Background
Hoyt was born in New York City, in 1869, the son of Alfred Miller Hoyt, a wealthy wholesale flour and grain merchant, and Rosina Elizabeth Reese Hoyt, the niece of General William T. Sherman and Senator John Sherman.
Hoyt was born in New York City, in 1869, the son of Alfred Miller Hoyt, a wealthy wholesale flour and grain merchant, and Rosina Elizabeth Reese Hoyt, the niece of General William T. Sherman and Senator John Sherman.
After four undistinguished years at St. Paul's School, in Concord, N. H. , Hoyt entered the Columbia School of Mines, receiving the C. E. degree in 1890. He then did graduate work at the University of Berlin.
At the urging of William H. Woodin, a close friend whom he had met at Columbia, Hoyt joined the Jackson and Woodin Manufacturing Company in Berwick, Pa. , a large manufacturer of railroad equipment. He worked first in the machine shop and then in the foundry; within a year he was shop superintendent. In 1893 he became the company's New York representative and continued in that position after the company, now headed by his friend Woodin, joined with others in 1899 to form the American Car and Foundry Company (later ACF Industries).
In 1902, Hoyt returned to Berwick to organize with Woodin the Berwick Malleable Company, which functioned as a supplier to Car and Foundry until it was absorbed into that company in 1906. Shortly after Woodin became the president of Car and Foundry, Hoyt became a director, serving from 1917 to 1951. Hoyt and Woodin were also associates in several other enterprises, notably Hoyt and Woodin Manufacturing Company and Good Land Cypress Company, which for approximately twenty years cut and marketed oak and cypress in Mississippi and Louisiana. When Woodin left Car and Foundry to join Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, Hoyt founded (1934) the Cinaudagraph Corporation to research high-fidelity sound reproduction, and established (1936) at Stamford, Connecticut, a factory to produce a new type of loudspeaker. He remained president of this company until 1940.
Hoyt's humanitarianism began quite early. In 1887 he decided to "try to give half my time for my own livelihood and half to the young"; he purchased a farm in Pawling, N. Y. , which he ran every summer for the next sixteen years as a fresh-air camp. His dedication was reinforced by a family noted for its Christian devotion for several generations. His father advised him in a letter on his twenty-first birthday to be "high-minded, honorable, and a man of character. " When a favorite sister died in 1891, Hoyt was brought to "the realization of our transitory life here and the absolute existence of a future life hereafter, and all guided by a power greater than ourselves. "
His service with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) began in the winter of 1890-1891, when he helped run a program in Berlin. He was on local boards in Berwick and on New York's West Side before serving as a member from 1906 to 1919 of the international committee, where he held office in the industrial department. He was an original member of the autonomous National War Work Council, organized by the international committee after the United States entered World War I.
Hoyt devoted so much time to its operations that a council vice-chairmanship was soon created for him. Responsible for organizing and supervising American YMCA operations overseas, he made two trips to the front lines. The Hoyt commission's arrival in France in October 1917 "marked the beginning of full appreciation by American lay leaders of the magnitude of the task and the absolute necessity of fully implementing the requests of the European staff. " The next year criticism of YMCA activities at the front forced Hoyt to make a rare public statement, in which he praised the association's efforts during the fighting in the Argonne.
After the war Hoyt ended his major activities with the YMCA and concentrated on Christodora House, a New York settlement house, and on the Boy Scouts of America, of which he was one of the founders. In June 1910 Hoyt attended in New York the organizing meeting of the Boy Scouts of America and was soon on the national council. Elected to the executive board in September 1911, he worked on the finance committee until 1950, serving as its first chairman from 1911 to 1932. He was vice-president from 1926 to 1950 and was a member of the executive committee of the executive board from 1931 to 1949. On at least two occasions, however, he refused the presidency of the organization. Hoyt also helped found what became in 1928 the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center by bringing Babies' Hospital, of which he was president from 1908 to 1928, into cooperation with Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University in 1925.
Hoyt died in White Plains, N. Y.
Hoyt was shy and modest and disliked publicity.
Quotes from others about the person
Arthur A. Schuck, onetime Chief Scout Executive, said of Hoyt, "As a pioneer in the early days, his wise counsel meant much to the establishment of the Movement. "
In 1895 he married Ethel Valentina Phelps Stokes, whose family had a long and distinguished record of religious and philanthropic service. They had six children.
