THE SENATE LOSES A GREAT PROGRESSIVE
Neuberger, Richard L.
The Senate Loses A Great Progressive By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER ONE BY ONE, the old-line Progressives are passing out of American public life. Borah is gone. Norris is gone. Tom Walsh is gone. The...
...Among his devoted Senate friends are Bob La Follette and Harry Truman...
...What sort of charge was this...
...In 1899, at the age of 16, he began to learn the geography of that country...
...issues of the case...
...At the comparatively young age of 61, Homer Bone dislikes ending active participation in public life...
...Bone was a backer of William O. Douglas for the United States Supreme Court...
...In 1909, when he was 25 years old, Homer Bone first got actively interested in the cause of public power...
...Ernest Gruen-ing, Alaska's Governor, is another of his friends...
...Many of the most significant social and economic gains of the New Deal have been predicated on the pioneer legislative fights carried on by "the sons of the wild jackass...
...But now the President himself has recently come out in favor of a Missouri Valley Authority and has also suggested that the great dams on the Columbia River be supervised by an agency similar to the TVA...
...He deeply, admired George Norris...
...Homer Truett Bone closed his door in the Senate Office Building and left for the Pacific Coast to become a judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals...
...Reinvestigated the...
...Md., near the national capital...
...qually River...
...After a bitter debate the proposal was beaten in the legislature...
...Bone had active opposition in the primary but was renominated...
...He was attorney for the Port of Tacoma for 14 years...
...This grandfather went back a long way...
...He had been 30 years of age when Jefferson died...
...As a judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Bone will report to Douglas, in whose riding the circuit is included...
...He was reelected in 1938 under extraordinary circumstances...
...A farmer answered, "Jim Hill of the Great Northern owns all the power sites between here and the main river...
...asked Norris, pointing to the majestic cataract...
...On a tributary of theColumbia he saw a great plumed waterfall...
...Sons of the wild jackass" began as a term of opprobrium...
...Norris telling me at Bonneville Dam in 1940 how he had visited the Northwest 25 years before...
...His great grandfather, John Bone, had fought with Gen...
...One of his closest friends was the late J. D. Ross, pioneer advocate of public power and founder of Seattle's municipal light system...
...Long ago they began insisting that the other sections of the United States be developed by regional authorities patterned after the TV A. Some elements in the Roosevelt Administration, perhaps fearful of losing certain bureaucratic privileges, resisted this advocacy...
...Bone built up an extensive legal practice serving as counsel for such organizations as the Grange, Railroad Brotherhoods, and other labor unions...
...Long afterwards Bone explained, "This assault on the patriotism of men who merely believed that their community had a right to own a power-generating plant was the thing which first directed me into the power fight...
...That was the cost of filing with the Secretary of State...
...Grand Coulee Dam, across the Columbia in the Inland Empire, is the greatest power project ever constructed...
...Bone, engrossed in his legal studies, was not paying much attention to the campaign until the private power company made the charge that anyone who believed in municipal ownership of power-producing facilities was not a good American citizen...
...The Columbia River is the mightiest stream for water power anywhere on the North American continent, according to the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers...
...George W. Norris, is America in his debt for such projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Fort Peck Dams...
...From this grandfather Homer Bone learned the history of his country...
...The Good Fight As Bone left Washington last week, he concluded his second consecutive Senate term...
...He came of pioneer stock...
...Until that time the city of Tacoma had been buying its juice from a private company, which bitterly opposed the generating venture on the part of the municipality...
...Generally, some one incident precipitates a man into a cause which becomes the dominating interest of his career...
...There have been operations and long periods of convalescence...
...The elder La Fol-lette died nearly two decades ago...
...Andrew Jackson in front of New Orleans, when Old Hickory's army of ragamuffins turned back Packenham's British regulars...
...The sons of the wild jackass" fought for minimum wage and maximum hour laws, they championed racial and religious minorities, they struggled to keep the natural resources of the land from being looted...
...I couldn't see why any one man or any private group should be able, to monopolize a great river belonging to all the people...
...It produces six times as much power as the great dam built across the Dneiper River in Soviet Russia...
...Inciting Bone To Battle In the case of Norris' major ally, Homer Bone, the inciting incident occurred in Tacoma...
...Bone then stumped the State for the public power bill which had been beaten in the legislature...
...American politics is now a step farther removed from the men whom George Moses once called "the sons of the wild jackass" when Sen...
...He is an advocate of the development of Alaska...
...As his campaign expenses Bone listed, "Postage, three cents...
...From then until 1932, when he was elected to the United States Senate, he crusaded continually for public development of the hydroelectricity of the Columbia River Basin...
...Bone wrote, introduced, and sponsored the bill establishing this institute, which is one of the greatest cancer research organizations in the world...
...But he has fought the good fight, and he can look back on noble causes ably and tenaciously championed...
...From that time on," Sen...
...Hiram Johnson takes little active part now in the affairs of the Senate...
...He would speak only on occasions to which he had received bona fide invitations...
...Alone, it will turn out nearly as much juice as more than 200 plants in the State of New York...
...The legislation was handled in the House of Representatives byj a devoted follower of Bone's, Congressman Warren G. Magnuson of Washington, who may succeed him in the Senate...
...Homer's paternal grandfather, with whom he lived, had served in the Mexican War...
...During recent years he has been troubled by an aggravating leg injury...
...He and the late George Norris have been the principal advocates of the New Deal power program...
...Yet in time it became a mark of great distinction...
...Norris said to me, "I was strong for public power...
...His partner was the late Merritt J. Gordon, a former chief justice of the Washington State Supreme Court...
...William Allen White was recently buried at Emporia and Charley McNary lies in the soil of his native Oregon...
...Brandeis, Holmes, and Cardozo are dead...
...Homer Bone has been the main custodian of that energy, fighting to protect it for all the people...
...Bone has been interested in many causes...
...But he has never stopped crusading for public power and for the protection"of the natural resources of the nation...
...They settled in Tacoma, a port near the southern tip of Puget Sound...
...Bone sat up and took notice...
...It dwarfs even Boulder Dam...
...But in 1932 Homer Bone was elected to the United States Senate on the Democratic ticket, even running ahead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who swept the State of Washington...
...Few there were among "the sons of the wild jackass" who had not benefited their countrymen in some important way...
...One of Homer Bone's most memorable days was when President Roosevelt stood at Grand Coulee in the Autumn of 1937 and dedicated the monumental dam to the building of a "Promised Land" in the Northwest...
...Bone accepted with reluctance President Roosevelt's appointment to the Federal judiciary...
...The people of Tacoma voted to construct the public plant, and today they pay the lowest light bills in the United States...
...I remember Sen...
...In 1922 Bone was elected to the Washington legislature, where he led a fight for the adoption of a law giving the people the right to organize into Public Utility Districts for the distribution of publicly-owned power...
...This week another link with old-line progressivism is broken...
...As a Senator for the past 12 years, Bone has conducted this crusade on a national basis...
...Then he began making speeches in behalf of the public plant on the Nis...
...He is close to President Roosevelt...
...In fact, Bone and Norris have always been ahead of that program...
...Today, Public Utility Districts distribute power at cheap rates in many parts of Washington, using the legislation drafted a generation ago by Homer Bone...
...He would not buy an inch of newspaper advertising, not one minute of radio time...
...His father and mother moved across the continent to the state of Washington, on the Pacific Coast...
...Perhaps the cause in which Bone takes the greatest pride is not his championing of Grand Coulee, TVA, and public power in general, but instead his work for the creation of the National Cancer Institute, now located at Bethesda...
...Burton K. Wheeler...
...The Republican tide was commencing to run in 1938, but Bone defeated his GOP adversary 371,535 votes to 220,204...
...Homer Truett Bone was born in Indiana in 1883...
...Near the waterfall were farms lighted with kerosene lamps and candles...
...A fifth of all the potential hydroelectricity in the United States is within the borders of Washington...
...Bone was a young law student when the municipal electric board, which owned its own distribution system, undertook to build its own generating plant on the Nisqually River, which flows off the glacial slopes of 14,408-foot Mount Rainier...
...The electorate adopted the measure by an overwhelming majority...
...Ranks With George Norris In the far-flung Pacific Northwest, in the legislature of the state of Washington, and in the United States Senate, Homer Bone campaigned unremittingly for public power...
...Grange leaders took to the hustings at his side...
...Homer Bone's friends are men of many political faiths...
...He announced that year that he was not going to spend a single dollar to be renominated or reelected...
...He is also a warm friend of Sen...
...His retirement leaves a great void...
...Homer Bone is a wiry, nervoDs little man...
...He introduced many Pacific Northwest bills with the Republican leader, the late Charles L. McNary...
...Second only to Sen...
...He would like to crusade some more, but considerations of health have prompted him to retire from politics...
...Why don't you people develop this wasted power...
...In 1911 Homer Bone was admitted to the Washington bar, but even before then he had enlisted actively in the power movement...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 46
