Education
His father, whose ancestors, of Scottish origin, had long inhabited northern New England, held pastorates in several towns including Eastport, Maine, and Franklin, N. H. George attended public schools in both these towns.
Thereafter, stretching a lean family budget by odd jobs and scholarship loans, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1887 and Dartmouth College (A. B. 1890, A. M. 1893).
As his schooling ended, he attached himself to the ruling politicians of New Hampshire's Republican organization, serving as secretary to Gov. David H. Goodell in 1889-90, as a reporter and news editor on the Concord Evening Monitor of Senator William E. Chandler [q. v. ] beginning in 1890, and as secretary of the state forestry commission from 1893 to 1906.
Career
Chandler's tutelage was particularly crucial to his progress.
Men like Lucius Tuttle of the Boston & Maine, Thomas J. Coolidge [q. v. ] of the Amoskeag, and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge [q. v. ], all Bostonians, confirmed his respect for the reach of power and his deference to its agents.
He regarded the reformism of New Hampshire's Winston Churchill as little more than the "gospel of gush" (Moses to Chandler, Nov. 30, 1906, Moses Papers).
Theodore Roosevelt refused him, but in 1909 Senator Lodge's intercession with President Taft won him the post he coveted, the ministry to Greece and Montenegro.
In Athens, Moses pursued tactics friendly to the new Venizelos regime, worked on plans for a Balkan federation, and glumly eyed the Balkan drift toward war.
In 1912 he resigned, stripped of diplomatic illusions.
He yearned for a seat in the United States Senate, and when Jacob H. Gallinger [q. v. ] died in 1918, Moses won the election for his place.
His diplomatic experience and friendship with former Secretary of State Philander C. Knox [q. v. ] won him prompt appointment to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
An irreconcilable foe of the League of Nations on grounds of nationalist realpolitik, he was a vociferous ally in Lodge's campaign against Wilsonian internationalism, and later fought American participation in the World Court.
In 1924 he chaired a noisy investigation into the innocuous Peace Plan of Edward Bok [Supp.
1].
He proudly claimed to be Calvin Coolidge's earliest supporter for the Republican nomination in 1924.
As president pro tempore of the Senate after March 1925, he spiked efforts by Vice-President Charles G. Dawes to speed up Senate business by reforming rules of debate.
He fought efforts to bar the importation of dyestuffs used by textile makers, and waged a running feud with the farm bloc over its neglect of apples, hay, and tariff protection for Eastern manufacturers.
In 1929 his labeling of Midwestern agrarian Senators as "sons of the wild jackass" (ibid. , Nov. 10, 1929) ignited a furor which almost cost him his chairmanship of the Republican Senatorial campaign committee.
Meanwhile Moses battled doggedly with the liberal wing of the New Hampshire Republican party led by Gov. John G. Winant.
In 1936 he helped promote Knox's abortive presidential ambitions, and in the New Hampshire primaries suffered the defeat of his own hope to return to the Senate.
He was buried in the Franklin (N. H. ) Cemetery.
[The Moses Papers (about 1, 800 items) in the N. H. Hist.
Soc. , Concord, N. H. , are valuable for his early career in state politics and journalism, but sketchy on the Senatorial years, which may be followed in the Cong.
Record and N. Y. Times.
See also Merrill A. Symonds, "George Higgins Moses of N. H. --The Man and the Era" (Ph. D. dissertation, Clark Univ. , 1955); Ezra S. Stearns, ed. , Genealogical and Family Hist.
of John Gilbert Winant (1968).
There is a biographical summary in the Nat.
Cyc.
Am.
Biog. , Current Vol.
C, pp. 71-72, and obituaries in the Concord Daily Monitor and N. Y. Times, Dec. 21, 1944. ]
Religion
A contemporary description of Moses as "that humorous and independent mossback" (New York Times, Oct. 22, 1923) seems apt, if a shade indulgent.
He died of a coronary thrombosis at his home in Concord, where he had long been a member of the South Congregational Church.
Politics
He was a tireless and aggressive partisan, and acquired a sure feel for the forces which defined the terms of Republican dominion in the state--White Mountain timber interests, the mammoth Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester, and, above all, the Boston & Maine Railroad.
The patterns in his domestic conservatism were granitic.
He survived liberal challenges to his reelection in 1920 and 1926, but the depression undid him, and he lost his seat to a Democrat in 1932.
