The George Frisbie Hoar Appreciation Society started as a school history project. I am a middle school history teacher, and I like to challenge my students with questions for which I have no answer. Sometimes this results in frustration, but often this allows my students to conduct actual historical research. In the summer of 2010, I was strolling through an exhibit at the short-lived Boston Immig
ration Museum when I saw a poster that read, “George Frisbie Hoar when he died in 1904, bells rang in Boston and Shanghai.” I read the caption and saw that he opposed the “Chinese Exclusion Act and later stood alone in fighting the extension of this legislation. “I think that guy was from Concord” was my first thought, followed by “Why would G. Hoar care about the Chinese?”
When the fall came around, I set this question to my 15 7th-grade (12 and 13-year-old) boys. I had them brainstorm in small groups, and their response was delightful “Well, he must have had a Chinese friend when he was in middle school.”
The boys broke into five research teams to attack the question of George Frisbie Hoar’s opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Each team had a different focus:
How did GF Hoar’s professional life shape his view of the Chinese? What was the Chinese Exclusion Act, and what were the reasons it was initially made into law? What was the history of the Chinese in Massachusetts? (Would GFH have known anyone of Chinese descent? What was the political atmosphere in 1882, 1892, and 1902 and what was Hoar’s place inside the Republican party? What was GFH’s childhood like in Concord, and how did his family influence him? Our research took us to Special Collections in the basement of the Concord Library. Another group took an evening trip to the Massachusetts Historical Society, where we could access his handwritten diaries. We were so excited to read the inner thoughts of GF Hoar, but it turned out that his journals were just notes of meeting schedules and reminders of debts owed and due. It was a great lesson in failure. Eventually, each team wrote a paper on their sub-topic and made a presentation to the class. Using the collective wisdom of class, each of the 15 boys created a multigenre project about GF Hoar. One made a movie documenting the process; another wrote and directed a play; one made a presentation to the school assembly. We had a rap song, a graphic novel, a letter to the Concord Journal, a detailed poster, poems - 15 different projects, all exploring why George Frisbie Hoar was steadfastly willing to face withering ridicule in his defense of the rights of the Chinese. Ultimately, we collectively concluded that there was no specific driving cause, but we felt that his upbringing in a family of abolitionists cemented his views on race relations. His mother, Sarah, and elder sister Elizabeth were ardent members of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, which must have helped shape his views on race. In the spring of 2011, we culminated our research project with a trip to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where each boy read the words engraved on the back of GF Hoar’s tomb and thereby became the first member of the George Frisbie Hoar Appreciation Society. With each new spring, I tell my current class of middle school boys the story of GF Hoar’s courage and bring them to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to be inspired by his words and to become initiated into The Society.
