--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Evans, John Henry collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 13 number: 5 published: 1910-03 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Evans, John Henry, "Some Men Who Have Done Things. V.—George H. Brimhall," *Improvement Era* 13, no. 5 (March 1910): 400–407.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera135unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera135unse start_page: 400 end_page: 407 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1910-03) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera135unse publication_year: 1910 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1910, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Some Men Who Have Done Things. V.—George H. Brimhall Some Men Who Have Done Things. BY JOHN HENRY EVANS, OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS' UNIVERSITY. V. -George H. Brimhall. A BOY WHO LIVES A WHOLE WINTER ON CORN BREAD AND MOLASSES BECOMES THE MOST INSPIRATIONAL TEACHER THE "MORMON" PEOPLE HAVE PRODUCED. Nobody who lives among the Latter-day Saints needs to be Brigham Young told that George H. Brimhall is the president of the University at Provo. And it is superfluous to say here that he is one of the most influential school men, not only in Utah, but in the Rocky Mountain states. The other day a prominent edu- cator, when I asked him what he thought of President Brimhall, answered instantly, as if the question were not unfamiliar to him: "I have no hesitation in saying that I believe him to be the most inspirational teacher the Lat- ter-day Saints have ever pro- duced." This is high praise. But it does not appear to be an exaggeration when we call DR. GEORGE H. BRIMHALL. t0 mind the h ° StS ° f people scattered throughout ^^ 'Mormondom," whose lives are vastly different from what they SOME MEN WHO HA VE DONE THINGS. 401 would be if it were not for the uplifting influence of^is man. You cannot know of BrimhalPs work, and then go off and meas- ure any one's real worth in the world by the number of figures in his bank book. He was born in Salt Lake City, but did not live there long. Ogden was the first home he remembers. Among his earliest recollections is the Echo Canyon war. His father, being a fifer in the old Ogden band, went marching off to the war fifing, in a new straw hat, and six year old Georgie's heart welled up with pride, partly because of that fife, partly because of the new hat. He was too young, then, to feel any way put out by the fact that the family had to shift for itself. The first pair of shoes, which he wore at this time, were made by his mother out of an old bell strap of good width, and some boot tops that had been his fath- er's. His first pair of trousers, acquired at this time also, were made of factory cloth colored brown with sagebrush. A picture of those early days that, once you get it, sticks in your memory, is of a loaded wagon drawn by four cows and an Indian pony, the pony being on the lead to guide the other animals, and driven by long rope lines. This was the Brimhall family on the move in those troublous times of '58. Behind, in one corner of their little dirt-roof cabin, were a pile of straw and pieces of wood ready for the torch which was to set the whole settlement in flames. Spanish Fork, Cedar Fort, Grafton on the Virgin river, Salt Lake, and Spanish Fork again, are towns that he lived at during the next few years. The explanation of this migratory life is found in the fact that his father was called on a mission to pioneer some of these places. It was a hard life, incomprehensible nowadays, because there is nothing like it. And yet it had its compensa- tions. It taught the boy that what was to be got out of life he had to work for. Many instances could be given which taught the future educator lessons of courage, altruism, obedience, integ- rity. No wonder, is it? that Professor Brimhall believes in the efficacy of pioneer life, and sends some of his boys to Canada to wrest a hardy character from the frontiers. Three instances will serve to show his mettle in those days. At Spanish Fork in the later sixties food was scarce — scarce m IMPROVEMENT ERA. at least, in the Brimhall family. For, all one winter he lived on corn bread and molasses. He had to work, too, with men who were better fed, and here was the main trial. Every day at noon when they stopped for lunch, he went off by himself to eat his simple meal. Returning, he saw more than one dinner pail in which he knew were crusts of white bread left over and for which he would have given anything. Another time he and his brother were sowing wheat. The wagon was in the middle of the field with a gun, half of it in plain sight. It had been taken merely because President Young's coun- sel was that the brethren should never go out to work unarmed, for there had been no apparent need for it hitherto. Pretty soon a couple of Indians came riding towards the wagon at a gallop. Instantly George cried out to his brother, "Indians! unhitch!" at the same time breaking for the gun. It was a race with death. But he got there first, and the Indians made for the hills. It was sheer obedience to counsel that saved the day— else the gun would not have been there, and therefore the boys' lives would have been endangered. Once, again, George was at Tintic, working in a mine. The manager, a friend of his father's, was a well-informed Josephite. He wanted very much to convert the boy to his way of think- ing. And he was fast effecting his purpose, too, for George had no answer to the man's outflow of "argument." All at once young Brimhall remembered his parents' teachings that whenever in doubt over anything he should go to the Lord for guidance. So, one night he did so. The next day when the wily antagonist began to throw the net, it was with a strong man he had to wrestle, not a stammering boy as before. No more attempts were made to change his views. There was much evil on every hand at the mines, which was becoming harder and harder to resist. And so George got out of the place as speedily as he could, at the first favorable opportunity, because drinking, gambling, profanity, blasphemy, were not at all to his liking. Meanwhile his education had been going on as rapidly as his circumstances would permit. By the time he went to school at Ogden, he could read anything in McGuffy's Third Reader, write a fair hand, and cipher a little. All this he owed to a conscientious SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 403 mother. At all the places where the family lived he had some- what of schooling. And he speaks highly of the character of his teachers. One of them made a profound impression on the boy's mind by reason of his kindliness in dealing with the wayward. When- ever an urchin in the school did something worthy of the birch, a brand-new withe was taken out of a large bundle hanging over the desk. The lad was marched solemnly to the front, taken by the hand, and sent around in a circle a-flying. But never a birch touched the boy anywhere; was always worn out on the floor at it the culprit's heels! That must have been a spectacle not soon to be forgotten, whoever proved to be the erring one. Anyway, it made a profound impression on the future pedagogue. At eighteen George had made such progress in his studies as to warrant his being chosen to assist George Carson in the Spanish Fork school. Next year, however, he came in contact with Judge Dusenberrv, who had started at Provo what was called the Timpanogas University. This was his first impulse towards an education higher than that of the grades in those days. His nineteenth year, therefore, found him at the Provo school. Two years he attended there, working for his board the second year and doing janitor's service at school. When he returned to Spanish Fork from his school work, he found that an impetus had been given to education which is alto- gether unique. Forty of the Spanish Fork boys had gone to the canyon, chopped down logs, hauled them to the town, erected a 1 ' commodious building, and established the "Young Men's Academy there, with a capable teacher from Provo in charge. Brimhall was employed here the following year. Presently we find him becoming a public character, for he was chosen superintendent of schools and member of the town council. Meantime, however, he managed either his father's farm or one of his own, — a practice, by the way, he has continued almost up to the present. When the Brigham Young Academy opened, young Brimhall was among the first students to enter. Over him, as over hun- dreds of others, was the spell of the magician teacher cast. "Judge Dusenberry,' he told me, "showed me the road to higher education, but Karl G. Maeser pointed out the way to the higher 404 IMFRO VEA1EKT ERA life." This great teacher became the boy's ideal of the higher life, expressed in the qualities of honesty, earnestness, industry, sim- ple faith, fidelity. He studied at the academy off and on till he took his degree. In 1891, President Brimhall left the public schools to accept a position in the Provo academy. When he first went there he was in charge of the preparatory department. He was advanced from one place to another till he became president of that large institu- tion. During all these years he occupied responsible offices in the Church. He was in every capacity except that of chorister, in both the Sunday school and the Mutual Improvement Association. "When did you first make up your mind to become a school teacher?" I asked him. "Well, really," he answered, "I did not make up my mind at all on the matter. As a matter of fact, teaching is simply the survival of the fittest of the occupations I have had. I cannot be said at any time in my life to have set up a peg and aimed at reaching it. Whatever I happened to be doing, I said to myself concerning it, 'I'm going to do my best at this, and enjoy it.' I believe you have to enjoy what you do in this world. That, in my opinion,is the main thing. I have never had an extended employ- ment in my life that I did not like. But there are some things that I like to do better than others. And teaching I like the best of all. I like that best, perhaps, because I have been able to do it better than anything else —been more successsful in it than in other things. That is why I call it the survival of the fittest." "But, President Brimhall, have you not had one dominant purpose or desire running through your life?" — "Yes, I have certainly. My ruling passion has been to move men's minds, to convert others to my way of thinking. This above all else I have had an ambition for; and I suppose if I had not taken up with the profession of teaching, I should have had to do somehow with public affairs. It has been a sort of instinct with me. And so what I meant by saying that I did not set up a peg and endeavor to reach it is, that I had never fixed my purpose on this or that place in life, or even on any particular calling. I had always merely the instinctive desire to deal with ideas in men, and rested in the teacher's vocation for the reason partly that I think SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 405 it affords a better opportunity of expressing that desire than any- other. I found myself possessed of this general purpose at six- teen or seventeen years of age, and it has remained with me evtr since." Doubtless this furnishes an explanation for his effective pub- lic speaking, if one be needed. He is one of the most convincing preachers we have. An editorial writer in Colorado, the other year, commenting upon a sermon which President Brimhall had delivered the evening before in the town, said: "Whether his ideas about God are true or not, we cannot say; but while he is speaking, you simply have to believe in the existence of a God." And that is true. The man has a most dominant personality— in the pleasant sense,I mean, — and you cannot get away from the feeling that what he says is true. He has a marvelous gift of setting ideas clearly before you, and of showing you the right side of them. He is, moreover, a hard man to deal with when you are covering up the meaning underneath a quantity of words, whether you do it consciously or not. His keen intellect will have separated the chaff from the wheat — if there be any wheat— by the time you have ended your speech. I asked him to give me the qualifications of a real teacher, and in answer he offered the one word, "sympathy." "By sympathy, "he explained, "I mean the power of entering into the soul of the taught so as to see what is there and what is needed, and then of supplying that need, — it is the power of sim- ple appreciation. We talk about graft in business and politics. There is graft in education, too. What is it? Why letting a pupil fail under our hands. That's what graft in education is. A favorite motto with me is, 'Thou shalt not permit any stu- dent to get discouraged.' What an awful thing it is, when you come to think of it, to allow any young person in our charge to lose heart in the highway of individual progress, when almost the only really helpful thing we are able to give is an uplift! En- couragement with a fable is better than discouragement with a fact." "The true teacher, then, is all too rare," I commented. "And why?" he demanded; and answering his own question, "because too many use the sacred profession of teaching as a 406 IMPROVEMENT ERA. so-called stepping-stone to something higher! There is nothing higher. There may be something with more money in it. There may be something with more fame in it. But nothing higher. Martin Luther declared that if he were not a preacher he would be a teacher. "I have never found my ideal in a politician or even a states- man, though that comes nearer it. Much less have I found my ideal in the money-maker. Nor have I been able to find it in the inventor, nor even in the man of letters. To me it has been alone in the teacher. I could have made money if I had the inclination, and plenty of it. A few years ago a man said to me, 'Why do you waste your time in the school room when you could be making heaps of money.' He was himself a maker of shekels. 'I'll let you have money, you can invest that in land, buy sheep, set your boys to work, and in a single year you may clear twenty-five thousand dollars.' "Twenty-five thousand dollars! I said to myself — that's what my sons and I may make in a single year. That's pretty good! But what will the twenty-five thousand dollars in a single year make of them and me? That's the point." He broke off suddenly here and gave me his idea of what manner of man everyone ought to be. "My ideal of true manhood," he said, "has always been Joseph who was sold into Egypt. He must have been a fine specimen of the physical man to have attracted Potipha^'s wife; that he was strong morally is evidenced from his resisting her charms; his intellectual superiority is proved by his ability to cope with so large a situation as confronted him when he was made ruler under Pharaoh; and his great spirituality is brought out in his religious life. A man who lacks physical manhood is weak; he who is deficient mentally is an imbecile; to lack spirituality or moral power is to be weak. It takes all four of these qualities to produce a genuine manhood — to give life in its fullest and richest sense. For me and my sons to divert our whole energy to the making of money, would be to deprive us of the power of tr.ily living. And so I remained in the school room." The mention of money reminded me of the small compensa- tion teachers get, as a rule. And I mentioned the matter by way SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 407 of drawing out the President. I was somewhat startled by the result. It was like pressing an electric button unconsciously, and suddenly turning on a roomfull of light. "Compensation!" he cried, turning on me with great warmth — "compensation! Measure the real compensation that a teacher gets with the apparent compensation that, say, successful busi- ness men receive, and what do you get? And here followed such a glorification of the teacher's calling as made most other pursuits appear mean and groveling by com- parison. "The farmer, as he watches the golden grain maturing, experiences a real joy in life. So I suppose does the man who sits behind the bank counter. The farmer in the fall reaps his harvest. And so does the banker. But what becomes of it all grain and — money, houses, clothing, whatnot? It lasts for a time and then perishes out of the sight of man. No matter how high the heap of money may be nor how full the barns — it is the same— there is an end of it all. "Not so with the teacher's. His harvest is not only contin- uous, never-ending, but increases as the years and the centuries go on! Take my missionary class at the University, for example. Say that I inspire in them a desire to live the fuller, the richer, the higher life. They go out from me and live it. They teach their children to desire it and to live it, and they in turn inspire their children, and so on endlessly. Why, talk about harvest, this is the only harvest— there is no other. This will be Karl G. Maeser's harvest, his reward, to be surrounded by the thousands whose influence has uplifted them to what is really worth while to — — what is enduring in life. And it will be the harvest of every genuine teacher who has sought faithfully to uplift his fellow- men." Time to Help Mother. "It is time to organize a Mother's Protective Association among the boys and girls. Have less jolly times, and more rest for mother; for all around me I see motherless homes, where mother was killed by overwork and want of rest and recreation in the fresh air." C. E. Davis.