"First Citizen'"

"First Citizen"

As it must to all men, Death came last week to Charles William Eliot, 40 years president and 17 years president emeritus of Harvard University. It found him at his summer home in Northeast Harbor, Me., ready to go peacefully after 92 years of vigorous living.

Harvard. "He found it a college; he left it a university." Europe, in which he spent two of the early and one of the later '60s as a young mathematics and chemistry researcher, conceived the U. S. as an intellectual wilderness with but one stockaded stronghold of pioneer culture, Boston, and a single blockhouse, Harvard. Resolved to alter the basis for this conception, Dr. Eliot declined the treasurership of a big spinning company, taught at Boston Tech and wrote to the magazines attacking U. S. educational methods. He advanced the notion that their curse was uniformity. His pointed strictures drew the attention of the Harvard Corporation which, in 1868, was casting about for a successor to President

Thomas Hill. "Too young a man," objected the Harvard Overseers, but the Corporation insisted. Alarm followed as 35-year-old President Eliot proceeded, in Oliver Wendell Holmes' words, to "turn the place over like a flapjack."

The features of the flapjack's new reverse are well-known: lectures instead of recitations, written instead of oral examinations, an elective curriculum, no more compulsory worship. Individualism was the keynote. New life entered the law and divinity schools. The libraries were expanded for research. "Virtue . . . duty . . . piety . . . righteousness," were more real words then than now; Dr. Eliot used them often. After 40 years, the name of John Harvard himself was no more deeply graven upon the tablets at Cambridge than Dr. Eliot's when he retired, at 75, "to spend the evening of his life in serenity."

Peace. Soon after his retirement, Dr. Eliot was asked by President Taft to go as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The press bubbled with enthusiasm. "A typical citizen," people said, "our first citizen." Dr. Eliot excused himself, but sailed around the world two years later as envoy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Five-Foot Shelf. Europe mocked, still mocks, the kind of thing this university-maker next did. Yet the popular outlines and abridgments of many subjects that followed his selected "five-foot shelf" of indispensable classics from the world's literature (The Harvard Classics) have been partly responsible for a level of mass culture in the U. S. higher than that to be found in any other land.

When he reached 80, his friends and relatives were amazed at the continued clarity and vigor of his mind. His bristly sideburns were pure white; wrinkles had deepened and his gold-barred spectacles were made of thicker glass. But he would not reminisce, dodder or preach plaintively like an ordinary old man. "With him," they said, "it is always the next month, the next year, the future of humanity."

He made a startling pronouncement on religion: "The prevailing Christian conceptions of heaven and hell have hardly more influence with educated people these days than Olympus and Hades have."

Labor problems, capitalism, government had been subjects of his public utterances, which he continued when the Ku Klux Klan appeared and Prohibition became an acute issue. Of the Klan he said: ". . . magicians, astrologers, suggesters, healers and false prophets." Prohibition enlisted his support in a controversy with Wet President Butler of Columbia University.

His best obituary came from his own mouth. Nearing 90, he was asked how he had lived so soundly. He mentioned his exercises (rowing had been his favorite), his moderate diet, and his temperament. The temperament was "a calm temperament, expectant of good."