Henry Merritt Wriston files (OF.1C.11)

Biographical/Historical Note

Henry Merritt Wriston (1889-1978), eleventh president of Brown University, was born in Laramie, Wyoming, on July 4, 1889. His father, Henry Lincoln Wriston, born in West Virginia, had attended Ohio Wesleyan University for two years before moving to Texas and then to Colorado, where he was in the first class to graduate from the University of Denver. His mother, Jennie Amalia Atcheson, was the daughter of a New York ship carpenter who moved to Missouri and then to Colorado. At Wesleyan he majored in medieval history, edited the college newspaper, debated, and won the senior oratorial contest. After graduation in 1911, he pursued graduate study at Harvard for three years, but left without completing his dissertation to return to Wesleyan as an instructor in history. By 1919, he was a full professor at the age of 30, and still without his Ph.D. During the World War he was an assistant manager of the Connecticut State Council of Defense, and demonstrated administrative talent which led to his appointment in 1919 as executive secretary of the Wesleyan endowment fund campaign. Wriston then took a leave of absence to work for his doctorate, which he received from Harvard in 1922. His dissertation, which treated the extent of the use of personal executive agents by American presidents in conducting foreign relations, won him a reputation as an American diplomatic scholar, and when published in book form, became a standard text in the State Department. In 1925 he accepted the presidency of Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. He left to become president of Brown in 1937. The newly-elected president was as different as possible from his predecessors. He was the first who was not an ordained Baptist minister and the first non-graduate of Brown since Francis Wayland. William S. Learned 1897, who recommended him, wrote, “He would undoubtedly provide a series of shocks to the old college, but I believe it would survive and profit enormously.” In fact, he was like a breath of fresh air, injecting new life into the University, and he himself later commented that his selection signalled the Corporation’s determination to make substantial changes in the University. Among the accomplishments of Wriston’s administration were the integration of Brown and Pembroke classes, the growth of the Graduate School, the acquisition of new and younger faculty members, and the establishment of new departments such as Applied Mathematics and Egyptology. After his retirement in 1955, he was named executive director of the American Assembly, an organization to hold conferences on current national problems, which had been founded by Dwight D. Eisenhower while he was president of Columbia University. In 1960 Eisenhower named him chairman of the President’s Commission on National Goals, which produced a volume, Goals for Americans, which made recommendations concerning economics, government, education, foreign policy, and science. Wriston returned to Brown at Commencement in 1976 to receive the Susan Colver Rosenberger Medal. He died on March 7, 1978 in New York City.