John Macrae was born on August 25, 1866, in Richmond, Virginia. He was the third of six children and oldest of three sons of John Hampden Macrae and Sheldena A. (Beach) Macrae.
His father, a railroad construction engineer, was a native of Richmond who had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point (1842 - 44).
While serving in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he was wounded and captured, and thus met the Union nurse from Hartford, Connecticut, whom he subsequently married.
Education
Young John, after a boyhood in Greenwich, Virginia, and attendance at public and private schools, left home to seek his fortune.
Career
Moving gradually northward, Macrae worked in a Baltimore factory at the age of sixteen, unsuccessfully sought a government surveyorship in Washington, D. C. , and late in 1885, at the age of nineteen, went to work as an office boy at the New York publishing firm of E. P. Dutton & Company. Dutton's, founded in Boston in 1852 by Edward Dutton and Lemuel Ide, had moved to New York City in 1869 and by the mid-1880's was operating a large retail bookstore as well as publishing titles in the religious and children's fields.
Edward Dutton quickly recognized Macrae's talents and in 1886 made him manager of the religious book division and sent him on the road as a salesman. On a business trip to Europe in 1895, Macrae reached reciprocal trade agreements with British and German publishers. Moving steadily up the ladder, he became the firm's secretary in 1901, vice-president in 1905, and vice-president/treasurer in 1914.
As Edward Dutton grew older, Macrae assumed an increasing share of the managerial responsibility, and with Dutton's death in 1923, he succeeded him as president, a position he was to hold until his own death on February 18, 1944. In 1941, Macrae had transferred a controlling stock interest in E. P. Dutton & Company to his son Elliott, who after his death became president, with John Macrae, Jr. , as chairman of the board.
Active to the end, Macrae died of a heart attack in 1944 at his home in New York City. After Episcopal services at New York's St. Thomas Church, he was buried in the churchyard at Greenwich, Virginia.
Achievements
Views
Macrae consistently opposed trends which seemed to threaten the small retail bookstores, which he knew intimately from his early days on the road and which he viewed as the backbone of the industry. On these grounds, he attacked the price cutting of Macy's and other large department stores and bitterly opposed the rise of mail-order "book clubs" in the 1920's.
When his widely circulated attack on the Book-of-the-Month Club involved him in a $200, 000 lawsuit in 1929, he retracted certain specific allegations but reasserted his general opposition and his refusal to submit Dutton titles for book club consideration.
Personality
Macrae, a man of distinguished features and precisely clipped beard, clearly savored the role of urbane and cultivated bookman, establishing close personal ties with such well-known Dutton authors as William Lyon Phelps and Van Wyck Brooks. But his gifts as a salesman never deserted him, and he zestfully promoted Eat and Grow Thin and other works more lucrative than memorable.
Strong-minded and outspoken, he never hesitated to express his views, whether in Congressional testimony, speeches, magazine articles, or newspaper letters.
Connections
John Macrae was married on September 20, 1893, to Katharine Green of Virginia, by whom he had two sons: John (1898) and Elliott Beach (1900), both of whom joined the firm in 1922.
In the early years in New York, the Macraes lived on Staten Island; later they moved to Manhattan's Gracie Square. Macrae's first wife died in 1913, and on September 5, 1939, he married Opal Wheeler of Beverly Hills, California, the director of Miss Yates's School in New York City and coauthor of several children's books published by Dutton.