University of Virginia - Corks and Curls Yearbook (Charlottesville, VA)

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- . 127:3: r: s: ..v. . 1. . r. i : U 9 g G ,, . . M . a a w ; Am i '5 213413ng E!1umlr! IQQIIWJ 8 QWIMJ In Jefferson,s active membership in the days of its beginning were men who afterwards won fadeless laurels,-Poe and Thompson among theme and in later times unforgettable Americans like Woodrow Wilson, who was a iiJeff man at the University and a Jeffersonian in the turmoil of the greatest world problem for whose solution American sanity and genius have wrought and sacrificed for the salvation of mankind. Is any other student literary and forensic society in America equally as iianeient and honorable? For a great many years, and until a time Within the memory of many, iicommencement at the University was a social event of deep interest in Virginia. Representatives of the beauty and chivalry of the State came to dance the german, attend the hops? hear the invited orators, and crowd the Public Hall on the evenings the iiJefF, and the iiWasH' Literary societies iicelebratedf, Many of the iiold boys,' remember the splendid spectacle afforded on those evenings when the Rotunda and the Public Hall were a blaze of light, and it seemed impossible that any avenue could be so noble and dazzling as the one from the portico through the Rotunda and connecting porch into the great hall, where the whole view ended in the rostrum and Raphaehs assembled philosophers. Even the architectural assessories of the great paintingathe portico, the columns, and high arched portals,--seemed details of the public hall itself. The hall,s acoustics were not good, perhaps but a thousand young men and women filling the floor and galleries,-undis-, turbed by poor acoustics,-a dozen ushers rushing about with gay batons until they trouped their colors over the aisle in honor of the Faculty, Board, orators, and distinguished guests, in stately progress to the rostrum, made a picture full of color and movement and altogether good to look upon. It was a duty the Society owed to itself and the University to signalize its centenary by taking stock of its hundred years of existence, full of service in many ways. William P. Sandridge, Jr., of Lynchburg, Va., William D. Bogue, Tampa, F 1a., Charles L. Cleaves, University, Va., Edward W. Gregory, Jr., Chase City, Va., George P. Gunn, Lynchburg, Va., James D. Lovelace, Farmville, N. C., and Thomas A. McEachern, Greenville, Miss, planned the commemoration. The celebration took place November 18, 1925, in conformity with their program. Lectures in the University were suspended, and Cabell Hall, the scene, was crowded to hear Senator Oscar W. Undere wood, of Alabama, once President of the iiJeff, President Edwin A. Alder! man, and the iiJeff's personal leader, its. president, Fred H. Quarles, Jr., of Charlottesville. IZOI

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N Wu A a .----3 3 : I :m. nnx' m1:m:mu:m:usrn: m ,, ,., 2. 3 i Lvl- WI :37: w -r a '3?! 7179931 Tuww-SIW F'b' ,y, r-E: ;:.. f t ': 5-1 :. 4 W v re a :- l: E: m gm; -. WWW 'o - s - -- :--.. - -: w !IIJA,;-:;; lllyll'g l 5:32- i: A urge E E EV I ' I .: Wgagg- .wa t g i E :E E 5 i E g - :1; ll'l liltibrhi : E l E ii: : z - . E E E 5': ; i l '1: I -l' 1: Ealk 3.33.; gi :Lraii-zi Inga ...... .. -. -5... E .z: 3 ?HE: The Jefferson Literary Society: Its Centennial LTHOUCH it dates from the first half of the first session of the Univ versity the Jefferson was not the first founded student literary society. That distinction belonged to the Patrick Henry Society which embraced in its membership nearly all of the 122 students of that time. Its meetings Were occasions of tumult and not of legitimate literary and Oratorical effort and display. The Jefferson Society was the child of a secession impulse, the protest of dignity and reason which sixteen members of the Patrick Henry led against the disorder and defeated aims of that society. The first session of the University openelelarch 7, 1825. The Jefferv son Society was inaugurated July 14, 1825, in room 7, West Lawn, by the sixteen seceders from the Patrick Henry Society. Only seven of the Lawn pavilions were occupied as residences in that early day and their incumbents, all foreigners except Professor Tucker and Professor Emmet, had been resi- dent only a few months. The leaders in the creation of the Jefferson were Edgar Mason, of Charles County, Maryland, John H. Lee, of Fauquier County, Virginia, and William C. Minor, of Fredericksburg, Virginia, who drafted the constitution. At first the meetings were secret and held weekly-on iilVlonolay evening at early candlelightthith Edgar Mason as iimoolerator. The earliest ses- sions were held in Pavilion I, occupied by John Patten Emmet, nephew of the Irish patriot, then in the houses of other professors and in Hotel F at the east end of West Range, until it finally acquired Hotel D, the present Jeffer- son Literary Society Hall. All of the founders were born during Mr. Jeffersonk incumbency of the Presidency of the United States, the first decade of democracy triumphant in America, and may safely be counted as his disciples. They elected the great leader to honorary membership and fol- lowed with his fellow patriots and co- workers, Madison, Monroe, and La- fayette, who accepted the proffered honor with expressions of pleasure. JEFFERSON HALL ll9l

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a 4'7'?T.3 w;;w-a4ag ...,--.. - H Kw l W535 ixy'euzu: f if t t i. reigning, In his address as the presiding officer on this notable occasion Mr. Quarles tolcl briefly the life-story of the Society-the purposes for which it was founded and some of the results of its career. Alderman who expressed appreciation of the services, and told of the value and meaning, of the Jefferson Society in the life of the University: The University of Virginia, I may say officially, as its President, owes -a debt of gratitude to the Jefferson Literary Society which I hereby formally acknowledge and express its gratitude for. In a way it has been a splendid department of political science and government for a century of time. This University for eighty-seven years managed to struggle along, sending out leaders in different parts of the nation, without this training of political science and government and forensics; and this Society stepped in and took that burden upon itself. And how well it carried it may be shown by that list of names that President Quarles read to you, and others that I have jotted down here in a hasty way, leaving out many that should be here-R. M. T. Hunter, and John W. Daniel, Charles Culverson, and Governor Manning of South Carolina; R. H. Dabney, and William M. Thornton, Virginius Dabney, Robert Taylor of New York, and a list that would take up all my time, that went out into the nation and did the work that highly trained men ought to do. HAnd I want to thank, and express my gratitude to this group, this group right here, and the several groups for the last twenty-two years since I have been here, who under many dis- advantages and difficulties, in a different age and with a different spirit and understanding of what honor and success and glory mean, have with courage and grim persistency kept alive the traditions and dignity of the Jefferson Literary Society and what it has stood for in a cen- tury of time, and deserve praise for it. During the great period between l825 and 1860, when there was a vast debate about this nation, as to the nature of this union, whether a state must stay in or go out of. that league, or nation, this Society trained the debaters who upheld their end of that argument with such power and distinction as has seldom been seen. And when war came, and a new republic had to be built, the men who had to be trained for such tasks as these, to renationalize its impulses and aspirations, to preach the gospel of national unity, to fight for the idea of common education for all menehigh and low, rich and poor, and bond and free-this Society, I say, had to train men to do that and send out into this nation and into the south, men of the type of your speaker today lSenator Underwoodl, who have with grim strength and power kept the true idealism and the true spirit of the south shining in its face, but have built it back into the union of the states as one of its strongest attributes. I think your Society can look to itself as one of the agents in this accomplishment. A business world came to scorn the talker and exalt the doer, and that is a good thing to do, . . . but I want to say to you that the time will never come in any democracy when a man who can stand Hat-footed before an audience and say forcefully and clearly, or read forcefully and clearly,ethe time will never come, I say, when that man will not be a power which men and nations must reckon. In April, l9l7, I sat in the gallery of Congress and heard President Wilson read his message to summon his country to the defense of the free spirit of men. It was a great hour. His audience was the world. His thought was compact of high sense and good feeling, and it was clothed in language of force and dignity and beauty. The message, therefore, was a two-edged sword, and cut to the heart of the question. uHave you ever thought of the way in which obscure Abraham Lincoln won his way to power? It was by being the greatest artist in words ever produced in the political history of mankind. How he did it with his background is just a mystery. I cannot fathom it. Whence came the training that flowered into the Gettysburg speechasimple, pellucid, almost childlike, or the solemn beauty of his letter to Mrs. Bixby, but it is there. IZII He introduced President