Anniversary

Down to dinner in Manhattan last week sat sharp-eyed. Scholar and Libertarian Joel Elias Spingarn & friends. They did not celebrate "J. E." Spingarn's birth, his scholastic achievements or his work as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but the 25th anniversary of a famed old U. S. academic scandal in which "J. E." Spingarn lost his job.

When, in March 1911, Columbia University's President Nicholas Murray Butler dismissed "J. E." as chairman of Columbia's Division of Modern Languages and Literatures, he claimed that fiery young Professor Spingarn was unable to work smoothly with his colleagues. Professor Spingarn always believed that his real offense was his valiant and tactless championship of a Columbia scholar who had been cashiered six months before.

That scholar was Harry Thurston Peck, famed as a classicist, as an editor (The Bookman, The International Encyclopedia), as a fractiously brilliant historian whose Twenty Years of the Republic inspired Mark Sullivan's contemporary Our Times. Professor Peck's wit and flowering waistcoats had excited a full generation of students when, in the summer of 1910, he wrote a bundle of impetuous letters to an obscure stenographer named Esther Quinn. Esther Quinn sued him sensationally for breach of promise. He was deserted by his wife and friends, espelled from his clubs, finally dismissed from his Columbia professorship. At a faculty meeting Professor Spingarn got himself in scholastic hot water by defending his friend Peck. Independently rich, Spingarn refused to resign when President Butler suggested it, sharpened the issue by making Columbia fire him.

Already a notable literary scholar, "J. E." Spingarn went on to further triumphs as a critic (Creative Criticism). Longtime president of the N. A. A. C. P., he annually awards the Spingarn Medal, highest honor a U.S. black man can receive. Major of infantry in the War, onetime Republican candidate for Congress, Spingarn now lives quietly "as a retired capitalist," grows clematis on his 1,000-acre estate in Dutchess County, N. Y.

Absent from his dinner last week was Harry Thurston Peck, who had retreated in disgrace to Stamford, Conn., where he unsuccessfully tried to make a living as a free lance, lost his mind, shot himself in 1914.

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