Charles Wilbert Snow

Charles Wilbert "Bill" Snow (April 6, 1884 – September 28, 1977) was an American poet, educator and politician. He served as the 75th Governor of Connecticut. He generally went by the name Wilbert or Bill Snow, or formally as C. Wilbert Snow.

Snow was born on Whitehead Island, Maine. He grew up in Whitehead Island and in neighboring Spruce Head Village. At the age of 14, Snow left school to become a lobster fisherman; he returned to school three years later after moving to Thomaston, Maine. After graduating, he began teaching in a one-room elementary school while studying at Bowdoin College. Bowdoin's President, William Dewitt Hyde helped Snow attain the scholarship he needed to finance his studies.^{[citation needed]} At Bowdoin, Snow was on the debate team and editor of "The Quill", the campus literary magazine.

Snow earned his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin in 1907, receiving Phi Beta Kappa honors. He obtained a one-year replacement appointment teaching debate and public speaking at New York University. He enrolled at Columbia University where he obtained his master's degree in 1910, using Bowdoin's first Longfellow Fellowship. One of Snow's students was Carl Van Doren, to whom he introduced the works of Herman Melville, then in total obscurity. Van Doren, in turn, became responsible for the national rediscovery of Melville. But Snow rebelled at the rigid academic degree progression and told Ashley Horace Thorndike, head of Columbia's English Department, that the PhD "was a German invention designed to turn an art into a science." He never took his doctorate.

Snow returned to Bowdoin as temporary instructor of debate and English. From there it was on to Williams College for another one year temporary appointment. One of his favorite students was James Phinney Baxter III who shared Snow's disdain for the academic rigamarole and nearly got tossed out as a result. Some 25 years later, Baxter returned to Williams as President. At the end of that year, he was hired to teach debate and English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Snow's political views were very far left for the period. It took the President of Miami only ten days to decide he talked "too plainly with undergraduates about politics and religion" and ask him to leave.

Snow was saved at that point by an invitation by a former Bowdoin friend to become an Eskimo teacher and reindeer agent in Alaska, which he did from 1911 to 1912. He spent the following six months campaigning for Woodrow Wilson in Maine and then the next six giving lectures on Alaska. At that point he received an appointment to the faculty at the University of Utah where he spent two stormy years because of his political views (opposing the reelection of Mormon Apostle Reed Smoot as United States Senator) and support of Academic Freedom more generally. While at Utah, he induced future historian Bernard DeVoto to transfer to Harvard University. From there, after six months of writing, he went on to another temporary appointment to the faculty of Indiana University.

With the opening of World War I, Snow enthusiastically signed up with the Army and eventually became an artillery captain at the Army's artillery training center at Louisville, Kentucky. He was never sent overseas and worked to get a quick release after the Armistice to accept a temporary position at Reed College. He married Jeanette Simmons on February 23, 1922. They had five sons; Charles Wilbert, John Forest, Nicholas, Stephen, and Gregory Elisha.

Snow's friend, Homer Woodbridge, was then teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and managed to get Snow an offer to take charge of the debating program and teach freshman English. It nearly didn't happen when someone wrote President William Arnold Shanklin that Snow was too far to the left of center for his aggressive support of the League of Nations. Snow was called east by Shanklin but "survived the interrogation."

With a new appointment firmly in hand, Snow married Jeannette Simmons and planned a delayed honeymoon in Europe for the summer of 1922. When they returned, he had a copy of James Joyce's newly released Ulysses hidden in his luggage. Hidden because Ulysses had been "banned" in America ahead of its actual publication. Snow always asserted, with some logic because of the dates involved, that he had "smuggled the first copy of Ulysses into the United States."