Nicholas M. Butler

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 Republican Party electoral votes for Vice President of the United States in the 1912 presidential race, when the nominated vice presidential candidate James S. Sherman died in office 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.

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.

Early Life and Education

Butler was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to manufacturer Henry Butler and Mary Murray Butler. He enrolled in Columbia College (which became Columbia University in 1896) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Criticism

Despite Butler's accomplishments, many people regarded him as arrogant.

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."

Butler and Anti-Semitism

Though not overtly anti-Semitic, 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 anti-Semitism. 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!")

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. 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. When Seth Low folded in 1938, its remaining students were absorbed into the Columbia College undergraduate population. However, when they graduated, they received the stigma of a bachelor of science degree, and not the normal bachelor of arts—which is exactly what happened to Asimov.

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.

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."

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

External links

• Nobel Prize biography
• IMDb biography for Nicholas Murray Butleraom

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