Frederick Hale was born on October 7, 1874, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Eugene Hale and Mary Douglas Chandler. His father represented Maine in the United States Senate from 1881 to 1911, and his maternal grandfather, Zachariah Chandler, was secretary of the interior under President Ulysses Grant and a senator from Michigan (1879).
Hale attended Lawrenceville (1889 - 1890) and Groton (1891 - 1892) preparatory schools and received the Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard in 1896. He then attended Columbia University Law School (1896 - 1897).
After leaving Columbia, Hale read law for two years in the Portland, Maine, office of an uncle, Clarence Hale, and was admitted to the Maine bar in 1899.
In 1902 Hale formed a law partnership in Portland with Arthur F. Belcher. After Belcher's death, he entered the partnership of Verrill, Hale and Booth. Hale served one term (1905 - 1906) in the lower house of the Maine legislature, then was defeated for reelection. From 1912 to 1918 he was Maine's Republican national committeeman.
In 1916, as the first United States senator from Maine chosen by popular vote, he began a career in the Senate that lasted until his retirement in 1941. He served on the Rules, Appropriations, and Naval Affairs committees, and was chairman of the latter for nine years and briefly chairman of the Appropriations Committee.
Once, on a hunting trip in Alaska, Hale was charged by a bear and forced to kill it. Upon discovering that the bear had left three small cubs, he wrapped them up, carried them by train across the country, and presented them to the Washington Zoo. Throughout the trip, he bottle-fed the cubs every two hours, and named one of them Portland, after his hometown.
In 1943 he accepted the chairmanship of the Red Cross War Fund campaign for the Greater Portland area. At the close of World War II, Hale became vice-president of the Navy League of the United States, which sought to inform the country of the importance of maintaining an adequate navy. Frederick Hale died on September 28, 1963, in Portland, Maine.
Frederick Hale was noted for his strong advocacy of a large navy. He firmly believed that "preparedness is cheaper than war. " He counted naval strength on a comparative basis, however, and voted for the naval arms limitation treaties proposed by the Washington Arms Conference of 1921 - 1922.
In his early years in the Senate Hale supported the woman suffrage amendment and the Lodge reservations to the League of Nations covenant. In 1931 Hale joined other senators who unsuccessfully opposed the London treaty for naval limitation. By this time he concluded that the ratio offered was less satisfactory than the one in 1922, and that the pact would "hamstring and hogtie" the United States.
His strenuous objections to the Coolidge and Hoover economy cuts in naval construction finally resulted in a cruiser-building program. In 1925 Hale told President Calvin Coolidge that the American fleet was all but helpless in the Pacific because of inadequate bases, and he worked for the strengthening of Pearl Harbor. Throughout the 1920's and 1930's he tended toward isolationism, voting in 1933 against extending diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.
By 1939, however, Hale was warning that strong aid to Great Britain was essential to American safety. Hale disliked publicity and viewed speechmaking with distaste. Nevertheless, as chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee he made the key speeches on naval legislation. Both in Maine and in Washington, he was respected for his honesty and integrity. "If Hale says so, it's so, " a colleague reportedly remarked. He attempted to protect the interests of his constituents, on one occasion almost single-handedly leading, and winning, a fight to remove the tariff on commercial fertilizers in order to aid Maine potato growers. Yet he refused either to make campaign promises or to engage in congressional "logrolling. " In 1936 he refused to vote for the huge expenditures for the Passamaquoddy tidal power project that would have been located in his state.
During the 1930's Hale consistently opposed New Deal spending policies. He voted against President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "court-packing plan" and contended that the New Deal attitude toward business retarded economic recovery.
On the questionnaire sent him for the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of the Harvard Class of 1896, Hale wrote that his most enduring satisfactions in life were "1. That the people of my State elected me to four terms in the U. S. Senate. 2. That fifty-six years of my life were spent not under the New Deal. "
He warned that the "pacifists of this country would undoubtedly seek . .. to cut down our navy, " as they had after World War I.
Frederick Hale was reserved and outwardly crusty, but those close to him recognized the wit, humor, and kindness that lay beneath the forbidding exterior.
Frederick Hale never married.
The fact that he was unmarried occasionally posed political problems for Hale. In 1922 his opponent, Howard Davies, raised the issue of the family man versus the bachelor. During the campaign hecklers shouted at Hale: "Get married! Get married!" He also deeply resented being called "Washington's most eligible bachelor. "
Eugene Hale was a Republican United States Senator from Maine.
Zachariah Chandler was an American businessman, politician, one of the founders of the Republican Party, whose radical wing he dominated as a lifelong abolitionist.
Chandler Hale was a United States diplomat who served as Third Assistant Secretary of State from 1909 to 1913.
