George Frisbie Hoar, US Senator

George Frisbie Hoar

Find A Grave Memorial ID # 2835

George Frisbie Hoar 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 denounced the Philippine-American War, calling for allowing independence of the Philippines. He also denounced the U.S. intervention in Panama. George F. Hoar in his elder years. “ You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.

Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.

—Senator George F. Hoar, From a speech in the United States Senate in May, 1902, chastising the Philippine-American War and the three Army officers, who were court-martialed. ”

Hoar pushed for and served on the Lodge Committee investigating alleged, and later confirmed, war crimes in the Philippine-American War. In addition to his political career, he was active in the American Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society, serving terms as president of both organizations. He was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1880, and a trustee of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. His autobiography, Autobiography of Seventy Years was published in 1903; it first appeared in serial form in Scribner's magazine.

Hoar enjoyed good health until June 1904. He died in Worcester, 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.

Through his mother, Sarah Sherman, G.G. 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.

It is not a secret that after the Civil War and the 15th amendment, giving freedmen the right to vote, women were fed up with the issue of suffrage. During this time period, women continued fighting for the right to vote. With both allies and enemies within the government, this fight would not be an easy one and would not end until the 19th amendment was passed in 1920 that would give them the right to vote.

           One ally the Suffragettes found was in Senator George F. Hoar from Massachusetts. He published a leaflet titled “Woman’s Cooperation Essential to Pure Politics.” In this leaflet Hoar argues on the side of the Suffragettes. He starts out by stating his understanding of why this issue is taking so long to be overcome, that when doubling the number of voters there is bound to be some backlash. Then he goes on to share that he is impatient with the amount of time this has taken because the government had just recently given freed African Americans the right to vote when only thirty years before this was written they were seen as inferior. 

Hoar goes on to comment that he is surprised that suffrage was given to women in frontier states, but not in developed and settled communities in the northeast. He includes two letters, one from the Governor Warren of Wyoming and one from the Chief Justice of the Washington Territory, Roger Sherman Greene. The letter from Wyoming states that giving the women the right to vote has raised the quality of elections, women consider the character of the candidates much more deeply than the men. The letter from Washington states that not a single bad thing has come from woman suffrage and many women find a greater honor in the ballot than even the men do. Hoar writes that women possess the same values in their country and elections that the men of America do: belief in the public good, a strong intuition in judging candidates, and a love for the country. Hoar argues that many of the greatest Native American provinces were run by women and queens of the modern century have done an amazing job at governing elsewhere in the world. He lastly argues that a woman who runs for office will make her goals ones that she is at capacity to handle and leave the other public concerns to which men are most adapted for to them. Hoar closes with saying that as more citizens are able to vote in the country, elections will become more of a way to accomplish “wise and beneficent public ends.”

George F. Hoar Papers, 1784-1933; bulk: 1860-1905, Massachusetts Historical Society - https://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0298