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NICHOLAS MIRACUL0US
The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler
By MICHAEL ROSENTHAL Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Michael Rosenthal
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-374-29994-3
Chapter One
The Sage There is a sage for Xmas turkey, There is a sage to flavor cheese, There is a sage to spice the lowly porker, There is a sage that mother brewed in teas, There is a sage that fills the prairies wide, But the sage who makes our lunches delightful Is the sage from OLD MORNINGSIDE.
Thus Number 25 in the 1939 songbook of the Occasional Thinkers Club, entitled simply "To the Sage." The book's inside cover exhibits the same kind of admiration but in a different rhyme scheme:
There is no man whose wit is subtler Than our friend and sage, good Dr. Butler, So let us drink to him this toast: Some mean a lot, he means the most. Chorus Oh sage we feel this way for you For all the things you say and do.
No mere purveyor of comic doggerel, the poet Robert Underwood Johnson evoked the greatness of his sage in a 1933 sonnet published in the New York Herald-Tribune after he had read several of Butler's addresses on the increasingly grim state of European politics:
To Nicholas Murray Butler Let no man wait another hastening hour, Nor unearned sleep enjoy, till he shall hear These warning words that show thee sage and seer, And breathe the secrets of the spirit's power. Now, when the clouds of doubt more darkly lower And Love and Hope contend with Hate and Fear We listen for thy summoning trumpet, clear And cogent, lest our very courage cower. No time is this for the smooth prophecy, For laggard rescue, rash experiment As though no danger ever trod this path. Nearest thou art unto a prophet sent Bringing our needs-Lincoln's humanity, Milton's full mind, Savonarola's wrath.
The things that Nicholas Murray Butler said and did as influential Republican, international statesman, and president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945 made him a dominant American presence in his time, known, celebrated-and not infrequently vilified-throughout the world. The journalist Max Frankel, explaining why his parents chose to settle in New York after fleeing Germany in the 1930s, pointed out that the "three most famous symbols of America for every European-Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia and Columbia University-were New York institutions." Butler couldn't take credit for FDR and "the Little Flower," but he could for Columbia, which owed its status almost exclusively to his drive and flair. In building it into a world-renowned institution, Butler succeeded in turning himself into one as well.
The titles conferred upon him during his career by The New York Times suggest the magisterial sweep of his achievement: "the incarnation of the international mind" (1927), "Member of the Parliament of Man" (1931), "Prime Minister of the Republic of the Intellect" (l937). It is not likely that the author John O'Hara ever met him, and it is almost certain that Butler never read his novels, yet when O'Hara, in his 1934 bestselling Appointment in Samarra, has Caroline Walker document in a letter to Joe Montgomery the illustrious nature of the shipboard company on her first trip to Europe, her list begins with Nicholas Murray Butler (followed by the comedian Eddie Cantor, the actress Genevieve Tobin, J. P. Morgan's daughter Anne, and financier Joseph Widener). Whether Joe was impressed with all this talent, O'Hara does not say. But it is telling that he chose Butler as representative of the power and distinction he wished to claim for some of Caroline's shipmates. Bewildering as such a choice may seem today, when Butler appears to have vanished from human memory, his presence on board would have conjured for any middlebrow reader of the 1930s precisely the impression O'Hara intended.
Of course, no cultural seismographs are calibrated precisely enough to register the exact effect of an individual on any given era. For the opening decades of the twentieth century-once one is through with the Carnegies, Morgans, and Rockefellers, with Dempsey, Tilden, and Babe Ruth, with presidents and movie stars, inventors and war heroes-what method exists for determining the significance of a person's life?
In 1930 The New Yorker's Alva Johnston came up with a scientific breakthrough. A foolproof technique did in fact exist to calculate the magnitude of human achievement: merely count the lines in an individual's Who's Who entry, and the results will yield an indisputable rank order of importance. Applying this arithmetical model to the 1929 Who's Who, Johnston discovered the five greatest Americans to be Samuel Untermyer, Nicholas Murray Butler, the Reverend Dr. William Eleazar Barton, Nathan William MacChesney, and Bion Joseph Arnold.
Butler could not have been happy with his runner-up position (by only two lines) to lawyer Untermyer. And he would have been right. Johnston had overlooked a flaw in his objective approach: the discrepant nature of the information included in Who's Who. Whereas Butler's lines were limited to basic biographical facts and the array of positions he had held, honors earned, clubs joined, organizations headed, and books published, Untermyer's entry was primarily made up of lengthy descriptions of his legal victories. As a measurement of stature, Untermver's padded ninety-nine lines cannot compare to Butler's lean, compelling ninety-seven. Had Johnston controlled for the verbose accounts of Untermyer's cases, his analysis of "The Fifteen Biggest Men in America" would have made clear that Nicholas Murray Butler was unquestionably the biggest.
Johnston's formula for determining cultural size is not the only method available. Beyond the prominence afforded by enormous wealth or political power or by the visibility given to entertainment and sports stars, America offers a host of other distinctions that help to define a person's status in the culture. Butler garnered a substantial collection of these: honorary degrees (thirty-eight); Time magazine covers (one); days in which his obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times (two); memberships in foreign societies (thirteen); number of times a quotation from his writing provided the solution for the Saturday Review's famous Double Crostic (one); occasions on which he received electoral votes as the Republican vice presidential nominee after the death of the actual candidate (one); public addresses delivered before various governmental bodies, such as the British House of Commons, the French Chamber of Deputies, the Italian Parliament, and the Hungarian Parliament (fourteen); issues of The New Yorker that included profiles of him (two); decorations from foreign countries (seventeen)-including Commander of the Red Eagle (with star) of Prussia, Grand Commander of the Royal Redeemer (First Class) from Greece, Serbia's Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sava (First Class), Grand Officer of the Order of Polonia Restituta (Second Class), Knight Commander of the Order of the Saints Mauritius and Lazarus from the Italian government, Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion (First Class) from Czechoslovakia, and Grand White Cordon with Red Borders of the Order of Jade from China.
Inducted into the Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers Union in 1923, Butler won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. He became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1925, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1928, and chairman of the Carnegie Corporation Board of Trustees in 1937. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 1920. His celebrity finally became commonplace: in 1928 the Philadelphia Record commented that Butler's receiving the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Romania didn't cause much excitement
for the reason that he already holds ever? nonstop, long-distance, endurance and weight-carrying record in this department of endeavor. His latest acquisition ... is simply another scrap of adornment for the most lavishly decorated member of the human race. It may be, indeed, the last, for the supply must be about exhausted, and there is only a remote possibility that new nations will be formed or new seats of learning founded for the purpose of adding illustrious initials to his name ... Anyway, his possessions make him an influential factor in international affairs and the metal trades, although proposals that he incorporate himself as an individual League of Nations are not considered practicable.
Encrusted with honors, he was for H. G. Wells "the pearly king of academics."
Butler also collected-another sign of cultural influence-hordes of adoring friends and acerbic enemies. The friends included many of the world's most distinguished people, including the British statesmen Arthur Balfour, Lord Morley, Herbert Asquith, and Lloyd George; the foreign ministers Gustav Stresemann of Germany and Aristide Briand of France; the philosophers Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce; Andrew Carnegie, who embraced him within the inner circle of his trusted "old shoes"; Theodore Roosevelt, whom he served as an adviser until a political dispute ended their relationship in 1908; New York governor and democratic presidential candidate Al Smith; secretary of state and first president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Elihu Root; the banker William Crocker; Presidents William Howard Taft and Warren Harding; and almost everyone else of note in America.
For those who admired him, there was hardly an American to compare. Superlatives competed to capture his immensity: "the greatest savant in America-if not in the whole world"; "no man in this country so necessary for the peace of the world and the guidance of humanity"; "of all the men in America ... the best informed regarding the public life of Europe"; "nothing of human concern is foreign to his mind"; "one of the great intellectual leaders of today"; "one of the great shining lights in the world"; "the one outstanding supreme figure in our entire American university world"; "the master interpreter of nation to nation in our time"; "the nation's greatest unofficial statesman"; "the incarnate combination of the Greek and the Roman ways felicitously united"; "the most brilliant mind in the educational and political life of America."
William Nelson Cromwell, cofounder of the prestigious New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, said it perhaps most fulsomely in birthday greetings to Butler in 1942:
The effulgence of your glorious career obliterates time which gave to the world the miracle of your existence. If my heart had voice, it would become speechless in the endeavor to convey to you my devotion, admiration and gratitude for the marvel of such a unique unparalleled life as you have exemplified to all mankind. Such work, such influence and such benefaction as your existence has manifested will never die. They possess the sublime gift of perpetuity. A revolving world is the type and you, Dr. Butler, are its most distinguished exemplar.
Honoring Butler on his eightieth birthday, his good friend Charles D. Hilles remarked, "It is indispensable that a man, to become great or famous, shall represent in a well-defined way the general aspirations of his times." Hilles was certainly right. Coming to power at the same time America was coming to power, Butler reflected the energy, and optimism of a young country about to take on a position of world leadership, supremely confident in the rightness of its political and economic system. His values were unapologetically elitist, embodying the perspective of what he would call "the better classes," men entrenched in seats of influence and privilege, enjoying the benefits of good clubs, substantial incomes, and political clout. Butler flourished as the ultimate insider, really only comfortable with the well-to-do and the well-connected, with men who felt that the world would be better off leaving them alone to run it.
If his admirers came largely from the economic and cultural elite, his critics were a more diversified lot-writers, cranky professors, social activists. For them, "the Sage" represented an abhorrent strain of reactionary thought opposed to social or intellectual change. Catering to the rich, smugly confident in the rightness of his ideas, as tyrannical to those beneath him as he was obsequious to those above, their Butler was less exemplary icon than despicable caricature. The poet Ezra Pound, for example, considered him "one of the more loathsome figures of a time that has not been creditable even to humanity." No friend to university presidents, the economist Thorstein Veblen used Butler as a convenient model for his dissection of the species's most pernicious traits in his brilliantly dyspeptic The Higher Learning in America. The muckraking writer Upton Sinclair, who exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry, in his novel The Jungle, also sought to expose Butler as "the representative, champion, and creator of ... false and cruel ideals ... whose influence must be destroyed, if America is to live as anything worthwhile, kindly or beautiful." Charging Butler with serving as "the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy," he claimed that Butler was the most "complete Tory in our public life." For Butler, Sinclair argued, there were no people, only "the mob," and it was in opposition to the mob and in the interests of plutocracy's "instinctive greed" that he devoted his many talents. In the more direct words of the Communist Daily Worker, "Of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler it may be said, paraphrasing Voltaire, that if he didn't exist, it would be necessary for the capitalist class to invent him."
The social critic (and Columbia College alumnus) Randolph Bourne mocked him as President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher of Pluribus University, a man who took pains every commencement day to warn "the five thousand graduates before him against everything new, everything untried, everything untested." Convinced of the absolute perfection of our Anglo-Saxon political system, Bourne's Dr. Butcher "never wearies of expressing his robust contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth." As America's outstanding "philosopher-politician," he is able to inject "into the petty issues of the political arena the immutable principles of truth."
Walter Lippmann shared Bourne's reservations about Butler's political acuity. He cited Butler as the extreme example of the man who wrote about politics without the slightest understanding of politicians, someone so committed to abstract principles at the expense of the nitty-gritty of reality that there was nothing left "but to gasp and wonder," Lippmann wrote, "whether the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?"
H. L. Mencken saw him as representing one of the two major strains of twentieth-century American thought:
When the history of the late years in America is written, I suspect that their grandest, gaudiest gifts to Kultur will be found in the incomparable twins: the right-thinker and the forward-looker. No other nation can match them, at any weight. The right-thinker is privy to all God's wishes, and even whims ... Butler is an absolute masterpiece of correct thought; in his whole life, so far as human records show, he has not cherished a single fancy that might not have been voiced by a Fifth Avenue rector or spread upon the editorial page of the New York Times. But he has no vision, alas, alas! All the revolutionary inventions for lifting up humanity leave him cold. He is against them all, from the initiative and referendum to birth control, and from Fletcherism to osteopathy.
To which list Mencken might have added the income tax, woman suffrage, and the direct primary. At the same time, it must be noted that Mencken was mightily pleased when the right-thinker reviewed favorably (if briefly) his early book on Nietzsche. Right-thinking clearly has its moments.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NICHOLAS MIRACUL0US by MICHAEL ROSENTHAL Copyright © 2006 by Michael Rosenthal. Excerpted by permission.
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