Edward D. Page

The best that the merchant community of our great commercial city contributes to good government and sound finance was typified in Edward Day Page. During thirty-six years a busy partner in the dry-goods house of Faulkner, Page & Co., of which he became the head, he gave both his time and his money with the utmost freedom to the cause of public welfare. At a time in the later eighties, when not only was outright free silver coinage legislation constantly threatened in Congress but when even the Eastern business community was drawn through sheer weariness of controversy into approving half-way compromise, Page stood absolutely firm for the gold standard and a sound currency. When, in the face of urgent pressure by party leaders and close political associates to compromise again, Mr. Cleveland in 1890 and 1892 boldly threw down the gauntlet to the silver faction, the most effective moral support behind him was the support of that resolute body of private citizens among whom Page was conspicuous.

Sound currency, in Page’s mind, was bound up with sound government, national and municipal, and he supplemented his work for currency reform with long and active service on the New York City Committee of Seventy in 1894, in the presidency of a Good Government Club in the three ensuing years, and on the executive committee of the Citizens’ Union afterward. He was a member in 1909 of Governor Hughes’s Committee on the stock and commodity exchanges, to which his clear views and ripe experience were of the highest value. During the years in which currency reform was approaching the hour of possible solution and the Federal Reserve legislation appeared in the field of public controversy, his work through the New York Merchants’ Association, of which he was president, was notably effective in the aligning of public opinion.

When one recalls that Page was an enthusiastic art collector, that he held active membership in a number of home and foreign scientific associations, and that he owned and supervised the editing of a country newspaper, the breadth of his interest in life becomes apparent. It was equally manifest in his shrewd conversation at the table of the Century, where he was always a familiar and welcome figure.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook