A trifling amount of time in the grand scheme of things. ;D
So, the same districts for 46 years, that's good to know. And imagine at one point or another we held every single one.
1904 was the only time we won the Chi-based 4th and 5th districts, in fact that year we won 24 of 25, all but the 20th district of future House Speaker Henry Rainey, we only beat him in 1920 only to see him take it back in '22. Didn't get that seat again until 1942. It appears to have been a West/Central IL seat. Not one I would expect to be a rat stronghold.
I haven’t researched what the deal was with the district that sent Rainey (his home was in Carrollton, Greene County). I’d tend to rank him as one of the worst Speakers in history, as he effectively gave FDR absolute carte blanche to ram through his leftist agenda in the opening of the 1933 Congress. One wonders if the more Conservative Cactus Jack Garner, who was consigned to presiding over the Senate (a useless job by then with the Dem majorities, for which he compared to being worth a warm bucket of $hit), would’ve put the kibosh on the Socialist orgy.
Interestingly, by 1942, the GOP (despite no change in the lines that first sent Rainey to Congress) kept it solidly in their column for the next 40 years. Dick Durbin won it in 1982 from the odious anti-Zionist RINO Paul Findley (Arafat’s best friend in Congress). John Shimkus had the seat now (which still includes Rainey’s hometown of Carrollton, despite Greene County being sliced and diced between his and the old Lane Evans/Phil Hare district).