- Arthur Pue Gorman
Arthur Pue Gorman (
March 11 ,1839 –June 4 ,1906 ) was a United States Senator fromMaryland , serving from 1881-1899 and from 1903-1906. He also served in theMaryland House of Delegates from 1869-1875. He was a prominentBourbon Democrat and later served as a member of the Mills Commission which investigated the origins ofbaseball .Gorman was born in
Woodstock, Maryland 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 ofIllinois senatorStephen 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 theMaryland 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 theDemocratic caucus chairman from 1890-1898, 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 theWilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, where he defeated PresidentGrover 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 successfully elected to the U.S. Senate in 1902. He was again appointed as the Democratic caucus chairman from 1903-1906, and served as senator until his death of a heart attack in Washington in 1906.References
*Lambert, John R. "Arthur Pue Gorman" (1953), the standard scholarly biography
*CongBio|G000326
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