He was highly decorated by European countries, including receiving a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur from France.

[1] His paternal grandmother, Julia Beach Lawrence, was the daughter of the largest landowner in New York state and an East India merchant.

[4] After his father died in 1871 when Wells was six years old, the family lived at Sommariva, his mother's home in New Brunswick, New Jersey that overlooked the Raritan River.

Hollins & Co., a New York City banking company that owed funds to J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt; its debuts were reported to be more than $4,500,000 ($130,032,110 in today's money).

[26] In The New York Times in February 1926, Wells defended Romania's position regarding paying Austria and Hungary for pre-war bonds.

[28][27] In October 1926, Wells helped coordinate the New York portion of Queen Marie of Romania's royal visit to America, along with Princess Ileana and Prince Nicholas.

[29] He was also fourth in the royal procession at the ball hosted by the Friends of Roumania at the Ritz–Carlton Hotel in New York City, with some 700 guests in attendance.

[31] The executive secretary of the American Jewish Congress, Bernard G. Richards responded, "The grievous wrongs suffered by the Jewish citizens of Rumania [sic], to which we have repeatedly sought to call attention, are now voiced by an impartial deputation representative of various Christian denominations..."[31] Leo Wolfson, president of the United Rumanian Jews of America, also responded, writing, "Mr. Wells is a distinguished American lawyer, but he knows about Rumania and her Jews what he has been told, or what he has been shown when he visits the country he represents.

"[33] In 1928, Wells visited Queen Marie and Iuliu Maniu, Prime Minister of Romania, while on a three-month trip to Europe.

[34] In 1938, Wells headed a group of 300 mourners for the Dowager Queen Marie at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

"[40] The Wells family eventually made it Venice, Italy but a bank crisis meant they were unable to access the funds that the U.S. Congress put in place to help Americans escape Europe.

[37] However, the family eventually made it to Rome and sailed on the SS Canopic from Naples, arriving in Boston, Massachusetts on September 25, 1914.

[36] When his memoir was published in 2017, Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Wells' interpretations of the grand history unfolding around him are consistently insightful and prescient...This is historical scholarship at its best: rigorous, testimonial, and dramatic.

"[37] In September 1914, Wells was a member of the founding committee of the American branch of Secours National which raised funds to help Belgian and French refugees from the war.

[41] One of their appeals that ran in newspapers across the country said they were "organized in France to give immediate relief to the women, old people and children crying for bread and in need of clothing."

The peasants fled to the south and their buildings, granaries, and agricultural implements were destroyed... An official report gives the number of fugitives from the provinces...as 675,000 and 315,000 more from the large towns.

Wells reported, "The conditions in Serbia have been bad, but are rapidly getting worse because the people, having been driven from their farms and villages by the Austrian invasion, have been herded into concentration camps where only the barest of necessities of food have been available to keep them alive, and where sanitary precautions were impossible.

The result has been that typhus fever has now broken out which is likely to decimate that brave people unless medical help and nourishing food can be rapidly supplied to them.

[4] This group existed to coordinate "mass meetings of protest all over the United States against the treatment of Roumanian Jews, and to raise funds for the relief of the sufferers.

[5] In 1917, Wells served on a fourteen-person committee that paid to print an English-French handbook for American soldiers going to France.

[54] In 1898, Wells joined the board of the Five Points House of Industry in New York City; he served as the charity's president for 21 years, starting in 1914.