Who was Nicholas Murray Butler and why is he significant?
Nicholas Murray Butler was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator who served as president of Columbia University for 43 years, the longest tenure in the university's history. He shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize with Jane Addams for his promotion of the Kellogg-Briand pact and his leadership of the establishment-oriented American peace movement. He also served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 to 1945.
What was Nicholas Murray Butler's role in the 1912 presidential election?
When Vice President James S. Sherman died six days before the 1912 presidential election, Butler was designated to receive the electoral votes that Sherman would otherwise have received as William Howard Taft's running mate. The Republican ticket won only 8 electoral votes, from Utah and Vermont, finishing third behind the Democrats and the Progressives.
Why is Nicholas Murray Butler considered antisemitic?
In 1919, Butler amended Columbia University's admissions process to cap Jewish enrollment, making Columbia the first American institution of higher learning to establish a formal quota on Jewish students. The policy reduced the share of students from New York City from 54% to 23%. Historian Stephen H. Norwood concluded Butler's failure to recognize the dangers of Nazism was influenced by his privately expressed antisemitism.
What was Nicholas Murray Butler's attitude toward Mussolini and Nazi Germany?
Butler was a longtime admirer of Benito Mussolini, comparing him to Oliver Cromwell and praising what he called "the stupendous improvement which Fascism has brought" in the 1920s. He welcomed the German ambassador Hans Luther to Columbia in November 1933, months after the Nazi book burnings began, and did not unambiguously condemn Nazi Germany until after Kristallnacht. He permanently expelled student Robert Burke in 1936 for leading an anti-Nazi protest on campus.
Why did Ernest Hemingway not win the Pulitzer Prize for For Whom the Bell Tolls?
In 1941, the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury selected For Whom the Bell Tolls and the board initially agreed, but Nicholas Murray Butler, as ex officio head of the Pulitzer board, found the novel offensive and persuaded the board to reverse the decision, so no novel received the prize that year. Hemingway did not win a Pulitzer for fiction until 1952, for The Old Man and the Sea, after Butler had died.
What hidden message did a poet conceal about Nicholas Murray Butler?
In 1939, a former Columbia student named Rolfe Humphries published a poem in Poetry magazine called "Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion." The first letters of each line formed an acrostic reading "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass." The editors of Poetry published a formal apology after discovering the hidden message.