A. Piatt Andrew
Biography:
ANDREW, Abram Piatt, Jr., a Representative from Massachusetts; born in La Porte, La Porte County, Ind., February 12, 1873; attended the public schools and the Lawrenceville (N.J.) School; was graduated from Princeton College in 1893; member of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1893-1898; pursued postgraduate studies in the Universities of Halle, Berlin, and Paris; moved to Gloucester, Mass., and was instructor and assistant professor of economics at Harvard University 1900-1909; expert assistant and editor of publications of the National Monetary Commission 1908-1911; director of the Mint 1909 and 1910; Assistant Secretary of the Treasury 1910-1912; served in France continuously for four and a half years during the First World War, first with the French Army and later with the United States Army; commissioned major, United States National Army, in September 1917 and promoted to lieutenant colonel in September 1918; elected as a Republican to the Sixty-seventh Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Willfred W. Lufkin; reelected to the Sixty-eighth and to the six succeeding Congresses and served from September 27, 1921, until his death; delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1924 and 1928; member of the board of trustees of Princeton University 1932-1936; died in Gloucester, Mass., June 3, 1936; remains were cremated and the ashes scattered from an airplane flying over his estate at Eastern Point, Gloucester, Mass.
("Andrew, Abram Piatt, Jr. (1873-1936)", Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, accessed September 2015, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=A000240.)
Congressman; director of American Field Service in France during WWII. Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury
A. Piatt Andrew played a crucial role in the formation of the Federal Reserve System. He was known as a scholar, a soldier, and a statesman throughout a varied career that took him from the lecture halls of Harvard University to the battlefields of France and on to the nation’s capital.
Andrew was born in La Porte, Indiana, in 1873, the son of a banker. After graduating from Princeton University in 1893, he traveled to Europe for further study and eventually earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1900.
Following his education, Andrew joined Harvard as an economics instructor and professor, a position he held until 1909. During his time at Harvard, he was widely published in scholarly journals, wrote for newspapers on business and economic topics, and counted a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt among his students.
Following the Panic of 1907, Andrew was tapped by Sen. Nelson Aldrich to work for a newly formed congressional panel charged with studying the causes behind the financial turmoil. Andrew served as an expert and editor for the National Monetary Commission, helping produce the commission’s extensive reports describing the financial system in other countries and the structural problems within the US financial system.
In 1909, Andrew, by now a well-known and recognized expert on financial and banking issues, was appointed by President William Howard Taft to serve as director of the US Mint. He quickly advanced within the Taft administration and was named an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department in 1910.
Later that year, Andrew was one of six men, including Sen. Aldrich, to attend a secret meeting on Jekyll Island Georgia, that was organized under the ruse of a duck hunt. But the group was actually there to develop a plan to restructure the country’s banking system; the plan they developed was the basic foundation for what would eventually be the Federal Reserve System.
After passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, Andrew left the United States and traveled to the front lines in France soon after the outbreak of war in Europe. With other volunteers, he established a battlefield ambulance service funded by donations from his American contacts and others. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the ambulance corps was attached to the US Army and became known as the American Field Service. Andrew was appointed a major in the Army and was eventually promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Following the war, Andrew returned to his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was elected to the US House of Representatives as a Republican in 1921, and he would continue to serve his district for fifteen years. While in Congress, he worked to help France resolve its war debts and also sought to repeal prohibition.
Andrew died suddenly in 1936 after a battle with influenza. A bridge named in his honor spans the Annisquam River in Gloucester.
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/people/a_piatt_andrew
