George Rublee

George Rublee prepared at Groton, and graduated, magna cum laude, from Harvard in 1890, and from the Harvard Law School in 1895. He was the first graduate of Groton—the only boy in his form—and this chance had a deep and lasting effect on him and his relations with others. He was not only the first graduate of Groton in time, but all his life he was the pride and beau ideal of the School—a position that he occupied with humorous fortitude, but was quite helpless to ameliorate. He went back to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Groton in 1934, and sitting beside the Rector was a somewhat younger graduate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The President of the United States insisted on rising and yielding the place of honor to the senior graduate.

In 1912, he spent part of the winter teaching at Groton, and persuaded the Rector to vote for T.R. on the Bull Moose ticket. This was a truly astonishing accomplishment. In 1914, he opposed the re-election in New Hampshire of Jacob H. Gallinger, Republican leader of the Senate. In the following year, Rublee was appointed by President Wilson to the Federal Trade Commission; but Senator Gallinger successfully fought confirmation on the ground that Rublee was “personally obnoxious.” Thus the Senator acquired a similar immortality to that of the man who burnt the Temple of Diana at Ephesus.

President Wilson continued to appoint Rublee to various important boards during the First World War, and he served on them most acceptably. After the War, he likewise held high government posts under Presidents Coolidge and Hoover; and in the administration of President Roosevelt he was director of Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, negotiating with Nazi Germany for permission for the German Jews to emigrate, a project that was interrupted by the Second World War.

George was a very tall, lean man with a long, sad face, and lank, thin hair that he parted in the middle. The secret of his influence on those he came in contact with is not explicable. He seemed to have a maturity, a confident certainty, that gained acceptance of his ideas even among men quite as capable as he was himself. He had very distinguished abilities, but he had his way more by the impress of his personality than by the force of his reasoning.

He was entirely without rancor, though seldom converted to any point of view with which he had first disagreed. He had a really noble spirit—like John Hampden, not like the rest of us—and it is unthinkable that in his whole life he ever did anything mean, sordid, vulgar, or not generous.

George W. Martin
1958 Century Association Yearbook