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10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Dorothy Payne Whitney.md
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@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
created: 2026-10-09
updated: 2026-10-09
updated: 2026-10-26
title: Dorothy Payne Whitney
aliases:
- Dorothy Payne Whitney
@ -43,6 +43,14 @@ relations:
with: "[[Michael Whitney Straight]]"
role: son
fn: 3
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Payne Whitney]]"
role: brother
fn: 4
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Harry Payne Whitney]]"
role: brother
fn: 4
- type: founded
with: "[[The New Republic]]"
start: 1914
@ -55,14 +63,14 @@ relations:
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
end: 1930
role: board of directors
fn: 13
fn: 14
- type: owned
with: "[[Dartington Hall]]"
start: 1925
fn: 2
- type: founded
with: "[[William C. Whitney Foundation]]"
fn: 15
fn: 16
---
Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887 to 1968) was an heiress of the [[Whitney family]] who helped found [[The New Republic]] with her first husband, [[Willard Straight]], in 1914, and who was among the principal donors to the [[New School for Social Research]] in its first decade. With her second husband, [[Leonard Knight Elmhirst]], she developed [[Dartington Hall]] in [[Devon]] as a progressive experiment that she continued to support until her death.[^1]
@ -71,56 +79,59 @@ Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887 to 1968) was an heiress of the [[Whitney family]] wh
She was the youngest child of Flora Payne and [[William C. Whitney]], a financier and secretary of the Navy under President [[Grover Cleveland]]. By the age of seventeen her mother, stepmother and father had all died, leaving her a large inheritance. At the age of 20 she became president of the [[Junior League of New York]] (1907 to 1909), where she introduced formal training for members and was the driving force behind the Junior League Hotel, a new model of cooperative housing for women.[^1][^2] She married Willard Straight in 1911. Their son, [[Michael Whitney Straight]], was born in 1916, the third and youngest of her children with Straight; the others were [[Whitney Straight]] and [[Beatrice Straight]].[^3]
The Yale Obituary Record entry for her brother [[Payne Whitney]], who died in 1927, lists his surviving siblings as [[Harry Payne Whitney]], Yale 1894, and a sister, the wife of Leonard Knight Elmhirst of Yorkshire, England. The same entry names [[Oliver Hazard Payne]], Yale 1863, as an uncle of Payne Whitney.[^4]
Her papers at [[Cornell University]] (collection #3725, 10 cubic feet, dates 1887 to 1978, most of the material from 1887 to 1926) include notebooks from her school days, guardianship papers, newspaper clippings on her father's death, an inventory of the house at 1130 Fifth Avenue, and correspondence with Willard Straight on their courtship and on his service in France in 1917 and 1918. The finding aid lists her involvement with the New York State Food Commission, the Women's Liberty Loan Committee, the Social Unit Plan, the Junior League, the War Camp Service Committee, the Women's Emergency Committee of the European Relief Council, the New School for Social Research, the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children, the Pueblos Defense Committee and the Mayor's Committee of Women on National Defense, and states that she supported students at the Bordentown Military Academy and Hobart College.[^2]
### The New Republic
After reading [[Herbert Croly]]'s *[[The Promise of American Life]]* aloud during their honeymoon, the couple invited Croly to lunch. In the fall of 1914 the Straights and Croly founded The New Republic.[^1] [[Alvin Johnson]] wrote that when Croly wanted a weekly, "I will find it," Dorothy Straight said simply.[^4] The Cornell finding aid lists correspondence and statements concerning The New Republic and *Asia* magazines among her papers.[^2]
After reading [[Herbert Croly]]'s *[[The Promise of American Life]]* aloud during their honeymoon, the couple invited Croly to lunch. In the fall of 1914 the Straights and Croly founded The New Republic.[^1] [[Alvin Johnson]] wrote that when Croly wanted a weekly, "I will find it," Dorothy Straight said simply.[^5] The Cornell finding aid lists correspondence and statements concerning The New Republic and *Asia* magazines among her papers.[^2]
In 1922 the magazine was short of money, and its owners wanted the New School terminated so that Straight would provide the magazine with more support.[^5] A New Republic publisher interviewed by the FBI in 1969 said that her family's fund had founded the magazine in 1914 and had been used for its operation until 1954, when [[Gilbert A. Harrison]] bought a controlling interest; the editor of *Antiques*, a magazine owned by the Straight family since about 1930, said that it and The New Republic had shared the same office space in New York.[^6] Her son "enlisted new patrons" after "his mother's withdrawal of support of the magazine."[^3]
In 1922 the magazine was short of money, and its owners wanted the New School terminated so that Straight would provide the magazine with more support.[^6] A New Republic publisher interviewed by the FBI in 1969 said that her family's fund had founded the magazine in 1914 and had been used for its operation until 1954, when [[Gilbert A. Harrison]] bought a controlling interest; the editor of *Antiques*, a magazine owned by the Straight family since about 1930, said that it and The New Republic had shared the same office space in New York.[^7] Her son "enlisted new patrons" after "his mother's withdrawal of support of the magazine."[^3]
### The New School Pledges
As early as 1916 Dorothy Straight and Croly had discussed with [[Charles Austin Beard]] and [[James Harvey Robinson]] the possibility of an independent social science institute. When Beard and Robinson resigned from [[Columbia University]] in 1917, these discussions took on new meaning. Willard Straight, then serving in Europe, warned her away from the two men: "I'm getting a little restive and uncertain about some of these forward looking people."[^1] Beard and Robinson "found sympathetic and resourceful patrons" in Croly and Dorothy Straight, and the "Heir to the Whitney fortune" saw in their school an opportunity.[^7]
As early as 1916 Dorothy Straight and Croly had discussed with [[Charles Austin Beard]] and [[James Harvey Robinson]] the possibility of an independent social science institute. When Beard and Robinson resigned from [[Columbia University]] in 1917, these discussions took on new meaning. Willard Straight, then serving in Europe, warned her away from the two men: "I'm getting a little restive and uncertain about some of these forward looking people."[^1] Beard and Robinson "found sympathetic and resourceful patrons" in Croly and Dorothy Straight, and the "Heir to the Whitney fortune" saw in their school an opportunity.[^8]
She did not heed the warning. She turned the school from a subject of discussion into a realizable dream "by pledging $10,000 a year to the project for ten years."[^1] The school's early pledges were "ten-year pledges of support amounting to nearly $300,000, much of it from Dorothy Straight," and the townhouse the school renovated was "paid for largely by Dorothy Straight."[^8] In Alvin Johnson's *Pioneer's Progress* the founding circle consisted of Robinson, Beard, Thorstein Veblen, Croly, "Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Bacon, and other liberals," and a women's committee met at the apartment of Caroline Bacon: Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Haven Putnam, Mrs. Learned Hand, Mrs. Victor Sorchan, and "later Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont."[^9] Johnson wrote of her as "the most generous, Mrs. Straight," who "would leave us if the threatened secession from the board took place" in the crisis of 1922.[^10]
She did not heed the warning. She turned the school from a subject of discussion into a realizable dream "by pledging $10,000 a year to the project for ten years."[^1] The school's early pledges were "ten-year pledges of support amounting to nearly $300,000, much of it from Dorothy Straight," and the townhouse the school renovated was "paid for largely by Dorothy Straight."[^9] In Alvin Johnson's *Pioneer's Progress* the founding circle consisted of Robinson, Beard, Thorstein Veblen, Croly, "Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Bacon, and other liberals," and a women's committee met at the apartment of Caroline Bacon: Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. George Haven Putnam, Mrs. Learned Hand, Mrs. Victor Sorchan, and "later Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont."[^10] Johnson wrote of her as "the most generous, Mrs. Straight," who "would leave us if the threatened secession from the board took place" in the crisis of 1922.[^11]
When Johnson took over as director in April 1922 he wrote to her of the change, in a letter that includes the words "To put it baldly, I have usurped the"; the board members who stayed were Croly, [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], Caroline Bacon, Dorothy Straight and Emily Putnam.[^11][^12] She sat on the Board of Directors until 1930, after 1925 as Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst.[^13]
When Johnson took over as director in April 1922 he wrote to her of the change, in a letter that includes the words "To put it baldly, I have usurped the"; the board members who stayed were Croly, [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], Caroline Bacon, Dorothy Straight and Emily Putnam.[^12][^13] She sat on the Board of Directors until 1930, after 1925 as Mrs. Leonard Elmhirst.[^14]
[[Judith Friedlander]] uses a 1952 letter by Johnson to characterize Dorothy and other founders, including [[Learned Hand]] and [[Mary Harriman]], as antisemites. Mastrelli, reviewing the book, writes: "For the record, I am not sure what kind of antisemite Dorothy would have been," and notes "accounts that she aided Johnson in the University in Exile."[^13] The records of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars include, in their philanthropic file series, a file titled "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935."[^14] The Cornell finding aid for her papers states that the New School was "begun with the backing of the Whitney Estate in 1919."[^2]
[[Judith Friedlander]] uses a 1952 letter by Johnson to characterize Dorothy and other founders, including [[Learned Hand]] and [[Mary Harriman]], as antisemites. Mastrelli, reviewing the book, writes: "For the record, I am not sure what kind of antisemite Dorothy would have been," and notes "accounts that she aided Johnson in the University in Exile."[^14] The records of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars include, in their philanthropic file series, a file titled "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935."[^15] The Cornell finding aid for her papers states that the New School was "begun with the backing of the Whitney Estate in 1919."[^2]
### William C. Whitney Foundation
After 1929 she continued to support the school for several years through the [[William C. Whitney Foundation]]; Mastrelli attributes this to the Dartington Hall Trust archives.[^13] In 1969 [[Milton C. Rose]], senior partner of [[Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander]], told the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] that the foundation was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" and that her son Michael had been its president "since its inception in 1937."[^15] The FBI's summary describes it as a charitable organization that "concerns itself with the arts, having made many grants in the fields of music, dance, theater, and painting." [[Harriett K. Evison]], who had been her social secretary, became assistant secretary-treasurer of the foundation.[^15] A December 1952 newspaper report on testimony before a House committee on tax-exempt foundations records that her son, as president, was questioned on $19,000 in grants.[^16]
After 1929 she continued to support the school for several years through the [[William C. Whitney Foundation]]; Mastrelli attributes this to the Dartington Hall Trust archives.[^14] In 1969 [[Milton C. Rose]], senior partner of [[Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander]], told the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] that the foundation was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" and that her son Michael had been its president "since its inception in 1937."[^16] The FBI's summary describes it as a charitable organization that "concerns itself with the arts, having made many grants in the fields of music, dance, theater, and painting." [[Harriett K. Evison]], who had been her social secretary, became assistant secretary-treasurer of the foundation.[^16] A December 1952 newspaper report on testimony before a House committee on tax-exempt foundations records that her son, as president, was questioned on $19,000 in grants.[^17]
### Dartington Hall
She married Leonard Knight Elmhirst in 1925.[^3] She met Elmhirst while working on the [[Willard Straight Hall]] project at Cornell, and the couple moved to [[Totnes]] in Devon, bought and restored a medieval property, and set about developing Dartington Hall as a laboratory of experiment for a "many sided life."[^1] She and Elmhirst purchased Dartington Hall, reconstructed the fourteenth-century manor and founded a school on the property.[^2] A second set of her papers from Dartington Hall (collection #3782, 4 cubic feet, 1890 to 1976) includes correspondence on Willard Straight Hall (1920 to 1967), lecture notes, diaries and travel journals, and an inventory of the records room at Dartington Hall.[^17] Her son Michael was educated at Dartington Hall.[^3]
She married Leonard Knight Elmhirst in 1925.[^3] She met Elmhirst while working on the [[Willard Straight Hall]] project at Cornell, and the couple moved to [[Totnes]] in Devon, bought and restored a medieval property, and set about developing Dartington Hall as a laboratory of experiment for a "many sided life."[^1] She and Elmhirst purchased Dartington Hall, reconstructed the fourteenth-century manor and founded a school on the property.[^2] A second set of her papers from Dartington Hall (collection #3782, 4 cubic feet, 1890 to 1976) includes correspondence on Willard Straight Hall (1920 to 1967), lecture notes, diaries and travel journals, and an inventory of the records room at Dartington Hall.[^18] Her son Michael was educated at Dartington Hall.[^3]
### Willard Straight Hall
Willard Straight died of septic pneumonia while serving with the [[American Expeditionary Forces]] in France in 1918, before the school opened.[^3] In his will he asked that Dorothy make Cornell a "more human place." She built Willard Straight Hall, one of the first models of a student union in the [[United States]].[^1] The Cornell finding aid for her papers gives his death as 1919; the finding aid for the Dartington Hall papers and the New York Times give 1918.[^2][^17]
Willard Straight died of septic pneumonia while serving with the [[American Expeditionary Forces]] in France in 1918, before the school opened.[^3] In his will he asked that Dorothy make Cornell a "more human place." She built Willard Straight Hall, one of the first models of a student union in the [[United States]].[^1] The Cornell finding aid for her papers gives his death as 1919; the finding aid for the Dartington Hall papers and the New York Times give 1918.[^2][^18]
### Death
She died in 1968.[^1] The FBI's 1969 summary of her son's background lists her as deceased.[^15]
She died in 1968.[^1] The FBI's 1969 summary of her son's background lists her as deceased.[^16]
### Footnotes
[^1]: "Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst," Histories of The New School, by Tara Mastrelli, May 25, 2018, https://histories.newschool.edu/people/dorothy-payne-whitney-straight-elmhirst.
[^2]: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, "Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers," #3725, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/1281.
[^3]: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Michael Straight, Who Wrote of Connection to Spy Ring, Is Dead at 87," *The New York Times*, January 5, 2004 (Internet Archive copy, https://web.archive.org/web/2016id_/https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/nyregion/michael-straight-who-wrote-of-connection-to-spy-ring-is-dead-at-87.html).
[^4]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress* (New York: Viking, 1952; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 233.
[^5]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, *New School: A History of The New School for Social Research* (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 28.
[^6]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1, special inquiry reports of September 1969 on the interviews with the publisher of The New Republic and with Alice Winchester, editor of *Antiques*.
[^7]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, pp. 10 and 11.
[^8]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, pp. 19 and 21.
[^9]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, pp. 167 and 273.
[^10]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 280.
[^11]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 30, Johnson's letter of April 1922 to Dorothy Straight.
[^12]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 35.
[^13]: Tara Mastrelli, "'In the Name of Freedom': a Review of Judith Friedlander's *A Light in Dark Times* (2018, Columbia University Press)," *International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society* 34 (2021), pp. 125-135, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-019-09344-5, notes citing the New School Archives and Special Collections and the Dartington Hall Trust Archives; the board tenure, the post-1929 foundation support and the Dartington Hall attribution come from these notes. The characterization of founders by Judith Friedlander, *A Light in Dark Times* (Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 307, which quotes in full a 1952 letter by Johnson, is reported through Mastrelli's review.
[^14]: New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records (MssCol 922), Series IV, box 171, folder 15, "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935," https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922.
[^15]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 and teletypes of September 1969 on interviews with Milton C. Rose and Harriett K. Evison, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
[^16]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 ("Miscellaneous Information"), citing the Washington Times-Herald of December 6, 1952, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
[^17]: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, "Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers from Dartington Hall," #3782, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/1289.
[^4]: Yale University, *Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1927*, entry for Payne Whitney, B.A. 1898, pp. 171 to 172. https://archive.org/details/obituaryrecordof00yale_4
[^5]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress* (New York: Viking, 1952; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 233.
[^6]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, *New School: A History of The New School for Social Research* (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 28.
[^7]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1, special inquiry reports of September 1969 on the interviews with the publisher of The New Republic and with Alice Winchester, editor of *Antiques*.
[^8]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, pp. 10 and 11.
[^9]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, pp. 19 and 21.
[^10]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, pp. 167 and 273.
[^11]: Alvin Johnson, *Pioneer's Progress*, p. 280.
[^12]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 30, Johnson's letter of April 1922 to Dorothy Straight.
[^13]: Rutkoff and Scott, *New School*, p. 35.
[^14]: Tara Mastrelli, "'In the Name of Freedom': a Review of Judith Friedlander's *A Light in Dark Times* (2018, Columbia University Press)," *International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society* 34 (2021), pp. 125-135, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-019-09344-5, notes citing the New School Archives and Special Collections and the Dartington Hall Trust Archives; the board tenure, the post-1929 foundation support and the Dartington Hall attribution come from these notes. The characterization of founders by Judith Friedlander, *A Light in Dark Times* (Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 307, which quotes in full a 1952 letter by Johnson, is reported through Mastrelli's review.
[^15]: New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records (MssCol 922), Series IV, box 171, folder 15, "Elmhirst Fund 1934-1935," https://archives.nypl.org/mss/922.
[^16]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 and teletypes of September 1969 on interviews with Milton C. Rose and Harriett K. Evison, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
[^17]: FBI, summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 ("Miscellaneous Information"), citing the Washington Times-Herald of December 6, 1952, in "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1."
[^18]: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, "Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst papers from Dartington Hall," #3782, https://archives.library.cornell.edu/repositories/2/resources/1289.

228
10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Knight Woolley.md Normal file
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@ -0,0 +1,228 @@
---
aliases:
- Knight Woolley
category: "Business & Finance"
tags:
- Person
- BrownBrothersHarriman
- HarrimanBrothers
- SkullAndBones
- YaleClassOf1917
- BankersAcceptances
- UnionBankingCorporation
- HollandAmericanTrading
- ThyssenFamily
- AlienPropertyCustodian
- ConsolidatedSilesianSteel
- CouncilOnForeignRelations
- AmericanHawaiianSteamship
- SouthernRailway
summary: "Knight Woolley, Yale 1917 and Skull and Bones member, general manager of Harriman Brothers & Co. and partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, named in Union Banking Corporation and 1933 Silesian Steel correspondence."
born: 1895-05-01
died: 1984
location: "New York, New York"
relations:
- type: member_of
with: "[[Skull and Bones]]"
start: 1917
role: "member of the class of 1917 (The Order '17)"
fn: 1
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Guaranty Trust Company]]"
start: 1919
end: 1920
role: "as recorded by Sutton"
fn: 8
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Harriman Brothers & Co.]]"
start: 1927-03-17
end: 1931-01-01
role: "general manager from the firm's founding, then partner from January 1, 1929"
fn: 12
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Brown Brothers Harriman]]"
start: 1931-01-01
role: "partner of the merged firm; managing partner of Harriman Brothers & Co. at the time of the 1930 merger; listed as a partner in 1943, 1956 and 1961"
fn: 21
- type: partner_of
with: "[[Prescott Bush]]"
start: 1931-01-01
role: "partners of the merged Brown Brothers Harriman"
fn: 12
- type: partner_of
with: "[[E. Roland Harriman]]"
start: 1931-01-01
role: "partners of the merged Brown Brothers Harriman"
fn: 12
- type: partner_of
with: "[[Robert A. Lovett]]"
start: 1931-01-01
role: "partners of the merged Brown Brothers Harriman"
fn: 12
- type: partner_of
with: "[[Ellery Sedgwick James]]"
start: 1931-01-01
role: "partners of the merged Brown Brothers Harriman; classmate at Yale"
fn: 12
- type: director_of
with: "[[Union Banking Corporation]]"
start: 1932
role: "listed among the directors for 1932 in Sutton's accounts"
fn: 31
- type: director_of
with: "[[Caledonian Insurance Company]]"
start: 1930
role: "director (reported as director of the Caledonian-American in 1942); later chair of the Finance Committee"
fn: 24
- type: director_of
with: "[[American-Hawaiian Steamship Company]]"
start: 1943
role: "director, as reported in the Securities and Exchange Commission summary of May 1943 purchases"
fn: 25
- type: director_of
with: "[[Southern Railway]]"
start: 1946
role: "named as a director in a brief in United States v. Pullman Co."
fn: 27
- type: member_of
with: "[[Federal Reserve Bank of New York]]"
start: 1939
role: "representative of the private banks on the bank's Foreign Exchange Committee, formed in August 1939"
fn: 29
- type: member_of
with: "[[Council on Foreign Relations]]"
start: 1951-11-01
role: "listed in a November 1951 table of corporate officers who were Council members"
fn: 39
created: 2026-10-26
updated: 2026-10-26
---
Knight Woolley (May 1, 1895, Brooklyn, New York, to 1984) was a member of the [[Yale University]] class of 1917 and of [[Skull and Bones]]. Before 1927 he had worked in the foreign department of the [[American Exchange National Bank]]. In that year he organized the private bank that [[W. Averell Harriman]] and [[E. Roland Harriman]] set up as a partnership, and he was a partner of [[Brown Brothers Harriman]] from the 1931 merger into the 1960s.[^1][^2] The record also places him as a director of the [[Union Banking Corporation]] of New York, as the author of a January 1941 letter to the New York state superintendent of banks about that bank, as the author of a January 1933 letter about the [[Consolidated Silesian Steel Company]] that the [[The Guardian|Guardian]] quoted in 2004, and as one of the registered holders of shares in the [[Holland-American Trading Corporation]], seized in 1942.
### Andover, Yale and Skull and Bones
Woolley prepared at [[Phillips Academy]], Andover, where he was class historian at the 1913 commencement, business manager of the school yearbook, the Pot Pourri, and an undergraduate treasurer.[^3][^4][^5] The class history of 1917 at Yale prints his biographical entry. It gives his birth in Brooklyn on May 1, 1895, and his preparation at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Preparatory School and Phillips Academy. It records that he was on the class crews, held the John Eliot Scholarship, was assignment editor of the [[Yale Daily News]], and that "He belongs to [[Psi Upsilon]] and Skull and Bones." The entry closes with the note that Woolley "intends to go into business."[^1] A passage on the class's 1917 military training places him on guard at the sick-stables when an inspection party arrived.[^6]
The class history's entries for [[Prescott Bush]], E. Roland Harriman, Woolley and [[Neil Mallon]] each state the same membership.[^7] [[Antony C. Sutton]]'s catalogue of members by class year lists Woolley under the class of 1917 ("The Order '17"), and his list of the Brown Brothers, Harriman partners names him in the same class.[^8] [[Kris Millegan]] wrote that the office Bush joined under [[George Herbert Walker]] employed "many of his classmates from his Yale class of 1917, including Roland Harriman and Knight Woolley," and that "The three had been close friends at Yale and were all members of Skull and Bones."[^9]
Sutton's account of the 1917 members involved in the [[Guaranty Trust Company]] and Harriman business begins with "the following five members in the class of '17 (only fifteen were initiated)." It names Woolley first, with the dates "Guaranty Trust from 1919-1920, Harriman Company from 1927-1931, then Brown Brothers, Harriman from 1933," and names [[Frank P. Shepard]] alongside him, a vice president of Guaranty Trust from 1920 to 1934.[^8]
### Harriman Brothers and the acceptance business
On March 17, 1927, the Harrimans set up a partnership bank. It was first called W. A. Harriman & Co., without the "Inc.," and soon renamed [[Harriman Brothers & Co.]] [[John A. Kouwenhoven]]'s 1968 firm history names Woolley as the man the Harrimans hired to run it. He came from the foreign department of the American Exchange National Bank, which was then in the process of merging into the [[Irving Trust Company]]. He brought several former colleagues with him, three of them specialists in foreign exchange, among them [[Harold D. Pennington]], who later managed the firm's operations and sat on the board of the Union Banking Corporation. Kouwenhoven also describes Woolley as already an authority on bankers' acceptances, citing his *A B C of Bankers Acceptances*, first published by the American Acceptance Council in 1924. The bank began with four employees in a single room, with capital from the Harrimans and from [[M. Samuel & Co.]], and Averell Harriman's instruction to Woolley was "Here's four million. Go ahead and run the bank." Within less than four years the firm had moved twice and had seventy employees.[^10] Rudy Abramson wrote in his biography of Averell Harriman that the bank started with employees in a single room at 39 Broadway.[^11]
The founding date appears in several forms. Kouwenhoven's text gives March 17, 1927. His partner table comments that Woolley "Had been general manager of Harriman Bros. & Co. from its founding in 1926 until he became a partner," and gives January 1, 1929 as the date he became a partner of Harriman Brothers & Co. and January 1, 1931 as the date of his partnership in the merged firm.[^12] *The Bankers Magazine* of January 1931 wrote that "Harriman Brothers & Co., a co partnership, was formed on February 1, 1927, to further the Harriman interests," that its partners included W. A. Harriman, E. Roland Harriman, Woolley and Prescott S. Bush, and that the directors of the affiliated W. A. Harriman & Co., Inc. included the same four with others. It added that forty-nine foreign banks represented the firm as correspondents, that the firm was a member of the New York Stock Exchange and an associate member of the New York Curb Market, and that it transacted no margin account business.[^13] [[Garry Wills]] gave 1926 and wrote that the Harrimans "put a classmate in as president," identifying Woolley.[^14] A notice of new partnerships in *The New York Times* of May 5, 1929 lists Harriman Brothers & Co., May 1, 1929, 39 Broadway, with the partners W. A. Harriman, E. Roland Harriman, George H. Walker, [[Dale M. Parker]] and Knight Woolley.[^15]
By the time of the merger, the Harriman banking partnership was doing a profitable business in acceptances and foreign exchange, held a seat on the [[New York Stock Exchange]], and carried on a brokerage business, though none on margin account.[^10] The partners' minute book for 1927 records that Woolley, as general manager, had received through [[Ellery Sedgwick James]] and accepted "the offer of a $250,000 participation" in an acceptance credit for a Berlin metal firm, along with [[Brown Brothers & Co.]] and two other banks.[^16] In June 1930 the exchange received a proposal to transfer the membership of William H. Bixby to Woolley, identified as a partner in Harriman Bros. & Co.[^17]
### The 1930 merger and the managing partnership
[[Time]] reported on December 22, 1930 that the two houses had merged "last week," counting 16 partners in the new firm of Brown Bros., Harriman & Co., eleven of them Yale graduates. The same report named Ellery Sedgwick James as a classmate of E. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and Woolley.[^18]
Kouwenhoven places the origin of the merger on a train to a Yale reunion in the spring of 1930, when "Ellery James, Knight Woolley, and Prescott Bush" had taken a drawing room in a parlor car and someone suggested that the two firms should merge. Kouwenhoven called the story "now current in various versions, as all good legends are," and recorded [[Thatcher M. Brown]]'s recollection that James first suggested talking with the Harrimans.[^16] Abramson also set the card game in a New Haven Railroad parlor car with James, Bush and Woolley.[^11] [[Zachary Karabell]], writing in *[[Financial History]]*, placed a railcar trip on the same line in the fall of 1930 and wrote: "Roland wasn't on the train that day, but Ellery James and Knight Woolley were." Karabell described Woolley as "rarely without a bespoke double-breasted suit" and as "managing partner of another one of the Harriman firms."[^19]
Kouwenhoven's photograph caption identifies Woolley as the man "who had organized the Harrimans' private bank in 1927," and as "managing partner of Harriman Brothers & Co. at the time when the merger with Brown Brothers & Co. was arranged in the final months of 1930." The caption shows him as a Brown Brothers Harriman partner on a business trip to Vienna in the summer of 1933.[^10]
Wills wrote that Bush "quickly became, with Knight Woolley, the principal expert on what projects to back" at the firm, and quoted Bush's oral-history interviews: "We [he and Woolley] were running the business, the day-to-day business, all the administrative decisions and the executive decisions. We were the ones that did it."[^14] Sutton's list of partners in the mid-1970s, which he gave as twenty-six partners, of whom nine were members of the order, includes Woolley for the class of 1917.[^8]
### Partnership and directorships, 1931 to 1967
The [[New-York Historical Society]] finding aid for the Brown Brothers Harriman records lists clippings for the merger, including a clipping titled "Knight Woolley elected director" dated between December 12, 1930 and January 23, 1931, photographs of Woolley with W. Averell Harriman dated 1933, and photographs of Woolley with the [[Union Pacific Railroad]] board and the Business Advisory Council between 1936 and 1939.[^2] A Brown Brothers Harriman advertisement of October 1943, marking the firm's 125th anniversary, lists the partners as Moreau D. Brown, Thatcher M. Brown, Prescott S. Bush, Louis Curtis, E. R. Harriman, W. A. Harriman (then newly named ambassador to Russia), Ray Morris and Woolley.[^20] A Brown Brothers Harriman notice in *The Economist* of July 22, 1961 lists "Knight Woolley" among the partners, with Prescott S. Bush, Robert A. Lovett, [[Thomas McCance]] and others; the firm's notices in *Trusts and Estates* for July 1956 and January 1961 list him in the same way.[^21][^22] Photographs dated July 1964 in the finding aid show the senior partners Harriman, Lovett, Bush and Woolley in a newly built room at 59 Wall Street, and a photograph caption dated July 28, 1964 shows them in a post-luncheon discussion; a photograph of Woolley, Harriman and Kouwenhoven at the Harriman estate is dated May 19, 1967.[^2][^23]
The finding aid also records that Woolley "was a director of [[Caledonian Insurance Company]] beginning in the 1930s," and that he later chaired its Finance Committee, to which the bank acted as investment advisor.[^2] An October 1942 survey of insurance directorships held by private bankers wrote that "Knight Woolley is a director of the Caledonian-American," counted thirty insurance companies with board or trustee members who were partners in the bank, and described W. A. Harriman of the same firm as then in London as President Roosevelt's personal representative and Lend-Lease co-ordinator.[^24]
A Securities and Exchange Commission summary of insider transactions reported in the *Chicago Daily Tribune* of July 17, 1943 lists a May purchase of 700 shares of [[American-Hawaiian Steamship Company]] by "Knight Woolley, director."[^25] The *Daily Worker* wrote on October 5, 1946 that W. Averell Harriman exerted influence over Pacific shipping lines, including the American-Hawaiian Steamship Co. as one of the Pacific's "Big Three," "through Attorney Knight Woolley, his man Friday, who represents Harriman's interests on the American-Hawaiian board," and added that Woolley was a partner of the Harriman bank.[^26] A brief in *United States v. Pullman Co.* (Supreme Court, October term 1946, appeal of the United States) lists "Guy Cary and Knight Woolley, directors of the Southern Railway Co." among the members of the board of the Air Reduction Co.[^27]
### Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Guaranty Trust
Sutton wrote in 1983 that Woolley "was also a director of the Federal Reserve Bank," and that "Guaranty Trust was represented by Knight Woolley."[^28] The twenty-fifth annual report of the [[Federal Reserve Bank of New York]], for 1939, states that the bank organized a general committee of New York money-market interests in August 1939, and a foreign exchange committee of five commercial-bank representatives, two representatives of private banks and investment houses, and one each for foreign banks and for Stock Exchange firms. It names "Mr. Knight Woolley, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co." among the members of the foreign exchange committee, "representing private banks and investment houses," with R. F. Loree of Guaranty Trust as chairman.[^29] The bank's Circular No. 1015 of January 8, 1931 announced that the Federal Reserve Board had reappointed Clarence M. Woolley of Greenwich, Connecticut, chairman of American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation, as a Class C director for the three years from January 1, 1931.[^30]
*The Bankers Magazine* of January 1931 listed Guaranty Trust Company of New York among the corporations of which W. A. Harriman was a director.[^13]
### Union Banking Corporation
Sutton's 1976 chapter notes give the 1932 directors of the Union Banking Corporation as taken from the 1932 edition of the Bankers Directory and from Poor's Directory of Directors, and state that "J.L. Guinter and Knight Woolley were also directors."[^31] In his 1983 book on Skull and Bones, Sutton lists eight directors for 1932, among them Woolley.[^28]
On January 14, 1941, Woolley wrote to [[William R. White]], superintendent of banks for the State of New York, about the Union Banking Corporation, which he described as "a state institution under your supervision." The letter names four directors, "E. R. Harriman, [[Ray Morris]], Prescott S. Bush and our manager, H. D. Pennington," as "my partners," and writes on their behalf. It describes the corporation as "in effect a New York office, or agency, of the [[Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart]], in Rotterdam," and says: "Should the United States enter the war, they feel they might be under some embarrassment because of their connection with the bank, even though we have no financial interest in the Union Banking Corporation, nor do we participate in its earnings." Woolley asked White for "a frank expression from you as to the action" the directors should take.[^32]
The letter also describes the bank's operations. Its only depositor was the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, its activity was limited to occasional payments and a few purchases and sales of securities, and its accounts were frozen under the presidential proclamation of May 10, 1940. The company's accounts were kept at the [[Chase National Bank]], the [[National City Bank]], the Guaranty Trust Company and the Harriman firm itself. Morris or Pennington had to sign checks jointly with the company's president, [[Cornelius Lievense]], or with an assistant, and a representative of the firm had to be present whenever the company's safe deposit box at the Chase Bank was opened.[^32] A report of the corporation issued on January 1, 1941 and reprinted in the same source lists as directors Lievense, E. Roland Harriman, Pennington, Bush, J. Kouwenhoven, Ray Morris and J. G. Groeninger.[^32]
The letter gives the origin of the directorships as a meeting in Europe in 1925 between W. A. Harriman and [[Fritz Thyssen]], after which "various members of the Harriman organizations" served on the board. It states that the directors act "merely as a matter of business courtesy."[^32] White replied on May 13, 1941 that the department "would not feel free to object" if the directors resigned, but that "the department would be gratified if these gentlemen could find it possible to remain on the board during this period of uncertainty."[^33] A memorandum of the [[Treasury Department]] dated August 18, 1941 also concerns the company.[^34]
In the 1942 vesting orders, Woolley's name appears on the Holland-American Trading Corporation and not on the Union Banking Corporation. Vesting Order 248, executed October 20, 1942 and published in the [[Federal Register]] of November 7, 1942, vests the 4,000 shares of the Union Banking Corporation held for the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. Its registered owners are E. Roland Harriman with 3,991 shares, Cornelius Lievense with 4, and Harold D. Pennington, Ray Morris, Prescott S. Bush, H. J. Kouwenhoven and Johann G. Groeninger with one share each. Woolley is not among them.[^35]
Vesting Order 261 covers the Holland-American Trading Corporation. It was executed on October 28, 1942 by [[Leo T. Crowley]], [[Alien Property Custodian]], filed December 18, 1942, and published in the *Federal Register* of December 19, 1942. It vests 500 shares, registered to E. Roland Harriman (491), Cornelius Lievense (4), and one share each to H. D. Pennington, Ray Morris, Knight Woolley, H. J. Kouwenhoven and J. G. Groeninger. The shares "are held for the benefit of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N. V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands, which bank is owned or controlled by members of the Thyssen family".[^36] The Guardian described the Holland-American and [[Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation]] seizures as affiliates against which "further seizures were made" after the Union Banking Corporation seizure.[^37]
### Sutton's characterization
Sutton wrote that "Averell Harriman, his brother Roland Harriman, and members E.S. James and Knight Woolley, through the Union Bank (in which they held a major interest) were prime financial backers of Hitler."[^28] The sentence is Sutton's.
### The Consolidated Silesian Steel letter
The Guardian reported in September 2004 that a letter of January 1933 from Woolley to W. Averell Harriman concerned the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), a Silesian steel and mining company, after Polish moves to nationalize the plant. The newspaper quotes the letter: "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in [[Sullivan and Cromwell]], in order to be sure that our interests are protected." The letter continues: "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors." The Guardian cited [[National Archives]] files as the source of the letter and described Woolley as Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman."[^38]
### Council on Foreign Relations and the Luce correspondence
A table of corporations whose officers were members of the [[Council on Foreign Relations]], dated November 1951, lists Brown Brothers Harriman with E. Roland Harriman, Ray Morris, Knight Woolley and Thomas McCance among its officers who were Council members.[^39] A list of membership proposals sent to [[Allen Dulles]] with the agenda for the Council's board meeting of December 17, 1951 names Woolley as the proposer of Grinnell Morris, vice president of the Central Hanover Bank.[^40]
The New-York Historical Society holds the papers of [[Henry Luce]] (MS 3014). Its finding aid lists a correspondence file headed "Woolley, Knight (Mr. and Mrs.)," dated 1936 to 1957.[^41]
### The Hopkins telegram of July 9, 1941
A telegram of July 9, 1941 from the Acting Secretary of State to Ambassador [[John G. Winant]] in London, number 2483, carried a message from [[Harry Hopkins]] about British exports of consumer goods and "the next lend lease bill," and ends "Have seen Woolley." The telegram gives no first name or post for Woolley. The records found do not establish whether the Woolley named is Knight Woolley, whose partner W. Averell Harriman was then in London as Roosevelt's Lend-Lease representative.[^24][^42]
### The Boys' Club and memoir
A letterhead of the Boys' Club of New York in the correspondence of the Medallic Art Company, kept by the American Numismatic Society, lists Knight Woolley as assistant secretary, with E. Roland Harriman as vice president and Robert A. Lovett as assistant secretary.[^43] Woolley privately printed a memoir in 1975, titled *In Retrospect: A Very Personal Memoir*.[^44]
### Papers and dates
The New-York Historical Society holds the records of Brown Brothers Harriman (MS 78). Its people files include a folder headed "Knight Woolley (1895 - [1984]), 1923-1967," and the Tax Department scrapbooks include a folder on the partners from H to W for 1941 to 1964. The finding aid dates his life 1895 to 1984.[^2]
### Footnotes
[^1]: *History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred and Seventeen, Yale College*, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), entry for Knight Woolley, pp. 343 to 344, https://archive.org/details/historyofclassof00murr
[^2]: Brown Brothers Harriman Records, MS 78, New-York Historical Society, finding aid: People Files (Box 77, Folder 7, "Knight Woolley (1895 - [1984]), 1923-1967"); clippings (December 12, 1930 to January 23, 1931); photographs (1933; 1936 to 1939; July 1964; May 19, 1967); Tax Department scrapbook ("Partners H-W. Newquist - Woolley, 1941-1964"); historical note on Caledonian Insurance Company. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/nyhs/ms78_brown_brothers_harriman/
[^3]: "Andover Townsman," June 13, 1913, report of the commencement exercises of Phillips Academy, naming "the class historian, Knight Woolley." https://archive.org/details/andover_townsman_1913-06-13
[^4]: *Pot Pourri* (Phillips Academy, Andover, 1913), staff list and class biographies naming Knight Woolley business manager. https://archive.org/details/potpourri00unse_20
[^5]: *Phillips Bulletin*, vol. 8, list of student offices naming Knight Woolley, Brooklyn, New York, undergraduate treasurer. https://archive.org/details/phillipsbulletin08phil
[^6]: *History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred and Seventeen*, vol. 1 (1917), narrative of the class's 1917 military training, p. 405, https://archive.org/details/historyofclassof00murr
[^7]: *History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred and Seventeen*, vol. 1 (1917), entries for Prescott Sheldon Bush (pp. 105 to 106), Edward Roland Noel Harriman, Knight Woolley (pp. 343 to 344) and Henry Neil Mallon, https://archive.org/details/historyofclassof00murr
[^8]: Antony C. Sutton, *America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones* (Trine Day, 2002; first published 1983), membership catalogue by class year, the section on Brown Brothers, Harriman listing the partners who were members of the order, and the section on the Union Bank and the class of 1917 (the "five members in the class of '17" passage, with the dates for Woolley and Shepard). The dating and the counts are Sutton's. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^9]: Kris Millegan, *Fleshing Out Skull & Bones: Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society* (Trine Day, 2003), chapter on Prescott Bush and Harriman & Co. https://archive.org/details/fleshing_out_skull_and_bones
[^10]: John A. Kouwenhoven, *Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1818-1968* (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 13 to 15, on the 1927 founding, Woolley's appointment as general manager, the former American Exchange colleagues, the 1924 *A B C of Bankers Acceptances*, the four-million instruction, the staff of seventy, the 1930 position, and the photograph caption of Woolley ("Courtesy of Miss Julie Brennan"). https://archive.org/details/partnersinbankinganhistoricalportraitofagreatprivateb
[^11]: Rudy Abramson, *Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986* (New York: William Morrow, 1992), chapters on the Harriman banks and the merger. https://archive.org/details/spanningcenturyl00abra
[^12]: Kouwenhoven, *Partners in Banking* (1968), partner table, pp. 231 to 235, entry for Knight Woolley (became partner of Harriman Bros. & Co. January 1, 1929; of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. January 1, 1931; comment: "Had been general manager of Harriman Bros. & Co. from its founding in 1926 until he became a partner. Resident in New York."). https://archive.org/details/partnersinbankinganhistoricalportraitofagreatprivateb
[^13]: *The Bankers Magazine*, vol. 122, no. 1 (January 1931), listing the partners of Harriman Brothers & Co., the directors of W. A. Harriman & Co., Inc., and the corporations of which W. A. Harriman was a director. https://archive.org/details/sim_bankers-magazine_1931-01_122_1
[^14]: Garry Wills, "Father Knows Best," *The New York Review of Books*, November 5, 1992, on Harriman Brothers & Co. "not founded until 1926," the classmate "put in as president (Knight Woolley)," Bush and Woolley as the firm's principal experts, and the oral-history quotation. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/11/05/father-knows-best/
[^15]: Notices of new partnerships, *The New York Times*, May 5, 1929, financial pages. https://archive.org/details/sim_new-york-times_1929-05-05_78_26034_0
[^16]: Kouwenhoven, *Partners in Banking* (1968), pp. 16 to 17, minute book entry of 1927 quoting the partners' records on the $250,000 participation, the account of the card game on the train to a Yale reunion in the spring of 1930, and the recollection of Thatcher M. Brown. https://archive.org/details/partnersinbankinganhistoricalportraitofagreatprivateb
[^17]: Stock Exchange membership notices, *The New York Times*, June 13, 1930, financial pages, proposal to transfer the membership of William H. Bixby to Knight Woolley, "a partner in Harriman Bros. & Co." https://archive.org/details/per_new-york-times-magazine_the-new-york-times_1930-06-13_79_26438
[^18]: "Business: Brown-Harriman," *Time*, December 22, 1930, https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,740853,00.html
[^19]: Zachary Karabell, "Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power," *Financial History* 138 (Summer 2021), Museum of American Finance, pp. 14 to 17 (passages at pp. 15 to 17). https://archive.org/details/financialhistory138
[^20]: Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. advertisement on the firm's 125th anniversary, *The Commercial and Financial Chronicle*, October 14, 1943. https://archive.org/details/sim_commercial-and-financial-chronicle_1943-10-14_158_4220
[^21]: Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. statement of condition with list of partners and limited partners, *The Economist*, July 22, 1961. https://archive.org/details/sim_economist_1961-07-22_200_6152
[^22]: Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. notices listing partners and limited partners, *Trusts and Estates*, vol. 95, no. 7 (July 1956) and vol. 100, no. 1 (January 1961). https://archive.org/details/sim_trusts-estates_1956-07_95_7 and https://archive.org/details/sim_trusts-estates_1961-01_100_1
[^23]: Kouwenhoven, *Partners in Banking* (1968), photograph caption dated July 28, 1964, "The senior partners in a post-luncheon discussion." https://archive.org/details/partnersinbankinganhistoricalportraitofagreatprivateb
[^24]: "Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.," *The Insurance Eastern Underwriter*, October 9, 1942, on partners of the bank who were insurance company directors. https://archive.org/details/sim_insurance-eastern-underwriter_1942-10-09_43_41
[^25]: Summary of Securities and Exchange Commission insider transactions, *Chicago Daily Tribune*, July 17, 1943. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_1943-07-17_102_170
[^26]: *Daily Worker*, October 5, 1946, vol. 23, no. 239, article on West Coast shipping boards. https://archive.org/details/per_daily-worker_daily-worker_1946-10-05_23_239
[^27]: *United States v. Pullman Co.*, 331 U.S. 865 (1947), No. 253, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1946, printed record, passage on interlocking directorates of the directors of the Pullman Company. https://archive.org/details/micro_IA40385610_0183
[^28]: Sutton, *America's Secret Establishment* (1983), section on the Union Banking Corporation (eight directors for 1932), the passage on Guaranty Trust, and the passage on Averell Harriman, Roland Harriman, E.S. James and Knight Woolley and the Union Bank. The lists and characterizations are Sutton's. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^29]: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, *Twenty-Fifth Annual Report* (for the year 1939), pp. 16 to 17 and note 2 on the foreign exchange committee. https://archive.org/details/sim_federal-reserve-bank-of-new-york-annual-report_1939-12-31
[^30]: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Circular No. 1015, "Appointment of Directors," January 8, 1931. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/historical/ny%20circulars/1931_01015.pdf
[^31]: Antony C. Sutton, *Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler* (1976), notes to the chapter on the Union Bank, note 15, citing Bankers Directory, 1932 edition, p. 2557, and Poor's Directory of Directors: "J.L. Guinter and Knight Woolley were also directors."
[^32]: Knight Woolley to William R. White, January 14, 1941, as reprinted with a newspaper account of the Union Banking Corporation, a report of the corporation issued January 1, 1941, and a narrative of the directorship, in Millegan, *Fleshing Out Skull & Bones* (2003), pp. 214 to 217 and 222 to 223. https://archive.org/details/fleshing_out_skull_and_bones
[^33]: William R. White to Knight Woolley, May 13, 1941, reprinted in Millegan, *Fleshing Out Skull & Bones* (2003), pp. 216 to 217. https://archive.org/details/fleshing_out_skull_and_bones
[^34]: Treasury Department memorandum, Mr. May to Mr. J. W. Pehle, August 18, 1941, "Re: Union Banking Corporation," ref. 9-151, with handwritten notation by J. W. Pehle, declassified by NARA (authority NND 960103).
[^35]: Office of the Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248, "All of the Capital Stock of Union Banking Corporation and Certain Indebtedness Owing by It," executed October 20, 1942, F.R. Doc. 42-11568, 7 *Federal Register* 9097 to 9098 (November 7, 1942), registered-owners table. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1942-11-07/pdf/FR-1942-11-07.pdf
[^36]: Office of the Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 261, "All of the Capital Stock of Holland-American Trading Corporation," executed October 28, 1942, signed Leo T. Crowley, F.R. Doc. 42-13532, filed December 18, 1942, *Federal Register*, vol. 7, no. 248 (December 19, 1942), p. 10627, holder table of 500 shares. https://archive.org/details/sim_federal-register-find_1942-12-19_7_248
[^37]: Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power," *The Guardian*, September 25, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
[^38]: Aris and Campbell, *The Guardian*, September 25, 2004, quoting the January 1933 letter from Knight Woolley to Averill Harriman and citing National Archives files. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
[^39]: Council on Foreign Relations, Receipts (1946-1951), Research Budget, with Contributions of Corporations, Individual Contributions to the 25th Anniversary Fund and Corporations with Officers who are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, November 1951, CIA CREST document CIA-RDP80R01731R001100170005-1. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80r01731r001100170005-1
[^40]: Walter H. Mallory, Council on Foreign Relations, to Allen W. Dulles, December 10, 1951, enclosing the agenda of the 94th meeting of the board (December 17, 1951) and the "Membership Proposals, Suggested List, December 1951," CIA CREST document CIA-RDP80R01731R001100170002-4. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80r01731r001100170002-4
[^41]: Henry R. Luce Papers, MS 3014, New-York Historical Society, finding aid, file "Woolley, Knight (Mr. and Mrs.), 1936-1957." https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/nyhs/ms3014_henry_luce/all
[^42]: *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941*, vol. III, document 6, telegram 2483, the Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant), July 9, 1941, relaying a message from Hopkins. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v03/d6
[^43]: Letterhead of The Boys' Club of New York, in Medallic Art Co. correspondence, American Numismatic Society, ca. 1908 to 1931 (officers: Charles H. Sabin, president; E. Roland Harriman, vice-president; Knight Woolley and Robert A. Lovett, assistant secretaries). https://archive.org/details/medallicartco19000amer
[^44]: Knight Woolley, *In Retrospect: A Very Personal Memoir* (privately printed, 1975), as cited in the notes to Darwin Payne, *Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880-1978* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). https://archive.org/details/initiativeinener00payn_0

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---
category: "Business & Finance"
aliases:
- "Whitney family"
- "The Whitneys"
tags:
- Person
- Family
- Whitney
- Payne
- StandardOil
- SkullAndBones
- Yale
- WhitneyMuseum
- Philanthropy
- CIAFoundations
- Harriman
- StreetRailways
- NavalReform
summary: "New England family whose New York fortune joined William C. Whitney's street railways to the Payne share of Standard Oil, whose members belonged to Skull and Bones, and whose trust recurs in CIA-linked records."
location: "New York City"
relations:
- type: member_of
with: "[[Skull and Bones]]"
start: 1851
role: "eight Whitneys in Sutton's index, from Emerson Cogswell Whitney to Payne Whitney"
fn: 13
- type: founded
with: "[[Yale Aviation Corps]]"
start: 1916
role: "Payne Whitney, B.A. 1898"
fn: 16
- type: founded
with: "[[Whitney Museum of American Art]]"
start: 1930
role: "Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney"
fn: 20
- type: owned
with: "[[New York Herald Tribune]]"
role: "John Hay Whitney, former owner and publisher, per the 1967 Chronicle report"
fn: 31
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Oliver Hazard Payne]]"
start: 1869
role: "brother of Flora Payne Whitney, uncle of Harry Payne Whitney and Payne Whitney"
fn: 9
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Dorothy Payne Whitney]]"
role: "daughter of William Collins Whitney"
fn: 2
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Michael Whitney Straight]]"
role: "grandson of William Collins Whitney"
fn: 47
created: 2026-10-26
updated: 2026-10-26
---
The Whitney family is a New England line that settled at [[Watertown, Massachusetts]] and became a New York fortune through [[William Collins Whitney]], a lawyer and financier who served as [[Grover Cleveland]]'s Secretary of the Navy and who married [[Flora Payne]], sister of the [[Standard Oil]] treasurer [[Oliver Hazard Payne]]. [[Antony C. Sutton]] places the Whitney family, dated to 1635 at Watertown, among the old-line families of [[Skull and Bones]] in his chart, which he titles "Hypothesis Number One," and he places the Payne family under Standard Oil among the new-wealth families.[^1] The [[Yale University]] Obituary Record entry for [[Payne Whitney]] traces the family to John Whitney, who came from England in 1635 and settled at Watertown.[^2]
### William Collins Whitney
William Collins Whitney was born in [[Conway, Massachusetts]] on July 5, 1841, the son of [[James Scollay Whitney]], a Democratic leader in Massachusetts and superintendent of the United States Armory at [[Springfield, Massachusetts]]. He entered Yale in the class of 1863, took a course at [[Harvard Law School]], read law in the office of Abraham R. Lawrence and began practice in [[New York City]] in 1865 with his classmate Henry Farnam Dimock, who married his sister. In 1871 he helped organize the Young Men's Democratic Club, which took part in the movement that overthrew the [[Tweed Ring]]. He was appointed Counsel to the Corporation of the City of New York on August 9, 1875, was twice reappointed and resigned on November 6, 1882. At the 1884 Democratic convention in [[Chicago]] he exerted what the Yale record calls a powerful influence for Cleveland.[^3]
### Secretary of the Navy
Whitney practiced law until March 1885, when he became Secretary of the Navy, and he held the post until the close of Cleveland's administration in 1889. Yale University gave him an LL.D. in 1888.[^3] His first annual report, dated December 1885, argues that the department's bureau system left no one with a duty to deliberate: the Secretary was a civilian with a staff of one stenographer, one clerk and three messengers, and the department's decisions, among them the rebuilding of the [[USS Omaha]] for $572,000, had no identifiable author. He recommended a board of naval officers and experts to advise the Secretary, as the French and German navies had, and an Assistant Secretary of the Navy.[^4]
The report for 1887, dated December 6, 1887, states that the country lacked factories for steel gun forgings, for armor and for secondary batteries, and that all three were then being built under contracts with the department. It says that "it was a fatal mistake for this country to be dependent upon any other nation for its implements of war."[^5] The department had advertised in the summer of 1886 for armor and gun steel of domestic manufacture, allowed about seven months for bids and opened them on March 22, 1887. The result was a contract with the [[Bethlehem Iron Company]], under which a plant for armor and gun steel was being erected at [[Bethlehem, Pennsylvania]].[^5] The report for 1888 gives June 1, 1887 as the date of the contracts and describes them as the first important step toward a navy modern in character.[^6]
The Yale record credits his tenure with improvements in steel manufacture that made it possible for the first time to equip American war vessels fully with an armament produced at home.[^3]
### The street railways and the Whitney Group
After 1889 Whitney turned to finance. The Yale record says he developed the [[Metropolitan Street Railway]] from a single company through reorganization and consolidation, that it bought out its only rival and that it was in turn merged into the [[Interurban Street Railway Company]]. It adds that for several years he held no visible office or connection with the system, yet controlled its operations and secured the results he sought through others, and that his judgment in selecting men to carry out his plans was unerring. He retired from active business in 1902. He was a trustee of the [[Consolidated Gas Company]] and a director of the [[Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company]], the [[Metropolitan Steamship Company]], the New York Loan and Investment Company, the Manufacturing Investment Company, the [[Mergenthaler Linotype Company]], the [[Guggenheim Exploration Company]] and the Cuba Company, and he held shares in several local banks. He died at his New York home on February 2, 1904.[^3] Sutton wrote that a cluster of capitalists known as "the Whitney Group" were heavily criticized in several books, and that the group's New York street railway franchises generated enormous profits.[^7]
The railway system went into receivership three and a half years after his death. The [[New-York Tribune]] of September 26, 1907 reported that [[Adrian H. Joline]] and [[Douglas Robinson]] had been named receivers of the New York City Railway Company, the lessee of the Metropolitan Street Railway, which had guaranteed a 7 percent dividend to Metropolitan stockholders. The paper called the receivership a "friendly proceeding" and wrote that a receivership might otherwise have been precipitated by interests "distinctly unfriendly to the Ryan-Belmont control." It adds that Judge [[Emile Henry Lacombe]], who appointed the receivers, had been an assistant corporation counsel while Whitney was Corporation Counsel, and had been named a federal judge during Whitney's term in Cleveland's cabinet.[^8]
On October 13, 1869, Whitney married Flora Payne, daughter of [[Henry B. Payne]], a United States senator from Ohio, and sister of his classmate Oliver Hazard Payne. They had two sons, who graduated from Yale in 1894 and 1898, and three daughters.[^3]
### Oliver Hazard Payne and the Standard Oil treasurership
Oliver Hazard Payne was born in [[Cleveland, Ohio|Cleveland]] on July 21, 1839, the son of Henry B. Payne, who served in the Ohio Senate, in the [[United States Congress]] and as a United States senator from 1885 to 1891. He left the Yale class of 1863 in October 1861 to accept a commission in the [[124th Ohio Infantry]], rose to colonel and was brevetted brigadier general on March 13, 1865. The Yale Corporation voted him a B.A. in 1878, and he was enrolled in the class of 1863 from that date. After the war he entered the oil refining business in Cleveland with [[James B. Clark]] and [[John Huntington]]. The business was absorbed by the Standard Oil Company, and Payne served as its treasurer until 1884, when he moved to New York City and joined its board.[^9]
The decree in the government's suit, as set out in the Supreme Court's 1911 opinion, names "Oliver H. Payne" among the seven individual defendants who joined the combination, together with [[John D. Rockefeller]], [[William Rockefeller]], [[Henry H. Rogers]], [[Henry M. Flagler]], [[John D. Archbold]] and [[Charles M. Pratt]].[^10] The opinion places the trust agreement of 1882, which vested the stock of forty corporations in nine trustees, in the second of three periods of the alleged combination, and it lists "O. H. Payne" among the individual holders of stock exchanged into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in 1899.[^11]
His directorships included the [[American Tobacco Company]], the Virginia and Southeastern Railway Company, the Coal Creek Mining and Manufacturing Company and the [[Tennessee Coal and Iron Company]]. His largest gifts went to the Cornell Medical School, and in 1887 he endowed the Loomis Laboratory. Payne's will left one million dollars each to Yale, the [[New York Public Library]] and [[Lakeside Hospital]] in Cleveland. He spent each summer from 1898 to 1914 in Europe on his steam yacht Aphrodite, and he died in New York City on June 27, 1917. The Yale record names his nephews as [[Harry Payne Whitney]], Payne Whitney and [[Henry Payne Bingham]].[^9]
Sutton wrote that "The Paynes are not in The Order," and that adding the Payne piece of the Standard Oil fortune made Whitney's fortune "that much larger."[^12]
### Skull and Bones membership
Sutton's index of the Order by class year lists eight Whitneys: [[Emerson Cogswell Whitney]] (1851), [[Edward Payson Whitney]] (1854), [[James Lyman Whitney]] (1855), William Collins Whitney (1863), [[Edward Baldwin Whitney]] (1878), [[Joseph Ernest Whitney]] (1882), Harry Payne Whitney (1894) and Payne Whitney (1898).[^13] Sutton's text names W.C. Whitney and his two sons as "the core of Whitney influence" in the society, and he ties that influence to the Harriman family and to intermarriage with the Paynes and the Vanderbilts.[^14]
Sutton's chart table prints the two sons' years in reverse, giving Payne Whitney as 1894 and Harry Payne Whitney as 1898, while his text and index give Harry Payne Whitney as 1894 and Payne Whitney as 1898. The Yale records give the same graduating years as Sutton's text and index.[^15][^3] The Yale Obituary Record for Payne Whitney lists "Skull and Bones" among his undergraduate activities.[^2]
### Payne Whitney
Payne Whitney was born in New York City on March 20, 1876. He rowed on the Yale crews and captained the Senior crew, took an LL.B. at Harvard Law School in 1901 and was a director and member of the executive board of the [[Great Northern Paper Company]] from 1903 to 1927. The Yale record also lists him as director and vice-president of the [[Northern Finance Corporation]] from 1911 and of the [[Whitney Realty Company]] from 1910, a trustee of the [[United States Trust Company]] from 1905 and of the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] from 1922, a director of the [[First National Bank of New York]] from 1924, a former director of the [[Northern Pacific Railroad]] and chairman of the executive committee of the [[Vanadium Corporation of America]] from 1923. In 1923 he gave $2,000,000 to the New York Public Library, of which he had been a trustee since 1915.[^2]
On February 6, 1902, in Washington, he married [[Helen Hay Whitney|Helen Hay]], daughter of [[John Hay]], then Secretary of State. Their children were Joan, who married [[Charles S. Payson]] of the Yale class of 1921, and [[John Hay Whitney]], of the class of 1926, then a student at the [[University of Oxford]]. Payne Whitney died in [[Manhasset, New York]], on May 25, 1927. The Yale record lists his surviving siblings as Harry Payne Whitney and a sister, the wife of [[Leonard Knight Elmhirst]] of [[Yorkshire]], England.[^2]
In June 1916 Payne Whitney formed the [[Yale Aviation Corps]]. A Yale Obituary Record entry for a member of the corps says it was "formed by Payne Whitney, '98, in June, 1916," and that [[Aerial Coast Patrol Unit No. 1]] was organized by [[F. Trubee Davison]] of the class of 1918, a unit afterward known as the Huntington Unit.[^16]
The New York appraisal of his estate was reported in November 1928. The Washington Daily News headed its account "Payne Whitney Left Biggest Estate Ever Appraised in U.S.," gave the appraised net value as more than $175,000,000 and the expected death tax as about $20,000,000, of which about $15,600,000 would go to New York State. The larger part of the estate was a half interest in the Northern Finance Corporation, a holding company for securities, which the paper said grew from a fund set aside by his uncle, Colonel Oliver H. Payne, who established it to be relieved of the care of large blocks of Standard Oil and subsidiary stocks and tobacco shares.[^17]
### Harry Payne Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and the Whitney Museum
Harry Payne Whitney, Yale 1894, was born in New York on April 29, 1872. He married the sculptor [[Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney]] in 1896, according to Sutton, who wrote that the Whitney-Payne fortune then "joined some Vanderbilt money," which he says was channeled into the [[Guaranty Trust Company]] and the [[J. P. Morgan & Company|J. P. Morgan]] and Guggenheim interests.[^18] He kept a racing stable whose horses won the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby and were the leading money winners of 1924, and he was a member of the American polo team that brought the international cup back from England in 1909. He died of pneumonia at his Fifth Avenue home on October 26, 1930, at 58. The United Press reported that he was the son of the Secretary of the Navy in Cleveland's cabinet and that he had inherited from his father a fortune estimated at $200,000,000.[^19]
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney became the leading patron of American art from 1907 until her death in 1942, established the [[Whitney Studio Club]] in Greenwich Village in 1914, and founded the [[Whitney Museum of American Art]] in 1930, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art declined the gift of her collection of more than five hundred works. The museum opened in 1931 on West Eighth Street.[^20]
Their son [[Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney]], Yale 1922, is listed in the 1927 Yale record as a nephew of Payne Whitney.[^2] Sutton writes that Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney married Marie Norton, and that after their divorce she married [[W. Averell Harriman]].[^18] The Library of Congress finding aid for the Harriman papers lists the marriage in 1930 to Marie Norton Whitney, who died in 1970.[^21]
### Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney in the Truman administration
The [[Harry S. Truman Library]] photograph record for a meeting of the [[National Security Council]] on August 19, 1948 names Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, among those at the table: he sits with Secretary of the Army [[Kenneth Royall]], Executive Secretary [[Sidney Souers]], National Security Resources Board Chairman [[Arthur M. Hill]], Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Secretary of Defense [[James Forrestal]], Secretary of State [[George Marshall|George C. Marshall]], President Truman and Under Secretary of the Navy [[W. John Kenney]].[^22] The State Department's volume of Foreign Relations documents on intelligence for 1945 to 1950 lists "Whitney, C. V., Assistant Secretary of the Air Force."[^23] A second Truman Library record, dated March 5, 1950, captions him as Acting Secretary of Commerce at the swearing-in of the director of the Census Bureau, and the library's other photographs describe him as Under Secretary of Commerce.[^24]
### Dorothy Payne Whitney and the Straight line
The 1927 Yale record for Payne Whitney lists a sister, the wife of Leonard K. Elmhirst, and that sister is [[Dorothy Payne Whitney]].[^2] She had married [[Willard Straight]] in 1911, and the couple founded [[The New Republic]] in 1914 with [[Herbert Croly]].[^25] Sutton wrote that [[The Nation]] and the New Republic on the left "were financed by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney (The Order) funds."[^26] An [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] summary of a 1969 interview with the magazine's publisher, as cited on the Dorothy Payne Whitney page, records that her family's fund had founded the magazine and had been used for its operation until 1954.[^27]
The [[William C. Whitney Foundation]] appears in the FBI file on Michael Straight. Milton C. Rose, senior partner of [[Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander]], told the FBI that the foundation was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" and that Michael Whitney Straight had been its president "since its inception in 1937." The same summary records that Straight was questioned before a special House committee investigating tax-exempt foundations, as reported by the [[Washington Times-Herald]] on December 6, 1952, about $19,000 in grants the foundation had made to organizations "cited as subversive or communist fronts."[^28]
### Michael Whitney Straight
[[Michael Whitney Straight]], Dorothy Payne Whitney's son, was a grandson of William Collins Whitney and the president of the William C. Whitney Foundation according to the FBI summary cited above.[^28] In June 1963 he told FBI agents that [[Anthony Blunt]] had recruited him for Soviet intelligence while he was at Cambridge, and that account was followed by Blunt's confession in 1964. The Soviet file, the British and American responses and the rest of the record are on his page.[^29]
### John Hay Whitney, the embassy and the Herald Tribune
John Hay Whitney, called Jock, was the son of Payne Whitney and Helen Hay and a member of the Yale class of 1926.[^2] The Department of State's Office of the Historian records his appointment as ambassador to the [[United Kingdom]] on February 11, 1957, with credentials presented on February 28, 1957, and his departure from the post on January 14, 1961.[^30]
The [[San Francisco Chronicle]] reported on February 25, 1967 that Whitney was the former owner, publisher and editor of the [[New York Herald Tribune]], and that he was a one-third partner in its successor, the [[World Journal Tribune]], and a member of that paper's three-man executive board.[^31] A statement of ownership for [[United Nations World]] dated October 1, 1947 lists "J. H. Whitney, 630 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y." among the holders of one percent or more of the magazine's securities, beside [[Nelson Rockefeller]] and [[Max Ascoli]].[^32]
On March 26, 1969 [[Henry A. Kissinger]] wrote to [[Peter Flanigan]] about Whitney's interest in the [[President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board|Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board]]. Kissinger's memorandum reads: "You should know that this has twice been raised with the President and rejected both times."[^33]
### J. H. Whitney and Company, William H. Jackson and the CIA
The investment firm [[J. H. Whitney and Company]] had its offices at 630 Fifth Avenue in New York, the address given in the 1947 ownership statement.[^32] A letter of May 29, 1947, on the firm's letterhead and signed "W. H. Jackson," came from [[William Harding Jackson|William H. Jackson]] and was addressed to Rear Admiral [[Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter]], then Director of Central Intelligence. It reads: "You need only call upon me and I shall do anything within my power to be of assistance," and it offers to come to Washington "whenever you request it regardless of other appointments."[^34]
The writer of that letter is William Harding Jackson (1901 to 1971), the later Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. He was born in [[Nashville, Tennessee]], took a B.A. at [[Princeton University]] in 1924 and an LL.B. at Harvard in 1928, worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York, served in the Army from 1942 to 1945 and in 1944 sat on General [[Omar Bradley]]'s intelligence staff.[^35] A member of the three-man board that reported to the National Security Council on the national intelligence system in January 1949, he was named Deputy Director of Central Intelligence by [[Walter Bedell Smith]] and served from October 1950 until August 3, 1951; the CIA's announcement of his resignation that month calls him William H. Jackson "of Princeton, New Jersey" and says he resigned "due to the pressure of private business."[^36][^37] The Eisenhower Library's description of the President's Committee on International Information Activities identifies its chairman, William H. Jackson, as "a managing partner in the investment firm J.H. Whitney and Company, and a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency."[^38] From August 1951 to February 1956 he was a part-time assistant and senior consultant to the Director of Central Intelligence.[^35]
The CIA's official history of the Walter Bedell Smith years says that when Smith and Jackson could not recruit "men of great prestige with practical experience" for the [[Board of National Estimates]], they created a group of outside advisers who met in Princeton, known as "the Princeton Consultants." The history lists among the group's original members [[Vannevar Bush]], [[George Kennan]], [[Hamilton Fish Armstrong]], [[Alexander Standish]], "a partner in J. H. Whitney & Company," [[Barklie McKee Henry]] and [[Burton Fahs]].[^39] Barklie McKee Henry was later a member of the Jackson Committee, appointed by President Eisenhower in January 1953 with Jackson as chairman; its other members were [[Robert Cutler]], [[C. D. Jackson]], [[Roger Kyes]], [[Sigurd Larmon]], [[Gordon Gray]] and [[John C. Hughes]], and its report went to the President on June 30, 1953.[^38]
A second letter, of October 3, 1952, on the same letterhead and signed by William H. Jackson, was sent to the Central Intelligence Agency about a correspondent who had to interview "a great number of people." Jackson wrote that "if he wants to see Secretary Lovett, General Smith is the person to arrange it."[^40] The letter refers to [[Robert A. Lovett]] and to Smith, then the Director of Central Intelligence.
Hillenkoetter, the addressee of the 1947 letter, was at the same National Security Council table as Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney on August 19, 1948.[^22]
### The Granary Fund and the John Hay Whitney Trust
On February 25, 1967 the San Francisco Chronicle reported from a schedule of contributions filed with the Massachusetts attorney general that the [[Granary Fund]] of [[Boston]] received $300,000 in 1964 from the [[John G. Thornton Trust]], $150,000 from the [[James Carlisle Trust]] and $500 in miscellaneous contributions. Officials who asked not to be named called the Thornton and Carlisle trusts CIA fronts, and the paper described the Granary Fund as a fund used by the CIA to channel money to organizations at home and abroad.[^31] The same report says the Granary Fund gave a John Hay Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes $225,000 in 1964 and $100,000 in 1965.[^31]
The Chronicle reported that the Whitney trust was a charitable trust established by Whitney on December 29, 1958, during his term as ambassador to the United Kingdom. [[Walter N. Thayer]], head of the Whitney communications corporation, made a statement on Whitney's behalf that the trust had operated since that date and that its pledges and contributions to tax-exempt organizations had all been properly reported.[^31][^30] A [[Los Angeles Times]] report of February 26, 1967 said that Representative [[Wright Patman]] had named eight funds in 1964 in connection with the [[J. M. Kaplan Fund]], among them the [[Gotham Foundation]], and that the Internal Revenue Service had not yet produced records for four more, among them the Granary Fund.[^41] A February 21, 1967 newspaper item in the CIA reading room, "Foundations Fail to File Tax Report," also lists the Granary Fund, Boston, among foundations under question.[^42]
The 1967 reports followed the disclosure of CIA funding for the [[National Student Association]]. The [[Ramparts]] article by [[Sol Stern]] on the association and the CIA appeared in March 1967, and the [[The New York Times|New York Times]] reported the magazine's account on February 16, 1967.[^43][^44] The [[Church Committee]]'s 1976 report on foreign and military intelligence states: "Until 1967 the Agency also maintained covert ties to American foundations in order to pass funds secretly to private groups whose work the CIA supported."[^45] The report says that most of those funds "were transmitted through legitimate or 'devised' foundations, that is, fictitious entities established by the CIA," and that at least 108 of the 700 grants over $10,000 made by 164 foundations other than the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations in 1963 to 1966 involved partial or complete CIA funding.[^46]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Antony C. Sutton, *America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones* (1983), chart "Hypothesis Number One: A Secret Society Dominated By Old Line American Families And New Wealth Has Existed From 1833 To The Present Day," with the spokes WHITNEY FAMILY (1635, Watertown, Mass.) and PAYNE FAMILY (Standard Oil). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^2]: Yale University, *Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1927*, entry for Payne Whitney, B.A. 1898, pp. 171 to 172 (birth, death, descent from John Whitney of Watertown, Yale relatives, crews, the listing "member Hé Boulé, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Skull and Bones," directorships, gifts, marriage to Helen Hay, children and survivors). https://archive.org/details/obituaryrecordof00yale_4.
[^3]: Yale University, *Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased 1900 to 1910*, entry for William Collins Whitney, class of 1863, pp. 350 to 352. https://archive.org/details/1900t10obituary00yaleuoft.
[^4]: William C. Whitney, *Report of the Secretary of the Navy*, December 1885, in *Annual Reports of the Navy Department* (Government Printing Office, 1885), pp. xxxviii to xli (the Secretary's staff, the rebuilding of the Omaha at $572,000, the proposed advisory board and Assistant Secretary). https://archive.org/details/annualreportsna00deptgoog.
[^5]: William C. Whitney, *Report of the Secretary of the Navy*, Navy Department, Washington, December 6, 1887, in *Annual Reports of the Navy Department* (Government Printing Office, 1887), passages on the armor, gun-steel and secondary-battery factories and the Bethlehem Iron Company contract. https://archive.org/details/annualreportsna06deptgoog.
[^6]: *Report of the Secretary of the Navy* for 1888, in *Annual Reports of the Navy Department* (Government Printing Office, 1888), passage on the contracts of June 1, 1887 with the Bethlehem Iron Company and the department's 1886 report on armor and gun production. https://archive.org/details/annualreportsna02deptgoog.
[^7]: Sutton (1983), section "The Whitney Family" and the Whitney table, passage on "the Whitney Group" and the New York street railway franchises. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^8]: *New-York Tribune*, September 26, 1907, p. 1 (Joline and Robinson as receivers of the New York City Railway Company; the guaranteed dividend; "friendly proceeding"; the Ryan-Belmont control; Judge Lacombe and William C. Whitney as Corporation Counsel). https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1907-09-26/ed-1/?sp=1.
[^9]: Yale University, *Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased 1915 to 1920*, entry for Oliver Hazard Payne, B.A. 1863, pp. 295 to 296. https://archive.org/details/1915t20obituary00yaleuoft.
[^10]: *Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States*, 221 U.S. 1 (1911), Section 2 of the decree as set out in the opinion, naming "the seven individual defendants" and including "Oliver H. Payne." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/1.
[^11]: *Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States*, 221 U.S. 1 (1911), the opinion's description of the trust agreement of 1882 and its nine trustees, and the list of individual stockholders including "O. H. Payne." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/1.
[^12]: Sutton (1983), the passage on the Paynes and Standard Oil. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^13]: Sutton (1983), index of members by class year: the Whitney entries under 1851, 1854, 1855, 1863, 1878, 1882, 1894 and 1898, and the list for the class of 1863, which does not include Payne. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^14]: Sutton (1983), the section "The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy-Acheson Chain of Influence," point 1 ("the core of Whitney influence"). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^15]: Sutton (1983), Whitney table, which prints "1894 Payne Whitney" and "1898 Harry Payne Whitney"; text, which gives "Harry Payne ('94) and Payne Whitney ('98)." https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^16]: Yale University, *Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased 1915 to 1920*, entry for Albert Dillon Sturtevant, Ph.B. 1916, Sheffield Scientific School, stating that the Yale Aviation Corps was "formed by Payne Whitney, '98, in June, 1916," and that Aerial Coast Patrol Unit No. 1 was organized by F. Trubee Davison (B.A. 1918). https://archive.org/details/1915t20obituary00yaleuoft.
[^17]: "Payne Whitney Left Biggest Estate Ever Appraised in U.S.," *Washington Daily News*, November 23, 1928, p. 6. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82016181/1928-11-23/ed-1/?sp=6.
[^18]: Sutton (1983), the passage on the Harriman family, the Whitney-Payne fortune and the Vanderbilt marriage, and the account of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney's marriage to Marie Norton. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^19]: "Harry Payne Whitney, Multi-Millionaire, Is Dead," United Press, *The Indianapolis Times*, October 27, 1930, p. 2. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82015313/1930-10-27/ed-1/?sp=2.
[^20]: Whitney Museum of American Art, "Whitney History: Founding." https://whitney.org/about/history.
[^21]: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, *W. Averell Harriman Papers: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress* (2016), chronology entry "1930 Married Marie Norton Whitney (died 1970)." https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2003/ms003012.pdf.
[^22]: Harry S. Truman Library, photograph 73-2702, "Truman with National Security Council," August 19, 1948 (identification of Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter at the table). https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-records/73-2702.
[^23]: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment*, "Persons," entry "Whitney, C. V., Assistant Secretary of the Air Force." https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/persons.
[^24]: Harry S. Truman Library, photograph 2017-286, swearing-in of Roy V. Peel as Director of the Bureau of the Census, March 5, 1950 (caption: "Mr. C. V. Whitney, Acting Secretary of Commerce"), and the library's index entry for "Whitney, C. V. (Cornelius Vanderbilt), 1899-1992." https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-records/2017-286.
[^25]: Tara Mastrelli, "Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst," Histories of The New School, May 25, 2018 (founding of The New Republic with Willard Straight and Herbert Croly; the 1911 marriage), as cited on the Dorothy Payne Whitney page. https://histories.newschool.edu/people/dorothy-payne-whitney-straight-elmhirst.
[^26]: Sutton (1983), the section on the press (the Nation and New Republic passage). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones.
[^27]: FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), special inquiry report of September 1969, interview with the publisher of *The New Republic*, as cited on the Dorothy Payne Whitney page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
[^28]: FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," summary memorandum of September 10, 1969, interviews with Milton C. Rose and Harriett K. Evison, the William C. Whitney Foundation passage, the summary of the Washington Times-Herald article of December 6, 1952, and the statement that Straight was president of the foundation, as cited on the Michael Whitney Straight page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
[^29]: FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," memorandum of June 25, 1963 on the interview of June 18, 1963, as cited on the Michael Whitney Straight page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.
[^30]: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "John Hay Whitney (1904-1982)," Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission, United Kingdom. https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/whitney-john-hay.
[^31]: San Francisco Chronicle, "CIA Link to Charity Funds," February 25, 1967 (CIA reading room copy). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp75-00149r000800060024-5.
[^32]: *United Nations World*, December 1947 (Vol. 1, No. 10), statement of ownership, management and circulation for October 1, 1947. https://archive.org/details/united-nations-world_1947-12_1_10.
[^33]: Henry A. Kissinger to Peter Flanigan, memorandum, March 26, 1969, on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and John Hay Whitney (CIA reading room copy, document LOC-HAK-1-2-69-2). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-loc-hak-1-2-69-2.
[^34]: William H. Jackson to Rear Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, letter of May 29, 1947, on J. H. Whitney & Co. letterhead, 630 Fifth Avenue (CIA reading room copy, CIA-RDP80B01676R004000040034-9). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80b01676r004000040034-9.
[^35]: Georgetown University Library, *William Harding Jackson Papers* (GTM-101014), biographical note (born March 25, 1901, Nashville; B.A. Princeton 1924; LL.B. Harvard 1928; lawyer and investment banker in New York; Army 1942 to 1945; Bradley's intelligence staff 1944; Deputy Director of the CIA from August 18, 1950 to August 3, 1951; part-time assistant and senior consultant to the CIA director, August 1951 to February 1956; died September 28, 1971). https://findingaids.library.georgetown.edu/repositories/15/resources/10428.
[^36]: Central Intelligence Agency, press release of August 23, 1951 announcing Allen W. Dulles as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence to succeed William H. Jackson, "of Princeton, New Jersey," who "resigned that post due to the pressure of private business," and noting that both men were members of the three-man board that reported to the National Security Council in January 1949 (CIA reading room, CIA-RDP57-00384R000100150018-8). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp57-00384r000100150018-8.
[^37]: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community*, "Persons," entry "Jackson, William H.," member of the National Security Council Survey Committee in 1948 and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from October 7, 1950. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/persons.
[^38]: Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, *U.S. President's Committee on International Information Activities (Jackson Committee): Records, 1950-53*, finding aid, historical note (appointment of William H. Jackson, "a managing partner in the investment firm J.H. Whitney and Company, and a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency," as chairman; members; report of June 30, 1953). https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/finding-aids/pdf/us-presidents-committee-on-international-information-activities.pdf.
[^39]: Central Intelligence Agency, "General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950 to February 1953," vol. III (CREST document 00669377), passages on the Board of National Estimates, the Princeton Consultants and their original members, and the references to William Jackson as deputy director. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-00669377.
[^40]: William H. Jackson to the Central Intelligence Agency, letter of October 3, 1952, on J. H. Whitney & Co. letterhead (CIA reading room copy, CIA-RDP80R01731R000500470007-3). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80r01731r000500470007-3.
[^41]: Don Irwin and Vincent J. Burke, "21 Foundations, Union Got Money From CIA," *Los Angeles Times*, February 26, 1967 (CIA reading room copy). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp75-00149r000600210002-4.
[^42]: "Foundations Fail to File Tax Report," February 21, 1967 (CIA reading room copy), list including the Granary Fund, Boston. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp73-00475r000101290002-3.
[^43]: Sol Stern, "A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.," *Ramparts*, March 1967. https://archive.org/details/nsa-and-the-cia.
[^44]: "Ramparts Says C.I.A. Received Student Report," *New York Times*, February 16, 1967 (CIA reading room copy), as cited on the Michael Josselson page. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp75-00149r000800100021-3.
[^45]: U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, *Foreign and Military Intelligence*, Book I, S. Rept. 94-755 (1976), p. 182. https://archive.org/details/finalreportofsel01unit.
[^46]: U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, *Foreign and Military Intelligence*, Book I, S. Rept. 94-755 (1976), p. 183 (devised foundations; 108 of 700 grants). https://archive.org/details/finalreportofsel01unit.
[^47]: FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," summary memorandum of September 10, 1969 (Straight as grandson of William C. Whitney), as cited on the Michael Whitney Straight page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1.

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---
aliases:
- William Howard Taft
- William H. Taft
- Wm. H. Taft
- W. H. Taft
- Governor Taft
- President Taft
- Chief Justice Taft
category: "Political Figure"
tags:
- Person
- SkullAndBones
- YaleUniversity
- PhilippineCommission
- PhilippineAmericanWar
- WaterCure
- TaftKatsura
- SecretaryOfWar
- PanamaCanal
- Cuba1906
- DollarDiplomacy
- NicaraguaLoans
- SupremeCourt
- Olmstead
- Sutton
summary: "27th President and 10th Chief Justice, Yale 1878 and Skull and Bones, first civil governor of the Philippines, and the American party to the 1905 Tokyo conversation with Katsura."
born: 1857-09-15
died: 1930-03-08
location: "Cincinnati, Ohio"
created: 2026-10-26
updated: 2026-10-26
relations:
- type: member_of
with: "[[Skull and Bones]]"
role: "member, Yale class of 1878"
fn: 17
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Yale University]]"
start: 1913
end: 1921
role: "Kent Professor of Law"
fn: 2
- type: head_of
with: "[[Philippine Commission]]"
start: 1900-03
end: 1901-07
role: "president of the United States Philippine Commission"
fn: 21
- type: head_of
with: "[[Philippines]]"
start: 1901-07
end: 1904-02
role: "first civil governor"
fn: 21
- type: appointed
with: "[[Theodore Roosevelt]]"
start: 1904-02-01
end: 1908-06-30
role: "Secretary of War"
fn: 30
- type: head_of
with: "[[Panama Canal]]"
start: 1904
role: "placed in charge of the Isthmian Canal project"
fn: 30
- type: head_of
with: "[[Cuba]]"
start: 1906-09-29
end: 1906-10-13
role: "provisional governor"
fn: 39
- type: participant_in
with: "[[Katsura Taro]]"
start: 1905-07-27
role: "conversation in Tokyo and agreed memorandum of July 29, 1905, reported to Elihu Root"
fn: 35
- type: appointed
with: "[[Warren G. Harding]]"
start: 1921-07-11
end: 1930-02-03
role: "Chief Justice of the United States"
fn: 54
- type: head_of
with: "[[Supreme Court of the United States]]"
start: 1921-07-11
end: 1930-02-03
role: "Chief Justice of the United States"
fn: 54
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Alphonso Taft]]"
role: "son"
fn: 3
- type: relative_of
with: "[[Henry W. Taft]]"
role: "brother"
fn: 14
---
William Howard Taft (September 15, 1857 to March 8, 1930) was the 27th President of the United States, serving from 1909 to 1913, and the 10th Chief Justice of the United States, serving from 1921 to 1930.[^1] He was a member of the Yale class of 1878 and of [[Skull and Bones]]. He was the first civil governor of the [[Philippines]] and then Secretary of War from 1904 to 1908.[^1] He held the Kent Professorship of Law at [[Yale University]] from 1913 to 1921.[^2]
### Alphonso Taft and the family
His father was [[Alphonso Taft]] (1810 to 1891), born at Townshend, Vermont, on November 5, 1810, the only child of Peter R. and Sylvia (Howard) Taft. Alphonso Taft took the Yale degree of 1833, taught for two years at Ellington, Connecticut, and was a tutor at Yale from 1835 to 1837. He was admitted to the bar at New Haven in August 1838 and settled in Cincinnati in January 1840. He sat on the Cincinnati Board of Education for twenty-five years, ran as the Republican candidate for Congress in 1856, was appointed judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati in 1865, and resigned in 1871. He became a member of the Yale Corporation in 1872, when its members were first elected by the alumni, and held the seat until 1882. Yale gave him the LL.D. in 1867. In March 1876 he entered the cabinet of President [[Ulysses S. Grant]] as Secretary of War and two months later was transferred to the attorney-generalship, which he held until March 1877. [[Chester A. Arthur]] appointed him minister to Austria in April 1882 and he was transferred to Russia in 1884, where he remained until August 1885. He died at San Diego, California, on May 21, 1891.[^3]
The Office of the Historian gives the Austria-Hungary appointment as April 26, 1882, with credentials presented on June 30, 1882 and a departure on August 25, 1884, and the Russia appointment as July 4, 1884, with credentials presented on September 3, 1884 and a recall presented on July 31, 1885.[^4]
The Yale record of William Howard Taft names Alphonso Taft's parents as Peter Rawson Taft, a judge in Windham County, Vermont, and Sylvia (Howard) Taft of West Townshend, Vermont. His mother was Louisa Maria (Torrey) Taft, daughter of Samuel Davenport and Susan Holman (Waters) Torrey, of Millbury, Massachusetts.[^5] Alphonso Taft's first wife, Fanny (Phelps) Taft, was the daughter of Charles Phelps of Townshend; she died on June 2, 1852. He married Louisa M. Torrey on December 26, 1853.[^3]
Alphonso Taft is named as a co-founder of Skull and Bones. [[David A. Richards]] named him as a cofounder with [[William Huntington Russell]] in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015.[^6] [[Antony C. Sutton]] wrote that the American chapter "was founded in 1833 at Yale University by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft who, in 1876, became Secretary of War in the Grant Administration."[^7] Sutton also wrote that Alphonso Taft was Attorney General in 1876 and 1877, then minister to Austria from 1882 to 1884, and ambassador to Russia from 1884 to 1885.[^8]
Sutton's chart of old-line families gives the Taft family a settlement date of 1679 at [[Braintree, Massachusetts|Braintree]].[^9]
### The half brothers, the brothers and the two Charles Phelps Tafts
The Yale record lists two half brothers of William Howard Taft, Charles P. Taft (Yale 1864), who was editor of the [[Cincinnati Times-Star]], and Peter R. Taft (Yale 1867).[^10] The elder Charles Phelps Taft was born on December 21, 1843, in Cincinnati and died there on December 31, 1929. His Yale entry lists as his nephews Peter R. Taft's son Hulbert Taft (1900), Walbridge S. Taft (1907), William Howard Taft 2d (1909), [[Robert A. Taft]] (1910) and "Charles P. Taft, 2d, '18."[^11]
William Howard Taft's own entry in the same volume lists his children as Robert Alphonso (B.A. 1910, LL.B. Harvard 1913), Helen Herron (B.A. Bryn Mawr 1915, Ph.D. Yale 1924) and Charles Phelps, 2d (B.A. 1918, LL.B. 1921).[^12] The Yale class of 1918 therefore contained one Charles Phelps Taft, the President's son and the nephew of the elder Charles Phelps Taft. Sutton's book names "Charles Phelps Taft (The Order '18), nephew of President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft" in a passage on the Twentieth Century Foundation and [[Evans Clark]].[^13] The relationship Sutton gives as nephew of the President is, in the Yale record, that of son of the President and nephew of the older Charles.
In 1930 the survivors of William Howard Taft were two brothers, [[Henry W. Taft]] (Yale 1880) and [[Horace D. Taft]] (Yale 1883), and a sister.[^14] The Yale record also names Henry W. Taft as one of four authors, with [[George W. Wickersham]], [[A. Lawrence Lowell]] and William Howard Taft, of the 1919 book The Covenanter, an American Exposition of the League of Nations.[^15] Henry W. Taft joined the New York law firm [[Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft]] in 1889, and the firm took that name in 1914; Wickersham had joined it in 1883.[^16]
### Yale, 1878, and Skull and Bones
Taft attended Woodward High School in Cincinnati and then Yale. The Yale record describes him as salutatorian of the class of 1878, its class orator, and a member of Linonia, Delta Kappa, Phi Theta Psi, He Boule, Psi Upsilon, Skull and Bones and Phi Beta Kappa.[^17] The membership index in Antony C. Sutton's 1983 book lists "Taft, William Howard" in the class of 1878, and his list of Yale faculty members who were in the society gives "TAFT, William H. 1878 Professor of Law (1913)."[^18] Sutton wrote that eight Tafts had been members of the society and that "the great contribution of the Tafts to The Order" was "on the world court system and world law."[^19]
Taft took the LL.B. at the Cincinnati Law School in 1880 and was admitted to the Ohio bar that year. He worked in his father's law office in 1880 and 1881 and then in partnership with Harlan P. Lloyd as Lloyd and Taft from 1883 to 1887. He was assistant county solicitor of Hamilton County from 1885 to 1887, judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati from 1887 to 1890, solicitor general of the United States from 1890 to 1892, and United States circuit judge for the Sixth Circuit from 1892 to 1900.[^20]
### The Philippine Commission and the governorship, 1900 to 1904
Taft was president of the United States Philippine Commission from March 1900 to July 1901, and then the first civil governor of the Philippine Islands from July 1901 to February 1904.[^21] In June 1902 he was sent to Rome by President [[Theodore Roosevelt]] to confer with [[Leo XIII]] about the purchase of church lands in the Philippines, and he returned to the islands in July.[^21] The Yale record says that while governor he went to Washington in December 1901 to testify before the Senate Committee on the Philippine Islands and the House Committee on Insular Affairs.[^21]
The printed hearings of the Senate Committee on the Philippines, chaired by [[Henry Cabot Lodge]], are Senate Document 331, 57th Congress, first session, Part 1, "Affairs in the Philippine Islands." Taft's statement runs over several sessions, and the session of February 4, 1902 opens with the committee's roll of Senators Lodge, Allison, Hale, Proctor, Beveridge, Burrows, McComas, Dietrich, Culberson, Dubois, Carmack and Patterson.[^22]
### The water cure before the Lodge committee, 1902
In the session of February 4, 1902, Senator Patterson asked Taft for information on the use of the so-called water cure to obtain surrenders of guns. Taft said he had intended to speak of the charges of torture "which were made from time to time, and have been made in letters written from the Philippines by soldiers and others," and that such charges would, "if they were true," be "the basis for proper charges against the management of the Army."[^23]
Taft first took up the insurgent side. He said that the captured correspondence between the insurgent leaders showed "that the policy of terrorism adopted toward the Filipino people by the insurgent leaders in this guerrilla warfare was recognized by them as necessary," naming the correspondence of Sandico, whom he described as a brigadier general. He described the fighting as "chiefly ambushing," with a great deal of shooting into towns at night.[^24] Later in the same session he said that "warfare which depends upon terrorism and murder is a crime."[^25]
Senator Culberson asked what Taft had heard of cruelty by American soldiers. Taft answered "Never of the mutilation of bodies," and said: "I have heard charges of whippings and charges of what has been alluded to as the water cure. They were rife in Manila."[^26] Culberson asked about a case in which a Filipino prisoner was shot after surrendering; Taft said he had not heard of it. Taft then said that "individual instances of water cure, that torture which I believe involves pouring water down the throat so that the man swells and gets the impression that he is going to be suffocated and then tells what he knows, which was a frequent treatment under the Spaniards, I am told," were among the things that "are true."[^27]
Patterson then described Macabebe troops enlisted in the American Army who would throw natives on the ground, pour buckets of water down their throats "till they swelled up to an abnormal size," and jump on their stomachs, with the result that guns were produced "with the knowledge of American officers." Taft answered: "I have no doubt there were such instances, of course, a great many more than there ought to have been, but if the Senator will excuse me, dependence on private letters from private individuals as to what occurred is dependence on a very broken reed." He added that he "did not realize the unreliability of such letters until I had experienced what it was," and that he had been at Manila throughout, in daily conference with General [[Arthur MacArthur]].[^28]
Taft pointed to the efforts of the military commanders, "especially General MacArthur," in ordering courts-martial and investigations and in issuing orders to the troops that such methods "would be condemned and must not be adopted." When the chairman asked whether any men had been punished, Taft said he knew that courts-martial had been ordered and that "some courts-martial were lectured for not punishing more heavily than they did men whom the evidence showed had been guilty of that method of securing evidence."[^29]
### Secretary of War and the Isthmus, 1904 to 1908
Taft was Secretary of War under Theodore Roosevelt from February 1, 1904 to June 30, 1908.[^30] The Yale record says he was placed in charge of the Isthmian Canal project in 1904 and visited the isthmus in November and thereafter.[^30] Under the order of the Secretary of War of June 24, 1904, the Canal Zone was declared open to the commerce of all friendly nations, with customs districts at Ancon and Cristobal and the governor of the zone as head of the customs service.[^31]
[[John Barrett]], the American minister at Panama, reported on December 6, 1904 on the Secretary's visit. He wrote that the method of negotiation was to lay each day before the Panama officials the proposed order, which the Panama officials considered and returned, and that Taft then laid it before Admiral Walker, General [[George W. Davis]], Judge [[Charles E. Magoon]] and Barrett in conference. Barrett added that "Mr. Nelson W. Cromwell, assisted by Mr. Farnham, has acted as an Intermediary between the two Governments, and as an adviser of Panama."[^32] Taft told President [[Manuel Amador Guerrero|Amador]] on November 27, 1904 that the United States "has no desire to exercise any power except that which it deems necessary under the treaty to insure the building, maintenance, and protection of the canal."[^32]
On November 5, 1905 the Liberal leaders of [[Panama]] presented Taft with a memorandum on the coming elections. Their representatives were [[Pablo Arosemena]], then vice president of the Republic, [[Belisario Porras]], [[Eusebio Morales]] and General [[Domingo Diaz]]. The American minister and governor of the Canal Zone, Charles E. Magoon, reported the meeting in a despatch of November 10, 1905. He quoted the leaders' questions, including whether the American government guaranteed "public order and constitutional succession in this Republic."[^33] The Panama Journal printed Taft's reply, that "no government which, in order to remain in power, needed to have recourse to fraud and violence at the polls had the right to exist."[^33]
### The July 1905 conversation with Katsura
Taft was in Tokyo in July 1905 with a congressional party, a journey the Yale record dates to July through October 1905 and describes as a visit to the Philippine Islands, Japan and China.[^34] On July 27, 1905 he held a long conversation with [[Katsura Taro]], then prime minister of Japan and temporarily in charge of the foreign ministry in place of Baron Komura, who was on his way to the Portsmouth peace conference. Taft reported it to Secretary of State [[Elihu Root]] in a memorandum dated July 29, 1905 and in a cable from Tokyo of the same date; both are in the [[Library of Congress]] Manuscript Division and are catalogued by the Theodore Roosevelt Center. The catalogue describes the memorandum as the account Secretary of War Taft gives of a conversation he had with Count Katsura about Japan's desires in regard to the Philippine Islands and Korea, and the cable as an "agreed memorandum of conversation" between the prime minister of Japan and Taft on the Philippine Islands, Korea and the maintenance of peace in the Far East.[^35]
[[Tyler Dennett]] printed the text of the agreed memorandum in Current History in October 1924 with the American's name replaced by asterisks. In the first part Katsura observed that Japan's only interest in the Philippines would be, in his opinion, "to have these islands governed by a strong and friendly nation like the United States," and stated that "Japan does not harbor any aggressive designs whatever on the Philippines." The second part records Katsura's proposal for a good understanding among Japan, the United States and Great Britain. It records the statement that the President could not enter into even a confidential informal agreement "without the consent of the Senate," and the view that the people of the United States were so fully in accord with the policy of Japan and Great Britain that appropriate action "could be counted on by them quite as confidently as if the United States were under treaty obligations." In the third part Katsura said Japan was constrained to take definite steps to prevent Korea from falling back into her former condition. The American "fully admitted the justness of the Count's observations" and said that "in his personal opinion, the establishment by Japanese troops of a suzerainty over Korea to the extent of requiring that Korea enter into no foreign treaties without the consent of Japan was the logical result of the present war." He added that President Roosevelt would concur, "although he had no authority to give assurance of this," and that he would forward a memorandum of the conversation to Mr. Root and the President.[^36]
Dennett wrote that at Katsura's request the agreement was regarded as so secret that it was not disclosed even to [[Lloyd C. Griscom]], the American minister at Tokyo. Roosevelt replied on July 31, 1905: "Your conversation with Count Katsura absolutely correct in every respect. Wish you would state to Katsura that I confirm every word you said."[^37] The conversation is the one later called the Taft-Katsura agreement.
In November 1905 the American legation at [[Seoul]] was withdrawn, and Katsura wrote that the Imperial Government was "profoundly satisfied with the prompt and just steps" taken. The American chargé at Tokyo, [[Huntington Wilson]], reported that the fact that the United States "has been the first to take this step" was "esteemed as a very graceful and friendly act."[^38]
### Cuba, 1906
In September 1906 Roosevelt sent Taft and Assistant Secretary of State [[Robert Bacon]] to Cuba as commissioners. They arrived at Havana on the morning of September 19 on the U.S.S. Des Moines, during a cessation of hostilities arranged by Roosevelt's public letter to the Cuban minister at Washington, and set up their offices at the residence of the American minister at Marianao. After a week of interviews they drew up a compromise that kept [[Tomas Estrada Palma|Palma]] as president, with a coalition cabinet and new congressional elections; the Liberals agreed and the Moderates refused. Palma's resignation, which he declared irrevocable, left the republic without an executive, and on September 29, 1906 the commissioners established a provisional government under the authority of the President of the United States.[^39]
Taft signed the proclamation of that date as "Secretary of War of the United States, Provisional Governor of Cuba." It stated that the provisional government would be maintained "only long enough to restore order and peace and public confidence," and that the heads of all departments, including the commander of the rural guard, would report to him for instructions.[^40] The American minister, [[Edwin V. Morgan]], reported on October 13, 1906 that political prisoners were set at liberty, that the disbanding and disarming of the rebel forces was the chief concern of the provisional government, that Taft issued a general amnesty proclamation on October 10, and that on October 13 he transferred the provisional governorship to Charles E. Magoon, who had succeeded him.[^39] Root wrote to the Cuban minister on October 1, 1906 that "you will perceive in the terms of Secretary Taft's proclamation" that the purpose of the United States was the preservation of Cuban independence.[^41]
### Dollar diplomacy and Nicaragua, 1909 to 1912
In his first annual message, dated December 7, 1909, Taft told Congress that the government had terminated diplomatic relations with the Zelaya government of [[Nicaragua]]. He said that "recently two Americans were put to death by order of President Zelaya himself."[^42]
Taft's annual message of December 3, 1912 has a section headed "Diplomacy a hand maid of commercial intercourse and peace." It says: "This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims. It is an effort frankly directed to the increase of American trade upon the axiomatic principle that the Government of the United States shall extend all proper support to every legitimate and beneficial American enterprise abroad."[^43] The same message said that the "terrible events" of the revolution in Nicaragua in the summer of 1912 "might have been averted" had the Senate approved the loan convention. It said that "it became necessary to land over 2,000 marines and bluejackets in Nicaragua," and it recorded "with sorrow the death of seven American marines and bluejackets."[^44]
The message gave the reason for the Central American policy in terms of the Monroe doctrine: "the Monroe doctrine is more vital in the neighborhood of the Panama Canal and the zone of the Caribbean than anywhere else." It said the government had been "glad to encourage and support American bankers" who would help the Central American republics, because "the protection of their customhouses from being the prey of would-be dictators would remove at one stroke the menace of foreign creditors and the menace of revolutionary disorder," and that bankers "may naturally be loath to advance a loan adequate to set the country upon its feet without the support of some such convention as that of June, 1911, upon which the Senate has not yet acted."[^45]
The loan of September 1, 1911 was made by [[Brown Brothers Harriman|Brown Brothers and Company]] and [[J. and W. Seligman and Company]] to the Republic of Nicaragua. Customs receipts were pledged as security, and a collector general of customs was to be nominated by the bankers. On November 2, 1911 the bankers wrote to the Department of State that they had nominated [[Clifford D. Ham]], who was at the time "Surveyor of the Port of Manila, in the Philippine Islands." They wrote that he had been "recommended to us as a person qualified for the position and worthy of our confidence."[^46] Secretary of State [[Philander C. Knox]] approved the nomination on November 11, 1911. He wrote that "I therefore approve the selection of Mr. Clifford D. Ham as Collector-General of Customs of Nicaragua." His letter added that the approval "must not in any wise be understood as indicating that the Government of the United States will lend any other or further good offices" beyond what it would give "any legitimate American enterprise abroad."[^47]
The American minister in Managua wrote on February 14, 1912 that the legation "did not wish to take any official part in the business negotiations between the Nicaraguan Government and Brown Brothers et al." The minister also reported that the currency experts read the clause that put the government's lake steamers under the Pacific railroad option to mean that Brown Brothers "will on the exercise of the option acquire a franchise to navigate the lakes and San Juan River."[^48]
### The 1912 split
Taft was renominated for president at the Republican convention in Chicago in June 1912, and he failed of election in November.[^49] [[Henry L. Stimson]], whom Taft had appointed Secretary of War in 1911, stayed in the administration through the break with Theodore Roosevelt that year.[^50]
### Kent Professor and Chief Justice, 1913 to 1930
Taft held the Kent Professorship of Law in Yale College and the professorship of constitutional law in the Law School from 1913 to 1921. He had been a member of the Yale Corporation from 1906 to 1913 and again from 1922 to 1925.[^51] The Yale record lists him as president of the American Red Cross from 1905 to 1913, a founder and president in 1915 of the League to Enforce Peace, trustee of the [[Carnegie Institution of Washington]] from 1906 to 1915, chancellor of the [[Smithsonian Institution]] from 1923, and an incorporator of the American Law Institute.[^52] It lists him as co-chairman of the National War Labor Board in 1918 and 1919, and as the arbiter in 1922 of the Amory oil concessions, at the joint request of the British and Porto Rican governments.[^53]
The Supreme Court's list of members gives [[Warren G. Harding]] as the president who appointed Taft, with service from July 11, 1921 to February 3, 1930.[^54] The Yale record says he was Chief Justice from 1921 until his resignation on February 3, 1930, on account of ill health. He died on March 8, 1930 of cerebral arteriosclerosis and was buried at [[Arlington National Cemetery]].[^55]
### Olmstead v. United States, 1928
Taft delivered the opinion of the Court in Olmstead v. United States, argued on February 20 and 21, 1928 and decided on June 4, 1928. The writ was limited to the single question whether the use of evidence of private telephone conversations, intercepted by wire tapping, violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The convictions were for a conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act, and the information leading to the discovery of the conspiracy "was largely obtained by intercepting messages on the telephones of the conspirators by four federal prohibition officers."[^56] The syllabus records that the tapping connections were made in the basement of a large office building and on public streets, and that no trespass was committed upon any property of the defendants.[^56]
The opinion held that the evidence did not violate either amendment. Taft wrote: "The language of the Amendment can not be extended and expanded to include telephone wires reaching to the whole world from the defendant's house or office. The intervening wires are not part of his house or office any more than are the highways along which they are stretched." The opinion stated that Congress could protect the secrecy of telephone messages by making them inadmissible in federal criminal trials, and that it was not for the courts to do so by "attributing an enlarged and unusual meaning to the Fourth Amendment."[^57] Justices Holmes, Brandeis, Butler and Stone dissented, and the judgments were affirmed.[^58]
### The family in Sutton's chart
Sutton's chart places "THE ORDER" at the center of nine old-line families, with the Taft family listed at 1679 in Braintree.[^9] Sutton wrote that the "most influential Trustee of Antioch College was the co-founder of The Order," and he named that trustee as Alphonso Taft. [[Horace Mann]] was president of [[Antioch College]] from 1853.[^59]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930 (New Haven: Yale University, 1930), entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," pp. 69 to 72. https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^2]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 71 (Kent professor of law in Yale College and professor of constitutional law in the Law School, 1913 to 1921). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^3]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1890-91 (New Haven: Yale University, 1891), class of 1833, entry "Alphonso Taft," pp. 18 to 19 of the volume. https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1859_1924/1890-91.pdf
[^4]: Office of the Historian, Department of State, "Alphonso Taft (1810-1891)," Department History, People, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary entries for Austria (appointed April 26, 1882; credentials presented June 30, 1882; left post August 25, 1884) and Russia (appointed July 4, 1884; credentials presented September 3, 1884; recall presented July 31, 1885). https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/taft-alphonso
[^5]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 69 (parents, Peter Rawson Taft and Sylvia (Howard) Taft; mother Louisa Maria (Torrey) Taft, daughter of Samuel Davenport and Susan Holman (Waters) Torrey, of Milbury, Mass.). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^6]: David A. Richards, "The origins of the tomb," *Yale Alumni Magazine*, May and June 2015, naming Alphonso Taft as a cofounder with William Huntington Russell. https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4072-the-origins-of-the-tomb
[^7]: Antony C. Sutton, America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (1983), passage on the founding of the American chapter. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^8]: Sutton, America's Secret Establishment (1983), passage on the founders, "Alphonso Taft went further: he was Secretary of War in 1876" and "U.S. Attorney General in 1876-7, then U.S. Minister to Austria in 1882-4, and finally U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 1884-5." https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^9]: Sutton, America's Secret Establishment (1983), chart "Hypothesis Number One," family list ("TAFT FAMILY (1679, Braintree, Mass.)"). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^10]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 69 (relatives: "Charles P. Taft, '64 (half brother)" and "Peter R. Taft, '67 (half brother)"). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^11]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "Charles Phelps Taft, B.A. 1864" (born December 21, 1843, Cincinnati; died December 31, 1929, Cincinnati; Yale relatives: "Peter R Taft, '67 (brother), and his son, Hulbert Taft, '00; Walbridge S Taft, '07, William Howard Taft, 2d, '09, Robert A Taft, '10, and Charles P. Taft, 2d, '18 (nephews)"). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^12]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 72 ("Children: Robert Alphonso (B.A. 1910, LL.B. Harvard 1913); Helen Herron ... ; and Charles Phelps, 2d (B.A. 1918, LL.B. 1921)"). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^13]: Sutton, America's Secret Establishment (1983), passage on the Twentieth Century Foundation and Evans Clark, naming "Charles Phelps Taft (The Order '18), nephew of President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft." https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^14]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 72 (survived by "two brothers, Henry W. Taft, '80, and Horace D. Taft, '83, and a sister, Mrs. William A. Edwards"). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^15]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 71 (one of the authors, with George W. Wickersham, A. Lawrence Lowell and Henry W. Taft, of The Covenanter, an American Exposition of the League of Nations, 1919). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^16]: Yale News, "Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft Donate Historical Records to Yale University Library," September 20, 2000 (Henry W. Taft, Class of 1880, "brother of William Howard Taft," joined in 1889; George W. Wickersham joined in 1883; the firm "officially became known as Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft in 1914"). https://news.yale.edu/2000/09/20/cadwalader-wickersham-and-taft-donate-historical-records-yale-university-library
[^17]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 69 (Woodward High School; salutatorian; class orator; Linonia, Delta Kappa, Phi Theta Psi, He Boule, Psi Upsilon, Skull and Bones and Phi Beta Kappa; LL.B. Cincinnati Law School 1880, admitted to the Ohio bar). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^18]: Sutton, America's Secret Establishment (1983), index of members by class year, class of 1878 ("Taft, William Howard"), and the list of Yale faculty members ("TAFT, William H. 1878 Professor of Law (1913)"). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^19]: Sutton, America's Secret Establishment (1983), passage on the world court system and world law ("The great contribution of the Tafts to The Order was on the world court system and world law") and the count of eight Tafts who have been members of the society. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones
[^20]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," pp. 69 to 70 (Lloyd and Taft 1883 to 1887; assistant county solicitor of Hamilton County 1885 to 1887; judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati 1887 to 1890; solicitor general 1890 to 1892; circuit judge, Sixth Circuit, 1892 to 1900). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^21]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 70 (president of the United States Philippine Commission, March 1900 to July 1901; first civil governor, July 1901 to February 1904; Rome in June 1902 to confer with Pope Leo XIII on purchase of church lands; Washington in December 1901 to testify before the Senate and House committees). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^22]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, "Affairs in the Philippine Islands," hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate, session of February 4, 1902, "Statement of Governor William H. Taft, Continued," p. 68 (present: Senators Lodge, chairman, Allison, Hale, Proctor, Beveridge, Burrows, McComas, Dietrich, Culberson, Dubois, Carmack and Patterson). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^23]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, p. 71 (heading "The so-called water cure"; Patterson's request and Taft's reply). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^24]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, p. 72 (headings "The system of terrorism" and "Character of warfare"; the correspondence of Sandico). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^25]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, p. 79 ("Now, I say that warfare which depends upon terrorism and murder is a crime"). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^26]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, p. 74 (Culberson: "Have you heard in a similar way of instances in which American soldiers have been guilty of what might be termed cruelty?"; Taft: "Never of the mutilation of bodies ... They were rife in Manila"). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^27]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, pp. 74 to 75 (the Metcalf case; Taft's statement on "individual instances of water cure ... all these things are true"). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^28]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, pp. 75 to 76 (heading "The so-called water cure"; Patterson's Macabebe question; Taft: "I have no doubt there were such instances," "a great many more than there ought to have been," "a very broken reed," "I did not realize the unreliability of such letters until I had experienced what it was"). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^29]: Senate Document No. 331, 57th Congress, 1st session, Part 1, p. 75 (heading "Efforts of army officers to prevent cruelty"; General MacArthur's orders; "some courts-martial were lectured for not punishing more heavily"). https://archive.org/details/affairsinphilip01philgoog
[^30]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," pp. 70 to 71 (Secretary of War under Roosevelt, February 1, 1904 to June 30, 1908; Isthmian Canal project from 1904; Cuba 1906; the 1905 trip to the Philippines, Japan and China with a congressional committee, July to October 1905; Cuba, Puerto Rico and Panama 1907; first Filipino Legislative Assembly 1907 with return through Russia). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^31]: Order of the Secretary of War, June 24, 1904, Sections 1 to 3, printed in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904, Panama. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1904
[^32]: John Barrett to the Secretary of State, Panama, December 6, 1904, No. 71 B, with inclosed remarks of Secretary Taft to President Amador of November 27, 1904, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904, Panama. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1904
[^33]: Charles E. Magoon to the Secretary of State, Panama, November 10, 1905 (despatch No. 21), with the translation from the Panama Journal of November 8, 1905, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1905, document 726, p. 717. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1905/d726
[^34]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 70 ("visited Philippine Islands, Japan, and China with a congressional committee July-October, 1905"). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^35]: Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, "Memorandum from William H. Taft to Elihu Root," July 29, 1905, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, 7 pages, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o50423/ ; and "Telegram from Rudolph Forster to Benjamin F. Barnes," July 29, 1905, forwarding a copy of the cable sent from Tokyo by Secretary of War Taft to Secretary of State Root, https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/digital-library/o50427
[^36]: Tyler Dennett, "Roosevelt's Secret Pact With Japan," Current History (October 1924), pp. 16 to 17, text of the "agreed memorandum" of July 29, 1905, covering the conversation of July 27. https://archive.org/details/current-history_1924-10_21_1
[^37]: Dennett, "Roosevelt's Secret Pact With Japan," Current History (October 1924), pp. 16 to 17 (the request that the agreement be kept secret from Lloyd C. Griscom; Roosevelt's telegram of July 31, 1905). The article was expanded in Dennett, Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War (Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1925). https://archive.org/details/current-history_1924-10_21_1
[^38]: Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1905, document 602, Chargé Huntington Wilson to the Secretary of State, Tokyo, November 30, 1905, with the enclosed notes of November 25 and 28, 1905, including Count Katsura's reply. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1905/d602
[^39]: Minister Edwin V. Morgan to the Secretary of State, Habana, October 13, 1906, No. 217, with inclosed "Epitome of events attendant upon establishment of the provisional government in Cuba," Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1906, Part 1, Cuba, document 436. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1906p1/d436
[^40]: Proclamation "To the people of Cuba," Habana, September 29, 1906, signed Wm. H. Taft, Secretary of War of the United States, Provisional Governor of Cuba, inclosure 2 to Morgan's despatch of October 13, 1906, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1906, Part 1, Cuba, document 436. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1906p1/d436
[^41]: Elihu Root to the Cuban Minister (Quesada), Washington, October 1, 1906, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1906, Part 1, Cuba, document 433. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1906p1/d433
[^42]: Taft, first annual message to Congress, December 7, 1909, in Presidential Addresses and State Papers of William Howard Taft, from March 4, 1909, to March 4, 1910 (1910), p. 458. https://archive.org/details/presidentialaddr00unit
[^43]: Taft, "Fourth Annual Message," December 3, 1912, section "Diplomacy a hand maid of commercial intercourse and peace," The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-16
[^44]: Taft, annual message to Congress, December 3, 1912, printed as the "Message of the President" in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, pp. XI to XIII. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912
[^45]: Taft, "Fourth Annual Message," December 3, 1912, section "Central America needs our help in debt adjustment," The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-16 ; and Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, "Message of the President," p. XIII. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912
[^46]: Brown Brothers and Company and J. and W. Seligman and Company to the Secretary of State, New York, November 2, 1911, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, Nicaragua, document 1482. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1482
[^47]: Secretary of State P. C. Knox to Brown Brothers and Company and J. and W. Seligman and Company, November 11, 1911, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, Nicaragua, document 1484. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1484
[^48]: The American Minister to the Secretary of State, Managua, February 14, 1912, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, Nicaragua, document 1498. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1498
[^49]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 71 (renominated for president at the Republican convention in Chicago in June 1912; failed of election in November). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^50]: Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, *On Active Service in Peace and War* (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), ch. II, "With Roosevelt and Taft," pp. 18 to 55, and table of contents ("The Split of 1912").
[^51]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 71 (member of the Yale Corporation 1906 to 1913 and again 1922 to 1925). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^52]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," pp. 71 to 72 (American Red Cross 1905 to 1913; League to Enforce Peace 1915; Carnegie Institution of Washington 1906 to 1915; chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution 1923; incorporator of the American Law Institute). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^53]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 71 (co-chairman of the National War Labor Board, 1918 to 1919; arbiter in the Amory oil concessions in 1922 at the joint request of the British and Porto Rican governments). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^54]: Supreme Court of the United States, "Members of the Supreme Court of the United States," list of justices with appointing president and dates of service, entry for "Taft, William Howard" (Connecticut; Harding; July 11, 1921; February 3, 1930). https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members_text.aspx
[^55]: Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1929-1930, entry "William Howard Taft, B.A. 1878," p. 72 (death due to cerebral arteriosclerosis on March 8, 1930; buried at Arlington National Cemetery; Chief Justice of the United States 1921 until resignation on February 3, 1930). https://web.archive.org/web/2024/http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1929-30.pdf
[^56]: Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), opinion of the Court by Chief Justice Taft and syllabus (Library of Congress, United States Reports). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep277/usrep277438/usrep277438.pdf
[^57]: Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), opinion of the Court (the telephone wires passage; Congress may protect the secrecy of telephone messages by legislation). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep277/usrep277438/usrep277438.pdf
[^58]: Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), dissenting opinions of Justices Holmes, Brandeis and Butler and the statement of Justice Stone concurring in the dissents; judgments affirmed. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep277/usrep277438/usrep277438.pdf
[^59]: Sutton, America's Secret Establishment (1983), passage on Horace Mann and Antioch College ("The most influential Trustee of Antioch College was the co-founder of The Order"). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones