The Green Thumb

When he was a Nebraska farm boy, little Alvin Johnson studied so hard that his classmates called him "Professor Frog." He read so much that his neighbors were sure he would go "brain-broke." But to his own Danish-born parents, Alvin was something special. "This boy," proclaimed his grandfather proudly, "will be a philosopher."

Alvin Johnson never held himself out as a philosopher, but he did become a scholar--with a spectacular sort of wanderlust that eventually made him famous. A kindly, ruddy-faced man who wandered from medicine to the classics to economics, he taught at eight universities, founded a school, finally became one of U.S. education's elder statesmen. By last week, as he published his autobiography at 77 (Pioneer's Progress; Viking Press, $5), he could justly make the claim: "I possessed an educational green thumb. Intellectual plants grew under my hand."

"Friends of Mine." At the University of Nebraska, Johnson enrolled as a premed, but his heart belonged just as much to Latin and Greek. He devoured Tacitus and Thucydides ("Two friends of mine"), took up Sanskrit, learned German, threw himself into the Populist cause. He also submitted to the drilling of a stiff-backed young military instructor named John J. Pershing.* By the time the Spanish-American War broke out, Johnson was ready to enlist.

He never went beyond Chickamauga. Instead, he watched 112 out of the 120 men in his company succumb to malaria, typhoid and dysentery in Georgia. That caused him to worry about other things besides the classics. "Why had this government of ours rushed gaily into . . . war . . .? Why was no attention ever given to the problems of sanitation ? Why were we left with obsolete rifles . . .?" To answer some of these questions, Johnson took up economics.

By living partly on sea biscuit, he managed to earn a Ph.D. at Columbia. Later he got a job at Bryn Mawr, published his first textbook, wrote a delicately worded book on prostitution for a group of Manhattan reformers called the Committee of Fifteen. After a brief return engagement at Columbia, he headed west ("You are making a great mistake," cried Nicholas Murray Butler). He taught at Nebraska, in Texas, in Chicago, became head of the economics department at Stanford, finally returned east to teach at Cornell. With Walter Lippmann, he also became one of the first editors of the New Republic. Then in 1919 he turned to a brand-new career.

Clear & Steady. He became a founder and later director of a new sort of school--"an institution for the continued education of the educated." As Johnson saw it, "the educated . . . bore a heavy social responsibility ... It was therefore of the utmost importance that the educated mind remain clear and steady." But unfortunately, the good minds seemed to him to be the first to be eroded by "torrents of emotion-bearing catchwords." What the U.S. needed, he decided, was a place where the educated could refresh themselves with reflection and study.

With a group of distinguished scholars (among them: Philosopher John Dewey, Economist Thorstein Veblen, Historians Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson), he set up shop in six old Manhattan houses, began advertising for students ("Good God," said Beard, "they are selling us like a new brand of cheese"). Gradually, people began answering the ads. One of the first major U.S. experiments in adult education, the New School for Social Research was a success from the start.

Over the years, its enrollment has grown to 5,000. But to Alvin Johnson, it has been only one of many activities. In 1927 he took on the job of editing the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. He also wrote a novel, an article on Cleopatra, raised enough money to build the New School a permanent building, designed by Joseph Urban.

Worried about the German scholars threatened by the Nazis, Alvin Johnson set up a University in Exile, persuaded a group of Manhattan philanthropists to finance it and the State Department to issue visas. All in all, he got eleven scholars out of Germany to teach at the New School. Then he began to worry about France. He established Manhattan's Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes--a graduate school where French and Belgian refugee professors could lecture. At first, he thought he would try to rescue only five scholars from the Occupation, but by the time he had finished, the Ecole faculty numbered 60.

Now "retired into the limbo of emeritus" at his home in Nyack, N.Y., Alvin Johnson is still as busy as ever, rereading Plautus, Terence, Vergil, Seneca, thinking up a few new schemes (e.g., he recently persuaded the New School to hire retired professors for an additional semester of teaching), and "experiencing the eager thrill of dawn . . . not too deeply discouraged by the gathering darkness of night."

* Who, fresh from fighting the Sioux in Dakota, also taught mathematics and took enough law courses to earn an LL.B.

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