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Scottish; his plain Yankee twang has a mellow brogue. He was born in 1884 in a two-family house across from John Stanley's blacksmith shop, where his old man worked. He stuttered in school and became so embarrassed that he wept. When he got into fights, an old friend remembers, he got so mad he would "cry and fight like hell all at the same time." He delivered newspapers, earned $4 a week. He started a savings account, which he still has (balance: around $7,000).
At high school he played baseball and was a good enough athlete to be offered a Dartmouth scholarship. But he had a job on the town paper. Instead of going to college he stuck to newspaper reporting and bought the Evening Chronicle.
He got himself elected to the State House, later to the Senate, retired from politics for a while to buy a North Attleboro insurance business; got back into politics again and ran for Congress.
He was respected, well liked. He was too busy to get married. He put two brothers through college. He lived with his mother and father on Orne Street. His district sent him to Washington.
Every two years after that they returned him. Roosevelt carried his district in 1936, but Joe won. The Administration poured WPA money in to beat him in 1938. Joe still won. Big-bellied, good-natured brother Charlie said: "He's a conservative Yankee. They'll never lick him. He gets too many Democratic votes. They all like him." Charlie, who likes a good time, added as an afterthought: "I get the sinners, Joe gets the saints."
Middle-Class Man. Joe followed in the steps of that other Massachusetts legislator, dignified, tactful, goateed Frederick Gillett, who capped a long career in the House by becoming Republican Speaker in the Democratic Administration of Woodrow Wilson.
Joe was chairman of the Republican National Convention in 1940 and he might have won the nomination for President if he had been willing to deal with the anti-Willkieites. Roosevelt, who liked him personally, singled him out for personal attack in the famed "Martin, Barton and Fish" crack of the '40 campaign. "I only used your name because it rhymes with Barton," Roosevelt laughingly told him. But Joe had the last laugh. He ran in 1940 and won, and also in '42, '44 and '46. His voting record was "regular"—he voted along the party's line. But as minority leader he helped lay out the line. Opponents charged that it was a line of sullen opposition. Martin defends it as an effort, in general, to keep the Government i) honest, 2) within its democratic prerogatives.
In early pre-Pearl Harbor days he voted consistently against aid to the Allies. But finally, in 1941, he voted for Lend-Lease. He voted for the draft but against extending it in 1941, on the grounds that this was breaking the original contract with draftees. He voted against arming U.S. merchant ships in 1941 because the U.S. had nothing with which to arm them and he believed that the bill would only provoke U-boat attacks.