THE UNIVERSITY

For some time the newspapers had been full of accounts of the founding and approaching opening of Stanford University at Palo Alto, California. Soon after Leland Stanford, Jr., the only child of Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford, died in Rome in 1884, the Stanfords announced their intention to found and endow with their great wealth a new university in California. The romantic character of the founding and the picturesque setting of the new university in the middle of a great ranch on the shores of lower San Francisco Bay, with the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains rising from its very campus, its generous provision for students unable to meet the expenses of the older institutions of the East, and the radical academic innovations and freedom of selection of studies decided on by the Stanfords and David Starr Jordan, the eminent scientific man selected to be the first president of the new university all this, together with the evident strong leaning of the institution toward science, as revealed by the character of the president, faculty and curriculum, combined to assure young Hoover that this was the modern scientific university of his dream, just made to order for him. It was exactly the place where he could become a mining engineer like the wonderful man he had always remembered.

So when it was announced in the Portland papers that a professor from Stanford would visit the city in the early summer of 1891, to hold entrance examinations for the university, which was to open in the autumn, Herbert decided to try the examinations. But when he came to compare thoughtfully his store of knowledge with the published requirements he would have to meet, he found that his self-preparation had been rather one-sided. For in this preparation he had followed his inclinations more than the prescribed schedules of college entrance requirements. Why should one waste a lot of time, he had thought, and be bored during the wasting, by studying grammar if one could already talk intelligibly to people? And why should one not revel in complicated problems of figures and geometrical designs that really took some hard thinking to work out, if hard thinking was just what one liked to do?

So, much to his distress he found out, as the examinations went on, that he was decidedly unprepared in some of the required lines such as grammar, rhetoric, etc. And even in mathematics, his favorite study and the one in which he made his best showing, he had not been able to cover, in his limited time for study, the whole ground required for college entrance. He seemed doomed to be refused the coveted certificate of admission.

But the Fates worked for him. In the first place, Professor Swain, the examining professor now president of Swarthmore College was the head of Stanford’s department of mathematics. In the second place, he was a Quaker, and a man who liked the right sort of boys. And so a candidate who was a little weak in the languages, but was strong in arithmetic and geometry and was a brave Quaker boy, besides was not to be too summarily turned down.

This kind and wise examiner has described to me, recently, how he was first attracted to the young Quaker in the group of candidates before him by his evident strength of will. “I observed,” said President Swain, “that he put his teeth together with great decision, and his whole face and posture showed his determination to pass the examination at any cost. He was evidently summoning every pound of energy he possessed to answer correctly the questions before him. I was naturally interested in him. On inquiry I learned that he had studied only two books of Plane Geometry, and was trying to solve an original problem based on the fourth book. While he was unable to do this, he did much better; for the intelligence and superior will he revealed in the attempt convinced me that such a boy needed only to be given a chance. So although he could not pass all of the tests, I told him to come to my rooms at the hotel after the examinations, as I would like to talk with him. He came promptly at the appointed hour with a friend of his, the son of a banker in Salem, Oregon. The two boys invited me and Mrs. Swain to stop at Salem to visit them, which we did. I learned there that Herbert Hoover, for that was the boy’s name, was an industrious, thoughtful, ambitious boy earning his own living while he studied.”

All this was enough for the wise teacher. And an arrangement was mutually agreed on between examiner and examined to the effect that if young Hoover would work diligently for the rest of the summer on the literary necessities of the situation, and come on early to Stanford for a little special coaching, he might consider his probabilities for admission to the university so high as to be reckoned a sure thing.

Well, it all turned out as desired by both candidate and examiner. And Herbert Hoover was enrolled the following October among the first students, the “pioneer class” of Stanford University, and was actually the first Stanford student to inhabit the beautiful great new dormitory called Encina Hall. It was not only his university of dreams come true, but it was really to be the university of his graduation, the alma mater of a boy without any other mother. And it was the university of which he was to become, in later successful years, a patron and trustee. Stanford did much for Herbert Hoover; but so has he done much for Stanford.

Any university means many things, for all their lives, to those who have come timidly and wonderingly to its doors as boys and girls, and have gone out on that final day of happy reward and tearful good-byes as men and women eager to try themselves against the world outside of sheltered school-rooms. And most of these things are to most persons who have known them, things of pleasant and loving memory.

Stanford is like any other university in this relation to its graduates. But there seems to be something unusually strong and yet at the same time unusually intangible in the ties that bind its former students to it. Perhaps the explanation lies as much in the special character of its students, at least its pioneer ones, as in the special character of the institution itself. The students who came to Stanford in its earlier years came because it was different from other colleges, and because they did this it is likely that they themselves were different from other students. Like the restless, seeking pioneers that came over the desert and mountains to the Pacific Coast to find a different life from that of worn tradition and old ways, their descendants and the later coming youth, who had mixed with them and been infected by their seeking spirit, flocked to this institution that offered a different kind of college atmosphere.

Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission buildings of yellow stone and heavy red tiles, nestling under high hills that run back to mountains, surrounded by wide grain fields flecked with rounded live-oaks and tall strange eucalyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns and well-kept paddocks and exercising tracks in which sleek trotting horses of famous Palo Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a strange new setting for studying Greek and Latin and mathematics and science.

“Die Luft der Freiheit weht” is the Stanford motto; and there was truly no more likely place for the winds of freedom to blow than over and through this college on a California ranch. And its founders did well to find for its first head a man than whom no other American scholar had given clearer indications of being anxious to break with clogging scholastic tradition.

The university itself, so tenderly conceived as a memorial to a boy lost to his parents, and so generously established as an opportunity for other boys, some of whom, like the hero of our story, might have had their parents lost to them, is an almost unique example of a great educational institution maintained by the fortune of a single family. All of the Stanford millions are returned today to the country in which they were accumulated in the form of a great endowment and of the beautiful halls in which thousands of students have found a free training for independent existence and right citizenship. These students wear the Stanford cardinal as a red badge of obligation, not anarchy. No other college in the country had more of its sons and daughters, in proportion to their total number, devoting themselves to their country’s service during the Great War. If Herbert Hoover was the most distinguished of the serving sons of Stanford he was not more eager and devoted than many others.

But we leave Our Hero waiting too long upon the threshold of his dream university come true. It had been agreed, you remember, between young Hoover and his friendly examiner in Portland that the candidate for admission should come to the Stanford Farm which is the students’ name for the campus, and which literally described it in those beginning days before the time of the opening of the university to be coached in the two or three studies in which his preparation was deficient.

So he came down from the North a month before the announced time for opening, a lonesome boy without any friends at Stanford except the good Quaker professor of mathematics, and with all of his savings from the “real estate business” tucked away in an inside pocket. They amounted in grand total to about two hundred dollars.

It was less simple getting to Stanford in those first days than it is now. There was not even a beginning then of the beautiful thriving town of Palo Alto that stands today with convenient railway station, just at the entrance to the long palm-lined avenue that runs straight up to the main university quadrangle. It was all grain field then, part of the great Hopkins estate, where now the college town welcomes the annually incoming Freshmen, and offers them convenient lodging places of all grades of comfort and quick trams and motor busses to the university.

Young Hoover had to get off at Menlo Park, the station for a few great country houses of California railway and bonanza kings, which offered no welcome for small boys with a few saved dollars in their inside pockets. He had to find a casual hackman to carry him and his bag and trunk to the university a couple of miles away. But even there he found no place yet ready to house him. So someone advised him to go to Adelanta Villa, a mile or more back from the university, in the hills, where a number of the early arrivals among the men of the new faculty were living. And there he did go, and found a warm and simple welcome and hospitality. He was soon ensconced in the old mansion and doing odd jobs about the establishment to help pay for his board and lodging.

Between jobs he was feverishly at work on the finishing touches for his final entrance tests, and probably quite as feverishly worrying about them. He felt pretty safe on everything but the requirements in English composition. As a matter of fact, when he came to that fearful test he ignominiously failed in it, and, indeed, did not finally get the required credit in it until nearly ready to graduate! But he was passed in enough of the entrance requirements to be given Freshman standing, “conditioned in English,” a phrase not unfamiliar to other college students. He had, however, added something to his score by a Hooverian tour de force.

Noting that a credit was offered in physiology, about which he knew nothing technically, he reasoned that as everyone, of course, knew already a little something about his insides and how they worked, one ought to be able to find out a little more from some textbook, and that the two littles might make enough for passing purposes. Thereupon with that prompt and positive reaction to stimulus which has been conspicuously characteristic of him all his life, he got a book, read it hard all of the day and night before the examination and passed in physiology!

The story of Herbert Hoover’s college life reveals no startling features to distinguish it from the college careers of other thousands of boys, endowed with intelligence, energy, and ambition, but not with money, and hence forced to earn their living as they went along. Nevertheless it does reveal many of the main characteristics that we know so well today. For he did things all through those four years in the same way that he does them today, promptly, positively, and quietly. They were mostly already done before it was generally recognized that he was doing them.

His two hundred dollars could not last long even in a college of no tuition fees and an unusually simple student life. He had to earn his way all the time, and he earned it by hard work, directed, however, by good brains. Many a story, most interesting but, unfortunately, mostly untrue, has been told of his various expedients to earn the money necessary for his board and lodging, clothes, and books. Not a few of these stress his expertness as waiter in student dining-rooms. Undoubtedly he would have been an expert waiter if he had been a waiter at all. But he was not. A famous San Francisco chef has often been quoted in interesting detail as to the “hash-slinging” cleverness of the future American food controller in the dining-room which this chef managed by the way, just after Hoover left college in the great Stanford dormitory in those early days. But, though interesting, these details are mythical. As are also the accounts of the care he took of professorial gardens, although that would have been an excellent substitute for the outdoor exercise and play which he found little time for in college except in geological field excursions and camps. Nor was he ever nurse to the professorial babies, which also has been often placed to his credit by imaginative story-tellers.

For at the very beginning of his college life Herbert Hoover and another distinguished son of Stanford, known to the early students as Rex Wilbur and to the present ones as Prex Wilbur for he is now the university’s president put their heads together and decided that if they had any brains at all in those heads they would make them count in this little matter of earning their way through college. And both of them did.

In most of the things that Herbert Hoover did as a college boy to earn his needed money he revealed an unusual faculty for “organizing” and “administering” which is precisely a faculty that as a man he has revealed to the world in highest degree. He organized, at some profit to himself, the system of collecting and distributing the laundry of the college boys which had been done casually and unsatisfactorily by various San Jose and San Francisco establishments. He acted also as impresario, at a modest commission, for various lecturers and musicians, developing an arrangement for bringing visiting stars from San Francisco to the near-by university.

More important in its permanent influence on student activities was his work in reorganizing the system of conducting general student body affairs, especially the financial side of these affairs. In his Senior year he had been made treasurer of the student body and on taking office found little treasure and much confusion. Each of the many student activities had its own separate being, its own officers and own funds or debts and a dangerous freedom from general student control. Hoover worked out a system by which all control was vested in the officers of the general student body, and all funds passed into and out of a general treasury. The Hoover system of student affairs management prevails, in its essential features, in the university today.

In later years, as trustee of the university, he was the initiating figure in reorganizing the handling of all the institution’s many million dollars worth of properties, and so his organizing genius is evidenced today at Stanford both in the management of student activities and in the handling of the financial affairs of the whole university.

But the work that he did in his student days that paid him best, because it brought him more than money, was that which he did partly for, and partly at the recommendation of his “major” professor, Dr. John Casper Branner, a great geologist and remarkable developer of geological students.

Dr. Branner has been one of Stanford’s greatest assets from the day of its opening in all his successive capacities as professor, vice-president, and president, and he still wields a benign influence on the institution as resident professor and president emeritus. It was the particular good fortune of young Hoover to find that his early decision to become a mining engineer, like the wonderful man who had visited him in Newberg, led him, when he came to the university, into the class-rooms and laboratories of this kind and discerning scholar. Dr. Branner quickly discovered “good material,” something that he was always looking for, in this industrious, intelligent, and ambitious Quaker boy; and Herbert Hoover found in his major professor not only a teacher but a friend, who, in both relations, has had a great influence, all for the best, in his life. It is an interesting illumination of the democracy of American education to note that while the professor became the university’s president the student became one of its trustees.

The first money-earning work that student Hoover did for Dr. Branner, except for various little jobs about the laboratory or office, was a summer’s work on a large topographic model of Arkansas which that state was having prepared by Dr. Branner after a new method devised by him. Part of this summer was spent in the field in Arkansas and the rest of it wrestling with the model in the basement of the professor’s house.

Two summers were spent in work with the U. S. Geological Survey in the California Sierras around Lake Tahoe and the American River under Waldemar Lindgren, one of the greatest of American scientific mining engineers. This work was on the relations of the famous Sierra placer gold deposits to the original gold-bearing veins and lodes, and resulted in tracing those comparatively recent placers back to the old mountain slopes and valleys. It was a fascinating problem successfully carried through. The young geologist’s association with Lindgren, whose standards of personal character and regard for the dignity and ethics of his profession were of the highest, was a source of much valuable education.

All this summer activity was of value to young Hoover not only for the help it afforded him in his struggle for existence, and for the outdoor exercise it involved, but for the practical experience in geological work which it gave him to mix in with his lecture room and laboratory acquisitions and to test them by. He seemed to have no difficulty in getting all of this kind of work he had time to do. In fact, some of the other students used to speak a little enviously and suggestively about “Hoover’s luck” in this connection. Dr. Branner happened to overhear some remarks of this kind from a group around a laboratory table one day and promptly broke out on them in his forcible manner.

“What do you mean,” he said, “by talking about Hoover’s luck? He has not had luck; he has had reward. If you would work half as hard and half as intelligently as he does you would have half his luck. If I tell any one of you to go and do a thing for me I have to come around in half an hour to see if you have done it. But I can tell Hoover to do a thing, and never think of it again. I know it will be done. And he doesn’t ask me how to do it, either. If I told him to start to Kamchatka tomorrow to bring me back a walrus tooth, I’d never hear of it again until he came back with the tooth. And then I’d ask him how he had done it.”

Dr. Branner was as kind to his boys as he was stern when sternness was needed. Hoover came down with typhoid in his Junior year, just at a time when his finances could not afford such an expensive luxury. So Dr. Branner sent him to a hospital and saw that he was cared for by the best of physicians and nurses and told him to forget about paying for it all until after he had graduated. And that probably meant that the good professor had to go for some time without buying books, which was what he usually did with his extra money.

Another unfortunate illness was announced to the busy student by an outbreak of little red spots on his body which were declared by the college physician to be the result of poison oak. But they were not; they meant measles, and measles needs prompt attention. Unfortunately young Hoover’s neglected case affected his eyes to such an extent that for several years afterward he had to wear glasses. And out of this grew the familiar Stanford tradition that Herbert Hoover ruined his eyes while in college by over-much night work on his studies!

As a matter of fact Hoover was no college grind. He studied hard enough at what he liked or thought important for his fitting to be a mining engineer, but he did not dodge getting a few credits from well-known “snap” courses, and he got through other required, but, to his mind, superfluous ones without doing much more work on them than necessary. He had a disconcerting habit of starting in on a course and then if he found it uninteresting or unpromising as a contributor to the special education he was interested in, of simply dropping out of the class without consultation or permission. But he did dig hard into what he thought really counted; his record in the geology department was an unusually high one.

But with all his work and study he found time for some other kinds of activity. At least the two Irwin boys, Will and Wallace, who were Stanford’s most ingenious disturbers of the peace in pioneer days, claim that Hoover, in his quiet effective way, made a few contributions of his own to the troubles of the faculty. But such contributions from others were generally credited or rather debited to the more notorious offenders, so that they had to suffer not alone for their own brilliant inspirations but for those of other less conspicuous collaborators. Wallace, for what seemed to the faculty sufficient reasons, was, as he has himself phrased it, “graduated by request,” while Will had his Senior year encored by the faculty, so that it took him five years, instead of the more conventional four, to graduate. In fact, I remember that even as this fifth year was drawing near its close, the faculty committee of discipline, of which I was a reluctant member, seriously considered letting Will go in the same way that Wallace had gone. But some of us argued that if we should let Will graduate in the more usual way we should be rid of him soon anyway and without risking the bare possibilities of doing him an injustice. President Jordan always maintained that Will had good stuff in him, and he used his ameliorating influence with the faculty committee. So Will Irwin is today one of Stanford’s best-known alumni.

Herbert Hoover’s haunting trouble all through his college course was that unpassed entrance requirement in English composition. Indeed, he did not pass in it until about a week before he graduated, although he tried it regularly every semester all through his four years. How he finally got his passing mark has been told me by Mrs. Hoover. She knows because she was there through most of the long agony.

After failing regularly at each semester’s trial principally, he thinks (and Mrs. Hoover is inclined to agree), because he always had to take it under a particularly meticulous instructor, his predicament began to worry even his professors in the geology department. It looked as if their star student might not be allowed to graduate. Finally a date was set by the English department for a last trial before the end of his Senior year.

A day or two before this date the professor of paleontology, J. P. Smith, famed not only for his erudition but for his especial kindness to all geology students especially if they did well in paleontology came to the worrying Senior with a paper that Hoover had written sometime before on a paleontological subject, and said to him: “Look here, you will never pass that examination in the state you are in. Take this paper; it’s fine. Copy it in your best hand; remember that handwriting goes a long way with professors of English; look up every word in the dictionary to be sure you have got the right one; then put in all the punctuation marks you ever saw, and bring it back to me.” Hoover did it.

Then Professor Smith disappeared with the paper in his study, but soon came out with it, abundantly blue-penciled. “Now take it and re-copy it with all these indicated changes, and bring it back again.” Again the interested Senior obeyed his mentor. Then the professor left the laboratory with the paper in his hand. Hoover awaited his return with ever-increasing interest. Pretty soon he came back with a cheerful smile, handed Hoover the paper, and said: “Well, you’ve passed; although you probably don’t deserve it.”

Professor Smith, it seems, had carried the paper, not to the fatal instructor, but to the head of the English department and had said to him: “See here; your instructor is holding up the best man we have from graduating. Now look at this paper of Hoover’s. Is there anything the matter with it? Doesn’t it make good sense? Isn’t it well written? Isn’t it well punctuated?”

The English head glanced over it impatiently he was translating Dante, his dearest recreation, at the moment and then roared out: “Well, it looks all right. I suppose Instructor X has to live up to the rules, but if the boy can do this well for you it’s good enough for us.” And with his Dante pencil he wrote a large “Passed” across the paper.

Someway all this does not sound like an account of life at the conventional university. Nor does Professor J. P. Smith, who used to interrupt his lecture to wake up a dozing student with a sharp but kindly “Here, Jack, wake up, this is an important point and I will surely ask about it in examination,” seem to be of the conventional type of professor. And most Freshmen coming to Yale or Harvard would hesitate a little before taking the advice of some workman about the campus to go, with bag and trunk, in search of board and lodging to a house full of professors.

But as I said at the beginning, Stanford was different. It is precisely because it was, that Hoover’s particular college experiences and acquisitions were what I have tried to suggest, and not what you might think they would be from your knowledge of other universities. And while Stanford has converged somewhat with years toward the more usual university type colleges get more alike as they get older it has still an atmosphere peculiarly its own. But it was in the first days that this atmosphere was so very distinctive. Its president and faculty and students, all living closely together in the middle of a great ranch of seven thousand acres of grain fields, horse paddocks, and hills where jack rabbits roamed and coyotes howled, were thrown together into one great family, whose members depended almost entirely on one another for social life. And each department was a special smaller family within the great one. Life was simple and direct and democratic. Real things counted first and most; there was little sophistication. Work was the order of the day; recreations were wholesome.

The geology family was an especially close and happy one. Some of Dr. Branner’s former assistants and students had followed him out to California. They were the older members of the family. Almost all of them are now well-known geologists and mining engineers. So also are many of his younger ones. The family went on long tramps and camps together. The region about Stanford is singularly interesting from a geologist’s point of view; and in those days it was a terra more or less incognita. Everybody was discovering things. It was real live geology. Lectures and recitations were illustrated, not by lantern slides, but by views out of the window and revelations in the field.

And at the same time these young geologists learned real life; they had come to know intimately real men and women, all fired with the enthusiasm of a new venture, new opportunities, and a high ideal. With all this, Herbert Hoover learned, in particular, one additional very important thing. He learned that a certain unusual girl, beautiful, intelligent, and unspoiled, a lover of outdoors, and, as proof of her unusualness, a “major” student in geology, was the girl for him. Having learned this he decided to marry her. And later, she decided that he had decided right.

And so with all his experience at earning his living by organizing anything needing organizing, and with his stores of geological lore gained from lecture room and textbook and field work and close personal association with his able and friendly professors, and, finally, with the knowledge that he had already found exactly the right girl for him, Herbert Hoover went out from Stanford, in 1895, with his Pioneer Class, ready to open his oyster. But he had only himself to rely on in doing it.