Arthur P. Gorman, U.S. Senator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Pue_Gorman

Arthur Pue Gorman (March 11, 1839 – June 4, 1906) was a United States Senator from Maryland, serving from 1881 to 1899 and from 1903 to 1906. He also served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1869 to 1875. He was a prominent Bourbon Democrat and later served as a member of the Mills Commission which investigated the origins of baseball.

Gorman was born in Woodstock, Maryland, moved to Laurel, Maryland about 1845 with his younger brother William Henry Gorman, and attended the local public schools. He was appointed as a page in the House of Representatives in 1852 and was transferred to the Senate through the influence of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who made him his private secretary. Gorman subsequently served the Senate as page, messenger, assistant doorkeeper, assistant postmaster, and finally postmaster.

In September 1866, Gorman was removed from his Senate office and was immediately appointed collector of internal revenue for the fifth district of Maryland. He later served as director and eventually president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Co.

Gorman was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1869, serving until 1875; he served as speaker of the house for one session. In 1875, he was elected to the Maryland State Senate, serving until 1881.

In 1880, Gorman was elected to the United States Senate, where he soon became a leader of the Bourbon Democrats. He served as the Democratic caucus chairman from 1890 to 1898, as the chairman of the Senate Committee on Printing (Fifty-third Congress), and as a member of the Senate Committee on Private Land Claims (Fifty-fifth Congress). He played a major role in financial and tariff legislation, especially the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, where he defeated President Grover Cleveland's low tariff goals by raising the tariff to thwart competition with industry in his state.

Gorman was reelected in 1886 and 1892, but was an unsuccessful candidate for re-election in 1898, losing to Louis E. McComas. After his defeat, Gorman campaigned for the other Maryland senate seat, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1902. He was again appointed as the Democratic caucus chairman from 1903 to 1906, and served as senator until his death of a heart attack in Washington in 1906.

His son, Arthur Pue Gorman, Jr., attended Lawrenceville Prep and traveled to the Maryland Agricultural College (now the University of Maryland), where he played on the football team as a fullback and served as an assistant coach. At the age of 22, Gorman was one of the founding members of the Washington Nationals Base Ball Club, the first official baseball team in America. Eventually he would become President of the National Association of Base Ball Players.