Richard Ward Greene Welling was an American political and educational reformer.
Background
Richard Ward Greene Welling was born at his family's summer home, Pojac Point Farm, in North Kingstown, R. I. He was the younger of two sons and fourth of six children of Charles Hunt Welling, a wholesale textile merchant in Philadelphia, and Katharine Celia (Greene) Welling. His father's family, from Trenton, N. J. , traced its ancestry back to a late seventeenth-century settler on Long Island. His mother was from Rhode Island, her grandfather having been a brother of the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. The boy was named for his maternal uncle Richard Ward Greene, chief justice of Rhode Island. Charles Welling moved his family in 1863 to New York, where soon afterward his business went into bankruptcy. Though he later repaid all his debts and regained financial security, a lifelong fear of penury plagued his son Richard. Somewhat high-strung as a youth, Richard was instilled by both parents with the virtues of stoicism and self-reliance, but grew up painfully shy and self-conscious.
Education
After attending private school in New York, he entered Harvard in 1876. College proved disappointing, save for the formation of several close friendships, including one with his classmate Theodore Roosevelt. Graduating (B. A. ) in 1880, he wanted to become a sheep raiser in the West, but his father vetoed this idea, and Welling spent the next two years at the Harvard Law School.
Career
After a brief stint as a clerk in a New York law firm, he was admitted to the bar in 1883 and began a private law practice. It was, however, as a municipal reformer of the Mugwump type that Welling made his mark. Previously a Republican, he supported Grover Cleveland in the presidential election of 1884. He early joined the City Reform Club, founded in 1882 by Theodore Roosevelt and dedicated to the principles of honest, nonpartisan city government, and for the next two decades was in the forefront of every effort to purify city politics and unseat the entrenched Tammany machine. He fought against bribery in elections and - as secretary of the Commonwealth Club, founded in 1886 by Carl Schurz, E. L. Godkin, and others - for the adoption of the Australian ballot. He also arranged the meetings and speakers for the People's Municipal League, which ran a reform candidate for mayor in 1890. Beginning in 1892, he and Edmond Kelly organized Good Government Clubs in every assembly district in Manhattan; these contributed importantly to the election in 1894 of the reform mayor William L. Strong. In that same year, Welling helped establish the National Municipal League. He was active in the Citizens' Union campaign that failed in its attempt to elect Seth Low mayor in 1897, and in the successful campaigns of Low for mayor in 1901 and of William Travers Jerome for district attorney in 1905. A few years later, Mayor William J. Gaynor appointed Welling to the city Civil Service Commission, where he served from 1909 to 1913. Discouraged by the defeat of Seth Low in 1897 and by the decline of the Good Government Clubs, upset by a growing conviction that voters supported reformers only in times of the most blatant public scandals, and worried about his declining law practice, Welling in the late 1890's began to waver in his zeal for municipal reform. At this time he became interested in the activities of the George Junior Republic, a self-governing community of young boys, which had been set up in 1895 in Freeville, N. Y. , by William R. George. Welling became convinced that the real key to reform was education, and in 1904 he established the School Citizens Committee - later renamed the National Self Government Committee - to develop "a real love of democracy in the public schools of our country". Encouraged by his friend John Dewey, he began to lecture widely on the need for schools to adopt both civics courses, which would give a realistic picture of urban politics, and provisions for student self-government. With America's entry into World War I, the fifty-eight-year-old Welling, who had served as an ensign during the Spanish-American War, returned to the navy and was given command of the base at Montauk Point, Long Island. There he introduced a novel program of limited self-government for his men. After the war he enthusiastically resumed his educational work. Sensitive to criticism and highly opinionated, he became involved in bitter controversies with educators like President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard over his belief that students should witness and participate in political activities; but he also won many adherents to his point of view. In 1932 Welling, along with Lyman Beecher Stowe, founded the Boys Brotherhood Republic, a boys' club on New York's Lower East Side, which worked to eliminate juvenile delinquency by imparting a sense of responsibility to its members through self-government. Welling returned to municipal reform during the 1930's. He took part in each of the three successful mayoralty campaigns of Fiorello H. La Guardia, and, as president of the Civil Service Reform Association (to which he had belonged since 1897), he led the battle that deprived ex-mayor James J. Walker of his municipal pension. On the national scene, Welling voted in 1932 for the Socialist Norman Thomas, but he approved of the New Deal and cast his next three presidential ballots for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among other interests, he was an active officeholder in the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Parks and Playgrounds Association of New York, the Symphony Society of New York, the Municipal Art Society, and the National Sculpture Society. In 1946, at the age of eighty-eight, he contracted a severe cold and died at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. After a brief Episcopalian service (his denomination throughout life), he was buried in North Kingstown, R. I.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
In the judgment of one prominent political scientist, "It was this great and good man who more than any other in the past fifty years successfully contributed to the cause of good government and the demolition of the machine".