James Herbert McGraw was born in Panama, Chautauqua County, New York. He was the youngest of five sons and eighth of nine children. His parents, Patrick and Catharine McGraw, had emigrated from Ireland about 1849 and after a few years in Canada had moved to western New York, where they operated a dairy farm.
An ambitious and determined lad with a strong didactic streak, James was first drawn to teaching, and in 1884-1885, following his graduation from the state normal school in Fredonia, he served as a school principal in Corfu, N. Y.
In 1885 McGraw joined the American Railway Publishing Company of New York, in which one of his former teachers had an interest, and was sent first to Boston and then to Philadelphia as subscription salesman for one of its periodicals, the American Journal of Railway Appliances. Soon thereafter, on the strength of a $1, 000 investment borrowed from a wealthy Chautauqua County farmer of his acquaintance, he became a stockholder and vice-president of the nearly bankrupt company and moved to New York City. The strong will that was one of his dominant characteristics emerged early, and in 1888 he broke with his partners and bought them out. The clash turned in part on their conflicting estimates of the importance of the electric streetcars that were then supplanting horse cars. McGraw had at once perceived that the future lay with electricity. Now sole owner and publisher of the American Journal of Railway Appliances (and soon of the Street Railway Journal, also acquired from his former partners in 1889), he built on this slight foundation a remarkable and complex industrial and technical publishing empire. At this crucial stage of his career he received important financial support from Curtis E. Whittlesey of Corfu. McGraw's mode of operation was to acquire several small and competing technical publications, to consolidate them into a single periodical, and to give them the benefit of his steadily expanding editorial, production, and marketing facilities. In 1899, for example, he purchased Electrical World, combined it with two other electrical magazines he had bought over the preceding three years, and made it a leader in the field. In 1899 he also incorporated the McGraw Publishing Company, with himself as president and his father-in-law as treasurer. From periodicals, McGraw moved into the field of technical and scientific books. In 1909 he merged his book list with that of a rival publisher, John Alexander Hill; in 1917, a year after Hill's death, the two firms were combined to form the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, with the McGraw-Hill Book Company as a subsidiary. In the decade that followed, as president of both the parent firm and its book-publishing subsidiary, McGraw won unchallenged supremacy in the field of technical publishing with such periodicals as Power, American Machinist, Coal Age, Engineering News-Record, and the Contractor. The book list, comprising 250 titles in 1909, was systematically expanded under the joint direction of Martin M. Foss and Edward Caldwell.
Typical of the profitable and highly respected titles bearing the McGraw-Hill imprint was A Manual of Engineering Drawing for Students and Draftsmen (1911), by Prof. Thomas E. French of Ohio State, which in various revisions was to sell nearly two million copies in the succeeding half-century. The textbook department, aimed initially at the college market and then at the high school market as well, also made rapid strides.
During most of McGraw's career the family lived in Madison, N. J. In 1904, while chairman of the Morris County Republican Committee (1900 - 1908), McGraw was a delegate to the party's national convention. In 1925 McGraw, in poor health, retired as president of the McGraw-Hill Book Company and in 1928 as president of the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. He remained as chairman of the board, but extended vacations in the West took up more and more of his time. He was thus not intimately involved in such important McGraw-Hill developments as the founding of the highly successful magazine Business Week (1929), the firm's tentative entry into the trade book field under the Whittlesey House imprint (1930), or the construction (1930 - 1931) of the distinctive McGraw-Hill Building on 42nd Street, a Manhattan landmark. He retired completely in 1935 and spent his final years in San Francisco, where he died of bronchopneumonia in 1948 at the age of eighty-seven. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Morristown, N. J.
McGraw's remarkably successful career was, from one perspective, simply a by-product of the technological revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, for he supplied the channels of communication by which the leaders of that revolution kept in touch, announced new developments, advertised their wares, and transmitted their know-how to a new generation of technocrats. But McGraw also brought a unique combination of personal qualities to his profession. He insisted that his periodicals and books conform to the highest editorial and visual standards, and that each be written or edited by a recognized specialist. He was willing to pay well for such talent, and he possessed a keen sense of when to make a major commitment to a new area. Although delegating authority did not come easily to him, he recognized its practical necessity and gave wide autonomy to subordinates, provided they could withstand the rigorous and unpredictable grillings to which he periodically subjected them. A somewhat intimidating figure in his mature years, with stern visage and precise white goatee, he had a habit, when irritated, "of moving his jaw up and down so that his whiskers came out at you almost like a porcupine".
McGraw married Mildred Whittlesey on June 8, 1887. The McGraws had four sons, all of whom eventually joined the family business: Harold Whittlesey (born 1889), James Herbert (1893), Curtis Whittlesey (1895), and Donald Curtis (1897). They also had a daughter, Catharine, born in 1899.
