USA > Vermont > Vermonters : a book of biographies > Part 11
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At the beginning of his administration his company was composed of the owners of about a million policies represent- ing insurance of two billion dollars, and the assets of the company were slightly less than five hundred millions of dollars. At the close of the year 1930, the twenty-fourth year of his presidency, there were in force over two and a half mil- lion policies representing insurance considerably in excess of seven billion dollars, and the company had accumulated assets, held in trust for the benefit of the policy-holders, amounting to ever one billion and seven hundred millions of dollars.
Such gigantic figures do not, like Topsy, merely grow. Somebody is responsible for them. The man on whose shoulders rests the ultimate burden of such a trusteeship, and who selects and calls to his aid the men who share this trustee- ship with him, is at least entitled to be called a great business administrator. But there is something more.
A reasonable brief might be drawn to show that the in- fluential leaders in the practical affairs of American life have been men of imagination. Indeed they have often been laughed at as "philosophers" and "visionaries" by the mere money-grubbers. The history of Vermont is singularly studded with the names of many such practical idealists in the fields of politics, aesthetics and industry. One has only to consult the index of this volume to see that this is so. Consider the in- fluence of such men as Senators Jacob Collamer, Stephen A. Douglas, George F. Edmunds, Justin S. Morrill, Ambassador
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Phelps and Admiral Dewey in the political history of the country; the brothers William Morris Hunt and Richard Morris Hunt in aesthetics; Henry O. Houghton and John Cotton Dana in the making and classification of books; Thad- deus Fairbanks, Theodore N. Vail, and Daniel Willard in the upbuilding of American history.
Darwin Kingsley belongs in this group. He is recognized by his contemporaries and peers not only as a financier of wisdom and sound judgment, but in his own particular field as a leader who has preached and practiced standards of integrity and public service. He has done this, said the chief executive of another great financial corporation in the city of New York, in a recent address, "with emphasis and indeed with poetry."
One or two extracts from his collected addresses may lead the reader to surmise that he might have been a man of letters if he had not elected to follow a career of business. The first is from a tribute to Matthew Buckham, the creative president of the University of Vermont :
Matthew Henry Buckham's right to rank with Chittenden and Morrill will not be instantly recognized or conceded by all, not even by all Vermonters. His life and work were not the kind that usually or in- deed often command quick recognition. He was not the political head of the State; he did not reach nor seem to care to reach the popular imagination. He did not stand in the Senate House and battle for sound money and the nation's credit. He created in the youth of the State the sound minds which gave political leaders sane audiences. He moulded the intellects and the morals which lie back of good politics. His fame will rest on labors as undramatic and as vital as wholesome food and pure air. Vermont produces men. Why? The life work of President Buckham gives us a large part of the answer to that question. .
A college or university training is a succession of regenerations. President Buckham was our intellectual and moral father-the head of those regenerating forces which transform, awaken and re-awaken, mould and re-mould. "A part and parcel of the days of old" he is, but equally a part and parcel of us as we are tonight. So by the law of the limitless sphere in which we came under his tutelage, he will forever re-
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main a part and parcel of the University, of the State and of the scholar's larger world.
The second extract is from an address to a national association of insurance experts in which the character and functions of life insurance are described:
Life insurance is, first of all, based on good morality, not simply ab- stract morality, or individual morality, but morality as a question of statesmanship, as a matter of practical administration in human affairs. From the moment when the soliciting agent opens his rate-book until the hour when the contract, made through his instrumentality, ceases to exist, life insurance fixes for itself the very highest standard of moral as well as legal responsibility. It presents itself as a haven, a city of refuge, a vast, half impersonal organization which professes to lift the individual somewhat out of the current hazards of existence, and offers to solve some of the pressing and cruel problems of fate. It is not an overstatement to say that, primarily, life insurance approaches the individual much as the confessional does. It asks the public to come, to give over into its keeping, almost without question, not only hopes, and plans, and responsibilities, but money. . . .
In order to carry out a pledge which when made seemed almost to assume the possession of more than human power, life insurance adopts methods which are neither mysterious, nor magical, nor unknowable, but entirely material and purely human. It necessarily plunges at once into the very center of modern activity and modern life. Its primary promise, while seemingly very wonderful, is simple enough, but before that promise is made good, life insurance has to touch and handle and know and master business and law and medicine and the most abstract reaches of the most exact of the exact sciences; it must know and be able to measure habitat and occupation and all the forces and facts that influence life, since life is its problem.
The moral responsibility of life insurance, considering what it takes from the people and what it teaches them to expect, comes very close to something superhuman in its quality. The material responsibility of life insurance is so built into the very fabric of all commercial faith that even a suspicion of its soundness cannot be tolerated.
"Perhaps the explanation of Mr. Kingsley's success in imbuing his many public addresses and papers on the technique of busi- ness and economics with imagination may be found in the fact that he has been a wide reader of the best literature, both ancient
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and modern. His familiar and scholarly acquaintance with that great Englishman, whom "rare" Ben Johnson called the "sweet swan of Avon," is buttressed by a fine library of Shakesperiana, including precious copies of the first, second, third and fourth Folios. These details are noted here not for the purpose of ascribing any special credit to Mr. Kingsley, but to aid in the refutation of the not uncommon criticism that American busi- nessmen are wholly absorbed in the worship of the "almighty dollar."
Historians in the past have devoted themselves too much to the study and recording of political and martial chronicles. Des- pite the famous third chapter in his colorful HISTORY OF ENG- LAND, Lord Macaulay makes no reference in his historical essays, so far as I have been able to discover, to his great contemporary, George Stephenson, the father of the steam railway. And yet the steam railway has done more to extend the limits of the British Empire, and to mold the character and customs of its people, than most of the kings and prime ministers of England.
When some future historian comes to portray the economic story of the United States, as historians of the past have por- trayed its political, military and legal episodes, he will have to take account of some of the outstanding industrial builders who were born or bred in the state of Vermont and whose names are listed in this volume. Darwin Kingsley's name will be not the least among them.
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JOHN LILLIE
By Zephine Humphrey Fahnestock
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TOHN LILLIE was born in Dorset, Vermont, in 1869. His J father had been born there too, and his grandfather in Danby. The family was typical of New England in some of its subtler as well as more obvious manifestations. A strain of almost mystical feeling ran through it, finding expression here and there in the love of beauty.
This love was strong in John Lillie. Diffused through his childhood, the sensitiveness first came to a definite focus one day in his early youth when, crossing a meadow, he saw a land- scape painter at work. The phenomenon was quite new to him, and, watching it as carefully and closely as he dared, he knew that this was the vocation he wished to make his own.
But no form of graphic art was taught in the Dorset schools, and the boy did not know how to go about the realization of his dream. So his outer life followed the common course of de- velopment. Finishing school, he worked on a farm for several years. In his early twenties he married; and then, with the versatility characteristic of Vermonters, he began building houses. This became his major profession for the rest of his life. It gave scope to much of his talent, enabling him, in beauty of line and arrangement, in solidity of structure, to translate the impressior. made on him by his native hills.
It was not enough, however; and, when he was in his forties, fate once more summoned him by the same hand that had un- consciously beckoned to him in his youth. Walter Shirlaw came to spend the summer in Dorset, and John Lillie recognized in him the landscape painter he had seen at work in the meadow thirty years before.
There were other painters in Dorset that summer. They used the Lillie barn as a studio. Watching them closely, eagerly
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now, John felt not only that he wanted but that he was able to emulate them. One day, with some house paints for which he was agent and with an odd assortment of brushes (among them a shaving brush), he painted a landscape on a smooth board and set it up among the canvases in his barn. The effect was dynamic. The other painters received him at once into their fellowship; and when in the autumn an exhibition was held in the village, several canvases by John Lillie were shown to the public.
After this, progress was for a time slow. Walter Shirlaw did not return to Dorset; and, though John Lillie went on painting, it was only as an amateur. Natural modesty and economic necessity forbade his taking his landscapes as seriously as they deserved.
Then, when he was about fifty, another distinguished painter, Edwin Child, who had long been identified with Dorset, decided that it was time something was done about John Lillie's work. In conjunction with other friends, he arranged for a showing of some of the Lillie canvases in New York.
The following summer the editor of THE OUTLOOK happened to drive through Dorset, and stopped to see a group of Lillie pictures which were on exhibition. He was so impresed by them that he then and there ordered an article to be written about the man and his painting. When it appeared, this article, featured in THE OUTLOOK, was copied by THE LITERARY DIGEST, with the result that Dorset became famous as the home of "the mountain painter."
Since that summer, John Lillie's reputation has steadily though quietly increased. Save for a trip to New York, whither he was summoned by Royal Cortissoz for an all-day conference, and another trip to Boston, the home-loving painter has seldom left his valley. An occasional one-man show has been arranged for him in Boston and New York, and his canvases are always seen in the annual exhibition at Manchester. Otherwise, it is at his home on the West Road in Dorset that he and his work may be found. Many visitors seek him there.
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He paints very rapidly, striving to catch the fleeting mood of the day or hour, with its spiritual significance; and naturally has time for other occupations. Moreover, it seems to him sensible and wholesome to live a balanced life. So he goes on with his house building, and has lately concerned himself with plumbing and furnace installing. He reads a good deal, lov- ing poetry especially. He is always ready to talk with other painters about the problems and ideals of their common craft. His personal presence conveys a sense of unhurried opportunity but unremitting vigilance: "without haste, without rest."
Of late years a grandson, John Lillie Davis, born in 1925, has aroused not only a new affection but also a new surmise in John Lillie's heart. The little fellow, now only five years old, has painted landscapes of real power and significance. Several of them were exhibited in Manchester in 1930, and some of them were sold. What the future development of the precocious child will be, of course remains uncertain; but Vermonters may well watch it hopefully.
Meantime we may all be thankful that through the person- ality and the brush of John Lillie our beautiful state has found sympathetic expression.
MATTHEW LYON
遺照 By Vrest Teachout Orton
A record of the life of this rough, fire-eating, red-headed Irishman reveals an astonishing character of bellicosity and versatility almost unequalled among his contemporaries. Matthew Lyon put chips on his shoulders and dared the world to knock them off. His pugnaciousness and boldness led many to accept the invitation, making life one fight after another. But he usually won. No matter where he was, he got into
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everything. Because of his race, his hair and his origin, as well as his personality, he excited many people to violent hatred. With others he formed ardent friendships. He abhorred half- way measures. In his seventy-six years he was a printer, book- binder, sailor, common laborer, merchant, farmer, innkeeper, realtor, iron master, paper-maker, miller, manufacturer, ship broker, ship-wright, lottery agent, publisher, editor, soldier, politician and Indian agent. Such amazing versatility demands attention, regardless of the man's combativeness which was probably more the result of his vivacity than anything else. It got Lyon attention in his day ... in ours he is forgotten. This is too bad, for, with the possible exception of Ethan Allen, no more dashing figure moved through early Vermont history. A brief review of the mere facts in Lyon's life is enough to em- phasize its unique interest.
Running away from Ireland when thirteen, he got sea passage by bonding himself to the captain who later sold the indenture for two bulls. Lyon's favorite oath thereafter was, "By the bulls that bought me." He was with Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga where he exuberantly celebrated the capture of the fort by firing off on his own initiative the largest cannon in the fort known as the "Old Sow." While a labourer on Governor Chittenden's farm he married Beulah, the Governor's daughter, his first wife, a relative of Ethan Allen, having died. In 1776 came his first public infamy. Stationed as a lieutenant at an outpost fort in Jericho, Vermont, under Captain Fassett, he with other oficers, were alleged to have induced the men to mutiny. They all deserted the post. Lyon was taken to General Gates, and although' denying all blame, was cashiered, and, so it is said, was presented a wooden sword as a symbol of his disgrace. Although he later rose to the rank of colonel, the wooden sword episode tagged him throughout life.
He soon became active in Vermont politics. In 1777, he was a member of the Council of Safety and later deputy-secretary to the Governor and Council. In 1779, when Ethan Allen refused
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to run as representative from Arlington, Lyon was chosen, beginning a state legislative career which kept him in the As- sembly for fifteen years, ten of them as member from Fair Haven, the town he founded in 1783. Here the leading figure, he waxed prosperous, built a tavern, numerous mills, dickered in land, founded a semi-monthly magazine, and the fourth Vermont newspaper.
Lyon, as an anti-Federalist, inaugurated his national career by starting to run for the Congress as soon as Vermont became a state in 1791 and finally in 1796 after some reverses got elected. He managed to keep in hot water, contesting elections and cam- paigning. He was a forceful speaker and wielded a caustic and racy pen. Once, accused by Judge Chipman of buying the votes of a whole company of soldiers and of being an ignorant Irish puppy, Lyon engaged the Judge in a rough and tumble fight. He took occasional time for lawsuits; once being fined and im- peached for refusing to deliver the records of the Court of Confiscation which had taken property from Vermont Tories and of which Lyon had been secretary. By his first speech in the Congress, he got into disrepute with both parties by de- livering a long diatribe against the British custom of replying to presidential messages. Somewhat involved with the Allens in the Haldimand Negotiations and apparently siding with them, he later tried to disparage Ira Allen during the Olive Branch affair. Yet his motives were unquestionably patriotic.
Lyon got his greatest national notoriety by getting into a brawl with Roger Griswold of Connecticut on the floor of Congress. When Mr. Criswold alluded to the wooden sword, Lyon promptly spit in his face. Colleagues separated the two. Later Griswold chose to hit Lyon over the head several times with a heavy cane upon which Lyon rushed in and staged a rousing fight which ended with Griswold sitting on top. The Congress tried to expel Lyon but failed just short of the necessary two- thirds vote. The battle gave the wits choice material for ridicule and caricature.
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Lyon got into another scrape by publishing in 1798 a letter criticizing President Adams. He was made the goat and pros- ecuted ex post facto under the newly enacted but unjust Alien and edition laws. This gave his enemies their chance. He was tried in Rutland, fined $1,000, and put into jail for four months. He served his sentence but while actually behind the bars, again got elected to the Congress! By operating a lottery he paid the fine, and when he got out, evaded further persecu- tion by claiming congressional immunity. His journey from jail to Congress was a hero's triumphal march of public acclamation. Direct from a Vermont jail, he arrived in Congress in the nick of time to cast the deciding vote during a deadlock contest which put Jefferson into the presidency. A resolution was introduced to expel him but it, too, failed by a narrow margin.
Politics, enemies and absence in Washington eventually ruined his business in Fair Haven; bankruptcy and his enemies awaited him. He decided to quit Vermont for Kentucky where he founded the first printing establishment, became a merchant and ship builder, and got elected to the Congress in 1803 from a second state. Because of war contracts in 1812, he was obliged to assign all his property and face ruin again. He got himself an appointment in 1820 as Indian Agent in the Arkansas terri- tory. He had little more than arrived and settled when for the third time he was honored by election to Congress, but on August 1, 1822, he died before he could take his seat.
This remarkable man was a real opportunist and could have risen probably in no other country but America. There is no question that he was a considerable force in his day, perhaps more than we realize, for he founded two towns himself, helped found three states, and valiantly maintained the Bill of Rights.
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GEORGE PERKINS MARSH
By Frederick Tupper
A T a stack's end in one of the rooms of the Billings Library at the University of Vermont is a pleasing picture of a scholar at work in his study-a man of massive frame and Jovian front surrounded by well-filled shelves. A visitor, raising his eyes from the picture, sees all about him the volumes there por- trayed, and near the doorway in marble the magnificent head of the student himself; for this is the Marsh Room, greatest of memorials to the collector of its treasures, George Perkins Marsh, a citizen of the wide world of men and books, who yet called Burlington home. He played in his time many parts: lawyer, manufacturer, statesman, diplomat, but, above all, scholar by every token of the guild, a zest for knowledge, which brooked no denial from language, letters or science, a zeal for labor which wrought eagerly to his latest hours, and a love of truth which crowned all his achievement. Far horizons always allured him.
George Perkins Marsh was born with the nineteenth century, March 15, 1801, in one of the most delightful of Vermont villages, Woodstock. His grandfather, Joseph, was a first settler of the State, his father, Charles, was a first citizen,-graduate and trustee of Dartmouth College, and eminent lawyer, under whom Daniel Webster yearned to study. With him his young son traveled much at Woodstock, learning many secrets of field and forest. When George's years at common school and months at Phillips Andover were behind him, he went in 1816 to Dart- mouth. John Wheeler, Joseph Torrey and his cousin, James Marsh, later his neighbors, were here his contemporaries. Not what he learned of the ancient languages in classrooms, but what he acquired of the modern through his own efforts awakens our wonder. Here is the beginning of that conquest not only of the written, but of the spoken word, which marks the great
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linguist. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German were met and mastered, while Marsh „was still young. For a few months he taught at Norwich, lured by its nearness to Dartmouth, but found no fascination in the teacher's trade.
In 1825, Mr. Marsh became a member of the Burlington bar and was soon in active practice. He was faithful to his cases, for the Puritan conscience was always strong within him, but his heart was in Scandinavia. Much of his leisure was given to the languages of Northern Europe and to the making of an Icelandic Grammar, which emerged from a faulty press in 1838. In these early Burlington years he had married and lost his first wife, and had taken a second, Caroline Crane, the gracious and gifted woman, whose biography, LIFE AND LETTERS OF GEORGE PERKINS MARSH, VOL. 1, tells his story until his de- parture for Italy in 1861. In the thirties and early forties of the century he was very active. He followed the law. He raised sheep and cattle on his Shelburne farm. He projected and surveyed the river road to the Winooski Falls and brought woolen mills to that site. He was close to the builders of the Central Vermont Railroad. He was a member of the Executive Council of Vermont. He collected engravings; and he gathered the books, which were his joy and pride, as they are now ours. He moves through the Vermont world of a hundred years ago, a grave and stately figure like some early New England forefather, "wearing the look of a man unbought."
Then in 1842 came the call to larger usefulness. He was chosen to represent his district in Congress. A vigorous cham- pion of party vicws, he fought for the tariff, he opposed the an- nexation of Texas and the Mexican War, speaking always with such clarity, candor and self-restraint as to win the respect of warm-blooded adversaries. Always the scholar, he displayed dur- ing his Washington years large interest in the Smithsonian, to which he gave his treasured engravings, and in the formation of a public library, and found time to deliver impressive ad- dresses at Dartmouth, Harvard and Union.
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In 1849, Mr. Marsh was appointed Minister to Turkey-not the diplomatic post that he coveted, yet bringing within his ken the Old World hitherto alive only in his books and dreams. He was soon deep in the study of Turkish, Arabic and Persian, and in his holidays wandered through Egypt and Palestine and over much of Europe. Though greatly hampered by his small salary and by his low rank in the diplomatic corps-both ill be- fitting the American representative-he discharged his every duty admirably, not only in Turkey but in Greece, to which he was sent on a delicate mission.
In 1854, he was home again to contend with narrow circum- stances. Yet the serenity of his intellectual life is seemingly undisturbed. Interest in language always dictated the themes of his lectures on English at Columbia University, 1858-59 and at the Lowell Institute, Boston, 1860-61. These scholarly dis- courses, afterward embodied in two substantial volumes, still have historical value. That his mind had also a singular aptitude for practical science is shown by his report to the Vermont Legisla- ture in 1847 on the artificial propagation of fish, and by the essay for the Smithsonian Institute in 1854 on "The Camel"- pleading for its naturalization-which grew into a delightful volume, full of reminiscences of Eastern travel. In 1855, he re- fused a Harvard professorship, and a year later declined to enter the race for United States Senator, although election was certain.
With growing concern and grave comment Mr. Marsh watched the approach of war, but its fiery progress he must observe from afar, for in 1861 he received from President Lincoln the appointment of Minister to the new Kingdom of Italy. Here he served for twenty-one years, following the government from capital to capital, from Turin to Florence to Rome. Through his learning, wisdom, fidelity and tact he was always persona grata. In scholarship he was ever active. The love of nature inbred in him produced in 1874, that entertaining volume, EARTH AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION, a reworking of the MAN AND
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