Ambassador Miles Poindexter (1868 - 1946)

[KALKI]

Miles Poindexter (April 22, 1868 – September 21, 1946) was an American politician. As a Republican and later a Progressive, he served as a United States Representative and United States Senator.


Legal career

After he graduated, he settled in Walla Walla, Washington, where he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law. In 1892 he became the prosecuting attorney of Walla Walla County. He moved to Spokane, Washington in 1897 where he continued the practice of law. He served as the assistant prosecuting attorney for Spokane County from 1898 to 1904, and as a judge of the superior court from 1904 to 1908.



He was elected as a Republican to the Sixty-first Congress, and served from March 4, 1909 to March 4, 1911 representing the then Washington's newly created 3rd congressional district. He was then elected to the United States Senate in 1910 and was reelected in 1916, serving from March 4, 1911 to March 4, 1923. Poindexter left the Republican Party in 1913 to join the Progressive Party, rejoining the Republicans in 1915.[1] He was unsuccessful in his candidacy for reelection in 1922. He was one of only three Republican Senators to vote, on June 1, 1916, to confirm Louis Brandeis as a Supreme Court Justice—the other two Republicans being Robert M. La Follette and George W. Norris.

To date, Poindexter is the last Senator from Washington who lived east of the Cascades at the time of his election.

[KALKI]

Lineage: William Bowyer, George Benskin, Edwin Isham?, George III, George, George

1868 - 1946
Miles Poindexter from the state of Washington was one of the more outspoken and aggressive members of the progressive Republican Party. He was in Congress from the time of his first election to the House of Representatives in 1908 to the beginning of World War I in 1917. At the time, he received considerable attention in the press, and after his election to the Senate in 1910 he was probably as closely identified with the reform movement in Congress by the national press as any of the progressive Republicans except Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. Miles Poindexter served only two terms in the Senate. At any rate, Poindexter did not serve long enough to accumulate seniority and to acquire the power and visibility which usually accompany seniority, and his role in the Congress during the Progressive era passed by, relatively unnoticed.
Poindexter's reputation as a prominent Senate progressive also suffered because he abandoned a progressive stance after 1917 and shifted to the right during World War I and the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920. He became even more vitriolic and intolerant in his denunciation of labor unions, Socialists, pacifists, and "Bolsheviks" after 1917 than in his attacks upon the trusts, "special interests", and their alleged defenders in the Congress in the pre-war years.

Poindexter's abandonment of reform and his turn against many of his former progressive colleagues after the war, combined with his retirement from the Senate in 1923, probably served to obscure his earlier reputation as a leading Senate progressive.

Mile's Presidential Campaign Speech Given In 1920


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Extended Bibliography

Allen, Howard W. “Miles Poindexter and the Progressive Movement.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53 (July 1962): 114-22.

Poindexter of Washington: A Study in Progressive Politics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.

Filson, Helen. “Miles Poindexter and the Progressive Movement in Eastern Washington, 1908-1913.” Master’s thesis, Washington State University, 1941.

Poindexter, Miles. The Ayar-Incas. 2 vols. New York: H. Liveright, 1930.

Peruvian Pharaohs. Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1938.

[KALKI]

Ambassador Miles Poindexter (1868 - 1946) states in his book, The Ayar-Incas:

"Aryan words and people came to America by the island chains of Polynesia. The very name of the boat in Mexico is a South Indian (Tamil) word: Catamaran.

(source: The Ayar-Incas - By Miles Poindexter published by Horace Liveright New York volume 1-2. 1930).

[KALKI]

The word catamaran is derived from the Tamil word kaṭṭumaram