Dr. John Rood Cunningham

College Man of Destiny

John Rood Cunningham, Westminister 1914, is an affable, urbane gentleman of 63 with a fondness for Tennessee walking horses, mailorder chicks and roses, and an unwavering devotion to the principle that Christian ethics and a liberal education are inseparable.

He has also been described, less sweepingly, as the kind of college president who would cheerfully give a student the shirt off his back --- and he did, when the need arose. This, insists the preacher-president of Davidson College, is inaccurate, since he was not wearing the shirt at the time. Just the same, he enjoys telling the story.

"It was the night of the big fall formal. A few minutes before 10 o'clock, a thin-voiced sophomore achieved a telephone connection with the white brick presidential residence on the northern fringe of the campus, and spouted a tale of woe into the dignified presidential ear.

'Mother sent my tuxedo, but she forgot the dress shirt,' and then a nervous, dry-lipped pause followed. "I was wondering, sir ..."

What size do you wear, son?

"Sixteen, sir."

Then come right over... a few minutes later, as the student strode triumphantly out of the Cunningham living room, with the Cunningham shirt tucked firmly under an arm, he turned to say:

"If you ever get in a jam, Dr. Cunningham, I certainly hope you will let me know.'

I was never more flattered"

The fact that students turn readily to him in time of trouble is a source of unending satisfaction to this tall, broad-shouldered Presbyterian preacher who left a wealthy Winston-Salem church in 1941 to guide 115-year-old Davidson through what has been called a decade of destiny.

In Dr. Cunningham's sunny, tall-ceilinged office in the east wing of Chambers Hall, the problems that have beset collegians from time immemorial take firm precedence over affairs of lesser moment. They are the problems of star-crossed young love, strained finances, and what-to-do-about-that-C-minus-in-Latin and to John Cunningham, they are matters of pressing urgency.

"I get a kick, he says, out of wondering who is in this student body. Woodrow Wilson was here for a year but nobody suspected that he would be the leading citizen of his time. He was not a particularly outstanding student, you know, although the records of the Literary Society show that he was twice a prayer leader at meetings and once a fire maker."

From humble beginnings on a Missouri farm, Dr. Cunningham has risen to the top of two professions. In 1947 he was elected moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., the highest office to which a Presbyterian can aspire. In 1953, he was elected president of the Association of American Colleges, again the highest office of that profession.

President Cunningham's first devotion is to the Davidson concept of a liberal education, which he likes to state in the words of Theodore Roosevelt: Educate a man's mind and not his morals and you give a menace to society, Schools like Davidson, he feels, are doing much to achieve this marriage of mind and morals.

"The church college has been in the past the mother of higher education in American. By the same token, it may easily be that she must stand forth again to render an unique and fundamental service to the cause of education, and to the broader cause of democracy."

He followed the usual course of many another student by making his expenses waiting on table and doing odd jobs. In the summers he worked with the Red Path Chautauqua in Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri. Until his senior year he had planned to enter medicine but right at this time he decided to enter the ministry. This was a personal decision, growing out of a long-time feeling that his life's work really belonged in the field of religion.

Following ordination as a Presbyterian minister, just after gaining his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, he became an Army YMCA secretary in the last few months of the First World War. In 1919 he accepted his first pastorate in Grenada, Mississippi. Later he accepted calls to Gainesville, Florida, and Bristol, Tennessee, and then in 1930, accepted the presidency at Louisville Seminary. Here he stayed for six years during the depths of the depression, doing work of the highest order before moving on to Winston-Salem where he remained until he came to Davidson in the fall of 1941.

The advent of a world war two months after taking over the helm at Davidson was a severe challenge to him but he met it with the same common sense determination that had favored one of his predecessors who kept the doors of his college open throughout the Civil war, when every other college in the South was closed.

It is Dr. Cunningham's firm conviction that students who plan to go to professional schools such as law and medicine, ought first to be strongly grounded in ethics, history, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. He relates,

"We're finding that science alone can make a mighty little man,"

Evidence of Davidson's high standards of scholarship is found in the fact that she has produced 10 Rhodes Scholars thus far in the 20th century. If Dr. Cunningham were asked to sum up the philosophy that guides his efforts at Davidson, he would in all probability, and quite correctly, too, point to the college's motto, chiseled in Latin on the facade of Chambers Hall: Alenda Lux Ubi Orta Libertas.

"Let Learning be Cherished Where Liberty Has Arisen."

Fifteen Year of Progress

Davidson Flourishes Under Dr. John R. Cunningham

In 1861 Callaway County, Missouri, being largely inhabited by people from Virginia and Kentucky, was in sentiment a detached fragment of the Southern Confederacy. By agreement in October of that year this county was not to be invaded by Federal forces, and to this day it bears the name The Kingdom of Calaway.

About twenty years later Sims Clay Cunningham, born in Giles County, Virginia, located in this community. His paternal ancestors were from South Carolina. He married Mary Augusta Rood, who was born in Cambridge, Ohio, and while a child had moved with her family to Missouri. Her paternal ancestors were originally from Vermont. The combining influences of these different backgrounds, Northern and Southern, Republican and Democrat, left an imprint of broad-mindedness and tolerance upon the five children of this home.

John Rood Cunningham was born July 3rd, 1891. He never knew life apart from the Church, for his was a church-going family. His father served as an elder in the Nine-Mile Presbyterian Church at Williamsburg, Missouri. As a boy John joined this church, and at one time served as janitor to earn money for piano lessons. He won a Bible in the Sunday School for the best recitation of the Shorter Catechism.

Reared on a farm, John attended the nearby one-room country school and went to Caruthersville Missouri, for his high school work. After graduation, he entered Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, and graduated in three years. He waited tables during the school year, and worked for Redpath Chatauqua in Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska in the summers to meet college expenses. Having three members of a family in college at the same time was a financial strain on a farmer in those days.

In his senior year at college John decided to invest his life in the ministry. While a student at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary he served as pastor of two churches, at Hebron and Boston, Kentucky. During his senior year he was president of the student body.

After graduating from the seminary in 1917 the young John Cunningham served as YMCA Secretary at Canp Sevier, under the War Work Council of the Presbyterian Church, U.S. For a short period he worked for the Committee of Christian Education, visiting colleges and universities in the South.

In 1919 he accepted a call to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian church of Grenada, Mississippi, serving until 1923. It was during this period that he met an attractive young home missionary, Miss Rubie Ray of Ocala, Florida.

After graduating from Salem College she had served missions in Kentucky for three years when on August 24, 1922 she and John Cunningham were married in Anderson Chapel, Montreat, with Dr. R.C. Anderson performing the ceremony.

In 1923 the Rev. Mr. Cunningham accepted a call from the First Presbyterian church of Gainesville, Florida. A Gainesville newspaper of early 1924 noted the phenomenal growth of the church; more than 60 new members were added in the first five months under the new pastor.

He continued his interest and active participation in community affairs and was elected president of the Gainesville Rotary Club. In 1927 he was chosen to represent the club at the International Rotary Convention at Ostend, Belgium, the first of four trips to the Continent as a representative of a service or religious organization.

The reputation of John Cunningham was growing, and in 1928 he accepted the pastorate and challenge of the First Presbyterian Church of Bristol, Tennessee, like Gainesville a city of college students and young people as well as of vigorous Presbyterians.

At Bristol he was not only a beloved minister of the Gospel, but gained his first experience with a large and planned financial campaign as the church remodeled its physical plant.

However, he was not to serve the Bristol pastorate long. In early 1930, he delivered three lectures in chapel of the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary on The Ideal Minister of Today. On May 6 he was offered the presidency of his theological alma mater, just 13 years after his graduation, and on June 27 began the first of many successful years as the chief executive of an educational institution. In a seminary publication the retiring president, Dr. John N, Vander Meulen, described the new president to the students of the seminary and in five categories told of his capabilities.

1. His spirituality, a burning passion for Christ .. expressed through a gracious and modest personality
2. His wonderful hold on college students.
3. His strong preaching.
4. His capability as an executive, as evidenced by his success in raising funds for remodeling the church at Bristol.
5. His great poise and his sound judgment.

During his six years at Louisville President Cunningham was widely sought as a preacher, particularly for baccalureate sermons. In 1931 he conducted evangelistic services at Southwestern, and later preached at Princeton, the University of Louisville, and at Agnes Scott. He conducted a revival at the First church of Detroit, Michigan in that same year.

It was therefore no surprise that he was offered many pastorates, and quite natural that he should yield to the summons and to his personal zeal when he accepted a call to the First Church of Winston-Salem on Feb. 6, 1936. A Louisville newspaper apologized for being hackneyed when stating editorially that the term scholar and gentleman never was more suited to an individual than to John Cunningham.

Once again the membership of his church swelled, and once again the voice of John Cunningham was strong in community life. He was the keynoter for the YMCA membership campaign in 1937. He presided as the Kate Bitting Reynolds hospital was dedicated, and gave the commencement address for the seventh grade at Calvin H. Wiley school on January 27, 1938. Wrote Dr. Cunningham

"the church is concerned with anything that touches the life of the people,"

On November 19, 1940, the Davidson College Board of Trustees announced that they had chosen, after a search of 18 months, a fitting successor to Dr. Walter L. Lingle, who was retiring as president of the college. They selected John Rood Cunningham, but it was not for several months that he accepted the call, for his congregation and his city urged him to stay.

Dr. Cunningham and his wife had four children. The oldest was a girl, Harriet, who was born in 1924 in Gainesville, Florida. Harriet sent the preceding biographical sketches of her father to her niece and Dr. Cunningham's granddaughter, Beth Wood. Beth, her husband Dr. Floyd (Casey), and daughter Libby are members of the First Presbyterian Church in Gainesville.

In the 1956 sketch, Harriet was listed as Mrs. Harriet Inscoe, wife of a furniture company executive in Morgantown and mother of three sons. The other three children of Dr. and Mrs. Cunningham were John Rood, Jr, teacher at the Darlington School, Rome, Georgia; and the father of a daughter; Walter Ray of Charlotte's Security Life and Trust Co; and William Clay of the United States Army.

Mrs. Harriet Inscoe reported that while in Gainesville her father was offered a job as the chancellor [President] of the University of Florida, but he declined. She also indicated that Preacher Gorden was the best man at the wedding of Dr. Cunningham and Miss Rubie Ray. [Preacher succeeded, Dr. Cunningham at Gainesville First Presbyterian.] Mrs. Inscoe also remembered that her father had baptised current church members, Dr. Tom Fey, and Marguerite Preston, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Henry Hamilton.