Moravian alumni may recognize the name James M. Beck in connection with the yearly prizes he established and which are presented to students. But in the early 20th century, that name was famous—if not infamous—in the fields of law and politics.

Born in Philadelphia on July 9, 1861, James Montgomery Beck was raised in a Moravian home. He attended Moravian College and Theological Seminary, graduating in 1880 at the age of 18—a prodigious achievement. Four years later, he was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia, where he rose to national prominence as a corporate lawyer.

Beck served as assistant US attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania and as US attorney in Philadelphia. As assistant attorney general of the United States under President William McKinley, he pursued litigation to limit the federal government’s regulatory powers over corporations. Conversely, under McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, Beck would prosecute monopoly cases against corporations. His convictions, however, would always be with business, not government, and he returned to the practice of corporate law in 1903.

A decade later, as war in Europe loomed, Beck was one of the first Americans to support a “Triple Entente” between Great Britain, France, and Russia. When war did break out in 1914, he laid the blame at the feet of Germany in The Evidence in the Case as to the Moral Responsibility for the War, one of many books he wrote about the war and the US Constitution.

President Warren G. Harding appointed Beck solicitor general of the United States in 1921, and by the time Beck resigned in 1925, he had overseen almost 1,000 Supreme Court cases, of which he personally and successfully argued more than 100. In 1927, he won a special election to fill a vacant seat in Congress, where he would become the leading spokesman in the campaigns against Prohibition and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he deemed socialistic. He left Congress in 1934, claiming Congress had become a rubber stamp for the free-spending White House.

But Beck continued to fight. In 1934, he became a legal advisor to a new organization called the American Liberty League (ALL), a lobbying group funded by wealthy bankers and industrialists to oppose federal checks on their power. The ALL battled the feds over price controls, labor laws, taxes, and relief programs among other things, forcing Roosevelt to transfer responsibility for assisting unemployed workers from the federal government back to cash-strapped states and municipalities. In many ways, the league shaped the Republican platform for the 1936 election. That platform would be soundly defeated in both 1936 and 1940, after which the ALL disbanded.

James M. Beck remained engaged in public debate until his death at age 74 on April 12, 1936. And although he had vehemently opposed their policies in life, leaders of the Roosevelt Administration paid him tribute in death.