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Edward Roland Noel Harriman was an American financier and philanthropist. He was a co-founder of Harriman Brothers and Company, served as the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad for 23 years, and was one of the seven directors of the Union Banking Corporation.
Background
Edward Roland Noel Harriman was born on December 24, 1895 in New York City. He was the youngest of five surviving children of Edward Henry Harriman, a financier and executive of the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific railroads, and Mary Williamson Averell. Among his siblings was William Averell Harriman, the financier and government official, four years his senior.
Edward H. Harriman's estate was substantial, variously estimated between $70 million and $100 million upon his death in 1909. When his family lived at 1 East Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan, Harriman played on the city streets and in Central Park. When he was ten years old, the family acquired a house at 1 East Sixty-ninth Street in New York City.
His was no ordinary childhood, however; his summers were spent at the 20, 000-acre family homestead in Orange and Rockland counties, New York. Named Arden House, it was given to Averell by his mother in 1916; he, in turn, gave it to Columbia University in 1950, for use as a conference center. There were also cruises on the family's yacht, Sultana, kept docked at Newburgh, on the Hudson River, and holidays at Island Park, the family ranch on the Snake River in Idaho.
Harriman's father took the family on most of his business trips; the boy had been in every state in the union but two (Alabama and North Dakota) by the time he was nine years old. When his father was ordered by his doctor to reduce his work load, the elder Harriman organized a scientific expedition to Alaska in 1899, which included among its scientists John Muir and John Burroughs. The group reached the Bering Sea. When the elder Harriman visited Japan in an attempt to link the steamship subsidiaries of his railroads with the Manchurian railroad in 1905, the family accompanied him. There were also many family trips to Europe.
Education
Harriman was educated at Groton, from which he graduated in 1913, and Yale, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1917. At Yale he majored in history and rowed on the varsity crew.
Career
During World War I, Harriman served for ten months as an inspector with the rank of lieutenant in the United States Army Ordnance Department. Stricken with pneumonia and influenza, he was honorably discharged in January 1919. After regaining his health in California, he joined the Merchants Shipbuilding Corporation that November, a firm in which his brother Averell had an interest.
In 1922, Harriman joined W. A. Harriman Company, investment bankers in New York City, under the tutelage of his brother. The following year, he was made a vice-president; in 1927 the two brothers formed the banking firm Harriman Brothers and Company, and in 1931 the firm was merged with Brown Brothers and Company, with Roland as vice-president. Headquartered on Wall Street, Brown Brothers Harriman started with nine partners and about two hundred employees.
In 1975, a few years prior to Harriman's death, there were twenty-nine partners and approximately one thousand employees. Nevertheless, its $360 million in assets in 1978 was a small fraction of such competitors as First National City Bank with its $18 billion in assets. As the firm grew, it husbanded its capital and maintained its partnership status while a competitor, J. P. Morgan and Company was forced to go public in 1940 upon the death of three of its partners. To forestall such a contingency, the Harriman brothers stipulated in their wills that their shares in the partnership should remain in the firm upon their deaths. The firm performed specialized banking services for customers, mainly medium-sized corporations; it was not a member of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Its extensive overseas activities included a brisk stock brokerage business with English and Scottish investment firms.
In 1968, Harriman and three other senior partners at Brown Brothers (Robert A. Lovett, secretary of defense under President Harry Truman; Prescott S. Bush, former senator from Connecticut; and Knight Woolley - all Yale men) moved "upstairs, " literally and figuratively, to make way for the younger partners, one of whom was Robert Roosa, former undersecretary of the Treasury. Harriman was president of the Bear Mountain Hudson River Bridge Company, which built the Bear Mountain Bridge (opened in 1924), making nearby state parkland more accessible from the east. Financing was arranged by W. A. Harriman and Company. His directorships at various times included the American Bank Note Company, the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, the Mutual Life Insurance of New York, the Oregon-Washington Railroad and Navigation Company, the Union Pacific Railroad (succeeding his brother Averell in 1946 as board chairman), the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, the Oregon Short Line, the Royal Exchange Assurance Company, and Weekly Publications, publisher of Newsweek.
Harriman followed the philanthropic example of his mother and father. For example, he contributed to, and for a time was president of, the Boy's Club of New York, founded by his father. He and his wife established the Irving Sherwood Wright professorship in geriatrics at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. He joined the American Red Cross as a member of the board of governors in 1947, helped reorganize it after World War II, served as manager for the organization's North Atlantic area from 1944 to 1946, was its vice-president and national annual fund appeal chair in 1949, and was appointed its president by President Truman, to succeed General George Marshall in 1950. President Dwight Eisenhower reappointed him president in 1953.
Harriman founded the Trotting Horse Club of America in 1924 and made it responsible for publishing the Wallace's Register and the Year-book (which he purchased when they stopped publishing), to maintain breeding and racing records; assisted in the formation of the U. S. Trotting Association in 1938; and owned and operated the Historic Track in Goshen, New York.
Harriman died in Arden, New York.
Achievements
Edward Roland Noel Harriman was a prominent financier and philanthropist, who served prominently as the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad and one of the seven directors of the Union Banking Corporation. Harriman hepled establish the Irving Sherwood Wright professorship in geriatrics at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, and provided funds for cardiovascular research at the hospital, and also helped reorganize the American Red Cross.
Politically, Harriman was a conservative Republican. An advocate of balanced budgets, he wrote articles on the subject for the Saturday Evening Post and the Review of Reviews in 1935; his speech on WEAF radio in August 1937 on the topic was reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day (1937).
His views were in sharp contrast with those of his brother Averell, who left the Republicans in 1928 to vote for Governor Al Smith of New York for the presidency. As a Democrat, Averell became a New Deal administrator under Franklin D. Roosevelt, ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, and governor of New York. Of their political differences, Roland said, "everything we have done in our business careers has been 50-50. I would say we are also 50-50 politically, because he is a Democrat and I am a Republican. "
Membership
Harriman was a steward of the Trotting Horse Club, president of the Orange County Driving Park Association, and president of the Hambletonian Society.
His other philanthropic board memberships included that of the American Museum of Natural History, for which he was also treasurer.
Interests
Sport & Clubs
Harriman's father owned and raced trotting horses, so that it was not surprising that he became interested in the sport. Indeed, he was racing horses as an amateur by the time he was sixteen. Later this interest became a more serious avocation.
Connections
Harriman married Gladys C. C. Fries on April 12, 1917; they had two children.
