William Edmond Curtis

William Edmond Curtis was right-hand man to Secretary [John G.] Carlisle in the unhappy days of 1894, when the national finances were deadlocked between a Congress which would not move to protect the depleted Treasury, a banking community which hesitated to take a public loan not distinctly payable in gold (Germany has lately shown what possibilities might arise in the absence of such stipulation), and a Secretary of the Treasury concerning whom it could be said not only that his personal ideas on the currency were confused, but that he would not deal personally with the bankers. On Curtis fell the task of negotiating at New York for the absolutely necessary loan. In face of the largest public deficit in a generation, with labor in revolt and desperately hard times in trade, with Wall Street joining the Senate in denouncing the Cleveland Administration and with imminent peril of free silver coinage overhanging, no one dared rest the fate of the loan on popular subscription. If the two $50,000,000 loans of 1894 should have failed in such forbidding circumstances, the Stock Exchange would have said, We told you so. That the loan should at last have been placed for gold with a New York banking syndicate, at a price 17 per cent above par and with a 5 per cent interest rate, testified equally to the banking community’s faith in the country’s longer future and to the hard work done by Curtis. It was he who was sent by the Government to England one year later, to put the finishing touches on the contract whereby an international syndicate was engaged to provide the gold required for placing the United States Treasury on its feet. The sequel to the Government’s resolute stand of 1894 was the famous revival of American finance and industry in 1899.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1924 Century Association Yearbook