The General Education Board was organized in 1902. Its purpose was at the first very limited and entirely sectional. It aimed at that time simply to promote primary education, white and black, in the South, without distinctions of creed. Its very modest program was illustrated by Mr. Rockefeller’s pledge at its birth of One Hundred Thousand Dollars per year for a period of ten years.
Mr. Edwin M. Shepard, however, had been retained to draw up the charter and an extraordinary charter it was that he drew. Instead of confining the powers of the organization to the limited work then contemplated, he drew a perpetual charter which within the United States conferred on the Board authority to hold limitless capital and to do anything whatever which could be construed to be directly or even remotely educational. Congress alone could grant such privileges, and even Congress could do so only in its special jurisdiction over the District of Columbia. To Congress therefore we applied.
It was extremely fortunate for us that Senator Aldrich, Mrs. Rockefeller Junior’s father, was then the leading man in Congress. He took the bill into his own hospitable hands and put it through in record time. The Board was duly incorporated by Congress, January twelfth, 1903.
But it was still some years before the infant organization came to self-consciousness and to a realizing sense of its mission and destiny. However, with our pledge of a Hundred Thousand a year and our narrow aims in behalf of Southern education only, we set to work. Our first important action was to make a thorough survey of educational conditions in the South and to choose, of the many things we might undertake, the one which would give us the greatest leverage of uplift over the widest territory. I was made chairman of a committee to make the survey. After months of inquiry shared by Dr. Buttrick, who had been made secretary of the Board, I reported in a carefully prepared paper that our most fruitful work would be the multiplication of high schools throughout the states of the South. It was true that this would cost many millions for new grounds and buildings alone, if successful on the scale contemplated. But nearly all the necessary funds we contended the South would itself furnish. What the South needed was only information, initiative, and leadership. This we could furnish. The rest would do itself. There existed at that time in every state a state university. Our plan proposed that in every state university a chair of education be created. The incumbent was to be named and his duties defined by us, subject to university approval, we to pay his salary and expenses in full. This officer was not to teach, but to ascertain by careful survey, and as rapidly as possible, the name and location of every community in the state needing and capable of founding and supporting a high school. These places he was to visit in turn. He would come as an officer of the University, laden with its wisdom and its moral authority. Our agency in the matter was not to be exploited or mentioned. He would call a public meeting or meetings. He would urge the paramount value of a high school in that community. He would give stereoptician views of attractive and well-planned buildings in other similar communities with accurate statements of cost, and calculations of added taxes. He would point out the increase in the value of property the high school would bring and into the new families it would attract to the community. He would describe in detail the methods of procedure and answer courteously and fully any objections.
The plan proved efficient beyond our most sanguine anticipations. All the Southern states without exception called for these professors of secondary education. Under their leadership the South had established in 1922 more than sixteen hundred new high schools, at a cost of over Forty-six Million Dollars, all raised by local taxation. So fully has the need of high schools been supplied, that for some years now our professors of education have been able to give their entire attention to enlarging the scope and improving the instruction in the high schools. This addition of over sixteen hundred high schools has stimulated the entire educational system of the South beyond the power of imagination to compass. It has multiplied many times the enrolment of the colleges and universities, and given their students a better preparation. It has furnished more and better teachers for the common schools. It has created and supplied a demand for many normal schools. At Nashville it has built up one of the best teachers’ colleges in the country. There is no school in the South of any kind, from the kindergarten to the university, that has not felt the new impulse to education given by the multiplication of the high schools.
Mr. Rockefeller, in June, 1905, pledged Ten Million Dollars to the General Education Board. The quarter-century between 1880 and 1905 had shifted the emphasis of education in the United States from the preparatory schools to the colleges. The number of public high schools aiming to fit young men and women for college had not only increased, but had actually multiplied many fold throughout the country. These students, so prepared, now thronged the colleges and universities, and threw the emphasis of financial need on the higher education. It was under these circumstances that Mr. Rockefeller had made his gift of Ten Millions, and had asked me to draw up the formal letter of gift designating the purpose to which the funds were to be devoted. I had no hesitation in dedicating the fund wholly to the higher education. By this time I had become pretty well acquainted with most of the four hundred institutions of our country chartered and called colleges or universities, and I understood the governing factors of their growth and influence. I had a reasonably clear bird’s-eye view of the whole filed and, while there was much to encourage, there was much also to regret. The picture was one of chaos. Most of these institutions had been located in a soil which could not sustain them as colleges; in spots they were injuriously crowded together. They were scattered haphazard over the landscape like wind-carried seeds. The hopeful feature of the situation was that there were enough suitably located colleges and universities, about a fourth of the whole number, which could be formed by careful selection into a system of higher education, and this system, carefully nourished, would prove adequate. These were the considerations which framed my letter of gift. I quote the substance of the letter, underscoring the decisive words:
“The income to be distributed to such institutions of learning, at such times, in such amounts, for such purposes and under such conditions as the Board mag deem best adapted to promote a comprehensive system of higher education in the United States.”
The key word was the word system.
A little later I was asked by the Board to frame the policy which the gift so worded required, and to present it for their consideration. I did so in a long and carefully wrought paper, read before them in January, 1906, embodying about all that seventeen years of study and experience had taught me as to the needs of higher education and the most effective ways of meeting them. The paper was cordially adopted as the policy of the Board. The policy in full will be found by the curious among my indexed manuscripts.
It became necessary to enrich the Board by the addition of several eminent educators. It was at the request of Mr. Rockefeller that I was made chairman.
Thus began the work of the General Education Board for the colleges and universities of the United States. Mr. Rockefeller has contributed about One Hundred and Forty Millions to the Board, of which some Twenty Millions was for medicine. The direct service which the Board has performed can be roughly appraised by a study of the annual reports. But all such estimates must be underestimates, for the indirect service to education has been immeasurable. The Board has appropriated over Fifty Millions to higher education, including technical and professional schools, on terms invited by its beneficiaries, which have brought to them over Two Hundred Million Dollars. Fands, buildings, equipment, and bequests have everywhere followed independently. According to Viscount Bryce in his Modern Democracies, the United States now has four times as many college graduates per million of inhabitants as France, and twice as many per million as England. Clearly we have the most efficient system of higher education in the world. I may add that since the close of the World War there has been a multiplication of college students so sudden and so great as to overwhelm our institutions of higher learning.
Up to 1917, when I resigned as chairman, the policies of the Board had been formulated by me, its beneficiaries had been chosen, and the amount and conditions of its gifts had been largely influenced by me. To Dr. Buttrick as secretary fell almost all the work of correspondence, inquiry, interview, and travel. I cannot close this chapter without expressing my appreciation of Dr. Buttrick and his work. Together we worked and planned in brotherly affection. In his difficult and delicate relations with scores and hundreds of applicants, a majority of whom had always to be declined, Dr. Buttrick’s bigness of heart, his manifest disinterestedness and freedom from prejudice, his unfailing grace of manner, his delightful humor protected him from making enemies or alienating the sympathy of friends. And yet his quick and alert intelligence penetrated to the heart of his problems, and his courteous frankness never concealed from applicants such defects as they could remedy. He wrought with diligence and enthusiasm, always ready for exacting tasks. No journeys, in season or out of season, were so long, so trying, or so frequent as to moderate his ardor. He loved his work and lived in it.
He was always gracious to his official family, thoughtful alike of their feelings and their interests, and a spirit of loyalty, unity, and cheer pervaded the rooms of the Board like an atmosphere. In the later years, as his labors and responsibilities led into wider fields, he was assisted by gifted special aides, each a master in his department. Long past the retiring age, and with fewer responsibilities, he is still, in 1926, as I write, a highly valued adviser in the rooms of the Board.
Soon after the words above were written, Dr. Buttrick passed away, universally beloved and lamented.
I cannot bid a final farewell in these pages to my dear old friend and associate in more fitting words than those of a congratulatory letter I wrote him on his seventieth birthday. It happened to please him, and he used to show it to intimate friends:
“Dear Old Friend:
“Here’s a hand of hearty welcome to the high and select Order of Septuagenarians into which I preceded you by nearly five months. I dreaded the day, but I find it is good to be here.
“Really, when one comes to be here, it presents itself mainly as a distinction—a distinction which everybody, after all, desires, though few attain, an honor which never goes by favor but always and infallibly by merit, a title of nobility that marks a man as belonging by birth to an hereditary aristocracy of at least four generations and probably many more, a true and not an artificial or conventional aristocracy, the only aristocracy which nature owns, an aristocracy of high moral and physical superiority. It means that and more. You have proved yourself a worthy heir of that best legacy which ancestral opulence can bestow, for have not you too atained the days of the years of your fathers? You have not wasted your substance in riotous living, or squandered your great patrimony in any prodigality.
“Age has been honored since the dawn of history. Religion itself among all nations has its roots in the worship of ancestry. Hoary heads have ever been a crown of glory. Age, viewed close at hand, is to be welcomed, not dreaded. It brings privileges, immunities, and emoluments all its own and not few—precedence everywhere, the gracious bow, the lifted hat, the proffered arm, the easy chair, the cozy corner, the dainty morsel, the weightiest influence in counsel, release from exacting duties, ripeness and tenderness of filial love, shelter from every ill wind that blows. Since my seventieth birthday, women have risen from their seats in the crowded subway trains and offered them to me with exquisite grace of speech and manner. Think of that and what it means!
“And then we don’t have to work any more. From us the primeval curse of the fall of man has been lifted. No more do we eat our bread in the sweat of our brows. For us the flaming sword has been removed from the gate of Eden. We are permitted in the Divine Economy to re-enter. We may eat of all the fruits of the Garden. We may enjoy the immense advantages pleaded so successfully by Eve in tasting the apple of knowledge, without any of its terrible penalties. Ah! the apple of knowledge, and for the first time in life abundant leisure to eat our fill, to read the history and literature and science a too busy active life has denied us!
“We need not deceive ourselves. Henceforth to the end we shall be walking through the valley of the great shadow. But it was for these aged travellers that the Twenty-Third Psalm was written. It’s in the valley that the Good Shepherd leads us into the green pastures and makes us to lie down beside the still waters. The rod and the staff alike are for our comfort.
“For forty-five years you and I have been close friends—for over thirty years most intimate confidential friends—engaged together in exacting and stupendous enterprise, pregnant with measureless destinies, and there has never been a break between us. I hardly know where to look for a duplication of such a record. We were built to work together just as we have, and surely it was a divine Providence that placed us side by side. And now we seem destined to spend the twilight of the evening of life without being separated, and we can walk on hand in hand in the earned release of a joyful and carefree childhood.
“Ever most truly, [Frederick T. Gates]”
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Chapters In My Life 