Arts and Letters

Our Academy and our country suffered a grievous loss when on December 7, 1947, Nicholas Murray Butler died at the age of eighty-five—our fellow member since 1911 and our President from 1928 to 1941.

In submitting to you this inadequate sketch of his life and personality, those of you who heard here, from time to time, his brilliant memorials on so diverse a group of his friends as Elihu Root, Brander Matthews, John H. Finley, and David Jayne Hill will probably agree with me that the only man really competent to write Butler's biography for this occasion was Butler himself. Luckily for posterity, he anticipated that task, toward the end of his life, by publishing his two interesting volumes (1939; 1940) entitled, with singular appropriateness, Across the Busy Years. This paper can do little more than to mine that rich deposit of literary ore. His attitude toward his own life and its relation to his surroundings and his friends, he set forth in his introductory chapter on the subject of biography in general:

One who has had and is having the inestimable pleasure and satisfaction of a busy, interesting, and a happy life and who has enjoyed and is enjoying world-wide contacts and associations of the greatest possible charm and importance, may easily overestimate the value to others of even an imperfect record of those things which he has seen and heard. On the other hand, there is no more interesting branch of biography, with its record, often ingenuous and vain, of the interplay of heredity and environment, of matured capacity and opportunity, with their resulting activities and achievements in the field of reflective thought or in letters, or in science, or in public service whether official or unofficial.

As to most biographies, he commented that rarely is enough told of the supposedly minor events in the subject's life before he became a character of public significance, and he pointed out how especially difficult it is for a biographer to convey an idea of personal characteristics.

With these comments in view, his book may well be supplemented with an anecdote told by a fellow townsman of Paterson, who on revisiting that city in 1917, met an old roughneck acquaintance who greeted him with the remark: "I remember the old days whin ye were a member of Nick Butler's gang up on the east side—the grand tough fighter was Nick. Himself and me has fought many the good scrap…. By the way, whatever became of Nick?" (This remark was made after Butler had been President of Columbia for seven years.)

Among his other personal characteristics were his courage, his self-confidence, and his gift of leadership. To him, there might well be applied the remark made about one of the former presidents of The Century Association—that he was "predestined from birth to be a chairman of any organization of which he was a member," and also a chairman who was inclined to control his meetings. He was not overfond of being overruled or controverted. I shall never forget an episode at a meeting of the American Society of International Law, when he was a speaker. Under its constitution, speakers were limited to fifteen minutes. Elihu Root was presiding and he interrupted Butler, not merely in the middle of his speech, but in the middle of a sentence, with the remark: "Mr. Butler, your time has expired and you will sit down." The absolutely thunderstruck look on Butler's face at this suppression, unaccustomed to him, is a vivid memory to all in his audience.

Another of his characteristics was his cultivation of the art of personal contacts; and as he wrote in his Across the Busy Years: "It has been my happy fortune to meet, to talk with, and often to know in warm friendship, almost every man of light and leading who has lived in the world during the past half century." He was proud of his acquaintance with nearly all the British Prime Ministers since Gladstone in 1884; and of American men of consequence, he wrote that "nearly every one has played some part in shaping my life and thought or in guiding and inspiring my activities." His personal friendships were not confined to men in academic or public service. Substantially everyone prominent in literary, artistic, cultural, and scientific fields was his familiar. In fact, it was sometimes said, with more than half truth, that Butler's hobby was collecting famous men.

A perusal of the amazing number of lines devoted in Who's Who in his lifetime to Butler's honors and his achievements will convince one that Theodore Roosevelt's reference to "Nicholas Miraculous Butler" was not a mere semi-jesting remark. (It would be boring to recapitulate too much of Who's Who, but one little-known fact omitted in that book, though appearing in his Across the Busy Years, may be mentioned, namely, that his original family name was not "Butler," for his English grandfather was named John Thomas Butler Buchanan, but dropped the "Buchanan'' when he moved with his family to the United States in 1834.)

Butler's youthful days were lived in Paterson, New Jersey, but about 1892-3 he became a citizen of New York City. He graduated from Columbia University in 1882 and from that time its interests were first in his heart. He served it as Assistant Professor and Professor of Philosophy from 1885 to 1910, and as President until 1946. "My choice of an academic career," he wrote on his 75th birthday, "has been held to, despite every possible temptation, whether financial or political…. The freedom and solid satisfaction of the academic life, the association with scholarship which it brings and the opportunities which it offers to inform and guide public opinion in matters of largest importance are incomparable in their satisfactions and compensations."

But he was not merely academic, for his theories and administration of scholastic matters were shot through with imagination. He guided Columbia University, not from an ivory tower but from intellectual and spiritual levels responsive to the many-sided needs of a modern democratic society. He maintained with energy and gusto his views on many controversial questions and problems of the day, like prohibition and the League of Nations. He maintained contacts with political leaders, and was the friend and counsellor of most of the prominent Republicans of his time; he was voted for as candidate for Vice President on the Republican electoral ticket in 1912 (on the death of the Convention nominee, Sherman). In 1920, he received 69½ votes for President in the Republican Convention. In his Across the Busy Years, his chapter on his attendance at 14 Republican National Conventions (from 1880 to 1924), and his further chapters entitled "Behind the Scenes in Politics" and "Keeping Out of Public Office," are valuable sources of history, although I have known several of his political co-actors whose personal recollections did not always conform to his own.

In general, he might be regarded as a conservative liberal, but he was frequently regarded by his opponents as "an old semi-reactionary" (or to use a term which he himself once applied to an academic character, "a fine old educational mastodon"); and his attitude on professorial freedom of speech met with considerable challenge.

Second to his devotion to Columbia was his absorption in international relations. No American citizen has been more justifiably termed "a citizen of the world"—both from his personal contacts and from his breadth of viewpoint. Although an aggressive American, he had eminently "an international mind"—a phrase which he was fond of using. His familiarity with educational conditions, and with the historic principles, politics, and philosophy of American, as well as of British and other foreign governments, was his preparation for his international activities. "It was his knowledge of philosophy and of the history of human thought from its very beginning that made him such a master in debate or discussion," said his friend, Frederic R. Coudert.

He was President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 to 1945, and kept his views fresh on that subject by annual visits to the statesmen of Europe. In 1931, he received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Butler's voice was rich and impressive, his diction was cultivated and his choice of words superb. His robust physique made him a marked man, wherever he arose. In public, his manner was serious and pontifical. But in his private relations, he shed his solemnity; and, as Coudert has written, he "was one of the kindest and most genial of men, with a keen sense of humor, and a great delight in human friendship—no more considerate or loyal friend could be found." This side of him was pleasantly portrayed in an article in the New York Sun by John Godfrey Saxe, February 12, 1948, about the monthly gathering of close companions called "The Occasional Thinkers," which Butler described as "a group of understanding and affectionate friends who keep alive the best traditions of conversation in our American social life." It consisted of about twenty men, drawn from various walks of life, and reflecting many intellectual and professional interests, whose host was always termed "the Sage." In his chapter on "Companions and Conversation," in Across the Busy Years, he delightfully depicts his participation in this group, and in The Round Table, The Century Association, The Players, and other similar social gatherings.

In his last year, his increasing blindness and deafness interfered with many of his activities, but he did not entirely cease from public speaking, especially at Columbia. Those who last heard him there will never forget a noble figure, rising from his chair, thrusting aside the proffered arm of a friend, stepping forward for the previously calculated number of steps, and delivering his speech, erect and confident as ever.

And so passed from us that world-known character—the man whom President Conant of Harvard termed "the philosopher and statesman"; the man whom Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, lauded for his "exceptionally wide knowledge of men and the problems of nations"; and the man whom ex-President Hoover honored for his "profound influence on educational developments in the United States and in the wider field of public thinking." He has left a gap here which is hard to fill.