2
The Way It Maybe Was

Robert was eight—his brothers twelve and four—when he discovered there were no Indians in Oberlin, Ohio. It was a great disappointment. He didn't want to fight Indians; he just wanted to see them. Instead, he saw what he later recalled as "the hottest, coldest, wettest, flattest part of the state of Ohio."^[1] Oberlin College had been established by Congregational missionaries "who selected the most disagreeable part of Ohio they could find in order to be sure that they were not living in luxury."^[2] It was a long, long way from the new era that was burgeoning even in Brooklyn. He had been a city boy for eight years, and now he found himself on a Puritan island of two thousand souls consecrated by its founders to "the total abolition of all forms of sin." Oberlin College was one of the oldest and most reputable in the west. In Congregational ecumenicity it welcomed the services of a distinguished Presbyterian preacher who had entered the ministry from the associated Oberlin Graduate School of Theology (where free-will "Oberlin Calvinism," embracing revivalism and abolitionism, had flourished in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s).

Now Will Hutchins was back there, with his wife and three boys, living in a faculty boarding house. After Yale (class of '92), he had begun his theological studies at the nonsectarian Union Seminary in New York and finished them at Oberlin. (His father, Robert Grosvenor Hutchins, had been graduated from the nonsectarian Williams College in 1862, when less than 1 percent of the male college-age population of the country got a higher education, and had then prepared for the ministry at Union and Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. Early in his preaching career he had been pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Oberlin and was later a trustee of the college.) For Robert's father, if not for Robert, Oberlin was more like home than Brooklyn was.

Oberlin was not only nonsectarian. It was the first college in the United States to admit women and Negroes. Even in 1907 there weren't many such, and the very few women who had gone beyond high school in the 1890s had attended women's colleges like Mount Holyoke—from which Anna Laura Murch had been graduated before her marriage to Will Hutchins. Her New England ancestors had been sea captains. (Their Scottish ancestry was attested by her given names.) They were an especially rugged, dogged breed. Her father had gone to sea at the age of eleven on a four-year voyage. She was intelligent and capable, a quiet woman who, however, had no great difficulty in keeping her three sons in order, and no difficulty at all in sharing her husband's life as a preacher and professor.

But for Will Hutchins, giving up preaching for the teaching of preaching was a considerable change. One of its attractions was an immediate jump in salary from eight hundred dollars a year to two thousand. On two thousand a year a professor could rent a good-size frame house on Elm Street. By the time the boys were ready for college their father's salary had risen to five thousand dollars—the maximum then paid a professor in the United States except in the universities. The boys all did odd jobs around town to earn money for college. With the family's installation at Mrs. Rawdon's faculty boarding house, Robert, at eight, found himself waiting table at lunch (called dinner)—and never dreamed that he shouldn't be. That summer he had a short-lived job as a printer's devil at the local press, which paid four dollars a week.

There were no rich or even "comfortable" families in Oberlin, Ohio. The students all had jobs, after school, weekends, summers, and the self-supporting student enjoyed an elevated social standing merely because he was self-supporting. (The college motto was "Learning and Labor.") The life of service would be the life of austerity. Everyone was plain, every pleasure plain. No one was hungry or ever would be. In Oberlin, economic insecurity, like economic splendor, was unknown. Parents took care of their children, and children, when their parents were old, took care of their parents.

After his sons were grown and gone, Will Hutchins left Oberlin for a hardy adventure—the presidency of little Berea College in Kentucky, a school for mountain boys that in those days lived from hand to mouth, and after his retirement from Berea he became president of the Danforth Foundation in St. Louis.

The Oberlin salary would not have moved Will Hutchins to leave the ministry for education. He was moved by something he called the Cause. His sons knew what the Cause was without his ever having had to expli-

cate. The Cause was doing good, in the sense of leading men and women to the Christian life. He was not a fundamentalist, but what was known then as a "full Gospel" man, bent on influencing lives in the interest of service here below. Long afterward, a fellow president of a university complained to Robert Hutchins about an Oberlin graduate in his faculty. The man was excellent in his field, but he was always stirring up trouble about "public questions." Hutchins could have told the president that that's what he got for hiring an Oberlin graduate. "Public questions" were as much the essence of Oberlin as the abolition of all forms of sin. The college had been a station on the Underground Railroad, and in Robert's boyhood the campus still had two little red buildings crumbling away at the corners that had been used to house the fugitives on their way to Canada. The Martyrs' Arch memorialized the Oberlin graduates who as missionaries had been killed in the Boer War. Oberlin was beset by a sense of mission abroad and at home, and a professorship of preaching was as much a ministry as the ministry itself.

"At fourteen I was going to be a missionary,"^[3] said Bob Hutchins afterward. "Every fourteen-year-old in Oberlin was going to be a missionary." Oberlin's sons and daughters thought of themselves as "going out," with the Gospel of Christ and the gospel of service, into missionary occupations. Fifteen years out of college, Robert Hutchins found that if one of his classmates was actually engaged in making money he was almost always apologetic about it and insistent upon telling his fellow alumni privately that his extracurricular life was devoted to civic betterment. Law was not an entirely respectable vocation—there was too much money-wrangling about it. But doctoring (even for women) was a high calling; its modest temporal rewards did not discountenance its high professions. Nursing was, of course, a particularly suitable career for an Oberlin woman, whether or not she became a missionary's (or a preacher's) wife. And a high proportion of female graduates went into the then limited field of "social work," in the city settlement houses or church welfare agencies.

But the Oberlin professor of preaching had no occasion to doubt that his sons would be either preachers (or missionaries, or both) or teachers in church-related schools. Two of Will Hutchins' three gratified his expectations. William, the eldest, became a master at the Presbyterian-founded Westminster School in Connecticut. Francis (always "Frank"), the youngest and most religious of the three, eventually succeeded his father as president of Berea College, after serving as director of Yale-in-China (where his father's evangelical contemporaries had cried, "A million a month are dying without God!"). But Robert—well, Robert turned out

differently. He turned out to be dedicated to Christian service—if the expression may be used loosely to embrace the running of a university—but without ever being able to confess Christianity.

Not that his boyhood was any different from William's and Frank's, nor their home different from any other in Oberlin. The sense of obligation was bred in the bone; it did not weigh on them. It all went without saying. It went without saying, when Will Hutchins (watching the time for his first class) put his watch on the table at breakfast, with its Phi Beta Kappa key on the fob, that his three sons would one day have Phi Beta Kappa keys on their watch fobs. It went without saying that there was college chapel every day, and church twice on Sunday, and Christian Endeavor meeting Wednesday, and choir practice Friday evening. Oberlin had two choirs, and any student who could even try to sing was a member of one or the other.

The consequences of all this exposure to the Light and the Leading were considerable, especially for Robert Hutchins, who was never able to eradicate anything from his memory. His life long, his speeches were laced with allusions to Scripture—usually unattributed, because it would never occur to an old Oberlin boy that their source would not be recognized; as a college teacher he was amazed to encounter a senior who had never heard of Joshua. And he invariably found himself "singing, humming, or moaning third-rate hymns like 'Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,' while shaving, while waiting on the platform to make a speech or catch a train, or in other moments of abstraction or crisis."^[4] On one occasion in later life he explained—though there were other explanations he found it harder to make—that the outward signs of inward grace that he endured in his boyhood made it "very hard for me to go to church now." (On yet another occasion he said that he had been unable to go to church for many years because of his father's sermons: "Every other preacher seems so vapid, insipid, vacuous, fatuous, inane, and empty that I cannot listen to him.")

It was not that the Oberlin young were unwholesomely religious or depressingly earnest. Rather, these observances, to which they were not always attentive, were among the centerpieces of their daily and hourly furnishings. "We had no radios, no automobiles, no movies, and no pulp magazines. We had to entertain ourselves. We could not, by turning a small knob or paying a small fee, get somebody else to do it for us. It never occurred to us that, unless we could go somewhere or do something, our lives were empty. We had nowhere to go and no way to get there."^[5]

That wasn't quite the case. They had nowhere to go, but they did have a way to get there. Mr. Thomas W. Henderson's big red touring car—he had retired to Oberlin as vice-president of the Winton Motor Car

Company—was parked outside the Second Congregational Church every Thursday evening for prayer meeting. Cars (and houses) weren't locked in Oberlin, and Sophomore Hutchins and three classmates went joyriding in it. They were going to return it before church services were over, but it ran out of gas outside of town. The thieves pushed it off the road and walked home. The next day a $150 reward notice for the return of the stolen car was posted all over town. The scoundrels went to Mr. Henderson's house and confessed. Mr. Henderson called the mayor over and the mayor suggested the county jail in Elyria. The four penitents suggested that the irate Mr. Henderson join them in prayer then and there. He did so, and cooled off, and decided not to press charges. Sixty years later one of the culprits, recalling the event in the Cleveland Plain Dealer , said that as the shriven sinners were leaving the house, the "show-off" Hutchins began his fund-raising career by proposing (unsuccessfully) that the victim split the $150 reward money with them.^[6]

Apart from stealing automobiles, "our recreations were limited to two: reading and physical exercise. The first meant reading anything you could lay your hands on. The second meant playing tennis." So the Oberlin boy acquired some knowledge of one good book—the Good Book—and the habit of reading. He had all the more time for reading because of what he later maintained was his intense aversion to physical exercise, masked by the alibi that he had no time for it. (He claimed to have inherited the aversion from his father.)

He was a tough, strong boy (as he would be a man), so strong and tough that he was a prime target of the Oberlin College upperclassmen in the free-for-all "initiation" of the freshmen, from which he emerged, still on his feet, so exhausted that his father succeeded in having the college put an end to hazing. And as president of his freshman class he scaled the impressively high college heating-plant chimney by night to adorn it with his class numerals: 1919.^[7]

He was inordinately tall for his age, and at twelve he was captain of the freshman basketball team in high school. But that was just about his last appearance as an athleticus . He decided that he was going to get to be taller than anybody—he said afterward that it was the only decision of his life that he made stick—and sacrificed his every other activity to that determination. He added the extra cubit lying on his bed reading "and," said his brother William, "reading and reading" while ("according to me," said William) his brothers did the chores.^[8] At fourteen Robert topped his father by an inch and stood six feet. ("My height," he said later, "has been of enormous advantage to me in the course of my public career. It has enabled me to change light bulbs that the ordinary man cannot reach.")

The children of Oberlin professors attended the four-year Oberlin Academy free. Bob Hutchins made a clean sweep of the academy's distinctions. In the 1915 yearbook there appeared the following item under the heading "An Intimate Interview": "Mr. Robert M. Hutchins, President of the Senior Class, stepped up to Mr. Robert M. Hutchins, President of the Athletic Association, who was walking down the hall accompanied by Mr. Robert M. Hutchins, Captain of the Debate Team, Mr. Robert M. Hutch-ins, Manager of the Football Team, Mr. Robert M. Hutchins, Manager of the Glee Club, Mr. Robert M. Hutchins of the Men's Council and the Tennis Team, and Mr. Robert M. Hutchins, the Commencement Orator. 'Hello, Bunch,' remarked the President, 'Where is Mr. Robert M. Hutch-ins, the Sporting Editor of the Annual?' 'Hello, President,' answered the Captain and the Manager and their friends, 'he's over at the Second Church Choir practice.' 'Much obliged, fellows,' returned the President. 'I just wanted to see him a moment about writing up the Class basketball for the last two years, when he has been Captain of the Team.'"

He made his first public address at fourteen, and after some eleven hundred subsequent platform appearances he was still, at seventy-five, uncomfortable as a "set" speaker. But he was a debater born. He would never stop arguing, and he started early. As a small boy he was amusing but saucy—or, as his aunt complained to his father, "smart," meaning smart-aleck, with a proclivity for breaking into the talk of his elders with an always relevant (but not always timely) observation that revealed the impatience of a quick intelligence quickly bored.^[9] His sauciness was unabated in later life, but he had got it under urbane control. He appeared to be the most equable of men.

Whenever he was complimented on his graceful forbearance (and it was often) his reply, "My father always said that there is no excuse for bad manners" or "My mother always told me to be polite," suggested that his aunt's complaint had produced some effective remonstrance. But the quick impatience abode beneath the urbanity. He would wait his turn, and wait beyond his turn—and then let go with, more often than not, a question so ingenuously put that the colloquist did not know where or how he had been hit. He learned to suffer fools faultlessly, to listen (or appear to listen). But he never learned to suffer them gladly. The pedestrian Henry Luce (whose envy of him was a lifelong love-hate passion) called him a wisecracker. Alexander Woollcott and Harry Hopkins and Sinclair Lewis and Carl Sandburg and Aldous Huxley and Harold Ickes and Gertrude Stein (and Alice B. Toklas) thought that he was just great.

How he got that way, or was born that way, is not to be discovered in the family annals. His father, his mother, his brothers weren't like that.

He was never to lose that compulsive impudence of spirit that lifted him, again and again, when the personal (not the institutional) stakes were high enough, to an insistence on having his say, if necessary to the detriment of the Cause, a compulsion to upset his own apple cart. (One day at the height of his twenty years' war at the University of Chicago, his dean of humanities, Dick McKeon, when the two of them were walking to a meeting of the faculty senate, tried to argue him out of letting a critical issue come to the floor. "We haven't got the votes," said McKeon, "there's no point in going in there and getting licked." "Let's go in there and get licked," said Hutchins. And they did.)^[10]

It didn't happen that way consistently, or even customarily; the life of the successful administrator is one of both shameful and shameless truck-ling. But it happened again and again. (What university president would have done anything but dodge when the McCarthyites crowded him into a corner and asked him if he would have a Communist on his faculty? But this one said, "Of course I would, if the competent colleagues regarded him as competent in his field and his social views did not affect his competence.")^[11]

There is a behavior pattern that is adequately explained by masochism; or by parental influence; or by Hutchins—alternatively or in combination. Robert Hutchins' childhood was distorted—nourished, he said—by the stories of his ancestors' independence, ancestors who were "all of them stubborn and some of them vain. Their notion of success did not seem to involve material goods as much as it did holding onto their own convictions in the face of external pressure. I began to think at an early age that the ideal American was the perpendicular man."^[12] The perpendicularity, if not the sauciness, was hereditary. When Robert was fourteen his father received for Christmas a portrait of a friend of his "who had amassed a great deal of money and power by concentrating on doing so, and who looked it. My father put the photograph on the piano and said, 'I will put this here to remind us of the things we are fighting against.' I have sometimes thought that if I were to write my autobiography I would call it The Picture on the Piano ."^[13]

Nobody ever meant as much to Robert Hutchins as his father, and nothing his father ever said or did meant more than the statement he made when he put the photograph on the piano. Of all the things "we are fighting against," the earliest to which a fourteen-year-old's attention was directed was the deliberate amassing of a great deal of money.

It was an Oberlin assumption that a man might be rich or honorable, but hardly both. A Will Hutchins could accept a Teddy Roosevelt because the imperialist bully-boy (while he accepted their campaign contributions)

crusaded against "the malefactors of great wealth"—among whom John D. Rockefeller's name led all the rest. Over a lifetime largely spent in convincing the malefactors of great wealth (including John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) that the things they represented were not bad things, and could be put to good uses, Robert Hutchins adverted again and again (in public as well as in private) to his father's words when the Christmas present was unwrapped on Elm Street. The picture on the piano never faded. "I still cherish the view"—this in his old age—"that the independent individual is the heart of society, that his independence is his most precious attribute, and that discussion is the essence of democracy. It is hard for me to concern myself with the material prosperity of my country or with that of the individuals who compose it, because I was brought up to believe that prosperity and power were secondary, perhaps even dangerous, goals."^[14]

The man who admires independence per se is, of course, a sucker for all sorts of fanatics, as the word gets around at home and abroad that he will listen to you when nobody else will. A war veteran who rejected pacifism, President Hutchins of the University of Chicago sent a memorandum to a vice-president covering the appeal of a conscientious objector for a job: "Dear Pomp—see what you can do. I like these boys."

It was a coincidence, but no accident, that Oberlin was established the same year as the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1833. Issues burned at Oberlin, and home and school alike provided an atmosphere of continuous discussion of them. The mock political convention—Republican of course, in those parts—was traditional at Oberlin. The great extra-curricular activity of the college was not intercollegiate athletics; physical fitness was encouraged, and whoever wanted to maintain it by playing football played football. (Thus Ohio State's preseason defeat of Oberlin, by 128-0, in Robert Hutchins' last year was no more exhilarating for the victors than it was desponding for the vanquished.) The great extracurricular activity at Oberlin was debating. Literary societies took the place of fraternities and sororities. "We were not merely free to talk about everything; we were required to. You were entitled to your own opinion but only if you were willing to submit it to examination and to change it if it could not survive rational scrutiny."^[15]

The Congregational tradition called for congregational rule; the small college was operated by thirty-two faculty committees, an all-time record in the history of nonadministration, and the faculty encouraged the students to be no less congregational than they were themselves. There was a singular emphasis on "rational scrutiny"—singular in an institution with so strong a religious commitment, a commitment which passed from denominational to interdenominational and eventually to the nonsectarian

character which, in spite of chapel and choir, set Oberlin apart from the "church colleges" that dotted Ohio. The president, in Hutchins' day, was Henry Churchill King, author of a half-dozen treatises on rational living. When President King had a cold he told the students that its cause was his failure to live rationally.^[16]

Pleasures were to be weighed against pains, especially present pleasures against future pains, and dismissed accordingly. The pleasures of the mind alone were excepted from this procedure; they were rational pleasures. (But the pleasure of pride in the achievement of the pleasures of the mind was not to be condoned.) The students took this dedication seriously, but not so seriously that they did not have to be directed along the strait way of rationality. As the first American college to admit women, the Oberlin of Hutchins' day was still acutely sensitive to what was then called the boy-girl problem. Dancing was of course forbidden. Freshman girls were required to stay in their dormitories after 6:30 P.M ., sophomores after 7:30, juniors after 8:30, and seniors after 10. An uncharitable cynic might have ascribed the popularity of book-learning and singing to the fact that dormitory curfew was suspended only for choir practice and library work.

Drinking was not against the rules because nobody even contemplated so unrational an indulgence. The ultimate nonrationality came to the male students in the form of tobacco—Hutchins wanted to smoke but was too timid to break the rule—and when the son of another professor was detected smoking he was summarily expelled and the community agreed that the only thing for that boy to do was to join the navy.^[17]

If the life of Oberlin College in the early decades of the twentieth century was deadly, those who lived it didn't know it. It never occurred to them that there was any other way to live. "It was only many years afterward that a classmate of mine named Thornton Wilder drew my attention to the fact that our early environment had been highly unusual."^[18]

In at least one respect it was not unusual. "I do not remember that I ever thought about being educated at all. I thought of getting through school. This, as I recall it, was a business of passing examinations and meeting requirements, all of which were meaningless to me but presumably had some meaning to those who had me in their power."^[19] He had no doubt that the Latin and Greek he studied at Oberlin Academy were supposed to do him good, but he had no idea of what particular kind of good they were intended to do him. Since he had got into the habit of reading, he was perfectly willing to read anything anybody gave him. Apart from a few plays of Shakespeare, nobody gave him anything good to read until he was a sophomore in college, when he was allowed to examine the grammar and philology of Plato's Apology in a Greek course. And since he had

"had" an unusual amount of German, he was permitted to take a course on Faust . These were the only good books that anybody would give him to read until he was president of the University of Chicago long afterward and Mortimer Adler gave him all the good books to read at once.

"My father once happened to remark to me that he had never liked mathematics. Since I admired my father very much, it became a point of honor with me not to like mathematics either. I finally squeezed through Solid Geometry. But when at the age of sixteen, I entered college, I found that you could take either mathematics or Greek. (Of course, if you took Greek, you were allowed to drop Latin.) I did not hesitate a moment. Languages were pie for me. It would have been unfilial to take mathematics. I took advanced Greek, and have never seen a mathematics book since. I have been permitted to glory in the possession of an unmathematical mind."^[20]

His scientific attainments were of the same order. (It did not take the scientists at the University of Chicago long to find this out and, having found it out, to convict him of being antiscientific when his only offenses were being nonscientific and more than ordinarily suspicious that scientific work taught nobody anything more than scientific work). He had got through a course in physics at Oberlin Academy with a high grade—but only because his father expected his sons to get through all their courses with high grades. (It was long afterward and, of course, at Yale that he first learned that it was respectable to pass a course with a "gentleman's C.")

One course in science was required by the college "because one course in everything, in everything, that is, but Greek and mathematics, was required by the College."^[21] After he had blown up too many retorts in the Oberlin laboratory doing the Marsh test for arsenic, the chemistry professor was glad to give him a high grade and get rid of him. What he later remembered of college philosophy, prior to his becoming a philosophical university president, was that the text book in a ten weeks' course in the history of philosophy had green covers and pictures of Plato and Aristotle. "I learned later that the pictures were wholly imaginary representations of these writers. I have some reason now to believe that the content of the book bore the same relation to their doctrines."^[22]

His formal education, then, when he left Oberlin at the end of his sophomore year, had given him no understanding of science, mathematics, or philosophy. It had added almost nothing to his knowledge of literature. He had some facility with language, but he was not long away from Oberlin before he found himself unable to read Latin or Greek except by guesswork. (He retained a mastery of German through the accident of being able to find nothing in English during his military service in Italy, but

several books in German.) So, when he left Oberlin, he had, he said later, no idea of what he was doing or why.^[23] College was a lot of courses. You toiled your way through those which were required and for the rest wandered around taking those that seemed most entertaining (or least boring). The days of the week and the hours of the day at which courses were offered were, he said, perhaps the most important factor in determining the Oberlin (like every other college's) student's course of study.

Not quite monstrosities, then, or juvenile monks and nuns, but college students. It was a time when college still had magic, largely because so few had the means to go, when colleges did not call themselves universities, and when college professors were teachers and college teaching a vocation. It was a time when a university had two or three thousand students. A college like Oberlin had a thousand, all of whom knew each other and nearly all of whom came from within a small, homogeneous area. The mark that college made—not the courses, but the college—was indelible, and the mark that Oberlin made peculiarly so.

Innocent sons of innocent fathers in an innocent time and place, preparing, or being prepared, without their thinking about it, to sally forth from its innocent fastness with no other purpose than to change the world or, more likely, innocently fail in trying. Was it really like that? "Of course not," said Hutchins fifty years afterward. "It wasn't like that because it couldn't have been. Nothing could have been. It was either a dream, or something like a dream. I suppose that everything that has happened since has been so bad that that's the way it seems it was."

He always said that he could not bear sentimentality—which he carefully distinguished from sentiment—and made the point in billing himself as the sentimental alumnus when he returned to Oberlin, fifteen years after he left it, to speak at Convocation in the college chapel. The sentimental alumnus—and he, he said, was the sentimental alumnus par excellence—sees his alma mater "through a rosy haze that gets thicker with the years. He wants to imagine that it is like what he thought it was like in his time. He sees a beautiful uniqueness about the period when he was in college. That period has not been equaled before or since. The sole object of the institution should be to return to those glorious days that produced him."^[24]

He was the most sentimental, and therefore the most dangerous, of all alumni because his sentimentality was compounded by the emotions we all have when we think of home. "It is impossible for me to separate the streets of Oberlin, the trees, the buildings, the activities of the College, from my family and my family's friends who in those surroundings were a part of those activities. And since those were the most impressionable

years of my life, those people seem to me much more real than you whom I see before me now, and far more gifted." A mirage, and "the inhabitants of that mirage move against a background that you will tell me has long since disappeared. Indeed, you will say that they may have, many of them, disappeared themselves. You may even hint that neither the place nor the people ever existed as I claim. This may be true for you, but not for me. For me there is no retiring age for faculty, nor any new appointments to it. For me the Class of 1919 never went to war and never graduated. This static, beautiful Oberlin wherein my friends and I are forever young and forever friends deprives me of the powers of reason and leaves me only the power of recollection."^[25]

That was fifteen years after Oberlin. Fifty-five years after Oberlin "a classmate of mine named Thornton Wilder" said: "Bob was righter about Oberlin than you'll ever get him to say. It really was something like that. We were young and serene—imagine, young and serene. We didn't know what we were, but we knew where we were. Our inner life, so terribly hard for young people today, was untroubled in its essentials. Our fathers—Bob's was a notable case—were possessed of unassailable omniscience. They knew everything, and our mothers knew how to do everything. There were sorrows and some hardships, there were sickness and accidents and disappointments and bickering and dying and being born. But there was something that went on and on and carried us with it, into it, through it, out of it, and beyond."^[26] Something like what Hutchins might have referred to as "a play called Our Town, " in which "the strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest."