Few agreed with Hoar, either in Congress or across the nation. His speech provoked condemnation from both the press and the political establishment. “It is idle to reason with stupidity like this,” the New York Times proclaimed. The New York Tribune put Hoar in the class of “humanitarian half thinkers.” Legislators from western states pointed out that many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had owned slaves, and one Colorado lawmaker insisted that the Caucasian race “has a right, considering its superiority of intellectual force and mental vigor, to look down upon every other branch of the human family.” (Chang 131)