James Eli Watson was a U. S. Representative and U. S. Senator from Indiana.
Background
James Eli Watson was born in Winchester, Randolph County, Ind. , the third son and third of six children of Enos Lindsey Watson and Mary Margaret (Judd) Watson. Both parents were natives of Ohio. The father was a self-taught lawyer and the owner-editor of the Winchester Herald; a staunch Republican, he was elected to the state legislature in 1867 and again in 1881.
Education
James Watson graduated from the Winchester high school in 1881 and from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. , in 1886.
Career
After reading law for a year in his father's office, he was admitted to the bar and became his father's partner. He and his wife settled in Rushville, Ind. , where Watson became the head of his own law firm. His long association with politics began at the age of twelve when he accompanied his father to the Republican national convention of 1876. During the 1880's Watson campaigned extensively in Indiana for his party's presidential ticket. He first won public office in 1894 when he defeated the veteran Democratic incumbent, William S. Holman, for a seat in Congress. One element in Watson's victory was his facility in speaking German, a language he had learned as a boy from a neighbor, to the German portion of his constituency. He was narrowly defeated for reelection in 1896, but was returned to the House in 1898 and four times thereafter. From the start, Watson identified himself unequivocally with the Old Guard Republicans. A close friend and protégé of Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, he was soon promoted to the position of Republican whip and was later placed on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. In 1908 he ran for governor of Indiana, but was defeated by Thomas R. Marshall. He remained in Washington after the expiration of his congressional term and served for a time as a lobbyist for manufacturing interests seeking higher tariffs; because of his former membership in the House, these activities were criticized by a congressional committee as a breach of propriety. His high standing with the regular Republicans led to his selection in 1912 as floor leader of the Taft forces during the Republican national convention, where he successfully forestalled Theodore Roosevelt's challenge for the disputed delegates. Watson returned to Capitol Hill in 1916 as a United States senator, after winning a special election to fill the unexpired term of Benjamin F. Shively. He was reelected for full terms in 1920 and 1926. In the Senate, Watson remained the epitome of the Old Guardsman. His closest friend was Sen. Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania; and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge chose Watson to act as floor whip in the GOP's fight against the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. At the 1920 Republican Convention, Watson was chairman of the resolutions committee and played an important part in drafting the party platform. Throughout his years in the Senate, Watson spoke and labored faithfully for the railroads, the banks, and the corporations. He was untiring in his advocacy of high tariffs, and as a member of the Senate Finance Committee he helped devise and enact the Republican tariffs of the 1920's, which he eulogized as the very touchstone of American prosperity and greatness. He successfully urged the creation of a Railroad Labor Board to mediate labor disputes as part of the Esch-Cummins Act of 1920. Watson was also an exponent of a big navy and an isolationist in foreign policy, one who regretted his support of American entry into World War I. Sharing the traditional American distrust of Europe and the determination to remain aloof from its affairs, he believed also in "the rigid restriction of immigration. " He was an early advocate of the literacy test, arguing that it would exclude "great hordes of Italians and Huns who come in year after year, undermining the very principle of this Republic and interfering with labor all over the country. " Only rarely did Watson take a stand that could be described as other than conservative. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage, he helped steer the Nineteenth Amendment through the upper house. During the 1920's he joined his party's Midwestern insurgents in supporting the successive McNary-Haugen bills to raise farm prices. Watson actively opposed the nomination of Herbert Hoover for president in 1928, aspiring to that office himself. Instead, Hoover became president and Watson became the Senate majority leader - the beginning of a scarcely concealed antipathy between two very different personalities. The two men were at odds over Hoover's first major legislative proposal, tariff revision. Hoover had called for an upward revision limited to agricultural products only, but Watson insisted on a general revision. Eventually, after a protracted battle, a general revision was enacted. Hoover later unsuccessfully attempted to have Watson replaced as majority leader by the more congenial Sen. David A. Reed of Pennsylvania. Among his contemporaries in the Senate, Watson was affectionately regarded for his imperturbable amiability, his colorful personality, and his zest for storytelling - qualities evident in his memoirs, As I Knew Them (1936). Political analysts were not so kind. The editor of the New York Times saw him as "a classic example of the 'glad hand' statesman"; Frank Kent characterized him as a "lovable old humbug. " Clearly, Watson's talents were centered in the political arts of party loyalty and survival. A master horse trader, he once remarked that "all legislation of consequence is a series of compromises. " Watson's long political tenure ended abruptly with the Democratic landslide of 1932, when he was defeated by Frederick Van Nuys. Retiring from active politics, he resumed the practice of law in Washington, D. C. A lifelong Methodist, he was also a member of many fraternal organizations. Watson died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Washington at the age of eighty-three and was buried there at Cedar Hill Cemetery.