Ralph Montgomery Easley was born on February 25, 1856 in Schuyler County, Illinois, United States. He was the second child and first of two sons of Charles L. and Elizabeth J. (Berry) Easley. His father, a merchant, was a native of Kentucky; his mother was born in Pennsylvania.
Growing up in moderate circumstances, Easley was educated in public schools and, for a brief period, at Johnson College, Quincy.
In 1875 he went to Hutchinson, Kansas, with the intention of studying and practising law in the expanding West. He found greater opportunities in the newspaper field, however, and by 1883 had established himself as owner and editor of the Hutchinson News. Through the News Easley participated in a wide variety of public-spirited crusades and played an influential part in Kansas affairs. At the same time, impressed by the gathering discontent of the western farmer, he began a lifelong study of social and economic problems.
In 1891 he moved to Chicago to become "politico-economic" editor on the Inter Ocean. Here he continued his ways as a crusading newspaper man and became acquainted with another large social problem, the struggle between capital and labor. During the winter of 1893-94, aided by the interest aroused by his work on the Inter Ocean, Easley brought together a group of Chicago's prominent citizens to form the Civic Federation of Chicago for the purpose of promoting municipal reform.
Leaving the Inter Ocean, be became salaried secretary of the new organization, which under his energetic leadership quickly became an important force in city affairs. But his initial success soon gave him the desire to deal with larger issues. Sensing the approach of a great popular movement to reform the abuses of big business, and fearful that it might lead to radical and ill-considered measures, Easley proposed to avert such a danger by mobilizing men of position and influence in all classes - the natural conservatives of society - to undertake a moderate program of reform.
To this end he resigned from the Chicago Civic Federation, in 1900, and organized the National Civic Federation, moving the new organization to permanent headquarters in New York City the following year. During the next decade and a half the National Civic Federation accomplished its purpose with a success greater than even the sanguine Easley had anticipated. Attracting the support of many prominent people of the day--business figures like Mark Hanna, George W. Perkins, and Elbert H. Gary; labor leaders like Samuel Gompers and John Mitchell; public and professional men like Seth Low, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Francis Lynde Stetson, and Archbishop John Ireland it played a vital role in the public discussion of nearly all the major issues of the progressive era. It made notable efforts to improve the relations between capital and labor, participating between 1900 and 1916 in the settlement of more than 500 labor disputes and pioneering in developing techniques of industrial mediation and in popularizing the idea of collective bargaining.
He died at his home in Rye, New York, and was buried at the Ferncliff Mausoleum, Ardsley, New York.
Exerting a strong influence for compromise and moderation, it defended the interests of business when business was under popular attack, but at the same time it sought to educate business men to take a larger view of their responsibility to society. In this last fact, particularly, lies the historical significance of the National Civic Federation, and of Ralph Montgomery Easley as well. Easley was always the Federation's central figure.
After the first World War, as the reform spirit in the United States declined, the National Civic Federation began to lose its support and became increasingly Easley's personal instrument. At the same time Easley himself changed. Always sensitive to the threat of radicalism, he now became obsessed by it, directing more and more of his efforts into immoderate pamphlet attacks on radicalism and un-Americanism. Though he remained faithful to his old ideas, he was unable to apply them to the changed conditions of postwar America. By the mid-1920's Easley and the National Civic Federation had become the favorite betes noires of liberal defenders of free speech and nonconformity; by the 1930's they had sunk into obscurity.
In his work he found ample outlet for those gifts as a reform leader which impressed all who knew him. He had an enormous energy, boundless optimism and enthusiasm, an uncanny flair for detecting emerging issues, and an unshakable faith in the worth of what he was doing.
Easley was married twice: to Nerva C. Cheney of Mechanicsburg, Ohio, on March 23, 1881, by whom he had two children, Donna Rachel and Ronald Merl, and, following the death of his first wife, to Gertrude Brackenridge Beeks, on September 3, 1917.
