George Boughton Curtiss (September 16, 1852 – June 20, 1920) was an American lawyer from New York who authored two books on protectionism.
In 1883, shortly after he argued his first court case, he was elected District Attorney of Broome County as a Republican.
[3] In 1900, President McKinley appointed him the United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York.
Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft reappointed him to the office, and he served in that position for 13 years.
He wrote an influential, 300-page treatise on supporting the tariff called Protection and Prosperity, with introductions by William McKinley, Thomas B. Reed, and Levi P. Morton,[5] in 1896.
Along with being a lawyer and working for the federal government, Curtiss was a honorary member of the American Protective Tariff League.
At the request of the League he wrote a pamphlet, Abraham Lincoln Protectionist, in which he wrote "Washington introduced the American System of protection to domestic labor and industry, and Lincoln aided in establishing and perfecting that system.