Honorary Degrees Awarded to Eleven | Dartmouth Alumni Magazine | July 1955
Following are the citations read by President Dickey in conferring honorary degrees at the Commencement exercises:
ELLIS ORMSBEE BRIGGS '21 United States Ambassador to Peru DOCTOR OF LAWS
GRADUATE of Dartmouth, Class of 1921. father of a member of the Class of 1956, neither distance, nor war, nor any vicissitude has ever cut you off from that love of things Dartmouth you learned as an undergraduate. You stayed longer on Hanover plain than that earlier Dartmouth prowler, John Ledyard, but even with your devotion to learning and his "jumping the gun" he could hardly compete in übiquity with a man who has taught in Turkey, shot big game in Africa, practiced diplomacy in Chile, Cuba, Liberia, The Dominican Republic, China, Peru, Uruguay, Czechoslovakia and Korea, not to mention Washington, D. C. During thirty years as a career Foreign Service Officer you have borne the disciplined duty of a young vice-consul, the lonely burdens of our Ambassador in communist-oppressed Czechoslovakia and communist-attacked Korea and it has been your lot as an American diplomat to live through a period of harassment at home such as no other professional foreign service has ever borne. Words of admiration and appreciation in this moment of calm are small coin for such fidelity, but with them goes the highest honor this College can bestow, the enduring testimony of her Doctorate of Laws, honoris causa.
ROBERT FROST '96, LITT.D. '33 Poet DOCTOR OF LAWS
COMING to us as you do from having a Vermont mountain come to you (at least in name), what dare we say or do? We could speak a word of history and say that all your academic comings and goings began right here in 1892. Or we might talk about Pulitzer Prizes, four so far, or even about San Francisco and whether it was actually '74 or '75 that you began to have your say; but it wouldn't matter much on what we started, we'd soon find you pulling on some loose thread of truth that caught your eye in the garment of our talk and before you finished pulling on that thread . . . well, there'd be a lot of truth laid bare. In a sense that is what we really want to say, that you have done more good teaching than any other man we know, teaching us to like and know that which we do not know we know ... a teacher who has always sort of known that the hardest part of getting wise is being always just a little otherwise. And so, because ours is a love long learned, Dartmouth dares doubt that one honorary doctorate of letters is enough and herewith otherwise than ever before adds in witness of all left unsaid her honorary Doctorate of Laws.
JOSEPH WILLIAM MARTIN JR. Minority Leader, United States House ofRepresentatives DOCTOR OF LAWS
YOUR native modesty and perhaps your political principles preclude your saying that your life was planned as an American political classic, but perhaps it can be said that had such a plan existed it would include being born and reared a small town boy, skilled as a shortstop, apprenticed as a newsboy and then progressively reporter, publisher, state legislator, congressman, leader of your party in the House of Representatives and on two occasions as the Speaker of that House, the legislative leader of this land. One of America's foremost practitioners of the honorable art of politics, your example has taught two generations that in a republic where the great wheel of governing goes round and round, political parties are spokes dependent on each other's strength as well as on their own and as such must be honored at both the top and the bottom of the wheel's turning. Brother of two Dartmouth graduates whose education you helped provide, it is wonderfully right that this College should now be privileged to welcome you into its fellowship as Doctor of Laws.
HENRY MERRITT WRISTON President of Brown University DOCTOR OF LAWS
As an historian, would you not agree it could hardly have been otherwise that one who began life on the Fourth of July in the wild west of Laramie, Wyoming, and who turned East for fame and fortune should thereafter manifest a lifetime affinity for fireworks and reversing the course of things? Graduate of Wesleyan, Harvard Ph.D., distinguished teacher and student of American diplomatic affairs, for thirty years now - first at Lawrence College and since at Brown University - you have both enlivened and enlightened the institution of the American college presidency. And now as you prepare to retire to presumably less nettlesome pastures, on behalf of all who labor in American education we here say "thank you" for jobs well done on many fronts, for all your leadership has meant to Brown and thereby also to her sister institutions, and above all for being yourself through it all. The esteem of Dartmouth and her best wishes for yourself and for the renowned institution you have so ably served are bespoken in the award to you of this Doctorate of Laws.
RENE D'HARNONCOURT Director of the Museum of Modern Art DOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
BY birth an Austrian of both title and talent, out of the harsh aftermath of World War I you became an American and one of the foremost authorities on the art and crafts of Mexico and of the American Indian. A versatile painter and creative craftsman, acclaimed as a writer both for your children's stories and for your scholarly work on the art of the Indians, today as Director of the Museum of Modern Art you seem to thrive on the hazardous occupation of running a museum in the no man's land of contemporary art. In your daily work integrity and open-eyed judgment must go boldly forward hand in hand without waiting for the aid of time to light the way. And yet even a museum of modern art cannot escape birthdays and at the venerable age of twenty-five years such a venture might seem to some to be approaching senility. For our part we congratulate your institution on the longevity of its youth and on a Director whose unique talent for bringing into focus for millions the art images of our time makes him a worthy recipient of Dartmouth's Doctorate of Humane Letters.
THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL '25 Cartoonist and Author DOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
CREATOR and fancier of fanciful beasts, your affinity for flying elephants and man-eating mosquitoes makes us rejoice you were not around to be Director of Admissions on Mr. Noah's ark. But our rejoicing in your career is far more positive: as author and artist you singlehandedly have stood as St. George between a generation of exhausted parents and the demon dragon of unexhausted children on a rainy day. There was an inimitable wriggle in your work long before you became a producer of motion pictures and animated cartoons and, as always with the best of humor, behind the fun there has been intelligence, kindness, and a feel for humankind. An Academy Award winner and holder of the Legion of Merit for war film work, you have stood these many years in the academic shadow of your learned friend Dr. Seuss; and because we are sure the time has come when the good doctor would want you to walk by his side as a full equal and because your College delights to acknowledge the distinction of a loyal son, Dartmouth confers on you her Doctorate of Humane Letters.
FRANK LAMONT MELENEY '10 Professor of Clinical Surgery, College ofPhysicians and Surgeons at ColumbiaUniversity DOCTOR OF SCIENCE
GRADUATE of this College in 1910, since completing your medical studies at Columbia, as practitioner, teacher and researcher, your life has been given to advancing man's health through surgery. From the first days of your internship your mind focussed on the ever-expanding truth that surgery is more than a technical art and that the highest expression of a surgeon's skill rests on foundations of understanding laid by Pasteur and Lister. It has been said of you by an eminent contemporary that "since Lister's time no surgeon has studied as intensively and has made so many original contributions to ... the bacteriology of infection and inflammation requiring surgical therapy." And, incidentally, it might have been added that thanks largely to work such as yours the ancient "wheeze" about the operation being successful but the patient dying has been mercifully laid to rest in the history of medical humor. In this venerable outpost of medical education where today every other person is either an M.D., an incipient M.D. or suffers daily exposure to one or the other, your College takes especial pride in acknowledging your preeminence as Doctor of Science.
WILLIAM COLLINS HAINSWORTH MOE '10Minister of the Tolland, Connecticut,Federated ChurchDOCTOR OF DIVINITY
YOUR life has been immense in all the dimensions that count: courage, conscience, competence, kindness and generosity. Reared as an orphan who knew not the meaning of parents until adopted into the hard life of a farm family at seven, for well-nigh sixty years as student and pastor you have done all that it was in you to do in the service of your God. Fifteen years after finishing high school - years spent in work, teaching, the study of theology and preaching - you came to Dartmouth and as Pastor of the Congregational Church in Norwich worked your way through this College to graduate summa cum laude with the Class of 1910. You have been, indeed you are, a pastor who truly gives of himself to others according to their troubles. No man in trouble is a stranger to you. Ten years after most men retire you do double duty as pastor of your parish and as chaplain to the inmates of a county jail who except for the generosity of your caring would know precious little of either the brotherhood of man or the fatherhood of God. In witness of a good man and true son, Dartmouth's Doctorate of Divinity was never more worthily conferred.
JOSEPH BROOKS DODGE Huts Manager of the AppalachianMountain Club MASTER OF ARTS
ONETIME wireless operator at sea, longtime mountaineer, student of Mount Washington's ways and weather, you have been more than a match for storms, slides, fools, skiers and porcupines. You have rescued so many of us from both the harshness of the mountain and the soft ways leading down to boredom that you, yourself, are now beyond rescue as a legend of all that is unafraid, friendly, rigorously good and ruggedly expressed in the out-of-doors. And with it all you gave this College a great skiing son. As one New Hampshire institution to another, Dartmouth delights to acknowledge you as Master of Arts.
LANE DWINELL '28 Governor of the State of New Hampshire MASTER OF ARTS
YOUR Excellency, before you became our Governor you were President of the State Senate and before that you served as Speaker of the New Hampshire General Court and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of that House. Prior to that you were Chairman of the Lebanon Town Budget Committee and manufactured clothing a North Countryman could buy and dared wear out-of-doors. Earlier you were apprenticed to business in the financial offices of General Motors and in due course supplemented your Vermont birth by marrying a lovely New Hampshire girl. When such a course of events is coupled with qualities of personal integrity and humility that might be coveted by even the Old Man of the Mountains we have a career that in these parts can only be called a categorical inevitability. It is with affection and pride that your alma mater confers on yet another son the traditional degree of Master of Arts accorded New Hampshire's Governor as a Trustee of the College.
EDGAR HAYES HUNTER '01 New Hampshire Statesman MASTER OF ARTS
GRADUATE of Dartmouth in 1901 and for fifty-five years president of your class, father of two Dartmouth sons, your life has taught us all that the Hanover community of town, gown and hospital must not, like Gaul, be divided into three parts. As Dartmouth's Superintendent of Buildings and later as a builder, you ereated such College landmarks as Massachusetts, Webster, Dartmouth Hall and Dick Hall's House; as longtime chairman and trustee of the Mary Hitchcock Hospital, as Moderator of the Town of Hanover and, above all perhaps, as just a good citizen, for more than fifty years now in mind, hand and heart you have personified community unity and human qualities at their quiet best. And beyond Hanover, a man is hard pressed to find an aspect of New Hampshire that is not better because as a legislator or State official you bothered to make it better. For your mastery of the art of making the North Country a better neighborhood, Dartmouth awards you her honorary Master of Arts degree.
HONORARY DEGREE RECIPIENTS with President Dickey. Left to right, front row: Joseph W. Martin Jr., LL.D.; Governor Lane Dwinell '28, M.A.; Robert Frost '96, LL.D.; President Dickey; Ellis O. Briggs '21, LL.D.; President Henry M. Wriston, LL.D. Back row: The Rev. William C. H. Moe '10, D.D.; Theodor S. Geisel '25, L.H.D.; Joseph B. Dodge, M.A.; Rene d'Harnoncourt, L.H.D.; Frank L. Meleney '10, Sc.D.; and Edgar H. Hunter '01, M.A.