George Howland

It is not altogether unusual for the Century membership as a whole to be ignorant of remarkable achievement or distinction achieved by one of its associates, and this was true regarding George Howland. By instinct, Howland was a painter. Circumstances placed him on the working staff of a railway company. But he too had set his mind on studying art, and eventually he made his home in France. His paintings received honorable mention at the Salon in 1914 and a medal later on; but the war changed the purpose of his life. He turned over his house at Montreuil to the British expeditionary force; then went to work personally in behalf of the wounded French soldiers, devoting to that kindly task not only the personal activities of himself and his wife, but his own money and all that he could gather from his friends in America.

So important was the help which he thus gave to his adopted fellow-citizens in their hour of need that the city of Montreuil conferred upon Howland one of the rarest honors in the gift of France. What it meant when he was named as “citoyen” may be judged not only from the fact that, by French tradition, the citoyen outranks every one except the President or his representative, but by the further fact that the distinction has been bestowed on only two other men in the European war—on Pétain by the City of Verdun and on Foch by the City of Morlaix.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook