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Henry Suzzallo was an American teacher and educational leader. He is noted for his service as a president of the University of Washington from 1915 to 1926.

Background

Henry Suzzallo was of Croatian descent, born on August 22, 1875 in San Jose, California, just after his parents' emigration from the Dalmatia region of Croatia. His paternal grandfather was a native of Herzegovina.

His father, Peter, who was born in the Adriatic port town of Ragusa (now Dubrovnick), followed a family tradition by taking to the sea as a boy. Later he spent some years in the California gold fields.

At forty he returned to Ragusa to marry a distant cousin, Anne Zucalo (another form of the family name) and took his bride back to California. After various vicissitudes, the family settled in San Jose, where Anthony Henry was born, the eighth of nine children, only four of whom lived to maturity.

Education

Henry Suzzallo's family had small means, and the boy had to work after school hours. His opportunity for a higher education was due in large measure to the kindly interest of two local business men, Emil and Jesse Levy, who gave him employment, encouraged him in his ambitions, and advanced money when necessary. His school record was not remarkable, partly owing to rather delicate health, partly to calls of outside work, and partly to lack of interest.

At any rate, he was not admitted directly to Stanford University, newly established in the neighboring town of Palo Alto, but had first to complete the program of the local normal school, earning his way there and throughout the long period of his professional preparation by teaching. At Stanford, where he entered in the fall of 1895, Suzzallo found himself. The faculty was young and enthusiastic, and a high proportion of his fellow-students were destined to make their mark in later life.

Despite the outside calls upon him, which included a year's leave of absence as principal of a rural school, his academic record was brilliant and he took an active part in student affairs. Although he had earlier wavered between medicine and the law, he was now in no doubt as to the future. Practical success as a teacher and principal, and, it is said, conflict with unenlightened school authorities, had turned him definitely toward education as a profession.

Following his graduation in 1899 came full-packed years of combined teaching, educational administration, and further study. In the San Francisco public-school system, Henry Suzzallo (he had dropped the Anthony) rose rapidly to the deputy superintendency, serving in that capacity for five months of each year.

This arrangement made it possible for him to rise meanwhile (1902) to an assistant professorship in education at Stanford, and to complete the requirements at Columbia University for the master's degree in 1902 and the doctor's degree in 1905.

Career

In 1907 he went to New York as adjunct professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and two years later was promoted to the professorship of educational sociology. While holding this professorship he served for a time as acting dean of Teachers College. In addition to his regular teaching duties at Stanford and Columbia, he taught for shorter periods at other universities, including Chicago, California, and Yale.

In 1915 he was elected to the presidency of the University of Washington, at Seattle. The period of his tenure was one of rapid development for American state universities, and in this development Washington had its full share. Though standards of admission and graduation were steadily advanced, the enrollment was more than doubled during these years, and the number of degrees granted annually was nearly trebled.

A general plan for campus development was adopted and ten academic buildings were erected, four of them by private gift. State support for general maintenance was more than trebled and the salary scale for professors doubled. With the entry of the United States into the World War, he was plunged in a new set of responsibilities.

In June 1917 he became chairman of the state Council of Defense, later a representative of the Shipping Board in the Northwest, adviser to the War Labor Policy Board, and a wage umpire for the National War Labor Board at Washington. He was mediator and conciliator in more than fifty strikes affecting war efficiency.

During an extended illness of the Governor, he was in fact, if not in title, the governor of the state. The steps leading to his removal from the presidency of the University in 1926 are too complicated for recital here. The issues were personal and political rather than educational. Though both the state legislature and the University regents were involved in the controversy, the real issue lay between the recently elected governor, Roland H. Hartley, and Suzzallo. The two men had come into sharp conflict some years before, during the latter's war service and when the former was active in the lumber industry, over the question of the eight-hour day, and it is generally believed that this had much to do with the later difficulties.

Suffice it to say that the Governor's action in removing him from office, after he had declined to resign without the filing of specific charges, aroused nationwide discussion, but never even threatened Suzzallo's standing as an educator or as a citizen. Certainly there was no lack of opportunity for him to serve elsewhere. On leaving Washington he was in constant demand. Though he could have chosen from a number of college and university presidencies, he preferred to return to his old chair at Teachers College.

In 1927 he served as visiting professor of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at Vienna and Budapest, and spent some time in the land of his forefathers, Dalmatia.

In 1929 he was called to Washington to act as director of the National Advisory Committee on Education, in charge of the preparation of a report to the president of the United States, financed by a grant of $100, 000 from the Rosenwald Fund.

Suzzallo had, in 1919, become a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and during 1926-27 had served as chairman of the board.

Upon the retirement of Dr. Henry S. Pritchett in 1930, he was elected to the presidency of the Foundation. His position made him, ex officio, a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, and in the three years which remained to him he became one of the most influential trustees of the larger foundation. The work of preparing the report of the National Advisory Committee carried on into the first months of his presidency.

His next important task was the personal direction of a study of higher education in the state of California, which the state government had invited the Carnegie Foundation to make. The economic depression having meanwhile created a critical situation, he was called to make a study in several regions of the possibilities of drastic economies without loss of essential efficiency in the conduct of systems of higher education. To follow the central thread of his career is not to tell the whole story.

After returning to New York in 1930, he played an active part in developing the art program of the Carnegie Corporation. He was always interested in political affairs, and unusually well-informed as to political conditions. If he could have satisfied the technical requirements as to residence, it is said that he would have been nominated and elected "reform" mayor of San Francisco in 1906.

In 1900 he became editor of the Riverside Educational Monographs which now include more than seventy titles, and a little later, the editor of the Houghton-Mifflin Educational Classics. After leaving the University of Washington, he undertook the editorship-in-chief of Collier's The National Encyclopaedia.

Besides several textbooks and numerous articles of a professional and general character, he is the author of Our Faith in Education (1924). While all these interests and activities took their toll, perhaps the heaviest inroads upon what should have been his leisure came from incessant invitations to lecture both on educational and upon more general subjects.

His lectures took him all over the country, enlarged the circle of his friends, extended his influence, and contributed to his unusual knowledge of social and political conditions throughout the United States. But these excursions meant a steady depletion of his reserves of strength. It was not until after the successive and heavy demands of the National Advisory Committee on Education and the California study that he realized that his health had become seriously impaired.

He was persuaded to devote the summer of 1933 to rest and relaxation in California. The lightening of the load had come too late, however; he and Mrs. Suzzallo started to make their return trip by way of Canada, but on the voyage to Seattle his heart showed disquieting symptoms.

He was taken directly to the Seattle General Hospital upon landing, and six days later, on September 25, 1933, he died in the city where he had achieved some of his signal successes and had suffered his greatest disappointment. Had he lived a few days longer, he would have heard of the adoption by the regents of the University of a resolution designating the central building of the campus as the Henry Suzzallo Library.

Since the death of Charles W. Eliot, probably the closing of no educational career attracted such widespread attention or evoked such appreciative editorial comment. The first results of the two major surveys to which he devoted himself so unreservedly were disappointing.

He failed to obtain the unanimous support of the National Advisory Committee on Education, minority reports being filed by the heads of negro institutions and by Roman Catholic educators; and public and political attention was directed almost wholly to a reference in the majority report to the ultimate desirability of giving education a place in the president's cabinet, to the neglect of recommendations of more immediate significance.

The influence of the report grew steadily, however, and has been shown in great improvements in the educational service for the Indians and in the merger of the hitherto independent Board of Vocational Education with the federal Office of Education.

The immediate effect of the publication of the California study seemed to be to accentuate the conflict of authority and influence between the state Board of Education and the regents of the University, but since Suzzallo's death the legislature has followed one of its chief recommendations in the creation of the state Council for Educational Planning and Coordination.

The recommendations of the Commission (Part Two of the California report), written by Suzzallo himself provide what might be called a charter of higher education for the country as a whole; and both reports set forth basic principles and make suggestions as to the elimination of duplication and other desirable and practicable economies.

He died in Seattle, Washington in 1933.

Achievements

  • Perhaps Suzzallo's the most outstanding contribution was in his success coordinating the services of the university with the needs of the state. He entered promptly into the life of the community. He became a member of the state Board of Education and served in many other capacities. He also served as director of the National Advisory Committee on Education and president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He also organized a study of graduate instruction throughout the United States. At different times he served as a trustee of Stevens Institute of Technology, as visitor to the United States Naval Academy, as editor of the Journal of Educational Sociology, and was active in nursing, pharmaceutical, religious, and other vocational studies. He also rendered special advisory services to the Universities of Wyoming, Denver, and Omaha, to Colorado College, and to the systems of higher education in Georgia and Oregon. In the judgment of those who knew him best, Henry Suzzallo will be remembered as an outstanding figure in his generation, not as a scholar, though his scholarship was sound and he made important contributions to educational sociology--a new field in which his alert and agile mind played over a wide range; not as a teacher in the ordinary sense of the term, though his classrooms were always overcrowded; not as an administrator, though his accomplishments at Seattle and elsewhere were distinguished.

Works

All works

Religion

Henry Suzzallo was deeply concerned with ethical and religious questions, but his interest was not of the type to fit any denominational pattern. Reared in the faith of his fathers, Roman Catholicism, he early found himself more in sympathy with Protestantism, but though he attended the services of the Episcopal Church, he never joined its membership.

Politics

In his political affiliation Henry Suzzallo was a Republican and at one point served as a member of the committee on plans and platforms of the Republican National Committee. His services in the Northwest were perforce largely political, though never partisan.

Views

Henry Suzzallo began an address on the Anglo-Saxon tradition at a luncheon of the Pilgrims in London on May 29, 1931, with the statement that there was not a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins. Yet there was not a thought in his mind, he said, nor an aspiration in his heart, which was not a part of this same tradition, a tradition which was brought to him, the son of immigrants from the Adriatic, through the American system of public education.

He was a man of wide-ranging interests, with quick enthusiasms and an instinctive readiness to do his full share of any work to be done. His boyhood days, spent in the beautiful Santa Clara Valley, with summer holidays by the sea at Monterey, bred in him a lifelong appreciation of beauty in all its forms. It is characteristic that his first graduate work was done in the field of esthetics, and that years later he was responsible for building up a department of fine arts at the University of Washington, and for stimulating a community interest in the arts in Seattle.

It will be rather as a man of many talents, of broad sympathies and interests who retained to the end of his life the curiosities and enthusiasms of his youth. His ability to enter immediately into an understanding with those with whom he came into contact and to share with them his own interests and sympathies had much to do with the influence he exerted.

It was said of him that he never taught a subject, but always a student, and that what he taught, not only in the classroom but also on the lecture platform and through his writings, was a broad social and intellectual tolerance and a realizing sense of the place of education in a modern democracy.

Membership

Even an incomplete list of the organizations in which he played an active part will indicate something of the calls upon his time in addition to his regular professional responsibilities. In the field of education the institutions which he served, either as officer or member of the governing or advisory board, include the National Education Association, the American Council on Education, the Association of State Universities, the Institute of International Education, the American Association for Adult Education, the Educational Research Committee of the Commonwealth Fund, the Cleveland Conference.

Connections

Henry Suzzallo was married on February 8, 1912, to Edith Moore, a graduate of the University of Chicago, inaugurated an unusually close companionship. Since there were no children Mrs. Suzzallo could accompany him on his journeys, and wherever his duties might temporarily call him she established a home.

Wife:
Edith Moore

associate:
Roland H. Hartley

He served two terms as the tenth Governor of the state of Washington from 1925 to 1933 as a Republican.

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