James Graham Phelps Stokes

Early years

Stokes was born in New York City to one of the city's most prosperous families. His parents were Helen Louisa Phelps and Anson Phelps Stokes, a banker, railroad owner, and real estate developer. He grew up in a large house on 229 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. His family spent the summers in their 100-room house in the Berkshires— the largest private home in the United States at the time. The family fortune came from Manhattan real estate, the Phelps Dodge mining empire, a and railroad in Nevada.

He attended the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, receiving his Ph.B. degree there in 1892. There, he was a member of the Fraternity of Delta Psi (St. Anthony Hall). He celebrated his graduation with a trip around the world in 1892.

He also attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, receiving an M.D. in 1896. While at Columbia University, Stokes became concerned with the plight of the American underclass and poverty. In 1895, Stokes became a member of the Council of the University Settlement and worked for the YMCA. Although his goal was to become a medical missionary, he never practiced medicine because he had to take over the family businesses from his ailing father. Following receipt of his medical degree, Stokes continued with a year of graduate study of political science at Columbia.

Stokes served in Squadron A of New York National Guard from 1896 to 1901. During the Spanish–American War, he was a private in the U.S. Army cavalry, but he did not deploy overseas. At this same time, Graham's father was active in the Anti-Imperialist League, described by one historian as "a group of substantial citizens" opposed to American intervention in the Philippines.

Career

Stokes was president of the Nevada Central Railroad from 1898 to 1938. He was also president of the Nevada Company with offices at 47 Cedar Street and president of the Woodbridge Company at 100 Williams Street. While Stokes did participate in commercial affairs throughout his life, serving variously as an officer of businesses such as the Phelps Stokes Corporation, the Austin Mining Company, and the State Bank of Nevada, Stokes's primary interests and concerns lay in the realm of public affairs.

In 1902, Stocks moved to the Lower East Side to take up settlement work. One of his friends explained, "Mr. Stokes is very much interested in social problems and he takes deep interest in questions concerning capital and labor. He is a thorough democrat in his spirit and feeling, and is opposed to social distinctions which separate the classes... He believes in plain people and feels that every effort which helps them to develop themselves is something to their advantage. He therefore feels that he can serve society best by living in a house which denies the existence of classes and which claims equal opportunities for everybody."

Volunteer workers at the University Settlement received no pay, but did receive modest quarters on the top floor. Historians Arthur Zipser and Pearl Zipser describe the scene: "There was a lively intellectual atmosphere on the top floor of the University Settlement house, where the highly educated, mostly rich, young social workers had their residence, dining, and club rooms. It was a world apart from the lower floors of the building, where the regular settlement house functions were carried out among the denizens of the surrounding ghettoized slum. This separation between leaders and led was not the goal they were aiming for, which was the outreach of the privileged to the downtrodden. But the separation was real."

In addition to being a member of the Council of the University Settlement, Stokes founded and became chair of the board of Hartley House in New York City. He also served on committees of the Church Federation, the People's Institute, the Prison Association of New York, and the Trade School Committee. He was also associated with American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, Constitutional Democracy Association, The Legal Aid Society, National Security League, and the Outdoor Recreation League. In 1905, Stokes was the United States delegate at the International Prison Congress in Budapest, Hungary.

Publications

Books and pamphlets

Hartley House: And Its Relations to the Social Reform Movement. New York: Hartley House, 1897.

Dear Comrade: The Intercollegiate Socialist Society Has Now Entered Upon its Second Year. with Jack London and Upton Sinclair. New York City: The Society, 1906.

Down with Democracy! Down with Authority!: Lenine. New York : National Security League, circa 1919.

Industrial Paralysis under the Bolsheviki: An Examination of Falling Off of Productivity of Manufacturing Centers under 'Dictatorship of Proletariat'. New York: American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, 1919.

A Brief Sketch of the History of the 244th Coast Artillery (9th Regiment, N.Y.) 16731924. New York: 1924.

The Gap in the "Lineage of the Ninth Regiment of the State of New York," with Leonhard A. Keyes. New York: 1953.

The One Lord of East and West. (Introduction by Swami Sivananda) India: Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy, 1956.

The Ever-Returning Christ: And Other Writings. Rishikesh, India: Yoga Vedanta Forest University, 1958.

Articles

"On the Relation of Settlement Work to the Evils of Poverty," International Journal of Ethics, vol. 11, no. 3, (April 1901) pp. 340–345.

"Public Schools as Social Centres," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 23 (May 1904), pp. 49–55.

As editor

The Socialism of To-day: A Source-Book of the Present Position and Recent Development of the Socialist and Labor Parties in All Countries, Consisting Mainly of Original Documents. Editor, with William English Walling, Jessie Wallace Hughan, and Harry W. Laidler. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1916

Honors

He received the Military Cross of the State of New York in 1920.

Stokes' papers are housed at Columbia University in New York City. The collection includes more than 1600 cataloged letters.

A collection of letters received by Stokes and his wife are housed at Yale University.

The Hartley House records, which include extensive correspondence with Graham Phelps Stokes, are housed at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis.

Personal life

In November 1902, Stokes moved from his father's house to live in the University Settlement house on Eldridge Street the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of the poorest areas of New York City. Because of the settlement house, Stokes met Rose Harriet Pastor (née Wieslander), a news reporter who interviewed him for the Yiddish Daily News. She was a Jewish–Polish immigrant and former cigar factory employee with less than two years of formal education; the newspapers called her the "Cinderella of the Sweatshops." The couple married on July 18, 1905. With his own hands, Stokes built their home on the two-acre Waite's Island (Caritas Island), New York which he had inherited; the site became populated with reformers and societies of all types.

Their marriage was "the" celebrity wedding of its day, and newspapers reported their every move for nearly two decades. However, they separated when he left radical politics during World War I. He told a reporter for the New York Tribune, "Mrs. Stokes and I still have the same ideals, the same aims, but we differ on the means of attaining them." Stokes was so supportive of the war that he enlisted, serving as a major in the New York National Guard because he was too old to serve overseas. His promotion of the war resulted in an invitation to the White House to meet President Woodrow Wilson.

In the meantime, Rose persisted in war and other protests, getting arrested in Kansas City and sentenced to ten years in prison. Although Stokes rushed to his wife's aid and paid her $10,000 bail—and her conviction was overturned—they divorced in 1925. She refused alimony on principle and lived in poverty. When she became ill with cancer, she was unable to pay for a doctor. Their mutual friend Upton Sinclair wrote Stokes, asking for help to cover the cost of her treatment. Stokes replied, "I am now assured by friends of hers in New York, that sufficient funds for her care for a year have been raised. If I could help her without helping her work, much of which appears to me to be so very abominable, I should gladly do so, but I don't see how I can." Rose died of cancer in 1933.

Stokes joined the Liberal Catholic Church in 1925 when it established the Church of St Michael the Archangel in New York City. In April 1926, he married Lettice Lee Sands at the Liberal Catholic Church. She was the daughter of a railroad baron and was much younger than Stokes.