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Paul Fuller

Lawyer

Centurion, 1919–1948

Born 7 February 1881 in South Orange, New Jersey

Died 12 May 1948 in New York (Manhattan), New York

Buried Saint Luke Catholic Cemetery, Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey

Proposed by Frederic R. Coudert and Alton B. Parker

Elected 7 June 1919 at age thirty-eight

Archivist’s Note: Son of Paul Fuller; nephew of Frederic R. Coudert; cousin of Frederic R. Coudert

Century Memorial

Paul Fuller, Jr. [Born] 1881.

Lawyer, son of a Centurion of the same name [Paul Fuller].

Earlier tonight I have spoken of the essential place of the lawyer in our times. Paul Fuller was one of the best. He had reorganized the finances of Haiti, he was Director of War Trade Intelligence and of the Bureau of Enemy Trade during the first World War. He also was one of those who was wise in time: he saw Prohibition as an infringment of basic rights and he said so; he saw our abandonment of France after the first World War as pulling the plug to release the second.

These things are germane to him in the Century: we are here as whole men not as parts. There is no Centurion character divorced from other character. And so to record Paul Fuller’s interest in all the great movements of American life for peace and social betterment is not enough. He must be recorded as a wide and diversified reader, interested in poetry and literature, like his honored father before him.

His conciliatory personality and sound judgment enabled him to achieve results in positions of importance where the good work accomplished had to be done in a modest and self-effacing way, without the publicity so often sought by persons in governmental or public activities, else it would not be done.

Paul Fuller was like that, unselfish to the last degree, always helping others and never asking anything for himself.

To those of us who knew him well and saw him here almost daily, his personality lives vividly in our hearts.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1948 Memorials