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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