Paul Percy Harris was an American attorney and social reformer. He was the founder of the first Rotary Club and first president of Rotary International.
Background
Paul Percy Harris was born on April 19, 1868 in Racine, Wisconsin, United States. He was one of six children of George Howard Harris and Cornelia Bryan. At the age of three, his father's drugstore business having failed, and Harris was sent to live with his paternal grandparents, Howard and Pamela (Rustin) Harris, in Wallingford, Vermont.
His subsequent contact with his parents, whom he later characterized as improvident and flighty, was confined to brief family reunions.
Education
After a boyhood that Harris sentimentalized in his autobiographical writings, Harris attended high school in Rutland, Vermont, and then transferred to Black River Academy in Ludlow, from which he was expelled for his pranks. Concluding his secondary education at Vermont Academy, a military school in Saxton's River, he enrolled at the University of Vermont in Burlington in 1885, only to be expelled once again for disruptive behavior, midway through his sophomore year.
He next attended Princeton College for a year (1887-1888), and in 1889, after working briefly for a marble company in West Rutland, he heeded his grandmother's advice to go West.
In 1919, by vote of the Vermont trustees, he was retroactively awarded the Bachelor of Philosophy degree as of 1899.
In 1891 received a law degree from the state university at Iowa City.
Career
Settling first in Iowa, Harris read law in Des Moines. A wanderer for the next five years, Harris worked as a reporter in San Francisco, a business-college teacher in Los Angeles, an actor in Denver, and a fruit picker in Louisiana. He made two trips to England, first as stockboy on a cattleboat and then as salesman for a marble and granite company.
Settling in Chicago in 1896, be began to practice law, but with only modest success. "Desperately lonely" and still unmarried, he lived in thirty different residences over the next fourteen years and attended various churches but still made few friends. On February 23, 1905, he brought together three other young businessmen of his acquaintance into a club for friendship and civic activity. The name "Rotary" was chosen because the weekly luncheons (then and later the heart of the movement) were initially held in rotation at the various members' places of business.
Harris founded a second club in San Francisco in 1908, and by 1910, when the National Association of Rotary Clubs was organized in Chicago, sixteen local clubs had been established. Founded at a moment when an emergent urban middle class was discovering itself and coming together for a variety of civic and social purposes, Rotary caught on at once.
Many of the early members, like Harris himself, were young business or professional men of rural or smalltown origins who had few ties or associations in the cities where they were trying to make their fortunes. For them, Rotary provided a circle of friends, business contacts, and a sense of meaningful involvement with a large-scale movement that espoused a variety of worthy philanthropic and civic causes. From the first, Harris threw himself into the new movement. He served as first president of the national association, and in 1912, when deteriorating health forced his resignation, he became president emeritus.
Although still technically head of his Chicago law firm, he in fact spent almost all his time addressing clubs around the world, writing regularly for The Rotarian, and serving as Rotary's principal public spokesman. With Chesley R. Perry, secretary of Rotary International from 1910 to 1942, he tirelessly preached the dual gospel of sociability and service that gave the movement such appeal.
Harris died in Chicago in 1947, at seventy-eight, after several years of failing health.
Achievements
Paul Percy Harris went down in history as a prominent attorney and social reformer, and is best remembered for founding Rotary International, a service organization that currently has well over one million members worldwide.
Through his work with the Rotary Club, Harris received awards from numerous national governments. He lived to see the movement grow to some quarter of a million members in more than seventy countries and was the recipient of many awards, honors, and citations, including the Silver Buffalo of the Boy Scouts of America (1934) and the French Legion of Honor (1937).
In cooperation with Rotary International, several towns have established a Rotary Heritage trail. It includes Harris' birthplace in Racine, Wisconsin and a downtown plaza named after him, as well as the organization's current headquarters in Evanston, Illinois (with a reproduction of his law office), their home, and final resting place.
(The story of a boy, a Vermont community and Rotary.)
Religion
Harris was a Republican in politics.
Personality
With his own unsettled and peripatetic background, gregariousness, civic idealism, nondogmatic religiosity, Harris was in many respects the quintessential Rotarian.
Connections
On July 2, 1910, Harris married Jean Thomson, a native of Edinburgh. They had no children.
