Farewell to the Oddens Farewell to the Oddens - The Taft School

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E N D N O T E The Virtues of Horace Taft By Lance R. Odden With the retirement of Barclay Johnson ’53 last June, I have become senior master—the last to have worked for Paul Cruikshank and to have been initiated into Taft by those who worked for Horace Taft, as well as Paul Cruikshank. My mentors were men like Ed Douglas, Jim Logan, Harry Stearns, Joe Cunningham and others who worked for a long time for Horace Taft, and then some of the most significant but younger men such as Bill Sullivan and Len Sargent. The impact of those men was extraordinary, and I will be forever indebted to them, as was a generation of Taft students and faculty. All this moves me to talk about our history and about Horace Taft in greater depth than I ever have before. Although Horace Taft retired in 1936, his influence on the school remains essential. In fact, I am proud to have brought him back as a central icon for our school community, for I deeply believe his values are as apt today as they were 110 year ago. Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a lawyer, judge, and diplomat, Horace Taft graduated from Yale in 1883, having roomed with Sherman Thacher for several years. Trained in the classics and destined to study law, Taft often mused with Thacher about teaching and starting his own school. However, family directives pushed him into the law to prepare him for politics and service to the nation—the family’s calling. Within a few years, Horace Taft rebelled, leaving the law, returning to Yale to teach classics, and earning the disdain if not disrespect of his parents, who were sure that he would soon come to his senses and return to a higher calling. After several years on the Yale faculty, Horace Taft did come to his senses, not to return to the law, but instead to start his own school to prepare young men for college, preferably in New Haven. His years at Yale had taught him that a student’s fundamental character was in place by the time he arrived at college and that it was at the secondary level that the fundamental habits of heart and mind were established. A secondary school would offer a teacher the greatest influence on the next generation. From our very beginnings in Pelham Manor, New York—where the school resided for three years—through the entirety of Horace Taft’s career, he spoke of educating the whole student. While Mr. Taft believed that preparing the mind was the first responsibility of his school, he insisted that the heart, spirit, and conscience of a student were of equal importance, and that the totality of a person’s character counted most. In this regard, he was thoroughly Emersonian, and was most assuredly influenced by Emerson’s seminal essay on American character. Horace Taft believed deeply in personal honor, a value he emphasized continually in public speeches. He said, “As for me, truthfulness or honor is the foundation. Whatever else a student is, if they tell the truth, there is hope, there is something to build on.” From this value, evolved our honor system, so essential to our school today, and so much at odds with the world at large. “Next to honor, we have counted hard work as the most important element in character training.” Indeed, he believed so deeply in hard work, that he believed it could overcome nearly every obstacle. In his speeches, he praised students with “gumption”—the ability to overcome setbacks with hard work—which was so much more important than theoretical aptitude or natural ability. Mr. Taft derived great pleasure from the remarkable records his students wrote on college entrance examinations. He was always delighted by the great records of leading scholars, but he was proudest of the triumphs of those less able. How delighted Horace Taft would have been with Bill Weaver, the donor 38 Spring 2001
E N D N O T E of our new track, who commented at the dedication ceremony last spring that “the harder you work, the luckier you get.” A comment so Taft-like, that it nearly belongs on the Belcher Library windows. Horace Taft also believed that the individual is responsible for his or her lot in life and that a residential school teaches enduring lessons. In his earliest recorded Vespers notes he wrote, “The first lesson here and everywhere is the lesson of unselfishness. Not to or for yourself. The great advantage of boarding school is that it gives opportunities for a student to get out of himself. He must work for others and learn that he can work with others. He must go into things and make them work. The great value of football and baseball is the unselfishness and self-suppression they enforce. The grandstand player or the one who trains only when the coach’s eye is on him, is not the one to be successful in life.” Or, “School is what you make it.” Horace Taft believed in total commitment to whatever he or his students undertook. Thus, he wrote, “There are two elevating aspects of work at Taft, first to do it well, and second, to do it for others.” Of course, the latter sentiment is rooted in his family’s deep belief in public service, a belief still carried on so many generations later by our own Bob Taft ’59, current governor of Ohio. In one Vespers after another, Horace Taft spoke of the duties of Tafties to contribute to American society, most often speaking of Washington and Lincoln as models of selfsacrificing men, one who gave up his fortune for the country’s good, and the other his life. From these beliefs came our motto—not to be served but to serve—a call to all Taft students and teachers to make a difference in the years ahead. Horace Taft’s school was designed to assure that the whole student and his learning about every aspect of life would be the responsibility of his faculty. At Taft, masters would live among students, not segregated to the side, in houses connected to dormitories. Faculty meetings were to be about students, who were to be known well in the classroom and even better on the playing fields, in the dorms, or as young people growing up. George Van Sanford, the great headmaster of Hotchkiss and a fellow Yale classicist, was famous for stopping students in the hall and asking them to conjugate verbs or to cite declensions. Horace Taft conversed with his students about their roommates, their extracurricular activities, and how well they were doing. He cared for the whole person and asked his faculty to do so as well. His was to be a student-centered community, and here his vision is also clear. Connectedness was virtue, and so we would eat, sleep, go to classes, and live together in one ever-connected, serpentine building, always designed so that people would acknowledge each other. While his collegiate Gothic architecture was grand, it was designed at a human scale so that people were connected and not diminished. Last spring, I went back to my alma mater for a meeting and arrived early. I went on a nostalgic walk only to find myself surprised that the students neither acknowledged visitors, nor asked if they could be of assistance, which our students do routinely. The academy’s paths and hallways are grand allowing people to pass without any eye contact, remaining anonymous. Size, scale, and a vision of connectedness shaped our campus and lie behind our traditions of reaching out to each other and to visitors, which we have maintained even as our campus has grown. Trained in the law, Horace Taft was a man of undeniable principle. An avid opponent of Prohibition, Horace Taft gave one last dinner party the night before Prohibition began and never again took a drink in the United States until Prohibition ended. Perhaps this explains his deep devotion to Murray Bay and his beloved vacations in Canada! From 1890 to 1927, Mr. Taft owned his school and rejected all offers of financial gifts, fearing that they might somehow compromise his independence. When he was persuaded to incorporate as a nonprofit organization and turn governance over to “Old Boy Trustees,” to assure the school’s survival after his death, he continued to reject any gift which had strings attached. Thus, when the great philanthropist Harkness approached him about a gift of $5 or 6 million, equal to his benefaction at Exeter, Mr. Taft asked if it meant we would have to incorporate the round table, or Harkness system, of teaching. Harkness said yes, and Mr. Taft said, I appreciate the offer, but I cannot accept, proving him to be a man of impeccable principle—and for our school to have a little less principal than we might have had otherwise. However, Mr. Taft was never rigid. Two stories come to mind. In 1926, Ben Belcher, a middler from Lakeville, Conn., was caught importing enough bootlegged booze to intoxicate his entire class. Mr. Taft expelled young Ben, but called Mr. Van Sanford at Hotchkiss and asked him to take Ben on as a special day student for classes only, to return home before athletics each afternoon. If Belcher did well, Taft said that he would take him back as an upper middler. Van Sanford agreed and Belcher went to Hotchkiss for six months, meeting Mr. Taft’s requirements. Belcher returned to excel in his upper middle year, and subsequently Mr. Taft appointed him head monitor of the school. He went on to be not only a great head mon, but also a distinguished alumnus and, of course, a great benefactor of Taft. Penalty, contrition, and absolution were Mr. Taft’s values. Once Taft was asked how he had survived 46 years as headmaster. He immediately replied, “I have never forgotten the little boy inside me.” He could empathize with the students. Imagine this story. One night the east wall clock hands disappeared from the Town Hall down by the old P.O. Drug Store. The town was scandalized. The next night, the south wall clock hands disappeared. Several nights later, the west. Several nights thereafter, the school’s best rock climber returned with the north wall clock hands, crept into bed in the dark certain that he had pulled off a remarkable coup. Imagine his surprise when he found Horace Taft Taft Bulletin 39
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