The Past President’s Page
[The Rotarian, December, 1934]

The Tree That is Rotary

By Allen D. Albert

President, Rotary International, 1915-16

You younger Rotarians who love your gardens will have an understanding of us who are older in the service.

How often have you set out a seedling and called across the lawn when you first made sure that the new green of a young shoot was really showing through the bark. You know how your love for the seedling surpasses that you have for the tree which you or another gardener transplanted after it was almost grown. Well, the same intertwining comes to us who watch the years minister to an organization as they do to your seedling: the shoots become branches, the trunk thickens, the tree takes shape and gives itself a crown, and the seeds it blows away on the summer winds make new seedlings the next spring.

Which of us is so uncomprehending that he does not stand in awe before the miracle of growth? Which of us that has nurtured a seedling but counts himself fiber of its fiber, life of its life?

Rotary is young in 1934, but already it has the proportions of maturity. Like the tree that only yesterday was a sapling, it spreads a comforting shade on the ground below and with springing branches weathers the storm which tears other trees apart. Look upon the Rotary tree, young Rotarians, and share our older pride in it! Look upon it and reflect upon the cycles of trees, how at the first they are all seedlings, then saplings, then spreading with growth, then indifferent to the first dead wood, then dying in certain branches (often the branches that are the hardest to see, on the inside, nearer the trunk) and then, while men contend for their fruit, emerging further and further to an ultimate and gaunt barrenness.

One source of sturdiness in the Rotary tree has been that it has never been grafted to grow more than one kind of fruit. From the first coming together of delegates from several clubs, now twen­ty-four years ago, we have had only one objective - the development in the individual Rotarian of a new capability to serve others. Every year since the second convention, in Portland, I suppose, men have come to each succeeding gathering afire with devotion to some fine movement for the public weal, appealing to us to make Rotary more definite, to make it count for something, as they might put it; and every year Rotary has found the wisdom, after hearing their pleas, to stick to the one work which distinguishes it from associations of commerce, civic bodies, neighborhood improvement groups. Rotary would not have gone to the heart of the world if it had been only a "luncheon club." It has gone to the heart of the world because it spoke to the world of man's larger possibilities of service.

I remember that in the early days I spoke thus of Rotary to a visitor from one of the older cultural centers of Europe. He was alert with that curiosity which is the beginning of sympathy and lie heard me with unconcealed wonder. I remember how he took away my American breath for a moment with this comment:

"Such an appeal would be strong, I should say, to the men of a country as old as mine. But I am truly surprised to find it should have such a response in a land so near the hand‑to‑hand contentions of pioneering as the United States."

He had not learned one of the best lessons Rotary has to teach. It came to me in 1911, and I voiced it to the convention of the next year at Duluth. Like the passer‑by in The Passing of the Third Floor Back, I said to the convention, "Rotary summons men to respond to their best impulses. It is part of the wisdom of the Most High - by whatever name in our several faiths we identify Him ‑ that men everywhere will heed the call to come and grow in His likeness. That is one of the strongest evidences of their brotherhood together. So, when Rotary summons them to their best selves, men lift up their heads in every land. The best things in us are not confined by national boundaries."

Those of us to whom Rotary was thus revealed in that early time hardly dared to hope for what we all know now as the Sixth Object. We foresaw in a world‑wide fellowship of men who loved peace one of the highest expressions of the good that is inherent in us. But we did not talk of it very much ‑ and the reason was that we were then intent on arousing ourselves to express that same good in our relations to our craft, our neighborhood, our home. Before Rotarians should be reaching out to international influence, we told each other, let Rotary prove its mettle in the smaller, homelier, simpler ministry at the elbow of the individual Rotarian.

Apparently it has so proven itself, for Rotary as an international force is recognized today in every chancellery. In my own experience, ministers of foreign affairs have asked whether it were good or ill to have their ambassadors become members of Rotary clubs in the capitals

to which they were accredited. We have read how Rotary in one great city was besought by all parties to forfend continued revolution. Another great people finds in Rotary a kind of social and governmental cement to hold together leaders of several geographical districts. Two nations are at war at the very moment when I write these words on my typewriter; but it is God's great mercy to His children that the Rotarians of the two nations are not at war with each other.

The thickheadedness of war, the waste of it, the payment for it in values that are forever sacrificed‑the blood of boys, the talents of young men, the head of the table made empty in young households, the ache of incurable loneliness in the, hearts of mothers and fathers ‑ in the end these manifest overcharges for an international process, which never yet settled any dispute, must move men to end it. In the meantime it is my judgment that a league of nations and an international court will help them perceive the possibilities of better methods.

But a league of nations and an international court are not proper concerns of Rotary International. Let it be occupied in the fostering of the goodwill upon which the reduction of war must depend at 'every crisis. This is a field in which Rotary has no rival and none too many associates. I look into my heart and find there the warm consciousness of affection extended unto me by my Rotary brothers in Berlin and Hangchow, in Tokyo and Stockholm, in Havana and Hamilton, and I know that their nations and mine are never to war against each other with our assent.

These are the fields of Rotary: it works in the breast of the Rotarian to make him a better craftsman, a better citizen, a better houseman; and it works in the breasts of men throughout the world to make and keep them good neighbors.

Surely this is enough to keep Rotary busy. It does not need to legislate upon tariffs, to prove itself by its works even in such a cause as that of curing cripples. For twenty‑nine years it has accepted the high responsibility of calling forth from its members the practical expression of their best impulses not as to tariffs, only, or tariffs plus community chests, but in all the relations of the Rotarian. In this singleness of purpose, Rotary has its greatest distinction.

Will Rotary yield on someday in the indefinite future to some such cycle as that which I have cited for the tree? I think it is not for us to answer that question. Our business is to see that Rotary thrives in health and usefulness in our own time.

I see no overshadowing danger threatening it. I am convinced it is justifying itself with rather less than more of yielding to our common human tendency to scatter our energies and change our objects. I conceive it to be on the threshold of a service of true magnificence. I would that other Rotarians might peer into the future with me and share the vista.

For that very reason I devote to Rotary's single purpose my contribution to the series of article by men who have served as Rotary's presidents. The allurement of mere bigness is ever threatening. If Rotary did not add a single club to its roll in the next ten years, if its total membership did not grow by a single unit in that time, and it should teach its lesson of unique responsibility, of unit service, of a brotherhood of those who love peace throughout the world, to even half of its members, it would be honored so long as men should live to revere human character and rejoice in the maintenance of peace between the nations.