Gloveman's Gift

Off & on for 30 years Harvard has been looking for a millionaire to endow a Graduate School of Public Administration. The late great President Charles William Eliot first had the idea for such a school but alumni were apathetic. His project was finally converted into the gaudy, bustling School of Business, endowed with a whacking $6,000,000 by the late George Fisher Baker. So widespread was the apathy toward public service that when the New Deal created the first great demand for topnotch civil servants, no major university had a graduate school to train them. The fact that Harvard did contribute the greatest number of young New Deal recruits was largely an accident. They were not the products of any special training for public service but proteges of Law Professor Felix Frankfurter.

In this situation Harvard's new President James Bryant Conant organized some makeshift expedients. The Business School put in a special course to train men for such governmental business ventures as the TVA, such regulatory bodies as the SEC (TIME, Feb. 4). The government department and Law School devised special programs. What was needed, however, was a separate graduate school. Last week Harvard got one. The public-spirited donor, found after 30 years of search, was Lucius Nathan Littauer.

Littauer is the biggest name in the U. S. glove industry. Lucius Littauer's father Nathan started in business peddling gloves from house to house in upstate New York, ended by founding Littauer Brothers. Son Lucius went to Harvard where he made close friends with Theodore Roosevelt, played football, rowed on the crew, began his philanthropies by helping classmates through college. Graduating in 1878, he presently took over and built up his father's business. Gloveman Littauer's own career as a public servant began in 1897 when his glovemaking neighbors sent him to Congress. For the next ten years he faithfully pursued their interests by working for a higher tariff on gloves.

In 1907 he retired from Congres but turned up frequently in Washington as a lobbyist for the glove industry. Especially in 1922, when he got the duty on cotton gloves upped 15%, Mr. Littauer deemed his tariff lobbying a public service on behalf of his neighbors and business associates.

His home town of Gloversville, N. Y. has been showered with benefactions, including a medical center and $200,000 swimming pool.

Grateful Gloversville honored its stout, bald, walrus-mustached benefactor with a life-size statue of which Mr. Littauer, as a believer in useful monuments, disapproves on principle. Six years ago he established the Littauer Foundation which supports research into pneumonia, cancer, heart disease.

For 57 years he has kept up the practice of helping students through college, at present has more than a hundred under his wing. Although at 76 he is retired from business and lives in Manhattan, he returns to Gloversville to vote in every election, national, State or municipal.

Gloveman Littauer conceived the idea of a Harvard School of Public Administration quite independently of Harvard authorities. To him, as to many another, the demands of the New Deal revealed the paucity of first-rate civil servants in the U. S.

In England there might be no better clerks, no smarter politicians but there were dozens of career men from Oxford and Cambridge near the top of every government department. Lacking the British tradition, how could the U. S. create in short order a similar body of career men?

Last September Mr. Littauer broached his offer to President Conant. Under the plan announced last week Mr. Littauer will give Harvard $2,000,000, one quarter for a building, the rest as endowment. To lay the groundwork for the school, Dr. Conant last week appointed a committee headed by a fellow university president, Princeton's Harold Willis Dodds, who was the first chairman of the undergraduate School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

When the Dodds committee has surveyed the field and laid out a curriculum, Harvard will appoint a dean and three professors, probably open the school in September 1937. Founder Littauer charged the University especially to find "a dean of high abilities, energy and courage." An obvious question last week was whether it could overlook Felix Frankfurter, whose young proteges in Washington are the nearest U. S. approach to the British Civil Service. Since Professor Frankfurter and his "Happy Hot Dogs'' are cordially disliked and distrusted by Republicans, businessmen and most Harvardmen, a good guess was that Harvard will find a way of overlooking him.

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