FROM 1847 to 1857 there was no president of the Association. At each meeting a member, usually one of the "Committee of Management," was "called to the chair." In 1857 the office of President was created. The offices of First Vice-President and Second Vice-President were created in 1867, and the first incumbents were elected in 1868.
As a student, Follen joined the Giessen Burschenschaft whose members were pledged to "republican" [terroristic nihilism] ideals. Though he did not attend himself, Follen was a major organizer of the first Wartburg festival of 1817.
Early in the fall of 1818, he undertook the cause of several hundred communities in Upper Hesse which desired to remonstrate against a government measure directed at the last remnant of their political independence, and drew up a petition to the grand duke on their behalf. It was printed and widely circulated and aroused public indignation to such a pitch that the obnoxious measure was repealed. However the opposition of the influential men whose plans were thereby thwarted precluded any thought of a career in Follen's home town, and he became a Privatdozent at the University of Jena in October 1818.
At Jena, he wrote political essays, poems, and patriotic songs. His essays and speeches advocated violence and tyrannicide in defense of freedom; this, and his friendship with Karl Ludwig Sand brought him under suspicion as an accomplice in Sand's 1819 assassination of the conservative diplomat and dramatist August von Kotzebue. Follen destroyed letters linking him with Sand. He was arrested, but finally acquitted due to lack of evidence. His dismissal from the university and continuing lack of opportunity prompted him to move to Paris. There he met Charles Comte, the son-in-law of Jean Baptiste Say and founder of the Censeur, a publication which he defended until he chose exile in Switzerland instead of imprisonment in France. He also became acquainted with Marquis de Lafayette, who was then planning his trip to the United States. Follen came under suspicion again after the political assassination of Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry in 1820, and fled from France to Switzerland.
In Switzerland, he taught Latin and history for a while at the cantonal school of the Grisons at Coire. His lectures having given offence by their Unitarian tendency to some of the Calvinistic ministers of the district, he asked a dismissal and obtained it, with a testimonial to his ability, learning, and worth. He then became a lecturer on law and metaphysics at the University of Basel. At Basel, he made the acquaintance of the theologian Wilhelm de Wette and his stepson Karl Beck. Both Follen and Charles Comte were forced to leave Switzerland. In Follen's case, demands were made by the German governments for his surrender as a revolutionist. These were twice refused, but on their renewal a third time in a threatening form, Basel yielded, and a resolution was passed for Follen's arrest, and in 1824 he and Beck left Switzerland for the United States of America via Havre, France.
Arriving at New York City in 1824, Follen anglicized his name to "Charles." Lafayette was then visiting the United States and sought to interest some people of influence in the two refugees, who had moved from New York City and settled in Philadelphia. Among those Lafayette contacted were Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, a prominent lawyer, and George Ticknor, a Harvard professor. Ticknor in turn interested George Bancroft.[3]
With the help of these sympathetic people, the refugees established themselves in Massachusetts society. Beck quickly secured a position at Bancroft's Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, in February 1825. Follen continued to study the English language and law in Philadelphia, and in November 1825 took up an offer from Harvard University to be an instructor in German.[3] In 1828 he became an instructor of ethics and ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School, having in the meantime been admitted as a candidate for the ministry. In 1830 he was appointed professor of German literature at Harvard.[1] He became friendly with the New England Transcendentalists, and helped introduce them to German Romantic thought.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 1868-1878
DANIEL HUNTINGTON 1879-1895
HENRY CODMAN POTTER 1895-1906
JOHN BIGELOW 1906-1911
JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 1912-1917 ELIHU ROOT 1918-1927
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was established in 1910, to promote international peace and bring about the abolition of war; and the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911 (with a grant of $125,000,000), was set up "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States by aiding technical schools, institutions of higher learning, libraries, scientific research, hero funds, useful publications, and by such other agencies and means as shall time to time be found appropriate therefore."
With such a history of philanthropic contributions, the Carnegie Endowment, on its face, appeared to be innocent. However, its goal of promoting international peace, was just a ruse to disguise its true purpose to promote one-world government.
The first three Presidents of the group were: Elihu Root, socialist and former Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a leading advocate of the League of Nations; he was succeeded in 1925 by Nicholas Murray Butler, the former President of Columbia University;...
Nicholas Murray Butler, First Vice-President, 1928-1947
-- The Century Association Year-Book 1960, by the Century Association
and then Alger Hiss, the communist who helped found the United Nations. Their President during the 1960's, was Joseph E. Johnson (a member of the CFR), a close friend of Hiss, who was known as the "permanent unofficial Secretary of State."
1953 / Johnson, Joseph E. / 345 East 46th St., N.Y. 17
-- The Century Association Year-Book 1960, by the Century Association
He worked closely with the Donner Foundation, which financed the Temple of Understanding, an occult organization connected to the Lucis Trust in England (a group of Satan worshipers with ties to the Theosophical Society). Members of the Temple met at the Endowment headquarters in the United Nations Plaza. Among their members: Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson), Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Watson (President of IBM), Max Lerner, James Linen (of Time-Life), Norman Thomas, James A. Pike ...
1953 / Pike, James A. nr / 1055 Taylor St., San Francisco 8, Calif.
-- The Century Association Year-Book 1960, by the Century Association
Ellsworth Bunker...
1958 / Bunker, Ellsworth nr / American Embassy, New Delhi, India
-- The Century Association Year-Book 1960, by the Century Association
and John D. Rockefeller IV.
1943 / Rockefeller, David / 30 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y. 20
1930 / Rockefeller, John D., Jr. / 30 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y. 20
1939 / Rockefeller, John D., 3d / 30 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y. 20
1937 / Rockefeller, Nelson A. / 30 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y. 20
-- The Century Association Year-Book 1960, by the Century Association
The 1934 Yearbook of the Carnegie Endowment, said that they were "an unofficial instrument of international policy, taking up here and there the ends of international problems and questions which the governments find it difficult to handle, and ... reaching conclusions ... which officially find their way into the policies of government."
The 1947 Yearbook recommended:
"... that the Endowment work for the establishment of the United Nations headquarters in New York ... that the Endowment construct its programs primarily for the support of the United Nations ... that the Endowment's programs should be broadly educational in order to encourage public understanding and support of the United Nations at home and abroad ... that Endowment supported organizations such as International Relations Clubs in colleges, the Foreign Policy Association, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and local community groups be utilized to achieve these goals, of achieving broader understanding and support for the United Nations."
The Carnegie Endowment and Rockefeller Foundation gave over $3,000,000 to the Institute of Pacific Relations, who used the media to convince the American people that the Communists in China were agricultural reformers. The Endowment has also given money to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the United Nations Association of the U.S., and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.
Norman Dodd, who in July, 1953, was appointed as the research director of the Special Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, said he discovered that the oldest tax exempt foundations were established before the initiation of income taxes, therefore they existed for a different purpose. He examined minutes of the Board of Trustees, and found that for the first year, the members concentrated on whether there was any means more effective than war to alter the life of the people of a nation. They concluded that to get America into an upcoming war, they had to control the diplomatic machinery of the State Department.
Dodd discovered that all high-level appointments in the State Department took place only after they had been cleared through a group called the Council of Learned Societies, which was established by the Carnegie Endowment. He saw in the minutes of the Carnegie Board, record of a note to President Wilson, requesting that he "see to it that the War does not end too quickly."
Board of Directors, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to President Woodrow Wilson, "see to it that the War does not end too quickly."
Syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft, writing in Harper's in July, 1958, said that records indicated that the Carnegie trustees hoped to involve the U.S. in a world war to set the stage for world government. Dodd said they wanted "to bring the idea of 'one-world' (government) to the point where it is acceptable to the people of this country. That is the primary aim, and everything that has happened since then is a means to that one end." Their memos indicated that they believed their efforts were successful, because the war "had brought about a change in the American psyche."
In the archives of the Endowment, Dodd discovered that they felt that the "only way to maintain control of the population was to obtain control of education in the U.S. They realized this was a prodigious task so they approached the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that they go in tandem and that portion of education which could be considered as domestically oriented be taken over by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which was oriented to international matters be taken over by the Carnegie Endowment." Dodd said that "they decided that the success of this program lay in an alteration in the matter in which American history was to be presented."
The Guggenheim Foundation agreed to award fellowships to historians recommended by the Carnegie Endowment, and a group of 20 were assembled, and sent to London, where they were briefed and became founding members of the American History Association. In 1928, the A.H.A. was given a grant of $400,000 by Carnegie to write a 7-volume study on the direction the nation was to take. The secret of its success would be that it would be done gradually.
Rene Wormser, legal counsel to Reece's Committee, said that the Carnegie Endowment was attempting to mold the minds of our children by deciding "what should be read in our schools and colleges." He also described how the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Carnegie Corporation jointly sponsor conferences to push the goals of the United Nations.
The investigation by Reece's Special House Committee, found that the Carnegie Corporation financed the writing and publication of the Proper Study of Mankind by Stuart Chase, the book praised by the communist agents Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie, which outlined an "ideal" society in which the individual is suppressed. Over 50,000 copies of the book were distributed by the foundation to libraries and scholars. They also gave a $340,000 grant to print a 17-volume study on American education by Dr. George Counts, which was later called "an educational program for a socialist America."
CHARLES A. PLATT 1928-1930
GARI MELCHERS 1931-1932
ROYAL CORTISSOZ 1933-1944
GEOFFREY PARSONS 1945-1949
PAUL MANSHIP 1950-1953
PAUL KIEFFER 1954-1963
YALE KNEELAND 1964-
FIRST VICE-PRESIDENTS
DANIEL HUNTINGTON 1868-1870
GILBERT M. SPEIR 1871-1888
HENRY CODMAN POTTER 1889-1894
JOHN BIGELOW 1895-1905
JOHN Q. A. WARD 1906-1910
EDWIN HOWLAND BLASHFIELD 1911-1922
CASS GILBERT 1923-1927 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 1928-1947
WILLIAM ADAMS DELANO 1948-1949
WHITNEY H. SHEPARDSON 1950-1952
JOHN W. DAVIS 1953-1953
JAMES KELLUM SMITH 1954-1955
LAWRENCE GRANT WHITE 1956-1956
PAUL AUSTIN WOLFE 1957-1962
SECOND VICE-PRESIDENTS
LEWIS M. RUTHERFURD 1868-1868
JAMES W. BEEKMAN 1869-1869
LEWIS M. RUTHERFURD 1870-1870
FREDERICK E. CHURCH 1871-1872
SAMUEL B. RUGGLES 1873-1873
DANIEL HUNTINGTON 1874-1878
HENRY W. BELLOWS 1879-1882
HENRY CODMAN POTTER 1883-1888
JOHN BIGELOW 1889-1894
JOHN Q.A. WARD 1895-1905
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 1906-1908
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1909-1911
J. HOWARD VAN AMRINGE 1912-1915
WILLIAM CRARY BROWNELL 1916-1922
GEORGE HAVEN PUTNAM 1923-1927
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM 1928-1936
JOHN MUNRO WOOLSEY 1936-1944
HENRY DE FOREST BALDWIN 1945-1947
WILLIAM ADAMS DELANO 1947-1948
THOMAS D. THACHER 1948-1949
WALTER WALKER PALMER 1950-1950
LEARNED HAND 1951-1952
JAMES KELLUM SMITH 1953-1953
PAUL AUSTIN WOLFE 1954-1956
WILLIAM A. LOCKWOOD 1957-
SECRETARIES
DANIEL SEYMOUR 1847-1850
EDGAR S. VAN WINKLE 1851-1851
EDWARD SLOSSON 1852-1854
S. W. GOODRIDGE, Jr. 1855-1855
T. BAILEY MYERS 1856-1856
JOHN H. GOURLIE 1857-1858
AUGUSTUS R. MACDONOUGH 1859-1885
JOHN H. PLATT 1886-1886
HENRY E. HOWLAND 1887-1900
EDWARD CARY 1901-1906
WILLIAM M. SLOANE 1907-1909
GEORGE WILLIAM KNOX 1910-1910
HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR 1911-1917
ALEXANDER DANA NOYES 1918-1937
GEOFFREY PARSONS 1938-1944
HENRY ALLEN MOE 1945-1949
ROGER BURLINGAME 1950-1952
CHARLES G. PROFFITT 1953-
TREASURERS
THOMAS S. CUMMINGS 1847-1849
JOHN H. GOURLIE 1849-1851
RUSSELL SMITH 1851-1852
GEORGE G. SMITH 1852-1854
D. WILLIAMSON LEE 1854-1856
EDMUND G. STRONG 1856-1857
JOHN PRIESTLEY 1857-1872
CHARLES COLLINS 1873-1880
HENRY A. OAKLEY 1881-1884
ROBERT B. MINTURN 1885-1885
GEORGE L. RIVES 1886-1887
J. HAMPDEN ROBB 1888-1891
GEORGE L. RIVES 1892-1898
ALFRED ROELKER 1899-1900
LANSDALE BOARDMAN 1901-1903
WILLIAM M. SPACKMAN 1904-1908
ELGIN R. L. GOULD 1909-1915
HENRY de FOREST BALDWIN 1916-1944
RAY MORRIS 1945-1949
RICHARDSON PRATT 1950-1956
SHERMAN BALDWIN 1957
THE Century Association was formed in 1847 at a meeting of the Sketch Club, which had been in existence since 1829. In the following list of Founders of The Century, those marked with an asterisk were Sketch Club members, the others had been frequent guests of the Sketch Club.
Rev. Henry W. Bellows
* Henry K. Brown
* William C. Bryant
J. D. Campbell
* J. G. Chapman
L. G. Clarke
David C. Colden
*A. M. Cozzens
*T. S. Cummings
Rev. Orville Dewey
*A. B. Durand
*F. W. Edmonds
C. L. Elliott
Thomas Addis Emmet
Thomas H. Faile
George Folsom
* Dudley B. Fuller
Alban Goldsmith
* John H. Gourlie
* Henry Peters Gray
Ogden Haggerty
* W. J. Hoppin
* Daniel Huntington
* Charles C. Ingham
* Robert Kelly
* Gouverneur Kemble
* William Kemble
Shepherd Knapp
* Charles M. Leupp
Samuel E. Lyon
William McNeven
Christian Mayr
Eleazer Parmly
* T. P. Rossiter
* Daniel Seymour
John L. Stephens
* Jonathan Sturges
H. P. Tappan
Joseph Trench
H. T. Tuckerman
* Edgar S. Van Winkle
* Gulian C. Verplanck
1856 / George Bancroft / 1880
1852 / Augustus R. Macdonough / 1886
1847 / * John H. Gourlie / 1889
1847 / * William J. Hoppin / 1891
1854 / John Jay / 1893
1864 / Richard Henry Stoddard / 1894
1847 / * Daniel Huntington / 1895
1862 / Worthington Whittredge / 1900
1860 / John La Farge / 1903
1869 / Henry Codman Potter / 1906
1897 / William Dean Howells / 1912
1865/ Charles Collins / 1917
1886 / Elihu Root / 1928
1872 / George Haven Putnam / 1929
1898 Alexander Dana Noyes / 1938
1920 / Royal Cortissoz / 1945
1911 / Henry E. Crampton / 1946
1893 / Henry L. Stimson / 1949
1922 / Geoffrey Parsons / 1951
1893 / Charles C. Burlingham / 1955
1907 / William Adams Delano / 1956
1908 / Learned Hand / 1959
His friends remember the striking contrast between the extreme shyness and modesty of Wayman Adams and the impetuous boldness of his painting. There was consistent integrity in his work. As a portraitist, he was far from what is known as a "society painter" and he never made a concession to the vanity of his sitters. He had an almost uncanny capacity for seeing latent facets of character in his subjects and presenting them on canvas precisely as he saw them. Critics sometimes accused him of "brutal frankness."
Though some of his candid portraits were of his artist friends, he was much loved and respected by his fellow painters. Perhaps, being painters, they were able to see what he saw even in themselves—or, at least, saw it less dimly than vain and pompous laymen could.
His portraiture embraced a wide variety of men and women. There was Governor Allan Shivers of Texas but there was also Bobby Jones, the golfer. Booth Tarkington and John Purroy Mitchel were among his subjects outside the artist sitters, and so was the feminist Clara Driscoll.
Wayman was born in Muncie, Indiana. His first painting, for which he got five dollars, was of a heifer. From Muncie he went for his special education to Indianapolis and studied at the John Herron Art Institute. He continued his studies in Italy and Spain. After he came back, he won the Benjamin Altman prize of $1,000 from the National Academy of Design for a painting entitled "108 West 57th Street."
Until 1948 he lived in New York City and in Elizabethstown, New York, where, with his wife, he maintained an art school. But then he moved to Texas—so that for the last ten years he was rarely at the Century. He is remembered by his fellow Centurions as extremely reticent, as if he believed so deeply that painting was his only true medium of expression that he could give little value to the words that he spoke.
Avery Delano Andrews
General Andrews lived actively in the years most of us only read about. As soldier, lawyer, New York Police Commissioner, and business executive he saw more changes in every field of his endeavor than have taken place in any similar span of time in history. Born during the Civil War, he saw the birth of the telephone, the electric light, the automobile, and the airplane, but he has seen, too, the cold war and satellites in orbit. He was as American as you can be: one direct ancestor landed in Plymouth Colony in 1621, another in Massachusetts Bay in 1635.
Avery Andrews was graduated from West Point in 1886 and commissioned a second lieutenant in the Fifth United States Artillery. While in the army he studied law at Columbian (later George Washington) University and took his degree of LL.B. in 1891. The following year he got another bachelor's degree from New York Law School. Evidently in those years of peace this departure from rigid duty as an army officer was possible, but it was certainly unusual.
From the time he resigned from the army in 1895, Andrews's interests expressed themselves in many fields, and he achieved triumphs in military, legal, business, and governmental activities. For three years after leaving the army he was New York City's Police Commissioner. His most celebrated contribution to the effectiveness of the force was his organization of the first bicycle squad, whose duty was to stop runaways. At the same time, he never quite left the military as he was active in the national guard of New York. In 1898 he was briefly in command of Squadron A, but in the summer of that year the Spanish War drew him back into the armed forces. He served as lieutenant colonel of volunteers on the staff of Major General James H. Wilson, U.S.A., until the war was over. In 1899 he was appointed adjutant general of the State of New York with the rank of governor general.
In the First World War he was assistant chief of General Pershing's staff in France. But in the intervals of his military career he found time for legal and business activities. He practiced law with the firm of Wells and Andrews, he was the representative in the United States of the Royal Petroleum Company of Holland and the Shell Transport and Trading Company of London, and he was director of the Irving Trust Company of New York, the Central-Penn National Bank of Philadelphia, and the Shell Union Oil Corporation.
He was a Centurion for sixty-three of his ninety-five years.
Montgomery Boynton Angell
A Centurion friend of "Monty" Angell writes that "the qualities which made him a joyous companion were his instant responses, his mind well stocked with the thoughts of the best writers throughout the ages, an understanding and pleasure in the creations of artists in many fields, an objective appraisal of controversial issues in matters civic and personal, a felicity of expression, a keen sense of humor which tempered his conclusions to the thin, thin sensitivity of any belligerent opponent."
Montgomery Angell was born in Rochester, New York, in 1889. He was graduated from Princeton in 1911, having been a member of the hockey team in his undergraduate days. In 1915 he took his law degree at the Harvard Law School, where he was treasurer and an editor of the Harvard Law Review. The year he left Harvard he joined the Interstate Commerce Commission and served there until the United States entered the First World War.
In the army he was an infantry major in combat overseas. He won the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star and a French Army Corps Citation.
In the Treasury Department after the war he served as a tax expert until he entered the general counsel's office of the Federal Reserve Board.
Coming to New York early in the 1920's, he joined the law firm which eventually became Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland and Kiendl. At his death he was a senior partner of this firm. During this time he published articles in legal periodicals and lectured at the Practicing Law Institute.
His membership in the Century dates from 1933.
Reginald Rowan Belknap
Even if they did not know him, Centurions were impressed by the look of Reginald Belknap with his erect bearing, his fine head, and his keen, steady blue eyes. If they inquired about him, as they usually did, they were told that he was one of the navy's oldest living admirals, a veteran of the Spanish-American War. And even before that he served in the Asiatic station during the war between China and Japan from 1894 to 1896.
The high point of Admiral Belknap's career was his remarkable performance in the First World War, when he commanded the mine-laying squadron which laid 56,571 mines that formed four-fifths of the 230 x 23 mile field between the Orkney Islands and Norway. This operation, in 1918, was described in the report of Secretary Josephus Daniels as "the outstanding anti-submarine offensive product of the year." In recognition of this feat, which had required ten ships in fifteen expeditions, he was promoted to rear admiral by special act of Congress.
Ten years before this North Sea operation he had performed an act of humane service in the Mediterranean. After the Messina earthquake in 1908 he commanded the Red Cross ship Bayern which brought supplies for the construction of buildings for the temporary housing of some 16,000 people whose homes had been destroyed. For this he was awarded the American Red Cross Gold Medal.
Reginald Belknap was born at Maiden, Massachusetts, in 1873. His father was Admiral George Eugene Belknap, a Civil War veteran and later an oceanographer. Reginald got his commission as ensign at the age of twenty. In the war with Spain he was transferred from the Asiatic base and served as flag secretary to the commander of the Key West Naval Base. During the Philippine Insurrection, he was again sent to the Pacific where he was flag secretary to the commander- in-chief, Asiatic station. For three years after 1907 he was naval attache at embassies in Berlin, Rome, and Vienna. During his naval career he received the Navy Distinguished Service Medal and officer decorations of the Belgian Order of Leopold and the French Legion of Honor.
Upon his retirement in 1927 he became deeply interested in church work. He was a prominent Episcopalian layman. He was vestryman, then junior warden of Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in New York. He was a member of the board of managers of the Seamen's Church Institute, a president of the American Church Union, and a chairman of the Layman's National Committee.
In recognition of his far-flung activities, he was made president of that extremely exclusive and fascinating institution The Ends of the Earth Club. It was, of course, natural that the club's membership should include several Centurions.
A non-resident member of the Century, the admiral came to lunch at the club about once every two weeks. Sometimes, of an evening, he would join a group at the Round Table, where he was always welcome. As long as they live, those Centurions who knew Reginald Belknap will be proud of their memory of him.
Walter Lawrence Bogert
Walter Bogert was a teacher of music, a lecturer on the history and appreciation of music, an occasional conductor, and a singer. He was also, for a time, a practicing lawyer. With all the distinctions that rewarded his varied efforts, he remained a gentle person, never imposing his views on others or, indeed, talking about himself. He seldom mentioned his music or insisted upon the quite positive opinions he was known to hold. Rather, he would talk about some hobby such as photography which he especially enjoyed. And, in spite of the affliction which overtook him in later years, his happy disposition seemed never to lapse.
He was born ninety-four years ago in Flushing, New York, descended from Dutch ancestors who settled on Long Island in the 1600's. He was educated at Columbia College, from which he graduated in 1888. Two years later he took his LL.B. degree at Columbia Law School. The law, however, was never his first love: his main activity in these years was the study of instrumental and vocal music at the National Conservatory of Music and the Institute of Musical Art. As a result of these studies he became instructor in harmony at the Conservatory. Because of his interpretative skill he was given the post of organist at St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1903 he took time off to conduct the United States Marine Band in Washington. As a baritone he gave some five hundred recitals.
In 1920 he began to lecture at Yale in what is now known as musicology. At one time he was president of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, and later he was one of its directors. He was a director, too, of the Russian Symphony Society and the MacDowell Club of New York. A less formal post was that of secretary of "The Bohemians," an organization which met once a month at the Harvard Club for a convivial musical evening.
Bogert's closest friends at the Century were Francis Rogers, Willem Willeke, and Theodore Steinway, all of whom he survived. In the earlier days of his membership he would come to the Club and occasionally play informally for the entertainment of whatever members were there. In later years he was unhappily prevented from coming or, indeed, from seeing most of his old friends by a crippling disease which eventually confined him to a wheel chair.
A Centurion friend writes of Walter Bogert: "He was a live and let live sort of fellow with standards of courtesy and forbearance which seem to be old hat in the hurly-burly of the second half of our turbulent century."
Lindsay Bradford
Lindsay was a direct descendent of the minister who led the Pilgrims to America in the Mayflower in 1620 and became Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony. In later years, the Bradfords drifted to New York, and it was there that Lindsay was born in 1892.
He became known to many Centurions when he was appointed to the Board of the American Academy in Rome. His first appearance there both fascinated and frightened most of the other board members. He had, they said, a "wicked gleam in his eye," but they were impressed by his quick, keen intelligence. They came to know his wisdom in the management of their funds, and eventually he endeared himself by what they called his "touch of boyish bravado." He was a handsome man with an abundance of hair which was always straying from the brush. He was a contrast to the common image of the businessman.
Yet businessman he was, very much so. When he retired he was vice-chairman of the board of New York's City Bank Farmers Trust Company. He had been an investment banker since 1914. At his death he was director of some half-dozen corporations. It was this broad experience in finance—especially in connection with trusts—that made him so valuable to the Academy.
Lindsay was educated at Phillips Andover Academy and at Yale. He took his bachelor's degree in 1914. After his graduation he entered the investment banking firm of Hambleton and Company. In the First World War he served as lieutenant junior grade in the navy. From 1919 to 1927 he was with the New York Trust Company and then joined the bank which became the City Bank Farmers Trust Company. He came on the Academy board in 1945.
A fellow Centurion who was also associated with him in the Rome Academy writes: "Lindsay was a spare man of extraordinary energy. He seemed to have plenty left over from his many and large responsibilities to devote to riding, golf, tennis, bridge, chess and other competitive games and sports. He played to win and generally did. He was really a fine gamesman."
He was elected to the Century in 1946.
Arthur Freeman Brinckerhoff
"Brinck," as we always called him, was an architect and a landscape architect and he achieved the peak of his distinguished career in the combination of these professions. He worked mainly in the country and designed homes, schools, institutional buildings, and parks. He was interested, too, in federal housing projects in Staten Island and in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and he became so accomplished in large patterns which involved both building and planting that he was chosen consultant to the board of design of the New York World's Fair in 1939-40. Many gardens on large private estates also bear testimony to his special talents.
He was educated at Cornell, where he received a B.S. degree in architecture in 1902. He began his work as a member of the firm of Vitale, Brinckerhoff and Geiffert. In the First World War he was in the construction division of the army; in the Second World War he was chairman of Artists for Victory.
In 1939 he was spokesman for New York's Fine Arts Federation and was so successful in his presentation of the artists' objections to the plan for a Battery-Brooklyn bridge that the proposal was abandoned and a tunnel was substituted. And he was for a while president of the Federation. He also held directorship of the Municipal Art Society of New York and was at one time chairman of the Society of Landscape Architects. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Architectural League of New York in 1920 and the Medal of Honor of the National Sculpture Society in 1943. He was a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Institute of Architects. He served as president of the Israel Putnam Memorial camp ground committee of Putnam Park near his home in Redding, Connecticut.
Brinck was a familiar figure at the Century, where he had warm friends. He spent many a long evening in the billiard room and he was a constant attendant at meetings of the Stim Committee. He was a Centurion for thirty-two years. In the last two years we have missed him, for illness kept him much at home away from town.
Lyman Lloyd Bryson
In his book The Next America Lyman Bryson described democracy as "a way of developing the creative differences among men, engineered by free choice and consequence." He conceded that this was an arbitrary definition "in the imperative mode," but he wanted to let it stand for the purposes of his book.
This concept of "creative differences" was in the foreground of Bryson's mind through most of his teaching career. His invention of the "panel," now so popular in radio and television, was intended to present these differences to the public as immediately and dramatically as possible.
Bryson's interest in the discussions based on differences of views and opinions led him into the promotion of adult education, a relatively new institution in America, at least on the scale he envisioned. There were soon a million or more listeners to the CBS program "The People's Platform" which he moderated. It was an ad lib dinner table conversation on current events. This was succeeded by "Invitation to Learning," "School of the Air," "Church of the Air," and "Of Men and Books"—his popularity increasing with each new program. When television came, he took part in "You and the World," which was about the United Nations, and "Lamp Unto My Feet," a program of religion and ethics which still continues.
Bryson confuted the highbrows who said you could not interest people on a low level of education in high-level philosophy and literature and science. He often told about a fan who wrote him that in spite of a minimum of school she easily understood his broadcasts on Bacon's Novum Organum and Darwin's Origin of Species.
Lyman Bryson was born in Valentine, Nebraska, in 1888. He was educated in an Omaha high school and the University of Michigan. In summer vacations he worked as a newspaper reporter in Omaha and Detroit. After taking his M.A. he taught rhetoric and journalism at the University of Michigan. During the First World War he was with the Red Cross and continued with it till 1928. After an interval in California— first as director of the San Diego Museum of Anthropology, then as professor of anthropology in San Diego Teacher's College—he came in 1934 to Teacher's College, Columbia University. In New York he attracted large audiences to his popular Town Hall lectures. At Columbia he established what he called the Readability Laboratory whose function was to re-edit books on economics, sociology, and government so that they would be easy to read. In 1936 he published Adult Education, which today is a standard text.
Bryson was active in the Century. He served on the Board of Management and was chairman of the Committee on Literature. He was especially interested in the preliminary plans for a fifth floor library.
On his death, an editorial in The New York Times said: "He was a man of pleasant and unassuming personality. He was also, as those know who saw him during the years he was fighting his last enemy, his final illness, a man of superb courage. Perhaps the last lesson he taught was to face death with an almost Socratic serenity. His gaiety and enthusiasm remain in memory."
Lyman Bryson's death was a loss to millions of listening and watching Americans. But his life had brought immense gain to the cause of American education.
Oliver Ellsworth Buckley
Bell was one of the pioneers among American industrial laboratories to engage in basic scientific research. Although this activity was defined by a recent government official in this somewhat ungrammatical sentence, "Basic research is when you don't know what you are doing," industrial corporations are giving more and more attention to it as a profitable enterprise. This exploration of the unknown requires the direction of a true scientific mind—which is the explanation of the success of Oliver Buckley in the Bell Laboratories.
Buckley was an engineer and inventor as well as a director of fundamental research. His engineering achievement? included the development of high-speed submarine telegraph cables. Two of his inventions were an ionization manometer and a mercury vapor aspirator. His research work began during the First World War, when as major in the Signal Corps he headed a laboratory in Paris. This was, of course, applied research and he did not begin his fundamental studies till he joined the Bell Laboratories in 1925. Then his main interests were acoustics, electronics, photoelectricity, and microphonic effects. He was concerned, however, with every subject that had a possible bearing on communications. It was because of his successful investigations in this area that he was appointed to the communications and guided missile divisions of the National Defense Research Committee in the Second World War.
Doctor Buckley was born in Sloan, Iowa, in 1887. He took his bachelor's degree at Grinnell College in 1909 and his doctorate at Cornell in 1914. Meanwhile, he had taught at both Grinnell and Columbia. He joined the Western Electric Company in 1914. After working in applied research and development there, it was natural for him to go to Bell.
His advance at Bell Laboratories was rapid. In 1933 he was appointed director of research. By 1940 he had become president of the Laboratories. He retired as chairman of the board in 1952. Meanwhile, his membership in professional associations and societies had multiplied. The more important of these were the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
A Centurion associate tells of Buckley's warm enthusiasm in his work: "As the head of Bell Laboratories Oliver was always eager to demonstrate, at various business meetings or conferences, the new gadgets and gimmicks that were coming out of our research. He would stand before his audience with his pockets loaded with all kinds of devices, talk in a rushing sort of way about what was going on, and bring piece after piece out of his pocket to illustrate this or that. When it came time for Oliver to appear on a meeting program, one always knew that he would have on his person as much of his beloved Laboratories as he could carry."
David Chapman Bull
Dave Bull was a Connecticut Yankee whose delicate New England humor was never submerged by his distinction as a doctor and his total dedication to his profession. It was a "quaint humor couched in circumambient phrase"—a happy description given at the memorial service in the chapel of Presbyterian hospital.
Dave was born in Naugatuck, Connecticut, prepared for college at Hotchkiss, and in 1912 received a Ph.B. degree at Yale. Four years later he was given a master's degree in the School of Pure Science at Columbia and in the same year, 1916, earned his M.D. at Columbia's School of Medicine.
In the summer and fall of 1916 he served with Squadron A on the Mexican border. Early the following year he began his internship at Bellevue Hospital, but a few weeks after the United States entered the First World War he was commissioned first lieutenant of Medical Corps in the 12th New York Infantry. In October, 1917, he was transferred to the 107th Infantry and went overseas with that regiment in the spring of 1918. In September he was wounded in action at Ferme Guillemont, France. Later he was promoted to captain and cited in division orders "for exceptional courage and devotion to duty for maintaining a first aid station at the extreme front under very heavy fire for more than twenty hours" and in A.E.F. orders "for distinguished and exceptional gallantry." He was awarded the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. After his discharge from the army, he completed his internship at Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
Dave Bull was both physician and surgeon. He became particularly eminent in the fields of fractures and disabilities of the extremities and in the field of blood transfusion. From 1930 to his death he was instructor and professor of surgery at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where his lectures were constantly admired. In 1940 his name was submitted to the governor of the State of New York as a specialist-consultant in surgery on boards of the medical preparedness program of the National Defense Plan. He was a founder of the Blood Transfusion Association and served on a committee whose recommendations led to the establishment of the Presbyterian Hospital Blood Bank in 1939.
As a distinguished Centurion colleague says of him: "All in all, Dave was a dear fellow, loved and respected by all who knew him, in and out of his profession."
Henry Jagoe Burchell
Henry Burchell was a kind of ambassador from Italy to the Century Club and sometimes vice-versa. He knew Italy with the intimacy that can only come to one who knows to the most delicate nuance her rhythmic language. But his linguistic gift carried him beyond Italian into the Latin from which it mainly derived and to a love of the classics, including the Greek, and enabled him to become a lecturer and instructor in these subjects at Columbia and Barnard.
A friend says that to walk with Henry Burchell in Venice, Florence, or Rome was to be followed by the ghosts of Renaissance painters, architects, and poets. He was on close and friendly terms with them all. But he was equally friendly with Centurions and enjoyed introducing them to his immortal companions.
He was born in 1869, grew up in New York, and was graduated from Columbia in 1892. After his nine years as instructor, he served as director and secretary of the Italy-America Society and as a director of the Mulberry Community House. In 1928 President Nicholas Murray Butler appointed him director of the Casa Italiana, Italian Cultural Center at the University. During the next two years he reorganized the Casa and prepared it for an international program. In recognition of his contributions to cultural relations between Italy and the United States, the Italian Government awarded him the Order of S.S. Maurice and Lazarus. He was also made a Knight Commander of the Crown of Italy.
During Butler's presidency, Columbia's Casa Italiana, which opened in 1927 as a center for the study of Italian culture and which also housed the Italian Department, was controlled by supporters of Premier Benito Mussolini, who used it to propagandize for Fascism. The Casa Italiana also sponsored student exchanges between Columbia and universities in Fascist Italy and arranged many receptions for Mussolini's emissaries, during which his regime was enthusiastically praised. The Mussolini government supplied most of the furniture for the Casa, with President Butler's consent. Mussolini himself in September 1933 wrote to Professor Giuseppe Prezzolini, director of the Casa from 1930 to 1940: "I am following with interest the work done by the Casa Italiana of Columbia University and I am very pleased with what is being accomplished." Prezzolini translated Mussolini's letter and proudly forwarded it to President Butler. Butler responded by thanking Prezzolini for the "charming message from Mussolini" and noted, "It is pleasant, indeed, to know that he is following our work and appreciates it." [42]
Nicholas Murray Butler was a longtime admirer of Premier Mussolini and enjoyed a warm personal relationship with him for many years. In 193 I President Butler startled many when, in his welcoming address to the incoming freshman class, he declared that "the assumption of power by a virtual dictator whose authority rests upon a powerful and well-organized body of opinion" produced leaders "of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than does the system of election." Informed listeners understood at the time that it was Mussolini with whom Columbia's president was "conspicuously impressed." [43] The next year Butler maintained that Mussolini's leadership of the Fascist movement had "brought new life and vigor and power and ambition" to Italy. [44] Butler met with the Italian dictator in Rome several times during the late 1920s and 1930s for cordial conversations about international politics. Escorted by Mussolini's federal secretary, Butler was received by the Florence Fascisti at their clubhouse, and he donated books to its library. As late as January 1938, Butler was pleased to inform a leading Italian-American donor that Premier Mussolini had recently asked him about the Casa and "was much gratified when I told him the work that was being carried forward." [45]
Butler cultivated Mussolini's friendship despite his suppression of opposition parties and newspapers (completed by 1927) and elimination of academic freedom in Italian universities. In 193 I Mussolini enacted a law requiring all professors in Italian universities to join the Fascist party and take the Fascist oath. Public schools indoctrinated students to promote "national aggrandizement [and] power ... the spiritual essence of fascism." The Fascist government made the teaching of Catholic doctrine the "foundation" of public education, and compulsory in the schools. It introduced standard textbooks for the elementary grades that included passages very hostile to Judaism. As early as 1923, opponents of Mussolini voiced fear that the Fascist educational reforms would drive Jews from the schools, both teachers -- because they could not "impart Catholic doctrine" -- and students. [46]
Giuseppe Prezzolini, director of the Casa Italiana from 1930 to 1940, and Dino Bigongiari, head of the Columbia Italian Department during the 1930s, were members of the Italian Fascist party (Prezzolini formally joined in 1934). Bigongiari was also a founder in 1923 of the Fascist League of North America and translated the works of leading Italian Fascist theoreticians like Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco. Prezzolini proudly declared to President Butler in 1935, "I have been for thirty years a friend and admirer of Mussolini." [47]
The other leading members of the Italian Department, Howard Marraro and Peter M. Riccio (whose appointment was at Barnard), were also ardent Fascists. In 1927, Marraro published a book entitled Nationalism in Italian Education that proclaimed, "Fascism is the exaltation and ennoblement of all the elements concurring to form and assure the greatness of Italy," and he praised the Fascist program of education instituted by Mussolini's minister of public instruction, Giovanni Gentile. President Butler contributed the book's foreword, which "cordially commended" the work. Upon his return from a 1934 trip to Italy, Marraro declared, "The labor situation in Italy should be a model for the world." He claimed he had not seen in Italy the "distress and suffering" that then prevailed in the United States. [48] Professor Peter M. Riccio's Columbia dissertation, "On the Threshold of Fascism," sought to establish Prezzolini as a leading intellectual progenitor of Italian Fascism. Italian anti-fascists charged that Riccio's work was "one of the worst and most disgraceful dissertations ever written," a crude Fascist polemic that did not meet even "elementary standards of scholarship." [49]
In the fall of 1934, Professor Riccio had a leading role in bringing a delegation of 350 Italian Fascist university students to the United States for a tour of Eastern and Midwestern campuses, and he served as secretary of the committee in charge of the visit. [50] President Butler made Columbia University one of the thirty American colleges and universities sponsoring the tour. The Italian students considered themselves "official ambassadors from Mussolini." The Nation, a prominent national liberal weekly magazine, charged that the Italian student tour was "a propaganda move designed to win the friendliness of American university students to the fascist cause." [51]
Docking in New York in September 1934 singing the Fascist anthem "Giovinezza," the Italian student delegation made Columbia its first American university stop. Columbia College dean Herbert E. Hawkes officially greeted the Fascist students on President Butler's behalf at the university's McMillin Theatre. Dean Hawkes declared that Americans had "much to learn" from the Italian delegation. [52] When the Italian students encountered pickets from anti-fascist Columbia student groups, they raised their hands in the Fascist salute and sang the "Giovinezza." [53]
About a month later, the Italian consul-general in New York, at a Casa Italiana ceremony, bestowed on Professor Riccio a medal for his devotion to Italian "culture and ideals." As she introduced the honoree, Dean Virginia C. Gildersleeve of Barnard dismissed the concerns of pickets outside the Casa protesting Riccio's statements in the press that Fascism was the best system of government for Italy. She declared emphatically to the audience, "I don't care what Professor Riccio is." [54]
In November 1934, The Nation charged in a series of articles that Columbia's Casa Italiana was "one of the most important sources of fascist propaganda" in the United States. It claimed that the Casa, dominated by Fascist professors, worked closely with Italian government officials to present a favorable image of Mussolini's regime in America. The Nation accused the Casa of regularly sponsoring lectures by Fascists, while denying opponents of Mussolini the opportunity to speak, and even forbidding "student gatherings for discussing aspects of fascist rule." It claimed that Professor Arthur Livingston, the only member of the Italian Department opposed to Mussolini, had been transferred to the French Department. According to the Columbia Spectator, the reassignment had occurred at the insistence of a Fascist donor. [55]
President Butler angrily denied The Nation's charges, labeling them a "hodge-podge of falsehood, misrepresentation, and half-truth," and assured Casa director Prezzolini that he considered them "nonsensical and untrue." He insisted that the Casa was "without political purpose or significance." Butler praised the Italian Department faculty as "distinguished scholars, so recognized on either side of the Atlantic." [56]
Butler had presided over, and participated in, many events at the Casa Italiana and elsewhere featuring Italian Fascist speakers. He gave the welcoming address for Mussolini's official biographer, Margherita Sarfatti, at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in which he hailed her as a "second Columbus." [57] Butler officially received at the Casa such emissaries of Mussolini as Foreign Minister Dino Grandi (who also spoke at Columbia's Institute of Arts and Sciences); Ambassador Augusto Rosso, who visited Columbia several times between 1933 and 1936; the director of Italians in foreign countries, Signor Parini; and the Italian consuls-general, along with Fascist scholars like Sarfatti and Marchese Piero Misciattelli. [58]
In an effort to discredit The Nation's charges, officers of Columbia's Graduate Club of Italian Studies announced that the club was inviting Gaetano Salvemini, a distinguished historian exiled by Mussolini who was teaching at Harvard at the time, to speak at the Casa Italiana. Salvemini replied to the Graduate Club that, considering The Nation's charges, he would accept the offer only if Professor Prezzolini, as the Casa's director, personally agreed to invite him. He also asked that the Graduate Club inform President Butler of his request, so that he could not dodge responsibility. But Prezzolini refused to invite Salvemini. He explained to the Graduate Club that Professor Salvemini was a "political troublemaker" whose only purpose in lecturing at Columbia was "to stir up some trouble." [59] As a result, Salvemini, the leading Italian spokesperson for anti-fascism in the United States during the 1930s, never spoke at the Casa Italiana.
Butler shared Prezzolini's desire "to maintain good and friendly relations" with the Mussolini government, which had the support of wealthy Italian-American businessmen whose financial donations to the Casa both men valued highly, and he made no effort on Salvemini's behalf. Prezzolini stated to Butler that had he permitted "anti-Fascist political agitators of the type of Mr. Salvemini" to speak at the Casa, he would not have been able to host Fascists like Margherita Sarfatti and Piero Misciattelli, whom he had invited, he noted, at Butler's own request. [60]
The Columbia Spectator, stating that Columbia stood "gravely indicted" by The Nation's charges, demanded that the administration launch an investigation into Fascist control of the Casa Italiana and accused President Butler of evading the key issues. Protesting Butler's refusal to discuss the matter with campus delegations that asked to meet with him, students began picketing his mansion and Low Library, where his offices were located. [61]
In the midst of the controversy, the Casa Italiana sparked more furor when it held a lavish reception to honor Dr. George Ryan, president of the New York City Board of Education, who had just returned from Rome, which he had visited as guest of the Mussolini government. Dr. Ryan arrived in New York "full of enthusiasm" for Fascist Italy's educational system. The event seemed singularly ill-timed, and The Nation suggested that Prezzolini had set it up "under direct orders from Rome." At the Casa, Ryan's Board of Education colleague William Carlin praised Fascist Italy as "the true successor to the glory of Rome," whose "present educational system has the admiration of the world." [62]
Prezzolini objected to the Casa Italiana's being singled out for not hosting anti-Fascist speakers. He pointed out that Columbia's History Department had not been willing to invite Professor Salvemini to speak either. Columbia's Deutsches Haus, which kept a considerably lower profile than the Casa, although maintaining a friendly attitude toward the Hitler regime, had never invited Albert Einstein to give a lecture, although he was then located nearby at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New jersey. In fact, as Prezzolini noted, the Deutsches Haus had never invited any German refugee professor to speak. [63]
A Centurion who was his intimate friend and companion says of Henry Burchell: "He read everything and remembered much, adored people, laughter and good wine. We have lost in him one of the last Amateurs, using the term in the sense of one who knows a lot about lots of things, as opposed to the latter-day scholar who knows everything about something."
"C. C. B." was a Centurion in two senses. He was an honorary member of our Association. And, in years, he passed the century mark. To the end, in spite of physical handicaps, his mind was as vigorous and as luminous as in the days of his prime. The Century awarded him the highest honor it could give and the City of New York called him its First Citizen.
The arresting thing about his powerful influence upon the city's government was that it was exerted without title or office. His work for reform was all behind the scenes. To what extent his efforts determined the defeat of Tammany by the election of John Purroy Mitchel in 1913 and again, by the triumph of La Guardia in 1933, cannot be reckoned; nor can there be any accurate estimate of his immense influence on revisions of charter or the raising of judicial standards or the smashing of rackets, for he never sought personal credit. Yet there was no city official good or bad but felt either the guidance or the pressure of his hand; none was ever quite unaware of the intervention of his wit and wisdom.
Charles Culp Burlingham was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, the 31st of August, 1858. His father, Dr. Aaron Burlingham, was a Baptist minister who in the boy's ninth year was called to St. Louis. C. C. B. went for two years to Washington University there and then entered Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1879. Two years later he received his LL.B. degree from the Columbia Law School in New York. In the same year, 1881, he was admitted to the New York bar and began law practice in the city.
A little known phase of his life began at this point. His father, in the old Baptist tradition, had so emphatically disapproved of the theater that the boy had grown up knowing nothing of it. On his father's death, however, the young man went suddenly into reverse from the parental training and conceived a passion for the stage. He was introduced to it by two friends: Julia Marlowe's first husband, Robert Mather, and an artist friend through whom he met Ellen Terry. In time he came to know the important actors and actresses in England and America, and after his election to the Century he brought the English producer Granville Barker to it for a long evening of talk about the international theater.
C. C. B.'s professional specialty became admiralty law, and he was long considered the leader in this field, although his interests ranged far and wide. Education was a particular concern. The overseers and faculty of Harvard felt his influence; three Harvard presidents knew of his devotion to the highest intellectual standards. For a while he headed New York City's Board of Education. Though he often expressed his contempt for "sentimental Christianity," he was deeply religious and took an intense interest in the vestry of St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church in New York of which he was senior warden. In politics he was a Democrat but not in city elections when Tammany held the party whip. In 1956 when he was ninety-eight, he told someone his major interests were Harvard University, his church, and the election of Adlai Stevenson.
C. C. B. was often on the unpopular side of a cause. He was a pioneer in the advocacy of woman suffrage. He believed in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. He favored the admission of Red China to the United Nations. In a letter to the New York Times, he bitterly attacked the State Department for its denial of a visa to the so-called "red" Dean of Canterbury. The action was, he wrote, a "flagrant and foolish violation by our Government of the constitutional right of freedom of speech."
In the sixty-six years of his membership he became greatly attached to the Century. In his later years he was especially anxious to meet and talk to the younger members. In the spring of 1959, in his hundred and first year, he came to a dinner at the Century for Learned Hand. As a special honor he was seated between Judge Hand and Justice Frankfurter. But later in a taxi he was asked if this had pleased him. "It was all right," he replied, "but I would have preferred meeting some new people."
Once, when he was well over ninety, he wrote a note to a Centurion whom he did not know but whose name had puzzled him because it was so nearly like his own. "I am sure we must be cousins," he wrote. "Come and have tea with me and we'll talk about what bad spellers our ancestors were." The Centurion at once called him on the telephone. "No," he was told by the housekeeper, "Mr. Burlingham is downtown at his office. But I know he wants to see you. Can you come up at five today?" The Centurion arrived on time but C. C. B. had not come home. "Well," said the Centurion, "the traffic is bad—his car would naturally be delayed." "Car?" he was asked. "Why didn't you know, Mr. Burlingham always rides on the subway?" Presently he came. He was nearly blind and quite deaf. In an hour of talk his visitor was so fascinated that he lost all reckoning of time. Looking, at last, at his watch he was shocked. "But I have tired you!" he said. "Nonsense," said C. C. B., using his favorite expression, and he then insisted that the "cousin" stay another half hour.
Almost to the end of his life, he welcomed visitors. When he was at last confined by his disabilities, men and women came from everywhere to his home—not out of kindness to an old man but to be heartened by his courage and stimulated by his wise, humorous, and sometimes ironic words.
C. C. B. believed in an immortality beyond that of men's memories. The rector of his church remembers his saying: "Do you know the most interesting half hour I am looking forward to? It's the first half hour after death."
So we cannot mourn this friend; only rejoice that he stayed with us so long and gave us so much.
John Carroll
A Centurion who lives close to John Carroll's 300 acre farm in East Chatham, New York, tells of this talented, contradictory, sensitive, and lovable artist at home.
"John had a habit of sitting always in the same spot in his house, the corner of a sofa. Whatever woman guest arrived would naturally sit beside him at once for he had an irresistible charm for women. He might say to her, 'Would you like to see my collection of paper napkins?' And sure enough, under the cushion next to him, there they were, all the same of course. His humor was often zany and he never explained anything."
His powerful physique and colorful, almost flamboyant, dress hid a shy, gentle, and credulous man. This contradiction scared away some of those who would have liked his friendship but distrusted inconsistency. He is said to have been a lonely man because few could penetrate through his disguises to the fine reality beneath, but those who did become intimate with him were rewarded.
In his painting, too, there seemed to be paradox. Of his portraits an anonymous critic of the New York Times said: "They had a wispish, wraithlike quality—a kind of spindrift, diaphanous delicacy." One would not expect such painting to have the great strength that his fellow artists saw in his work. Actually he achieved wide recognition. In 1954 he was awarded the first prize in the Benjamin Altman competition at the National Academy of Design. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's purchase, also in 1954, of his painting "Spring Bonnet" followed the example of other museums in New York, Newark, Omaha, Andover, Toledo, and Honolulu.
John Carroll was born on a train of the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad in 1892. His parents were on their way to California, and John grew up there on his father's cattle ranch. It was there that he acquired his lifelong attachment to farming and the outdoor life. His talent for drawing showed itself when he was only five. As a boy he attended the Mark Hopkins Art Academy in San Francisco and later studied engineering at the University of California. He was in the navy in the First World War. In 1922 he had his first show in New York and two years later won the Purchase Prize from the University of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This enabled him to go abroad and establish a studio in Paris. On his return in 1926 he was appointed professor of painting at the Art Students League in New York.
His farm in Columbia County, New York, was a real farm and he did much of the heavy work himself, for which he was greatly respected by the farmers of the countryside. Here too, he trained hunters and for many years was Master of the Carroll Hounds.
Except for his admirers among his fellow artists, he did not have a chance to know many Centurions. He died after he had been a member only four years.
Harris Dunscomb Colt
Harris Colt nearly reached the century mark. At ninety-eight he was Yale's oldest living graduate and had been a New York lawyer for more than seventy years. A year before his death he was still practicing. He had outlived nearly all of his Centurion friends.
Colt's ancestors had been in America since the landing of the Mayflower. His grandfather, Elisha Colt, had fought in the Revolution as a member of the Eighth Company of the Eighth Regiment of the Connecticut Continental line. Harris Colt carried on the military tradition by joining the original Troop A—the nucleus of New York's Squadron A—and he was before his death its only surviving member.
He graduated from Yale at the age of twenty-three in 1884. After receiving his law degree at the Columbia Law School, he worked with Lord, Day and Lord until, in 1896, he became a member of the firm of Stearns, Curtis and Colt, later Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt and Mosle. He was an estate and trust specialist.
He was at one time a vice-president and trustee of the Sevilla Home for Children in New York and a trustee of New York's Society for the Relief of Half Orphans and Destitute Children.
In point of membership Colt had seniority in the Downtown Association (of which he was Honorary Member), the University Club of New York, and the Yale Club.
He was a Centurion for forty-five years. He used to come often to the Long Table for lunch but in later years gave it up on account of deafness.
Charles Pelham Curtis
In the Apocrypha, II Esdras, 14:25, it is written: "I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out, till the things be performed which thou shalt begin to write." Charlie Curtis put this quotation at the head of the first commentary in his A Commonplace Book.
"I like 'a candle of understanding,' " he wrote. "Not a flash, not a searchlight, nor a floodlight. A small flame burning in a great room, flickering and swaying in the drafts, darkening the far corners, casting long shadows behind the high backed chairs, the deeper behind what it most illuminates. A warm light, lending grace and beauty to what it is making visible, and giving a presence to what it leaves obscure."
There is deep thought behind the words in this paragraph; it must be reread a good many times to find it all. But, too, it gives an image of Charlie's mind—a "great room" illumined by "a warm light." Those who knew him well knew how great and how warm.
A Commonplace Book is full of wisdom. But it is shot through with humor, too, and it reflects a panorama of reading and study far beyond the scope of most busy lawyers. It gives new interpretations to the writings of Montaigne, of Pascal, of Pindar, of Voltaire, even of Shakespeare. Occasionally it takes King James's translators to task for their misunderstandings of Hebrew nuances. You will find A Commonplace Book in the Century library, and sampling it will give you an afternoon of surprise and delight.
Charles Pelham Curtis was a native of Boston. He was educated at Groton, at the Ecole des Sciences Politique in Paris, and at Harvard. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard College in 1914 and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1917. After two years in the navy in the First World War, he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. In addition to an active practice, he was assistant United States attorney in Massachusetts, a member of the Harvard Corporation, a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, trustee of several banks and of Sarah Lawrence College, and a lecturer in government and sociology at Harvard. With all these things, he found time to hunt big game in Africa and to write several books.
At the Century, we looked forward to Charlie's visits. Each time there was something in his conversation that carried over to the next time. His spirit was here; Charlie always seemed to be just around the corner so that we did not think of him as a non-resident.
One of his last acts was to write, for the Groton School Quarterly, a memorial to our beloved historian George Martin which was at once so sympathetic and so witty that George himself—had he been more aware of his own importance — might have done it. It brought George so immediately alive that to his friends who read it the memorial gave a measure of compensation for his loss.
Charlie's life ended in sudden tragedy. He died of burns suffered in a flash fire in his home in Stonington. For a man's friends such a thing is hard to take until we remember that he died at the peak of life, knowing neither weakness of body nor dimming of mind.
George Parmly Day
George was one of the redhead boys in his brother Clarence's play, Life With Father, and his friends say that he inherited some of the traits of the immortal Clarence, Senior. "He had," one Centurion friend reports, "immense energy, got a tremendous amount done, was utterly charming when he was in the right mood but had a short and explosive temper like Father Day." That he was greatly loved outside, as well as within the Century, is shown by the outpouring of sorrow and tribute that followed his death.
His life was devoted to Yale and through Yale to literature. As president of the Yale University Press, he arranged for the publication of some 2,000 books. The Century has a special interest in this part of his career, for he established here a memorial to his Centurion brother, Clarence, in the form of books bearing a Clarence Day bookplate. Each year I he would send a list of books published by the Yale Press from which the Committee on Literature was asked to select those it wished to add to the Clarence Day collection.
George Day was born in New York in 1876. His grandfather was Benjamin Day, founder of the New York Sun. His father was governor of the New York Stock Exchange. George went to St. Paul's School and entered Yale with the class of 1897. As an undergraduate he was editor of the Record, managing editor of the News and a member of Psi Upsilon and Scroll and Key. On his graduation he worked for a time in his father's Wall Street firm, but after ten years, in which he became a senior partner, his beloved Yale drew him back to New Haven. In 1908 he established the Yale University Press, and in 1910 he was elected Yale's treasurer, succeeding Lee McClung who had just been appointed Treasurer of the United States. His attitude toward his dual responsibility is reflected in his answer to an alumni questionnaire in which he gave Yale University Treasurer as his occupation and listed the Yale University Press under "hobbies and recreations."
Under Day's guidance Yale's endowment fund rose from $12,000,000 in 1910 to $101,000,000 in 1942. In 1944 he retired from the post and from the Press, but he never retired from Yale. He kept an office on the campus, watched all of the University's affairs with close interest, and, as an editorial in the New York Times put it, "to the passing students he seemed as permanent a campus figure as old Ben Silliman's statue."
Though he always spoke of his brother Clarence as the only literary member of the family, George's own effervescent wit kept bursting forth in verse. He loved to poke fun at Harvard. When it was announced that Harvard had received as a gift the ownership of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, he wrote in a stanza of a longer poem:
Shall it [Harvard] base the pay of teachers
On the bar sales at the Ritz?
Do with fewer chapel preachers
If there's less demand for Schlitz?
In 1939 King Gustav V of Sweden made him a Knight of the Royal Order of the North Star in recognition of a book, Sweden, the Middle Way, by Marginschilds, published by the Yale Press. He was awarded honorary degrees by Princeton, Colgate, and Lake Erie College as well as by Yale. Elected in 1930. he grew fond of the Century, the meeting place of so many colleagues.
Eugene Floyd Dubois
Along with the progress of aviation and submarine activity and with the spread of world war, more and more dark corners of the earth have been revealed as places where man could, and sometimes must, live. The unique capacity of the human animal to create his own environment has led many men into the fascinating study of the supposed uninhabitable.
One of these explorers in the field of physiology was Doctor Gene Dubois. What the human body could endure in extremes of heat and cold, starvation and thirst, altitude and ocean depth became his special interest and the subject of constant experiment not only in laboratory and hospital but in arctic exploration and two world wars as well.
Eugene Dubois was educated at Harvard College and Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. After his internship at Presbvterian Hospital in New York he specialized in pathology. In the First World War, he served in the navy medical corps and was assigned to a submarine. Here came his first opportunity to study physiological reactions under uncommon pressures. For his work he was awarded the Navy Cross.
In 1928 he began to work closely with Centurion Vilhjalmur Stefansson on dietary experiments. He was at that time director of the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology. Stefansson himself was the subject of some of these tests in which, among other things, it was found that a man could live for several weeks on meat and water alone without suffering any damage. Doctor Dubois also aroused much interest and discussion in the medical profession by his studies of the effects of heat and cold. As a result of these he held that although the body adapted easily to extremes of heat, it was ill-fitted to withstand severe cold. When Doctor Stefansson published his book Not By Bread Alone, Dubois wrote the Introduction.
A Centurion who was his close associate and friend writes that Eugene Dubois was "a many-sided man, a really great scientist, a good teacher and leader, a cultured man with unusual charm, a tremendous worker. His work for the army and navy in the matter of physiology of the human in high flying and in submarines was extremely valuable to our country. He was widely known for his investigations of metabolism and established the first real scientific foundation for standards of basal metabolism, so helpful to the technician in diagnosing toxic goiter. With all his learning and wide knowledge he was most modest and approachable to the students and fellow workers under his guidance, provided he was convinced of their sincerity and real desire to learn."
In the Second World War, Dubois attained the rank of captain in the navy. At his death he was professor emeritus of the Cornell Medical Center.
He was a Centurion for just under forty years.
John Foster Dulles
There is always controversy about the way a Secretary conducts the Department of State. None of the Centurions who have occupied this highest position in the cabinet of the United States has escaped criticism. But in such controversy lies the health of the republic.
In the office of Secretary of State Foster Dulles was preceded by a Centurion, and he is followed by one. In their years when international alliances and hostilities have altered almost overnight, when the "containment" of communism has presented new difficulties year after year, and when the problem of coexistence with the Soviet Union has harassed every thinking American, the job of these men has moved beyond our accurate appraisal. Fortunately Centurions have other criteria for the judgment of their fellow members and it is in the light of these that we must remember Foster Dulles.
One of our members who knew him well contributes a word which reveals him in this light.
"I was regularly struck," he writes, "by his courage and have no doubt myself that his courage was rooted in faith and what our Quaker friends call 'concern.' The above remark is not intended to gloss over his occasional lapses into politicians' expediency nor to brush under the rug lapses of tact and consideration which made his task more difficult. But at the center of the labyrinth of his character was, in my judgment, deep concern for the difference between right and wrong, a mixture of Presbyterian Elder and Old Testament Prophet, which helps to explain a good deal of his zeal, singleness of purpose, and almost unbearable sense that he was engaged in a crusade against the forces of evil. One might in all fairness be able to criticize a Secretary of State for pressing some of these matters too far under given circumstances, but I do think that any implication of hypocrisy or insincerity would be both unfair and inaccurate."
There are those who think that such old-fashioned compulsions are out of place in a man who must conjure with balances of power. Perhaps one with colder heart and a mind restrained by austere objectivity would be more successful in dealing with forces which may have gone beyond human control. Yet in this time of fading morals and dissolving integrity it is heartening to see a man who has preserved standards out of a nearly forgotten past, who has faith in some absolute ideal that is immune to dialectic or logic.
Whether or not we can share that faith it is beyond doubt that it supported him in the extremes of his last suffering. Perhaps most of all this quiet endurance woke our admiration.
Foster Dulles was born in Washington in 1888. His father, the Reverend Allen M. Dulles, was a liberal Presbyterian minister. Along with the religious influence exerted by his father a distinguished maternal grandfather gave him political background. This John Foster, following the classic American tradition, went from the frontier cabin in which he was born to generalship in the Civil War and the cabinet of President Benjamin Harrison in which he was Secretary of State.
Foster was graduated from Princeton in 1908, Phi Beta Kappa, valedictorian of his class, and winner of a scholarship entitling him to a year's study at the Sorbonne in Paris. This study persuaded him to take up law rather than theology. In George Washington University, where he pursued this aim, he got the highest grades ever attained at the University. He was then admitted to the New York bar and began work with the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. In the next years he moved further and further into the international field.
Unfit, because of poor eyesight, for combat service in the First World War, he was commissioned captain in the War Industries Board. At the war's end he was sent to the Versailles Peace Conference, where he was one of five economic advisers to President Wilson. He was then but thirty-one years old.
From this point, as a partner in the firm in which he had started, Foster worked on a series of international assignments. Just before the Second World War he became a close associate of Thomas Dewey. This did not prevent him from accepting an appointment from President Truman (who had just defeated Dewey for the Presidency) as chairman of the United States delegation to the United Nations at Paris just after the election of 1948.
It is generally conceded that had Dewey been elected in 1948 he would have appointed Dulles his Secretary of State. Until 1952, however, Dulles's work was bipartisan. In 1951 President Truman sent him to Tokyo on an extremely delicate mission consequent upon the removal of General MacArthur from his Far East Command. In 1952, however, in the Eisenhower campaign Dulles was angrily Republican.
When he became the new President's Secretary of State, he broke the long diplomatic tradition of leaving to United States envoys abroad the handling of international crises. In these events he insisted in being personally on the spot. The result was that he was almost perpetually in flight: even at the start of his illness when he must have been in pain he refused to share responsibility with the diplomats in foreign lands.
Foster Dulles's relatively brief membership in the Century coincided for the most part with this peripatetic activity. For this reason, he seldom got to the Club—a circumstance his many friends there regretted, as he was a charming as well as an instructive companion.
Harrison Griswold Dwight
In a long, active, and useful career, Harrison Dwight has been a diplomat, an author, a poet, a news correspondent, and a museum director. Much of his writing was done against the background of his early career in the Near East; for example, there was his poem which became the subject of the opera In a Pasha's Garden, produced by the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York.
Dwight's parents were Congregational missionaries in Turkey, and he was born in Constantinople. After attending the preparatory school for Roberts College, he came to the United States and took his bachelor's degree from Amherst in 1898. He began his career as vice-consul in Venice and also served as correspondent for the Chicago News Herald.
In the First World War he was secretary to General Tasker Bliss, and he continued in that position during the negotiations of the Versailles Peace Treaty. For some ten years after 1919 he was with the Near East and Protocol Divisions of the Department of State. When he left, he expected to devote himself entirely to writing. He had already published several short stories which were collected in two volumes: Stamboul Nights and The Emperor of Elam. Later he wrote regularly for the magazines: articles, book reviews, and poems.
In 1936 he became assistant director of the Frick Collection on Seventy-second Street in New York and was there for ten years. At his death he was eighty-three. He had been a Centurion for twenty-one years.
A banker by profession, Lewis Franklin was best known and will be remembered mainly for his important work in the Protestant Episcopal Church. He began his career in finance at sixteen when he was a bank messenger in New York. Some fifteen years later he was vice-president of the Guaranty Trust Company. During the First World War he became president of the Investment Bankers Association of America. Then in 1918 he was called to Washington to assist Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo with war loans and Liberty and Victory Bond drives.
After the war's end he became interested in the church. It was Bishop Lloyd who diverted him from banking. The bishop was then president of the Episcopal Board of Missions. The church, he said, needed someone with Franklin's business acumen, skill in honest diplomacy and enthusiasm to manage the "reawakening campaign" of 1919. Franklin did this as a volunteer; then, at the beginning of 1920 he accepted the position of treasurer of the National Council, a post in which he remained until his retirement in 1948.
He moved, then, from New York to Noroton, Connecticut, and devoted much of his time to helping the local Episcopal church there. But he was interested, too, in the whole of the Connecticut diocese and led a campaign for church building throughout the state.
Although his mind was quick and sharp and his intelligence high, these qualities never made him aggressive or egotistic. On the contrary, he was self-effacing, giving the credit for many of his noteworthy accomplishments to others. He was naturally generous and innately kind.
He enjoyed games. He was a steady tennis player and a formidable opponent at bridge. He was witty and talented in amateur theatricals. At the Club he could often be found in the pool room, where he held his own with the best of them.
Lewis Franklin lived for eighty years. Every institution he helped was better for his touch and so were many boys and men.
James Lawder Gamble
A sailor, a golfer, a photographer, incurably addicted to the State of Maine, James Gamble was celebrated in the medical profession for what he termed "the study of disease by the methods of chemistry." To this, early in his career, he decided to devote his life. That he could carry on such an intensely absorbing research without losing any of his enjoyment in his amateur activities was a revelation to ivory tower students.
Dr. Gamble was educated at Leland Stanford College and the Harvard Medical School. He received his M.D. degree in 1910 and five years later joined the Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins. It was there that he conducted what the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin calls "his classic investigations on the maintenance of acid-base equilibrium and body fluid volume in fasting children."
To the layman the idea of "fasting children" is not appealing, and the thought that the poor youngsters might be starved in order to carry on medical experiment is horrifying indeed. But it would have been equally so to Jim Gamble. Actually he took quick advantage of a new therapy for the treatment of young epileptics. It was found that by prolonged fasting of these child patients, seizures could be inhibited. This presented an ideal condition for the measurement of electrolytic intake and loss. The results of the tests became the basis for many important papers and lectures which, for practicing pediatricians everywhere, clarified biochemical thinking. It is said that, largely due to Gamble's work, infant mortality caused by diarrheal dehydration was nearly eliminated. To this doctor who, during his internship at Boston's Floating Hospital had watched babies die like flies of summer diarrhea, these discoveries must have brought immense satisfaction.
In 1922 he was invited by Harvard to set up the chemistry laboratory at the Children's Hospital in Boston. After some seven years of teaching at the Harvard Medical School he was made full professor of pediatrics, a post he held until 1950 when he became professor emeritus.
In his lectures he was careful to avoid what he called "precise misinformation"—more wrong because it was so precise. For this reason he did not speak extemporaneously but memorized his carefully studied and polished lectures. These were characterized, the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin says, by "a classic economy and precision of style, wealth of content, deliberateness and quiet humor." The Bulletin tells a story to illustrate this:
A lecture came so soon after the final exams in pathology that his audience was "in a mentally relaxed condition. Just prior to Dr. Gamble's entry, students filled his water glass with a rather strong mixture of gin and water. When the moment came and he lifted the glass to his lips, there was no obvious reaction. As sip followed sip, the intricate interlocking concepts of electrolytic physiology unfolded clearly, deliberately, beautifully. After he downed the last drop at the end of the lecture, still without visible effect, he offered a toast to 'water'—to a class which by this time had assimilated very little of the meticulously prepared and studiously memorized lecture."
Gamble owned Calf Island off Sorrento in Frenchman's Bay, Maine. Here he took his vacations sailing in the "Torno" (a yacht named for the Italian song, "Ritorno a Sorrento") or working over his photographs in his summer workshop there. But he indulged his hobbies not only on vacations. His colleagues remember that on the way to medical meetings he would stop off for a day of golf and an evening of fun with the other doctors.
After he died, there was a memorial service for him on his beloved island. Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, president of the Union Theological Seminary, spoke of James Gamble's "instinctive courtesy to those of every station—adult and child, rich and poor, learned and untutored, eminent and unknown —kindliness without patronage, and a concern without condescension."
Jerome Davis Greene
Probably no one in his generation has done more for Harvard than Jerome Greene. After working his way through Harvard College and the Harvard Law School by newspaper work and tutoring jobs in the summer, his sense of loyalty and gratitude to the University lasted through his long life. In his later years his brilliant work for Harvard compensated him for the personal disaster he encountered in his business career.
He was born in Yokohama in 1874, the son of American Congregational missionaries, and his first dozen years were spent in Japan. When he was thirteen, he came to the United States and prepared for Harvard, which he entered with the class of 1896. After he was graduated, he spent two years in the law school. Like many men who have had legal education, he never practiced law; yet he gave abundant proof of the contention—much alive in these days—that this study is of great value in any profession as well as in the higher reaches of business.
From the turn of the century Jerome had a varied career. But Harvard was always an anchor, and he never drifted far from her support. He was secretary to President Charles W. Eliot from 1901 to 1905, when he became secretary to the Harvard Corporation. Five years later, he came to New York as the first business manager of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and in 1913 he became the first executive officer of the Rockefeller Foundation. He resigned in 1917 to accept a partnership in the Boston firm of Lee, Higginson and Company. During the First World War he was in London as executive secretary of the American Shipping Mission, and in 1919 he was the American member of the Secretariat of the Reparations Committee at the Versailles Peace Conference.
In the depression the investment banking firm to which he had given fifteen years of effort became a total casualty, and Jerome suffered overwhelming personal financial losses. The next two years after this disaster in 1932 he spent as a professor of international politics at the University College of Wales. This seemed to his host of friends in America a kind of retirement, and he was greatly missed.
But Harvard simply could not get along without Jerome Greene. He had become so integral a part of it that Cambridge just didn't look right without him. And Harvard at this time was planning its greatest celebration since it had been, for the settlers of Massachusetts Bay in 1636 the "first flower of their wilderness, star of their night." Who, then, was the logical designer and administrator of this Tercentary but Jerome Davis Greene?
The beauty and dignity of that festival will be long remembered not only by Harvard men but by educators everywhere. For Jerome Greene it was a triumphant return to the field of his earlier success. He again became secretary of the Harvard Corporation and there, under the presidency of Centurion James Bryant Conant, he remained until his retirement in 1943.
Since then he was a familiar figure at the Century. Though his home was in Cambridge, he came to the Club whenever he was in New York. His friends among us were many indeed, and he was greatly beloved.
Ferris Greenslet
It is not usual for a man to be successful as editor and author at the same time—although many try. Writers commonly use an editorial position as a stepping stone to authorship, but then their eagerness to write persuades them to steal time away from editing. Sometimes, too, they become frustrated by being forced to deal with the creations of others instead of focusing on their own masterpieces.
Ferris Greenslet was an exception to the rule. While he was associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly, he produced biographies of James Russell Lowell and Walter Pater and The Quest of the Holy Grail. Then, during a long, distinguished career with Houghton, Mifflin and Company, he wrote a life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and an autobiography entitled Under the Bridge. The Practical Cogitator, on which he collaborated with Centurion Charles Curtis, set the pattern for Curtis's later A Commonplace Book. During this time he moved from literary adviser of the publishing house to director, general manager of the trade department, and vice-president.
Greenslet was born in Glens Falls, New York, in 1875. He took his bachelor's and master's degree at Wesleyan University in 1898, his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1900, and his Doctorate of Letters at Dartmouth in 1924. Meanwhile he was with the Atlantic from 1902 to 1907 and then began his career in book publishing. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Greenslet's autobiography, Under the Bridge, reveals a habit of mind that many of us take tranquilizers to attain. For he is unafraid of digression, unashamed of leisurely thought. In the Preface to The Practical Cogitator, he and his collaborator, Charles Curtis, carried on a brief dialogue in verse that suggests a happy environment for thinking:
Ferris, this fumbling through other minds
Has made me thirsty. Tell me where one finds
A place where you and I can sit,
And slake the dust of other people's wit.
To which, Ferris replies:
Charles, I know a tavern not far distant
Where we can sit and talk o'er wine consistent
With our own thoughts; and while we're drinking
We will atone for all vicarious thinking.
He was a Centurion for fifty of his eighty-four years.
Lloyd Carpenter Griscom
Meeting with the chief of a fierce nomad tribe in an almost unexplored part of Persia, employing a United States battleship to bluff the Sultan of Turkey into paying a $90,000 debt, conducting the relief operations after the Messina earthquake in Italy, flying with Wilbur Wright in 1909 when the top altitude was 200 feet, serving as aide-de-camp to a general in the Spanish-American War and as a liaison officer on Pershing's staff in the First World War—these were only a few of Lloyd Griscom's exploits in a life of eighty-six years. He was at various times lawyer, diplomat, soldier, sportsman, author, and newspaper publisher.
Born in Riverton, New Jersey, in 1872, Griscom spent his schoolboy years in Pennsylvania, Switzerland, and France. He took his Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1891, at the head of his class, in the Wharton School of Finance and Economics of the University of Pennsylvania. He then studied law at the Pennsylvania Law School, and at twenty-one he held the post of attache to the London Embassy and was also the private secretary to the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. In 1895 he returned to the United States and attended the law school of New York University. His studies were interrupted by the Spanish-American War in which he was captain of volunteers.
His diplomatic career began in earnest with his service as charge d'affaires in Constantinople from 1899 to 1901. It was there, when he was only twenty-eight that he had his brush with the Sultan. The debt owed by the Turkish government had resulted from damage to United States property during the recent Armenian massacre. On learning that the battleship Kentucky was scheduled to stop at Smyrna, he requested Secretary of State John Hay to order it to remain there five days. This scared the Sultan into offering to pay in full, but Griscom magnanimously agreed to an installment plan. Richard Harding Davis, Griscom's close friend, wrote him, "Few boys of 28 are given a battleship to play with. Be careful it doesn't go off." A few years before this incident Davis and Griscom had made extensive travels together as a result of which Griscom became one of the heroes of Davis's book Three Gringoes in Central America.
At thirty-four he became our youngest ambassador. This was to Italy. He had already served as minister to Persia, to Brazil, and to Japan. He was in Japan during the whole of the Russo-Japanese war. After he left the diplomatic service, he practiced law in New York until the First World War, when he went overseas with the 77th division and became a staff officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
All these experiences had given him the sense of news values that is needed to own and operate a paper. The journal he chose was the Tallahassee Democrat and he resolved to give Tallahassee "a better newspaper than a town this size can normally afford." From this time in the late twenties, he remained with the Democrat and lived in Georgia until his death there.
Griscom was always a sports enthusiast. He played tennis till he was over seventy, and his golf continued to his middle eighties. He was an excellent shot and was out shooting pheasants three days before he died.
With his varied interests so far away and so exigent he was able in his nearly fifty years of membership to make only occasional visits to the Century. But we were proud of him and happy to greet him when he could find time to come.
Ludlow Griscom
In an article in the Audubon magazine by the President of the National Audubon Society, Centurion John Baker, a story is told which shows that Ludlow Griscom was expert in botany as well as in ornithology.
"One day Ludlow and Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy were traveling east toward Montauk, Long Island, at some 50 miles an hour. Murphy suddenly said, 'Ludlow, what is that white flower we just went by in the shoulder of the road?' Ludlow, without stopping the car, still going at 50 miles an hour, looked through the back window and said, 'That is (such and such) indigenous to Switzerland and that is the first record of it in this country.' He stopped the car within a quarter-mile, backed up, and verified the observation."
Ludlow Griscom's interest which brought him into the first rank of contemporary ornithologists began at the age of six. In the tender years that followed, to the annoyance of his parents, he "wasted" countless hours out in the fields with binoculars, watching and studying.
Until he was eleven, he was taught at home by private tutors who enhanced routine instruction by making him fluent in French and German and an accomplished piano player. From eleven to fifteen he went to school in New York and at fifteen passed the entrance examination to Harvard. Too young to enter college, he spent the next two years traveling with his parents in Europe and perfecting his languages and music. He then turned from Harvard to Columbia, from which he was graduated in 1912. His father wanted him to go to law school, but Ludlow insisted on following his passionate interest at Cornell. He was Cornell's first graduate student in ornithology. After taking his master's degree there, he worked for ten years in the bird department of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1927 he accepted a life appointment as research ornithologist in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
As a lieutenant with the American Expeditionary Force in 1918, Griscom served in a unit that sent leaflets in balloons over the German lines. In the Second World War he organized some thirty linguists to translate articles from foreign language newspapers and periodicals. During the war he used his bird knowledge to tell an anxious father from what mysterious front his son had written. The young man had explained that he could not divulge his whereabouts but that he had just seen a manatee in captivity and thought this would interest Ludlow Griscom. The father showed Ludlow the letter; without hesitation the ornithologist said the son had been on a boat off the coast of British Guiana, that he had landed there and had written, no doubt, from Georgetown. This uncanny bit of detective work was later verified in detail.
In the course of his constantly active life, Ludlow Griscom was President of the Boston Society of Natural History and chairman of the board of directors of the National Audubon Society. His field trips in the interests of both botany and ornithology took him to Labrador, Newfoundland, Mexico, Panama, Cape Town, Dakar, and Rabat. He was awarded the Conservation Medal of the National Audubon Society.
To those who knew him well, Ludlow Griscom endeared himself by his sense of humor, his warmth, and his capacity for true affection.
George Matthews Harding
"Although, at moment," says a fellow artist, "the work of such contemporaries as George Harding has been overlooked in the pursuit of the abstract, I am sure that the day is coming when his work will be regarded in the same light as that of Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer." It seems unlikely, however, that even in a forest of abstract art Harding's work can ever be hidden, for it has been integrated with architecture in permanent monuments to his skill. For he was, primarily, a muralist; he has recorded in form and color adapted to many structural settings some of the events which have given direction to our history. That he worked from drawings made on the spot in these critical times and places is a circumstance that has given his production an uncommon authenticity.
In two World Wars Harding followed troops into combat. From 1917 to 1919, as captain of engineers, he served as official combat artist with the American Expeditionary Force in France. A quarter century later, as a major in the United States Marine Corps, he painted a record of the invasions in the South Sea islands. In the meantime he did many paintings which, today, are in collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Sacramento Museum in California, in the Chrysler collection in Detroit, and in the hands of many private owners. Also, between the wars, he was on the faculty of the School of the Pennsylvania Academy. He was a popular teacher, favored for his directness, his sincerity, his scorn of the preciosity which was often present in the art circles of the day, and what one of his students has called a "down-to-earth brusqueness."
George Harding was born in Philadelphia in 1882. He was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied architecture as well as painting. For two years he was a pupil of the illustrator Howard Pyle. In 1908 he was sent by Harper's magazine to the northern ice fields and to the West Indies as illustrator and four years later journeyed 'round the world as special artist for Harper's. He took up mural painting in 1916.
His principal murals are in the Philadelphia Custom House, the United States Post Office Administration in Washington, the Municipal Courthouse in Philadelphia, the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and the J. J. Audubon Shrine in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. He was awarded the Pennsylvania Academy's Stotesbury Award and its Gold Medal of Honor, the Gold Medal of the Architectural League of New York, and the Fine Arts Award of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture.
Unfortunately his non-resident membership in the Century was terminated by his death after only five years, so that few of us who had not known him before were able to become his friends. But among our artists and architects he had a host of admirers.
Walter Hauser
Of the many Centurions who have been connected with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walter Hauser was one of the best loved. Like Hebe Winlock and Ambrose Lansing, he was an archaeologist. The "digs" in which he took part were not only in Egypt but in Iraq and Persia as well. He was successful in his work and had the rare gift of telling others about it with simple clarity, as many a young man about to embark on this fascinating but complex profession remembers. Indeed, much of his energy was devoted to this encouragement and inspiration of his less experienced colleagues— especially in his later life when as curator of the Museum's library his interests reached out to cover many kinds of art.
Hauser was born in Middlefield, Massachusetts, in 1893. He studied architecture at M.I.T. and afterward taught advanced mathematics and drawing. But he was restless in this work, which seemed to him formulated and repetitive, and the Metropolitan's suggestion that he work on an Egyptian expedition easily lured him away. This was concerned with the necropolis of Thebes, and his survey of that area was thought by his associates to have been a "veritable masterpiece of draftsmanship and clear exposition."
When he was not digging, he got immense pleasure from the opera and the theater. He had learned to enjoy them in Boston while he was studying there, and they filled much of his spare time during the New York intervals between his far-flung activities.
In 1931 he accompanied a joint expedition of the Metropolitan and German State Museums which excavated the site of Ctesiphon, near Baghdad, and the following year he was appointed adviser to the Persian expedition to Kasi-i-Abu- Nasr, the site of the Shiraz of the Susanian and early Mohammedan eras—near the present Shiraz. Later he helped organize the Museum's own Persian expedition, an operation continued till 1940 when the war stopped it. In 1946 he was made curator of the library, and he snowed an administrative ability that ordered and eased the work of his assistants.
Hauser never cared for official formality. His way was direct and simple; if he could by-pass protocol so much the better. He was uncommonly generous, and though most of his giving was anonymous, his liberal contributions to the Welfare Fund of the Museum's Employees Association will be long remembered.
A favorite avocation was cooking. The lucky friends who got invited to his repasts used to say he could have been a first-rate professional chef if he had not had so many other interests.
Walter Hauser's Centurion friends are sorry he came so late to the Century and that his membership was cut off so soon after his election.
Allan Vanderhoef Heely
The particular kind of genius it takes to be a successful headmaster of a boys' school is rare and inscrutable. It is not enough to say that such a man must be patient, tolerant, firm, and wise. It is not enough for him to understand the adolescent; he must know and judge the adult as well. Only part of his problem involves boys; a large and extremely difficult part concerns his subordinate teachers and their wives and families—in the community but not of it.
Patience, tolerance, and the quick memory of when he was himself a boy, painfully harassed by the business of growing—these are part of it sure enough. But what distinguishes the natural from the synthetic school head is flexibility. The capacity for quick adjustment to a sequence of problems, each of which in some phase is unique, lifts a man out of formula and makes him great in his field.
Allan Heely is remembered by his teachers as such a person. "As a headmaster," one of them has written, "Allan always put common sense ahead of arbitrary rules and was annoyed when members of his faculty regarded rules as if they were tablets from Sinai, forgetting that it was only we, after all, who had made them up." Another of his uncommon gifts was the ability to delegate authority. He would give someone a job to do and was so intuitively certain he had picked the right man that he could forget it. Once he had set an assignment he never interfered. A reason this worked so well at Lawrenceville was his unerring judgment of men. He picked a teacher only when all doubts had vanished.
Allan Heely was born in Brooklyn in 1897. His preparatory school was Andover, his college Yale. His college career was interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as second lieutenant of field artillery at Camp Jackson.
After graduating with the class of 1919, he began a business career, first in advertising and then in wholesale drygoods. But he soon found out that business was wrong for him. "I wanted," he wrote in a class report, "to do something that I could get excited about. After two years of consideration, education seemed to fill the bill. Its importance was basic, its interest promising. I got a job as teacher of English at Andover, my place in business was taken by a green typist, and it looked as though the world was safe again." While still at Andover, he took an M.A. degree at Oxford. In 1934, however safe the world had looked seen from Andover, he left it to head Lawrenceville.
This school, more than a century old, had had its ups and downs. It was having a relative down when Allan Heely took charge. In twenty-five years he brought the endowment fund from almost nothing into the millions. Notwithstanding the considerable enrollment of 625 boys, he introduced the Harkness conference plan in which all classes of instruction were limited to fourteen boys.
Allan is remembered by those who worked with him as "affable, conciliatory, deliberate and discreet"—the opposite of his predecessor. He described his recreation as "a careful cultivation of complete inertia from which I emerge occasionally to play a game of golf." But he also played the piano and sang; he was gregarious and genial. He wrote one book, Why the Private School? whose title explains it.
A Centurion friend tells: "Allan was a discerning gourmet and an ideal companion for an evening at the Century. Delighting always in the exact use of words, he was able to make any topic seem amusing and significant. The secret of this was partly that to an exceptional degree his was the magic gift of perceiving in all things the difference between the apparent and the real."
Allan Heely died at the untimely age of sixty-two. He had been a member of the Century twenty-five years.
Charles Ralph Hickox
"Charlie Hickox," writes a close friend, "was a figure out of the Victorian era—tall and straight, with a fine intellectual face. He always wore a high, stiff collar, a bow tie and a double-breasted suit and made an arresting picture. In politics, he was a conservative of the conservatives. A little to the right of Louis XIV, it has been said."
Hickox was educated at both Yale and Harvard; he got his bachelor's degree at Yale in 1893; the Harvard Law School gave him his LL.B. three years later. He began practice with Convers and Kirlin (which later became Kirlin, Campbell and Keating) in 1899 and was a partner in the firm in 1908. He was a highly successful admiralty lawyer.
Many psychologists believe that the habit of intense concentration builds a good memory. Hickox had both to an uncommon degree. A young lawyer who worked for him used to be astonished by the documentation of his mind. Hickox would lean back in his chair and dictate a long brief without once looking up a citation. Such a performance is, of course, a superb time-saver, but other lawyers should be pretty sure they have his truly photographic memory before they follow his example.
He carried this quality outside the office. He was fond of reading; especially fond of poetry. He could recite his favorite poems in toto without a slip. He had a sensitive literary taste and could display it with sharp wit.
During the First World War, in which he was a major with the American Expeditionary Force, he gave valuable service as judge advocate. He was decorated by the French government with the Order of University Palms. But he was then already a veteran of the Spanish American War, having served in Cuba with New York's Squadron A.
Charlie Hickox was a charming companion, and we were lucky to have him with us so long. He was a member for forty-six years.
James Hazen Hyde
"Caleb" Hyde, as his intimates used to call him, saw little of his American friends during his middle years, unless they happened to be in Paris. Yet during his self-imposed exile, he won his most important distinctions. The Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor was awarded him for his long devotion to Franco-American cultural relations. He was chairman of The Federation of French Alliances in the United States, he founded The Alliance Franchise in America, and had the rare honor of election as associate member of The French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.
"Caleb's" early life before he left for France under a stigma which he always considered unjust was colorful indeed. He was born in Manhattan in 1876, the son of Henry Baldwin Hyde, founder of The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. At the age of twenty-two he was graduated from Harvard College with honors in French and German.
On his father's death a year later, the young man inherited a large fortune. He then began a life of what Thorstein Veblen called "conspicuous leisure." Its evidences were not mere luxury—although the luxury may have been the most conspicuous part of it—but it involved, too, finesse of judgment in the acquisition of beautiful things in which he delighted. But he took pleasure as well in the refinements of cuisine and service; his dinners and other entertainments became the talk of the town. As usual the reports of these affairs emphasized their lavishness in terms of their apparent cost rather than of Hyde's personal charm in entertaining his guests. What is forgotten about "Caleb" is that he was one of the great raconteurs of his time and that his wit spiced his dinners far more subtly than even the celebrated seasoning of the dishes.
The parties culminated in 1905 with one which not only hurt his reputation but cast suspicion upon the operations of the insurance companies in general. It would be superfluous to tell in detail here of the fancy-dress ball in which Sherry's was rather naively transformed into a facsimile of the French court of Louis XVI at Versailles. The American public was less impressed by the irony of the historical setting with its near coincidence with revolution than with the report that it had cost $200,000. A later, more accurate, estimate of $75,000 failed to appease the public ire, and the appointment of the Armstrong Committee to investigate the doings of all insurance companies, plus the resulting drastic legislation, seem to have been the direct result of the Sherry extravagance. It was at this point that young Hyde—still under thirty—went to live in France and sublimate his bitterness in good works there.
That his immoderate and often dictatorial ways were balanced by a wide erudition and charm of manner is remembered by those who knew him best. Many anecdotes, some of which are, of course, apocryphal, are told of him. Once, at a dinner, on being introduced to a lady he had never seen before, he immediately asked if she knew the definition of adultery. On her blushing "No" he said, "Why, the wrong man in the right place, of course." At a Paris dinner he soon discovered that the lady on his left was afflicted with what Madison Avenue has diagnosed as halitosis. Through dinner, he avoided her remarks but when the cheese was passed he turned to her suddenly, "Vous dites, Madame?" he is said to have said.
He returned in later years to New York. He did not come often to the Century, but when he was there he was subdued. He is remembered as seeming solemn and literal—quite the reverse of his usual appearance. Perhaps he came too seldom to become familiar with the Round Table, where his humor might have found ready response. Hyde lived to be eighty-three; he had been a Centurion for fifty-seven years.
William Raymond Jelliffe
Doctor Jelliffe was a Presbyterian minister who was also an effective organizer and administrator. The principal work of his career was in the New York City Mission Society of which he was, successively, executive vice-president, president, and chairman. His special interest there was the expansion of the Mission's work among New York's Spanish-speaking people—an activity that has become a major part of the Society's program. In the same direction his assistance was of great value in establishing the Second Spanish Evangelical Church in East Fourteenth Street and the Society's Harlem Branch, Camp Sharparoon in Dover Plains, New York.
The Society's staff members gratefully remember Jelliffe's strenuous efforts to keep it going during the depression years, for he did not let a single one of his workers go. Also, as chairman of the social services committee of the Presbytery of New York, he was able to raise support for the desperate unemployed in that tragic time.
He was a graduate of Union Theological Seminary. For thirteen years he served the Sea and Land Church and then became associate minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church under Centurion Henry Sloane Coffin.
He seldom preached in the Church but was usually in the chancel during services. The story is told of him that he used to look down the pews, note which ones had new or strange faces, and then send a note to the head usher telling him to spot each person as he went out. In this way he got to know the newcomers and to show his friendliness toward them. He loved people and had sensitive understanding of character.
Middlebury College in Vermont gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1930. His last years after he had passed eighty were spent at Princeton, where he suffered his final long illness.
The Century knew him from 1936.
Edward Johnson
A train carrying the Metropolitan Opera Company on tour drew into Bloomington, Indiana, in a downpour of rain. The station would accommodate about a third of the orchestra. This left the rest of the musicians, the chorus, the ballet, and the principals with the choice of staying aboard or going out into the pouring rain. Nerves got dangerously on edge. "Touring," remembers a Centurion member of the company, "is an intimacy closer than holy matrimony . . . it brings out the worst and it brings out the best." But at that critical point in Bloomington, a magnificent tenor voice rose above the noise of the storm. "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin' " sang Edward Johnson walking through the cars. Instantly the spirits of everyone went up. It was impossible not to laugh, and Johnson knew that these people could not laugh and kill one another at the same time. No one asked if this was dignified behavior for the general manager of an internationally famous opera. It was "Eddie," and Eddie could do no wrong.
Edward Johnson began his musical career as a soprano choir boy in Guelph, Ontario. His first "aria" was sung in Sunday School; its name was "Throw Out the Life-Line." While still a boy, he took part in a regimental band and ran a minstrel show to make money for the band's instruments. His first tenor role was in the operetta The Waltz Dream by Oskar Strauss. In it he made enough money to go to Europe to study singing for grand opera. For three years his master was Vincenso Lombardi who had taught Caruso.
By 1912, when he was thirty-four, he was ready for his debut in Padua. To get recognition as an opera singer in Italy, he had been obliged to change his name to Eduardo di Giovanni—a free translation of his own. His Padua role was in Andrea Chenier but soon he was singing at the Scala in Milan: in the first Italian Parsifal, in Alfano's L'Ombria di Don Giovanni, in Pizzetti's Fedra and in the new short operas of Puccini, // Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi. His success in these and other operas in which he created new leads came to the attention of the Chicago Opera Company, which brought him back to America in 1919. He stayed with this company for three years, and then he joined the Met in New York and, under his own name, became best known in the part of Avito in L'Amore dei Tre Re. His first appearance in the Met was in this role in 1922. His last New York performance was in Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande in March, 1935. The following month he was named general manager.
It was a difficult post, demanding resourcefulness, energy, stamina, and many new talents. It required both artistic judgment and the capacity for organizing and working with an immense diversity of more or less temperamental folk. Besides all this, his job included lifting the Met out of the depression, reviving its waning finances, and putting it on a firm economic footing. Incidentally, it involved dealing with powerful and occasionally cantankerous labor unions. Yet he was loved by the lowliest of the employees. When he retired, the employees made this statement: "We, better than the general public, know what financial, artistic, and managerial problems you have had to solve to maintain the Metropolitan's position and prestige. For this and for making our opera company truly representative of the best in American music and musical artists, we honor you."
It is told that once, when he was called on to speak at a dinner honoring Jack Rosenberg, president of Local 802, he recalled that Rosenberg had been a drummer in the orchestra of The Waltz Dream. "When I was in musical comedy," Johnson said, "our guest of honor used to look up at me. Now that I am general manager of the Metropolitan I look up at him."
Although he brought many foreign conductors—such men as Bruno Walter, Sir Thomas Beecham, George Szell, and Fritz Reiner—to the Met he took the greatest pride in the opportunities he was able to give to American artists.
His time in the Century was unhappily brief. He was elected after his retirement when he had gone to live in his birthplace, Guelph, Ontario. But he came when he could and especially enjoyed the dinners of welcome to the new members. He took much interest in the musical career of William Daniel's daughter whom he met when she graduated from the Juilliard School.
At his death, the New York Times and the Herald Tribune paid editorial tribute to him. The Times said, in conclusion: "Cultivated, ardent, witty and wise, he was, in Chaucer's words, a parfait, gentle knight."
Albert Richard Lamb
The Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in the establishment of which Columbia University and the Presbyterian Hospital collaborated, owed much to the tireless and constructive efforts of Albert Lamb. To his exceptional skill as a physician and his special talent for diagnosis, Doctor Lamb added a great capacity for negotiation and organization and, finally, a literary facility uncommon in a man whose medical occupation was so urgent. For he not only made his abundant contributions to the making of the Center, but he wrote its story in his History of a Great Medical Adventure, published in 1955.
After graduating from Yale in 1903, Albert Lamb received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1907. He served his internship at Presbyterian Hospital and followed this by two years' service as bacteriologist and pathologist. He began teaching in 1913 and was appointed Columbia's professor of clinical medicine in 1922. Meanwhile, he had gone overseas as major in the Army Medical Corps in the First World War. In 1919 he served in Paris with the American Commission to Negotiate Peace.
His important work in developing the Medical Center was completed in 1928. In 1940 he was made president of Presbyterian Hospital's medical board. In the Second World War, he helped develop the Blood-for-Britain program which included a large blood plasma processing center at Presbyterian Hospital. In 1952 he retired from active practice and devoted the rest of his life to writing.
Doctor Lamb was a quiet man, respected for his wisdom and penetrating understanding. One of his close associates tells that he had a delightful sense of humor, was frank in his opinions, but was always a sympathetic listener. It was "unfortunate," said this Centurion doctor friend "that he, like the rest of us in these busy days, could not enjoy the Century more." He had been a member since 1926.
James Warren Lane
Having been a bird watcher since he was five and, in his adult years, an earnest student of bird life, Jim Lane was shocked when a friend suggested that he come to a blind some morning and shoot ducks. But the friend said shooting was only a small part of the pleasure, that he himself was such a bad shot that he almost never hit a bird. The fun, he said, was being away from all the brouhaha of life—being able to think and dream and meditate. So Lane tried it; he enjoyed meditating and especially enjoyed seeing his friend miss all the ducks.
They lived, these friends, the watcher and the shooter, at St. James, Long Island, where there were plenty of birds. Jim Lane used to lecture about them to fascinated local groups, and his articles for the paper inspired many watchers. But ornithology was not Lane's profession. He was a historian of art and a critic. He did special research for the National Gallery in Washington. In this work he was meticulous and precise. His field was American painting and his particular enthusiasms were for nineteenth-century artists. He wrote a book about Whistler and another in which he explored the beginnings of modern art. Here he followed the sequence of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Derain, Demuth to Georgia O'Keefe and Jean Chariot. He omitted Picasso.
"Picasso," he wrote, "has a feverish power of invention, but his inability to progress in his art has left him, in the final analysis, a great improviser rather than a great creative painter."
Greatness in any art, Lane thought, depended largely on the honest belief of the artist in his creation. "Sincerity . . . is the least common denominator of greatness. But there is one more condition. A great painting must have a spiritual quality. It must be experience humanized. The novels of Dickens and Tolstoi, the laments and marches of Tchaikowski, have this quality as do the paintings of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Chariot."
James Warren Lane was born in Brooklyn in 1898. He was educated at Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was editor of the "Lit," and after graduation, he edited the Authors' League Bulletin. From 1939 to 1943 he was associate editor of Art News and from 1945 to 1951 he was a research assistant at the National Gallery. From 1936 to 1940 he was visiting lecturer on American painting at New York University.
He was a shy, sensitive man, deeply religious. He had a quiet sense of humor of which he himself was often the target. He was greatly loved by friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
Ambrose Lansing
Those of us who gathered at the Round Table before lunch were glad when Ambrose joined us, for he had a rare understanding of the pleasure of true conversation. Yet few of us who talked with him then realized the extent and variety of his achievements or the degree of his scholarship, because he so seldom talked his own shop. Occasionally he would let drop a word or two about his home on Roaring Brook near Chappaqua, but only his intimates knew that his weekend gardening included the building of models of Egyptian tombs with self-locking doors.
Ambrose was an Egyptologist who spent many digging seasons in the Valley of the Kings. He and Centurion Herbert Winlock uncovered some of the finest models of ancient Egyptian ship, farm, and trade practices that are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They found these lovely miniature replicas of the people and things that made up the everyday life of that fabled land in the tombs of kings. Lansing discovered some of the finest of them quite by accident in a spot he had already explored and was about to leave when it appeared that a pile of sand from the excavations was gradually growing smaller. Hastily shoveling the sand away he uncovered a crack beneath it. The beam of a flashlight through the narrow slit showed a great galaxy of figures.
A trait which colleagues remember was Ambrose's selfless fairness in his competitive relations with others in his field, whether they were private collectors or museum curators. Jealousy was quite foreign to his thinking.
Ambrose was born of American parents in Cairo in 1891. At thirteen he came to the United States after acquiring in his childhood his life interest. He took his A.B. at Washington and Jefferson College in 1911. Immediately after his graduation, he went to work as field archaeologist in Egypt, though his summers were spent in Germany as a student at Leipzig University until 1914. In 1922 he was appointed assistant curator, in 1926 associate curator, and in 1939 curator of the department of Egyptian art in the Metropolitan Museum. He was a member of the American Oriental Society, Chicago's Oriental Institute, the Egypt Exploration Society, and the American Museums Association.
He left us too soon, and we miss him.
Samuel McCune Lindsay
The crowning achievement of Samuel Lindsay's academic career was the reorganization of Columbia's Academy of Political Science, making it a link, so to speak, between gown and town. This Academy had been in existence since 1880, but it was a moribund existence till Lindsay took hold of it more than a quarter century later. But from the small group it was when he became its president in 1910, he raised its membership to ten thousand, including representation from virtually every country in the world. Its meetings became animated forums with addresses by statesmen, candidates for office, diplomats, high civil servants, labor leaders, professors, and lawyers and discussion on the topics they introduced. These broke open any professorial ivory towers that may have existed and taught their inmates something about the rough-and-tumble of politics and the economic realities in the business world.
Lindsay is said to have been the first professor in the field of labor legislation at Columbia. When the United States first took possession of Puerto Rico, he was appointed its Commissioner of Education; later he was the first chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico. On the fifteenth anniversary of its founding the university gave him an honorary doctorate.
Samuel Lindsay was born in Pittsburgh in 1869. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and after taking postgraduate courses in Halle, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and Paris, he received his LL.D. degree. For about ten years before he came to Columbia, he was professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He entered Columbia in 1907 as professor of social legislation.
His extra-curricular activities included the presidency of the Men's Association of the Bach Presbyterian Church, and to it he brought a coterie of distinguished speakers. He was later elected one of the ruling elders of the Church. Though modesty prevented his speaking often, his rare words of wise advice were treasured by those who heard him.
He lived to be ninety and was a Centurion for fifty-seven years.
James McBey
The Century is fortunate in owning seven of James Mc- Bey's etchings. These were chosen from the hundreds of drawings, paintings, and sketches he made as official artist for the British Expeditionary Forces under Lord Allenby in 1917. Most of the others are in the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum in London.
McBey, as his name assures us, was a Scot. At fifteen he seemed to be headed for a banking career. He worked then for the North of Scotland Bank in Aberdeen. But even then his talent for drawing led him into night study of the art of etching. He was self-taught, but he made quick progress. By the time he had made sixty experimental plates, he forgot about banking and made art his vocation. His first exhibition was at Goupil's gallery in London in 1911.
His insistent eagerness for new subjects led him into a roving life. He wandered all over Britain, then over the Continent and to North Africa. The war interrupted this footloose interval, and in 1916 he joined the British army in France. But happily his talent was recognized, and he was able, though in uniform, to go on with his life work. The British army was wiser, in those days, than the American. Too many of our artists were wasted in the infantry, for which they were peculiarly unfitted, but we learned our lesson in time for the Second World War.
After he left the service, McBey worked for a time in Venice, but then he drifted to New York, where he did some important portrait etchings. He lived at first in the Gainsborough Studios on Central Park South, but this conventional neighborhood bored him, and he moved down into East John Street a block from the waterfront. All about him were fish markets and shops for fitting out ships. These had descended directly from the enterprises of the earliest colonial days and offered a wealth of material for McBey's pencil. He became an American citizen in 1942.
But even the rich, multicolored scenes of New York's lower East Side could not hold him forever. The adventurous spirit was still strong in his sixties, and he spent the last years of his life in Tangier, where he did some of his best work.
James McBey was distinguished by his independence of all schools. He never imitated. His work has the freshness of original thought; he approached each new subject from scratch, as it were, unbiased by formula or prejudice.
George Whitney Martin
George Martin was the first historian of the Century. The office was created in 1950. Before that, memorials to those who had gone to join the Century's immortals had been composed by the secretary. But as the secretary's business had multiplied with the years, the burdens of this additional task had become more than one man could bear. So this new post was devised, and George was asked to tell, each year, the story of those who had left us.
When the first yearbook after his appointment appeared, Centurions read a new kind of tribute. The historian's report was so instantly interesting that we read it through, as absorbed by the memorials to strangers as if they had been our close friends. We wished we had known these men.
We were stirred by the almost biblical directness and economy of the prose, yet we found warmth in it, too, and color—even gaiety. It seemed as if the men George had written about were still alive and would always be so in the clubhouse. Thus, he interpreted the spirit of the Century — the intimation of immortality that is forever present there as no one else has quite done.
George used to say that members were friendly to him in the hope of a good memorial after they were "pegged out.' But it never occurred to anyone that he himself could die. We still expect to meet him—in the lower hall, perhaps, swinging the army knapsack he used for a brief case; or in the East Room with a group listening to his exuberant eloquence in defense of an idea or to the shattering wit of his disapproval.
George was born in Rochester, New York, in 1887. He was the son of a well-loved Centurion, Edward Sanford Martin, a brilliant writer and the first editor on John Ames Mitchell's Life. George went to Groton School and Harvard College. His class in Harvard was 1910, but he finished a year early and entered the Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the bar in 1913. He began his practice with the firm of Byrne and Cutcheon and, in 1918, joined that of Marvin, Hooker and Roosevelt, of which Franklin Roosevelt was a partner. Five years later Langdon Marvin and Grenville Emmet joined with George to form the partnership of Emmet, Marvin and Martin. With this firm he remained until his death.
George's participation in the First World War was told in a letter he wrote in 1940 to Frank Miles, editor of the Iowa Legionnaire who had questioned his patriotism. Having read a report that George was one of a group which had publicly favored the entrance of the United States into the Second World War with Germany, Miles wrote to ask: "What fighting did you do in the last war? Are you now of an age of physical and mental fitness which would enable you to do military service? . . . Kindly reply by return mail." George replied:
"Answering your questions: In the last war I enlisted in the United States Army in April, 1917, and was honorably discharged in March, 1919. I received the divisional citation for gallantry in action during the Argonne-Meuse offensive. Is this enough, or will you have it inch by inch and minute by minute with a full box score?
"Owing to the fact that I have supported myself without the assistance of the taxpayers ever since being discharged from the Army, I am now of an age and of a physical and mental fitness which will enable me to do military service. The only possible question of my mental fitness arises out of the fact that I am a member of the American Legion.
"It is written in the Scriptures that Samson inflicted immense loss on the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. If you will be good enough to send me your lower maxillary, I will forward it to the War Department in the full confidence that the country will hardly need more than this."
This correspondence was printed in the New York Herald Tribune in June, 1940. After Pearl Harbor, George, then fifty-four, was commissioned colonel of the 4th New York Infantry, and at the war's end he was brigadier-general of the 5th New York Artillery Brigade.
Though a lawyer by profession, writing was his constant avocation. He once quoted Kipling as saying that in a law office a man is neither seen nor heard. Perhaps it was to balance this silence that his urge to write was so strong. George was a fighting writer. His words cut sharp and deep. His irony withered the coward, the bigot, the hypocrite, and all who would limit freedom of the mind. He was intolerant of the yes-man and of him who conforms through fear. "The fear of God," he wrote, "is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of men is the grave of freedom."
Some of his writing was pure fun and hilariously funny but mainly it was the expression of a crusader or a rebel. Unfortunately much of it had not the wide circulation it deserved. An example of this was an article entitled "The Duty of Rebellion," published in the Groton School Quarterly— a sweeping attack on the attempt to regulate morals by statute in which the special target was national prohibition: "There is a silent referendum in the heart and minds of men on every important enactment by a Legislature and on every important decision by a Court which involves a fundamental principle of civil liberty. Without a favorable issue in that referendum, the statute and the decision alike are written in water."
For more than fifteen years, George was president of the board of directors of the Brearley School for girls. Of his performance there, Millicent Mcintosh wrote in the Brearley Bulletin: "His intellectual gifts alone could never have achieved the enormous influence he had on the school. His extraordinary charm and wit and kindness made him able to persuade as well as to agitate; his deep belief in education as a means to self-fulfilment was part of his essential liberalism."
George was deeply religious. This never blinded him to the smugness and hypocrisy of certain clerics (including bishops); on the contrary his ironic words toward them stemmed from the very fact of his candid faith. He was bitter, for instance, toward a House of Bishops who, in convention, linked alcohol and narcotics in their exhortation to obey the prohibition law. Yet he was a vestryman of St. George's Church in New York and, with his family, a regular attendant there.
In his wallet after he died was found this quotation from a speech of Socrates. It is a key to his persistent faith. "Wherefor my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been reciting."
So be it, George. You have brought a degree of immortality to our dead; you deserve it wholly for yourself.