Henry Matson Waite was an American civil engineer and public administrator.
Background
Henry Matson Waite was born in Toledo, Ohio, the second son and second child of Henry Selden Waite and Ione (Brown) Waite. His maternal grandfather, Joseph W. Brown, was a brother of Jacob W. Brown and a prominent figure in the early history of Michigan, serving as territorial chief justice and as major general of the state militia. His paternal grandfather, Morrison R. Waite, was Chief Justice of the United States. Waite's father, who had been born in Connecticut, moved west to Ohio around 1850, served for a time as assistant city engineer of Maumee, and then settled at nearby Toledo, where he went into business.
Education
Henry Waite was educated in the public schools of Toledo and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He graduated in 1890 with a B. S. degree in civil engineering.
Career
He found work as a transitman with a surveying crew on the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, and in 1892 advanced to engineer of maintenance of way. The following year he took a position with the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railway, serving first as division engineer (1893 - 99), then successively as bridge engineer, roadmaster, and superintendent of the railway's Cincinnati division (1899 - 1905), and finally as superintendent of its Chattanooga division (1905 - 07). From 1907 to 1909 he was general superintendent of the Seaboard Air Line Railway. He then left the railroad industry to become vice-president and chief engineer of the Clinchfield Coal Corporation in Dante, Va. Waite entered public service in 1912 as chief engineer of the City of Cincinnati. Two years later, when Dayton, Ohio, adopted the city manager form of municipal government, Waite was appointed city manager there. Dayton was still recovering from the disastrous Ohio Valley floods of 1913, and Waite immediately initiated a flood-control program that eventually put an end to the annual destruction wrought by the Ohio River and its tributaries. An able and public-spirited administrator, he reorganized the city government, employing experts where needed, and energetically promoted a more efficient system of food inspection, a correctional farm for workhouse prisoners, free legal aid and employment bureaus, and new recreational centers. He left this position in 1918, following America's entry into World War I, in order to serve in Europe as a colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers. On his return to civilian life in 1919, Waite became vice-president and chief engineer of the Lord Construction Company of New York City, and the following year president of its subsidiary, the Lord Dry Dock Corporation. He soon resigned, however, to establish an independent consulting practice in New York, which he maintained until 1927. In that year he was appointed chief engineer of the newly organized Cincinnati Union Terminal Company, with responsibility for the planning and construction of a new union station in Cincinnati. Begun in 1929, this proved to be the last of the great metropolitan railway terminals. Since its track and approach system required the unification of rail lines previously disposed in the most disorganized pattern of any American city, it embodied many novel structural features. It was also the first big station to be designed (by the achitectural firm of Fellheimer and Wagner) in the modern style. After completion of the Cincinnati Union Terminal in 1933, Waite went to Washington, D. C. , to help in the planning of one of the emergency relief agencies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Public Works Administration. Together with Col. George R. Spalding of the Army Corps of Engineers, he organized a tentative staff, and when the PWA came into being in June, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed Waite as its deputy administrator, a post which carried the responsibility of deciding the merits of the hundreds of projects submitted for federal aid. Waite's plan for a decentralized organization, however, was opposed by Ickes, who felt it jeopardized his role as administrator. Waite resigned in September 1934, but remained on friendly terms with Ickes, who privately described him as a man of "imagination and character". Waite next became the director (1934 - 37) of the Regional Department of Economic Security, a nongovernmental agency at Cincinnati, where he supervised an unemployment survey. He returned to federal service as technical adviser to the National Youth Administration and consultant to the National Resources Committee (later the National Resources Planning Board) from 1937 to 1940. Meanwhile, in 1937, he had established a consulting office in Cincinnati. At the request of Ickes, he also served as chairman of the transportation committee of the Chicago Subway Commission, under whose auspices the city's first subway was built (1938 - 43). From 1940 until his death he was director of the War Projects Unit of the federal Bureau of the Budget. Waite's government service in World War II took him again to Washington, D. C. , and it was there that he died, at the age of seventy-five, of bronchial asthma. He was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati.
Achievements
For his public achievements at Dayton and Cincinnati, Waite received honorary degrees from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, and the University of Cincinnati.
Interests
His versatility in professional life was matched in private life by a lively interest in music, literature, painting, and the theatre.
Connections
On April 15, 1914, he married Mary Mason Brown of Lexington, Ky. They had no children.
