A History of Shared Governance at East Carolina Budget Cuts and World Federations: Faculty Activism in the 1930s and early 1940s Presented Tuesday, November 4, 2014 John Tucker, University Historian On February 17, 1932, President Wright called a special i.e., emergency meeting of the staff of East Carolina Teachers College. At the meeting, Wright asked for cooperation in addressing necessary budget cuts. After explaining that Governor Max Gardner had called for drastic cuts and adding that the North Carolina Budget Bureau had legal authority to reduce salaries, Wright suggested that employees voluntarily accept a ten per cent reduction in remuneration for the following four months. Sallie Joyner Davis (1871-1954), a professor of history and niece of Dr. James Yadkin Joyner, moved that, to help the state, there be a voluntary cut in compensation for faculty, officers, and other employees of the institution for the following four months. Davis motion was passed unanimously. Almost a decade later, on January 31, 1941, the ECTC faculty again led by Miss Davis made another relatively unique move. Miss Davis resolved: 1
That it is the sense of this meeting that the faculty of East Carolina Teachers College should go on record as endorsing the Principles enunciated in the Declaration of the Federation of the World. Miss Davis resolution, seconded by Mr. Cleveland Hollar (History), carried, albeit without indication of unanimity. Following some revision of Davis resolution, Dr. Alice Lucile Turner (English) moved that the president, Dr. Leon Meadows, notify Mr. Humber of the action on the resolution on the Declaration on the Federation of the World. Seconded by Dr. Robert Hilldrup (History), that motion also carried. President Meadows communicated the faculty decision to Mr. Humber in a note dated February 7, 1941. 2
The Mr. Humber referred to in Turner s motion was Robert Lee Humber (1898-1970), a Greenville native who in late 1940 had returned home from Paris where he had lived and worked for nearly two decades just as the Nazi invasion of France began. Earlier Humber had studied at Wake Forest (BA), Harvard (MA), at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and finally at the University of Paris (ABD). Along the way, he passed the North Carolina bar exam enabling him to practice law. He also traveled throughout much of Europe and Asia. In the 1922, Humber took up residence in Paris, earning a living tutoring, offering tours, and practicing law. It was there that he met Thomas Gilcrease, an Oklahoman of Creek Native American ancestry, who came to own 160 acres of land on which oil deposits were later discovered. Gilcrease founded an oil company, acquired considerable wealth, and soon developed an interest in expanding sales in Europe. With Humber s assistance, Gilcrease bypassed the major American oil producers and penetrated the European market. Gilcrease s offices were based in Paris, on the Champs Elysees, and led by Humber. During the 1930s, as ECTC faculty were voting voluntary reductions in salary, Humber, the son of a machinist, made a fortune from his interest in Gilcrease Oil. The Nazi invasion of France in 1940, however, forced Gilcrease to close its European branch. Although offered the presidency of Gilcrease Oil, Humber chose instead to return to Greenville with his French wife, Lucie Berthier Humber, and three children and from there lead a movement for the creation of a world federation. Humber s campaign for world government which he saw as humanity s only alternative to war was launched at Davis Island in the Core Sound of coastal North Carolina. The Humber campaign soon took the form of securing endorsements from various organizations in favor of his Declaration of the Federation of the World. Prior to the faculty decision on January 31, the ECTC Alumni endorsed the Humber resolution. That endorsement was headlined in the student paper, The Teco Echo. 3
Endorsement of the Humber resolution distinguished East Carolina Teachers College. On February 9, 1941, Humber wrote President Meadows expressing his deep satisfaction and happiness with the action of the Faculty of East Carolina Teachers College in endorsing the principles and objectives of the Declaration of the Federation of the World. Humber added, the faculty of East Carolina Teachers College has the distinction of being the first faculty which has endorsed the Declaration, though similar action is contemplated by other institutions in the near future. 4
Two months later the North Carolina General Assembly followed the lead of Humber and ECTC, approving his resolution, thus becoming the first of 16 states or one third of the United States at that time to do so. Humber s associations with East Carolina did not stop with his resolution. He played instrumental roles in securing legislation for the creation of the North Carolina Art Museum, in coordinating local support for the growth of the Greenville Art Museum, and in recruiting Francis Speight, a Bertie County native and nationally recognized artist, to East Carolina College as an Artist in Residence. Humber was also one of the leading figures behind the application that secured for Greenville, in 1963-64, a technical institute, Pitt Tech, today Pitt Community College. Reportedly it was Humber who suggested and secured approval for the neo-classical architectural motif that defines the PCC campus and reveals, arguably, that the institution was never meant to be a technical institute for long. Humber later guided PCC in its transition to community college status. Finally, it was Humber, a state senator from 1958-1964, who initiated discussions of university status for East Carolina, and then later, reportedly, the suggestion that a state-supported medical school be established at East Carolina. Humber passed away in 1970, of a heart attack, just two days after the French President, Charles de Gaulle died, also of a heart attack. Although in Greenville at the time, fittingly Humber was watching the first half of the film version of Tolstoy s War and Peace at the Plaza Cinema when he passed away. Humber was both a dreamer as well as a man of action. While his movement for a World Federation did not succeed, the wisdom of one has been repeatedly established by events since January 1941. Humber did participate, incidentally, as a member of the Southern Council on International Relations at the United Nations Organizational Conference in San Francisco in 1945. Humber s intersection with the faculty of East Carolina might have been brief, but his own greatness as an individual devoted to education, the arts, and world government was in many respects a function of his childhood in Greenville, growing up around the corner from Governor Thomas Jarvis, Senator James Fleming, a growing college faculty, and an academic culture that most likely bred, at one level or another, his childhood dream of becoming a Rhodes Scholar, and then later, his dream of contributing institutionally to world peace. 5