Truxtun Beale

Truxtun Beale (March 6, 1856 – June 2, 1936) was an American diplomat. Biography Beale was born in San Francisco to Mary Engle Edwards and Edward Fitzgerald Beale; his siblings were Mary (1852–1925), who married Russian diplomat George Bakhmeteff, and Emily (1854–1912), who married John Roll McLean. He was named for his great-grandfather Commodore Thomas Truxtun. His maternal grandfather was U.S. Representative Samuel Edwards. In 1874 he graduated from the Pennsylvania Military College, and four years later, after studying law at Columbia University, was admitted to the bar. From 1876 to 1877 Beale was secretary to his father the US Ambassador to Austria-Hungary in Vienna. Instead of practicing law, he became manager of his father's Tejon Ranch in California, where he remained for 13 years. In 1891 he was appointed by President Harrison United States Minister to Persia, and a year later, Minister (afterward Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary) to Greece, Romania, and Serbia, making him ambassador to three countries at once. The years 1894-96 he devoted to travel in Siberia, Central Asia, and Chinese Turkestan. Many articles on international questions were contributed by him to reviews and magazines. On the death of his father in 1893, Beale inherited the Tejon Ranch. In 1894 he married his first wife, Harriet Blaine of Maine (the daughter of James G. Blaine), and together they had a son, Walker Blaine Beale (1896 - September 18, 1918), a Lieutenant in the United States Army who was killed in action in France in World War I.