US Senator. He served as the only Iowa Democrat in the United States Senate between the American Civil War and the Great Depression, serving from April 12, 1926 to March 3, 1931. Following the November 1924 election, there was a recount of disputed ballots twice with the Republican incumbent Smith W. Brookhart being unseated from a Republican-control Senate. The first recount had Brookhart the winner by a narrow margin, yet Steck requested another recount, charging illegalities at the polls. In the second recount, both candidates lost ballots. With the Iowa Republican Party no longer supporting Brookhart allegedly "for the manipulations of his own party," Steck was proclaimed the winner with the US Senate awarded him funding for the legal case of the recount. The dispute caused a seventeen-month delay in him actually taking office and Brookhart becoming a bitter political enemy. According to "Time" magazine, his voting in the Senate was much more aligned with a Republican. His efforts to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, which gained national popularity during his term, were a main goal as he condemned organizations fostering racial, religious, or class strife. He was an unsuccessful Democrat candidate for re-election. After attending public schools, he graduated from the law department of the University of Iowa and was admitted to the bar in 1906 before starting a practice in Ottumwa. During World War I, he served in a National Guard unit in the Third Infantry at the rank of captain in France. After leaving the Senate in 1931, he resumed his law practice. At one point, he assisted the governor on a Mississippi River project. He served as a special assistant to the United States Attorney General from 1933 to 1947, when he retired. He married, and the couple had a daughter in 1909, who lived only one day.