Daniel Webster Turner, named after the famed antebellum senator and orator, was born on a farm near Corning, Iowa.

His political activism and boxer's nose led the press to dub him, “Fighting Dan Turner.” As a representative of the progressive wing of the Republican Party during the era of “prairie populism,” when the Midwest was a font of radicalism, Turner advocated for many reforms.

In a 1912 address to the Republican State Convention, he defended the anti-trust law and called for direct election of U. S. senators, income and corporate taxes as more equitable than property taxes, and an end to corrupt leadership, saying, “We must cleanse our party of complacent plutocrats and corpulent freebooters, masquerading as Republicans.”[1] Elected to the Governorship in 1931, he attacked lobbyists in his inaugural address and demanded fair congressional districts, measures to promote child welfare, and establishing a state conservation commission: “The professional lobbyist .

He is not interested in the well being of the people we represent.” “Our streams are rapidly degenerating into open sewers, receiving the waste drainage of private industry and municipalities.

Turner, as a "Son of the Wild Jackass" and one of four speakers at the Republican National Convention of 1928, urged the party to support farm relief.

To keep people from contracting bovine tuberculosis, a State law mandated testing of dairy cows and destroying diseased animals.