Arthur Wilson Page was born in Aberdeen, North Carolina, on September 10, 1883, the son of Walter Hines Page and Alice Wilson Page. He graduated from Lawrenceville, New Jersey, School in 1901 and received his A.B. degree from Harvard University in 1905.
Upon graduation from Harvard, Page went to work for Doubleday, Page, and Company, publishers. He became a vice-president of the company and editor of World's Work in 1913 when his father left the company to become United States' ambassador to the Court of St. James under President Wilson.
In 1927, Page left Doubleday to become vice-president in charge of public relations for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. While with AT&T he also served as a director of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Continental Oil Company, the Chase National Bank, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Kennecott Copper Corporation, and the Prudential Insurance Company of America; as a vice-president and director of the Long Island Biological Association; as a trustee of the Teachers College of Columbia University, the Carnegie Corporation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Farmers Federation (The James G. K. McClure Foundation); and as a member of the Harvard University Committees to Visit the Bussey Institute, the Department of History, and the Harvard University Press.
Page's government service during this period began when he was an advisor to the London Naval Conference in 1930. In August, 1942, he became Chairman of the Joint Army-Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation, a position he held until the end of World War II, and reassumed when the committee was reconstituted in 1946. Page served as the Chairman of the Executive Committee, United Seamen's Service, Inc., 1942-1943, and went on special missions for the War Department to London in 1944 and to Paris in 1945. Also in 1945, he worked as a special public relations consultant to the Secretary of War, helping to break the news of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. For this and other wartime services, the War Department awarded him the Medal for Merit.
Less than a year after he retired from AT&T, in 1947, Page began a new career as business consultant. He continued in public service. In 1955, the Cabinet report to President Eisenhower on national transportation needs was based largely upon work done by an advisory committee headed by Page. Then, in 1956, the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan Rapid Transit Survey engaged him as its project director. A year later, Page's commission recommended a program calling for a $400 million rapid transit loop which would link the New York subways with New Jersey's commuter railroad network. The plan failed to win approval of the legislatures of the two states.
Page married Mollie Hall on June 1, 1912, and they had four children: Mollie (Mrs. Anderson Hewitt), Walter Hines II, John Hall, and Arthur W. Page, Jr.
