Alanson Bigelow Houghton was an American glass manufacturer, Congressman, and diplomat.
Background
Alanson B. Houghton was born on October 10, 1863, in Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. He was the second of five children and elder son of Amory and Ellen Ann (Bigelow) Houghton. Both parents were natives of Boston; his father's forebear, John Houghton, had come to Massachusetts from England about 1650. Alanson's grandfather Amory Houghton, Sr. , who had operated a small glass factory in Massachusetts since 1851, moved the family in 1864 to Brooklyn, N. Y. , where he and Amory, Jr. , took control of the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company; in 1868 they moved to Corning, N. Y. , and founded the Corning Flint Glass Company. This business failed and was sold in 1871, but Alanson's father stayed on as manager. Four years later he formed his own company, the Corning Glass Works, which specialized in the manufacture of railway signal glass, thermometer tubing, and pharmaceutical glass.
Education
Alanson attended the Corning public schools, St. Paul's School in Concord, N. H. , and Harvard College, where he graduated, A. B. magna cum laude, in 1886. Planning a scholarly career, he spent the next three years in Europe studying political economy at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin, and Paris.
Career
While abroad he completed an article on Italian finance for the Quarterly Journal of Economics (January and April 1889) and contributed background material for a chapter in James Bryce's The American Commonwealth. In 1889, however, his father fell ill, and Houghton was called into the rapidly expanding family business. Starting out as a shipping clerk in order to learn the business from the ground up, he became vice-president for sales in 1903, president in 1910, and chairman of the board in 1918. During his presidency the Corning Glass Works trebled in size, a growth attributed in part to his salesmanship, to war contracts, and to the invention of heat-resistant Pyrex glass. Under Houghton the company also developed the first standardized railway signal glass and in 1908 established one of the first industrial research laboratories.
As the glass works flourished, the Houghton family increasingly came to dominate the civic and religious life of the community. Alanson served as president of the Corning board of education and of the Protestant Episcopal Board of Religious Education of Western New York. A generous contributor to the Republican party, he was a presidential elector in 1904 and 1916. In 1918 he was elected to the first of two terms in Congress. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and then of the Ways and Means Committee, he was considered a diligent and intelligent legislator. Houghton resigned his seat in 1922 when President Harding selected him as America's first postwar ambassador to Germany.
Houghton believed that a stable Europe, with a reintegrated, democratic Germany, was necessary both to ensure a future market for a growing American surplus and to check the potential threat of Soviet Russia. At a time when the war reparations issue was becoming inflamed, with the French taking a hard line, Houghton advocated a friendly attitude toward Germany, which he regarded as abiding faithfully by its treaty obligations. His cordial relations with the German people contributed to his effectiveness in persuading a reluctant Weimar government to accept the Dawes Plan in 1924. Houghton's pro-German sympathies were resented by both the British and the French. Nevertheless, when Frank B. Kellogg was appointed Secretary of State in 1925, President Coolidge chose Houghton to replace him as ambassador to Great Britain; and despite initial misgivings, the British quickly found him to be a sincere friend.
In the next few years, Houghton achieved some notoriety as an outspoken diplomat. In May 1925, in a warning clearly aimed at France, he declared that the United States would stop sending money to Europe if the powers continued to arm for war. Back in the United States in the spring of 1926, he told Coolidge that the Locarno agreements, which sought to establish a military and diplomatic balance in Europe, were in jeopardy; this pessimistic report sparked a heated debate in Congress and the press. In a speech at Harvard in June 1927 he called for new peace machinery including one-hundred-year nonaggression pacts which would be submitted to popular referenda, thus putting the issues of war and peace directly into the hands of the people. For the rest of his life Houghton was closely associated with peace causes and was a trustee and treasurer of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Houghton returned to the United States in 1928 to run for the Senate, but lost to his Democratic opponent, Dr. Royal S. Copeland. Although he resigned his ambassadorship the following year, he remained interested in politics. Along with his old friend Frank O. Lowden and President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, he sought in 1931 to improve the sagging image of the Republican party and thus prevent its defeat in 1932. During the 1930's he was active in educational and religious organizations and in 1934 was elected chairman of the board of directors of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N. J. Dignified and somewhat reserved, Houghton had the respect of his employees and enjoyed a warm family life. He died of cardiac failure owing to arteriosclerosis at his summer home in South Dartmouth, Massachussets, in 1941 and was buried in Hope Cemetery Annex in Corning.
Achievements
Connections
Houghton married Adelaide Louise Wellington of Corning on June 25, 1891, and the couple had five children: Eleanor Wickham, Amory, Quincy Wellington, Matilda, and Elizabeth.