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Homer Truett Bone was born in Indiana, but the family moved to Tacoma, Washington in 1899. Homer studied diligently on his own, in addition to working full-time. In 1907, he enrolled in night classes at the Tacoma Law School, and passed the bar in 1911. His law practice specialized in labor cases and he actively pursued socialist causes, although in 1916 the Socialist party purged him from its ranks as too moderate. He won his first political office when elected in 1922 to the Washington House of Representatives as a member of the Farmer Labor party. Convinced that state ownership of the region's abundant water power was necessary to ensure all citizens access to cheap electricity, he quickly became a prominent leader of the forces supporting public power. He became the Democratic Senator from Washington to the U.S. Senate in 1933.

Homer Bone transferred his concern for public power to the national stage. When bickering between the Interior Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over control threatened to derail the Bonneville Dam project, he fashioned the compromise that kept it alive, and insured that public and cooperatively-owned utilties were given preference for purchasing the cheap federally produced electricity. Even though Bone's fame rests on his fight for public power, his accomplishments in the Senate exceeded this one issue. He called attention to the profits some American munition manufacturers, had made from wars abroad, and he authored legislation creating the National Cancer Institute, at Bethesda, Maryland. Bone won a second term to the Senate in 1938, but the effects of an injury dissuaded him from a third term. In 1944, President Roosevelt nominated him to the more sedate position of justice on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Bone remained on the federal bench full-time until his retirement in 1954.