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WOODROW WILSON: A BIOGRAPHY - GLOSSARY (SPOILER THREAD)

is a broadly based reform movement that reached its height early in the 20th century and is generally considered to be middle class and reformist in nature. It arose as a response to the vast changes brought by modernization, such as the growth of large corporations and railroads, and fears of corruption in American politics.
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David Lloyd George was born in Manchester on 17 January 1863, son of a schoolmaster. His father died when he was young and his mother took him to Wales to be raised. He became a lifelong Welsh nationalist. He qualified as a solicitor and in 1890 was elected Liberal member of parliament for Caernarvon, a seat he held until 1945. He quickly became known for his radicalism and earned notoriety for his opposition to the Boer War.
In 1905, the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, appointed Lloyd George as president of the Board of Trade. In 1908, he was named chancellor of the exchequer in the government of HH Asquith. Lloyd George's 1909 budget has been called the 'people's budget' since it provided for social insurance that was to be partly financed by land and income taxes. The budget was rejected by the House of Lords. This, in turn, led directly to the Parliament Act of 1911 by which the Lords lost their power of veto.
Lloyd George remained chancellor of the exchequer through the early years of World War One. In 1915 he was appointed minister of munitions in Asquith's wartime coalition government. In July 1916 he became secretary of state for war, but was increasingly critical of Asquith. In December 1916, with the support of the Conservative and Labour leaders, he replaced Asquith as prime minister. Lloyd George's achievements in the last two years of the war included persuading the Royal Navy to introduce the convoy system and the unification of the Allied military command under the French general Ferdinand Foch.
At the successful conclusion of the war, Lloyd George was Britain's chief delegate to the Paris Peace Conference that drafted the Versailles Treaty. He remained prime minister, although now dependent on Conservative support. In 1921 he secured the settlement that established the Irish Free State. In the summer of 1922, Lloyd George was involved in a scandal involving the selling of knighthoods and peerages. In October, the Conservatives withdrew from the coalition over their opposition to Britain's foreign policy in Turkey. Lloyd George resigned as prime minister.
He remained in parliament, but was marginalised politically. In 1944 he was made Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor. He died on 26 March 1945 at Ty Newydd, Llanystumdwy, Wales.
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As an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941) tried to reconcile the developing powers of modern government and society with the maintenance of individual liberties and opportunities for personal development.
As the United States entered the 20th century, many men became concerned with trying to equip government so as to deal with the excesses and inequities fostered by the industrial development of the 19th century. States passed laws trying to regulate utility rates and insurance manipulations and established minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws. Louis Brandeis was one of the most important Americans involved in this effort, first as a publicly minded lawyer and, after 1916, as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Adolph and Fredericka Dembitz Brandeis. His parents were Bohemian Jews who had come to America in the aftermath of those European revolutionary movements of 1848 that had sought to establish liberal political institutions and to strengthen the processes of democracy so as to safeguard the dignity and potential for self-development of the common man.
In 1875, at the age of 18, Brandeis entered the Harvard Law School without a formal college degree; he achieved one of the most outstanding records in its history. At the same time he tutored fellow students in order to earn money (necessary because of his father's loss of fortune in the Panic of 1873). Although Brandeis was not the required age of 21, the Harvard Corporation passed a special resolution granting him a bachelor of law degree in 1877. After a further year of legal study at Harvard, he was admitted to the bar.
Early Legal Career
In 1879 Brandeis began a partnership with his classmate Samuel D. Warren. Together they wrote one of the most famous law articles in history, "The Right to Privacy," published in the December 1890 Harvard Law Review. In it Brandeis enunciated the view he later echoed in the Supreme Court case of Olmstead v. United States (1928), in which he argued that the makers of the Constitution, as evidence of their effort "to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations ... conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
During this stage of his career, Brandeis spent much time helping the Harvard Law School. Though he declined an offer to become an assistant professor, in 1886 he helped found the Harvard Law School Association, an alumni group, and served for many years as its secretary.
Years of Public Service
By 1890 Brandeis had developed a lucrative practice and was able to serve, without pay, in various public causes. When a fight arose, for example, over preservation of the Boston subway system, he helped save it; similarly, he helped lead the opposition to the New Haven Railroad's monopoly of transportation in New England. The Massachusetts State Legislature's adoption of a savings-bank life insurance system was the result of his investigation of the inequities of existing insurance programs.
Brandeis also took part in the effort to bring legal protections to industrial laborers, and as part of this effort he contributed a major concept to Supreme Court litigation. In 1908, defending an Oregon law establishing wages and hours for women laborers, Brandeis introduced what came to be known as the "Brandeis brief," which went far beyond legal precedent to consider the various economic and social factors which led the legislature to pass the law. Many lawyers followed the Brandeis brief and presented relevant scientific evidence and expert opinion dealing with the great social problems of the day mirrored in judicial litigation.
Appointment to the Supreme Court
President Woodrow Wilson offered Brandeis a position in his Cabinet in 1913, but the Boston lawyer preferred to remain simply a counselor to the President. Brandeis continued his investigations of the implications for democracy of the growing concentration of wealth in large corporations. In 1914 he published Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use It, in which he set down his antimonopoly views.
Wilson's nomination of Brandeis to the Supreme Court on Jan. 28, 1916, aroused a dirty political fight. Six former presidents of the American Bar Association and former president of the United States William Howard Taft denounced Brandeis for his allegedly radical political views. Some anti-Semitism was involved, for Brandeis was the first Jew ever nominated for America's highest court. Finally, however, the fight was won in the Senate, and Brandeis took his seat on June 5, 1916, where he served with distinction until Feb. 13, 1939.
Brandeis often joined his colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in dissenting against the Court's willingness to pose its judgments about economic and social policy against those of individual states. Also with Holmes, Brandeis bravely defended civil liberties throughout this era. If he did uphold wide use of state powers, it was only in the service of furthering individual self-fulfillment; he also rejected incursions of a state upon a citizen's liberty. Two examples are the Olmstead case (already noted), involving wiretapping, and Whitney v. California, in which Brandeis opposed a California law suppressing free speech.
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The Woodrow Wilson Birthplace is referred to as The Manse, which is the name of a Presbyterian minister's home. The Manse was constructed in 1846 by the Staunton First Presbyterian Church. It has twelve rooms with twelve fireplaces, and cost about $4,000 (equal to $103,467 today). The Wilson family moved into the house in 1855. At that time the family only consisted of his two parents, Jessie Woodrow Wilson and Joseph Ruggles Wilson, and their two daughters Marion and Annie, who were about four and two years old, respectively. Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in what is now called the "birth room" on December 28, 1856. The Wilsons left The Manse in early 1858 when Joseph Wilson accepted a call from a congregation in Augusta, Georgia.
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was a prominent Presbyterian theologian and father of President Woodrow Wilson and of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, Jr.
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Wilson's mother, Janet Woodrow Wilson, born in Carlisle, England, but raised in America, was a warm and loving companion to Wilson's father and a devoted mother to her four children—Woodrow, his two older sisters, and a younger brother. Later in life,
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Although he is generally associated with Princeton University and the governorship of New Jersey prior to becoming President of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia and spent 13 childhood years in Augusta, Georgia. The son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister, he moved with his parents and two sisters to Augusta in 1858, when his father was installed as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. The future president, then known as “Tommy,� had just turned one when the Wilsons moved to Augusta. His younger brother was born while they lived in Augusta.
In 1860, the church offered Reverend Wilson a raise and a comfortable new house as incentives to remain. The salary increased from an above average $2,500 to a generous $3,000 per annum. The church purchased the house for $10,000. The Classical Revival 2½-story brick home had conveniences of the day, including gas lighting and running water. The church justified this purchase by explaining its goal of making the pastor and his family so comfortable in this temporal life that his only earthly concern would be the care of his congregants� souls.
The Wilson family remained in Augusta until the fall of 1870 when Tommy was nearly 14. Wilson suggested in a speech in 1909 that his earliest memory was standing at the front gate and hearing someone pass by exclaiming that Abraham Lincoln had been elected, and there would be war. He also remembered wounded and dying soldiers, when his father’s churchyard had been confiscated by the Confederate government to use as a hospital. Joseph Wilson, originally from Ohio, defended slavery in a widely distributed sermon and served as Chaplain in the Confederate Army. Young Tommy Wilson witnessed Jefferson Davis being brought under guard through the streets of Augusta after his capture.
While living in the house, Wilson formed the Lightfoot Baseball Club with friends and served as its president. He wrote a constitution and bylaws and conducted the meetings according to Parliamentary Procedure in the carriage house. This started his lifelong fascination with governing and political science, culminating in the U.S. Presidency and formation of the League of Nations.
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Indeed, the Augusta home has recently been refurbished. I will have to visit one day.

Indeed, the Augusta home has recently been refurbished. I will have to visit one day."
I didn't know about the Augusta Home. I'll have to visit while reading the book since Augusta is only about an hour and a half away from me.


Davidson College is an institution of higher learning established in 1837 by Presbyterians of North Carolina. Since its founding, the ties that bind the college to its Presbyterian heritage, including the historic understanding of Christian faith called The Reformed Tradition, have remained close and strong. The college is committed to continuing this vital relationship.
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Chartered in 1746 as the College of New Jersey � the name by which it was known for 150 years � Princeton University was British North America's fourth college. Located in Elizabeth for one year and then in Newark for nine, the College of New Jersey moved to Princeton in 1756. It was housed in Nassau Hall, which was newly built on land donated by Nathaniel FitzRandolph. Nassau Hall contained the entire College for nearly half a century.
In 1896, when expanded program offerings brought the College university status, the College of New Jersey was officially renamed Princeton University in honor of its host community of Princeton. Four years later, in 1900, the Graduate School was established.
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Economist, political analyst, and editor of The Economist who was one of the most influential journalists of the mid-Victorian period.
His father’s family had been general merchants for several generations, while his maternal uncle Vincent Stuckey was the head of the largest bank in the west of England. Bagehot’s relatives felt that his acute political sense derived from his father, whereas the sparkle and originality of his mind came from his mother.
Bagehot had the severe schooling of an early Victorian. As a child he went to Langport Grammar School, whose headmaster had been a friend of the poet William Wordsworth; at 13 he was sent to Bristol College, one of the best schools in Great Britain. There he received an intense grounding in philosophy, mathematics, literature, the classics, and the new natural sciences.
Because his father was a Unitarian, the obvious choice for Bagehot’s higher education was University College, London (at that time Oxford and Cambridge were decidedly Anglican). Bagehot was a “lanky youth, rather thin and long in the legs with a countenance of remarkable vivacity and characterised by the large eyes that were always noticeable,� wrote Sir Edward Fry, one of his friends at Bristol. Bagehot’s somewhat sardonic manner did not endear him to all of his contemporaries, but he did make a number of lasting friends at University College, notably Richard Holt Hutton, who was for the latter part of the century the distinguished editor of The Spectator; Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet; and, of an older generation, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had been the friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and who had served as a correspondent for The Times during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1846 Bagehot took his bachelor’s degree with first-class honours at University College, despite bad health, and in 1848 he earned his master’s degree with the university’s gold medal in moral and intellectual philosophy.
He studied law for three years after his graduation but never liked it, and it was chance that took him into literature. Bagehot happened to be in Paris at the end of 1851 when Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat took place. He wrote a series of articles in the leading Unitarian journal describing the coup and defending Napoleon and thereby stirred controversy among readers because the coup was widely condemned in England. This, however, convinced Bagehot that he could write, which he began to do while settling down to work in Stuckey’s bank. Over the next several years, he wrote a series of literary essays on John Milton, William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Sir Walter Scott, and Pierre-Jean de Béranger, together with studies of leading political figures such as Henry St. John Bolingbroke, William Pitt, and Sir Robert Peel.
As a banker, Bagehot had written various economic articles that had attracted the attention of James Wilson, financial secretary to the treasury in Lord Palmerston’s government and an influential member of Parliament. Wilson had founded The Economist in 1843. Through this acquaintance, Bagehot met Wilson’s eldest daughter, Eliza. The two were married in April 1858.
The following year Wilson was asked to go to India to reorganize the finances of the Indian government, and he died in Calcutta in 1860, leaving Bagehot, then the manager of the Bristol branch of Stuckey’s bank, in charge of The Economist. For 17 years Bagehot wrote the main article, improved and expanded the statistical and financial sections, and transformed the journal into one of the world’s foremost business and political publications. More than that, he humanized its political approach by emphasising social problems.
Bagehot described himself as a conservative Liberal or “between size in politics.� Unlike many Liberals, he had grown up in the deep countryside and believed strongly that rapid industrialization and urbanization were creating social problems in Britain. He was also an acute observer of international affairs, with an instinctive affection for France and an equal distrust of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany. His early years at The Economist coincided with the American Civil War, about which he wrote nearly 20 articles; instinctively, like many of his British contemporaries, he sympathized with the Confederacy, yet he supported Abraham Lincoln.
In 1867 Bagehot published The English Constitution, an attempt to look behind the facade of the British system of government—crown, Lords, and Commons—to see how it really operated and where true power lay. He was one of the first to observe the overriding power of the Cabinet in the party that commanded an effective majority in the House of Commons. He cultivated many close political friendships, notably with William Ewart Gladstone, who became the first Liberal prime minister in 1868; with Lord Carnarvon among the Conservatives (the author of the British North America Act, the constitution of Canada); and with William Edward Forster (the author of the first public education act in Britain).
Bagehot never succeeded, however, in entering politics himself. He stood for election to Parliament seats representing Manchester, then Bridgwater near his Somerset home (a district that had a notorious reputation for corruption), and finally London University in 1867. But he was a poor speaker and failed each time.
All this time, Bagehot and his wife were living in London, and he was editing a weekly of growing influence. In his 40s he became increasingly frail, and such energy as he had was concentrated on professional economic studies. In 1873 he published Lombard Street, which, though really a tract arguing for a larger central reserve in the hands of the Bank of England, in fact contains the germ of the modern theory of central banking and exchange control. He was working on a major series of economic studies when pneumonia struck him down at the age of 51.
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a Representative and a Senator from Massachusetts; born in Boston, Mass., May 12, 1850; attended a private school and graduated from Harvard University in 1871; editor of the North American Review 1873-1876; graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1874 and admitted to the bar in 1875; earned one of the first Ph.D. degrees in history and government granted by Harvard University in 1876; lecturer on American history at Harvard University 1876-1879; member, State house of representatives 1880-1881; author of many historical, biographical, and political works; unsuccessful Republican candidate in 1882 for election to the Forty-eighth Congress and in 1884 to the Forty-ninth Congress; elected as a Republican to the Fiftieth, Fifty-first, and Fifty-second Congresses and served from March 4, 1887, until March 3, 1893, when he resigned; had been reelected to the Fifty-third Congress, but was later elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1893; reelected to the Senate in 1899, 1905, 1911, 1916, and 1922 and served from March 4, 1893, until his death; Republican Conference chairman (1918-24); president pro tempore (1911-13); chairman, Committee on Immigration (Fifty-fourth through Sixty-second Congresses), Committee on Printing (Fifty-fifth Congress), Committee on the Philippines (Fifty-sixth through Sixty-first Congresses), Committee on Private Land Claims (Sixty-third through Sixty-fifth Congresses), Committee on Foreign Relations (Sixty-sixth through Sixty-eighth Congresses), Republican Conference (1918-24); appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt a member of the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal in 1903; member of the United States Immigration Commission 1907-1910; overseer of Harvard University from 1911 until his death; represented the United States as a member of the Conference on Limitation of Armament in 1921; died in Cambridge, Mass., on November 9, 1924; interment in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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Although my background is Presbyterian/Huguenot and 20th century, I can understand the result of his religious environment.

a Representative and a Senator from Massachusetts; born in Boston, Mass., May 12, 1850; attended a private school and graduated from Harvard University in 1871; editor of the ..."
Henry Cabot Lodge is featured in




A new era of instruction was initiated with the hire of John Barbee Minor in 1845. An 1834 law graduate of UVA, Minor remained at the helm of the law school for 50 years. In his History of the University of Virginia, Philip Alexander Bruce describes Minor’s personality as a young lawyer: “From the hour of his first admission to the bar, he had displayed all those qualities which afterwards so conspicuously distinguished him as an instructor. It is said that, even as a young lawyer, he exhibited extraordinary powers of analysis; that he refused to ask for or accept any relaxation in the stiffest requirements of pleading; and that he showed familiarity with the most obscure and abstruse rules and forms of practice, but, at the same time, was equally well informed about the broad general principles of jurisprudence.� A rigorous and demanding instructor, in Minor’s first ten years of teaching, a mere nine percent of his students were able to pass the exam and earn a Bachelor of Laws degree. His experience as a legal practitioner influenced the way he structured his law courses, affording students the opportunity to combine practical skills with a systematic study of the concepts of law. In 1870, Minor was persuaded to publish his Institutes of Common and Statute Law, cementing his reputation as the leading legal professor in the south and boosting the enrollment of the law school dramatically.
Despite the rigor of his course and examinations, Minor earned the loyalty and admiration of scores of law students during his 50 year tenure at the helm of the University of Virginia law school. He allowed financially strapped students to defer payment of fees until they were established in practice, and put considerable time into writing recommendations that would enable students to secure good positions upon graduation. In 1870 he established a summer law course for practitioners who needed to supplement their practical skills and knowledge of the law. Minor retired from teaching just weeks before his death in July of 1895.
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It began in an era when the education of women was an unconventional notion. But idealism was rampant in the 1840s, and an unshakeable belief in the capacity of women to learn, to lead, and to make a difference in the world prevailed.
Founded as Augusta Female Seminary in 1842 by Rufus W. Bailey, Mary Baldwin College is the oldest institution of higher education for women in the nation affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Among its first students, totaling 57 young women (paying as much as $60 per semester to attend), was Mary Julia Baldwin.
Lauded by the school’s board of trustees for her boldness, intellect, and philanthropic characteristics, Ms. Baldwin was given the challenge of leading the seminary through a turbulent era. In 1863, she was named principal of the seminary and saw the institution through the Civil War, even though all other schools in the area had closed due to the depressed economy and dangerous conditions of the wartime South.
Augusta Female Seminary was renamed Mary Baldwin Seminary in 1895 in honor of Miss Baldwin, and became Mary Baldwin College in 1923. Although much has evolved on campus since its early days in the mid 1800s (including the addition of a few good men in our graduate and adult programs), MBC continues to thrive as one of the finest residential colleges for women in the nation and a leader in personalized, transforming education.
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was an American journalist, publisher, and diplomat. He was the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War I.
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The Caligraph 1, which wrote capitals only, appeared in 1880, but the company soon found that this improved typewriter was still flawed. The machine had a perfectly round plated which resulted in uneven printing quality. There were many other minor problems with typebar suspension, ribbon advancement etcetera. And so, in August 1882, the company introduced two new models: The Caligraph 1 Ideal and the Caligraph 2, which wrote lower case and upper case letters from a full keyboard.
The Caligraph 1 Ideal (shown here) had a faceted platen so that the type always struck a flat surface. The machine was also slightly larger than the original Caligraph 1. The suspension of the type bars was improved and there was a renewed ribbon system. All these improvements were also present on the Caligraph 2.*
The Caligraph 1 is said to have remained in production until 1896, although later models with full keyboards were far more popular.
The Caligraph is an odd looking machine with a long, stretched front and two space bars on either side of the keyboard. Very awkward is the spacing mechanism on the Caligraph. The escapement is driven by a long spring that is fitted lengthwise around a bar under the machine. It puts tension on the vertical rod (pic 6) that is seen behind the machine, to pull the carriage when a key is hit. Since the spring is attached to the bottom of the rod, tremendous tension on the spring is needed to provide enough momentum to pull the carriage. No wonder that on many of the Caligraphs found today, the main spring is broken.
Caligraphs are also known for the large decal on the front, that is often missing.
After a disagreement with his partners in the American Writing Machine Company, Yost went his own way again to set up the typewriter company that bore his own name.
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Ellen Axton's father was a Presbyterian minister, and while she briefly knew her future husband as a child, she and Woodrow Wilson had their first meaningful meeting when he was a young lawyer, attending services at her father's church. As their romance blossomed, her mother died giving birth to another daughter, and her father subsequently lost his grip on reality, and was committed to an insane asylum before killing himself. Barely a year after her father's suicide, Woodrow and Ellen were married at the home of her grandfather, who was also a minister.
Ellen Wilson herself lived through depression in 1905, after her brother, his wife, and their infant son were all killed when the horse pulling their carriage spooked, and plunged into a raging river. In the aftermath she considered suicide, but instead devoted herself to her church and her art. She was a talented painter, and sold many of her works, signed "E.A. Wilson", donating the proceeds to charity.
After her husband became Governor of New Jersey, Mrs Wilson again lapsed into depression when he ran for the Presidency and, fearing that opposition Republicans would use his marital infidelity against him in the campaign, he confessed to his wife that he had been involved with a well-to-do widow, Mary Peck. Mrs Wilson stayed with her husband, but she knew even before he won the election that she was not well. Her kidneys were failing.
She was America's First Lady for only seventeen months, and used her celebrity to speak out for better living conditions for poor and black Americans. She pressed her husband for laws limiting child labor and compelling school attendance. As her illness progressed, her three daughters and her cousin Helen Bones acted as surrogate hostess for White House events, and in her last days Mrs Wilson reportedly told her physician to encourage her husband to re-marry. About six months after her death, President Wilson met Edith Bolling Galt, and they were married several months later.
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British politician, diplomat, and historian best known for his highly successful ambassadorship to the United States (1907�13) and for his study of U.S. politics, The American Commonwealth, which remains a classic.
At Trinity College, Oxford (B.A., 1862; doctor of civil law, 1870), Bryce wrote a prize essay that was published in book form as The Holy Roman Empire (1864). In 1867 he was called to the bar, and from 1870 to 1893 he served as regius professor of civil law at Oxford, where, with Lord Acton, he founded the English Historical Review (1885). From 1880 to 1907 he was a Liberal member of the House of Commons, serving as undersecretary of state for foreign affairs (1886), chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster (1892), and president of the Board of Trade (1894�95). He also presided (1894�96) over what came to be called the Bryce Commission, which recommended the establishment of a ministry of education.
At about this time he began to attack the expansionist British policy that led to the South African War (1899�1902). Thus, when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had also opposed the war, became prime minister in December 1905, he appointed Bryce chief secretary for Ireland.
Bryce, who had made the first of his several visits to the U.S. in 1870, was sent as ambassador to Washington, D.C., in February 1907. He already had made many friends in American political, educational, and literary circles and had become widely popular in the U.S. for The American Commonwealth, 3 vol. (1888), in which he expressed admiration for the American people and their government. As ambassador he dealt principally with U.S.-Canadian relations, which he greatly improved, in part by personal consultation with the Canadian governor general and ministers. In the process, he also bettered relations between Great Britain and Canada, securing Canadian acceptance of an arbitration convention (April 4, 1908) originally signed by Great Britain and the United States. He retired as ambassador in April 1913.
On Jan. 1, 1914, Bryce was created a viscount. In the same year, he became a member of the International Court of Justice, The Hague. Later, during World War I, he headed a committee that judged Germany guilty of atrocities in Belgium and France. Subsequently, he advocated the establishment of the League of Nations.
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American historian and educationalist, was born at Shutesbury (near Amherst), Massachusetts, on the 16th of April 1850. He graduated at Amherst, at the head of his class, in 1872; and between 1873 and 1876 he studied political science, history and economics at Göttingen, Berlin and Heidelberg, Germany, receiving the degree of Ph.D. at Heidelberg in 1876, with the highest honours (summa cum lande). From 1876 almost until his death he was connected with the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, being in turn a fellow, an associate in history (1878�1883), an associate professor (1883�1891) and after 1891 professor of American and institutional history, In addition he was lecturer on history in Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1878-1881, and for many years took an active part in Chautauqua work. In 1884, also, he was one of the founders of the American Historical Association, of which he was secretary until 1900. In 1882 he founded the “Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science,� and at the time of his death some forty volumes had been issued under his editorship. After 1887 he also edited for the United States Bureau of Education the series of monographs entitled “Contributions to American Educational History,� he himself preparing the College of William and Mary (1887), and Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (1888). It was as a teacher, however, that Adams rendered his most valuable services, and many American historical scholars owe their training and to a considerable extent their enthusiasm to him. He died at Amherst, Massachusetts, on the 30th of July 1901.
In addition to the monographs mentioned above, he published: Maryland's Influence in Founding a National Commonwealth (1877); Methods of Historical Study (1884); Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to the United States (1885); and the Life and Writings of Jared Sparks (2 vols., Boston, 1893), his most important work.
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Prof. Richard T. Ely was born in Ripley, N. Y., April 13, 1854. He received his early education in the public schools of his native city and later attended the Normal at Fredonia, N. Y., and at eighteen entered Dartmouth college. One year later he was transferred to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1876. After three years of graduate study abroad Prof. Ely received his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the famous University of Heidelberg. In 1881 he was appointed to the chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, which he retained until 1892, when he came to Wisconsin as Director of the School of Economics, Political Science and History, which was organized that year, and of which he is now the head. During this comparatively brief period of twenty years, Prof. Ely has written voluminously and effectively. His works upon economic and social questions have gained a wide reception in this country and have been translated into many foreign tongues. Almost every important magazine has printed articles from his pen.
Prof. Ely was a member of the Maryland Tax Commission and prepared its report which at once took high rank in the literature of finance. A mere enumeration of his writings which have assumed the proportions of books would exhaust our space. In addition he has edited two important series of works devoted to economic, social and political subjects.
While many persons stand ready to criticise Prof. Ely's views upon many economic questions, we are compelled to recognize the fact that his ideas are growing less radical because the current of things is moving toward his way of thinking.
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How the Institutions Have Changed from What They were Intended to Be
*Congress: There has been a growth and predominance of congressional power as the result of increased efficiency of organization. This is evident in congressional influence in the appointment process (increasing control over both nominations and confirmations), treaty process (ability to stall treaties in committee), the supervision of executive administrative agencies, and appropriations (delineated as opposed to appropriations of for the whole).
*Executive: The method of choosing the President has changed considerably from the intent of the Constitution. The initial idea behind the electoral system was to have trustworthy, nonpartisan men elect the President. The creation of party conventions took choice away from electors since they, in practice, must vote for their party's pre-selected candidate. It also took away power from congress whose caucuses chose electors until 1832. Finally, elections by party conventions also caused candidates to suppress unpopular political tenants and rewarded short political records.
*Federal System: Wilson asserts that there was a change the condition of government that made checks and balances become less effective. The most important check envisioned by the founders, the check between state and national powers, has been the least effectual. Increased federal power is evident in both policy, such as through interstate commerce, as well as sentiment. It is the federal government that has ultimate power in deciding the jurisdictions of state governments--so federal power constantly grows. The only recourse of the states in arresting the growth of congressional power is also in the federal branch, namely the Supreme Court.
Predominance of Congressional Committees
Wilson remarks that our legislature should be viewed as a conglomerate, not a homogeneous body. Referring to the committees, he notes that, "we are ruled by a score and a half of 'little legislatures'." While committees in the UK House of Commons merely investigate and report legislation, committees in the U.S. Congresses actually originate and conduct legislation.
*Wilson argues that Congress has no visible, thus no controllable, party organization. Legislation is the aggregate of committee bargaining, thus mixing the minority and majority party opinions. Committee reports representations the will of a few individuals, not of the unified party in power as a whole. This contrasts greatly with parliamentary systems where all bills introduced represent that entire coalition's stance.
*Debates in congress have little effect on the minds of the people. People are willing to pay attention to select leaders, not 40 plus standing committee chairmen. The US congress does not have national leaders that the public looks towards for guidance on policy.
*Congressionally, the US financial administration is in the hands of 24 congressional committees. Divisions include a chasm between all taxing and spending. Unlike the English parliament, the US Congress does have direct contact with the financial officers in the executive. This means that the House is much less acquainted with the details of the Federal Treasury than the English House of Commons.
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How the Institutions Have Changed from What They were Intended to Be
*Congress: There has been a growth and predominance of congressional power as the result of increase..."
Thanks, Bryan. I had my reservations about reading this book, and while I still don't especially like the man, I am beginning to respect where he was coming from. This summary is very useful.

When Bryn Mawr College opened its doors in 1885, it offered women a more ambitious academic program than any previously available to them in the United States. Other women's colleges existed, but Bryn Mawr was the first to offer graduate education through the Ph.D.—a signal of its founders' refusal to accept the limitations imposed on women's intellectual achievement at other institutions.
A Quaker Legacy
The founding of Bryn Mawr carried out the will of Joseph W. Taylor, a physician who wanted to establish a college "for the advanced education of females." Taylor originally envisioned an institution that would inculcate in its students the beliefs of the Society of Friends (popularly known as Quakers), but by 1893 his trustees had broadened the College's mission by deciding that Bryn Mawr would be non-denominational. Bryn Mawr's first administrators had determined that excellence in scholarship was more important than religious faith in appointing the faculty, although the College remained committed to Quaker values such as freedom of conscience.
The college's mission was to offer women rigorous intellectual training and the chance to do to original research, a European-style program that was then available only at a few elite institutions for men. That was a formidable challenge, especially in light of the resistance of society at large, at the end of the 19th century, to the notion that women could be the intellectual peers of men.
M. Carey Thomas' Academic Ideal
Fortunately, at its inception, the college was adopted as a moral cause and a life's work by a woman of immense tenacity, M. Carey Thomas. Thomas, Bryn Mawr's first dean and second president, had been so intent upon undertaking advanced study that when American universities denied her the opportunity to enter a Ph.D. program on an equal footing with male students, she went to Europe to pursue her degree.
When Thomas learned of the plans to establish a college for women just outside Philadelphia, she brought to the project the same determination she had applied to her own quest for higher education. Thomas' ambition—for herself and for all women of intellect and imagination—was the engine that drove Bryn Mawr to achievement after achievement.
The College established undergraduate and graduate programs that were widely viewed as models of academic excellence in both the humanities and the sciences, programs that elevated standards for higher education nationwide. Under the leadership of Thomas and James E. Rhoads, who served the College as president from 1885 to 1894, Bryn Mawr repeatedly broke new ground. It was, for example, the first institution in the United States to offer fellowships for graduate study to women; its self-government association, the first in the country at its founding in 1892, was unique in the United States in granting to students the right not only to enforce but to make all of the rules governing their conduct; its faculty, alumnae and students engaged in research that expanded human knowledge.
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"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." With these words, Frederick Jackson Turner laid the foundation for modern historical study of the American West and presented a "frontier thesis" that continues to influence historical thinking even today.
Turner was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1861. His father, a journalist by trade and local historian by avocation, piqued Turner's interest in history. After his graduation from the University of Wisconsin in 1884, Turner decided to become a professional historian, and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1890. He served as a teacher and scholar at the University of Wisconsin from 1889 to 1910, when he joined Harvard's faculty. He retired in 1924 but continued his research until his death in 1932.
Turner's contribution to American history was to argue that the frontier past best explained the distinctive history of the United States. He most cogently articulated this idea in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which he first delivered to a gathering of historians in 1893 at Chicago, then the site of the World's Columbian Exposition, an enormous fair to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus' voyage. Although almost totally ignored at the time, Turner's lecture eventually gained such wide distribution and influence that a contemporary scholar has called it "the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history."
Three years before Turner's pronouncement of the frontier thesis, the U.S. Census Bureau had announced the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line. Turner took this "closing of the frontier" as an opportunity to reflect upon the influence it had exercised. He argued that the frontier had meant that every American generation returned "to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line." Along this frontier -- which he also described as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" -- Americans again and again recapitulated the developmental stages of the emerging industrial order of the 1890's. This development, in Turner's description of the frontier, "begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on with the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader... the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farm communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with the city and the factory system."
For Turner, the deeper significance of the frontier lay in the effects of this social recapitulation on the American character. "The frontier," he claimed, "is the line of most rapid Americanization." The presence and predominance of numerous cultural traits -- "that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things... that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism" -- could all be attributed to the influence of the frontier.
Turner's essay reached triumphalist heights in his belief that the promotion of individualistic democracy was the most important effect of the frontier. Individuals, forced to rely on their own wits and strength, he believed, were simply too scornful of rank to be amenable to the exercise of centralized political power.
Turner offered his frontier thesis as both an analysis of the past and a warning about the future. If the frontier had been so essential to the development of American culture and democracy, then what would befall them as the frontier closed? It was on this forboding note that he closed his address: "And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history."
More than a century after he first delivered his frontier thesis, historians still hotly debate Turner's ideas and approach. His critics have denied everything from his basic assumptions to the small details of his argument. The mainstream of the profession has long since discarded Turner's assumption that the frontier is the key to American history as a whole; they point instead to the critical influence of such factors as slavery and the Civil War, immigration, and the development of industrial capitalism. But even within Western and frontier history, a growing body of historians has contested Turner's approach.
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Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), for whom the ACLS lecture series is named, was the first chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, from 1920 to 1926. He began his teaching career at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the B.A.degree in 1887, and the Ph.D. in 1890. He later taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard, where he was Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the time of his retirement in 1931, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1908 to 1924. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1922, and was a founder and the second president of the Medieval Academy of America.
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was a capitalist and philanthropist who was active in New York City politics. He was President of Phelps Dodge, and served as "adviser and financier" to Woodrow Wilson. He was known for his charity work in World War I.
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was an American businessman. He was president of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902
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Francis Landey Patton, a native of Bermuda, began his teaching career at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He was called to the seminary in Princeton, where his reputation as a teacher and theologian � and his popularity as an after-dinner speaker � grew rapidly. Even those who disagreed with his rigid, conservative Presbyterian views admired his intellect and wit.
His election as McCosh’s successor did not meet with unanimous enthusiasm. Many had hoped not only for a devout educator, but also for an experienced administrator who would bring efficiency to the expanding College.
Faculty accounts indicate that Patton lacked initiative in important policy matters, resisted meaningful curriculum reform, and was lax in matters of discipline and scholarly standards � in short, as one colleague said kindly, he was “a wonderfully poor administrator.� But students of the 1890s were unanimous in their affection for him.
In the fall of 1896, Patton proclaimed a three-day holiday to celebrate the Sesquicentennial of the College and to confirm its new official name, Princeton University. In the process, he changed the wording of the seal from Collegii Neo-Caesariensis to Universitatis Princetoniensis, retaining the open Bible at the center and returning to the ancient motto: Dei sub numine viget (Under God’s power she flourishes).
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I thought this was an interesting site:
The Presidents of Princeton University
1746 to the present
Colonial Times
Jonathan Dickinson, 1747
Aaron Burr, Sr., 1748�57
Jonathan Edwards, 1758
Samuel Davies, 1759�61
Samuel Finley, 1761�66
Revolutionary War
John Witherspoon, 1768�94
Nineteenth Century
Samuel S. Smith, 1795�1812
Ashbel Green, 1812�22
James Carnahan, 1823�54
John Maclean, Jr., 1854�68
James McCosh, 1868�88
Francis L. Patton, 1888�1902
Twentieth Century
Woodrow Wilson, 1902�10
John G. Hibben, 1912�32
Harold W. Dodds, 1933�57
Robert F. Goheen, 1957�72
William G. Bowen, 1972�88
Harold T. Shapiro, 1988�2001
Twenty-first Century
Shirley M. Tilghman, 2001�
Source: Princeton University Website
Write-up on the above website about Woodrow Wilson as it relates to Princeton University:
Woodrow Wilson
1902-10
Woodrow Wilson entered Princeton as a member of the Class of 1879. “Tommy,� as his classmates called him, was an eager student and an acknowledged leader. Not satisfied with the courses offered by the College, he supplemented the formal curriculum with an ambitious program of independent reading. Still feeling less than fully occupied, he became managing editor of the Daily Princetonian and organized a student club for discussion of public affairs. His classmates elected him speaker of the American Whig Society, one of two principal campus groups. Pursuing athletic interests, he became secretary of the Football Association and president of the Baseball Association.
After graduation, he went to law school at the University of Virginia and practiced in Atlanta. Disillusioned by the tedium and materialism of legal damage suits, he enrolled in Johns Hopkins for graduate work in political science and history. His doctoral dissertation, “Congressional Government,� led to teaching positions at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and finally Princeton.
As professor of jurisprudence, Wilson built up a strong prelaw curriculum. He was soon voted most popular teacher and became friend and counselor to countless students who were attracted by his warmth and high-mindedness. During the sesquicentennial celebration of 1896, he delivered the keynote address: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.�
When the trustees elected him president, Wilson proposed a $12.5 million program to transform Princeton into a full-scale university.
At the time this was a staggering sum, almost 25 times greater than the annual budget, but the trustees approved it immediately.
He began by creating an administrative structure � departments of instruction with heads that reported directly to him. In place of the aimless elective system, he substituted a unified curriculum of general studies during the freshman and sophomore years, capped by concentrated study in one discipline (the academic “major�) during the junior and senior years. He also added an honors program for able and ambitious students. Wilson tightened academic standards so severely that enrollment declined sharply until 1907.
Supported by the first all-out alumni fund-raising campaign in Princeton’s history, he doubled the faculty overnight through the appointment of almost 50 young assistant professors, called “preceptors,� charged with guiding students through assigned reading and small group discussion. With a remarkable eye for quality, he assembled a youthful faculty with unusual talent and zest for teaching.
In strengthening the science program, Wilson called for basic, unfettered, “pure� research. In the field of religion, he made biblical instruction a scholarly subject. He broke the hold of conservative Presbyterians over the board of trustees, and appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty.
Before the end of his term, he authorized fellow members of the Class of 1879 to cast two heroic bronze tigers for the front steps of Nassau Hall. (Tigers appeared as mascots during McCosh’s tenure.) After modernizing the administration, the curriculum, and teaching methods, Wilson proposed the creation of quadrangles, or “colleges,� in which undergraduates of all four classes would live with their own recreational facilities and resident faculty masters. Membership would be by assignment or lot.
Twenty-five years after his death, the trustees named the School of Public and International Affairs for him. Sixty years after the defeat of his “quad plan,� they carved out an area of the campus � six dormitories and a dining and social center � as a distinct residential complex known as Woodrow Wilson College. The trustees also created the Woodrow Wilson Award � the highest honor the University bestows upon an alumnus in recognition of his or her distinguished public service.
Their image of him:
The Presidents of Princeton University
1746 to the present
Colonial Times
Jonathan Dickinson, 1747
Aaron Burr, Sr., 1748�57
Jonathan Edwards, 1758
Samuel Davies, 1759�61
Samuel Finley, 1761�66
Revolutionary War
John Witherspoon, 1768�94
Nineteenth Century
Samuel S. Smith, 1795�1812
Ashbel Green, 1812�22
James Carnahan, 1823�54
John Maclean, Jr., 1854�68
James McCosh, 1868�88
Francis L. Patton, 1888�1902
Twentieth Century
Woodrow Wilson, 1902�10
John G. Hibben, 1912�32
Harold W. Dodds, 1933�57
Robert F. Goheen, 1957�72
William G. Bowen, 1972�88
Harold T. Shapiro, 1988�2001
Twenty-first Century
Shirley M. Tilghman, 2001�
Source: Princeton University Website
Write-up on the above website about Woodrow Wilson as it relates to Princeton University:
Woodrow Wilson
1902-10
Woodrow Wilson entered Princeton as a member of the Class of 1879. “Tommy,� as his classmates called him, was an eager student and an acknowledged leader. Not satisfied with the courses offered by the College, he supplemented the formal curriculum with an ambitious program of independent reading. Still feeling less than fully occupied, he became managing editor of the Daily Princetonian and organized a student club for discussion of public affairs. His classmates elected him speaker of the American Whig Society, one of two principal campus groups. Pursuing athletic interests, he became secretary of the Football Association and president of the Baseball Association.
After graduation, he went to law school at the University of Virginia and practiced in Atlanta. Disillusioned by the tedium and materialism of legal damage suits, he enrolled in Johns Hopkins for graduate work in political science and history. His doctoral dissertation, “Congressional Government,� led to teaching positions at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and finally Princeton.
As professor of jurisprudence, Wilson built up a strong prelaw curriculum. He was soon voted most popular teacher and became friend and counselor to countless students who were attracted by his warmth and high-mindedness. During the sesquicentennial celebration of 1896, he delivered the keynote address: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.�
When the trustees elected him president, Wilson proposed a $12.5 million program to transform Princeton into a full-scale university.
At the time this was a staggering sum, almost 25 times greater than the annual budget, but the trustees approved it immediately.
He began by creating an administrative structure � departments of instruction with heads that reported directly to him. In place of the aimless elective system, he substituted a unified curriculum of general studies during the freshman and sophomore years, capped by concentrated study in one discipline (the academic “major�) during the junior and senior years. He also added an honors program for able and ambitious students. Wilson tightened academic standards so severely that enrollment declined sharply until 1907.
Supported by the first all-out alumni fund-raising campaign in Princeton’s history, he doubled the faculty overnight through the appointment of almost 50 young assistant professors, called “preceptors,� charged with guiding students through assigned reading and small group discussion. With a remarkable eye for quality, he assembled a youthful faculty with unusual talent and zest for teaching.
In strengthening the science program, Wilson called for basic, unfettered, “pure� research. In the field of religion, he made biblical instruction a scholarly subject. He broke the hold of conservative Presbyterians over the board of trustees, and appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty.
Before the end of his term, he authorized fellow members of the Class of 1879 to cast two heroic bronze tigers for the front steps of Nassau Hall. (Tigers appeared as mascots during McCosh’s tenure.) After modernizing the administration, the curriculum, and teaching methods, Wilson proposed the creation of quadrangles, or “colleges,� in which undergraduates of all four classes would live with their own recreational facilities and resident faculty masters. Membership would be by assignment or lot.
Twenty-five years after his death, the trustees named the School of Public and International Affairs for him. Sixty years after the defeat of his “quad plan,� they carved out an area of the campus � six dormitories and a dining and social center � as a distinct residential complex known as Woodrow Wilson College. The trustees also created the Woodrow Wilson Award � the highest honor the University bestows upon an alumnus in recognition of his or her distinguished public service.
Their image of him:



first dean of the Graduate School, was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on May 17, 1853. He entered Princeton in 1870, but soon withdrew because of poor health and for two years attended Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, where his father was a professor in the Danville Theological Seminary. He returned to Princeton in 1872, graduating in the Class of 1874. After college, he taught high school Latin in Cincinnati for six years and, following a period of study in Europe, served for two years as principal of the Morris Academy in Morristown, New Jersey.
In 1883 he was called to Princeton by President McCosh to fill the newly founded Giger chair in Latin. Early in his career he published a book about the teacher of Charlemagne, Alcuin and the Rise of Christian Schools, and a Latin grammar he hoped would lead secondary school students ``without too many scratches'' through what Alcuin had called ``the thorny thickets of grammatical density.'' He was president of the American Philological Association, a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, one of the founders of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, and the principal founder of the American Classical League, which he organized in an effort to stem the decline of interest in the classics -- in his view, ``the gold standard of education.''
The organizing and fund-raising talents West used in his efforts on behalf of the classics also found dramatic expression in the University's highly successful sesquicentennial celebration in 1896. As secretary of the committee in charge of the celebration, he organized a splendid three-day affair, including a distinguished program of public lectures by visiting scholars from abroad that set a pattern for other, later university celebrations, and a spectacular torchlight procession of 2,000 gaily costumed alumni that stimulated the development of the most colorful event of the annual Commencement season -- the alumni parade.
West also helped to obtain President Cleveland's participation in the celebration, and after his second term as president, Cleveland moved to Princeton, naming the house and grounds that West found for him ``Westland.'' On his election as a University trustee, Cleveland became chairman of the trustees' committee on the graduate school and West's strong supporter.
As secretary of the committee that sought gifts in connection with the sesquicentennial celebration, West played a significant role in the raising of funds for endowment and for a library and three dormitories (``Here's to Andy three million West,'' the seniors sang, ``At gathering money he is the best''); he was also largely responsible for introducing collegiate gothic architecture at Princeton, communicating his enthusiasm for the gothic of Oxford and Cambridge to M. Taylor Pyne and other donors and -- through Pyne's influence as chairman of the grounds and buildings committe~e -- to other members of the board of trustees.
With his appointment in December 1900 as first dean of the graduate school, West devoted his energy and talents to the development of the school and particularly to the creation of a residential graduate college. He wanted Princeton to lead the way in providing adequate residences for American graduate students. In the spring of 1903, after visiting Oxford, Cambridge, and other universities in Britain and on the continent, he outlined his proposal for a residential college in a handsomely illustrated book, which he proceeded to use, with great effectiveness, in raising funds for this project. One of the first results of his effort was a $275,000 bequest left in the spring of 1906 by Mrs. Josephine Thomson Swann, of Princeton, for a graduate college in memory of her first husband, United States Senator Robert S. Thomson, of the Class of 1817.
The Swann bequest brought to light a disagreement between West and President Wilson regarding the location of the graduate college that marked the onset of the great controversy between these two strong and stubborn sons of Presbyterian ministers. From the beginning, Wilson had wanted the graduate college ``at the heart'' of the University as ``a means of vitalizing the whole intellectual life'' of the place. West appeared to be in agreement at first: in his book, he spoke of the influence the proposed graduate college would have on ``every undergraduate who passes it in his daily walks.'' However, as his plans developed, he settled on a location geographically separate from the main campus, where, as he put it, the graduate college would be free from the distractions of undergraduate life, and thus able to develop ``its own true life.''
West's position was greatly strengthened in the fall of 1906 when he received an invitation to the presidency of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What his loss would mean to Princeton was widely discussed in the nation's press as well as in the Princetonian and the Alumni Weekly. After the adoption of a trustees' resolution (drafted by Wilson) declaring that the board would consider his loss ``quite irreparable'' because it had ``particularly counted upon him to put into operation the Graduate College which he conceived and for which it has planned,'' West finally declined the invitation, and the New York Sun headlined its announcement ``WEST WON'T G0.''
West suffered a setback in the spring of 1908, when the trustees voted to locate the Thomson graduate college between Prospect and Seventy-nine Hall. A year later, however, West's continuing efforts were rewarded by a letter he received from Procter and Gamble Company President William Cooper Procter 1883, whose wife had been a student of West's at the Hughes high school in Cincinnati. Procter offered the University $500,000 for the graduate college, provided the trustees raised an equal amount from other sources and selected some site other than the Prospect one.
The stalemate that followed the Procter offer ended abruptly in May of 1910 with the death in Salem, Massachusetts, of Isaac C. Wyman 1848, a wealthy bachelor West had visited a number of years before, and sought to persuade to leave his money to Princeton for a graduate college to be built near where his father had fought in the Revolutionary battle of Princeton. From Salem, where he had gone for the funeral and probate of the will, West telegraphed President Wilson and Trustee M. Taylor Pyne (by then chairman of the graduate school committee) that Wyman had left his residuary estate (estimated originally at upwards of $2 million but eventually realized at a little less than $800,000) for the purposes of the Graduate College and had named West as one of two executors and trustees. ``I laid a spray of Ivy from Nassau Hall on Mr. Wyman's casket,'' West reported in a letter to Pyne describing the funeral, ``and I planted an Ivy root from Nassau Hall at his grave.''
President Wilson having acknowledged defeat in the matter of location, the Board, on his recommendation, unanimously authorized acceptance of the Procter gift; it also voted to extend its thanks to West for his ``great services to the University'' in obtaining the Wyman bequest.
Built on the north edge of the University's golf links, half a mile from the main campus, its chief supporters remembered by Thomson College, Procter Hall, Wyman House, Pyne Tower, and Cleveland Tower, the graduate college was dedicated on October 22, 1913, with speeches by, among others, Dean West and ex-President Taft.
Although his main ambition was now fulfilled, West continued to exercise his money-raising talent. When Henry Clay Frick, on being shown Procter Hall, observed that it ``looked too damn much like a church -- all it needs is an organ,'' West quickly persuaded him to give one. Nor was he discomfited by Edward W. Bok's comment that Princeton needed a memorial to Woodrow Wilson; he promptly exacted from Bok endowment for a Woodrow Wilson professorship.
A large man (the undergraduate Faculty Song described him as ``63 inches around the vest'') with an impressive voice, West was an unforgettable personage. A wit and a satirist, he delighted in epigrams and limericks. He also took special pleasure in writing the honorary degree citations, and was always ready to respond to a request for an elegant inscription for a new building. He enjoyed dining out, fine food, good conversation, a good cigar, a good detective story, and a good joke.
West retired in 1928 after forty-five years as Giger professor of Latin and twenty-seven as dean of the graduate school. Classicist Edward Capps, who had been called from the University of Chicago by Wilson and had been one of his strongest partisans, wrote to West: ``You are entitled to reflect, as few of us are, that you have seen most of your dreams come true. The Graduate School and the Graduate College are your sole creations, and they are splendid.'' At the same time, the university conferred on West an honorary doctor of letters, and the Daily Princetonian issued a 32-page special edition to recount his achievements. A few months earlier, R. Tait McKenzie's bronze statue of him, given by William Cooper Procter, had been erected in the main quadrangle of the Graduate College and a small house was completed next to Wyman House for his use the rest of his life.
In his retirement years, he recommended Princeton as ``a good place to grow old in'' to members of the Nassau Club, when they gave him a dinner on his eighty-first birthday, learned with satisfaction of the endowment by the Carnegie Corporation and anonymous donors of The Andrew Fleming West chair in classics, and, with the help of President Dodds, who went to see him at his request, planned his funeral. After ``some bantering back and forth and a considerable amount of laughter,'' they outlined a full service and left copies at the office and home of the president and the dean of the graduate school -- West ``had never been prone to leave things at loose ends,'' Mr. Dodds later recalled, ``and his funeral was to be no exception.''
He died on December 27, 1943, and the funeral service -- as planned -- was held in the University Chapel three days later.
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Following Cleveland's retirement from political office in 1897, he played the stock market and practiced law in order to support his substantial family—though it is estimated that by 1896 he had amassed a moderate personal fortune of $350,000. He moved to a spacious house in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was treated like royalty by the town's inhabitants. He also became a trustee of Princeton University and began writing essays and political commentary, including a book—Presidential Problems (1904)—which focused on some of his most controversial decisions. He never wrote his autobiography, however. Cleveland also served on several corporate boards and gave public speeches. The death of his oldest daughter Ruth, in 1904, visibly aged the old Democrat. Some of his friends said that he never fully recovered.
Grover Cleveland died as he had lived: determined to be in control. In the grip of a gastro-intestinal disease complicated by an ailment of the heart and kidneys, Cleveland suffered great pain in the spring of 1908. A severe attack hit him while on vacation in late March of 1908, causing him to think that the end was near. With great secrecy, he was rushed by automobile to Princeton, where he died early on June 24. "I have tried so hard to do right" were his final words.
Two days later, he was buried. Venezuela indicated that its nation's flags would be flown at half-mast. Theodore Roosevelt's eulogy compared him to a "happy warrior"—one who had served on honorable terms and who understood that the presidency was a "public trust" bestowed upon him by the people.
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Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729, the son of a solicitor. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and then went to London to study law. He quickly gave this up and after a visit to Europe settled in London, concentrating on a literary and political career. He became a member of parliament in 1765. He was closely involved in debates over limits to the power of the king, pressing for parliamentary control of royal patronage and expenditure.
Britain's imposition on America of measures including the Stamp Act in 1765 provoked violent colonial opposition. Burke argued that British policy had been inflexible and called for more pragmatism. He believed that government should be a cooperative relationship between rulers and subjects and that, while the past was important, a willingness to adapt to the inevitability of change could, hopefully, reaffirm traditional values under new circumstances.
He also maintained a keen interest in India. He concluded that Indian governmental corruption had to be resolved by removing patronage from interested parties. He proposed that India be governed by independent commissioners in London, but a bill to this end was defeated, prompting impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal.
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 gave Burke his greatest target. He expressed his hostility in 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' (1790). The book provoked a huge response, including Thomas Paine's 'The Rights of Man'. Burke emphasised the dangers of mob rule, fearing that the Revolution's fervour was destroying French society. He appealed to the British virtues of continuity, tradition, rank and property and opposed the Revolution to the end of his life.
Burke retired from parliament in 1794. His last years were clouded by the death of his only son, but he continued to write and defend himself from his critics. His arguments for long-lived constitutional conventions, political parties, and the independence of an MP once elected still carry weight. He is justly regarded as one of the founders of the British Conservative tradition. He died on 9 July 1797.
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With the assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, not quite 43, became the youngest President in the Nation's history. He brought new excitement and power to the Presidency, as he vigorously led Congress and the American public toward progressive reforms and a strong foreign policy.
He took the view that the President as a "steward of the people" should take whatever action necessary for the public good unless expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution." I did not usurp power," he wrote, "but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power."
Roosevelt's youth differed sharply from that of the log cabin Presidents. He was born in New York City in 1858 into a wealthy family, but he too struggled--against ill health--and in his triumph became an advocate of the strenuous life.
In 1884 his first wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt, and his mother died on the same day. Roosevelt spent much of the next two years on his ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. There he mastered his sorrow as he lived in the saddle, driving cattle, hunting big game--he even captured an outlaw. On a visit to London, he married Edith Carow in December 1886.
During the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt was lieutenant colonel of the Rough Rider Regiment, which he led on a charge at the battle of San Juan. He was one of the most conspicuous heroes of the war.
Boss Tom Platt, needing a hero to draw attention away from scandals in New York State, accepted Roosevelt as the Republican candidate for Governor in 1898. Roosevelt won and served with distinction.
As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none.
Roosevelt emerged spectacularly as a "trust buster" by forcing the dissolution of a great railroad combination in the Northwest. Other antitrust suits under the Sherman Act followed.
Roosevelt steered the United States more actively into world politics. He liked to quote a favorite proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick. . . . "
Aware of the strategic need for a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific, Roosevelt ensured the construction of the Panama Canal. His corollary to the Monroe Doctrine prevented the establishment of foreign bases in the Caribbean and arrogated the sole right of intervention in Latin America to the United States.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War, reached a Gentleman's Agreement on immigration with Japan, and sent the Great White Fleet on a goodwill tour of the world.
Some of Theodore Roosevelt's most effective achievements were in conservation. He added enormously to the national forests in the West, reserved lands for public use, and fostered great irrigation projects.
He crusaded endlessly on matters big and small, exciting audiences with his high-pitched voice, jutting jaw, and pounding fist. "The life of strenuous endeavor" was a must for those around him, as he romped with his five younger children and led ambassadors on hikes through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.
Leaving the Presidency in 1909, Roosevelt went on an African safari, then jumped back into politics. In 1912 he ran for President on a Progressive ticket. To reporters he once remarked that he felt as fit as a bull moose, the name of his new party.
While campaigning in Milwaukee, he was shot in the chest by a fanatic. Roosevelt soon recovered, but his words at that time would have been applicable at the time of his death in 1919: "No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way."
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a Representative from Maine; born in Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, October 18, 1839; attended the public schools; was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1860; studied law; acting assistant paymaster, United States Navy, from April 19, 1864, to November 4, 1865; was admitted to the bar in 1865 and commenced practice in Portland, Maine; member of the State house of representatives in 1868 and 1869; served in the State senate in 1870; attorney general of Maine 1870-1872; city solicitor of Portland 1874-1877; elected as a Republican to the Forty-fifth and to the eleven succeeding Congresses and served from March 4, 1877, to September 4, 1899, when he resigned; chairman, Committee on the Judiciary (Forty-seventh Congress), Committee on Rules (Fifty-first, Fifty-fourth, and Fifty-fifth Congresses); Speaker of the House of Representatives (Fifty-first, Fifty-fourth, and Fifty-fifth Congresses); moved to New York City and engaged in the practice of his profession; died in Washington, D.C., on December 7, 1902; interment in Evergreen Cemetery, Portland, Maine.
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Books mentioned in this topic
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Notable U.S. Ambassadors Since 1775: A Biographical Dictionary (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Ophelia De Laine Gona (other topics)Harold F. Bass Jr. (other topics)
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Cathal J. Nolan (other topics)
Neil A. Wynn (other topics)
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