U.S. Representative (1882–1906)
Hitt was elected to represent
Illinois' 5th district in the
United States House of Representatives in
1882. Hitt became Chairman of the
Committee on Foreign Affairs at the beginning of the
Fifty-first Congress and from the
Fifty-fourth to
Fifty-ninth Congresses. When the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 came up for renewal in 1892, he argued against the alien documentation provisions of the bill: "Never before in a free country was there such a system of tagging a man, like a dog to be caught by the police and examined, and if his tag or collar is not all right, taken to the pound or drowned and shot. Never before was it applied by a free people to a human being, with the exception (which we can never refer to with pride) of the sad days of slavery. …" He was appointed in July 1898, by President
William McKinley, as a member of the commission created by the
Newlands Resolution to establish government in the
Territory of Hawaii. Hitt received some support for the Vice-Presidential nomination at the
1904 Republican National Convention, including from President
Theodore Roosevelt, but lost the nomination to
Charles Fairbanks. During the last years of his life, he was Regent of the
Smithsonian Institution. ==Death and legacy==