INTRODUCTION

The Sage

There is a sage for Xmas turkey,
There is a sage to flavor cheese,
There is a sage to spice the lowly porker,
There is a sage that mother brewed in teas,
There is a sage that fills the prairies wide,
But the sage who makes our lunches delightful
Is the sage from OLD MORNINGSIDE.

Thus Number 25 in the 1939 songbook of the Occasional Thinkers Club, entitled simply “To the Sage.” The book’s inside cover exhibits the same kind of admiration but in a different rhyme scheme:

There is no man whose wit is subtler
Than our friend and sage, good Dr. Butler,
So let us drink to him this toast:
Some mean a lot, he means the most.
Chorus
Oh sage we feel this way for you
For all the things you say and do.

No mere purveyor of comic doggerel, the poet Robert Underwood Johnson evoked the greatness of his sage in a 1933 sonnet published in the New York Herald-Tribune after he had read several of Butler’s addresses on the increasingly grim state of European politics:

TO NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
* * *
Let no man wait another hastening hour,
Nor unearned sleep enjoy, till he shall hear
These warning words that show thee sage and seer,
And breathe the secrets of the spirit’s power.
Now, when the clouds of doubt more darkly lower
And Love and Hope contend with Hate and Fear
We listen for thy summoning trumpet, clear
And cogent, lest our very courage cower.
* * *
No time is this for the smooth prophecy,
For laggard rescue, rash experiment
As though no danger ever trod this path.
Nearest thou art unto a prophet sent
Bringing our needs—Lincoln’s humanity,
Milton’s full mind, Savonarola’s wrath.

The things that Nicholas Murray Butler said and did as influential Republican, international statesman, and president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945 made him a dominant American presence in his time, known, celebrated—and not infrequently vilified—throughout the world. The journalist Max Frankel, explaining why his parents chose to settle in New York after fleeing Germany in the 1930s, pointed out that the “three most famous symbols of America for every European—Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia and Columbia University—were New York institutions.” Butler couldn’t take credit for FDR and “the Little Flower,” but he could for Columbia, which owed its status almost exclusively to his drive and flair. In building it into a world-renowned institution, Butler succeeded in turning himself into one as well.
The titles conferred upon him during his career by The New York Times suggest the magisterial sweep of his achievement: “the incarnation of the international mind” (1927), “Member of the Parliament of Man” (1931), “Prime Minister of the Republic of the Intellect” (1937). It is not likely that the author John O’Hara ever met him, and it is almost certain that Butler never read his novels, yet when O’Hara, in his 1934 bestselling Appointment in Samarra, has Caroline Walker document in a letter to Joe Montgomery the illustrious nature of the shipboard company on her first trip to Europe, her list begins with Nicholas Murray Butler (followed by the comedian Eddie Cantor, the actress Genevieve Tobin, J. P. Morgan’s daughter Anne, and financier Joseph Widener). Whether Joe was impressed with all this talent, O’Hara does not say. But it is telling that he chose Butler as representative of the power and distinction he wished to claim for some of Caroline’s shipmates. Bewildering as such a choice may seem today, when Butler appears to have vanished from human memory, his presence on board would have conjured for any middlebrow reader of the 1930s precisely the impression O’Hara intended.
Of course, no cultural seismographs are calibrated precisely enough to register the exact effect of an individual on any given era. For the opening decades of the twentieth century—once one is through with the Carnegies, Morgans, and Rockefellers, with Dempsey, Tilden, and Babe Ruth, with presidents and movie stars, inventors and war heroes—what method exists for determining the significance of a person’s life?
In 1930 The New Yorker’s Alva Johnston came up with a scientific break-through. A foolproof technique did in fact exist to calculate the magnitude of human achievement: merely count the lines in an individual’s Who’s Who entry, and the results will yield an indisputable rank order of importance. Applying this arithmetical model to the 1929 Who’s Who, Johnston discovered the five greatest Americans to be Samuel Untermyer, Nicholas Murray Butler, the Reverend Dr. William Eleazar Barton, Nathan William MacChesney, and Bion Joseph Arnold.
Butler could not have been happy with his runner-up position (by only two lines) to lawyer Untermyer. And he would have been right. Johnston had overlooked a flaw in his objective approach: the discrepant nature of the information included in Who’s Who. Whereas Butler’s lines were limited to basic biographical facts and the array of positions he had held, honors earned, clubs joined, organizations headed, and books published, Untermyer’s entry was primarily made up of lengthy descriptions of his legal victories. As a measurement of stature, Untermyer’s padded ninety-nine lines cannot compare to Butler’s lean, compelling ninety-seven. Had Johnston controlled for the verbose accounts of Untermyer’s cases, his analysis of “The Fifteen Biggest Men in America” would have made clear that Nicholas Murray Butler was unquestionably the biggest.
Johnston’s formula for determining cultural size is not the only method available. Beyond the prominence afforded by enormous wealth or political power or by the visibility given to entertainment and sports stars, America offers a host of other distinctions that help to define a person’s status in the culture. Butler garnered a substantial collection of these: honorary degrees (thirty-eight); Time magazine covers (one); days in which his obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times (two); memberships in foreign societies (thirteen); number of times a quotation from his writing provided the solution for the Saturday Review’s famous Double Crostic (one); occasions on which he received electoral votes as the Republican vice presidential nominee after the death of the actual candidate (one); public addresses delivered before various governmental bodies, such as the British House of Commons, the French Chamber of Deputies, the Italian Parliament, and the Hungarian Parliament (fourteen); issues of The New Yorker that included profiles of him (two); decorations from foreign countries (seventeen)—including Commander of the Red Eagle (with star) of Prussia, Grand Commander of the Royal Redeemer (First Class) from Greece, Serbia’s Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sava (First Class), Grand Officer of the Order of Polonia Restituta (Second Class), Knight Commander of the Order of the Saints Mauritius and Lazarus from the Italian government, Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion (First Class) from Czechoslovakia, and Grand White Cordon with Red Borders of the Order of Jade from China.
Inducted into the Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers Union in 1923, Butler won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. He became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1925, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1928, and chairman of the Carnegie Corporation Board of Trustees in 1937. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 1920. His celebrity finally became commonplace: in 1928 the Philadelphia Record commented that Butler’s receiving the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Romania didn’t cause much excitement

for the reason that he already holds every nonstop, long-distance, endurance and weight-carrying record in this department of endeavor. His latest acquisition…is simply another scrap of adornment for the most lavishly decorated member of the human race. It may be, indeed, the last, for the supply must be about exhausted, and there is only a remote possibility that new nations will be formed or new seats of learning founded for the purpose of adding illustrious initials to his name…Anyway, his possessions make him an influential factor in international affairs and the metal trades, although proposals that he incorporate himself as an individual League of Nations are not considered practicable.

Encrusted with honors, he was for H. G. Wells “the pearly king of academics.”
Butler also collected—another sign of cultural influence—hordes of adoring friends and acerbic enemies. The friends included many of the world’s most distinguished people, including the British statesmen Arthur Balfour, Lord Morley, Herbert Asquith, and Lloyd George; the foreign ministers Gustav Stresemann of Germany and Aristide Briand of France; the philosophers Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce; Andrew Carnegie, who embraced him within the inner circle of his trusted “old shoes”; Theodore Roosevelt, whom he served as an adviser until a political dispute ended their relationship in 1908; New York governor and democratic presidential candidate Al Smith; secretary of state and first president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Elihu Root; the banker William Crocker; Presidents William Howard Taft and Warren Harding; and almost everyone else of note in America.
For those who admired him, there was hardly an American to compare. Superlatives competed to capture his immensity: “the greatest savant in America—if not in the whole world”; “no man in this country so necessary for the peace of the world and the guidance of humanity”; “of all the men in America…the best informed regarding the public life of Europe”; “nothing of human concern is foreign to his mind”; “one of the great intellectual leaders of today”; “one of the great shining lights in the world”; “the one outstanding supreme figure in our entire American university world”; “the master interpreter of nation to nation in our time”; “the nation’s greatest unofficial statesman”; “the incarnate combination of the Greek and the Roman ways felicitously united”; “the most brilliant mind in the educational and political life of America.”
William Nelson Cromwell, cofounder of the prestigious New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, said it perhaps most fulsomely in birthday greetings to Butler in 1942:

The effulgence of your glorious career obliterates time which gave to the world the miracle of your existence. If my heart had voice, it would become speechless in the endeavor to convey to you my devotion, admiration and gratitude for the marvel of such a unique unparalleled life as you have exemplified to all mankind. Such work, such influence and such benefaction as your existence has manifested will never die. They possess the sublime gift of perpetuity. A revolving world is the type and you, Dr. Butler, are its most distinguished exemplar.

Honoring Butler on his eightieth birthday, his good friend Charles D. Hilles remarked, “It is indispensable that a man, to become great or famous, shall represent in a well-defined way the general aspirations of his times.” Hilles was certainly right. Coming to power at the same time America was coming to power, Butler reflected the energy and optimism of a young country about to take on a position of world leadership, supremely confident in the rightness of its political and economic system. His values were unapologetically elitist, embodying the perspective of what he would call “the better classes,” men entrenched in seats of influence and privilege, enjoying the benefits of good clubs, substantial incomes, and political clout. Butler flourished as the ultimate insider, really only comfortable with the well-to-do and the well-connected, with men who felt that the world would be better off leaving them alone to run it.
If his admirers came largely from the economic and cultural elite, his critics were a more diversified lot—writers, cranky professors, social activists. For them, “the Sage” represented an abhorrent strain of reactionary thought opposed to social or intellectual change. Catering to the rich, smugly confident in the rightness of his ideas, as tyrannical to those beneath him as he was obsequious to those above, their Butler was less exemplary icon than despicable caricature. The poet Ezra Pound, for example, considered him “one of the more loathsome figures of a time that has not been creditable even to humanity.” No friend to university presidents, the economist Thorstein Veblen used Butler as a convenient model for his dissection of the species’s most pernicious traits in his brilliantly dyspeptic The Higher Learning in America. The muckraking writer Upton Sinclair, who exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry in his novel The Jungle, also sought to expose Butler as “the representative, champion, and creator of…false and cruel ideals…whose influence must be destroyed, if America is to live as anything worthwhile, kindly or beautiful.” Charging Butler with serving as “the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy,” he claimed that Butler was the most “complete Tory in our public life.” For Butler, Sinclair argued, there were no people, only “the mob,” and it was in opposition to the mob and in the interests of plutocracy’s “instinctive greed” that he devoted his many talents. In the more direct words of the Communist Daily Worker, “Of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler it may be said, paraphrasing Voltaire, that if he didn’t exist, it would be necessary for the capitalist class to invent him.”
The social critic (and Columbia College alumnus) Randolph Bourne mocked him as President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher of Pluribus University, a man who took pains every commencement day to warn “the five thousand graduates before him against everything new, everything untried, everything untested.” Convinced of the absolute perfection of our Anglo-Saxon political system, Bourne’s Dr. Butcher “never wearies of expressing his robust contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth.” As America’s outstanding “philosopher-politician,” he is able to inject “into the petty issues of the political arena the immutable principles of truth.”
Walter Lippmann shared Bourne’s reservations about Butler’s political acuity. He cited Butler as the extreme example of the man who wrote about politics without the slightest understanding of politicians, someone so committed to abstract principles at the expense of the nitty-gritty of reality that there was nothing left “but to gasp and wonder,” Lippmann wrote, “whether the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?”
H. L. Mencken saw him as representing one of the two major strains of twentieth-century American thought:

When the history of the late years in America is written, I suspect that their grandest, gaudiest gifts to Kultur will be found in the incomparable twins: the right-thinker and the forward-looker. No other nation can match them, at any weight. The right-thinker is privy to all God’s wishes, and even whims…Butler is an absolute masterpiece of correct thought; in his whole life, so far as human records show, he has not cherished a single fancy that might not have been voiced by a Fifth Avenue rector or spread upon the editorial page of the New York Times. But he has no vision, alas, alas! All the revolutionary inventions for lifting up humanity leave him cold. He is against them all, from the initiative and referendum to birth control, and from Fletcherism to osteopathy.

To which list Mencken might have added the income tax, woman suffrage, and the direct primary. At the same time, it must be noted that Mencken was mightily pleased when the right-thinker reviewed favorably (if briefly) his early book on Nietzsche. Right-thinking clearly has its moments.
Perhaps the most amusing instance of Butler’s capacity to inspire antipathy occurred with the appearance of the “Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion” in the June 1939 issue of Poetry magazine by the poet and classicist Rolfe Humphries. Richly veined in classical allusion and comically overwrought in style, the poem makes little sense until one reads vertically the first letter of each line, which clearly spells out its message: “Nicholas Murray Butler is a Horses Ass” (apostrophe assumed). Outraged at having been duped, Poetry castigated Humphries in the next issue for his “scurrilous phrase” and barred him from appearing in its pages again. (The prohibition was eventually rescinded, Humphries later admitted.)
Revered icon and reviled caricature, Butler was large enough to embrace both easily. Whatever else could be said about him, he was always noticed. During the first half of the twentieth century, few names possessed the potency of “Dr. Butler.” Installing himself, in Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo’s words, “by sheer force of wisdom and learning and ability and character” as “one of the men that the world, the sick old world summons to its bedside when the fever pains and ague rack it too severely for endurance and it would learn the path to health,” he ministered to it from on high, diagnosing its ills and prescribing his political, economic, and moral remedies. The press conspired with Butler in delivering his therapeutic counsel to a world in need. His addresses to Columbia and Barnard students, his welcoming speeches to summer school students, and even his annual reports to the Columbia trustees became instant news, reported by papers across the country and commented on by endless editorial writers. From 1923 on, his annual Christmas greetings to the world were published in The New York Times. When Dr. Butler spoke, everybody listened, hearing not a man so much as a venerable institution.
“The American Century,” which Henry R. Luce proclaimed in 1941, was very much Butler’s century, and he succeeded in imposing himself on it in a dizzying variety of ways. His ambitions were never parochially limited to Columbia, nor were they national or even international in scope. They were, finally, nothing less than intergalactic. The choice of “Cosmos” as the pen name under which he wrote a series of articles for The New York Times during 1916 on his program to end the war, tells us more about Butler than he understood, as does the quip that amused the British statesman Lord Halifax, to the effect that he had heard Butler had no intention of dying until a vacancy occurred in the Holy Trinity. Although it misses several dimensions of him, the best attempt to catch Butler’s singularity in a few phrases was made by Alva Johnston, when he described him in the 1930 New Yorker profile as “the only member of his profession—that of consulting world adviser and liaison officer of the nations; the grandmaster of internationalists (non-Red) of all countries; the most comprehensively decorated private individual extant; the semi-official boss of American letters; the president of the most prodigious educational establishment on earth.” Not bad for a boy from Paterson, New Jersey, whose father was a small-time manufacturer of floor coverings.
To understand the nature of Butler’s ascent to cultural eminence, we must first appreciate the rather primitive state of higher learning in America in the late nineteenth century. At the end of the Civil War, the United States did not have a single institution committed in any significant way to original research. An 1869 report of the National Teachers’ Association bluntly pronounced its absence to be a serious national liability: “We have, as yet, no near approach to a real university in America. No competent nation may stand acquitted before its own conscience and the enlightened judgment of the world until it can point to one such center of original investigation and educational power.” It wasn’t until the founding of The Johns Hopkins University in 1876 that the nation could legitimately claim to have an institution devoted to advanced instruction leading to a Ph.D. Hopkins changed the educational landscape as dramatically as the steel and oil and railroad monopolies were altering the economic one. It was, according to the sociologist Edward Shils, “perhaps the most decisive single event in the history of learning in the western hemisphere.” Butler, slightly more moderate, pronounced it “the beginning of a new era in the history of higher education.”
The rhetoric accompanying the arrival of the research university suggests the exalted aspirations attached to it. To use a term preferred by Butler, it was the “power house” that would drive the nation’s progress. Daniel Coit Gilman, Hopkins’s first president, did not intend hyperbole when he declared, “To be concerned in the establishment and development of a university is one of the noblest and most important tasks ever imposed on a community,” any more than Stanford’s David Starr Jordan did in asserting, “The foundation of a university…may be an event greater in the history of the world than the foundation of a state.” Well beyond their practical value in supplying a rapidly growing industrialized nation with trained doctors, managers, professors, lawyers, and engineers, universities were hailed as agents of the country’s material and even spiritual transformation. As opposed to the vitally important liberal arts college, with its avowed purpose of shaping moral character through the rigors of a prescribed curriculum, the university’s sophisticated research methods and its gifted scientists and scholars promised to bring society closer to truth of all sorts, including the mysteries of nature itself.
The leaders of these institutions were invested with enormous cultural capital by an America eager to feel it could compete intellectually as well as industrially with the Old World. Unlike the relatively innocuous band of fund-raisers who head today’s universities, the titans who roamed the campuses at the turn of the century—men like Jordan and Gilman, Eliot of Harvard, White of Cornell, Angell of Michigan, Harper of Chicago—were powerful figures of great influence. They ruled their academic empires in much the same way as Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt presided over theirs. Veblen, understanding how universities, with their complicated managerial and organizational challenges and their need for endless resources, resembled competitive business enterprises, contemptuously (if perceptively) labeled university presidents “captains of erudition.”
In his carefully groomed annual Who’s Who listing, Butler always identified himself first as a publicist, in the sense of being actively involved in and commenting on public affairs, and only second as a university president. This ordering neatly defined his own priorities, although it was only as a “captain of erudition” that the rest of his career was possible. Columbia’s presidency supplied Butler with the platform he required in his implacable commitment to the Butlerization of America. He derived much of his initial authority from his university affiliation, and he understood brilliantly how to enhance it.
To begin with, Butler realized that if Columbia, and its president, were to be important, his institution had to be big—bigger, if possible, than its peers. To this end, he instituted an ambitious, one might almost say frenetic, building plan from the moment he took office. In the first ten years of his tenure he presided over the construction of eleven buildings. As the buildings went up, so did the enrollment figures. Increased numbers of students meant increased tuition dollars that Columbia badly needed to meet its operational expenses and help defray the costs of expansion. But apart from the financial necessity, Butler appreciated that higher enrollments signified an institution’s health and prestige. Enrollment figures became the university’s bottom line, as it were, the not-for-profit’s equivalent of a business corporation’s net income figure. Including all manner of enrollments—summer school registrations, home-study students, and the like—in his official total, Butler made sure the numbers ticked ever higher with each passing year. He proudly trumpeted the increasing size of the university, always careful to emphasize the connection between quantitative growth and qualitative excellence. Expansion was rapid and impressive. By the early 1920s, when “Dr. Butler spoke,” it was as the president not just of a university but of one generally acknowledged to be the world’s largest. Weighty as his words were in themselves, the public accorded them even more weight because of Columbia’s size.
Columbia’s transformation into a globally recognized university did not occur simply as a result of Butler’s administrative skills, considerable as they might have been, or of the flourishing of the city around it, dramatic as that was. It was driven by Butler’s view that Columbia had a sacred mission: to generate a civilizing force and intellectual power that would shape the modern world. Skeptics such as Abraham Flexner mocked his aspirations, deriding Butler’s comparison of “the slight elevation called Morningside Heights on which Columbia University is situated” to the four most sacred and inspiring spots in the world—the Acropolis, the Mount of Olives, the Capitoline Hill, and Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. For Flexner, “Such language lapped up by the uncritical millions is a serious obstacle in the way of real progress.”
Flexner’s resistance to Butler’s excessive claims was understandable, but it missed the extent to which such convictions can animate an institution’s life and contribute to its success. Butler cannot seriously be accused of deluding the public or standing in the way of its realistic understanding of the nature of universities. He was simply articulating an ideal—unrealizable, as all ideals are—that defined his own vision of Columbia. In wanting Columbia to be much more than it could possibly be—a force affecting the spiritual and material nature of civilization—he made it into what it became, a great center of research and learning. John Sexton, the current president of New York University, is right to recognize the obligation of university presidents to create the institutional mythology that their schools require in order to know what they are about and where they are heading. “The greatest power of a university president is to be the Homer of the community,” he argues, and in the history of American higher education no president has ever been more brilliantly Homeric in this sense than Nicholas Murray Butler. Flexner might have found the claim absurd, but Columbia could never have managed what it did without Butler’s uncompromising belief in its greatness. Butler’s declaration of faith at a trustee celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday helps us to understand why Max Frankel’s family saw in Columbia one of the distinctive symbols of America:

What was in my mind, and is in my mind still, is that Morningside Heights shall become the greatest capital of the mind that the world has ever seen—either ancient or modern—and that from it there shall go out to every part of this land and to every foreign land a steady and heartening stream of influence and inspiration in every field of thought and endeavor.

Butler’s success in selling both his institution and himself to the world required capacities of a different sort from visionary ones, and he possessed them in abundance. Foremost was his intuitive sense of the need to keep the two products he was marketing—Dr. Butler and Columbia—constantly before the public. Like Andrew Carnegie, Butler had a genius for self-promotion. He grasped early on the insight, attributed to Carnegie by his biographer, “that a man and his business could be so identified in the public mind that whatever the man did became an advertisement for his product.” Butler labored unceasingly on behalf of his image. Before the age of television, that meant using the press, whose resources he exploited with virtuoso skill. As the novelist Henry Morton Robinson commented while still a Columbia student in 1932, Butler was

the originator of the idea that Higher Education must be sold Right, Constantly and in a Large Way…All this educational crusading is accompanied by the fanfare of Publicity’s bold brass horn. Butler, like every great modernist, thoroughly believes in the Front Page… Butler cannot munch a cruller or buy a Pullman ticket without “the papers” knowing all about it.

Or, put more sonorously by a hostile editorial writer in Indiana some years later, Butler was a man “who can merely gasp, wheeze or gargle and find himself quoted in headlines.”
Not surprisingly, Butler numbered among his friends the editors and publishers of newspapers throughout the country—Maurice Sherman of the Hartford Courant, William Allen White of The Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, Alfred Holman of the San Francisco Argonaut. And most important of all, the young publisher of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs. Superficially, Ochs and Butler were quite different: Ochs, an uneducated Jewish outsider, and Butler, the WASP insider bedecked with academic titles and honorary degrees. But coming to power in New York at roughly the same time (Ochs bought the Times in 1896) and sharing a socially conservative view of the world—Ochs was said to “worship the God of things as they are”—each came quickly to cultivate the other. For Butler, it was a calculated matter of self-interest: the Times served as his own personal press agency. For Ochs, it was a question of unabashed hero worship. He revered Butler’s culture and learning, finding in his intellectual achievements the embodiment of everything the untutored Ochs felt he himself lacked. According to Elmer Davis, who wrote a profile of Ochs for The New Yorker, Ochs put Butler on his very short list—along with Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and theatrical producer Morris Gest—of “radiant beings from a celestial world.” A series of important Times editors and managers—Carr Van Anda, John Finley, Louis Wiley, Karl Miller—understood the paper’s commitment to Butler and made sure that he received the attention that their publisher found appropriate for a figure of such distinction. The Times supported Butler’s political positions, devoted countless editorials to celebrating his achievements, covered his speeches, addresses, and reports, praised his stewardship at Columbia, published the Christmas greetings Butler issued to the world each December, and permitted him space for sixteen pseudonymous articles in 1916 presenting his ideas for terminating the war. The paper even felt it newsworthy to announce when the Butlers were leaving for their European travels in the summer and when they were expected back in the fall. Butler never uttered a statement or made a decision the Times didn’t like. It was no wonder that President James Angell of Yale, at a dinner honoring Butler’s thirty years as Columbia’s head, commented admiringly, “The metropolitan press has become little more than a diary of your daily doings.”
Butler’s ability to command press attention did not depend simply on the personal affection of editors and publishers, which, after all, would not explain the presence of his gargles and wheezes in small-town papers in Tennessee, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Montana. Butler’s most casual utterance found its way into the national news because of the care he took to ensure that every paper in the country received an account of what he said or did. Butler was a master of the art of dissemination and saturation. Every speech he gave, whether to Columbia freshmen or Barnard alumnae, was grist for his advertising mill. He even sent the guest list for his parties at the presidential mansion to the press. Although he employed two press agents, Butler functioned effectively as his own public relations firm, committed to the notion that no day was satisfactory unless his name appeared in the newspaper. In pursuit of this goal, he proved to be an in- exhaustible supplier of material to be publicized, producing at least one hundred articles, addresses, welcoming remarks, reviews, introductions, public letters, reports, and the like every year. The most substantial of these were regularly collected into books. Beginning with his undergraduate prize essay on the Effect of the War of 1812 upon the Consolidation of the Union, published in 1887, Butler went on to complete twenty volumes during his lifetime. He was successful enough in making himself into a recognized brand name that the American Educational Review assumed it would be understood when it characterized observations he made in 1924 as “truly Butleriolic.”
Butler was particularly concerned that his work reach the world’s political and intellectual elite. What newspaper coverage could obviously not guarantee, direct mailing would—helped along by the funds to which he had access through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An exchange in 1933 with Henry Haskell, his assistant at the Endowment, reveals Butler’s thoroughness: announcing in July that the subject of a September address would be “The Ship of State,” an examination of some features of American government, he urged Haskell to prepare the appropriate mailing lists and make sure that enough copies were available for immediate distribution. Columbia would be responsible for his university, editorial, personal, and political lists, and Butler expected the Endowment to take care of the rest. Haskell checked back on August 2 to make sure he had understood what Butler wanted. Beyond the four groups handled by Columbia, the Carnegie mailing would go to:

Trustees of Carnegie Endowment
Foundation
Corporation
Justices of U.S. Supreme Court
Judges of U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal
Judges of New York Court of Appeals
Judges of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals
President of the United States, Vice-President, Members of
Cabinet and Chief Assistant Secretaries
United States Senate—home addresses
House of Representatives—home addresses
Governors of all the States
Foreign Ambassadors & Ministers at Washington
Counsellors or chief secretaries of each Embassy or Legation at
Washington
U.S. Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls-General in Foreign Service
Carnegie Endowment foreign list
Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church
Protestant Episcopal Church
Methodist Episcopal Church
World Almanac: Presidents of all colleges
Officers of Educational, Religious organizations
Old and New Correspondents
Comité d’Administration
Foreign Newspapers

A total, Haskell calculated, of nine thousand copies.
Although Butler always directed himself to a highbrow audience, he became a figure esteemed by lesser brows as well. Middle-class America adopted him as its best-beloved upper-class pundit. Butler had no problem with this role, happy to dispense his influence and sell his image wherever he could. At the beginning of 1945, for example, Pageant magazine asked various “prominent people” to share their New Year’s resolutions with the world (or at least that portion of it that read Pageant). Butler, America’s “Public Sage no. 1,” according to the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal, was apparently not disturbed to appear next to the young Frank Sinatra, “America’s number one crooner.” And certainly his resolution was socially more significant than Sinatra’s. While Sinatra was content to encourage people “to nourish a feeling of confidence in your own abilities. To acquire poise and charm, to develop your own individual personality is to learn to live,” Butler offered a grand ambition appropriate to a serious international statesman: “Let us resolve to take leadership in the effort to unite the independent nations of the world in a movement to co-operate in the establishment of peace, prosperity and sound public morals, and to protect these by an international police force composed of the combined navies of the world.”
Butler understood both the quantitative features of marketing as well the need to attract consumer interest in his intellectual goods. He instinctively appreciated from the start of his university presidency the opportunity every Columbia address gave him to reach a larger public. He used his annual reports to the university trustees, ostensibly in-house documents dealing with conditions at the university, as occasions for musing on the state of education generally, on manners, morals, ethics, history, economics, and the American way of life. The incremental attention earned by the regularly scheduled ceremonial address or report was also not lost on Butler. If a single speech was good, a speech given under similar auspices the next year was even better, and by the third year an eagerly anticipated event with a built-in audience had been created. Such was the case with Butler’s Parrish Art Museum lectures in Southampton, the site of his summer home on Long Island. Having agreed to give a political talk there in 1926, Butler turned it into an annual address, usually in September, whose major significance was always noted by the press. The Oracle of Southampton, as he eventually became known, continued these lectures until 1944, when his physical infirmities required that he stop.
Butler’s potent blend of the practical and the visionary is perhaps best analyzed not in a handbook of qualifications for university presidents, but in an article written in 2000 by Michael Maccoby for the Harvard Business Review on what makes successful CEOs of major corporations. Maccoby’s description of what he calls “productive narcissists” is an extraordinarily accurate assessment of Butler’s strengths. It demonstrates that Butler was intuitively functioning as a modern CEO long before the term was ever thought of. Maccoby argues that today’s CEOs “hire their own publicists, write books, grant spontaneous interviews, and actively promote their personal philosophies. Their faces adorn the covers of magazines like Business Week, Time and The Economist…They shape public and personal agendas.” At best, Maccoby’s narcissists are gifted and creative strategists who seize opportunities and tend to see the big picture before others do. Critical to their success is their ability to attract followers through the power of their rhetoric. They are skillful orators who “believe that words can move mountains and that inspiring speeches can change people.”
Butler’s career testifies to the power of Maccoby’s insight into the importance of language to an effective leader’s self-creation. From his earliest years, Butler was effortlessly at home with words, reveling in his ability to dazzle listeners with his precocious verbal talents. At thirteen he gave the commencement day oration for his high school class, and at twenty, the class day address at Columbia.
“‘Talking with Dr. Butler,’ as one enthusiastic friend confided to another, ‘is like listening to a symphony orchestra.’” Professor and inventor Michael Pupin referred to the “magic of Butler’s winged words.” Although he distrusted Butler’s verbal facility, Roger Howson, a Columbia librarian and university historian, accurately diagnosed his president’s ability to build a career out of language:

For him words were things out of which one made sentences, out of sentences one made speeches and out of one’s speeches one compiled a career and a life. Speeches made at the right place, at the right time and to the right people formed a balloon barrage to keep intruders and inquirers at a safe distance. There was always an adequate supply of such speeches and enough in each speech to assure approval and agreement. If one agrees to 97% of the statements in a speech the 3% that is questionable seldom gets questioned. And if the subject of the speech is sufficiently general one forgets what in particular is omitted.

His seductive skills from the lecture podium were legendary. Dean James Russell of Teachers College remembered a twenty-minute introduction Butler delivered without any notes: “There was a perfectly beautiful flow of language. He was an artist at this. He had the amazing ability of putting one word next to another and making it sound beautiful. He went on and on.” Afterward, when a reporter who came late asked Russell what had been said, “I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember a thing that he had said. It just sounded so wonderful.”
Butler was very much a man of words, but not everyone admired them. Skeptics like Walter Lippmann dismissed Butler’s resonant language as essentially vacuous. Humorist Finley Peter Dunne claimed that the quality of Butler’s oratory in his annual Southampton Labor Day talks was so rich that “it was possible to waltz to it” the journalist Dorothy Dunbar Bromley thought his addresses “interminable miasmas of guff” Robert Shafer, a critic, noted that “wherever windbags are in demand President Butler is still asked to speak” for McAlister Coleman, Butler crafted his arguments “in phrases that glow with empty grace.” The feisty New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell declared that “even the semi-colons are pompous” in Butler’s prose, nothing that any list of occupational hazards faced by reporters would have to include “indigestion, alcoholism, cynicism and Nicholas Murray Butler.”
Harvard professor Harold J. Laski, whose radical social views clashed dramatically with Butler’s conservative ones, mocked what he considered his predictable conventionality. Laski headed a review of Butler’s A World in Ferment, published five months after America had entered World War I, “Nicholas Murray Tupper,” referring to Martin Tupper, the nineteenth-century British author of Proverbial Philosophy, whose name had become a synonym for the contemptible commonplace. College presidents, Laski concluded,

must perforce burnish platitude to the semblance of thought. That is, perhaps, in ordinary times. But as President Butler himself will not deny, these are not ordinary times. May not the young men who crave some stimulation, some intellectual clarity, some insight into the justice of their sacrifice, legitimately be resentful? May they not rightfully ask more than that they shall be gathered together and told—”You are about to die, and two and two make four”?

Whether one was moved or appalled by Butler’s words, they were indisputably the major source of the recognition he earned for himself. Their sheer profusion carved out a space in the American consciousness where the less loquacious feared to tread. When speaking, Butler also took care to pronounce them in a way that drew attention to their gravity. He employed what Jacques Barzun called the “Dutch Patroon Accent,” in which words like “circle,” “curve,” and “first” were pronounced “coicle,” “coive,” and “foist.” Easily mistaken for Brooklynese, this distinctive accent contributed to his aura of being a long-term, inbred member of Knickerbocker society—socially prominent descendants of New York’s original Dutch settlers—instead of the parvenu from Paterson that he actually was. A brief exchange with Clark University president G. Stanley Hall in 1923 testified to the success of Butler’s image making. Butler, in praising Hall’s autobiography, had remarked on the similarities between Hall’s rural childhood educational experiences and his own early schooling in northern New Jersey. Hall expressed surprise: “I did not know your boyhood was rural, but had an impression that you grew up in something like Fifth Avenue surroundings.”
Appropriately enough for a man who never seriously entertained the possibility that he might be wrong about anything, Butler’s autocratic bearing, like his words and his face, radiated self-assurance. “It has sometimes been remarked,” the Herald Tribune said in acknowledging his thirty years as Columbia’s president, “that Dr. Butler should have lived in an age of dictators.” His enthusiasm for democracy stopped short of sharing with others any portion of his own authority. The reason why St. Paul’s Chapel on the campus had not been consecrated, Butler explained to Columbia’s long-term Catholic chaplain George Ford, was because the act of consecration would have invested the Episcopalian bishop of New York with authority over it—an intolerable situation: “‘I,’ said Butler, ‘am the Bishop of Columbia. And I’ll be Bishop of Columbia while I live.’”
He didn’t merely hold opinions and issue judgments; he embodied them in an elegantly pugnacious physical self. Stocky and of medium height, Butler had as his defining feature a massive head, sitting, as one magazine described it, “like a dome on the shoulders of Atlas.” A formidable forehead, wide-set gray eyes with heavy folds beneath them, a broad nose, and a full, drooping mustache that he liked to stroke while speaking, led the Glasgow Bulletin to describe him as “burly of figure and striking in headpiece.” The Times of London observed that “energy exudes from his every pore. The robust, middle-sized frame seems to be always in motion, its movements are always alert; he couldn’t walk from one end of a room to the other without giving the idea of a hasting and unresisting spirit within him…One of those positive, downright, thoroughly high-minded controversialists with a tremendous power over the opinions of others.” One might compare him to Francis Prescott, Louis Auchincloss’s fictional Rector of Justin, whose critics claimed he “looks too much like a great man to be one.”
The cumulative distinction Butler fashioned for himself out of language, appearance, manner, and position was nourished by his prescient understanding, to use the mantra of today’s technology-driven commerce, of the synergies of cross-selling. The triumvirate of Butlers—the Sage, the president of the world’s largest university, and the international statesman and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—reinforced one another at every turn. His summer trips through Europe under the auspices of the Endowment spread Columbia’s reputation abroad, just as his presidency added academic prestige to the Endowment. Both contributed to his stature as Sage even as they derived luster from it. Altogether, a unique combination: “a high priest of things intellectual” who was at once “a human power plant, a political live wire and a tireless dynamo of industry.”
Butler gloried in the notion of being recognized as much more than a mere academic. For Americans, whose country was beginning to demonstrate its economic power, the image of a university president as an experienced business executive presiding over a large corporation was reassuring. The praise Butler frequently received for running Columbia like a railroad was serious indeed at a time when the organization of railroads gave America a perfect metaphor for its growing efficiency and industrial might. Even before he tried, during his quest for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, to resist being classified as another college professor running for the presidency, like Woodrow Wilson, he preferred to be seen not as an academic, but as a manager with cutting-edge administrative skills. Years before Calvin Coolidge’s famous declaration that the business of America was business, Butler had intuited what the country was about: BUTLER MEANS BUSINESS, his campaign pin announced.
“Polymath and politician,” in Justice Cardozo’s words, no university president achieved the worldwide celebrity Butler managed for himself, and no public or political figure acquired the intellectual distinction attributed to him. When the International Mark Twain Society (whose honorary president, surrealistically enough, was Benito Mussolini) awarded him its medal in 1937 for service to education, it was inscribed “To the American Plato.” Lists of the great, the profound, the articulate, and the accomplished invariably contained the name of Dr. Butler at the very top: one of “the three greatest thinkers” in America, behind William James and George Santayana; “among the five leading figures of the country”; among “the best thinkers of our time,” along with French writer André Maurois and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; among our “five greatest contemporaries” (ahead of Edison but behind Einstein and Mussolini, who were tied for first, followed by Gandhi and FDR); one of only “four good after-dinner speakers in New York”; one of “the two greatest living educators” (Vanderbilt’s James Hampton Kirkland being the other); one of the fifty Americans “whom all high school students should know”; tied with several others in fifth place behind FDR, Sinclair Lewis, the Mayo brothers, and Will Rogers for title of “greatest living American.” The newspaperman and press agent Edward Marshall explained to Butler in 1928 that he had been fortunate to have associated with many prominent people, among whom three stood out: Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Butler. Although the achievements of all three had already permanently influenced civilization,

You and Edison are both light-makers, and therefore, probably of greater import than Roosevelt, who to me seems to have been a sort of public conscience. You two are constructive; he was corrective…The world, because of Edison, is living every year millions of months longer than it was able to before his creation of a competent illuminant…You have done more than anyone of whom I have knowledge to teach humanity how best to use the hours that Edison has given. I always think of you and Edison as unconscious perpetrators of the greatest piece of teamwork in the modern world.

The scope and richness of his career, as much as any individual achievement in it, constituted Butler’s greatest triumph. As the Brooklyn Eagle commented in 1937,

He is unique in so many ways that colleges might give a special course on his life up to now as an outline of academic, political and social history of the last half-century. During this period Dr. Butler has been in the news more than any other American, and has made news more continuously than anyone else. He has been an initiator as well as a commentator, a participant as well as a spectator, a fighter as well as an instigator.

Although he was on occasion likened to Gilbert Murray, the Oxford classicist who actively involved himself, during the early decades of the twentieth century, in the search for world peace, the comparison is not finally useful. Murray was a far more subdued personality, lacking the manic energy that drove Butler. Perhaps the closest American parallel was a man whose background, flamboyant lifestyle, personal wealth, and political commitments were completely different from those of the Sage, namely “the Chief”: William Randolph Hearst. They were opposed on almost all the issues—Hearst, the man of the people, a radical, pro-union Democrat, a fierce critic of class privilege, an unwavering isolationist who was against the League of Nations; and Butler, the conservative Republican internationalist, hostile to unions in his defense of corporations and entrenched moneyed interests, and an advocate of the League. What they shared, however, was arguably more important: an all-consuming narcissism, a love of power, a brilliant understanding of the art of self-promotion, and an abiding passion to influence the American political agenda. Both wanted to be president of the United States, and when they were stymied in this aspiration, they spent the rest of their lives using the institutions they commanded to try to shape public opinion. It was a measure of Butler’s accomplishment that lacking the ready access to the nation that Hearst’s newspaper empire afforded the chief, he still succeeded, as H. G. Wells said, in making himself into a figure who “speaks with the voice of America.”
According to Garry Wills, the archetypal American myth celebrates the outsider, the anti-institutional figure who achieves his independence by cutting himself free from restraints and escaping to his freedom in the open spaces. Butler represented an American strain of quite another sort. A prophet of urban power and urban institutions, he earned his cultural centrality not by ambling out into the sunset, but by immersing himself ever more deeply in his metropolitan identity, by accepting yet more honors, affiliations, obligations. His career demonstrates the power of sociologist Georg Simmel’s insight that “it is the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or international area.” If John Wayne is Wills’s American Adam—”untrammeled, unspoiled, free to roam, breathing a larger air than the cramped men behind desks”—Butler can properly be seen as the institutional hero, a figure committed to all those values of intellect and culture, of corporate power and influence and social connection that the Wayne symbol equates with sterility and death. A less-resonant image perhaps than that of the unencumbered outsider, it nevertheless is also part of the mythic American experience.
Time has not been kind to Butler. Great and famous as he was acknowledged to be during his lifetime, caricature seems now to have effaced icon, and with it all traces of the man whom many of his contemporaries thought was guaranteed a distinguished and lasting place in the country’s memory. Even current Columbia students, though they generally realize that their renowned Butler Library was named after somebody, are hard-pressed to identify the person. No one would have been more surprised than Butler at his total disappearance today. His view of his importance is perhaps best caught in a small typewritten chart located in a file of his papers labeled PERSONAL ODDS AND ENDS. Most likely the product of a self-indulgent reverie that he had worked out in an idle moment sometime in 1940, it had no doubt been typed into its current neat form by a dutiful secretary:

Mussolini Stalin Hitler Roosevelt NMB

Born 1883 1879 1889 1882 1862
Come to Power 1922 1924 1933 1933 1902
Years in Power 18 16 7 7 38
Age 57 61 51 58 78
Total 3880 3880 3880 3880 3880
Divided by 2 1940 1940 1940 1940 1940

Astonishing as this numerical confluence is, it is no less astonishing than the demands of an imperial ego obsessed with making a claim for its own significance. Suggesting rather more recognition than history has granted him, the chart nevertheless must have assured Butler—who was fascinated by numbers—that he really did matter as much as he thought he did.
If a man is known not only by his achievements but also by the company he keeps and the company he thinks appropriate for himself, Butler is a compelling American cultural figure of his era. His contemporary obscurity is as unmerited as his numerical fantasy of world leadership was implausible. Somewhere in between, majestic and imperfect, stands the Sage. It is time to rediscover “the foremost American of his day” and the roles he played in the drama of the age that nourished