Dr. Goodspeed in his history of the University of Chicago, has made public with great frankness the story of increasing deficit through fourteen years of Dr. Harper’s active presidency, the resulting and dramatic climax in Mr. Rockefeller’s declination to continue endowment gifts, and the thorough reformation of university financial methods that followed. It remains for me to show in justice to both that from the first the temperamental difference between Mr. Rockefeller and Dr. Harper made it impossible for them to work in open, frank, and cordial cooperation, such as Mr. Rockefeller desired, towards the common end of building a great university. Both men were committed to the enterprise, both were as disinterested in it as was humanly possible, both were men of inflexible purpose, but they were of opposite temperaments. As we saw, Mr. Rockefeller had written Dr. Harper in trying to persuade him to become President of the University in the following words, among others less significant: “I confidently expect we will add funds from time to time to those already pledged to place it [the university] on the most favored basis financially.”
These are perhaps the most pregnant and important words ever uttered in the history of the University of Chicago. Considering their context and purpose, they certainly did effectually commit Mr. Rockefeller to Dr. Harper’s dream of a great university at Chicago. This sentence it was, no doubt, that decided Dr. Harper to resign his work at Yale and undertake the presidency at Chicago. But the two men each interpreted these words according to his own temperament, and the two were unfortunately temperamental opposites; and these differences were accentuated by experiences and pursuits of life as diverse as possible, and also by great differences in age. Mr. Rockefeller was a man in middle life. Dr. Harper was hardly more than a youth. Mr. Rockefeller had been a business man from his teens. Dr. Harper was a teacher and was without business experience. Mr. Rockefeller had perhaps had a wider experience in executive relations than any other man in America. Dr. Harper was almost without administrative experience. Mr. Rockefeller, with a breadth of vision as great as Dr. Harper’s, was temperamentally cool, reserved, cautious, circumspect, deliberate, amazingly patient, but in the end inflexible, adapting means to ends with long and accurate prevision. Dr. Harper was ardent, highly imaginative, with limitless capacity and insatiable eagerness for work, an undaunted optimist, minimizing difficulties, magnifying opportunities, rapid in conception, confiding, unsuspicious, bent on immediate results, willful, and impatient of opposition or delay. When Mr. Rockefeller wrote the crucial sentence we are discussing, he had evidently resolved to found, if he could, a great university at Chicago, but he intended to do so by making occasional and limited gifts, feeling his way along with care and making possible a slow, solid, and healthy growth, as such an opportunity should offer and public usefulness should justify. In finance he expected it to be a model of economy, thrift, and skill. He supposed every forward step would be discussed and financed in advance with all the factors accurately estimated. To an institution so conducted he pictured himself giving great sums with pleasure, always in advance of need, for the purpose of financing new plans of progress. He knew the defunct University of Chicago had been ruined by debt and deficit. He knew the new institution was pledged to himself and to the public to a policy of no debts or deficits.
But to Dr. Harper, on the other hand, such a policy was temperamentally impossible. Promise to restrain himself as he might, the opportunities ever thrusting themselves before his excited imagination always proved irresistible; and, notwithstanding immense and repeated gifts and every caution and precaution, each year of Dr. Harper’s active presidency, from 1892 to his disabling illness in 1904, was a year of increasing debt and deficit. It is true, as Dr. Goodspeed remarks in his history, that the forward steps were often discussed in advance in New York, but it is no less true that Dr. Harper’s advance estimates of cost were challenged by us at the time, though always vigorously defended by him, and it is a fact that they invariably proved to be far, very far, below the actual expenditures.
Mr. Rockefeller admired and sincerely loved Dr. Harper to the end, and today reveres his memory. He recognized his great qualities. But, months before Dr. Harper entered on his duties as President, Mr. Rockefeller had recognized with deep concern the temptations of his strength and the financial dangers into which his temperament and his inexperience would be likely to lead him. Dr. Harper admired and revered Mr. Rockefeller, and in the beginning each thought he could manage the other. Both were mistaken. Mr. Rockefeller protected himself from the first by withdrawing into his shell and, while maintaining delightful social relations, declined to have any financial conference whatever with his interesting and engaging friend after he became President of the University. Dr. Harper, justly relying on his personal charm and the persuasiveness that rarely failed with others to gain his ends, was baffled to find Mr. Rockefeller, while the most genial of hosts and companions, declining absolutely to confer with him at all on gifts to Chicago.
Mr. Rockefeller’s views and feelings were fully and repeatedly expressed by me to Dr. Harper, to Dr. Goodspeed, and to various trustees, often in long and intimate private conversations—occasionally by letter. The following is a sample letter that states very frankly the essential facts. The letter is dated February fifteenth, 1897. Mr. Rockefeller ordered that it be directed to Dr. Goodspeed, secretary of the Board of Trustees, rather than to Dr. Harper, in order that it might the more certainly reach the Trustees. I quote:
“In all that I have urged upon Dr. Harper and the Board at Chicago, from first to last, in the wag of avoiding debt and deficit, / have faithfully represented Mr. Rockefeller’s views. Nor has the emphasis of my representations been an importation or exaggeration of my own. But, it does not follow from this that Mr. Rockefeller’s conceptions of a University are, or have ever been, less broad than those of Dr. Harper, or that his ideals of what the University of Chicago may become are now, or have ever been, less expansiue or magnificent. Before he had been approached in behalf of an institution at Chicago, he had visited great universities in our own and in foreign lands, and he had intimately contemplated for years the plan of an institution involving far greater expense than any now involved at Chicago. His conservatism is not now, nor has it ever been, due to any narrowness of conception. Nor have his prudence and caution arisen from any reluctance to contribute. The story of his gifts, so numerous, so ready, so vast, always leading and inspiring others, testifies to his willingness to give.
“Why then these frequent and earnest admonitions to avoid debt and deficit at any cost?
“I reply, for one thing, in order that public confidence might be secured and maintained. The University has never put forth a treasurer’s report, because, as the treasurer says, it has never dared to disclose to the public the debts. The public confidence is maintained only because the public is not informed as to the true situation. Instead of inviting funds, debt and deficit, if known, are the most certain means of destroying confidence and repelling funds. The debts and deficits of the University of Chicago have not made the institution. On the contrary, the institution has been saved from their ruinous effects only by Mr. Rockefeller’s assuming them.
“Then again, Mr. Rockefeller’s cherishing views perhaps no less broad than those of Dr. Harper, and ideals no less high, has perceived the importance and value of time in an undertaking so vast. He has not been urgent that the University should spring up like a mushroom, in a night. He has realized his own inexperience in this great work, and the inexperience (to quote the substance of a remark of Dr. Goodspeed’s) of the management of the University, from the President down. He has felt that nervous haste would naturally follow inexperience, and has sought to restrain it.
“Then again, Mr. Rockefeller has distinguished between mere external expansion and real growth. The actual magnitude of the University is measured only by what it has money to pay for. All beyond that is deceptive and fictitious. He would avoid unreality. He would avoid the appearance of power not justified by the substance thereof.
“Again, Mr. Rockefeller has his eye not on the transitory present, but on the long future. He is unspeakably more interested in the tendencies, policies, and character of the management than in any present success, however brilliant.
“He has known from the first what he has only lately disclosed to others, this namely, how largely he might, under favorable conditions, become interested in the University of Chicago, and he has known that he would, himself, give, not ontyfar more cheerfully, but also far more largely, under a conservative and prudent management that avoids debts and deficits.
“Finally let me add that Mr. Rockefeller, rejoicing in all that has been achieved, recognizes and extols the great qualities of leadership, enthusiasm, and organizing ability of Dr. Harper, without which the present development of the University would have been impossible. He looks to the Trustees, whose invaluable services he also heartily recognizes, not to chill this ardor, or discourage it, but to guide it into channels of solid and permanent prosperity. ”
This frank letter is quoted in full in Dr. Goodspeed’s history of the University. But for Goodspeed’s faithfulness as an historian I could not have discussed so fully the temperamental differences that underlay the relations between Mr. Rockefeller and Dr. Harper.
Nothing but his clear vision of the public interest could have sustained Mr. Rockefeller in those trying years. He was grateful for the generous response of Chicago in the earlier years of Dr. Harper’s presidency. He saw students entering the University in numbers increasing annually by hundreds. He saw the state universities of the West imitating the University of Chicago in their ideals and resources, and the gradual rise in the Middle West of a great and powerful university system. He knew that Dr. Harper’s temptations and weaknesses were the faults of his strength. While he was painfully aware that the budgets annually presented to us in advance were not the least restraint on expenditures, yet he knew that after all there was little waste. All these facts it was my duty to keep before Mr. Rockefeller while at the same time I was warning the university authorities one and all, at the instance of Mr. Rockefeller, of the inevitable results of continued debt and deficit. And so Mr. Rockefeller was patient.
But not too patient. When in 1904 he thought the time had come and the interest of the University and of the public required that the Trustees assume authoritative and complete control of the finances, and live up to the budgets and not transgress them, the threatened blow fell and there was no faltering. The Trustees themselves were convinced that the hour had struck and were from that time as zealous as we were for complete financial reform. It was a tragic moment in December, 1903, at a meeting of Trustees in Mr. Rockefeller’s private office, when one Trustee after another, in Dr. Harper’s presence, declined, each personally and in turn, to endorse Dr. Harper’s appeal for more money, in face of the usual overexpenditures of the previous year, contrary to specific agreement. Dr. Harper fully realized that the conflict with Mr. Rockefeller, always a friendly conflict, was over, and that it was he who had lost. His saddest plaint was “The Trustees all went back on me” for that, with no lack of personal fidelity, was true. If there had been any illusions on the part of either Dr. Harper or the Trustees as to my loyalty to the University, and I think there were illusions, those illusions were then dispelled. For, after an overnight private conference with his father, Mr. John Junior formally announced the next day, to the reassembled Board, the discontinuance of further endowment gifts from his father until the University could show a clean balance sheet.
There was no break at any time in the friendly social relations between the Rockefellers and the Harpers.
Dr. Harper died in January, 1906. At the time of his death the University had no pension system. Mr. Rockefeller had indeed established a trust fund for Dr. Harper personally of Seventy-five Thousand Dollars some years before. This fund now went to the widow. In addition, Mr. Rockefeller now gave the University a fund of Two Hundred Thousand Dollars, the income to go to Mrs. Harper for life. Mr. Rockefeller also built almost wholly, with his own contribution of Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars, the Harper Memorial Library.
It was only after the University, under the skillful financial management of Dr. Judson, had lived within its budget for two years that Mr. Rockefeller began to renew his gifts for endowment and, before the close of the year, had added to his total contributions more than Three Millions, nearly all for endowment. I close this chapter with a quotation from Dr. Goodspeed’s history of the University of Chicago:
“The day of deficits ended. The last deficit was provided for in 1908. In March, 1907, Mr. Rockefeller turned over to the University lands south of the Midway Plaisance, for which he had paid One Million Five Hundred and Eighty-two Thousand Dollars, giving the University the entire frontage on both sides of the Plaisance, from Washington Park on the west to Dorchester Avenue on the east, a distance of more than three-quarters of a mile.”
Dr. Goodspeed closes the story of deficits as follows: There had been a struggle with debts and deficits lasting fifteen years. It was often a very trying and depressing struggle to those involved in it. It seemed long. In the long history of the University it will grow shorter and shorter till it will seem to have been of but a moment s duration. At all events it was now over. The expenditures were under complete control. There were still many needs, but attention to them awaited provision for them.
“The University has been conducted from that time to this not only without deficits but with a small annual surplus. For new needs Mr. Rockefeller continued to respond with large gifts because asked for them in advance of the expenditures, and the University entered on a course of uninterrupted financial prosperity.”
By 1910 Mr. Rockefeller’s gifts to the University of Chicago had totaled some Thirty-three Millions.
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Chapters In My Life 