"... this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday morning's breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle, and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American conviction that minding one's own business was even more important abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country. His greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of 1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate he placed these sentences: “No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic." I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals."
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Activists from the United StatesCivil rights activistsAcademics from the United StatesMembers of the United States SenatePoliticians from Boston
Original Language: English
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Sources
Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (1939)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Frisbie_Hoar
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George Frisbie Hoar
George Frisbie Hoar (29 August 1826 – 30 September 1904) was a prominent American politician and United States Senator from Massachusetts.
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