The Alumni Council of Princeton University formed its Princetoniana Committee shortly after the death of Frederic E. Fox '39 in 1981. In his final annual report as Keeper of Princetoniana, Fox wrote that his position had "particular responsibility for the legends, songs and symbols of the university." Fox added, "someday, there will be another Keeper of Princetoniana. There has to be. As long as there is a Princeton, there will be proud keepers of it." In essence, that is the function of the Princetoniana Committee.

The Committee held its first meeting in June 1982 and proclaimed its mission as "stimulating the accumulation of worthwhile Princetoniana by the University and charged with the receipt, acknowledgement, and sorting of such material." David Thompson '39, Hugh de N. Wynne '39, and Robert A. Winters '35 played key roles in the formation of the Committee. In those early days the committee's business often dealt with decisions about proposed gifts of Princetoniana, but soon the Committee took a more proactive role in acquisitions as in the cases of the Devereux tiger statue, the Kenneth Sawyer Goodman '06 scrapbooks, the statue of the Princeton student, and the Class of 1879 lion statues.

The Committee has also had an interest in the Princetoniana Room. In 1982, the room was located in the DeLong Memorial Room in the Firestone Library. Renovations included an old fireplace from Witherspoon Hall (the gift of Henry Martin '48), a new display case, and a portrait of Fred Fox '39 by Minnetta Bickel S39 (a gift of W.C. Bickel '39). In 1990, the room was moved to the Class of 1935 Room at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, where the University Archives are located. Rotating exhibitions at that library focus on Princeton's past.

In the 1990s the Committee's work broadened again to include the acquisition of two Joe Brown sculptures, an oral history based on the reminiscences of prominent alumni, Going Back, a beer jacket exhibit, a committee web page, and a retirement questionnaire for long-timer Princeton staff.

Ben Primer

Miscellaneous Early Alumni Association History

The Founding of the Western Association of Princeton Clubs. The "St. Louis Plan" for Alumni Representation on the Princeton Board of Trustees.

The founding in 1900 of the Western Association of Princeton Clubs was tied inextricably to a major university debate of fifteen years; standing-the establishment of a national alumni council. Movement in this direction had been under way since the mid-1880s, and by 1893 a body of that name was formed, and met at Reunions. But it was to be a paper body only, with no real authority or influence. It would take the continuing pressure of like-minded alumni before the affairs of the university would come far more directly under alumni influence, alumni electedon a national basis. It was a movement that would have as its first signal achievement the 1902 accession of Woodrow Wilson as University President.

St. Louis hosted the most dramatic meetings of the Western Association of Princeton Alumni Clubs: the first, in April 1900, laid the groundwork for Wilson's ascent; the eleventh, in March 1910, for his departure. The men who spear-headed this alumni drive were nearly all graduates from the 1870s and shared not just that decade with Professor Wilson '79 but his progressive out-look. They were also united in their growing dissatisfaction with President Francis L. Patton, whose management of university affairs they considered lax, and by whose sly and subtle resistance to new educational ideas they were frustrated. The effort to form an expanded body of Alumni trustees had as its goal the desire to achieve more momentum in these directions.

To a very real extent, it was the Princeton Cub of St. Louis, along with a handful of other influential "western" clubs-Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati-that played a central role in Wilson's career. The two most important western alumni in the first decade of the century, and throughout Wilson's presidency, were John David Davis of St. Louis and David Benton Jones of Chicago. Their roles as active alumni very nearly tracked Wilson's Princeton career. Both men became trustees in May 1901; Wilson was named president in June 1902. Davis' second term ended in June of 1910. Wilson resigned that October.

University History Professor Emeritus Arthur Link, who performed the back-breaking effort of compiling Wilson's papers, has noted that there was a certain irony in Patton's difficulties with his Board. His predecessor, the imaginative and educationally progressive James McCosh, had been saddled with a highly conservative, religiously strict Board. (That orthodox rigidity had kept at least one major historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, from being considered for a Princeton professorship, much to Professor Wilson's embarrassment.) He would have been well in tune with the more progressive group assembled under Patton. Patton, though, was too strict and too resistant to meet their eager designs for university improvement and change.

A. First Meeting of the Western Association of Princeton Clubs: April 27, 1900

The founding of a Western Association of Alumni was prompted by disappointment. It was motivated by the failure of that first effort to create a National Alumni Association. An early hint of its hasty demise lies in the fact that Davis was named Chairman of the new group at its 1893 founding, but a University catalog of 1895 lists Moses Taylor Pyne '77 as its leader. By 1898, it had become clear to Western interests that the body was moribund, wholly ineffectual in the advancement of alumni interests. That was the year in which the group announced its adjournment sine die-no plans for any further meetings.

St. Louis Club President Davis was expressing frustrations that were not limited to Westerners in his invitation to the region's Clubs.

The Trustees have neither put into effect their plan for an Alumni Council nor have they acted upon the suggestion made by the Princeton Club of New York that the Alumni be permitted to elect a trustee to fill every third vacancy occurring on the Board.

Later there would be dissension between the Western and New York Views of campus life and university initiatives, but for now the alumni stood united. The sentiment is reinforced in the debut issue of the PAW (April 7, 1900), which applauded the concept of alumni representation. It's clear that what St. Louis was initiating had broad, national alumni support.

In something like a Jacksonian insurrection, Davis extended an invitation to "the various Associations west of the Allegheny Mountains to cooperate in forming an Association of allied Clubs." He was careful, however, to stress the benefits of such a cooperative union, eschewing any threatening language:

If a meeting can be held each year in one of the principal cities of the West, to reach which a long journey will not be necessary, more delegates will attend, and interest in Princeton in the West will be greatly increased. The active Alumni in the different cities will thus become acquainted with each other, and the invasion of the city by a large number of enthusiastic Alumni will greatly stimulate local interest.

Given the tendencies even to this day of such enthusiastic alums, one might also have predicted an answerable interest on the part of local constabularies, but no such reports have come down to us. In any event, the word went out to the other 12 clubs-north as far as Minneapolis-St. Paul, West as far as Denver and San Francisco, south to Texas and East to Pittsburgh.

The response was gratifying. Davis had gauged the temperature of Western sentiment astutely. Reporting to the April 27 session in St. Louis were 25 representatives from 9 of those clubs, with two others (Omaha and the Twin Cities) sending regrets, but eager to be charter members. The healthy turnout yielded not only a full menu of discussion topics, but a firm consensus that item number one was to be alumni representation on the Board of Trustees.

By the evening of the first day a committee had drafted, and the membership approved, a plan consisting of six planks. Of these, the first went to the heart of the matter: "The enlargement of the Board of Trustees, by adding five Trustees elected by a direct vote of the Alumni." For the first election, the five freshmen would draw straws to determine their tenure, from one to five years. Thereafter, an election to a five-year term would occur annually. (The other five planks focused on eligibility and electoral procedures. Any matriculant could vote, once his class had graduated; and only graduates ten years out could run.)

Upon the plan's approval, a motion was passed for Davis to head a committee of three to lay the plan before the appropriate Board committee. Davis chose James Laughlin of Pittsburgh and Harlan Cleveland of Cincinnati. It was an idea whose time had come. In less than a year, the "St. Louis Plan" for Alumni Trustee representation had been approved by the New Jersey Legislature.

Professor Link gives a detailed account of the interim. The Board approved the St. Louis Plan in June, referring it to a special committee headed by Pyne. (Their minor revisions concerned only eligibility.) Their change was itself further revised at the Board's December meeting (only graduates of three years' standing could vote) and "arrangements were made to submit the bill to the New Jersey Legislature to amend the university's charter."

Thus within almost exactly a year of the submission of the St. Louis plan, the first-ever election of alumni board representatives was held: May 1, 1901. Those elected included three of the men in attendance at the crucial Western Association gathering: Davis and Laughlin, along with David Jones from Chicago. The other two were John Lambert Cadwalader of New York and Alexander Van Rensselaer of Philadelphia. The infusion of this more activist Western blood was to have a major effect on university affairs in the new century's first decade.

The timing was crucial. Of immediate importance, the election permitted these new alumni to move more expeditiously in the direction they felt vital-the removal of President Patton. While it is apparent that they hoped for his replacement by Wilson, most of those discussions went on behind closed doors. Davis again was at the heart of the machinations. After the regular Board adjourned on the afternoon of March 16, a special group of seven, that included Davis and Jones, as well as Grover Cleveland, met to consider the creation of an Executive Committee, a body which could exert more influence in the looming leadership crisis.

Davis, in common with other new Trustee members, was soon to contribute $1000 to a fund to provide Patton the equivalent of six years' salary, in effect buying out what had been planned as a twenty years' presidency. Within two months these plans were complete, Patton's financial security was assured, and a new position found for him as Theological Seminary president. Still, Wilson was to all appearances astonished when informed of his elevation one June morning before commencement. His brother-in-law Stockton Axson was present, and observed the "he showed what he had seldom showed in his life, a moment of timidity." Wilson's behavior persuaded Axson that "the actual thing had come to him with a great suddenness."

In a very real sense, therefore, the creation of the Western Association led directly to Woodrow Wilson's presidency. The event also signaled that new reserves of energy were at hand, ready for injection into University affairs. As with all major shifts in the authority of governance, this one brought with it an implicit threat to long-time holders of university privilege-primarily the Alumni of New York and Philadelphia. The split between these two groups - groups which had just pulled together on alumni representation, on Patton's removal, and on the inauguration of more modern, progressive educational policies-would soon widen.

Wilson came into office as a reformer and moved swiftly to carry out an academic revolution (rationalizing departmental course offerings; introducing the preceptorial system) that was as extensive as it was welcome. But when he turned from the purely academic to challenge the undergraduates' long-standing social structure, those latent tensions between the eastern elite and the new men of the West were to erupt, and erupt disastrously.

Isaac Lionberger's Adddress to the First National Alumni Association Meeting, February 12, 1921

The Background

The St. Louis Club's seminal and long-standing role in the founding and vital proceedings of the Western Association would seem to have guaranteed it a comparably vital role in that body's natural successor, the National Alumni Association. It did. And that process recreated an earlier historical transition. Just as it was not until the end of the Civil War that the College of New Jersey began its extraordinary expansion, so too it was only with the cessation of the Great War that the establishment of a nationally representative body of Old Nassau alums was officially sanctioned. The date was November 1, 1919; the place, Pittsburgh.

The 1924 Princeton Club of St. Louis history reports that on that occasion the Western Association "held a meeting simultaneously with the Graduate Council of Princeton. At this meeting, the [Western Association] decided to hold its annual meetings at the same time that the meetings of the National Alumni Association were held." At long last, it appeared that a lasting and generally representative body of Princeton alumni had assumed its rightful place on the University stage.

And it is particularly apt that it was St. Louis that hosted the firs true gathering of that Association, on February 11 and 12, 1921, when "there was a wide representation of Princeton Alumni." And it is equally apposite that the keynote address at that first national convocation was delivered by the articulate and wise Isaac Lionberger, a man who had had such an intimate involvement with the earlier historic Western Club proceedings.

Much of this remarkable address bears repeating, for it provides insight not just into one man's perception (and sharp critiques) of his own era, but into the practices of a much earlier era of education at Princeton - his own undergraduate years. The opportunity to review his words now, during the University's bicenquinquagenary, allows us to survey a whole swath of our University's educational history and evolution.

The Address (1)

Isaac Lionberger opens his remarks by saluting the assembled group as "this ecumenical council of graduates," and noting - with customary candor - that "this convention is important. It is the first of its kind' it may mean something or nothing." He goes on to estimate the calibre of the university's typical charges, providing a not entirely flattering snapshot of the Princeton undergraduate in the era of the flapper:

The average schoolboy [is] usually the offspring of the prosperous class, undisciplined by hardship of any sort, never having had to think seriously[; he] comes to college expecting not an education, to be laboriously acquired, but enjoyment [...] It is hard to make scholars of this misinformed, affluently superior and rather condescending product of the average school.

Lionberger's tongue is not placed so firmly in his cheek as the tone might suggest. But he moves on to a more serious question, one which arises from the quality of this raw material that it is the college'' business to fashion.

Equipped as it is and must be, what can the college accomplish for those who resort to it? We cannot hope to fashion them into philosophers and statesmen, nor even into financiers or captains of industry. No factory can produce such goods. We must be content with a more humble and more achievable task, and I think the university wise which promises nothing more to its students than the opportunity to acquire that sort of culture which may enable them to be what we call in a vague way open-minded, apprehensive, tolerant, clear-seeing, honorable, interesting men of the world.

To his own question, "What can college do for its young men with the vast foundations benefactors have established for their instruction?" he answers with a sound, if less than glowing, portrait of what a college might achieve.

I think we can do a great deal, and I base my conviction upon the steadfast fact that we have done a great deal. The college man is not like other men. Somehow he had been fashioned into something slightly perhaps, but obviously superior, not by learning, for he carries no such burden, but by influences which tend to the production of a distinct type; his point of view is not that of the self-made man, it is not that of the craftsman, artist or philosopher. He is a simple, fairly well-informed, unashamed man of good sense and breeding whom we call a gentleman. He values happiness more than wealth. he has a clean body and a clean mind and I do not think he lacks the virtues which most become a man.

He goes on to remind his audience that there is no need to apologize for the calibre of such a gentleman. Evidence from the recently-ended war speaks well for these collegiate products, whether America's or England's.

The flanneled fools of Oxford and Cambridge were not less manly than the disciplined hordes of their adversaries, and when the call for volunteers came from President Wilson every college in the land was deserted.

(2)

With this sketch as preamble, Lionberger goes on to what is for the readers in the 1990s a particularly informative section of his address, for it draws a vivid portrait of the kind of education Princeton men had received fifty years earlier, the 1870s. It was the sort of education Lionberger, John Davis '72, Charles Allen '75, and Woodrow Wilson '79 himself would have received. It was to a real extent the education which many of those men rebelled against, or sought to modify, when they assumed the reins of university leadership at the turn of the century.

I know that in my own case college did not turn out anything like an educated man. Its instruction was not calculated to produce such a result. I was taught to rely more on faith than reason, and to say what men should think, rather than why they should think it; and having been filled with comfortable and useful prejudices, found no way to improve them. Superiority did not at once influence me, for knowing a little of every subject I was rather content to listen to than to comprehend another's point of view.

I lacked that conviction of sin, which is the beginning of redemption. What I though I knew repelled that of which I was ignorant. I had been taught in college what to admire, and it never occurred to me that I had to understand Shakespeare or Milton or Bacon in order that the greatness of these men might become evident to me. Nothing that was old was quite understood, for I did not ponder upon it. Not in truth but in the opinions of others I found all that I sought in truth.

(3)

A more serious consequence of this sort of comfortable preparation was that

There was no department in the university, which taught me how to defend myself against imposture, quackery, plausibility or fanaticism. None told me either the meaning of words or how to repel their tyranny. I had no opportunity to ask questions. My teachers, having adopted the maxim of the preachers that as the twig is bent the tree will incline, sedulously inculcated doctrines and convictions which they deemed wholesome, and I was unable to resist them however incredible they may have been.

The portrait here given (along with the words "sin" "redemption" and "preachers") clearly reflects the more narrow, strictly religious world of the old, Presbyterian Princeton. Lionberger gives it grudging respect for its firm moral tone, but condemns it for its failures: its failure to provide students the capacity for critical judgement, and independent discernment.

College might have made us wiser - and I mean by wiser, more competent to apply an old principle to a new case. If it could not endow us with that complete and generous education which Milton describes, it might at least have started us right by communicating to us an intelligent appreciation of the experiments of mankind, his failures and triumphs; and so started, we might have been more apt to achieve the comprehensive, tolerant, apprehensive point of view which should characterize an educated man.

(4)

But this does not mean that the pedagogic or curricular changes in the intervening fifty years have necessarily produced a better-educated man. For Lionberger turns his attention next to the continuing inadequacies of a Princeton education. He insists that "Our system is wrong. It rests upon the notion that boys may be forced to learn." No, he insists, "Enlightenment comes by loving." He cites as a model the Greeks, who "established education upon a foundation of contact and discussion and tried to rouse the faculty of thinking not by the scourge of vexing examinations but by explaining things."

We attempt to make a philosophy of things which should be taught by fairy tales. The average mind is not better than it was a thousand years ago - it is still simple, and it must be taught simply. A fable, a parable, an example is interesting; a principle kills inquiry. Drudgery repels, curiosity invites diligence. We make a task of what should be delightful.

He objects here to the day's mechanical spirit of instruction, but finds the emphasis on amount equally to be deplored.

The university is too lavish in its teaching and cloys the appetite of youth. If we pour a glut of water upon a bottle, little water will enter. Each must receive according to his structure and capacity; yet if a boy likes what he is being taught he will take more than where instruction is forced upon him. Truth and beauty are not unpalatable unless we make them so, for an eager empty mind - and such is the mind of all healthy young men - will not shrink form gratification. The amiable parts of learning are not distasteful. If the university will but spread the feast, the student will eat.

What Lionberger seems to have in mind here is a truly Socratic, perhaps even peripatetic ideal of personal, direct education. It might certainly seem to reflect the original goals of that preceptorial system which Wilson had set in operation two decades before. But of this Lionberger is in fact suspicious. He reminds us that

Pythagoras did not reach the scholars who flocked to him by any such tutorial system: he spoke direct; it was he whom they wished to hear, not another and inferior. Let me be ever so common-place, yet if I am allowed an intimate association with a wise man, I cannot choose but catch from him something to make me wiser - a point of view, perhaps, a way of approaching a subject, a capacity for detecting an error, a craving for truth, a wholesome incredulity.

The spirit of what Isaac Lionberger 1875 here recommends is one that seems not to have been achieved at Princeton until the revolution of the 1960s. The premise of a pass-fail option, for instance, seems to embody this idea of a spread feast with minimal "testing" or formal accountability.

But his model is in truth not a revolutionary, but a deeply reactionary one. His admiration for the Greeks - and for the ways by which their intellectual practices were passed down - makes this clear.

The Greeks by their methods taught not only the Romans but all Christendom. Their influence has not subsided. [It] taught not what to think but how to think. It was at once interesting and stimulating, and none who felt it could resist its fascination. Long, long ago, nearly seven hundred years, men began to teach in Italy the literature of Rome. Cicero and Virgil and Tacitus were taught, and thousands in distant parts of the world, hearing strange rumors of the new learning, flocked to listen and learn, and having tasted of the waters of life scattered all over Europe, fructifying as with affectionate rain the arid souls of Christendom. One stood upon a corner in a remote province and cried his wares, offering "Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge" and a new university was established. Oxford was founded in the 13th century, and many other seats of learning. It was never difficult to persuade men to wish to know.

(5)

As he embarks upon his peroration (his age took speech-making seriously) Lionberger touches on all the major themes of his address, and shows again in what a direct, intimate and vital way, both European history and Biblical allusion spoke to that era's moral and intellectual culture. educated fold of the time looked to a continuity of tradition that stretched from Judea to Greece and then to Rome, England and America. Seventy-five years later, those traditions speak to us neither as powerfully nor elegantly; we are the products of an era that celebrates, instead of a single line, the diversity of cultural springs which contribute to our sense of national identity. Our era, for better or worse, does not have available to it the kind of unified intellectual and spiritual past felt strongly by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly European society which then populated Princeton - and, for better or worse, governed America. Lionberger's words offer a useful snapshot of that earlier era, and of the sense of confidence that dying age still enjoyed.

Knowledge is good, wisdom is excellent. We have managed somehow to make them uninteresting, hateful perhaps, and I mean to show that by other methods we might have done better. David supplicated God to give him understanding. Maybe it can be got nowhere else. There is significance in the serpent of Eden. The Greeks conceived truth to be a beautiful woman with snaky hair, whom to look upon was death. But I think these images are intended rather to entice than frighten us. Adam dared purchase knowledge with his life, and the Gorgon was overcome by a brave adventurer. Every youth has in him the propensity of a knight errant: he wishes to go into the world and encounter its perils and problems. There is a fascination in learning. Every day we make new discoveries. When we graduate we do not end but commence that real education which ends only with life.

He is convinced of the power and value of culture, and is especially sensitive to it as a progressive, self-correcting movement. The words of this seventy year old Princeton man are another manifestation of that lingering nineteenth century optimism, with its sense of sociable and gentlemanly intimacy, that at least for his generation seems to have survived the devastation of the Great War.

I know that culture is a slow progress for prejudice to prejudice, to be measured not by truth but by what seemed true and now seems false, yet it is worth striving for. it helps us to understand our fellows and reconciles us to them; it protects us against imposture; it is a broad highway to strangers and a pleasant bypath between neighbors; it gives pleasure and gets pleasure by conference, and I think it should be the aspiration of all social beings. To be fit for the best society should be the aspiration of every gentleman.

Is it foolish to hope that Princeton, enriched and fortified by the old culture, can make of the young men who flock to its halls from every part of this great republic worthy successors to the poets, historians and philosophers of a more barbaric age, or must we be content with mediocrity and the patterned fabrics of a factory, lacking variety and lacking vivacity?

(6)

He concludes with the humbling admission and reminder that even a college education is, for some rare individuals, finally irrelevant.

I cannot conclude and ignore the day. Lincoln was born on the 12th of February. His life, his service and sacrifice, none can ignore. He was not a college graduate, yet he was fit for his high calling. His character was eloquent and his word ran to the remotest confines of his country. he righted a great wrong, daring to fight for righteousness, and he won by the nobility of his character the gratitude even of his enemies.

If we ask why he was so great, men will tell you that he was humble-minded and wished to understand. To implant such a wish should be the object of a university.

Part of the value of Lionberger's address lies in the fact that he was not just addressing a Princeton audience about what Princeton University could become. He was outlining, for a body of reasonable and educated listeners, a portrait of what a university should be. Testimony to the eloquence and force of his words can be seen in the fact that the St. Louis Harvard Club reprinted his address, in its entirety, in its bulletin sent to all the local sons of Harvard that spring.

When Princeton's alumni begin actively to educate their Cambridge rivals, it can fairly be claimed that they have scaled the absolute summit of service to their nation.