Care And Feeding Of The Infant: Practical Advice For Mothers And Nurses (1915)
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Conservation in the Department of the Interior (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Conservation in the Department of the Interi...)
Excerpt from Conservation in the Department of the Interior
The miles immediately to the east, nursed in the arms of the Mississippi, deep spread with alluvial soil, equitably rationed as to rain and sunshine, draw greater wealth from Mother Earth than does any other area in the world. The Stretch On the Atlantic, adequately watered but less producftive agriculturally, nourishes an industrial multitude.
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Ray Lyman Wilbur was an American medical doctor who served as the third president of Stanford University and was the 31st United States Secretary of the Interior.
Background
Ray Lyman Wilburm was born on April 13, 1875 in Boonesboro (later Boone), Iowa, the fourth of six children of Dwight Locke Wilbur and Edna Maria (Lyman) Wilbur. His father was descended from one of the founders of Rhode Island; the Lymans had roots in Massachusetts. Both families had moved westward during the nineteenth century. Dwight Wilbur earned an uneven living as a lawyer and partner in a local coal mine; his wife had once taught at Lake Erie Female Seminary in Ohio. Ray's only brother, Curtis Dwight Wilbur, eight years older than he, became secretary of the navy under President Coolidge and chief justice of the California supreme court. Wilbur's boyhood was unexceptional. Within a context of close, loyal family relationships, his father deliberately fostered a spirit of independence in the two sons. In 1883 the family moved to Jamestown, Dakota Territory, where Dwight Wilbur was general land agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Four years later they journeyed to Riverside, Calif. , where the developing of orange groves made them somewhat more comfortable financially.
Education
He graduated from the local high school in Riverside, Calif. in 1892. Planning to study medicine, he entered Stanford University, recently founded by Senator Leland Stanford. During his freshman year he met Herbert Hoover, then a sophomore, and came to know him well by joining him in a compaign to systematize the finances of student organizations. In his senior year he was elected president of his class. After receiving his B. A. in 1896, Wilbur remained at Stanford as a graduate assistant in physiology and obtained an M. A. in 1897. That summer he enrolled at Cooper Medical College in San Francisco. There he soon began to assist in teaching and became known as a clear, precise lecturer, abounding in homely epigrams. Unknown to him at the time, Hoover was also helping to see him through financially. Wilbur took his M. D. degree in 1899.
Career
For a brief period Wilbur practiced medicine in San Francisco, while teaching and serving in the clinic at Cooper. In 1900 he returned to Stanford as assistant professor of physiology and began working on a Ph. D. in that subject. He gave up advanced study, however, after three years, deciding that it was less congenial than full-time medical practice. Still, he remained in the Palo Alto community, serving its often socially prominent patients as a general practitioner. Since 1901 he had been a member of the new state Board of Medical Examiners, and he aligned himself with the forces seeking to upgrade medical education through the application of rigorous scientific standards. On trips to the East and to Europe he rapidly formed contacts with the worldwide medical elite of his day. His pronounced interest in public health took shape during these early years. Wilbur resumed his direct tie with Stanford University in 1908; it would never again be broken until his death. Initially he served as clinical professor of medicine; he was appointed professor of medicine in 1909, and a year later became department chairman, which amounted to the headship of Stanford's new medical school (formerly the Cooper) in San Francisco. This position gave him his first baptism into administration. Under his direction, the school rapidly flourished and became prestigious.
His title was changed to dean in 1911; at this time he gave up his remaining private practice. His election the next year as president of the American Academy of Physicians revealed the national stature he had won. Now strongly committed to the ideal of medical research, Wilbur lent his weight to promoting the research aspects of medical education during one of its most revolutionary periods, and himself undertook a small but significant amount of investigation. Herbert Hoover, who had become a trustee of the university in 1912, suggested Wilbur for the presidency of Stanford in 1915, to replace the retiring John Casper Branner. Wilbur accepted the trustees' offer in part to assure the strong position of the medical school in the university's overall future.
When Wilbur took office in January 1916, Stanford University was financially weak and the faculty poorly paid. One of his first acts was to raise salaries noticeably, and on a more rationalized basis. His longtime familiarity with the campus was a great initial asset, but this was somewhat offset, in the eyes of the arts and sciences faculty, by his evident partiality to the medical school. Moreover, fund-raising efforts were hampered by the widespread but erroneous impression that the Stanfords had given the institution a permanently generous endowment. Though resources did gradually improve, Wilbur's administration witnessed slow growth rather than dramatic upturn. Student enrollment increased from 2, 199 in 1916 to 5, 179 in 1941; during the same period, endowment doubled to reach $50 million. The number of graduate students increased sharply, from 342 to 1, 670.
The coming of World War I interfered with Wilbur's plans and caused his first absence from the university to engage in national public service. Unlike the university's chancellor, David Starr Jordan, who was an outspoken pacifist, Wilbur threw himself wholeheartedly into war preparedness. In what may have been the most consequential action of his life, he played an early and forceful role in bringing Herbert Hoover's name before President Woodrow Wilson as a possible wartime food administrator. Hoover, after receiving the appointment, named Wilbur as one of his assistants, in charge of the domestic campaign to save food. Coining the slogan, "Food will win the war, " Wilbur spent some months touring the country, crusading among local public officials and housewives against food waste. The results powerfully reenforced his belief in the efficacy of voluntary cooperation. Wilbur also aided in student mobilization efforts and more generally helped incite patriotic emotions. He always retained his admiration for Wilson as a war leader. Yet calmer after-thought enabled him to avoid the extremes of nationalistic conformity in viewing American history; the right teaching of it, he later believed, "would do a great deal to take a little cockiness out of the so-called '100-percent American. '"
Upon his return to Stanford, Wilbur began a program of alterations that led to several major changes. Wartime pressures, combined with his native bent toward efficiency, first produced a shift from the semester to the quarter system in the fall of 1917; this became permanent. Wilbur also engineered two departures aimed at reducing the power of the academic departments. Stanford's structure had leaned unusually far toward departmental autonomy; subject majors could begin in the freshman year, with a minimum of required general courses.
In 1920 the four-year course was divided into an upper and a lower division, with majors confined to the junior and senior years and a new emphasis on common liberal education courses to precede them. Even more tellingly, departments were grouped into a number of schools (created between 1922 and 1925) that played a major role in promotions and appointments of professors. The result was the subjection of the faculty to a new degree of administrative pressure and control. Grading and attendance procedures were standardized. The chain of command was tightened from the top downward. Further changes of the postwar period ran counter to Wilbur's inclinations. Because the founders desired that poor boys be given every opportunity to attend college, Stanford had never charged tuition. In 1920, under press of financial conditions, tuition fees were reluctantly imposed. The result was to alter the tone of Stanford in the direction of wealth and social elitism, much against Wilbur's own convictions. (As an undergraduate he had opposed fraternities, and he had refused to wear academic dress at his inauguration, so deep ran his commitment to plainness. ) Finally, in 1919 alumni pressure compelled Wilbur to permit a return to intercollegiate football, reversing a policy that had existed since 1905.
The appointment in 1924 of a big-time coach, Glenn Warner, seemed in particular a betrayal of Wilbur's values. Both changes revealed the limitations upon a hard-driving university president's power to control the atmosphere of his own institution. The alumni had to be courted because their gifts were desperately needed, and they demanded a Stanford in their own image rather than Wilbur's. To counterattack, Wilbur sought during the 1920's to abolish all lower division (freshman and sophomore) instruction, encouraging junior colleges to provide a substitute. The alumni perceived that such a change would destroy the heartland of undergraduate social life, turning Stanford into an unrecognizably serious institution, and Wilbur met repeated defeat on the issue. Wilbur's own sympathies lay with scientific research and with the sternly purposeful moralism of his boyhood. The humanities languished at Wilbur's Stanford, and his Darwinian positivism kept him remote from religion. Science connoted a specialization of effort that implied both inner discipline from an early age and a functional view of life. Dissipation was anathema. Only somewhat less obviously than James Rowland Angell at Yale, Wilbur thus revealed himself to be out of step with the high-living, clublike institution he headed. He made all the necessary compromises that enabled him to remain an outward success. But in the process he lost any chance to be remembered as an exceptional academic leader of his generation.
Herbert Hoover's rise to the presidency in 1928 gave Wilbur an opportunity in an environment beyond these limitations. Wilbur had helped promote the Hoover boom in 1920; a lifelong Republican with progressive leanings, he had said he would support Hoover even if he ran as a Democrat. In 1928 he, and most of Stanford, campaigned for Hoover openly and stridently. Hoover appointed Wilbur secretary of the interior, a post that he held for the entire four years, while Stanford marked time with an acting president. Wilbur's policies were indistinguishable from those of his chief, except that he pushed the construction of Hoover Dam more vigorously (and named it on his own initiative, thereby sparking a protracted controversy). Like Hoover, Wilbur believed that the holding of national conferences was the best means for bringing scientific expertise to bear on the solving of social problems; by collecting and publicizing information the government had done its part.
Like Hoover, Wilbur believed in minimizing federal bureaucracy; he disappointed his academic colleagues by refusing to support a cabinet-level Department of Education. In the same spirit, he played a prominent part over the years in opposing socialized medicine, and he minimized the government's role in selling electric power. He took pride in running the Department of the Interior with new efficiency, but did not believe in altering its essential functions. His approach to the problem of the Great Depression was calculatedly to ignore it. The Interior Department had been criticized for showing a sometimes corrupt partiality to large business interests ever since the Teapot Dome oil scandals of the Harding administration. Wilbur ended any remaining aroma of corruption, but effectively allowed the partiality to continue. The leasing of oil fields (and oil shale deposits) on government land to private corporations remained a major issue during these years. Hoover's policy, which Wilbur cheerfully executed, was to restrict the granting of new leases as much as possible and to insist upon higher standards of efficiency in the way in which the lands were tapped. At a time when the future of the world's oil reserves appeared dangerously limited, this approach seemed to favor prudent conservation. But it also coincided with the interests of the existing large oil corporations, reducing their competition and keeping gasoline prices high. Wilbur (and Hoover) genuinely favored conservation of natural resources, and Wilbur was proud of his numerous small additions to the national park system. Yet individualistic beliefs and constitutional scruples prevented as much positive movement in the direction of orderly planning as his rhetoric promised. A certain groundwork was laid for the interventionist policies of the Roosevelt administration, but in most areas so little action resulted that ardent conservationists were severely disappointed.
With regard to Indian policy, which greatly interested Wilbur, congressional legislation gave him little leeway, but he personally favored complete assimilation of Indians into the mainstream of American life and the dissolution of reservations. He was at various times president of the American Medical Association (1923 - 1924), the California Physicians' Service, a body that established voluntary health care along the lines of his own earlier thinking (1939 - 1945), and the American Social Hygiene Association (1936 - 1948). He was American chairman of the Institute of Pacific Relations (1925-1929 and 1948 - 1949), a citizens' group devoted to the study of foreign relations in the Pacific area, and supported it vigorously when it was attacked as pro-Communist after World War II. In 1923-1925 Wilbur headed a major study of race relations concerning Asians on the Pacific Coast. He opposed legal restrictions against aliens and supported assimilation with full equality. Upon returning to the Stanford presidency in 1933, Wilbur faced the problems occasioned by the depression. He cut faculty salaries temporarily, but managed to keep the university fully staffed.
In 1941 he dedicated a new building on campus to house the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, and the following year he presided over the establishment of a broadly based School of Humanities. His long term as university head came to an end in 1943 when he moved into the honorary post of chancellor. He died of a coronary thrombosis at his home on the Stanford campus at the age of seventy-four; his remains were cremated.
Early rejecting evangelical Christian orthodoxy (his family was Congregationalist), he nonetheless retained his mother's sternly moralistic outlook, including the hostility to alcohol that made him a lifelong teetotaler.
Personality
Wilbur's erect, muscular body made him look even taller than he was. His eyes were penetrating, his nose and mouth unusually large. His face often seemed to wear a quizzical expression. In appearance and manners, he was formal rather than folksy. His efficient style struck many people as too abrupt. In his office he worked so rapidly, doing several things at once, that some callers came away believing he had hardly listened to them. He liked to make decisions instantly, in a machinelike fashion. As a student he had always enjoyed the punctual fulfillment of routine assignments, implicitly shunning open-endedness. Yet he was also sometimes remembered as tolerant and sympathetic, even kindly. A joiner by temperament, Wilbur served in an unusually large number of organizations.
Interests
He developed a keen love of the outdoors, expressed through fishing, the observation of wildlife, and increasingly adventurous forays of travel.
Connections
On December 5, 1898, he married Marguerite Blake, a former Stanford student and the daughter of a San Francisco physician. They had five children: Jessica Foster, Blake Colburn, Dwight Locke, Lois Proctor, and Ray Lyman.