
Joseph McKenna (10 August 1843-21 November 1926) was a member of the US House of Representatives (R-CA 3) from 4 March 1885 to 28 March 1892 (succeeding Barclay Henley and preceding Samuel Hilborn), United States Attorney General from 5 March 1897 to 25 January 1898 (succeeding Judson Harmon and preceding John W. Griggs), and an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 26 January 1898 to 5 January 1925 (succeeding Stephen Johnson Field and preceding Harlan F. Stone).
Biography[]
Joseph McKenna was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1843 to Irish Catholic immigrant parents, and he attended college in Benicia, California, where he became a lawyer in 1865. He served as Solano County district attorney, in the State Assembly from 1875 to 1877, in the US House of Representatives from 1885 to 1892 (during which he was a vehement proponent of Chinese exclusion), as a Court of Appeals judge from 1892 to 1897, as United States Attorney General from 1897 to 1898, and as a US Supreme Court associate justice from 1898 to 1925, when he resigned at Chief Justice William Howard Taft's suggestion after he suffered from a stroke. He died in 1926.