Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,336
By This is the grave of W. Murray Crane.
Born in Dalton, Massachusetts in 1853, Winthrop Murray Crane grew up in the paper world. His father owned a large paper company in western Massachusetts, which was the dominant industry in the Berkshires in these years. So he was a rich kid. Like any smart young person, he hated the name Winthrop and so became known as Murray. He went into the paper business himself, working for his dad, in 1870 and soon the business expanded even more. Crane managed to get huge exclusive contracts, including the paper wrapping for Winchester guns (today this would be seen as a violation of the 2nd Amendment or something to wrap the gun at all) and with the government for the paper for all paper money. So yeah, that’s a big contract!
Crane became super rich and invested like any good Gilded Age capitalist in a whole bunch of stuff that got him any richer. Also, like most but not all Gilded Age capitalists, he was an active Republican who sought to ensure that the government did only what would help the rich. Most of these guys had bought and sold hacks to do it for them, but some liked to get in the mire themselves and that included Crane. By the late 1880s, he was the chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party and although he was an extreme economic conservative personally, he at least realized that the party was diverse in that state and he sought to smooth over differences between the men like himself and those who remembered that the party was once the party of reform and social change.
Crane wanted bigger things for himself though. Although he hated giving speeches and avoided it at all costs, he became lieutenant governor in 1897 and then in 1900 became governor of Massachusetts. He was a pragmatic conservative type as governor, which made him slightly less of a complete hack then your average old school Gilded Age Republican. He certainly was no Progressive, but he was the type of conservative Progressives could work with. In fact, Crane developed a reputation as something of a labor mediator, having worked out a potentially damaging Teamsters strike in the state in 1900 to reasonable satisfaction to all sides. Based on that, when during the 1902 Anthracite strike, when Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t get JP Morgan and his henchmen to make a reasonable deal with some very reasonable workers, he got Crane on the case as part of the mediation commission that split the difference between workers and management in one of those rare times in the Gilded Age when the government did not just do corporate bidding. Later that year, both Crane and TR were nearly killed when they were in a horse carriage together and a speeding trolley car slammed into it, killing the driver of the carriage. But Crane and TR got off relatively unscathed.
After three one-year terms, Crane handed the governorship off to John Bates, another Republican, in 1903. The following year, Bates paid him back by naming him to the Senate to replace George Hoar, after that legendary anti-imperialist died. As senator, Crane was famous for doing nothing. No, literally, that was his thing. He figured that government should mostly do nothing and so he did that in his own actions. It will not surprise you that he became a mentor to young Calvin Coolidge on this. Mostly, he was a willing hack of railroad interests, which of course benefited him too. Ideologically, he kept on the same path of neither identifying with the Progressives or with the most reactionary types among Republicans. Although he became a close advisor of William Howard Taft, he was seen as somewhat suspect as the Republicans split in 1912 because he had worked with Roosevelt and because he was a late arrival to supporting Taft anyway, thinking he was a weak candidate. So when the Republicans who controlled the statehouse wanted to make their stamp on where they thought the party should go in 1913, they did not reappoint Crane and instead went for the reactionary John Weeks.
Crane returned to his ample business interests and died back in his home town in 1920, at the age of 67.
W. Murray Crane is buried in Main Street Cemetery, Dalton, Massachusetts.
If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1906-07, which is when Crane got his full term, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Robert Gamble is in Yankton, South Dakota and Robert Taylor is in Johnson City, Tennessee. Couple of legends there! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.