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Chapter six STEADYING THE COURSE IN THE ROARING TWENTIES Although—or perhaps because—Edgar Odell Lovett had been born in a small town, had earned his first degrees at colleges and universities located in small academic villages, and had spent most of his career teaching at small-town Princeton University, he loved cities. His correspondence makes clear that he was invigorated by the pace, excitement, diversity, and cultural riches of cities like London, Paris, and Berlin, and he had often visited the bookshops and haberdashers of Philadelphia and New York City. He firmly believed that cities were the nurseries of intellectual life. In his 1912 address at the opening ceremonies of the Rice Institute he had noted that “great trading cities have often been conspicuous centers of vigorous intellectual life: Athens, Florence, Venice, and Amsterdam . . . stimulated and sustained the finest aspirations of poets, scholars, and artists within their walls,” and considering the “commercial prosperity” of Houston, he optimistically concluded that “it requires no prophet’s eye to reach a similar vision for our own city.” The nurturing relationship between city and university was a theme to which he would often return in the following decades. This relationship was part and parcel of his ambition for the Rice Institute. As he wrote for the Houston Chronicle in October 1921, “The city is indispensable to the university, for the very simple reason that it is only in a great city that a great university can be built.” But for Lovett the relationship was reciprocal: the university and its leaders should contribute to the city in every way possible. For that reason, from the very beginning, he was intimately involved in the cultural life of Houston, he promoted a series of public lectures offered free by the Rice Institute faculty to the citizenry of the city, and his wife was similarly active in the intellectual and artistic life of the city. Lovett’s activities ranged from participation in Houston’s week-long Steadying the Course in the Roaring Twenties 157 carnival celebration entitled No-Tsu-Oh (Houston spelled backward), which had floats, balls, and other social festivities each November to honor King Nottoc (cotton spelled backward), to service on such committees as the Committee on Education of the Texas Welfare Committee to the Welfare Commission of the city’s Commercial Secretaries and Business Men’s Association. (Even Lovett’s small son Malcolm served as a page to “Her Majesty the Queen” at the 1911 No-Tsu-Oh Coronation Ball.) Because of his renown as an orator, Lovett was asked to read the Declaration of Independence at the official Fourth of July cele­ bration in 1913 at the City Auditorium. When the Houston Symphony Association was organized in 1913 to establish a permanent symphony orchestra for the community, Lovett was named to the board of directors . He accepted an invitation in January 1917 to serve on the board of the Houston Grand Opera Committee. He served on statewide commissions too, including one first organized in 1911 by Will Hogg to improve the public-supported universities of the state. Lovett’s services were of course not confined to Texas. He was chosen to become a member of the American University Union in Europe in 1923; he was asked, along with Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, to speak at the inauguration of a new president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ; and he spoke widely at university commencements and other special occasions (such as the installation of President Harry Woodburn Chase at the University of North Carolina in 1920) throughout Texas and the South. Recalling his 1908–1909 round-the-world trip to investigate the newest educational advances preparatory to establishing Rice, in November 1924 Lovett was invited to Brussels to represent Rice at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the École Polytechnique of Brussels, and he assisted in the laying of the cornerstone of the buildings given by the Commission for Relief in Belgium. He also spoke to every imaginable audience in Houston— business, cultural, educational, and otherwise. From newspaper coverage and introductions, it is clear that he became one of the best-known and most respected leaders in the city and state. And he fully supported those members of the Rice faculty who volunteered to serve the region by assisting various cultural and artistic organizations. Within a couple of years of Rice’s founding, its faculty were presenting dozens of lec- .221.146.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08...

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