Stokes, James Graham Phelps, 1872-1960

James Graham Phelps Stokes was born in New York City in 1872. He graduated from Yale University in 1892. Upon graduation from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1896 he entered the family business and became increasingly active in settlement house work and various other movements for social reform. Later Stokes became interested in politics and socialism. In 1908 he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. In 1904 Stokes married Rose Harriet Pastor whom he divorced in 1925. Stokes died in New York City in 1960.

Socialist and philanthropist

(Columbia University. College of P&S, M.D. 1896).

James Graham Phelps Stokes was born in New York City in 1872. He graduated from Yale University in 1892. Upon graduation from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1896 he entered the family business and became increasingly active in settlement house work and various other movements for social reform. Later Stokes became interested in politics and socialism. In 1908 he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. In 1904 Stokes married Rose Harriet Pastor whom he divorced in 1925. Stokes died in New York City in 1960.

James Graham Phelps Stokes was born in New York City on March 18, 1872. He was the son of Anson Phelps and Helen Louise (Phelps) Stokes. Family members included leaders in New York society, who had derived their fortune from the Phelps-Dodge Company and subsequent railroad and real estate holdings. The family had a long history of interest in religious and philanthropic activities and had been particularly active in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Bible Society, and the American Tract Society.

Stokes was educated at the Berkeley School in New York City and entered Yale's Sheffield Scientific School as a member of the class of 1892. While at Yale he was director of the Cooperative Society and a member of the executive board of the YMCA. After graduation he spent a year traveling and then entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia with the class of 1896. In medicine he hoped to combine his religious and scientific interest to become a medical missionary. While a medical student he served as an ambulance surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital, which covered Hell's Kitchen, and from this experience he came to be interested in the environmental influences on disease. Stokes perceived that the roots of the conditions in Hell's Kitchen were intimately related to the great disparities of wealth in American society.

Upon graduation he had to forego his desire to enter the missionary field to replace his ailing father in the family business. Eventually he served as president of the Nevada Company and the Nevada Central Railroad and, after 1927, as a member of the board of directors of the Phelps-Dodge Company. Stokes combined his entry into business with a year of study of political science at Columbia. But, in the years after 1897, settlement house work became the focus of his life. He served on the board of directors of the University Settlement and immersed himself in the study of life on the Lower East Side.

After serving in the Spanish-American War, Stokes returned to reform work. He served on innumerable boards, including those of the Outdoor Recreational League of New York, the Prison Association of New York (he eventually became a state inspector of prisons and a delegate to the International Prison Congress of 1905), the League of Political Education, the Citizens' Union, the New York State Conference of Charities and Correction, the New York Child Labor Committee, and Tuskeegee Institute. He also was a founder and chairman of the board of trustees (1897-1917) of Hartley House, a settlement house on West 46th Street.

After 1902 he lived at the University Settlement. It was here that he met Rose Harriet Pastor, a former cigar worker and militant reporter for the Jewish Daily News, who would become his wife in the much publicized marriage of the "Millionaire and the Factory Girl." At this time Stokes was evolving a collectivist philosophy which he called "Omnilism," one which looked "primarily to the Well-being of the Whole which Others and Self are but parts" and called for dedication to the advancement of the whole. This philosophy and his activist wife led him to politics and socialism.

In 1904 Stokes was a presidential elector on the Populist ticket, and in 1905, running on the Municipal Ownership League ticket headed by William Randolph Hearst, he was nearly elected president of the Board of Alderman of New York City. He joined the Socialist Party in 1906 and was a founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, serving as its president from 1907 to 1917. In 1907 he renounced the concept of philanthropy in favor of the collective ownership of capital for the public welfare, and in 1908 he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. In the same year he ran for the New York State Senate on the Socialist ticket. He also was one of the participants in the 1909 meeting on the status of the Negro, which led to the calling of the National Negro Congress and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of colored People (NAACP). In 1912 he ran for mayor of Stamford, Connecticut, on the Socialist ticket, and in 1916 he helped edit The Socialism of Today.

The question of American intervention in World War I split the Socialist Party. Stokes promoted the war effort as a founding member of the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. His wife opposed the war and moved towards communism. Their ideological split led to a divorce in 1925. In the years after the war, Stokes became progressively more conservative and increasingly centered his attention on veterans and on cultural and philanthropic activities. In 1926 he married Lettice Lee Sands. He devoted his later years to the study of religions and published two books on Christianity and the religions of the East. Stokes died in New York City on April 8, 1960.

Extracted from: Biographical Dictionary of Social Welfare in America, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 1986.