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Homer Truett Bone papers, 1932-1948

Overview of the Collection

Creator
Bone, Homer Truett, 1883-1970
Title
Homer Truett Bone papers
Dates
1932-1948 (inclusive)
1938-1944 (bulk)
Quantity
0.84 cubic ft. (3 boxes)
Collection Number
3456
Summary
Papers documenting Homer T. Bone's U.S. Senate activities, principally his efforts to insure merchant mariners and his role in the public power debate in Washington State.
Repository
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Special Collections
University of Washington Libraries
Box 352900
Seattle, WA
98195-2900
Telephone: 2065431929
Fax: 2065431931
speccoll@uw.edu
Access Restrictions

The papers are open to all users.

Request at UW

Additional Reference Guides

Languages
English
Sponsor
Funding for encoding this finding aid was partially provided through a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
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Biographical Note

Homer Truett Bone (1883-1970) was a United States senator from Washington from 1933 through 1945 and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, from 1945 through 1954.

“The [U.S.] Senate has lost its mightiest atom,” Time magazine reported in 1944 when Homer T. Bone resigned his seat to serve full time on the federal bench. A man of slight physical stature, Bone became a political giant by freely exercising a talent for invective and scalding sarcasm in support of a passionate commitment to protect the interests of the “common man” against “a class-type society based on wealth” and the “interests” which controlled it. None of the “interests” riled Bone like the private utility companies. “There is nothing lower on earth,” he once groused. He devoted much of his energetic political career battling them on behalf of publicly-owned power utilities, for which he became known, both in Washington State and nationally, as “the father of public power.”

Bone was born near Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1883. By the time Homer reached the eighth grade, his father’s health, weakened by incarceration in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, and finances, lacerated by the 1893 depression, prevented him from providing any support for the family other than a meager Civil War pension. Homer had to abandon his formal education in order to provide money for his family. The Bones moved to Tacoma in 1899, where 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 because his opposition to direct action in favor of organization and the ballot box proved unacceptably moderate.

In the early 1920s, Bone served as an attorney for Tacoma City Light, the city’s municipally owned utility. 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 in their increasingly bruising battles with the private utility companies. “The question now is breeding a battle that will tear the state wide open,” he predicted, accurately. While his campaign for public power would meet with mixed success during the next decade, Bone’s reputation grew and he captured the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1932. Wesley Jones, his Republican opponent, had held the seat since 1908 but was severely hampered by both ailing health and the extensive unpopularity of his political party. Bone won the election handily.

With enthusiastic support from President Franklin Roosevelt, the freshman senator transferred his concern for public power to the national stage. He believed that society as a whole should benefit from whatever of the nation’s natural resources had not yet been gobbled up by private interests. “Our great public domain, with its timber, coal, and oil lands, has been frittered away,” he lamented. “There is left, inexhaustible and most valuable of our resources, that of water power.” Owning the Columbia River system “would be like owning oil wells that never run dry,” and he fervently believed that the exploitation of such a vast reserve of power should be given “the people,” and not “Eastern power companies.” When bickering between the Interior Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over control threatened to derail the Bonneville Dam project, Bone fashioned the compromise that kept it alive and insured that public and cooperatively-owned utilities were given preference for purchasing the cheap, federally produced electricity.

Bone hated not only the private exploitation of what he believed to be public resources, but also political power purchased by profits gained from private exploitation. In a radio speech, he claimed that “private power companies are notorious for their attempts to control the press, legislatures, other public officials, even judges.” Unless citizens remained constantly vigilant, private power’s extensive and expensive propaganda machine would seduce public opinion and undermine democracy. Even though Bone attacked the supporters of private power for rampantly smearing their opponents with the “Bolshevik” label, he was not immune from using excessively-charged rhetoric himself. Reacting to a private-power plan in 1940 to “invade” public schools with their point of view, Bone declared “the scheme was worthy of the sinister brain of the Nazi Goebbels. Like the Nazi propagandist, the utilities adopted lying as a propaganda weapon.” He declared years later that “if they wanted to be rough, I thought I’d get a little rough, too!”

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 munitions manufacturers -- “merchants of death,” as he called them -- had made from the Italo-Ethopian War and other conflicts. As a member of the Senate Munitions Inquiry Committee, he attacked the weapon-makers’ greed, which, he believed, was pushing the United States closer to the “hell of war.” He only abandoned his pragmatic isolationism after the attack on Pearl Harbor rendered it quixotic. Bone also authored the legislation creating the National Cancer Institute at Bethesda, Maryland. When one senator questioned why the federal government needed to expend money for cancer research when private sources donated $200,000 annually, Bone thundered that “such a trifling amount is like spitting on Vesuvius to put out the fire. We need millions to fight this scourge.” The Senate passed the legislation unanimously.

Bone easily won a second term to the Senate in 1938, despite a campaign budget that allowed for little more than gas and oil for his car. An energetic man, Bone found his physical activity sharply curtailed by a broken hip in 1939, an injury from which he never fully recovered. He waggishly remarked on his treatment that “after all these years of having my leg pulled by amateurs, I’m having it pulled by an expert at last.” Despite this good humor, by 1944 the prospect of running a campaign while on crutches dissuaded him from seeking a third term. In April, 1944, President Roosevelt nominated him to the more sedate position of justice on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The Senate voted without dissent to accept the nomination twelve minutes after officially receiving it. Much to the consternation of many of his colleagues, Bone refused to give up his Senate seat immediately because that would have allowed Washington governor Arthur Langlie to fill it with a Republican. When Warren G. Magnuson won the seat in the November general election, Bone finally resigned and Langlie replaced him with the Senator-elect. Finishing Bone’s term importantly provided Magnuson with a 2 ½ month seniority over Arkansas’ William Fullbright.

Bone remained on the federal bench full time until his retirement in 1954 and still occasionally heard cases afterwards. Even though his commitment to justice never faded, his ardor had cooled by the time he had moved to the judiciary. In 1962, the former crusader reflected that he had become an “anachronism.” He noted with melancholy that “most of the old-timers like Homer Bone are dead, and no voice is raised now to resurrect the tribulations of those trying years.” As he became an old man, different issues inflamed Americans’ political passions -- on the day he died in 1970, Seattle police had to quell a student riot at the University of Washington -- but these new issues were not more important nor fought over with any more intensity, commitment, or principle than those that had engaged Homer T. Bone.

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Content Description

The material in this collection emerged from papers segregated from the Washington Public Utility District Records, donated in 1961, and from the Warren G. Magnuson Papers, donated in 1982, respectively. The total size of the collection, which consists of two accessions, is 0.84 cubic feet. Principally, the collection contains correspondence about legislative matters, specifically insurance for merchant mariners and the public utilities debate. It does not cover significantly Bone's life before his election to the Senate nor after his appointment to the bench.

Accession 3456-1 documents two bills designed to make insurance available to merchant seamen: S. 475 and S. 2806. The accession contains correspondence between Bone and Congressional colleagues, bills and government publications, newspaper clippings, and lists of merchant marine casualties. All series, including the correspondence series, are arranged chronologically.

The information in Accession 3456-2 is concerned principally with the debate between public and private power companies in the 1930s and '40s. World War II is the focus of a few radio speeches and writings. This accession is roughly half correspondence, including letters from many of Bone's fellow advocates of public power. The accession also contains memoranda, speeches and writings, and news releases. The authorship of most of the memoranda is unfortunately unknown, although the name "Seelig," apparently an aide, appears on some items. J.P. Alvey, a consulting engineer for the Bonneville Power Administration, also authored a few memoranda. Included also are government and other publications. The incoming letters are arranged alphabetically; all other series are arranged chronologically.

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Use of the Collection

Restrictions on Use

The creator's literary rights have not been transferred to the University of Washington Libraries.

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Administrative Information

Arrangement

Organized into 2 accessions.

  • Accession No. 3456-001, Homer Truett Bone papers, 1942-1943
  • Accession No. 3456-002, Homer Truett Bone papers, 1932-1948

Acquisition Information

Accession 3456-1 was found among legislative files in the Warren G. Magnuson Papers, (Accession No. 3181-2) donated in 1982. Accession 3456-2 was part of the Public Utilities District Association's Records (Accession No. 181-1), donated in 1961.

Processing Note

Reprocessing for both accessions was completed in 2004. Some processing had been done on the collection previously, although the exact extent of the processing is unknown. In Accession 3456-1, the 2004 processor arranged the documents into series based on document type: correspondence, government publications, etc. The processor also removed duplicates as well as most of the merchant marine casualty information from the accession. One complete casualty list was left in the collection as an example.

For Accession 3456-2, initial processing was done and an inventory was created in the late 1960s. Very little reprocessing was done in 2004. Duplicates and some newspapers and government publications were discarded, and the radio speeches, writings, and memoranda series were arranged in chronological order.

Three photographic prints and three negatives from Accession 3456-2 were relocated to the Homer Truett Bone Photograph Collection in the division in 2004.

Bibliography

Terry Slatten, Homer T. Bone, Public Power, and Washington State Progressive Politics in the mid-1920's, unpublished M.A. thesis, Western Washington University, ca. 1980. Copy available in the division.

Related Materials

In the Truman Price Papers, Accession No. 519 in the division, there are tapes and transcriptions of interviews Price conducted with Bone in 1962.

Most of Homer T. Bone's papers are at the University of Puget Sound Library in Tacoma. This much larger collection (over 132 boxes) contains diaries (1933-1964), campaign materials, drafts of speeches (1937-1942), correspondence (1911-1953), photographs, reports, legislative materials, and other miscellaneous papers.

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Detailed Description of the Collection

 


2005 (Last modified: 4/20/2018)

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