Nicholas Murray Butler was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. Butler was president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the deceased James S. Sherman's replacement as William Howard Taft’s running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election. He became so well known and respected that The New York Times printed his Christmas greeting to the nation many years during the 1920s and 1930s. According to historian Stephen H. Norwood, Butler failed to "grasp the nature and implications of Nazism...influenced both by his antisemitism, privately expressed, and his economic conservatism and hostility to trade unionism".
