
|

Back
to May/June obituaries | May/June
Contents | Gazette home

Harold
Stassen, 1907-2001
By
Mark F. Bernstein
 |
National
obituaries for the Honorable Harold E. Stassen Hon48, who died on March
4 at the age of 93, made much of his many bids for public office. Known
as the perennial candidate, among other offices, he ran for president
of the United States nine times, governor of Minnesota four times, governor
of Pennsylvania twice, the U.S. Senate twice, and mayor of Philadelphia
once. Often overlooked among the tributes was the one presidency Stassen
did attainthat of the University of Pennsylvania, which he led from 1948
to 1953.
Few
university presidents have ever boasted a more impressive resume. Stassen
was first elected governor of Minnesota when he was only 31 and delivered
the keynote address at the 1940 Republican convention, where he helped
clinch the nomination for Wendell Willkie. Reelected twice, he resigned
in 1943 to go on active duty in the Navy, serving as chief of staff to
Admiral William Halsey in the South Pacific. President Franklin Roosevelt
named Stassen to the American delegation to the first United Nations conference
in San Francisco, where he helped write the UN Charter and was voted the
most effective delegate.
In
1948 Stassen made his first and strongest bid for the White House. After
a series of upset victories in the early primaries, polls showed him the
favorite of convention delegates and indicated that he would beat President
Harry Truman in a head-to-head race. He became a hero to many young Republicans,
including Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, and future Chief Justice Warren
Burger. When Stassen fell short of victory at the GOP convention in Philadelphia
that summer, Penn pounced.
Though
Stassen was not the only politician-president in the Ivy League at that
timeDwight Eisenhower had just taken over at Columbiamany questioned
the selection of a man who had no ties to Penn or experience as an academic
administrator. In several respects, though, his tenure was successful.
Penn was in the middle of a more-or-less perpetual financial crunch and
Stassens skill as a fundraiser was put to good use. He succeeded in raising
money and cutting costs, choosing to focus limited resources on a few
prestige departments at the expense of others. In 1951, he bravely spoke
out against a bill in the Pennsylvania legislature that would have required
loyalty oaths from professors.
He
also sought to maximize the exposure of Penns nationally successful football
teams. Proclaiming that the Universitys goal was victory with honor,
Stassen replaced longtime athletic director H. Jamison Swarts with brash
young Francis T. Franny Murray and added Notre Dame and other national
powerhouses to the schedule. Coming as he did from the Big Ten, Stassen
argued that academic excellence was not incompatible with gridiron success,
but Penns Ivy rivals, who had grown tired of losing to the Quakers and
had no desire to keep up with a big-time program, dropped the team from
their schedules. Eventually, Stassen was forced to curb Penns football
aspirations as the price of securing membership in the Ivy League.
Football
was at the center of the other major controversy of Stassens presidency:
his fight with the NCAA over televising Quaker home games. By the late
1940s Penn was one of only two colleges in the country with a national
TV contract, a considerable source of
revenue for a cash-strapped university. When the NCAA voted to restrict
the number of televised games in order to stop the slide in gate attendance,
Stassen defied the order and signed a $200,000 contract with ABC. Forced
to back down when the NCAA threatened
to expel the Quakers, the incident unnecessarily damaged Penns national
reputation and further soured relations with the other Ivy colleges.
Whatever
his successes or failures, it was hard to shake the suspicion that Stassen
prized Penn chiefly as a staging ground for his next assault on the White
House. In his letter of acceptance to the trustees, he noted that he would
take office, subject to the fulfillment of my speaking duties on behalf
of Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the 1948 Republican nominee. That was a sign
of things to come, for in just over four years in office Stassen took
two leaves of absence, to make an extended speaking tour in Asia and to
campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952.
In
all, Stassens tenure was not a particularly rewarding one, either for
him or for Penn, and it was clear when he resigned to take a post in the
Eisenhower Administration that he and the trustees were relieved to be
rid of each other. Stassen kept few ties to the University after his term
ended, but went on to build a successful law practice and continued to
dabble in politics. In 1963, as president of the American Baptist Convention,
he joined the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on Washington.
And every four years, it seemed, he would seek his partys nomination
for president, earning a brief, increasingly dismissive paragraph in the
newspapers.
At
his 90th birthday party three years ago, Stassen received tributes from
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan, among others, while the members of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee unanimously urged President Clinton to award him the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. Though living in a nursing home, Stassen was still busily
promoting a 129-page proposal to revise the United Nations Charter and
filing yet again for the Minnesota gubernatorial race that Jesse Ventura,
a very different sort of maverick, eventually won.
Even
in old age, there was something Stassen found vital in tilting at windmills,
something that lent his lonely career an odd sort of gallantry. It was
fitting that his favorite lines of poetry came from Robert Browning:
Ah,
but a mans reach should exceed his grasp,
Or
whats a heaven for?
Mark
Bernstein has written for the Gazette on a Penn-Princeton football
game played at the Academy of Music in 1889 [December 1997] and math professor
Herbert S. Wilf [May 1998]. His book on Ivy League football will be published
by the University of Pennsylvania Press this fall, and he is at work on
a biography of Harold Stassen.
Previous issue's obituaries
| May/June Contents
| Gazette home
Copyright 2001 The Pennsylvania
Gazette Last modified 5/2/01
|

|