John Green Brady was an American politician and a territorial governor of Alaska. He is distinguished for his three term service as Territorial Governor of Alaska, from 1897 to 1906 and for carrying out a policy pursuing Native Alaskan civil rights.
Background
John Green Brady was born on May 25, 1848 in New York City and was a son of James and Catherine Brady. His mother died when he was very young and his father married again. At the age of eight he ran away from home, was picked up as a street waif, and was taken to Randall's Island.
Three years later he was sent by the Children's Aid Society, along with a number of other boys, to Noblesville, Ind. , where he was taken by John Green, a philanthropist, who put him to work on his farm.
Education
John Brady received his general education at Randall's Island, where he was cared for and sent to school.
At nineteen Brady began to teach at Mud Creek, Indiana, and later prepared for college at the Waveland, Indiana, Collegiate Institute. In 1870 he entered Yale, where he supported himself mainly by his own exertions. He was graduated in 1874 and spent the next three years at Union Seminary in New York, graduating in 1877.
Career
John Green Brady became manager of the Sitka Trading Company and at the same time founded an independent mission where he put into effect his theory of combining industrial and religious instruction. In 1884 he was appointed one of four United States commissioners to Alaska by President Arthur and held the position till 1889. In 1897 he was appointed governor of Alaska by President McKinley, and four years later he was reappointed by the same official.
In 1905 he was appointed for a third term by President Theodore Roosevelt but was removed by him in 1906 because of his connection with a fraudulent enterprise in which he had innocently invested heavily and had persuaded others to invest. He was at length fully exonerated and spent several years in work that finally reimbursed the stockholders.
He supported the policy of the importation of reindeer so conspicuously advocated by Sheldon Jackson. Articles by Brady on various phases of the Alaskan question appeared in the Chautauquan (September 1896), and the Independent (January 18, 1900, December 29, 1904, June 24, 1909).
He died on December 17, 1918 in Sitka and was buried in Sitka National Cemetery in Sitka, Alaska, and the last rites were conducted by his native friends and former pupils.
Achievements
John Green Brady served three terms as Territorial Governor of Alaska, from 1897 to 1906. The main focus he pursued as a governor concentrated on Native Alaskan civil rights. Even though he was forced to resign in 1906 due to his alleged involvement with the Reynolds-Alaska Development Company, he was later exonerated. As governor, Brady was master of the situation during the Klondike gold rush and handled the difficult problems of that excited time in a very competent manner. Few men if any knew Alaska as well as Brady, and he probably did more than any other man of his time to acquaint the American public with its resources and its needs.
His also regarded for co-founding what is now Sheldon Jackson College as a school for training Alaska Natives in 1878.
Religion
During his seminary years John Brady was actively engaged in city mission work and after graduation secured a tract of land in Texas, where he hoped to establish a farm for the education and Christianization of New York street boys. This project failed through lack of financial support, and in 1878 he went to Alaska and established his home in Sitka, where he remained, except for brief intervals, for the remainder of his life.
He began work in Alaska as a missionary of the Presbyterian Church. After a short time he concluded that the best way to convert the Indians was to combine industrial training with religious instruction, but his ideas were unacceptable to the Board, and after eighteen months he severed his connection with it.
Views
Brady wrote and lectured widely on its agricultural possibilities, its need of conservation laws, schools, railroads, lighthouses, and telegraph and mail facilities. He urged that the people be given the right to own the land and that the suffrage be extended to those who were fitted to exercise it. He opposed the government policy of prohibition and thought that high license with strict enforcement was better.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Brady went to live with the family of John Green, of Tipton County, Indiana. Judge John Green recalled, "I decided to take John Brady home with me because I considered him the homeliest, toughest, most unpromising boy in the whole lot. I had a curious desire to see what could be made of such a specimen of humanity. "
Connections
On October 20, 1887, John Green Brady was married to Elizabeth Jane Patton of Cochrantown, Pennsylvania, who with their five children survived him.
