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".
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".