The Fifty-Year Address
MR. Chairman, President Dickey, Sidney Hayward, David Leslie, Trustees of the College, members of the faculty, alumni, class of 1951, fathers of the class of '51, friends of the College, we of 1901 salute you.
We of the class of 1901 were singularly fortunate to have been born in time to become members of this particular class. To begin with, the turn of the century was an important moment in history. It was our experience to be coming of age, as college students, in Dartmouth, at that moment. In addition, as you will see, the subsequent fifty-year record of our class is unique.
When we entered in 1897 we were the largest class ever yet to have matriculated. With the coming of President Tucker in 1893 there began a steady growth in enrollment, a growth so rapid that the College was hard pressed to take care of us. Dormitory space, from a total capacity of 200 in 1893, had been increased by the purchase of private residences and the construction of wooden additions; still there were not enough rooms. The issue of The Dartmouth for September 24, 1897, reporting our arrival, said that rooms in the village were hard to find, boarding clubs crowded, recitation rooms filled, professors holding extra divisions, and in the chapel, recently enlarged, every seat occupied.
The old Dartmouth was being trans- formed into the new Dartmouth. The "modernizing process," Dr. Tucker called it. We were in it but only dimly con- scious of ,it. There, for instance, was Pro- fessor Wells. We knew him by name. What was the name of his subject? A word al- most as new in print as it was in our ears—sociology. There was Professor Pat- ten. His subject, zoology, a life science studied in the laboratory, represented a new era in education. The period in which we were maturing was, as Dr. Tucker said, an educational crisis. The traditional curriculum, emphasizing the classics, was giving way to the modern, emphasizing the sciences.
In the outside world something else was taking place the significance of which was far beyond our comprehension. On the 22nd of April, 1898, our freshman year, the United States intervened in Cuba, and by that act went to war with Spain. On the same day, a Sunday, Dr. Tucker addressed the college community in a sermon in the White Church, saying in part, and in effeet, that because Cuba was a Spanish possession, and therefore closer to Europe than to America, intervention in Cuba was the beginning of the end of the isolation of the United States.
The class of 1901 went through Dartmouth in the midst of that transition, out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, in the modernizing process from the old Dartmouth to the new, on the way out of an old world order in the direction of a new world order.
As a class we were not particularly conspicuous in our undergraduate years. We attended to business reasonably well. We had our share in the diversions of college life. A large percentage of our men were Thayer School students. After graduation a still larger percentage engaged in construction. It has turned out to be a class of builders, in various vocations, engineering, school and college, business, medicine, law, the ministry, social work, public service. The president of the class, Edgar Hunter, by profession a builder, was for eight years superintendent of Dartmouth's college buildings. This Gymnasium, Fayerweather, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and other buildings, were constructed under his supervision. He is now Chairman of the Public Service Commission of the State of New Hampshire. He is here today. The second alumnus of Dartmouth to be elected Governor of Massachusetts, Channing Cox, is of our class, here today. The second alumnus of Dartmouth to be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Stanley Qua, is another of our class. He will be here today. The first alumnus of Dartmouth to be chosen secretary to the President of the College, then Secretary of the College, first editor of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, mainspring in the first years of the Alumni Fund and the Alumni Coun- cil, is that member of our class whom you all know and love, Ernest Martin Hop- kins. Elected to the Wheelock Succession, he served as president of Dartmouth for nearly thirty years. He is Dartmouth's master builder.
We are proud o£ these distinguished members of our class. We are also proud of other classmates whose services to society have been less well known abroad but of like value to their respective vocations, institutions, and communities.
If there were time we should like to pay our tribute to the teachers of our dayAdams, Richardson, Lord, Worthen, Foster, and the others. They never knew how much indebted to them we were, as we still are. We ourselves have never fully known.
The one man who more than any other ■was for us the embodiment of the College was the President, William Jewett Tucker. We touched our caps to him as we did to all members of the faculty, to him with special respect. There were times when we stood in fear of him, with good reason. Always, and above all, we loved him. Our feeling for Dr. Tucker was the next thing to worship.
We wish you might have seen, you alumni of more recent years, that youthful oldest living alumnus of forty and fifty years ago, Judge David Cross of Manchester. Born in 1817, graduated in 1841, sixty years out of college when we graduated, he was a familiar figure and a most welcome guest at Dartmouth Nights and at Commencements. Vigorous in body and mind, smooth shaven, with as much black as gray in his hair, his face in repose showed strength of character and when he spoke lighted up with the fire of enthusiasm. You who were present at an occasion like this some forty years ago will remember his telling us that he was alive when some of the men of Dartmouth's first classes were still alive. "I was around," he said, "I might have known them," and then, in a ringing voice, "Time! time is nothing to a son of Dartmouth!"
Time took on a new meaning in the person of Judge Cross. The long history of the College came to life before our eyes. There in him we had, and you have, a symbol of the continuity of Dartmouth. When you look at us older alumni you can say to yourselves that you are seeing and listening to men who have seen and listened to a man who was a youth of nineteen when Samuel Gray of Dartmouth's first class of 1771 was still alive. That is a span of 182 years. As American institutions go, Dartmouth is old, older than the United States. She is also young, as young as next year's entering class, perennially young.
Early in 1913 the alumni of Boston were planning an annual dinner which should be the biggest and best ever. So it turned out; there were over 800 present. E. K. Hall '92, then president of the Boston association, father of Dick Hall in whose memory Dick's House was given to the College) read a letter which Dr. Tucker, then President Emeritus, had written for the occasion. "Keep young with the College," that was the theme of the letter. "Why," he asked, "should a man grow old with his class when he can keep young with the College?" He invited the alumni to keep the College as their intellectual residence. The letter closed with a toast" The College of today, younger by the years which make us older, rich in the wealth of the new knowledge, may we learn to renew our intellectual life in hers."
The College has now made that invi- tation explicit. "Come back," says Dartmouth, "to Hanover Holiday, for a week of listening and learning." Go to the library, to read, to study. Gradually you become aware that the dignity and beauty of the building, the amplitude of its facilities, are matched with the incomparable- hospitality of the staff. It is the Alma Mater saying, "Welcome, back, son, to be a student again." No experience which Dartmouth has to offer an alumnus is so heart-warming, so rejuvenating.
Being perennially young means that the College has a future. What that future will be no one can guarantee. It is a future to be created out of a present which is no less difficult, if not more difficult, than when Hanover Plain was a wilder- ness. There is one thing certain—in President Dickey the College has a great leader. So far as it lies in human power President Dickey and his associates will create for Dartmouth a future in keeping with her past. They will not attempt to do it alone. With the moral and financial support of the Dartmouth constituency, especially of the alumni, support of costly giving in time and money, they will be able to bring to pass that for which we all hope.
Some of the men who are here today were present at this same event in 1909. They will remember Dr. Tucker's presence on that occasion. It was his last appearance as President of the College. This is part of what he said: "A college is not so much an institution as it is a procession. . . . Always in the background of this steady movement stands the ancestral home. The generations of men come and go, and come back again and again. . . . When our hearts turn hitherward, we must not be afraid of sentiment. Let the mother of us all know, by visible and enduring signs, that you love her. Let her never be made ashamed, in any respect, for herself, not simply for her sons, as she stands with the years falling upon her in the midst of the older and the younger colleges of the land. Better yet, see to it that her strength is as the strength of the hills that guard her, and her beauty like their beauty, simple, true, sufficient."
A traditional feature of the DartmouthAlumni Meeting on Commencement weekend is the address delivered on behalf ofthe honored Fifty-Year Class. At the gathering in Alumni Gymnasium on Saturday,June 16, the 1901 address was given bythe Rev. Robert F. Leavens of Berkeley,Calif. The full text follows:
