Big Bequest .

A man who all his life was a philanthropist on the sly has left to U.S. religious groups one of the biggest bequests in their history. He was the late Arthur Curtiss James, who died last year at 74, left a gross estate of $37,304,940 by an accounting filed last week in Manhattan. The bequest: a probable $8,000,000 or more to Union Theological Seminary, Congregational foreign missions, Presbyterian home missions, a mission university, his church (Manhattan's First Presbyterian) and the Society for the Promoting of the Gospel among the Seamen of the Port of New York. Some $14,000,000 more will go to Hampton, Tuskegee, Amherst, two museums, two hospitals, many another institution.

Urbane, bearded, pince-nezed Commodore James was a calmly capable financier (he listed himself in Who's Who as a "capitalist"). He kept himself the least-known among America's dozen richest men by avoiding personal publicity (he made it a rule that to reveal one of his donations meant its cancellation). Result is that nobody knows for sure how much he gave away in his liberal lifetime, but it was probably some $20,000,000. Some of his gifts that can be tracked down: $750,000 to the Children's Aid Society, $1,000.-ooo to Union Seminary, $1,000,000, or more for Negro education, over $1,500,000 for a Manhattan settlement house.

A good Presbyterian, Philanthropist James gave to Congregational missions because that was the first foreign missions board established in the U.S. (1810), and because his family became identified with its work before the Presbyterians started their board. He left his bequests with no strings attached, but few institutions yet know what they will do with the money, since the estate may take years to settle. Unlike many a bit-scale philanthropist, he took a keen enough personal interest in his philanthropies to do what one beneficiary gratefully remembers as "lots of little sweet things." Example: he provided a car & chauffeur for the widow of Hampton's president.

He inherited a copper fortune, later made himself the world's biggest holder of railroad securities (at their 1929 peak worth some $350,000,000). He controlled 40,000 miles of railroads--one-seventh of the nation's total--and welded his holdings together until he had two through routes running from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. In 1931 he completed 200 miles of new track--the final link between his two routes' Pacific terminals, Seattle and San Francisco--by tamping a golden spike into a tie near Bieber, Calif. That simple act ended the epic of U.S. railroad building with a mild clink.

A qualified master mariner, Commodore James did most of his sailing aboard his Aloha, the largest square-rigged yacht in the world. He twice sailed it round the globe, once drove it under canvas from Sandy Hook to Gibraltar in 16 days. He played the organ well, tennis indifferently. He and his stately wife (they called each other "Bunny") entertained quietly but lavishly in one of Newport's biggest and ugliest mansions, a town house on Manhattan's Park Avenue. Flower fanciers knew him for 1) his unique town house arrangement, where the bedrooms opened on a central hothouse filled with orchids and rare blooms so that his household fell asleep and awoke in a wash of exotic perfume; 2) his Blue Garden at Newport, where in ten acres every flower was blue.

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