Despite his lukewarm support for President Roosevelt's New Deal agenda, he introduced the Walsh-Healey Act that established labor standards for government contractors.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Walsh opposed American involvement in World War II and was a leading member of the America First Committee.

Walsh, who never married, was also dogged by accusations of homosexuality during his lifetime, including a sensationalized scandal in his final term that he privately called "a tragic Gethsemane" to his political career.

[7] Walsh proposed increased government responsibility for charity work and the care of the insane and reorganized the state's management of these areas with little opposition.

[8] In his 1914 campaign for re-election, he cited as accomplishments an increase in the amounts paid for workman's compensation and improved administration of the state's care for the insane.

[12] He supported the work of the Anti-Death Penalty League, a Massachusetts organization founded in 1897 that was particularly active and nearly successful in the decade preceding World War I.

When the legislature later called a convention, Walsh won election as a delegate-at-large as part of a slate of candidates who endorsed adding provisions for initiative and referendum to the state constitution, key Progressive-era reforms.

There are men within the knowledge of us all who believe in a government of the few, of the college bred class only, of those only who have been successful in the commercial world, or those only who have been fortunate enough to have been born in an environment of ease and luxury.

[20] Walsh broke with Democratic President Woodrow Wilson on the subject of the Treaty of Versailles, joining fellow Massachusetts senator (and Republican) Henry Cabot Lodge in opposition.

[21] At the Democratic National Convention in 1924, he spoke in favor of condemning the Ku Klux Klan by name in the party platform: "We ask you to cut out of the body politic with the sharpest instrument at your command this malignant growth which, injected, means the destruction of everything which has made America immortal.

Though Herbert Hoover and Charles Evans Hughes campaigned for his opponent, in the November 1926 special election Walsh won the right to complete the remaining two years of Lodge's term,[24][25] defeating William Morgan Butler, a friend of Coolidge and head of the Republican National Committee.

A good and frequent host himself, he accepts all invitations out, is one of the most lionized Senators in Washington.Time reported that some commented on the contrast between his political populism and his luxurious life style.

A newspaper reported that "He is not of the insurgent type ... At heart, observers [in Boston] say, he dissents from many of the policies of the New Deal", but "he will stay on the reservation" and "he will avoid an open break".

[39] Speaking at New York City's Carnegie Hall, Walsh argued his position in terms of the separation of powers, judicial independence, and the proper role of the executive.

He described the public's reaction as "a state of fear, of apprehension, of bewilderment, of real grief, as a result of the proposal to impair, if not indeed to destroy, the judicial independence of the Supreme Court".

He also emphasized the role of the Court in protecting civil liberties, citing two examples:[40] One was the enactment, during the war hysteria, of a law in one of the sovereign States making it a crime to teach a child the German language ... [A] teacher in a German-language school was indicted and convicted ...

The United States Supreme Court, nine old men, sworn to uphold the Constitution, struck down that law and released from jeopardy an American citizen whose only offense was that he was a victim of war hysteria.

A State Legislature and the Governor approved a law, supported by an initiative vote of the people, denying a parent the right to send his child to a religious school of his choosing.

An independent judiciary, the United States Supreme Court, nine old men, struck down that law and proclaimed that it is an unalienable right under the Constitution for a parent to bring up his children and educate them as he may choose.He continued: Who can say when some majority of the moment may attempt to harass a minority?

Without an independent judiciary, I hesitate to even think of denials to minorities of constitutional guarantees if some of the doctrines preached by groups in this country today should be enacted into law.One Cabinet official described his overall relationship to the administration as "not sympathetic ... to put it mildly".

Speaking in the Senate on June 21, 1940, he denounced Roosevelt's plans to provide armaments to Great Britain:[46] I say it is too risky, too dangerous, to try to determine how far we can go tapping the resources of our own Government and furnishing naval vessels, air planes, powder and bombs.

[49] After the 1940 election in particular, he opposed any action that would compromise American neutrality, first in closed-door hearings of the Naval Affairs Committee, which he headed, and then in attacking the Lend-Lease program on the floor of the Senate.

"[51] When the Senate considered the Burke–Wadsworth Act to establish peacetime conscription for the first time in U.S. history, Walsh offered an amendment, which failed to pass, that would have delayed the law's effective date until war was declared.

[52] In June 1940, he authored an amendment to the naval appropriations bill, sometimes called the Walsh Act of 1940, which permitted "surplus military equipment" to be sold only if it was certified as useless for American defense.

He told Vice President Henry Wallace that "everyone knew" about Walsh's homosexuality[66] and he had a similar conversation with Alben W. Barkley, the Senate majority leader.

[68] An FBI investigation produced no evidence to support the New York Post's specific charges against the Senator, though it accumulated much "derogatory information" in its files.

Senator Bennett Clark asserted that Morris Ernst, attorney for the New York Post, had contacted the White House trying to engage the administration to smear FDR's opposition.

Senator Gerald Nye contended the incident represented a larger effort on the part of a "secret society" that for two years had been trying to discredit him and his fellow isolationists.

He also believed the troops should return home quickly, allowing only that some may be required to perform "police duties in enemy territory", and the reserves demobilized.

[84] Writing in the 1960s, former Attorney General Francis Biddle hinted at the subject when he described Walsh in the mid-1930s as "an elderly politician with a soft tread and low, colorless voice ... whose concealed and controlled anxieties not altogether centered on retaining his job.