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<em>Oscar Terry Crosby</em> was born in Ponchatoula, Louisiana the day that Fort Sumter was fired upon —April 21, 1861—two antithetical occurrences, for he devoted much time and effort toward the promotion of Peace.</p>
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The son of the Rev. George Locke Crosby and Elizabeth Terry Crosby, both of Northern origin, he was brought up in Brookhaven, Mississippi whence he entered the Academy in 1878, being largely self-educated between the ages of 13 and 17. His father, a Methodist minister, having died when Crosby was five, it was encumbent upon the lad to help support his widowed mother, impoverished by the conditions of the Reconstruction period. Thus he could afford to buy only a one way ticket to the Point— had he failed in his examinations, he was prepared to work in the North as a printer’s devil.</p>
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He arrived a few days ahead of schedule, clad in a Prince Albert lent for the occasion by an older cousin; this caused the First Classmen to query: “Who’s that pompous Roman senator in his toga?” On their enquiring as to what his previous condition of servitude had been, quoth he: “I was a slave to Love”. And why had he come so early?” I took time by the forelock.” This was symptomatic of many of his future ideas and activities. For two reasons he graduated only second in his class —inadequate draughtsmanship, and being caught after hours on Flirtation Walk.</p>
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As a Lieutenant of Engineers he was first stationed at Willett’s Point, Long Island (Now Fort Totten), then next in New Orleans where he met and married Jeanne Bouligny in 1885. During 1889 and 1890, he and John Ruckman (U.S.A.) developed a range and position finder, which was demonstrated at Governors Island after much correspondence with Col. A. Mordecai.</p>
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He resigned in 1887 to become Superintendent of the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor. From the Sprague days until 1913 he was active in the development and promotion of electric traction—in various capacities he worked with Edison General, Thompson-Houston and General Electric. In 1894 he was a partner of Crosby-White—when that became the J. G. White Engineering firm, he remained on the Board thereof. By 1897, he and Charles Lieb bought up and reorganized several companies in Washington, D.C., converting them from horse to electric traction, and forming the Washington Traction and Electric Co. During the same period he founded and was president of the Potomac Electric Power Co. (Washington, D. C.) until 1899. His last traction activities were with the Trenton Street Railway and the Wilmington-Philadelphia Traction Co. of which he was president in 1910. He retired in 1913 and celebrated the event by taking his family around the world.</p>
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But such a vital person could not remain idle long, so in 1915 he was Director of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, (which included northern occupied France). He remained there for six months. He always claimed that the Europeans had suffered less In World War I than the Southerners during the Civil War.</p>
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A friendship begun in the 90’s with W. G. MacAdoo led the then Secretary of the Treasury to ask Crosby to become Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in April 1917. As such he was in charge of the loans to the Allies. In order to deal with the conflicting and complicated demands of the Allies, the Inter-Ally Council for War Purchases and Finance was established the following November, with headquarters in Paris and London, so he presided over this body with the rank of U.S. Commissioner of Finance. The functions of the Council terminated shortly after the Armistice, and he was asked to stay on hand in Paris as an advisor, but unfortunately illness prevented his fulfilling this assignment with his usual thoroughness. His war time activities, fraught with interesting contacts and events, ended his private and public business career.</p>
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The foregoing is a blueprint merely, giving no hint of the flavor of Crosby’s personality, and barely suggesting his catholicity of interests. Few Americans have managed to be engrossed in a business career, the while retaining an interest in intellectual pursuits—as witness his writings and travels—these, though pointed at some specific objective, always included the broader implications and diverse facets of a subject.</p>
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In 1900 he crossed Abyssinia from East to West—King Menelik’s passport issued to “Mr. Crosby, the Englishman”—(after all, O.T.C spoke English) is extant. He reached the headwaters of the Blue Nile at the time that the Caliph was being defeated by the British. His becoming a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society resulted from that trip. Needing surcease from business in 1903 he went to Thibet. Since the British did not approve entrance via the Indian Frontier, he went through Russian and Chinese Turkestan. At that time the vast areas of the Thibetan region were uncharted—he added some data concerning that terra incognita. His impressions and experiences are summed up in his “Thibet and Turkestan”.</p>
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As a result of two side expeditions during his round the world trip, he wrote “Adam and Eve”—an interpretation of Genisis I and II; the other detour was to Borneo, attracted by the primitive and isolated Dyaks, one of whose skulls he brought back to the Smithsonian Institute.</p>
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Haiti beckoned him in 1921-22, because of the racial problem. Germany in the early twenties, with its financial ills next appealed. Then South Africa, in 1927, where he sought a “last drink of savagery”. The primitive peoples, plus the colonial problem, intrigued him, and his reflections on these subjects appeared in various publications.</p>
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The crash of ‘29, followed by his wife’s protracted illness and subsequent death in January, 1934 caused a hiatus in his travels, so in the Spring of ‘34 Guatemala was his destination, because of its relics of a past civilization. In 1936 his wanderlust was justified because his eldest daughter’s Italian husband was stationed in Dares-Salaam, Tanganyika, where he could study the Mandate problem. Besides that, he heard the call of the wild once more, and being only 75, crossed Africa from East to West.</p>
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Since 1918 he had been interested in the political experiment of the Soviets, so in 1937, via France and Italy, he went to Russia for the third time (in 1914 he had returned from the Orient by the Trans-Siberian). The authorities always insisted that tourists enter by way of Moscow, but he was determined to use an unorthodox route and entered via Odessa. On his return he made some most interesting notes, but unfortunately by that time his vitality was beginning to ebb, so that they were not edited for publication. And so ended his peregrinations in quest of answers to innumerable questions.</p>
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His interest in the abolition of war found tangible expression in 1910 when he was President of the World-Federation League. In 1915 he found a fellow-spirit in Senator Shafroth of Colorado, who, at Crosby’s behest introduced a Senate Joint Resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution authorizing the creation, with other nations, of an International Peace-enforcing Tribunal for the determination of all International disputes. His book “International War, Its Causes and Its Cure”, because President Wilson so requested, was not published until after he ceased being a public servant. He wrote two other books—”The Electric Railway in Theory and in Practise” (Crosby-Bell) and “Strikes, When to Strike and How to Strike.” In the early twenties he met the late Lord David Davies with whom he found much in common, so that he associated himself with the latter’s New Commonwealth movement: there is a nebular realization of their hopes in the Military Staff Committee of the United Nations. His interest in Peace, however, did not preclude his unsuccessful effort to take part in the Spanish-American War— the offer of his services was not accepted. In 1917 he was given a reserve commission as a major.</p>
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Crosby’s declining years were spent in his hilltop home, ‘‘View Tree”, Warrenton, Va., fifty miles from Washington, which he had built in 1908. There he received his friends from the countryside, the Capital and the World. Young and old, rich and poor, stupid and brilliant, sat at his feet, imbibing his gentle philosophy, his clarity of vision and his wealth of knowledge; he was as familiar with the Koran, the Talmud and the Sayings of Buddha as with the Bible; he had an equal grasp of the humanities, politics and science and discussed them with specialists in their respective fields.</p>
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He was a rare combination of Yankee acumen and Southern suavity, of intellect and kindliness, both leavened with humor. He brought out the best in every soul who had the good fortune to know him.</p>