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Jeremiah Smith Jr. (1870–1935)

Jeremiah Smith Jr. was a Boston lawyer and legal counselor for the J. P. Morgan Bank in Boston. Born in Dover, New Hampshire, he graduated from Harvard College in 1892 and Harvard Law School in 1895. In 1918, after the First World War, he accompanied the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in Paris as an adviser on financial questions. In 1924, he became commissioner general for the League of Nations’ loan to Hungary of 250 million gold crowns (kronen) and was in charge of the country’s financial reconstruction. Royall Tyler was deputy commissioner general. Smith refused compensation for his work and directed that the amount of his salary be used to support Hungarian students in the United States. By June 1926, after two years in Hungary, Smith had enabled the country to meet its reparation obligations and balance its budget. When he left Hungary in 1926, he requested the favor of seeing St. Stephen’s Crown, a Byzantine holy relic which was kept in a vault and never on public display. During the later years of his life, Jeremiah Smith was a director of the Harvard Alumni Association and a Fellow of the College.

 

Joseph H. Beale, “Jeremiah Smith Jr. (1870–1935),” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 71, no. 10 (March 1937): 549–50.

Zoltán Peterecz, Jeremiah Smith Jr. and Hungary, 1924–1926: The United States, The League of Nations, and the Financial Reconstruction of Hungary (London: Versita, 2013).