William Edgar Borah was born in 1865 in rural Illinois, the seventh of ten children. His father sent him to a Presbyterian academy in Enfield to train for the ministry, but he was expelled for riding an Illinois Central train to spend a night in a neighboring town, and he briefly ran off with a traveling Shakespearean troupe. He left the University of Kansas after contracting tuberculosis, read law with his brother-in-law, and passed the bar in 1887. In 1890 he boarded a train in Omaha and settled in Boise, Idaho, on the advice of a professional gambler. In 1907 he prosecuted Big Bill Haywood for the bombing murder of a former Idaho governor, losing to Clarence Darrow, and weeks later was acquitted on his own federal land fraud indictment.

Entering the U.S. Senate in 1907 in a ten gallon hat, Borah served until 1940. He championed the 16th and 17th Amendments yet voted against the 19th and fought federal anti-lynching bills as intrusions on state authority. He led the irreconcilables against the Treaty of Versailles, working with Henry Cabot Lodge to keep the U.S. out of the League of Nations, then chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and pushed ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. He declined Calvin Coolidge’s vice presidential offer in 1924 and lost the 1936 Republican nomination. He fathered a daughter, Paulina, with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and after Munich hoped to talk with Hitler personally. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 1940.

• In an 1899 mining strike murder trial, he rode the roof of a moving train and jumped to the platform to prove the prosecution’s theory to the jury.
• He met suffragist Alice Paul and resisted pressure from Theodore Roosevelt but would not back a federal suffrage amendment.
• He feared Article 10 of the League charter would send U.S. troops to war without the consent of Congress.
• Idaho sent him back to the Senate six times.
• About 23,000 people attended his viewing in Boise, nearly the city’s entire population.