Walter Hines Page

The American journalist and diplomat Walter Hines Page (1855-1918) edited several distinguished periodicals and served as ambassador to Great Britain during World War I.

Born in Cary, N.C., on Aug. 15, 1855, Walter Hines Page was educated at Trinity College (now Duke), Randolph-Macon College, and Johns Hopkins University (1871-1878), concentrating his study on the Greek classics. He began his journalistic career in St. Joseph, Mo., as editor of the Gazette (1880-1881). He then published a series of articles based on travels in the South and the West, some appearing in the New York World.

In 1883 Page returned to the South, hoping to help modernize the region, but his editorial advocacy of social and political reforms in the State Chronicle of Raleigh, N.C. (1883-1885), aroused local animosity and he went back to New York. As editor of the Forum (1891-1895), Atlantic Monthly (1898-1899), and the World's Work (1900-1913), he became known as a leader of reform. He helped develop the publishing house of Doubleday, Page and Company in 1899.

Page was one of the earliest political supporters of Woodrow Wilson, and this led to his appointment as ambassador to Great Britain in 1913. He rapidly won the respect and affection of British leaders. After World War I broke out, however, he became estranged from the president. Wilson was an assiduous exponent of neutrality and mediation; Page, convinced of Germany's war guilt, favored diplomatic and economic assistance to the Allies. Occasionally his dealings with British statesmen blunted Wilson's policies. Page strongly criticized the president's measured response to the Lusitania sinking of 1915 and opposed the peace mission of Edward M. House in 1916.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Page immediately urged extensive aid for the Allies, particularly naval and financial assistance. Pleased that his country had finally taken steps he deemed essential, Page remained critical and suspicious of Wilson. In Washington his extensive correspondence was generally dismissed as Anglophile propaganda. Plagued by ill health, the ambassador stayed loyally at his post until August 1918, when he could no longer carry on. He died that year in Pinehurst, N.C., on December 21.

Page wrote two books dealing with his lifelong interest in southern development, The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths (1902) and the novel The Southerner (1909), and a third considering his profession, A Publisher's Confession (1905).

Further Reading

The principal works on Page are by Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page (3 vols., 1922-1925) and The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 1855-1913 (1928). For Page's relations with a leading British statesman see Sir Edward Grey, Twenty-five Years, 1892-1916 (2 vols., 1925). His changing position in the Wilsonian entourage is traceable in Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (4 vols., 1926-1928). See also Ross Gregory, Walter Hines Page: Ambassador to the Court of St. James (1970).

Additional Sources

Cooper, John Milton, Walter Hines Page: the Southerner as American, 1855-1918, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Hendrick, Burton Jesse, The training of an American: the earlier life and letters of Walter H. Page, 1855-1913, Atlanta, Ga.: Cherokee Pub. Co., 1990.

Walter Hines Page (August 15, 1855 - December 21, 1918) was an American journalist, publisher, and diplomat. He was the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War I.

Walter Hines Page

Born in Cary, North Carolina, Page was educated at Trinity College (Duke University), then at Randolph-Macon College and Johns Hopkins University. His studies complete, he began a journalistic career editing the St. Joseph Gazette. Later he edited The Atlantic Monthly. He was partner and vice president of Doubleday, Page & Co. from 1900 to 1913, as well as editor, of World's Work magazine, when he was appointed ambassador to Britain by President Woodrow Wilson.

Page was a founding member of the Watauga Club in 1884, along with Arthur Winslow and William Joseph Peele. Together, they memorialized the North Carolina General Assembly early in 1885 to create an institution for instruction in "wood-work, mining, metallurgy, practical agriculture and in such other branches of industrial education as may be deemed expedient," establishing what is now North Carolina State University.

Page, along with Doubleday, founded the publishing company Doubleday, Page, and Co.,^[1] which became one of the great book publishing companies of the 20th Century, until it was acquired by Bertlesmann in 1986. The Company, sometimes publishes under the name "Country Life Press", in Garden City, New York, where Page resided in the years prior to World War I. Among the great writers in the early days of Doubleday was Rudyard Kipling.^[2]

Page believed that a free and open education was fundamental to democracy. In 1902 he published "The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths" (New York: Doubleday, Page). He felt that nothing—class, economic means, race, religion—should be a barrier to education.

Page was one of the key figures involved in bringing the United States into World War I on the Allied side. A proud Southerner, he admired his British roots and assumed that the United Kingdom was fighting a war for democracy. As ambassador to Britain, he defended British policies to Wilson and so helped to shape a pro-Allied slant in the President and in America as a whole.

When ambassador in London, on March 5, 1917, Page sent a message to Wilson saying that the British-French front was about to break down unless it could count on American help. This message did not correspond to the facts and was probably sent on request from J. P. Morgan & Co. who paid Page an annual salary of $25,000.

Page was criticized for his unabashedly pro-British stance as it seemed to keep him from what his job was supposed to be, the defending of the USA's interests in the face of British criticism.

One month after Page's message to Wilson, the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany.

The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, by Burton J. Hendrick, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1923, and The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, by Burton J. Hendrick, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1929.

There is a Walter Hines Page High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature (currently Ariel Dorfman) at Duke University. A memorial plaque in his honor rests in Westminster Abbey in Westminster, London, UK.^[3] He became ill and resigned his post as Ambassador to the Court of St. James and returned to his home in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where he died and he is buried in Old Bethesda Cemetery in Aberdeen, North Carolina.

Today, scholarships are awarded by the English-Speaking Union, in Hines name to teachers from the United Kingdom to study in the United States and Canada. ^[4]

He was also the brother of Robert N. Page,a U.S. Representative from North Carolina, and Henry A. Page a North Carolina representative and founder of the North Carolina Highway system.

References

1. ^ http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nynassa2/gardencity.htm
2. ^ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3761
3. ^ "To Walter Hines Page", Time, 3-24-1923, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,726984,00.html 
4. ^ http://www.esu.org/documents/newsletters/May_04.pdf

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Whitelaw Reid	U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain 1913–1918	Succeeded by John W. Davis

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