Treasures of the Texas Collection
Samuel Palmer Brooks
Hi! I’m Robert Darden, and Associate Professor of Journalism and your host for Treasures of the Texas Collection. The impact that Samuel Palmer Brooks left on Baylor University can be gauged by the number of students who – eighty years later – still concentrate their theses on his works and documents. Under Brook’s administration from 1902 to 1931, Baylor enrollment grew by the thousands, numerous specialized schools sprouted within Baylor, and Brooks allowed the student population to adopt the Bear as the school’s mascot. He not only developed a unique relationship with an admiring group of followers from the university’s staff and students, but also from civic and community leaders in the Waco area.
Brooks was stoutly devoted to human rights, speaking on behalf of all victims who were denied equal education and social standing. He was respected as a selfless human being, who even during his last days remained dedicated to the progression of Southern education.
Freelance writer Corley Sims spent a lot of time at the Texas Collection researching President Brooks. And, she says, she found a fascinating, remarkably modern man in many ways. Welcome to Treasures of the Texas Collection, Corley!
Thank you, Robert. It’s true – and the Texas Collection contains a wealth of resources relating to the president -- everything from biographical studies to “The Samuel Palmer Brooks Papers,” a large collection of boxes containing letters to and from the president, financial statements about the school, educational decrees from his presidency, and documentation of his speeches.
The most remarkable documents I uncovered at the archives were Brook’s speeches. He not only delivered progressive messages of morality and educational development, but did so with a lyrical quality that flows with poetic grace. His later fluency with language was perhaps sparked by an early fascination with the configuration of words and deciphering the intention behind phrases.
Where did this begin? Do we know?
I believe this fascination is best seen in the collection of letters Brooks wrote to his father during his years at Yale University. After graduating from Baylor, Brooks had gone on to Yale to earn an additional bachelor’s degree. These letters were collected and published by his son, Sims Palmer Brooks, in a book called “The Yale Letters from Samuel Palmer Brooks to His Father.” Brooks was impressed with the roundness of education he received at Yale as compared to his previous studies at Baylor. He found that his mind was not only broadened intellectually by the northern school, but also socially.
He does not go into detail about the majority of his classes in the Yale Letters. However, his literary studies captivated Brooks enough to convey the details to his father. Brooks was so stirred by his discoveries in literature that he sought to pass on his insights in those letters. He recommended numerous poems, books and plays to his father, taking the time to mail his own school books and point out specific passages so that his father might be inspired as Brooks was. “The more I read Hamlet for example,” he says, “the more I see in it and I feel like begging everybody to read it and study it, not stopping there but read more & more of other plays, but I am reminded of what Ophelia said to Laertes:
Do not as some ungracious pastors
Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,
While like a puffed & reckless libertine
Himself the primrose path of dalliance tread
And recks not his own reed.
After citing this quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Brooks concludes “I do not take my own advice as I ought.”
Ha! He’s not alone there, is he?
Brooks decided literature was a study that had been overlooked in his previous education. “I think we ought to have studied more the thing themselves and the history incidentally.” He vouched for the educational value of some of the greatest composers of his time: Tennyson, Emerson, Longfellow, and Shakespeare, saying, “The more I read these men, the more I find history, literature, art and philosophy wrapped up in the poetic masterpiece of these giants.”
The language in Brook’s casual letters to his father marked the early signs of a man who would evolve into an inspiring orator.
What I’ve read of the man leads me to believe he was an equally adept speaker, as well.
Yes! The speeches during his career as president exhibit a style that flows with elegance, a style that would have impressed those authors that cultivated Brook’s attention in school. One of the most notable speeches Brooks delivered was called “Climbing Down Fool’s Hill,” in which Brooks describes how a morally sound man might descend from the peak where the shallowest of men clamber up.
Brooks explains, “The young man, self-centered whose only assets are ancestry and good clothes is going up. The young man who counts not himself save (sic)as by good merit, who counsels with the experience of himself and that of others, whose will is commensurate with his opportunities, whose honor is unspotted with evil – such one is climbing down.”
Brook’s metaphorical draws on morality seem to echo the Psalms, speaking the truths of life through poetic expression. He did not condemn the man on the top of the mountain, but identifies his placement on the mountain, and offers hope for the man’s departure from Fool’s Hill.
Brooks was a highly religious man all of his life, from what I understand.
That’s right. And his speeches incorporated a ministerial quality. His speech continues as he classifies the men traveling this hill, saying those going up have lost the value of family, and become lost in their ego. It is those men who are descending the hill, void of greed and filled with selflessness, who will conquer the hill and make their way back to an ethical and fulfilling lifestyle.
Brooks respect for women and his belief in their equality also come to light in this speech. He says, “When a young man thinks all the girls are crazy about him, that he has to dodge their attention, he is high on the heights where dwell fools. When he pays respectful attention to girls, recognizes them as his equals, comes to see that they are losing no time or sleep thinking of him, he has found himself climbing down where dwell the sensible. Let a young fellow underrate the character of a woman, let him besmirch his own character, thinking it is allowable or tolerated by respectability anywhere, he is going up fast. Let him think every woman is pure as his mother, let him know that he must himself be as pure if he would be worthy of the love of woman or of God and he is putting fool’s heights to his back and sanity’s level to his front.”
Sound advice – and very modern for its day.
And he’s not finished. Brooks further says that climbing down Fool’s Hill would take a man who is completely committed to a higher better purpose, not simply going through the motions. He ties all these metaphorical ideas back to college education at the end of his speech saying “The college student who thinks that by attendance to every duty he will grow into wisdom’s ways is facing from the hill of folly. The farmer lad without money whose only asset is health and a good purpose, who is boom-proof from discouragement, having set his face towards college is climbing down to bed rock.”
Beautifully said! Obviously, Brooks was a thoughtful man and things like this mattered to him.
Brooks believed that social humanity and selflessness, the characteristics of the man descending the hill, working in hand with education would lead to a greater society as a whole. An educated man without civic responsibility was merely a disappointment, he believed.
In a commencement address, Brooks claimed that “Education is not a fad. Tell me the kind of school a people have and I will tell you what kind of people they are... Poor is the teacher, and irreconcilable is the preacher, who has no thought of social altruism... Man cannot be decent in any work of life unless he can rise to make his job a bit of social service.”
Again, this is an address that could be delivered to today’s college students.
Brooks was a man far before his own time on the human rights front as well. He spoke on behalf of grouped victims, women and blacks who could not receive equal education, and on a personal level, as he did many times for his deaf brother. The early signs of Brooks’ intolerance of human degradation are best illustrated in a letter to his father describing the horrors of hazing he witnessed at Yale.
Brooks writes about how the students of Yale “take the Freshies to the saloon, strip them, shampoo them with lager beer, make them drink lager mixed with sweet milk then smoke until deathly sick, meanwhile cheer ‘the class of 96’…Many of them are sons of senators, congressman, judges, ministers, millionaires, dudes, fools, and it seems to me devils.”
Brooks was disgusted by both the ritual and the town’s apparent support of this humiliation. He says the hazing was reported by the local papers “for amusement” and to “furnish fun for all the readers.”
The sad thing is, college hazing has only been abolished in recent years … and it still stubbornly endures in a lot of places – not just Yale.
He said there was an odd contrast between the intellectual side of the school and the activities students pursued during their free time. “You will understand that whatever exalted idea you may have of the scholarship of its professors you have not overshot the mark.” he says. The professors at this school have traveled extensively and were to be “taken as authority on their subjects.” But “strange combinations go in the name of religion.” he says, referring to the freshman hazing and other morally corrupt behavior he witnessed at the school. Texas schools were below par compared with the level of scholarship exhibited at Yale, but richer in moral fiber, he said “I see as I never saw before that Texas and the South need schools that shall offer the advantages here given without those elements that drag men to hell.” He says that “Baylor ought to cling sacredly to her religious dogmas and examples; yet at the same time shake off a little dust and offer more advanced methods of teaching.”
Interesting. Sounds like a man born to be a college president!
As a man born during the Civil War, Brooks had watched America slide into the industrial age, observing how the north and south portions of the country separately adapted. He traveled the Northeast and discovered a people who were more intellectually and economically advanced, and he believed the gap between the north and the south could be closed through broader education in the South. “More general education is the only remedy that I can see that shall prompt our people to see how far they are behind. The land is no better – not as good as the red hills of Georgia, yet while the Georgian is resting and waiting for the Yankee to make his goods the latter is rapidly getting rich and every day enjoying more of life’s luxuries than our people have on holidays.” he says in The Yale Letters.
Brooks defended Texas against those who stereotyped the state as a conservative, unenlightened territory. He believed fully that with the right measures taken, Texas could rival the advances and progression of the north. “Texans do not live in a corner,” he said in a later speech. “They are neighbors of the whole world. They do not think provincially. They think world thoughts. They are a composite people.”
He addresses the educational flaws of Texas education in comparison to the North, but ensures that he is confident improvement will be made. He says, “Progressive citizens taking the long look are determined to provide education for all Texans... As our citizens have grown in refinement and prosperity, so have grown the homes, urban and rural, in all creature comforts and cultural advantages. Our women through federated clubs are progressive in all their plans to this end. They can draw a map showing their work for social betterment... So one could go on recounting the varied activities of Texans, fraternal, social, political. Lay all the maps recounted above each other and one has a composite whole, a composite picture of a cosmopolitan people.”
Bravo! Now that’s a speech! Thank you, Corley, for bringing to life this modern Renaissance man. Sounds like we all need to read a little Samuel Palmer Brooks every now and then …
Now remember, as we begin our second story, that Samuel Palmer Brooks came to Baylor as a teacher in 1897. If he had been reading The Dallas Morning News – and everybody read The Dallas Morning News in those days – on the morning of April 17, 1897, he would have seen this stacked headline:
Flight of the Air Ship
A Mississippi Traveler Saw It In the Heavens Last Night
Mr. Griffin’s Strange Story
He saw the aerial traveler on the top of the courthouse – was overjoyed
Sensation in railroad circles
Freight Conductor J.E. Scully Caught a Glimpse of the Ship and Its Pilot Near Hawkins Tank
Now, that’s some headline! But then, this was some story. Fifty years before the events at Roswell, New Mexico, made the term UFO – unidentified flying object – a house-hold word, we had ‘em in Texas. And for the next few days, Texas newspapers reported on little else.
The newspaper noted that, suddenly, reports were coming in from everywhere, and all were about this amazing airship. One observer said that the craft looked like “a magnificent bird of passage.” A Mr. M.E. Griffin at the Dallas courthouse said he saw “the ship gliding through space like a thing of life.”
But the most detailed description came from Conductor J.E. Scully, nicknamed “Truthful” Scully by his friends. And – wait a minute – wasn’t one of the characters in “The X-Files” named “Scully?” I thought so.
Anyway, this is a direct quote from Truthful himself on the subject:
“Well, I saw the airship and I could scarcely believe my own eyes. Says I to myself, ‘They are seeing it everywhere. What’s the matter with taking a peep from the top of the courthouse?’ Well, I borrowed a powerful glass and climbed to the top of the courthouse. From my position, I could sweep the heavens in all directions. I had been there, say, ten minutes when to my great delight, I saw the airship going in a southeasterly direction with the velocity of the wind.
“It was shaped like a Mexican cigar, large in the middle and small at both ends, with great wings that made it look like an enormous butterfly. It was brilliantly illuminated by the rays of two great search lights. I shall never forget the magnificent spectacle and I very reluctantly descended to the earth. Ah, it was a sublime scene.”
Other observers had their own opinions, including one man who was convinced that the airship was between 150 and 200 feet long. Another man was a passenger on the southbound Missouri, Kansas and Texas train – and he claimed to have seen it as the train passed the town of Garland. Elsewhere, the newspaper is filled with other reports of the astonishing airship.
Now remember, too: this is a full six years before the flight of the Wright Brothers way out in Kitty Hawk, NC.
In Hillsboro, the Hon. J. Spence Bounds described the craft as being “a huge black monster” soaring about 1,000 feet above him, with light emanating from it. He too thought it was cigar-shaped.
In Paris, Texas, several observers that day saw the craft on the evening of April 16: “From what appeared to be at first a luminous cloud, there was now clearly outlined a monster airship.” Mr. J.A. Black also described sails or wings stretching out from a cigar-shaped body and whole craft being about 200 feet long. Black offered to sign an affidavit attesting to his truthfulness.
The following day, the newspapers continued their coverage. Many more people in Dallas stepped forward to vouch for Truthful Scully’s honesty. More reports flooded in from McLennan County, Kaufman County, Waxahachie, Whitney, Bonham, Cleburne, Texarkana – even as far as Beaumont. Everybody, it seemed, was seeing SOMETHING.
The Hon. A.T. Waits of Dallas, who saw the airship briefly, told a reporter, “I have a theory. I firmly believe that the 43 Greeks in Texas have clubbed together, purchased a serial airship from (Thomas) Edison or some other fellow and are experimenting before starting to Europe.” The Hon. Mr. Waits declined to identify either the “43 Greeks” or their supposed business in Europe.