The Fifty Year Address
Edward T. S. Lord '91 Looks at the Future and Calls the Outlook "Fundamentally Hopeful"
Following is the text of Mr. Lord's address in behalf of the Golden AnniversaryClass of 1891 at the Alumni Meeting inHanover June 14:
MR. PRESIDENT, MEMBERS OF THE GRADUATING CLASS OF 1941, ALUMNI, OFFICERS, AND FRIENDS OF DARTMOUTH:
According to the traditions of the College, the men graduated half a century ago return and, this year as the class of '19, are honored by the College. We deeply appreciate this and are very grateful to you all. Yet there is a function and a duty in our presence here. A duty to keep green the memories of Dartmouth as it was.
As you men of the class of 1941 now mark the beginning of new things, we of fifty years ago are chosen to symbolize perhaps, for a moment, the distant years and ceaseless march of the College. Our class has come back home today, home to our College Mother, "Dartmouth Undying."
In the autumn of 1887 eighty-eight men enrolled in Dartmouth. We came from nine states. All but ten came from New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. We came largely from the homes of farmers, preachers, doctors, lawyers and teachers. We were so young we did not recall the Civil War. But we did hold boyhood impressions of the disappointments and the sorrow which had come even to the homes of the North in the subsequent years. Our first recollections of childhood were forebodings of the trials that were ahead for a recovering country. Panics, depressions, and disasters were expected to come and they did. It was a rather stolid time, with no crusading hopes. The Westward Expansion had slackened and the great Industrial Expansion to come was but a faint murmur that had hardly reached our ears. The last quarter of the nineteenth century, Victorian for better or worse in standards, customs, habits and the way of life, was our heritage.
It was said recently that the Dartmouth of our day was a stodgy college. Be this as it may, we believed in our Dartmouth. We believed in it as Eleazar told the Indian he believed in it, as every class has always believed in it, as fully as Mr. Webster believed in it.
When we enrolled, the faculty of the Academic Department numbered twenty men. The student body numbered 262.
On reaching Hanover in 1887 we faced a curriculum far different from that of the present. The college year was divided into three terms. The courses prescribed for the first two years were mathematics, the languages, and subjects in which facts, rather than interpretation, were paramount. Social Science was not mentioned. Perhaps this hints a belief that a questioning mind must first be equipped with facts to think straight. English was a prescribed course in all four years. When we came to senior year, philosophy was compulsory and prominent.
Soon no one in the fifty-year class will have known the faculty of our day. Today they live again in our memory. We knew them all. President Bartlett, Hardy, Worthen—we knew him affectionately as "Tute" and adopted him as a member of our class, Bartlett of Culver Hall, Charles Francis Richardson, Rufus Richardson, Parker, Lord, Colby. Emerson, Hitchcock, Campbell, Pollens, Jessup, Sherman, Ruggles, Fletcher, our three freshman tutors, Gil Frost, Ed Frost, and George Lord. But why go on? This is our day, and be sure we are keeping the memory of all of them alive.
That sixty of us survived and were allowed by the faculty to graduate proves that we did some work while here, but we had a wonderfully good time. We had organized sport in those days, interclass and intercollegiate baseball and football, intercollegiate athletics in which our honored Secretary, Frank Rowe, was a fast quartermiler, tennis was popular, we had a college band, the Dartmouth Cornet Band, of which '91 was a large part. We went to the old Van Ness in Burlington, the Saint Johnsbury House, the Eagle Hotel in Concord for our class suppers. Groups of fellows strayed to Boston and New York periodically to attend fraternity conventions. I believe we had a junior prom, and I know we had a commencement ball. Alas, we arrived too soon for house parties, the Winter Carnival, skiing, golfing, and weekend trips to Skidmore, Wellesley and Smith. In season God's green earth was around us just as now, and then the "howling storms came out of the frozen north," immortalized by Dick Hovey in the "Winter Song."
Our ambitions on leaving college were overwhelmingly devoted to the professions. Strangely, of the sixty who graduated "big business" at first called hardly any. Most of us entered teaching, medicine, engineering, law, and the ministry. Nearly all of us later changed our locations and our jobs, some of us several times. Don't think for a moment that it was easier then to decide how to get a job and then to go and get it than it is now. The picking was no easier, we assure you.
Many of the boys have now gone West over the horizon. We stand at attention when we think of them. We remember them in college, as men returning with their families for reunions, always as friends and companions. Among them Charles S. Little, "Squash" to all Dartmouth men, awarded an honorary degree by the College in words of President Hopkins which we can never forget. "Squash" brought much honor to the College while here, and fear among the men of other colleges when they mentioned football. He went on to the heights of the medical profession in his devotion to making the life of the feebleminded more wholesome and happy. He was recognized throughout the country as an outstanding administrator of a beneficent institution.
Charles G. DuBois, stalwart man of brains, blessed with sound judgment. He met the challenge of "big business," to be elevated to the command of one of the leading industrial institutions of the country. He was elected a trustee of the College by the alumni and served ten years. "Duby," kindly, companionable and generous.
W. O. Smith, "Chang" to us, our perennial toastmaster, an educator of distinction in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Charles Manly Smith, Governor of the State of Vermont, a son of Vermont to the very fber of his being in college and out of college, a leader of us in thought and speech.
These are but a few. We would pay a sincere tribute to all those who have gone. There are thirty-nine of us living. Fifteen are here today. All the others would be here if they could.
Of all the changes in the College in fifty years, most conspicuous has been the expanded horizon of the students' thinking. President Tucker and President Hopkins have kept the College in step with the thought of the entire world. Some have felt at times that the extremes of liberalism were in possession of the College. We dis- believe that. We believe that a combination of education, sincerity and common sense has been and will be the objective of the College—sincerity above all things. The world spends its time arguing and disputing. When we listen to all the commentators, editors, publicists and politicians who by chance may be statesmen what do we know? In the bedlam of noises around him, a young man can find what he wants to believe, what it is easiest in his surroundings for him to believe, what it is dangerous for him not to believe, but where can he find and establish for himself with certainty for the present, at least, what he really believes and what he does not believe? The answer to that should be found in the colleges, if anywhere, yes, in Dartmouth College. "Seek truth and ye shall find it." Who dares to say no to that?
To THE SENIORS
This is the fiftieth year out of college for us. It is the twenty-fifth year of the administration of President Hopkins. This is a happy coincidence for us. May we, sir, speak plainly and openly to you through the members of the graduating class. If you of 1941 will be whatever the President has advised you to be, if you will take him as your example to guide you in your ways of thinking and of treating your fellow men, you will never go far wrong. In the great summing up of all that he stands for and of all that he has led you to put faith in, no one else of all the men you have known or are likely to know will be a safer guide to your intelligence, a greater inspiration to your search for truth, and a greater moral and, yes, spiritual contributor to your mak- ing the most of yourselves. The voices of leadership throughout the country have re- cently said in unison that we have no safer educator, administrator, or public servant to guide us than you, sir.
How do we, fifty years out of college, look at the future? I believe I speak for all of my class when I say that the outlook is fundamentally hopeful, but I stress the word "fundamentally." The men graduated from this College have largely absorbed the love of freedom, the respect for knowledge, and the desire for wisdom, which must finally include a knowledge even of good and evil. That these qualities may not have been accentuated as such does not mean that they have not become the fiber of American strength. The tragedy of the present accentuates that, and they and only they can finally survive. Tragedy is individual, universal, and forgotten. If this College has been created, preserved and strengthened—as I believe it has—about these very qualities, it may be her high privilege to fulfil in the midst of tragedy and beyond all hopes of her founders the mission of the "voice of one crying in the wilderness." "Vox clamantis in deserto."
DR. HENRY H. PIPER '76 Introduced at the meeting of the GeneralAssociation of alumni June 14 as the oldestDartmouth man in Hanover during theCommencement week-end. Dr. Piper, 88years old, is secretary and class agent of theclass of 1876 in which there are now a totalof iz surviving members. Dr. Piper celebrated his 65th reunion.
