Project Editor: Jeffrey Miller, History 470: Digital History, Spring 2008

The Wimberly Affair

Nobody was hurt in the Pinkerton affair, but in a later episode persons did in fact suffer. Lowry c. Wimberly was one of the most celebrated teachers on campus. Coming to the University before World War I "having been bitten by the writing bug at an early age," he stayed on to take a Ph.D. and founded the Prairie Schooner (1927), a little magazine devoted to publishing good writing that could not otherwise get a hearing. For fifteen years he was the center of whatever literary life Lincoln had, and some of the most gifted undergraduates gathered around him: Robert Lasch, a Rhodes Scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner; Edward "Tuck" Stanley, novelist and journalist with the international press and national television; Loren Eiseley, the naturalist; Dorothy Thomas, the novelist; Mari Sandoz, the popular historian; Weldon Kees, the jack-of-all-arts; and others. Rudolph Umland, his long-time friend, counted some twenty books coming from the Wimberly groups in fifteen years. Wimberly himself published stories and essays in leading journals, and his scholarly study of folklore in English and Scottish balladry (1928) attracted international attention. He was very colorful: "Lowry Wimberly trudged the streets of Lincoln in a dark overcoat and black Confederate-type slouch hat, his sallow face turned into the wind, a partly smoked cigar hanging from his thin, bloodless lips. Some saw him as a tragic, Poelike figure, not only in looks but in thought," one historian has written. Certainly he was not of sanguine temper. Son and brother of Calvinist ministers, he spent his final, ailing years agonizing over the fate of his immortal soul. He died in 1959, before he was seventy.

Wimberly's Prairie Schooner attracted national attention, and stories he published were reprinted regularly in the annual anthologies of best stories. As such things go, the magazine cost the University very little, only a few hundred dollars a year, but "he was forced to crawl on his knees to the chancellor's office each issue to beg for funds to pay the printer," Umland reported. When Mrs. Burnett, a genteel lady who wrote verses, was offended by the straightforward realism of something she read in the Schooner, Burnett became even more reluctant to support it—until the Omaha World-Herald condemned the administration for its threat to close down the periodical. Wimberly had no friends in academic administration. He wanted none. Perhaps he should have been more politic.

On the night of 13 February 1932, Wimberly and Norman Eliason, a young teacher in the English department, were faculty chaperons at a student dance in the Coliseum. When the dance ended at 11:30, the two entered a small room off the dance floor. Umland reported what happened: "In it were Mrs. Eliason, Alan Williams [business manager of the Prairie Schooner], two female companions, and a small quantity of liquor brought by Williams. 'I should have poured the liquor right down a toilet bowl,' Wimberly later lamented. Almost immediately a knock sounded on the door and, when Williams opened it, five officers of the law bounded in, one after the other, in quick succession and with the precision of animated toys. Two of the officers were the agents of 'Three-Gun' Howard [sic] Wilson, deputy Federal Prohibition Administrator of Nebraska."

According to C.H. Oldfather, later dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the officers had been assured they had the approval of the administration to descend upon a University building as though it were a speakeasy. "At one fell swoop the editor of the Schooner, the associate editor, and the business manager were taken in custody off to jail. It was all so unbelievably sudden it seemed like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. 'I was completely flabbergasted,' Wimberly said. That night he slept, or rather fitfully dozed, on a cot in a jail for the first and only time in his life. Williams was charged with possession of the liquor, ultimately found guilty, and fined five hundred dollars." Bearing no permanent ill will, Alan Williams many years later endowed a scholarship fund in Wimberly's name.

Wimberly and Eliason were summoned before the Board of Regents as though to a court, Dean Foster prosecuting and Dean John Hicks defending. After considerable discussion, the regents voted four to one to suspend Wimberly and Eliason six months, until 1 September, without pay. The unyielding regent was Fred A. Marsh of Archer, who was proud of having taught the men's Bible class at the Archer Methodist church for thirty-five years.

The campus was in an uproar. A lengthy petition from students protested the action, but other students, members of Farm House, an agriculture fraternity, dissented, saying that they wanted professors "whose ideals and examples will inspire and help us." A week later, on 25 February 1932, the editor of the Daily Nebraskan observed that the raid had been "conducted only to satisfy the public" and that this "medieval affair" and punishment were inappropriate "for breaking a law which it is literally fashionable to break." (It is not irrelevant that prohibition was repealed, even in Nebraska, after the 1932 elections.) The faculty was indignant at the general hypocrisy of the affair, for they knew that more than one member of the Board of Regents went in for sturdy drinking, and they recognized that the arrest and punishment were a public relations sop to antiliquor Puritans. Within a couple of weeks the usually timid professors schemed to modify the harsh judgment. Thomas M. Raysor, chairman of the English department, with the endorsement of both his dean and the director of the Extension Division, proposed that part-time work be found for the two men so that the financial penalty would not extend to their families. Soon thereafter John D. Hicks, a great favorite with students, who referred to him as "the jolly dean," accepted an appointment at the University of Wisconsin without even conferring with the chancellor. Eliason left the University to have a fine career elsewhere, but Wimberly stayed on, for family reasons and for the sake of the Schooner, he said. In any case 1932 was no time for easy moving. In later years he sometimes regretted his decision, but his local reputation as a teacher, scholar, editor, and personage was untouched by the affair. Burnett's reputation for integrity, on the other hand, suffered.