George William
Curtis was associated with Harper’s Weekly for 35 years,
authoring “The Lounger” column from October 1857 to December
1863 and the editorials from December 1863 to July 1892. An
ardent Unionist and loyal supporter of President Abraham
Lincoln, Curtis was an abolitionist who supported not only
emancipation but full racial equality as well.
Curtis was born into a prosperous family in
Providence, Rhode Island. As a teenager, he moved to New York
City when his father took a position there with Continental
Bank. Educated by private tutors and in a boarding school,
Curtis and his older brother, Burrill, spent 18 months at the
Brook Farm commune in order to take advantage of its academic
opportunities. They then traveled to Concord, Massachusetts,
where they lived among some of America’s leading literary
figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Henry David Thoreau. From 1846 to 1850, the Curtis brothers
undertook a “grand tour” of Europe and the Middle East.
Upon his return to the United States,
George William Curtis began a career that combined journalism
and literature. During the 1850s, he worked as a critic and
travel writer for the New York Tribune, an editor for the
short-lived but highly esteemed Putnam’s Magazine, and a
columnist for Harper’s Monthly (“The Easy Chair,”
1854-1892) and Harper’s Weekly (“The Lounger,”
1857-1863). In December 1863, he assumed the editorship of
Harper’s Weekly, writing weekly commentary while oversight
of the newspaper was left to a series of managing editors.
During the 1850s and early 1860s, Curtis was a best-selling and
critically acclaimed author of travel books and novels. He was
also one of the most popular speakers on the
lyceum circuit from the 1850s until 1873.
In 1856, Curtis married Anna Shaw; they
lived on Staten Island, New York, and later had five children.
He had previously been aloof to politics and reform, but in the
mid-1850s began speaking out against slavery and for the new
Republican Party. In 1862, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress
in a heavily Democratic district in order to promote the Union
cause and the Lincoln administration. Over the years, he turned
down several offers of ambassadorships from Republican
presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B.
Hayes.
During the Civil War, Curtis supported
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as an immediate military
necessity and a long-term social obligation. In addition, he
encouraged the enlistment of black men into the Union armed
forces and, along with his brother-in-law, Colonel Robert Gould
Shaw, commander of the all-black 54th Massachusetts
Infantry, petitioned Congress for their equal pay with white
soldiers. Curtis endorsed Radical Reconstruction, including
federal civil rights legislation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. For 25 years, he
highlighted the discrimination and violence faced by black
Americans. He also advocated justice for American Indians and
Chinese Americans. A strong supporter of equal rights for
women, he helped found the American Woman’s Suffrage Association
in 1869, and served for 20 years as one of its vice presidents.
In 1870-1871, Curtis joined Harper’s
Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast to help topple from power New
York City’s corrupt political boss, William Tweed of Tammany
Hall. Although the views and personalities of Curtis and Nast
sometimes clashed, they stood together again to bolt the
Republican Party in 1884 when it nominated James Blaine for the
presidency. Thereafter, Curtis continued to press for a reform
agenda in his commentaries, while remaining independent of party
affiliation.
A longtime supporter of public education,
the New York state legislature elected Curtis in 1864 to
lifetime tenure on the Board of Regents of the University of the
State of New York, the supervisory agency for all of the public
institutions of higher learning in the state. Curtis was named
vice chancellor of the Board of Regents in 1888 and chancellor
in 1890. He advocated university extension programs and
correspondence courses in order to bring the opportunity of a
college education to those who were unable to attend a
residential college on a regular basis. He also promoted
education for women, blacks, and American Indians.
Curtis was an early proponent of
environmental conservation. In the 1850s, he celebrated the
glories of nature in his travel books, compiled and edited
essays by one of America’s pioneering landscape architects,
Andrew Jackson Downing, and backed the creation of Central Park
in New York City. In the 1870s and 1880s, he promoted the
establishment of land reserves at Niagara Falls and in the
Adirondack Mountains of New York.
The reform for which Curtis is best
remembered is civil service reform, which replaced the patronage
system of government service with a professional, nonpartisan
bureaucracy. He served as president of both the National and
the New York Civil Service Reform Associations, and in 1871 was
appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to chair the first
federal Civil Service Commission. Congress established civil
service rules for the federal bureaucracy with the passage of
the Pendleton Act in 1883.
George William Curtis died on August 31,
1892, at his home on Staten Island.
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