Beveridge, Albert J. (1862–1927)
BEVERIDGE, ALBERT J. (1862–1927)
Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana, a lawyer and orator of extraordinary talent and overweening ambition, served two terms in the United States senate (1899–1911) as a Republican. He advocated imperialism to open new markets for American industry and favored permanent annexation of the insular territories gained in the Spanish American War, without extension of constitutional protections and self-government, for which their non-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants were unfit. An economic nationalist, Beveridge favored repeal of the sherman antitrust act, believing that trusts should not be broken up but regulated in the national interest. Defeated for reelection, Beveridge joined theodore roosevelt's Progressive Party and was its candidate for governor in 1912. Defeated again, he turned to writing a long-planned biography of Chief Justice john marshall. The four-volume work, completed in 1919, won a Pulitzer Prize for biography. In the book Beveridge presents Marshall as the statesman who molded the Constitution to meet the needs of a vigorous, commercial nation, over the objections of petty agrarians and disunionists like thomas jefferson.
Dennis J. Mahoney
(1986)
Bibliography
Bowers, Claude G. 1932 Beveridge and the Progressive Era. New York: Literary Guild.