James G. Blaine

James Gillespie Blaine ( January 31, 1830 in West Brownsville, Washington County, Pennsylvania, † January 27, 1893 in Washington, DC ) was an American politician of the Republican who for several months was 1881 Foreign Minister and as a candidate of his party in the presidential election in 1884 Grover Cleveland was defeated. From 1889 to 1892 he was again Secretary of State.

Life

James G. Blaine was the son of a rich landowner Scotch-Irish descent and great-grandson of Colonel Ephraim Blaine, who played an important role in the Revolutionary War. He graduated in 1847 at the Washington College in Pennsylvania in 1853 and moved to Augusta in Maine, where he found a job as editor of the Kennebec Journal newspaper.

Policy

From 1859 to 1862 he was a delegate in the House of Representatives from Maine. Blaine quickly rose to become one of the leaders of the Republican Party. From 1862 he was member of Congress, and fell as a skilled orator on. He was then elected by the House of Representatives as its Chairman ( Speaker). In 1877, the government of Maine sent him in the U.S. Senate. In 1876 and 1880 he was set up by the temperate part of his party as a candidate for the presidential election, but did not reach to the Republican National Convention in the majority. James A. Garfield, who was a close friend with him, called him on March 4, 1881 as foreign minister in his cabinet.

As foreign minister, he worked to expand U.S. influence in the other countries of the American continent and to enlarge. But was his interference in the Salpeter between Chile, Peru and Bolivia is not successful, and therefore Blaine stepped under the new President Chester A. Arthur back in December 1881. In 1884 he was appointed to the nominating convention in Chicago for the presidential candidates; but he was defeated in a fierce and aggressive election campaign, the Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland. Above all, the utterance of a prominent campaign employee, the Democrats are the party of " Rum, Romanism and Rebellion " hurt Blaine's reputation among the Irish Catholic voters in the important state of New York. Under President Benjamin Harrison, he was from 1889 to 1892 Minister of Foreign Affairs again.

Honor

According to James G. Blaine following places in the U.S. have been named: Blaine County ( Idaho) Blaine County ( Montana), Blaine County ( Oklahoma) and Blaine County ( Nebraska) and the city of Blaine in Washington State.