"Useful Man'

At Lenox, Mass., last week, died Henry White, onetime (1905-07) Ambassador to Italy, onetime (1907-09) Ambassador to France, and Peace Commissioner to the Peace Conference at Paris (1918). The younger generation perhaps associates his name chiefly with his Paris mission, though there he played a necessarily subordinate part.

Probably of at least equal mental stature with the other Commissioners* accompanying President Wilson, Mr. White was taken along partly with the idea of imparting a bipartisan color to the Delegation (on which he was the only Republican) and was in no position to exercise a dominating influence. After the Versailles Treaty was drawn up, Mr. White sought to arrange a compromise by which the Senate might ratify the document, but the disagreements between the Senate and the President became and remained so acute that no compromise was possible.

Few of the men at the Paris Conference brought to it a richer background of diplomatic experience. Mr. White began his diplomatic career in 1883, occupying a secretarial post in the U. S. Embassy at Vienna. From 1884 to 1893 he was a Secretary at the Court of St. James's. Then came four years of private life (coinciding with the Democratic Cleveland Administration). In 1897 President McKinley sent him back to London where he remained till 1905, in which year President Roosevelt appointed him Ambassador to Italy. From 1907 to 1909 he was Ambassador to France.

President Roosevelt called him "the most useful member of the diplomatic service." Joseph H. Choate, onetime (1899-1905) U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's said (in 1910) that Mr. White (who was a member of the U. S. secretarial staff in London during the regime of five ambassadors--Phelps, Lincoln, Bayard, Hay, Choate) "conducted a school of diplomacy at London." "He took fresh, green Ambassadors and put them to school," said Mr. Choate. "Hardly a question that could arise did not arise under the five Ambassadors under whom he served. You can imagine, with Harry White in the back room, how much of the responsibility was turned over to him."

Mr. White was born in Baltimore in 1850. In 1879 he married Miss Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, sister-in-law of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt. Mrs. White died in 1916. In 1920 Mr. White married Mrs. Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, who survives him.

*Robert Lansing, General Tasker H. Bliss, Colonel E. M. House.