Thomas Nelson Perkins

Thomas Nelson Perkins (born at Milton, Massachusetts on May 6, 1870; died October 7, 1937) was a Boston lawyer in the firm of Ropes, Gray, Boyden & Perkins, a fellow of Harvard University, and a director of railway, utility, copper, banking and telephone companies, among them the Boston and Maine Railroad and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.¹² In 1917 he sat on the priorities committee of the War Industries Board. In 1922 he was chosen chairman of the Commercial Radio International Committee, the body through which Radio Corporation of America, the English Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, the French Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans Fil and the German Telefunken arranged their South American and trans-Atlantic radio traffic.³ From 1926 he presided over the arbitral tribunal of interpretation for the Dawes Plan, and in 1929 he was an American alternate on the Committee of Experts that drafted the Young Plan for reparations owed by Germany, signing the committee's report at Paris on June 7, 1929. He belonged to the Perkins family of Boston.

Descent and early years

Perkins was born at Milton, the son of Edward Cranch Perkins and Jane S. Watson (Jane Watson).⁴ His father was a son of James Handasyd Perkins and Sarah Elliott Perkins of the Owls Nest house near Cincinnati, and a brother of Charles Elliott Perkins, later president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.⁵ The 1907 family memoir by Edith Perkins Cunningham lists four children of Edward Cranch Perkins: Thomas Nelson (1870), Elliott (1873 to 1885), James Handasyd (1876) and John Forbes (1878).⁵ It describes John Forbes, "the President" of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, bringing "his niece, Jenny Watson" through Cincinnati in 1858 on a western trip while he was buying the line; this is John Murray Forbes, whom Charles Elliott Perkins succeeded in running the Burlington.⁶

Perkins took the A.B. at Harvard College in 1891, was admitted to the bar in 1893, and took the LL.B. in 1894.⁴ His classmates in 1891 included Nicholas Longworth, then a member of the United States House of Representatives, who married Alice Roosevelt on February 17, 1906. In the class report for that year Perkins wrote that "much the most prominent position that I have filled was that of best man to our classmate Longworth at his recent marriage."⁷

On June 6, 1900 he married Louisa Catherine Adams at Lincoln, Massachusetts; the class report gives her as "daughter of Charles Francis Adams."⁸ She was born on December 28, 1871, a daughter of Charles Francis Adams Jr. and Mary Hone Ogden (Mary Hone Ogden), who had married on November 8, 1865.⁹⁴ Adams, a brother of Brooks Adams and Henry Adams, was a member of the Massachusetts railroad commission from 1869 to 1879, a government director of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1877 to 1890 and its president from 1884 to 1890.⁴ The 1926 history of Quincy lists the children of Charles Francis Adams as Mary Ogden, Louisa Catherine, Elizabeth Ogden, Henry and John, states that "Louisa married Thomas Nelson Perkins," and dates his death at Washington on March 20, 1915.¹⁰ Perkins moved to Westwood, Massachusetts in 1899, and his firm practiced from 60 State Street in Boston.⁸

Ropes, Gray and the Boston bar

In October 1894 Arthur Dehon Hill entered the office of John D. Bryant at 53 State Street, and a year later formed a partnership for the general practice of law with Perkins and Lawrence M. Stockton. In May 1897 that firm broke up, Perkins joining Ropes, Gray & Loring and Stockton the firm of Lowell, Stimson & Stockton.¹¹ In 1899, after the death of John C. Ropes and the appointment of William Caleb Loring to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the firm became Ropes, Gray & Gorham, whose members were John C. Gray, Robert S. Gorham, Roland W. Boyden and Perkins. Roland Gray joined in 1902. Perkins described his practice as "almost entirely an office practice," most of his time "spent on corporation work and the management of trust properties."⁸ Who's Who gives the firm name as Ropes, Gray & Gorham in 1916 and as Ropes, Gray, Boyden & Perkins in 1920, and the 1928 entry gives the office as 50 Federal Street.¹²¹³¹⁴ The Business Historical Society's obituary dates his partnership from 1899 and describes his work for Stone and Webster: "He won his spurs in 1899 when, as representative of Stone & Webster, he unraveled the tangled traction problems of Seattle."¹⁵

Roland W. Boyden, his partner, is identified in the Foreign Relations series as American unofficial representative on the Reparation Commission as of April 30, 1922, and the Congressional Digest of November 1924 introduced him as "Former United States Delegate on the Reparation Commission."¹⁶¹⁷ Boyden wrote "The Priority Question" for Foreign Affairs in April 1928.¹⁸

The War Industries Board

Who's Who lists Perkins during the First World War as a member of the Priorities Committee and chief counsel of the War Industries Board, a member of the American commission to the Inter-Allied War Conference at Paris, an assistant to the Secretary of War and an assistant director of munitions.¹⁴ The Associated Press obituary of October 7, 1937 repeats these posts, and the Business Historical Society calls him "Assistant Secretary of War in charge of purchase and supply" and a member of "the House Commission to the inter-allied conference in Paris."¹⁹¹⁵

The Board's report, published in 1921 under Bernard Baruch, records the structure. Robert S. Lovett was priorities commissioner from the fall of 1917, and Edwin B. Parker was designated by "Judge Lovett" as chairman of the new priorities committee, taking charge on August 23, 1917 and succeeding Lovett as commissioner on the reorganization of March 4, 1918. The other members of the committee were Charles K. Foster as vice chairman, J. B. Aleshire, George Armsby, H. H. Barbour, C. P. Rowland, F. H. Macpherson, N. E. Mason, C. A. McKenney, Everett Morss, Lucius P. Ordway, Perkins, T. C. Powell and A. V. Zane. "During the fall of 1917, studies on behalf of the priorities committee were being made in England and France by Thomas Nelson Perkins, a member of the committee. He observed the various control systems in use there and prepared daily reports and comments for the committee." Priorities Circular No. 1 was issued on September 21, 1917, the day the price of copper was fixed.²⁰

Daniel R. Beaver, in his study of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, writes of the arrival in Washington of a report from Perkins as the Board's representative at the Inter-Allied conference.²¹ In the Army's history of its own organization, James E. Hewes calls Perkins "a Boston corporation lawyer" serving with the Board and "Mr. Baker's nemesis," and writes that the Board "loaned" him to the War Department in April.²² The Library of Congress register of the papers of Felix Frankfurter lists two folders of correspondence with Perkins from 1918 to 1934.²³

Radio: the Commercial Radio International Committee

In April 1922 The Wireless Age reported that Owen D. Young, vice president of General Electric, was on his way to Cannes with Thomas N. Perkins of Boston "on a mission in connection with the activities of the Radio Corporation of America for the development of trans-Atlantic wireless communications." Young described a meeting he had called at Paris the previous October, at which the English Marconi company, the French Compagnie de Télégraphie sans Fil and the German Telefunken agreed with RCA to build one station in Argentina for all four. Control was placed in nine trustees, two named by each of the four companies and a ninth, "acting as Chairman," appointed by RCA: "Thomas N. Perkins was chosen to fill the post of Chairman."³ Who's Who in 1930 gives him as chairman of the board of the Commercial Radio International Committee, and the Boston and New York press of March 1928 gave the same title when he was elected to the Boston and Maine post.²²⁴

The Reparation Commission and the Dawes tribunal

Who's Who in 1928 lists him as "U.S. citizen member Reparation Commn. (Paris), 1924-26," and a Reuter dispatch printed in October 1937 calls him "United States citizen member of the Reparation Commission in Paris from 1924 to 1926."¹⁴²⁵ The Reparation Commission's own papers show a narrower record for those years. The Regulations for Deliveries in Kind, drafted in the winter of 1924 to 1925 by a special committee created under the London Agreement of 1924, gave the American Citizen Member of the Reparation Commission the decision on contracts that the Allied and German offices could not agree on, with power to nominate a substitute if prevented from acting. The committee's covering letter of March 9, 1925 reports: "By letter of February 19, 1925 Mr. Thomas N. Perkins has accepted the task which the Committee proposed to entrust to him, under certain reserves which, in the opinion of the Committee, should in no way endanger the proper working of the Regulations."²⁶ In the Commission's report for 1926 the American Citizen Member is Walter P. Cooke, who resigned as president of the Arbitral Tribunal "to become the American Citizen Member of the Reparation Commission," with "Mr. Thomas Nelson Perkins" appointed president of the tribunal "in his stead."²⁷ A family history of the Cutcheon line records that Franklin W. M. Cutcheon was appointed United States Citizen Member in December 1927.²⁸ The German edition of the tribunal's decisions, published in 1927, calls Perkins Cooke's successor and "früherer Delegierter der Vereinigten Staaten zur Reparationskommission," a former delegate of the United States to the Reparation Commission.²⁹

The Foreign Relations series names other Americans in the unofficial seat: James A. Logan Jr. in February 1924 and Ralph Waldo Snowden Hill in May 1926.³⁰³¹ In July 1924, during the London negotiations, Ambassador Myron T. Herrick reported that the British and French prime ministers had settled that the decision on a German default would be left "to an American, presumably the Agent General, and Owen Young's name was mentioned."³²

The tribunal arose under the agreement between the Reparation Commission and the German government signed at London on August 9, 1924. Sir John Fischer Williams, British legal representative on the Commission, wrote in 1928 that it began with three arbitrators and was enlarged in June 1925, before any sitting, by two neutral members, and that "the chairman or president of the tribunal was to be an American citizen."³³ Its first award, of March 24, 1926, was signed by Cooke as president, with Marcus Wallenberg, A. G. Kröller, Charles Rist and Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy as the other members; the Commission's report records that it decided questions I, III and IV in favor of Germany and VII and VIII in favor of the Commission.³⁴²⁷

Award No. II, delivered at The Hague on January 29, 1927 with Perkins as president, answered a question submitted by terms of submission dated at Paris on March 25, 1926: whether the annuities payable to the Agent General for Reparation Payments comprised compensation paid by the German Reich to German nationals for the retention, liquidation or transfer of their property, rights and interests. The tribunal found it "impossible to place upon the Experts' Plan a construction according to which the annuities were intended by the Experts to comprise" such compensation. The award is signed "Thomas N. Perkins, President" and "E. N. van Kleffens, Secretary," and its English text is authoritative.³⁵ Award No. III, delivered at The Hague on May 29, 1928 after a session of May 7 to 14, concerned three questions on whether the net proceeds of German private property liquidated by the Allied powers under the Treaty of Versailles were to be reckoned against the annuities. The tribunal answered all three in the negative, and the American Journal of International Law recorded it as an award "against German contention."³⁶³⁷ In the summer of 1927 Josiah Stamp, one of the authors of the Dawes Plan, and Mendelssohn Bartholdy were named honorary doctors of laws of Harvard "unter den Auspizien des Präsidenten des Schiedsgerichts," Perkins, according to the German editors' foreword.³⁶

The Young Committee, 1929

The Reparation Commission, jointly with the German government, appointed Owen D. Young and J. P. Morgan as the American members of the Committee of Experts, each with power to name an alternate. On January 18, 1929 Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg telegraphed the American chargé in Paris that the British Ambassador was going to New York "to offer the appointment to Young and Morgan and to Perkins as an alternate," and that the American government had no objection.³⁸ On January 19 Herrick reported the Commission's appointment of "Messrs. Young and Morgan as members of the Committee of Experts each with power to appoint his alternate," and that the committee would hold its first meeting at the Bank of France on February 9.³⁹ On January 21 the membership was telegraphed in final form: "American Experts: Mr. Owen D. Young, Mr. J. P. Morgan; alternates: Mr. Thos. N. Perkins, Mr. T. W. Lamont."⁴⁰ The member named only as J. P. Morgan is J. P. Morgan Jr., the son of the elder J. P. Morgan, who died on March 31, 1913; the alternate Thomas W. Lamont was a partner of the Morgan firm.

On March 3, 1929 the embassy in Paris cabled Washington a message from Young: "The third subcommittee, of which Perkins is the chairman, is working on deliveries in kind in endeavor to see to what extent they can be used, say over a period of ten years, to facilitate transfers from Germany." For the first year it was thought that deliveries might run as high as 750 million marks, diminishing year by year.⁴¹ The Communist Daily Worker reported on March 2, 1929 that the experts were considering "an international trust, incorporated under the laws of neutral power, to act as a general sales agent for all future deliveries in kind," that "the Thomas N. Perkins Committee on deliveries in kind has evolved the idea at the suggestion of Perkins," and that Perkins "is a director of a dozen chemical, power, traction and machinery companies."⁴²

Denys P. Myers wrote in 1930 that Perkins, American, "was the chairman of the Tribunal of Interpretation between the Reparation Commission and the German Government," and that five members of the 1924 committee sat again in 1929.⁴³ The report, signed at Paris on June 7, 1929, closes: "We regard our report as an indivisible whole." The signatures include Owen D. Young, J. P. Morgan, Thomas N. Perkins and T. W. Lamont.⁴⁴ An annex prints a letter of June 4, 1929 to Lamont at the Hôtel Ritz, "confirming my conversation of this morning with you and Mr. Perkins."⁴⁵ Annex I of the report recommended that the Interpretation Tribunal "set up under the London Agreement of August 30, 1924" should "be retained in existence" to decide disputes between Germany and the creditor governments or the Bank on the extent of Germany's liabilities or the interpretation of the Plan.⁴⁵

The Young Plan tribunal and the Bank for International Settlements

The tribunal under the Young Plan was to have five members sitting for five years, the incumbents named in the plan: Perkins as president, Wallenberg and Kröller as neutrals, Rist as creditor member and Mendelssohn Bartholdy as debtor member. Myers added that "Mr. Perkins, however, resigned before the New Plan came into effect."⁴⁶

The Young Plan placed the intergovernmental payments in the Bank for International Settlements. The bank's Organization Committee met at the Hotel Stephanie in Baden-Baden from October 3 to November 13, 1929. It had two members appointed by the governors of the central banks of Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Japan, and two American delegates, Jackson E. Reynolds of the First National Bank of New York and Melvin A. Traylor of the First National Bank of Chicago; it produced the bank's charter, statutes and trust agreement.⁴⁷ The statutes provide that a dispute between the bank and a central bank or shareholder on the interpretation of the statutes go "for final decision to the Tribunal provided for by The Hague Agreement of January, 1930."⁴⁵

On April 28, 1930 Representative Louis T. McFadden, chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, told the House that the State Department's statement of May 16, 1929 had turned America's participation in the bank over "to a group of bankers headed and dominated by J. P. Morgan & Company," and added that "closely associated with the dominating influence, Mr. Owen D. Young, in the organization of the Bank for International Settlements, were J. P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and Thomas N. Perkins, who with Mr. Young composed United States representatives of the committee which brought forth the Young plan." The United States Daily printed the speech on April 30, 1930.⁴⁸

Boston and Maine

Perkins was elected a director of the Boston and Maine on April 9, 1924.⁴⁹ On March 7, 1928 he was elected chairman of the executive committee, succeeding Homer Loring; he made it clear that the committee would continue to exercise the same functions as in the past and that President George Hannauer would remain the executive head.⁵⁰²⁴ The report for 1929, signed by Perkins as "Acting President" on March 11, 1930, lists him as "Chairman Executive Committee and Acting President."⁵¹ A newspaper photograph of January 1930 identified him as "Acting president of Boston & Maine," about to address the Traffic Club of New England.⁵² He resigned as chairman of the board on April 25, 1933 and remained a director and member of the executive committee. The directors' minute on his death records that "for the 5 years preceding April 25, 1933 ... he was the dominating influence in your company's policies."⁴⁹

Directorships

The Directory of Directors in the City of Boston and Vicinity shows the accumulation in order. In the 1906 edition Perkins was a member of the board of managers and executive committee of the Children's Hospital, a director of the National Bank of Commerce, vice president and director of the Railway and Light Securities Company, trustee of the Seattle Electric Company, director of the State Street Trust Company, trustee of the Suffolk Savings Bank for Seamen and Others, and a director of Walter Baker and Company.⁵³ By 1908 he was also a Fellow of Harvard College and a director of the Puget Sound International Railway and Power Company and the St. Mary's Mineral Land Company, and he sat on the boards of the Houghton County Electric Light Company, where his co-directors included Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster of Stone and Webster, and the Houghton County Street Railway.⁵⁴ The 1911 edition adds the Michigan copper companies Ahmeek Mining Company, Allouez Mining Company, La Salle Copper Company, Osceola Consolidated Mining Company and Tamarack Mining Company, whose boards included Rodolphe L. Agassiz; the Tacoma Railway and Power Company; and the Boston Opera Company.⁵⁵

Who's Who in 1916 adds the Merrimac Chemical Company and the Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company, and the 1920 entry adds the Sullivan Machinery Company.¹²¹³ The 1928 entry lists the Puget Sound Power and Light Company, the George H. Morrill Company, the Boston and Maine, the Postum Company and the Champion Copper Company.¹⁴ The 1930 entry gives him as chairman of the executive committee of Puget Sound Power and Light and of the Boston and Maine, and as a director of the General Foods Corporation, Champion Copper, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Engineers Public Service Company, with seats on the executive committees of Stone and Webster, the Lee, Higginson Trust Company and the Old Colony Trust Company.² The Associated Press obituary adds the executive committee of the First National Bank of Boston.¹⁹

The annual reports of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company list Perkins among the directors from the report for 1929 through the report for 1936. The board in the report for 1929 also included George F. Baker and George F. Baker Jr., John W. Davis, W. Cameron Forbes, Walter S. Gifford, Owen J. Roberts, Myron C. Taylor and Daniel Willard; the report for 1930 added Winthrop W. Aldrich and Hale Holden.⁵⁶

From 1929 to 1931 he sat on the board of directors of the Russian Student Fund, Inc., with Norman H. Davis, Frank L. Polk, Ogden L. Mills, John R. Mott, Cornelius W. Wickersham and Allen Wardwell.⁵⁷ The Business Historical Society's obituary records that in 1932 he was named to the Boston committee formed to aid the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Federal Reserve System in promoting wider use of credit, and that Dartmouth College conferred a doctorate of letters on him under President Hopkins.¹⁵

Harvard Corporation

Perkins was appointed a Fellow of Harvard College in 1905 "to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the late Samuel Hoar"; the 1915 quinquennial catalogue lists "Thomas Nelson Perkins, (see A.B. 1891); Fellow 1905-" and gives Samuel Hoar's service as 1894 to 1904.⁸⁵⁸ The Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1926 that at 35 he was "the youngest Fellow ever to be elected."⁵⁹ The same notice records that "in 1924 he resigned, after 19 years of loyal service, in order to serve on the Reparations Commission in Europe," his place taken by Charles P. Curtis Jr. of the class of 1914, and that in October 1926 he was re-elected to the seat vacated on October 11 by James Byrne of New York. He had been chosen president of the Harvard Alumni Association and had received the honorary Doctor of Laws from Harvard the previous June. The Corporation then consisted of President A. Lawrence Lowell, Charles F. Adams as treasurer, Henry P. Walcott, Bishop William Lawrence, John F. Moors, Perkins and Curtis.⁵⁹ The Business Historical Society's obituary states that "from the age of 35 until his death" he was a Fellow of the Corporation.¹⁵

Henry Aaron Yeomans's biography of Lowell lists Perkins among the Fellows at the time of Lowell's election as president and prints a letter from Lowell to Perkins dated November 1, 1932.⁶⁰

Family, clubs and death

The class report of 1906 names two sons, born March 16, 1901 and November 17, 1903; the 1907 family memoir lists a third child born in 1907, and the Associated Press obituary names three surviving sons.⁸⁵¹⁹ His clubs in the 1910 entry were the Somerset, Exchange, Norfolk Hunt (Boston), University and Harvard (New York) clubs; the 1928 entry adds the Knickerbocker and the Metropolitan (Washington).⁴¹⁴ He is listed at Westwood in the entries of 1910, 1916 and 1928.⁴¹²¹⁴

He died on October 7, 1937. The Associated Press dispatch is datelined Westwood and says he died "after a long illness"; the Sedgwick genealogy and a 1975 genealogy of presidential descendants also place the death at Westwood, and a Reuter dispatch printed in the North China Daily News is datelined Dedham, Massachusetts.^1916125 The Business Historical Society's bulletin of November 1937 records that he "remained partner until he passed away in October 1937," and the directors of the Boston and Maine recorded his death in their report for 1937.¹⁵⁴⁹