Page, Arthur W.

Birth and Education

Page was born on September 10, 1883, in Aberdeen, North Carolina, the second of four children of Willia [Page 600]Alice Wilson Page and Walter Hines Page. Walter Page wrote for and edited several prestigious publications, including Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly, before founding the publishing house Doubleday, Page and Company, where he served as literary editor of World's Work magazine. The Pages were Methodists and Democrats, both of which young Arthur became as well.

Arthur Page was educated at the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Latin School from 1896 to 1899 and the Lawrenceville (New Jersey) School from 1899 to 1901, and he graduated from Harvard College in 1905. At Harvard he was a member of the Hasty Pudding, two literary societies, and a Southern Club that he had organized. Although his academic career culminated in an undistinguished “gentleman's C,” he never stopped working on behalf of education, raising funds to educate African American teachers, serving on the Board of Overseers at Harvard, becoming a trustee at Columbia Teacher's College, and spearheading a corporate giving campaign for colleges and universities generally. He was honored with Doctor of Law degrees by Columbia University in 1954 and by Williams College in 1959.

Early Career

Page said he wanted to be an architect, but his father wanted him to go into the family business. While at Harvard, Arthur wrote for The Advocate, contributing almost all of the editorials published during his senior year, and he spent his summers at World's Work, proofreading and collecting pictures for the public affairs magazine. World's Work published 21 feature articles under Arthur's byline after he went there full-time in 1905.

Page began to assume more responsibility, both at home and at work. In 1911, he became managing editor. He married Mollie W. Hall of Milton, Massachusetts, on June 1, 1912. When his father went to London to serve as U.S. ambassador from 1913 to 1918, Arthur took charge of the magazine. Toward the end of World War I, Page went to France to help prepare propaganda for the Allied Expeditionary Force's Psychological Subsection. This group created leaflets on such topics as the amount of food army regulations provided for prisoners. The army dropped millions of the leaflets by airplane during the last two or three months of the war in hopes of convincing German soldiers to surrender.

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