University of Virginia Library

2. TWO

The Alderman Years

DEMOBILIZED SERVICEMEN, many of whom had not had time
to shed their uniforms, were flooding back to the arcades
in the autumn of 1919. No fewer than fourteen hundred students
had registered by the end of September, much the largest
enrollment in University of Virginia history to that time.

There were glad handshakes at the Corner as men greeted
one another and prepared to resume their academic pursuits;
and there was sorrow for those who would never return. The
faculty had not yet been expanded to take care of the increased
enrollment, and many of the same professors the students
had known before the war were on hand to greet them.
Deans James M. Page of the College, William M. Lile of the
Law School, Theodore Hough of the Medical School, William
M. Thornton of the Engineering School, and Richard Heath
Dabney of the Graduate School welcomed the older matriculates
and the first-year men.

At the Corner, Johnny LaRowe was operating his pool
room; he would later become famous as the admired coach of
Virginia's championship boxing teams. Also among those
present were several other personalities familiar to at least a
generation of Virginia men—R. M. Balthis and T. Jameson,
operators of Anderson Brothers' Bookstore; "Captain"
Schneider, the one-armed news vendor; Charlie Hopkins, the
black baggageman; and Charlie and Willie Brown, the dapper
black barbers with their handsome collection of shaving mugs
bearing the names, in gilt lettering, of such patrons as President

Alderman and Professors Albert Lefevre and Armistead
Dobie.

Things were almost back to normal with classes getting under
way, football practice starting up, fraternities rushing
prospective "goats," the Washington and Jefferson societies
beginning to function, and other peacetime activities being resumed.
Special courses instituted for the war had been abandoned,
and the prewar curriculum was once more in effect.

President Alderman had been at the university throughout
the conflict, after seventeen months at Saranac Lake, N.Y.,
battling tuberculosis. He had been permitted by his physicians
to resume his duties, but was warned that he would have to be
careful for the rest of his life and work at only half the normal
tempo. His morale had been greatly lifted on his return to the
university in the fall of 1914 when some nine hundred students,
practically the entire student body, met him at the station
with a tumultuous welcome and escorted him, in the glow
of torchlights, to his home on Carr's Hill.

Varsity football had been discontinued the previous year because
of the war but was resumed in the fall of 1919. Basketball,
baseball, and track had functioned in the winter and
spring of the 1918-19 session, following the termination of
the world conflict in November 1918. The athletic record in
1919-20 was a ragged one, although the basketball team under
the coaching of the returned Pop Lannigan made an excellent
showing.

In football Virginia began the season with only two lettermen
and won only two games. One of the losses was to the
sensational and previously obscure team from little Centre
College of Danville, Ky. The morning before the game, a man
named McMillan showed up at LaRowe's pool room, said he
was the Centre quarterback, and offered to bet even money to
all comers that he would personally score more points than
the entire Virginia team. Loyal Virginia rooters hastened to
cover his bets. The man was "Bo" McMillan—who turned out
later to be an all-American—and he led the "Praying Colonels"
of Centre College to a 49 to 7 walloping of the Orange
and Blue. McMillan scored several touchdowns and returned
to Danville with a large wad of currency.

Observance of the university's centennial, originally planned
for 1919, was postponed until 1921 "because of disturbed

world conditions following the Great War." John Stewart
Bryan, rector of the university, and Frederic W. Scott, a member
of the board, were "joint and alternate chairmen" of the
Centennial Endowment Fund drive for $3,000,000, launched
in the fall of 1920. Prof. Armistead M. Dobie was given a year's
leave of absence from the law school to serve as executive director.
John L. Newcomb, then a professor in the School of
Engineering, was chosen general chairman of the centennial
celebration, which was set for May 31-June 3, 1921.

Publication of Philip Alexander Bruce's monumental fivevolume
history of the university's first hundred years was a
feature of the observance, as was the appearance of a book of
poems, The Enchanted Years, contributed by American and
British poets in honor of the occasion. There was also a motion
picture.

No effort had been made since the 1916 Finals to attract the
alumni back to alma mater. This policy was continued in 1920
in order that all energies might be devoted to achieving a record-breaking
turnout for the centennial observance the following
year. Lewis Crenshaw, back from Paris, said his alumni
office would "start work in earnest . . . to see that every human
critter that can walk or hop or crawl or fly or swim, or even
float down the Rivanna on his back, gets within calling distance
of the old Rotunda." He was searching for the "oldest
living specimen of the genus alumnus Virginiensis, who we will
have seated on the throne of extinct beer kegs [prohibition
being in full force], and crowned with a chaplet of fragrant
mint leaves."

The celebration brought many alumni back to the Grounds,
as well as internationally known speakers from both sides of
the Atlantic—French Ambassador Jules Jusserand, President
Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, Prof. Henry van Dyke
of Princeton, and British Ambassador Sir Auckland Geddes.
There were greetings from President Woodrow Wilson and
from leading European universities. The Distinguished Service
Cross of Serbia was presented to Dr. Alderman.

Dedication of the McIntire Theater, incorrectly called the
McIntire Amphitheater—an amphitheater is circular or oval
in shape—was an important event. The theater was made possible
by a $120,000 gift from Paul Goodloe McIntire, one
of the university's greatest benefactors, who had donated

$155,000 for the School of Fine Arts in 1919 and whose
contribution of an additional $200,000 to establish a Department
of Commerce and Finance was announced during the
centennial.

The Shadow of the Builder, a centennial pageant by Frances
O. J. Gaither, was a significant event. Corks and Curls was especially
complimentary to "the dancing girls from Mississippi"
and "the torchlight procession of the Athenian youths after
the footrace." It also found "admirable" the acting of "Dr.
W. M. Forrest as Jefferson, Dr. R. H. Dabney as Socrates, Dr.
J. J. Luck as an American citizen, and Prof. Francis H. Abbot
as an Italian stonecutter." An augmented symphony orchestra
rendered musical interludes composed by John Powell, internationally
known pianist and university alumnus, and there
was a choral number composed by George Harris of Richmond.

A tablet to the eighty University of Virginia men who lost
their lives in World War I, the gift of the classes of 1918, 1919,
1920 and the Seven Society, was unveiled on the south front
of the Rotunda. The dedicatory address was delivered by
Capt. A. D. Barksdale, a much-decorated alumnus. On the
tablet were these lines by Laurence Binyon:

The centennial celebration ended with a pyrotechnic display
on the Lawn showing the head of the founder, and in
letters of fire the words "Jefferson Still Lives."

A somewhat somber note had been injected when Dr. Alderman
announced that only $1,300,000 of the $3,000,000
sought for the Centennial Endowment Fund had been raised
or pledged. Actually the amount was found later to be only
$1,200,000; furthermore, a considerable part of this sum
would never be collected. Unfavorable business conditions
were a major factor in this outcome.

Failure of many former students to honor their commitments
was the most distressing aspect of the drive's lack of
success. C. Venable Minor, attorney for the Alumni Board of
Trustees, reported in 1928 that approximately fifteen hundred

12. Professors joined students at the turn of the century in
protesting an "outrage" by Charlottesville police.

students enrolled in the university in 1920-21 subscribed a
total of $142,000. This money was to go toward the building
of the new gymnasium, as a memorial to the men from the
university who had died in the war, and was to be paid by Jan.
1, 1926. Only $57,000 had been collected by that date, and
654 of the delinquent subscribers refused to answer any correspondence
on the subject. At the end of the drive, total collections
from all sources were only $1,037,851.54. Yet, as Robert
B. Tunstall, treasurer of the Alumni Board of Trustees of
the Endowment Fund, reported in 1931, the fund "rendered
possible the erection of the gymnasium, of the orthopedic and
obstetrical wing of the hospital, and the completion of the new
medical group of buildings; and the income from it has been,
and is being, of help to the University in a variety of important
ways."

A contribution of $1,000 to the fund was promised by "the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" in a letter published in 1921 in
College Topics. Payment was pledged by Jan. 1, 1926. Nothing
further was heard, and no effort seems to have been made to
collect the money.

The Klan was undergoing a revival at the time in various
parts of the country. It was much less vigorous in Virginia than
in most areas, but for the next few years there would be occasional
parades in Charlottesville, at least one speech by a
Klansman at the courthouse, and a couple of meetings in
downtown churches. A University of Virginia Klan was
formed by a few students, but they soon withdrew from the
organization in a letter to Imperial Wizard William J. Simmons
in Atlanta, citing "misconduct, misrepresentation, broken
promises, financial ambitions contrary to the principles of the
order."

A branch of an organization called the Anglo-Saxon Clubs
of America was then formed at the university, under the leadership
of John Powell, the pianist, with Dr. Paul B. Barringer
as president. Its purposes were described as "to preserve the
purity of the white race and to maintain the qualities and purposes
of the Anglo-Saxon race." With Powell spearheading the
effort, it successfully sponsored legislation at the 1924 session
of the General Assembly forbidding any intermarriage between
whites and those with a single drop of Negro blood.
Nothing further was heard of the organization.

Although the Ku Klux Klan managed to participate in a few
church gatherings in Charlottesville, it had no role in such
services at the university. The usual weekly worship in the
chapel was abandoned in 1920, and one well-attended service
each term was substituted. Prominent speakers were obtained,
and the chapel was often crowded to capacity. Most of the university's
religious life revolved around the student YMCA,
which worked with the various churches of the community in
promoting student attendance. Prof. John C. Metcalf's Sunday
Bible Class was also a major religious event.

In the previous chapter we noted the controversy over admission
of women to the university. It began in the 1890s and
ended, temporarily, in their admission, over the strong objections
of professors, students, and alumni, to the graduate and
professional schools at the session of 1920-21.

Arrival of the first group of females, numbering seventeen,
in September 1920 was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm
by the male contingent. In fact, their entry into classes
was signalized at times by loud stamping of feet—so much so,
that in at least one instance the professor felt it necessary to
lecture the group concerning their lack of courtesy. Various
student organizations commented that they didn't like having
the ladies either but that stamping was unmannerly, that the
coeds were "here to stay," and the men should make the best
of it. Most professors were decidedly unhappy over the entry
of the women, but only one went as far as French Prof. Richard
H. Wilson. He ordered a coed out of his class.

By 1922 Dean of Women Adelaide Douglas Simpson reported
that "the furore attending the admission of women to
the university has had two years in which to die away, and . . .
it no longer causes a sensation for a woman to appear in a
classroom or laboratory."

Shortly after the admission of the ladies in 1920-21, they
organized an association known as the Women's Self-Government
Association. Among their chief desires was a women's
dormitory or women's building that would make possible
some sort of social life. They were living in widely separated
places throughout the community. A series of informal teas
was held each Friday afternoon in Peabody Hall.

By the opening of the 1924-25 session, sixty-one coeds
were enrolled, distributed as follows: law, two; medicine,

seven; graduate, fourteen; education, thirty-six; college, two.
Three years later the first sorority, Chi Omega, established a
chapter at the university, and Kappa Delta followed in 1932.

A suite of three rooms on West Range was made available in
1929 for coed rest and recreation, with President and Mrs.
Alderman as hosts for the opening. The rooms, formerly used
by art and architecture students, had been completely redecorated.
The largest room was equipped with a piano and orthophonic
victrola, comfortable chairs, and an open fireplace.
The second room had kitchen equipment, and the third was
a rest room. A maid was in attendance part of each day to
serve tea.

Mrs. Mary Jeffcoat Hamblin, who had been named dean of
women to succeed Dean Simpson, resigned in 1934, and in
the following year Miss Roberta Hollingsworth was appointed
to the position. Miss Hollingsworth would serve until 1967,
nearly a third of a century, almost until the entry of women
on the same basis as men. She was an A.B. of Goucher College
and a Ph.D. of the University of Virginia. After four years as
instructor in Spanish at Agnes Scott College, she joined the
university's Spanish faculty. A woman of considerable good
looks, charm, and executive ability, she was active in various
aspects of university affairs. In 1953 she married Prof. Allan
T. Gwathmey of the chemistry faculty. Her last years were
shadowed by her husband's premature death and her own serious
illnesses.

In the early 1930s the vast majority of students were still
unalterably opposed to coeducation under any circumstances.
College Topics, edited by Murat Williams, said in 1934: "If Virginia
draws more coeds, and the lure and lilt of the Lawn gives
way to the love-making atmosphere of the mid-Western campus,
we advocate a second Rotunda fire and the deletion of
the last phrase, `founder [sic] of the University of Virginia,'
from Jefferson's epitaph."

And Prof. Herman Patrick Johnson, a bachelor, opined,
"Women are lovely creatures, but they should not be educated."

President Alderman assumed that the commonwealth would
eventually establish a college for women, but he opposed creation
of an entirely separate institution. His original preference
had been for a coordinate college similar to those at

Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, and Cambridge, at or near the
university. Subsequently he came to the view that one of Virginia's
normal schools should be converted for the purpose.

A hearing on establishment of a coordinate college was held
at the Capitol in Richmond in late 1929 before a state commission
headed by Judge Don P. Halsey of Lynchburg. Representatives
of various organizations, with Mrs. Mary Cooke
Branch Munford as spokeswoman, said that the college
should be at Charlottesville, and if this was refused, "the General
Assembly will make the university coeducational."

Dr. Alderman and five of the seven members of the Board
of Visitors present preferred placing the college away from
Charlottesville, with Alderman specifically favoring either the
Fredericksburg or Harrisonburg State Teachers' College. The
Halsey Commission, in its report, recommended that the institution
be located at or near Roanoke, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg,
or Fredericksburg. Legislation was passed by the General
Assembly in 1930 stipulating that any college coordinate
with the university be located at least thirty miles from Charlottesville.
Nothing further was done about the matter for a
good many years.

Another controversy engulfed the university over a long period.
It involved the effort to move the Medical School to Richmond
on the ground that Charlottesville was so small that the
school lacked adequate clinical facilities. This contention was
advanced by two members of the university's faculty as early
as the mid-1830s, before any medical institution had been established
in Richmond and was revived on various occasions
after the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) began operations
there.

As chairman of a Virginia Education Commission in 1912,
Dr. Alderman advocated a merger of the two schools in Richmond,
in accordance with the findings of the commission. He
was to change his mind later as to the desirability of this move,
but at that time he doubted whether an adequate medical
school could be developed in a small town.

Dean Theodore Hough conceded when the controversy
over the proposed merger was at its height that from about
1905 to 1915 "we could not honestly say that we were sure
that ultimate success could be attained" by the university's

Medical School. It was his view that "if adequate funds were
offered to place the school on its proper basis, either at the
University or in Richmond, it was our duty to seize the opportunity,
provided University ideals and control were assured."

Gov. Westmoreland Davis recommended in his message to
the 1920 General Assembly creation of a Commission on Medical
Education charged with the duty of studying the desirability
of establishing a single state-supported medical school,
with suggestions as to how this might be achieved. After the
report of the commission, the UVA and MCV Boards of Visitors
would meet and try to agree upon a plan of consolidation.
Delegate Wilbur C. Hall of Loudoun was named commission
chairman with Dean Hough as secretary.

It seemed probable as the hearings got under way that there
was general agreement among commission members that the
two medical schools should be consolidated, since there was
the strong feeling that two state-supported medical schools
were too many. There remained the problems of where the
consolidated institution would be located and how it would be
financed.

Advocates of placing the projected school at Charlottesville
argued that adequate clinical material could be provided
there. They pointed to the fact that highly successful medical
schools had been developed in small towns by the state universities
of Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

However, following the commission hearings, that body
voted five to four that there should be a merger of the two
institutions at Richmond. A bill carrying out this recommendation
was introduced in the General Assembly at the 1922
session. It provided that the University of Virginia should "establish
the Medical Department of the university, including
the School of Pharmacy and Dentistry, at the city of Richmond,
upon the unconditional transfer to them of the property
of the Medical College of Virginia, subject only to its
existing liabilities." But those liabilities were great; the college
at Richmond was, in fact, on the verge of bankruptcy. No provision
was made in the legislation for additional financing or
facilities, and this whole vital aspect of the matter was left
vaguely to the future. A group of Richmond bankers and
businessmen did agree to pay off a $207,000 indebtedness of
MCV if the merger should be effected.

13. "Uncle Henry" Martin, the university's bellringer for decades.

The university's partisans determined to fight the bill. President
Alderman testified at length, as did Dean Hough, and
both risked serious illness with their strenuous exertions. With
tongue in cheek Prof. John L. Newcomb told the committee:
"Yes, we agree that the Medical School ought to be in Richmond
where there are fine clinical facilities; and we also want
the Engineering School at Pittsburgh, where there are more
factories, and the Modern Language Department in Switzerland,
the linguistic capital of the world."

Garland M. McNutt, '10, headed the university's lobby
against the bill and was credited with doing extremely effective
work. State Sen. N. B. Early, '94, of Greene County led
the opposition on the floor of the Senate. The bill was soundly
defeated there by a vote of 24 to 16. That ended efforts to
move the university's medical school to Richmond. (There was
brief discussion in the late 1940s of a "partial merger" of the
two schools, but the subject was soon dropped.)

Alderman came home in triumph from the 1922 hearing.
As in 1914, the students went to the railroad station to greet
him; with them was a band and an ancient tallyho. They
pulled the vehicle, bearing him and Dean Hough, to the Corner
and called upon them to speak. In a letter to a friend
Alderman wrote: "The boys had gotten a cow, covered it with
white sheeting, and in large letters had written: `The victory
is ours—and this ain't no bull.' I caught sight of myself in
a store window as the tallyho went by and, believe me, I was a
helluva-looking hero."

Since the Medical School was now free from the threat of
being moved to Richmond, Dean Hough and his associates
could address themselves to the effective development of its
needs. Some of these were met by a gift of $50,000 from Paul
Goodloe McIntire toward the erection of a new $118,000
building for obstetrics, orthopedics, and pediatrics and additional
private rooms. It opened in 1924. Also, recent consolidation
of the public health work of the university, the city of
Charlottesville, and the county of Albemarle "places on our
very doorsteps one of the strongest health units in the South,"
said Hough. He saw it as an exceptional opportunity to train
men for public health service, especially in the rural areas.

The faculty of the School of Medicine made a significant
decision in 1926 when they agreed to accept income "ceilings."

Fees over and above the ceiling formed the basis for a departmental
fund in each clinical department. Later the money
thus collected was distributed through the university bursar's
office, after certain amounts had been deducted for departmental
purposes.

The Ennion G. Williams Preventorium was constructed in
1927 with $40,000 contributed by the Virginia State Teachers'
Association. Paul G. McIntire made a $75,000 gift in 1932 for
the study of psychiatry. This sum, plus a grant from the federal
Works Progress Administration, made possible the addition
in 1936 of two floors atop the preventorium. Completion
of the new Medical Building at a cost of $1,400,000,
was a significant event of 1929. This was made possible
by an $800,000 grant from the General Education Board, a
$250,000 appropriation from the Virginia legislature, and a
number of smaller gifts from alumni and friends totaling
$350,000. A nurses' home was constructed in 1931, thanks to
a bequest from Dr. Randolph McKim, and it was appropriately
named McKim Hall. The $200,000 Barringer Wing of
the hospital, named for Dr. Paul Barringer, was opened in
1936, to provide special accommodations and service to private
patients. An interns' building in the rear of McKim Hall
was completed in 1941, and in that same year the West Wing
of the hospital was added thanks to a $325,000 appropriation
from the General Assembly. This wing provided improved facilities
for ward patients.

The School of Nursing received an important impetus in
1926 when $50,000 was made available by the Graduate
Nurses' Association for the establishment of the Sadie Heath
Cabiness School of Nursing; it became a subdivision of the
School of Education in 1928. At that time there were just two
faculty members and three students. Adequate library, laboratory,
and other facilities were lacking, as were well-prepared
nurse instructors and graduate nurse supervisors, but it was a
beginning.

Two years in high school had been required in 1920 as a
prerequisite to nursing, with college work on degrees preferred.
Before that time the requirement consisted of a practical
nursing class weekly and night classes at varying times.
One hundred nurses had been recruited for Base Hospital 41
in World War I, and distinguished service was rendered. The

School of Nursing's new modern classroom building, completed
in 1972, was named for Josephine McLeod, who made
an exceptional record as superintendent from 1924 to 1937.

It was difficult in the early years of the century to persuade
women to go into nursing. The profession was looked down
on, and one mother told her daughter who planned to begin
training as a nurse, "I'd rather see you dead and buried." This
was a fairly common attitude.

Effective supplementary service was provided the nurses at
the hospital by the Women's Auxiliary, Circle of King's Daughters.
It was composed of wives of professors in all departments.
"Outsiders and divorcees, as well as the newer doctors'
wives, were taboo" and could not be members, according to
Sarah S. Matthews, author of a highly readable history of the
hospital's first fifty years. The taboo was lifted subsequently.

Dr. Stephen H. Watts, nationally known head of the Department
of Surgery, was the most prominent member of the
medical faculty in these years. Known as "Burly" to the students,
when he wasn't listening, Dr. Watts achieved celebrity
by reconstructing the nose of a man whose proboscis had been
shot away while turkey hunting in the early 1900s. One of the
man's friends apparently "mistook his nose for a turkey," and
it was shot almost entirely off. A substitute nose was fashioned
from the patient's little finger, and was covered with a flap of
skin from another part of his anatomy. The result was said to
be of such quality that the man's physiognomy seemed virtually
normal.

Watts had been trained at Johns Hopkins under the famous
Dr. William S. Halsted. The surgical department at the University
of Virginia, as it is known today, dates from 1907, when
Watts was appointed its head. He introduced the residence
system for surgeons, the first in the South, and excelled both
as a teacher and a clinician. Many were dismayed when he
announced in 1928 that he was retiring, after twenty-one
years as head of the department. He was then at the height of
his powers and lived until 1953, aged seventy-five. He left
$500,000 to the Medical School.

Dr. William H. Goodwin worked with Dr. Watts, and for a
quarter of a century he and Watts were, in effect, the Department
of Surgery and Gynecology. Goodwin organized Base

14. Dr. Paul B. Barringer, chairman of the faculty, 1896-1903.

Hospital 41 in World War I and was chief surgeon with the
rank of colonel. He became a full professor in 1926 and retired
ten years later. It was said that teaching was not his forte
and he disliked administration, but he was a dedicated surgeon
and popular with both faculty and students.

Dr. Edwin P. Lehman succeeded Watts as chief surgeon in
1928 and served until he retired in 1953. An honor graduate
of Harvard Medical School and a leader in cancer control and
research, he was elected president of the American Cancer
Society in 1947. He was also president of the Southern Surgical
Association. Lehman was an especially skillful teacher.

Dr. John Staige Davis, who taught the practice of medicine
for more than thirty years, was the second of that name to
serve on the medical faculty. He was noted for the charm of
his lectures. Jokes, anecdotes, and witticisms made them
memorable, and as Dr. Harry J. Warthen, Jr., expressed it in
1935 in presenting the university a portrait of Davis, the gift
of the class of 1925, "His classical references and apt quotations
enlivened the most prosaic subject, and what was still
more important, they enabled us to remember it." Davis's personality
and character left a lasting impress on many of his
students. A small, wiry, high-strung man who moved quickly
and seemed always to be in a hurry, he was a pioneer in neurology
and psychiatry. That department was accordingly
named for him, as were the wards for patients suffering from
those disabilities. His end was a sad one, for he lay paralyzed
from a stroke for nearly six years. He died in 1933.

Dean Theodore Hough's death occurred in 1924, partly,
perhaps, as a result of his unremitting exertions in the Medical
School fight. An able administrator with a somewhat forbidding
personality, he was succeeded as dean by Dr. James C.
Flippin, a member of the faculty since 1902, who served as
dean until 1939. Under his firm leadership the Medical School
made further progress and acquired new buildings costing
over $2,000,000. Flippin was an excellent teacher and was famous
for his sense of humor and contagious chuckle.

Another notable member of the faculty was Dr. Halstead S.
Hedges, a specialist in diseases of the eye, ear, nose, and
throat, who served from 1905 to 1938. Hedges lived to be
nearly 102 and was a well-known archer and angler.

No account of medical affairs in the 1920s would be complete
without reference to Dr. John A. Hornsby, superintendent
of the hospital from 1923 to 1931. A former U.S. Army
medical man and obvious martinet, he "inspired fear and
loved it, gleefully bullying the timid," Sarah S. Matthews
writes. "I haven't time to say good morning," Hornsby barked
in his parade ground voice. Unaccustomed to dealing with
blacks, he discharged the entire kitchen and dining room
force and installed white mountaineers. It soon developed
that they couldn't cook anything but the simplest dishes, and
those in a style unappetizing to lowlanders. Furthermore, they
got drunk on pay day and engaged in a free-for-all in the
kitchen. The bellicose Dr. Hornsby waded into the melee, disarmed
the ringleader and fired the entire lot. The black help
were reinstated.

On a trip to Washington, D.C., Hornsby was knocked down
by an automobile and promptly taken to Walter Reed Hospital.
When he asked how they happened to take him to Walter
Reed instead of some other hospital, the reply was, "We knew
you were an army man; you were giving orders before you hit
the ground." Despite, or perhaps because of, his modus operandi,
the hospital made considerable progress during his regime.
It was a period of "tremendous growth and change,"
with much hiring and firing. The hospital was placed on the
accredited list of the American College of Surgeons. Hornsby
retired in 1931 but "refused with scorn the customary farewell
honors," says Sarah Matthews.

A notable personality around the hospital for more than
half a century was Stewart R. Fuller, a black major domo
known with admiration and affection to generations of teachers,
patients, and students. Endowed with polished manners,
innate dignity, and fabulous ability to remember names, Fuller
was hardly less than an institution. "There are two perfect
gentlemen in the university," Dr. Paul Barringer remarked,
"Dr. Alderman in the president's office and Stewart Fuller in
the hospital." Fuller was honored in 1953 by the Medical
Alumni Association on his completion of half a century of service.
He was made an honorary member of the association,
given the "class designation" of the medical class of 1903, and
a loving cup and watch and chain. He remained in his position

for several more years until failing health forced his retirement.

University enrollment was beginning to tilt in the late 1920s
toward the Northeast and away from the Southeast and
South. In former days New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania
had been represented only to a minor extent in the student
body, but that picture was changing. The number of
Jewish students, especially from New York, was growing.
Aware that there was a minimum of anti-Semitism at Virginia,
Jews were applying in greater numbers, until for the session
of 1926-27 they constituted about 8.5 percent of the student
body, as compared with 5 percent three or four years before.
They were usually among the ablest scholars in the institution.

Entrance requirements at the university in the 1920s were
extremely low and had been the subject of debate for years.
However, former Dean B. F. D. Runk, long a distinguished
member of the faculty, stated in 1969 that the curriculum in
the 1920s "was as tough as, if not tougher, than it is today.
Required courses were rigid. . . . Requirements for remaining
in the university were very liberal, but it was difficult to get
that degree." Of course "Dee" Runk deplored the ease with
which students were admitted during those years.

College Topics said editorially in 1927 that the institution had
"practically no entrance requirements" and "everyone who
can write an English sentence of three words is admitted."
This was an obvious exaggeration, but the time had come to
do something about the situation. At the session of 1927-28
requirements were substantially tightened, and about two
hundred students who had been allowed to stay in school despite
dismal academic performance were dropped. The university
had been plagued for many years by the presence of
mediocre undergraduates, with too little ambition and too
much money. Frequently they were flunk-outs from Ivy
League colleges or they had been rejected by one or more of
those institutions. The university was strapped for funds and
needed their tuition fees; but things had gotten out of hand.

In the Law School, too, requirements were being raised.
Law had been a two-year course before 1909; at that time it
was expanded to three years. However, there was no requirement
for prelaw college work, and one year of such work was

added in 1920-21. In 1922-23 another year of prelaw was
stipulated. Dean Lile called attention to the fact that he and
his colleagues were carrying an excessive burden. He stated
that "six hours a week is the normal schedule in other law
schools of our class. . . . Our schedule calls for nine hours a
week (six periods of 1-½ hours. . . . This was the schedule in
1881-82 when I was a student)." Dean Lile and Professors
Charles A. Graves, Raleigh C. Minor, Armistead M. Dobie,
and George B. Eager constituted the faculty, and in addition
to the lectures each of them corrected from 500 to 700 examination
papers during the session. Graves had passed the
age of retirement, Minor's health was failing rapidly, and Lile
was within three years of retiring.

Other complaints as to the inadequacy of staff were being
made throughout the university. For example, biology Prof.
Ivey F. Lewis said, apropos of his department, that he did not
believe "there exists anywhere in this university or in any
other institution of coordinate rank . . . so grave and pressing
a condition of understaffed instruction." He and Prof. William
A. Kepner were carrying the entire load, with only $1,500 for
"a subsidiary instructional budget." He requested the extraordinarily
modest sum of $500 for research. Such was the
shoestring on which the university was being operated in
those days.

The Department of Engineering also was suffering from an
insufficient number of teachers, but, like the Law School, it
was broadening and raising its requirements. Effective in
1919-20, all candidates for engineering degrees were required
to take courses in English literature, economics, and
business administration. This approach was developed further
in 1926-27, when in order to provide a broader culture
for the students, other liberal arts courses were incorporated
into the curriculum. And to answer the demand for research,
a fifth year was provided, "at the end of which the successful
student will receive the titled degree in civil, mechanical, electrical,
chemical and mining engineering."

In the Department of Graduate Studies, requirements were
raised in 1921-22 for the M.A. and M.S. degrees; a thesis was
required for the first time as a prerequisite for those diplomas.
Graduate work had received little emphasis or encouragement
from President Alderman until the early 1920s. Dumas

Malone observed in his biography of Alderman: "He never
valued minute research as some of his colleagues thought he
should have; and even if he had, obviously he was convinced
that the time to emphasize it in the South and in this institution
had not yet come. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
enrollment in the Department of Graduate Studies in this decade
[Alderman's first as president] hovered in the thirties. He
placed far greater emphasis on the professional departments."

As Graduate Dean Richard Heath Dabney put it in a letter
to Alderman during the 1920-21 session, the department
"can never become a flourishing one until we have a larger
teaching force." He expressed the hope that the endowment
fund sought in connection with the centennial would make
this possible. And during the next session Dabney wrote Alderman
concerning the office of the graduate department,
which he described as a "wretched hole with a rotten floor,
with a ceiling and walls that are constantly dropping scales of
plaster upon the table and floor, and with unworthy, dilapidated
furniture." These accommodations had been occupied
by the department for some years. Dabney resigned as dean
in 1923 "to devote more time to teaching and writing." He had
served in the position since 1905.

In addition to the foregoing obstacles affecting the development
of an adequate graduate school, there was what Prof.
L. G. Hoxton, long head of the Physics Department, termed
"a certain attitude of indifference amounting to hostility toward
research, particularly on the part of older and influential
members of the faculty." Hoxton joined the faculty in
1906, and he said said that "it did not take long" to sense the
foregoing attitude. "Remarks were made such as `Thomas Jefferson
founded the University of Virginia for the imparting
of knowledge, not its discovery'(!!)," Hoxton wrote in 1948, on
his retirement. "Scorn was expressed for `these Hopkins specialists.'
`Our business is to teach these boys and not to rush
into print,' and so on. . . . An alumnus, a physicist, once said
to me: `About 1872 a crust of self-satisfaction began to form.'
. . . This picture, on the whole, is correct."

Prof. John C. Metcalf, a greatly admired teacher of English,
was named dean of the Department of Graduate Studies succeeding
Dabney, and in Malone's words, the "hitherto neglected"
department was assigned the entire pavilion on the

15. Eppa Rixey, star university pitcher who went to the major
leagues and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1963.

Lawn formerly occupied by the late Prof. Raleigh C. Minor
and family. This immediately made possible a more effective
operation. Also, in the next few years it was financially feasible
for the university to employ additional teaching staff.

Writing to a member of the university faculty, Prof. Edgar
F. Shannon of Washington and Lee, father of the future president
of the University of Virginia, stated that the latter institution
was the "natural place" for development of a first-rate
graduate school for the South and that he hoped to see such
a school there. The low state of graduate studies at Charlottesville
as of 1925 was seen in a poll of hundreds of professors in
American colleges and universities, ranking the nation's
graduate schools in twenty fields of study. The University of
Virginia was not even mentioned. Yet in 1925 the university
awarded more than twice as many Ph.D.s as any other southern
institution, as follows: Virginia, nine; North Carolina,
four; Texas, Tulane, Rice, and South Carolina, two each.

A significant pioneering effort was initiated two years later
by the Richmond alumni chapter, with Dr. Carrington Williams
and Andrew D. Christian as the leaders. The chapter
pledged to provide $20,000, payable $4,000 a year for five
years, for the establishment of a research fellowship in history.
The following year Raphael Semmes of Trinity College was
named to the position, but he lasted through only one session.
Dumas Malone, who had joined the faculty several years before,
was then chosen the research fellow. He made a distinguished
record, as did Thomas P. Abernethy, who succeeded
him.

The primary impetus to research during these years was
provided by establishment of the Institute for Research in the
Social Sciences, with Wilson Gee as director. The institute was
to give particular attention to problems of the state of Virginia.
A gift from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation
provided $27,500 annually for research over a five-year period.
Banking and currency, labor, industrialization, criminal
justice, local finances, and taxes were among the subjects to be
addressed. By the end of 1929 Wilson Gee was able to announce
that ten of the eighteen studies projected by the institute
had been completed, with three more approaching completion.

President Alderman was now enthusiastically behind the
development of more and better graduate work. He wrote
that the Graduate School, "carrying forward work on the
highest level, is the supreme contribution of the university to
society." He also declared that "in the great fields of mathematics,
history, astronomy, political science, economics and sociology
eight research professorships or associates exist, the
incumbents of which devote practically their entire time to research
and publication." Comprehensive examinations for all
M.A. candidates were introduced in 1926-27. Dean Metcalf
asserted in 1928 that, "taken as a whole, the University of Virginia
is ahead of all other Southern universities in research"
and that "this has been confirmed by an expert who has investigated
graduate study and research in Southern institutions."
The important role of the Institute for Research in the Social
Sciences was stressed by Prof. Stringfellow Barr, who had been
aided by the institute in writing his life of Mazzini. "It would
be difficult to exaggerate the value of the institute in developing
historical research at the university," he wrote, "and it
would be difficult to exaggerate the sympathetic intelligence
with which its director and council have met requests for aid
from members of the history faculty." On the institute's tenth
anniversary in 1936, it was announced that the various faculties
in the social sciences had published forty-four volumes, of
which twenty-six were prepared under institute auspices. Furthermore,
the General Assembly, for the first time in its history,
appropriated "a significant lump sum specifically for research
at the university," an appropriation that was increased
two years later.

There were many complaints from faculty members during
the 1920s that their salary scale was too low. A 25 percent increase
across the board had been put into effect for the session
of 1919-20, but inflation following World War I more than
wiped this out, and the teaching staff was extremely unhappy.
Eighty-four of them signed resolutions in 1928 requesting a
minimum increase of 40 percent, since this would "restore the
actual value of the salaries paid to the economic level of the
salaries paid in the year 1913." One of their grievances was
that the university had embarked on a costly building program
while failing to give due attention to the professorial pay

scale. Furthermore, at the time of the centennial President
Alderman had led them to believe, no doubt in entire good
faith, that the centennial endowment fund would make
higher salaries possible. The fund failed by a wide margin to
reach its goal, and salaries were among the casualties.

Suddenly it was made known that Philip Francis du Pont, a
recently deceased alumnus, member of the wealthy du Pont
family of Wilmington, Del., and author of several volumes
of verse, had bequeathed to the university a trust fund of
$6,000,000—half of it for fellowships and scholarships and
the rest unrestricted. The bequest was made despite the fact
that du Pont was dismissed from the university in 1900 for
"persistent neglect of duty," apparently for inattention to his
classwork. His handsome gift not only raised the institution's
endowment to $10,000,000, a figure exceeded by only two or
three state universities, but it made possible substantial salary
increases for the administrative and teaching staffs, effective
with the session of 1930-31. Full professors in the college and
graduate departments were getting $4,500 and now would be
raised to $6,000; associate professors might receive as much
as $4,250, and assistant professors $3,400. Still larger raises
were provided in some of the professional departments, and
deans and assistant deans shared in the good fortune. But
with the Great Depression underway and getting steadily
worse, the euphoria was short lived.

In the student body the customs and traditions of earlier days
were being maintained in the 1920s, and coats and ties were
worn at all times, but alarm was expressed in the collegiate
organs of opinion lest the enrollment get out of hand; if it
went beyond two thousand, they said, the old university would
be no more. (By the end of the decade the figure was approaching
twenty-five hundred.) Among the long-established
customs was the tipping of hats by students to professors and
by professors to students, with the latter showing complete
deference on all occasions. There was never any thought of
making "demands" on the administration or the faculty; a polite
request was the maximum that anybody considered. If you
passed a group of students you knew, there was no hat tipping,
of course, but you usually said "Good morning, gentlemen"
or just "Gentlemen." In an article in the Outlook George

16. Robert K. (Bobby) Gooch, brilliant university quarterback.

Marvin wrote: "At the University of Virginia the word `gentleman'
means something very definite. In some localities in
these hurrying times it has lost its definition."

On the other hand, there was the very real danger that gentlemanliness
at Virginia was degenerating into supercilious indifference.
A well-nigh pathological fear of "sticking one's
neck out" seemed to cause near-paralysis when an effort was
made to get the students to act affirmatively for the good of
the university or even to answer questions in class. Anyone
who replied to a question addressed by the professor to the
class as a whole was widely regarded as a show-off. In the early
1920s it was also taboo to wear a preparatory or high school
athletic letter on Lambeth Field; the proper thing was to turn
the sweater wrong-side-out, lest one's "neck" protrude unduly.
During one whole session it was considered bad form to wear
anything but a white shirt and solid black tie; if anybody had
had the gall to appear in a striped cravat, he would have been
blackballed from one end of the Grounds to the other. Also, it
was always called the "Grounds," never the "campus." "Campus"
was considered too "collegiate," as was excessive cheering
at games. In the same vein it was "first-year men," never
"freshmen"; and the first-year men did not wear beanies in
the manner of those at the despised "rah-rah" institutions;
their instructions were to wear hats and not hang around the
Corner. College Topics protested that "every worthwhile thing
that has been accomplished has simply been the work of some
individual sticking out his neck," but the prevailing attitude
was to the contrary.

Director of Athletics James G. Driver, an alumnus who had
attended or been affiliated with several other institutions, remarked
in 1930: "There is less effort on the part of clubs and
fraternities and other organizations to do some constructive
work for the university than I have found at any other college
or university with which I have ever been connected."

University of Virginia students in the 1920s also were overwhelmingly
lacking in anything remotely resembling a social
conscience. Concern for the poor or the disadvantaged was
almost unknown among them, and the race problem for them
was virtually nonexistent. It was much the same at other institutions
in that era. "College life was just a continuation of prep

school," an alumnus of another university observed in later
years.

Weekends on the Grounds were quiet and uneventful.
Classes met six days a week, and hardly anybody had an automobile;
hence the temptation to take off for Hollins or
Sweet Briar, Washington or New York was at a minimum.
Nearly everybody stayed at the university; it was an opportunity
to see more of one's fellow students, to do a little sociable
drinking, or even to catch up on neglected class assignments.
There were tennis courts behind Madison Hall, but Madison
Hall outraged the young men by issuing a ukase that nobody
could use them on Sunday. Impromptu games of baseball or
touch football could be arranged on Lambeth Field, or basketball
in the gymnasium. Since the enrollment was smaller
and the student body more homogeneous than it later became,
close relations existed between students in the college
and those in the professional or graduate schools, and this
situation was enhanced on weekends. Students also intermingled
with the faculty at such times and were entertained by
the professors and their families.

Greater understanding between faculty and students likewise
was promoted by what was called "College Hour" or
"University Hour." This was a monthly rite in Cabell Hall from
1908 to 1922, was then abandoned because of little student
interest, but was revived three years later. It had previously
involved only speakers from the college, but on being reinstituted
embraced the entire university. Students, alumni, and
even outsiders were invited to be on the program.

Fraternities did their rushing in the early fall as the decade
opened, but in 1924 the Interfraternity Council proposed that
pledging of "goats" be delayed until February, a proposal
heartily endorsed by President Alderman and Dean Page.
Early rushing was one of the main causes for the poor scholastic
showing of many first-year men, about one-third of
whom were being dropped annually at the end of their freshman
year. Thirteen of the thirty fraternities endorsed the plan
for postponed rushing and put it into effect, but the plan was
abandoned soon thereafter. Fraternity pledging and the problems
surrounding it would be a subject of controversy over a
long period.

Only about half of the students belonged to the relatively
expensive fraternities, and the university was never a "rich
man's school," reports to the contrary notwithstanding. The
charge that a poor boy had "no chance of getting an education"
at Charlottesville, made during the medical school fight,
was answered by Dr. Alderman with the statement that 47 percent
of the student body were working their way through, in
whole or in part. Seventy percent of the medical class "are
partially self-supporting," he declared.

The leap in enrollment after World War I caused serious
crowding around the Grounds. Living quarters were hard to
find, and students were having to reside as far away as High
Street downtown and at Fry's Spring. Classrooms and laboratories
were badly overloaded. Yet construction of the first new
dormitories in over a century was viewed with alarm because
of a rule that first-year men would have to live in them. Compulsory
living in the dorms, it was argued, might well mean
undermining university traditions of individual liberty and
lead to the class system—another of those greatly feared characteristics
of "rah-rah" institutions. On the other hand, the
class system was endorsed on more than one occasion by university
publications. However, Dean Page expressed his opposition,
a factor weighty in the scales. He said that the faculty
had never favored it, and added: "The university was organized
as an institution for men and not for boys, and it is for
this reason that we have never had anything like hazing at the
university. The fear has been expressed by some that if we
introduced freshmen, sophomores, and other classes, the college
would lose something of its ancient dignity on account of
class rushes, etc."

The first dormitories, situated west of Monroe Hill overlooking
the old golf links, were completed and occupied in
1929, and the twelve units were named for that number of
professors who served during the nineteenth century—George
Tucker, George Long, Gessner Harrison, William B. Rogers,
William H. McGuffey, Basil L. Gildersleeve, George F. Holmes,
Charles S. Venable, William E. Peters, John W. Mallet, Noah
K. Davis, and Francis H. Smith.

While the first-year men were being required to live in the
dormitories, the older ones were finding rooms with the fraternities
or in rooming houses. Among the latter, Miss Betty

Cocke's and Miss Betty Booker's, on University Avenue between
Madison Lane and Chancellor Street, were the most
popular. They housed students for generations; Miss Cocke
and Miss Booker were viewed with affection by their roomers
and were personalities in their own right. Miss Virginia Mason
and Mrs. Robert P. Hamilton, who had highly-regarded rooming
houses on Madison Lane and Chancellor Street, respectively,
also were ladies of charm. The top-ranking place for
meals in this era was Mrs. E. M. Page's, on University Avenue
just west of the Corner. For a quick snack many patronized
Johnson's on Main Street at the crest of the hill beyond the
C&O bridge, where a motion picture house was built later.
This eatery was established in 1895, and a special service was
the delivery of letters to the night trains. Amorous swains
trudged down to Johnson's in the late hours so that their missives
would reach their inamoratas next day. The establishment
boasted in 1930 that it had handled "over six million
letters in the past 34 years."

Many of the boys who wrote these letters invited their fair
ones to the university for Easter Week, observed annually during
the week following Easter Sunday. Easter Week was the
social highlight of the year over a long period. For nearly all
of the nineteenth century, however, Finals was the time for
merriment and wassail, for terpsichorean diversions in the
Rotunda and Chinese lanterns on the Lawn. But just before
the turn of the century Easter Week, or "Easters," as it came
to be called, began taking the spotlight. Fayerweather Gymnasium
was the scene of the Easter dances, with a dance each
night from Monday through Saturday; they were moved to
the new Memorial Gym in the mid-1920s. "Openings" in the
fall and "Midwinters" were less strenuous and prolonged. The
participating young people at all of these events were dressed
in their best, the girls in evening dresses, perfumed and powdered,
the boys in white tie and tails. These formal dances
were in glaring contrast to the carryings-on at Easters in the
1970s, when many students and their dates wallowed about in
mudholes, swilling grain alcohol drinks from large fruit juice
cans.

A "name" orchestra, usually Meyer Davis, furnished the
music in the 1920s for the Easter dances, which continued until
3 A.M. on weeknights, occasionally to 5 A.M. These dances

were variously sponsored by the Elis, Tilkas, PK Society, German
Club, Beta Theta Pi fraternity, Corks and Curls, and the
IMPs. All dances were "pledged," that is, no student could attend
who had had a drink of alcohol since noon of that day,
and were chaperoned by faculty wives. Students who took part
in these nocturnal revels found difficulty in getting to their
classes, and class-cutting was frequent.

No fraternity house dances were permitted, and girls did
not so much as enter those houses except on very special occasions,
and then with adequate chaperonage. Several fraternities
had carefully controlled house parties. A petition in
1929 from seventeen fraternities for permission to have
dances after those in the gymnasium had ended was denied
by the university's Administrative Council. There were loud
lamentations that this was "about the last thing in prep school
rules." College Topics issued a comprehensive blast not only
against the ban on late fraternity dances but also against "compulsory
attendance at classes, drinking and parking rules." It
went on to say that "requests made upon gentlemen are far
more effective" than regulations of this kind.

Fayerweather Gymnasium had been taken over by the art
and architecture students and was the scene of the annual
Beaux Arts Ball in the late 1920s and for some years thereafter.
Sponsored by Alpha Rho Chi, the architecture fraternity,
each ball had a theme, and the hall was tastefully decorated,
with costumes of the dancers to match. For example,
the Beaux Arts Ball of 1930 had as its theme the lost city of
Atlantis; the former gym was transformed into a temple in the
sunken city, with the orchestra at one end of the balcony and
a huge green idol at the other.

Important contrasts in the mores of that day and this may
be mentioned. One of them is seen in the poll taken in 1916
of 230 Princeton University seniors, forty-three of whom said
they had never kissed a girl; forty said they thought it would
be wrong to do so. Things were changing a bit a few years
later, as evidenced by an editorial observation in 1922 by the
Virginia Reel, the university's humorous monthly: "Holding
hands has given way to the experiment of the so unsavory
named `petting party.' " Such parties gravitated to what were
known as the "petting pits," two former ice pits behind Pop
Lannigan's house that had been converted into "rustic bowers

17. The 1915 football team that defeated Yale and made athletic history. Front row, left to right: George
Wayne Anderson, Claude Moore, Eugene N. Mayer, Captain Harris W. Coleman, Edward C. Anderson,
Harold A. Sparr, and James C. Ward. Second row: William A. Stuart, Richard E. Tippett, John C.
Calhoun, Richard N. Stillwell, John D. Brown, and Norborne Berkeley. Third row: James L. White,
Thomas G. Coleman, and Allen G. Thurman. Back row: John K. Gunby, assistant manager; Walter A.
Williams, Jr., manager; Dr. Harry H. Varner, coach; and Henry H. (Pop) Lannigan, trainer.

connected by a subterranean walk." Dr. W. A. Lambeth, who
was responsible for the university grounds, explained that the
pits had not been rehabilitated for the purpose of providing a
secluded spot for "spooning"; their roofs had caved in and
they had become dangerous, he said; there was a hole in one
of them into which a cow had fallen. However, it was stated
that "gallant young men and their frail charges sought the old
ice pits for the place of their heart-throbbing romances." This
petter's paradise fell into disuse with the coming of the automobile.

For many years the University of Virginia has had a reputation
for excessive drinking, a reputation that informed
persons believe to be undeserved. At most institutions bacchanalian
carouses are held behind closed doors, and the public
is unaware of them, but at Virginia drinking is more open.
For example, since the late nineteenth century the Eli Banana
ribbon society has paraded from time to time on Saturday
nights with drums beating and the members proclaiming to
all the sundry in the words of their alcoholic anthem, "We are
drunk boys, yes every one." While it could hardly be maintained
that these youths are all cold sober, neither are they all
drunk. Yet the amount of noise they make in public contributes
to the legend that Jefferson's university is soaked in rum.

The coming of state and national prohibition had little effect
on the drinking habits of students at this university or at
most others. Nineteen saloons had been operating night and
day on Charlottesville's Main Street, according to Charlie
Brown, the respected university barber, and when these were
closed, Dean Page rejoiced. But ere long the moonshiners and
bootleggers were in action, and almost the only difference was
that an inferior brand of whiskey was being sold. It came from
the fastnesses of the not distant Blue Ridge foothills, with
Shifflett's Hollow reputedly the principal source; emissaries
would canvass the fraternity houses, calling from the front
door to those within, "Yawl want any cawn likker today?"
Their project was raw and loaded with fusel oil, it might contain
dead bugs or other similar ingredients, and its potency
was such that, when swallowed, it seemed likely to remove the
top of one's cranium. But this "white lightning" was somehow
consumed without lethal effects; the hangovers were awesome
but the sufferers survived.

The manufacture of home brew was not widely pursued in
the years immediately following the enactment of prohibition,
but the technique was soon acquired and perfected. By the
mid-1920s the boys were brewing and bottling beer in substantial
quantities. The 1928 diary of Harrison (Tiz) Williams,
Jr., a popular senior engineering student who lived on the
lawn and was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident almost
immediately following his graduation, affords abundant evidence
of this. As for the price of moonshine at that time, Williams
records that he bought five gallons of raw corn whiskey
for $30. Rye was $8 a gallon.

Another important statement in the diary is that a representative
of something calling itself the Intercollegiate Prohibition
Association asked Dean Page to allow three of its stooges
to register as students and spy on the boys in order to get
evidence of dry law violations. It was said to have been one of
the rare occasions when the dean allowed himself to indulge
in unrestrained profanity.

Despite wild charges of drunken orgies at the university,
consumption of alcohol there seems to have been no greater
than at the average institution of higher learning. Stern regulations,
spelled out in the university catalogue, provided for
dismissal of any student convicted of public drunkenness, and
there were expulsions. The Charlottesville police said they
would enforce the prohibition law strictly against the students,
and President Alderman, a believer in prohibition, said he
thought such enforcement was proper. The student body
passed resolutions condemning drunkenness in public.

There were stringent rules also against violation of the dry
laws by the faculty, and this led to the suspension for a year of
Prof. Albert Lefevre. He was driving to Richmond with
friends when the car was involved in a slight accident. A flask
partially filled with liquor was discovered by a local sheriff in
Lefevre's possession, and he was convicted of violating the Volstead
Law. Although Lefevre said he was returning the flask
as a favor from a friend to a friend by whom it had been inadvertently
left behind and that he did not know it contained
liquor, he offered to resign from the faculty. The Board of
Visitors would not permit him to do so but suspended him
from all teaching for a year.

One of the perennial outbursts against the university's supposed

iniquities came in 1926 at a meeting of the Law Enforcement
and Observance League. A federal dry officer,
addressing the organization's Richmond convention, said that
the university's fraternity houses were distributing pints of liquor
and that "when a new member is first taken in . . . he is
handed a cigarette and a cocktail, and given to understand
that he is not a good sport unless he smokes and drinks." The
Interfraternity Council replied: "Instead of encouraging
drinking on the part of first-year men, the fraternities have
consistently opposed it. Many have rules prohibiting liquor in
their houses under any circumstances. All exercise careful supervision
over their first-year men in the matter of drinking.
Many require that all new men pledge themselves not to drink
during their first year at the university. The others seriously
censure drinking by the new men and require a `liquor pledge'
from any man who shows a tendency to drink to excess."

The Alumni News, edited by McLane Tilton, a prominent
Charlottesville businessman, entered the controversy with this
statement: "We do not hesitate to declare that there is less
drinking at the University of Virginia than at any other institution
of like size in the country. . . . [Recently] there visited
here the distinguished dean of one of America's oldest and
greatest universities. He was here for four days. He made it
his business to get about the community, alone and with others,
both day and night. In conversation just before his departure
he volunteered the tribute that ours was the quietest,
most orderly and studious and dignified institution he had
ever visited."

Yet in the autumn of 1928 there was another salvo of criticism
against the university, this time from the Reverend R. V.
Lancaster of Fredericksburg, a Presbyterian clergyman. He
attended the Virginia-North Carolina football game, and in a
letter to a Fredericksburg newspaper estimated that three out
of four students and their dates were intoxicated. This manifest
absurdity was seized upon by the Reverend David Hepburn,
superintendent of the Virginia Anti-Saloon League,
who pronounced drinking at the University of Virginia "a
statewide scandal." The Alumni News denied the truth of the
charge and added the pungent thought that Dr. Alderman "is
as unable to control his flock as to sporadic cases as the Rev.
Hepburn or any other preacher is to control his congregational

18. James Rogers McConnell in the uniform of the French air
force.

drinking." Alderman sent a long and detailed reply to
Hepburn, saying that "in every case . . . in which proof of public
drunkenness is clear, the student has been immediately dismissed."
He added that drinking at the university was "on a
par with similar institutions throughout the country."

Intrigued by these repeated charges of excessive drinking
at the university, the Flat Hat, published by the students at
William and Mary, sent a reporter to Charlottesville to appraise
the situation. He reported the following findings in that
paper, as summarized by the Virginia Spectator, temporary successor
to the University of Virginia Magazine: "He had not seen
a single drop of liquor, a single student who showed the slightest
sign of having been partaking of liquor, or a single exhibition
of conduct indicative of the probability or actuality of liquor
in the near future."

Use or possession of intoxicating liquor by students in any
of the dormitories or other university buildings, or otherwise
within the precincts of the university, was forbidden, under
heavy penalties, in a regulation adopted by the president and
Administrative Council of the university in 1929.

Yet charges of open violations of the prohibition law at the
Virginia-Washington and Lee football game in 1930 were
made against the university by the Reverend H. C. Marsh, a
Methodist pastor of Waynesboro. Persons who attended the
VMI-VPI game at Roanoke shortly before said there was just
as much drinking there as at the Charlottesville contest, but
nobody made any public outcry. Eleven persons were arrested
at the Virginia game, but none was a student. The press of the
state came vigorously to the defense of the university, and the
Lynchburg Advance's comment was typical: "Any football fan
who attends the gridiron contests knows that there is no more
drinking on Lambeth Field than on any other athletic field in
Virginia."

A staunch defender of conditions at the university was
James Anderson Hawes, for a quarter of a century national
secretary of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, in which capacity
he visited institutions in many parts of the country. As
early as 1914 Hawes issued a strong defense of the state of
things at Virginia, based on his personal observations, and he
reiterated these views in his autobiographical work Twenty
Years among the Twenty Year Olds, published in 1929. "The idea

that there is more drinking at Virginia than at other colleges
is, to my own knowledge, absolutely unfounded," he wrote.
"Everything is done in the open, and the students have never
been trained along lines of fear and hypocrisy, so general elsewhere.
. . . I can state absolutely that there is less sex and other
immorality at Virginia than at any other college of its size in
the country."

The foregoing conjecture as to the amount of sexual activity
among students at the university is probably more or less correct.
While no one can make an accurate comparison between
institutions of higher learning in such an area, it seems unlikely
that many University of Virginia men patronized the
Charlottesville red light district. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries "Aunt Mat" Thomas, to whom
reference was made in the preceding chapter, was the bestknown
operator of a bawdy house in the town. Her
establishment was one of several "near the C&O station," according
to Tim Wheeler, writing in the Cavalier Daily in 1972.
Marguiretta Crescioli, variously described as a Creole, part Indian
or black, opened what is said to have been a high-class
establishment on Fifth Street in 1922, just after houses of
prostitution had been outlawed by the Virginia legislature.
"Aunt Mat" also continued to operate until late in the 1920s,
if not longer.

One day she called on Dr. Barringer, chairman of the faculty,
and told him that she understood a certain university student
would be unable to return the following session for lack
of funds. She wished to provide the money, on condition that
the student not be told whence it came. Dr. Barringer asked
"Aunt Mat" why she was so interested in the young man, and
she explained that she and her parents had been slaves of the
student's father and mother, and they had been so extremely
kind and considerate to her and the other members of her
family that she wished to show her appreciation. Dr. Barringer
agreed to the arrangement, and she pulled out a huge roll of
bills and paid the university fees for the following session. The
young man returned and got his degree, never knowing that
his benefactor was "Aunt Mat."

Marguiretta's fancy establishment was finally closed by the
police in 1946 or 1949—there are conflicting accounts—and
came spectacularly to public notice in 1972, when the building

was torn down and substantial sums of money were found
mysteriously buried on the premises. Marguiretta, like Aunt
Mat, was "charitable to those in need, including any number
of starving children," according to a rather incredible newspaper
account.

If Virginia students in the 1920s were largely uninterested
in the downtown brothels, they exhibited the same attitude, as
already noted, toward much else in the community and on the
Grounds. For example, College Topics suspended operations
temporarily in 1926, since only a small minority of matriculates
were subscribing. Until Topics could be got back into operation,
the General Athletic Association published a special
bulletin informing the students of upcoming athletic events.

The University of Virginia Magazine, normally the most sedate
of publications, ran into heavy weather when its October
1926 number was denounced by both President Alderman
and College Topics, chiefly for its story "Mulatto Flair." Reviewing
the issue, Prof. Stringfellow Barr remarked sardonically:
"The suggestion that local flappers have Negro blood, while
not very interesting, was one of the few suggestions not yet
advanced about them." The editor of the magazine was discharged
from that post by his own staff and left the university.
Soon thereafter the magazine was superseded for six years by
the Virginia Spectator. Then a charge of "vulgar obscenity
which bursts violently into the recent issue" was made against
the humor magazine, the Virginia Reel, by College Topics. A new
publication called the Cavalier replaced the Reel, announcing
that it would give its readers "a minimum of filth" and avoid
"the course of moronic collegiatism." But the Cavalier got into
hot water when it published a "Scott's Issue" in October 1931
simultaneously with the dedication of the Scott Stadium, presented
to the university by Frederic W. Scott. On the cover
were two rolls of prominently displayed "Scot Issue" toilet paper.
The Cavalier was permanently suppressed by order of the
university's Administrative Council. Such occasional flagrant
violations of the canons of good taste apparently occur at virtually
all colleges and universities.

An anonymous sheet called the Yellow Journal made its appearance
once annually during most of the years from 1920
through 1934. It had burst upon the scene for the first time

in 1912, under the auspices of Sigma Delta Chi journalistic
fraternity and was published for several successive years
thereafter. Publication was resumed in 1920, with no sponsorship
by Sigma Delta Chi and no indication concerning the authorship
of the various items, most of which contained sly digs
at prominent members of the university community.

The anonymous character of the publication brought a
statement from fifty-one students in 1923 denouncing the
Journal as "inconsistent with the ideals and traditions of the
University of Virginia." College Topics carried the statement
with an editorial captioned " `Vale' Yellow Journal," and over
the students' attack it placed the words "Hic Jacet." The
anonymous executive committee of the Journal's board retorted
that it had no intention of discontinuing and signed off
"Hic Jacet Hell."

By 1928 the university administration and faculty had become
greatly annoyed by the Yellow Journal's shafts aimed at
tender portions of professors' and students' anatomies. The
faculty senate adopted a resolution viewing "with profound
disapprobation anonymous publications," and "earnestly requesting
the students responsible" to abandon the enterprise.
The Journal's unidentified editors replied that they would continue
publication, but would make no further references to
the faculty. Professors Albert Lefevre, William H. Faulkner,
and Robert H. Webb retorted that what they objected to was
the paper's anonymous character. And Lefevre was so agitated
that he delivered a long speech in Cabell Hall excoriating the
Yellow Journal as "unworthy of the student body and gravely
injurious to the spirit of this place and its good name." However,
on a show of hands, about three-fourths of the students
present favored the Journal's continuance. A compromise was
reached to the effect that the sheet would be sponsored by the
OWL journalistic fraternity, the members of which were
known. For the next three years this sponsorship was noted
on the masthead, with the following variation in 1929 and
1930: "Sponsored by the OWLS (the damned fools)." The
Journal seems to have appeared for the last time in 1934, at
which time the OWLS were not mentioned. The university's
Administrative Council issued an order in that year forbidding
"the publication or sale of any anonymous paper, and

[we] desire to record our unanimous condemnation of the recent
number of the Yellow Journal as scurrilous and indecent in
the extreme."

On a quite different level the Virginia Quarterly Review made
its debut in 1925, to great acclaim. This highly intellectual
journal was ably edited by James Southall Wilson, who abandoned
his cherished plan to write a biography of Poe in order
to accept President Alderman's urgent invitation that he
launch the quarterly. From the first, the magazine was a succès
d'estime—by no means a financial bonanza since it has always
had to be subsidized, but able to publish leading writers from
both sides of the Atlantic. Part of the money needed to get the
VQR off the ground came from funds allotted to the Alumni
Bulletin, which was discontinued after being published since
1894.

Perhaps the only sour note greeting the first number of the
quarterly issued from the sanctum of the Baltimore Evening
Sun, which said: "The VQR is quite as correct as a white tie
with a dress suit or a mint julep without a maraschino cherry.
What matters it, therefore, if it fails to shake the dear old
commonwealth from that delightful Bourbon trait of neither
forgetting anything nor learning anything?" The Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot replied that the Evening Sun was belittling the
magazine because it was not like the University of North Carolina's
Journal of Social Forces, and added: "The university at
Chapel Hill has broken out with a vigorous journal of social
research. . . . Its editors were galluses and overalls. The university
at Charlottesville has given birth to . . . a magazine . . .
with its chief emphasis on literary and political criticism or
belles lettres as distinguished from better homes and babies.
Its editors wear spectacles and white collars. To compare the
two journals is like comparing the American Federation of Labor
and the American Academy of Arts and Letters." Two
years later the elegant Boston Transcript, organ of the New England
Brahmins, called the Virginia Quarterly and the Yale Review
"the only two worthwhile quarterlies in this country." On
its fifth anniversary the VQR was solidly established, with subscribers
in every state in the Union and a score of foreign
lands. "It has probably created more good will for the university
among intelligent people everywhere than any other
agency that has been created by the university during the last

19. Edwin Anderson Alderman, president of the university,
1904-31.

quarter of a century," said the Alumni News. Contributors included
Thomas Mann, André Gide, Walter de la Mare, Gerald
W. Johnson, Howard Mumford Jones, and many others of like
distinction. Offices of the magazine were moved from the
basement of the Graduate House on West Lawn to One West
Range, previously occupied by the physiology laboratory,
where it remains today. James Southall Wilson retired as editor
in 1930, after a highly successful six years, and was succeeded
by Stringfellow Barr, who held the post for three
years, and then turned it over to Lambert Davis. The publication's
quality was maintained under these editors.

The university's literary prestige also was enhanced, albeit
in later decades, by the spectacular success of two students,
Julien Green and Erskine Caldwell, who became internationally
recognized writers. Green, born in France of American
parents, attended the university for nearly three years, beginning
in 1919. An introvert and homosexual, he was not well
known on the Grounds and left without graduating. In 1971
he was elected to the French Academy, the only non-Frenchman
ever to achieve this rare honor. In at least two of his
books, Moira and Terre lointaine, he has dealt with his life at the
university. Caldwell was desperately poor at times during his
years at Charlottesville (1922, 1925-26). He swept the floor
at LaRowe's pool room and cleaned up the place working his
way through, and held other odd jobs. Helen Lannigan, Pop
Lannigan's daughter, was his first wife. In later years Caldwell's
books sold in the millions of copies, and the play Tobacco
Road, based on one of his novels, had a tremendous run on
Broadway.

Establishment of the Institute of Public Affairs in 1927 further
enhanced the university's standing. Dean Charles G. Maphis,
the director, was credited with suggesting the ambitious
enterprise, and various alumni and friends provided the necessary
start-up funds. Among those most active in supporting
and contributing to the institute was C. Bascom Slemp, a university
alumnus and Republican leader from southwest Virginia
who had been private secretary to President Calvin
Coolidge. Yet the institute was completely nonpartisan politically;
Gov. Harry F. Byrd, the state's foremost Democrat, was
chairman of the advisory committee, and Norman Thomas,

the perennial Socialist candidate for the presidency, was a
leading speaker for a number of years. The institute differed
from others in the United States, notably the Williamstown
Institute of Politics, in that it emphasized domestic rather than
foreign affairs. Held for two weeks in the summer, it included
round table discussions as well as numerous formal addresses
both during the day and in the evening. Such subjects as
unionization of southern industry, public versus private ownership
of public utilities, and prohibition versus repeal were
freely and frankly debated by prominent speakers. The 1928
session was especially exciting since the Herbert Hoover-Alfred
E. Smith presidential campaign was in full swing. This provoked
lively, if not heated, discussions, particularly concerning
the religious issue. The Reverend A. C. Dieffenbach, Boston
Unitarian and editor of the Christian Observer, stirred up a
storm by pronouncing "Al" Smith unfit for the presidency because
of his membership in the Roman Catholic Church. And
the 1931 institute was widely credited with having been the
jumping-off place for the presidential candidacy of Franklin
D. Roosevelt; he spoke there on states' rights, and his address
was heralded as the opening gun in his successful quest for
the Democratic nomination in 1932.

The Institute of Public Affairs was the most conspicuous
feature of the summer program at the university, but the
Summer School, which had been in operation on a limited
scale since the early 1900s, also was developing steadily. When
the University of Virginia established the school in 1919 as an
integral part of the university year, with courses in the College
of Arts and Sciences of equal credit value with those offered
during the rest of the session, it was the first university in the
South to do so. In former years the Summer School had been
maintained for the benefit of public school administrators and
for teachers desirous of meeting certification requirements, as
well as for students who had failed one or more courses during
the regular session and wished to make them up. But by
1920 Dean Maphis, head of the Summer School, announced
that "college courses in practically every subject taught in the
college in the regular session will be offered young men and
women to shorten the time required to secure academic degrees."
In 1923 the total enrollment for both summer terms,

with duplications eliminated, was 2,523, of whom one-fourth
were men, an overall enrollment considerably larger than that
for the regular session.

A series of rather elaborate Rural Life Conferences was
held annually at the university as part of the Summer School,
beginning in the early 1900s. These were terminated in the
early 1920s.

Charles G. Maphis, then professor of secondary education,
was appointed in 1915-16 as the university's first director of
extension services. Those services had been formally introduced
in 1912, when several professors agreed to lecture anywhere
in Virginia if requested to do so. The first extension
course for college credit was given in 1919, but, like so many
other department and division heads at the university during
these years, Maphis was operating on a wholly inadequate
budget. He pointed in 1922-23 to the fact that the University
of North Carolina Extension Division's budget was nearly five
times his and that it had a full-time director and a much larger
staff. He had only one full-time employee but managed an
enrollment of between 600 and 700 as compared with 200 in
North Carolina. Courses in a dozen subjects were being given
at ten locations in Virginia, and the same degree credits were
awarded as were available to full-time students. Special bulletins
and handbooks containing information on pertinent subjects
suitable for public discussion were distributed through
the Virginia High School Literary and Athletic League to any
school, club, or other organization requesting them.

George B. Zehmer, professor of education, was appointed
in 1925 as the first full-time director of the Extension Division.
He stated later that the "great majority" of the faculty "were
either indifferent or openly hostile to the idea of university
extension" and that they "called a meeting to express through
deliberate and joint action their objection not only to specific
forms of extension education but to the concept of University
Extension education." By contrast, President Alderman termed
the extension concept "the most daring and beautiful and
moving movement of advance in the whole history of the university,"
and the Extension Division became well established.
In subsequent years the faculty reversed its position, and Zehmer
wrote: "I question whether any extension director in any

other university can report as good a record of faculty cooperation."

The School of Education, established by President Alderman
soon after he took office, was operated on the sound
theory that administrators and teachers in the public schools
need to be professionally trained. The theory was unassailable,
but for many years its working out left much to be desired.
Excessive emphasis on methodology and too little on
subjects to be taught caused the School of Education to be
regarded during its early decades with decided skepticism by
most of the faculty members in other disciplines. Some of this
prejudice was unfair; in fact, some professors at the university
apparently believed that it was a mistake ever to have established
a School of Education at the institution. Worthwhile
contributions were made by such faculty members as William
R. Smithey, Richard A. Meade, George O. Ferguson, George
B. Zehmer, and Francis G. Lankford, Jr. Yet some of the subjects
assigned for theses and dissertations were hardly less
than ludicrous. This situation might well have been changed
for the better if Prof. Bruce R. Payne had not left in 1911 to
accept the presidency of Peabody Teachers' College in Nashville,
Tenn., and William Harry Heck, the school's first professor
of education, had not died in the great influenza epidemic
of 1918-19. Dean John L. Manahan announced in 1922 that
the school's library in Peabody Hall had been named for Professor
Heck, whose well-selected private library of two thousand
volumes had been given to the school by his widow, Anna
Tuttle Heck. Mrs. Heck, the university's assistant librarian before
her husband's death, was chosen the institution's registrar,
succeeding the courtly Howard Winston, who retired
after serving in the post for fifteen years.

Appropriations to the university by the General Assembly
were still extremely low, as Dr. Alderman was wont to point
out at periodic intervals. Hence he took particular pleasure in
announcing the receipt of substantial sums from private
sources. On Founder's Day 1930, for example, he called attention
to gifts and bequests totaling more than one million dollars,
among them $350,000 from William A. Clark, Jr., for a
new law building, $300,000 from Frederic W. Scott for a new
athletic stadium, and a $140,000 bequest from Alderman's old

friend John B. Cobb, which was used for an addition to the
chemistry laboratory. The university's greatest need was for an
adequate library, but as yet no one had come forward with the
necessary funds. In 1924 Alderman had heavily stressed the
lack of support from the state legislature; in addition to other
statistical shockers he declared that "the University of Virginia
is receiving from the state a smaller portion of its maintenance
than any other state university in the world." The various
schools—they were not called departments until after World
War II—were having to get along somehow on these meager
allotments from the coffers of the commonwealth.

One of the university's intangible assets that could not be
computed in dollars but was nonetheless of incalculable value
was the influence and personality of Dean James M. Page, who
had been the last chairman of the faculty before Alderman's
coming. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to understand
young men, to discipline them, and at the same time retain
their affection. Students summoned to his sanctum on the
Lawn were greeted with "a half chuckle and half growl," as
one of them aptly expressed it, but the growl was distinctly
pianissimo, and any young man called on the carpet knew that
the dean would deal with him fairly. Given the small enrollment
in the College by comparison with later years, Dean Page
was personally acquainted with practically every undergraduate
and was well-informed as to whether any one of them was
behaving himself and doing a reasonable amount of studying
or was "wasting his substance in riotous living." Compulsive
drinkers and gamblers were likely to be haled before him,
given a friendly but stern lecture, and told that he would like
their pledged word to cease their misdeeds until further notice.
The oral pledge was forthcoming and was observed. If a
miscreant later felt an uncontrollable urge to drink or gamble,
he might ask the dean to release him for a weekend, and the
dean might or might not grant the request. Thanks to Dean
Page's wisdom, kindness, and understanding this informal system
worked remarkably well. Few, if any, deans in American
education have rivaled James Morris Page in his ability to
maintain a moderate degree of discipline and at the same time
seldom provoke even so much as a murmur of criticism from
those whom he called to account. James Anderson Hawes said
that during his travels to many colleges and universities he

20. Carl Zeisberg, whose cartoons appeared in Corks and
Curls over a twenty-year period, comments on the dire prospect
that a limited number of women will be admitted to the university
in 1920.

had known only two truly great deans of men, Page of Virginia
and Gauss of Princeton.

Dean Page possessed a unique asset in his secretary, Miss
Mary Proffitt, who was a virtually ideal occupant of her position.
She, too, knew personally nearly all the students in the
College and was familiar with their records, scholastic and
otherwise. The dean was relieved of certain disciplinary problems
by Miss Proffitt who, acting unilaterally and with his
approval, called in any student she knew to be guilty of neglecting
his studies or consuming excessive amounts of alcohol
and demanded an explanation. Like "Jim" Page, Mary Proffitt
was regarded with a combination of affection and awe, and
her reprimands carried genuine weight. She once told a
young man that he was wasting his time at the university and
to go home; he went the next day. On the other hand, Miss
Proffitt would take the side of any student up for suspension
if she thought he could be persuaded to mend his ways. "She
probably kept more students from being thrown out, and got
more suspensions changed to reprimands than anyone else in
the university," said B. F. D. Runk, who later occupied the
deanship with great distinction. "They worshipped her for it."
In the semifacetious words of an alumnus, "Miss Proffitt ran a
darned good university." She continued as secretary to Ivey F.
Lewis when he succeeded to the position of dean after the
death of Dean Page—an overall total for Miss Proffitt in that
position of some forty years. It was revealed after her death
that she had been elected to the exclusive and secret Seven
Society.

Dean Page, as well as everybody else connected with the university,
was anxious to obtain a new library, but it was nowhere
in sight in the 1920s. However, the appointment of Harry Clemons
in 1927 as librarian was a long step forward. A Princeton
graduate, he had served as that university's reference
librarian for four years and then as librarian at the University
of Nanking, China, from 1914 to 1927—a position from
which he was driven by Chinese bandits. At the University of
Virginia, Clemons succeeded John S. Patton, who had been in
charge of the library since 1904, and made the best of a bad
situation. A significant acquisition in 1922 had been the eightthousand-volume
collection of W. Gordon McCabe, the
schoolmaster, poet, and essayist, given to the university in his

memory by his son, W. Gordon McCabe, Jr. It contained many
personally inscribed works of Browning, Arnold, Tennyson,
and other nineteenth century English writers who were
friends of the elder McCabe.

In his report for 1928 Harry Clemons stated that there were
151,333 volumes in the university library, but that only 88,881
could be accommodated in the Rotunda, with most of the remainder
housed in a variety of unsuitable places around the
Grounds. He went on to say that the University of North Carolina
last year "added six times as many books as we did, and
already surpasses us by 30,000." A more dedicated advocate
of a new library than Harry Clemons could not have been
found, and he spent his waking hours working toward that
end.

Another baffling problem involved the decades-long struggle
of students in Prof. Thomas Fitzhugh's Latin classes to understand
what he called "the sacred tripudium." Fitzhugh felt that
he had discovered a rhythmic element in the Latin language,
but his oft-reiterated "tum te tum te tum," in class and out,
failed to elucidate the matter for the frustrated and bewildered
young men under his tutelage. His book on the subject
The Sacred Tripudium and the Evolution of Latin Rhythmic Art left
everybody as much in the dark as ever. What, then, was the
astonishment of Colgate Darden, when president of the university,
to learn, in calling on the retired Professor Fitzhugh
with Prof. Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., that the discoverer of the
sacred tripudium had found that it was nonsense. "Oh it was
all a bunch of rubbish, nothing to it; I found that out years
ago," he told his startled callers. Darden had introduced the
subject by saying "Uncle Tom, we have often thought of the
sacred tripudium." Leaving the house, Darden remarked to
Davis, "A. K., he's a talented person, but he found out years
later what everybody in the class knew at the time. . . . It didn't
make any sense to any of us, but we had to fall in line with it
or we didn't get any degree."

The decade of the 1920s marked the centennial of various
university events, and in 1925 the Jefferson Society observed
the hundredth anniversary of its founding. Sen. Oscar W. Underwood
of Alabama, who had been president of the society
in his student days, was the speaker of the occasion in Cabell
Hall. A banquet was held that evening in the Dolly Madison

Inn. The "Jeff" claims to be "the oldest functioning collegiate
literary society in the nation."

The Honor System had not yet celebrated its centennial. It
was functioning well, but as long ago as 1914 Prof. William H.
Echols had said concerning the system during the preceding
twenty years, "Eternal vigilance has been absolutely necessary
for its preservation." Librarian John S. Patton reported that in
1920-21 a total of 52,000 volumes had been checked out of
the library and that only about 2 volumes had been lost—in
glaring contrast to the huge number of books that would be
disappearing from the library some fifty years later. Yet failure
of students to pay their subscriptions to publications or their
pledges to various causes was noted indignantly in 1928 by the
student newspaper; it said these bad debts totaled from 20 to
50 percent, in many instances, as against 10 to 12 percent in
other colleges and universities. "All the university publications
and more especially Madison Hall are the heaviest suffers
from this frivolous and patently dishonorable attitude," said
College Topics.

Professors William A. Lambeth and Albert Lefevre, who had
dominated the athletic scene at Virginia since just after the
turn of the century, resigned in 1921 from the General Athletic
Association's executive committee. Differences between
that committee and the students and alumni concerning athletic
policy and the university's lack of success in football
caused the two professors to take this action. Lambeth and
Lefevre had always stressed clean athletics, and their unremitting
efforts to maintain this policy were appreciated by
everyone connected with the university, but it was felt that a
more effective type of organization would bring better results
in the "win" column. The other faculty members of the
G.A.A.'s executive committee also resigned, and what was
called the 3-3-3 Athletic Council was created in its stead.
This body was composed of three faculty members, three students,
and three alumni. General control of all intercollegiate
sport at Virginia, insofar as scheduling, selection of coaches,
and eligibility and related problems were concerned, was
placed in the hands of the 3-3-3. The G.A.A. board retained
virtually the same authority it had before with respect to financial
management, appointment of team managers, supervision

21. Dean James M. Page, last chairman of the faculty and the
first dean of the university, 1904-34, a legend in his time.

of schedules, and award of varsity letters. A major aim
of the new system was to encourage every student to take part
in some form of athletics.

David Ellis Brown, an alumnus, was chosen graduate manager
of athletics, and G. J. Campbell of Harvard was appointed
head football coach, succeeding Rice Warren. Warren,
an alumnus, had been chosen head coach in 1920, following a
decision to have only professional mentors for football.
Coaching by unpaid alumni had been highly successful for a
few years, but then the results had been disappointing. Warren
also achieved dismaying results and resigned. Campbell
was accordingly employed, and the football season of 1922
was termed "highly successful," with four wins, four defeats,
and one tie. In the previous disastrous year the Virginia
eleven had scored a grand total of three points in its last four
games. In 1923 Earl (Greasy) Neale was hired as head coach
of both football and baseball, with the understanding that he
would be on the Grounds the year 'round. Neale had made an
excellent record in both sports, as a participant and as coach.

On another sector of the athletic front Pop Lannigan's
ability to turn inexperienced runners into track stars was strikingly
evident when the university's mile relay team won that
event at the Penn Relays in 1924, against the fastest teams in
America, and won the South Atlantic mile relay four years in
a row. The runners who achieved these feats, several of whom
had never donned a track shoe until they came to the university,
were Benjamin M. Baker, Jr., and Eldridge H. Campbell,
both future Rhodes Scholars; E. Lee Douglas, Frank Talbott,
Jr., Charles Castleman, M. T. Bohannon, and Jed H. Irvine.
The last four listed won at the Penn Relays in 1924.

Intercollegiate boxing had its inception at Virginia in 1922.
Beginning on a small scale, it soon became extremely popular
and took the center of the stage as teams wearing the orange
and blue became extraordinarily successful and nationally famous.
As with track, success was due in large measure to the
coach—Johnny LaRowe. After serving in the U.S. Marine
Corps, LaRowe opened his billiard parlor at the university in
1904. When boxing was inaugurated, he coached the Virginia
team for several years without pay. His conception of sportsmanship
was unusually high, and he often said that he was

"more interested in making men than boxers." Matches were
first held in Cabell Hall, and the 1923 team had an undefeated
season, while in 1924 only one match was lost. Similar results
were achieved in succeeding years, and boxing was made a
major sport in 1927-28. With completion of Memorial Gymnasium
the matches were moved there, and its 5,000 seats
were often packed for the bouts. Adolph Leftwich, the conspicuous
star of the mid-1920s, won every bout over a fouryear
period except his first and was captain in 1924 and 1925.
Leftwich won a place on the U.S. Olympic boxing team at the
1924 games, held in Paris, but was defeated by Black, a Canadian.

By 1927-28 the overall athletic situation at the university
appeared much improved. In football, baseball, basketball,
boxing, and track a total of "47 opponents were conquered
while only 23 defeats were sustained." Inside the state the university
won 27 contests and lost only 2. Henry H. Cumming,
twice captain of track, was undefeated during the year in the
100 and 220. Harrison F. Flippin, national pentathlon champion
in 1927, lost only one hurdle race and was chosen team
captain, succeeding Cumming. He set world records in the 50and
60-yard hurdles, although the first of the two marks was
not recognized since official timers were not present. Flippin,
a great all-around athlete, who later became as eminent in
medicine as he was in athletics did not make the 1928 Olympic
team but Cumming did; he sailed for Amsterdam with Marcus
W. Dinwiddie, a university student and member of the U.S.
rifle team. Neither placed at Amsterdam.

The University Band made its appearance in the mid-1920s
and was a factor in arousing enthusiasm at pregame rallies
and at the games. Attitudes of the students toward the teams
ranged from high enthusiasm to bland indifference, depending
to some extent on whether that particular team was having
a successful season. Even when successful, the baseball nine
began drawing only a few hundred students to its games, and
little enthusiasm was shown. Interest in tennis took an upturn
with the completion in 1930 of the Lady Astor Courts near
the gymnasium with funds contributed by Nancy, Lady Astor,
Virginia-born member of the British Parliament, on condition
that an additional sum was raised. Tennis had been recognized

as a minor sport a decade previously and golf received that
recognition in 1929. Lacrosse and swimming had their beginnings
shortly before.

Sportsmanship between contesting institutions in the 1920s
was generally of a high order. College Topics often congratulated
visiting teams when they defeated Virginia and sharply
criticized university students when they occasionally went beyond
proper limits in razzing opposing players. In 1924 the
Virginia football team eked out a 13 to 9 victory in the last
quarter over Hampden-Sydney; Captain Sam Maphis of the
Virginia eleven walked across the field and gave the football
to Captain Blankinship of the Tigers, saying "You deserve it."
The gesture brought unstinted praise from the Tiger, Hampden-Sydney's
student newspaper. At the basketball game with
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill the following
year lights were turned out at the half, and the entire Carolina
cheering section joined in singing "The Good Old Song." Topics
thanked the Carolinians in its next issue and congratulated
them on their team's victory over Virginia. It should be noted
that rooters at basketball games in that era were careful to
maintain complete silence while a player from either team was
shooting from the foul line, in glaring contrast to the manufactured
racket that often erupts today under such circumstances
in an effort to disconcert any player from the opposing
team who is trying to put the ball into the basket.

"The Good Old Song" is generally considered to have been
the university's official alma mater song since about 1900, but
it has never been formally adopted as such. In fact, student
contests were held in 1923 for the best "alma mater song" and
the best "fight song." John Albert Morrow won the alma mater
contest with "Virginia, Hail All Hail" while Lawrence Lee and
Fulton Lewis, Jr., were judged to have produced the best fight
tune with "The Cavalier Song." Neither production made
much impact; "Virginia, Hail All Hail" was forgotten almost
at once and "The Cavalier Song" was heard thereafter at only
rare intervals, despite periodic protests that the students
should learn it and sing it at games, and the band should play
it. "The Good Old Song," to the sedate rhythms of "Old Lang
Syne," is far from being a fight song, but nothing else has
caught the fancy of the average student of alumnus. "The

Cavalier Song" did have one immediate result: It caused Virginia
teams to be called the Cavaliers. Before 1923 that term
was not in use, but by 1924 it was an oft-heard expression and
has so remained.

Whereas the university's athletic fortunes had appeared
definitely improved in 1927-28, they skidded within two years
to what was described by the Alumni News as probably an alltime
low. There had been three losing football seasons in
succession, the usually invincible boxing team was fifth in the
conference, and showings in most other sports were equally
dismal. The student body exhibited vast indifference, and on
two afternoons in early November only twenty-seven men
were out for football; three tackles had been injured and only
one remained. Greasy Neale resigned as football coach to become
assistant manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball
club, and Earl Abell, former Colgate all-American, was chosen
to succeed him. Ellis Brown resigned as graduate manager to
enter the coal business. The scope of athletics had been
greatly broadened during Brown's seven-year incumbency,
with nineteen teams in intercollegiate competition during the
session of 1928-29, about twice the number when he took
over. Brown also was credited with having been an important
factor in the development of boxing at Virginia. But in view
of the general decline in the performance of Virginia's teams,
there was little consolation for students and alumni in the Carnegie
Foundation's 1929 report that the University of Virginia
was one of the small minority, among 130 institutions studied,
that were given a clean bill of health, athletically speaking.

The collapsing situation at Virginia, insofar as winning
games was concerned, led to another reorganization of the
athletic department. The position of director of athletics was
created, replacing that of graduate manager, and James G.
Driver, a three-letter man at Virginia and before that captain
of football, baseball, basketball, and track at William and Mary,
was named to fill it. He was given the rank of full professor
and was provided with a capable assistant, Thomas M. Carruthers,
and an office staff. Driver had coached four major
sports at William and Mary and then had joined the athletic
staff at the University of South Carolina, whence he was lured
to Charlottesville.

In his first report to President Alderman in 1930, "Jim"
Driver said he had "found a total lack of organization in the
business affairs of the General Athletic Association and a lack
of coordination in the coaching department." He added that
he had remedied the G.A.A.'s abovementioned shortcomings
and that the coaching staff was now "entirely harmonious."
Great disappointment at the "lack of aggressiveness in our
athletes, particularly football," was expressed by Driver, who
said "they haven't the . . . will to win and the . . . will to give
and take punishment." Most University of Virginia athletes
"are not as tough and rugged as the boy who comes from a
family of comparatively little means, and who has manual labor
to do from childhood," he went on. Many Virginia men
spend too much time at dances and parties when not in training,
he added, and during the summer they go to a "resort
and have a good time, whereas most of the athletes from other
colleges work on the highways, in the steel mills or at some
other sort of hard labor." The university "needs more of the
better class of Virginia high school athletes," Driver declared.
In speeches to alumni throughout the state and beyond he
stressed the thought that "a well-rounded system of athletics,
and not a world-beating team in any one sport, is what we
want to develop." The new stadium was not being built with a
view to placing undue emphasis on football, he said, but
rather to provide larger gate receipts with which to equip
more teams in various sports and greater recreational facilities
for the whole student body. In his financial report for
1929-30 Assistant Athletic Director Carruthers pointed out
that all sports at Virginia except football were being operated
at a loss, including the popular boxing. Profits from football
which for that year totaled only $49,000 were used to pay part
of the cost of all other sports. But football obviously was yielding
only meager returns after a succession of poor seasons,
and the merry-go-round of changing coaches continued. Earl
Abell resigned late in 1930 and Fred Dawson, for four years
head football coach at the University of Nebraska, was chosen
to succeed him.

A bright spot in the gloom was the play of William T.
Thomas in the Virginia backfield in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Bill
Thomas had captained all four sports at McGuire's School in
Richmond and was a three-letter man at the university. In

22. Prof. Albert (Little Doc) Lefevre.

football he averaged over five yards per carry and had a punting
average of forty-five yards. He was all-southern in football
in 1930, received a certificate of "exceptional merit" from the
All-America Board of Football, and was all-state in basketball
in 1932. Thomas turned down a professional football contract
to enter the Law School.

An important university landmark was lost when Pop Lannigan,
trainer and coach in many sports for a quarter of a
century, died at the end of 1930 after a lingering illness. Born
in Wales, he emigrated to the United States in his early teens.
A member of the athletic staff at Cornell University, Lannigan
came to Virginia in 1905 and was a central figure in university
sports thereafter. Noted as an athlete, he had an uncanny
ability to coach and train others, especially track men and to a
lesser degree basketball players. During his first year at Virginia
he organized the first basketball team in the South, and
for some time the university quint was dominant in the region.

Lannigan was an admired and beloved figure on the university
scene. He could be gruff, but he was a person of sensitivity.
His humorous stories when traveling with his teams were famous,
and his laugh contagious. Since he was modest concerning
his early athletic prowess, it was difficult to tell just what
feats he had accomplished. It was said that he had excelled in
track and field events, held the world record in the shotput
for some years, "trained the great Fitzsimmons for the ring,"
and defeated the Swedish fencing champion. Whether all this
was true remained something of a mystery. But Pop was certainly
a topflight trainer and coach. Admiring Virginia students
gave him an automobile in the 1920s. When he resigned
in 1929 because of failing health, there were tributes from
many directions. The 3-3-3 Athletic Council, which retired
him on a "substantial pension," passed resolutions that said:
"The affection in which Pop Lannigan is held by his old boys
gives irrefutable evidence of those qualities of fairness, sportsmanship,
patience and ability which have ever characterized
his dealings with the students." Lynchburg alumni presented
him with a gold watch and chain, and the 1930 Corks and Curls
was dedicated to him. His passing at age sixty-five caused
widespread sorrow.

Archie Hahn, head trainer and assistant track coach at
Princeton, was chosen track coach at Virginia and trainer for

varsity and freshman football. A former member of the U.S.
Olympic Team, he was holder of two Olympic dash records.

Lewis Crenshaw returned to the university from Paris following
World War I after closing his University of Virginia European
Bureau, but he found it impossible to continue as alumni
secretary. He had struggled before the war to get the alumni
association on a firm financial basis but had received only
minimum cooperation from alumni. With his salary in arrears
much of the time and the whole operation barely solvent,
Crenshaw felt that he could not resume his prewar duties unless
guarantees of adequate financial support were forthcoming.
None could be had, so he went back to Paris and opened
an office with the words "International Contacts" on his letterhead.
In 1920 William Matthews, '17, took over the job of assistant
alumni secretary and editor of the Alumni News on a
temporary basis. In response to a demand for more and better
news concerning the university, Dr. Alderman authorized establishment
of the University News Bureau, with Matthews in
charge. Two years later McLane Tilton, '97, was named parttime
alumni secretary, and William H. Wranek, '19, was made
full-time head of the news bureau. Wranek was soon able to
increase markedly the amount of material published in the
press relative to the university. By 1925 he was getting many
more inches of news into the leading Virginia newspapers
than appeared concerning any other institution of higher
learning in the state, news predominantly unrelated to sports.

The tendency of alumni to sigh for "the good old days" and
to resent any changes, even when those changes are obviously
for the better, was noted by the Alumni News. An alumnus
complained of macadamized roads being built throughout the
university. When asked why he objected to them, he replied
that they were not here in his day. "O visions of blessed Albemarle
mud!" exclaimed the News. "When shown the new law
building another alumnus at once lost himself in a fog of
memory and spoke tremulously of the austerities of the two
rooms under the Rotunda that once housed our School of
Law; and he never did enter the new building, but hurried
away to look at the old. . . . It seems characteristic of every
man who attends a university to want that university to remain
exactly as it was when he graduated."

Beginning in 1924, purusant to legislation passed by the
General Assembly, at least three of the ten members of the
university's Board of Visitors were to be chosen from a list of
nominations submitted by the alumni association.

No alumnus was more illustrious in his profession than Dr.
Hugh H. Young, '94, the Baltimore surgeon. A bust of him by
Clare Sheridan was presented to the university's Medical
School in 1926 by Robert Worth Bingham, '91, onetime ambassador
to the Court of St. James's. After the unveiling ceremony
a handsome lady rushed up to Dr. Young and said, "Dr.
Young, I want you to know that I drove a hundred miles just
to see your bust unveiled." "Madam," replied the gallant surgeon,
"I'd travel twice as far to see yours."

Considerable momentum for adoption of a class system at
the university was generated in 1926 and 1927 when College
Topics endorsed the idea, and an alumni conference voiced approval.
The question was debated at College Hour, with one
student taking each side. President Alderman advocated the
step, as did "the older men in college, the leaders," according
to the Alumni News. But that publication disgustedly declared
that "the first-year men . . . have remained unanimously and
enthusiastically inert and silent. . . . The reason is the dread
fear of `sticking your neck out.' " That was the end of the effort.

The Virginia Spectator remarked that "the term individualism
has been buried in a welter of sentimentalism only to appear
in the garb of indolence. Rather than profit by this comparative
freedom as expressed in a vaunted spirit of individualism
and, acting on personal initiative, develop independent characteristics,
the university student has complacently lain down
on the job."

Establishment of an Alumni Fund was approved by the
Board of Managers of the alumni association in 1928. Similar
funds had been created in many universities. Gordon M.
Buck, president of the association, pointed out that "friends
and alumni would be enabled to contribute to a fund controlled
by the alumni, rather than contribute to the commonwealth
through donations to the university." He added the
hope that "contributions to the fund would supplant the various
appeals made from time to time on the alumni," who
would not be solicited further during the year.

23. Adolph Leftwich, who lost only one bout at Virginia in four years
and went to the 1924 Olympics.

McLane Tilton rendered his part-time service as alumni secretary
while giving attention to his private business interests,
but he devoted much conscientious effort and thought to his
alumni post. During his eight-year stint he was instrumental
in bringing about increased efficiency, wider service, improved
finances, and new offices at the Corner. Near the end of his
incumbency there were about fifteen hundred members of
the association out of twelve thousand alumni, which he said
was a better percentage than in any other southern university.
Despite his ability, Tilton's aggressive manner antagonized
some of those with whom he was associated, and a few of his
editorials in the News raised hackles in the Alumni Board of
Managers. In particular there was one editorial in 1930 suggesting
a "compromise" with respect to the controversy over
location of the proposed coordinate college for women. At a
special meeting of the board this pronouncement was unanimously
disapproved as "grossly inaccurate." Tilton's name was
summarily removed as editor of the News, an editorial committee
was substituted, and responsibility for all material in
the publication was vested in that body. Taken aback, Tilton
remained temporarily as treasurer of the association and was
nominated for reelection to the Board of Managers but he
declined. This terminated his official connection with the
alumni association. His service to that organization had been
unselfish and productive, although he did overstep proper
bounds with a unilateral suggestion as to the coordinate college
at a tense moment in the controversy concerning its location.
One or two other editorials also irritated the board.
His contributions to the development of the association were
praised in letters from Dr. Alderman, Howard Turner, president
of the Varsity Club, and others.

J. Malcolm Luck, '16, operator of an automobile business in
Roanoke, was chosen alumni secretary in 1930. "Mac" Luck,
an all-southern guard on the undefeated basketball team of
1915 and member of Delta Kappa Epsilon social fraternity
and the Raven Society, took over at once. There were no more
editorials in the Alumni News until the 1940s.

Benefactions of Paul Goodloe McIntire were a notable feature
of the 1920s. Reference has been made to his gifts for
strengthening various departments of the Medical School, for

the creation of a School of Fine Arts, including music, and a
School of Commerce, and construction of the McIntire Theater.
In addition he gave $100,000 for cancer research and
$47,500 for Pantops Farm, to be used for the study of psychiatry
and nervous diseases. He also financed a series of concerts
in Cabell Hall by internationally famous artists beginning
in 1919. On top of all else, he donated a collection of rare
books to the Alderman Library and nearly 500 art objects to
the University of Virginia Art Museum in the Bayly Building.
McIntire's benefactions to the university totaled overall in the
vicinity of $750,000. All this was in addition to the handsome
statues that he gave to the city of Charlottesville, together
with four parks and the McIntire Public Library, as well as
$174,000 provided the county of Albemarle to bolster its
schools. Other quiet largesse was never publicized.

McIntire was a strange type of self-made millionaire. Shy,
withdrawn, and without a sense of humor, giving the impression
of being unhappy most of the time, he seemed ill at
ease and had little to say in any group. Yet his generosity was
extraordinary, and his alma mater, as well as his city and
county, are much the better for his philanthropy. He attended
the university for only one session, 1878-79, since he "had to
make a living." In this he succeeded admirably, for he accumulated
a fortune in Wall Street. McIntire moved back to his
native Charlottesville from New York after World War I. He
remained there for a couple of decades and then returned to
Gotham. By that time he had given away almost his entire estate,
for he told Prof. Tipton R. Snavely in 1942 that he had
been struggling to keep his expenses within his life annuity of
$6,000. He died ten years later.

Deaths of several eminent professors during the 1920s brought
grief to the university community. Raleigh C. Minor died in
1923 at his home on the Lawn following a lingering illness.
He had served thirty years on the law faculty and had endeared
himself to more than a generation of students. A calm
and placid personality in contrast to the ebullient and voluble
Armistead Dobie, Professor Minor was a profound scholar.
His Conflict of Laws was termed "a lasting contribution to legal
scholarship," while his A Republic of Nations antedated Woodrow
Wilson's proposal of a League of Nations. In his student

days Raleigh Minor had been president of the Jefferson Society
and a founder of T.I.L.K.A., and as a young professor he
was active in establishing the Raven Society. His death was
called "an irreparable loss" by the New York alumni.

Another serious loss was sustained in 1924 with the death
of Prof. Thomas L. Watson, head of the geology department
and state geologist. Only fifty-three years old when he died,
Watson was the author of Mineral Resources of Virginia, which
the Richmond News Leader termed "historic." The paper
added that "no man since [Matthew Fontaine] Maury has
done as much to open the eyes of Virginians to the riches of
their hills and fields." Engineering Dean William M. Thornton
wrote that Watson "left more than 150 important published
books and papers as testimonials to his gift for investigation
and research," and added: "A lucid and enthusiastic teacher,
he stamped upon his students the fine impress of a gracious
nature, a loyal soul and a scientific spirit."

Four years later Prof. Albert Lefevre, aged fifty-five, succumbed
to a cerebral hemorrhage. "Little Doc" Lefevre's
classes in philosophy were favorites of the students, and his
famous annual lecture on the death of Socrates was frequently
attended by outsiders. On the faculty for nearly a quarter of
a century and head of the School of Philosophy, the diminutive
professor was a collaborator with Dr. William A. Lambeth
in founding the Southern Conference and promoting high
standards of athletic eligibility. He was the author of several
books and associate editor of the Philosophical Review. President
Alderman termed him "among the great humanists and
teachers of youth."

Charles A. Graves died in 1928, aged seventy-eight. He was
one of the quartet of law professors who were the backbone
of the law school for a generation, the others being William
M. Lile, Raleigh Minor, and Armistead Dobie. A student at
Washington College under the presidency of Robert E. Lee,
Graves had won the Robinson medal in 1868 for the highest
attainments in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and in 1869 he
won it again for similar attainments in history, English literature,
moral philosophy, and modern languages. Following
graduation he served as assistant professor of English and
modern languages, and while teaching began the study of law,
in which he graduated in 1873 with great distinction. After

serving on the Washington and Lee law faculty until 1899,
Graves joined the University of Virginia teaching staff. At that
institution he won a secure place in the hearts of the students;
his high-pitched voice together with his too small derby hat
and other mannerisms were lovingly burlesqued in the annual
Phi Delta Phi shows. University of Virginia and Washington
and Lee alumni joined in tendering "Charlie" Graves a dinner
in New York the year before his retirement at the end of the
1926-27 session.

Another student at Washington College under Robert E.
Lee was Milton W. Humphreys, professor of Greek at Virginia
for twenty-five years, who died in 1928. Having served as a
Confederate artilleryman, Humphreys continued the study of
ballistics and was recognized as a leading authority. His versatility
is further attested by the fact that he refused university
professorships in English, modern languages, and physics,
gave courses in Hebrew, botany, and mathematics, and twice
declined the presidency of a state university. Humphreys retired
from the university faculty in 1912 but continued to live
in the community until his death.

Dr. Harry T. Marshall of the medical faculty died of pneumonia
in 1929 at the American Hospital in Paris, following an
operation. He was described by Medical Dean Harvey E. Jordan
as "the greatly beloved and widely honored professor of
pathology and bacteriology." A man of compassion and high
sensitivity, he was also notably absentminded. After a score of
years on the faculty, Dr. Marshall's health began to fail, and he
went to Europe in hope of recovery. He was buried in Brussels.
During his active years he served as president of the Association
of Pathologists and Bacteriologists and as a member
of the State Board of Health.

Another loss to the university was the departure in 1930 of
the Reverend Noble C. Powell, for ten years rector of St. Paul's
Episcopal Church, to accept a call from Emmanuel Church,
Baltimore. "Parson" Powell, as he was known to the undergraduates,
had entered into the life of the student body in
many ways and was greatly admired and highly popular. College
Topics commented that "he has set a standard for future
college rectors that will be either a severe handicap or a powerful
inspiration to his successors. . . . It will be hard to think
of the university without him."

Formal tribute to the memory of Woodrow Wilson was paid
on Founder's Day 1929 when a bronze tablet, the gift of the
classes of 1925 and 1928, was unveiled on the south front of
the Rotunda. C. Venable Minor, '25, made the presentation
and Dr. Alderman responded. The room at 31 West Range,
occupied by Wilson as a student, was restored and equipped
with late nineteenth-century furniture, thanks to the generosity
of Cary N. Weisiger and Bernard M. Baruch. The refurbished
room was officially opened on the day the memorial
tablet was unveiled; Mrs. Wilson visited it and expressed herself
as pleased.

Another addition to the Grounds in these years was an ancient
fourteen-foot limestone pinnacle that had adorned the
chapel at Merton College, Oxford University, and was a gift to
the University of Virginia. Four such pinnacles had been
erected on the chapel in 1451, and when they were declared
unsafe in recent times, it was decided to distribute them. The
university's arrived in 1927 and was placed in the garden of
Pavilion VI between East Lawn and East Range.

The Raven Society completed an important project in 1928
that had been on its agenda for nearly a decade and a half,
namely, marking the grave of Elizabeth Arnold Poe in St.
John's churchyard, Richmond. The plan to place a stone at the
unmarked resting place of Edgar Allan Poe's beautiful and
talented mother was suggested in 1912 by Henry A. Cowardin,
Jr., a member of the society, and was enthusiastically
approved by the membership. Entertainment consisting of
music, readings, and speeches was given in Cabell Hall the
following month to raise funds for the project, and in the succeeding
year Miss Betty Booker gave a concert in Madison
Hall for the same purpose. Finally in 1928 the actual marking
took place in Richmond, with James Southall Wilson as the
speaker. The precise location of the grave had to be guessed
at, for Elizabeth Poe had been buried near the wall in one
corner of the churchyard since actresses were looked down on
in the early nineteenth century. Samuel P. Cowardin, Jr., a
Raven, deserves much credit for bringing about the ultimate
success of the effort.

Poe's room at 13 West Range was completely refurnished by
the Ravens in 1930, thanks to "gracious and invaluable feminine
assistance." Then in 1941 a more elaborate restoration

24. William Minor Lile in 1911, dean of the Law School,
1904-32.

was carried out under the direction of Edmund S. Campbell,
head of the School of Architecture, who did considerable research
to make the project authentic. Alterations recreated
the room as it was in Poe's day. For example, the relatively
modern door was replaced by an original door from 49 West
Range, while iron latches for the shutters were taken from No.
51. Brick for the hearth came from the anatomical building,
an original Jeffersonian structure destroyed to make way for
Alderman Library. Twin closets, one on each side of the fireplace,
were put back, while panes of original glass were collected
here and there and placed in the window. Poe had spent
$24 for second-hand furniture when he moved into the room
in 1826, and Campbell went to great pains to obtain furniture
appropriate to the period that would, according to his calculations,
have sold in that year for about $24.

Edwin A. Alderman had come to the university as president
under several handicaps, but these were surmounted. Chief
among them was the opposition of most faculty members to
abandoning the old chairman of the faculty system and serving
under a president. The fact that Alderman was not a
graduate of the university or a Virginian also was regarded by
some as a liability. But it took him only a few years to win over
faculty, students, and alumni. At the end of his sixth year in
office, 1910, the teaching staff unanimously presented him
with a loving cup which bore this inscription: "To Edwin A.
Alderman in grateful recognition of his devoted and efficient
services to the University of Virginia, in the increase of its resources,
in the expansion of its work, in the enhancement of
its usefulness without sacrifice of its standards and traditions,
and also of his just and sympathetic attitude toward his colleagues."
Dumas Malone regarded the presentation of this cup
as "in some sense the most signal triumph of his [Alderman's]
life."

As time went on, faculty support for the president's policies
was no longer unanimous, although the attitude was predominantly
favorable. For example, there were those who deplored
his desire to increase the university's enrollment and
his democratization of the institution by appealing for a larger
contingent from the public schools. History Prof. Thomas
Cary Johnson spoke with high admiration of Alderman's personal

charm and excellent training for a university presidency,
but added that he "was the man who first started the deterioration
of the university; that is, turning it into a great democratic
institution. . . . His first serious [mis]step was restricting
the dormitories to first year students." Dean B. F. D. Runk also
had "great respect for Alderman. . . . He was a gentleman and
friendly with all the students . . . but I didn't like some of his
ideas of trying to increase the university's size."

It was generally agreed that he was a man of great suavity
and impressive presence in any company, but there was also
criticism of his mannerisms and his undue awareness of his
prestigious position. As he strolled over the Grounds with dignity
he bowed ceremoniously to ladies as he passed, but frequently
did not remove his hat. As Malone puts it, "At times
he wore his honors with swagger," but "his humor was disarming."
Well-liked by most professors, students, and alumni, he
represented the university before foundations and the public
with golden words and complete aplomb. His oratory was
widely admired; indeed he was one of the most flawless public
speakers of his era, and recognized, too, as the most prominent
spokesman for the South. Some leading undergraduates
were not among his admirers; Prof. Robert K. Gooch said
concerning Alderman's early years at the university, when he
himself was an undergraduate, "the kind of students that I
respected were not very keen on President Alderman." Nicknamed
"Tony" by the University of North Carolina students
soon after he became president there because of his fondness
for dressing well, the sobriquet followed him to Virginia. The
word tony was in common usage in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries as signifying "high toned" or "genteel."
As time passed, Alderman became increasingly fastidious
as to his clothes, and his collection of thirty canes was
almost awe-inspiring.

President Alderman was not a scholar in the ordinary sense
of the term. His only earned degree was the Ph.B. that he
received at Chapel Hill in 1882, and he made no effort to
obtain a graduate diploma. From the University of North Carolina
he went to the public schools, where his three-year statewide
crusade in their behalf, with Charles McIver, was of well
nigh legendary renown. Much later, of course, he was the recipient
of honorary degrees from about a dozen institutions,

including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. But
he was not a profound student in any one discipline; rather
he was a widely read, cultivated academician with a deep understanding
of the meaning of education and exceptional capacity
for elucidating his educational ideas.

But if Alderman was hardly a profound scholar, he was endowed
with great literary skill, as is evidenced in his classic
memorial address on the career of Woodrow Wilson, who had
died Feb. 3, 1924, delivered to a joint session of the U.S. Congress
on Dec. 15 of that year. Wilson had told Adm. Cary T.
Grayson that he regarded Alderman as the most eloquent
man he had known, and Mrs. Wilson suggested that the University
of Virginia president be invited to make the memorial
deliverance. At first he declined, as he was loaded with work
at the time, but the date was postponed in the hope that he
would accept, and he finally did so. Several months of reading
and meditation went into the preparation of the address, and
it is difficult to see how it could have been improved upon.
Those who heard it were enthusiastic, but it is perhaps even
more striking when read, and the rolling rhythms of the
speaker's elegant prose can be thoughtfully savored. It would
be difficult to find a single cliché in its thirty-eight printed
pages, its tone is statesmanlike, and there is an inspirational
quality from beginning to end. Wilson's faults are conceded;
yet the man's greatness comes through with abundant clarity.
As an example of Alderman's balanced judgments consider
the following as a summing up of the rights and wrongs in the
tragic fight over the League of Nations: "I may be permitted
the reflection that something less of malice in the hearts of his
enemies, and something more of compromise in his own
heart, and something more of political genius and firm purpose
in the hearts of those who held the faith, and there might
have been another world!"

Alderman's platform technique was not the old-fashioned,
stem-winding, table-pounding type for which the South had
long been famous. "I deliberately refrained from a display of
forensic oratory," he said later of his address on Wilson. "I
wanted to show the North and West that a southerner could
talk straight and clear without making a windmill of his arms
or a megaphone of his voice." It was nothing new for him to
rely upon freshness of diction and smoothness of delivery

rather than histrionic effects. But in earlier years he had had
to refrain entirely from public speaking, since the tuberculosis
from which he suffered had settled in his larynx as well as his
lungs. The cure was finally sufficiently complete for him to use
his voice to great effect on public occasions.

Alderman was overwhelmed with congratulations on his address
in commemoration of Wilson. Hundreds of letters
poured in from all over the country, and the full text was published
in numerous newspapers. Charles W. Eliot, the retired
president of Harvard, said he was moved to tears several times
as he read it, and Bernard M. Baruch, chairman of the War
Industries Board under Wilson, wrote, "You lifted once more
the torch that he lighted." Alderman was promptly elected to
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also was mentioned
in various quarters as a well-qualified candidate for the
Democratic nomination for president of the United States. He
was not at all interested and commented in writing to a friend:
"Well, I am a cool-headed man getting well along in years, and
free from all insensate ambitions. I once told Walter Page, and
he howled like Gargantua when I said it, that I would rather
catch a ten-pound land-locked salmon than to be the whole of
Taft's administration." His one ambition, he declared to Sen.
Claude Swanson, was to "see the University of Virginia retain
its place as the foremost institution in the southern states," and
he added: "Its preeminence is seriously threatened, and will
be destroyed in a period of five years unless something is
done."

Soon thereafter he declined the chancellorship of the University
of Georgia. The University of Virginia Alumni Association's
Board of Managers expressed its thanks in the following
terms: "The 21 years during which you have directed the
policies and energized the activities of our alma mater have
been years of stirring achievement. Her gain in endowments,
in student attendance, in academic authority, in scientific
equipment, in teaching power, in public usefulness and in
popular esteem have been magnificent and in large measure
your personal work. They have won for you the sympathy, the
support, the admiration, the confidence and the loyalty of our
alumni."

Engineering Dean John L. Newcomb was formally appointed
assistant to the president in 1926, before Alderman

left on one of his numerous summer trips to Europe, some of
which were paid for by wealthy friends. Newcomb's administrative
ability had been demonstrated in his chairmanship of
the centennial observance in 1921, and he had shown marked
capacity for dealing with the General Assembly in helping to
defeat the attempted removal of the Medical School to Richmond.
As a matter of actual practice, Newcomb had been Alderman's
assistant since the centennial, and this was now being
made official. For all his merits, Alderman was not primarily
an administrator; rather he was a planner, a dreamer, and an
impressive personality who lent prestige to the university.

When Herbert Hoover was pitted against Alfred E. Smith
for the presidency in the bitterly fought campaign of 1928,
Alderman openly backed Smith, despite his own belief in national
prohibition and Smith's well-known opposition to it.
Alderman denounced the religious prejudice that was rampant
because of Smith's Roman Catholicism, and spoke of the
New York governor's "amazing and inspiring career . . . an
executive of rare gifts. . . . I do not care to what church he
belongs." Smith, of course, was badly defeated and even lost
Virginia, until then a rock-ribbed Democratic stronghold.
One of Jefferson's statues on the Grounds was promptly
draped in black by unknown parties, and on it was a card with
the following: "To the memory of Jeffersonian Democracy
and Religious Freedom in Virginia—Died November 6, 1928."

In his 1929 Founder's Day address Alderman deplored
what he called the students' "chiefest defect . . . a too intense
individualism." This fault had been noted by others, and the
president elaborated by saying that the attitude "tends to overemphasize
one's rights and to minimize one's duties; and danger
lies that way, and the great philosophy needs to be looked
into, lest it become a vice instead of a virtue."

Alderman was completing twenty-five years as president of
the university, and the progress achieved under his leadership
was remarkable. The Alumni News published the following in
its December 1928 issue:

         

	1904	1929
Officers of Instruction	48	290
University Departments	5	9
Academic Schools	15	28
Students, Regular Session	500	2,200

25. Lady Astor, donor of university tennis courts, greets Captain
Bill Luke of the university football team at a game with the
University of South Carolina in 1928. South Carolina Captain
Cooper holds the ball.

             

Students, Summer Quarter	0	2,700
Students, Extension Service	0	1,528
Students, Nurses' Training School	0	125
Total Annual Income	$160,000	$1,741,352
Productive Endowment	$350,000	$10,000,000
Annual State Appropriation	$50,000	$400,000
Value Bldgs. and Equipment	$1,500,000	$9,000,000

"Dr. Alderman's administration is as much an honor to himself
as it is a glory and a power to the state," the Richmond
News Leader, edited by Douglas S. Freeman, commented. "It is
given to few men to achieve in a quarter of a century such
amazing and solid advances." And the New York Times said:
"The University of Virginia . . . during these 25 years has
come to be more than a `secluded nursery for the production
of scholars and gentlemen.' It still performs that function, but
it has come to be an institution to which all the people of the
state may look for instruction and guidance. Democracy in
these years has had no voice more eloquent and appealing
than [Alderman's]. . . . He has done more than enlarge and
improve Jefferson's institution; he has often spoken for
America in shining and stately sentences that will be permanently
preserved in American literature."

Another accolade came from the university's alumni during
a luncheon at Finals, when they presented the president with
a silver platter "in commemoration of the completion of 25
years of unselfish, abundant and inspired service enriched by
rare eloquence, wise leadership and high vision of a future of
dignity, beauty, power and renown for our alma mater." The
Edwin Anderson Alderman Alumni Fund was established under
a permanent board of fifteen, as a testimonial to "the distinguished
services of the first president of the university." A
year later a bust of Alderman by the Russian sculptor Sergei
Konenkov, the gift of Charles Steele, '78, was presented to the
university and placed in the Rotunda.

Surprisingly little seems to have been said in most published
accounts of the grave health problems under which Alderman
labored after 1912. His bout with tuberculosis made it necessary
for him, throughout the remainder of his life, to spend
only the latter half of the morning in his office, with rest in
the early afternoon. He seldom went out in the evening, except

for faculty or committee meetings. And there were several
other illnesses while he was at the university, in addition
to tuberculosis and its side effects. He was operated on for an
abdominal hernia in 1919 and developed a gastric ulcer two
years later, necessitating rigid diet. In the mid-1920s he broke
his arm and suffered with a carbuncle. The following year he
began having eye trouble and bad headaches. Alderman was
fortunate in having so able an assistant as John L. Newcomb,
who could keep the administrative machine operating while
he was ill or recuperating or on vacation. His vacations were
often prolonged. When he wasn't spending the summer in
Europe he was likely to be fishing in Canada. Often he was
invited by affluent friends to elaborate fishing camps, in one
of which he pursued the elusive salmon and the other trout
and bass. Alderman was never happier than when casting his
lure into a lake or stream.

While his health had always been more or less precarious,
the public was shocked to read in the press on the morning of
Apr. 30, 1931, that he had suffered a fatal apoplectic stroke
the previous night on board a Baltimore and Ohio railroad
train, en route to the inauguration of Harry Woodburn Chase
as president of the University of Illinois. Removed from the
train at Connellsville, Pa., he died soon afterward in the hospital
there, two weeks short of his seventieth birthday. He was
buried in the university cemetery after services in the university
chapel. Clergymen taking part were the Reverend Dwight
M. Chalmers, pastor of the Charlottesville Presbyterian Church,
of which Alderman was a member; the Reverend William Kyle
Smith, secretary of Madison Hall; the Reverend Beverley D.
Tucker, Jr., of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Richmond, who
had been a much-beloved rector of St. Paul's Church at the
university; the Reverend Noble C. Powell of Emmanuel Episcopal
Church, Baltimore, and the Reverend Walter L. Lingle,
president of Davidson College. Eight students served as pallbearers.

Tributes to Alderman poured in from throughout the
country. Scores of newspapers were high in praise of his
achievements, and hundreds of letters and telegrams were
received. Among those sending messages were President
Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs. Woodrow

Wilson. President Wilson had contemplated naming Alderman
ambassador to the Court of St. James's, according to one
published report, and many believed the appointment would
have been made but for his health. A resolution of the Alumni
Board of Managers termed Alderman "an orator without rival;
a statesman without artifice; a philosopher without fanaticism;
a scholar without pedantry; an administrator without
pride; an instructor without bias; a wit without vinegar; a
Christian without cant; a friend without hesitancy."

John L. Newcomb, dean of the Engineering School since
1925 and assistant to the president since 1926, was named acting
president of the university, pending choice of a permanent
successor.

Dumas Malone summed up the meaning of Alderman's life
and career in his excellent biography: "Everywhere it was remarked
that he had been the most conscpicuous spokesman of
the South in his day and the noblest interpreter of the section
to itself and the outside world. . . . The ideas which he implemented
and the faith which he kindled . . . will survive long
after the echoes of his voice have died away. . . . This wearer
of the mantle of Jefferson will continue to be regarded as one
of the torchbearers of his time."