Fred Dubois - Return To The Senate

Return To The Senate

As the Silver Republican faction declined, it was thought by many that Dubois' political career was over. But in 1900, after refusing to rejoin the Republican Party, he was elected again to the United States Senate by the Democratic Idaho Legislature by defeating Shoup, his onetime political ally. Shortly after returning to the Senate in 1901, Dubois switched parties and joined the Democratic Party, one of few politicians in that era to do so. He remains the only person in Idaho history to serve in the United States Congress as both a Republican and a Democrat.

During his second term in the Senate, Dubois continued to advocate abandoning the gold standard, but focused most of his attention on opposition to imperialism and Mormonism. Dubois led a group of senators which tried to force Reed Smoot of Utah, the first Mormon ever elected to the Senate, to resign.

Dubois strongly opposed efforts to make the Philippines, which were annexed from Spain after the Spanish-American War, an American territory. Dubois first supported independence for the Philippines, but after a 1905 visit he declared that Filipinos could not rule themselves and advocated selling the islands to Japan. His main reason for opposing expansion was that he was afraid of the new territories' economic competition with the rest of America. Dubois also supported strong limits on Chinese immigration.

Dubois broke with most Democrats of the day and supported President Theodore Roosevelt's agenda of environmental conservationism. He supported William Randolph Hearst for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904.