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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253357205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2012 |
| Pages: | 488 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Herman B Wells
The Promise of the American University
By James H. Capshew
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 James H. CapshewAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35720-5
CHAPTER 1
In the Land of Jordan
In April 1921 the Indiana University Registrar's office received a letter of inquiry from a potential transfer student from the University of Illinois. The student, Herman Wells, was completing his first year and wanted to know whether he could transfer his credits and enroll at IU. He enumerated the courses he took, grades received the first semester (an 89 percent average) and anticipated for the second (the same), and asked for full transfer credit. He received a short, impersonal reply from the registrar stating that Indiana would grant full credit for the Illinois coursework, and "We shall be glad to welcome you as a student at the beginning of next semester."
Wells was from Boone County, located west of Indianapolis, and he had graduated from Lebanon High School in 1920. He had gone to Illinois because it had a good business school and had a direct rail connection to his hometown. Although some of his classmates had gone to Indiana, its business school was just getting started, and Bloomington, although closer than Champaign, lacked good rail connections. But after a disappointing year at Illinois, Wells was ready to try something different.
Wells, who was an only child, had high hopes for college. They were inculcated nearly since his birth by his parents, Granville and Bernice, both former schoolteachers. Neither was a college graduate, although his father had taken classes at Indiana State Normal School in Terre Haute. Granville worked as a cashier at Lebanon's First National Bank and served as the Treasurer of Boone County. Bernice helped out at the county treasurer's office and kept the household running smoothly – and, importantly, soothed her depressed and anxious husband.
Arriving at Illinois in September 1920, Wells soon made his way to the College of Commerce, headquartered in an expansive building dedicated only seven years before, and registered for classes. Like other public universities of the time, the Illinois campus lacked dormitories, so Wells roomed with a friend from Lebanon in a private family residence. Like many freshman, he was intimidated by the size and impersonality of the campus. Although he made some friends, social life on the sprawling campus was dominated by wealthy students from Chicago, and revolved around the Greek system and athletics. Wells felt like an outsider, both as an out-of-state student and because of his marginal social role on campus. A studious freshman but not a grind, he was quite aware of his parents' aspiration to provide a college education for him, and especially his father's expectations of success. Wells, away from the comfortable confines of Boone County and cut off from daily family support, was sometimes "wretchedly homesick."
As a beginning student, Wells was well prepared. He had obtained thirteen hours of entrance credit for his studies at Lebanon High School, and during his first year as a general business student, he took courses in economics, accounting, rhetoric, Spanish, and concert band. Wells served on the staff of the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, as head of the advertising desk. He went regularly to the Methodist church and participated in its extensive Wesley Foundation program for young people.
Wells persevered through classes that held five hundred fellow students and his feelings of alienation and displacement. By midyear, he was invited to pledge a fraternity, but he had already decided to leave Illinois and transfer to Indiana University. Granville strenuously objected, arguing that Illinois's business school was much better established than IU's fledging School of Commerce and Finance, which was still in its first year, and Herman was getting good grades as a freshman. The younger Wells pointed out that since he expected to make his career in Indiana, his Indiana connections would be more useful. He also had many friends going to school in Bloomington. Wells was a dutiful and respectful son, but bent on his new course. Granville finally relented, giving his increasingly independent son his blessing.
Wells was back in Lebanon for the summer of 1921, living at his parents' home and working again at his father's bank. Starting at age thirteen, he had worked there after school and on vacations, and had learned to appreciate the vital services it provided to the small town and the rural area surrounding it. Among other tasks, young Wells had learned to operate the county's first Burroughs posting machine at the bank, and, by high school, became so proficient on it that he trained bookkeepers at other local banks. After high school graduation in 1920, Wells was hired as bank manager for a small country bank in nearby Whitestown, recently organized as a competitor to the established bank, and earned a sizable amount of money for college.
Banking served to bond Granville Wells and his son, Herman. Granville maintained a stoic and competent persona as a bank officer, financial adviser, and public servant, but was often withdrawn and morose at home. Herman had to grow up quickly to cope with his father's mood disorder, and Bernice relied increasingly upon him as a confidant and ally in managing Granville. Early on he discovered that assisting at the bank pleased his father immensely, and the bright boy took it all in, from the technical details of banking operations to the human drama connected to financial transactions.
Back in Lebanon after a year away, everything seemed pretty much the same, including the daily routines of the family. Still the dutiful and busy son, during the week he approached his summer job with a confident air born of experience, and, on Sundays, went to the Methodist church with his mother and, upon occasion, his father. For fun he would socialize with his many friends or go to movies. Continuing a pattern from high school, he never dated or had a romantic attachment, due perhaps to persistent groin pain. Yet Wells had changed, discovering new sources of strength in himself and renewed determination to become a "college man" on his own terms.
THE SPIRIT OF INDIANA
Herman Wells was a busy young man in Fall 1921 when he started walking under campus trees, becoming immersed in the genius loci of Indiana. He came to Bloomington for the first time and enrolled for classes as an Indiana University sophomore. Adjusting quickly to the southern Indiana environment, Wells responded strongly to the attractive campus.
The town of Bloomington had 13,000 residents and boasted a strong manufacturing base in the Showers Brothers Furniture factory, which was advertised as the largest maker of wood furniture in the world. The university, with its 2,500-member student body, was also an important economic mainstay, providing jobs for residents and customers for local commerce. Although yearly state appropriations to IU were often meager, Bloomington residents had developed an understated pride in "their" university, often sending their sons and daughters there. In fact, students from Monroe County were the largest group from any locale. The state of Indiana was the home of over 95 percent of the student body. Of the 105 out-of-state students, 83 hailed from twenty other states, and twenty-two were from eight foreign countries.
Another new arrival, mathematics professor Harold Davis, sought to orient himself to the campus milieu in the early 1920s and discovered clear signs of the influence of David Starr Jordan, a biology professor and president in the 1880s. Famous among students for his abolition of in loco parentis rules and regulations, he replaced them with two tongue-in-cheek commandments: do not shoot the professors and do not burn campus buildings. With the same liberating impulse, Jordan encouraged each faculty member to follow and "explore those paths into which his own interest and his own imagination may direct him." By example and exhortation, Jordan led IU to get in step with the new national trend toward university research before leaving in 1891 to become the first president of the nascent Leland Stanford Junior University. Before he left, Jordan oversaw the move from the original campus, crowded up against the railroad tracks at Second Street and College Avenue, to some undeveloped land east of the courthouse optimistically christened "University Park." Commenting on the atmosphere and traditions that he encountered in the 1920s, Davis quipped, "It is altogether fitting and proper, therefore, to characterize this institution as the 'Land of Jordan.'"
In September 1921, Wells got his first taste of IU's traditions of academic pomp and circumstance on the opening day of classes when he attended the freshman induction ceremony. At 7:30 in the morning, administrative officers and some of the faculty of the university assembled on the steps of the Student Building underneath the clock tower. They were joined by a student draped in white folds representing the Spirit of Indiana, who welcomed the crowd with a prepared speech. Exhorting the crowd, she said,
The spirit that is Indiana knows no limitations of age, color, creed, doctrine, social, political, or economic bounds.... It includes all those who have come for the purpose of seeking truth and intellectual freedom.... The spirit that greets you here is the rich heritage of a glorious past made possible by students, who, like yourselves upon entering the university, felt strangely far from home and intimate friends, but who soon adapted themselves to their new environment.... As rich as is the heritage which you find here, it should be and must be made richer and better because of your having been here.
Then William Lowe Bryan took the stage and offered the "President's Charge," reminding the crowd of the "University's basic purpose: The intellectual development of her sons and daughters." He performed the induction by having the freshman repeat the university pledge. The ceremony concluded with the band playing and the assembled group singing "Indiana, Our Indiana."
The nineteen-year-old Wells threw himself into collegiate life with gusto. Eager to know and to be known, he lost no time getting involved. He took his classes seriously, marveling at his professors' facility in academic discourse, and he was soon absorbed in several student organizations. The most important of these was his fraternity, Sigma Nu. Wells had hopes of joining a fraternity since his freshman year at Illinois, and took the opportunity to pledge at Indiana shortly after his arrival. With its own chapter house, Sigma Nu provided not only a physical home for Wells but also an extensive brotherhood of friends, which was especially satisfying to an only child who had grown up in a family of adults.
Indiana, like many other colleges and universities, was the home of many Greek-letter social fraternities. Dating from the beginnings of American higher education, with the establishment of Phi Beta Kappa at the College of William and Mary in 1776, fraternities and sororities had evolved during the nineteenth century from associations recognizing academic achievement into philanthropic organizations designed to serve the social needs of their members and the wider community. Perhaps their most important practical role in the first half of the twentieth century was to provide living accommodations to college students in an age when university dormitories were rare.
As a new pledge, Wells learned the story of the college fraternity movement as well as the history of Sigma Nu. The fraternity got its start at Virginia Military Institute in 1869, begun by an ex-Confederate soldier who opposed the hazing practices of existing fraternities. Honor was its guiding principal. At Indiana, the Beta Eta chapter of Sigma Nu was founded in 1892 and had grown into one of the larger fraternities on campus, boasting about forty members in 1921. The chapter house was a converted and expanded former private residence two blocks east of campus, at the corner of Kirkwood Avenue and Grant Street. Sigma Nu took over the house at 322 East Kirkwood Avenue (the home of the Phi Psi fraternity until 1911) and called it "Kirkwood Castle." As a pledge, Wells relished his introduction to fraternal ideals and practices. It eased his way into campus social life and provided a ready circle of friends.
THE KLAN IN BLOOMINGTON
Wells had barely settled in his new fraternal home on Kirkwood before the town was in an uproar over the Ku Klux Klan's announcement of a rally in Bloomington. In early November 1921, flyers were circulated to promote membership in the nativist, racist organization, and the Bloomington World-Telephone announced that a Klan parade was being planned for downtown Bloomington. The organization revived following World War I and this incarnation was populist and middle class, centered in the newly urbanized areas of the upper Midwest. The Klan stood for white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy and was hostile to ethnic immigrants, African Americans, Jews, Catholics, atheists, and others who did not meet their definition of "100 percent white American." Indianapolis was the headquarters of the Klavern of Indiana, the largest state organization in the U.S. Historians have estimated that up to one quarter of the adult white male Hoosier population at the time were members.
Against this backdrop of KKK resurgence, every locale of any size was targeted for a public display. The parade in Bloomington was held on November 6. With full regalia, including white robes and hoods, Klan members assembled in a field about a mile south of the courthouse, and then marched up Lincoln Street to the stately building. They were led by three masked horseman followed by a drum corps of university students, who remained unmasked. Others carried a banner reading: "We stand for Old Glory and the Constitution." Among the crowd of hundreds who turned out to watch the spectacle was Wells. He remembered the parade as a "silent, eerie, frightening kind of thing." Wells had grown up in an area with few blacks but his egalitarian sympathies, nurtured by his family and his church upbringing, were aroused, and he bristled at the ugly display. Reflecting further on its meaning, he said, "It was designed to show the enormous strength of the Klan in a community and to silence the voices of those who had been criticizing the Klan and stood for the things which the Klan opposed."
Wells was no stranger to the Klan's scare tactics. During his boyhood, his father had a confrontation with the Boone County chapter of the secret society. As a member of the Lebanon school board, Granville Wells got a visit from some local Klan members who were upset with a teacher who talked with his students about the League of Nations and internationalism. They branded him a socialist and demanded that he be fired. Granville asserted that if the teacher were competent he would take no such action. Upon hearing Granville's defense of the teacher, the Klansmen threatened to spread rumors and start a run on the local bank. Despite the potential harm to the bank and to his reputation as a bank officer, Wells's father stood firm.
In Bloomington, things returned to normal once the Klan parade was over. But the memory would stay with Wells. Plunging into his first year on campus, the sophomore took a full load of five courses each semester, and began to fill his social life to overflowing. He started going to the First Methodist Church, a prosperous congregation, located on the next block over from the Sigma Nu house. He joined the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), a popular group that provided various forms of social welfare for students and another venue for socializing. Among other activities, the group published the popular IU Red Book, a directory of student names and addresses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Herman B Wells by James H. Capshew. Copyright © 2012 James H. Capshew. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface: A Hoosier State of MindPrologue: Campus Centennial, 1920I. The Shaping of a Fiduciary, 1902-371. In the Land of Jordan2. Betwixt Banking and Social Science3. The Politics of Banking Reform4. First Taste of Academic StewardshipII. Transforming the University, 1937-625. Acting like a President6. A Vision for Indiana University7. Charting a New Course8. War Stories9. Renouncing Prejudice10. Postwar World, Home and Abroad11. Music Appreciation12. The Man behind Kinsey13. A Metropolis of Books14. Expanding the University's Universe15. Passing the Presidential TorchIII. At Large in the World, 1962-200016. Education and World Affairs17. Back to Basics: Management and Marketing18. Being Plucky: Covering the Distance19. An Icon Aging in Place20. A Peaceful Passing21. Keeping the Memory GreenEpilogue: Reflections on a Hoosier AntæusAppendixBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Many universities have a giant of the past whose name is almost synonymous with the institution. Herman B Wells is Indiana University's giant. His powerful vision and commanding presence transformed a small Midwestern college into a major research university of international stature. From his days as a student until his death in 2000, Wells demonstrated daily a deep and abiding love for Indiana Universityand the whole university community past and present. Professor Jim Capshew's thoroughly-researched book provides thoughtful and detailed insight into Wells' early life, his important contributions to banking reform, his road to the presidency, the transformation of the university he then brought about, his efforts to desegregate the campus and the community at a watershed time for the nation, his extensive contributions to the internationalization of Indiana University, and his steadfast and courageous support for academic freedom. This compelling and magisterial book will enhance our understanding of IU's legendary eleventh president and all he accomplished. And it helps us understand how he achieved these remarkable accomplishments in the face of constant difficulties and opposition. It is a story of tremendous vision, of exceptional and subtle intelligence, of persuasive skills of the highest order, of almost irresistible charm, of relentless driving energy, but also of a man who hugely enjoyed being president of Indiana University. As such it is also a story which will serve the vital purpose of introducing new generations of students and new members of the Indiana Universitycommunity to the extraordinary life and career of Herman Wells and to rekindle fond memories among those who knew this great and unique man.
This much-needed biography gives Herman B Wells his rightful place in the sun as an important university leader.
In this delightful biography, James Capshew has captured the essence of Herman B Wells, his extraordinary leadership of IU as president and chancellor, and his contributions to the university, observable from every corner of the campus. With tenacity, intelligence, and skill, Herman B Wells pursued his vision of building the greatness of IU—and it is all set out for us with grace and elegance in this volume to remember, learn about, and appreciate the life and work of Herman B Wells.
Herman B Wells was, indisputably, the preeminent university leader of our time, who inspired and energized two generations of presidents, chancellors, and deans. Capshew's account of Wells's remarkable career fills a critical gap—not simply by recounting his myriad achievements, but by helping us to better appreciate the true genius of a revered colleague and mentor.
This much-needed biography gives Herman B Wells his rightful place in the sun as an important university leader.
It is impossible to really understand the history of American higher education in the twentieth century without this vivid, informed biography of one of the great, perhaps the greatest, of the university builders.