Nicholas Murray Butler

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Murray Butler ran Columbia University for 43 years, the longest presidency in that institution's history. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He shook hands with presidents and persuaded Andrew Carnegie to fund one of the world's great peace organizations. He also blocked Ernest Hemingway from winning the Pulitzer Prize, imposed a quota on Jewish students that made Columbia the first American university to formally limit Jewish enrollment, and praised Mussolini's Italy as a "stupendous improvement" in the 1920s. Theodore Roosevelt called him "Nicholas Miraculous." A former student hid a different verdict inside a poem. Who was this man, and how did his contradictions survive for so long at the center of American intellectual life?

• 2. The Making of a Mandarin

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  Butler was born on the 2nd of April 1862 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a manufacturing worker named Henry Butler and his wife Mary. His great-grandfather was Morgan John Rhys, a detail Butler likely knew well. He enrolled at Columbia College and joined the Peithologian Society, earning his bachelor's in 1882, his master's in 1883, and his doctorate in 1884. Three degrees in three years signals a particular kind of velocity. In 1885, he traveled to Paris and Berlin to study. There he met Elihu Root, a man who would become Secretary of State, and through Root he was introduced to both Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Those friendships would shape his political life for decades. By the fall of 1885, Butler had joined Columbia's philosophy department as a faculty member. Two years later, he co-founded the New York School for the Training of Teachers with Grace Hoadley Dodge. That school later became Teachers College, Columbia University, and a co-educational unit spun off from it became Horace Mann School. From 1890 to 1891, Butler also lectured at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Throughout the 1890s, he served on the New Jersey Board of Education, helped establish the College Entrance Examination Board, and edited The Great Educators series for Charles Scribner's Sons. By the time he reached 40, Butler had his hand in nearly every lever of American educational infrastructure.

• 3. Columbia's Longest Reign

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  Butler became acting president of Columbia in 1901 and formally assumed the role in 1902, with President Roosevelt among the dignitaries at his investiture. His 43-year tenure ended with his retirement in 1945, a record no Columbia president has matched. He oversaw a major physical and institutional expansion of the campus, adding buildings, schools, and departments. One of those additions was Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, described as the first academic medical center in the world. Power at that scale has its own gravitational pull. In 1941, the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury selected Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Pulitzer Board initially agreed. Butler, serving as ex officio head of the board, found the novel offensive and personally persuaded the board to reverse its decision. No novel received the prize that year. Hemingway did not receive a Pulitzer for fiction until 1952, for The Old Man and the Sea, after Butler had died. Butler's power extended to the symbolic as well as the institutional. During his lifetime, Columbia named its philosophy library after him. After his death in 1947, the main academic library was renamed Butler Library. A faculty apartment building on 119th Street and Morningside Drive also took his name, as did a major prize in philosophy. Upton Sinclair took a harder view, examining Butler's Columbia presidency at length in a book called The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education.

• 4. Exclusion Inside the Ivory Tower

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  In 1919, Butler amended Columbia's admissions process to cap Jewish enrollment. Columbia became the first American institution of higher learning to formally establish such a quota. The policy drove the proportion of students from New York City from 54% down to 23%, a result attributed at the time to what was called "the invasion of the Jewish student." That phrase was Butler's era's language, not a later critic's gloss. In September 1931, Butler told Columbia's incoming freshman class that totalitarian systems produced "men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character, and far more courage than the system of elections." This was not a private remark. It was an address to hundreds of students. Historian Stephen H. Norwood concluded that Butler failed to grasp the nature and implications of Nazism, shaped in part by his privately expressed antisemitism and his hostility to trade unionism. Butler was a longtime admirer of Benito Mussolini, comparing the Italian Fascist leader to Oliver Cromwell. In November 1933, months after the Nazi book burnings had begun, Butler welcomed the German ambassador Hans Luther to Columbia and declined to appear alongside a prominent German dissident who was also visiting the university. In 1936, Butler permanently expelled a student named Robert Burke, the class president of the class of 1938, for organizing an anti-Nazi mock book burning on campus. Butler had accepted an invitation to a celebration at Heidelberg University the same year. Critics described his posture during this period as one of "remarkable silence" and complicity. He did not unambiguously condemn Nazi Germany until after Kristallnacht.

• 5. Peace Work and Contradictions

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  From 1907 to 1912, Butler chaired the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration. He was instrumental in persuading Andrew Carnegie to commit the initial $10 million that founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Butler headed the Endowment's international education and communication work, founded its European branch in Paris, and served as president of the Carnegie Endowment from 1925 to 1945. In 1931, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Jane Addams. The Nobel Committee cited his promotion of the Kellogg-Briand pact and recognized him as a "leader of the more establishment-oriented part of the American peace movement." That description carries some weight on its own. In December 1916, Butler joined Roosevelt and a group of other philanthropists, including John C. Moffat, William Astor Chanler, Joseph Choate, Clarence Mackay, George von Lengerke Meyer, and John Grier Hibben, in purchasing the Chateau de Chavaniac in Auvergne, birthplace of the Marquis de Lafayette. The property became headquarters for the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial Fund, managed by Beatrice Ashley Chanler. Butler also served as president of the Pilgrims Society, which promotes Anglo-American friendship, from 1928 to 1946, and as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1928 to 1941. He had believed since at least the early 1930s that Prohibition was a damaging mistake, and he was active in the campaign that brought about its repeal in 1933. His intellectual foundations, he said, came from John W. Burgess and Alexander Hamilton.

• 6. The Man Behind the Monuments

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  Butler married Susanna Edwards Schuyler in 1887. She was born in 1863, the daughter of Jacob Rutsen Schuyler and Susannah Haigh Edwards. She died in 1903, and Butler married again in 1907, taking Kate La Montagne as his second wife. Kate was the granddaughter of New York property developer Thomas E. Davis. The couple had one daughter from his first marriage. Butler had always generated strong reactions. In 1915, the writer Randolph Bourne published an essay in The New Republic lampooning him under the name "Alexander Macintosh Butcher." In 1939, a former student named Rolfe Humphries published a poem in Poetry called "Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion." The poem appeared to be an exercise in classical unrhymed blank verse, one classical reference per line. Readers who looked at the first letter of each line discovered something else: the acrostic spelled out "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass." The editors of Poetry, on discovering the hidden message, published a formal apology. The critic Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, writing in The American Mercury, called Butler's prolific speeches and writings "those interminable miasmas of guff." In 1940, Butler completed his autobiography with the second volume of Across the Busy Years. By 1945, at age 83, he was almost completely blind and resigned from his remaining posts. He died on the 7th of December 1947 and was interred at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson, New Jersey. The New York Times had printed his Christmas greeting to the nation for many years across the 1920s and 1930s, the sign of a man who believed himself, and was believed by others, to be indispensable. The formal apology that Poetry magazine ran after the Humphries poem appeared in print suggests that not everyone agreed.