John H. Page
President, Inco Alloy Products (Retired)
September 23, 1985

"Remembering Arthur W. Page"

To download a printable version of this speech, click here.

(Note: Mr. Page has expanded on his annual meeting remembrance of his father, Arthur W. Page, in this special transcript for Arthur W. Page Society Members.)

My purpose this evening is to tell you something about my father. I welcome the opportunity. My fear is I may not do him justice or I will take too long trying to do so. With these caveats, I will proceed.

To understand Arthur Page, one has to orient oneself to the era that molded him. It was some time ago -- I strongly suspect no one in this room was born when Arthur W. Page graduated from college in 1905.

The U.S. in 1905 was a far different country. It was small -- some 80 million people. It was, in a sense, still partially undiscovered. Sure, people lived in all the major states and cities but it wasn't long after 1905 that my father wrote an article for the Worlds Work about Crater Lake, Oregon, in which he claimed he was the first white man to see the lake, having been guided up to the rim of the crater by Indians.

At the turn of the century the U.S. was not only small and partially unexplored, but it was still a very young nation -- not much more than 100 years old. The idea of a nation of free men was new and still had much of the excitement associated with its beginning. I often heard my father talk of the U.S. as being different from European nations; something very new, based on what free men could accomplish. This belief was real and important to Americans of that era -- certainly it was for Arthur W. Page.

To orient one further: In my father's formative years, a college education was a rarity. Only some 5 percent of people the appropriate age attended. (Today, the figure is 60-65 percent). In most communities, only the preacher, the lawyer and the doctor had gone to a university and as a result, these people accepted a degree of obligation to their communities -- certainly Arthur W. Page felt this.

So, if you will, Arthur W. Page grew up in a nation which was intense in its belief that free men had developed a society and a nation that was different and -- at least in their minds -- much better than any in Europe.

It was a nation still small enough to be run by an establishment -- and this was based on an informal group of those who had gone to college. They all knew each other. They all had a common bond.

Sure, there was an inner circle of those who went to Ivy League schools, but the establishment was broader and included nearly all college graduates. It had a significant influence because they were a cohesive group and the country was small; they could easily get together and get things done.

Besides this national background, my father was influenced by a number of other factors. Probably the largest was his father, Walter Hines Page. The family came from Aberdeen, North Carolina. They founded the town in the early 1800s after migrating from Aberdeen, Scotland.

There were two leading families in town - the Pages and the Blues. The Page business was lumber; also, they owned a railroad spur off the Southern Railroad to carry the lumber to market called the Aberdeen and West End Railroad. It had one engine, a coach, and flatbed freight cars. My father worked on that railroad during the summers. It sparked in him a lifelong interest in railroads.

As probably none of you have heard of Aberdeen, N.C., but perhaps have heard of Pinehurst, N.C. (especially if you are a golfer), let me tell you a story of how they are related.

Sometime about the turn of the century, a Mr. Tufts from Boston appeared in the Aberdeen area. He was attracted there by the climate. I don't know how Mr. Tufts made his money but he obviously had some. (Tufts University in Boston is his doing.) He decided to buy land in the Aberdeen area. To make a long story short, today's Pinehurst was sold to him by Walter Hines Page. Family history has it that Walter's wife scolded him, not for selling the land, but because, as she wrote in her diary, "Even if he was a Yankee you shouldn't have charged him so much." The price was a dollar an acre.

Walter Page was an unusual man. He reached far beyond his origins in Aberdeen. He attended Randolph Macon College, was a small town editor, a professor of english, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the co-founder of Doubleday, Page & Co. which is today's Doubleday. Because he was a promoter of Woodrow Wilson for president, Walter became U.S. Ambassador to the court of St. James. In this capacity he argued strongly for U.S. entry into World War I, eventually breaking with President Wilson over this issue.

The point is that in this whole process my father -- either as a confidant or a journalist -- was heavily exposed to, and in many cases came to know, key U.S. and British politicians and statesmen. Few at his age had such an experience.

My father produced a whole series of articles for the Worlds Work starting in the early 1910s and continuing until he joined the Bell System in the late 1920s. The articles explain the genesis of much of his philosophy. There were three major themes.

One theme was the exposing of weaknesses within the American system and suggested reforms. These articles discussed mining facilities, how the railroads were not modernizing fast enough, etc.

The second theme appeared in more positive articles pointing out that the American system was working, and explaining how it differed from the European societies. These articles stressed the rapid social movement in the U.S., the lack of a class system as they had in Europe, etc.

The third theme is why I am here tonight and why his name is on the banner behind me. This theme was a really quite radical thought for that time: that a business, or any organization in a democracy, derives its right to exist and continue from the people. Clearly, what was thus granted could be eliminated or modified and thus business had an interest in explaining its actions and reason and in understanding what the electorate expected and thought.

It was this series of articles that caught Walter Gifford's eye at AT&T. When he asked Arthur W. Page who could implement such a philosophy in the system, Dad nominated himself. In truth, he and his father's partner, Mr. Doubleday, had never had a smooth relationship and so Mr. Gifford's proposal was thus doubly welcome.

I remember Dad telling me that another motive for the move was the opportunity to try doing something rather than continuing to write about what others did.

Thanks to the Bell System's word warriors the rest of his career is well known and even a wee bit over glamorized.

You all are aware of the series of Bell System policy pronouncements defining the relationship of customer, employees and investors; the role of regulation for a monopoly; the need to inform all and to be responsive to customers, communities, etc.; and the role of employees in the public dialogue.

Certainly Arthur W. Page took great pride in his contribution to the philosophy evolved by the Bell System. But I believe he really saw more than just the Bell System benefiting.

Again, I believe that in making the System work he was trying to contribute to the healthy growth of this new nation, and thus to provide at least a partial answer for the disillusioned and skeptics of the 1930s. For some people so motivated, belief in the American system provided not only an answer but a career. The struggle of the 1930s was real and many were involved but the result was that the U.S. did not buy into the European solutions of Communism and Socialism. The Bell System was a positive force in that struggle and I believe my father saw his work at the Bell System in that context.

I have mentioned Walter Hines Page's influence on Arthur W. Page. There were many others.

One was history. He read extensively of it, particularly American history. But dad also lived history. Imagine a person sensitive to history who personally knew people who had fought in the Civil War; who saw the nation go from rural to urban; who watched the auto come, the plane, modern communications; who saw two World Wars, the development of the U.S. to a world power, the destruction and the rebuilding of Japan and Germany; who had early knowledge of the bomb and wrote the words used by Harry Truman in announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. Of course, others of his generation lived through all this, but the point is he was an active participant or a journalist who knew the people and often helped shape the events. It was a fast track and he enjoyed it.

Some people are products of one institution, or rely on a fairly narrow base for their contacts and intellectual nourishment. In dad's case this was not true. His base was enormously wide. A portion was in North Carolina. He stayed close to it. For instance, he and the family helped pay off the debts of the Page Trust Co. in Aberdeen after it went bust when the other banks did. He knew well the wealthy and successful Duke family. He became very close to a James McClure in the Asheville area. Mcclure was a unique person and also an important force in the development of Western North Carolina. He was also an ordained preacher; indeed, he married my wife and I.

Harvard College also was part of Arthur W. Page's base. He worked with, and at times argued with, Harvard's approach to the teaching of history. He was a factor in the early stages of the business school, and came to be a close friend of James Conant.

Because of his conviction that isolation was the wrong policy for the U.S., he was active in the foreign policy debates between the wars at the Council on Foreign Relations, and related forums. On a personal level, he vetoed my plan to tour Europe in 1939 because he said he didn't want me there when war broke out. Imagine the re-evaluation I was forced to make of a parent's wisdom and judgment when he turned out to be right on September 1, 1939!

To these character-forming sources has to be added his very long and close association with Henry L. Stimson. It spanned 40 years.

Dad went to London for the naval department conference with Stimson in the mid-1920s; he worked hard with Stimson in trying to persuade the U.S. to get involved in World War II -- indeed he had a hand in Stimson's talk at Yale commencement, a talk which was probably responsible for Stimson being asked by President Roosevelt to become Secretary of War. It was this close relationship that prompted Stimson to order Dad to Washington to become one of the few people briefed on the thermonuclear device, and asked to think about if and how it should be used.

Like many of his era, Arthur W. Page believed strongly in education. He involved himself in the affairs of Teachers College, Columbia, and was active in the founding of Bennington College, in addition to his interest in Harvard.

Despite this, he was far from an elitist. Indeed, he had an abiding faith in the judgement of the ordinary man. He was, if you will, a Jeffersonian. He was suspicious of the non-working or non-involved rich. Society per se bored him, and he avoided it. He was not cultural -- art and music were not his interests. He recognized their place in society but never really involved himself.

He commissioned two paintings in his life -- one of whaling ships in Cold Spring Harbor, his home on Long Island, and the other of the engine and cars of the Aberdeen & West End Railroad. Both reflected his interest in history rather than art.

He really never understood plant operations, the union movement or labor per se. He didn't use "staff" in the modern sense. He wrote his own memos, his own speeches. He wrote the book on the Bell System in answer to the Senate investigation in a very short time, and nearly all of it at home after dinner.

He was a shabby dresser and avoided perks, he was embarrassed when Gifford sent the car for him, preferring to ride the subway. After the war, he rode the Third Avenue Elevated to work, mainly because it wasn't crowded but also, I suspect, because he knew that the sister engine to that used on the family railroad had been used originally on the Third Avenue Railroad.

Arthur W. Page was better at making the bullets than shooting them. He tended to work in the background, putting together the arguments and people needed to effect change or to make decisions.

How was he as a father? Because he was busy and heavily involved, one might suspect he might not have had time or interest for his family. This was decidedly not true. He always had time to advise and, above all, to listen. Two stories illustrate this point:

Somewhere in the mid-1930s, when I was becoming aware of the world around me, I became terribly concerned about the inequities of the world. This culminated in my cornering him one evening and announcing that, "We were too rich."

Looking back this must have been a shock to a man who was trying to guide his family and the Bell System through the depression. But he never blinked an eye. Rather he encouraged me to talk further and then said, "Well, the Bible says the love of money is evil and that is so, but as you grow older you will find that having some of it will come in very handy." How right he was.

Another story.

My sophomore year at college I came home for the Christmas holidays. This was most pleasant, as always. The night before I was due to return he called me aside and asked if I had anything to tell him. "No," I said. He then produced a form letter with my name typed in to the effect that I had been dropped from the university and that I had been so informed. I said that I knew nothing of it and besides, I knew no reason for such an action and that it must be a mistake. He said he thought that must be the case, or I would have talked to him about it.

Well, it was a mistake. But note the confidence and faith in me he displayed, leaving it to the last moment. It was hard to not love and respect such a parent.

But beyond this he was a great teacher -- always talking to us of the world he was involved in and, when he could, being sure we met people of substance. To have dinner with them or to hear him discuss what they said or were doing was a great educational experience. He was following in his father's footsteps, and I and the rest of his children were benefactors of this.

Two last stories -- one which is appropriate for you "word warriors," for it makes the point that you should not always believe what you read, or perhaps what you write.

An official biography of Arthur W. Page would say he was a prominent yachtsman and member of the New York Yacht Club. This description connotes a demanding skipper ordering his crew about and someone one who was heavily involved in the affairs of the NYYC.

The truth is, it was my mother who taught him and we children how to sail. He was a loyal crew (and let's face it, a provider of the boats). He was a member of the New York Yacht Club but only because he decided to buy a certain class of boat and only then found out that in order to do so, one had to become a member. He was not the skipper. He left that to my older brothers or my mother. His pleasure was in watching his crew, the members of his family, sail and race the boats.

And now the last story, one I believe he would like me to tell on this occasion.

Not long before Dad retired from the Bell System, Jack Joseph, the Vice President of Public Relations at Ohio Bell, asked Arthur W. Page to come to cleveland to address the public relations group.

I was a member of Jack's department. After the speech and the appropriate polite questions, etc., we were driving home. Availing myself of the impertinence available only to family, I said, "Dad, despite what they said, I thought you really didn't say a great deal or anything new." He laughed and said, "You are correct; one of the problems I have these days and one reason I plan to retire is that everyone expects me to be wise and Godlike in all my pronouncements. Frankly, I find playing God very difficult."