Nicholas Miraculous

When Nicholas Murray Butler was a few days old, his aunt gathered the baby, an American flag, a $10 gold piece and a Bible in her arms. Then she carried her treasures up to the cupola of the house, and in a little ceremony dedicated little Nicholas to a life of patriotism, wealth and piety. All that was missing, to include all of the symbols that Butler lived by, was the blue-&-white pennant of Columbia University.

As student, professor and president, Nicholas Murray Butler was part of Columbia--and Columbia part of him--for 67 years. At 28, he was Columbia's youngest philosophy professor, and had already started a college for schoolmarms on the side (it became Columbia's famed Teachers College). Columbia's impressed trustees made him president of the university at 39.

Champion Visitor. The new president had a majestic mien, a Wall Street manner and a Midas touch, which eventually brought to Columbia $120,161,727. He was a new kind of college president, of a type now familiar: an administrator, a speech maker, a fund raiser, and not too much of a scholar.

He was also a man of great ambitions, not all of them realized. H. G. Wells once called him "the champion international visitor and retriever of foreign orders and degrees" (he was kudosed by 15 countries, 38 universities). On his first trip to Europe, at 22, Butler was armed with letters to Pope Leo XIII, William Gladstone, Otto von Bismarck, John Henry Cardinal Newman. That was only the beginning. "It has been my happy fortune," he wrote later, "to meet, to talk with and often to know in warm friendship almost every man of light and learning during the past half century."

Among them was every President of the U.S. since Hayes. A big behind-the-scenes Republican, Butler was a close adviser of Teddy Roosevelt (who dubbed him "Nicholas Miraculous"). Later they quarreled, and Butler became William Howard Taft's running mate in 1912. In 1920 he made his own vain bid for the Republican nomination, with the slogan: "Pick Nick for a Picnic in November." But politicians could not overcome a suspicion that he was a stuffed shirt.

Nobel and Nine Secretaries. He kept nine secretaries busy, dictating his 3,500 articles, speeches and books, campaigning for repeal of prohibition, against the child-labor amendment, for the League of Nations and the Republican Party. For his plodding conservatism, leftists were apt to regard him as a kind of American Blimp. His memberships and honors took up four times as much space in Who's Who as Franklin Roosevelt's. In 1931, for his work as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Butler shared a Nobel prize with Jane Addams.

But it was Columbia which was his monument. Columbia had fewer than 4,000 students when Butler became its president; today it tops 30,000, and its faculty is among the nation's four best. He once told the alumni (paraphrasing "Bloody Mary") that if they opened him they would find "Columbia" written on his heart. Two years ago, he reluctantly surrendered the presidency he had held for 44 years.* Last week Nicholas Murray Butler, 85, and blind for the past year, died in the shadow of the great campus he had built on Morningside Heights.

* His heir apparent, picked after an 18-month search: Dwight Eisenhower, still hovering in the wings.

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