Lehman Hall on the Williams campus is named after Herbert H. Lehman ‘99, the son of Meyer Lehman, who, along with his brothers Emmanuel and Henry, founded Lehman Brothers. The building bearing the Lehman name was completed in 1928, at the very height of a prolonged stock market boom. The Lehman Community Service Council is also, I think, named after Herb Lehman - along with a college, a couple of high schools, numerous buildings at other colleges, and a library and professorship at Columbia. Herbert Lehman ‘99 was one of those people that get many things named after them.

He worked at Lehman Brothers after graduating from Williams, but spent most of his adult life in public service. He was part of the General Staff Corps in Washington during World War I; after the end of the war, he worked for Al Smith’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, and served as Lt. Governor to FDR. After Roosevelt’s election to the Presidency in 1933, he became the Governor of New York, and was a very popular chief executive, with a reputation for nonpartisanship.

As Governor, Herbert Lehman was heavily involved in trying to mitigate the banking crisis of the 1930’s, shutting New York’s banks to try to avert a panic in March 1933. In an eerie premonition of this weekend’s meetings, he also tried, unsuccessfully, to organize a Wall Street rescue of the Bank of the United States in 1930; the failure to reach an agreement caused the largest bank failure in US history up to that point, one of the first large commercial bank failures of the Depression; depositors were not made whole, and the ensuing fear and hysteria led to thousands of other banks collapsing over the next few years (cf: Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan, pp. 320-360).

During World War II, Herbert Lehman resigned his governorship to head the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an agency set up to assist citizens of nations that had been occupied by the Axis powers. He became a Senator from New York in 1949; in the Senate, he was a vocal critic of McCarthyism, voting for McCarthy’s censure, and was a strong supporter of Truman’s liberalism.

Towards the end of his life, he continued to work as an activist and reformer within New York’s Democratic party, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, but died the day before the award ceremony, which took place on December 6 - just two weeks after JFK’s assassination. This was the citation that was read for Herbert Lehman in absentia by President Johnson: “Citizen and statesman, he has used wisdom and compassion as the tools of government and has made politics the highest form of public service.”

No one can hope for a better epitaph.

This weekend, the firm that Herbert’s father and uncles founded went out of business. American finance is being shaken to its core, and fear and foreboding have Wall Street in their grip. Lehman Brothers started as a dry-goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, and rose to become a storied investment bank. In partnership with Goldman, Sachs and Kuhn, Loeb (which it absorbed in the 1970s), it helped to finance many nascent industries over its 158-year history. The three Jewish banks did banking work for unglamorous and risky companies in retail, oil, and broadcasting; they promoted up-and-coming stocks, like Macy’s and RCA, that the Anglo half of Wall Street (the Morgans in particular) would not touch. They were risk-takers in the very best sense of the term. On 9/11/2001, Lehman Brothers survived a direct hit to its headquarters at the World Trade Center. Exactly seven years later, it was destroyed by the natural processes of the market and by its own derivatives and leverage. There is a crude analogy to be drawn here, but I won’t go there.

It is a near certainty now that Lehman’s 26,000 employees (including a significant number of Ephs) will lose their jobs. The impact on the financial system will be extremely serious (though you wouldn’t know it from watching the evening news, which has spent more time covering political nonsense). Many employees will lose both their jobs and their savings, because they were compensated in stock. This is the toughest, most challenging situation the financial system has seen in a very long time - if we are to believe Alan Greenspan, it is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

We’ll reckon the wider economic fallout from this in due time; now, however, I’d just like to wish good luck to all Lehman employees, and goodbye to the Lehman name. One might be tempted to say, sic transit gloria mundi, were it not for the buildings and schools named after Herbert. Those will continue to stand, at least for the time being.

Miss those great posts by JG featuring old New York Times articles about Williams? I do! (Examples here and here.) Yet the right response whenever you want JG, me or any other EphBlog author to do something is not to complain. Instead, encourage! In that spirit, here is an New York Times article from 1913.

Williams College is a unique institution in more than one respect, but its policy in regard to numbers is perhaps more distinctive than any other. Most American institutions of learning welcome an increase in enrollment of students, and the Berkshire college is almost in a separate class because it does not hold to this popular course and because it has the courage to stand out against quantity.

And, to some extent, the same is true today. Both Yale and Amherst, for example, are expanding their student bodies. Williams, fortunately, is not. If anything, Williams ought to give some thought to reducing the size of the student body, perhaps by 10%, perhaps by a bit more. It would be good, for example, to provide every student with a single and to increase the faculty:student ratio. One could achieve these goals by building more buildings and hiring more faculty, but the College is big enough as it is.

Alas, I lack the ability to copy-and-paste other sections of the (pdf) article for those without NYT logins. Perhaps a more skilled reader could do so in the comments. Read the whole thing.

Random New York Times surfing allowed me to add the identity of the 1989 Commencement Speaker to our Wikipedia listing. But surely we can fill in some of the missing years? Note that 20% of the speakers in the last 20 years were African American (Cole, Franklin, Reagon and Davis). Wasn’t somebody complaining a few months ago about having too many white speakers?

Also, consider my claim from 5 years ago about ideological diversity among Williams Commencement Speakers.

Looking at this pessimistically, it is sad to see Williams not doing a better job of providing balance. Of course, a sample size of 10 isn’t enough to draw serious conclusions, but I don’t recall graduation speakers being too right wing in the 1980’s. A good out of sample test going forward will be to see how Williams does over the next 10 years. If they fail to invite any of the three recent Republican governors of Massachusetts or any leading Republican Senators and Cabinet Secretaries, it will probably be fair to conclude that there is as much bias at Williams as anywhere else.

Our out of sample test of five speakers shows two liberals (Friedman and Halberstam), two artists with uncertain (to me) politics (Davis and Serra) and one news anchor who votes Democratic (I think) but is largely non-political in her public persona (Couric). What are the odds that the College will have a conservative/republican speaker in the next five years? Low. If we invited former Democratic governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for 1990, why wouldn’t we invite former Republican governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Mitt Romney for 2010? Because the people doing the inviting think that liberals/democrats are more interesting and/or honor-worthy than conservatives/republicans.

This story of the theft of an original Shakespeare folio is one bit of Williams lore with which I was previously unfamiliar.  Oh, and should I ever play Trivia again, dibs on Middlebury Professor Sinclair E. Gillingham as my team name …

Even as far back as 1913, Williams was doing its best to establish a nest egg for the future.  An article in the wonderful New York Times archives describes then-President Garfield’s announcement of a $2 million endowment effort.  True to form, he already had about 25% lined up and more pledged to match.  This effort was announced at the “alumni luncheon” following commencement.  I wonder if Morty will have any exciting announcements this weekend during reunions?

I continue to enjoy the fact that Williams College news made it to the New York Times with great regularity back in the day.  Including such exciting events as the alumni beating the varsity basketball team in a game.  Yes, really.  I can’t find the link again at the moment, but it was great.  In the 1920s, someone wrote in with that bit of news - including the roster and some form of a box score from the game - and it was published in the Times.

You can see the article in its original form (scanned a little crookedly, but readable) here.

WILLIAMS SEEKS $2,000,000.
President Garfield at Commencement Tells Endowment Plans.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., June 25 — At the alumni luncheon following the commencement exercises at Williams College to-day, President Harry A. Garfield announced that the college would attempt to obtain an endowment fund of $2,000,000.  Half of the first million appeared to be in sight, he said.  The General Education Board of New York, Rockefeller Foundation, had offered $100,000 when the college should raise $500,000.  Mrs. Russell Sage had contributed $50,000, and $200,000 more had been promised conditionally.  To this, President Garfield said, $150,000 might be added from an estate over which litigation recently ended.

The need for $1,000,000, Dr. Garfield said, was immediate, as that sum would hardly do more than make up the annual deficit, and a second million must be had to do justice by the teaching force and the future.  The college, he pointed out, had prospered by buildings presented, but giving for endowment had not been popular and the faculty as a result had been kept on low pay.

President Garfield said that while the salaries of the teachers at Williams had increased more than $50,000 in the last twelve years, the maximum paid to any professor was only $500 in excess of the amount paid in 1900, and the largest amount now received by any professor was $3,200.  The President believed desirable to raise the maximum at once to $4,000, with corresponding increases to all professors and assistant professors.

Williams graduated 115 young men with the degree of bachelor of arts.  Among the honorary degrees conferred were these:  Doctor of Laws, Charles B. Wheeler, ‘73, of Buffalo, a Justice of the New York Supreme Court; Master of Arts, Albert Rathbone, ‘88, lawyer of New York.

Copyright (c) The New York Times, originally published June 26, 1913

Thoughts on professor salaries as an effective fundraising ploy?  Did everyone notice the names of those donors?  I would love to know whose estate was being challenged - possibly over the gift to Williams?  Any Williams history buffs know what famous alum or former prof died sometime around 1913?

I’d also like to say that this shows some shrewd planning by somebody.  Capitalizing on the strength of our alumni to start building those funds way back when undoubtedly built a foundation for the massive pile of cash we’re sitting on today.  Granted, Williams graduated a lot of young men from old money families, so this kind of strategy was likely old hat to them although it seems practically clairvoyant to those of us brought up without trust funds, family homes, and other such personal “endowments.”

David asked that I re-post an article from my comment yesterday as a new thread, as some aren’t brave enough to read the comments (and I know even fewer follow links). This is a lovely little bit of Williams history, pulled from an 1895 article found online in the now free New York Times Archives.  Honestly, the reaches of Google never cease to amaze me.

I’ve typed the text of the piece below, but I also recommend that you view the pdf in all of its glory - historic typface and all.

STUDENT WAYS AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Undergraduate Life There Many Years Ago.
John Howard Corwin in the American University Magazine.

In its early days Williams College approached more nearly to Garfield’s famous definition of an ideal institution of learning — “a log with a student on one end and Dr. Hopkins on the other” — than could possibly be imagined by a visitor to Williamstown in these later times. There was then, in fact, little else to make the college beside the Faculty and very few students. The doctor resigned more than twenty years ago, yet his influence is still strongly felt. My impression of the men I saw and learned to love at Williamstown twenty years ago, in my own and contemporary classes, is that there were very few of them sent through college. No body of associates could, on the whole, have been more serious and earnest than they in the pursuit of all that goes to build up manhood.

When the college was in the “log” era it had some peculiar institutions, which have ceased with their causes. One was “Chip Day,” in the Spring when the Faculty allowed a day’s respite from books that the boys might rake up and burn the Winter’s accumulation of chips, which their own sturdy arms had made cutting the wood that burned in students’ stoves.

Athletics were not neglected in the days before steam heaters. “Gravel Day” was anciently another local institution — a recess that the boys might gravel the walks about the campus, those who did not work commuting by the payment of a fine, used to pay for the carts and horses.

Those were the days when, perhaps in a “Chip Day” poem, a Williams man flapped around Parnassus thus:

The roads were not passable,
Not even jackassable;
And he who would travel ‘em,
Must turn out and gravel ‘em.

These useful and healthful days of frolic were merged into “Mountain Day,” now called “Scenery Day,” an opportunity for the athletic pleasure of climbing Greylock and offering sacrifices to the nymphs of the Hoosac and the hills. In these degenerate days, students actually drive to the top of Greylock. Ichabod! Nothing remains to ruin it but a hotel at the summit. It used to offer a grand climb through an almost pathless forest. It needed sturdy legs and good lungs to reach the summit. Sweet was the sleep on pine boughs on that breezy top in a shelter of green branches.

“Mountain Day” is still a Williams Institution. I have heard Martin I. Townsend say that Williamstown had an air to make a man feel like eating a whole ox, and the sturdy old gentleman looked when he said it as if could do it.

Old fellows who chopped their own wood, graveled their own roads, cleaned up the campus and climbed mountains insist that the ancient athletics were far superior to the new in physical, mental, and moral results; that they distracted the students less from the serious work for which men are supposed to go to college; that they were far cheaper than “Weston Field” and the Laselle gymnasium. They insist it is better to swing the axe than throw the hammer; better to climb a mountain and get somewhere than trot on a cinder track that returns to the starting point. Yet it may be these old fellows played “three old cat” and cricket and a mild football in which they kicked the ball and not each other.

Published December 25, 1895
Copyright The New York Times

There is further discussion in the comments section of David’s original post for anyone who wants to know more.

And another bit of Williams history, this time an article from 1854 that recounts a whole host of strange and interesting Williams traditions with their appropriate timing (among them Gravel Day in the Fall, Chip Day in the Spring, and Mountain Day in the Summer). This is amazing stuff. I don’t have the time to type the text of this one into the post, but please check it out! The brief overview: there were events that sound like the precursors to Ivy Exercises - class marshall organized fun events ending at East College; the possible originator of Light Night - evening presentations after the baccalaureate address called “Moonlight Exhibition.” I will admit it gave me chills to see who the speaker was that year - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I could spend far too much time mucking around in the online archive of the NYT. I will follow up perhaps next week with a post about the mysterious mention at the beginning of the 1854 article of a recent “periodical story so discreditable to Williams.” That the internal workings of Williams were worthy of the Times is pretty cool.

Readers may recall that I have made the point a few times that, when it comes to social issues, controversies, and student self-governance at Williams, there is a certain circularity that seems to escape the notice of most on campus. The last time I wrote on this it was to cover 2007’s resurrection of the idea to “lock down” campus dorms to non-residents after a certain hour, in the name of descreasing vandalism. This same idea had been almost foisted on students four years ago, nearly to the day. Thankfully, Security showed forbearance in 2003, and student voters showed good sense in 2007.

The present project of a large group of students to consider adopting a Social Honor Code is another case of nothing new, and as intrepid and proud of their work as today’s students rightly feel, I hope proponents and opponents alike are aware that their peer predecessors had the same concerns and solution. Once again, nearly precisely 4 years ago, a draft of a Social Honor Code was on the floor at College Council. Sabrina Wirth ‘05 was its author and main proponent, and she brought it to the floor during the 14 January 2004 Meeting of College Council. The text of her draft and the debate over it are recorded in the linked minutes from that meeting, and included below the break for (highly) interested readers.

Back then, the project was allowed to be forgotten. A number of people including myself volunteered to work with Sabrina on the project, but it was never followed up on, due to a combination of timing, disinterest or suspicion by some in Council, including myself. Then and now, I did not believe in implementing such a code, largely because I knew it would be actually enforced by the dean, and not what I considered a true representative body of the community. The ability to “enforce community standards” is the most broad and vague source of disciplinary power for the Dean, and I had no desire to see it strengthened.

I don’t at all wish to impose my views or arguments on the students of today, though I do hope this:

1. Students will read Sabrina’s work and the discussions of their predecessor peers.
2. Students will not make the interpretation of community standards the discretion of a dean, who is already the executor and need not be made judge or jury as well.
3. If they draft a code, students make it one amendable by students alone. The Academic Honor Code is amendable only by faculty and, in this way, is not a good model for a code of the community. Only a tiny percentage of the faculty are any meaningful part of the social community.
4. The code be publicly deliberated and voted on, and written records kept of all deliberations. All of this will be crucial to properly implementing and revising such a code in the future.

Awful as scrawling “nigger” is, arguably worse incidents took place shortly before and after Sabrina’s code proposal, and it was not taken up by enough believers to continue her effort. I’d have to bet on the side of the idea of this code being eventually dropped—doing it right would take so much time and thought, and doing it wrong would be awful—but if a code is implemented, one thing is certain: administrators now and ever after will describe it as a mandate, as “the restrictions students convened to place upon themselves.”

They had better be smart ones. When you hand over the freedom to determine community standards informally—through public shame and subtler private mechanisms—no one ever hands it back to you.
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When a friend forwarded me a link to the recent article in the New York Times spotlighting Williams Bridge, I was all revved up to make sure the story made it to ephblog. Who better to break the news than one of the club’s former devotees? Then I saw that it had already been linked—in an itty bitty mention at the end of Jeff Z’s Athletics Round Up. Well, Jeff, that just won’t do. This story is getting prime billing, and will be used as another excuse for me to deposit a few more Williams memories into this site, this time from the point of view of someone who learned and taught bridge at Williams and saw its level of play reach what I believe was a peak since its last heyday over a decade ago, maybe longer.

Mind you when I say “peak” I am using the term in the New England skiing context, or as a mathematician might say a “local maximum.” We’re still talking about bridge, and that means we weren’t ever packing Goodrich hall. But by my junior year, we did have enough interest to run both a beginner’s class during Winter Study and a handful of semesterly tournaments, not to mention get covered in a paper that, if not the Times, was still national news. We also always had weekly social bridge nights, which is really when most of the learning for everyone happened, and when all of the learning happened every year before we and Frank Morgan started teaching formal classes. For me, the “peak” of bridge was when social bridge night had a record attendance one night of 28 players: enough to pack two common rooms in Currier, with 7 simultaneous games, enough to be a fire hazard.

This is a picture from that night in January 2004. In the upper left is a table of people who had just learned that night, mingled with Dave, shuffling, who was in Morgan’s class at the time. Top center you can see two players from the third game in the hall, the fire hazard. The foreground game was historic: Elaine is holding up and pointing to the strongest hand I have ever seen from a true deal. She herself had 20 high card points and a void, translating to an ability to take at least 8 tricks out of 13 all by herself (the average hand in bridge takes about 3 tricks. A hand of Elaine’s value is dealt 8 out of every 1000 deals). Her partner had over ten high card points, which meant they were able to take all 13 tricks, called a “grand slam.”

What follows is a “brief” overview (think Ken Thomas brief) of bridge at Williams and after, as I know it.
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Great photos and commentary from Ethan Zuckerman ‘93 on Williamstown’s industrial past.

I shot two sets of mill photos this weekend. The Carol Cable Factory in Williamstown was still making extension cords when I was a student at Williams, with three shifts of workers manning the molding machines. We founded Tripod across the street at 191 Water Street, and I remember walking past Carol Cable late at night, listening to machines clank and wondering what the inside of the building looked like.

Now we know. The economic transitions of the Berkshires over the last 100 years would make for an interesting senior thesis in either economics or history.

Our best-friends-forever at the OCC Finance Blog are looking for information about the Purple Bull Investment Club. Can anyone help them out?

Enlarge, click around and explore the formidable “Stone Hill”! A journey through local lore and history.

Andrew Whinery ‘08 wrote this during WSO Naming discussions:

[H]ow about great educators? Try these on for size: John Dewey, L.L. Nunn, Horace Mann, and Harold Blum.

Is there another Deep Springer attending Williams, or is Mr. Whinery merely well-informed?

There are people who act publically and people who act privately and personally, and Lucien Lucius Nunn was evidently the latter. His name is hardly recognized among those above, much less among the Rockerfellows [fellers!] and Vanderbilts, though, like Vannevar Bush, his influence may have been greater.

In response to Mr. Whinery’s comment and another thread that took me to Wikipedia, I have updated Wikipedia’s entry on Deep Springs to reflect some of the history as I know it. I am also pasting it raw into the extended entry.

Williams-Deep Springs-Telluride connections abound, and I’ll start to pay more attention to their collection.

Williams and Deep Springs’ Mission Statements have also long shared the dedication, “From Those To Whom Much is Given, Much is Expected.” I first read that in Andy Hernandez’s office, in fact, as both of us sought to understand the office that had been passed to him. I know Nunn read quite a bit of Dewey; I can’t imagine he missed Mark Hopkins, in his visions of nationhood and piety and the interplay of technology and history. The first Deep Springer (Telluride Institute) I can recall at Williams was class of 1905, his son was DS’s President while I was there, and perhaps the connection runs much earlier.

I have also recently rededicated my life to the Nunnian ideals of service– though my foray into industry hardly seems odd in retrospect, despite the general hostility I receive from those in the humanities– and come to same conclusions as Nunn.

Again, hardly odd. More later.

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There is a really cool engraving of Williams c.1910 — 1920 currently up for auction on eBay.

Alas, it’s currently out of my price range… but maybe we could help the auctioner pinpoint the date a bit more exactly.

Where can you find true stories of eph-engineered mischief involving lobsters and beer pong? Willipedia!

Every fall, Dining Services serves an excellent Harvest Dinner, at which the most anticipated and beloved dish is surely the lobster. Though a ticket system attempts to ensure that each student can get only one lobster, in 2002 a few Deviant mischief-makers managed to collect enough from helpful friends to arrange a little tableau at the Log, where a number of noise complaints had been called in earlier that semester. Four lobsters were posed playing a hand of poker, and others were set up playing beer pong (using apple juice in the cups, so as not to break open container rules =) ). The perpetrators called in two noise complaints from public phones, using the names “Red Skelton” and “Rod Stewart.” This would have been the end of the story, except that Security looked up the name “Stewart” in the student directory and headed over to Lehman, where they woke up a very confused freshman named Robin Stewart and interrogated him until they understood that he had absolutely nothing to do with the prank.

The relatively new “Pranks” article is one of many pieces on WSO’s Willipedia that I think many of you will get a huge kick out of, and are capable of being a huge help to. Personally, I think the present list of pranks is a little weak. I’m working on getting some quality new content out of some sources (check back in about a week; you won’t be disappointed), but I have no doubt that many of you Ephbloggers have the real scoop on stories forgotten, or still celebrated but distorted by time.

If you have a WSO login, you can and should add your bit of the Williams consciousness to Willipedia. If you don’t, get one, or reminisce here and let me know if I can add it on your behalf.