In a Carolina Forest

(See front cover)

A distinguished company of U. S. educators traveled last week, from as far away as Boston and Atlanta, to a long clearing in a fragrant pine forest in North Carolina. There, awaiting its first formal inspection by important outsiders, stood the most prodigious new educational project in the land this century--Duke University, now nearly complete though little grass yet grows on its sandy campus, no ivy on its neo-Gothic walls of soft-colored fieldstone.

Duke's 800 distinguished visitors at its first big public reception and showday were mostly medical educators--among them the deans of Harvard and Johns Hopkins medical schools, and Dr. William Henry ("Popsy") Welch, "Dean of U. S. Medicine." The central ceremony of the day was the dedication of Duke's medical school and hospital. Apparently these instead of the University as a whole were selected for dedication because--though no Duke man would like to say so-- the medical aspect of Duke seems bound to reach maturity and fame before the institution's other branches. Money can get results faster in medicine than in the less scientific fields of culture. The $40,000,000 which the late tobacco and power Tycoon James Buchanan Duke gave to little Trinity College of Durham, N. C. in return for taking his name (TIME, Jan. 12, 1925), will doubtless turn out many an able doctor before it polishes an important poet, will probably improve physically thousands of lives before it contributes much original thought on the way of life.

Medical Centre. Duke Medical School, School of Nursing and Duke Hospital are planned as, and already are (having functioned for eight months) the greatest medical centre between Baltimore and New Orleans. Admirably designed, efficient and already smooth running, the hospital stands on a knoll behind the Medical School at one end of the campus. With a capacity of 456 beds (150 for Negroes, 50 bassinets for infants) it now has about 175 beds ready--and filled. Its staff likes to take interesting, out-of-the-ordinary ailments rather than everyday broken legs or appendectomies. Last year 3,000 students applied for admission. Because Duke hopes to distinguish itself by selecting its men carefully, only 70 were admitted. A principle adopted by the medical school's able Dean Wilbur Cornell Davison--Princeton man, Oxford Rhodes scholar, Johns Hopkins professor--is to speed up the medical course, get his men through in two or three years by means of a four-quarter plan, give them as much hospital work as possible. A pediatrist, he has helped plan the hospital, introduced many an innovation such as a shop for making braces and crutches.

Buildings. Duke moved last Autumn out from Durham and up the broad asphalt avenue to the clearing in the forest. The women's college took possession of the old Trinity campus with several new buildings added. The first spring in the clearing finds everything there completed-- 31 separate structures--except the great chapel which is rising opposite where the asphalt avenue sweeps into the clearing. The long axis of the campus is at right angles to the avenue, with the hospital at the right end as you enter and dormitory quadrangles opening off the left end, beyond the long double row of lecture halls, library, students' union, auditorium. Behind the chapel is the stadium. All is modern, thoroughly equipped, efficient. In the students' union are shiny dish-washing and potato-peeling machines. In the theatre is the latest cinema for 150. The stadium seats 35,000. Architect of the whole scene is Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia, who frankly and freely drew upon the best features of Oxford and Cambridge for his inspiration. The net result is a synthesis of extraordinary completeness and perfection, incongruous though a brand-new medieval community may seem in a Carolina forest.

Students. Possessed of dignity as well as wealth, Duke does not call itself the Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or Princeton of the South. It is and means to be Duke University, second to none, with the flower of the land coming to it from all the States. The present student body, some 1,200 male undergraduates and some 1,100 students in the women's college and schools of Medicine, Nursing, Law, Religion and the Graduate School, is drawn from 40 States.

Duke students are not yet distinguishable from their contemporaries at other inland institutions. They paint DUKE on their slickers, have "dates" with the coeds, occasionally buy a fruit jar of corn liquor. They talk hopefully of their teams (their baseball team beat Cornell last month; they are proud of their new football coach, Wallace Wade). The local Greek-letter fraternities have no houses of their own, but the members of different brotherhoods are allowed to bunch themselves in the dormitories for a sort of "house plan" life--Kappa Alpha in Kilgo House, Sigma Alpha Epsilon in Craven House, etc. etc.--some of them with faculty members in residence.

Faculty. An amiable president is Duke's Dr. William Preston Few. Tall, lank, Vandyke-bearded, he waves cheerily to one & all as he strolls about his campus. Once an English professor, he became president of Trinity College in 1910. His campus nickname: "Sis." His fellow townsmen remember that when the children of Benjamin Newton Duke were young--Mary, and "Angy" (Angier), who fell from a yacht tender at Newport in 1923 and was drowned--Dr. Few used to ride with them in their ponycart. Like many another Duke official, he is a Rotarian. A friend of North Carolina's hard-bitten little Methodist ex-Senator Furnifold McLendel Simmons, he was like him a leading Hoovercrat. Many North Carolinians believe Dr. Few to be a shrewd, astute politician backed by the Duke Endowment, heading a powerful lobby which could swing the election, for example, of a Methodist bishop, or aid in such an appointment as that of Hoovercrat Frank R. McNinch to the Federal Power Commission.

Duke University's most popular man is bright-faced, bright-eyed, cupid-smiling little Dr. Robert Lee ("Bobby") Flowers, secretary and treasurer of the University since 1910 and contact-man with the Duke Endowment. A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, he has taught mathematics at Trinity since 1892. When "Buck" Duke began to plan his great Endowment, Dr. Flowers hustled off with Dr. Few to Charlotte, N. C. to make sug- gestions. And he it was who, when Trinity decided to change its name and move its campus, roamed about the countryside looking for a suitable site, selected the wooded, hilly. 5,100 acres three miles from town and quietly bought them. Says he: "Mr. Duke loved trees. When we stood there he told me: 'This is the place!'"

The Founder. Many a rich U. S. un-versity owes its name to an individual now remote and legendary--Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Elihu Yale, Ezra Cornell, Nicholas Brown, John Harvard. It is less than six years since James Buchanan Duke passed to his rest. Famed as a "log-cabin milionaire, " hero of many a stirring success story, he was born and lived not far from the new Duke campus. Durham is full of Duke cousins and fresh memories of the State's great man. Many an oldster is left who knew the great man's father, Washington Duke. The rich story that is Duke is still well-preserved from its beginning.

Though "Old Man Wash" was almost illiterate, he was no "po' white," and the birthplace of his sons Brodie, Benjamin Newton ("Ben") and James Buchanan ("Buck") was no log cabin but a farmhouse surrounded by 300 acres of good North Carolina land. In 1865 the Civil War was over; Wash was 45 years old, had 500 in cash and a bag of tobacco that Federal soldiers had left on the farm. This he sifted, labeled Pro Bono Publico, sold in Durham. Then he built a log cabin on his farm, made more tobacco, a great deal more.

But he had a potent competitor: Bull Durham. Ever since North Carolina's famed "bright yellow" tobacco had been discovered, by chance, in 1852, the pipe and chewing tobacco trade had been booming, and John R. Green had made his trade-mark world-famed.* It was Buck Duke who urged that the family go into the cigaret business, then undeveloped. They employed the first successful cigaret-making machine, got one William T. O'Brien, a bright young mechanic, to perfect it for them. Swift thereafter was the rise of W. Duke Sons & Co. and the formation in 1890 of American Tobacco Co. with a capital of $25,000,000./- In a ruthless, buccaneering business era, Buck Duke assembled his great combine with all the gusto and smash of the northern tycoons who were putting together railroads, steel mills, oil wells, can factories. He fought historic battles in what was one of the most fiercely throat-cutting U. S. businesses. Then, in 1912, when he was ordered to unscramble his trust, he did so with superb aplomb.

Tall, husky, redheaded, kinetic Buck Duke had more learning and less piety than his tobacco-spitting father. He had been sent off to college but he came home in a hurry. Said Old Man Wash: "There's two things I just can't seem to understand. One of them is the Holy Ghost and Free Grace. The other is my son Buck." But years later Son Buck liked to say: "My old daddy always said that if he amounted to anything in life it was due to the Methodist circuit riders. If I amount to anything in this world I owe it to my daddy and the Methodist Church."

It was because of its Methodism that Trinity College first attracted Duke patronage. Originally the college stood 100 mi. to the west of its present location in Randolph County. When it decided to move to a city, Wash Duke offered to better any bid by $50,000 if Trinity would move to Durham. His son Ben said: "Go ahead, father, it's a good cause." So Trinity went to Durham in 1892. Thereafter, until it became Duke University in 1924, it received some $2,103,500 from the Duke family, was the richest college in the South Atlantic States.

When Trinity changed its name and received some $17,000,000 cash for physical expansion, there were of course jibes. Said Author James Boyd (Drums): "Why don't they call it the Father, Son & J. B. Duke University?" Others suggested that Trinity's motto, Religio et Eruditio (religion and learning), be expanded to Eruditio, Religio et Tobacco; that since it was co-educational it might be called Duke's Mixture. But Buck Duke viewed it with satisfaction. His University and the Duke Endowment which he had just had drawn up meant the accomplishment of what he had planned for many a year.

The Endowment provided a trust fund of about $34,000,000, the income of which should be divided as follows: 20% to be added to capital until an additional $40-000,000 shall have accumulated; 32% of the remainder to Duke University; 32% to the Duke Hospital and other local hospital programs ($1 a day for every bed in every charity hospital in North and South Carolina); 5% to Davidson College (Presbyterian at Davidson, N. C.); 5% to Furman University (Baptist at Greenville, S. C.); 4%, to Johnson C. Smith University (Negro, at Charlotte, N. C.); 10% to North & South Carolina orphanages; 2% for pensions for Methodist ministers; 6%, for new Methodist churches; 4% for upkeep of those Methodist churches. When Buck Duke died, his will bequeathed nearly $40,000,000 more to the Endowment, about half of which went outright or in trust to the University. The 15 trustees of the Endowment are instructed to keep the capital in stock of the Southern Power System or in U. S. Government bonds.

"I reckon all this will last now," said Buck Duke. He had planned it carefully. The great power system, fruit of his later labors, would exist, he said, so long as the rivers continued to flow. The money from it would go towards training lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, chemists, historians, economists. Thus, when asked his greatest achievement, he said: "The Duke Endowment, because through it I do not merely bring men together, I make men."

Duke's Men. It is said that in the days of the great tobacco combine, when dashing young Pierre Lorillard left a director's meeting to join a group of fun-loving friends, James Buchanan Duke said quietly: "I think I'll have to buy me some friends sometime." But like all great tycoons, he could surround himself with able, loyal subordinates. For his board of trustees he chose 15 men he knew well, all Southerners but one. Board president and largest in calibre is George Garland Allen, president of Duke Power Co., vice board-chairman of British-American Tobacco Co. Treasurer is W. C. Parker, long a member of Duke Power Co. Among other Duke trustees are: William Robertson Perkins, counsel for the Duke brothers and for many a power and tobacco company; William States Lee, chief engineer of Duke Power Co., who first aided James Buchanan Duke in buying up North Carolina power sites; President William N. Reynolds of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. (Camels), who was lately elected to succeed Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle (resigned last year); President Bennette Eugene Geer of Southern Worsted Corp.; Dr. Robert Lee Flowers, secretary-treasurer of the University, and Dr. Watson Smith Rankin, onetime dean of Wake Forest College (N. C.) School of Medicine, director of the hospital and orphanage program. Alternating between Manhattan and North Carolina, the Board meets every month. Last month it handed out $886,000 to the institutions on its list.

Widow. The Endowment's only woman trustee is Mrs. Nanaline Holt Inman Duke. The Holts are a First Family of Macon, Ga. Her first husband, Walter Inman, was of Atlanta's aristocracy. In 1907, widowed, she married Buck Duke, who had divorced his first wife, Lillian N. McCready. Famed is Daughter Doris Duke (born 1912) who will become a trustee when she reaches her majority. Many a newspaper column has been devoted to Doris and her wealth ($53,000,000), her presentation at the Court of St. James's, her expensive debut at Newport last year (she was supposed to awaken to melodious chimes, bathe in water from an illuminated fountain, travel with a body-guard). Like many another rich Southern woman, Mrs. Duke is conservative, quiet, charming. Her fellow trustees regard her as a fine figure of a woman, find her (unlike the Southern woman of tradition) able and efficient in business. She seldom goes to their Carolina meetings but always attends in New York (the Foundation and other Duke interests occupy three floors of No. 535 Fifth Ave.) unless she is off in Newport, where she maintains a handsome establishment, or in Europe. (She was absent from last week's dedication. Daughter Doris attended, appeared bored, left after a short while.) Personage of a world far wider than the Duke institutions have yet become, she is respected by her husband's executors as his most personal representative left on earth. Yet they can feel their work is far more important than she is. For, as Board President Allen recalled at last week's ceremony: "Did I not hear him say that he expected to be looking down upon this work one thousand years hence?"

*The bull was suggested to Tobaccoman Green by the bull's neck on the seal of Durham, England, trade-mark of Coleman's mustard. Three smokers of Bull Durham were James Russell Lowell, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson.

/-fSee The Story of Durham, by William Kenneth Boyd; Duke University Press.

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