Jerome Greene - Early Years

Early Years

Greene graduated from Harvard's college and law school by 1899 and became secretary to Harvard University's president and the Harvard Corporation from 1901-1910. This gave him contacts with Wall Street which made him general manager of the Rockefeller Institute from 1910-1912. Later, Green became an assistant to John D. Rockefeller in philanthropic work for two years, then trustee to the Rockefeller Institute, to the Rockefeller Foundation, and finally to the Rockefeller General Education Board until 1939.

For fifteen years (1917-1932) he worked for the Boston investment banking firm of Lee, Higginson & Co; most of those years serving as its chief executive officer, as well as with its London branch. He was executive secretary of the American section of the Allied Maritime Transport Council stationed in London, England 1918. He lived in Toynbee Hall, the world's first settlement house. This brought him in contact with the Round Table Group in England, a contact which was strengthened in 1919 when he became secretary to the Reparations Commission at the Paris Peace Conference. Accordingly, on his return to the United States he was one of the early figures in the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations which served as the New York branch of the Lionel Curtis Institute of International Affairs.

As an investment banker, Greene is mainly remembered for his sales of millions of dollars of the fraudulent securities of the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger. That Greene offered these to the American investing public in good faith is evident from the fact that he put a substantial part of his own fortune in the same investments. As a consequence, Kreuger's suicide in Paris in April 1932 left Greene with little money and no job. He wrote to Lionel Curtis asking for help and was given, for two years, a professorship in international relations at Aberystwyth, Wales. The Round Table Group controlled the professorship from its founding by David Davies 1919, though Davies had broken with the Round Table because of its subversion of the League of Nations and European collective security.

On his return to America in 1934, Greene also returned to his secretaryship of the Harvard Corporation and became, for the remainder of his life, a trustee and officer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Gardner Museum in Fenway Court, the New England Conservatory of Music, the American Academy in Rome, the Brookings Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the General Education Board (only until 1939). He was also the director of the Harvard University's 1936 Tercentenary Celebration.

Greene is of much greater significance in indicating the real influences within the Institute of Pacific Relations than any Communists or fellow travelers. He wrote the constitution for the lPR in 1916. For years he was the chief conduit for Wall Street funds and influence into the organization. Additionally, Greene was treasurer of the American Council for three years and chairman for three more, as well as chairman of the International Council for four years.