Talk:John Jay Chapman

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John Jay Chapman[edit]

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

-- John J. Chapman, Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.215.3.220 (talk) 23:58, 11 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

education dominated by the needs of business[edit]

Chapman's last book, New Horizons in American Life (1932), was an attack on the way that the United States education was being dominated by the needs of business. John Jay Chapman died on 4th November, 1933. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.215.3.220 (talk) 00:01, 12 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Famous Speech[edit]

No mention of his famous Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900 and no link to wikiquote?

Personal life of John Jay Chapman[edit]

I question the following information in the personal life section.

 On July 2, 1889, he married Minna Timmins (d. 1898) and they had three children before Timmins died giving birth to their third child. …
 On April 23, 1899, Chapman married Elizabeth Astor Winthrop Chanler (1866–1937), second daughter of John Winthrop Chanler and Margaret Astor Ward of the Astor family …

The death date of Minna Timmins is not correct, nor is the date of Chapman's second marriage.

Find a Grave gives Minna Timmins's death date as 25 January 1897. This is confirmed there by the photograph of her gravestone. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21824418

As I write this, I am working with a letter from John J. Chapman's friend, Sarah Wyman Whitman, to Sarah Orne Jewett, dated 2 May 1898, in which she reports Chapman's second wedding, which took place earlier than expected because the bride's sister had volunteered to serve as a nurse with the Red Cross in the Spanish-American War.

   Elizabeth Chanler's sister was  Margaret Livingston Chanler Aldrich (1870-1963), who, before she married, served as a Red Cross nurse in the Spanish-American War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Astor_Winthrop_Chanler

Notice that the marriage date is incorrect at Elizabeth Chanler's wikipedia page, as well.

Terry Heller (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]