USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume II > Part 13
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A HISTORY OF BANKING IN BOSTON
Fayne, of New York, 1917; James S. Dunstan, of New York, 1917; Herb- ert C. Sierck, of New York, 1917; Paul B. Skinner, of Chicago, 1917; Percy W. Brown, of Cleveland, 1924, and Alfred R. Meyer, of New York, 1925.
Memberships are held in the New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit and Cleveland Stock exchanges, and an extensive private wire system covers most of the large and important cities of the country. In addition to the home office in Boston, offices are maintained in' New York, Chi- cago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Providence, and Portland, Maine. The firm is a member of the Investment Bankers Association, of which a New York partner of the house, John W. Prentiss, was president in 1925. It is also a member of the American Bankers Association.
Brown Brothers & Company-The Boston firm of Brown Brothers & Company is a branch of the successor to the oldest private banking house in the United States, which was founded in Baltimore by Alexander Brown in 1800. In 1805 the partnership of Alexander Brown & Son was formed, which was changed five years later to Alexander Brown & Sons. The senior member of the firm was the father of four sons, who sep- arately or in partnership founded the houses of Brown Brothers & Com- pany in Philadelphia in 1818 and in New York in 1825, and the English house of Brown, Shipley & Company in Liverpool in 1810, transferred to London in 1863, co-partners with the American house. This partnership was dissolved in 1917 when Brown Brothers & Company continued in the United States, while Brown, Shipley & Company continued as a sep- arate firm in London, acting in close cooperation and correspondence with the American house, however.
The Boston office of Brown Brothers & Company and Brown, Ship- ley & Company, was opened in 1844 by Thomas B. Curtis as agent and attorney. Thus the Boston office of this firm is one of the oldest in the city. Mr. Curtis was succeeded in 1863 by his son, Daniel Sargent Curtis. Mr. Curtis, Sr., who in his youth had been a midshipman on a United States Frigate in the War of 1812, died in Paris, where he had resided for a number of years, in 1871.
Daniel Sargent Curtis relinquished the Boston agency in 1878, and was succeeded by George E. Bullard and Louis Curtis, who had entered the office in 1870 and was the youngest son of Mr. Curtis, Sr., who were individually authorized to sign for the firm by powers of attorney. The power to sign for the firm was given to George A. Nash and George Abbot in 1899, and to Henry P. Binney, step-son of Mr. Bullard, in 1907, all of whom are acting at the beginning of the year 1927. Daniel S. Cur- tis died in 1908 in Venice, where he had been living for several years. Mr. Bullard retired from the agency in 1908, after being connected with
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the firm for 52 years, and died in 1916 at the age of 77. In 1911 Louis Curtis was made a full partner in the New York, Philadelphia and Bos- ton houses and of Brown, Shipley & Company, London, resident in Boston.
The Right Hon. Montagu Collet Norman, D. S. O., was made a part- ner of Brown, Shipley & Company in 1900, and elected director of the Bank of England in 1907. He resigned from the firm in 1915 to devote himself to the affairs of the Bank of England of which he became Deputy Governor and Governor in usual course, which latter position he has filled up to the present time with unusual reëlections. His service of great dis- tinction has covered the period of the great war and the difficult condi- tion of financial affairs of the world which followed.
In 1912 S. Huntington Wolcott was authorized to sign for the Boston house of Brown Brothers & Company, under power of attorney. He resigned in 1918 to become vice-president of the State Street Trust Com- pany. In 1922, Louis Curtis, Jr., after some service in New York, Phila- delphia, London and Paris with the firm's houses or correspondents in these cities, joined his father as partner in the New York, Philadelphia and Boston houses of the firm.
Ellery Sedgwick James joined the Boston house with power of attor- ney and was made a partner in 1925. He has since moved to the New York office, where he now is. Under his guidance the Boston house largely extended its office, personnel and connections by private wires covering New England for wider distribution of securities, now super- vised by his assistant and successor, Laurence G. Tighe, who was given the firm's power of attorney on July 1, 1926. The management of the Boston house, at the beginning of 1927, was under Louis Curtis and Louis Curtis, Jr., as resident partners, and the holders of the power of attorney already mentioned, George A. Nash, George Abbot, Henry P. Binney and Laurence G. Tighe.
Estabrook & Company-The firm now known as Estabrook & Com- pany, was organized on April 1, 1851, as Brewster, Sweet & Company, by John Brewster and Charles A. Sweet, who opened a "Stock Exchange and Banking Business" at 76 State Street, Boston. It is as Estabrook & Company, however, that the firm has achieved national prominence in the investment banking field.
The firm name was first changed in 1874, when Brewster, Sweet & Company became Brewster, Basset & Company. In ISS3 the name was again changed to Brewster, Cobb & Estabrook. The present name was adopted in 1896. The changes in name were paralleled by a number of changes of location. The first office was at 76 State Street. Two years later. in 1853, the firm moved to 40 State Street. In 1875 there was a
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shift to 35 Congress Street. In 1904 the firm returned to State Street, occupying the lower floors of the building at 15 State Street, which it now owns.
The business career of John Brewster, the founder of the firm, began at a comparatively early age. Mr. Brewster was born at Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in 1813. Reaching Boston at the age of twenty-three, he started the drygoods firm of Williams & Brewster, on Hanover Street. He was a successful merchant and accumulated what was at the time, a substantial fortune. He sold out in 1850 and decided to become a banker.
His first venture in the financial field was with Charles A. Sweet, who prior to 1851, had been in the office of the banking house of Gilbert & Sons. The capital was largely supplied by Mr. Brewster, with Mr. Sweet contributing the experience. It was Mr. Sweet who became, on March 28, 1851, a member of the Boston Stock Exchange. He did not remain with the firm, however, withdrawing eventually to establish a business of his own. Mr. Brewster continued with the firm he had founded, how- ever, until the day of his death, January 13, 1886.
The career of Arthur F. Estabrook, whose name must always be linked with Mr. Brewster's, was not without its romantic aspects. He was born in Boston, 1847, and entered the employ of Brewster, Sweet & Company in 1857, when he was only ten years old. His rise from office boy to a member of the firm, a dignity which he attained at the age of twenty-seven, was in accordance with the best traditions of English fic- tion. Becoming a partner in 1874, Mr. Estabrook continued in the firm which now bears his name, until his death in 1919. At the time of his death he had been in business for sixty-two years, during approx- imately forty-five of which he had been a member of the firm.
The roll of those who have been members of the firm comprises, in addition, the names of George W. T. Riley, William Basset, Henry E. Cobb, Charles E. Eddy, Arthur L. Sweetser, C. Herbert Watson, Frank B. Bemis, Stedman Buttrick, J. Bradley Cummings, E. Hunt Allen and F. Foster Sherburne. All of these men contributed to the upbuilding of Estabrook & Company, but special mention should be given to Mr. Bemis and Mr. Buttrick. Mr. Bemis entered the office in 1878, became a partner in 1889, and retired in 1924. Mr. Buttrick was first employed in 1886, was received into the firm in 1901, and died in 1925. In length of service the careers of these two men have only been exceeded by that of Mr. Estabrook.
The present partners are Arthur Sinclair, S. Howard Martin, Richard Pigeon, Philip L. Spalding, Orrin G. Wood, Hermann F. Clarke and Roger H. Williams. Of these men, four-Martin, Pigeon, Sinclair and Clarke-have been for many years connected with the firm, beginning as employees. Mr. Spalding, before his admission, had been president
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of the New England Telephone & Telegraph Company. Mr. Williams came to the firm from the National Bank of Commerce in New York, where he had been a vice-president. Mr. Wood was formerly vice-presi- dent of the Merchants National Bank of Boston.
E. H. Rollins & Sons-The Boston firm of E. H. Rollins & Sons, the main office of which is at 200 Devonshire Street, had its inception at Denver, Colorado, in 1876, in the personal trading of Edward W. Rollins in the county warrants and bonds with which he had become familiar while serving as treasurer of the Union Pacific Railway, and its begin- ning in the eastern part of the country in 1881, in Concord, New Hamp- shire.
Mr. Rollins is a native of Concord, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the class of 1871. He decided to go to the West, where the railroads then under construction were beckoning for engineers. At first an engineer, he became cashier and treasurer of the Colorado Central Railroad. He discovered he could purchase county warrants for the railroad at a discount, and then could use them at par in paying the railroad's taxes. The discovery gave him an idea that he could build a very substantial business. With $5,000 he had saved in his first five years out of the institute, he struck out for himself in 1876. In 1880 he formed a partnership with Frank C. Young, who had been cashier in a bank at Central City, Colorado.
The new firm of Rollins & Young found a wonderful opportunity awaiting it. County warrants could be bought as low as fifty cents on the dollar, and they usually paid ten percent. Eight percent interest was the rule on bonds of the county and school districts that enjoyed the best credit. By purchasing these securities and then reselling them in the eastern part of the country where lower rates of interest prevailed, a large profit could be obtained.
Looking for an eastern connection, Mr. Rollins found that his brother, Frank W. Rollins, who was practicing law in Concord, New Hampshire, was willing to leave the law to engage in the investment banking busi- ness. With his father, Edward H. Rollins, then United States Senator from New Hampshire, Frank W. Rollins formed the firm of E. H. Rol- lins & Son, to represent the Denver firm of Rollins & Young. In 1887 the two organizations were consolidated under the name of E. H. Rol- lins & Sons.
Senator Rollins died in 1889, and from that time until the death of Frank W. Rollins in 1916, the two sons of the senator were the factors which brought about the expansion of the firm into a nation-wide finan- cial house, The Boston office was not opened until 1890, and even then the headquarters were continued in Concord. Frank W. Rollins became
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Governor of New Hampshire, and the Boston office was left with one stenographer, Walter H. Seavey as office boy, and R. B. Young as the firm's only travelling salesman, covering a territory from Maine to the Mississippi, with occasional visits into Canada. The office was closed for a time, but in October, 1892, it was reopened permanently and made the head office of the firm.
A New York office was opened in 1893, only to be closed two or three years later, and then reopened permanently in 1911. A San Francisco office, also opened in 1893, was closed after three years and then reopened permanently in 1898. Edward W. Rollins was president of the firm until 1912, when his brother succeeded him, and he became chairman of the board of directors. When the brother died, he resumed the presidency, retaining it until 1923, when he was succeeded by Walter H. Seavey, the firm's first office boy, who had started in 1890 at $2.00 a week. Mr. Seavey died in 1926 and was succeeded by George W. Treat, who had started with the firm as a salesman in 1901 and had gradually worked his way to the top. The firm has thirty-four offices, employs 550 persons and has 135 salesmen as compared with the one salesman in 1890.
CHAPTER X. THE PRESS. By F. Lauriston Bullard Chief Editorial Writer of the Boston "Herald."
The "Mayflower" brought one practical printer to the shores of the New World. William Brewster, his modest fortune depleted by perse- cution in England, had established in Holland, at the old university town of Leyden, a press, from which he issued Puritan books containing opin- ions and criticisms that would not have been tolerated across the Chan- nel. The signers of the famous Compact included in their number there- fore a representative of the printing craft and an exponent of the liberty of the press. Brewster gave his little library to Harvard College, and among these books were eight which he himself had published in Holland.
But New England had to wait almost a score of years after the land- ing at Plymouth, and eight years after Winthrop's settlement at Boston, for the arrival of a printing press and the establishment of a printing business. The "John" of London crossed the ocean in 1638, with the essentials for printing stowed away somewhere on board, and among her passengers were the owner of the press, a printer, and three press men. The owner, Joseph Glover, a dissenting minister, had resigned his charge for the purpose of founding a printing establishment overseas. He paid for the font of type. Friends furnished the funds for the rest of the out- fit. In June in London he arranged with Stephen Daye to take charge of the press, reserving to himself as owner the right of supervision. He may or he may not have known that an enterprising printer of Seville, Jacobo Cromberger, had sent a press and a supply of type to Vera Cruz more than a century before, that the first printing plant this side the ocean had been set up in the city of Mexico in 1535, from which, almost precisely a hundred years before, Juan Pablos had issued the "Breve y mas compendioso Doctrina Christiana en lengue Mexicana y Castellana."
On the voyage to Massachusetts Glover "fell sick of a feaver and dyed," but his widow arranged to fulfill his purpose. She set up the press in the house of Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard Col- lege, and there with Daye, rather an unskilled craftsman, she began the publishing business. First appears the Freeman's Oath, on a half-sheet of small paper ; no copy survives. Next an Almanack, prepared by Cap- tain William Peirce, a noted mariner, and of this no copy is known. Third, a crude quarto of 128 pages, the celebrated Bay Psalm Book, sold at the press, and in the shop of Hezekiah Usher, the first bookseller of
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New England, then located in Cambridge. Of the original edition of 1,700 copies, put out in 1640, only four perfect copies are known now to exist.
The following year President Dunster acquired a share in the busi- ness by his marriage with the widow Glover, and upon her death in 1643 he came into full possession. Daye returned to his original trade of lock- smithing. His son, Mathew Day, as he spelled the name, followed the father as printer, and Samuel Green, the first of a race of printers, in turn assumed the task in 1648. To aid in the production of Eliot's Indian Bible, the magnum opus of the Cambridge Press, Marmaduke Johnson, a typographer of skill, came from England in 1660, and in 1665 he brought from England a complete equipment for a printing establishment of his own. Further competition appeared with the establishment of Foster's Press, but Samuel Green survived both his rivals and operated his shop until 1692.
To John Foster, however, belongs the distinction of having been the first engraver in the United States, and, unless he was preceded by John- son, he was also the pioneer printer in Boston proper, where he set up, in 1675. Born in 1648 in that part of Dorchester now called South Boston, he was a member of the Harvard class of 1667, and he died at the early age of thirty-two from the disease then known as consumption. Among his engravings are the well-known wood cut of Richard Mather, and the two editions of Hubbard's Map of New England, called respectively "The Wine Hills" Map and "The White Hills" Map. About a half-hundred book or pamphlet titles may be assigned to him also, nearly all of them religious, and almost a third of them works by Increase Mather.
Early Censorship-Several incidents illustrate the deliberate policy of Massachusetts to prevent the spread of ideas inconsistent with the official theology and to enforce a strict censorship over the printing press. Having paid a large price for the privilege of life and worship according to their understanding of the Scriptures, the fathers and founders held it to be a duty of sound judgment and self defense to guard the purity of their doctrine and to preserve the character of their institutions. When Sir Harry Vane pleaded the cause of William Pynchon, the Governor and council said : "We held it our duty and believed we were called of God to proceed against him" for the circulation of a pamphlet adjudged by the General Court to be "erronyous and hereticale." The next to come under the ban was no less a personage than the Harvard president. To the consternation of the community Dunster is preaching against infant baptism. He refuses to recant. His separation from the college follows. He is willing to endure personal sacrifices but he will not refrain from expressing his opinions. If there is no record of formal cen-
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sorship for twenty-four years after the introduction of the printing press, there is not, either, any recognition of the right of freedom of discussion. Across the ocean John Milton has written that wonderful plea for un- licensed printing which Melville E. Stone never tires of extolling, and which Augustine Birrell pronounced the "Noblest pamphlet in the langu- age," and that immortal plea came from the pen of the Puritan poet only five years after the Glover press had been set up in Cambridge.
Formal action the General Court did take in October, 1662, by the passage of the first act for the censoring of the Massachusetts press :
For prevention of irregularities & abuse to the authority of this country by the printing presse, it is ordered that henceforth no copie shall be printed but by the allow- ance first had & obteined under the hands of Capt Daniel Gookin & Mr Jonathan Mitchel, vntil this Court shall take further order therein.
This act was revoked in 1663, only to be renewed in the licensing order of May, 1665, which gave Cambridge a monopoly of the printing press and denied any right to print except by authority. The sole modification of this rigorous regulation was made after some years in the interest first of Marmaduke Johnson and then of John Foster, permitting the estab- lishment of a press in Boston.
Edmond Andros adopted the identical policy respecting the press which the local authorities had pursued, but that policy was directed, of course, against those local leaders themselves. The censorship they had imposed is now imposed upon them. The Andros government lasted but a short time, and in 1689 the old charter again became the warrant of authority and the control of printing passed once more into the keeping of the General Court. But this period in turn was brief, and when the new charter came into operation in 1692 the Royal Governors once more assumed the oversight of the Colonial press, and for years the Andros instructions were repeated almost verbatim to each new Governor in succession.
The printers of Cambridge and of Boston in the half century between the founding of the Glover press and the end of the Colonial period are estimated to have published not less than 300 books and pamphlets by native writers-almanacs, acts and resolves of the General Court, and works of a religious or controversial nature. The seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries have well been called the "classic era of the English pamphlet." Moses Coit Tyler refers to the pamphlet as "the immediate ancestor of the newspaper," and goes on to say that "the maturity of journalism really meant the old age and death of pamphleteering." These are well considered words and just. For several centuries after the in- vention of printing the pamphlet was the great means for reaching the public and influencing public opinion. In America almost through the
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War for Independence the pamphlet held the imperial position now occu- pied by the newspaper, and when the newspapers began to grow in power they owed their increasing prestige not so much to any original work done by the printers who in those days both set the type and did what editing was done, but rather to the army of pamphleteers-the most eminent men of the day, the scholars and clergymen, the lawyers and politicians-who utilized those crude news sheets to spread before the people the ideas that otherwise would have been issued in pamphlet form. Those men in their day wrote letters for the press, just as men today "write to the editor." They constituted, as in due time we shall see, "a magnificent staff of unpaid contributors." Many of them, both sides of the Atlantic, had had much experience in the art of the pamphlet- eer. John Milton gave a score of years to the production of pamphlets. We may match with him in America such men as John Dickinson, before the Revolution, and Thomas Paine, in the course of that war. Dickin- son first published his "Farmer's Letters" week by week in a Philadel- phia newspaper. Every paper in America but four, twenty-one in all, reprinted them at once. The series completed, the articles were collected into a pamphlet. Thomas Paine appealed to the public by the pamphlet direct, and his amazing series of burning booklets swept the Atlantic seaboard as a conflagration might have swept the prairies of the West.
In that short interval between the going of Andros and the coming of Sir William Phipps, while the original charter for a little while was the symbol of authority, one startling event had taken place. This was nothing else than the appearance of the first newspaper within the pres- ent bounds of the United States, an unlicensed sheet whose publication brought out a prompt and complete demonstration of the fact that faith in the freedom of the press had not yet arrived in Massachusetts.
First Newspaper Attempted-The first attempt to establish an actual newspaper in Boston, and it was also the first in America, must be assigned to "Publick Occurrences" by Benjamin Harris, and not to "The Present State of the New-English Affairs," by Samuel Green. The first and only issue of the former was brought out on September 25, 1690. The only printing of the latter is dated 1689, and internal evidence indicates the latter portion of that year. But the earlier publication was not a news- paper, while the latter was designed to be one.
The debate upon the respective claims of these rival candidates for priority has gone on for many years. The earlier sheet has this imprint : "Boston. Printed and Sold by Samuel Green, 1689." Below the heading, "The Present State of the New-English Affairs," is this line: "This is Published to prevent False Reports." It is a single sheet, 143/8 by 9 inches, printed in two columns on one side. The contents pertain exclusively to
THE FENWAY
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political conditions in New England. Consider the situation. A revolu- tion has placed a new king on the British throne. The Colonists have overthrown the Andros government. Increase Mather in London is striving for a new charter. What most of all would the people of Massa- chusetts wish to know? From Mather have come several messages. With intense eagerness the populace must have waited for tidings of King William's intentions toward his subjects in the Colonies. Garbled reports are abroad. Is authentic news available?
Now what does this sheet contain ? It contains a portion of Mather's letter to Governor Bradstreet, dated September 3, 1689; also a passage "extracted from the publick News-Letter" of London, dated July 6, 1689, giving some account of Mather's interview with the king; and besides some part of a letter, dated September 2, 1689, from Increase Mather to his son, Cotton Mather. Moreover this sheet carries a statement to the effect that a royal order, dated July 30, 1689, has just arrived, instructing the New England authorities to send Sir Edmund Andros back to Eng- land by the first ship.
Thus do the contents of this sheet justify its title, "The Present State of the New-English affairs," and its avowed intent, "to prevent False Re- ports." Obviously this is not a newspaper but a broadside. Mr. Albert Matthews has added strong arguments to the demonstration by an exam- ination of the seventeenth century newspapers in the British Museum, and by the discovery in the Massachusetts Archives of a document, dated November 8, 1689, containing allusions to the "many papers" which "haue been printed & dispersed tending to the disturbance of the peace & subuersion" of the Government of William and Mary. This is the first publication known in the Colonies of an exclusively domestic news char- acter, but it is not a real newspaper nor intended for successive and reg- ular publication.
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