Political and legal career
Hoar graduated from
Harvard University in 1846, then studied law 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.
With 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.
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 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.<ref>Hoar, George Frisbee. From a speech in the United States Senate given May, 1902. Originally published in Bryan, William Jennings, ed. The World’s Famous Orations. Volume X, America III. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906. </ref>
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 of 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.
