George Andrew Sanderson was born the son of a humble pork packer in Hamilton’s North End, but in his later years he roamed the corridors of power, rubbed elbows with senators and diplomats, a pawn in the quest for world peace.
Details of his life, even according to his official biography offered by the U.S. Senate Historical Office are “obscure” as he eschewed both cameras and discussions of his life and background: “Today, beyond certain vital facts, we know very little about him.”
Sanderson was born February 22, 1850. His father died after a long six-week illness in 1890, and his mother Amanda McDonald Sanderson earned a heartfelt obituary when she died under the headline “A BEAUTIFUL LIFE ENDS OVER FOUR SCORE YEARS” when she died of a bronchial infection in 1910. Mrs. Sanderson was active in the Temperance Movement and with local churches and charities.
After George Sanderson graduated from Hamilton High School he accepted a nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1871. “For reasons that are now obscure,” the Senate bio reads, “he resigned his naval commission after two years to enter the British merchant marine” where he commanded a steamship. That venture lasted only two years and he returned to Ohio for a few months in Hamilton and Dayton. He then moved to Chicago and with his Naval Academy training in civil engineering made his fortune building railroads. In 1902, he left Chicago to build railroads in Mexico. In 1904, he became the president of a railroad construction firm in Sonora, and remained there until his nomination to the post that led to his greatest fame.
In addition to frequently returning to Hamilton to visit his aging mother until her death, Sanderson apparently stayed closely connected to business interests in Chicago. A headline in the Chicago Tribune referred to him as “a Chicago man” when in 1919, at the age of 69, Illinois Senators Medill McCormick and Lawrence Sherman (the latter a native of Piqua, Ohio) tapped him to become the 13th Secretary of the United States Senate. According to the Tribune, the post was “a reward for work done for the Republican party in the last congressional campaign.” Other articles of the time suggested that his relationship with a prominent Chicago banker was a prevailing factor.
Thus, his nomination was not without controversy. Adversaries accused him of lobbying for Chicago meat packers, harvest machinery manufacturers, and bankers. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch remarked that “newspaper men and Senators began to marvel at the ease with which he had plucked the best political job of the Senate.”
His lobbying work was not disputed, but his supporters at the New York World declared, “In his representative capacity Mr. Sanderson never did any coarse work in the ante-chambers of Congress. He operated in evening dress, usually at the dinner table.” That paper also noted that a man of Sanderson’s means wouldn’t have much use for the $6000 annual salary (around $120,000 in 2025 dollars) of the secretary, a job that would give him unfettered access to all matters of the Senate, including closed sessions.
Even in this high-profile position, Sanderson remained something of an enigma. Upon his nomination, Leslie’s, a business magazine, did a small profile noting the “brevity” of his bio. “Dates and nature of former business are purposely omitted and when you press him for the date of his birth he likens himself to a woman who prefers not to mention her age... Mr. Sanderson abhors the camera and only three poses have been recorded of him within a lifetime of perhaps fifty-odd years.” The magazine did not know that he was nearing 70.
“Gentle of manner, modest to an extreme degree, soft in voice and dignified in approach - one is impressed as meeting a personality of serious intent and tremendously interested in the tasks assigned. He is married.”
Leslie’s noted that other publications have referred to him as “an elegant dresser,” “attractive personally,” and as “a free spender living at the best hotel in Washington,” the New Willard.
The controversy was but a splash, and according to the Senate historian, “We know little about Sanderson’s day-to-day activities and can only assume he was a quietly effective secretary.”
Despite his abhorrence of the camera and publicity, Sanderson found himself on the front page of newspapers across the country in March 1920, when the Republican-led Senate declined to accept the Treaty of Versailles, the document that ended World War One.
Ratification of the treaty turned into a battle of wills between Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge, leader of the Senate’s Republican caucus.
The previous July, President Wilson delivered the treaty to the Senate in person, and after his impassioned plea for its ratification, the 426-page volume was stored in a safe in Sanderson’s office. The Senate failed to ratify the document in November 1919 and again the following March. After the second failed vote to ratify, Lodge instructed Sanderson to deliver the bulky leather-bound volume, wrapped in brown paper and secured with red tape, to the executive clerk of the White House. It had been kept in a safe in Sanderson’s office for the intervening months.
Sanderson and two other Senate officials walked to the White House and were greeted by Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s personal secretary, but Sanderson declined to leave it there without getting a receipt. Tumulty excused himself to confer with the president and left Sanderson’s party cooling their heels in the office for nearly an hour.
He managed to remain out of the spotlight for the rest of his tenure in the Senate, but he was involved in many historic events and pieces of legislation, including the passage of the Women’s Suffrage Amendment; the swearing in of the first woman senator Rebecca Felton and the investigation of the Teapot Dome scandal.
On April 25, 1925, Sanderson succumbed to a heart attack after suffering a severe case of indigestion. He was 75 years old. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.