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George Frisbie Hoar (August
29, 1826 – September 30, 1904) was a prominent United
States politician and United States Senator from Massachusetts. Hoar was born
in Concord, Massachusetts. He was a member of an extended family that was politically
prominent in 18th and 19th century New England. Hoar graduated from Harvard
University in 1846, then studied at Harvard Law School and settled in
Worcester, Massachusetts where he practiced law before entering politics.
Initially a member of the Free Soil Party, he joined the Republican Party
shortly after its founding, and was elected to the Massachusetts House of
Representatives (1852), and the Massachusetts Senate (1857). In 1865, Hoar was
one of the founders of the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial
Science, now the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He represented Massachusetts
as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1869 through 1877, then
served in the U.S. Senate until his death. He was a Republican, who generally avoided
party partisanship and did not hesitate to criticize other members of his party
whose actions or policies he believed were in error. Hoar was long noted as a
fighter against political corruption and campaigned for the rights of African
Americans and Native Americans. He argued in the Senate in favor of Women's
suffrage as early as 1886 and opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882. As a
member of the Congressional Electoral Commission, he was involved with settling
the highly disputed U.S. presidential election, 1876. He authored the
Presidential Succession Act of 1886, and in 1888 he was chairman of the 1888
Republican National Convention. Unlike many of his Senate colleagues, Hoar was
not a strong advocate for an American intervention into Cuba in the late 1890s.
After the Spanish–American War, Hoar became one of the Senate's most outspoken
opponents of the imperialism of the William McKinley administration. He called
for independence for the Philippines and denounced the Philippine–American War.
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