Joseph Ridgway Grundy

Background

Grundy was born on January 13, 1863, in Camden, New Jersey, the son of Mary Ridgway and William Hulme Grundy, a woolen mill owner. Grundy grew up in a financially secure Quaker home in Bristol, Pennsylvania.

Education

Grundy attended private and public schools and studied at the Secondary Division of Swarthmore College for two years (1877-1879) before he entered Swarthmore College as a freshman in 1879. After one year, he went to Europe for a grand tour.

Career

Upon his return to the United States, Grundy worked for his father, starting at the lowest level and learning the family business of manufacturing woolen goods. While taking on greater responsibilities in the business, Grundy began to assist his father in lobbying for a high tariff. When his father died in 1893, Grundy became head of the woolen mills and principal stockholder of the Farmers National Bank in Bristol. He inherited approximately $1 million, which he had increased to $18 million by the time of his death. Grundy was the Bucks County Republican leader for Senator Boies Penrose, and he also served on the Bristol borough council. In 1909 he founded the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association (PMA), an organization of small manufacturers intent on combating the growing power of reform groups, and became its first president. With the primary goal to maintain the status quo, the PMA tried to influence the Pennsylvania legislature through campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. The capital stock tax-exemption and laws covering child labor, female labor, and wages and hours were Grundy's chief concerns. Grundy's rise to national importance began with his participation in the selection of Warren G. Harding as the 1920 Republican presidential nominee at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. In 1924, Grundy was responsible for raising $800, 000 for the Coolidge campaign. His abilities as a fundraiser and lobbyist made him a major figure among the Republican politicians in Pennsylvania. After the death of Penrose in 1921, Grundy was one of a handful of Republican leaders who took charge of the party. In the 1926 Pennsylvania elections, Grundy's choice for governor, John S. Fisher, won the Republican nomination and was elected in November. But Philadelphia's "boss, " William S. Vare, defeated Grundy's favorite, the incumbent senator George Wharton Pepper, and Governor Gifford Pinchot in the Republican senatorial primary, and easily won the November election. Grundy fought hard for a high-tariff plank in the 1928 Republican party platform, and in 1929 he persistently lobbied for fulfillment of that pledge. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) raised duties on most manufactured goods. Although not its author, Grundy was so closely associated with the bill that it was commonly referred to as the Grundy Tariff. As the nation's best-known lobbyist, Grundy was called to testify before the Lobby Investigating Committee of the United States Senate in late 1929. His appearance before that committee gave him an opportunity to present his views on tariffs, taxation, and the importance of manufacturing. His frank, hard-hitting, often tactless testimony displayed his beliefs as well as his charm, and it won him praise in numerous editorials. When Vare was denied his Senate seat in December 1929, Governor Fisher appointed Grundy to the vacancy that had existed since 1927. Grundy's stay in the Senate was short. He was defeated in the 1930 Republican primary by Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, an ally of the Mellon family in Pittsburgh. Grundy had expected full Republican support when he accepted Fisher's offer, but Vare gave his support to Davis, while the Mellon forces backed Grundy only halfheartedly. Grundy's loss to Davis demonstrated that the PMA was not as powerful as had been thought. Thereafter, Grundy's prominence as a national figure declined. His role in state politics, however, increased during the 1930's. With Grundy's help, Gifford Pinchot won a second term as governor in 1930. With the Democrats in power in Pennsylvania after the 1934 elections, the death of Vare in 1935, and the weakening of the Mellon influence in Pittsburgh, Grundy became the undisputed Republican leader. Ironically it was a time when the Republicans in Pennsylvania were at their lowest point in seventy years. After the 1936 elections, Grundy began to share party control with Joseph N. Pew, a wealthy Philadelphia oilman. The Republican party regained control of state politics in 1938 and stayed in power for sixteen years, but Grundy was less involved and had less control than in the past. In 1947 he retired as president of the PMA Executive Committee. That year Governor James H. Duff openly attacked Grundy's leadership. In 1950 Duff won the Republican primary for senator and carried his gubernatorial running-mate to victory over Grundy's choices. During the rest of his life, Grundy contented himself with civic and philanthropic activities. He was very generous to his hometown of Bristol. He spent his last years in Nassau in the Bahamas, where he died on March 3, 1961.

Achievements

• Grundy's greatest accomplishment was the founding and fostering of the PMA, the largest political interest group of its kind in the United States. Its methods of influencing legislation became the model for other interest groups, especially labor organizations.

Membership

President of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association

Connections

Grundy never married.

Father:

William Hulme Grundy

Mother:

Mary Ridgway

References

• The Pennsylvanian: Joseph R. Grundy
• The Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association