The elderly man beside her added, “You will find many here who will say the same. In the formative period of our town’s history he made an indelible impression for good.”
They took me to his church, where a large bronze tablet set forth his virtues and his influence. They showed me the Ellis Randolph Memorial Library. I was shown the public playground which he conceived a generation before any one else thought of such a thing. But what made the deepest impression on me were the men and women who came to shake my hand because I was Uncle Ellis’ niece, because they wanted to testify to the greatness of his value in their lives. The minister of the town, a white-haired man, told me with a deep note of emotion in his voice, that Dr. Randolph had done more than merely save his life; in his wayward youth he had saved his soul alive. The banker told me that he had heard many celebrated orators, but never any one who could go straight to the heart like Dr. Randolph. “I often tell my wife that she ought to be thankful to Dr. Randolph for a lecture on chivalry to women which he gave to us boys, at an impressionable moment of our lives.”
And the old principal of the school said, “Not a year goes by that I do not thank God for sending that righteous man to be an example to my youth. He left behind him many human monuments to his glory.”
What did I say to them? Oh, I didn’t say anything to them. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
GOD’S COUNTRY
When I was a faculty-child living in a middle-western university town we were all thrilled by the news that the energetic Chancellor of the University had secured as head of the Department of Chemistry a noted European scientist. Although still young he had made a name for himself by some important discoveries in organic chemistry. We talked about those discoveries as fluently, and understood about them as thoroughly as we all now discuss and understand the theories of Professor Einstein.
Professor Behrens was not only a remarkable chemist, so we heard, but a remarkable teacher and a man of wide sympathies and democratic ideals. It was the candid period in American life, when, especially in the west, the word “Europe” was pronounced with a very special intonation, of which Henry James’ wistful admiration was the quintessence. It was the time in American university life when Germany was the goal toward which all our younger scholars ran their fastest race. Yet here was Professor Behrens, leaving a University not only European but German, from which our younger professors were proud to have a Ph.D. and deliberately choosing our new, raw, young institution for the sake of the free, untrammeled, democratic life in America. It went to our heads!
Passages in his letter of acceptance were read to my mother by my father, who had borrowed the letter from the Chancellor. “I have a family of children and as they grow older I am more and more aware of the stifling, airless stagnation of European life. I want them to know something bigger and freer than will ever come to them in this Old World of rigid caste lines and fixed ideas. My wife and I, too, wish to escape from the narrowness of this provincial town where an arrogant young lieutenant swaggering about in his gold-braided white broadcloth uniform is much higher in social rank than the most learned and renowned member of the University faculty; where a rich lumber-merchant, brutal and ignorant, can buy his way into political position and parade about with sash and gold chain and the insignia of the office of Mayor.”