• Before reaching 30 years old, Robert S. Brookings transformed a small St. Louis business, Cupples & Marston, into the nation’s largest distributor of household products. At 35, he conceived and created a central warehousing terminal that revolutionized the cost structure for wholesale merchants in St. Louis and became the model for the nation’s freight handling.
• Brookings realized the importance of education and its role in training men and women for leadership and devoted himself to Washington University in St. Louis, which he admired for its strong charter and able faculty. For 33 years he served as president of the university’s governing board, giving much of his time, his fortune and his former home to revitalize the University and its medical school.
• Offered a chance to run for the U.S. Senate in 1909, Brookings declined the honor in favor of rebuilding the university’s medical school.
• In 1916, Brookings worked with other government reformers to create the Institute for Government Research in Washington, D.C., the first private organization devoted to the fact-based study of national public policy issues. In 1922 and 1924, he helped create a new Institute of Economics and founded the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government. This school was at first part of Washington University, then became an independent organization.
• President Woodrow Wilson called Brookings to Washington, D.C. to serve on the War Industries Board in 1917. A year later, the president asked him to chair the Price Fixing Committee. Through these experiences, Brookings discovered the inefficiency of government, deepening his commitment to reform.
• In 1927 he merged the institutes and the school into the Brookings Institution which remains the world’s pre-eminent think tank. Started with a grant of $160,000, the Brookings Institution has grown to a budget of more than $80 million.
• Amid a flood of tributes, Brookings completed his term as Washington University’s board president in 1928. The building he donated, University Hall, was renamed “Brookings Hall” in his honor.
• Already the recipient of honorary degrees from Yale, the University of Missouri, and Harvard, Brookings was awarded Washington University’s honorary LL.D. and M.D. degrees at the 1929 Commencement.
• In 1931, his wife Isabel January Brookings donated a new building on Lafayette Square to serves as the headquarters of the Brookings Institution. The institution later moved to its current headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue in Dupont Circle.
• Brookings died in 1932; his wife in 1965. They are buried side-by-side in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.