Thomas Mott Osborne

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Thomas Mott Osborne (1859 - 1926) was a U.S. prison reformer, industrialist and New York State political reformer. He was also known as "Tom Brown", his alias when he had himself incarcerated for a week in the Auburn Prison in New York state in 1913.

Osborne was appointed warden of Sing Sing prison on December 1, 1914 for almost 15 months; however, a part of that time he had taken leave to defend himself against sensational Grand Jury charges, pushed by Governor Charles S. Whitman, that included sodomy with prisoners, all eventually rejected in court as meritless. (Osborne's was the first infamous big case of William Joseph Fallon, then assistant Westchester County district attorney. In private practice soon after losing the Osborne case, Fallon, depicted in a biography by Gene Fowler "The Great Mouthpiece" (1931) and feature film "The Mouthpiece," (1932) continued using unconscionable, sensational tactics to defend New York City mobsters and murders. See www.nypress.com, Nov. 9, 2001.)

In Ted Conover's book "Newjack" (published in 2000) he writes, "Osborne had grown up in a wealthy household in Auburn, and, after attending prep school and Harvard, became mayor of Auburn (New York), a newspaper publisher, and a manufacturer. A patron of young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Osborne held other state appointive offices before getting himself named chairman of the new State Commission on Prison Reform."

Osborne was president of the DM Osborne & Co., in Auburn, New York, one of the nation's largest agricultural implement manufacturing companies at the time, from 1886 and 1903, when his family sold out to the International Harvester Trust. His influences include Martha Coffin Wright and Lucretia Coffin Mott, his grandmother and great-aunt, respectively, sisters and organizers of the world's first women's rights conference, the Seneca Falls Convention, New York. His mother, Eliza Wright Osborne, also a feminist, was an unofficial guardian of Harriet Tubman, who frequently visited the Osborne household during T.M.'s upbringing.

Among Osborne's other proteges were Progressive Era journalist John Silas Reed and Louis McHenry Howe, who became FDR's political strategist. FDR, Howe and Osborne were Upstate New York's best-known foes of Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst.