George William Curtis

• George Curtis
• Born: February 24, 1824
• Died: August 31, 1892

Reform orator and writer, abolitionist, and civil-service advocate, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the second son of George Curtis and Mary Elizabeth (Burrill) Curtis. His father, the descendant of a settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a successful businessman, and his mother was the daughter of James Burrill Jr., chief justice of Rhode Island and a member of the U.S. Senate. Mary Curtis died in 1826 and her husband remarried in 1835. Motherless from a very young age, George Curtis became close to his elder brother, James Burrill Curtis, a relationship that continued for a quarter of a century as they shared the same room at school and later at Brook Farm, in Concord, and abroad.

From the ages of six to eleven Curtis attended C. W. Greene’s school near Boston, where, as he later recalled, he was awed by the great ships moving in the harbor with their air of “indolent self-importance.” He returned to Providence in 1835. The “cardinal event” of his youth, he said, was listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson speak on the “oversoul,” and he was also impressed when he heard transcendentalist Margaret Fuller.

Curtis failed his entrance examinations to Brown University in 1838 and worked briefly in a countinghouse in 1839; this activity he found distasteful. He ventured forth with his brother in 1842 on a significant journey to the Utopian community of Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a one-and-a-half-year adventure that became an exciting intellectual and moral idyll. At Brook Farm Curtis studied philosophy with its director, George Ripley (who thought the brothers were like “two young Greek gods”) and Greek with the newspaper editor Charles A. Dana; he also listened to the transcendentalist views of the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing. Under Emerson’s influence, Curtis concluded that “my soul must stand without aid.”

In 1844 the Curtis brothers went to Concord, Massachusetts, where they helped build Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. At this time George Curtis began to write poetry and to develop an interest in abolitionist ideas.

After moving to New York City, where he wrote for The New-York Tribune, Curtis began a four-year tour of Europe, Egypt, and Syria in 1846; contact with the past, he reported, stimulated “all the hopes of our American imagination.” But he was stirred also by the political unrest then sweeping Europe. Letters sent during his travels to the Tribune were published in book form as Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852). Other works of this period included Lotus-Eating (1852) and The Potiphar Papers (1853). The latter book, a somewhat moralizing but satirical description of elite society, influenced by the work of Washington Irving, was popular for years. Prue and I, also influenced by Irving, appeared in 1857.

In the 1850s Curtis began to write essays on Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other literary figures. Contributing regularly to Putnam’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly, of which he became editor in 1863, he developed a widespread reputation, becoming editor of the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s. He was successful, too, as a lecturer, delivering addresses on the virtues of inner success and utilizing what he had learned from the transcendentalists. Curtis supported the abolitionists on the Kansas slavery issue and became one of the most popular speakers for Republican candidate John Frémont in the presidential election of 1856. He was noted for his strong personality, rich voice, polished delivery, and rhetorical flourish; American revolutionaries of the past, he told an audience at Wesleyan University, were “no more truly martyrs than every murdered man whose bones lie bleeding in the summer sun upon the silent plains of Kansas.”

After the 1856 election Curtis married, in a Unitarian ceremony, Anna Shaw of Staten Island, New York. They had three children. He continued to lecture, addressing feminist groups and other audiences on such topics as “Democracy and Education.” As a delegate to the 1860 Republican party convention Curtis supported the call of the Ohio abolitionist Joshua Giddings to reaffirm the Declaration of Independence and to work for a full abolitionist program. In 1864, after running unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate in a New York congressional race, he was elected by the New York State legislature as a regent of the State University of New York; he became vice chairman of the Board of Regents in 1886 and chancellor in 1890.

In the last two years of the Civil War Curtis gave a lecture entitled “Political Infidelity” more than fifty times in the northeastern states, declaring that if slavery were “too delicate to discuss” it “is too dangerous to tolerate. Any system, any policy, any institution, which may not be debated will overthrow us if we do not overthrow it.” After the war his lectures supported black equality. He also spoke for women’s rights, declaring that “the spirit of society cannot be just. . . so long as half the population are politically paralyzed.” He declined the Republican nomination for secretary of state of New York State in 1869 and failed in an attempt to gain the nomination for governor the next year.

An opponent of the spoils system, Curtis vigorously advocated civil-service reform. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him a member of the Civil Service Commission in 1871. He resigned in 1873 in protest over the administration’s attitude toward reform. As chairman of both the New York State and the National Civil Service Reform associations, he championed the cause of merit as opposed to political patronage as the basis for appointment to civil office. He attacked the powerful political machine of Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling in New York and supported the successful presidential candidacy of Rutherford B. Hayes at the Republican convention of 1876. Curtis declined Hayes’s postelection offer of the ministry to England.

Curtis consistently supported civil-service reform in his lectures and his columns; the Pendleton Bill signed by President Chester A. Arthur in 1883 incorporated many of Curtis’s views. In his lectures Curtis also attacked the exploitation of immigrant minorities and the excesses of corporate power, a major issue to American reformers toward the end of the century. He aligned himself with his fellow abolitionist and reformer

Wendell Phillips and in an 1884 memorial tribute praised Phillips for distrusting “that conservatism of prosperity which chills human sympathy.” Patriotism, Curtis stressed, was defined by Phillips according to his conscience and his “unbending Puritan soul.” Curtis delivered other commemorative tributes to Senator Charles Sumner and President James A. Garfield.

Curtis died at the age of sixty-eight.

Winning an extended national reputation for his oratorical and literary efforts in behalf of such reforms as abolition, women’s rights, and civil service, Curtis exemplified the power of genteel conscience in American life, derived in part from the Protestant and transcendentalist traditions. Not the literary peer of Emerson or Thoreau, he made his impact by expounding the ideals of good citizenship.

Curtis’s writings are to be found in his Works, 6 vols. (1863); C. E. Norton, ed., Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, 3 vols. (1893-94); G. W. Cooke, ed., Early Letters of George William Curtis to John S. Dwight (1898); Other Essays from the Easy Chair (1893); and “An Autobiographical Sketch,” Cosmopolitan, October 1894. Curtis’s papers are in the Duyckinck Literary Correspondence, Manuscript Division, New York Public Library. Biographical sources include G. Milne, George William Curtis and the Genteel Tradition (1956); E. Cary, George William Curtis (1894); J. W. Chadwick, George William Curtis (1893); S. S. Rogers, “George William Curtis and Civil Service Reform,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1893; and G. W. Cooke, “George William Curtis at Concord,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1897. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1930).