Chapter
2 - Undergraduate years
Walter, how much money do you have?" John asked. "Enough to last
you a while?"
"Money?" repeated Walter, mentally totaling his
assets, "a little more than three hundred dollars, I guess."
"Three hundred dollars, hmmm. I don't need to
tell you to hold onto it. I'm sure you will, even though money
means less to you than to me. I can't imagine your wasting it,"
said John.
"Haven't thought much about it, John, I guess you're
right, though."
They walked on a moment in silence and in the pause
John acknowledged a greeting from a man across the street.
"That's George Coe," he said. "He's our new
philosophy professor."
"Oh, really! But tell me what were you going
to say about money?"
The two Scott boys were headed toward the Nelson boarding house for
lunch. The day was September 4, 1891. The following week
John was to start as an instructor in Greek at the College of Liberal
Arts, the same time Walter was to begin his freshman studies.
"What I wanted to say about money," John continued,
"is simply that we're going to have to find a way for you to earn
some. Your scholarship covers only the tuition, and you'll need
money for board and room and books and incidentals."
"How well I know it, John."
"Don't worry, Walter, we'll find a way. In
fact I have an idea."
"You mean an idea for making money? Leave it
to you to think of everything."
Walter was eager to know what John had in mind, but he didn't ask
because John gave him a look that seemed to say: "Be patient a
while. I'll explain it all in a few days."
The two walked on silently. There was a touch of fall in the
air. Masses of zinnias and chrysanthemums gave the street a
decorative splendor and made Walter think of home and harvesting.
John, his thoughts on plans for getting Walter suitable spare-time
employment, turned to thinking about their new careers.
He turned and looked up into his brother's eyes, his face aglow.
With a touch of emotion in his voice, he said: "Just think of it,
Walter, think of what we had to go through to get where we are.
In a week I'll be a college teacher. And before long you'll be
teaching, too."
Words rolled from him like a torrent. He told of his dreams and
expounded his views on his profession. With great warmth he spoke
of his conviction that the Greek and Latin classics must forever be the
cornerstone of a liberal education. In his enthusiasm the whole
procession of the great teachers of history became a living and
stirring force.
John's words sounded so much like a prepared speech that Walter was
amazed and yet at the same time touched. But he didn't show
it. Instead he remarked:
"It sounds wonderful, but after all it will be a
long time before I become a college teacher. I hope when I do,
I'll feel as enthusiastic about it as you do."
Two days later Walter registered for the usual freshman courses-Greek,
Latin, mathematics, and elocution. Each of the first three
required five class hours a week, elocution two hours, 17 hours in all.
Though he realized only too well that he must devote a great deal of
time to studies and to work, he did not intend to lead the life of a
recluse. Extra-curricular activities, he knew, would be given all
the time he could spare.
As these thoughts ran through his mind, his elation over being a
college student suddenly became submerged by concern over his future
and the difficulties now facing his folks on the farm. Though not
given to brooding, Walter, after all, had his share of gloom and
moodiness.
Suddenly he realized that a lovely girl with large luminous eyes was
looking at him. His mood lifted and his spirit brightened as he
said to himself, "I've got to get acquainted with her."
Meanwhile, there was a livelihood to think about, and Walter wondered
when John would reveal his plan for meeting the problem, He didn't have
to wait long. The day after registration Walter ran into John in
the library, and John broached the subject immediately.
"I'm glad you're here, Walter. I've been
wanting to ask you something. Let's take a walk."
Once outside, John asked Walter if he thought he could do tutoring.
Even before Walter could reply, John supplied the answer.
"Why, of course you can. It's not a bad way to
make a living. I'm pretty busy now, and I don't have much time
for it. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to turn
some of my pupils over to you."
That evening Walter was introduced to Donald Johnson, a boy of 18 who
was planning to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Donald needed coaching in mathematics. It didn't take Walter long
to realize Donald was afflicted with a drive to be precise, coupled
with a fear of the self-discipline that the compulsion entailed.
Donald had wavered between no effort at learning algebra and geometry
and driving himself to the point of exhaustion.
By his own self-confidence, Walter was able to instill sustained
self-assurance in Donald. He showed Donald simple shortcuts in
the technique of studying mathematics. This, reinforced by
Walter's friendly interest in the boy's progress, soon brought balance
and order into Donald’s methods of study as well as to his general
attitude.
Another example of the boys and girls Walter tutored during his college
years was Mildred Gardner, the daughter of a successful lawyer.
Having spent six months abroad, Mildred had fallen behind in her high
school work. In three months, Walter's tutoring enabled her to
pass a special examination and to catch up with her classmates.
Then there was Fred Burton, 12-year-old son of a hardware dealer.
Handsome and bright, Fred had received too much attention in
childhood. Everything had come easy for him. When he
reached the sixth grade, he realized that certain subjects could be
mastered only with effort-particularly grammar and arithmetic. He
barely managed to pass to the seventh grade, and there he had become
completely discouraged. His parents, gravely concerned, were
greatly relieved when Walter undertook to help the boy.
Walter figured out ways of giving Fred simple success experiences in
both arithmetic and grammar. After that he explained that even
geniuses had to work hard to attain their objectives. He got Fred
accustomed to systematic study, at first 15 minutes at a stretch, and
finally as much as an hour and longer. All the while Walter
maintained the attitude of a friendly adviser who had complete
confidence in Fred. Less than four months after his first
session, Fred was in the upper half of his class and taking his school
work in stride.
Walter's reputation as a tutor spread rapidly among wealthy
Evanstonians, and within a short time he was offered more pupils than
he could handle. His pay was $1.25 an hour-excellent remuneration
for those days.
As for his own scholastic work, he did well from the start. He
maintained a high standing consistently through all his student years
and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
When Walter first entered his mathematics class in the fall of 1891, he
found someone there of special interest to him—the dark-eyed miss who
had made such
a strong impression on him a few days earlier. At the time of
roll call he learned her name was Anna Miller. Later, much to his
pleasure, he saw her also in his Latin and Greek classes. Then
they found themselves in the same elocution class where they, along
with all the others, listened spellbound to Prof. Robert Cumnock,
as he read from Cumnock's Classic Readings.
Daily attendance at chapel was compulsory in the 1890s. This rule
was not necessary for Walter and Anna, however. They enjoyed
chapel service and always could be seen in the freshman section in the
fall of 1891. Both of them participated regularly in the class
prayer meetings on Wednesday nights, too, though attendance there was
not compulsory.
Still it was not until November that Walter felt free to speak to
Anna. After the initial meeting of the freshman class, at which
officers were elected, the class decided to hold an informal
get-together early in November. This ice cream and cake social
was held in the parlors of Willard Hall, where Miss Miller lived.
As the students drifted in, the class president introduced them to each
other and to those already there. When Walter came along, he
said, "Miss Miller, may I present Mr. Scott." And in conformity with
college customs in the 1890's the two continued to call each other
"Miss" and "Mister" until one day, nearly four years later, they
reached the "understanding" that amounted to an engagement.
As the semester lengthened, they met more and more frequently.
They belonged to the student literary society and attended the same
concerts, debates, and lectures. After the Greek class three or
four students often would gather at Willard Hall to study the next
assignment together, with Walter and Anna invariably taking part in
these co-operative study sessions.
In their junior year both were elected to the editorial board of
Syllabus. Both were assigned to the Cuts and Grinds Committee of
three members, and, if one of the three was absent from the weekly
meeting in the parlors of Willard Hall it can be truthfully said that
it was never Walter nor Anna.
In the '90s, Northwestern's home games were played at Shepard Field,
where the grandstand and bleachers boasted a seating capacity of
700. It was before such
crowds that the university's football and baseball games were
played. In winter the field was flooded to provide an ice skating
rink.
Walter and Anna, both enthusiastic skaters, often came to the rink,
especially on Saturday afternoons when the twenty-five cent admission
fee covered music by the University band. But Walter was still
wary of becoming too strongly attached to Anna. Once, during
their junior year, when both were part of a crack-the whip formation,
Anna was throwing across the field. It was another young man, not
Walter, who escorted her home, bruised and bleeding.
He still had a year of undergraduate work to do. After that there
were two or three years of postgraduate study if he was to become a
college teacher or enter any other profession, for that matter.
So he was ever on guard against emotional involvement. Marriage,
he felt, would have to be deferred until his future was clearly assured.
In the '90s the Northwestern University Settlement House was organized
and established on Chicago's Northwest Side, largely through the
efforts of Mrs. Henry Wade Rogers, wife of the university
president. Faculty members and students participated in the
pioneering Americanization work among the immigrants in the
community. Walter and Anna both taught classes at this social
service center during their last two years as undergraduates.
This association, more than any other, drew them closer together, and
now, more than half a century later, the settlement is still dear to
their hearts.
Their undergraduate years drew to an end.
Commencement week of 1895 was marked by the usual excitement and
activities. That year the seniors held their class day program in
the now gone and almost forgotten Bailey's Opera House of Evanston, the
program simulating a graduation of a district school. The
participants came dressed in farm clothes, the boys wearing blue jean,
colored shirts, and suspenders. Walter stood out from the rest,
having been elected to play the role of teacher.
Following the "valedictory address" and the class prophecy, the
distribution of the class gifts was made by the student who had been
their freshman class president in 1891. The last one of the
entire group of 55 to receive her gift was Anna. When she came
forward, the president of the 1891 class escorted her to Walter.
"Miss Miller," he said with a bow, "may I present
Mr. Scott."
"And that," says Mrs. Scott, "is how I got him."
They were not married until three years later, however, and their
marriage even then barely escaped being deferred still longer.
During his undergraduate years, Walter was elected treasurer of his
freshman class, vice-president of the literary society, a member of the
editorial staff of Syllabus, the student publication, president of the
college Y.M.C.A., and president of the senior class of 1895.
Despite his slender build he played left guard on the varsity football
team. In his junior year he decided he was not rugged enough to
perform well on the gridiron, and that summer he tutored in Evanston
eight hours daily for four weeks, using the money earned by this
concentrated effort to take a vacation in Colorado. He spent his
vacation outdoors, toughening himself for the season ahead. That
fall he played in every game scheduled by Northwestern.
As his four years as an undergraduate at Northwestern were drawing to a
close, Walter was confronted with the problem of selecting a field in
which to specialize.
From the beginning, Walter had always considered John and George A. Coe
his best teachers. Despite his deep admiration for John, however,
basic differences developed between Walter and him over the use of
psychological knowledge in and outside academic circles. Coe,
however, remained open-minded. Indeed, it was Coe who was
instrumental in getting Walter started in applying psychology in fields
outside of pure thought and in the world of living.
While he was still an undergraduate, Walter did not, of course,
anticipate his pedagogical conflict with John, although in the back of
his mind there were certain stirrings as to the uses to which knowledge
might be put — unorthodox stirrings about which he said nothing to
others. He himself was conscious of them only in a fragmentary
fashion. These stirrings were in large part stimulated by Coe,
whose teaching program included a course in psychology, then considered
a subdivision of philosophy.
Steeped in learning, Coe — who is still mentally alert at 88 — was and
is a match for any academician. At the same time his mind reached
out in all directions. His chief interest was in the psychology
of religion, but he always held a deep concern for the problems of the
"practical" world-politics, the adjustment of youth, the arts, human
relations, and human potentialities.
"It is of the utmost value to the whole cause of
truth that the mind, before attaining the relative fixity of maturity,
should for a time assume an utterly free and questioning attitude
toward everything," Coe observed on one occasion.
Another time he remarked: "In matters of belief and of conduct,
authority tends to disappear, and in its place comes an appeal to the
heart, the conscience, and the reason."
And more significant still in relation to Scott's career is the
following fuller statement by Coe:
"Sometimes the age is called utilitarian, and
certainly the modern man does see in things chiefly instruments for
promoting human ends. Yonder flow the lazy tides of ocean; some
day they shall become toilers in the workshop of humanity. The
radiant energy of the sun shall run to and fro upon our errands.
The very changes of the seasons shall fill our reservoirs of
energy. Yes, our typical man is the practical man, and the
important question with him is, “What is it good for?” If this is
utilitarianism, then the age is utilitarian. But the
utilitarianism that means the same as devotion to material ends as
final is not characteristic of our age.
"This brilliantly successful appropriation of nature has added to our
sense of the value of this life. We no longer feel that we are
pilgrims and strangers passing through a disagreeable country because
it contains the only road to a better; we feel more and more at home
where we are.
"We are not in an enemy's country; on the contrary,
the world belongs to us, and we propose to cultivate it, and apply the
produce of it to human ends. We are outgrowing the habit of
longing for another world, while more and more arises a wish that we
might live here for a hundred or a thousand years.
"The world-weariness of an occasional pessimist,
decadent or blase idler is a mere incidental product; the modern world
as a whole, at least the Western World, feels young. The
prevailing sentiment is that the present is good; that the future is to
be better; that progress is the order of the world; and that to have a
share in the universal movement is worth while.
"Thus our new control over nature gives us
self-confidence, inspires a practical attitude toward all things, makes
us this-worldly rather than other-worldly and gives zest and buoyancy
to the work of the world.”
In response to a request for his recollections of Scott, Coe wrote on
November 30, 1950: "My active association with Walter D. Scott began
when he, a downstate farm lad, appeared in my classes at
Northwestern. He appeared to be a shy lad, and what chiefly
distinguished him from other students was a kind of verbal economy that
suggested a relationship to his obvious ancestry.
"His words were crisp and his sentences often were
clipped. But every word went straight toward its mark, and the
mark most often was a fact of observation, not a broad generalization
that might cover ignorance and guesswork. It appeared before long
that the kind of fact that most interested him was the one that gave
one who understood it control of some event. This was
characteristic of his entire life, and it clearly characterized his
psychology."
After Walter had taken one course in psychology for two semesters with
Coe, and particularly after he had heard and analyzed many of Coe's
psychological generalizations, it occurred to him that he had been
applying psychology when he thought all he was doing was using common
sense. In fact, Walter had been doing this consistently in his
tutoring, but he was not as yet ready to make psychology his lifelong
field.
At 25, Walter was still undecided about what he would do after his
graduation the following year. Then something occurred that gave
him a definite goal. It was a talk by the Rev. Newell
Dwight Hillis, an outstanding clergyman who was then pastor of the
First Presbyterian Church of Evanston. Though Scott later served
for nearly 20 years as president of the greatest American university
sponsored by Methodists, he himself has been a Presbyterian since early
manhood. And as such he, and Anna with him, attended Hillis'
church.
They were inspired by his brilliance and eloquence, by the breadth of
his views, and the power of his appeal.
"How strategic life's better hours!" they once heard
him say. He seemed to be speaking directly to them, and
particularly Walter, as he continued in tones that played upon the
heart: "One of God's precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies
the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at its best. Full
oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a maze
without a clue and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is uneasy,
confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear and
physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them;
for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large profits
by them .... Then enters some element that nurtures the nobler
impulse. Some misfortune, earthquake-like, cleaves through the
hard crust. Or some gentle event, like the coming of an old
friend or the returning to the old homestead, stirs old memories and
kindles new thoughts.
".. Then years are fulfilled in a single hour....
Unspeakably precious are these strategic hours of opportunity.
God sends them; divineness is in them; they cleanse and fertilize the
soul; they are like the overflowing Nile. Men should watch for
them and lay out the life-course by them, as captains ignore the clouds
and headlands and steer by the stars for a long voyage, and a distant
harbor."
On another occasion Hillis told of thousands of men and women in China
embracing Christianity through the Presbyterian Church. He spoke
of similar developments in other parts of Asia and Africa. Then
he deepened his tone dramatically and declared:
"Plainly, another half-century and two or three
continents will have been born, as it were, in a day. You may
help the progress of this work, but try as you can, you cannot hinder
it."
Then came the direct and dramatic appeal:
"Young men, what part are you to have in this great
enterprise? Are you investing your whole life in this high
service?"
Walter's mind lighted up. At last he had found an
objective. He spoke to Hillis. He would go to China and
join the faculty of an American college there. Hillis
beamed. Anna approved and so did John. But something more
than that was necessary. Upon completion of his four-year course
at Northwestern, Walter would have to take post-graduate work for three
years at a theological school.
Thus, after receiving his bachelor's degree at Northwestern, Walter
entered McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He was 26, yet
he had three years ahead of him before he could expect to become a full
fledged college teacher. And, of course, marriage would have to
be deferred. Patience was required, but at least now he had a
goal to which he could dedicate himself.
He would soon be contributing to the Christianization as well as the
general enlightenment of an ancient people that had lost their way and
needed to be imbued with a new spirit, and given a new direction.
The words of Hillis kept ringing in his heart, and Anna encouraged him
to go on. He envisioned himself marrying her and taking her to
China with him. Perhaps he could rise to the presidency of an
American college there. And the two of them together might become
an important influence in bringing Christianity and enlightenment to
the Chinese.
He plunged into his new studies. He delved deeply into the
Bible. He learned Chinese history and geography. He took
courses in practice teaching, theory of instruction, and educational
administration. He acquired a rounded knowledge of Presbyterian
doctrine. He developed into an effective public speaker.
All the while he continued his private tutoring in his spare
time. Anna, meanwhile, returned to Peoria and became a high
school teacher. Walter's parents sold their farm and moved into
Cooksville, Ill. And his brother John went to Europe to study at
the Universities of Gottingen and Munich in Germany.
The three-year period passed. Now everything was set as far as
Walter was concerned. He had completed his work at the
seminary. All he needed was a call to China. Then he and
Anna would get married and leave for the Orient by way of San
Francisco. It was that simple.
But fate willed otherwise. For some unaccountable reason the call
to China did not come. It seemed incredible. Walter was
fully prepared; he was brilliant and able. He had spirit and
enthusiasm and a proved capacity for teaching and leadership. He
had the sponsorship of Newell Dwight Hillis. Certainly he could
be useful in China. But no opening was offered him. And
somehow, that was that.
Three years wasted? Hardly. He had learned much in the
three years at the seminary and had gained additional strength of
character. Now he needed all that strength, all the patience he
could muster. Now he had to turn his thoughts in another
direction and decide on another program.
His thoughts returned to the psychology course he had taken with
Coe. Stories and articles were beginning to appear in newspapers
and magazines about this field of study, this science or semi-science
of human behavior. In academic circles there was a great stir
over a new development in psychology, the first psychological
laboratory in the world. It had been established by Wilhelm Wundt
at the University of Leipzig in Germany.
Wundt was being hailed as the father of experimental psychology.
Outstanding American scholars were flocking to Germany to study under
him. Walter decided he, too, would study under Wundt and become a
psychologist. Coe, Anna, and his brother approved. Now he
was all set again for another new start. But first he wanted to
marry Anna and take her along to Europe. She was enthusiastic
over the idea and made plans to work for her own doctorate in Germany.
Though Walter had only a few hundred dollars when he first came to
Northwestern, he had several thousand dollars when he was ready to
marry Anna and take her abroad. Most of this came from tutoring
wealthy Evanston students at $1.25 an hour, big pay for those
days. Full scholarships at both Northwestern and McCormick and
the low living expenses of the period enabled him to save the major
portion of his earnings.
The past was put out of mind, and all thoughts were turned to the
future. Then came a new development, and for a time it looked as
if the marriage between Walter and Anna might have to be deferred
again, that Walter might have to leave for Europe alone. Anna's
father, a Peoria physician, was stricken with a serious
illness, and she felt that she could not leave him, Anna's mother,
however, felt differently. She and Walter "got their heads
together," and as a result Anna and Walter were married on July 21,
1898. That summer the newlyweds sailed for Germany together.
