Clyde Griffen

ED/V1U4D PLATT

OF POUGHKEEPSIE Republican Candidate for Congress

COUNTIES OF ORANGE, PUTNAM AND DUTCHESS.

Edmund Platt 1865 - 1939

The author of the Eagle's History of Poughkeepsie was a member of the fifth generation of the Platt family in Dutchess County. Edmund Platt, journalist, banker, and historian, was born in Poughkeepsie on February 2, 1865, the son of John I. Platt and Susan Sherwood. His grandfather, Isaac Platt, edited the Dutchess Intelligencer which became the Poughkeepsie Eagle in 1834; his uncle, Edmund P. Platt, was a founding partner of the Luckey Platt and Company department store.

After his preparatory education in Poughkeepsie private schools, he apprenticed in the printer's trade at the Eagle. He then entered Harvard college where he majored in economics and banking, graduating cum laude in 1888. For the next two years he studied at Poughkeepsie's Eastman Business College while teaching mathematics and history at Riverview Academy which he followed with a brief stint as an associate editor of a newspaper in Wisconsin.

In 1891 Edmund Platt first became associated with the Eagle, then edited by his father, as "a reporter and general handy man." The following year he married Adele Innis, joining together several of the city's most prominent families. Her father, Aaron Innis, was one of the city's financial leaders; her mother was a sister of merchant William Thatcher Reynolds. Edmund Platt took an early interest in community affairs. The completion of the great Poughkeepsie railroad bridge in 1889 in which his father had played so crucial a role as publicist and lobbyist first inspired him to consider writing a history of his city. But although he wrote historical pieces for the paper during the next decade, he did not begin his survey — published in 1905 — until a New York publisher cancelled his contract with the publishers of the Eagle to produce a history of Poughkeepsie.

Edmund Platt became editor of the Eagle when his father died in 1907, and retained his association with the paper until it was purchased in 1931. His involvement was less active after 1912, however, when he first won election as the Republican nominee for Congress from the district which included Dutchess County. Serving five terms, he early made a name for himself on the House banking and currency committee, helping to push through the Federal Reserve Act. In 1920 President Wilson, a Democrat, named him as the first vice-governor of the Federal Reserve Board. He held that position until 1930 when he left the Board to become vice-president of the Marine Midland Banking Group. He resided in Long Island at the time of his death in 1939.