Robert Treat Paine was an American lawyer and philanthropist. He was also a social reformer.
Background
Robert Treat Paine was born on October 28, 1835 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was the third son of Charles Cushing and Fanny Cabot (Jackson) Paine and a brother of Charles Jackson Paine. He was a descendant of Thomas Paine (or Payne) who settled in Yarmouth, Massachussets, and was admitted freeman of Plymouth Colony in 1639, and of Governor Robert Treat of Connecticut, and a great-grandson of Robert Treat Paine, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Education
Robert Treat Paine was educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, graduating from the latter in 1855 at the head of his class. After a year at the Harvard Law School and two years spent in study and travel in Europe. He was admitted to the bar in 1859.
Career
About 1859 Paine started to practise law in Boston with marked and immediate success. Through his enterprise and wise investment in railroad and mining property he acquired a large fortune at a comparatively early age. He then retired from business and professional life and devoted himself exclusively to charitable and philanthropic work. As early as 1870 he began a movement for better housing and in twenty years he had built in the vicinity of Boston over a hundred suburban dwellings, which workingmen were encouraged to buy on easy terms. His most successful and original enterprise was the Wells Memorial Institute for Workingmen, organized in 1879, a pioneer among institutions of the kind in the country. Its building, erected in 1881 at Paine's expense, became a center of industrial and trade-school courses, the seat of a cooperative bank, a successful club for working men, and even a meeting place of organized labor. His activities in behalf of better housing culminated in the Workingmen's Building Association and the Workingmen's Loan Association, both formed in 1888, of which he was the president.
He was one of the first to appreciate fully that social problems must be scientifically studied, and in 1887 he and his wife founded the Robert Treat Paine Fellowship to enable Harvard graduates to study, at home or abroad, the ethical problems of society and public and private methods of ameliorating the conditions of the masses. In 1890 he established, with an endowment of $200, 000, the Robert Treat Paine Association for the Help and Elevation of Working People, the proceeds of the endowment to be devoted to religious, charitable, and educational work. It was in connection with the Associated Charities of Boston, of which he was the principal founder and the president from 1879 to 1907, that Paine's best work was done. His numerous addresses on the ideals of modern charity, which had wide circulation in pamphlet form, brought him recognition as a leading authority on the subject. The motto of the Boston Associated Charities, "Not Alms but a Friend" invented by Paine, expresses his idea of philanthropy.
Paine was prominent at national and international peace conferences and at those held at Lake Mohonk. His only political office was his membership in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for the session of 1884 - 1885, during which time he carried on investigations in connection with the committee on charitable institutions, of which he was chairman. Loyalty to his convictions drove him, at considerable cost to himself, into the Mugwump movement of 1884, and he was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the Forty-ninth Congress that year. Originally a Unitarian, he went with his family to Trinity Church in 1870 and remained thereafter a prominent member of the Episcopal Church, to the General Convention of which he was many times a delegate. He was chairman of the building committee of Trinity Church, and was primarily reponsible for securing the site and raising the funds for its present edifice. He was always either vestryman or warden of Trinity, and between him and its rector, Phillips Brooks, there existed a rich and lifelong friendship.
Achievements
Religion
Robert Treat Paine was a prominent member of the Episcopal Church.
Views
Robert Treat Paine was an active supporter of the peace movement.
Membership
Robert Trat Paine was a director of the American Prison Association and of the Boston Children's Aid Society. He was also a president of the American Peace Society from 1891 to his death.
Personality
Robert Treat Paine was large in mind and body, a genuine idealist, an executive of tact and force, with a rare capacity for winning adherents to a cause in which his convictions were enlisted.
Connections
On April 24, 1862, Robert Treat Paine married Lydia Williams Lyman, by whom he had two sons and five daughters.