Albert Beveridge

Albert Jeremiah Beveridge was born Oct. 6, 1862 on a small farm in Highland County, Ohio, the son of Thomas H. and Frances (Parkinson) Beveridge. In 1865 the father, after the loss of his property, moved the family to a farm in Illinois. Young Beveridge's early life was one of privation and hardship. He was a plowboy at twelve, a railroad hand with a section gang at fourteen, a logger and teamster at fifteen. Before he was sixteen, however, he managed to enter a high school. His yearning for knowledge led him to determine to go to college, and with a loan of $50 from a friend, in the fall of 1881 he entered Asbury College, now DePauw University, at Greencastle, Ind. During his college course he won the inter-state oratorical honors and prizes sufficient to provide for two of his college years. He graduated in 1885. He was twice married: in 1887 to Katherine Langsdale of Greencastle, Ind., who died June 18, 1900; in 1907 to Catherine Eddy of Chicago. Admitted to the bar in 1887, for twelve years Beveridge practised law in Indianapolis. Meanwhile he had become well known in his state as a political orator. In every campaign for fifteen years, beginning while yet a college boy, as early as the Blaine campaign of 1884, he had stumped the state from end to end. In a deadlock among the leading senatorial candidates in 1899 the Republican legislative caucus turned to him as a compromise candidate, and he was elected to the United States Senate at the age of thirty-six, being among the youngest members ever to sit in that body. In 1905 he was reelected without opposition within his party, but in 1911, chiefly because of party schism, he was defeated for a third term, after which he never again held public office. The twelve years of his senatorial service were a period of agitation, of party revolt and insurgency, leading to the rise of the Progressive party. Beveridge was one of the Senate "insurgents," one of the original Progressive Republicans. He supported the Roosevelt policies, such as equal industrial opportunities, prevention of trust abuses, government regulation of public service corporations, a strong navy, the meat inspection law (which he drafted), conservation of national resources, and extension of nominating primaries. He was outstanding and effective in his opposition to injurious child labor, proposing an amendment (to a pending bill on child labor in the District of Columbia) prohibiting inter-state commerce in the product of factories and mines where children under fourteen years of age were employed. His speech on this amendment, occupying parts of three days (Jan. 23, 28, 29, 1907), was a notable contribution to the controversy (Congressional Record, 59 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 1552-57). He favored a tariff commission, to be conducted on non-partisan lines, in the hope of taking the tariff out of politics and thus sparing the country from the business uncertainty resulting from frequent revisions. It was on the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, in the first year of President Taft's administration (1909), that the disruption in the Republican party occurred. Beveridge was in the forefront of the insurgent senators in opposition to this party bill. He believed that the "Old Guard" leaders cared nothing for the well-being of the masses but were working constantly for the protection of selfish interests, and that the Aldrich tariff was a "revision upward" and was, therefore, a betrayal of party pledges. Because of his independence of his party, the "stand-pat" Republicans in Indiana helped the Democrats to defeat him for the Senate in 1911.

With this senatorial experience and his democratic disposition it was easy and natural for him to go with Roosevelt into the Progressive party in 1912. In the Progressive National Convention in Chicago in that year it was Beveridge, as temporary chairman, who sounded the "keynote" in a campaign address, entitled "Pass Prosperity Around." During the same year he was nominated by the Progressive party of Indiana as its candidate for governor. He received 10,000 more votes than the Republican candidate, but was defeated by the Democratic candidate, Samuel M. Ralston. In 1914, after the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, the Indiana Progressives nominated Beveridge as their candidate for the United States Senate, but Progressive support had fallen away, and he came in third in the popular vote. In 1916, together with Roosevelt, he rejoined the Republican party, and supported Charles E. Hughes for the presidency. In 1922 he was nominated for the United States Senate by the Republicans of Indiana in a state-wide popular primary, defeating Harry S. New, the sitting senator, but in the ensuing election he was again defeated by Samuel M. Ralston, the Democratic nominee. This closed his political career.

He was a pronounced nationalist, suspicious of foreign countries, with some anti-British feeling, a stout opponent of America's having anything to do with the League of Nations; at times disposed toward jingoism in speech, declaring himself for "America first! Not only America first, but America only!" He was somewhat temperamental, but his finer qualities greatly overtopped his minor defects. He had a rare political aptitude, and no man ever questioned his public integrity or his political courage.

But he was even more distinguished as a historical writer than as a politician. In his early service in the Senate he already showed an overwhelming desire to get information at first hand, even traveling to the Philippines in order to make a personal investigation of the Philippine problem. During the Japanese and Russian struggle in order to satisfy himself as to the situation he took a trip to Siberia and Russia, the outcome of which was The Russian Advance, published in 1903. In 1905 he brought out The Young Man and the World, in 1906 The Bible as Good Reading, in 1907 Meaning of the Times, in 1908 Work and Habits and Americans of Today and Tomorrow,--volumes intended especially for young men and women. In 1915, while spending a year as a war correspondent in Germany he produced his What Is Back of the War, which was regarded in America as distinctly pro-German, and brought the author some unpopularity. Beveridge's greatest work, however, was his biography of Chief Justice John Marshall, designed as an historical and political interpretation of the Supreme Court and of Marshall's part in giving that court its place in American history. This task he accomplished in a way that gained the universal approval of scholars and critics. As a biographer Beveridge showed his characteristic industry in gathering his materials, a discriminating mind in sifting and evaluating, a painstaking care in revising and rewriting until the facts took on their right relations and proportionate importance, and "the picture stood out as an historic and artistic whole." Bringing to his task sympathy for his subject, the art of eloquent and effective writing, and an undimmed historical imagination, he produced an outstanding historical biography. The first two volumes of The Life of John Marshall appeared in 1916, the second two in 1919. Beveridge then turned his attention to what he considered a harder and more important task, a similar biography of Lincoln in four volumes. At the time of his death two of these volumes had been substantially completed. He brought to this task the same qualities that had been applied to his Marshall. He had a horror of mistakes and his completed chapters had been read in manuscript by many historical scholars and were carefully revised and rewritten, some of them as many as fifteen times. His death was regretted on many accounts, but above all because of the loss to the world of his uncompleted Lincoln. He died Apr. 27, 1927.

text by James A. Woodburn, Dictionary of American Biography