WU ArchivesIn her book, “Beginning a Great Work: Washington University in St. Louis, 1853-2003,” Candace O’Connor relates the history of the University from William Greenleaf Eliot to Mark. S. Wrighton.
Following the death of William Greenleaf Eliot, a cloud of gloom settled over Washington University. At one blow, the young school had lost its co-founder, third chancellor, and the only board president it had ever known. More fundamentally, it had lost the moral leader who had shaped its generous social and educational policies: its liberal scholarship assistance, its hospitality to students of varied religious and ethnic backgrounds, its early admission of women, its accommodation of students who wanted to pursue nonprofessional careers, and its belief in allowing faculty members to teach and publish as they wished.
Leaderless now, the board had to grapple with a deficit of nearly $40,000 per year and with the University’s unsustainable pattern of spending unrestricted endowment, just to make ends meet. The underlying dilemma was simple: Most programs had sprung up without adequate endowment to support them. … Much later, onetime faculty member James Hosmer recalled that, “Dr. Eliot…used to compare the struggling university to a small dog with an inordinate tail,” he said. “The dog did not wag the tail, but the tail wagged the dog.”
The Board Takes Drastic Cost-Cutting Measures
Clearly, no one with any sense would serve as chancellor of such a financially strapped institution, so the board again asked the University’s loyal dean, Marshall Snow, to become acting chancellor until the situation improved. Meanwhile, it needed a new board president to deal with these difficult times, and chose the vice president, Leighton, for the job. A prominent attorney, he had given up his legal practice to head his father-in-law’s iron manufacturing business, and now he took Bridge’s place as University board member and donor. In private life, Leighton was a cultured man, a collector of literary and artistic treasures, with a private library of western Americana that was the largest in St. Louis and possibly in the United States.
Not a reformer at heart, Leighton still did his job honorably, taking stock of the University’s finances and recommending stringent austerity measures: trying to make the University’s holdings more profitable, raising tuition, increasing the endowment, and reducing operating expenses.
Between 1887 and 1889, his rigid economies made some difference, as the deficit shrank by two-thirds. At the same time, the endowment grew by more than $240,000 – though, in the board’s time-honored fashion, its members gave most of the total themselves. Yet this increase had to offset new expenses, such as a recently introduced fifth year in the engineering program – and the faculty, which suffered most in this belt-tightening, finally became restive.
In June 1889, 17 professors signed a stunning critique of the University’s instruction, academic standards, and resources. They described vast deficits in books and equipment that they routinely filled from their own collections. Admission standards were comparable to those at leading colleges, they said, and they themselves were highly productive; some departments, notably astronomy, were among the best in the nation. The facilities, however, were outdated, dismal. To rectify matters, they needed a well-equipped library, better apparatus, bright new buildings, and greatly increased salaries.
Six months later, Colonel Leighton responded in another report, which “will not be read with pleasure by the people of St. Louis,” predicted one newspaper, because it was even bleaker than his first. A limit had been reached, he agreed. The deficit was down to around $11,000, but there was no new way to cover it. While emergency measures might hold the line for two years, he said, it would then be necessary to trim the educational program, “however humiliating to us and to this city it may be.” Reluctantly, he named five candidates for elimination, and at the top of the list were the two programs – the A.B. and Ph.B. courses, leading to degrees in arts and philosophy – that made up the liberal arts portion of the Undergraduate Department. And yes, he admitted candidly, the faculty was right: Their salaries were indeed too low, and cuts made during the economic panic of the 1870s had never been restored.
Amid these lean times, key faculty members began to depart. “I could not support my family on my salary,” recalled James Hosmer, professor of English and German, who left in 1892 to become librarian of the new Minneapolis Public Library. William B. Potter resigned in 1893, thus ending the successful, 22-year life of the Department of Mining and Metallurgy – ironically, the program that ranked at the top of Colonel Leighton’s list to preserve.
However, many other faculty did wait and labor – and it was their loyalty, above all else, that sustained the troubled University. Alexander Langsdorf, B.S. ’98, who later became dean of the Schools of Engineering and Architecture, recalled that he “had the great privilege of knowing twelve of them…and can testify that as a whole no finer men could have been found anywhere.” He added gratefully: “They may be said to have been the brains, bone, and sinew of the institution through all the lean years.”
Casting a “Lengthened Shadow”: Robert Somers Brookings
In 1895, Robert S. Brookings had just concluded the biggest business deal of his life. Thanks to his earlier efforts, the firm he had served faithfully for 28 years – the Samuel Cupples Woodenware Co. – was already the largest of its kind in the United States. In downtown St. Louis, he had built a giant warehouse complex, strategically located near major rail lines, that had space for 40 companies doing $100 million of business a year.
He had even managed to keep this “Cupples Station” project afloat during the 1893 business depression. When American banks refused to loan Brookings the money he needed to finish construction and stave off bankruptcy, he sailed for London. There he persuaded Seligman Brothers to give him a $3 million loan – “a personal triumph,” said his biographer, Hermann Hagedorn, “that marked the peak of Brookings’ business career.”
With Cupples Station now secure, he was seeking something more than mere board membership: He longed for a sense of purpose, a way to do good in the world. Intrigued by Andrew Carnegie’s notion that the rich are merely stewards of their wealth, he consulted Cupples, his mentor and friend, on various forms of benevolence. A charitable gift, said Cupples, had to involve some effort on the recipient’s part or it would only confer “the palsy of pauperism.” On the other hand, he added, “education – the higher education which trains for leadership… is at least free from this defect.”
So education it would be. Accepting the board presidency, Brookings devoted himself to Washington University, which he admired for its strong charter and able faculty. For 33 years he remained in this role, giving nearly all of his time and at least $5 million of his fortune, including Cupples Station and his own home on Ellenwood Avenue, to revitalize the University and its medical school. Much later, Alexander Langsdorf, then dean emeritus of the School of Engineering, said of him: “If it is true, as Emerson said, that an institution is the lengthening shadow of a man, it can be said with complete certainty that Washington University, in the form it now has, is the lengthened shadow of Robert Brookings.”
University-building was an odd fate for a man who had little formal education. Born in 1850 in Cecil County, Maryland, he was just two when his father, a country physician, died suddenly. His mother remarried and Brookings, along with older brother Harry and young sister Mary, grew up on a farm near Baltimore. He spent part of each summer making rounds with a physician uncle, acquiring a nickname: “little doctor.”
His school was basic and crowded, and Brookings was restless. Harry sent back glowing letters from St. Louis, where he was now working for a young firm, Cupples & Marston. Eager to get ahead, Brookings persuaded his mother to let him quit school at age 16, take a quick bookkeeping course, and join Harry in the West. He arrived on January 1, 1867, crossing the ice on the frozen Mississippi River. Within weeks, his mother had died of a stroke; within a year, Mary had joined Robert and Harry in St. Louis.
He took a job as receiving clerk at Cupples & Marston for $25 per month and supplemented his income by doing evening bookkeeping for the firm, which had been founded in 1851 by Cupples, then a 19-year-old from Ohio. They were wholesale dealers for an eclectic list of items: “Cordage, Twines, Wicking, Batting, Paper, Brooms, Brushes and Cigars, Wood and Willow Ware, Mats, Matches, Blacking, Sieves, Bird Cages, and French, English and German Fancy Goods,” said their advertising. Brookings took to the business, coming in early each morning to gain sales experience with customers who turned up before regular selling hours began.
Promoted to “fiddling drummer” in 1868, he peddled his company’s wares throughout a vast territory that extended from the Mississippi to the Pacific. By train and stagecoach, he traveled 300 days a year, pleasing his German customers by learning a little of their language, playing his violin on lonely evenings, making friends wherever he went. “He had the glittering gifts of the successful salesman,” wrote Hagedorn – and orders poured in. In 1872, Cupples made Robert and Harry, his leading buyer, partners in the firm; another principal was Asa Wallace, who married Mary Brookings.
By 1878, Brookings had groomed replacements and gotten off the road himself. With Samuel Cupples ill from asthma and often out of town, he and Harry ran the business, positioning it to break into manufacturing. He remained close to Cupples, who had embraced philanthropy. “There was an attractive father-and-son relationship between himself and this young man…they reacted on each other, stimulating each other to think beyond their bank accounts,” said Hagedorn.
Brookings reached out to the community, becoming president of the Mercantile Library Association and helping to found the new St. Louis Choral Society. He wanted more polish so that he could move in elite social circles, so he learned manners while renting a room from local dowager Sarah Beaumont Keim, daughter of pioneer physician William Beaumont. University faculty member Marshall Snow came occasionally to provide academic lessons.
In 1885, Brookings took a year off business and traveled abroad to live in Berlin, practice his beloved violin, and hike in Switzerland and Bavaria. On one of these hikes he got word that his company – now the Samuel Cupples Woodenware Co. – had lost a large manufacturing plant in a fire. That news brought him home, and this time he settled down, buying a series of St. Louis houses and a country castle, Selma Hall.
Once he became Washington University board president in 1895, he threw himself into that work, making an in-depth study of the University and its needs. Board meetings turned into a kind of monologue in which Brookings detailed his findings. His knowledge “was nothing short of amazing, and could have been accomplished only by a man of active and versatile mind, who had withdrawn from practically every other pursuit,” said board member Charles Nagel. In 1905, Brookings wrote to Chancellor Chaplin, “I feel so intensely about the University that anything which concerns it strikes at my very vitals.” Offered a chance to run for the U.S. Senate in 1909, Brookings, a Republican, sacrificed it in favor of rebuilding the University’s medical school.
In 1917, he was camping in Glacier National Park when he was called to Washington, D.C., by President Woodrow Wilson, who asked him first to serve on the War Industries Board and a year later to chair the Price Fixing Committee. These experiences revealed to him the inefficiency of government and awakened his interest in reform. He reorganized an existing Institute for Government Research, convinced the Carnegie Foundation to finance a new Institute of Economics, and – with major funding from an old friend, Isabel Vall‚ January – founded the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government, which was at first part of Washington University, then independent. In 1927 he merged the institutes and school into the new Brookings Institution, still a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C.
He had never married, and at age 77, after two heart attacks, he finally decided to act. He proposed to Isabel January, 51, whom he had first met in St. Louis as a pigtailed 8-year-old. She had Washington University roots as well, since her grandfather, Derrick January, had been an early board member. As a young widow, Isabel’s mother, Grace, had become a dear friend of Brookings – she and Isabel called him “Bobberts” – and he visited them often after they moved to San Remo, Italy. Grace died in 1919, but Isabel and Brookings remained close. On June 19, 1927, they eloped, marrying in the rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore. “I am very happy,” was Brookings’ only public comment.
The next year he resigned as University board president, amid a flood of tributes; the building he had donated, University Hall, was renamed “Brookings Hall” in his honor. Already the recipient of honorary degrees from Yale, the University of Missouri, and Harvard, Brookings was awarded Washington University’s LL.D. and M.D. degrees at the 1929 Commencement. Ailing and weak, he spoke only briefly, saying that the University owed him nothing, that he had always received more than he had given. “As he undertook to express his ‘overwhelming gratitude,'” said the Washingtonian later, “his voice broke and he resumed his seat.”
Brookings died in 1932, Isabel in 1965; they are buried side-by-side in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. Like founder William Greenleaf Eliot, said the Washingtonian, Robert Brookings left an extraordinary legacy:
“Washington University is the product principally of two successive leaders, each in his time with a heart and mind singularly like that of the other, each devoted idealistically to the cause of education, each offering his effort, his life and his means unstintingly to the work of his heart. What secular institution anywhere can point to two such inspired founders of such singleness of purpose as William Greenleaf Eliot and Robert Somers Brookings?”
This excerpt is from “Beginning a Great Work: Washington University in St. Louis, 1853-2003,” by Candace O’Connor, copyright Washington
University in St. Louis 2003. This excerpt is the third in a monthly series.