Aldrich
Aldrich names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Aldrich NELSON WILMARTH, an American politician
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
NELSON WILMARTH, an American politician, born in Foster, spent R. I., in 1841. His Hi early life was in business and he became a partner in a wholesale grocery firm in Providence. He early showed an interest in and capacity for politics and was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives in 1875. Within a few years he was the chief political power in the State. He was elected to Congress in 1878, but resigned in 1881 to enter the Senate, to which he was successfully re-elected until 1911. His powerful personality and his deep knowledge of business and economics from the political standpoint made him a pow powerful factor in the Senate, especially in relation to measures affecting the tariff. He was chiefly responsible for the McKinley Bill in 1890. Greatly interested in financial matters, he was largely responsible for the Aldrich-Vreeland Currency Law. At the height of his power he was the most dominant figure in the Senate. At the expiration of his term in 1911 he declined renomination, undoubtedly foreseeing the conditions that were about to result from the splitting up of the Republican party, which took place in the following year. He was a chief authority on banking and finance and through his efforts banking laws were greatly improved. After his retirement he took no active part in politics, and died on April 16, 1915.
Aldrich THOMAS BAILEY, an American poet
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
THOMAS BAILEY, an American poet, essayist, and writer of fiction, born in Portsmouth, N. H., Nov. 11, 1836. He spent his early youth in Louisiana, but at the age of 17 entered a mercantile house in New York. Removing to Boston in 1866, he became editor of "Every Saturday," and, in 1881, editor of the "Atlantic Monthly." He has become almost equally eminent as a prose writer and poet. Among his prose works the best known are: "The Story of a Bad Boy" (1870); "Marjorie Daw and Other People" (1873); "Prudence Palfrey" (1874); "The Queen of Sheba," a romance of travel (1877); Of "The Stillwater Tragedy" (1880). his poems, most are included in "Complete Poems" (1882) and "Household He died in Boston, Edition" (1895). Mass., March 19, 1907.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's, writing in 1921, credited Nelson W. Aldrich with the Aldrich-Vreeland Currency Law but stopped short of its sequel: the National Monetary Commission he chaired, and the secret 1910 meeting of bankers at Jekyll Island, Georgia, produced the plan that became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Historians now treat him less as a tariff expert than as the archetype of the boss-run Senate that the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, was meant to end; his daughter Abby married John D. Rockefeller Jr., and his grandson Nelson Rockefeller became vice-president in 1974. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's standing has gone the other way. Once ranked with the leading American men of letters and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, he is now read almost solely for The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), remembered as the model Mark Twain built on in Tom Sawyer; his Portsmouth boyhood house is preserved as a museum.
Written for this edition, 2026.