Frederick Hale (U.S. senator)


Frederick Hale was the United States Senator from Maine from 1917 to 1941. He was the son of Eugene Hale, the grandson of Zachariah Chandler, both also U.S. Senators. He was the brother of diplomat Chandler Hale, and the cousin of U.S. Representative Robert Hale.

Biography

Hale was born on October 7, 1874 in Detroit, Michigan to Eugene Hale. He attended the Lawrenceville School, and graduated from Groton School in 1892. He graduated from Harvard University in 1896 and attended Columbia Law School in New York City from 1896 to 1897. He was admitted to the bar and commenced the practice of law in Portland, Maine in 1899.
Hale was a Republican member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1905–1906; and a member of the Republican National Committee, 1912-1918. In 1916, he was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate, defeating incumbent Democrat Charles Fletcher Johnson to reclaim the Senate seat that had been held by his father Eugene Hale.
He was reelected in 1922, 1928, and again in 1934, serving from March 4, 1917 to January 3, 1941.
In the 1928 Republican primary, Hale defeated incumbent governor Owen Brewster for their party's nomination which signaled the end of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine as an important political factor.
He was not a candidate for renomination in 1940. He served as chairman, Committee on Canadian Relations in the Sixty-sixth Congress, and served on the Committee on Naval Affairs in the Sixty-eighth through Seventy-second Congresses, and the Committee on Appropriations in the Seventy-second Congress.
A fierce opponent of the Ku Klux Klan faction of the Republican Party in Maine, Hale was one of a handful of senators who voted against the elevation of Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937 based on his alleged Klan membership.
He retired to private life and died in Portland, Maine on September 28, 1963. He is interred in Woodbine Cemetery in Ellsworth, Maine. At the time of his death, Hale was the last living Senator who was serving at the time of the United States' declaration of war against the German Empire, which precipitated the United States' participation in World War I.