William Edgar Borah (June 29, 1865 – January 19, 1940) was an outspoken Republican politician, one of the best-known figures in Idaho's history. A progressive who served as a United States senator from 1907 until his death in 1940, Borah voted for American entry into World War I but is often considered an isolationist, for he led the Irreconcilables, senators who opposed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which would have made the U.S. part of the League of Nations.
Borah was born in rural Illinois to a large farming family. He studied at the University of Kansas and became a lawyer in that state before seeking greater opportunities in Idaho. He quickly rose in the law and in state politics, and after a failed run for the House of Representatives in 1896 and one for the United States Senate in 1903, was elected to the Senate in 1907. Before he took his seat in December of that year, he was involved in two prominent legal cases. One, the murder conspiracy trial of Big Bill Haywood, gained Borah fame though Haywood was found not guilty and the other, a prosecution of Borah for land fraud, made him appear a victim of political malice even before his acquittal.
In the Senate, Borah became one of the progressive insurgents who challenged President William Howard Taft's policies, though Borah refused to support former president Theodore Roosevelt's third-party bid against Taft in 1912. Borah reluctantly voted for war in 1917 and, once it concluded, he fought against the Versailles treaty, and the Senate did not ratify it. Remaining a maverick, Borah often fought with the Republican presidents in office between 1921 and 1933, though Calvin Coolidge offered to make Borah his running mate in 1924. Borah campaigned for Herbert Hoover in 1928, something he rarely did for presidential candidates and never did again.
Deprived of his post as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the Democrats took control of the Senate in 1933, Borah agreed with some of the New Deal legislation, but opposed other proposals. He ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1936, but party regulars were not inclined to allow a longtime maverick to head the ticket. In his final years, he felt he might be able to settle differences in Europe by meeting with Hitler; though he did not go, this has not enhanced his historical reputation. Borah died in 1940; his statue, presented by the state of Idaho in 1947, stands in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
Childhood and early career
William Edgar Borah was born in Jasper Township, Illinois, near Fairfield in Wayne County. His parents were farmers Elizabeth (West) and William Nathan Borah. Borah was educated at Tom's Prairie School, near Fairfield. When Borah exhausted its rudimentary resources, his father sent him in 1881 to Southern Illinois Academy, a Cumberland Presbyterian academy at Enfield, to train for the ministry. The 63 students there included two future U.S. senators, Borah and Wesley Jones, who would represent the state of Washington; the two often debated as schoolboys. Instead of becoming a preacher, Borah was expelled in 1882 for hitching rides on the Illinois Central to spend the night in the town of Carmi.
He ran away from home with an itinerant Shakespearean company, but his father persuaded him to return. In his late teenage years, he became interested in the law, and later stated, "I can't remember when I didn't want to be a lawyer ... there is no other profession where one can be absolutely independent".
With his father finally accepting his ambition to be a lawyer rather than a clergyman, Borah in 1883 went to live with his sister Sue in Lyons, Kansas; her husband, Ansel M. Lasley, was an attorney. Borah initially worked as a teacher, but became so engrossed in historical topics at the town library that he was ill-prepared for class; he and the school parted ways. In 1885 Borah enrolled at the University of Kansas, and rented an inexpensive room in a professor's home in Lawrence; he studied alongside students who would become prominent, such as William Allen White and Fred Funston. Borah was working his way through college, but his plans were scuttled when he contracted tuberculosis in early 1887. He had to return to Lyons, where his sister nursed him to health, and he began to read law under his brother-in-law Lasley's supervision. Borah passed the bar examination in September 1887, and went into partnership with his brother-in-law.
The mayor of Lyons appointed Borah as city attorney in 1889, but the young lawyer felt that he was destined for bigger things than a small Kansas town suffering in the hard times that persisted on the prairie in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Following the advice attributed to Horace Greeley, Borah chose to go west and grow up with the country. In October 1890, uncertain of his destination, he boarded the Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha. On the advice of a gambler on board the train, Borah decided to settle in Boise, Idaho. His biographer, Marian C. McKenna, said that Boise was "as far west as his pocketbook would take him".
Pre-Senate career
Idaho lawyer
Idaho had been admitted to the Union earlier in 1890, and Boise, the state capital, was a boom town, where the police and courts were not yet fully effective. Borah's first case was referred to him by the gambler who had advised him on board the train; the young attorney was asked to defend a man accused of murder for shooting a Chinese immigrant in the back. Borah gained an unasked-for dismissal when the judge decided that killing a Chinese male was at worst manslaughter. Borah prospered in Boise, both in law and in politics. In 1892 he served as chair of the Republican State Central Committee. He served as political secretary to Governor William J. McConnell. In 1895 Borah married the governor's daughter, Mary McConnell. They were married until Borah's death, but had no children together.
Activists determined to pressure Borah with petitions from his constituents, and former president Roosevelt sent him a note urging him to change his vote. This had no effect, and when the Senate voted on the amendment in early October 1918, it failed by two votes, with Borah voting in the negative. More petitions and pressure on Borah followed, and the senator agreed to meet with suffragist leader Alice Paul. After the meeting, Paul stated that Borah had agreed to support the amendment if re-elected, but the senator said he had agreed to no such thing. Nevertheless, Paul called off the efforts to sway or defeat Borah, and the senator retained his seat by nearly a two-to-one margin.
Harding and Coolidge years
Borah was determined to see that the Republican presidential candidate in 1920 was not pro-League. He supported his fellow Irreconcilable, California Senator Hiram Johnson, who had been Roosevelt's running mate in 1912. Borah alleged bribery on the part of the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, General Leonard Wood, and was snubbed when he demanded to know the League views of Wood's main rival, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden. When the 1920 Republican National Convention met in Chicago in June, delegates faced a deadlock both as to who should head the ticket, and as to the contents of the League plank of the party platform. The League fight was decided, with Borah's endorsement, by using language proposed by former Secretary of State Elihu Root supporting a league, rather than the League. The presidential stalemate was harder to resolve. A hater both of political intrigue and of tobacco, Borah played no part in the smoke-filled room discussions as the Republicans attempted to break the deadlock. He was initially unenthusiastic about the eventual nominee, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, his colleague on the Foreign Relations Committee, as he was disappointed at the failure of Johnson's candidacy and disliked Harding's vague stance on the League. Nevertheless, Borah strongly endorsed Harding and his running mate, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who were victorious. Borah later stated he would have left the Senate had Harding lost.
Borah proved as idiosyncratic as ever in his views with Harding as president. The original idea for the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22 came from a resolution he introduced in December 1920. After the new Secretary of State, Charles Hughes, took the idea, Borah became an opponent, convinced the conference would lead the United States into the League of Nations through the back door. Borah stated that Taft, at 63, was too old and as a politician had been absent for decades from the practice of law. In 1922 and 1923, Borah spoke against passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which had passed the House. A strong supporter of state sovereignty, he believed that punishing state officials for failure to prevent lynchings was unconstitutional, and that if the states could not prevent such murders, federal legislation would do no good. The bill was defeated by filibuster in the Senate by Southern Democrats. When another bill (Costigan–Wagner Bill) was introduced in 1935 and 1938, Borah continued to speak against it, by that time saying that it was no longer needed, as the number of lynchings had dropped sharply.
thumb|[[Time (magazine)|Time cover, May 5, 1924]]
Harding's death in August 1923 brought Calvin Coolidge to the White House. Borah had been dismayed by Harding's conservative views, and believed Coolidge had shown liberal tendencies as a governor. He met with Coolidge multiple times in late 1923, and found the new president interested in his ideas on policies foreign and domestic. Borah was encouraged when Coolidge included in his annual message to Congress a suggestion that he might open talks with the Soviet Union on trade—the Bolshevik government had not been recognized since the 1917 October Revolution and Borah had long urged relations. Under pressure from the Old Guard, Coolidge quickly walked back his proposal, depressing Borah, who concluded the president had deceived him. In early 1924, the Teapot Dome scandal broke, and although Coolidge had no involvement in the affair, some of the implicated cabinet officers, including Attorney General Harry Daugherty, remained in office, backed by the Old Guard. Coolidge sought the support of Borah in the crisis; his price was Daugherty's firing. The president stalled Borah, and when Daugherty eventually resigned under pressure, it was due more to events than Borah. When the president was nominated for election in his own right at the 1924 Republican National Convention, he offered the vice presidential nomination to Borah. By one account, when Coolidge asked Borah to join the ticket, the senator asked which position on it he was to occupy. The prospect of Borah as vice president appalled Coolidge's cabinet members and other Republican officials, and they were relieved when he refused. Borah spent less than a thousand dollars on his Senate re-election campaign that fall, and gained a fourth term with just under 80 percent of the vote. Coolidge and his vice-presidential choice, Charles G. Dawes easily won, though Borah did no campaigning for the Coolidge/Dawes ticket, alleging his re-election bid required his full attention.
Senator Lodge died in November 1924, making Borah the senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and he took its chairmanship. He could have become Judiciary Committee chairman instead, as the death of Frank Brandegee of Connecticut made Borah senior Republican on that committee as well. The Foreign Relations chairmanship greatly increased his influence, one quip was that the new Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, created policy by ringing Borah's doorbell.
Borah was involved through the 1920s in efforts for the outlawry of war. Chicago lawyer Salmon Levinson, who had formulated the plan to outlaw war, labored long to get the mercurial Borah on board as its spokesman. Maddox suggested that Borah was most enthusiastic about this plan when he needed it as a constructive alternative to defeat actions such as entry into the World Court, that he deemed entangling the U.S. abroad.
Hoover and FDR
Borah hoped to be elected president in 1928, but his only chance was a deadlocked Republican convention. He was reluctant to support Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover for president, backing Ohio Senator Frank Willis instead, but after Willis collapsed and died at a campaign rally in late March, Borah began to find Hoover more to his liking. The Idahoan's support for Hoover became more solid as the campaign began to shape as a rural/urban divide. Borah was a strong backer of Prohibition, and the fact that Hoover was another "dry" influenced Borah in his support; the senator disliked the Democratic candidate, New York Governor Al Smith, an opponent of Prohibition, considering him a creature of Tammany Hall. Though Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh commented on "Borah's recent conversion to Hoover", and some progressives were disheartened, Borah undertook a lengthy campaign tour, warning that he saw "the success of Tammany in national politics as nothing less than a national disaster". Hoover was elected and thanked Borah for "the enormous effect" of his support. He offered to make Borah Secretary of State, though deploring the loss to the Senate, but Borah declined. Borah opposed the McNary-Haugen Act as unconstitutional.
thumb|upright=1.3|Hoover (seated) with senators and cabinet officers, 1930. Borah stands directly behind his chair.
Borah was not personally harmed by the stock market crash of October 1929, having sold any stocks and invested in government bonds. Thousands of Americans had borrowed on margin, and were ruined by the crash. Congress in June 1930 passed the Hawley–Smoot Tariff, sharply increasing rates on imports. Borah was one of 12 Republicans who joined Democrats in opposing the bill, which passed the Senate 44–42. Borah was up for election in 1930, and despite a minimal campaign effort, took over 70 percent of the vote in a bad year for Republicans. When he returned to Washington for the lame-duck session of the Senate beginning in December, Borah pressed the passage of legislation that would help business and suggested that members of Congress turn back their salary to the Treasury. The economy continued to worsen in the winter of 1931, and Borah urged relief legislation, stating that opponents argued "that for the Government to feed this woman and her sick children would destroy her self respect and make a bad citizen of her. Does anyone believe it? It is a cowardly imputation on the helpless. I resent it and I repudiate it."
When Congress reconvened in December 1931, the Republicans nominally controlled the Senate by the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Charles Curtis, but, as Hoover later wrote, there was no real majority as Borah and other progressives were against the administration. After the Bonus Army marched on Washington, Borah and Hoover agreed that no action should be taken on their demands so long as the ex-soldiers remained in the capital. Borah considered their presence intimidating to Congress, but was angered when they were forcibly dispersed.
Borah considered challenging Hoover for renomination in 1932, but concluded the president's control over the party machinery, especially in the South, could not be overcome. Borah disagreed with the platform of the 1932 Republican National Convention over Prohibition; after the party passed a vague compromise plank and renominated Hoover, Borah made a major address on June 20, gaining nationwide attention by attacking his party's platform for forty minutes. Between then and November, he rarely mentioned Hoover's name publicly, though he said late in the campaign that he would vote for the president. He made speeches discussing issues, not candidates, and did nothing to aid Hoover's doomed campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt. When some Idahoans demanded that he support Hoover on pain of being opposed for renomination for Senate in 1936, Borah responded that he regretted if his quarter century in the Senate had left them with the impression he might be moved by such an ultimatum.
The Democratic landslide that accompanied Roosevelt's election cost Borah his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, but much of his influence was independent of party. Borah liked Roosevelt for his liberalism and his energy. Due to illness, Borah took only a limited role in Roosevelt's Hundred Days, though he did play a key part in the passage of Glass–Steagall in June 1933, helping forge a compromise that ended the opponents' filibuster. He opposed Roosevelt's calling in of gold, alleging that the government had no power to tell individuals what to do with their money. Borah opposed the National Recovery Act (NRA) and was gratified when it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935. Borah's fifteen-year fight for the recognition of the USSR ended in 1933 when Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations.
1936 presidential campaign and final years
thumb|right|Few states had presidential primaries in 1936. Those won by Borah are in green.
Borah ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1936, the first from Idaho to do so. His candidacy was opposed by the conservative Republican leadership. Borah praised Roosevelt for some of his policies, and deeply criticized the Republican Party. With only 25 Republicans left in the Senate, Borah saw an opportunity to recast the Republican Party along progressive lines, as he had long sought to do. He was opposed by the Republican organization, which sought to dilute his strength in the primaries by running state favorite son candidates in order to ensure a brokered convention. Despite being easily the leading primary vote-getter, Borah managed to win only a handful of delegates and took a majority of them in only one state, Wisconsin, where he had the endorsement of Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr. Borah refused to endorse the eventual candidate, Kansas Governor Alf Landon (who was nominated at the 1936 Republican National Convention), leading some to believe Borah might cross party lines and support Roosevelt. Ultimately, as he had four years earlier, he chose to endorse neither candidate. Borah was on the ballot that fall in Idaho, seeking a sixth term in the Senate. For the first time since the people had been given the right to elect senators, the Democrats ran a serious candidate against him, Governor C. Ben Ross. Although Idahoans overwhelmingly voted for Roosevelt, who won every state except Maine and Vermont, Borah still took over sixty percent of their votes in his re-election bid.
thumb|upright=1.3|left|Borah (seated) holds a press conference, 1935
Only sixteen Republicans remained in the Senate, most progressives, when Congress met in January 1937, but Borah retained much influence as he was liked and respected by Democrats. Many of Roosevelt's New Deal policies, such as the NRA, were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court during Roosevelt's first term, but he had no opportunities to make an appointment to the court in his first four years. In 1937, Roosevelt proposed what came to be known as the court-packing scheme, that for every justice over the age of seventy, an additional one could be appointed. This would give Roosevelt six picks, but would require Congress to pass legislation, which Borah was immediately opposed, believing it would be the death of the Supreme Court as an independent institution. Although he refused to take the lead in the bipartisan opposition, Borah wrote a section of the committee report dealing with the history and independence of the court. When the matter came to the Senate floor, Borah was asked to make the opening speech, but again deferred to the Democratic majority, and Roosevelt's plan was defeated. The court crisis had also been defused by the retirement of the Senior Associate Justice, Willis Van Devanter, a Taft appointee. When Borah was asked if he had played a role in Van Devanter's retirement, he responded, "Well, guess for yourself. We live in the same apartment house."
After Hitler took control in Germany in 1933, Borah thought well of the new chancellor's repudiation of the war guilt and other clauses of the Versailles treaty, and saw much of value in his new social and economic programs. Despite the Nazi mistreatment of the Jews, Borah did not speak out against Nazi Germany, though many urged him to do so, as he felt that each nation had the right to run its own affairs. Borah opposed large-scale immigration by Jews from Germany, feeling that was "impractical with millions of Americans unemployed". By 1938, Borah was speaking out against the continued persecutions, but still felt that the European issue could be settled if Germany's former colonies were returned. After the Munich Conference in September 1938, Borah issued a statement far more critical of Britain and France for deceiving Czechoslovakia into dismemberment, than of Germany for her aggression.
Borah sought to visit Germany and see Hitler, hoping to settle the troubled international situation. He approached the German Embassy in Washington through intermediaries, and the Germans approved the trip, and even offered to pay, something Borah was unwilling to accept. Borah realized that such a journey would compromise him in foreign policy debates, and did not go; by August 1939, the U.S. was seeking to evacuate its citizens from Europe and the journey was no longer feasible.
in September 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began, Borah mourned, "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler—all this might have been averted." This was said to William Kinsey Hutchinson, then International News Service's Washington Bureau Chief. Hutchinson indicated that Borah confided this "in words that ran like a prayer". McKenna noted, "It was fortuitous that the march of events prevented Borah from joining those pacifists and liberals ... who trudged up the hill to Berchtesgaden to lay before the Fuehrer their plans for world peace".
Death
Midway through his sixth term on January 19, 1940, Borah died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 74 at his home in Washington, D.C. His state funeral at the U.S. Capitol was held in the Senate chamber on January 22. A second funeral was held three days later at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, where Borah's casket lay beneath the rotunda for six hours prior to the service. An estimated 23,000 passed by the bier or attended the funeral; Boise's population in 1940 was just over 26,100. He is buried in Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise.
The tributes to Borah on his death were many. William Gibbs McAdoo, a former Democratic senator, stated "You don't have to agree with every position taken to concede that he was an intellectual giant and one of the truly great men of our times." Ernest K. Lindley deemed Borah the "most effectively liberal voice in the Republican Party." Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' paper, Der Angriff, asserted, "American life loses a personality valued by friend or foe on account of his courage, honesty, and decent method of fighting." Borah's old classmate, Kansas editor William Allen White, called him "a righteous man who was wise and unafraid, who followed his star, never lowered his flag, and never lost his self-respect ... an honest man who dedicated his talents to his country's good." Columnist Raymond Clapper mourned, "there are no fighters on the progressive side [of the Republican Party]—no men like T.R. ... Borah was the last."
Marriage and family
thumb|upright|Mary McConnell Borah,
In 1895, Borah married Mary McConnell of Moscow, Idaho, daughter of Governor William J. McConnell. They first met in Moscow while he was campaigning for her father. They had no children. Mary lived in Washington, D.C., into the 1960s; and died in 1976 at the age of 105. Small and elegant, she was commonly known as "Little Borah".
Borah had an affair with his close friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the eldest child of Theodore Roosevelt. He was the biological father of her daughter, Paulina Longworth Sturm (1925–1957). One family friend said of Paulina, "everybody called her <!--(love child Paulina)--> 'Aurora Borah Alice.
Sites, memorials and cultural effect
In 1947, the state of Idaho presented a bronze statue of Borah to the National Statuary Hall Collection, sculpted by Bryant Baker. Idaho's highest point, Borah Peak, at was named for him in 1934, while he was dean of the Senate. Two public schools are named for him: Borah High School in Boise, opened in 1958, and Borah Elementary School in Coeur d'Alene. William E. Borah Apartment, Windsor Lodge, his longtime home in Washington was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1976.
Borah was the subject of a 1963 episode, "The Lion of Idaho", of the syndicated television anthology series Death Valley Days. In the episode, Borah as a young attorney (played by Steve Forrest) defends a woman in Nampa on a murder charge.
At the University of Idaho, an annual symposium on international problems and policy is held by the Borah Foundation, which operates under the university's auspices. The symposium is intended to honor Borah's memory "by considering the causes of war and the conditions necessary for peace in an international context". The inaugural edition was held in September 1931, and included Borah himself. Also affiliated with the university is the William Edgar Borah Outlawry of War Foundation, which was funded by a donation from Borah's colleague in the outlawry movement, Salmon Levinson, in 1929.
Criticism of Borah meant little to the people of Idaho, who sent him to the Senate six times over thirty years in a rapidly changing America. Claudius O. Johnson, who studied Borah, explained their relationship:
Notes
References
Sources
- DeBenedetti, Charles. "Borah and the Kellogg-Briand Pact." Pacific Northwest Quarterly 63.1 (1972): 22–29.
External links
- National Statutory Hall – U.S. Capitol
- Biography UMKC Law School – biography of William Borah
- History News Network – The West: "The Lion of Idaho" ... William E. Borah, More Than a "Little American"
- A Lion Among the Liberals: William Edgar Borah and the rise of New Deal Liberalism
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