CHAPTER 8
Crash and Rush

My habits of work are not such that carefully analyzed progressive steps from the present to the remote future have much appeal. Most of the tasks which confront me are not susceptible to such analysis… I am content to be on my way. Once over the first rise of ground I can appraise the casualties thus far and set my eye on the next objective. One veers and tacks under this procedure and sometimes it seems that ground is being lost. But on an unexplored terrain I know no other method.¹

ROBERT GREENLEAF

Monday, October 14, 1929, dawned a beautiful fall morning, with highs expected to reach the mid-60s. New York was in the middle of a fourteen-day dry spell, but no one was complaining, especially not Bob Greenleaf, who was reporting for his first day of work at the headquarters of the world’s largest corporation. Bob strode through the cacophony of the Manhattan morning and stepped into the hush of his new office at 195 Broadway, just a short walk from Wall Street. AT&T’s twenty-nine-story neoclassical building reminded him he was at the center of corporate power. Sculptured Oriental maidens with turbans supported drinking 95 spouts along the marbled corridors. Doric columns and heavy draperies adorned the board room where “the Cabinet” met, including AT&T Board men such as William Cameron Forbes, the former Governor-General of the Philippines and grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson.² Bob’s ambitions for influence in this building were unusual. He had no desire to be one of the Cabinet, but he wanted to eventually affect company policies from his small corner of the big AT&T world, 450,000 employees strong at the time.³ The company would need all the help it could get in the immediate years ahead.

The summer of 1929 had been one of spectacular, but illusive, performance on the New York Stock Exchange. From June 1 to September 3, AT&T stock had soared from 209 to 304.⁴ That was as high as it would go, because that day, the bull market ended.⁵ It would take seven weeks for it to slide into a bear market, an incipient recession, and finally crash into a full-blown depression on Black Thursday, October 24. At sunrise on the Monday following the crash, thousands of blackbirds mysteriously descended on Wall Street, ate every available scrap of food and suddenly departed, leaving scores of dead and dying birds who were too sick or weak to escape.⁶ The event was both an omen and a proclamation of fact; by July of 1932, AT&T’s stock sold at 72, and most of the country’s businesses and financial institutions were weak, dead, or dying.⁷

While the country sank into its financial and psychological Depression, Bob’s personal life took an upswing. In June 1931, Maron Newcomb, an AT&T colleague based in Chicago, made a trip to New York where he visited his talented and beautiful niece Esther Hargrave and asked if he could introduce her to a young man named Bob Greenleaf. “He’s not much to look at, but he’s the most considerate young man I have ever met,” he told Esther.⁸ She agreed to meet Bob at the 125^th Street Ferry for a first outing at the Palisades, the forested cliffs on the western banks of the Hudson.

Bob was waiting when she arrived at the rendezvous site. His bright blue eyes must have lit up when he saw her, a slim, five-foot-two beauty with brown eyes, brown hair, a confident walk, and an aura of elegance and style. As for Esther, from a distance she saw a twenty-six-year-old man just one-quarter inch shy of six feet tall. As she drew nearer, the artist in her noticed his long face constructed of low planes, held in serious demeanor. The sun was shining, backlighting his brown windblown curls. 96 He greeted her and she thought, “He’s not even as good-looking as Uncle Maron promised!”⁹ Still, there was something about him, something about her response to him, that transcended all that. As they stood looking across at the New York skyscrapers, she must have sensed that this was her one man of destiny, because events progressed rapidly after that day. Three months later, on September 6, they were married. For years, Bob joked that he “picked up Esther on the 125^th Street Ferry.”¹⁰

The wedding was performed quietly in the pastor’s study of the church Bob had been attending, the Community Church of New York. The famous Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes presided over the short ceremony. One of Esther’s friends came along as witness, but two were needed, so Holmes recruited his wife Madeleine for the duty.

If the wedding was not a big deal, neither was its announcement to the world. George and Burchie Greenleaf first learned that their son was married by reading about it in a Terre Haute newspaper, which had reprinted the announcement forwarded by a paper in New York. Esther was close to her mother and probably wrote or called before the ceremony, because “girls talk.”¹¹ Neither set of parents would meet their new in-laws until the following Christmas, when the young Greenleaf couple took a train trip west. That was when George Greenleaf gave his advice that they both “keep sweet.”¹²

There was to be no Greenleaf honeymoon for three years after the wedding, and even then it would be a learning trip to Europe. On the day of his marriage, Bob could not have known how important Esther would be to his work, his intellectual development, or his personal evolution into full maturity, but he would have fifty-eight years with her to find out.

Esther Hargrave was born on October 17, 1904 in Ripon, Wisconsin and grew up in Roberts, Wisconsin as a middle child sandwiched between Bill, one year older, and Eleanor, two years her junior. She received a degree in architecture from the University of Minnesota, where she earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. After graduation, she studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, then got a job in New York, where she earned enough money to live in Paris for six months and study with André Lhote, one of a group of artists who contributed to the development of Synthetic Cubism and has been judged by one art historian as “the official academician of Cubism.”¹³ At the time Bob met her, Esther was a fully independent woman, living at the Evangeline Hotel for Women, supporting herself by teaching at Cooper Union and working for interior designer Elsie Sloan. 97

Esther was a light-filled Mozart to Bob’s brooding Beethoven, an airy, optimistic Libra to his complicated Cancer.¹⁴ She was not tumultuous or Bohemian but light, rational, friendly, sociable, absolutely fair, and not inclined to share her sufferings with many people. Esther had an abiding sense of style, design, and loveliness. She was imbued with the sensibilities of not just an artist, but of Artist. Art was not simply something she did, but something she lived, and she was brilliant at it. She was also a woman in touch with her modernist times. Frank Lloyd Wright was a powerful influence on her thinking about architecture. Modern art was one of her passions, and she adored Matisse. By contrast, Bob liked “realistic” paintings and preferred time alone, even though he was gracious, thoughtful, and wryly funny to friends and colleagues. At the young age of twenty-six, he already presented an intense mien, showing little interest in sports, card games, or cocktail parties. He was lured by ideas, big ideas about religion, organizations, the social order, and the endless complexities of one’s inner life. That attraction was balanced by the sheer pleasure he got from working with his hands.

By outward appearances, Esther was the more unconventional of the two. She painted abstract art, wore striking outfits, came from a family that believed in homeopathy and fresh, organic food, and was willing to walk up to strangers and start conversations. Bob presented himself like a typical early twentieth-century male executive. He was cautious about how he dressed and how much he revealed to others. He was a natural introvert, still a captive of Midwestern provincialities, but time would reveal—and their daughter Lisa would agree—that, although Esther was highly creative and intuitive, Bob was the more thoroughly unconventional one inside.¹⁵

In old age, Bob and Esther saw a psychic who told them, “You two have been one before. Now you are two, but you will be one again.” Their daughter Lisa thought that was odd, but ten years later, after both parents had died, Lisa showed their pictures to another psychic who said, “Old. They are essence twins. They actually share one essence but, for the fun of it, they did a mitosis; they separated. Actually, they completely fit together as one large being.”¹⁶

For a week following the wedding, Bob and Esther continued to live apart until they could make arrangements to set up house together. They then took a small, two-room apartment with a kitchenette in Greenwich Village, near the Rand School for Social Science (devoted to worker education 98 and socialism) and the New School for Social Research. “New York is a great place for young people to be,” said Bob. “There is so much going on all the time.”¹⁷ The Greenleafs took advantage of the action, attending nearby lectures by thinkers like John Dewey. One weekend, they attended four performances of the London String Quartet playing all six of Beethoven’s complex, almost avant-garde Later Quartets.¹⁸

Bob’s provincialism was evident early in the marriage when he pronounced modern abstract art “a bad joke.”¹⁹ One day Esther asked him what kind of art he would prefer she create, and he said, “Something more realistic.” Esther then decided she would experiment with more “representational” art. It was an accommodation she was willing to make—for the time being—for the sake of the marriage. Bob did not order her to change what she painted; she offered.²⁰ Still, when Esther’s younger sister Eleanor (Nora) heard about the decision, she was furious. To the end of her life she claimed Bob had “Beat Esther down! Just beat her down!”²¹ Nora, a feisty and powerful woman, was Bob’s harshest critic throughout the marriage, believing he dominated Esther, prevented her from having an independent life, and ruined her chances for fame as an artist. Bob and Nora never reconciled.

Shortly after they were married, Elsie Sloan cut Esther’s salary, because the Depression was taking its toll on interior design clients. Esther understood the reason for the cut and wanted to keep her job at reduced wages. Bob, however, disagreed. He wanted her to quit the job, and he won this battle. In his mind, the husband was supposed to be breadwinner and king of the castle; the wife, keeper of domestic order.

Bob’s attitude was typical of men of the day, but something more personal was at work here. Bob desperately wanted—and needed—stability in his own home. He remembered his mother’s erratic episodes, her raised voice, the barely adequate housekeeping and inadequate nurturing, pans flying through the air. It was all scary then, and the prospect of a repeat was terrifying now. A wife who gained public recognition for her work was likely to be drawn away from the nurturing and order-keeping essential for Bob to indulge his lifelong love of deep silences.

Years later one of their daughters reflected on this dynamic. “Bob had to build some order in his [home] life, and Esther had to give it to him. But she was capable of it—peace, order, reliability. She had to remain rational and calm even if he was not… Once, as I was leaving college, he asked, ‘Well, what do you want?’ I said, ‘I would like recognition.’ He looked away, his 99 face fell and he said, ‘Oh dear.’ I think he really thought that that would not bring a woman happiness; it would sow seeds of dissension and create disharmony in her personal life. And, of course, it does.”²²

New York City may have been the epicenter of the catastrophic Wall Street meltdown, but it was still the place to find world-class thinkers and doers, many of whom Bob met personally. The first luminary who influenced him was New Yorker magazine writer and humorist E. B. White. Greenleaf discovered White’s writing his first week in Manhattan, and White’s outlook was to have a “very great… remarkable” influence on his ability to “see things whole.”²³ To understand White’s effect, which one can see throughout Bob’s career, one must fast forward to a 1987 essay summarizing White’s influence on his thinking, My Debt to E. B. White.

My Debt To E. B. White lifted up four of White’s themes that support wholeness. First was ethical conduct, as illustrated by White’s poem about Nelson Rockefeller destroying Diego Rivera’s fresco that contained the head of Lenin, and White’s fight with Xerox over corporate sponsorship of a journalist’s article. Second, determination to show life as it is, a work in progress that does not always tie up loose ends, like the “unfinished” ending of White’s Stuart Little. Third, love of the sheer beauty of this world, as illustrated by this passage from Charlotte’s Web:

Finally, wholeness required direction: “‘The right direction’,” said Bob, “that White also attributed to Harold Ross in his obituary, is central to 100 White’s concept of wholeness. One often does not know the precise goal, but one must always be certain of one’s direction. The goal will reveal itself in due course.”²⁶

Seeing things whole is not always comfortable, because it causes a person to turn and squarely face the Big Questions: life, death, human frailty, the lies we tell ourselves, the meaning of inner struggles. In that same essay, Greenleaf quoted White’s essay on Walden.

From his earliest days at AT&T, Bob had the “urge to set the world straight” in his quiet way. While he would have his moments of play and joy, he would contain them in a larger, almost world-weary context of one who knows the inadequacies of himself and others. He did, however, have faith that something “good or even great” would result from his work.

It could be argued that Bob Greenleaf already had a tendency to “see things whole,” going back to the days when he watched George Green-leaf’s reflective strategy for fixing steam engines and his ability to work through political messes in order to build a better, more whole community. Bob lamented that formal education did not teach seeing things whole, but he had this advice for others: “When you look at anything or consider anything, look at it as ‘a whole’ as much as you can before you swing on it.”²⁸

Always the pragmatist, Greenleaf believed the efficacy of ideas was proven through their application. He consciously tried to “see things whole” throughout his career, and encouraged others to do so in order to break their limiting assumptions. There are many examples, but one occurred in September of the tumultuous year of 1969, when Carleton College invited him back to Minnesota to meet with a group of students, administration, and faculty a few days before classes began. The group gathered in the Language House lounge to consider “issues affecting the student’s position in society and the college, especially as they relate to career 101 decisions.”²⁹ It was an open-ended agenda that could have failed unless the group found focus. Greenleaf had them read E.B. White’s short story, The Second Tree From the Corner, in which Trexler, the story’s main character, is asked by his therapist, “What do you want?” Trexler is forced to think about unattainable goals and finally decides to accept himself as he is and not make himself over. Greenleaf did not say another word for the next two hours, while students discussed the story.

Years later, Greenleaf remembered, “Condensing two hours of discussion into one sentence: they ultimately identified the problem of the students of their generation as a sort of mental illness, and, like Trexler, they would only recover their poise when they accepted their illness as health—and got on with their work.”³⁰ And get on they did. The group changed its name to The Second Tree From the Corner Seminar and published a list of “essential institutional problems in serving the human needs of its members and of society,” which would make worthy reading by any of today’s progressive college educators.³¹ One student said the seminar was “the best thing that ever happened to me at Carleton.” ³² In 1987, Greenleaf wrote, “That was over 15 years ago, and I still hear the occasional reverberation from that meeting. Such is the influence of thinking that sees things whole and of language that tells us what one sees that is powerful and beautiful.”³³

In 1969 Bob wrote E. B. White to tell him about The Second Tree From The Corner group at Carleton. White responded with a short note that read, in full:

Dear Mr. Greenleaf,

I was glad to hear about the group called TSTFTC. I hope something good comes from it.

Knowing youth, though, I am quite prepared to have it suddenly changed to mean: To Stifle Trade From The Caribbean.

I’m glad the young are restless. But I sometimes feel that they are missing something—a feeling of appreciation and wellbeing that I remember well. I think the young are a bit too sure that nothing is any good.

Sincerely,

E. B. White³⁴ 102

In 1984 Greenleaf wanted White to read his essay My Debt To E. B. White, but White was already blind in one eye and could no longer read. So Bob recorded it on an audio cassette and sent it along with a note. White wrote back, in part:

Bob’s grandson Michael had a different kind of response when he heard the audiotape of Bob speaking his essay. Michael wrote his grandfather to explain why he enjoyed it. Michael said he even got “choked up” listening to it, “mostly because it is a very rare thing to hear Grandpa Greenleaf string so many words together at one time for one duration!”

After their wedding, the Greenleafs attended the Unitarian church of John Haynes Holmes, the minister who married them, and they became friends with the Holmes family. The Reverend Holmes was a different kind of mentor than White, an iconoclastic activist whose community involvement must have reminded Bob of a larger scale version of Rev. John Benson’s Social Gospel ministry at Montrose Methodist in Terre Haute. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); a key figure in the political drama that rid New York City of its corrupt mayor, Jimmy Walker; and an early supporter of Margaret Sanger’s controversial birth control efforts. Like Eugene Debs, Holmes was against The Great War and, also like Debs, he paid a price for his political stance. In its paper The Register, Holmes’s own American Unitarian Association denounced his pacifist stand as treason; former U.S. President William Howard Taft accused him of using freedom of speech to mask sedition; and his worship services were regularly visited by Secret Service men. At least he survived the war without being tossed into jail, and his church grew through the controversy. 103

In the year of Bob and Esther’s wedding, the Community Church had more than 1,800 members of 34 nationalities from six continents, and Holmes wrote in his newsletter that “we have rich and poor, high and low, black and white, ignorant and educated, Jew and Gentile, orthodox and agnostic, theist, atheist and humanist, Republican, Democrat, Socialist and Communist. All of which means that we are representative of New York City!… It is in this sense that we are a public and not a private institution—a community church, in the true meaning of the phrase.’”³⁶ Clearly, Holmes cared more about getting things done than about theological or political labels, and that way of action in the world was one that Bob had admired all his life. Greenleaf’s personal instinct, however, was to pursue a course of gradualism to accomplish change rather than follow Holmes’s strategy of taking absolute positions.³⁷

Bob and Esther were always seeking new people and experiences. It was an interesting time to be looking. The stock market crash had completed the destruction of an optimistic myth of steady progress in America’s religious and social history. Beginning in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the rosy view of the intelligentsia was that society— and humankind—was getting better and better every day in every way, with education, science, and technology leading the way. Man was perfectible, perhaps not to flawlessness, but to the point where good will could create true community. Furthermore, entire societies could be reformed. This theologically liberal—and essentially Protestant—view was behind the Social Gospel Bob witnessed in his youth, a major driver of the reform movements at the turn of the century and the Progressive Era itself. World War I ended that fantasy for many, but Robert Greenleaf’s generation came of age between the wars and, in spite of their Roaring Twenties college days, held on to a remnant of their parents’ hopeful as-sumptions.³⁹

“The great stock market crash was a very traumatic experience on the heels of the euphoric boom years of the 1920’s,” he later recalled. “There came out at that time a rash of utopian ideas of how to return to these euphoric boom years, and I remember two of them: Technocracy and the Townsend Plan, but there were many others.”⁴⁰ Bob’s practical side, his suspicion of once-and-for-all answers, made him wary of such schemes.

Then, in 1931, he went to a meeting where he met Eugene R. Bowen. Mr. Bowen, a former farm machinery executive whose career had been 104 ruined by the Great Crash, was now in charge of the Cooperative League of the U.S.A., headquartered in New York. Here was an idealistic man promoting a scheme that had a history: an economy with a large proportion of consumer and producer cooperatives.

Bob was not totally unfamiliar with cooperatives. One of the philosophical fathers of the movement was Robert Owen, the wealthy Scotsman who, in 1824, took over the Harmonist movement at New Harmony, Indiana, and tried to create an ideal society. Owen was a true revolutionary who despised private property, but through the years the idea of a cooperative society had matured and yielded the Roachdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in England, the National Grange (a farmer’s coop), and experiments in the Scandinavian countries.

In 1932, Bob and Esther decided to try cooperative living for themselves. (Newcomb Greenleaf has suggested that Esther probably enjoyed living in a community more than her private husband.) They moved to an apartment in the Consumer Cooperative Services complex, located in the Chelsea neighborhood on West 21st Street.⁴¹ There they were befriended by a woman whom Bob would later name as one of his most important servant mentors.⁴² Her name was Mary Ellicott Arnold, and she would further initiate the Greenleafs into the ideas and culture of the Cooperative Movement.

Mary Arnold had been instrumental in organizing the cooperative where the Greenleafs lived. It included a cafeteria, library, lecture hall, apartments, and even a credit union.⁴³ She was also General Manager of New York’s Consumers’ Cooperative Services and board member and treasurer of the Cooperative League of America. By the time Bob and Esther met her, Arnold and her lifelong companion Mabel Reed had already lived a life of adventure, serving as Indian agents in the Klamath region of California from 1908 to 1909, and engaging in cooperative activities ever since.⁴⁴

A few years after the Greenleafs moved out of the Manhattan cooperative, Mary and Mabel left New York for Nova Scotia, helped start cooperative projects in housing and education at Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, and became involved with the founders of the Antigonish Cooperative Movement.⁴⁵ Three years later, they traveled south again and began working with the lobster fishermen of Maine, then did cooperative work in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, and Bolivia, all the while writing pamphlets, study guides, and books. Bob kept in touch with Mary through the years. 105

Bob and Esther developed a deep friendship with Eugene Bowen, who suggested they visit Europe to see successful cooperative movements first-hand. It sounded like a worthy adventure. For three years the Green-leafs saved their money until, in 1934, they could sail off to Europe for a nine-week learning trip and delayed honeymoon. They went to study their passions—Cooperative Societies and modern architecture—but also found time to sightsee. They rode trains through Germany, where the shadow of Nazism was already darkening the country. The Germans still had their beer halls though, and in one of them Esther drank alcohol for one of the few times in her life. (She had signed a Lincoln Society temperance pledge card in 1911.) Bob bought a Bavarian hat, but as he watched Germany’s growing belligerence after they returned to America, refused to wear it. The Greenleafs also visited Holland and were able to spend many happy hours hiking the cities and countryside.⁴⁶

In Denmark they learned of the work of Nikolaj Frederik Severin (N. F. S.) Grundtvig (1783–1872), a man whom Greenleaf would later use as an example of a servant-leader. Grundtvig’s life and work showed young Bob that an abiding and nurturing spirit could be nourished on a national scale.

If ever a country and people needed spirit, it was Denmark in the mid-nineteenth century. Danish peasants had been liberated from serfdom in 1788, but the Napoleonic Wars from 1807–1814 and Denmark’s separation from Norway after a four-hundred-year union had devastated, isolated, and demoralized the little country. Danish farmers and peasants were described as “unprogressive; sullen and suspicious; averse from experiment; incapable of associated enterprise.”⁴⁷ Yet, in these people, Grundtvig found hope for the salvation of the country. “O, what high souls, Here in lowliness dwell!” he wrote in one song.⁴⁸

N. F. S. Grundtvig was the son of a Lutheran minister. His early, rationalistic education was mostly dull, but three events awakened him spiritually. On April 2, 1801, he witnessed the bombardment of Copenhagen; a year later his cousin fired him with ideas of German Romanticism and, about the same time, he struggled to suppress passions when he fell in love with a married woman. “Life to him became a battlefield where the powers of good and evil are forever in conflict, and where everything depends upon the choice of sides made by each human soul.”⁴⁹ He discovered this same world-view in Scandinavian mythology, and in 1808 began writing books, plays, and poems that presented his people’s ancient 106 stories with a touch of Romanticism. He became famous as a poet and scholar.

After the peace of 1814, when everything lay “torpid, poverty-stricken and hopeless,” Grundtvig strangely found new hope. It was based on his conviction that he and all of Denmark were spared by the grace of God. His Christian principles told him that all could recognize their kinship with fellow humans, and this made him “radically democratic to the very core.”⁵⁰ He began writing songs with populist lyrics.

• And be we poor and lowly
• Yet are we sons of kings
• And higher than the eagle
• Hope may spread out its wings.⁵¹

He wrote poems for all his countrymen, not just the esthetically literate. “By his poetry he would sing a higher life into them. He had come to regard poetry not as an art, but as a life-giving power in every human soul, and a mighty influence in promoting the common life of an awakened people… he created through his poetry a new Denmark.”⁵² Still, he wondered how he could harness the volcanic potential of common people for sustained change. He had lost hope of working through the church for such an undertaking. Grundtvig had been ordained as a Lutheran clergyman in 1822 but immediately ran into conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. A number of laypeople—farmers, artisans and cottagers—had been holding religious gatherings in homes, because they believed the Gospel was no longer being preached in churches. Religious officials went so far as to sue the rebel leaders for trying to exercise religious freedom, even though their outside services were “conducted in an Orthodox Lutheran spirit.”⁵³ Grundtvig found himself on the side of the outsiders and was forced to resign his ecclesiastical office.

Then he visited England. In contrast to listless Denmark, England was bustling. Grundtvig “asked himself why it was that everything in Denmark was quiet and lifeless, whilst England was pulsating with vigorous life, the air resounding with hammer blows, with the whistling of engines, and with the din of traffic and other noises by which modern civilisation proclaims itself in a city like London.”⁵⁴ Where did the English get their spirit?

He found two answers. First, the religious and personal liberties enjoyed by the English proved that “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is 107 liberty.”⁵⁵ Second, he noticed the “wholesome habit the British had of looking upon real life as the final test, in contrast to the Danish and German tendency to let theory and preconceived ideas dominate their thought and action.”⁵⁶

When the Danish king was forced to begin granting modest political and religious freedoms, Grundtvig began promoting the idea of free Folk High Schools for all young adults. The curriculum would consist of “The living word in the mother tongue”—Danish poems, songs, mythology and history, all taught without textbooks. Young adults would spend intensive residencies at the schools and, borrowing from the English philosophy, would apply their knowledge in real life as the final test of learning.⁵⁷ Knowledge was not the most important outcome, however; spirit was. “Spirit is power,” said Grundtvig, and his Folk High Schools also became known as “schools of spirit.”⁵⁸ Grundtvig first proposed the schools in 1838, when he was fifty-six years old.

Robert Greenleaf admired Grundtvig’s emphasis on spirit, practical learning, and the use of poetry. He also noticed that, while Grundtvig inspired the Folk High School movement, he allowed others to carry the ball. “He addressed himself to the masses rather than to the cultured,” wrote Greenleaf. “The ‘cultured’ at that time thought him to be a confused visionary and contemptuously turned their backs on him. But the peasants heard him, and their natural leaders responded to his call to start the Folk High Schools—with their own resources.”⁵⁹ By the end of the century, the farmers had taken over the government of Denmark, thirty-five percent of the members of the lower house of parliament had been trained in Folk Schools, and other graduates were modernizing Danish culture and agriculture. By 1934, the year the Greenleafs visited, Denmark had established old-age pensions, socialized medicine, unemployment and accident insurance, and an eight-hour workday. Folk High Schools had empowered citizens to start cooperatives so they could control production and distribution without recourse to outside capital. Ninety-seven percent of all dairies were run by cooperatives, and the Folk School movement had gone international.⁶⁰

When Bob and Esther returned, they both wrote articles for Consumer’s Cooperation, a national magazine for cooperative leaders, and Bob was ghostwriter for a Cooperative League pamphlet titled Sweden: Land of Economic Opportunity.⁶¹

By the age of thirty, Bob Greenleaf had already embraced four ideas that would be at the core of his later servant writings. His father was the 108 model for the idea that servanthood—the desire to “make things better in my little corner of the world”—was the most important component of leadership. E. B. White’s writings taught him the importance of seeing things whole. The AT&T culture and Nikolaj Grundtvig’s schools showed it was possible to nurture spirit, even in large organizations and societies. Finally, his bias about education was confirmed—deep learning should be practical and experiential, a lifelong adventure.

As he entered his fourth decade of life, Robert Greenleaf was riding high. Already he could say, “I have had a satisfactory measure of success in business, even without discounting the times, and I have a substantial opportunity for progress in salary and achievement before me.”⁶² He was in a staff position, in which he could follow his old professor’s advice to change things for the better from inside a large institution.⁶³ He was married to a sparkling woman and stimulated daily by Big Ideas.

Further adventure—and tragedy—were just around the corner.