Miles Poindexter was an American politician, senator from Washington.
Background
He was born on April 22, 1868 in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, the eldest of the six children of William Bowyer Poindexter and Josephine Alexander (Anderson) Poindexter, both of old Virginia families. His maternal grandfather, Francis T. Anderson, was a prominent Virginia lawyer, landowner, and rector of Washington and Lee University; his great-uncle was Joseph Reid Anderson, Confederate general and president of the famous Tredegar Iron Works.
His father, after serving in the Confederate Army, worked briefly in Tennessee and Arkansas, where he sold insurance for a time, but he settled permanently on a farm at Elk Cliff, the Anderson estate at Greenlee near Lexington, Virginia, when Miles was two.
Education
He was educated at nearby Fancy Hill Academy and at Washington and Lee University, where he attended the academic and law departments and received the LL. B. degree in 1891.
Career
Moving to Walla Walla, Washington, he established a law practice. Poindexter quickly entered politics, winning election as county prosecuting attorney the year after his arrival in Walla Walla, although he was defeated when he ran again two years later.
Poindexter served as an assistant prosecuting attorney for Spokane County (1899 - 1904) and judge of the superior court (1904 - 1908) and in 1908 was elected to the House of Representatives. Joining the small band of Western and Midwestern Republicans known as the Insurgents, he supported their successful challenge to the leadership of Speaker Joseph G. Cannon and backed most of their program of reform, including measures for conservation, a federal income tax, railroad regulation, and postal saving banks. On the strength of his progressive record, Poindexter swept the Republican senatorial primary in 1910 and thus secured his election to the Senate by the Washington state legislature.
In the Senate, Poindexter at first continued his outspoken advocacy of progressive reform. He backed the domestic legislative program of Woodrow Wilson; he and Robert M. La Follette, for example, were the only non-Democrats in the Senate to vote for the Underwood Tariff. Poindexter also fought to preserve Alaska's natural resources. At this time sympathetic toward labor, he strongly criticized the millowners during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachussets, led by the Industrial Workers of the World; and in the following year he offered a radical plan for a federal industrial army of the unemployed to carry on public works projects.
After the war, reacting violently against the economic radicalism and militant union activity that he believed were inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, he became one of the leaders in the "Red Scare" - the effort in 1919 and 1920 to alert the nation to the alleged dangers of "communism" - and claimed responsibility for prodding Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer into conducting his famous raids of 1919 and 1920.
By the end of his second term, Poindexter had achieved some national stature in the Senate, but he had done so at the expense of political support in his own state. His record after 1917 alienated many progressives, farmers, and workingmen, and his opposition to federal legislation to ease the economic effects of the postwar agricultural depression also lost him support among distressed farmers in eastern Washington. He was soundly defeated in 1922 by a progressive Democrat. The next year President Warren Harding appointed Poindexter ambassador to Peru, a post he held until 1928.
Poindexter returned to the state of Washington in 1928 to make a final, unsuccessful campaign for reelection to the Senate. Shortly after the death of his wife in 1929, he moved back to the family estate in Virginia and throughout the 1930's continued to practice law in Washington.
Poindexter died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack at his home in Greenlee, Virginia, at the age of seventy-eight.
At first a Democrat, he found himself repelled by the Populist doctrines espoused by most Democrats in Washington, and after supporting the Republican presidential nominee, William McKinley, in 1896, he moved the following year to Spokane, Washington, and became a Republican.
He vigorously criticized President William Howard Taft, supported Theodore Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1912, and became the only senator to list himself as a member of the Progressive party.
With the decline of the Progressive party, Poindexter returned in 1915 to the Republican ranks, and the following year was reelected by a substantial popular majority. On issues of foreign policy, however, Poindexter had already begun to differ sharply with many fellow progressives, and he now drew closer to the regular Republicans. He championed a strong army and navy and advocated increased American intervention in Latin America. He criticized Wilson's handling of the Mexican revolution and even urged annexation of Mexico's northern states. He strongly supported American entry into World War I, but he disliked Wilson's international "idealism" and bitterly criticized the president for not prosecuting the war with sufficient vigor.
Connections
On June 16, 1892 Elizabeth Gale Page. They had one child, a son, Gale Aylett.
On August 27, 1936, he married Mrs. Elinor Jackson (Junkin) Latané, widow of the historian John Holladay Latané; their brief marriage ended in divorce.