CHAPTER 30
CONSIDERATION OF CHARLES EVANS HUGHES, WOODROW WILSON AND OTHERS IN SEARCHING FOR A SUCCESSOR TO JAMES B. ANGELL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PUBLIC WORK came unexpectedly for me to do, just as it will come to all who will try to fit themselves and be willing. In 1908 I was tendered by Governor Warner an appointment upon the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, to succeed the late Peter White, of Marquette. Really to deserve to be a regent of the university and to do the work measurably well is, to my way of thinking, the greatest honor to be had in Michigan.
Any old dub may be a governor or a United States senator, and several have been, but generally the regents have been high grade, well-equipped men. Almost always they have been chosen from the alumni of the university.
Consequently I assumed my new duties with proper humility and not without misgivings. Where I lived as a boy in Indiana, such is the prestige of the University of Michigan, that a house where dwelt a man who had graduated at Ann Arbor was pointed out to all as a famous landmark. With such a man for president as the late James Burrill Angell, there was not much for a board to do but back him up. But he was growing old and wished to retire and was entitled to consideration.
To find a successor to this wonderful man was to be a task that devolved upon the regents. Dr. Angell was the most constructively aggressive man in his inimitable way that I have ever known, and yet to all he was one of the sweetest and most peaceful of human beings. He had a way of having others do the fighting. A wizard could not have measured men better. This one was selected for the very thing he could do best and that one for the same reason. When he had made his assignments, he would look on with the face of a calm god and rarely did his man fail him. Best of all, the person selected for an especial work seldom realized it; almost always he would think that he had originated the matter in hand. Dr. Angell never took off for a moment his armor of benignity, but behind it always there was the force of a big man. It was because of his remarkable method of using men and delegating work, that he was able to remain efficient to an age much greater than most men are permitted to retain their faculties, or even life itself.
During the winter after he was eighty-seven years old he had a severe sickness, largely caused by his insistence upon acknowledging in long hand hundreds of loving letters received upon his birthday. His relatives were summoned and all concerned expected the long call. On the nights of February 29 and March 1 it was thought that he would not see the morning.
I was in the office of University Secretary Shirley Smith at about half past ten o’clock the forenoon of March 2. A telephone call came from Dr. Angell’s brother. Secretary Smith’s face was long and mournful, then it lighted up with both gladness and humor.
Instead of the dreaded news, the brother asked the secretary if Dr. Peterson, of the medical college hospital, would not loan a wheeled chair for the use of Dr. Angell. It transpired that just when they thought he was nearest death he rallied, raised himself in bed, and complained of being hungry. He was given a breakfast of coffee, toast, a cereal and an egg, which he actually enjoyed. Then he insisted upon getting up into a wheeled chair. A few weeks later he peacefully crossed the threshold of eternity.
He had nourished his vital forces all of his life upon kindliness of heart, tranquillity of spirit and life in an atmosphere of youth. Once he told me that to live long one must be temperate and keep his heart youthful and alert. No wonder he was so much of a factor in causing the University of Michigan to become one of the greatest of the higher educational institutions of the world. He was loved by everybody and most so by the students.
It was this great man that a worthy successor had to be secured for. There were many applicants. Of course, not one of them applied directly, like a hungry man in search of a job. Some of them were just as eager, no doubt, but all went through the form of being proposed by their friends. Many of those who were urged in greatest volume were the most unlikely and unfit.
Serious consideration was given to the name of the then Governor of New York, Charles Evans Hughes. Mr. Hughes had been a member of the Cornell faculty and was looked upon, not only as a big man, but as one who was also an educator. The two qualifications do not necessarily dove-tail.
The place of president of the University of Michigan was tentatively offered to him by a committee of regents appointed for the purpose. Governor Hughes composed the usual gracious, and often meaningless, phrases of regret, and gave as his reason that he had a life’s work of reform in the political arena of New York State. Otherwise he would have been made happy by taking up the direction of the parent of all popular universities.
Within a few weeks he permitted himself to be sidetracked, even shelved, so far as political reform activities were concerned, by an appointment to the United States Supreme Court. In the light of what he had uttered in such a Parsifallian spirit, I was shocked, and in my eyes Mr. Hughes has worn a broken halo ever since.
Some one proposed the name of David Jayne Hill, United States Ambassador to Germany. He looked like ideal timber. I went to Berlin to look him over. It is proper, I think, to state that I paid my own expenses. Accuracy, at the expense of elegance, requires me to record that I reported to the board of regents that Mr. Hill had taken on too much weight of all kinds.
One of the most interesting candidates, for we were caused to think, at least I was, that he solicited the position, was Woodrow Wilson. At the very first most of the regents jumped at the shining lure of surface brilliance. I do not mean to state that Mr. Wilson is not a profound scholar; only that more than most men of erudition he possesses an exterior luminescence that is distinctive. More sober consideration threw another light upon the retiring president of Princeton. There was a consensus of opinion that he had done good work at Princeton, but that whether he had done more good than harm was a question that could not be so easily answered.
He had gone to Princeton with the unanimous support of the managers of that college, and left it with scarcely a friend among them. Practically, it seems, he was dismissed. His gratuitous quarrel with Grover Cleveland was analyzed, and a decision was come to that Dr. Wilson was tactless.
The University of Michigan depends for its financial life upon the people, and the Legislature of a Republican state. It has always had the respect, affection and generous consideration of its State. How long would it take a southern Democrat of Mr. Wilson’s peculiar type to destroy the delicate relations that subsist between them? That was the danger that lurked in him. Good enough, the people have said, to be a two-term President of the United States, but the regents did not decide that he was good enough to be president of the University of Michigan.
It was a happy solution of the problem to select Dr. Harry B. Hutchins, dean of the University of Michigan Law College, to be president. I opposed his appointment for an unlimited term. In fact, I was not very enthusiastic about Dr. Hutchins, and I proposed that the place be given him for three years, in order that the board might have time to look around without the disagreeable and hurtful consequences of not having a president.
Some of the regents, who knew him better than I did, proposed that I be appointed a committee of one to interview Dr. Hutchins and come to terms with him. This they did, with the suspicious twinkle in their eyes of a ruminating rhinoceros. They expected fireworks. If they could have been within hearing of the session between Dr. Hutchins and myself they would have considered themselves enjoyably justified. I found the dean a much bigger and stronger man than I had supposed him to be. In fact, he rapidly developed presidential size, in my estimation, as we sat vis-à-vis and fought back and forth. We shouted at each other and pounded the desk that was between us. Finally I said to him:
“For goodness” sake, don’t act like you are behaving; you remind me too much of myself!”
This, he has said since, uncovered his humorous senses, and we soon had a rational discussion. At first he felt it as a reflection upon him to be offered a limited term. I told him just why we had insisted upon a definite period and I placed the good of the university above everything. The people of the nation only gave their President a limited term, and why should he, in the face of such an exalted example, object to being placed upon the same footing? That was not what appealed to him. It was the good of the university that won his willingness to do anything that would contribute to such an object. I suggested increasing the term to five years, and we agreed, whereupon the board of regents ratified the decision, and Dr. Harry B. Hutchins became president of the University of Michigan.
It is only due him to state that his work as the head of the university has more than justified the expectations of his chiefest admirers.
While I was a regent, a kind of thing came up that must arise continually in the life of every university. Professor R. M. Wenley’s philosophical lectures had taken such a wide and free and bold scope, as to attract a great deal of attention which was not confined to university circles, but pervaded the State and farther. He was admired as a man of profound thought and high courage by those who were big enough and sufficiently fair to see him as he is and measure his work.
Those who did not like his methods, and some of the faculty who were unquestionably jealous of him, formed a potential opposition to him that took form in a determination to drive him out of the university. One day Wenley delivered a lecture so Christless and so heartless and so platonic in their estimation as to stir his enemies to extreme action. They interviewed a regent who came to me with the matter. This regent was one of the oldest and best men on the board and an alumnus. He was all wrought up and managed to communicate his feelings to me.
I agreed to support a resolution dismissing Professor Wenley from the faculty. We had votes enough pledged to pass it. But before it was voted upon all of us came to our senses. The truth seemed to stalk before me unguided, as the truth needs no guide. It seemed to say: “What right have you to do this thing? Is this a university or a penal institution? Will you strive to give wings to thought and then kill it when it tries to fly? How are you going to combat error if it is not exposed? Do you not know that the fearless teacher presents every facet of the intellect in action? Next time you oppress an intellectual process it may be the death of a great truth. Where are you going to draw the line inside the demarcation of complete freedom of thought and speech? If the truth cannot withstand the competition of error it becomes error, and error becomes truth.”
Then the disgraceful resolution that I helped to father I helped to kill.
Wenley still shakes things up, and I have come to have a large respect for his work without yielding an iota of my Presbyterianism.
