He was an intellectual leader of the Progressive Era and a biographer of Chief Justice John Marshall and President Abraham Lincoln.

Beveridge was born on October 6, 1862, in Highland County, Ohio, near Sugar Tree Ridge; his parents moved to Indiana soon after his birth.

[4] Beveridge entered politics in 1884 by speaking on behalf of presidential candidate James G. Blaine and was prominent in later campaigns, particularly in 1896, when his speeches attracted general attention.

[6] He celebrated the "white man's burden" as a noble mission, part of God's plan to bring civilization to the entire world: "It is racial....

He has marked the American people as His chosen nation...."[7] After Beveridge's election in 1905 to a second term, he became identified with the reform-minded faction of the Republican Party.

He championed national child labor legislation,[8] broke with President William Howard Taft over the Payne–Aldrich Tariff, and sponsored the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, adopted in the wake of the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

When the Progressive Party disintegrated, Beveridge returned to the Republicans with his political future in tatters; he eventually ran one more race for the Senate in 1922, winning the primary against incumbent Harry S. New but losing the general to Samuel M. Ralston.

In 1901, a decade before Leo Tolstoy died, American travel lecturer Burton Holmes visited Yasnaya Polyana with Beveridge.

Afterwards, Beveridge's advisers succeeded in having the film destroyed, fearing that evidence of his having met with a radical Russian author might hurt his chances of running for the presidency.