James Graham Phelps Stokes

James Graham Phelps Stokes, known as Graham Stokes (March 18, 1872 – April 8, 1960) was an American socialist, railroad president, political activist, and philanthropist. He grew up in a large house on 229 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The family fortune came from Manhattan real estate, the Phelps Dodge mining empire, a and railroad in Nevada. 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.

In 1902, Stocks moved to the Lower East Side to take up settlement work.

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 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. Stokes was the second name on a ticket that featured William Randolph Hearst for Mayor of New York, causing contemporaries to refer to the Municipal Ownership League as "Hearst's League." The decision to run down the ticket with the multimillionaire publisher was not a popular one with Stokes' radical new wife, who wanted defeat for Hearst and his associates. She later recalled:

"One evening, passing my living-room window, I heard Graham's name flung upward from the street below. I leaned out to see. A very fiery young man was making a speech from a soapbox on the corner. A little knot of men, women, and children had collected about him. He was pointing up at my window—at me. He was saying things about us. I strained to hear... 'Municipal Ownership is no solution,' he cried, 'so long as the propertied classes own the municipalities. J.G. Phelps Stokes is a rich man—a man of property; he belongs to the capitalist class. The Municipal Ownership League is a rich man's creation. W.R. Hearst belongs to the millionaire class. This is his government. He doesn't want to change the government. The Socialist Party, the workers' party, and what we want is a government of, for, and by the people who work.' 'Hear, hear!' I called down, leaning far out of the window and clapping my hands. The campaign did well, but Stokes was disillusioned with the reform movement at the end of the campaign. The first formal meeting of the organization, held at a restaurant in New York City late in the summer of 1905, elected Stokes as second vice president of the ISS, serving with London as president and Sinclair as first vice president. thumb In May 1907, London resigned from the ISS presidency and Stokes assumed the position. Stokes had a leading role in the organization for the next decade, serving as president until 1917 and speaking far and wide on topics of contemporary concern under ISS auspices.

Stokes ran for New York State Assembly in 1908 as a Socialist candidate.

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. 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. 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." In April 1926, he married Lettice Lee Sands at the Liberal Catholic Church. Stokes invited Bab to stay at his Greenwich Village home at 88 Grove Street whenever he was in New York.