writer. It was there that he became friends with Eugene V. Debs, head of the Socialist Party of America and repeated candidate for president and other offices on its "ticket". At the urging of Terre Haute Representative and then Attorney General of Indiana John Edward Lamb, Bowers was chosen in 1904 as Democratic candidate for Congress for the district that includes Terre Haute. He campaigned hard but lost in a Republican landslide. He was renominated unanimously in 1904, but lost again. Though he lost, the experience polished his abundant speaking skills. He was "much in demand as a speaker". The political activity led to a "political position": he accepted an appointment to the Terre Haute Board of Public Improvements, serving unhappily from 1906 to 1911. From 1911 to 1916 he was secretary to Senate majority leader John W. Kern. This allowed him access to leading politicians of the time, including President Woodrow Wilson. "He gained national prominence in the party." He defended the League of Nations, a principal project of Wilson. Since Kern was Democratic leader of the Senate and was absent from the office for days at a time because of caucuses, conferences, and floor strategy, Bowers did the full routine work, making him ex officio senator from Indiana. Kern was defeated in the 1916 election, and Bowers returned to Indiana and accepted a position at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. Kern died in 1917 and Bowers published the following year a biography of him. Much later, Bowers published a biography of the man Kern defeated in 1910, Albert Beveridge. Described as "an ardent Democrat", he was chairman of the Platform Committee of the Democratic Party in 1918. He declined the party's 1918 offer of the post of Indiana Secretary of State. His book The Party Battles of the Jackson Period (1922) was well received, and led to a 1923 invitation, which he accepted, to join the editorial staff of the influential New York World, the nation's leading Democratic newspaper. When it folded in 1931, he became a political columnist for the New York Journal from 1931 to 1933. He was a frequent public speaker, and in 1929 was described as "best known now as an orator", although "he gained first fame as a writer of historical works". He was a speechwriter for and advisor to 1928 presidential candidate Al Smith. He became a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt;