Chapter 5: Novus Ordo Seclorum: Nicholas Murray Butler’s Overture to British Internationalists, 1921-1939

By the time he became president of Columbia University in 1902, Nicholas Murray Butler was the confident of presidents as well as an international celebrity. William Allen White, the noted journalist from Emporia, Kansas, observed of Butler: “Probably no other citizen of this land for the last forty years has known so many of the powerful figures of business, education and politics in Europe and the United States....” H. G. Wells labeled him “the Gilbert Murray of the United States,” while H. L. Mencken, the supreme iconoclast, noted favorably: “As a class (college presidents) they are platitudinous and nonsensical enough, God knows. But there is at least one among them, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, who actually says something when he speaks.”¹