Before the Philadelphia convention next June, a major job of the nation's voters will be to absorb, weigh, and compare the records in the Republican Who's Who of presidential candidates. Herewith, in the fifth* of a series, TIME publishes the condensed biography and political record of Massachusetts' Joseph William Martin Jr.
Vital Statistics. Age: 63 (born Nov. 3, 1884 in North Attleboro, Mass., in a two-family frame house across the street from John Stanley's blacksmith shop). Ancestry: eldest son of eight children of Joseph William Martin Sr., a Presbyterian Scotsman who worked in the blacksmith shop, and Catherine Katon, an Irish Catholic;...