Photo: Library of Congress

Charles Crane was born in Chicago in 1858. His family owned the Crane Company, a large manufacturers of plumbing supplies. He became president of the company in 1912 when his father died but in 1914 he sold his interests to a brother. The money and freedom from company business allowed Crane to indulge his love of travel, especially to Asia and the Middle East. In 1909 Taft appointed Crane as his Minister to China, but a conflict with Secretary of State Philander Knox forced Crane to resign his position before he had even departed. Crane abandoned his support for Taft after this and began to support both Republican and Democratic progressives, including New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson. In 1912 he gave money to the primary campaigns of both Republican Senator Robert La Follette and Woodrow Wilson. He later explained that he wanted to make sure that at least one of the main parties nominated a progressive. La Follette’s campaign faltered early, so Crane became a strong Wilson supporter. He was vice-chairman of the Wilson campaign’s finance committee and the largest single donor, giving $40,000.

One of Wilson’s trusted advisors by 1917, Crane agreed to travel to Russia as part of a mission to report on the ongoing Russian Revolution. Crane was familiar with Russia from his travels and so dissented from the group’s final report which stated that the provisional reform Kerensky regime would defeat the Bolsheviks..

In 1918 Crane left on another fact finding mission, this time to Japan, Korea, Manchuria and China. In 1919 he spent some time in Paris as an unofficial member of the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference and in April 1919 was appointed one of the two American commissioners on mandates to Turkey along with Oberlin College President Henry Churchill King. The King-Crane Commission visited the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East. Their report recommended that the territories, including Syria, Iraq and Palestine were not ready for independence and so should be placed under control of the U.S. King reported that local elites preferred the U.S. to British or French control. King’s recommendations were rejected and the territories were divided between London and Paris. Crane finished his service to the Wilson administration as U.S. ambassador to China from 1920-1921.

Crane later financed oil exploration in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and won oil concessions for the U.S. in those countries. He died in 1939.