The Class of 1898
“Smith, Frederick Madison, president Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints; University of Iowa 1894-5; B.S. Graceland College 1898; University of Missouri 1908-9: A.M., University of Kansas 1911; Ph.D., Clark University 1915.”
--Who’s Who in America.
From the precious opportunities of the school room, from the wholesome intimacies of boyhood friendships and the congeniality of the little groups that gathered for an occasional evening in Doctor Hobby’s parlor, from one swift year of academy and another far too short year of university life and all those two short years meant to an ambitious country boy with the idea of a great work already before him, Fred Smith was call back to the little town that saw him generally as a necessary link in a most important plan, to the little college on the grassy hill just south of Lamoni.
Graceland College, though a nonsectarian school, was founded by the church with idea of providing education for its young people under an environment of Christian discipline and ideals. The school was then in its first year; its professors were trained and gifted men and women, but they were limited in number and the student body was very small. To a people whose leader was not lonely their president but their counselor, their example and their friend as well, there could be no stronger guarantee for the new school than that their president’s son, who was also to be their future president and prophet, should be one of its first students. Consequently, regardless of all that the change meant to him the freshman at S.U.I. returned to become a sophomore at Graceland.
Just how much it cost him no one will ever know. His is not in the habit of parading his feelings. It is his nature stoically to accept his changed position, and to exert himself to better it in every way possible.
Immediately on his transfer he devoted himself to the development for his new Alma Mater of the invaluable something known as school spirit, and in so doing unconsciously established for the new institution another prerequisite of a real college, the elements of tradition. For among the earliest traditions of Graceland are the stories of the growth, under the guidance of Fred Smith of the Graceland spirit.
I have heard the stories from many tongues. In fact, the tales when told across time and space have become so various and withal so extravagant that my husband’s reputation for steadiness has suffered a little.
I remember he showed me, as late in his life as his ordination as counselor to the president of the church, a letter from one of the church men who is now active in departmental work, hoping, that since this great responsibility had fallen upon him he would forsake the wildness of his youth.
Of course we have always laughed at the current stories, some one of which was no doubt responsible for the kindly warning but any such reference to the early days of Graceland College recalls the perfectly true tales of serenades and college yells, the echoes of which disturb the tranquil and curfew-bred people of Lamoni to this very day.
The story is told, and I can vouch for is truth, of the first time the old Graceland, “Rackety, hackety,” woke the sleeping village. My husband was the author of the yell and the instigator of the plan for its public recital.
The night was set, and the portentous hour of midnight. With his trusted henchmen, of whom the most conspicuous were Wilber Gillen, the son of a missionary, Harry Nicholson, the leading banker’s son, “Win” Kelley, the son of the first financial man of the church, and Dave Anderson, a brother of the Benjamin Anderson who had married Fred’s oldest sister, the campaign was mapped out. Certain members of the college board, of which Joseph Smith was president at the time, and others of the faculty, not forgetting a particularly austere old professor, were to be favored by the recital. In case of attack the gang was to disperse, following devious ways until pursuit had ceased, when they were to reassemble in the vacant lot behind the blacksmith shop.
Precisely at twelve on that historic night a hoarse and lusty, “Rackety, hackety, sis boom bah! Graceland!” aroused the good president of the college, and incidentally the neighbors for two blocks in every direction. The president being a valorous man in all that the old proverb ascribes to valor, reassured his family and went back to bed. So also did the rest of the board and faculty similarly honored, to the great disgust of the concertists, when the constable of the town hearing the disturbance, and believing that the town was being invaded, turned out to investigate. He was a long-faced, rheumatic villager, who had been a deacon in the church for many years, and the innovation of college yells at night did not coincide with his ideas of propriety.
As long as the officer worked alone in his efforts to catch the offenders, the boys did not consider it worth their while to disband, and kept about a block ahead of the constable, giving the yell on every corner. Before the night was over, however, the officer of the peace had deputized six men in his attempt to silence the four or five very lively youngsters who dodged up and down alleys, across vacant lots, in at one shed door and out of another until near daylight.
All seemed quiet at last, and the weary constable had gone home to get a morning nap, when just at cock crow, a jubilant “Rackety, hackety,” boomed out strong and clear directly under the window of the slumbering law.
But if this episode of my husband’s record provoked no more notice than the futile attempts of the village police, the next escapade drew down upon his head the wrath of that austere professor whose youthful recreation had been obtained at the woodpile and who believed in a similar regime for the rising generation, and the combined college authorities as well.
Tiring of the chaplain’s long sermons in the morning chapel the son of the president of the church conceived the idea of having a chapel of his own. The only room at his disposal was one of the laboratories which lay directly under the auditorium, but he refused to consider the disadvantages of such a location. When the chapel period began, Fred Smith and several of the other boys, who were willing to join the revolt, open their chapel in the lower room with all solemnity. All would have gone well—or at least, things would not gave gone so badly as they did for the young religionists, had it not been for the marked difference in the length of Fred Smith’s prayer in the unauthorized service, and that of the professor in charge of the chapel in the room above. The minister had only well begun when Fred Smith finished, and a chorus of joyous and untrained voices broke forth in opening hymn.
The student body above heard, but their flickerings of mirth were dissolved into horror at the look on the face of the august teacher as he attempted to go on with his prayer under the bombardment of those enthusiastic voices. He stammered, used a word incorrectly with a decidedly humorous effect, at which no one dared to smile, and finally hesitated. The song halted in a quaver of discord. The minister looked relieved, and had just taken up his prayer when the music again swelled forth, a new stanza, more out of tune than the last.
It was no use. Every effort to carry on the regular chapel was met with some ill-timed effort from below. The assembly broke up in confusion, and vengeance descended on the revolutionists.
Fred never would make long prayers, anyway. Just a little talk with God seems to him sufficient. When grace has been said at the table in our house, before I could two little, brown heads bowed, and my own, my husband with a few short words had finished the blessing. If I should laugh, though, or the children, he would glare at us and mutter something about our being sacrilegious.
Nor has he any patience with us if we are not quite ready to compose ourselves to prayer the moment we are seated, no matter how uproarious a time we may be having before dinner is called. I remember once when I was in a particularly merry mood and continued to jest as he pulled out my chair for me. When he had quieted us all, he looked from one to another of us, and seeing that my eyes still twinkled, said severely, “Ruth, will you please as the blessing!” His is really funny, sometimes, but I suppose we should to expect him to see it, even if he did get into trouble for it back in ’98. On that far-famed occasion, the culprits did not escape simply with being laughed at, nor even after a footrace with town constable. At the instigation of the old professor the authorities took the matter to heart, and, after placing most of the attendants at the impromptu chapel on probation for a few days, decided that the leaders must be punished; and for example’s sake, the higher the position which their fathers occupied in the religious life of the community, the longer was to be the term of the sons’ suspensions.
On the next prayer meeting night a most astonishing thing occurred. One after another those young men, with a very few exceptions, who were Fred Smith’s most devoted followers in the affair of the chapel, young men whose voice had never before been lifted in testimony at weekly prayer services, arose, and intones of humble pleading and contrition, asked forgiveness for certain indiscretions the seriousness of which they had not realized at the time of their committal, and for which they were duly sorry.
“Amen,” exclaimed the professor from the depths of his great beard, as each of the culprits took his seat. At each recital, the old man’s voice softened, and his manner became more benign, until at the final confession, his “amen” held a note of triumph and of pardon.
And Fred Smith? He would scorn to mitigate his punishment by a public confession of what he had not and never has considered a sin. He would scorn both the attempt to mitigate the punishment, and the public confession of that which he did not consider a sin. And besides, he would not think a prayer meeting the proper place in which to settle college difficulties. To him the quiet and contemplative spirit of this service is indeed a “flow of soul.” Because he in undemonstrative as a rule of religious feeling, as well as of his more mundane affections, I have sometimes been surprised at the unaffectedness with which he has wiped away his tears when some prayer of righteousness or testimony of faith has touched a responsive chord in his vast hidden nature. On such occasions, when the rest of us are shyly winking back the mist before our eyes, out comes his great handkerchief in all its whiteness, off come his spectacles, and the traces of his emotion are swept away with an utter disregard for the presence of others.
I never could understand though just why he always concluded this ceremony with a little snort of finality which said as plainly as the flourish with which he tucked away his wet handkerchief that the moment of human frailty was past, and “Richard was himself again.”
At the end of his six weeks sentence, he again climbed the college hill and finished his year’s work, an honor student still so far as scholarship was concerned. An honor student, and an honorable man in every way, I still maintain, in spite of the fact that many of his older friends cannot forget the gayer incidents of his undaunted spirit—spirit in more than on sense, perhaps, for the “ghosts walked” every once in awhile at Graceland.
It was under his leadership that Lamoni first learned to accept, with no more than a murmured imprecation as it turned over to go to sleep again, the nightly song of serenading parties, the outlandish din of midnight initiations and class riots, and the torch light parades of expectation and the bonfires of triumph or consolation which are to be expected on every possible occasion of intercollegiate contests, whether it be in football, baseball, track or debating.
They have grown quite comfortable about their young people there in Lamoni these days. The professors all realize that such nonsense is the legitimate overplus of college spirit, and crops out some place else if it does not take this reasonably wholesome expression; and they have decided that the best way of “sublimating” the high tension emotions of youth is in directing the form of their expression.
It was not quite the same in the old days. I remember the story they tell of D. F. Lambert’s system of keeping order, and how Fred Smith proved to be the exception to his rule. Brother Lambert was the principal of the high school Fred attended in Lamoni, a keen disciplinarian who believed that the way to keep a boy out of mischief was to devise some manner of keeping him too busy by adding to his already full course a lesson a day in natural philosophy, which Fred prepared by reading the entire course in his first study period, leaving him several extra periods a week in which to invent new methods of tormenting his instructor.
And yet Mr. Lambert grew very fond of the boy. He admired him, even at that trying age, for his big brain and his keen sense of honesty. The good man once said to me in speaking of my husband’s school days”
“Yes, Fred always caused me a good deal of trouble. But I will say this for him, he never told me a lie.”
So it was that the president’s son took his first degree, as a bachelor of science, at Graceland College, as the only member of the first class to be graduated from the new institution. With his educational aspirations and achievements what they have been, he might easily have taken no pride in so small a beginning; but that is not his nature. My husband is not the only man to who position and recognition have come, whose education was begun in one of the small parochial schools of his own immediate locality.
That Frederick is instead almost boyishly proud of having been the first graduate from Graceland is evident from the fact that some years ago he had a sun-dial set up on the campus, which has grown from the open hillside fields of his day to a lively park, dotted over with its various modern buildings and dormitories. On the pedestal of the dial is inscribed, in memory of that first degree: “A gift from Frederick Madison Smith, the class of 1898.”
And indeed, there are many reasons other than those of sentiment for the pride he takes in Graceland. It is now considered to have one of the largest and best junior colleges in the United States, besides its numerous other departments: its teaching corps includes some of the finest educators of the country, and its students come from every part of the world and go out again to make records of worth both in university and professional circles. As to his graduating in science, that is only an indication of the breadth that his educational efforts have assumed, and the slight incongruity of a minister starting out with a scientific course is completely lost when one contemplates the scope of the interests represented by that long list of associations, institutes, conferences and societies, on everything from statistics to archaeology, and from criminology to the S.A.R. which I discovered after his name in Who’s Who lately, when my attention was called to it by one of the children and I remember how we all laughed at the ridiculous string of titles, degrees and clubs which it presents. He has since added two new combinations of letters to those which he is entitled to wear. One, an F.R.S.S., which his old friend Ernest Dewsnup insisted on obtaining for him when he was last in England, is further indicative of his wide and varied interests; but aside from its sentimental value, what he shall ever do with the honorary doctor of divinity degree Graceland bestowed on him at its last big homecoming, when his car headed the class parade with the class of ’98 himself, in cap and gown, bowing and smiling from the tonneau, I am sure I do not know.
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