Morningside's Miracle

Morningside's Miracle "B., aren't you proud of your boy?" a woman asked her husband during a ceremony at Columbia University 30 years ago. Of course B. was proud of his boy.

This week it was B.'s boy himself who could feel proud. In his honor some 2,000 Columbia alumni from far & near traveled to Manhattan to gather in the Waldorf-Astoria for the largest dinner they or the hotel had ever given. It was the fourth annual "Round-the-World-Columbia Night." broadcast this time over 81 U. S. stations and to the rest of the world over two short-wave stations. Similar dinners were also taking place in Paris, London, Berlin, Geneva, Mexico City, Havana, Moscow, Manila. Aboard the 5. 5. Resolute off Bombay, and the S. S. Reliance in the West Indies were more dining Columbians. In Shanghai, Columbia men were determined not to let Japanese shot & shell spoil their fun.

For the main dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Western Union Telegraph Co. installed complete cable and telegraph stations and three translux machines to flash messages of congratulation as they poured in from rulers, statesmen, educators and dignitaries in the four corners of the world. Ready for the diners' inspection were nine of the ten extant oil-paintings (among them an Orpen, a La very, a Salisbury*) of the man they were honoring. Elaborate souvenir programs and menus were printed. Two dollar Wedgwood plates depicting Columbia scenes were to be distributed to each & every guest. New York's Bishop William Thomas Manning would bless their food. President James Rowland Angell of Yale University. Author John Erskine (Columbia, 1900). Chief Judge Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (Columbia, 1889) of the New York Court of Appeals, put a final polish to their respective speeches. Non-Columbians accepting invitations to the dinner included Alfred Emanuel Smith. Owen D. Young. Governor Wilbur Lucius Cross of Connecticut, President Livingston Farrand of Cornell. Presiding Bishop James De Wolf Perry of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Italian Ambassador to the U. S. Nobile Giacoma de Martino.

Toastmaster and organizer of the banquet was William Fellowes Morgan (Columbia, 1880), president of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness. Patrician, handsome and ruddy at 71, he is rich (warehouses, refrigerating), High Church Episcopalian (president of the Church Pension Fund), a famed after-dinner speaker and clubman. Toastmaster Morgan, member of the Columbia Society of the Early 80's, was Columbia's second alumni trustee (1910 to 1916).

Every guest to be seated at the head table held honorary degrees from Columbia--except the honor guest and the university's president, Nicholas Murray Butler. TIME'S cover-portrait, by Frank O. Salisbury, is reproduced by permission of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society.

President Butler has 34 degrees, U. S. and foreign, but Columbia has given him no more than he earned: A.B., M.A., Ph.D. Some day soon the alumni hope to confer upon him a "supreme honorary degree." In the meantime, however, they pay him high personal tribute, at the Butler-Day banquet which marks Dr. Butler's 30th anniversary as president, 50th as alumnus, and 70th as a very human being.

1882, Columbia College had 227 students and several buildings at Madison Avenue and 49th Street. Aged 16, N. M. Butler, son of a New Jersey merchant, matriculated in 1878 to find only four of his classmates younger than himself. Slight, slick-haired young Butler busied himself winning prizes ("bun-yanking"), assimilating learning in enormous doses. He edited a college paper, Acta Columbiana, drafted the freshman class constitution. Politically-minded, oratorical, he was interested in everything but athletics. He was fit, though, set himself a private record by walking 45 mi. in 12 hr. on an Adirondack trip.

At 20 "Murray" Butler was graduated by Columbia. He went off to Europe to study in Paris and Berlin, armed with letters to four of the world's most potent men: Pope Leo XIII, William Gladstone, Otto von Bismarck, John Henry Cardinal Newman. They gave his international, political, social notions a tremendous push. To them, he recalls, he was just a brash young American -- "a speck of dust." But Butler talked right up to them, made them the nucleus of his enormous collection of friendships, to which, as he grew older, he has added almost every person of national or international importance.

When you call him Doctor Butler, you may have in mind any one of the degrees he has received from Columbia, Syracuse, Tulane, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Penn sylvania. Yale. Chicago, St. Andrews, Manchester, Cambridge, Williams, Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, Toronto, Wesleyan, Glasgow, State of New York, Oxford, Breslau, Strassburg, Nancy, Paris, Louvain, Prague, King's College (N. S.), Rome, Charles (Prague), Szeged (Hungary), Budapest, California.-- His first doctorate he took at Columbia at the age of 24, with a dissertation on the History of Logical Doctrine. Making all knowledge his province, he instructed in education and philosophy, became at 30 the youngest full professor of philosophy Columbia had ever had. One summer he helped dig in the Bad Lands to discover the Uintatherium and a Mesonyx. Another summer he went off to Alaska to help found the Alaskan Society. Always Dr. Butler has scurried busily about the U. S. and the world. Before he was 30 he had lectured in every state in the union. That, says he, is one reason why he knows the temper of the U. S.

1902, When Columbia's President Seth Low was elected Mayor of New York, everyone knew who would succeed him. Of an early faculty meeting at which young Professor Butler spoke, the late Dean John William Burgess later remarked: "I saw in a flash . . . that he would become president of Columbia and that Columbia would become the greatest institution on earth." Today Columbia University has 31,978 students in residence, is the world's largest institution of learning for men & women. Monuments to Dr. Butler are Teachers' College and its many affiliates, and Columbia's great summer school. Dr. Butler secured for Columbia the well-endowed Pulitzer School of Journalism, whence emerge the yearly Pulitzer Prizes. The University jointly with the Presbyterian Hospital owns the Medical Center, is related to many a hospital, museum and laboratory. Also there is the famed Uni-versity Extension of home study which adds 4,939 corresponding students to Columbia's rolls. Centres for study as well as cultural life are the Deutsches Haus, Maison Franchise, Casa Italiana, Casa de las Espanas, Japanese Culture Centre. Newest agency in Columbia's expansion is a projected $20,000,000 -Engineering Centre which would provide research facilities as great as those of the Medical Center. Upon the completion of this and the $3,500.000 library donated last year by Philanthropist Edward Stephen Harkness, Columbia's development will probably become qualitative rather than quantitative.

1932. Publicist as well as university president are the titles Dr. Butler gives himself in his Who's Who article, longest of any living U. S. citizen. Publicist he is, not only for Columbia (which has, besides, one of the nation's ablest press agents in James T. Grady) but for everything else in which he believes. Often and --Dr. Butler's honors other than scholastic include: Officier de la Legion d' Honneur, 1906, Commandeur, 1912, Grand Officier, 1921; Order of Red Eagle (with star) of Prussia, 1910; Grand Commander of the Royal Order of the Redeemer, ist Class (Greece), 1918; Grand Cross Order of St. Sava, ist Class (Jugoslavia), 1919: Grand Cordon Order of Leopold (Bel-gium), 1921; Grand Officer Order of Polonia Restituta. 1923; Commander of Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus (Italy), 1924; Grand Cross Order of the Crown of Roumania, 1927: Order of the White Lion, ist Class (Czechoslovakia), 1027. loudly Dr. Butler trumpets for Peace, the Republican Party and Repeal of the 18th Amendment. Famed is his work with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which he reputedly persuaded the old steelmaster to establish. International amity has able spokesmen in Washington, but it is Dr. Butler who most often sells its fundamentals to the People. For his ardent salesmanship he won half a Nobel Prize last December.

Few politicians have been so regular in election years, so independent when votes were not being counted. A Wet of Wets he was one of the first notable persons after Prohibition to come out for repeal. Long a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Dr. Butler broke with him over his Progressive movement in 1910. Every four years he writes a national platform for the Grand Old Party only to see it tossed aside at the convention. He went as a delegate to his first Republican convention in 1888. Since 1904 he has never missed one. In 1912 as the vice-presidential nominee of his party he went down in defeat with William Howard Taft. In 1920 as the candidate of the New York delegation to the Chicago convention, he got 69 1/2 votes for the presidential nomination that eventually went to Warren Gamaliel Harding.

Last autumn Dr. Butler was again talking politics--tariff reduction, unemployment insurance, revision of the Anti-trust laws. Was the presidential bee buzzing once more? Last month the Columbia Spectator nominated Dr. Butler for the White House, advised both parties to select him as their joint leader so that he might head "the kind of government so fondly hoped for by the writers of the Constitution." But, older now, Dr. Butler has grown faintly supercilious toward public office and the politicians who fill them. The idea of his seeking the Presidency he brushes aside as altogether unworthy of any man in his position.

At Home-- No. 60 Morningside Drive is a handsome house which, from a high eminence, overlooks a park, an elevated track and a large section of Harlem. Like few other upper West Side homes, it is in the Social Register. Like few other Social Register homes, it is known throughout the world. An invitation to Dr. Butler's is New York's ultimate accolade to distinguished visitors. Chatelaine of No. 60 is Dr. Butler's second wife, Kate La Montagne. She is unobtrusively busy when dignitaries are around. Every March Dr. Butler goes to Brunswick, Ga., every June to Europe, every July to Southampton for the rest of the summer.

In New York Dr. Butler keeps himself and nine stenographers keyed up every day except Wednesdays and Saturdays, when he dashes off to play golf, keep down his small paunch. Once a week he lunches with the directors of New York Life Insurance Co. When he receives visitors in his study he paces up & down, up & down talking volubly. At 5 p. m. each day, according to a Columbia legend, he pops into bed "raw" for a two-hour nap.

Guests at this week's banquet were to include: Mrs. Butler; Sisters Eliza Rhees Butler, head of Columbia's Women's Graduate Dormitory, and Mrs. Walter P. Mayhony; Brother Henry M. Butler of Paterson, N. J.; Daughter Sarah Schuyler Butler. If any one of his relatives approaches Dr. Butler in energy and accomplishment, it is Daughter Sarah. Born some 30 years ago, she was schooled at her father's knee and at Barnard College. At three she went with him to the polls to watch him vote straight Republican. When little Miss Sarah congratulated President Roosevelt on his birthday, he sent her a thank-you note illustrated with sketches of a macaw and of his daughter "Princess Alice." Later Miss Butler helped entertain notables. Today she is Vice Chairman of the New York Republican State Committee, a position she attained by hard political work from her election district up. Tall and dark, she stumps the State for her party, sounds off on "issues" like anybody else.

Nicholas Miraculous was the name T. R. gave to his friend, after St. Nicholas Thaumaturgis. Few contest the aptness of the title. Dynamic, downright in his utter "rightness," often sententious and rhetorical in public and private utterances, Dr. Butler serves the U. S. as an unofficial ambassador-at-large. He is at home anywhere. He is a member of the Institut de France, was the first unofficial foreign visitor ever to be received by the French Academy. He has advised the British Cabinet, lectured the Reichstag in German.

To some extent Dr. Butler is a prophet greater outside his own country than in it. Certainly he has not acquired the position of national wiseman occupied by Har vard's late great Charles William Eliot. Although often held up as a horrible ex ample of mass-production-educator, he is better appreciated by the superior few who recognize the quality of his own ideas than by the democratic many for whom he spreads out a quantity of learning. But whether he is judged by the institution he created or by the friends he has made, it could be said of him as of Sir Christopher Wren : Si monnmentnm qnaeris, circum-spice.

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