Francis L. Hine

Francis Lyman Hine was for thirteen years executive head of a remarkable New York banking institution that had a remarkable beginning. The origin of the First National Bank, of which Hine was president from 1909 to 1922, was indicated by its title; it was the first applicant in New York City for the national charter offered by the government in 1863 to replace the old state banking system and to finance the war. It then broke loose from strong New York doubt and prejudice against such federal charters, and the time came when it had to break with Wall Street banking timidity again. In 1878, when John Sherman came to New York to place the $50,000,000 specie resumption loan, the great banks had their misgivings. They told the Secretary at the Fifth Avenue Hotel that, if he would “intimate his willingness to receive a proposition” for 4½ per cent. bonds at par, they would go so far as to recommend their associates to unite in making it. Mr. Sherman asked if that was their ultimatum; they said it was; he remarked, reflectively, that he would have to think it over.

One of the surviving bank presidents participating in that conference used to say in after years, with a somewhat rueful grin, that “the old fox had an option in his pocket all the time from a London syndicate at 101½, and never told us.” When the contract on those favorable terms with the most powerful London private banking houses was read in the newspapers next day by the Secretary’s surprised and disconcerted Wall Street acquaintances, they found in the list of underwriters the name of only one native institution. The First National had not been able to share the doubts of its compatriots. It continued to hold that attitude throughout the period of test for the success of gold resumption, whose attendant difficulties we have learned to understand better since Europe of 1927 has occupied the shoes that we wore in 1879. The opposition press of our own resumption days used to talk about “Fort Sherman,” but the implied accusation had a not wholly uncomplimentary significance.

Hine did not join the bank until long after its achievements in resumption-day finance, but he did his part in conducting its affairs through the trying days of 1896, and again in the period of extraordinary depths and heights of financial fortune that came to the New York money market with the European war.

One of the reminders suggested by Bolshevik Russia’s recent celebration of its completed decade of political existence was the extent to which the men who saw the beginnings of the episode have passed from the scene. A few years more, and first-hand memories of 1917 and 1918 at Petrograd and Moscow will have become as legendary as the fugitive published reminiscences of 1791, the guillotine and the French Terror. The historical apologist is already busy, as he was when the French dictators tried to become respectable. Communist doctrines having become unworkable, the central committee threw them over; in due course, the unreconstructed Communists were treated to the pre-war luxury of exile to Siberia; therefore Moscow had become an enlightened modern government. Yet the benighted outside world persisted in its belief that the dominant personnel was still made up of cynics, fanatics, or scoundrels.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook