James Hazen Hyde

“Caleb” Hyde, as his intimates used to call him, saw little of his American friends during his middle years, unless they happened to be in Paris. Yet during his self-imposed exile, he won his most important distinctions. The Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor was awarded him for his long devotion to Franco-American cultural relations. He was chairman of The Federation of French Alliances in the United States, he founded The Alliance Française in America, and had the rare honor of election as associate member of The French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.

“Caleb’s” early life before he left for France under a stigma which he always considered unjust was colorful in deed. He was born in Manhattan in 1876, the son of Henry Baldwin Hyde, founder of The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. At the age of twenty-two he was graduated from Harvard College with honors in French and German.

On his father’s death a year later, the young man inherited a large fortune. He then began a life of what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous leisure.” Its evidences were not mere luxury—although the luxury may have been the most conspicuous part of it—but it involved, too, finesse of judgment in the acquisition of beautiful things in which he delighted. But he took pleasure as well in the refinements of cuisine and service; his dinners and other entertainments became the talk of the town. As usual the reports of these affairs emphasized their lavishness in terms of their apparent cost rather than of Hyde’s personal charm in entertaining his guests. What is forgotten about “Caleb” is that he was one of the great raconteurs of his time and that his wit spiced his dinners far more subtly than even the celebrated seasoning of the dishes.

The parties culminated in 1905 with one which not only hurt his reputation but cast suspicion upon the operations of the insurance companies in general. It would be superfluous to tell in detail here of the fancy-dress ball in which Sherry’s was rather naively transformed into a facsimile of the French court of Louis XVI at Versailles. The American public was less impressed by the irony of the historical setting with its near coincidence with revolution than with the report that it had cost $200,000. A later, more accurate, estimate of $75,000 failed to appease the public ire, and the appointment of the Armstrong Committee to investigate the doings of all insurance companies, plus the resulting drastic legislation, seem to have been the direct result of the Sherry extravagance. It was at this point that young Hyde—still under thirty—went to live in France and sublimate his bitterness in good works there.

That his immoderate and often dictatorial ways were balanced by a wide erudition and charm of manner is re membered by those who knew him best. Many anecdotes, some of which are, of course, apocryphal, are told of him. Once, at a dinner, on being introduced to a lady he had never seen before, he immediately asked if she knew the definition of adultery. On her blushing “No” he said, “Why, the wrong man in the right place, of course.” At a Paris dinner he soon discovered that the lady on his left was afflicted with what Madison Avenue has diagnosed as halitosis. Through dinner, he avoided her remarks but when the cheese was passed he turned to her suddenly, “Vous dites, Madame?” he is said to have said.

He returned in later years to New York. He did not come often to the Century, but when he was there he was subdued. He is remembered as seeming solemn and literal—quite the reverse of his usual appearance. Perhaps he came too seldom to become familiar with the Round Table, where his humor might have found ready response. Hyde lived to be eighty-three; he had been a Centurion for fifty-seven years.

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1960 Century Association Yearbook