Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Francis Beverley BIDDLE
He was educated at Harvard, where he received a B.A. cum laude in 1909, and an LL.B cum laude in 1911. Upon graduation, he became the personal secretary of Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes during the Supreme Court term of
1911-1912. In 1912, he returned to Philadelphia and entered the law firm of Biddle, Paul, and Jayne. Francis dispensed with the Republican traditions of his family and campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Progressives. In 1918, he joined the law firm of Barnes, Biddle, and Myers, where he worked for two decades. In 1927, he published his only novel, Llanfear Pattern, which mocked the elite of Philadelphia society. With the onset of the Great Depression, Francis Biddle became consumed with the plight of the Pennsylvania coal miners and became politically active around the issue of labor relations. In 1934, he was appointed chairman of the newly created National Labor Relations Board, a post which he held for one year. In 1935, he returned to his private law practice, but was soon asked to serve as legal counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was being investigated by a
special congressional committee on the charges of corruption. Biddle won the case for the TVA, and in 1940, he was appointed U.S. Solicitor General, as well as the head of Immigration and Naturalization Services. In 1941, Francis Biddle was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he served until the death of President Roosevelt in 1945. At the conclusion of World War II, President Truman appointed Francis Biddle as chief American representative at the Nuremberg trials.
Upon Francis Beverly Biddle's retirement, he served as the chairman of Americans for Democratic Action from 1950-1953, and as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union. He married poet Katherine Garrison Chapin on April 27, 1918, and together they had two children.
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