Nicholas Murray Butler

Educator

  • Born: April 2, 1862
  • Birthplace: Elizabeth, New Jersey
  • Died: December 7, 1947
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American educator

Butler was a leading figure in the creation of the modern American university. He is considered one of the foremost academic empire-builders of the early twentieth century.

Area of achievement Education

Early Life

Nicholas Murray Butler was born to Henry Leny Butler and Mary Jones (Murray) Butler. When coming to the United States from England in 1835, his grandfather had changed the family name from Buchanan to Butler. His father was a financially comfortable textile importer and manufacturer in Paterson, New Jersey. The youth attended local schools, and was graduated from Paterson High School at the age of thirteen. After private study to make up deficiencies in his preparation, he entered Columbia College in 1878. Although reared as a Presbyterian, he became an Episcopalian while at Columbia. He was graduated in 1882 after compiling an impressive record and stayed on with a fellowship for graduate study in philosophy. He received his master of arts degree in 1883 with a thesis entitled “The Permanent Influence of Immanuel Kant.” His Ph.D. dissertation was “An Outline of the History of Logical Doctrine.” After receiving his Ph.D. in 1884, he did a year’s further study in philosophy and educational theory in Europe.

Butler returned to Columbia in 1885 as an assistant professor of philosophy and rose rapidly through the ranks to become full professor in 1890. His major areas of teaching were the history of philosophy, the history and principles of education, and modern British and German philosophy. His own personal allegiance was to a neo-Kantian idealism that assumed the universal validity of such principles as private property, individual liberty, and limited government. During those years, the Columbia faculty and trustees were sharply divided over the institution’s future direction: whether Columbia should remain primarily a liberal arts undergraduate college or become a university emphasizing graduate study, professional training, and advanced research. The so-called university party had won a significant victory in 1880 when John W. Burgess gained approval by the trustees of his plan for a graduate-level Faculty of Political Science. Although not himself a scholar of importance, Butler became a leader of the group pushing for the organization of parallel faculties in philosophy and the natural sciences. The selection of Seth Low as Columbia president in 1889 marked the triumph of the pro-university faction. When the Faculty of Philosophy was formally established the following year, Butler’s colleagues elected him dean. After Low resigned as president in 1901 to run for mayor of New York City, the trustees named Butler acting president and, in 1902, made the appointment permanent. He would continue in that position for more than forty years.

Life’s Work

Before he ascended to Columbia’s presidency, Butler’s major interest lay in the improvement of public education through professionalization of teacher training and nonpartisan administration of the schools. He was instrumental in the founding in 1889 of the New York College for the Training of Teachers (renamed Teachers College after 1892) and its later affiliation with Columbia. He served on the New Jersey State Board of Education from 1887 to 1895 and was president of the Paterson Board of Education from 1892 to 1893. After moving his residence to New York in 1894, he was a leader of the successful battle to abolish the existing decentralized system of ward school boards and concentrate control over the city’s schools in the hands of an appointed professional superintendent. He was similarly active in the fight for establishment of a powerful state commission of education for tighter centralized control at that level. As president of the National Education Association from 1894 to 1895, Butler was the moving spirit behind the work of the association’s Committee of Ten and Committee on College Entrance Requirements in laying down guidelines for the high school curriculum. He was one of the organizers of the College Entrance Examination Board in 1900, acted as its first secretary, and served as its chair from 1901 to 1914. He was founder and from 1892 to 1919 editor of the Educational Review.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Butler took an active part in Republican Party affairs. He viewed himself at a Tory reformer who stood for an enlightened gradualist approach that avoided the extremes of standpattism and radicalism. In practice, however, Butler was more Tory than reformer. The major exception was his interest in administrative reorganization aimed at improving governmental efficiency. An elitist by temperament with a Hamilton-like fear of demagogues, Butler opposed such measures for direct democracy as the direct primary, popular election of U.S. senators, and the initiative, referendum, and recall. Reflecting the links that he had forged as president of Columbia with New York’s business and legal elite, he was hostile to the income tax, trustbusting, and labor legislation. For a time, he had close ties with Theodore Roosevelt, but their relationship cooled because of Roosevelt’s support for stricter federal regulation of business. Becoming a confidant of President William Howard Taft, Butler allied himself with the party’s Old Guard in thwarting Roosevelt’s bid for the 1912 GOP presidential nomination. When the GOP vice presidential nominee died during the campaign, Butler received the votes of the Republican electors for that place.

There was talk of Butler himself as possible Republican candidate in 1920 with the slogan “Pick Nick for a Pic-Nic in November.” Although he was receptive, even hopeful, his support at the convention remained limited to the New York delegation. He was on friendly terms with President Warren G. Harding, but he grew increasingly unhappy over the Republican Party’s continued support for Prohibition. He opposed Prohibition not only as involving the expansion of governmental power beyond its proper sphere but also as a source of hypocrisy and lawlessness. In 1928, he became a publicly declared candidate for the GOP presidential nomination as the champion of repeal. Butler was no admirer of the successful Republican aspirant, Herbert Hoover. He was strongly hostile to Hoover’s Democratic successor. In his eyes, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a reckless spender and dangerous leveler; Butler regarded the New Deal program as undermining individual initiative and responsibility.

Next to running Columbia, Butler’s major commitment was the promotion of international peace. He was a leader of the “conservative” or to be more accurate, “legalist” wing of the American peace movement. In 1907, he organized the American Association for International Conciliation to promote better international understanding through cultural exchanges. His larger ambition was the elimination of war through the development of a clearly defined body of international law enforced by an independent judiciary. He played a key role in persuading Andrew Carnegie to set up in 1910 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a ten-million dollar gift. Butler’s access to the Carnegie funds in turn gave his views on international questions added weight. He had especially close ties with German official circles, including Kaiser William II. For a time, he had visions of himself as a moderator who could bring about an Anglo-German rapprochement. At the time of the outbreak of World War I, he blamed militarists on both sides for the conflict. By 1916, however, he had become a vocal champion of the Allied side. He supported United States membership in the League of Nations with no more than “mild” reservations, and whether from sincere belief or Republican Party loyalty, he joined other Republican mild reservationists in issuing a public statement that the election of Harding was the best way of assuring United States membership in the League.

Even though disappointed on this score, Butler continued his efforts on behalf of peace during the 1920’s. In 1925, he took over the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment a position he would retain until late 1945. He supported United States membership in the World Court. He was the person probably most responsible for drumming up popular support in this country for the proposal made in 1927 by French foreign minister Aristide Briand for a pact renouncing war. Asked by the State Department to draft the treaty, Butler turned the job over to two of his Columbia members Joseph B. Chamberlain and James T. Shotwell and he led the campaign that succeeded in winning Senate ratification of the resulting Kellogg-Briand treaty outlawing war. He was joint recipient with Jane Addams of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1931. By that time, he had come to see the economic nationalism stimulated by the Depression as the gravest threat to world peace and thus made his top priority encouragement of international cooperation to deal with world economic difficulties. He opposed the isolationist-inspired neutrality legislation of the 1930’s, and after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, he joined as he had during the previous conflict the ranks of those calling for United States support for the Allies.

Butler’s major importance was as one of the group of energetic and imperious academic empire-builders who in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century reshaped American higher education. The years from his becoming president to 1917 constituted Columbia’s golden age: the time when Columbia was generally recognized as the nation’s leading university. The basis for that preeminence had been laid under Butler’s predecessor, Seth Low, but he made major contributions of his own. A tireless fund-raiser, he built Columbia’s endowment by 1914 into the largest of any American university. He kept a watchful eye on all aspects of the institution from undergraduate athletics to the hiring and promotion of faculty. He was by the standards of the time a liberal on higher education for women. With a keen eye for spotting talent, he was instrumental in hiring established names from outside such as philosopher John Dewey from the University of Chicago and promoting from within such promising younger men as the historian Charles A. Beard. He brought in future chief justice of the United States Harlan Fiske Stone as dean of the law school. Thanks to his support, Teachers College became the nation’s leading center of pedagogical innovation although Butler personally had no sympathy with the child-centered approach that became its hallmark. He was largely responsible for making the School of Journalism, established with a gift from publisher Joseph Pulitzer, into the country’s most prestigious training ground for aspiring journalists.

There were, however, accompanying costs. Extremely conscious of public relations, Butler was excessively sensitive about anything that he feared might reflect unfavorably on the institution. His emphasis on strengthening graduate and professional education led him to downgrade the undergraduate program. To the extent that he was interested in undergraduate instruction, he was a traditionalist favoring the old general-education ideal and dubious about the elective system. His centralization of authority in his own hands after 1905, for example, the deans of the different faculties were appointed by him rather than elected by their colleagues rankled many on the faculty. Even more damaging was a series of faculty dismissals and resignations raising charges of the violation of academic freedom. Although paying lip service to scholarship for its own sake, Butler’s major goal was to make the university a training center for an enlightened elite dedicated to upholding sound values. He took the position that what the Germans called Lehrfreiheit was limited to the work of a scholar in his field of academic specialization and did not apply to violations of accepted moral and social standards. The beneath-the-surface frictions came to a head in October, 1917, with the firing of three antiwar faculty members. The affair attracted nationwide attention because of the dramatic resignation by Beard in protest. In one sense, the crisis had a salutary effect. During the remaining years of Butler’s presidency, there would be no further significant problems of academic freedom at Columbia. Despite his own personal hostility to the New Deal, Butler took pride in the role played by Columbia faculty in the Roosevelt administration as exemplifying his ideal of the university as a center for public service. However, the institution and his own reputation never fully overcame the stigma growing out of the 1917 affair.

Most serious in the long run was Columbia’s worsening financial status compared to that of rival institutions. At least part of the difficulty lay in the overexpansion of the graduate and professional programs relative to the undergraduate program. The situation was aggravated by the changing socioeconomic and ethnic composition of the undergraduate student body as the number of commuters attending Columbia College grew. In his latter years, Butler was widely suspected of anti-Semitism. The charge was unfair. Columbia was more open to Jewish faculty and students than most Ivy League schools of the time. Butler personally ordered a reluctant English Department to retain the distinguished literary critic Lionel Trilling. Butler was without question, however, a socially pretentious snob and this snobbery, combined with his personal and political identification with the old-line New York establishment, impeded his ability to tap the city’s newer money. In the 1930’s, faculty salaries were low and promotions slow. Columbia’s success in retaining as distinguished a faculty as the institution continued to have owed much to the larger attractions of New York City. As those attractions increasingly faded in the post-World War II years, so did Columbia’s position among American universities.

With a “nobly domed forehead, a cool, piercing gaze, and an aggressive beak,” Nicholas Miraculous (as he became nicknamed) exuded a commanding presence that made him appear larger than his medium height. He could be charming, but he was an overweening egoist whose conversations all too often became monologues about the famous personages he had known. Such name-dropping similarly ran through his two-volume autobiography, Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections (1939-1940). A lover of pomp and ceremony, he was what an irreverent observer called “the champion international visitor and retriever of foreign orders and degrees.” He had married on February 8, 1887, Susanna Edwards Schuyler; they had one daughter, Sarah Schuyler Butler. After his first wife’s death in 1903, he married Kate La Montagne on March 5, 1907; this union had no offspring. Afflicted by near-blindness and worsening deafness, Butler retired as president of Columbia effective October 1, 1945. Before his death on December 7, 1947, of bronchopneumonia, he gave his blessing to the selection of General Dwight D. Eisenhower as his successor.

Significance

Butler never produced any major work of scholarship. Although he had to his name an imposing bibliography of published books and articles, those were mostly expositions of his views on current issues. He was not a deep or penetrating thinker; rather, he excelled as a publicist for the ideas of others. As an educational reformer, he was more interested in improving the efficiency of the system’s administrative machinery than in questions about education’s larger purpose. Although not without influence within the Republican Party, he was at odds with the dominant currents of American political life during much of his life. He had a deep and sincere commitment to the promotion of international peace, but his effectiveness was limited by his narrowly and naïvely legalist approach. He impressed foreigners who exaggerated his influence more than he impressed most of his fellow countryfolk. There is no question that he was an extraordinarily able academic empire-builder, but even here he appears to have been moved more by ambitions of institutional aggrandizement than by any intellectual vision of what a university should be.

Bibliography

Burgess, John W. Reminiscences of an American Scholar: The Beginning of Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934. The autobiography of Butler’s most important ally in the transformation of Columbia from a liberal arts undergraduate college into a major university.

Butler, Nicholas Murray. Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939-1940. Butler’s own autobiography is anecdotal rather than analytical, self-congratulatory rather than introspective, and makes all too evident his egoism and snobbery. The work nevertheless remains the fullest available account of his multifarious activities.

Coon, Horace. Columbia: Colossus on the Hudson. New York: E. P. Hutton, 1947. Provides a breezy and at times irreverent survey of Columbia University during the years of Butler’s presidency.

Herman, Sondra R. Eleven Against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1898-1921. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1969. Provides an insightful analysis of Butler’s “legalist” approach to international relations.

Johnston, Alva. “Cosmos.” In Profiles from the New Yorker, edited by Clifton Fadiman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938. A skillfully done, if overly eulogistic, profile of Butler that first appeared in the November 8 and 15, 1930, issues of The New Yorker.

Kuehl, Warren F. Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to 1920. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969. Contains the fullest information about Butler’s efforts to promote international peace during the years covered.

Rosenthal, Michael. Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Examines how Butler acquired and wielded power during his presidency of Columbia University and at other times in his career.

Summerscales, William. Affirmation and Dissent: Columbia’s Response to the Crisis of World War I. New York: Teachers College Press, 1970. A detailed account of the World War I academic freedom crisis at Columbia that is sympathetic to though not uncritical of Butler.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. A provocative and penetrating analysis of the restructuring and reshaping of American higher education that, on balance, gives a negative appraisal of Butler’s role as university-builder.

Whittemore, Richard. Nicholas Murray Butler and Public Education, 1862-1911. New York: Teachers College Press, 1970. A generally admiring examination of Butler’s contributions to the professionalization of teacher training and the administrative reorganization of public education, although the author acknowledges Butler’s preoccupation with the organizational aspect and his lack of philosophical depth.

1901-1940: April 5, 1910: First Morris Plan Bank Opens; November 25, 1910: Carnegie Establishes the Endowment for International Peace; June, 1917: First Pulitzer Prizes Are Awarded; August 27, 1928: Kellogg-Briand Pact.