 A towering figure in the Republican party of his day, Blaine fell into obscurity fairly soon after his death. A 1905 biography by his wife's cousin, Edward Stanwood, was written when the question was still in doubt, but by the time David Saville Muzzey published his biography of Blaine in 1934, the subtitle "A Political Idol of Other Days" already spoke to its subject's fading place in the popular mind, perhaps because of the nine men the Republican Party nominated for the Presidency from 1860 to 1912, Blaine is the only one who never became President. In 1947, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a historical marker in West Brownsville, noting Blaine's historic importance. Although several authors studied Blaine's foreign policy career, including Edward P. Crapol's 2000 work, Muzzey's was the last full-scale biography of the man until Neil Rolde's 2006 book. Historian R. Hal Williams was working on a new biography of Blaine, tentatively titled James G. Blaine: A Life in Politics, until his death in 2016.
