Fifty-Year Address
Following, in part, is the traditional address by a member of the 50-Year Class, delivered this year at the Commencementmeeting of the General Alumni Association by Mr. Kenerson, retired partner inthe publishing firm of Ginn and Company.
WHEN John Wentworth, the Royal Governor of New Hampshire, left Portsmouth for Dartmouth's first Commencement in the summer of 1771, his party travelled on horseback, following a blazed trail for the most part through the primeval forest to Plymouth and Haverhill, and then down the river to Hanover. It was fifteen years before the first road into Hanover was built coming in from the South.
No one in the group of councillors and trustees at that first Commencement could envision the Dartmouth that was to come, for the North American continent nowhere contained such a student body and plant as we now have. In fact, the historic universities of Oxford and Cambridge together had at that time a smaller attendance than our enrollment here in Hanover this past year.
The Dartmouth of the fall of 1899, when we of 1903 entered, was little changed from the days of our fathers. It was still a small liberal arts college, with students from New England predominating. The four classes from 1900 through 1903 graduated fewer men than will receive their diplomas tomorrow.
Already the revitalizing influence of Dr. Tucker was at work. Long before the term "social science" became common in the catalogues of colleges and secondary schools, Dr. Tucker was giving the College in his talks much that has now been accepted as basic in that field. In educational philosophy he was a forerunner of Paul Hanus and John Dewey.
We view this college of ours today with pride in its development and its increasing importance in the educational world as well as in the affairs of state and nation. We know our good fortune in the administrators who followed President Tucker. The College continued to grow and educational opportunities broadened under President Nichols. When he retired to reenter research in his chosen field, President Hopkins began his service of twenty-nine years. His was one of the truly remarkable administrations in the history of our American colleges. Throughout this period he held the deepest loyalty of faculty, alumni, and undergraduates. At the same time his talents were loaned by the College in service to the nation. In World War I he was an assistant to the Secretary of War. Later labor and business called for him, and the public grew to think of his name as inseparable from the College.
In the past seven years President Dickey has demonstrated an ability to maintain for the College the same high degree of importance to education and present-day affairs that marked the administrations of Drs. Tucker and Hopkins.
The small college we attended had its compensations. We gained a nearly complete acquaintance, not only with our own classmates, but with the six other classes of our college days.
Winter was long and confining, and thereby college life had few interruptions. The Outing Club, with its cabins and trails and Winter Carnival, had not been born. I remember the remark of my Texas partner, E. A. DeWitt of the Class of 1882. who said he hoped to meet that man Fred Harris some day, for any man who could turn such a damnable liability as a Hanover winter into an asset for the College, as he had done with his Outing Club, was a genius!
Daily through the week President Tucker faced the College at morning chapel, and his Sunday-evening chapel talks stand out in retrospect as one of the outstanding courses we had. This was no elective, however. Attendance was mandatory, sometimes to our regret, and the weekend parade out of town, which came in with the automobile age, was no part of our curriculum.
Coming to the administration of the College from the ministry, Dr. Tucker never ceased to consider the undergraduates as part of his parish. He emphasized the Christian religion as the source of our laws and code of ethics. To him it was as fundamental in the proper development of government as in the development of man and the society of which he is a part. Education was not for personal aggrandizement, in Dr. Tucker's view, but to make the recipients of it more effective members of society.
And so with the thought of Dr. Tucker in mind that the measure of the College is the measure of the men she sends forth, I speak with affection and pride of some of my own classmates.
[Mr. Kenerson then reviewed the' careers of a number of the distinguished members of the Class of 1903 and paid a special tribute to the memory of the late Victor M. Cutter, Life Trustee of the College.]
When we graduated, an examination of the membership of the 50-year class showed little change in vocations from the early beginnings three quarters of a century before. College education led to the professions of the ministry, law, education and medicine. The class of 1853 was distinguished by men who served their day and generation well in professional ranks and brought honor thereby to our college.
This last century has developed the industrial age and its vehicle of enormous production the corporation. Our country has reached a preeminent position in the world, and education has had to change to meet the needs of the times. The classical course, with its Latin-Greek French-German mandate for the A.B. degree, had to make room for broader courses in science, economics, sociology, history, comparative literature and philosophy.
The Tuck School, which was established while we were in college, was followed by the Graduate School of Business at Harvard, the Wharton School and other such institutions through the country. These in effect have added business to the group of professions, and their influence has done much to raise the general standard of business efficiency as well as to develop in business men a greater sense of responsibility to the public.
As a result of these changes, the largest group in our class went into business. Henry Haugan was president of a large Chicago bank and several other men served as officers or directors of their local banks. Hale was president of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company. French, our Alumni Fund Agent and former member of the Alumni Council, and Wadham spent their active business lives with the Telephone Company. Hess has been director of rate-making bureaus for the insurance industry. Pierpont was President of the Nebraska Standard Oil Company, and Frank Wen tworth established his own business in San Francisco as a distributor of office supplies and furniture. Among his public activities was his service as Trustee and Treasurer of Mills College. M. R. Brown has been Treasurer of Fall River Textile Mills as well as active on the boards of banks and charities in that city.
And so the record runs this broad basis of business and industry has made possible the needed aid to the College the Alumni fund has furnished.
Since the establishment of the Alumni Fund, our class has more then met its quotas, and private gifts from various members of the class for endowment of memorials and other purposes have more than doubled the Alumni Fund quotas. And now I have a message for and request of the class of 1953.
On the evening of our graduation in 1903, thirty-one of our class gathered for a final dinner together at the Hanover Inn. There are nineteen of that dinner group living today, of whom twelve have been with us this weekend. As a matter of fact, over half of our class graduating in 1903 are living today.
An elderly gentleman asked if he might join our group on that long-ago evening. He proved to be George Parks Whitcomb of the Class of 1853. A lawyer from Chicago, he had been one of the reuning fifty-year class.
Mr. Whitcomb requested one of us, when reaching our own fiftieth reunion, to extend to the graduating class of 1953 the best wishes and congratulations of the class of 1853.
In doing this, I ask you of the class of 1953 to extend congratulations and best wishes from 1903 to the class of 2003, when you return for your fiftieth!
We of 1903 can make no forecast of the changes to come in the next century. We do, however, ask you of the graduating class to keep in mind the fundamentals laid down by Dr. Tucker in our undergraduate years and perpetuated in the William Jewett Tucker Foundation, namely, that the purpose of a liberal education is to develop men morally and spiritually as well as intellectually. Reemphasized by President Hopkins in the dictum, "The primary concern of the college is not with what men shall do, but with what men shall be," the principle has been restated many times by President Dickey.
We charge you of the graduating class to give time and thought to the problems of your community. Keep in touch with one another and with your college. Guard and protect Dartmouth's independent position and keep her free from pressure groups of the hour. Cherish the knowledge that you are one of the Dartmouth family, and that when your work is over, the College will stand through the centuries rich and glorious in the record of her sons. And please God, so may it be.
SPEAKERS AT THE ALUMNI MEETING during Commencement weekend included Edward H. Kenerson '03 (right), who spoke for the 50-Year Class, and Edward F. Boyle '53, secretary of the graduating class.
