C. Reinold Noyes

C. Reinold Noyes graduated from Yale in 1905 and went into the wholesale drug business in St. Paul. He worked at this most successfully, becoming a director of a couple of banks and a trustee or officer of various civic, educational, and philanthropic organizations. After twenty-five years of this he got fed up, and in his late forties, driven by sheer intellectual curiosity, he took up the life of a scholar. For three years he was a special student in the Graduate School at Johns Hopkins, studying economics and psychology.

Then he began to write books and articles dealing with the problems of economics. Perhaps the best known are America’s Destiny and Economic Man; but the range of his productive work was wonderfully wide and included studies of the institution of property, and the physiological and psychological nature of man, and the springs of human action.

In the Century, he organized an Economic Group with members who were interested in these matters, and he was the counselor, director, and moving spirit of it. So long as he could move about, Reinold presided over the dinner-meetings of this group and over the animated discussions that followed. As moderator he was altogether admirable: gracious, skillful, and just. With his clean-cut features, his clipped gray mustache, and a kind of military precision in his manner, he might have been the Colonel of a Regiment of the Guards presiding over a particularly articulate and talkative Officers’ Mess.

The last six or eight years he was crippled with arthritis and exceedingly handicapped in getting about. But he loved the Century, and long after he was forced to use crutches he came to the monthly meetings and continued to administer the Economic Group. He was a vibrant, affirmative man: competent, informed and urgent, ngine with a never-failing intellectual ferment.

George W. Martin
1955 Century Association Yearbook