Eliot Tuckerman

Eliot could trace his American ancestry to 1630 and he was proud of the Yankee family through which he was descended. His views were so conservative that even some of his rightist Republican friends stopped short of his position. He was nostalgic for the old ways which he believed had been defeated by the loose thinking and ethics of the modern world. He never hesitated to express his beliefs no matter what company he was in, and his companions sometimes thought him too emphatic.

But many of our best citizens, including, of course, Centurions, heartily agreed with him in his indignation about national Prohibition. He was firmly convinced that the 18th Amendment was proposed in defiance of constitutional rule. Actually, the amendment was submitted to the states by the vote of two-thirds of the members of each house who were in attendance at the time. But Tuckerman maintained that the vote should be by two-thirds of the whole number of Senators and Representatives and he cited a letter by Gouverneur Morris, one of the Constitution’s signers, as evidence of the correctness of his view. In 1927 he filed a brief to this effect in the Supreme Court.

Born in New York in 1872, he graduated from Harvard College in 1894 and took his law degree at the Harvard Law School in 1898. After serving as private secretary to Joseph H. Choate, he entered the offices of Evarts, Choate and Beaman. When his apprenticeship there was completed, he practiced on his own, specializing in estate law. He was considered an expert on constitutional law.

In 1914, soon after the outbreak in Europe of the First World War, he went to England on a warship as custodian of a gold shipment from J. P. Morgan and Company to the British government.

In 1918 he was elected to the New York State Assembly from the tenth district. As a Republican he took an active interest in politics and public affairs. He wrote frequent letters to the newspapers; his correspondence included many diatribes against President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

At his death Tuckerman was eighty-seven. He had been a Centurion since 1911.

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1960 Century Association Yearbook