Robert A. Woods, champion of democracy

Front matter

REFERENCE LIBRARY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

2 Park StreET, Boston

NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM THE SHELVES | EXCEPT BY PERMISSION OF | THE LIBRARIAN —

Preface

Mr. Woops died the 18th of February, 1925, after an illness of eight weeks. So familiar was his figure in the everyday scenes of Boston that those who knew him could not believe that within that brief time they had not been seeing him going and coming across the Common to his wonted appointments. |

In the division of the responsibilities which his death entailed upon others, I chose the privilege of this biography which the companionship of our marriage seemed naturally to give me. I have endeavored to keep his spirit alive within the compass of his thoughts transcribed in his own terms, with such personal touches as the memories of myself and others who worked with him could restore.

It has been my desire to keep fresh for some the sense of his companionship; to offer to others the means of making acquaintance with his prophetic outlook, and an opportunity to draw upon his courage, energy, and judgment asa fresh inspiration in time of need, as many have done in the past. :

When the material had been assembled from the accumulated notes and addresses of years of interpretation of the movement of which Mr. Woods was a part, there proved to be far more than enough for a single volume. It became clear that the book should be chiefly a coherent choice of his own exposition. The quotations are, therefore, the essential part of its pages. They have been chosen largely from unprinted material or from printed sources, such as the South End House Reports, not easily accessible to readers. In a few cases, however, I have used the addresses assembled in 1922 into a volume entitled ‘The Neighborhood in Nation-Building,’ to which those interested in following his commentary of thirty years of service can easily refer. There are many sentences and

Vill PREFACE phrases too briefly quoted to interrupt the reader with an exact reference.

But no record of his thought would alone convey a sense of the person whom we knew as we lived and worked with Mr. Woods. He was a man of action, and it has been important to try to suggest something of the coming and going from morning till midnight which an active city life demanded of him. This is my part of the book which he once proposed we should sometime write together. The answer to his question, ‘What shall it be about?’ is in these pages.

I desire to express my appreciation to several friends and colleagues who could recall incidents of value out of their associations with Mr. Woods. The manuscript has been read by Miss Ellen Coolidge, Miss Lillie M. Peck, Mr. Albert J. Kennedy, and Miss Esther G. Barrows, representing settlement interests, and as far as possible I have made use of their suggestions. I am indebted also to Mr. Henry G. Pearson and Mr. Stedman Buttrick for advice in the preliminaries of writing, and especially to Mr. Ferris Greenslet for his very suggestive opinion both as to the form and nature of the biography which should be written. To the friends whose sympathetic understanding has lent courage for the undertaking, I would express my gratitude; particularly is it due to Miss Marion Keyes, Miss Grace Keyes, Mrs. M. A. Mahan, and to my brother, Mr. Samuel Prescott Bush.

Exveanor H. Woops

. An ABOMINABLE EVIL

Contents

. A PITTSBURGHER BY BIRTH . A New Enctanpb Epucation: AMHERST COLLEGE . ANDOVER SEMINARY: Four YEARS OF PREPARA-

TION — FOR WHAT?

. A Visit TO ENGLAND: ToyNBEE HALL AND ENGc-

Chapter I A Pittsburgher By Birth

RosBert ArcHey Woops came out of Pittsburgh; he was born on the borders of the ‘Town beyond the Mountains’ December g, 1865. He belonged to the racial strain dominant in the making of that great industrial city — the Scottish people bred during two hundred years in the difficult economic and political conditions of the North of Ireland.

They were the last of the Puritans; Pittsburgh was ‘the most Calvinistic town in the world, with all that means of good and not so good. The manners and customs showed about equal traces of pioneer days in the Ohio Valley and the traditions of the old country.’ Unlike neighboring sections of Ohio, ‘Pittsburgh owed nothing to successive waves of migration from New England.’ Philadelphia had been their port of entry and Pittsburgh the gateway to economic freedom in the possession of the fertile soil of the New West, but the city itself attracted those accustomed to the life of the mercantile center. They gave to it something of a British flavor, and many of the streets looked very like those you would see in Glasgow or Belfast. These people belonged distinctively to the middle class, the rise of which was the characteristic American social development of the early nineteenth century.

Robert Woods, senior, came to the United States as a young man from the region of Londonderry, Ireland, much as he might have gone to Belfast to enter a commercial occupation, so close at that time were the ties of acquaintance between the two parts of the Scotch-Irish world. He had a deep affection for the ‘old country,’ which he several times revisited. In Pittsburgh he entered a business office and remained with the same concern for thirty-five years. He married, in 1859, Mary Hall, the daughter of Isaac Gillespie Hall and Catherine Campbell.

Mr. Hall brought his bride from Belfast to Pittsburgh in 1827; he owed his start in life in America to a maternal uncle, who seems to have played the part of father to the children of a widowed sister.

Mrs. Hall was Catherine Campbell, of Stewartson, Ireland, the daughter of a country squire who had died before her marriage. About his memory there hung vague rumors of fox-hunting proclivities. She was possessed of some education, unusual for women of that time, and in her old age could still repeat some of the Latin verses of Virgil in which she had been tutored by a Catholic priest, though the family was Presbyterian. Her mother and sisters remaining in Ireland, there continued during her life to be active intercourse with the old country.

After a few years of living in Pittsburgh, the Halls bought a considerable farm in Ohio some fifty miles from the city. The daughters, of whom there were six, continued, with the exception of Mrs. Woods, to make the neighboring town their home as they married. Of the two sons, the Reverend Isaac Hall was a person of distinction in the circles of the Presbyterian Church in Ohio. He was described as a born leader of men and one who knit his friends to him with bonds of steel.

Mr. and Mrs. Woods made their home in East Liberty, then a rural community with access to the Pittsburgh schools. There were five children, of whom the eldest, Elizabeth, was fourteen years the senior of Robert. James and William, the two brothers between, were nearer in age to Elizabeth, but Robert had a boyhood companion in Leonard, two years younger than himself and so entitled ‘my little brother.’

“The Scotch-Irish with their contrasted traits of sturdiness and ardor have two great separate interests — in-

A PITTSBURGHER BY BIRTH 3 dustry and religion.’ Mr. Woods was closely identified with the strong religious current of his time in that section of the country. It was soon after his marriage that the movement for the United Presbyterian Church culminated. After seventy-five years of effort to bring about the union of two offshoots of the General Assembly of Scotland, it was accomplished, ‘born of the spirit of life in a revival.’ The organization of the new body took place in Pittsburgh in 1858. Mr. Woods became one of the founders of the church in East Liberty instead of following the traditions of his family in Ireland and becoming an Episcopalian.

- The rigors of Calvinism, which were ‘firmly held and emphatically preached’ * in the denomination, were softened in the case of Mr. Woods by his gentle nature, which left its definite impress on those who came under his influence. He governed, but by the affections, and he had a faculty of creating harmony among those about him. A story is told of his being away from home over a Sunday and of his seeking out a place of worship. He found himself in a Methodist church and, following his habit, attended both the service and the Sunday School. It happened that in the latter a class of older girls was without a teacher.’ Perhaps he had told the superintendent of his work in the Sunday School of his own church, where he had for many years a similar class. At any rate, he took this group of the twittering, restless age; they began to giggle. Then he asked them the number belonging to the class and continued, after receiving their answer, ‘There are nine of us here now.’ The girls counted only eight and disagreed with him; ‘Jesus is with us also,’ replied Mr. Woods, and had their quiet attention through the lesson.

Robert and Leonard had a certain resourcefulness in making up their own games which their father encouraged as being of educational value. In some of these amusements Robert’s excellent memory played its part, and in the making of playthings he had some manual dexterity. In the childhood reminiscence of a member of one of the

* George P. Hays and others: Presbyterians.

families with whom the Woodses were intimate, there is the recollection of a party of all ages at the Woods home, where, after the observance of prayers, as was the custom, the children were led off to the dining-room by Robert, who produced games and directed their play.

A school companion, belonging to the close circle of church and social life which surrounded them, said that he was going to catch hold of Robert’s coat-tails and get carried into the next grade; he thought they would go so fast that the teacher wouldn’t notice him. A more serious estimate of that age was that Robert, though not older, always seemed to his companions more mature. “Intellectually, he left us all as though we were standing still, for I can well remember that, when we got to a certain grade in the public school, it was not long until his superior ability was recognized and he was at once promoted to the next grade, so that from then on we never caught up with him. Our admiration for his ability and achievements was unbounded, and we were always proud to have him as a friend. ... While he always had a wonderfully happy nature and was always apparently heart and soul in all our sports, he seemed, at the same time, to have a seriousness that showed he was looking ahead. His happy nature was always in evidence and his whole being radiated buoyancy and optimism. He always seemed to know that he had a mission in life and was preparing for it.’

By pushing ahead in school, Robert was in a class where he found his level of ability so that in high school he was not especially conspicuous as a student, but he was a recognized arbiter in his class which relied on his fairness of judgment. A picture of him in these years is associated with the study of elocution in which they were well disciplined by an able teacher whom they greatly respected. Robert, somewhat rotund of figure and of a ruddy countenance, struggled in restless fashion about the stage, but generally managed to come through the ordeal with reasonable success. This practice made them useful in Sunday School recitals in which as a boy he did his share.

A PITTSBURGHER BY BIRTH F

Robert’s imagination was stimulated by his father’s journeys to England and Ireland. The talk of the Old World lived vividly in his mind and often brought in later years a quizzical, reminiscent smile as he referred to ‘my native land.’ Related to that familiarly discussed country there moved, in the background of the Woods home, shadowy personalities from the not-so-distant past. Occasionally, indeed, a traveler would appear with claims of Irish cousinship, and once, it was said, Uncle Archey and Aunt Betty Woods arrived for a visit, but, liking Ireland better than Pittsburgh, thither they returned. Mrs. Woods’s great-uncle, Dr. Leonard Gillespie, stood out from the shadow most clearly, for of him there was an interesting portrait-engraving in uniform. The following letter gives reality to his existence:

On board His Majesty’s Ship “The Victory’ at sea off the coast of Sardinia Jan. 7th, 1805 Mrs. Fane Hall, Armagh, Ireland: DEAR SISTER: |

I did myself the pleasure of writing to you in great haste on the 29th inst. being at that time on board H.M. Ship ‘The Swiftsure’ off the coast of Catalonia on my way to join this ship, which I effected on the 2nd inst. and I am at present fully established in my office as Physician to this fleet, which is, thank God, in the best possible order as to health, discipline, spirits, and disposition towards our gallant and revered commander in chief, Lord Nelson.

It may amuse you, my dear Sister, to read the journal of a day such as we pass it here at sea, in this fine climate and in these smooth seas, on board one of the largest ships in the navy, as she mounts IIo guns, one of which carrying a 24th shot, occupies a very distinguished station in my apartment.

At six o’clock my servant brings a light and informs me of the hour, wind, weather, and of course the ship, when I immediately dress and generally repair to the deck. Breakfast is announced in the Admiral’s cabin which when finished we repair upon deck to enjoy the majestic sight of the rising sun, scarcely ever obscured by clouds in this fine climate, surmounting the smooth and placid waves of the Mediterranean which supports the lofty and tremendous bulwarks of Britain, following in regular train their Admiral in the ‘Victory.’

Between seven and two there is plenty of time for business, study, writing and exercise.... At two o'clock a band of music plays till within a quarter of three, when the drum beats the tune called ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ to announce the Admiral’s dinner. . . then if a person does not feel himself perfectly at his ease it must be his own fault, such is the urbanity and hospitality which reign here, notwithstanding the numerous titles, the four orders of knighthood worn by our Lord Nelson, and the well-earned laurels which he has acquired....

March 16, 1805 — Off Barcelona. His Majesty’s ship the ‘Renown’ is just upon the eve of departure for England, by which I send this enclosed to my friend W. Steward.~

Affectionately remember me to all the children. Let me beg you not to indulge Leonard too much, but keep him to his book. Do not forget to give them the allowance I mentioned in a former letter for pocket money. Let me hear from you at every opportunity. Remember me affectionately to all our friends and relatives, and believe me to be your ever affectionate brother

LEONARD GILLESPIE

But the younger Robert belonged to his own time; family tradition played small part in his growth to maturity. When he was fifteen, his father died, and the following year he was ready for college. His mother was eager to give both the younger boys whatever education they would take. It was natural to think that Robert might have, like her brother, a distinguished career as a Presbyterian minister, but, though eager that such a future might be his, she was not a woman of compelling force in gaining her ends. Robert was left free to choose his path while with affectionate solicitude she watched his progress, never quite convinced of his wisdom. The first direction of his course fell to one of his high school teachers.

Tt was in the nature of things in Pittsburgh that not the university, but the high school, should be the outstanding educational institution, as the one wrought out to meet

A PITTSBURGHER BY BIRTH 7 specifically the American social conditions found in middleclass life. But the high school was the best of its kind. The teaching staff counted men from both Ohio and Eastern colleges, among whom was a recent graduate of Amherst College, Henry Gibbons, teacher of the classics. Mr. Gibbons regarded Robert Woods on first acquaintance with some disapprobation, thinking him indolent. As he grew to have very friendly relations with the boys who were contemplating college and became their adviser, he found the fact to be that Robert was given to fruitful meditation far beyond his years. Expression, too, was active enough to make his writing matter of comment among his schoolfellows and to stir his aspiration for the literary art. There were five boys who decided to go to Amherst College, not because Gibbons told them to, but that he said to go where there were at least two good teachers and he could name three at Amherst — Seelye, Garman, and Morse. Robert, now growing to a tall man’s stature, was the youngest of the group. For him it was a definite break from Pittsburgh; except for the incidents of summer vacations, with the experience of earning something as a bank messenger, the current of his life soon set in another direction. He was not to the manner born of that city of great economic adventure, with its accepted traditional morality and definite lack of moral enterprise; ‘though,’ as he has said, ‘Pittsburgh has never been a place to emigrate from. The only deserters were those who found it in them to care for a reasonable measure of cultivated life, difficult to secure in a town where there was not a library worth the name until 1895 and where a whole winter would pass without a single lecture on a significant subject intelligently treated.’ It was always a regret to him that his own adventure, in its time, would have been unfruitful there.

Chapter II A New England Education: Amherst College

Amuerst CoiiecE, founded in 1821, was as characteristically American as academies and high schools antedating it. It belonged to the high tide of moral energy following upon the economic and political discords inherited by the nineteenth century from the period of the American Revolution. The little towns of western Massachusetts dug deep into their limited resources to establish education on a basis that ‘could face and overcome ignorance, barbarism, immorality, and irreligion’; that would “discipline and train the best and strongest young men and send them out to be leaders and inspirers of the community.’ Its early years were those of a ‘period of experiment and adventure, of faith in the perfectibility of man, and even in his desire to be reformed and perfected. .. . It was followed by a revival of common sense and religion.’

Of the spiritual kinship between the inland Puritan movement of the early settlement of the Connecticut Valley and that which was carried west of the Alleghanies by later immigrants, enough survived, even as late as 1882, to keep the son of United Presbyterianism from feeling himself a stranger among New England Congregationalists in the land of Jonathan Edwards. Robert Woods found himself in an atmosphere congenial to his thought and tastes when he entered into the traditions at Amherst which sixty years had wrought into a broad culture unafraid of either science or religion. The physical surroundings, as well, were not without a familiar quality to one who knew the steep but fertile slopes of western Pennsylvania and had lived above the turbid tributaries of the great river at whose headwaters lay the city of Pittsburgh, not yet arrived at her majority of obliterating smoke. He

* John Mason Tyler: The First Hundred Years of Amherst College.

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION 9 found a wider valley with its broad but sinuous and slower moving river of clearer water than his native streams, and an alluring prospect of wooded hillsides; in fact, more rugged than those about his home, but of a gentler mien — the Pelham Hills loved by sons of Amherst.

It was wholly a man’s world in which he was now to live for two thirds of the time. The society of women did not find place in the surrounding facts of life; no family acquaintance in either New England or New York existed to provide the natural opening of a near-at-hand social intercourse. Not that Smith College, six miles away in Northampton, was not then as now a social escape, but for Woods there was but one essay at calling on a college girl. This by no means indicated lack of social gift nor of appreciation for the charm of women; at vacation time in Pittsburgh his own generation of both sexes held him in esteem; he appeared always, as the years passed, with unaffected bonhomie, dressed with considerate good taste which, with his high color still persisting and his height of six feet, lent distinctive character to his appearance.

In company with two of the Pittsburgh companions, Bigham and Kenngott, Woods roomed in the ‘Octagon,’ a house still a familiar object in the village of Amherst. He did not join a fraternity till the last year because of the Presbyterian bringing-up which then held strongly against secret societies as it did also against drinking.

Bigham, himself a hard student, found Woods’s methods of studying something of a puzzle, in fact not quite deserving the name. For one thing, he had the newspaper habit badly, by which he succeeded in digging out a surprising amount of information with which he was willing to part and did indeed, as an interpreter, make really interesting. Then he had a curiosity about people, and, from a careful study of the catalogue of students’ names and in other unknown ways, he picked up a knowledge about most of the men in college. He seemed to care very much about persons and to consider the professor more important than his subject.

During the visits home, Mr. Gibbons usually had them at his house for an evening chat about college affairs. He observed that Woods had too much to say about his dislike of mathematics, an affliction shared with his friend William Evans, also one of the five. Finally Mr. Gibbons decided to give some advice to the effect that 1t was most important to conquer mathematics and suggested devoting all of his time, if necessary, for two or three months until he understood the subject. At the end of that time Woods wrote a letter, saying: ‘I have followed your advice about mathematics; I am doing quite well in the subject and I like mathematics.’

The story of undergraduate years may now, happily, become partly autobiographical, thanks to notes prepared for a class reunion and an address at the Amherst centenary:

One of the most distinct impressions of college days on my memory is that of a side issue. But side issues may sometimes furnish forth a parable to show the significance of main issues.

Three times I spent the spring vacation at Amherst. In a sense it was a real vacation only as a horse race on the stage is like a real horse race — the horses mark time, while the background shifts. But eliminate all class-work, with the striving to meet duties or to escape them, and one could effectually transform Amherst into a ‘dear lovely bower of innocence and ease.’ Looking across twenty years, the rain and mud of April in Amherst may be forgotten.

A certain piquancy was given to one’s disregard of time and the hour by the continued regular service of the college clock. The leading figures in the local drama were changed — towns people for a brief moment assuming precedence and authority, the academic Olympians being either absent or flitting shorn of power and ghost-like.

Every day or two saw its tramping expedition — to the Notch or to Sugar Loaf for a climb, to Orient for the first arbutus, or in advanced seasons to the woods along Freshman River to capture the first botanical specimens. I can remember one occasion when some declamations were solemnly rehearsed in a beautiful pine grove beside the railroad half way to South Amherst. If there

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION II was a favoring dispensation of weather, the base ball season and the tennis season were both introduced without the uncomfortable presence of the great in either of these fields of action.

Two pursuits in which we soaked ourselves during the spring vacation were whist and novel reading. Spring vacation, partly because it seemed to be snatched from under the eaves of the college, made one feel possessed of shoals of time. It is hard to understand now how anyone could have been so care free. By playing whist — the plain old-fashioned sort with five hundred points as the game — one came to have something of Garman’s loyalty to the game, and could understand how, at his wedding, as soon as the ceremony was safely over, he proposed a game of whist in order to escape from being congratulated. For myself a good share of the ‘long, long days’ were filled with Hawthorne, whose acquaintance I first made in spring vacation, and who came nearer to being a liberal education for me than all but two or three of my college studies. Then there were the little evening parties at Jack Hall’s house — to which all the members of the class in town were invited, and each one was made wholesomely welcome.

It might be said that spring vacation was without the cardinal influences of college life. On the contrary, it carried over by a strong momentum some of those things in undergraduate existence which were unduly minimized while college was in session. One had free time to come into thorough relation with the minds and natures of a number of fellow students, to reach common ground with men who under ordinary circumstances one hardly knew at all. In spring vacation there went on many of those talks which were possible only in the days of one’s youth, talks “boundless, endless and sublime — a wilderness of verbiage, irrigated everywhere with that inextinguishable Homeric laughter,

‘Oh the time went by like a tale that’s told In a land of song and mirth.’

I have a feeling, too, that there is a certain touch of affection that I feel for the country about Amherst that would be missing if there had not been a few times when it exerted its influence without any conflicting claims. Spring vacation, thus gave a few of us a special variation on one of the best results of the whole course at Amherst — intimacy with living and growing nature and human nature; the dramatic interplay of equals, superiors and inferiors in collegiate seniority and dignity against the background of the pageantry of the seasons in this exquisite valley. This of all that made college life, ‘we remember yet, with a fond regret.’

No doubt many of the possibly more fortunate majority who spent spring vacation at home found much of the same quality in it which I have been suggesting — not eventful, functionizing like the Christmas holidays, not a relapse into a totally different existence as in summer — simply the coming to the surface of undercurrents of term-time interest.

Those who had to remain in the Amherst barracks had nothing, however, to make up to them of any of the social joys of home and neighborhood, in which the departed majority were finding pressed-down and running over satisfaction. Spring vacation at Amherst by emphatic contrast in this respect suggests the greatest defect in our college training, the result of unprofitable short-sightedness in one respect of the members of the faculty. I cannot remember that any lonely fellow ever had a friendly overture during spring vacation from a professor. Indeed, in our day, few, very few students and they very rarely, had any experience of unaffected hospitality during the entire four years’ course. Yet that is what Amherst College is for. It is to bring a certain limited number of youths into the very atmosphere of cultivated men’s lives, to infect them with personal standards of taste and conscience and give them an unmanageable enthusiasm for high achievement. We get unspeakable value out of association with our fellow students. We could have had and were entitled to have had a full measure of comradeship and intimacy with the members of the faculty — such experience as a few members of the class had with Garman in getting out the philosophy papers or with Genung in his evening seminars.

Not to fail of full appreciation of Amherst, even in those respects where spring vacation seemed to suggest deficiencies, I may be pardoned if I tell of a slight experience at the end of the college course which contains a personal reference. This experience showed that the college did ascribe a certain definite value to the amenities of life, even if it were at the expense of college studies that they were pursued. When'the final marks were made, Professor Mather, looking over the list and selecting out the names of Billy Fitch, Dan Kellogg and myself from among those whose diplomas were to focus only in that sparing adverb rite, urged that the net result of our years at Amherst might be more than the marks indicated, and managed to secure faculty

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION 13 action to override the records and have three more degrees given cum laude. It was a modest triumph for those who had lived in a certain spring vacation atmosphere during the whole of the college year.