Education: Prodigy

That Nicholas Murray (“Miraculous”) Butler is a prodigy there has never been any dispute. He was graduated from high school at 13, had his Ph.D. at 22, became a member of Columbia University’s faculty at 23. “I saw in a flash,” said Columbia’s Dean John William Burgess later, “that he would become president of Columbia and that Columbia would become the greatest institution on earth.” Today, at 77, Dr. Butler has 37 honorary degrees, decorations from almost every important nation, a column and a quarter in the U. S. Who’s Who, almost a column more than that in the British Who’s Who. Consequently, the publication this week of his autobiography, Across the Busy Years,*was in a sense a prodigious event.

Dr. Butler’s autobiography betrays no false modesty. It begins with an apologia in which he claims to have been on more or less intimate terms with “almost every man of light and leading who has lived in the world during the past half-century,” including British statesmen from Gladstone to Neville Chamberlain, 13 U. S. Presidents. Dr. Butler goes on to make a clean breast of his career as educator, publicist, kingmaker, counsellor to politicians.

Dr. Butler’s ancestry abounded in preachers, educators, merchants. Dr. Butler’s British-born father went into the jute business, in Paterson, N. J. Proud of his British blood, Dr. Butler exclaims: “It has never been . . . possible for me . . . to be on … British soil without a feeling of exaltation.” When Dr. Butler was a few days old, his aunt carried him up to the cupola of his house with an American flag, a $10 gold piece and a Bible; there dedicated his life to patriotism, wealth and piety.

He got “a good old-fashioned education” hi Paterson public schools (one of his masters used to beat his hand with a strap until blood ran). Says Dr. Butler: “The present-day notion, that an infant must be permitted and encouraged to explore the universe for himself . . . had, fortunately, not yet raised its preposterous head. In my time children were really educated.” Dr. Butler ruefully records that he stood third in his high-school graduating class, below a grocer’s daughter and a contractor’s.

Lacking the heft he acquired later, Nicholas Murray Butler was rejected for crew and football at Columbia College† but played on the cricket team. Meanwhile, he edited the Acta Columbiana, taught in private schools, wrote for the New York Tribune, paid most of his expenses and finished college with $1,000 in the bank.

Because his father had long been a power in New Jersey Republican politics, young Butler planned to study law, go into politics himself. But Columbia’s President Frederick A. P. Barnard persuaded him into pedagogy. He lived to fulfill Dean Burgess’ prediction, to expand Columbia from 5,000 to more than 32,000 students, to turn down the presidencies of Stanford and the State universities of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, Washington and California. Dr. Butler reports that Governor Leland Stanford of California offered him $25,000 to be Stanford’s first president, when Dr. Butler was getting $3,500 as a Columbia professor.

Having adopted pedagogy as a career, Dr. Butler made politics his avocation. Speaking of his “lifelong struggle against the evils of the saloon,” he says: “This began while a freshman in college.” His autobiography dwells most fondly on his behind-the-scenes activities. He relates the inside story of 14 national Republican Conventions, where he sat in on many a smoke-filled hotel-room confab, with such politicians as Pennsylvania’s Boies Penrose and the late President Warren G. Harding. Politician Butler’s chief usefulness was as a kind of glorified errand boy who carried messages between one faction and another, wrote the first draft of political platforms (usually discarded), delivered statements to the press. It was Theodore Roosevelt who gave him his nickname of “Nicholas Miraculous.”

Most startling chapter in Dr. Butler’s autobiography is “On Keeping Out of Public Office.” “The pressure upon me to accept public office,” says he, “began early and has been unremitting all these years.” Offices he says he has turned down: New Jersey legislator, U. S. Representative and Senator, U. S. Commissioner of Education, U. S. Ambassador to London or Berlin, U. S. Secretary of State (offered by President Harding), New York City’s Mayor, New York’s Governor. But Republican politicians have long known there was one office Nicholas Murray Butler coveted. Biggest Butler boom for President came in 1920, when his supporters, to bring him down to the voters’ level, coined the slogan: “Pick Nick for a Picnic in November.”

Dr. Butler says, with simple dignity: “I was not in the least disappointed or surprised at the result.”

*Charles Scribner’s Sons ($3.75).

†As Columbia’s president, he abolished football in 1905, restored it, under alumni pressure, in 1915.