Albert W. Hawkes

Albert Wahl Hawkes (November 20, 1878 - May 9, 1971) was a United States Senator from New Jersey. Born in Chicago, he attended the public schools and graduated from Chicago College of Law in 1900, gaining admission to the bar the same year. He studied chemistry at Lewis Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) for two years and engaged in the chemical business. During the First World War served as director of the Chemical Alliance in Washington, D.C. (1917-1918); he later became president of Congoleum-Nairn, Inc., at Kearny, New Jersey (1927-1942), becoming chairman of the board in 1937. He was president and director of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States in 1941 and 1942, and was a member of the Newark Labor Board and later appointed to the Board to Maintain Industrial Peace in New Jersey 1941-1942. He was a member of the National War Labor Board, Washington, D.C., in 1942; that year, he was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate and served from January 3, 1943, to January 3, 1949; he was not a candidate for renomination in 1948, and resumed former business activities in Montclair, New Jersey until 1961, when he moved to Pasadena, California. He was a trustee of the Freedoms Foundation, where the Hawkes Library (in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania) was named after him. He died at Palm Desert, California, and was interred in Mount Hebron Cemetery, in Montclair, New Jersey.

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