President Dodds made three major addresses at the convocations in October, February, and June. During the course of the year, he also conferred honorary degrees on some hundred eminent persons, including Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, Arnold J. Toynbee, Alvar Aalto, Erwin Panofsky, Reinhold Niebuhr, Salvador de Madariaga, Jacques Maritain, Trygvie Lie, General Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State George Marshall, and President Truman.
The chief designer of the Bicentennial Conferences was Dean J. Douglas Brown, who directed a series of conferences in the fall; Professor Whitney J. Oates directed a series in the winter and spring. Most of the conferences were led by Princeton professors and were concerned with broad topics in their several fields of scholarship, e.g., ``The Future of Nuclear Science,'' Eugene P. Wigner; ``The Humanistic Tradition in the Century Ahead,'' Donald A. Stauffer; ``The University and Its World Responsibilities,'' Gordon A. Craig and Cyril E. Black. The conferences were attended by scholars and men and women of affairs from all parts of the world.
The October convocation, commemorating Charter Day, began with an academic procession from Nassau Hall to the Chapel; the undergraduate band, grouped about the Cannon, played as an accompaniment a hitherto unperformed march by Beethoven. At the exercises the choir and the glee club sang an anthem, ``Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,'' composed especially for the occasion by Professor Edward T. Cone.
The February convocation was held in the Chapel on Washington's Birthday, even more snowbound than usual in the late Princeton winter. At the luncheon that followed, alumni and guests heard Secretary of State George C. Marshall make his first address since taking office.
The Bicentennial Year reached its climax with a brilliant series of events during the days from June 14 to 17. These included: on Saturday, the dedication of the new Dillon Gymnasium and a musical review of Princeton history, narrated by Jose Ferrer '33; on Sunday, a service of remembrance in the Chapel and a festival concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by Serge Koussevitsky; on Monday, a service of dedication, the laying of the cornerstone of Firestone Library, a formal reception of visiting delegates, a garden party at the Graduate College, and a dinner for 1,700 guests; and on Tuesday, the final convocation of the celebration.
At the convocation, an audience of five thousand persons seated in front of Nassau Hall watched an academic procession that included such celebrities as President Truman, former President Hoover, General Eisenhower, Field Marshall Viscount Alexander of Tunis (the Governor-General of Canada), Admiral Nimitz, Chief Justice Vinson, Judge Learned Hand, Governor Driscoll, Albert Einstein, Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, T. S. Eliot, and Serge Koussevitsky. The procession was swollen to a thousand persons by delegates from universities and colleges in all parts of the United States and in forty-three foreign countries. They walked in the order of the founding of their universities beginning with twelfth-century Salamanca and thirteenth-century Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Toulouse, and ending with several American colleges established in the 1940s. Their presence, President Dodds told them at the reception of delegates on the preceding day, was ``more than a gracious gesture of friendship''; it was an indication ``of the comity of purpose that makes scholars everywhere citizens of one world-wide commonwealth.''
President Truman said the need for educated people in public life, which Grover Cleveland had stressed at Princeton's Sesquicentennial fifty years before, was now greater than ever and in this collection praised the program of the Woodrow Wilson School.
The guiding spirit in the development tithe Bicentennial Year was Walter E. Hope '01, chairman of the executive committee of the trustees and of the executive committee for the Bicentennial. Serving as chief marshal at the various convocations was Chauncey Belknap '12, clerk of the Board of Trustees. The chief organizer and coordinator was Arthur E. Fox '13, assistant to the president, secretary of the Bicentennial executive committee. Colonel Fox left a file of Bicentennial procedures and methods, ``complete to the most minute detail,'' in the University archives. There it awaits his successor in 1996.