Horace Porter

Henry Kirke Porter was one of the men whose lifework, in the days when the “steel amalgamations” of 1899 and 1901 were directing the speculative promoters to this city as the place to scatter their money, helped to persuade New Yorkers that there was another and a very different side to Pittsburg[h], even in the steel trade. Mr. Porter, a successful locomotive builder in that city since the early seventies, was not only a long-time officer of the Pittsburg[h] Chamber of Commerce and of the Carnegie Institute, but he was an active worker in the civic interests of his city, in the Young Men’s Christian Association, the American Baptist Union, the Crozer Theological Seminary, the Pennsylvania Institute for the Blind, besides being an interested member of geographical and archaeological societies. He had shouldered musket in the Civil War and had served a term in Congress.{{/5545}}



{{4282}}James Bettner Ludlow’s life was largely devoted to the development of Yonkers, where he had an important part in establishing the water-front enterprises which have made of that locality in its way a notable commercial center. He was said to believe that the eventual destiny of Yonkers was that of a transatlantic steamship terminal—not an inconceivable result when the crowding of the metropolitan water-front of Manhattan Island, on both sides of both rivers had long ago caused serious talk of using even the Long Island harbors for the landing of the great ocean liners.{{/4282}}



{{7470;3133}}Two of the first citizens of what we now call the Borough of Brooklyn—both of them citizens who gave to that community the distinctive character which it has borne since as well as before the incorporation into Greater New York—are on the Century’s death-roll of 1921. Each of them a merchant, each a native Brooklyner, each a philanthropist of broad view and practical common sense, and each devoted whole-heartedly to the city of his birth, Alfred Tredway White and Aaron Augustus Healy were the kind of men who shape the civic history of their community and are remembered long after their life work is ended as among its finest traditions. Mr. White’s work for the better housing of the poor may be said to have broken ground for one of the nation’s great reforms, but he was not a man of one idea. He was an organizer of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities and of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; one of the most active directors of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the main promoter of the Wallabout market; perhaps the most efficient leader in the movement to reclaim the waste land for the Ocean Parkway, and a notably useful Commissioner of Public Works under Mayor Schieren. A modest man, doing his good work by preference in such way that public notoriety would not accompany it, he was nevertheless drawn into public eminence by the importance of his achievements for the city and by the city’s recourse to him whenever a fresh problem of the kind confronted it.

Mr. Healy’s life, primarily devoted like Mr. White’s to the interests of his city, extended particularly into the field of politics as the means of good government and of art as a means of popular education. Quiet in manner, sympathetic, always the gentleman in bearing, his personal tastes were distinctly along artistic lines. His father had been a collector of paintings; the son greatly enlarged the collection. He was not only familiar with modern art but an excellent judge of Italian primitives; being in fact one of the few real connoisseurs in America. But he did not collect for himself alone; he was constantly buying pictures and presenting them to the Brooklyn museum. During twenty-five years he was president of the Brooklyn Institute and long a director of the Academy of Music—that institution of which the old-time directorship had distinction as well as duties. Public office he never held but once, as Collector of Internal Revenue in the four years after 1893, but his active work for honest city administration as an Independent Democrat was never relaxed. One of the problems of Greater New York in coming years will be the extent to which, after the recent surrender to a political cabal as stupid and incompetent as it is unscrupulous, the hard work of reform can command the services of men like these.{{/7470;3133}}



{{124}}What Alfred White and Augustus Healy [subjects of the previous memorials] were to Brooklyn, Charles Wilberforce Ames was to St. Paul, Minnesota. Successively occupied in engineering, newspaper editing and finally in law-book publishing, his real life work was identified with the city in which he lived. The plan of the St. Paul Institute, originated in the days of the West’s new prosperity early in this century, “with potential departments for every conceivable activity that a growing civic culture might seem to require,” was ambitious enough to create skepticism over the possibility that it would ever be realized. A score of other towns and cities indulged, during that period of unbounded American hopefulness, in similar dreams which are now only pleasing memories. But to the task of enlisting the people of St. Paul in making his dream reality Mr. Ames, in the words of his surviving colleagues in the undertaking, “devoted an enthusiasm that never faltered, a persistent and resourceful effort that taxed even his seemingly exhaustless energy and more money than he ever confessed.” He was “inspired by the vision of a city concentrating its scattered activities into a united effort for advancement along lines essential to right living and good citizenship.” The result, one of the now famous institutions of the West, a center of art, music, literature, and practical instruction, was largely the monument of one man’s life. Yet all this time Mr. Ames, as described by his intimate associates, “displayed the capacity for being interested in a dozen civic enterprises at the same time; of keeping each in a separate mental compartment; of taking one from its pigeon hole, discussing it, replacing it and immediately taking up another.” To his great charity for those who differed with him his friends ascribed his unusual ability to convert the most strenuous opponent.{{/124}}



{{2435}}One of the pleasures of the Century has been the association which it opened with men who were able to contribute from their own observation of life and travel to the information of their fellow members. Among those peculiarly gifted in this respect was William J. Forbes. Making no pretense to profound scholarship, he seemed to have some accurate knowledge about everything, whether it was a geological formation in Australia, where he had travelled extensively; the habits of mountain sheep, which he had hunted in Mexico; the technique of a manufacturing process which he had studied, or the characteristics of an etcher or painter. As student in Yale, from which he was graduated in 1877, he began a collection of etchings which were through life his favorite form of art, but he was also a keen sportsman, a genuine lover of nature and an expert gardener, with scientific knowledge of the flora of both hemispheres.

Engaged for many years in the shipping business with Australia, Africa and New Zealand, all of which he visited, and an eager explorer of remote places, his opportunities for acquiring information were un[u]sually wide, and a remarkable retentive memory enabled him to depict places and scenes with realistic accuracy when a casual reference or an inquiry drew upon his store of experiences. But his greatest interest was in his friends, and it was his quality of genuine sympathy with the interests of other people by which he will be best remembered.{{/2435}}



{{3837}}An active and public-spirited citizen of Worcester, Mass., Lincoln Newton Kinnicutt had during more than twenty years conducted a banking business in that city. His avocations reached far beyond his professional occupation. In the benevolent organizations of the city his work and responsibilities were extensive, but he was also deeply interested in nature, literature, and history, especially of colonial New England, a subject with which he dealt in published monographs. Like many men of his particular qualities, he was an expert angler, and a genial companion in house or field.{{/3837}}



{{1999}}W. A. Douglas was not often seen in the Century, but when he visited the Club on his trips from his home in Buffalo, he was usually met in company with his old friend, Smedley.{{/1999}}



{{5908}}Of Edward L. Rogers, who was a member of the Stock Exchange during all his business life, it is interesting to recall that his special hobby was Roman and Italian history and that his mind had a special bent towards the Italian Renaissance, on which he had read and collected many books. Whenever he could get the chance for a long vacation he went to Italy. He kept his capacity for enthusiasms to the end; his heart, as his Wall Street associates used to say, was always liable to reach conclusions faster than his head, and that was one reason why they liked him as they did.{{/5908}}



{{7466}}Thomas Delano Whistler of Baltimore was a near relative of the famous artist whose name he bore. He was himself a man of miscellaneous attainments; perhaps his achievement as an expert angler was nearest to his own heart.{{/7466}}



{{2205}}Dr. Bache McEvers Emmet prided himself in belonging to the family of the celebrated Irish insurgent of an older generation, Robert Emmet, but his family was remarkable in another way for its proof of the persistence of inheritance. Not only was the father of the Irish leader of 1803 a physician, but it is said that since his time there have always been at least two physicians in each generation of the Emmets, of whom several have reached high distinction. Dr. Emmet began his important work as assistant surgeon, in the Woman’s Hospital, to his well-known uncle [sic: first cousin], Thomas Addis Emmet, whose work he later carried on in that institution with conspicuous success as attending surgeon. Personally, he was of modest and unassuming character, commanding both respect and affection from his patients, rich and poor, and always absorbed wholeheartedly in his profession.{{/2205}}



{{6809}}George Knowles Swinburne, related by blood or marriage to three or four Centurions and brother to our admiral of that ilk, was well known to the medical profession of New York and as well known to the Century. Absorbed in his profession, he yet found time for constant reading, wholesome exercise, and amusement. Others spoke of his benevolence and self-sacrifice in his profession, with which a wide circle of patients and beneficiaries were familiar; from Dr. Swinburne himself one would learn chiefly of the pleasure of life.{{/6809}}



{{7441}}George Peabody Wetmore was on that list of distinguished non-resident members of the Century which ought to be, and undoubtedly will be, greatly increased in the course of future years. His occasional visits to the Club gave to those who knew him a glance at a world outside their own. Senator Wetmore, as he was always called, was chosen a presidential elector from Rhode Island hardly ten years after he had begun to practice law. In 1885, when sixteen years out of the law school, he was elected Governor of Rhode Island. Defeated for re-election and defeated again in his candidacy for the United States Senate, he was elected to the senatorial office on his second trial and served in that capacity at Washington for eighteen years.{{/7441}}



{{6078}}Colonel William Cary Sanger was one of our notable military men in civil life, under whose personal administration occurred the great change from conduct of a war by state militia organizations and volunteer service to the trained conscript army of 1917. A militia officer himself, quartermaster of the Third Brigade of the New York National Guard as long ago as 1886, he was an active force in the mobilizing of our troops for the Spanish War; but he also lived to play his part as Director of Military Relief in the Red Cross at Washington when that momentous chapter of American military history suddenly opened—does it not seem far more distant?—five years ago next spring. Colonel Sanger’s high capacity for military organization was recognized not only by his chairmanship of the commission to reorganize the machinery of the National Guard in 1907, but by his appointment as Assistant Secretary of War under President McKinley and Secretary Root after the ending of the Spanish War.{{/6078}}



{{5545}}The death, nearly three years after the ending of the Great European War, of the officer who carried to Sherman at Atlanta the orders of the commanding general for the March through Georgia, the Ambassador whose address and diplomatic skill successfully smoothed out in France the friction of irritated popular sympathies while the United States was at war with Spain, the veteran who, in 1915, warned his fellow-alumni at West Point of America’s further military duties, was one of those events which lifts the curtain to a long and extraordinarily varied panorama of American history. But Horace Porter’s personality was in its way more interesting even than his achievements. It is not given to many citizens, even in versatile America, to cut a picturesque figure successively as soldier, diplomat, orator, railway president, and commercial organizer and author.

General Porter’s eighty-four years of life covered all this, and they covered more. One may recall him as the forceful defender at the second Hague Conference of the rights of smaller nations, as the bringer-home of Paul Jones’s body from a foreign grave to the country which he served, as the flashing wit of after-dinner oratory whose retorts routed even the Clover Club, as the citizen who placed the Memorial to General Grant on the Riverside through his own energetic solicitation of private funds when public bodies seemed indifferent, or even as the ingenious mechanic who invented that badge of the New York transportation industry, the Elevated Railway “ticket-chopper.” All of his achievements bore the impress of a strong will, a brilliant mind, and a purely American personality.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1922 Century Association Yearbook