Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 30, 2013

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Joseph B. Foraker

Joseph B. Foraker (1846–1917) was the 37th Governor of Ohio from 1886 to 1890 and a Republican United States Senator from 1897 until 1909. Born in rural Ohio in 1846, Foraker enlisted at age 16 in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After the war, he was a member of Cornell University's first graduating class, and became a lawyer. Interesting himself in politics, he was elected a judge in 1879 and became well known as a political speaker. Although defeated in his first run for governor in 1883, he was elected two years later. Foraker lost re-election in 1889, but was elected senator by the Ohio General Assembly in 1896. In the Senate, he supported the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. He differed with President Theodore Roosevelt over railroad regulation and political patronage. They also disagreed over the Brownsville Affair, in which black soldiers had been accused of terrorizing a Texas town, and Roosevelt had dismissed the entire battalion. Foraker fought unsuccessfully for the soldiers' reinstatement, and Roosevelt then helped defeat Foraker's re-election bid. In 1972, the Army reversed the dismissals and cleared the soldiers. (Full article...)

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