B. H295fii cop. 2 Young Man in a Hurry The story of WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER First president of the University of Chicago By Milton Mayer ILLJMOIS HISTORlCAl SURVEY Young Man in a Hurry WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER Young Man in a Hurry The story of WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER First president of the University of Chicago by Milton Mayer published by the university of Chicago alumni association CHICAGO 37, ILLINOIS Foreivord The Story of Ullliayn Rainey Harper was published originally as a supplement to the university of Chicago MAGAZINE, June, 1941. It commemorated the fiftieth anni- versary of the University of Chicago and was written for the MAGAZINE by Milton Mayer. In the fall of 1956 it was republished to commemorate the centennial of Harper's birth (July 24, 1856) and the quinquagenary of his death (January 10, 1906). It ap- peared in three parts— in the October, November, and December issues of the magazine. So popular was this second publishing that the Alumni Association could not meet all the requests for extra copies. This reprint is published to meet these requests, in a format to keep pace with the young man in a hurry. The University of Chicago Alumni Association June, 1957 Sunday Morning at Vassar The Professor of Hebrew finished his lecture on Amos and wiped his sweating spectacles with a linen handker- chief. The white-waisted maidens closed their notebooks and crowded out of Old Main. It was a sunny Sunday morning in October. It was 1888. It was Poughkeepsie. The professor, still flushed with the enthusiasm that al- ways captured him when he taught the Prophets, was putting his notes away. The richest man in the Western world was standing in the rear of the otherwise empty hall, but the professor didn't notice him. Looking suddenly up, the stocky young Professor of Hebrew, pumpkin-faced and long-haired, found himself face to face with his antithesis, a spare, square-shouldered individual with a distinctly businesslike black mustache and a distinctly businesslike carriage. The rich man held out his hand. "Dr. Harper," he said, "I happened to be up here for the day, and I wanted to talk to you." Dr. Harper smiled his sweet, unworldly smile. Living as he did in the dusty past, absorbed as he was in men and matters that might have been important twenty centuries before, it wasn't likely that he saw the significance of Rockefeller's coming to see him. The President of the Trust, the A4oloch of Monopoly, never happened to be spending the day anywhere. But it wasn't likely that the round-faced Professor of Hebrew would appreciate the fact. Three Men Disguised as One It wasn't likely, but it was so. Dr. Harper took his worldly visitor by the arm. To- gether they walked out of the hall and into the sunlight. Fourteen hours later they separated in New York, having come down from Poughkeepsie together. The professor, still smiling his sweet, unworldly smile, took the midnight train to New Haven. He went to his study to prepare for his crowded classes at Yale. He left his study at dawn, still smiling. The President of Standard Oil went home to his mansion on Fifty-fourth Street. He was almost smiling himself. For the first time in his life, John D. Rockefeller had met a man his own size. And he knew it. He knew all about this earnest young theologian, all about his consum- ing selflessness, his prodigious powers as an educational organizer, his fantastic success at stirring up the country to the study of Hebrew. He had made up his mind that this was the man to spend his money for him. That was why the richest man in the world happened to be spend- ing the day at Vassar. When the young Hebrew professor later left Yale to create some sort of educational institution "in," as the Boston Post put it, "Chicago, of all places," nobody then, least of all the man who agreed to finance it, had any idea what sort of pig-in-a-poke it would be. Nobody, that is, but the man who ^\'as going to create it. And the Univer- sity of Chicago that today is one of the world's great centers of learning is nothing but the lengthened shadow of WilUam Rainey Harper. The man who conceived and created the first great university is one man. The man \\ho got thousands of people to study the deadest of all dead languages is an- other man. The man wiio pried the padlocks off the pockets of John D. Rockefeller is still another man. These three men, effectively disguised as one, Hved to be forty- nine years old, and died leaving the details and the im- mortality to others. This is the story of these three men. This is the story of the professor who met and mastered John D. Rockefeller and brought the higher learning to America. That Sunday morning in 1888 could not have happened before, and no one nowadays seriously believes that any- thing like it will ever happen again. The two men who met that morning symbolized two eras. Matthew Arnold had just died, and the era that achieved the emancipation of man had ended; B. P. Hutchinson had just pushed the price of wheat to two dollars, and the era that achieved the emancipation of nature had begun. Harper, at thirty- two, was the flower of the first era; Rockefeller, at forty- nine, was the seed of the second. They met the moment that the expanded spirit met the expanding machine, and for a few historic years the spirit dwarfed the machine. The paths of the two men had to cross. The thirst for learning cried out from the parched land, and Harper yearned to slake it. The dammed-up gold cried out from the Rockefeller vaults, and its owner yearned to release it. //l^^ .^^^^r^-^^ ^^/^^^^^^ ^. ^^^..^/^^^^^^^^^'^''-^-^ /y^J ...^:^../ j^^^^^ FROM WILLIES FATHERS NOTEBOOK: JULY 24: I ATTENDED STORE AND WE HAD A BABE BORN ABOUT I I/2 o'cLOCK A.M. ELLEN WAS PRETTY BAD FOR A SHORT TIME— BUT ABOUT 3 OR 4 HOURS- SHE WAS NOT SO LONG AS WE EXPECTED." He owned, among other good things, one-fourth of the shares of the Trust, which paid fourteen milhon dollars in dividends in the modest year of 1888. The simple pro- fessor smiled his sweet, unworldly smile that Sunday morning, while Moloch, gorged on his golden diet, talked himself into opening his vaults to education. "I cheat my boys every time I get a chance," "Doc" William Rockefeller once said, "I want to make 'em sharp." Samuel Harper wanted to make his boys sharp, too, but where "Doc" Rockefeller's idea of a sharp boy was one who piled up his account with the banker, Sam- uel Harper's was one who piled up his account with God. Samuel Harper was a typical member of the atypical community of New Concord, Ohio. **We had a babe born' The few hundred Scotch Covenanters who settled New Concord were "peculiar." They hated chiffon and liquor, they loved the Bible, and they were positively fanatical about education. In the 1830's they established Muskingum College and supported it without aid from church or state. They wanted their children to be wise as well as good. Otherwise they were ordinary people, and there wasn't anything in either the Harper or the Rainey ancestry to suggest that something important had hap- pened in the world the day that Samuel Harper wrote in his diary: July 24, 1856—1 attended store and ixe had a babe born about 11 and a half o^clock A.M. The Harper home was a log house about thirty feet square, but it had more than its share of books, more than its share of family worship, and more than its share of music. And the babe's mother and father had more than their share of the sturdy virtues. But the babe had some- thing more still. By the time he was three years old he could read. His "good little book," as he called it, was the New Testa- ment, but his precocious appetite didn't stop there. He read everything he could lay his hands on, and he read with fierce concentration and fixative memory. Fortu- nately, New Concord didn't know enough to pamper a prodigy, and Willie Harper was punished in the New Concord way when liis parents, seeing a lamp burning in the parlor in the middle of the night, found Willie sprawling on his stomach, his elbows propping up his arms, his chin in his hands, and a book on the floor in front of him. He had to be dragged away, because he was deaf when he was reading; the only thing he could hear no matter what he was doing was music. An A.B. at Thirteen There was something strangely guileless about the child, even in guileless New Concord. One summer Sun- day in church, the perspiring preacher poured himself a glass of water. Willie Harper, wearing his white Sunday dress, wriggled down out of his seat and walked up the aisle to the platform and up the steps to the pulpit. With perfect equanimity he stood there in front of the congre- gation until the preacher paused, and then he asked the preacher for a drink. He drank the whole glass, just as unconcernedly as if he were standing at the kitchen sink at home. Then he smacked his lips and thanked the preacher, turned around and walked back to the family pew and climbed up into his seat. The performance took a long time, for three-year-old Willie walked all the way, slowly and sedately. Willie Harper wasn't a sissy, but the delights of boy- hood seemed slow and flavorless, somehow. He wanted to read and learn. He learned faster than any kid New Con- cord had ever seen. He could learn from anybody, and, as they said in New Concord, he could "learn 'em dry." He finished high school before he was ten years old, and there was nothing to do but admit him to Muskingum College. The rest of the freshmen ranged from eighteen to twenty. The College faculty thought they ought to hold him back, for his own good, but stocky little Willie Harper, still in short pants, breezed right through Latin and Greek, Trigonometry, Psychology, and Physiology. Three of his classmates, preparing for the ministry, wanted to study Hebrew, and Willie joined them. He- brew was hard; he liked it. Mornings he walked up the hill to the college building, and evenings he walked down, absorbed in his Hebrew. If he stumbled, he picked him- self up, still studying. Commencement was approaching, and Willie Harper was to deliver the Salutatory in Hebrew. The college faculty met in special session. Could they give a Muskin- gum degree to a boy of thirteen? What would it do to the boy? What would it do to Muskingum's honorable repu- tation? President Paul, a man of great breadth, was the most worried of all. Wiilie Harper was very dear to him, for Willie came over to the Paul house with his books every night and studied while young Ella Paul played the piano by the hour. The boy was normal. His college work was not brilliant and erratic, but consistently good. What could they do? Jime 23, 1810—1 attended store and Commencement. Willie graduated. It ivas a very solerim matter to me. Think of having a son to graduate before he ivas 14 years old. Samuel Harper was a solemn man anyway, and he and President Paul spent several solemn hours together after Commencement. Willie w^anted to go on studying. That meant graduate work away from home. Samuel Harper left the decision to President Paul. President Paul shook his head and said that he was afraid, afraid of having Willie Harper spend two years in graduate work and emerge a Doctor of Philosophy at the age of fifteen. Samuel Harper went home and watched and listened to Willie playing the comet. When the boy finished, his father spoke to him. "Will," said Samuel Harper, "you've got to decide what you want to be." "Be?" said Willie, puzzled. "Yes," said his father, "you've got to decide whether you want to be a band leader or a college profes- sor." The boy, still puzzled, said, "But why can't I be both.^" His father explained that he was too young to be away, that he was needed at the store, and that he could organize a band and study nights. New Concord discovered that Willie Harper had an unsuspected talent: he could sell anybody anything. The boy was a bottomless w^ell of enthusiasm, and whether it was the Bible, the cornet, or a bolt of yard goods that engaged his interest, he put such gusto into it that the Prophets, the composers, and the customers couldn't resist him. Business boomed at Samuel Harper's general store, and New Concord said that Willie Harper would make his mark as a businessman, that New Concord wouldn't hold him, that he'd burn 'em up some place like Zanesville. But clerking interested Willie only while he stood be- hind the counter. What really interested this fourteen- year-old college graduate \\as boyhood. He'd missed it in his hurry. Now he played boyhood games, none of them very well, and indulged in boyhood pranks, none of them very successfully. He smoked a cigar behind the barn and got sick and ate an orange to take the taste out of his mouth and got sicker. He organized and led the New Concord Silver Comet Band, whose members, including its fourteen-year-old leader, all wore derbies pushed back on their heads, and many years afterward people grinned at academic processions and Long Island lawn parties, when they saw the President of the University of Chi- cago with his mortarboard or his stove-pipe tilted back on his head like a derby on a poolroom dude. Willie Harper gave organ lessons, too, and spent his evenings still at Ella Paul's, studying Hebrew while Ella played the piano. A College Teacher at Sixteen Three times a week he rode horseback over to Zanes- ville, to study advanced Hebrew with a teacher there. President Paul decided that it wouldn't enter Willie's head— much less turn it— that being a college teacher at sixteen was extraordinary, and Willie got a job teaching elementary Hebrew at Muskingum. The following year President Paul began bringing catalogues of the European universities over to the Harper home. The Samuel Harpers of New Concord, Ohio, couldn't see themselves sending their Willie to Oxford or Berlin, even if they could have afforded it. There were no universities in HARPER CAME FROM A FAMILY OF MODEST CIRCUMSTANCES. HIS FATHER, SAMUEL, OWNED THIS GENERAL STORE IN NEW CONCORD, OHIO, AT THE TIME OF AVILLIE's BIRTH IN 1856. America, and Yale was the only college in the country with the semblance of non-professional graduate work. So Willie entered the Graduate School at Yale. He was wearing long pants. As soon as he got his Ph.D. he w^as offered the principal- ship of Masonic College at Macon, Tennessee. He married Ella Paul— the fulfillment of a resolution made when he 10 was ten— and she went with him to Macon, a metropolis of two hundred inhabitants. The College, which had about seventy-five pupils, wasn't really a college at all, and the biggest thing Principal Harper succeeded in doing there was organizing the college band, which he con- ducted. He was nineteen now— getting on, he told himself —and he had a lot to learn and a lot to do. When Denison University, a small but already distin- guished college in Granville, Ohio, offered him the job of tutor in its preparatory school, he took it, though it meant a reduction in rank. It wasn't long before President Andrews was hearing the complaints of other instructors that the students were putting everything they had into their work for Harper, letting the rest of their work get done as best it could. Andrews, one of the great educators of his time, at once appointed Harper principal of the preparatory school. He was only twenty, but he had no trouble handling the students. He called himself "Mister" instead of "Doc- tor," and his unaffected love of teaching communicated itself (as it always does) to his charges. He gave them hard work and plenty of it, but he worked harder himself than any of them. His discipline, like everything else about him, was unsophisticated. When he decided that drinking was becoming a campus problem he walked into the local saloon and sat down with the offenders and pre- sented his dilemma to them, concluding, quite simply, with, "I don't know \\hat to do. What would you fel- lows do in viy place?" The man's titanic power for toil amazed his colleagues. He never seemed to sleep, he never seemed to rest. In- stead, he moved easily, unhurriedly, from one task to another. One of his friends, finding Harper buried in 11 work in the middle of the hottest day of the year, asked the perspiring toiler if he Jiever took it easy. Harper looked up and said, with his characteristic innocent ami- ability, "Why, I've got to work— I consider my time worth a dollar an hour." A dollar an hour, in 1877, was several times the salary of any professor. He persuaded the University to let him organize a He- brew class. His regular work was Latin and Greek. The Hebrew class was outside the regular course, and its members, at the beginning, were mostly faculty people, men twice and even three times his age. Within the year, the Denison undergraduates were filling Harper's Hebrew classes. One To Raise the Dead President Andrews realized that he had stumbled upon a man who could raise the dead. The teaching of ancient languages, particularly the Semitic languages, was rapidly becoming extinct in America. The reason was that they were badly taught, and men like Andrews reaUzed it. But educators despaired of finding men who wanted to teach them well, or who could if they wanted to. In Harper, Andrews had stumbled upon the hope of reviving interest in the classic tongues. But neither Andrews nor Harper realized what An- drews had stumbled on until, one night in 1876, the 20- year-old language teacher appeared at a Baptist prayer- meeting in Granville. Most of the faculty, including President Andrews, was there. William Rainey Harper, who was not a church-member though he had been born a Presbyterian, sat in the back row. At the end of the 12 services he stood up, no longer a language teacher to whom the Bible was his "good little book," but a man transported. "I want to be a Christian," said Harper simply and earnestly. "I don't know what it is to be a Christian, but I know I am not a Christian and I want to be one." The Baptist Church received a convert, and the paths of William Rainey Harper and John D. Rockefeller be- gan, unknown to either of them, to converge. About that time President Northrup of the Baptist Union Theological Seminary wrote to President Andrews of Denison, asking if Andrews knew of any such thing as a good Hebrew teacher. Andrews knew of a good one— the best, he thought, in America. But he hated to let him go and he doubted if Northrup could keep him. The "West" appealed to Harper, and the Seminary was lo- cated in the Chicago suburb of Morgan Park. He went. He was tu'enty-two— younger than the men he would teach— and he looked still younger. At the end of his first year he was given the degree of Bachelor of Divinity and promoted from Instructor to Professor. His elementary course was the most popular in the Seminary. It consisted of four hours' study a day for five days a week in a ten weeks' course. The strain of such concentration was gen- erally thought to be impossible for students, but the Examining Committee of Visiting Pastors and Scholars reported, in 1880, that "the students at Morgan Park pur- sue Hebrew as though their immediate settlement in the pastorate and their final success in the ministry depended upon a knowledge of the entire Hebrew Bible. Their interest does not expend itself in the regular courses, but appears in the formation of extra classes for reading more than is prescribed." 13 One night in the spring of 1881, Will Harper came home from his classes, exhausted, but, as always, excited, and Ella Harper served him his supper. It was cove oyster stew, his favorite dish, and he ate too much, as usual. The last mouthful was no sooner down than his head was on his chest and he was asleep in his chair. Ella Harper went to the piano and began playing Mozart, softly. Will Harper could always turn himself on and off like a light; he went to sleep suddenly, slept deeply at once, and awakened suddenly. Ella was still playing Mozart when Will sat up in his chair. An idea had awakened him. Why should the Seminary close in the summer? Why should anything close in the summer? Why waste time on vacations, when there was so much to do and so little time to do it in? The next day he asked President Northrup for the use of the Seminary building for a summer school in Hebrew. It was 1881. By 1883 institutions all over the country were asking him to conduct summer schools for them. In the summer of 1885 he conducted five schools, east, west, north, and south. When preachers and students wrote him that they wanted to attend his summer schools but couldn't afford to, he had another idea. He could teach Hebrew by correspondence, preparing mimeographed lessons, sending them out, and receiving the papers by mail. The idea caught on, and the callous year of 1886 smiled at the spectacle of thousands of people, the country over, studying Hebrew under a man of thirty. The demand for Hebrew textbooks had to be met, and nobody else was able to write them. So Harper wrote them. There ought to be journals, too, one for lay stu- dents and another for scholars, and nobody else was able to start them. So Harper published The Hebrew Student 14 and Hehraica. An organization of the country's Hebrew teachers was needed, now, so Harper founded the Amer- ican Institute of Hebrew, ultimately to be one of the great learned societies. There had to be bookkeeping, endless bookkeeping, but that was where Harper drew the line. His younger brothers, who were living with him and studying at the Seminary, took the job. He Could Sell Anything He insisted only on keeping the tuition fees, the sub- scriptions, and the memberships so low that the poorest teacher or parson could take advantage of them, and the bookkeeping showed a deficit. So there had to be money raised, and Harper organized a joint stock company em- bracing all his ventures and sold the shares at $100 apiece to his friends. The whole thing grew and grew until it looked like, well, the Standard Oil Company, with holding companies, subsidiaries, interlocking directorates and stock issues. There were some differences, of course, in the two insti- tutions, not the least of which was the fact that the earn- ings of the Hebrew King were somewhat smaller than those of the Oil King. The earnings of the Hebrew King came to almost two thousand dollars a year. But a Morgan Park realtor prospered when he rented Harper a building for his offices and press. And the Morgan Park postmaster got a salary raise on the show that he was handling several hundred pieces of mail every day for a man named Harper. The people of New Concord had discovered, many years before, when thev went to Samuel Harper's store, 15 that Willie Harper could sell anybody anything. Now he was doing it. He was selling the country Hebrew lessons and Bible studies. And it wasn't the "Bible belt" he was selling them to, for William Rainey Harper was a modernist, a lover of the Jew's Old Testament and a scientific student of the New. "For several years," he said later in his life, "I studied the Bible for the purpose of discovering that M'hich would enable me to convince others that it \vas only an ordinary book, and very ordi- nary at that." But now the skeptic was retreating rapidly before the assault of faith. The "good little book" had be- come The Book, and the mission to teach was a Christian mission. The Baptist Menace Melts Will Harper had always said what he meant and acted as he felt. His Christianity embraced all men, whether or not they called themselves Christians, and all truth, whether or not it happened to be denominational. Harper was a scholar and a Christian, and if scholarship and Christianity appeared to be in conflict, the conflict had to be resolved; it could not be disposed of by dogma on the one hand or apostasy on the other. The inner life of a Christian scholar is hard. It was at Morgan Park that the servant of truth and the lover of Scripture faced his first great conflict. Discovering that his critical conclusions on a certain problem involved the denial of the Davidic au- thorship of one of the psalms quoted by Jesus, he strug- gled with himself for days. At the time he spoke to no one of his problem. In the end, the haggard truth-seeker emerged resolute and calm, ready for the storm his deci- 16 sion would bring down upon him. He had decided to follow his scholarly findings. Without the support— with, indeed, the enmity— of tra- ditionalists and sectarians— he plunged heedlessly ahead with his work, teaching, studying, organizing, administer- ing. A vacation was a change of work; work itself never stopped. In 1882 he conducted one of his summer schools at the Baptist assembly across the lake from Chautauqua, the great Methodist summer conference organized by Bishop Vincent in the '70's. The Baptist assembly had never amounted to much, but there lurked in Bishop Vincent's mind the possibility that the Baptists might some day find the right man and establish a rival Chau- tauqua. The first time Vincent heard Harper lecture, he knew that Harper was that man. Like the early petroleum operators who took one look at Rockefeller and realized he would put them out of business unless they made a deal with him, Vincent decided he had to hire that man to save Chautauqua from the Baptists. Harper accepted the principalship. Chautauqua bloomed under the touch of its new direc- tor. The fifteen summers he spent there saw the annual enrollment rise to two thousand and the staflF to more than a hundred. The Baptist Menace across the lake simply melted away. His classes at Chautauqua, each numbering hundreds of pupils, compelled him to develop the art of public speak- ing. He had always refused to go into lecturing— then, as now, a source of steady income for ragged professors— because he thought he lacked the address that the lecture platform demanded. But Chautauqua made him try. He overcame his inhibitions and lectured. He lectured, as he wrote, in a lucid style devoid of rhetoric, eloquence, and 17 humor. But his earnestness somehow made him a magnetic speaker. He could read a railroad timetable and convey the impression that this was an important document pro- foundly considered by a powerful man. Given a great crowd of people interested in his subject, Harper could hold them intent for hours. A Rickety Little Baptist College Affiliated with the Morgan Park Seminary was a rick- ety little Baptist college, in Chicago, established in 1859 by Stephen A. Douglas. It bore an imposing name, The University of Chicago, but it was neither a university nor of Chicago. It had never been more than two or three Steps ahead of the sheriff, and in the early '80's it was only one. The value of its first public subscription had been wiped out by the panic of 1857, fund-raising was made impossible by the Civil War, and such resources as it had left were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871, the panic of 1873, and the second big fire in 1874. Northrup and the Seminary's financial secretary, Thomas W. Good- speed, Mere trying to save this Christian outpost of higher education. Its collapse would not affect the Seminary, but it would weaken Baptist education in the West and strip the city of Chicago of its figleaf of culture. The sheriff caught up with it at last in the spring of 1886, when an insurance company foreclosed its mortgage on the property. Good- speed and Northrup were begging Rockefeller, a trustee and supporter of the Seminary, to save the dying college. Goodspeed thought $100,000 would revive it. But Rocke- 18 3-IS-92-I5M. 21070. standard Oil Company's PRIVATE TELEGRAPH LINE DBted... _2::^^iK^2JE0rP_ 11 189^ Received at,,er\. _ y^ f 1 J ... 4- lib jTV 4«.i « ^ 0« rN / To \) ^WXjo-^ n/VA>>-^M^ JWlj-o-o-j^-'T^ *--^ ^^^^^^^-^--^^ O^^CU Qj!^:o^ h^AMJ^o^ MR. ROCKEFELLER SENDS HIS REGRETS. THE ABOVE IS A REPRODUC- TION FROM THE FILES OF A CONSCIENTIOUS TELEGRAPH CLERK. 19 feller was apathetic; Northrup and Goodspeed were noble spirits but impractical, and Rockefeller, whatever his spirit, was notoriously practical. Though Goodspeed insisted that "there is profound interest felt by many Western men in the re-establishment of the University," Rockefeller knew better. The people of Chicago had other things to do with their money. Meanwhile Dr. Augustus H. Strong was pressing the Oil King to found a twenty-million-dollar institution in New York City. Strong was President of the Rochester Theological Seminary and a lifelong friend of Rocke- feller. He wanted to "take possession of New York for the Baptists," who, he complained, had always made the mistake of building their churches on back streets and their colleges in country towns. "We have already enough one-horse colleges to stock the world." Good- speed's hundred-thousand dollar college in Chicago would be "nothing but a great high school." The twenty-million- dollar "university" which he wanted Rockefeller to estab- lish on Morningside Heights— where Columbia now stands —was to be militantly Christian, closed to "infidel" teach- ers, and strictly controlled by the church. Rockefeller was, like Strong, a fundamentalist, but the latter's pas- sionate illiberality disturbed the capitalist who, as a young clerk in Cleveland, had contributed not only to the church but to Catholic, Negro, and Jewish causes as well. Early in 1886, John D. Rockefeller heard a rumor. It was not a rumor about federal indictments or antimonop- oly legislation, though there were plenty of such rumors about. It was a rumor that President Dwight of Yale was trying to get young Harper from Morgan Park. Rocke- feller sat down and wrote Goodspeed, saying that he sup- posed Morgan Park would be reluctant to let the young 20 fellow go. Goodspeed, who wasn't quite as impractical as Rockefeller thought he was, went to the trustees of the expiring college and proposed that they elect Harper president, which they immediately did. Then he answered Rockefeller's letter, saying that Morgan Park saw no way of holding Harper unless he could be induced to accept the presidency of the college, which, in turn, would have to be put on its feet: "Our seminary can no more hold him long within its limits than your first refinery could hold you. We have not so many men of eminent abilities that we can spare such a man to Yale and the Congrega- tionalists." The two-way trap was set, but neither of the victims chose to walk into it. Rockefeller replied that he "didn't know what to say" about the college, but he most em- phatically felt that the Seminary should make every effort to keep young Harper, and he was ready to make a special grant for the purpose. The other victim declined the presidency of the tottering University of Chicago, which promptly summoned enough strength to shut its doors. Harper couldn't be interested in a good college, much less a bad one. Only a Great University He was interested in something else. He was interested in something no one had thought of before, something that made twenty million dollars look like a down pay- ment. What Harper was interested in was a great uni- versity. American education had been spreading since the Civil War, but it had not been improving. There were excep- 21 tions— Harvard under Eliot, for instance— but they did not impress the country. As for graduate research, it was almost non-existent. Harper's far-flung contacts, at Chau- tauqua, at his summer schools, had shown him the picture. His insight had shown him the need. A Passion of Originality What American education needed was an institution new enough to pioneer and strong enough to set the pace that the rest would follow. The task of such an institution would not be to teach but to learn. It would take as its province not the daylight of human understanding but the darkness, hacking away at the night of the unknown until at last it had hacked a hole big enough for mankind to pass through into a better society. Civilization might spread with the spread of old truths, but it could advance only with the discovery of new. The business of this university, then, would be discov- ery and the training of discoverers. Every instructor would be an investigator, for, said Harper, "it is only the man who has made investigations who may teach others to investigate." The men to be called to the faculty of such an institution would have to be original minds, and, like all men consumed by the peculiar passion of original- ity, they would have to have a world of their own to live in, a world whose limits would be the farthest reaches of man's inquiry. The students of the university would not be boys and girls but mature men and women, candidates for the world of scholarship. Henry Philip Tappan had had the 22 same idea when he became the first President of the Uni- versity of Michigan in 1852 and announced that Michi- gan \\'as not to be "a preparatory school for boys." But Tappan, denounced for trying to "Prussianize" the state of Michigan through its University, had to abandon his dream, and Ann Arbor, after he left, had become another great college. It could not be done, apparently, in a state university, which had to give the taxpayers what they wanted when they wanted it. An endowed university was the only hope. This university of Harper's would contain a college, and even a secondary and elementary school. But they would exist for the sake of the university, not the univer- sity for the sake of them. They would be laboratories, nothing more, for experimentation in education. So, too, with professional schools. Divinity, Law, and Medicine. They would not exist primarily for the preparation of lawyers, doctors, and preachers, but for the purpose of discovery and the training of discoverers in each field. College life, meaning fraternities, football, and fun, would be permitted to exist only insofar as it did not interfere with the purposes of the university. Harper knew from grueling personal experience how nearly im- possible it was for a man to be at once a scholar and a teacher, to give himself up to research and at the same time civilize the adolescent homo sapiens ferns. He knew, too, how nearly impossible it was for an institution to pursue the truth fearlessly and at the same time to tack and shape its policy to increase enrollment and compete with other institutions. The work of Harper's university would be primarily theoretical, not practical. In Science, it would lay the groundwork for discoveries of general use. In Education, 23 it would give the country new methods and produce a steady stream of teachers to introduce those methods into the schools and colleges in M'hich they would teach. In the professions, his university would find out how to produce better practitioners so that the professional schools could produce them. Harper's university would water the tree of knowledge at the roots. His Vision "Was Audacious William Rainev Harper didn't sit around having Visions with a capital V. A conversation, a lecture, or the reading of a book would produce a segment of the uni- versity to be, and the segment would lodge itself, un- ordered, in the things-to-be-done compartment of his mind. As the segments piled up, over the years, in the things-to-be-done compartment, they began to crowd the things-being-done compartment. Then the university had to be created, to make room for them. Harper did not create the university idea. In 1886 the University of Berlin had five thousand students, all of them post-graduate in the American college sense. Oxford and Cambridge had twenty-five hundred to three thou- sand students each. But America was busy with more urgent matters than new truth. It was satisfied with Har- vard, a college only, a few of whose faculty and students were engaged in real university work. In 1876 Johns Hopkins was established with Daniel Coit Gilman as President. Hopkins was devoted to research, but it was a small institution. In 1888 G, Stanley Hall left Hopkins to be the first President of Clark University. Hall, too, tried to create an institution for advanced work, but the 24 %,3^ *!"r^ THE PRESIDENT S HOUSE, DESIGNED BY HENRY IVES COBB, WAS BUILT IN 1895. REMODELED, IT IS CURRENTLY OCCUPIED BY CHAN- CELLOR AND MRS. LAWRENCE KIMPTON. founder of Clark wanted a college, and the founder final- ly had his way. While Harper was still at Morgan Park, Seth Low was trying to persuade Columbia College to transform itself into a university, and Timothy Dwight was doing the same thing at Yale. Harper's slowly shaping vision wasn't so much original as it was audacious. To have the university he wanted he would have to find, not a millionaire but a multi-million- aire, and not an ordinary multi-millionaire either, but one who could be sold an idea completely remote from American thinking on education and philanthropy. As to who would do the selling, once this Heaven-sent iMidas was found, there was never any doubt in Harper's mind. Willie Harper could sell anybody anything. Nor was 25 there any doubt that Heaven would send the A4idas, for Harper's faith, hke his vision, was audacious. God would provide, but He could not be hurried. Harper was being deluged by letters from friends at Yale, begging him to take the professorship of Semitic lan- guages there. His future, they told him, lay not in a small seminary in Chicago but in a great college in the cultural center of the country. Harper thought that his future lay in a great university in Chicago. President Dwight was sending him telegrams now and railroad tickets to New Haven. Harper thought it over and decided, finally, that the shortest way from Morgan Park to Chicago was via New Haven. He accepted the post at Yale. He was twenty-nine years old. A Caravan to Yale It wasn't a man but a caravan that moved across the country from Morgan Park the summer of 1886. The headquarters of the correspondence school, of the summer schools of Hebrew, of Chautauqua, of the American Institute of Hebrew, and of two learned journals all had to be carried away, together with all the assistants and equipment involved. It was certainly the first time that any American railroad had ever shipped a complete com- posing room of Hebrew type. Moving Harper to Yale required the whole summer, and housing him, when he got there, required a three-story building in downtown New Haven. What had happened at Denison and at Morgan Park happened all over again, only on a larger scale. The whole Divinity School at Yale, traditionally hardened 26 against Hebrew, caught his enthusiasm. Students dis- covered that after a year in Hebrew with Harper, they knew the language better than thev knew any other lan- guage after six years with any other teacher. He was asked to give seminars in Assyrian, Arabic, Aramaic, Chaldee, Sanskrit, and Syriac, and the divinity students, who scarcely needed the command of these exotic tongues for success in the ministry, piled into his classes. They wanted all the Harper thev could get. But the linguist's major interest now was in teaching the "good little book" of his childhood. He offered courses in the English Bible to undergraduates, and before long the entire undergraduate body was absorbed in the historical study of the Prophets, an approach that would have been decidedly unorthodox in any Baptist institu- tion. In the hands of this warm and simple man, the Bible came to life. In his second year at Yale, the ad- ministration had to turn over the largest assembly hall in the University for his undergraduate lectures. He gave a series of Bible lectures in downtown New Haven, and twelve hundred townspeople attended them. He was called to New York, to Philadelphia, and to Bos- ton to repeat them. Every other Sunday he lectured be- fore the entire student body of Vassar, and special lectures took him to colleges everywhere. The man was hungr)% and his hunger fed on the feeding of others. He was probably one of the busiest men in America. His daily mail was larger than Yale University's. He couldn't carry the burden, but he wouldn't lay it down. There was only one alternative. Carefully picking men like Frank Knight Sanders, who was later Dean of the Yale Divinity School, he established a managing assistant for each of his enterprises. Once he had chosen a man, 27 the man was given complete responsibility for details. "If you get into trouble," said Harper to Sanders, "let me know." That was the way John D. Rockefeller was oper- ating, in a somewhat different line of business. But there was one thing he could not delegate to others, and that was the fire he infused into everything he touched. He neither could, nor would. Except for routine details in each of his ventures, he did everything himself. His schedule took him to his first class at 7:30 in the morning. He taught until 1 1 : 00, and went to his office to work on his mail, discuss perhaps a dozen matters with each of his five assistants, and drink a quart of eggnog at his desk. Catching the 1 : 00 o'clock train to New York or Boston, he would deliver a lecture in the afternoon and another in the evening. The midnight train took him back to New Haven and his study. Professor T. D. Seymour, the father of a future president of Yale, invariably awak- ened at four in the morning and went to his study, just as invariably encountering Harper leavmg his. He Listened and Slept He seldom slept when other men did. But when other men were awake and discussing matters of routine that didn't interest him, he would say something to indicate that he was attentive, go to sleep the next instant, and awaken five minutes later and resume the discussion. He could anticipate a profitless period of a conference and put himself to sleep for its duration. It was hard to take off"ense when he did it, because he never lost the thread of the conversation. "He could listen and sleep," said one of his Yale associates, "at the same time." 28 The midnight hours were all he had for study, for writing, for reading, and for friends. A student or young instructor, unable to solve some personal or scholarly problem, would get up in the middle of the night and walk over to the darkened campus. One light would be shining, from the corner study of North College. Irre- sistibly the single beam of light drew the troubled spirit down its path to Harper's study. And no matter how deeply engrossed in his work the professor might have been a moment before, he seemed to have nothing what- ever to do but listen to his visitor and consider his prob- lem. Harper couldn't bring himself to refuse those inter- views. But they had to be paid for, and sleep had to pay for them. No matter how near the dawn it was or how weary the man, classes had to be prepared. The student might be forgiven for coming to class unprepared, the teacher never. Scholarship, too, had to be crowded into the night. During his two years at Yale he wrote a textbook on He- brew and another on Greek, he edited a series of volumes on the inductive method of teaching Latin and Greek, he wrote articles for learned journals and regular reports on his various enterprises, and he carried on a running disputation in Hebraica on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, taking the liberal position against the tradi- tional position of his eminent opponent, Dr. W. Henry Green of Princeton. Sleep had to pay for it all, but Harper had ultimately to settle his account with sleep. He was a heavy, muscular man, but nobody could withstand indefinitely the abuse of driving work, erratic hours, and a diet of hurried mouthfuls broken occasionally by an oyster feast. His 29 THE GRADUATE SCHOO^ J/cM-c.^^ . MESIOENT THC UfJlVEF^SIT-r Of CrllC/\GO F .wnrtid hT JOHN D R0CKE="ELL£R WILLIAM R. H4HPFR. President Chicago March 5, 1894. In sending communicat icns of one kind and another to persons connected with the University, stenographers ■ and clerks are using envelopes. This is an expensive luxury; ', there is no reason, why the message should not be written on ! ■ a slip of paper and mailed in the Faculty Exchange without 1 an envelope. The number of envelopes used in the various i ( offices is something startling. Will you give orders in your office that except in rare cases the use of envelopes be here- after discontinued? Yours very truly. ^-^y^l/£..^,A-We.../& / PINCHING PENNIES, HARPER WROTE THIS LETTER TO DR. ERI B. HULBERT, FIRST DEAN OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL, WHO REPLIED: "for a long time ENVELOPES HAVE NOT BEEN USED FROM THIS OFFICE EXCEPT WHEN MATTERS Wh[iCh] OUGHT NOT TO COME UNDER THE PUBLIC EYE, AS IN THE MONCRIEF- JOHNSON CASE, HAVE BEEN ENCLOSED." 30 dark round face had no ruddiness in it. As a boy of fifteen he had what was known in New Concord as a "bad spell," so bad, indeed, that Samuel Harper wrote in his diary one day: / fear Willie will not be long with us. There was something wrong with what New Concord called his stomach. ^Villie Takes a "Vacation' The summer of 1889 was the hardest-worked of his Hfe. "We have had a most glorious season at Chautauqua," he wrote his friend Goodspeed. "The increase in every department is over forty per cent. We do not know what we are to do with the people who are to come in this week and next." His pallor was darker, his steps were slower, his weariness never lifted, but the summer was "glorious." Then he broke down. Ella Harper was wor- ried, but her husband told her he was just tired. He de- cided to go to Europe for a month of "perfect rest," but when he went, he found himself, accidentally of course, in Stockholm where the International Congress of Ori- entalists was meeting. There was one project that wasn't pressing. That was the university. Goodspeed and Strong had weakened themselves, he thought, by adding their names to the long, long list of petitioners who came to John D. Rocke- feller wanting something. They didn't want anything for themselves, it was true, but they wanted something from Rockefeller. They harassed him. The Oil King wanted to be let alone; perhaps he even wanted somebody he could go to, somebody who wanted to listen instead of talk. 31 William Rainey Harper was an impatient man, impa- tient to spread education everywhere, impatient to dis- cover and to see discovery done. But he was not impul- sive. He could wait, as long as he knew that success was inevitable. And though he had never exchanged a word with Rockefeller, he knew that success was inevitable. He knew, too, that he wanted his university in Chicago, in the roaring capital of the great uncultivated middle empire of America. An idea that defied tradition belonged in a place that defied tradition. He predicted, in 1887, that a university in Chicago "would in ten years have more students, if rightly conducted, than Yale or Har- vard has today." The prediction seemed fantastic. And so it proved. It was fantastically modest. Rockefeller spent the summer of 1887 in Europe with Dr. Strong and when they returned it appeared that Strong was on the very verge of victory. But the theo- logian made a fatal mistake. Rockefeller had talked a great deal about Harper that summer in Europe, and as soon as they got back Strong visited Harper and wrote to Rockefeller: "My dear Mr. Rockefeller, if we let that man get out of our hands, it will be the greatest loss our denomination has sustained during this century." Rockefeller had heard about that luaii long enough. He wanted to see him. He wrote him at New Haven, asking him to spend the day with him in New York. The friend- less Oil King and the friendly little professor had lunch together. Rockefeller talked. Rockefeller suggested they spend the afternoon riding in the park. Harper's time was, by his own estimate, worth a dollar an hour; Rockefeller was getting rich. Rockefeller suggested, at the end of the afternoon, that Harper come to the house for the evening. Rockefeller talked. He talked and talked. He talked as if 32 he had never had a chance to talk before, and perhaps he hadn't. Harper listened and smiled and answered questions. The Disinterested Expert Rockefeller wanted to know all about him, about his life, his work, and his family. As the evening wore on, the lonely capitalist, drawn on by his attentive companion, found himself talking about Strong's plan for New York. Harper smiled and nodded. Rockefeller described the project in intimate detail and said he was thinking of put- ting eight or ten million dollars into it. Harper smiled and nodded. Then he said he wanted Harper to be its presi- dent. Harper smiled. It was very flattering. Harper said. It would be a great opportunity. But he didn't nod. He changed the subject, absent-mindedly, and talked about Goodspeed and Northrup and the Seminary in Morgan Park. Then he went back to New Haven. A year passed, and Rockefeller, watching everything he touched turn to gold, resisted the petitioners, East and West. William Rainey Harper went on about his work in New Haven, saying nothing. His apparent indifference may have irritated Rockefeller; it certainly must have fascinated him. Early in October of 1888 the capitalist appeared at Vassar after Harper's Sunday morning lec- ture, and the fourteen-hour interview ensued. Rockefeller talked. Harper listened. Aiuch of what he heard, he'd heard before. But as they took the train to New York together that night. Rockefeller began to talk about Chi- cago. "He talked for hours in reference to the scheme for establishing the great university of Chicago instead of 33 New York," Harper \\rote Goodspeed the following dav. "The long and short of it is I feel confident that his mind has turned. He stands ready after the holidays to do some- thing for Chicago. It will have to be managed, however, very carefully." It was already being^ manaijed very carefully. Sensing that the strategic moment had come at last. Harper, his enthusiasm at flood stage, opened the dam. He didn't however, make Strong or Goodspeed's mistake of trying to sweep the man off his feet. He let Rockefeller advance the arguments for Chicago, he himself merely testifying to their validity. His role was that of the disinterested expert. Rockefeller turned up again at Vassar and spent the day with Harper. "He is practically committed to the thing," Harper w rote Goodspeed. A week later Rocke- feller went to Cornell to ask the advice of educators there and found himself listening to Prof. E. Benjamin An- drews, the same E. Benjamin Andrews who, as President of Denison University several years before, had decided that Will Harper was the most promising young man he had ever seen. The following week the capitalist appeared in New Haven, inquiring the way to Professor Harper's study. "It is absolutely certain that the thing is to be done," Harper wrote Goodspeed. "It is now only a question as to what scale. I have every time claimed that nothing less than four millions would be satisfactory to begin with, and have expressed my desire for five. Just what he wants to do and what his definite ideas are I cannot yet tell. . ." Rockefeller did not pretend to be an educator or to know what the needs of education were. Harper had the ideas. The industrialist wanted to hear the objections to 34 Harper's ideas. But there were no objections. President Taylor of Vassar was for it. Professor Andrews was for it. Professor Robinson of Cornell was for it. Rockefeller asked them if it wouldn't be better to place the institution in Washington, if it wouldn't be better to assist existing colleges, if it wouldn't be better to build a Seminary. They thought it would be better to build the University of Chicago, and to build it around Harper. A Mongrel Institution Onlv" Dr. Strono- dissented and his dissent w^as violent. He wrote Harper that "the chance is open to us to take possession of New York, and to lead the march of edu- cation on this continent." Harper's idea of "a mongrel institution in Chicago, which is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, neither University, College, nor Academy, but all three combined," would not create "a ripple on the sur- face of our educational ocean." But Strong was not nearly so horrified at the location or organization of the proposed institution as he was at its fundamental character. It was to be non-sectarian. Profoundly religious men like President White of Cor- nell had long maintained that the sectarian spirit was the \\orst enemy of higher education. Denominational intol- erance went all the way back to the ousting of the learned Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College. Har- per had no stomach for witch-burning. He had advised Rockefeller to separate Theology from the other depart- ments of the new university and to follow the liberal tradition of indifference to the orthodoxy of the teachers. 35 78 o^&^ • // ^% dt^t^^^/fC-rr^fZuyr s. ^h^^^^'^^u^ \ A PAGE FROM HARPEr's "rED BOOKS." HIS VIGOROUS APPROACH TO THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE UNIVERSITY AND HIS OWN SCHOLAR- SHIP CAN BEST BE SEEN IN THESE VOLUMES. THEY WERE A COMBI- NATION APPOINTMENT, NOTE, AND "iDEa" BOOK. THIS TYPICAL day's ENTRY LISTS "IMPORTANT MATTERS." Rockefeller had no choice but to accept this advice if he wanted Harper. What was more, Rockefeller could not see what difference it made. But to Strong it made a difference little short of heresy. Seeing his dream sHpping hopelessly away, the fervid theologian played his last card, in what must have been the hope of discrediting Chicago by discrediting Harper. Strong's daughter, a student at Vassar, was attending Harper's lectures there and taking notes. Strong, a trustee of the school, studied the girl's notes and decided that Harper was in fact a heretic. He wrote Harper that he was unwilling, as a parent and a trustee of Vassar, "to have the unsuspecting child under the influence of this teaching." He wrote Rockefeller, who was also a trustee of Vassar, that Harper had "departed from the sound faith" and was plainly a dangerous man. Harper a Heretic Though Harper refused to answer the attack, it dis- couraged him completely. He was, he said, "ready to pull out of the whole concern." He had his moods, less fre- quently, perhaps, than most men, but more possessive. He could be stiff-necked. He would not defend his in- tegrity. He certainly would not oppose Strong, a fanatic, with Rockefeller, a layman, as judge between them. Presi- dent Taylor, who had heard all the Vassar lectures, de- fended Harper to Rockefeller. President Northrup of Morgan Park wrote the capitalist that Haper was "the most remarkable young man in the religious history of our county in this century." Rockefeller had never really 37 believed Strong's charges. He had believed, however, that the affair might bring about an open and ruinous schism in the Baptist Church. Now he was satisfied that the denomination was behind Harper, Enter Gates, the Amazing A few weeks later, Strong surrendered at last, retracted his charges. Then Rockefeller sought an intervie\\' with Harper and discussed Chicago, this time in definite detail. Harper reported, as usual to Goodspeed. "He is certainly planningr to do something for Chicago. . . . He will decide soon. . . . He is more tired than ever of Strong, and the New York plan is N. G." While Strong's unhappy efforts \\ ere delaving Rocke- feller's decision, a new and powerful figure was press- ing it. The Rev. Frederick T. Gates had been appointed Executive Secretary of the American Baptist Education Societv, \\ hich was organized in 1888 to canvass the edu- cational needs of the denomination. Gates is one of those amazing individuals who sometimes slip through the his- torians' fingers. He was not a preacher at all, but a go- getter, sidetracked, temporarily, in a pulpit in Minne- apolis. He was a businessman's businessman, superlatively sharp and cynical. He had been watching Harper for a long time, and he was convinced that Chicago was the place for Rockefeller's great contribution to Baptist edu- cation. At a ministers' conference in October, 1888, Gates read a paper entitled, A New University in Chicago, A De- noniinational Necessity, as Illustrated by a Study of West- ern Baptist Collegiate Education. "The brethren were 38 'all torn up' over it," the realistic Dr. Gates wrote in describing the reception of his paper. "They were as- tonished, astounded, confounded, amazed, bewildered, over-whelmed." And they were, in Chicago, in Wash- ington, in Boston. And one of the brethren, the brother who was the hardest of all to astonish and astound, found a copy of it on his desk at 26 Broadway, New York. He read it and sent for Gates. It was one of those occasional May mornings in New York that lighten men's hearts and hearten their hopes. Gates and Rockefeller paced up and down in front of the narrow brownstone house at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street, just off the Avenue. The Baptist Education Society was to hold its annual meeting in Boston a few days later. Passers-by on Fifty-fourth that morning might have caught a word or two of the conversation between the two thin men who seemed to be, and were, so much alike. The phrases "four hundred thousand" and "six hundred thousand" were mentioned several times. It was Rocke- feller who was saying "four" and Gates who was saying "six." Suddenly Rockefeller stopped and faced Gates, and smiled the smile of a man who seldom smiles. "I have seen him give $10,000,000, $30,000,000, $1,000,000,000," Gates wrote many years afterward, "but no gift of his has ever thrilled me as did the first great gift of $600,000, on that May morning after those months of anxious suspense." In New Haven the Professor of Hebrew smiled the smile of a man who often smiles. The richest man in the world had agreed to give $600,000 for an educational insti- tution in Chicago provided the people of Chicago raised another $400,000 within a year. If anyone had told Rocke- 39 feller that day that the $600,000 pledge was going to cost him and his foundations a modest $80,000,000, he wouldn't have believed it. Gates ^\•ouldn't have believed it. Good- speed wouldn't have believed it. Only the Professor of Hebre\\' would have believed it. It was his idea. In his conversations with Rockefeller Harper had al- ways talked as if neither of them \\"as thinking of any- thing but a university. In his letters to Goodspeed he wrote always of "the great university" and "a university to begin with," and Mhen Goodspeed suggested that it mifrht be a college to beoin \\ith, he wrote, "it is not a college, but a university that is wanted, a university of the highest order, having also a college." And to Good- speed's reply that a college was bound to grow anyway: "Unless we hold a stiff upper lip and come out boldly and confidently for ^^ hat we want, viz., a university of the highest character, we shall lose ground and make a mistake." A few months before making his $600,000 pledge. Rockefeller had written Harper, "Of late I have rather come to feel that if Chicaoo could ^et a collecre and leave C? C C the question of a university until a later date, this would be more likely to be accomplished." When the pledge was announced "for a college," Harper decided that the time had come to turn the screw. He wrote Rockefeller: "This idea of a college now, perhaps a university later, is, it strikes me, most excellent. . . . Perhaps Dr. Goodspeed has written you that I have refused absolutely to con- sider the question of going to Chicago," Now the idea of a college certainly did not strike him as excellent, and while it w as true that he would not consider going to Chicago to establish a college, there was something un- characteristic about the casual finality with which he ap- 40 peared to be closing his long negotiations with Rocke- feller. The Trustees of the new Colleg-e asked him, as the man they wanted to head the institution, to draw up a plan for adoption at the September, 1890, meeting of the Board. He said he would, but the months \\ ent bv and he did nothing. For the first time in his life he appeared to be barren of ideas. He could not plan a college. If Rocke- feller, Gates and Goodspeed thought he had yielded, thev were wrong. If he appeared to have yielded, it was because he wanted to stay in the game until the last hand was played. He was not going to quit until he had lost. And if he played his last card cannily, if he held it until the bids were in on the last hand, he might win. His last card was William Rainey Harper, Time To Turn the Screw He had let himself be drawn into a game with a man whose fortune was crreat enough to give America world leadership in education and research. Unless Harper could persuade him differently, Rockefeller's colossal fortune might go the way of so many others, scattered amonfj hundreds of causes which, worthy as they were, would never solve the problems of mankind. Truth alone, truth discovered and taught, would do away with the ills the charity poulticed. For such a stake as this, guileless Willie Harper of New Concord was willing to play a sophisticated game. For such a stake as this he had per- sisted in misunderstanding the Oil Kingr's intention to establish a modest college. Rockefeller had once con- 41 sidered a twentv-million-dollar institution; he would have to be "managed" into considering it again. But apart from the strategy of maneuvering Rocke- feller, Harper wasn't sure himself that he wanted to go to Chicago. He wanted, on the one hand, to teach and to learn, "to go on growing," he said. On the other hand, he wanted to create a university. It was not a question of personal ambition. He had already turned down the presi- dencies of Bro\\n, Rochester, and South Dakota, and would some day, if he wanted it, get the presidency of Yale. President Dwight of Yale, upon hearing of the Chi- cago offer, sent for Harper and offered him the Yale School of Languages, for which a two-million-dollar en- dowment was being raised. Having raised the money, Dwight wrote Harper, in the summer of 1889: "And now all intending and approaching Baptists who from time to time are disposed to assail the tabernacles of the blessed saints, and run off with their professors, may have leave to withdraw." Wanted: A Blank Check The only thing that would resolve his doubts would be a free hand— holdinfj a blank check with the signature of John D. Rockefeller on it— to go to Chicago and create the university he wanted. He had spurned a college, and he would not, he wrote one of his friends, consider a university like those already in existence. "It is the op- portunity to do something new and different that appeals to me," The opportunity was Rockefeller's to make or deny, and John D. Rockefeller never in his life felt the impulse to sign blank checks. But he wanted Harper, and 42 PRESIDENT HARPER IS GOING ABROAD lY W?" ' MTCS ]^' §iii§^©r Touch TO ir.CTtRF.T THE CHICAGO PAPERS LOVED TO POKE FUN AT THE PRESIDENT OF THE NEW UNIVERSITY. 43 each passing month made him want him more. A group of Baptist leaders informed the industrialist that "the managers of Yale University have recently made Profes- sor Harper a series of propositions designed to bind him permanently to that institution." This, they told Rocke- feller, would be "scarcely less than a denominational dis- aster." Rockefeller kept writing Harper— "You are the man for President," "I regard you as the father of the institution"— in the hope of wheedling him into taking something less than a university. Rockefeller Capitulates But Harper held on to his last card. He was not the man to be wheedled. Nor was he the man to be bullied. When President Dwight heard that Harper was con- sidering the Chicago offer, he told him he could not honorably leave Yale. Harper would not be talked to that way, and Dwight's remark almost drove him to Chi- cago. Rockefeller did not know that, however. He knew only that he had to have Harper, and that Harper, though he had taken a place on the Board of the new institution, refused to head it. Attending the first meeting of the Board in July of 1890, Harper was told he was expected to take the presi- dency. He said nothing, and he produced no plan. A few days later he wrote Goodspeed that "there must in some way be an assurance of an additional million. How this is to be obtained, or where, is the question. If Mr. R. is in dead earnest, possibly the case will not be difficult as we may think." He didn't say whether he was talking about a college or a university, or how an additional mil- 44 lion \\ould affect his position. Goodspeed wrote to Gates, Gates wrote to Rockefeller, and Rockefeller wrote to Harper: "I confidently expect that we will add funds from time to time to those already pledged to place it upon the most favored basis financially." Rockefeller wrote the phrase iiiost favored basis finan- cially with studied ambiguity; Harper read it with studied unanibitJuity. He responded as if Rockefeller were of course talking about universities. "The denomination, and indeed the w hole country, are expecting the University of Chicas^o to be from the very beginning an institution of the highest rank and character . . . and yet, with the money pledged, I can not understand how the expecta- tions can be fulfilled. ... It seems a great pity to wait for grow th when we might be born full-fledged." Rockefeller invited him to come to Cleveland and dis- cuss the situation. What transpired there isn't known, but on August 17 Harper sat down with Gates and drew up a list of eight conditions on which he would accept the presidency. They provided, among other things, that the Seminary was to be transferred from Morgan Park as the Divinity School of the University, and that Old Testa- ment criticism and Hebrew instruction w^ere to be trans- ferred to University chairs, with Harper as head of the department. Point Number 7 was the heart of the agree- ment: "Air. Rockefeller to give one million dollars as a new, unconditional gift, a part of which would go for aid to the Seminary in carrying out the plan." Rockefeller had to decide at last. The million dollars would be used for research. The college would be a uni- versity. It would be the university Harper wanted. And the university Harper wanted would ultimately cost mil- lions. The wizard of American business, looking back to 45 that Sunday morning at Vassar, must have paid passing tribute to the superior \\'izardrv of the unworldly Pro- fessor of Hebrew. He accepted the eight conditions, spent a day with Harper discussing details, and Harper was elected President at the Board meeting of September 18, 1890. His election provided, at Harper's insistence, a period of six months for consideration of the offer. But he acted, as did everyone else concerned, as if he were already committed. Returning to New Haven after his election, he got on the train and pulled his little red notebook out of his pocket. Late that night he had completed his plan for the University of Chicago. He had spent a year try- ing in vain to plan a college; in a few^ hours he succeeded in planning a university which included a college. It "flashed upon him," he said, and there is no doubt that he felt, devoutly, that Divine Providence had illuminated his mind at the same moment it had moved the heart of Rockefeller. Emptying Baptist Pockets Meanwhile, Gates and Goodspeed had raised the $400,000 that secured the original pledge of $600,000. Gates had moved to iMorgan Park, and, with Goodspeed steering him around, he had emptied the Baptist pockets of Chicago. The campaign had been a bitter one, for Chicago, proud as it was of getting a great university, regarded it as a present from the richest man in the world. That was exactly what Rockefeller didn't want to have happen. So Gates and Goodspeed fought on, and the 46 money finally came in. Local Baptists provided half of it. Businessmen, individuals in other cities, alumni of the old University, and a Jewish club made up the rest. Mar- shall Field, when the money was all in, gave a ten-acre tract of marsh on the undeveloped South Side. Still engaged at Yale, teaching, studying, writing, edit- ing, lecturing, still administering Chatauqua, the summer schools and the correspondence work. Harper plunged into the biggest job of his life with characteristic abandon. He rarely saw his family. Little Sam, w ho was now eight years old, had the privilege of bringing his father his can of eggnog at lunchtime, and the overburdened man pulled up a chair for the boy and engaged him in a serious dis- cussion of the pressing problems of second grade arith- metic. Will Harper was trying desperately to resist the depersonalization of his life. But he got home at night- such nights as he did get home— too tired even to eat cove oyster stew, and he threw himself on the sofa, slept ten minutes, and resumed his work. The University had to be built and opened by October, 1892, The tools at hand were two million dollars, ten acres of land, an ardent scattering of Baptists, and the mind and personality of William Rainey Harper. Harper was jealous of his idea; he must do everything himself, down to the most trivial detail, for nobody else really knew what he was trying to do. He must even supervise the building and the money-raising, in addition to the larger assignments of organizing the curriculum and find- ing the faculty. Here he would delegate no power at all. If the new university was to be something truly new. Harper would have to pick the men and the studies him- self. He would fight academic traditionalism as he had fought theological traditionalism. 47 ^^/&y^^ //^ 'ne CHICACO. touo. Qui.cv FI./U.KI.III. F.c NEW YORK, 104 KORTH SrntiT MNCHESTCR, 38 Gcoxic St«cct PARIS, 4-6 Rue OEsPETirigEcunii CHEMNirZ T..e>te>-St»3ie 14 rAf4:a^o^ _ M a y a6 th* »0- ^^- T. T. Oatea, Cor. See* Dear Sir: — Satisfied that the eon- ditions attached to the noble pledge of Mr. John D. Kookefeller to give |600,000 as endovtnsnt for a new institution of learning to be loeataA in this olty have been fulfilled, I take great pleasure in notifying you that I am prepared to earry out ny eorenant of Jsnuary £13nd,l890, to give a site for the nev institution and to furnish further land on the terns suggested* In eonnon with all citisana of this elty, I ap- preciate the aplvidld benefaetlon of Mr.Soeke- feller to Chl«ago* I eongratulata the people of this eity and the ttitlre West on the success aohiored, and with all friends of HH^^S^' culture I rejoice that another noble institu- tion Of higher learning is to be founded, and founded in the heart of the Continent. r Tours Tsry truly, V^^^ MR. FIELD KEEPS A PROMISE. But it seemed to him that theological traditionalism might stand in the way of academic innovation. In the midst of his labors he began to worry all over again about the question of orthodoxy. He would, he knew, never yield on the first principle of all his theology, the principle of truth wherever the truth might lead. Theological scholarship in America was dying, a victim of dogma. Harper's historical interpretation of the scriptures had revived it, but it had stirred the dead bones and aroused the wrath of the guardians of the shrine. There would be more Dr. Strongs. The Seminary might find itself embarrassed as a part of Harper's truth-at-any- price university. Unless he made his position clear, right from the start, the supporters of the institution might desert it when the attacks began again. He could remain at Congregational Yale and teach as he wanted to, and he did not intend to compromise either himself or the new institution. Goodspeed, receiving a long and unhappy letter from him, replied, "We have settled that matter and I will not reopen it." Harper thereupon wrote Rocke- feller, insisting that a commission of Baptists pass upon his orthodoxy before he took office. "There is no doubt that the way I present Bible truth differs largely from that of leading men of the Baptist denomination." The Angry Oil King Rockefeller was angry. He had long since grown impa- tient with what he called "pushing and pulling" over theology. He had been hopeful that "you wise men will all see eye to eye" on the matter of biblical interpreta- tion. Dr. Morehouse, one of the men whom Harper 49 wanted to examine his orthodoxy, flatly refused to sit in judgment on the men \\ ho had already supported Harper in the Strong matter. Rockefeller and Morehouse wrote Harper that they would not consider his request. "I am ready to go to Chicago," he wrote Dr. More- house on February 7, 1891. "I do so, however, with the understanding that everybody has known beforehand my platform and my position and my situation and that I am free to do in the way of teaching what, under all the cir- cumstances, seems to be wise." On February 16 he ac- cepted the presidency of Chicago, in a letter written from New Haven on the purloined stationery of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, hotel. A Plan on the Train He had known for years what kind of university he wanted. He had prepared a general plan on the train be- tween Chicago and New Haven six months before. Now he had to make the blueprints and submit them to the Trustees in December, 1891. They were adopted without a hitch. The blueprints were as staggering as the vision had been. It should have been apparent at once, even to the Trustees, that this was no two-million- or ten-million- dollar institution. Nor was it the t\^'enty-million-dollar institution Strong had asked for. But it seems to have been apparent to no one but the pudgy little Professor of Hebrew. To an intimate friend he confided that "the first step will have been taken when the University has fifty million dollars." With easy effrontery. Harper organized a university on a scale entirely unwarranted by the funds at hand or in 50 fir I • " .34 1 ^ -^i-^Ccci^ ^v-r /