George F. Hoar

Hoar was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1826. He studied for several months at a boarding school in Waltham, Massachusetts, run by Samuel and Sarah Bradford Ripley. He graduated from Harvard University in 1846 and earned his law degree at Harvard Law School in 1849. He was admitted to the bar and settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he practiced law. Initially a member of the Free Soil Party, of which he became the leader, he joined the Republican Party shortly after its founding. ==Political career==

Hoar was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1852 and to the Massachusetts Senate in 1857. He represented Massachusetts as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for four terms from 1869 to 1877 and then served in the U.S. Senate until his death during his fifth term. For one term during his House service, from 1873 to 1875, his brother Ebenezer Rockood Hoar served alongside him. He was a Republican, but generally avoided heavy partisanship, and did not hesitate to criticize other members of the party whose actions or policies he believed were in error. Between 1856 and 1857 Hoar was active as a Kansas Free-Stater, supported the Freedmen's Bureau, and took a leading part in reconstruction legislation. He took part in the investigation of the Crédit Mobilier scandal and the impeachment of William W. Belknap, President Grant's secretary of war. An economic nationalist, Hoar believed in capitalism as progress for civilization in accordance to the plans by God. although it became law in a weakened form. - out of context. He opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, describing it as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination" He was a member of the Congressional Electoral Commission that settled the highly disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. He authored the Presidential Succession Act of 1886. During the 1884 United States presidential election, Hoar expressed sharp anger at Mugwumps, Republicans who supported Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland over GOP nominee James G. Blaine; he asserted to a friend who supported Cleveland: Hoar was a consistent opponent of American imperialism. He did not share his Senate colleagues' enthusiasm for American intervention in Cuba in the late 1890s. In December 1897, he met with Native Hawaiian leaders opposed to the annexation of their nation. He then presented the Kūʻē Petitions to Congress and helped to defeat President William McKinley's attempt to annex the Republic of Hawaii by treaty, though the islands were eventually annexed by means of joint resolution, called the Newlands Resolution. After the Spanish–American War, Hoar became one of the Senate's most outspoken opponents of the imperialism of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. He denounced the Philippine–American War and called for independence for the Philippines in a three-hour speech in the Senate, saying: By this time, one of his strongest opponents on the pro-imperialist side was his fellow Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a leading advocate for the Treaty of Paris. Hoar pushed for and served on the Lodge Committee, investigating allegations, later confirmed, of United States war crimes in the Philippine–American War. He also denounced the U.S. intervention in Panama. Hoar voted against the Chinese Exclusion Act. ==Other interests==

In 1865, Hoar was one of the founders of the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, now the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Hoar was active in the American Historical Association and the American Antiquarian Society, serving terms as president of both organizations. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1853, and served as vice-president from 1878 to 1884, and then served as president from 1884 to 1887. In 1887 he was among the founders of the American Irish Historical Society. He was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1880, an overseer of Harvard University from 1896, Hoar was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1901. His autobiography, Autobiography of Seventy Years, was published in 1903. It appeared first in serial form in ''Scribner's'' magazine. In 1904, he was one of several high-profile investors who backed the Intercontinental Correspondence University, but the institution folded by 1915. He attended the Unitarian Church of All Souls in Washington, D.C. Hoar enjoyed good health until June 1904. He died in Worcester on September 30 of that year and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord. After his death, a statue of him was erected in front of Worcester's city hall, paid for by public donations. ==Family==

In 1853, Hoar married Mary Louisa Spurr (1831–1859). In 1862, he married Ruth Ann Miller (1830–1903). With his first wife, he was the father of a son, U.S. Representative Rockwood Hoar, and a daughter, Mary (1854–1929). With his second wife he was the father of a daughter, Alice (1863–1864). Through his mother, Sarah Sherman, G. F. Hoar was a grandson of prominent political figure, Roger Sherman and Sherman's second wife, Rebecca Minot Prescott. Roger Sherman signed the Articles of Confederation, United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. • G. F. Hoar's father, Samuel Hoar, was a prominent lawyer who served on the Massachusetts state senate and the United States House of Representatives. • G. F. Hoar's brother Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar was an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, one of Ulysses S. Grant's attorneys general, and a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. • G. F. Hoar's first cousin Roger Sherman Baldwin was Governor of Connecticut and a U.S. senator; and William Maxwell Evarts was US secretary of state, U.S. attorney general and a U.S. senator. • He was the uncle of U.S. representative Sherman Hoar, and the great-uncle of Massachusetts state senator and assistant attorney general Roger Sherman Hoar. • His second wife's sister, Alice Miller (1840—1900), married U.S. representative William W. Rice, G. F. Hoar's successor as U.S. representative from Massachusetts. ==See also==