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About Yale Alumni Magazine | View Entire Issue (June 7, 1899)
312 & Adode ALU MINI WEEKLY -PROCESS OF ELECTION, The long process of election had been closed. The history of it is of course a part of the secrets of the gov- erning body, and justly so. At~ the same time, the main points of considera- tion and discussion have been generally familiar. The Corporation have taken up one by one a large number of possible Yale men of pronounced strength and ability, and have not limited themselves to any school or type. As far as it is known, the common law has been fol- lowed of considering only graduates of - Yale. But the list has been a long enough and strong enough one with this restric- tion. Such names as Prof. Henry W. Farnam, °74, Prof. Bernadotte Perrin, ’69, Prof. Theodore S. Woolsey, ’72, Prof. Henry P. Wright, 68, the Hon. Simeon E. Baldwin, ’61, .Dr. E. B. Coe, ’62, Judge William H. Taft, ’78, and Professor George E. Vincent, ’85, of Chicago University, made material enough for day after day of careful discussion and liberal consideration. The qualities which put these men in the list of Presidential possibilities are more or less familiar, and it is unneces- sary to analyze the candidacy of each one here. The Corporation’s meetings are regu- larly held one in the Fall, one in May, and one at Commencement; but since the resignation of President Dwight, and beginning early in the Winter, there have been at least monthly meetings, which have been quite fully atended and at which this Presidential question has been almost invariably the main topic of discussion. The way in which the Corporation has looked at the matter . has been dwelt upon in the WEEKLY. They have had their minds open for all suggestion, their eyes scanning the horizon for the form of every possible candidate. During these six months of discussion Yale men the country over have more thoughtfully turned their attention to this place than perhaps ever before in its history, and as a result of their consideration, suggestions without number have poured into New Haven. Whether they were addressed directly to the Corporation, whether they went to members of the Faculty, or whether they came, as hundreds of them did, through the agency of this paper, they generally reached the Corporation at last. And now that it is all over, . it is well to bear this in mind in esti- mating the quality and spirit of the men who carry the responsibilty of Yale government. PROFESSOR HADLEY FIRST MENTIONED. President Dwight’s resignation was hardly announced before the name of Professor Hadley was on men’s tongues and in the newspapers as his possible and probable successor. Like every early boom, if the word may be used of what was merely the expression of a very com- mon opinion and a very earnest hope, a reaction followed this condition, and for two or three months the situation looked extremely uncertain. The minds of the Corporation were honestly and anxiously in doubt. But in course of time men came again to look calmly and intelligently at the conspicuous claims .of Professor Hadley’s makeup and record, and so again his star rose. There was a certain degree of elimina- tion of other candidates, but it seems more reasonable to say that things assumed an equilibrium finally, and Professor Hadley appeared at the end, as he had appeared for a long time before the time of President Dwight’s resignation had been announced, as the most logical and promising of all candidates. The attitude of Yale men toward his candidacy was one of the controlling features in the final crystallization of opinion in his favor in the Corporation. The interviews and letters by which the -WEEKLY sought to gauge Yale senti- ment in this matter showed, according to a careful estimate in this office, that it would be safe to say that three-fourths of the Yale men in the country who _had- seriously considered the problem were more in favor of Professor Hadley as the best possible choice than of any other man. Besides all this, a repre- sentation was made to one or more individual members of the Corporation by no less than fifty full professors in Yale, giving it as their opinion that Professor Hadley had eminent qualities for this high office. This combination of graduate and Faculty sentiment, to- gether with the strikingly unanimous feeling of undergraduate Yale, was per- haps the final force which removed all doubt as to his choice. Arthur Twining Hadley. And what manner of man is it that Yale has chosen for her new leader? * The WEEKLy will not add a detailed biographical sketch, but will rest with comparatively few facts which must easily show the mind and the character of the new President. For it is pleasant to dwell on them, and no one can without taking great comfort for the future and adding to his Yale optimism. It is beginning with the easier,.to chronicle things intellectual. The record of Arthur Twining Hadley as a scholar goes back from the year 1899 to the apocryphal records of the later fifties. Into the latter it may not be profitable to enter in detail, but it is perfectly safe to ac- cept any number of current traditions as having inferentially sound historical basis. lf these tales are not as numer- ous as about some other scholars of unusual precocity, it is due to the fact that special pains were taken to pre- vent too great intellectual activity at that time. : It is going back far enough to speak . only of a few prizes in Yale College, into whose Class of Seventy-Six Arthur Hadley entered from the ‘Hopkins Grammar School. The Woolsey and Bristed scholarships, a Winthrop prize for students ‘most thoroughly ac- quainted with Greek and Latin poets,” the Clark prize for the solution of astronomical problems, a place on the Junior Exhibition list, a Towsend prize in Senior year, and, generally speaking, the lead of all his class in the general average of the course and graduation as valedictorian,—these make a fair record. An apparently very knowing biographer in the New York Sun thus sums up in a different way his record in those days as follows: “It became apparent at once to the Class of Seventy-Six that Arthur Had- ley was to be their leader. From the beginning and at all times he was easily first. It is said that his general average in Algebra for the first term of Freshman year was four: that being absolute perfection, a thing rather more difficult to attain at Yale than anywhere else. It is also said that the only mis- take credited to him in Greek grew out of a dispute with the Professor about a geographical location, in which the Professor happened to be _ wrong. Occasionally during his course he be- came needlessly frightened lest he was falling behind, and then he would put on a spurt as amusingly effective as that of a racehorse in the lead with the field hopelessly distanced. His general standing for the four years was about 3.60. Edwin Dean Worcester, Jr., his chum, took second place as salutatorian, being about fifteen-one-hundredths be- hind him. This average standing of Hadley’s, while very high, was not a record-breaker, that palm being held, it is said, by Prof. H. P. Wright, now Dean of the Faculty. But comparisons as to standing are of little value, except in the same class. Now, Seventy-Six was far above the average in ability, taking pride in the remark of a profes- sor to the effect that it was the smartest (and wickedest) class he had _ ever known. “Shortly after Arthur Hadley entered - College his father, Prof. James Hadley, died. His mother then being a widow and he her only son, he remained much with her and for the first two years of his course lived at home. During Junior and Senior years he lived in Durfee, in the first entry, with Worces- ter as this roommate. He was in no sense a dig. For one thing, his eye- sight would not permit it. Besides learning came easily to him, and his interest in humanity was too intense for him to be a recluse. There was always a strong practical vein in him, derived doubtless from a long line of Yankee ancestors. Books he regarded as but means to the one great end, knowledge of men and their affairs. It is a fact not generally known that though Prof. James Hadley studied and taught Greek all his life, being one of the world’s greatest scholars in that lan- guage, his natural bent was toward Mathematics. His son inherited this taste, and was one of the very few men whom one could picture as sitting down and reading Mathematics, like Stun- ning Warrington, as if he really enjoyed it. But he resolutely fought against this preference, fearing lest a constant pursuit of it might make him narrow. There were, by the way, some signifi- cant horrible examples at Yale in those days.” It is interesting that his roommate Worcester, whom he led by .15 in the competition for valedictorian, took two College honors from him on close com- petition, one the Junior Exhibition prize and the other the DeForest medal. HIS STUDIES AND WORKS. The man who has been since 1891 the head of the Department of Political Science at Yale, taking that position when Professor William Graham Sum- ner temporarily laid down his work on account of ill-health, and who is now serving his second year as. President of the American Economic Association, began the studies which led to his peculiar distinction in this field immedi- ately after graduation. There was first a year of post-graduate study at Yale in History and Political Science and two more years in Germany at the Univer- sity of Berlin, where his studies were in the same field. In 1883, after a ser- vice of four years as tutor in Yale Col- lege, in which he gave instruction in various branches, he began his work in the field of the history and science of railroad transportation, and it was two years later that his volume, entitled “Railway Transportation, Its History and Its Laws,’ made him almost at once the recognized authority in the country. He was then twenty-nine years old. Of this book there have been one translation in France and two in Russia. It is unnecessary to go through the list of his published articles under this head or under any other branch. Mr. Clarence Deming, Yale ’71, in a very attractive sketch of him in the New York Evening Post, points out the fact that the bibliography of Yale professors up to 1893 shows that of twenty-nine articles penned by Professor Hadley, practically all related to railroads and transportation problems. A series of articles an transportation was prepared by him for Laylor’s Cyclopaedia of Political Science in 1883; from 1884 to 1891 he was engaged in work for the ‘Railroad Gazette, in the last three or those years being connected with this journal editorially; while in 1887 to 1891 he was a regular contributor to the New York Evening Post and the Financial Chronicle. A part of the article on railways in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is from his pen. His other notable achievement as a writer is his book called “Economics,” published in 1896 and now a text book in a number of colleges and universi- ties. It is a book which its author's clear and unusual style has made not only a volume for the student but one for the general reader. If one cares .to pursue his work in this field into later years, in which he has continued it to a considerable extent despite his en- grossing duties as head of the depart- ment of Economics here, it is worth while to mention his charge of the de- - partment of Economics in Macmillan’s Dictionary of Philosophical Terms, which is just coming out, and his arti- cles on Political Economy in R.. H. Ingliss-Paulgrave’s Dictionary of Poli- tical Economy, and his address on Politics and Sociology, in Philadelphia the past Winter. Another address was delivered in April of this year before the Secondary School Teachers’ Asso- ciation of New York on the study of Political Science in secondary schools. If this may be taken to cover the main facts of his record in his specialty of railroads and in the general field of political economy, it need only be added © that he has of late years attained almost the same eminence in finance as before in railway transportation. One _ evi- dence that comes to mind is his series of lectures on the currency question before the Brooklyn Institute in 1806. AS A TEACHER. But records of this kind are not the only ones when one considers the intellectual equipment of Yale’s new President. Yale is a place of teaching, and Professor Hadley the teacher can be studied with just as much satisfac- tion as Professor Hadley the writer. Not only the popularity of his courses, but the tributes of the students in their votes, show the success that he has made in the classroom. His Junior elective regularly collects upwards - of ninety per cent. of the class, and his course in economic debates has been one of the peculiarly successful features of his teaching, contributing a very helpful feature in a department where the Yale instruction has hitherto been considered quite deficient, to wit, teach- ing men to think and talk onetheir feet. The report that he does not intend to abandon his work as a teacher is one of the best bits of news the student world has heard for some time. On the other hand, there are the records of public recognition of dis- tinguished service, and these are already numerous in the case of the President- elect, who is now in his forty-third year. His degree of M.A. from his own Uni- versity in 1886 was followed three years later by a medal from the Paris Exposi- tion in 1889. His Presidency of the American Economic Association has al- ready been mentioned, but two other offices have not been generally spoken of in giving the record of his life. ‘fe was made in 1886 one of the original members of the International Institute of Statistics. The membership was originally restricted to fifty, and as it draws from the civilized world every- where and is rated as one of the bodies most worth belonging to of all such organizations, the significance of his membership is very striking and very pleasant to Yale men. In the present year, 1899, he was chosen as one of the original members of the newly founded American Academy of Arts and Letters. This membership is only fifty and the list is a very striking and complete one. It is yet to be made public and the other names from Yale and elsewhere cannot be published here. 7 A CHARACTERIZATION, It is well to close this part of the sketch with a paragraph from Mr. Deming’s very appreciative article in the Evening Post. The writer is one who has been associated with Professor Hadley socially and in much profes- sional work for a long number of years. He is also one who is always a critic even when he most commands. He de- scribes Professor Hadley thus: “The ancestral traits of intellect which have converged in Prof. Hadley’s mind suggest its bent, but by no means mea- sure its versatility and its power. His knowledge is encyclopedic, reaching from the smallest and most isolated of facts up to the broadest theories. Not unaptly has he been described as gifted with a philosophical memory—a mem- ory not merely with prodigious grasp of details, but with a singular capacity for their quick, clear, and often very original generalization, marked, pos- sibly, by a little too much love for intel- lectual fencing and paradox.” It is hard to mark the line between Hadley the scholar and Hadley the man. Professor Hadley is always the scholar; he is also always the man. But there are some parts of his record which particularly indicate his charac- ter, and since the new administration of Yale is one that is above all things to test the President’s character, both his nerve and his poise, these points are perhaps the most interesting of all. AS LABOR COMMISSIONER. First under this head is his record in public office. It is not a long one but an interesting one. In 1885, Governor Henry B. Harrison appointed Professor Hadley Labor Commissioner. The in- teresting thing is that the office at the time he took it was far from being in favor with employers of labor, while on the other hand, the appointment of Hadley was anything but pleasant to the leaders of labor who had been most interested in establishing the Bureau. In 1889, when he finished his term, both the labor leaders and the labor em- ployers vied with each other in com- mendation of his course. With both he had been tactful and to both helpful. With employers of labor he showed that he knew what he wanted, and he got it. To the leaders of labor he showed that what he wanted included the facts most useful for the useful conduct of the office. To public men and students generally, he showed such reasonable- ness as weil as ability in handling the facts:and reaching conclusions, that his
