So far in the National Statuary Hall, from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Arkansas, there have been two journalist/politicians (Bob Bartlett & Ernest Gruening); two military hero/politicians (Joseph Wheeler/Barry Goldwater); a Jesuit missionary (Father Eusebio Kino); one lawyer/politician (James Paul Clarke); one lawyer (Uriah M. Rose); and one disability rights advocate/socialist (Helen Keller).
From California, Colorado, Connecticult and Arkansas, there was an actor/politician (Ronald Reagan); astronaut/politician (Jack Swigert); two Founding Father/Lawyer/politicians – Robert Sherman and Caesor Rodney; a merchant/politician – Jonathan Trumbull; a lawyer/politician (John M Clayton); a Woman Scientist/Public Health Doctor (Florence R. Sabin); and a Franciscan Missionary (St. Junipero Serra).
So far the count of politicians in the National Statuary Hall is at ten out of 16 statues, so over half of them, with four of those being lawyers as well.
The State of Florida is the next in line. The two people who represent Florida are John B. Gorrie and Edmund Kirby Smith.
John B. Gorrie was a physician and scientist, credited with the invention of mechanical refrigeration.
John B. Gorrie was born to Scottish parents in October of 1803 in St. Kitts and Nevis, which were among the first islands in the Caribbean to be colonized by Europeans.
St. Kitts and Nevis is the smallest sovereign state and federation in the western hemisphere, in area and population, in the British Commonwealth, with the Queen as its head-of-state.
Gorrie spent his childhood in South Carolina, and received his higher education at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York, also known as the Fairfield Academy.
The Trustees of the Fairfield Academy had petitioned the Trinity Episcopal Church in Fairfield in 1812 for a funding grant with which to establish a college of liberal culture under Episcopalian auspices, but the petition was denied.
According to what we are told, the Trinity Episcopal Church in Fairfield was built in 1808.
The following year, a different petition to the Corporation of Trinity Church granted the funding for the theological seminary at the Fairfield Academy, until the Theological School was transferred to Geneva, New York, in 1821, at what later became the Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
It is interesting to note that Trinity Church is even today one of the largest landowners in New York City, now under the name of Trinity Real Estate.
In 1894, the Trinity Corporation was exposed by a New York Times reporter to have substandard living conditions on their Charlton Street properties.
Back to John B. Gorrie.
He moved to Apalachicola, Florida in 1833, where he was a resident physician at two hospitals, and served as a council member; postmaster; President of the Bank of Pensacola’s Apalachicola branch; secretary of his Masonic Lodge; and was a founding vestryman of Trinity Episcopal Church, that is still in use today, located at the corner of ‘D’ And 6th Street in Gorrie Square.
Dr. Gorrie’s medical research involved Yellow Fever, for which the prevalent hypothesis at the time was that mal-aria – or ‘bad air’ – caused diseases.
Hurged the draining of swamps and cooling of a sickrooms based on this theory, and to this end he experimented with making artificial ice.
Gorrie first mechanically produced ice in 1844, and by 1850, he was able to mechnically produce ice the size of bricks.
He was granted the patent on May 6th of 1851 for a “machine to make ice.”
Just as a point of reference, the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London started on May 1st of 1851 and went until October 15th of 1851.
John B. Gorrie died, however, in 1855, not long after his invention was patented.
He was unable to raise the money needed to manufacture his machine and everything in his life went south for him, including his health.
The other statue for the State of Florida is represented by Edmund Kirby Smith.
Edmund Kirby Smith was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded its Trans-Mississippi Department between 1863 and 1865.
The Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate States Army was comprised of Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, western Louisiania, Arizona Territory and Indian Territory.
Edmund Kirby Smith was born in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1834, the youngest child of attorney Joseph Lee and his wife Francis.
Both of his parents were natives of Litchfield, Connecticut before moving to St. Augustine in 1821, where his father was appointed as a Superior Court Judge in the new Florida Territory, of which St. Augustine was the capital between 1822 and 1824.
As mentioned in Part 2 of this series, Litchfield was the location of the Litchfield Law School, the first independent law school established in America for reading law, founded by lawyer, educator and judge Tapping Reeve in the 1770s, and it was a proprietary school that was unaffiliated with any college or university.
I looked up meanings for the unusual name of “Tapping Reeve,” and here is what I found as some possibilities:
Tapping – To exploit or draw a supply from a resource.
Reeve – Administrator, attendant; curator; agent; director; foreman; and the list goes on.
Something to think about.
Edmund Kirby Smith entered West Point in 1841 and graduated in 1845, and by August of 1846 was serving in the 7th U. S. Infantry as a Second Lieutenant.
He served in several battles of the Mexican-American War, which took place between 1846 and 1848 after the United States annexed Texas in 1845, and had obtained the rank of captain by the end of it.
After the Mexican-American War and before the American Civil War, Smith taught mathematics at West Point between 1849 and 1852, as well as pursuing his scientific interest in botany, and was credited with collecting and describing species of plants native to Florida and Tennessee.
Then, he returned to leading troops in 1859 in the Southwest.
Smith was promoted to Major in January of 1861 when Texas seceded from the Union, and he refused to surrender his command at Camp Colorado in what is now Coleman to the Texas State Troops.
Within just a few months, Smith had resigned his commission in the United States Army to join the Confederacy.
He had been promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General in June of 1861, and given a command of a brigade in the Army of the Shenandoah, which he led in the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21st of 1861, the first major battle of the civil war, in which he was severely wounded.
Smith recovered from his injuries, and returned to duty in October of 1861 as a Major-General and division commander of the Army of Northern Virginia for awhile, the primary military force of the Confederate States in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War.
Then in February of 1862, he was sent west to command the eastern division of the Army of Mississippi, cooperating with General Braxton Bragg in what was called the “Invasion of Kentucky,” during which time he was victorious in the Battle of Richmond in Kentucky, called one of the most complete confederate victories in the war, and the first major battle in the Kentucky Campaign.
By October of 1862, Smith was promoted to Lieutenant-General, commanding the 3rd Corps, Army of Tennessee.
Then in January of 1863, Edmund Kirby Smith was transferred to command the Trans-Mississippi Department, and for the rest of the Civil War he remained west of the Mississippi River.
His Trans-Mississippi Department never had more than 30,000 men stationed over a large area and he wasn’t able to concentrate his forces enough to challenge the Union Army or Navy.
After the Union forces captured Vicksburg, Mississippi…
…and Port Hudson in Louisiana…
…Edmund Kirby Smith’s forces were cut off from the Confederate Capital of Richmond, Virginia.
As a result of being cut-off from Richmond, Smith commanded and administered a nearly independent area of the Confederacy, and the whole region became known as “Kirby Smithdom.”
Ultimately, the Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department on May 26th of 1865 on board the U. S. S. Fort Jackson on Galveston Bay in Texas to the Union Major General Edward Canby, approximately eight-weeks after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia.
Edmund Kirby Smith was active in the telegraph business as the President of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company…
…served as the Chancellor of the University of Nashville from 1870 and 1875…
…and taught mathematics and botany at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee…
…in whose cemetery he was buried after his death from pneumonia in 1893.
The statue representatives for the State of Georgia are Crawford Long and Alexander H. Stephens.
Crawford Long was a surgeon and pharmacist, best known for his use of inhaled sulphuric ether as an anesthetic.
Crawford Long was born in Danielsville, Georgia, on November 1st of 1815.
His father was a state senator, merchant and planter.
Danielsville is 16-miles, or 23-kilometers, north of Athens, Georgia.
He started attending the University of Georgia in Athens after he graduated from the local academy at the age of 14.
His friend and roommate at the University of Georgia was Alexander H. Stephens, the other statue representing Georgia.
More on him shortly.
Crawford Long received his Master of Arts degree, and first went on to study medicine at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he studied under the revered surgeon Benjamin Dudley, and Long was said to have first noticed the effects of operating without anesthesia.
Crawford Long went on to complete his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and received his M.D. in 1839.
Crawford Long returned to Georgia after an 18-month internship in New York, and took over a rural practice in Jefferson, Georgia, in 1841.
Crawford Long was credited with using ether for the first time as an anesthetic on March 30th of 1842 to remove a tumor from the neck of a patient, even though the first public demonstration of using either didn’t take place until four-years later by William Morton, to a medical audience at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Long was also credited with being the first to use ether as an anesthetic during childbirth, when he had his wife inhale ether when she was giving birth, and this practice was dominant in the field for many, many years afterwards.
Though others published their results before he did, Crawford Long was declared the official discoverer of anesthesia by the National Eclectic Medical Association in 1879…
…and led to “Doctors Day” being celebrated on March 30th every year to commemorate his first use of anesthesia on March 30th of 1842.
Crawford Long and his wife are buried next to each other at the Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens, Georgia.
The other statue represented by Georgia is one of Alexander Hamilton Stephens, an American politician who served as a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Georgia between October of 1843 to March of 1859 and December of 1873 to November of 1882; was Vice-President of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865; and the 50th Governor of Georgia from November of 1882 to March of 1883.
Alexander H. Stephens was born in February of 1812 in Talioferro County, near Crawfordsville, Georgia, the county seat.
Alexander H. Stephens was born on February 11th of 1812. His mother, Margaret Grier, died that same year.
His mother’s brother Robert Grier was the founder of Grier’s Almanac, one of Georgia’s longest-running publications, having been published continuously since 1807.
His father Alexander remarried in 1814, and both his father and his stepmother died from pneumonia in 1826, when Alexander was 14-years-old.
Though he grew up poor and in difficult circumstances, he went to live with another of his mother’s brothers, Revolutionary War General Aaron Grier, near Raytown in Talioferro County. His Uncle Aaron had inherited one of the best libraries in that part of the country from his father.
Stephens continued his education through several benefactors, and attended college in Athens, where I mentioned previously his roommate was Crawford Long.
He was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society and he graduated at the top of his class in 1832.
Stephens began legal studies and was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1834, and began his career as a successful lawyer in Crawfordsville with a career in law that spanned 32-years.
On top of that, he entered politics in 1836 when he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, where he served until 1841, and then he was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1842.
Then, Stephens served in the U. S. House of Representatives from October of 1843 to March of 1859.
He quickly rose to prominence as one of the leading southern Whigs in the House.
In 1861, Stephens was elected as a delegate to the Georgia Secession Convention to decide Georgia’s response to the election of Abraham Lincoln.
He came to be known as the “Sage of Liberty Hall” for his call for the South to remain loyal to the Union.
He voted again secession at the convention, but asserted the right to secede if the federal government continued to allow the northern states to nullify the “Fugitive Slave Law” with “Personal Liberty Laws.”
Liberty Hall was Alexander Stephens’ home in Crawfordville, and today is a museum, and part of A. H. Stephens Historic Park.
Stephens was elected to the Confederate Congress in November of 1861, and was chosen as Vice-President of the Provisional Government.
Stephens was outspoken in his support of institutionalized slavery.
He remained in this position through the end of the Civil War.
Stephens was arrested for treason against the United States at his home in Crawfordville on May 11th of 1865, and spent 5 months at Fort Warren on George’s Island at the entrance to Boston Harbor.
In 1866 Stephens was elected to the United States Senate by the first legislature that opened under the new Georgia Constitution, but was not allowed to take his seat because of restrictions against on former Confederates.
Then in 1873, he was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives as a Democrat, and was re-elected four more times – in 1874, 1876, 1878 and 1880.
He became Governor of Georgia on November 4th of 1882, but died a short time later, on March 4th of 1883.
He is buried next to his statue in front of his home in A. H. Stephens Historic Park.
Alexander H. Stephens never married, and has no known descendents.
Next we come to Hawaii, which is represented by Father Damien and King Kamehameha I in the National Statuary Hall.
Father Damien, or Saint Damien of Molokai, was a Roman Catholic priest from Belgium and a member of the Congregation of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a missionary religious institute.
The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary came about from the religious upheaval caused by the French Revolution.
Its original members founded new schools for poor children, seminaries to help grow their priesthood and parish missions throughout Europe, and in 1825, the Holy See entrusted the evangelization of the Hawaiian Islands to the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
Father Damien was recognized for his ministry from 1873 until his death in 1889 for people with leprosy in the Kingdom of Hawaii who lived in government-mandated quarantine in a settlement on Molokai.
Damien de Veuster arrived in Honolulu from Belgium on March 19th of 1864, and was ordained there as a priest on May 21st of 1864 at what is now the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, the Mother Church of the Diocese of Honolulu.
Father Damien was first assigned to the Catholic Mission in North Kohala on the island of Hawaii.
The Kingdom of Hawaii was struggling with a public health crisis and labor shortage.
Many of his native Hawaiian parishioners had infectious diseases like leprosy, smallpox, cholera, influenza, syphilis, and whooping cough, brought to the Hawaiian Islands by foreigners, and from which thousands died.
In 1865, out of fear of the contagious disease of Leprosy, King Kamehameha V and the Hawaiian Legislature passed the “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy.”
This Act quarantined the lepers of Hawaii, and the most serious cases were emoved to the settlement colony of Kalawao, and later a second one named Kalaupapa, on the island of Molokai.
From 1866 to 1969, approximately 8,000 Hawaiians were sent to these two settlements for medical quarantine.
The Kingdom of Hawaii did not provide enough resources, having planned for the people who lived there to take care of themselves and grow their own food, but this was not practical and did not work out well.
The Bishop of the Honolulu Diocese believed the lepers needed a Catholic priest to assist them, and the first volunteer to arrive at the isolated settlement of Kalaupapa was Father Damien.
We are told he worked with them to build a church and establish the Parish of St. Philomena.
Father Damien cared for the lepers and helped to establish leaders in the community to improve the quality-of-life there.
He was also said to have taught, painted houses, and organized farms, the construction of chapels, roads, hospitals and churches, as well as serving as their priest.
Father Damien worked for 11-years at the leper settlement on Molokai.
In 1884, he realized that he himself had contracted leprosy when he felt nothing when he put his foot into scalding hot water.
With his remaining time, he tried to advance as many projects as possible, including the completion of several building projects and improved orphanages.
Four volunteers arrived on Molokai to help him: Louis Lambert Conrardy, a Belgian priest; an American Civil War veteran, Joseph Dutton; James Sinnett, an nurse from Chicago; and Mother Marianne Cope, formerly the head of the Franciscan-run St. Joseph’s Hospital in New York City.
By March 23rd of 1889, he was bedridden, and he died from leprosy on April 15th of 1889.
Initially buried at the leper settlement where he had lived, his remains were returned to Belgium in 1936, though later the remains of his right hand were returned to Molokai for re-interment when he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995.
He was canonized as a saint in October of 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI.
The other statue for Hawaii is represented by King Kamehameha I.
King Kamehameha I , also known as the Great, was the founder and first ruler of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which originated in 1795, but became official when the whole Hawaiian Archipelago became unified in 1810.
Kamehameha was believed to have been born in the Kohala District of the island of Hawaii in November of 1758, at which time a bright star was said to have appeared just before he was born, which would have coincided with the return of Halley’s Comet in 1758.
He was the son of a high chief and daughter of King Alapa’i, who died in 1754.
King Kalani’opu’u was king when the expedition of British explorer Captain James Cook arrived in November of 1778, and went aboard his ship.
He went aboard Cook’s ship again in January of 1779, when the ship anchored in Kealakekua Bay, and gifts were exchanged.
Then in February of 1779, Cook’s ships returned to repair storm damage.
On this visit, Captain Cook tried to take the king hostage after the theft of a longboat, which lead directly to Captain Cook’s death when he was killed by the King’s attendants.
There’s differing reports about what happened after the death of King Kalani’opu’u in April of 1782.
One version of what happened is that the island of Hawaii was divided between his son Kiwalao, and his nephew, Kamehameha.
Things were peaceful we are told, until July of 1782, when a dispute between their chiefs broke out, which lead to war.
Kiwalao was slain at the Battle of Mokuohai, Kamehameha’s first major victory and solidified his leadership over much of the island.
Then Kamehamema embarked on a series of conquests that brought all the islands except for Kauai and Nihau under his control, which were eventually ceded to him through peaceful negotiations in 1810.
As King, Kamehameha set up governors to administer each island, and as a shrewd businessman, amassed a fortune for his kingdom through a government monopoly on the sandalwood trade and the imposition of port duties on visiting ships.
He was described as an open-minded sovereign who maintained his kingdom’s independence through the period of European discovery and exploration of the islands.
He died in May of 1819, his final resting place unknown as his trusted friends hid his body according to the ancient practice of “hiding the body in secret” to preserve his ‘mana’ or power.
This was King Kalakaua.
When King Kamehameha V died in December of 1872, he had not named a successor the last elected Monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Kalakaua ultimately became king through an election process by the legislative assembly in February of 1874.
He lost his absolute power in 1887 when he was forced by Hawaiian elites to accept a constitution that provided for a constitutional government.
He died in January of 1891.
Liliuokalani was proclaimed Queen of Hawaii after the death of her brother, King Kalakaua, in 1891.
She was the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian kingdom, from January 29th, 1891, until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom on January 17th, 1893, by subjects of the Hawaiian kingdom, U. S. citizens, and foreign residents residing in Honolulu
The last state I am going to be looking at in this part 3 of this series is Idaho, which is represented in the National Statuary Hall by William Borah and George L. Shoup.
William E. Borah was an outspoken Republican Senator, and considered to be one of the best-known figures in the history of Idaho.
He served in the U. S. Senate from 1907 until his death in 1940.
William Edgar Borah was born to parents who were farmers in June of 1865 in Jasper Township, Illinois, near Fairfield in Wayne County.
He received his initial education at Tom’s Prairie School near Fairfield, and then in 1881, his father sent him to Southern Illinois Academy, a Cumberland Presbyterian academy, to train for the ministry, but Borah was expelled in 1882.
Borah decided he wanted to be a lawyer, so his father sent him in 1883 to Lyons, Kansas, to live with his sister Sue, and her husband, Ansel M. Lasley, an attorney.
In 1885, he enrolled in the University of Kansas in Lawrence but contracted tuberculosis in 1887 and had to withdraw from his studies there.
He returned to Lyons, where his sister helped him recover his health, and he read law under his brother-in-law’s supervision, and passed the bar in 1887.
Though he was appointed as City Attorney of Lyons by the Mayor, Borah decided he wanted bigger and better things, and in 1890, he boarded the Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha, Nebraska, and headed west, and landed in Boise, Idaho.
Idaho had been admitted to the Union earlier in 1890,and the state capital, Boise, was considered a “boom town.”
Borah prospered in Idaho as an attorney in law and politics, serving as the chair of the Republican State Central Committee in 1892.
Borah joined many in Idaho in 1896 in breaking from the Republican Party to support the Democrat William Jennings Bryan in support of his platform of “Free Silver,” a major economic policy issue in the 19th-century, an expansionary monetary policy that featured unlimited coinage of silver as money on-demand, as opposed to the more carefully fixed money supply inherent in the gold standard.
The Republican-candidate, former Ohio Governor William McKinley, won the presidential election, and kept the gold standard in place.
As a point of historical information, President McKinley was shot twice in the abdomen by a gunman at the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 13th of 1901, and died as a result of his wounds on September 14th of 1901, at the beginning of his second term as president.
Back to William Borah.
Borah supported the Spanish-American War in 1898, and remained loyal to the Silver Republicans.
Then in 1900, he decided that the issue of silver versus gold standard was no longer important in the light of increased gold production and national prosperity, and subsequently made a return to the Republican Party.
Borah was prominent as an attorney in southern Idaho, and he sought election to the U. S. Senate in 1902, but was defeated by Weldon B. Heyburn, a mining lawyer from northern Idaho, in his first Senate run.
Borah set his sights on replacing the Senate seat of Fred Dubois in 1907, and, long story short, was successful in doing so.
Right before Borah entered the Senate in December of 1907, he was involved in two trials in Idaho – one in which he was counsel for the prosecution and the other in which he was a defendent.
In the case of the former, he had a role as counsel in the prosecution of Big Bill Haywood, who was tried for conspiracy in the murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg, who was assassinated on December 30th of 1905 by a bomb placed at the gate of his home.
Though Haywood’s defense attorney Clarence Darrow, best known for his defense of high school teacher John Scopes in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial” for teaching evolution in a state-funded school in Tennessee, won an acquital for his client, the trial made William Borah a national figure.
While defendents in the Haywood case awaited trial, Borah was indicted in federal court for land fraud, having to do with acquisitions by the Barber Lumber Company, of which Borah was counsel, of title to timber land claims. Individuals had purchased the claims, and sold them to the lumber company, after having sworn they were for they are own.
The indictment of Borah was perceived to be political by Idaho Republicans who had lost state party leadership because of the new Senator.
Borah was tried in September of 1907, and he was acquitted because the prosecuting U. S. Attorney was unable to tie Borah to any offense.
When William Borah arrived for the Senate’s regular session in December of 1907, he was already known for the trials in Idaho, and for wearing a ten-gallon hat.
Borah immediately staked out progressive positions, and was one of a growing number of progressive Republicans in the Senate, even though he often opposed liberal legislation.
The Progressive Era was what was called a period of widespread social activism and political reform in the United States that spanned the time-period from the 1890s to World War I, which started at the end of July in 1914.
The stated main objectives of the movement were to address problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration and political corruption.
Borah had a hand in his first term in what became the 16th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which allowed Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the States on the basis of population, which was passed by Congress in 1909.
Borah also had a hand in the 17th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913.
The 17th Amendment established the direct election of Senators in each State instead of election by the State Legislatures.
Borah’s popularity in Idaho won him re-election to a second term in the Senate in 1913, during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson.
He was given a seat on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, a seat which he held for the next 25 years.
He became one of America’s leading figures on International Affairs.
Borah voted against the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which passed Congress on December 23rd, 1913, and was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
It created and established the Federal Reserve System, and created the authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes (commonly known as the US dollar) as legal tender.
After World War I began in 1914, Borah believed that the United States should keep completely out of it, supporting American neutrality.
In early 1917, when Germany resumed unlimited submarine warfare, Borah remained hopeful the U. S. could stay out of World War I, though he supported Woodrow Wilson on legislation to arm merchant ships, and voted in favor when the President requested a declaration of war in April of 1917, in order for the U. S. to defend its own rights.
William Borah again won re-election in November of 1918.
Borah fought against the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers, and the Senate did not ratify it.
As a result of the Senate not ratifying the treaty, the U. S. never became an official member of the League of Nations, which was established in January of 1920, and was the first worldwide, intergovernmental organization with a stated mission of maintaining world peace.
Borah often fought with the Republican Presidents in office between 1921 and 1933, including Warren Harding, who was in office between 1921 and his death on August 2nd of 1923, and Calvin Coolidge who became President upon Warren Harding’s death.
The Teapot Dome Scandal broke in 1924, in which Coolidge himself was not involved but some of his cabinet members were implicated.
The Teapot Dome Scandal was a bribery scandal that took place during the Harding Administration between 1921 and 1923, in which the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, had leased Navy Petroleum Reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and two other locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding.
In order for Calvin Coolidge to get Borah’s support in the crisis, Borah wanted the Attorney General Harry Daugherty fired, which Coolidge resisted, but Daugherty ended up resigning under pressure.
Borah became the senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1924, and he became the committee’s chair, greatly increasing his influence.
He was involved in the efforts through the 1920s to outlaw war.
Chicago attorney Salmon Levinson formulated a plan to outlaw war called the “Kellogg-Briand Act,” or the “General Treaty of the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, and worked to get Borah on board as its spokesman, which turned out to be an on-and-off kind of support.
In the end, Borah supported it and after it was negotiated and signed by other countries on August 27th of 1928, secured the ratification of the treaty in the Senate…
…though the pact didn’t actually stop war, as World War II began eleven-years almost to the day it was signed, on September 1st of 1939.
Borah ran for the Republican nomination in 1936, however, his candidacy was opposed by Republican Conservative leadership, and the nomination went to Alf Landon from Kansas.
He won his sixth-term in the Senate that year instead.
In the years leading up to World War II, Borah sought to settle the troubled international situation through personal diplomacy, seeking to visit Germany and talk to Hitler himself, but he never made the trip realizing that making the trip would compromise him in foreign policy debates.
He died from a cerebral hemorrhage on January 19th of 1940.
He had a state funeral in the U. S. Capitol and then went to the Idaho State Capitol in Boise for a second funeral, where an estimated 23,000 people, half the state’s population at the time, passed by his body.
He was buried in the Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise.
George L. Shoup, the other statue representing Idaho, was the first governor of Idaho, the State, and the last governor of Idaho, the Territory.
After serving as Governor of Idaho after statehood 1890 for several months, he became one of Idaho’s first United States Senators.
George Laird Shoup was born in June of 1836 in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, northeast of Pittsburgh.
In 1852, he moved to Galesburg, Illinois, and farmed with his father.
Shoup moved to the Colorado Territory in 1859 to engage in mining and merchandising first near Pike’s Peak, and later in Denver, after he was financially devastated in the Panic of 1857, which was said to have been caused by the declining international economy and overexpansion of the domestic economy.
During the Civil War, Shoup enlisted with independent scouts working in the New Mexico Territory, Colorado Territory and Texas.
He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant when the Third Colorado Cavalry was formed in 1861 and left as a colonel in 1864.
He took part in the Battle of Apache Canyon in the New Mexico Territory…
…which was part of the Battle of Glorieta Pass from March 26th to March 28th of 1862, the decisive battle of the New Mexico Campaign during the American Civil War in which the Confederate forces failed to break the Union possession of the West along the base of the Rocky Mountains.
Shoup was also noted to have taken part in the Sand Creek Massacre during the Colorado War, a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U. S. Army in the American Indian Wars.
It occurred in November of 1864 when a 675-man force of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry attacked and destroyed their village in the southeastern Colorado Territory, in which an estimated 69 to over 600 Native American people were killed or mutilated.
After the war, he moved to Virginia City in the Montana Territory…
…and then settled across the Continental Divide in Salmon, a town in the Idaho Territory he helped found.
After the end of the Civil War, Shoup moved to Virginia City in the Montana Territory.
Shoup owned general merchandise stores in both locations.
Shoup was appointed Commissioner of Idaho’s Lemhi County, of which Salmon was the county seat…
…and in 1874, he was elected to the Territorial Legislature.
He served on the Republican National Committee for Idaho from 1880 to 1904.
And in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Shoup Governor of the Idaho Territory, a position he held until July of 1890, when Idaho became a State and the Territory ceased to exist.
He was elected the States first Governor in October of that year, a position in which he served only a few weeks, as he was elected to the United States Senate in November, and in which he served for over ten years, until March of 1901.
During his time in the U. S. Senate, he was interested in pensions, education and military affairs, and was Chairman of the Committee on Territories.
George L. Shoup died in December of 1904, and was given a state funeral in Idaho, and was buried in Boise’s Pioneer Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in continual use in the city since the area was settled in 1863.
I am going to end this part of the series on the National Statuary Hall here, and in the next part of this series I will be looking at the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Kentucky.
Revealing What Has Been Hidden in Front of Our Eyes 