society there. The societies are a great factor at Amherst and of course I want to join if I can,” Coolidge wrote his father. There were so many fraternities that getting in might not be hard. The year Coolidge entered, 285 out of 352 students enrolled were affiliated with one of nine fraternities, the largest being “Deke,” Delta Kappa Epsilon, the granddaddy fraternity of New England. His father had indeed married Carrie, thus setting to rest any concern his son might have at leaving him alone. Calvin instantly took to Carrie; missing mother and sister so long, he was glad to have Carrie and considered her a new mother.
The college that he encountered in his first few weeks of the fall of 1891 was worthy. Amherst had been founded not in the name of wealth or sport or Greek fraternities but to educate poor students to be ministers. It had been a splinter of a splinter: men who had deemed Harvard University too impious had founded Williams College, safe in the wilderness of western Massachusetts; Williams President Zephaniah Swift Moore, dissatisfied, had moved over to Amherst from North Adams, and students had followed him. From its beginning in the 1820s, Amherst had been small but mighty. “The infant college is an infant Hercules,” an astonished writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in his diary after passing through. “Never was so much striving, outstretching, and advancing in a literary cause as is exhibited here.” The students, he said, “write, speak, and study in a sort of fury, which, I think, promises a harvest of attainments.”
Amherst welcomed all Christians but tended to the Congregationalist, like St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had worshipped at “the North Congo,” the North Congregational Church. The fervor of the professors also recalled his grandmother Sarah Brewer, a Baptist. Christianity was, one president had said, “top stone and cornerstone” of Amherst, a fitting image in a region known for its granite and marble.
The quality of the education was seen as high enough to create leaders. “Terras irradient” was the Amherst motto: “Let them illuminate the earth.” Amherst men might become senators, preachers, or diplomats. The Amherst campus was its own City upon a Hill, situated to exploit a view of purple mountains. The steeples there were like those of Vermont: steeples of independence. The town itself, like St. Johnsbury and Ludlow before it, was showing Calvin how the world worked; the Fairbanks’ factory in St. Johnsbury had made great scales, purchased the world over, by customers as far away as Russia. In Amherst there were bicycles everywhere, whereas a few years before, there had been only horses.
Here in Amherst were names and achievements to aspire to. Among Amherst graduates was Henry Ward Beecher, who had preached abolition so successfully in Brooklyn. Even junior professors at Amherst were extraordinary: Charles Garman, who taught philosophy, had been described by none other than William James as “the greatest teacher” of all the colleges. Another Amherst star was a young librarian named Melvil Dewey, who had come up with a new classification of knowledge. During one Sunday sermon, staring at the pulpit, Dewey had come up with a way to organize books: “while I lookt stedfastly at [it] without hearing a word,” Dewey later wrote, “my mind absorbd in the vital problem, the solution flasht over so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’ It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, the arabic numerals as decimals, with ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”
Coolidge learned quickly that there were Amherst dynasties, not always wealthy but respected, chains of alumni with names such as Stearns or Dickinson. The bells of Stearns steeple, which chimed in the key of E, had been given by the father of an Amherst man who had died at Williamsburg in
The college that he encountered in his first few weeks of the fall of 1891 was worthy. Amherst had been founded not in the name of wealth or sport or Greek fraternities but to educate poor students to be ministers. It had been a splinter of a splinter: men who had deemed Harvard University too impious had founded Williams College, safe in the wilderness of western Massachusetts; Williams President Zephaniah Swift Moore, dissatisfied, had moved over to Amherst from North Adams, and students had followed him. From its beginning in the 1820s, Amherst had been small but mighty. “The infant college is an infant Hercules,” an astonished writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in his diary after passing through. “Never was so much striving, outstretching, and advancing in a literary cause as is exhibited here.” The students, he said, “write, speak, and study in a sort of fury, which, I think, promises a harvest of attainments.”
Amherst welcomed all Christians but tended to the Congregationalist, like St. Johnsbury, where Coolidge had worshipped at “the North Congo,” the North Congregational Church. The fervor of the professors also recalled his grandmother Sarah Brewer, a Baptist. Christianity was, one president had said, “top stone and cornerstone” of Amherst, a fitting image in a region known for its granite and marble.
The quality of the education was seen as high enough to create leaders. “Terras irradient” was the Amherst motto: “Let them illuminate the earth.” Amherst men might become senators, preachers, or diplomats. The Amherst campus was its own City upon a Hill, situated to exploit a view of purple mountains. The steeples there were like those of Vermont: steeples of independence. The town itself, like St. Johnsbury and Ludlow before it, was showing Calvin how the world worked; the Fairbanks’ factory in St. Johnsbury had made great scales, purchased the world over, by customers as far away as Russia. In Amherst there were bicycles everywhere, whereas a few years before, there had been only horses.
Here in Amherst were names and achievements to aspire to. Among Amherst graduates was Henry Ward Beecher, who had preached abolition so successfully in Brooklyn. Even junior professors at Amherst were extraordinary: Charles Garman, who taught philosophy, had been described by none other than William James as “the greatest teacher” of all the colleges. Another Amherst star was a young librarian named Melvil Dewey, who had come up with a new classification of knowledge. During one Sunday sermon, staring at the pulpit, Dewey had come up with a way to organize books: “while I lookt stedfastly at [it] without hearing a word,” Dewey later wrote, “my mind absorbd in the vital problem, the solution flasht over so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’ It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, the arabic numerals as decimals, with ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”
Coolidge learned quickly that there were Amherst dynasties, not always wealthy but respected, chains of alumni with names such as Stearns or Dickinson. The bells of Stearns steeple, which chimed in the key of E, had been given by the father of an Amherst man who had died at Williamsburg in
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