CHAPTER 6
A Willingness to Venture
“In my last two years at Carleton I had a hell of a good time, but there wasn’t much intellectual enjoyment in it. I simply was not designed to be taught in schools, and I have often said that I am glad that I received what passes for a respectable education before all of this was taken so seriously.”1
ROBERT K. GREENLEAF
Drive through the rural Minnesota prairie where Route 19 meets Route 3, about forty-five miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and you will enter Northfield. A sign at the city limits welcomes visitors to a place of “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” The cows can be seen just outside of town, where they presumably munch their way inside city limits when no one is looking. The colleges include St. Olaf and Carleton, and contentment seems to be pretty much everywhere. Today, the town retains much of the charm it had when Bob Greenleaf arrived there in 1924, and probably more than in 1876 when the Jesse James gang robbed the First National Bank on Division Street, shooting and killing Joseph Lee Heywood for refusing to open the safe.
66In 1924, Carleton College was a church-related, liberal arts institution. Bob’s Uncle John picked the right school for a young man interested in astronomy in the 1920s. Astronomy had made Carleton famous from Chicago to Seattle.
In 1871, only five years after its founding, Carleton hired William Wallace Payne as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Payne stayed at Carleton for nearly forty years. He demanded much from his students and inspired the most famous pun in Carleton history: “He never knew pleasure who knew Payne.”2 Payne’s real interest lay in astronomy, which was probably the most popular science of the day. In the first of several shrewd moves, he began buying astronomy instruments with his own money and in 1876 convinced the school to build and equip the first Goodsell Observatory, named after Carleton College’s founder.3 Payne found a practical niche for the school’s astronomy program—time and weather services.
In the 1870s, an accurate, widely distributed time standard was important to the nation’s railroads. Punctual departures and arrivals built the trust of riders, and exact timing was critical to switch tracks and avoid collisions. Coincidentally, Goodsell Observatory also needed a precise system for measuring time. Payne saw the opportunity. In 1878, the Carleton time service sent out the first time signals west of the Mississippi to railroads in the Twin Cities and Chicago. In 1883, the observatory provided a time ball service in St. Paul. Every day at noon, a sphere was dropped down a pole atop the Fire and Marine building so that all residents could set their watches and clocks. A similar service has been preserved in the New Year’s Eve celebration in New York’s Times Square. By 1888, Carleton College, a tiny school on Minnesota’s plains, was known as the timekeeper for the entire Northwest, a distinction it held until World War II. The Goodsell Observatory also became the site of the first weather monitoring station in the state, established by the U.S. Signal Corps in 1881. The college sent free weather reports and forecasts to newspapers within a 200-mile area, which were happy to include the Carleton College byline in each report.4
In 1886, the school built a new Goodsell Observatory, where Bob Greenleaf was destined to spend many late hours. It is a splendid Romanesque structure that has since been placed in the National Registry of Historic Places. By the time Bob Greenleaf arrived in 1924, the school had graduated—and hired—a number of distinguished astronomers, 67 including Herbert Couper Wilson, who had organized the trip to Catalina Island that had so impressed Bob.
Northfield was smaller than Terre Haute, but the campus culture was positively cosmopolitan compared to Rose Poly. This was the Jazz Age, the postwar era of world-weary sophisticates. Bob was not cynical like his distant relative T.S. Eliot, whose Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was the bored battle cry for the disillusioned of the time, but he was also not immune to the saucy insouciance that had infected even the Carleton community. The student newspaper, The Carletonian, tracked the times in a typical piece by the editor, whose pen name was Jake. It was called “Confessional.”
We are the young intellectuals.
We possess the gray hairs of youth.
We mouth half-truths learnedly and when called to account reply: All is relative.
We scoff at religion as superstition; at faith as a sign of ignorance; at hope as delusion; at love as self-deception. We criticize that we may seem to be above criticism. We are pseudo-radicals, pseudo-philosophers, and pseudo-cynics; our logic is faulty and our premises unsound… We are the young intellectuals.5
A few days later a student wrote a reply to the editor; “Outside of the classrooms I have seen among the most of us nothing that might legitimately earn for us even the ‘pseudo-’ part of (Jake’s) definitions. Our classroom thinking will be of small benefit to us if it is not carried over into the larger fields of human action and thought.”6
Bob Greenleaf, ever the pragmatist, might have replied, “Exactly!” He was not one who indulged in abstract philosophical speculations for fun; they had to be connected to action. In that sense, he was a serious student. His majors were mathematics and astronomy, with minors in economics and English.7 He quickly became disillusioned with what he saw as lack of rigor, at least in mathematics. “I daresay that very few of my Carleton classmates would have survived the regime at Rose,” he once wrote. “At Rose, mathematics was something everybody had to learn to use. At Car-leton it was something that one played around with.”8
A student discussion group in Bob’s first year at Carleton would have supported his observation. In answer to the question, “What are we in 68 college for?” students outlined four reasons: “. . . for culture, because our parents want us to be here, because the period just following high school is a transitional age and, in the perplexity of most boys and girls in deciding what they wish to do—the idea of college seems the simplest solution and (finally) men come to college for athletics.”9
Bob’s criticism extended to some faculty members. He had a paying job with the astronomy department, keeping track of a thousand or so asteroids in the solar system. Most students would have simply done the work and collected the paycheck, but that was not good enough for Bob. Still, astronomy left its mark on the young stargazer.
The method of locating (the asteroids) and calculating their positions had been worked out by the older of the three professors I worked with. It was a self checking procedure and not too difficult to follow. But I was curious about how the formulae had been derived. The old professor was amused by my questions, but he could no longer work it out. When I went home for Christmas I stopped to see Uncle John and he couldn’t work it out either. So here I was grinding away with the primitive hand-cranked calculator of that day on a procedure that nobody around could describe. I gave up. That was not the way I wanted to spend my life. So I finished out the year with this work and got another college job for the next year and left astronomy behind.
If any one of these professors had been a dedicated researcher, I might have caught some inspiration. But they weren’t. They were quite friendly folks and good to me. But there was no challenge.10
I did some thinking during those long quiet hours of darkness. What was out there? Space without limit; time without a beginning; staggering masses and distances; old stars blowing up; new stars being born; all in motion. I got an idea of a great cosmic force, magnificent order beyond the power of a little man’s mind to grasp. I feel small and insignificant, yet as important as any other part. I am a part. Maybe a big part; maybe a little part. Maybe I “only stand and wait.” I don’t worry about it. Whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be. I just watch for my signals.11 69
Bob may have been intellectually curious, but he was not an egghead. For one thing, he was sweet on several girls. In the 1925 yearbook Algol, Robert Greenleaf and “Babe” Lockin were mentioned as one of the couples that shared “Adventures in Friendship.” One stanza of the poem introducing the couples illustrates the sweet innocence that survived at Carleton, even during the Roaring Twenties.
- Everything is wonderful
- On a night in June,
- Walking home the longest way,
- Getting there too soon.12
Claudia M. Bray Hyde, class of ‘25, was asked by her grandchild years later, “What was it like at Carleton when you were there? What did you do? Where did you go on dates?”
“I told her of ice-skating on the (Cannon) river, of tobogganing on one of the campus hills, of canoeing, of hikes and picnics and an occasional dance.”13
Dancing was a fairly new activity at this Christian college. The first Junior-Senior Formal was not held until 1921, and the first all-college dance in December of 1924. Still, the faculty restricted where and when students could dance, and the college catalog reminded students that “social activities of the College are under the supervision of the faculty, and every effort is made to provide a natural and wholesome social life.”14
There may not have been many hip flasks and Stutz Bearcats among students, but the Twenties were still seen in fashions—”short skirts with belt lines at the hips for women and turtle-neck sweaters, coon-skin coats, and knickers in the spring and fall for men.” Bobs and bangs were the rage in women’s hair styles.15
In his first year at Carleton, Bob got involved in school plays, working behind the scenes as stage manager or lighting director. Sometimes he received more kudos than the actors. The review of Twelfth Night is but one example:
Robert K. Greenleaf deserves special congratulation upon the work which he did with the lighting and scenery. Seldom does an amateur production have the artistic play of light which he gave to this with 70 mobile blending of color such as one expects in Theatre Guild productions. The set for the Duke’s palace with stars visible in the night sky outside the window was the most effective. Mr. Greenleaf designed and made the three piece window used in this set, as he did the bunch lights, proscenium strips, and switchboard used for the lighting. He was assisted by Edward Ouelette.16
Ed Ouelette was one of the first friends Bob made at Carleton. Ed, a Minnesota native, was a bright freshman, one year younger than all the others in his class. Ed had what he called an “inferiority complex” when he met Greenleaf on the top floor of Willis Hall, constructing scenery for a play.
He took me and kind of put me under his wing . As we did things, I think his instinct was to bring me out. It was during that time that I began to realize that I could serve. But, he also had this instinct to serve me.17 On reflecting on it, I can see that he had more maturity and more skill in these things he did with his hands and was helping me to feel good about doing that kind of thing myself, which I wanted to do. Working with him, I could feel that I did a good job and we could rejoice in it together.18
I was amazed at his knowledge of electrical stuff because he fixed it so you could turn on this and that light, and he made fixtures. We made an electric sign that spelled out the college yell that we hung on the front of the dormitory.19
Ed and Bob were involved in a few college hijinks. Because of his other responsibilities, Ed had keys to many of the buildings on campus. He and Bob went into the music building one night, located the breakers for the girl’s dormitory, turned off the power, and high-tailed it out of there.20 That episode and several others landed him in the office of the “Prexy,” college president Dr. Donald Cowling. In the privacy of Prexy’s office, Bob discovered a man who was warmer than his image as an aloof, reserved intellectual whose main interest was raising money for Carleton. In a tribute to Dr. Cowling forty years later, Greenleaf recalled how he “discovered the man few knew, a man with deep and dependable 71 understanding and compassion and with an unequivocal belief in freedom for the human spirit to flower. I was too young to understand it all at the time, but it is an influence that has grown through the years and continues to grow.”21
Ed Ouelette said that one thing that would surprise most people about Bob was his capacity for creative mischief. It was not a trait Green-leaf denied or even regretted.
After I was through with astronomy I didn’t fit. I didn’t want anything in particular except to get my sheepskin and get the—out of there. So I became a hell raiser. Not the noisy rough kind of hell raising, but the more orderly kind where something went boom on one side of the campus while I was quietly studying in my room on the other side.”22
I am sorry for those who have never gotten into trouble because they really cannot share my experience. It is one thing to understand compassion intellectually, or even to give it. It is quite another thing to receive compassion when one knows that all one is entitled to is justice. There is no one best way to live a life, I have concluded. There are penalties and compensations for being ‘good’ as well as for being ‘bad’. Paradoxically, one must be both good and bad to enjoy this life to the full or to comprehend its meaning.23
Ed says that, “Bob was always looking slightly over the horizon someplace.”24 The two of them remained lifelong friends, with Bob generally serving as the older mentor. On matters of theology, though, Bob often learned from Ed, who grew into a well-read theologian and respected pastor.
Near the end of his first semester at Carleton, Greenleaf became a leader in an unlikely arena: the Men’s Glee Club. Since the 1880s, the Glee Club had been a prominent musical fixture at Carleton, but it had recently fallen on hard times. The college wanted to regain the Glee Club’s luster because the popular group could tour during semester breaks, bringing positive attention to the school. The women had a Glee Club too, but they were not allowed to give concerts out of town. Bob sang rumbling bass, and his pal Ed sang tenor during rehearsals for just such a tour. But things were not going well.
72With the (musical) leadership we had, we were getting absolutely nowhere and we were coming up on a January trip. So, Bob took it upon himself to go to the president of the college and just tell him what was what with our men’s Glee Club. The result was that Cowling said, “Is this for real? Because if I act, I want it to be the right thing.”
So he fired the one guy and put in another one and we had an intensive three weeks of rehearsal. We were able to make the trip. But it was Greenleaf who, for the good of the college and everybody in the group, saw that something was done. If that’s not leadership, I don’t know what is!25
Where others may have grumbled about the situation with the Glee Club, Bob Greenleaf acted. His decision was not likely to make him popular with the music director or the school administration, but he did it anyway. He had the example of student leaders who had confronted the president of Rose Polytechnic, the memory of his father’s many battles with powerful political authorities, and an abiding ethic that was already in place: to serve first. It would not be the last time Bob would confront school authorities at Carleton.
One day in philosophy class, the professor noticed that most students were drowsy and inattentive, undoubtedly because of a late-night social function the previous evening. Bob, who called himself “a night owl by nature,” seemed to be the only alert student in the class. The professor stopped speaking to gain attention, then said slowly, “You know, there is only one person in this room who is paying any attention to what I am saying.” “Then [he] directed his eye at me with something of a half cynical smile.” Bob recalled years later, “whereupon my classmates turned and regarded me with that malevolent countenance reserved for those who give the teacher an apple. Then the professor added, ‘And he doesn’t know what it is all about,’ thus relieving me of the odium of being the teacher’s pet, but implanting the seal of interdiction irrevocably so far as any scholarly aspirations on my part were concerned.”26
If an academic life was not in the cards, what was? Bob was eager to hear any vocational suggestion that would fit his unusual temperament as an insider/outsider. The direction came from an unlikely source: Dr. Oscar C. Helming, the goateed chairman of the Economics Department. Ed 73 Ouelette said Professor Helming made his students read some “awfully dull” textbooks, but that he could make economics interesting in the class-room.27 Helming was destined to be a prophet to the young man by suggesting the course and meaning of his career.
Helming, an ordained Congregational minister, believed in a version of the social gospel that Bob Greenleaf had learned from the Methodists. In a pamphlet titled The Church and the Industrial Problem, written for the Chicago Church Federation the year he came to Carleton, Helming stated:
The Christian gospel stands for the moral growth of the individual, for personal salvation. It also stands for social salvation. We now realize that these two things are in the end inseparable.28
Furthermore, Helming taught that one’s Christian duty was to serve—not just neighbors, but organizations. In a 1924 vesper service at Carleton, he spoke on a scripture that many clergy would later choose to explain servant-leadership: “He who would be great among you will be your servant.” Devoting one’s life to service and sacrifice, even unto death, was the highest calling.29
Most of the Reverend Doctor Helming’s work in economics was about understanding and humanizing capitalism. He was a realist who wished to see things as they were, not as they should be, but argued for the central role of ethics in American business life.
Ethics is not a substitute for economics; it is not a substitute for any kind of accurate knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge is dead unless it is somehow related to action… But if ethics must yield to knowledge, knowledge must in turn be responsive to moral impulses . . .30
To Oscar Helming, the moral or ethical impulse was as concrete as labor and capital. It was simply there, and it was powerful.
[Ethical impulse] is revolutionary, breaking the bonds of outworn traditions and customs. It allows no stagnation, no inertia, no crystallization of special privilege which robs the mass in the interest of the 74 few. It is a vital force which stirs the spirit and will of man, touching his power to do, as well as his knowledge of what ought to be done. As such it has an essential part to play in economic life as well as in education, in politics and in religion.31
In this context, the role of faith communities was to “help create an atmosphere in which good will and fair play shall thrive… It must keep the human factor to the front as against the insidious temptation to pursue profits at the expense of human well-being.”32 Helming foresaw a day when America’s economic system would hasten a kind of heaven on earth, provided people of good will—that is, ethical servants—did their jobs.
If in our homes, schools and churches, a new generation of people were trained to appreciate the various values attainable in a civilized country, public opinion would cease to estimate men by their possessions and learn to estimate them by their qualities as persons. Able business men would still handle large sums of money; but they would reckon with capital resources as means to carry out projects to enrich society… The distinction between the public servant in business and the selfish profiteer would be clear and unmistakable.”33
In some ways, Helming was an intellectual version of Bob’s father, more vocal but equally dedicated to social action. He was involved in the exciting events associated with the progressive labor movements of the day, had taken stands in favor of strikers at US Steel in Gary, and persistently questioned the methodology of industry leaders, especially their attitudes towards their own workers. The response from management was predictable: abuse and rejection.
In June, 1921, Helming wrote a polite letter to the Minnesota Steel Company in Duluth asking permission to tour the plant, explaining that he was a newcomer to the northwest and wanted to “know the conditions in Minnesota as thoroughly as possible” to enhance his teaching at Carleton.34
In response, Mr. S. B. Sheldon, Vice President and General Manager at Minnesota Steel, fired off a letter to Carleton president Dr. Cowling. “The information that Mr. Helming asks for and the privilege requested is that 75 which is not ordinarily granted in manufacturing plants. I would be glad to hear from you personally as to what purpose Mr. Helming proposes to put his information to.”35 There is no evidence that Mr. Sheldon knew of Helming’s pamphlet The Church and the Industrial Problem, but he probably suspected another do-gooder was on the loose, looking for problems to preach against. There were plenty of those pesky people around in 1921, especially in the church.
Cowling wrote back in firm support of Dr. Helming, explaining that the information would be used in the Professor’s classes, but he went even further.
I feel that it is exceedingly important that the educated people in the country understand thoroughly the conditions which exist in our great industrial centers. I also believe that complete publicity on the part of our great manufacturing centers would do much to help solve some of our labor problems… I do not believe that any proper and legitimate policy in industrial or commercial undertakings will be injured by publicity.36
Two days later, Mr. Sheldon wrote both Doctors Helming and Cowling that the Minnesota Steel Company would be delighted to have the good professor visit; he would find them a “startling example of what the Corporation is trying to do and in most cases succeeding, for its employees.” Unfortunately, the only people who could explain matters properly, including himself, would be out of town next week when the professor wanted to visit.37 It must have been a hastily scheduled trip. In any case, there is no evidence that Dr. Helming ever had the opportunity to tour the plant.
As a result of this and other encounters, Helming eventually decided that the fulcrum for changing large organizations must be positioned inside institutions like Minnesota Steel, not outside. Bob Greenleaf was ready to hear that insight, which was prophetic for 1926. It was communicated in a course on the Sociology of Labor Problems.
Helming was not a great scholar nor an exciting teacher. But he was, to me then, different from my other teachers. He had been around; he was wise. We were simpatico. 76
One day, in the course of a rambling lecture, he made a statement like this: “We are becoming a nation of large institutions… Everything is getting big—government, churches, businesses, labor unions, universities—and none of these big institutions are serving well, either the people whom they are set up to serve or the people who staff them to render the service. Now, you can do as I do: stand outside and suggest, encourage, try to bring pressure on them to do better. But nothing happens, nothing changes, until somebody who is established inside with his hands on the levers of power and influence, and who knows how to change things, decides to respond. These institutions can be bludgeoned, coerced, threatened from the outside. But they can only be changed from the inside by somebody who knows how to do it and who wants to do it. Some of you folks ought to make your careers inside these institutions and become the ones who respond to the idea that they could do better.”
There was not much response to this suggestion that morning. I had a short talk with Professor Helming later, but he didn’t have much more to say about his suggestion. I have no idea what other students got from this statement, and I regret that I had no further communication with Professor Helming. But, really, it was many years, and Professor Helming was long since dead, before I realized the full significance of what was said that morning. I am not sure that I fully realize it yet because it is still a growing idea.
My doors of perception must have been open wider than usual that morning because that remark set the course of my life. I did not think of it in those grandiose terms at that time. I have never been one to set big idealistic goals. I just work along from day to day and let inspiration guide me. Not much of the current “futures” talk moves me. I am much more concerned with what I am doing right now, and what is now visible on the horizon, and at this time I decided to follow this advice from Professor Helming, I was thinking only of what I could do next after graduation.38
Bob was offered a fellowship to stay and take a Masters degree in Astronomy, but it was too late.
Clearly, at that point, I was through with school. In fact, I had arrived at a rather low opinion of education. I was glad that I had my 77 experience at Rose, glad that I left when I did, glad that I had my experience with the construction company, glad that I had taken a look at astronomy and rejected it, glad for the experience at Carleton— particularly for that one piece of advice from Professor Helming. But I knew I wanted no further education in terms of pursuing a degree. I even toyed with the idea of packing my bags, saying goodbye to my friends, and leaving after my last class, skipping the final exams. The degree lacked meaning and still does. I guess that I didn’t have the guts to act on that idea. It would, of course, have hurt my parents and probably would have been only an act of bravado. But I did think about it enough to ask that none of the family come to graduation, and a negative attitude toward “degree hunting” persists to this day.39
Carleton College almost saved Bob the trouble of leaving on his own without a degree; the Dean was prepared to withhold his sheepskin for other reasons. When he arrived at Carleton, Bob had been pleasantly surprised to learn that, due to his Indiana State work and the rigorous nature of the Rose program, more credits transferred to Carleton than he had expected. As he neared the end of his senior year however, he was informed that, upon recalculating the transferred credits, the school decided he still did not have enough for graduation. He would need to return the following year. Bob disagreed. He thought the school’s record keeping was inaccurate. Besides, in his mind, the right credits in the right categories were not the point of education. If the school decided not to graduate him, that was fine. He would simply be on his way. He was not about to do something to meet someone else’s expectations.
The school backed down and justified his degree by giving four hours’ credit for a course at Rose Polytech in which Bob had earned a grade of D+. The school decided he could graduate in 1926, but his views on higher education were soured forever.
One of the darkest days of my life was the day I graduated from college. Being given somewhat to emotional speculations on my own capacity for development, I had gone to college with high hopes. I emerged without distinction (on the verge of disgrace, in fact), disillusioned, with a diploma that I promptly lost. Equilibrium was restored only after years of speculation when I concluded that my role was to know nothing.40 78I did not have the questioning attitude toward the adequacy of undergraduate education that I now have. But the seeds of questioning were laid then, and they have kept germinating for these nearly fifty-five years.41
Still, Bob got the degree, without which he would probably have never enjoyed the career he did. In the final tiff with Carleton, his fierce integrity of purpose had shown itself again. Ed Ouelette knew Bob would win the fight either way.
When crisis incidents like this came up, there was just no question about which way he was going to go.
I think he connected that with something I would call “adven-turesomeness,” which is a kind of act of faith. It’s a hunch that you go into this thing somehow believing that things will reorient themselves as people have the integrity to act. Things reorient themselves around that. This may be where we connected without ever stating it… a willingness to venture.42
In later years, Greenleaf sometimes faulted Carleton as a place that lacked “spirit.” It was not that way for Ed Ouelette or many other classmates like John Nason, who eventually served as the school’s president. By Bob’s own account though, his Carleton days were pleasant, even if he did feel that familiar, poignant sense of being an outsider.
I enjoyed my two years at Carleton. I made some lifelong friends, got involved in dramatics, raised a little hell, fell in and out of love, and generally fit the role of the not-too-serious college boy of the twenties. But I did not “fit” the way I did in high school. I was, in a sense, “outgroup.” I was my own group. And have been ever since.43
He may have been “outgroup,” but the in-group noticed Bob’s quiet, behind-the-scenes services. After praising his feat of raising a huge electric Carleton sign atop West Hall for Homecoming, the 1926 Carleton yearbook, the Algol, said, “Time and again, Bob has been the man upon whose 79 shoulders fell the responsibility for making a dance or a play a success from the electrical and mechanical standpoint. This is always an arduous and unappreciated job but Bob has functioned royally.”44
As he and one-hundred thirty five classmates walked across the stage to get diplomas, Robert K. Greenleaf’s destiny was in motion. The only thing he needed was an arena big enough in which to play it out.