(b. Fairfields, Illinois, 29 June 1865; d. 19 Jan. 1940) US; US Senator 1907 – 40 The son of a farmer, Borah attended local schools in Wayne County and then the Southern Illinois Academy at Enfield. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1889, having studied law, was called to the bar that same year, and began practising at Lyon. Two years later he moved to Boise, Idaho, and practised with one of the state's leading law firms. His political career began inauspiciously with an unsuccessful bid for election to the US House of Representatives as a "Silver" Republican in 1896, followed in 1903 by an unsuccessful attempt to win nomination for US senator. In 1907, however, he was elected Republican Senator for Idaho and was re-elected for each subsequent term until his death.

Although he never travelled abroad, Borah's interest was foreign relations. An isolationist, in 1920 he orchestrated the Senate's opposition to the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. He was a resolute opponent of America's membership of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In 1924 he became chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee; this enabled him to play an influential part in the direction and development of America's foreign policy.

In domestic affairs Borah assumed the role of spokesman for the interests of the Midwest. He was a prohibitionist but gained a reputation as a radical by being one of the first leading politicians to champion women's suffrage.

United States senator William Edgar Borah (1865-1940) was influential in developing American foreign policy, particularly by his isolationist attitudes in the 1930s and his opposition to aid to France and Great Britain as World War II approached.

William E. Borah was born to William Nathan and Eliza West Borah on June 29, 1865, on a farm near Fairfield, III. The family had settled originally in Pennsylvania about 1750 and moved west at the turn of the 19th century.

Young William had little liking for farm life. He resisted a career in the ministry and, while still a schoolboy, ran away with a traveling troupe of actors. Then an older sister invited him to join her and her husband in Lyon, Kans., where William continued his education, entering the University of Kansas in 1885. Forced by illness to leave college after his freshman year, he read law at home and passed the Kansas bar examination in 1887. Hard times, however, forced him to leave Kansas, and he settled in Boise, Idaho.

Borah prospered and became prominent in Republican party circles. In 1895 he married Mary O'Connell, daughter of the governor of Idaho. Although Borah bolted the party to campaign for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, he rejoined it permanently in 1902. An unsuccessful candidate of the Progressive wing of the Republican party for U.S. senator in 1903, in 1907 he was elected to the Senate - where he served until his death. The senator was a political independent in his views. Although he was a corporation lawyer and champion of Idaho lumber interests, he also supported the working man. He led the Senate fight in support of President Wilson's income tax bill but opposed Wilson's trust-regulation policy. A nationalist and an imperialist before 1914, he led the most vocal opponents of Wilsonian internationalism after World War I.

Borah never traveled outside the United States, yet his significance in American history lies in his influence on foreign affairs. The "Idaho Lion's" commitment to isolationism, parochialism, legalism, and moralism in foreign affairs led him to oppose effective political and military intervention by the United States on the world stage during the 1920s and 1930s. He championed policy divorced from power and created illusions of peace in the United States just as violent forces were bringing on the most terrible war in modern times.

Borah opposed American membership in the League of Nations because he feared agreements committing the United States to the use of force at a time not of its own choosing. As a leader of the Senate "irreconcilables," he mapped the strategy in the Senate that defeated the Treaty of Versailles. In the Washington Disarmament Conference (1922), Borah supported the Washington Treaty system to limit naval armaments and maintain the status quo in the Pacific, but he was among those senators who insisted upon a reservation disassociating the United States from the use of military power to enforce it. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after 1924, he enlarged the Kellogg-Briand Pact (out-lawing war) to include all the nations of the world, but he later refused to sanction the use of American arms to uphold the treaty.

With the rise of Hitler in Germany, Borah joined the isolationists' bloc in the Senate that imposed the neutrality legislation of 1935-1937. He did not believe that vital American interests were threatened by totalitarianism abroad. A war for democracy in Europe, he declared, would end democracy at home.

Borah opposed President Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to bring American resources to the support of the Western democracies and, when informed of approaching war in Europe at a White House conference in 1939, he refused to believe it, insisting that his information was more accurate than the President's. Still opposing President Roosevelt vigorously, the Idaho senator died on Jan. 19, 1940.

Further Reading

The best biography of Borah is Marian C. McKenna, Borah (1961). The three best books on Borah and American policy in the 1920s are Robert H. Ferrel, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1952), and John Chalmers Vinson, The Parchment Peace: The United States Senate and the Washington Conference, 1921-1922 (1955) and William E. Borah and the Outlawry of War (1957). For Borah and the coming of World War II the best books are Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (1957), and Robert A. Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality (1962).

For more information on William Edgar Borah, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: June 29, 1865, Fairfield, Ill.
• Political party: Republican
• Senator from Idaho: 1907–40
• Died: Jan. 19, 1940, Washington, D.C.

The cry “Borah's got the floor!” sent newspaper reporters rushing to the press gallery, and senators to their seats, to hear him speak. William E. Borah was an independent maverick whose position was often unpredictable but whose speeches were always well reasoned and magnificently delivered. Thoughtful and deliberate, he was never swayed by the prevailing passions but sought to influence and change public opinion. Borah came to the Senate during the Progressive Era, and his efforts led to the direct election of senators, lower tariffs, the graduated income tax, and other progressive reforms.

After World War I, Borah's attention shifted to foreign policy, and he spoke out strongly against the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war. During the 1920s, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he promoted isolationist policies designed to keep the United States out of foreign wars. One observer found Borah “so thoroughly independent that there was hardly a person with whom he did not differ at one time or another.” But even if they disagreed with him, liberals and conservatives alike found that Borah's independence helped give them sharper perspectives on the issues.

See also Treaty of Versailles

Sources

• LeRoy Ashby, The Spearless Leader, Senator Borah and the Progressive Movement in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972)

(1865-1940), U.S. senator. Born near Fairfield, Illinois, Borah "went West" as a youth, spent several months at the University of Kansas, passed the easy Kansas bar, and headed for Seattle. But he got off the train at Boise, Idaho, and stayed. He ran for local office as a Republican and bolted momentarily to the Democrats in 1896, but thereafter he never strayed from the Republican fold. His role as prosecutor in a trial of three union leaders accused of killing former governor Frank Steunenberg, which he lost to Clarence Darrow, propelled him into the Senate in 1907, where he remained until his death.

The Lion of Idaho, a burly, leonine figure, was a great orator. He managed criticisms without personal rancor, so that even his enemies, such as President Woodrow Wilson, admired him. He possessed a way of catching the desire of the people of the United States for moral positions and often convinced them that words were better than actions, which doubtless made many people feel good.

Borah's essence, however, was contrariness, although he disguised it with his oratorical and moral periods. President Calvin Coolidge supposedly observed, when gazing out of a White House window and seeing the senator ride by on a horse, that it was remarkable that horse and rider were both going in the same direction. Although he entered the Senate as a devotee of Theodore Roosevelt, Borah often opposed him, notably in 1912 when he refused to join the Bull Moose party. He enthusiastically voted for war in 1917 and with equal enthusiasm became an "irreconcilable" over the Versailles treaty and League of Nations, believing they would entangle the United States in the toils of European politics; he said he wanted the League twenty thousand leagues under the sea. In the 1920s he pushed for naval limitation and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. In 1929 he supported Herbert Hoover for president and then turned against him. He voted for New Deal legislation but adamantly opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt on foreign policy, reversing his 1917 stance in favor of entering World War I and going over to isolationism. In the summer of 1939 he even predicted that a second world war was unlikely: he flatly told the president there would be no war, basing his judgment on an obscure and, of course, unreliable private intelligence digest published in London that he had happened to read.

It is insufficient, however, to categorize Borah as a nineteenth-century idealist, unable to adjust to the twentieth, for his views fit no categories. On domestic issues he seems to have been a progressive if allowance is made for his anticonservation and free-silver views, the result of his state's interests. On foreign policy he was a theorist only, evident in the fact that he served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1920s and took all sorts of international positions, but never found time to travel outside the continental United States.

Bibliography:

Robert James Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy (1969); Marian C. McKenna, Borah (1961).

Author:

Robert H. Ferrell

(bôr'ə) , 1865–1940, U.S. Senator (1907–40), b. near Fairfield, Ill. Admitted to the bar in Kansas in 1887, after 1890 he became prominent in law and politics at Boise, Idaho. Shortly after election to the Senate, he gained (1907) national attention by his prosecution of William Haywood and two other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, who were accused of conspiring to murder (1905) ex-Governor Frank Steurenberg. In the Senate he was outstanding as an orator, as an expounder of the Constitution, and as a Republican notable for his independent stands (he was sometimes called “the great opposer”). Borah was one of the Senate leaders in defeating the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations after World War I. From 1924 to 1933 he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, and his major interest was in foreign policy. He early asked for recognition of the USSR, favored the collection of war debts, and opposed intervention in Latin American countries to protect U.S. investments. An advocate of disarmament and the outlawing of war, he suggested the Washington Conference of 1921–22 and promoted the Kellogg-Briand Pact; in 1939 he fought revision of the Neutrality Act. In domestic affairs, Borah staunchly favored prohibition. He spoke against economic monopoly and for enforcement of the antitrust laws, but he was opposed to extension of governmental powers and disapproved of the National Recovery Administration and many other New Deal measures.

Bibliography

See biographies by C. O. Johnson (1936, new ed. 1967, repr. 1969) and M. C. McKenna (1961); studies by J. C. Vinson (1957), R. J. Maddox (1969), and L. Ashby (1972).

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