Beardsley Ruml '15, Life Trustee
On April 18, the "due day" for federal income taxes, BEARDSLEY RUML '15, author of the pay-as-you-go income tax withholding plan, died in the Danbury, Conn., hospital following a heart attack. Newspapers throughout the country paid tribute to the man whose death, at 65, brought to an untimely end a career of great public usefulness.
"B" Ruml was born in Cedar Rapids, lowa, November 5, 1894. His father, Wentzle Ruml, was a well-known physician of Czech origin and his mother, Salome Beardsley, was a New Englander. His affinity for ideas showed up early in grade school, where he would race through the regular school work, and force his teachers to give him special reading to keep him interested. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1915, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Psi Upsilon, he went on to receive his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1917. He later received honorary degrees from many colleges.
During World War I, Ruml left an instructorship at Carnegie Institute of Technology to go to Washington, where he directed the Army's trade tests. Then he and five others formed a company to advise private industry on personnel problems. In 1921 he became assistant to Dr. James R. Angell, president of the Carnegie Corporation. The next year he was drafted by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to become director of the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial, where he remained for seven years. The establishment of the Public Administration Clearing House in Chicago, a national headquarters in the science of government, was one of his major achievements while serving in this capacity.
In 1931 Ruml went to the University of Chicago as Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Education. In 1934, in the depth of the depression, Percy Strauss, head of R. H. Macy & Co., invited him to become treasurer of the company "to challenge our thinking." Mr. Strauss reported later that "We got what we asked for." Ruml became board chairman in 1945 and retired in 1949, remaining as a director until 1951. During this period, from 1937 to 1946, he also served on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, first as a director and later as board chairman.
A registered Republican, "B" Ruml usually voted Democratic "to balance things." He thought up the idea for the domestic allotment plan for farm relief which was put into the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. He played a prominent part in the conference of monetary experts from 41 nations at Bretton Woods in 1944, which led to the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In Adlai Stevenson's campaign in 1952 he served as chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee. Active in the Committee for Economic Development, he had guided some of its more enlightened studies of national economic problems. He was also active in the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools and the National Planning Association.
At home in the fields of business, politics, government and finance, perhaps education was closest to "B" Ruml's heart. At his death Dr. Philip H. Coombs, secretary of the Fund for the Advancement of Education, said,
"American education lost a powerful friend when Beardsley Ruml left us. Throughout his career he served education well — as a teacher, university dean, foundation officer and trustee. His contributions have been especially significant, however, in the last half dozen years, when he gave his almost undivided attention to a search for fresh solutions to the critical problems confronting our schools and colleges. . . . He was developing other powerful ideas to strengthen education at the time of his death. We will, unfortunately, be deprived of these, but those he put into the public domain in the past half dozen years will continue to build strength in our schools and colleges for a long time."
Ruml's Memo to a College Trustee written in collaboration with the late Donald H. Morrison, Provost of Dartmouth, was a conversation piece on every college campus in the country. His thesis was that liberal arts colleges could save themselves from financial ruin, double professors' salaries, and enhance their position in higher education if they would eliminate outmoded curriculum practices. He felt strongly that the power to design and administer the college curriculum must be taken from the faculty as a collective body and returned to the trustees. Pure dynamite!
Ruml's ideas on fiscal policies were as provocative, and created as much public debate, as did his educational theories. His ideas on the national budget caused apoplexy in some quarters. His Tomorrow's Business, published in 1945, and The Manual of Corporate Giving, 1952, reflected some of his ideas in this field. He was called to Washington frequently as an adviser, and to testify before Congressional investigating committees. He was made deputy comptroller of New York City to help solve the city's tax problems, and he served on United Nations commissions on economic development.
Ruml was an "idea man," a "professional thinker," but in the business of thinking he was a formidable adversary. Someone said his mind was always in overdrive. Most of his thinking was done in an easy chair - "Nobody can think if he's uncomfortable." He liked nothing better than to upset long-cherished, established ideas. William Benton, a long-time friend and associate, called him "an agent provocateur of ideas." He possessed a color and subtlety of mind not commonly associated with fiscal experts. He called his process of thinking a "state of dispersed attention," and his mind ranged over wide vistas of fact and theory.
Wherever he was known, Ruml's personality made an impact. He has been described as a 240-pound imp, because of his habit of challenging established ideas and cross-examining everything; as a towering and affable behemoth. He possessed an engaging humor, tinctured with iconoclasm. Itv Seems incredible that a man who boasted "I spent many years getting into condition for a sedentary life, and never broke training" could have participated in so many, and so diversified, activities.
At the time of his death he was a director of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Enterprise Paint Manufacturing Co., General American Investors Co., Government Development Bank of Puerto Rico, Market Research Corp. of America, National Bureau of Economic Research, Muzak Corp., and National Securities and Research Corp. He was a trustee of Fisk University and the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1946 "B" Ruml was made a Trustee of Dartmouth College and in 1954 he was elected a Life Trustee. He had been chairman of the budget committee and vice-chairman of the committee on educational policy. John W. Masland, Provost of the College said, "For Dartmouth he sought the very best in educational purpose and program . . .
he had the conviction that a strong educational institution should provide for the student, the opportunity for truly independent learning, and for the teacher, maximum reward."
He is survived by his wife, the former Lois Treadwell, of West Redding, Conn.; two sons, Treadwell and Alvin; a daughter, Mrs. John Doyle; a sister, Mrs. W. K. Jordan, and a brother, Wentzle Ruml '19. David Ruml '26 was also a brother.
Beardsley Ruml '15
