Thomas Emmet Coleman (1893 February 20-1964 February 4) was born in Aurora, Illinois, the son of Thomas Augustine and Nora (Flynn) Coleman. He married Catherine Esther Head on June 23, 1917; their children were Thomas Head, Catherine Head, and Jerome Reed Coleman.
Coleman graduated from Central High School in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1910. He received his undergraduate degree in letters and science, a Ph.B. from the University of Chicago in 1914.
While in college, Coleman worked summers at the Madison-Kipp Corporation of Madison, Wisconsin. The company, of which his father was president, manufactures die castings and automatic lubricating systems. After completing his education, Coleman began full-time employment at Madison-Kipp in the Sales Department. Upon his father's death in 1927, he succeeded to the presidency of the company. In addition, he was Director of the Security State Bank in Madison from 1918 to 1953, also serving as the bank's president from 1926 to 1935.
Coleman's involvement in politics began in 1928 when he volunteered his services during Walter Kohler's successful gubernatorial campaign. When Kohler ran again in 1930, Coleman was his campaign manager in the Wisconsin Republican's unsuccessful bid to defeat Philip La Follette. For many years thereafter, Coleman served on the state GOP's finance committee. Money was scarce and, on one occasion, Coleman financed a statewide campaign for all Republican candidates on only $12,000. He was able to operate on such a minimal budget by organizing voluntary clubs which did the work of the party without requiring remuneration. Coleman led the movement to have the party officially endorse candidates, a provision still in the voluntary organization's constitution. He resigned from the Finance Committee in 1941 as a result of party dissension.
Beginning in 1943, Coleman played a strong role in state and national GOP politics for over 25 years. From 1943 to 1947 he acted as state chairman of the GOP. He was a delegate committed to Harold Stassen at the 1948 Republican National convention. In 1949 he resigned from the position of vice-chairman of the Republican National Committee, only to be selected a year later as one of 24 national GOP leaders working for the election of more Republican congressmen. From 1950 to 1957, Coleman acted as financial agent for Senator Joe McCarthy's investigations of alleged Communist infiltration into the U.S. government.
Coleman first came into close association with Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio in 1950. Two years later Taft chose him to be one of his regional campaign managers and his floor manager at the Republican National convention, to which Wisconsin Republicans also elected him to be a delegate-at-large. Following Taft's unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, Coleman, saddened and disillusioned, gradually withdrew from an active role in state and national Republican politics. He did, however, help Eisenhower's campaign manager, Arthur E. Summerfield, during the 1952 campaign against the Democratic candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson. After Taft's death in 1953, Coleman headed a group formed to raise money for the erection of a physical memorial for the late Senator; in 1959 the memorial, a bell tower, was erected on the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C.
From 1928 to the late 1950s, newspapers in Wisconsin and around the nation referred to Coleman as a party “boss” or as “Mr. Republican.” In his lifetime he had held only one elective political office -- president of the village of Maple Bluff, a Madison suburb where he made his home. His prominence in the Republican Party was not related to elective office, which he shunned; it arose, rather from his astute analyses of political events and especially from his great abilities as a fund raiser.
