eorge William Curtis was a reformer, journalist, novelist, and public
speaker. He 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.
He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 24, 1824, to Mary
Elizabeth Burrill Curtis and George Curtis. As a teenager, young Curtis 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.