Harvard's Bells, Asia's Crane

INTERNATIONAL

Harvard's Bells, Asia's Crane

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As might a proud but modest hen, couched on a whole nestful of golden eggs, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard discouraged last week the query, "How come?"

The President's golden eggs are golden-voiced bells, the largest and finest set of Russian church bells ever brought to a foreign land. They were being hung last week at Harvard in the tower of new Lowell House, a tower with a roof of royal blue, richer than Yale blue, blue as Lowell blood.

Dr. Lowell is deep in many things. He is enthusiastically deep in campanology (bell lore). He finds few books more fascinating than De Tintinnabulis by 16th Century Bell-Master Hieronymus Magius. All last week Dr. Lowell's stout old heart was palpitant with the excitement of getting those Russian bells hung just right. There was trouble.

Some of the oak bell-beams seemed to interfere with the right resonance. Some of the tintinnabulations clashed. Beams and bells were shifted. Yankee electricians hopped about trying to adjust a 20th Century U. S. ringing mechanism to Russian antiques. It was exciting! When you are 74 years old. when you have just denied that you are going to resign (as President Lowell did deny last week), you, too. may feel like ringing bells.

Thrilled not only by best Russian bells but by best Arabian coffee, best Confucian music, and by all the exotic bests which the East has to offer, is President Lowell's great & good friend Charles Richard Crane, onetime President of Chicago's potent Crane (plumbing) Co., onetime U. S. Minister to China (1920-21). When the Harvard publicity office divulged that Harvard's Russian bells are "the gift of a member of the Crane family," there could be no doubt as to which Crane was meant.

Charles R. in his 72 years has made 23 trips to Russia. He has said and truly, "I have seen more of Asia than any other man." Well may Harvard rejoice to receive from this unique non-alumnus (his sons are Harvard men, not he), supreme bells. First wind of the gift came not long ago when Mr. Crane and President Lowell were seen prowling about Lowell House. Together the two oldsters, fairly chuckling, measured the tower--not originally conceived as a bell tower. There was barely room for those bells!

Crane Years: 1858: Charles R. was born the son of self-made Richard Teller Crane, famed college-man-hater who used to dumbfound Chicago socialites by growling, "Don't mind me, I'm only a plumber!"

1878-80: aged 20, and having caught malaria while studying at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, Charles R. was sent to Asia instead of to college. He "traveled seriously," spent three months following on foot a book called Archbishop Grey's Walks In Canton. He resolved "to devote my life to the study of Asia."

1881-1914: devoted his life chiefly to the Crane Co. (president 1912-14), but with many trips abroad (first to Russia in 1887), and a stirring interlude at home when he headed the Municipal Voters League--an organization to ''Clean up Chicago!''

1914-1931: made it his pleasure to have a finger in every interesting pie. One of his sons (Richard) became secretary to Wartime Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Mr. Crane, at a critical moment, supplied famed Professor Masaryk with funds which were essential to his rise to become President Masaryk of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia and "Father of His Country."

After the War. Mr. Crane's son became U. S. Minister to Czechoslovakia, while Mr. Crane himself was Minister to China (1920-21), and his daughter Frances became the daughter-in-law of President Masaryk. Today Frances' husband is Czechoslovak Minister to the Court of St. James's.

Only last year Mr. Crane revisited his China. His first appointment as Minister to China was by President Taft. Obeying certain instructions of the President, he made a speech which so infuriated the Japanese that Mr. Taft recalled his new Minister and Mr. Crane became a Democrat.

Appointed again to Peking by President Wilson, Minister Crane indulged such practical whimsies as to have a monumental collection of Confucian music made on Pathe gramophone discs. On his 1930 China visit, Mr. Crane heard much of this music again, was present at the august unveiling at Nanking of a statue of Sun Yatsen. ''Father of Nationalist China'': the China of today.

Although he had arrived in China in a rambling, philosophical mood. Traveler Crane was caught up in the Nationalist whirl, entertained by President Chiang Kai-shek and the President's potent brother-in-law. Dr. H. H. Rung, 75th descendant of "Confucius" (Kung Fu-tze). Finally, after his return to the U. S. and just before he set off for Arabia (TIME, Feb. 2), he was mightily honored by China, appointed Honorary Adviser to the Nationalist Government.

Crane 6 Bells, Russian church bells mean more to Charles R. Crane than to almost any other U. S. man alive. When the first pink wave of Russian revolution broke (long before the land became a sea of red), he streaked for Petrograd and Moscow. There he participated with Orthodox friends in the very special ecclesiastical revolution within the Russian Church.

This of course was "caviar to the general," but Mr. Crane ate up with smacking lips the mystic moments of convening "that wonderful Church Council, the first in 500 years! They knew exactly what they wanted to do. They wiped out every religious change imposed under the Romanovs since the time of Peter the Great!"

The Russian Church, in Mr. Crane's view, was reborn. No more clerics were to be imposed from above. Each priest must be satisfactory to his parish, or he could not remain. At the apex of the glorious rebirth stood the Patriarch Tikhon. To Mr. Crane he was the carefully, lovingly chosen "best in Russia!" Amid the pealing of mighty bells, gorgeous services were celebrated.

Soon Patriarch Tikhon was arrested by the Soviet Regime, imprisoned. He died in 1925. The glory of the Russian Church was blotted out by Lenin's maxim: Religion is the opium of the people! All that Mr. Crane could do was to save, eventually, one of the characteristic glories of every great Russian Church: the bells.

"Cockpit of Arabia," Charles R. Crane, characteristically, had put the West again behind him last week. He has been doing it ever since his first incredibly arduous but incomparably exciting trip to China in 1879.

Last week Asia's Crane was seeing Arabia's Sultan Ibn Saud. The visit was one of exquisite difficulties, would have been impossible to almost any other white man. His Majesty Ibn Saud was on the point of war with Imam Yahya of the Yemen; and on Mr. Crane's last visit to Arabia he was the guest of the Imam.

Arriving, as usual, in the very nick of the crisis, Mr. Crane was privileged to inspect last week a perfect causus belli:

Asir, "the cockpit of Arabia" (lying just between the domains of the Sultan and the Imam), was recently occupied by Ibn Saud's haughty Viceroy in Southern Arabia. When it came to his ears that the No. 1 sheik of the Maharrassa tribe was plotting with Imam Yahya against Ibn Saud, the Viceroy instantly arrested and hanged the potent sheik. Promptly the sheik's tribe prepared to revolt, counting on the support of the Imam, and in Bagdad the white-robed General Staff of Sultan Ibn Saud prepared for war.

"Abhorrent to Jews.'-The reason why no Arab, no Mohammedan, will ever shoot Charles R. Crane, except possibly by accident,* goes back to the suppressed King-Crane Report on the Near East, suppressed by President Wilson upon the urgent request of France and Britain.

In Paris the "Big Four" were about to carve Turkey, about to encourage Jews to found their "national home" in Palestine. But when Mr. Crane and President Henry C. King of Oberlin College returned from the Near East, where they had been sent as an official U. S. fact-finding commission by President Wilson, they reported:

"The non-Jewish population of Palestine--nearly nine-tenths of the whole-- are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. . . .

"With the best possible intentions, it may be doubted whether the Jews could possibly seem to either Christians or Moslems proper guardians of the holy places or custodians of the Holy Land as a whole.

"The reason is this: The places which are most sacred to Christians--those having to do with Jesus--and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. . .

"The Commissioners feel bound to recommend . . . that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and ... the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up."

Of this suppressed report Mr. Crane is most proud, considers it the great work of his life, relates with relish that one of the highest British officials in Palestine said to him after the latest massacre:

"When you wrote it, Mr. Crane, your report was prophecy. Today it is history."

*Two years ago, while motoring across Arabia, Mr. Crane and his son John crouched quickly down in the tonneau, thus escaping a robber fusillade which killed the U. S. missionary who was traveling with them (TIME, Feb. 4, 1929).

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