Lee Harvey Oswald. John Wayne Gacy. James Earl Ray.
From the 1960s on, most three-name strangers met through the news were murderers and assassins.
As William A. Kinnison points out in “Modern Wittenberg,” the second of his two-volume history, that wasn’t always the case.
Rees Edgar Tulloss was incredibly energetic and accomplished. Graduating from high school at 15, he founded and ran a successful touch typing correspondence school from his dorm room at Wittenberg while captaining the football team.
After being ordained and studying psychology at Johns Hopkins and Harvard, where he got his Ph.D., Tulloss became the first president of Wittenberg without a German surname. He was 39.
Kinnison notes Tulloss’ use of his full name followed the lead of the top college leaders of the day: Harvard’s Charles William Eliot, Stanford’s David Star Jordan and Yale’s Theodore Dwight Woolsey.
Tulloss raised an unprecedented amount of money in his first years at Wittenberg, and in five years added an amazing four new buildings to its campus.
During the Great Depression, while president of both Wittenberg and Springfield’s First National Bank, he would work with other banks to form the BancOhio holding company to stave off financial failure.
On Easter 1932, Tulloss gave the guest sermon for “Church of the Air” on a network known by its full three names: Columbia Broadcasting System.
“Does that which (once) seemed sure and satisfactory today appear uncertain? Do you grope in the darkness, uncertain where the light may be, uncertain whether light is anywhere to be found?”
To the modern ear, the words sound like the beginning of a commercial for a clap-on light. But at the time, Tulloss had in mind the nation’s eroded confidence and, says Kinnison, his own.
“What you thought you were about to accomplish has been swept utterly beyond the power of your attainment,” Tulloss said, “and your courage wavers.”
He offered sympathy and again, suggests Kinnison, self-reflection.
“Many of you have ... lost so much that you have at times thought all was lost. And every successive catastrophe has found voice to call out to you mockingly, as though testifying to your incompetence, your mistakes and your defeat.”
He urged self-confidence.
“The wreckage of our ... plans may lie around us, but the real values of life are not only unshaken, they are unshakable .... No catastrophe can rob us of the thrill of spiritual adventure with which a brave man faces his future.”
The next year, another three-named man would sound a similar theme. After taking his first oath of office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reassured the nation with a message of hope: “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”
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