La Salle Peru Township High School - Ell Ess Pe Yearbook (La Salle, IL)

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THOMAS JOSEPH MCCORMACK

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ITERATURE is the hoarded thought and emotion of the race, the capitalized ex- perience of the past preserved in books. A book is the distillate, the precipitate of a human soul, and libraries are the savings banks of all the thought, of all the emotions, of all the science and experience of the past,- a capital from which we can draw without decreasing its wealth, and which exacts no interest from its borrowers. We talk of ma- terial thrift and material economy, but We rarely reflect that in the literature of books is preserved the spiritual thrift of the world. -Tlaomaf fafepla McCormack

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2111 gmlemurizrm Thomas Joseph McCormack THOMAS MCCORMACK, son of the late Thomas and Eleanor Burke McCormack, was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the grammar and high schools in that city and in Manhattan. Later he went to Princeton University at Princeton, New Jersey, where he received a classical education and was awarded, on graduation, the Fellowship in Modern History. Mr. McCormack then spent two years in Europe where he attended the Universities of Leipzig and Tubingen, studying history, political science, and the modern languages. On his return, he took up the study of jurisprudence at Columbia University, New York, and later at the Chicago Law School, receiving an L. L. B. degree from that institution. He was admitted to the bar but never prac- ticed law. Shortly after the Open Court Publishing Company was founded by the late E. C. Hegeler, Mr. McCormack came west, first to Chicago, and then in 1893, to La Salle where he worked for many years with that organization in the ca- pacity of writer, editor, and translator. His work and studies during this period were chiefly concerned with the history and Kphilosophy of science, eilpecially the philosophy of mathematics and physics, an with the psychology an theory of education. During this period, Mr. McCormack edited many philosophical and mathematical works, wrote numerous articles and reviews for the Monist and Open Court, of which he was assistant editor, and translated from the French, German, Italian, and other languages, a long list of books on science and phil- osophy. These works, and especially the notable translations in 1893 and 1895 res ectively of Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung CThe Science of Mechanicsl and, Popularwissenschaftliche Vorleslungen CPopular Scientific LecturesD, works of Ernst Mach, the renowned Austrian physicist and psychologist, brought Mr. McCormack into prominence and added much to his reputation in scientific circles abroad. Later he edited a large historical work, The Memoirs of Gustave Koerner. In 1903 Mr. McCormack was elected to the superintendency of the La Salle- Peru Township High School and, giving up his literary and scientific career, he devoted his time to the practical problems of secondary education as presented in that high school. In 1924 he was made Director of the La Salle-Peru-Oglesby Junior College. Perhaps Mr. McCormack's most widely known venture in prac- tical education was the establishment in 1923 of the Bureau of Educational Counsel, an organization devoted to the study of the individual needs of high school pupils. The La Salle-Peru Township High School was the first public school in the country in which mental hygiene was introduced as an auxiliary technique for the treatment of student problems. Mr. McCormack was a member of several scientific societies and academies, among them the American Philosophical Society and the American Mathe- matical Society, and his name is one of the one hundred and sixty-four repre- sentatives from Illinois in the Biographical Directory of American Men of Science, published by the MacMillan Company of New York. He was also the author of numerous contributions on educational subjects to national and tech- nical journals, and was, for several years, associate editor of The American Review.