James B. Reynolds

The career of James Bronson Reynolds can perhaps be best described as that of a practical social reformer. A sociologist in the sense of a theoretical investigator he never was. His first approach to the subject came through his engaging personally and during many years in East Side settlement work; from which he emerged, not with the half-baked Socialism which unhappily was so often left in the mind and thought of other resident workers but with clear judgment, grasp of feasible remedies for manifest abuses, and determination to effect the necessary reforms. It was this practical use of practical experience which caused Mayor Low to appoint Reynolds his official secretary in 1902 and President Roosevelt to make him the administration’s adviser on municipal conditions in Washington and on industrial conditions at the Panama Canal. Reynolds was a man of quiet bearing, more of a thinker than a talker, a good listener but quick to retort with evidence when confronted by any view of affairs in his own field which he believed to be mistaken.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1924 Century Association Yearbook