Curtis D. Wilbur

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Curtis D. Wilbur

Curtis Dwight Wilbur (born May 10, 1867 in Boone County , Iowa , †  September 8, 1954 in San Francisco , California ) was an American lawyer and politician ( Republican Party ) who belonged to the cabinet of President Calvin Coolidge as Secretary of the Navy .

Wilbur was at the 1884 United States Naval Academy in Annapolis ( Maryland included). Shortly after graduation, he left the academy, which was not an uncommon practice at the time, and moved to Riverside , California. There he was inducted into the state bar in 1890 and subsequently held the post of assistant district attorney in Los Angeles . In 1903 he was then judge at the Superior Court , in 1918 finally at the Supreme Court of California, as its 19th Chief Justice ( Chief Justice ) he served.

Curtis D. Wilbur (right) with Captain Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese Imperial Navy.

On March 19, 1924, Curtis Wilbur took the oath of office as Secretary of the Navy . He was the first minister to be appointed to his cabinet by President Coolidge, who had ruled last year , and was widely regarded as a man of high intellect and unassailable integrity. When Wilbur left the government together with the President in March 1929, he had a positive record. So he succeeded in expanding and modernizing the US fleet. An important part of this was the naval aviators , which were to become very important in the fighting between the United States and Japan during World War II .

Calvin Coolidge's successor to the presidency, Herbert Hoover , appointed Curtis Wilbur as a judge on the federal appeals court for the ninth district in San Francisco in 1929 . He held this office until 1945 when he retired.

Wilbur, who was married to Olive Doolittle and had three children, died in 1954. In memory of their former minister, the Navy named the destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur after him. In addition, Mount Wilbur in Antarctica bears his name. His brother Ray was US Secretary of the Interior under President Hoover from 1929 to 1933 .

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