WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL Biography - Crimes, Laws and people

 
 

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WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL

Name: William Nelson Cromwell                                                         
Born: 1854                                                                           
Died: 1948                                                                           
                                                                                     
William Nelson Cromwell (1854-1948) was an American attorney active in promotion     
of the Panama Canal and other major ventures.                                         
                                                                                     
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there by his mother, a Civil-War       
widow.                                                                               
                                                                                     
He worked as an accountant for the attorney Algernon Sydney Sullivan, who paid       
for his education at Columbia Law School and made him a partner in Sullivan &         
Cromwell in 1879.                                                                     
                                                                                     
According to Stephen Kinzer's 2006 book Overthrow, in 1898 the chief of the           
French Canal Syndicate (a group that owned large swathes of land across Panama),     
Philippe Bunau Varilla, hired him to lobby the US Congress to build a canal           
across Panama, and not across Nicaragua, as logic and reason would have it.           
                                                                                     
In 1902, after having run into a 10-cent Nicaraguan postal stamp produced in the     
US by the American Bank Note Company erroneously depicting a fuming Momotambo         
volcano (which was nearly dormant and lay more than 100 miles from the proposed       
Nicaraguan canal path), and taking advantage of a particularly volcanic year in       
the Caribbean, he planted a story in the New York Sun reporting that the             
Momotambo volcano had erupted and caused a series of seismic shocks. He               
thereafter sent leaflets with the above stamps pasted on them to all Senators as     
witness to the volcanic activity in Nicaragua.                                       
                                                                                     
On June 19, 1902, three days after senators received the stamps, they voted for       
the Panama route for the canal. For his lobbying efforts, he received the sum of     
$800,000.                                                                             
                                                                                     
One of his main pro bono activities was in the founding of "The Society of           
Friends of Roumania" in 1920 under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Marie of       
Roumania, granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. The New York-based Society     
under his tutelage promoted numerous exchanges between the two countries and         
published the distinguished "Roumania - A Quarterly Review".