Background
Born on June 29, 1865 in Jasper Township, Illinois, near Fairfield in Wayne County, William Edgar Borah was the son of Elizabeth (West) and William Nathan Borah, farmers.
Born on June 29, 1865 in Jasper Township, Illinois, near Fairfield in Wayne County, William Edgar Borah was the son of Elizabeth (West) and William Nathan Borah, farmers.
One of ten children, Borah was educated at Tom's Prairie public school, Enfield Academy, and worked his way through two years at the University of Kansas. After leaving college he lived with his sister in Lyons, Kans. , where he read law in her husband's law office.
Admitted to the Kansas bar in 1887, he was associated with his brother-in-law, Ansel Lasley, and served for a short time as Lyons' city attorney. In 1890 Borah left Kansas for the wider opportunities frontier communities offered young lawyers. In Boise, Idaho, he established a successful practice as a criminal lawyer, gaining prominence in 1897 as state prosecutor in the trial of "Diamondfield" Jack Davis, a gunman for a cattle company who had murdered two sheepherders. Borah eventually became a corporation lawyer for timber and mining interests. After one unsuccessful attempt in 1903, Borah was elected to the U. S. Senate by the Republicans in the Idaho legislature in 1907. (The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution providing for direct election of senators was ratified in 1913. ) One of his first achievements on the Committee on Education and Labor was to introduce the measures establishing the Department of Labor and its Children's Bureau. He was the chief advocate of resolutions for direct election of senators and for an income tax, which was also ratified as an amendment to the Constitution in 1913. Borah gave staunch support to most of President Woodrow Wilson's war measures after 1914, but he stood firmly opposed to the League of Nations and attacked the Versailles Treaty both in the Senate and in public speeches. His leadership was an important element in the Senate's rejection of the Treaty and the League of Nations in 1919. As a member, and then as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after 1924, Borah devoted his efforts to international disarmament, the improvement of Latin-American relations, international economic conventions to settle postwar problems, acceptance of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war, which the Senate adopted unanimously in 1928, the recognition of the Soviet Union, and the revision of the Versailles Treaty. As Idaho's representative, he took an interest in farm legislation, tariffs, and reclamation and irrigation projects. As early as 1903 he declared his independence of machine politics and organization control in the Republican Party, and while this independence won him the respect and loyalty of the Idaho electorate, ensuring a lifetime option on his Senate seat, it probably cost him the presidential nomination in 1936, which he actively sought in the primaries. Borah was one of the New Deal's loudest critics, for while he supported a substantial part of its social and economic reforms he attacked several measures on the grounds that they were unconstitutional, the most important of them being Roosevelt's Supreme Court reorganization plan. Louder still was Borah's criticism of Roosevelt's foreign policy after 1937. The Idaho senator favored strict neutrality, retention of good trade relations with Japan, and the embargo on arms. For a time Borah planned to visit Germany for talks with Hitler, but events precluded the trip. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Borah held that the United States could maintain a respected neutrality. He firmly opposed entangling alliances or any traffic in arms. Borah died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Jan. 19, 1940. After an impressive state funeral in Washington his body was taken to Idaho for burial.
In 1895, Borah married Mary McConnell (1870–1976) of Moscow, Idaho, daughter of Governor William J. McConnell. They had no children; she died in 1976 at the age of 105