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  From
“The Golden Wheel” by
David Nicholl,
chapter 5, pp. 85-88
 Looking
back on that momentous August of 1911, we can see how Harris and
Perry had brilliantly pre‑empted every move, foreseen every
development.
 Since
Arthur Sheldon had his own permanent platform, a journal he
called The Business Philosopher, Paul had obtained his
also, The National Rotarian, which back in January had
flooded the multiplying Clubs across the land with 3,000 copies
delivered post‑free. The delegates to Portland, knowingly or
not, had already been primed seven months before by the six‑page
newspaper through which the Founder could at last fulfil his
journalistic ambitions, refired by the sight of that San
Francisco write‑up in his old employer, the Chronicle.
“President Harris had a message which he wanted to deliver not
only to every Rotary Club but to every Rotarian,” Editor Perry
informed his readers. The President did indeed, and the
editorial introduction brooked no nonsense in its tone.
So the 3,000 copies were read (and hundreds of thousands of
facsimiles of it have been read since) and there, underneath a
"thinker" photograph of Paul Harris, cheek resting on pensively
curled finger, to make it clear that Paul the Philosopher was
speaking, a Manifesto was laid down in column after column of
close‑set type. It began: “If by interposition of Providence I
some day were to find myself standing on a platform in some
great Coliseum looking into the eyes of every living Rotarian
[the dead ones presumably being spared] , and were to be told
that I could have one word to say, without an instant's
hesitation and at the top of my voice, I would shout
“Toleration!””
We know to whom his shout was directed: the Rotarians of
Chicago. But one notes with interest the fantasy in which Paul
was indulging. He had seldom, if ever, shouted; would certainly
never have dreamed of doing so from a platform. If faced with a
packed coliseum, he would have fled. Yet it seems an uncanny
pre‑vision of that Portland stern‑wheeler when he goes on to
write: “. . . it was in pursuit of it [Toleration] that the
pilgrim fathers embarked in their frail craft upon the stormy
seas".
It remained fantasy. The Columbia River was hardly stormy on
that hot August morning, though the Conference in the
river-steamer was ‑yet with only auspicious gales ‑ and the
craft was anything but frail. And though Paul Harris was harking
back to his beloved, and romanticised, New England boyhood, was
he not only too aware that the society established by those
Pilgrim Fathers was the most intolerant ever known on the North
American continent? His two natures, the Bryan and the Harris,
were still fusing within him. But, knowing his Rotary time was
short, he had important things to say and nothing more important
has ever been said about Rotary. We shall refer to other parts
of his 5,000‑word article later in this book, but for now we can
skip the Bunyanesque bits ‑ involving characters like Mr Cash
Discount and Mr Vigorously Definite ‑ and quote these powerful,
prophetic lines, packed as they are with disturbing insight:
Life in Rotary should consist of a rational mixture of business
with civic activities and good fellowship....
There should be no occasion for meeting behind closed doors. If
Rotarianism cannot stand the test of trial before a jury
comprised of the entire American people, then it lacks
rationality and should be changed....
No doctrine is immune from criticism. It is part of wisdom to
profit from
rational criticism, not so much because of what other people
think of us as because of what they cause us to think of
ourselves....
Let us be in a position to defend ourselves ... not by
stentorian shouting of meaningless words but by logic that
convinces.... if we put Rotary on the highest possible plane and
keep it there, we shall experience no difficulty....
A grave responsibility lies on your shoulders and mine....
Rotary is a huge, powerful machine. Unguided, it could crash
down the aisles of time a menace to all mankind. Well directed,
it will become a humanizing instrumentality of which we need not
be ashamed.
The words still reverberate with warning and with truth, and
though the date beneath them is lst January 1911, one feels they
might well have been written ‑ and certainly contemplated and
slowly forged ‑ over all the years since the original
inspiration for the world's first Service Club had come to
Harris during that lonely walk in Rogers Park in the first year
of the century. He was writing more than a New Year's Day
Message for Rotarians of then and now. He was writing on the
first day of the modern era, with Armageddon growing impatient
in the wings and Europe full of very real, brutal and
three‑dimensional “huge, powerful” machines about to thrash
unguided “down the aisles of time”, a menace and doom to all
mankind and to the societies in which they were born. These
blind machines were about to destroy their creators and drag a
generation of innocent follies down to oblivion in their
terrible wake.
It is easy now to forget that the First World War almost began
in 1911 and not in 1914, in reaction to the Agadir Incident in
Morocco between France and Germany. Indeed it was on 23rd
August, the very day that the Second National Rotary Convention
was in ferment on the waters of the Columbia over its aims and
mottoes, that the Committee of Imperial Defence was also meeting
in London and, among other matters of world crisis, was
considering a memorandum by Winston Churchill which uncannily
predicted, with astounding accuracy, the course of the first
forty days of the war to come.
Harris had written in January: “The idea of having two or three
hundred men in non‑competitive lines looking out for your
interests all of the time looks wildly seductive. If it worked
out in practice as it does on the face of it in theory, we would
soon corner all of the business there is in the world.” His tone
was ironic, of course, but it reflected precisely the situation
which the Great Powers had once imagined they could create on
the global stage and of course failed to achieve with horrifying
inevitability.
It is appropriate that the same first issue of The National
Rotarian should carry a Californian advertisement, inserted by a
member of the Los Angeles Rotary Club, for an “Ostrich
Emporium”. But if Harris were anxious for Rotary not to bury its
head in the sand, his Rotary Manifesto ‑still more relevant than
anything written about the Movement since, including much by
himself in later years loses none of its importance or
significance from going unnoticed by the world at large at the
time. After all, very few people in that year were in the
slightest degree aware they had nearly been flung into the Great
War three years too early. Churchill and Harris, in very
different areas, showed awesome prescience of change and the
future, buried under the public's natural preoccupation with
other matters: the arrival of “ragtime” on dance‑floors both
sides of the Atlantic (helped by the composition of “Alexander's
Ragtime Band”); King George V's Durbar in India, filmed for a
three‑hour cinema showing in “Kinemacolor” both in London and
New York; the invention of animated cartoons; the launch of the
Titanic; and, if we glance in the other direction, the
revolution which threw out the Manchu dynasty and formed the
first Republic of China. It was also the year of Chicago's
greatest ever drive against vice and corruption, so an excellent
time to avert Rotary eyes from their city of revelation. |
