Charles Grenfill Washburn was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
Background
Charles Grenfill Washburn was born in Worcester, Massachussets, the eldest son of Charles Francis and Mary Elizabeth (Whiton) Washburn. His grandfather, Charles, twin brother of Ichabod Washburn, was a partner of that pioneer in the wire industry. Charles Francis Washburn's entire business life was devoted to it.
Education
He graduated from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1875) and Harvard College (1880).
Career
He started a wire-goods business of his own, in which he retained a controlling interest throughout his life. He soon entered the employ of the Washburn & Moen Manufacturing Company. By private study, however, he fitted himself for admission to the bar in 1887, and two years later became general counsel for that corporation. It was then rapidly developing the new wire-fencing branch of its industry, and Washburn was brought into intimate contact with the problems of corporation management and patent litigation. In 1891 he withdrew from the Washburn & Moen Company and began the practice of patent law in Worcester, but soon became president of a newly organized concern, the Washburn Wire Company. Eight years as president of the great textile firm, S. Slater & Sons, brought to him thorough knowledge of another of New-England's major industries. From 1897 to 1901 he was a member of the Massachusetts legislature, serving two years in each branch. By appointment of Gov. Winthrop Murray Crane in 1902 he became a trustee of the Lyman and Industrial schools. He was a member of the committee on revision of the corporation laws (1902), and chairman of a special commission on street railways (1919). In 1917 he was a delegate-at-large to the convention for revision of the constitution of Massachusetts. He was elected as a Republican in 1906 to fill a vacancy in the national House of Representatives caused by the death of Rockwood Hoar, and he was reëlected for the Sixtieth and Sixty-first congresses. His principal service was on the committees on insular affairs and patents and copyrights. He was mainly responsible for solving in 1909 the most difficult problem which long blocked the codification of copyright laws, namely the problem of "pirated" music for phonographs. On the floor of the House he spoke seldom, but his broad experience in legislation and in practical business lent weight to his discussion of matters relating to corporations and the tariff. After the final hearings upon the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust cases in 1911, Chief Justice White sought the judgment of Washburn as a businessman of broad experience upon the question of the probable effect of construing the first section of the Sherman Law so that it would forbid only contracts in unreasonable restraint of trade. Washburn strongly approved such a construction. In the final decision all but one of the justices followed the Chief Justice in unequivocally reaffirming the application of "the rule of reason" to the Sherman Law, thus reversing the Court's attitude in the Transmissouri case of 1897. Bad health during the campaign was largely responsible for Washburn's defeat for reëlection in 1910. An intimate friend of both Roosevelt and Taft, he parted company with the former in 1912 because of his advocacy of the recall of judicial opinions. In 1916 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. After his retirement from political life he retained the presidency of the Washburn Company, and from its establishment in 1914 until his death he served as a Class B director of the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston; but his energies were mostly devoted to literary and philanthropic activities. His Industrial Worcester (1917) was an important history of the development of a great industrial center by a man who had had close personal associations with most of the leaders in that movement. His Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of His Career (1916) was considered by Roosevelt himself and by his intimates as the most discerning characterization of him that had been written. At Harvard the classmates, Roosevelt and Washburn, had been students under Henry Cabot Lodge, and in 1924, at the request of Lodge, already stricken with fatal illness, Washburn came to his assistance and edited a most important portion of Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918 (1925). Only a few months later, before the Massachusetts Historical Society, Washburn presented a discriminating memoir of Henry Cabot Lodge. His third biography, The Life of John W. Weeks (1928), dealt with a former senator from Massachusetts, an intimate personal and political friend. Washburn gave freely of his means and of his counsel as a trustee of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and of the Groton School, and he was especially devoted to the service of the American Red Cross and of the Episcopal Church.
Achievements
Connections
He was married, April 25, 1889, to Caroline Vinton Slater, by whom he had a son and a daughter.