Herbert Lord

Herbert M. Lord was born in Rockland, Maine, on December 6, 1859, the son of Sabin Lord and Abbie (Swett) Lord.[1] He was raised and educated in Rockland, and graduated from Rockland High School.[2]

Lord briefly attended Bates College, then transferred to Colby College.[2] He graduated from Colby with a A.B. degree in 1884 and taught school while studying for his master's degree.[3] As a teacher, he specialized in the Greek, Latin, and English languages, and also served as the principal of the high school in Thomaston, Maine.[2] Lord also taught music and sang, and his tenor voice earned praise from admirers who suggested he could have pursued a singing career.[2]

He received an M.A. from Colby in 1889.[3] While at Colby, Lord joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity.[4] In 1920, Colby College awarded Lord the honorary degree of LL.D.[3]

After college, Lord began a career in journalism with a newspaper in Cardiff, Tennessee, for which he worked as a reporter, editor, and advertising manager.[2] He was next employed by a paper in Denver, Colorado, where he remained until returning to Maine.[2] Lord then became editor of The Courier-Gazette in Rockland, of which he later purchased an ownership stake.[2] A Republican, while editing the Rockland paper, Lord also served terms on the city's common council and board of aldermen.[2]

Beginning in 1894, U.S. Representative Nelson Dingley Jr. of Maine employed Lord on the staff of the Ways and Means Committee.[2] When Dingley became the committee's chair in 1897, he appointed Lord as the committee's chief clerk.[2] Lord worked on the details of the Dingley Act, a law that raised tariffs to counteract the Wilson–Gorman Tariff Act, which had lowered tariff rates.[2]

In 1898, Lord joined the United States Army for the Spanish–American War and was commissioned as a major of United States Volunteers.[2] He was assigned to the Paymaster Department duties and served with the Volunteers until joining the Regular Army.[2] In 1902, Lord was commissioned as a Regular Army captain, and he continued to serve in the Paymaster Department.[1]

Major General George W. Goethals and members of his staff, December 7, 1918. Front row, left to right: Mr. Gerard Swope, Major General George W. Goethals, Brigadier General Herbert Lord, Brigadier General William H. Rose. Back row, left to right: Edwin W. Fullam, Brigadier General Frank T. Hines, Brigadier General Robert E. Wood, Colonel F. B. Wells.

Lord was serving as a major in 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt made use of his previous experience by detailing Lord to assist the United States Congress with development of a new tariff bill.[2] The result, the Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, caused a rift between Republican reformers who supported low tariffs and conservative Republicans, who supported protectionism.[2] In 1910, Lord was appointed to oversee the disbursement of U.S. funds to the government of Cuba following the United States military's Second Occupation of Cuba.[2]

Following the Great Salem fire of 1914, President Woodrow Wilson assigned Lord to oversee disbursement of federal disaster relief funds.[2] $200,000 was appropriated for the effort, and Lord was praised for fulfilling all requests for assistance so efficiently that he saved $150,000 of the fund.[2]

During World War I, served as the Army's Director of Finance.[3] During the war, he was promoted to brigadier general and controlled the expenditure of $24 billion in War Department appropriations.[3] At the end of the war, he was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal for his services,[3] the citation for which reads:

The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress, July 9, 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Army Distinguished Service Medal to Brigadier General Herbert M. Lord, United States Army, for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services to the Government of the United States, in a duty of great responsibility during World War I, as Assistant to the Quartermaster General and later as Director of Finance. As such, General Lord was responsible for and had authority over the preparation of estimates, disbursements, money accounts, property accounts, finance reports, and pay and mileage of the Army. The success of the Finance Department was, in a large measure, due to his breadth of vision, executive ability, initiative, and energy.[5]

In March 1919, Congress adjourned without making provisions to pay more than $800 million that the military owed to factories, railroads, and other businesses for services and materiel they provided during the war.[3] On his own initiative, Lord diverted funds appropriated for other purposes so they could be used to pay the debts, which had by then increased to over $1 billion.[3] The creditors were satisfied, which averted an economic crisis, and at the next session of Congress, the House and Senate retroactively approved of Lord's actions.[3]

Herbert Lord as Director of the Bureau of the Budget 1921.

In the years following the war, soldiers who had sustained wartime wounds, injuries and serious illness applied for disability payments.[3] Because of haphazard recordkeeping that resulted from the exigencies of service on the front lines, veterans often did not have records to verify their units, type of service, or medical condition.[3] Lord took the initiative to pay them based on their own certification of eligibility, with the War Department later using centrally located records for verification.[3] Lord's efforts enabled the eligible veterans to rapidly obtain their disability payments, and Congress once again retroactively approved his actions.[3]

Lord retired from the Army on June 30, 1922, to accept appointment as Director of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, succeeding its first director, Charles G. Dawes.[2]

Lord took over as budget director on July 1, 1922.[3] During his term, Lord prioritized economy in spending, a policy directed by President Calvin Coolidge and continued by his successor Herbert Hoover.[3] Lord was considered by many observers to be obsessed with reducing spending, including such seemingly trivial measures as reducing the size of postal money order blanks by one inch to save $8,000 a year.[3] Scoffers also mocked Lord when he advocated that government employees save money by extending the length of time they used their pencils.[3] Despite the skeptics, when Lord resigned in 1929, the federal treasury's World War I debt had been eliminated.[3] In addition, the federal surplus had reached $2.7 billion, of which $2.4 billion was attributed to Lord's economizing.[3]

Lord suffered a prolonged illness in 1929, which caused him to resign as budget director.[3] He spent part of the winter of 1929-1930 in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the hopes of regaining his health.[3] His condition continued to worsen, and he died at his home in Washington, D.C.'s Woodley Apartments on June 2, 1930.[3] Lord was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.[3]

In 1886, Lord married Annie Stuart Waldo.[2] They were the parents of three children.[2] Stuart Waldo Lord was born in 1886 and died in 1889.[2] Kenneth Prince Lord (1888-1957) was a career Army officer and retired as a brigadier general.[6] Ruth Mayhew Lord (1890-1974) was the wife of Franklin Robinson Van Rensselaer.[2]

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• Herbert M. Lord at Arlington National Cemetery