Nicholas Murray Butler

Nicholas Murray Butler was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Entering Columbia College at age sixteen, Butler was a prodigy in philosophy, earning his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate by age twenty-two before continuing advanced philosophical studies in Berlin and Paris. Appointed professor of philosophy at Columbia in 1889, Butler founded Teachers College in 1887 and was inaugurated as President of Columbia University in 1902, presiding over its meteoric transformation into one of the world's premier research universities.

An advisor to nine United States presidents from William McKinley to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Butler became the intellectual engine behind American internationalism. In 1910, industrialist Andrew Carnegie consulted Butler on how best to donate $10 million for the permanent abolition of war. Butler drafted the charter for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, serving as director of its Division of Intercourse and Education and succeeding Elihu Root as its president from 1925 to 1945.

Butler mobilized scholarly research, academic exchanges, and international law professorships worldwide. A passionate advocate of the League of Nations and the World Court, Butler was the primary civilian promoter in the United States of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. In 1931, Butler was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with social reformer Jane Addams. In his final years, he helped draft the charter for the newly formed United Nations, living to see his internationalist ideals institutionalized on American soil in New York.