Arthur Curtiss James

The largest railroad stockholder in the world, controlling nearly a seventh of the nation’s mileage and probably one of the dozen richest men in the United States, had a distaste for publicity and, rarer still, the ability to avoid it. Photographs of rugged, bearded Arthur Curtiss James (Jake to his intimates) seldom appeared in print. His lavish gifts to the Presbyterian Church, to the support of music, art, literature and education and to many charities public and private, were usually made on condition that publication would mean cancellation. A widower, with no children, he left the greater part of his fortune to the institutions he had supported during his lifetime.

After earning his bachelor and master of arts degrees at Amherst, he secured a master’s certificate enabling him to captain the yachts aboard which he cruised more than 250,000 miles before 1921. In that year he took his bark-rigged auxiliary 219-foot yacht, the second Aloha, around the world. The delightful log of that voyage, written by Centurion Carl [Karl] Vogel, may be studied in the Century library. It describes how the bark, which needed 131 feet head-room, seemed, as she dropped down the East River, to be in danger of fouling the Brooklyn Bridge; it tells of Panama, Pearl Harbor, Batavia, the Philippines, Singapore, Suez, the Mediterranean. Commodore James—he had been commodore of the Seawanhaka-Corinthian and New York Yacht Clubs—told another Centurion he was sure that if the sweet-lined Aloha had not been encumbered with a propeller, she could have outfooted any clipper that ever sailed. The beautiful vessel—the last of her tribe—spread 20,000 square feet of canvas. In 1913, with her owner in command and her engines cold, she made Gibraltar from Sandy Hook in sixteen days twenty-two hours.

James was an early and vigorous opponent of Prohibition and, although a Republican, supported Alfred E. Smith for the Presidency. The son of Centurion D. Willis James, he was proposed for the Century by his father’s partner, William E. Dodge, who joined the Club in the year of its incorporation.

Geoffrey Parsons
1941 Century Memorials