Background
David Ignatius Walsh was born in Leominster, Massachussets, the fourth of five sons and ninth of ten children of James Walsh and Bridget (Donnelly) Walsh. His parents were Irish immigrants whose misfortunes thwarted their efforts to improve their modest circumstances. When Walsh was only twelve years old, his father died. As one of the younger children, however, he reaped the benefit of the sacrifices made thereafter by his mother and his older sisters, who worked in the textile mills of nearby Clinton.
Education
Walsh graduated from Holy Cross College in Worcester in 1893; four years later he received his law degree from Boston University.
Career
With his younger brother, Thomas, he developed a successful law practice in the Clinton area. But politics exerted a stronger attraction on Walsh than did the law. He was well suited for politics, being personable, handsome, and a skillful orator; and so, the year after he finished law school he became a member of Clinton's Democratic Town Committee. During the next decade Walsh's name became increasingly familiar in legal circles in Boston, and so did his reputation as an aspiring young Democrat. He delivered the keynote speech at the party's state convention in 1910, the year that Eugene Foss, a former Republican, captured the governorship for the Democrats. Two years later Walsh was elected lieutenant governor on the Foss slate. In the fall of 1913, after Foss had broken with his adopted party, Walsh secured the Democrats' gubernatorial nomination without opposition. A split in Republican ranks created by Theodore Roosevelt's launching of the Progressive party enabled Walsh not only to win the election but to secure reelection in 1914. Walsh's rise to prominence took place during the Progressive Era, and so he campaigned on platforms that endorsed many typical reform measures. Aided by a coalition of Democratic, Progressive, and working-class Republican legislators, his administration compiled a considerable record of reform achievements. Walsh remained particularly proud of two: the improvement of the state's labor code and the inauguration of a system of state-supported university extension courses designed to bring higher education within the reach of the wage-earning class. The governor's liberal leanings undoubtedly owed something to the deprivations he experienced as a child. In addition, Bay State Democratic leaders had become increasingly anxious to cement an alliance with the common-wealth's nascent labor movement. Moreover, during these same years Irish Catholics and other ethnic minorities had begun to grow restive under the hold so long exerted over state affairs by the Yankee Protestant, business-oriented Massachusetts establishment. The election of David I. Walsh as the first non-Yankee to serve as the state's chief executive was a landmark in the process whereby the minorities sought, through politics, to open up wider avenues to security and advancement. Although Walsh was identified with elements that were destructive of the Massachusetts status quo, he took pains to avoid unnecessarily offending the old-stock establishment. He remained aloof from the maneuverings of the Irish Democratic bosses - Curley, Fitzgerald, Lomasney, and the rest - who squabbled in Boston. Consequently, Walsh appeared to be "different" from that breed--more dignified--an asset when this son of immigrants sought to win votes among Republican and Democratic Yankees. Nevertheless, Walsh lost his bid for a third term as governor in 1915; the breach within the GOP had healed by then. But his defeat was by a narrow margin, and when he sought his party's nomination for United States senator in 1918, it came without opposition. In the fall he defeated incumbent Sen. John W. Weeks; with that upset Massachusetts found herself represented in the upper house of Congress by a Democrat for the first time since 1851. Walsh's debut in national politics was accompanied by a pledge of total support to President Woodrow Wilson in the pending negotiations to end World War I. As details of the Treaty of Versailles became known during 1919, however, disillusionment with the president's performance mounted, and nowhere more than among the ethnic minorities that constituted such a large part of Walsh's constituency. The Wilsonian principle of self-determination became a central issue, for the failure of various "old countries" to receive their "just rights" at the peace table turned important American nationality groups--the Irish and Italians, for example--against the president and his proposed League of Nations. For a while Walsh resisted the pressure to break with his party leader, but in a Senate speech of Oct. 9, 1919, he did so decisively. If Walsh's stand on the league cost him any support among liberals, the voting record he compiled on domestic issues during the remainder of his first term won them back, for he sided consistently with those who sought to withstand the tide of Harding's "normalcy. " In 1924 Sen. Robert M. La Follette's Progressive party endorsed his reelection, and when the veteran Wisconsin progressive toured the Bay State, he added his personal praise, declaring, "David I. Walsh stands for something more than party. " But Calvin Coolidge's presence at the head of the ticket made the Republican sweep irresistible in Massachusetts in 1924, and by the narrow margin of 19, 000 votes Walsh lost his Senate seat. Just two years later, however, Walsh staged a startling comeback by overwhelming President Coolidge's closest confidant, Sen. William M. Butler, by more than 55, 000 votes. In piecing together victory over such a formidable opponent Walsh drew heavily on his usual sources of support: the Irish Catholics, organized labor, and independent-minded Yankees. But most significant of all was the unparalleled support accorded him now by minority groups other than the Irish: the Italians, Jews, Poles, French Canadians, Portuguese, and Negroes, who together counted for much of the commonwealth's population. In the era of the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, and immigration restriction, Walsh consistently spoke up for the minorities' interests and self-respect. For example, he was one of only six senators who voted against the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, with its system of discriminatory quotas, and he prefaced his vote with a speech extolling the pluralistic nature of American society. He was instrumental, too, in seeing to it that during the 1920's the Democrats of Massachusetts extended recognition to diverse ethnic elements in the makeup of their statewide ticket. The results of his solicitude were apparent in 1926, when thousands of newer Americans who had never voted, or had been Republicans, came to the polls on his behalf. During the 1930's Walsh supported most aspects of the New Deal; as chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, he was instrumental in paving the way for measures that were important to the urban, industrial population that he represented. Yet his relations with President Franklin D. Roosevelt were far from harmonious, in part because of Roosevelt's disposition to bolster the power in Massachusetts of James Michael Curley, who had jumped aboard the pre-1932 Roosevelt bandwagon earlier than Walsh. The president's Court reform bill of 1937 precipitated Walsh's first open break with the chief executive; thereafter, the Bay State senator also voiced apprehension over Roosevelt's anticipated departure from the two-term tradition. Questions of foreign policy vastly widened the rift between Walsh and his party leader when, in 1939, Europe once again plunged into war. As chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Walsh was an ardent exponent of preparedness, but he regarded the contest in Europe as "nothing but a clash of two forms of imperialism" and called for a policy of "absolute, unequivocal, unconditioned, and determined neutrality. " He vigorously opposed the moves whereby President Roosevelt made the United States a virtual belligerent by the fall of 1941. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, however, there was no doubt in Walsh's mind that "we must defend ourselves, " and he gave energetic support to the war effort. Politically, nonetheless, his pre-Pearl Harbor attitudes now worked against him. When Walsh stood for reelection again in 1946, many ardent New Dealers withheld their support; he also faced that year the nationwide anti-Democratic trend that resulted in election of the Republican 80th Congress. In Massachusetts the veteran of nearly thirty years' service in Washington suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the young Henry Cabot Lodge. Almost immediately, Walsh's health began to fail and soon after he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a Boston hospital. He was interred in St. John's Cemetery in Clinton.
