CHAPTER IV

COLLEGE

It was decided that I should go to Westminster College, at Fulton, Missouri, an old Presbyterian school attended largely by those aspiring to the ministry, as I was supposed to be. My cousin Tressie had gone, the year before, to the Synodical Female Seminary, also a Presbyterian school at Fulton.

The Rev. R. H. Jackson had come to Westfield Church, and he and his wife established an Academy to which we all were sent. His influence was directed in favor of a church school.

I did not get out of college all I should have chiefly because I accidentally shot myself soon after going. I was invited by an elderly gentleman who lived near Fulton to hunt squirrels. He gave me a fine, old rifle, the trigger of which was worn, and it went off unexpectedly, sending a bullet through my right foot.

I was boarding with an old retired physician, who treated the wound by probing through it from top to bottom, pouring some listerine on it, and binding it up. Result—the wound closed, top and bottom, in a few hours, and soon blood-poisoning set in. He opened the wound and said "Some septicemia," but did little else. I got worse, and was quite sick. He insisted it was doing all right, but after several days I sent for a Dr. Yates, who had been a Confederate Army surgeon. Lie went right in with a knife and tweezers, took out some bits of sock and some splintered bone, and applied iodine. He did not use any anesthetic, though, and I shall always recall that experience as the most painful half-hour of my life. The wound was many weeks healing, and I was much reduced in strength, having to quit school toward spring and go home. The next fall Walter went back with me, and we both were students at Westminster.

During those weeks as a student at a Christian college not a professor or teacher ever made any serious inquiry as to my health. They talked "Service," but were too busy talking to practice it. My grandmother knew health was the greatest asset in life. They didn’t—in fact, few of them were healthy themselves.

I learned to appreciate literature, oratory, and music at Westminster. Much effort was spent on public speaking and debating in the college, and I heard some of the renowned orators of the South. Westminster belonged to the Presbyterian Church South, with the chief emphasis on the South, and all the orators were southern men of power and distinction.

Music I learned to appreciate by that best of all methods— doing. I boarded, after the foot got well, with a Rev. Gallaher, whose family were all musical. John. Gallaher was a musician of real ability. He played the violin, piano, and pipe organ, and was the organist in the large Presbyterian church. I had learned to listen to music at home, for my mother was very fond of it and sang and played.

John Gallaher loved music. He enjoyed my interest in it and found me a sympathetic and enraptured listener. He played Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Liszt, and pointed out to me the variety in their style and method. I had played the violin a bit before coming to college, and now took it up again. John organized an orchestra. I was assigned the flute, which John thought I played better than the violin. Our first piece was "Integer Vitae," which we were told was one of the oldest known pieces of music in the world, having come from ancient Greece. The title, "The Perfect Life," appealed to us. After many rehearsals John thought we played it perfectly, and we went on. Our final piece was Boccherini’s "Minuet," which we played later at a college entertainment. How well we played is rather doubtful in my mind, but we were applauded vigorously. We greatly enjoyed it. Later, I heard a string quintette from Boston give a concert. It opened with Boccherini’s "Minuet." John and I sat together. I turned and through misty eyes saw him wiping the tears off his cheeks. We were both entranced.

Later, I took singing lessons, and while my own accomplishments as a musician were very meagre, indeed, this method taught me to love, to understand, and to appreciate music.

My father was fond of poetry, so were Uncle Charles and Uncle Scott. The music of words appealed to them as did harmony and melody to the Wrights. These were two wonderful sources of joy and pleasure to them, as they have been all my life to me.

One of the best things about going to college is going back home, just as Americans appreciate their country more after returning from a trip to foreign lands. On returning home after being with entire strangers for the first time in my life, I had a new and increased appreciation of my own family. It seemed to me my father used better English than the professors; that my uncles and he had more general and practical information; that they were more vital and more interested in the Government, the country, morals, and society. They appeared to me in a new light. I had thought of them as a part of the very furniture and fixtures of life, but now I saw them as men and women of energy and of ability, busy in doing their share of the world’s work.

My Grandmother Nesbit was a new source of wonder and delight. Her stories of her girlhood and life and her quotations of poems now appealed to me with a new freshness. I found the vast realm of literature which had dawned on me at college had been looked upon by my people, and that as a boy I had not fully realized it.

Sade followed Tressie and attended school at Fulton, and my brother Walter also went to Westminster and was a Beta. One of the outstanding memories of college days was the elocution or reading contest at the Synodical Female Seminary, when Tressie took first prize. It was a close race between Tressie and Belle Black, but finally the judges gave them a piece neither had seen before, and Tress won. The prize was a bouquet of roses and other flowers from The White House conservatory at Washington, sent by the first Democratic President since the Civil War. It created great interest and was long preserved in alcohol.

Tressie also was quite the center of interest and the object of the unbounded admiration of the other three Nesbits when, at a musical entertainment, she played "The Rousing of the Lion" on the piano and a big string broke and flew up out of the piano. Tress gave it all the muscle she had and was the prize-winner that day.

Fulton was the county seat of Calloway County. It was known as the "Kingdom of Calloway." It was pure South— not even Virginia could be more southern in customs, manners, and sentiment. There was a southern atmosphere, and, being at an impressionable age, it gave me a southern viewpoint and sympathy which have remained with me.

While we were at Fulton my father was elected Secretary of the State Senate of the State of Missouri, and he and mother spent the winter in Jefferson City. Walter and I went over and visited them, as a railroad ran from the opposite bank of the Missouri from Jefferson City through Fulton.

Jefferson City, with the hustle and excitement there during the session of the Legislature, was interesting. After the session closed, everyone connected with it, nearly, went to St. Louis on a railroad pass. Several railroad lobbyists in Jefferson City had great bundles of blank passes and everyone in any way connected with the Legislature could get a pass anywhere in the State at any time. It was the custom. No one thought of it as anything wrong. For some years before that, when my father and uncles first became active in politics, none of the family had ever paid passenger fare. They paid enough freight, and plenty over, though.

It was the day of wild railroad expansion and speculation and manipulation. Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Commodore Vanderbilt, C. P. Huntington and others were piling up millions and fleecing the people in a dozen different ways. Contributing liberally to churches and handing out passes to everyone of any political influence were their cheapest methods of making friends and getting their schemes through. Men like my father and uncles, who would have scorned a bribe or any money payment, saw nothing wrong in accepting passes. From about 1880 till 1896 I do not think any of our family paid a railroad fare, nor do I think any other people of political influence did. If they did, they were considered dumb.

I recall hearing a noted preacher telling what a splendid man his friend, Mr. So and So, president of a railroad, was. "Why, last summer he took ten of us clergymen on his special car up to Wisconsin on a fishing trip, and it never cost us a cent." I was later to learn that these acts by railway officials were not motivated entirely by disinterested love and charity.

"The report of the Pacific Railroad Commission gives no adequate idea of the immensely valuable rights and possessions of all kinds that they secured by bribery and fraud. But it does give a comprehensive account of their money and stock plundering. In the accounts of the Central Pacific Railroad Company the report of the Pacific Railway Commission of 1887 states the diversion of earnings for improper purposes amounted to many millions, through contracts made by Messrs. Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker with themselves. According to this report, the cost of building 1,171 miles of road was $27,217,000.00, but they fraudulently charged three times that sum. Here was a theft of more than fifty millions in the grand haul. In addition to the stolen cash, they issued to themselves $33,722,000 in bonds and $49,005,000 of stock, But these sums were only part of their total theft."

Later the American people woke up, and in a grouchy mood, which put most of the railroads of the country into receiver-ships. Today the other and newer public utilities—electric light, gas, street railways, water, and water power corporations

—are playing the same old game the railways played fifty years ago. They are doing it with more finesse. They are more circumspect and less blunt with the consumers than Vanderbilt when he said: "The public be damned." "Milk from contented cows" is a phrase from which these magnates have absorbed some meaning.

I recall the campaign for Cleveland in 1884, which took place while I was at college. The "Kingdom of Calloway" celebrated the election of a Democrat to the Presidency in a manner befitting its southern traditions. As I was a total abstainer then, I merely looked on, but the red fire, the fireworks, the parades and torchlight processions, and the fiery threats of what would happen if the Republicans tried to rob Grover Cleveland of his election as they had robbed Tilden, were exciting and novel experiences. I thought Calloway County would just march East en masse and wipe New England off the map if the steal was attempted this time.

I was in Jefferson City on March 1, 1885, and stayed until the Legislature closed. The closing days were exciting and full of interest for me. On the last day my father was presented with a very fine gold watch and a big, gold chain. It is inscribed as being presented by Senators and his staff. After his death I put it in a safe deposit box, where it lay for twenty years. Then I took it to a jeweler to have it cleaned and oiled.

He told me later that before doing anything to it, he started it up and wound it, and that it ran for a week with a variation of less than one-half minute. He said it was a very fine Swiss watch. "Mermod Jaccard & Company" sold it. They handled fine watches and jewelry and had a great trade with planters, cattlemen, ranchers, and the South and southwestern country.

The next day or so, when my father was closing up the work, records, etc., of the Senate, a telegram came from United States Senator George C. Vest, Washington, D. C., telling my father he would within a day or so be appointed Chief Clerk of the U. S. Bureau of Agriculture, and to be ready to come on to Washington at once. He was disposed not to accept it, but mother urged that he do so. So did Walter and I, and he did accept and was soon on his way after the appointment. After he left, mother, Walter, and I spent the summer in the old home at Tallmadge, Ohio, with Grandmother and Grandfather Wright.

Father came in August for a two weeks’ vacation, and said he thought it best for me to come to Washington for a year with mother, that I was not well, and he did not think it best for me to go back to school. This was great news to me. His appointment was an era in the family history, for, with his journey to Washington began a return to the East of two of the three Nesbit families.