He was born on November 16, 1872, in Phoenix, New York, to Anthony Wayne Sweet and Sarah Elizabeth Campbell.

That fall, suffragist Marion Dickerman fought a tough race to defeat his bid for reelection, and though she lost she cut substantially into his support and, for the first time in his political career, made him work hard to win.

Shortly after breakfast on May 1, 1928, he and the pilot Lt. Bushrod Hoppin, U.S. Army, took off in a new Army observation plane, Curtiss O-1B Falcon, serial number 27-279, assigned at Middletown Air Depot, Pennsylvania,[1][2] from Bolling Field to fly to Oswego, New York, where he was to make a speech.

[3] He thought it best to land and selected a field on a stock farm near Whitney Point, New York.

Sweet, having unbuckled his safety belt, was pitched against the cockpit wall, and killed by a head injury.