Nicholas Murray Butler

Nicholas Murray Butler (April 2, 1862 – December 7, 1947) was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. The co-winner with Jane Addams of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, Butler was president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 to 1945, and received the 8 Republican Party electoral votes for Vice President of the United States in the 1912 presidential race, after that party's VP nominee, incumbent James S. Sherman, died a few days before the election. Butler's name was so widely recognised and his influence so great that he was able to deliver a Christmas greeting to the nation every year in the New York Times. Image File history File links NMButler. ... Image File history File links NMButler. ... April 2 is the 92nd day of the year (93rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1862 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... is the 341st day of the year (342nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1947 (MCMXLVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1947 calendar). ... Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) won the Nobel Peace Prize and was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House Movement. ... Lester B. Pearson after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish and Norwegian: Nobels fredspris) is the name of one of five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. ... Columbia University is a private research university in the United States. ... The Endowments headquarters at 1779 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a private nonprofit organization promoting international cooperation and active international engagement by the United States of America. ... The Republican Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States of America, along with the Democratic Party. ... Seal of the office of the Vice-President of the United States The Vice President of the United States is the first in the presidential line of succession, becoming the new President of the United States upon the death, resignation, or removal of the President. ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ... James Schoolcraft Sherman (October 24, 1855 – October 30, 1912) was a Representative from New York and the 27th Vice President of the United States. ... The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ...

President of Columbia for 43 years, the longest tenure in the university's history, Butler doubled the size of the campus and increased the enrollment by 30,000.^{[citation needed]}

Early Life and Education

Butler was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Mary Murray Butler and manufacturing worker Henry Butler. He enrolled in Columbia College (later Columbia University) and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1882 at the age of twenty, his master's degree in 1883, and his doctorate in 1884. Butler's academic and other achievements led Theodore Roosevelt to call him "Nicholas Miraculous." In 1885, Butler studied in Paris and Berlin and became a lifelong friend of future Secretary of State Elihu Root. Through Root he also met Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. In the fall of 1885, Butler joined the staff of Columbia's philosophy department. Map of Elizabeth in Union County Union County Court House Elizabeth is a City in Union County, New Jersey, in the United States. ... Columbia College is the main undergraduate college at Columbia University, situated on the universitys main campus of Morningside Heights in the Borough of Manhattan in the City of New York. ... A B.A. issused as a certificate Bachelor of Arts (B.A., BA or A.B.), from the Latin Artium Baccalaureus is an undergraduate bachelors degree awarded for either a course or a program in the liberal arts or the sciences, or both. ... “M.S.” redirects here. ... Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) The Eiffel Tower in Paris, as seen from the esplanade du Trocadéro. ... This article is about the capital of Germany. ... Seal of the United States Department of State. ... Elihu Root Elihu Root (February 15, 1845 – February 7, 1937) was an American lawyer and statesman, the son of Oren Root and Nancy Whitney Buttrick. ... William Howard Taft (September 15, 1857 – March 8, 1930) was an American politician, the 27th President of the United States, the 10th Chief Justice of the United States, a leader of the progressive conservative wing of the Republican Party in the early 20th century, a pioneer in international arbitration and...

In 1887, he co-founded, and became President of, the New York School for the Training of Teachers, which later affiliated with Columbia University and was renamed Teachers College, Columbia University. Throughout the 1890s Butler served on the New Jersey Board of Education and participated in forming the College Entrance Examination Board. Teachers College, Columbia University (sometimes referred to simply as Teachers College; also referred to as Teachers College of Columbia University or the Columbia University Graduate School of Education) is the top ranked graduate school of education in the United States. ... The College Board is a non-profit examination board in the United States that was formed in 1900 as the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB). ...

Presidency of Columbia University

In 1901, Butler became acting president of Columbia University, and in 1902 formally became president. United States President Theodore Roosevelt attended Butler's inauguration. Butler remained president of Columbia for forty-two years. During Butler's presidency, the university expanded its campus, erected a number of new buildings and added several new schools and departments. Among the innovations he oversaw was the opening of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, the first academic medical center in the world. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. ... New York-Presbyterian Hospital is a prominent university hospital in New York City, composed of two medical centers, Columbia University Medical Center and New York Weill Cornell Medical Center, each affiliated with an Ivy League University. ...

However, Butler also worked to limit the admission of Jewish students to the university, and to prevent the election of Jews to the Board of Trustees. (See "Butler and Anti-Semitism" below.)

Columbia named its main library building and a faculty apartment building in Butler's honor, along with a major prize in philosophy. Butler Library The Nicholas Murray Butler Library, commonly known simply as Butler Library, is the largest single library in the Columbia University Library System, which contains over 8. ...

Presidential Ambitions

Butler was a delegate to each Republican National Convention from 1888 to 1936. In the 1912 presidential election, Butler received the 8 vice-presidential electoral votes that would have gone to Vice-President James Sherman, who had died shortly before the popular election. In 1916, Butler failed in an effort to secure the Republican presidential nomination for Elihu Root. Butler himself attempted unsuccessfully to secure the Republican nomination for President in 1920 and 1928. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ...

Butler became disillusioned with the negative effects he believed the 1920 national prohibition of alcohol was having on the country. He became active in the successful effort to bring about the repeal of prohibition in 1933. The term Prohibition, also known as A Dry Law, refers to a law in a certain country by which the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages is restricted or illegal. ... In 1919, the requisite number of legislatures of the States ratified The 18th Amendment to the Federal Constitution, enabling national Prohibition within one year of ratification. ...

Internationalist

Butler was the chair of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration that met periodically from 1907 to 1912. In this time he was appointed president of the American branch of International Conciliation. Butler was also instrumental in persuading Andrew Carnegie to make the initial investment in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with $10 million. Butler became head of international education and communication, founded the European branch of the Endowment headquartered in Paris, and was President of the Endowment for twenty years. The Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration was founded in 1895 to support the cause of international arbitration, arbitration treaties, and an international court, and to generate public support on behalf of the cause. ... Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist, businessman, a major and widely respected philanthropist, and the founder of the Carnegie Steel Company which later became U.S. Steel. ... The Endowments headquarters at 1779 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a private nonprofit organization promoting international cooperation and active international engagement by the United States of America. ...

Continuing the clear sense that he was trusted by the many internationalists in power, Butler was made President of the elite Anglo-American integration society, the Pilgrims Society. He served as President of the Pilgrims from 1928 to 1946. Butler was president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1928–1941. The Pilgrims Society, founded in 1902, is a British-American society established, in the words of American past-president Joseph Choate, to promote good-will, good-fellowship, and everlasting peace between the United States and Great Britain. Over the years it has boasted an elite membership of politicians, diplomats, businessmen... The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an organization whose goal is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in American literature, music, and art. ...

Personal life

Butler married in 1887 and had one daughter from that marriage. His wife died in 1903 and he married again in 1907. In 1940, Butler completed his autobiography with the publication of the second volume of Across the Busy Years. When Butler became almost blind in 1945 at the age of eighty-three, he resigned from the posts he held and died two years later. Butler is buried at Cedar Lawn Cemetery, in Paterson, New Jersey Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklins autobiography. ... Cedar Lawn Cemetery is a cemetery located in Paterson, New Jersey. ... View of Paterson New Jersey 1880. ...

Despite Butler's accomplishments, many people regarded him as arrogant. In 1939, a former student of Butler's, Rolfe Humphries, was asked to contribute a piece for Poetry. He was given the title ("Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion"), and asked to follow a format of blank verse and one classical reference per line. Following these provisos, Humphries penned the infamous acrostic:

Niobe's daughters yearn to the womb again,
Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone;
Chaos in cry, Actaeon's angry pack,
Hounds of Molussus, shaggy wolves driven

Over Ampsanctus' vale and Pentheus' glade,
Laelaps and Ladon, Dromas, Canace,—
As these in fury harry brake and hill
So the great dogs of evil bay the world.

Memory, Mother of Muses, be resigned
Until King Saturn comes to rule again!
Remember now no more the golden day
Remember now no more the fading gold,
Astraea fled, Proserpina in hell;
You searchers of the earth be reconciled!

Because, through all the blight of human woe,
Under Robigo's rust, and Clotho's shears,
The mind of man still keeps its argosies,
Lacedaemonian Helen wakes her tower,

Echo replies, and lamentation loud
Reverberates from Thrace to Delos Isle;
Itylus grieves, for whom the nightingale
Sweetly as ever tunes her Daulian strain.
And over Tenedos the flagship burns.

How shall men loiter when the great moon shines
Opaque upon the sail, and Argive seas
Rear like blue dolphins their cerulean curves?
Samos is fallen, Lesbos streams with fire,
Etna in rage, Canopus cold in hate,
Summon the Orphic bard to stranger dreams.

And so for us who raise Athene's torch.
Sufficient to her message in this hour:
Sons of Columbia, awake, arise!

Upon discovery, an irate Poetry editor ran the following editorial:

"Not being accustomed to hold manuscripts up to the mirror or to test them for cryptograms, the editors recently accepted and printed a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person. This was not called to their attention until several weeks after the issue had been published. The phrase in question is puerile and uninteresting, and would not be referred to except that it is necessary to disclaim editorial responsibility. Apparently it is also necessary to state a principle which one would have thought obvious; namely, that any contributor who allows such matter to be printed without the editors' knowledge is guilty of a serious breach of confidence, and will automatically disbar himself from the magazine."

The ban was lifted in 1941, when three of Humphries' poems were published. Poetry, published in Chicago, Illinois, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. ... Blank verse is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. ... An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichon, from ákros, extreme, and stíchos, verse) is a poem or other writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each verse, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. ...

Butler wrote and spoke voluminously on all manner of subjects ranging from education to world peace. Although marked by erudition and great learning, his work tended toward the portentous and overblown. In The American Mercury, the critic Dorothy Dunbar Bromley referred to Butler's pronouncements as "those interminable miasmas of guff." To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

One notable critic of Butler was Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. While attending Columbia, Ginsberg scrawled the phrases "Butler Has No Balls" and "Fuck The Jews" in the grime on his dirty dorm window in Hartley Hall. (The dorm maid reported the graffiti to College dean Herbert Hawkes, who summoned Ginsberg and told him, "I hope you realize the enormity of what you've done." This incident was among the reasons that Ginsberg was suspended from Columbia.) The term beat generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: This is... Irwin Allen Ginsberg (IPA: ) (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American Beat poet. ... Herbert E. Hawkes was an American mathematician and educator. ...

Butler and Anti-Semitism

Though not a garden-variety anti-Semite, Butler had conflicted and complex feelings about Jews. On the one hand, he had great respect for many Jewish individuals, especially in the upper reaches of the sciences, law, and academia. Thus, it was during his tenure that Lionel Trilling became the first tenured Jew in Columbia's English department. Butler was also repulsed by crude displays of antisemitism. When the University of Heidelberg protested Butler's selection of a Jewish delegate to represent Columbia at Heidelberg's 550th anniversary celebration, Butler indignantly replied that at Columbia, delegates were selected on the basis of merit, not race. (Many students were outraged that Butler had accepted Heidelberg's invitation at all. This resulted in a rally outside Butler's home that started with the protesters chanting "Castigate Butler!" and ending with them shouting "Castrate Butler!") Lionel Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. ...

Anti-Semitism was common in American education during Butler’s day, and it may be argued that his personal dislike of Jews, and discriminatory policies against them, were no worse than average for that time. Nonetheless, Butler often considered Jews as a whole to be aggressive and vulgar.^[1] For many years of his presidency, Columbia had a strict quota limiting the number of Jews who could attend. In 1928, the Board of Trustees authorized the creation of “Seth Low Junior College” in Brooklyn as a way to deal with the number of Jewish (and Italian) applicants. If Columbia College, the university’s prestigious undergraduate school, had already admitted its modest quota of Jews for the year, other Jewish applicants would be shunted to Seth Low. Among Seth Low's alumni were Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach and noted science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who wrote of how he ended up at Seth Low. ^[2] When Seth Low folded in 1938, its remaining students were absorbed into Columbia's undergraduate population as students in the University Extension program (now the School of General Studies); as such, they were only eligible to earn a Bachelor of Science degree rather than a Bachelor of Arts. Asimov graduated in 1939 with a Bachelor of Science. The Boston Celtics are a professional basketball team based in Boston, Massachusetts. ... Arnold Jacob Red Auerbach (September 20, 1917 – October 28, 2006) was both a highly successful head basketball coach and an influential front office executive for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA). ... Isaac Asimov (January 2?, 1920?[1] – April 6, 1992), IPA: , originally Исаак Озимов but now transcribed into Russian as Айзек Азимов) was a Russian-born American Jewish author and professor of biochemistry, a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... A B.A. issused as a certificate Bachelor of Arts (B.A., BA or A.B.), from the Latin Artium Baccalaureus is an undergraduate bachelors degree awarded for either a course or a program in the liberal arts or the sciences, or both. ...

In 1928, the Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals (later U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Benjamin Cardozo (an alumnus of Columbia College and Columbia Law School) was appointed to Columbia’s Board of Trustees, the first Jew to serve on the board in 113 years. But when Cardozo resigned in 1932, Butler and the board prevented the election of Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the “The New York Times,” to the board. Another Jew did not serve on the board until 1944, when Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Columbia College Class of 1913) was elected a Life Trustee.^[3] Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (May 24, 1870–July 9, 1938) was a distinguished American jurist who is remembered not only for his landmark decisions on negligence but also his modesty and philosophy. ... Adolph Simon Ochs (March 12, 1858 - April 8, 1935) was an American Jewish reporter of Bavarian background, who purchased The New York Times in 1896, and rescued it from near oblivion, increasing its readership from 9,000 at the time of his purchase to 780,000 by the 1920s. ... Arthur Hays-Sulzberger (1891 - 1968) was the publisher of the New York Times (1935-61). ...

Butler’s attempts to limit Jewish admissions to Columbia are discussed (among other places) in the book Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler by Columbia English professor Michael Rosenthal.

Quotes Attributed to Butler

"An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less."

"America is the best half-educated country in the world."

"The man who thinks only of himself is not educated. He is not educated, however instructed he may be."

Notes

1. ^ Interview with Professor Michael Rosenthal, reported in “The Guy the Library’s Named After,” Blue and White Blog, entry of March 4, 2006, 11:17 pm, http://www.theblueandwhite.org/index.php?page=post&article_id=584
2. ^ Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green, Doubleday, 1979
3. ^ Robert A. McCaughey, Stand Columbia, Columbia University Press, 2003, Appendix “F”, “Topical Timelines #9,” “Columbia and the ‘Jewish Problem’” http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/stand_columbia/f.html

Works

• Between Two Worlds, 1934

Biography

• Michael Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006, ISBN 0-374-29994-3

See also

• U.S. presidential election, 1912

Presidential electoral votes by state. ...

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Nicholas Murray Butler

• Nobel Prize biography
• Nicholas Murray Butler at the Internet Movie Database