Philleo Nash Oral History Interview, June 24, 1966

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened October, 1973
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

HESS: Dr. Nash, to begin and for the record, would you give me a little background and biographical information on your birth, where you were born, on your education, and on your career?

NASH: Sure, I'll be glad to.

Once again, for the record, I am Philleo Nash, and I was born in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. My family, on both sides, have lived there for a long time. I have an odd first name; it is my mother's maiden name. It's originally French and they were French Protestants who fled to this country in the early 1700s looking for religious freedom

HESS: Huguenots?

NASH: Huguenots. The family settled down in Connecticut and there was distinguished by early getting into the

[2]

civil rights and abolitionist movement. Prudence Crandall Philleo, who was the subject of one of the Profiles in Courage television series, not the original of JFK [ John F. Kennedy ], but the one they did on TV, had a girl's school in Connecticut in about 1830; accepted a Negro girl for enrollment; all the white parents withdrew their children; she then opened it to Negro girls and had an all-Negro school. Not by her desire but by force of circumstance. The good people of Connecticut for this put her in jail and eventually burned her school down. In the course of this dispute she became acquainted with a distant relative, though not an ancestor, Calvin Philleo, who was a Quaker preacher. After their marriage the persecution continued. She finally left with him to open a girl`s school elsewhere, I think in Illinois. At any rate they wound up a little bit later in Kansas where they were both associated with John Brown. He died, she returned to Illinois, and fifty years after the date of her persecution the Connecticut legislature restored her citizenship and granted her a pension for the remainder of her life.

How I learned about this particular episode of

[3]

the Philleo family history is because I was sitting next to Constance Motley at a NAACP money-raising dinner in Madison while I was Lieutenant Governor, and she saw the name on my placecard and she said, "That's an odd name." She then told me this story which I hadn't known up to that point.

The Philleos then were emigrants into Wisconsin just before the Civil War. My mother's father was a newspaper editor in pioneer Wisconsin, a founder of the Congregational Church there; died young. There were numerous Philleos and numerous relatives around central Wisconsin. My mother, Florence Belle Philleo, was talented musically. So she as a young girl was sent to eastern cities where there were relatives where she could study voice and piano, and she followed music all her life.

When I was born they couldn't seem to come up to a decision on a name for me. They finally wound up with Philleo.

Now, on my father's side, the Nashes are of Irish origin -- am I telling you more than you want to know?

HESS: No.

[4]

NASH: They left after the potato famine in 1849. They first went to Ohio and then to Milwaukee. They were looking for work at the time of the railroad expansion, after the Civil War, and Grandpa took up the new art of railway telegraphy. He wanted to better himself. All the boys were track workers on the railroads in and around southern and central Wisconsin. So Grandpa, as a telegrapher, obtained a job as station agent on the Wisconsin Central in Wood County in what is now the town of Babcock, or it may be the town of Armenia, I'm not sure which. Just after the Civil War the Indians were gathering wild cranberries and were shipping them on the Wisconsin Central Railroad into Chicago and other big cities, getting prices as high as $30 a barrel, in the chaff. Grandpa thought he would like to have some of that money . . .

HESS: Is this when cranberries came into the family?

NASH: This is when the cranberries came into the family. So this was permitted at that time, apparently. At least I assume it was, if it wasn't, he did it anyway. That was a Nash trait -- they're Irish! He hired some Indians -- bought a piece of land and hired Indians to pick the crop. And then he shipped it on the Wisconsin Railroad

[5]

and was receiving $30 a barrel up to the depression of 1872. At that time the price dropped and it didn't hit $30 again until 1947. It was a great thing at the time. He decided that it wasn't enough to harvest wild crops and therefore he began to ameliorate wild cranberries, using sand as they did on Cape Cod; leveling; using pumps. He pioneered many of the modern cultivation practices in the cranberry industry. He was one of the founders of the Wisconsin Cranberry Growers Association, which is about the oldest horticultural society in Wisconsin, and stimulated the formation of the old Wisconsin Cranberry Sales Co. which was a cooperative that originated in 1906. By this time, however, he was out of the cranberry business. The drainage movement took great hold in Wisconsin in those days. They were over enthusiastic -- they dug huge ditches and lowered the water table in the peat beds and at the same time they had just finished cutting down the big forests, so the ground dried out and began to burn. And it was in the late 1880s that Grandpa Nash was burnt out, and he never went back into the cranberry business. He wanted to use the money he had made in the cranberries to go

[6]

into the paper business -- the manufacturing of paper. Now, at that time, it was thought that you could only make paper in Wisconsin from the white, hard water of the Fox River. He felt that it was possible to make paper from the brown water of the Wisconsin River, and he did, and did so successfully, and with others founded the Nekoosa Paper Co. It was one of the large paper manufacturing concerns of central Wisconsin.

He was also interested in politics. He ran for the assembly as a Democrat and was elected in 1885. When I was Lieutenant Governor I had occasion to look up the proceedings of the lower house of the Wisconsin legislature and found the committees on which he served, and his reports. It was quite interesting. He served only one term but while there he made a very important connection in terms of business, and Wisconsin history and politics, too. His seatmate was the Civil War hero, Col. William F. Vilas. Vilas was, perhaps, Wisconsin's richest man; if not at that time he was a little bit later. He could have had almost any elective office within the gift of the people of Wisconsin because he was a very popular Civil War veteran.

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But he was interested in the university. He was a lawyer. He had a very successful practice. And he had come out from the East. And he ran for the legislature rather than any of the other things that were offered to him, because he wanted to sponsor a good, big building program for the University of Wisconsin. He got his seatmate, T. E. Nash, my grandfather, appointed to the Joint Committee on Finance which was the committee to consider his bill. He thought a big building program was well in hand and therefore he resigned his seat in the assembly -- I'm speaking about Colonel Vilas now -- resigned his seat in the assembly in order to become Postmaster General in the first Cleveland administration, and he left Grandpa to shepherd the university building program. Unfortunately things were not in as good shape as they thought and the conservatives, who felt that the university was about to become a state within a state rather than a university within a state, opposed the building program and cut it back to $300,000. Even so, in terms of costs in those days they were able to get a gymnasium, a heating plant, and the first fireproof building on the Wisconsin

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campus, the old Science Hall, which still stands where I went to school.

After the term was over and they'd had to compromise on a very modest building program for the university, Colonel Vilas induced Grandpa to come to Washington with him as the Chief Clerk of the Post Office Department. They both left, of course, at the end of the first Cleveland administration. It was at about this time that the cranberry marsh burnt out, and with money from Vilas, with the money accumulated over the years from the sale of wild cranberries, Grandpa was able to build a small paper mill at Nekoosa. He served as president of this company, supervised its affiliation with the John Edwards Pulp Company to form the parent of the present Nekoosa-Edwards Paper Company, which operates .in Wisconsin and New York. My father was associated with him in the paper business, but ill health forced my grandfather out in 1906 and my own father went out with him. My father served in the First World War and his own father died during that period. When he came out he had to find a new business to get into. He had always liked the out-of-doors and was a great naturalist and outdoorsman, and he

[9]

concluded that an outdoor occupation would suit him the best and the family fortune had been founded with cranberries and he thought that he would do the same thing. So he went back into the cranberry business for a second time, which is how we happen to be in the cranberry business today. My children will be the fourth generation at this particular location where we are now, which is not the original location where Grandpa started. My own father decided that reason could prevail in agriculture, and therefore, he engineered the first automated and mechanized cranberry marsh, which was a pushbutton farm even in 1921 and 1922.

HESS: Back when it was really revolutionary!

NASH: Back when it was really revolutionary. So this is the general family background. I would have been born in northern Wisconsin as my brother and sister were, in connection with the pulp operation for the paper mill, but the fact is we burnt out just before I was born and the whole family came back to Wisconsin Rapids and that's where I was born. I went to public schools there; elementary school, and high school. My mother, as I said, was always interested in music.

[10]

She saw to it that I was musically trained and I did have ambitions to be a professional musician -- the violin was my instrument. I won a contest in Wisconsin in 1926 and went to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia for one year after high school. But they persuaded me that that wasn't a good idea, and I came back and entered the university. My brother had been a student of Alexander Meiklejohn at Amherst and our family has always been strong believers in the best and the most progressive in education. So my father persuaded me that the right place to go to school was in Alexander Meiklejohn's experimental college; the first progressive education enterprise in higher educa