Abram Piatt Andrew was an American economist, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the founder and director of the American Ambulance Field Service during World War I, and a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
Background
Abram Piatt Andrew was born on February 12, 1873 in La Porte, Indiana, United States, the older of two children and only son of Abram Piatt and Helen (Merrell) Andrew.
He came of a prominent Indiana family. His grandfather, Abraham Piatt Andrew, had been one of the founders of La Porte, where he and a brother operated a store and owned the first steam sawmill in the county.
Andrew's father, after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, joined Abraham Andrew in founding a bank (1869), in which he remained active for sixty years.
Education
Young Andrew went to Lawrenceville School and then to Princeton, where he took part in debating and was class valedictorian.
Graduating in 1893, he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard, spending two years also at the universities of Halle, Berlin, and Paris (1897-1899), and received his Ph. D. from Harvard in 1900.
Career
From 1899 to 1909 he taught economics at Harvard, at first as instructor, after 1903 as assistant professor. Among the students on whom his teaching made an impress was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Andrew's public service began as expert assistant and editor of publications of the National Monetary Commission, set up under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908 to propose reforms in the banking system. On the recommendation of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich took Andrew with him on his survey of European banking systems in 1908. Thereafter he became, along with George M. Reynolds, Henry P. Davison, Paul M. Warburg, and Frank A. Vanderlip, one of the inner core of advisers in the drafting of the famous "Aldrich Plan. "
In addition, Andrew was Director of the Mint from November 1909 to June 1910 and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, 1910-1912. This last position he resigned in disgust, writing to President Taft that the department had been hampered by the idiosyncrasies and incapacity for decision of Secretary Franklin MacVeagh. During the period 1910-1912 he was also treasurer of the American Red Cross.
The Republican defeat in 1912 and the outbreak of war in 1914 turned Andrew's interest in other directions. A group of Americans in Paris at the time of the first Battle of the Marne (1914) organized an emergency ambulance unit operating out of Paris. Andrew soon reorganized this and developed it into the famous American Field Service, made up of college volunteers. Attached at first to the French army, it was in September 1917 transferred to the American forces, and Andrew was commissioned a major. A year later he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. The United States, France, and Belgium all gave him high decorations for this war service.
After the war Andrew helped to found the American Legion and later became vice-commander for Massachusetts, where he then resided. Turning to politics, he was elected to the House of Representatives in the fall of 1921 to fill a vacancy and served continuously in the next seven Congresses (1923-1936). He was a delegate to the 1924 and 1928 Republican National Conventions.
He urged the reduction of World War I debts and the repeal of prohibition (1930), opposed the soldier's bonus in 1932 because of the Treasury's large deficit, and was an enthusiastic supporter of a large and efficient navy. Princeton University gave him an honorary A. M. in 1923 and later made him a trustee.
In the spring of 1936 he went home to Gloucester, Massachussets, to recuperate from influenza and died there, of cerebral thrombosis, in June. In accordance with his will, services were held jointly by a Catholic priest, a Baptist minister, and a Jewish rabbi.
Andrew died on June3, 1936. His remains were cremated and the ashes scattered from an airplane flying over his estate on Eastern Point in Gloucester.
Politics
Andrew was an active member of the Republican party.
Personality
Andrew was conservative but independent in his thinking and not afraid to express his views.
