Word: butlerism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Butler's autobiography betrays no false modesty. It begins with an apologia in which he claims to have been on more or less intimate terms with "almost every man of light and leading who has lived in the world during the past half-century," including British statesmen from Gladstone to Neville Chamberlain, 13 U. S. Presidents. Dr. Butler goes on to make a clean breast of his career as educator, publicist, kingmaker, counsellor to politicians...
...Butler's ancestry abounded in preachers, educators, merchants. Dr. Butler's British-born father went into the jute business, in Paterson, N. J. Proud of his British blood, Dr. Butler exclaims: "It has never been . . . possible for me . . . to be on ... British soil without a feeling of exaltation." When Dr. Butler was a few days old, his aunt carried him up to the cupola of his house with an American flag, a $10 gold piece and a Bible; there dedicated his life to patriotism, wealth and piety...
...good old-fashioned education" hi Paterson public schools (one of his masters used to beat his hand with a strap until blood ran). Says Dr. Butler: "The present-day notion, that an infant must be permitted and encouraged to explore the universe for himself . . . had, fortunately, not yet raised its preposterous head. In my time children were really educated." Dr. Butler ruefully records that he stood third in his high-school graduating class, below a grocer's daughter and a contractor...
Lacking the heft he acquired later, Nicholas Murray Butler was rejected for crew and football at Columbia College† but played on the cricket team. Meanwhile, he edited the Acta Columbiana, taught in private schools, wrote for the New York Tribune, paid most of his expenses and finished college with $1,000 in the bank...
Because his father had long been a power in New Jersey Republican politics, young Butler planned to study law, go into politics himself. But Columbia's President Frederick A. P. Barnard persuaded him into pedagogy. He lived to fulfill Dean Burgess' prediction, to expand Columbia from 5,000 to more than 32,000 students, to turn down the presidencies of Stanford and the State universities of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, Washington and California. Dr. Butler reports that Governor Leland Stanford of California offered him $25,000 to be Stanford's first president, when Dr. Butler...