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William Edgar Borah

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"WILLIAM EDGAR BORAH (1865-), American politician, was born at Fairfield, Ill., June 29 1865. He studied at the Enfield, Ill., Academy and entered the university of Kansas with the class of 1889, but did not finish his course. He was admitted to the bar in 1889, practised at Lyons, Kansas, 1890-I, and thereafter at Boise, Idaho. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1902, but was elected in 1907 and again in 1913 and 1919. At the time of the split in the Republican party in 1912 he opposed the nomination of President Taft but refused to bolt and follow Roosevelt, although in sympathy with his policies. In 1913 he was a vigorous opponent of Secretary Bryan's proposal to create a U.S. protectorate over Nicaragua. The same year he introduced an unsuccessful bill for raising the income tax exemption to $4,000. He had long favoured a Federal levy on incomes but thought that with the then existing system of indirect taxation the additional burden should fall upon the well-to-do. He favoured woman suffrage and independence of the Philippines, but was opposed to the league to enforce peace on the ground that it tended toward internationalism. He strongly opposed many of the measures of President Wilson's administration, and in particular the League of Nations, against which, as a delegate-at-large from his state, he was an effective speaker at the Republican National Convention of 1920.