I 1 Morison Samuel Eliot NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR OCEANIC HISTORY, INC. NEWSLETTER SPECIAL EDIT SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON (1887-1976) Photo No. 80-G-45504 in the National Archives. MODI E I BLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS BY SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860. Boston: Hough- ton, Mifflin, 1921, 1941. London: Heinemann, 1923. Paperback Compiled by K. Jack Bauer edn. Houghton, Mifflin, 1961. "Memoir of Alden Bradford," MHS, LV (1921-22), 153-64. This list excludes book reviews other than long review essays, "Memoir of Edward Henry Clement," MHS, LVI (1922-23), 57-68. faces to books by other authors, and articles in encyclopedias. (Ed.), William Manning. The Key of Libberty. Billerica: The Manning compiler wishes to thank Walter Muir Whitehill, Donald R. Association, 1922; William & Mary Quarterly, XIII (1956), rtin, and Rachel Stuhlman for their very kind assistance in 202-54. ating some of the more elusive entires. (Ed.), Paul Revere's Own Account of His Midnight Ride. Boston: breviations: Old South Association, 1922. Old South Leaflets No. 222. AAS Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New A Prologue to American History, An Inaugural Lecture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922. L&S, 3-26. Series. "The Commerce of Boston on the Eve of the Revolution," AAS, CSM Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. XXXII (1923), 24-51. HAB Harvard Alumni Bulletin. "Liberty and the Constitution," Proceedings of the Massachusetts L&S Reprinted in By Land and By Sea. Society of Sons of the Revolution, 1923, 91-121. MHS Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. SH Reprinted in Sailor Historian. "The Old American Merchant Marine," The Landmark, V (1923), 793-99. NEQ New England Quarterly. Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, VOH Reprinted in Vistas of History. 1764-1788, and the Formation of the Federal Constitution. he Kremlin of Moscow," Horae Scholasticae, XXXVI (1902), Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923, 1929, 1961; New York: 26-28. Oxford University Press, 1951. Paperback edn. Oxford, 1965. he First National Nominating Convention," American Historical "Dr. Amos Windship, 1745-1813, The Biography of a Rascal," CSM, Review, XVII (1912), 744-63. XXV (1924), 141-71. and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis. 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, "Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Ephraim Eliot and From Mifflin, 1913. Newspapers Relating to Seth Hudson and Joshua Howe," CSM, he Property of Harrison Gray Otis, Loyalist," CSM, XIV (1913), XXV (1924), 40-43. 320-50. "The Log of the Pilgrim, 1781-1782," CSM, XXV (1924), 94-124. he Massachusetts Embassy to Washington, 1815," MHS, XLVIII "The Origins of the Monroe Doctrine, 1775-1823," Economica, I (1914-15), 343-51. (Feb. 1924), 27-51. Trans. as "Les Origines de la Doctrine de uPont, Talleyrand, and the French Spoilations," MHS, XLIX Monroe," Revue des Sciences Politiques, XLVII (Jan. 1923), (1915-16), 63-79. 52-84. Yankee Skipper in San Domingo, 1797," MHS, XLIX (1915-16), "The Will of a Boston Slave, 1743," CSM, XXV (1924), 253-54. 268-73. "An American Professor's Reflections on Oxford," London Specta- he Struggle Over the Adoption of the Massachusetts Constitution, tor, Nov. 7, 14, 1925; The Living Age, 8th ser., XLI (Jan. 2, 1780," MHS, L (1916-17), 353-411. 1926), 44-48. he Vote of Massachusetts on Summoning a Constitutional Con- "Impressions of Harvard After Oxford," HAB, XXVIII (1925-26), vention, 1776-1916," MHS, L (1916-17), 241-49. 917-20. History of the Constitution of Massachusetts. Boston: Wright & "Sir Charles Vaughan's Viaticum of 1826," MHS, LIX (1925-26), Potter, 1917. 377-414. Brief Account of Harrison Gray Otis," Bulletin of the Society The Class Lives of Samuel Eliot and Nathaniel Holmes Morison, for Preservation of New England Antiquities, VIII (1917), 1-6. Harvard 1839. Boston: Privately printed, 1926. Poem on Election Day in Massachusetts, C. 1790," CSM, XVIII "Nova Albion and New England," Oregon Voter, Aug. 14, 1926, (1917), 54-62. and Oregon Historical Quarterly, XXVIII (1927), 1-17. 1.), John Winthrop. The Humble Request of the Massachusetts "Charles Bagot's Notes on Housekeeping and Entertaining in Washing- Puritans and A Modell of Christian Charity. Boston: Old South ton, 1819," CSM, XXVI (1927), 438-46. Association, 1917. Old South Leaflets No. 207. "Did William Bradford Leave Leyden Before the Pilgrims," MHS, d.), John Quincy Adams and Others on the Peace of Ghent. LXI (1927-28), 34-39. Boston: Old South Association, 1917. Old South Leaflets "New England and the Opening of the Columbia River Salmon No. 211. Trade," Oregon Historical Quarterly, XXVIII (1927), 111-32. 1.), The Treaty of Ghent and Negotiations That Followed. Boston: Oxford History of the United States. 2 vols., Oxford: Oxford Uni- Old South Association, 1917. Old South Leaflets No. 212. versity Press, 1927. 1.), Selections from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days in the Civil "Robert Morris," Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin, Dec. 15, War. Boston: Old South Leaflets No. 217. 1927. phraim Eliot's Private Report of the Class of 1780," CSM, XIX "A Harvard Hero of the Seventeenth Century, the Commonplace (1918), 290-95. Book of Joseph Green," HAB, XXXI (1928-29), 242-44. arvard in the Colonial Wars, 1675-1748," Harvard Graduates' "Forcing the Dardanelles in 1810," NEQ, I (1928), 208-25. Magazine, XXVI (1918), 554-74. "Henry Dunster, First President of Harvard College," HAB, XXXI e Eastern Baltic: (I) The Peace Conference and the Baltic; (II) (1928-29), 335-38. Latvia; (III) Latvia, Continued; (IV) Esthonia; (V) Finland," Historical Background for the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary in The New Europe, XII (1919), 77-82, 127-32, 155-59, 200-205, 1930. Boston: Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary, Inc., 1928, 270-75. 1930. Tercentenary Bulletin No. 10. .). Eliah Grimes, "Letters on the Northwest Fur Trade," Washing- "History," The History and Traditions of Harvard College. Cam- ton Historical Quarterly, XI (1920), 174-77. bridge: The Harvard Crimson, 1928. Subsequent editions e Education of John Marshall," Atlantic Monthly, CXXVI through 1936. (July 1920), 45-54. "The India Ventures of Fisher Ames, 1794-1804," AAS, XXXVII e New Baltic Republics: (I) Esthonia and Latvia; (II) Lithuania (1928), 14-23. and Finland," The Youths' Companion, Oct. 7, 28, 1920. "John Adams and Thomas Jefferson," New England Society of emarks on Economic Conditions in Massachusetts in 1780," Pennsylvania, 47th Annual Report, 1928, 51-67. L&S, 219-30. CSM, XX (1920), 191-92. "Squire Ames and Doctor Ames," NEQ, I (1928), 5-31. I&&S, 200- ston Traders in the Hawaiian Islands, 1789-1823," MHS, LIV 218 without notes. (1920-21), 9-47; Washington Historical Quarterly, XII (1921- "Two 'Signers' on Salaries and the Stage," MHS, LXII (1928-29), 22), 166-201; I.&S, 66-98 without notes. 55-64. Elbridge Gerry and Samuel Adams. istom-House Records in Massachusetts, as a Source of History," An Hour of American History; From Columbus to Coolidge. Phila- MHS LIV (1920-21) 324-31 delphia: Literature Resource Center 3.1 -- Advanced Search Results Page 1 of 13 Southern New Hampshire University Literature Resource Center HOME Title Keyword Authors Advanced Literary Historical Authors on Encyclopedia Gale Literary Search Search by Type Search Timeline the Highway of Literature Index Search for Author: Search Clear Form Print E-mail Biographies Literary Criticism, Articles & Additional Historical Work Overviews Resources Mark this document Revise Search Current Results Document 2 of 2 Samuel Eliot Morison July 9, 1887-May 15, 1976 Name: Samuel Eliot Morison Nationality: American Birth Place: Boston, Massachusetts Death Place: Boston, Massachusetts Genre(s): Biographies; Essays; Journalism; Memoirs; Textbooks Biographical and Critical Essay The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848 The Puritan Pronaos Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus History of United States Naval Operations in World War II The Rising Sun in the Pacific History as a Literary Art The Ropemakers of Plymouth Old Bruin": Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 The Oxford History of the American People The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600 Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France Writings by the Author Further Readings about the Author About This Essay Personal Information: Education: A.B., Harvard College, 1908; Ecole des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 1908-1909; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1912. Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, 1943. Columbia University Bancroft Prize for The Rising Sun in the Pacific (volume 3, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II), 1949. /LitRC?c=2&ASB2=AND&ASB1=AND&ste=71&docNum=H1200006306&bConts=2179&tab=1&AST3=NA&12/4/2001 Literature Resource Center 3.1 -- Advanced Search Results Page 1 of 8 Southern New Hampshire University Literature Resource Center HOME Title Keyword Authors Advanced Literary Historical Authors on Encyclopedia Gale Literary Search Search by Type Search Timeline the Highway of Literature Index Search for Author: Search Clear Form Biographies Literary Criticism, Print E-mail Articles, & Mark this document Work Overviews Revise Search Current Results Document 1 of 2 Samuel Eliot Morison 1887-1976 New Entry 10/30/1997 Nationality: American Birth Place: Boston, MA Death Place: Boston, MA Genre(s): Biographies; Essays; Journalism; Memoirs; Textbooks Personal Information Career Writings Sidelights Further Readings About the Author Personal Information: Family: Born July 9, 1887, in Boston, Mass.; died May 15, 1976, in Boston, Mass.; son of John Holmes and Emily Marshall (Eliot) Morison; married Elizabeth S. Greene (a painter), May 28, 1910 (died August, 1945); married Priscilla Barton, December 29, 1949 (died February, 1973); children: (first marriage) Elizabeth Gray (Mrs. Edward Spingarn), Emily Marshall (Mrs. Brooks Beck), Peter Greene (deceased), Catharine (Mrs. Julian Cooper). Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1908, Ph.D., 1912; Ecole des Sciences Politiques, graduate study, 1908-09; Oxford University, M.A., 1922. Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Army, Infantry, 1918-19. U.S. Naval Reserve, 1942-51; commissioned lieutenant commander and appointed historian of U.S. naval operations during World War II; served at sea and received Legion of Merit with combat clasp and seven battle stars; retired as rear admiral. Memberships: American Historical Association (former president), American Antiquarian Society (former president), Society of Antiquarians (fellow), American Philosophical Society (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), American Academy of Arts and Letters, Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid; fellow), Naval Historical Foundation (former vice-president), British Academy (fellow), Colonial Society of Massachusetts (former president), Massachusetts Historical Society, Charitable Irish Society (Boston), St. Botolph Club, Cruising Club, Tavern Club (Boston). Addresses: Home: 44 Brimmer St., Boston, Mass.; and Northeast Harbor, Me. 04662 (summer). Office: Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass. 02138. Agent: Curtis Brown Ltd., 575 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10022. /LitRC?c=1&ASB2=AND&ASB1=AND&ste=71&docNum=H1000070403&bConts=2179&tab=1&AST3=NA&12/4/2001 Literature Resource Center 3.1 -- Advanced Search Results Page 2 of 8 Career: Instructor in history, University of California, 1914; Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., instructor in history, 1915-18, 1919-22; Oxford University, Oxford, England, Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History, 1922-25; Harvard University, 1925-76, began as professor, became Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History emeritus, 1955-76. Anson G. Phelps Lecturer at New York University, 1934; Dunning Lecturer at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1956; speaker at historical occasions. Trustee, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Awards: Loubat Prize, Columbia University, and Jusserand Medal, both for The Tercentennial History of Harvard University, 1636-1936; Pulitzer Prize in biography, 1943, for Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, and 1960, for John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography; Bancroft Prize, Columbia University, 1949, for The Rising Sun in the Pacific, and 1972; Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal, 1956; Thomas Alva Edison Foundation national mass media award, 1957, for The Story of the "Old Colony" of New Plymouth; Christopher Award, 1960; St. Thomas More Award, Rockhurst College, 1960; Alfred Thayer Mayan Award, Navy League, 1961; Emerson-Thoreau Medal, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1961; Gold Medal for history and biography, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1962; Balzan Foundation award for history, 1963; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1964. L.H.D. from Trinity College, 1935, Amherst College, 1936, Williams College, 1950, and College of the Holy Cross, 1962; Litt.D. from Harvard University, 1936, Columbia University, 1942, Yale University, 1949, Oxford University, 1951, and University of Notre Dame, 1954; LL.D. from Union College, 1939, Boston College, 1960, Bucknell College (now University), 1960, and University of Maine, 1968. WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR: The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848, two volumes, Houghton, 1913, published as Harrison Gray Otis, 1765-1848: The Urbane Federalist, 1969. A History of the Constitution of Massachusetts, Wright & Potter, 1917. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860, Houghton, 1921, 3rd edition, 1961, reprinted with a foreward by Benjamin Woods Labaree, Northeastern 1979. A Prologue to American History, Oxford University Press, 1922. The Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917 (also see below), two volumes, Oxford University Press, 1927. An Hour of American History, from Columbus to Coolidge, Lippincott, 1929, revised edition, Beacon Press, 1960. (With Henry Steele Commager) The Growth of the American Republic (contains portions of The Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917), Oxford University Press, 1930, revised and enlarged edition, two volumes, 1937, 6th edition (with Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg), 1969, abbreviated and newly revised edition published as A Concise History of the American Republic, 1977. The Proprietors of Peterborough, N.H., Peterborough Historical Society, 1930. Builders of the Bay Colony, Houghton, 1930, reprinted, AMS Press, 1976, limited large- paper edition published as Massachusettensis de conditoribus; or, The Builders of the Bay Colony, Houghton, 1930, reprinted with a foreward by Edmund Morgan, Northeastern, 1981. /LitRC?c=1&ASB2=AND&ASB1=AND&ste=71&docNum=H1000070403&bConts=2179&tab=1&AST3=NA 12/4/2001 COSMOS CLUB THE FIFTH COSMOS CLUB AWARD SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON COSMOS CLUB alamy Washington D. C April 29.1968 Tan 2 2 Citation SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON Historian, biographer, university professor, teacher of historians, and bluewater sailor, Samuel Eliot Morison has added to the sum total of learn- ing in many fields and has contributed to the pleasure of thousands of readers who have found in him a scholar of profound erudition as well as an author possessed of literary vigor and charm. Our awareness and knowledge of colonial America owe much to his research and interpreta- tion. Among his many works in this area, the Maritime History of Massachusetts and Builders of the Bay Colony are characteristic of his interests in seafaring and in significant personalities. His Tercentennial History of Harvard University set a standard for academic history rarely achieved before or since, His Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a biography of Columbus, won for the author the first of two Pulitzer prizes, the second being for the biography of another heroic mariner, John Paul Jones. Morison's interest in the sea and in neval affairs, from the time of Columbus to his own day, made him the natural choice to head the Historical Section of the United States Navy in World War II. The fifteen-volume History of U. S. Naval Operations in World War II resulted, followed by The Two Ocean War. Morison's most recent contribution to naval history is a biography of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry entitled 'Old Bruin'. The recipient of many earlier honors, honorary degrees, medals, and citations, Morison received in 1963 the Balzan Foundation Award for History. Not content to con- fine his research to dusty archives and libraries, Morison sailed his own craft in the track of Columbus and later photographed from the air the islands and inlets of the Caribbean region that Columbus discovered Beginning as a lieutenant-commander, Morison retired as a rear admiral in the United States Naval Reserve. Like the great discoverer about whom be has written, be too deserves to be remembered as an "Admiral of the Ocean Sea." For his manifold achievements, for his many contributions to history, and for his eminence as a man of letters, the Cosmos Club of Washington is honored to name him the recipient of the Fifth Cosmos Club Award. [3]] ? 3 LIFE IN WASHINGTON A CENTURY AND A HALF AGO LETTERS OF A FEDERALIST CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR, AND HIS WIFE 1800-1822 SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON 1. Washington's First Year as National Capital My account of social life in Washington during the first quarter of the nineteenth century is based largely upon the letters of a Congressman from Boston, Harrison Gray Otis, and his wife Sally Foster Otis. They were, respectively, 35 and 30 years old in 1800 when the Federal Government moved to Washington from Phila- delphia where they had been prominent members of what has aptly been called the Republican Court. They were friends of President and Mrs. Washington and also kinsfolk to President and Mrs. Adams. Both were highly sociable people who had as many friends in the Middle and Southern States as in New England. The follow- ing tribute to their social qualities appears in a letter from John Quincy Adams to his father the ex-President: In the course of nearly thirty years that I have known him, and throughout the range of experience that I have had in that time, it has not fallen to my lot to meet a man more skilled in the useful art of entertaining his friends than Otis; and among the many admirable talents that he possesses, there is none that I should have been more frequently and more strongly prompted to Envy if the natural turn of my disposition had been envious. Of those qualities Otis has many-His Person while in Youth, his graceful Deportment, his sportive wit, his quick intelligence, his elo- quent fluency, always made a strong impression upon my Mind; while his warm domestic Affections, his active Friendship, and his Gen- erosity, always commanded my esteem, Mrs. Otis is and always has been a charming woman; and I am very glad you have seen them both in the place where of all others they appear to the great- est advantage-their own house. [ 5 ] Samuel Eliot Morison Memories of Northeast Harbor Edited by Gunnar Hansen The Pulitzer Prize-winning naval historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, spent almost every summer of his life at Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, and his eighty-odd years coincide almost exactly with the town's evolution into one of the most exclusive resort areas in the nation. The following reminiscence of his childhood days there is excerpted from a longer interview taped on October 10, 1973, in the study of his Maine home, "Good Hope." Together with recordings by many year-round and summer residents of that village, it is part of the archival collection established in 1972 by the Northeast Harbor Library. I feel that everything I've had or done stems from my every family and child in Northeast Harbor. She was summers up here as a child and small boy. I first the first one to greet us when we went on board about came here at the age of three or four, in 1890 or 1891, on 5:00 A.M. in Rockland, feeling rather sleepy and groggy the steamer City of Richmond. One went on board in after a night on the Bangor boat, and she was the last Portland after a train journey from Boston or New person we saw in the fall, when we went back to the York, spent the night on board, and woke up in the world of school and college. morning amid the delicious smells and sights of The reason my parents came up here was largely Eggemoggin Reach. their friendship with the Doanes. Northeast Harbor, as The Richmond was partly owned by her captain, everyone knows, was founded as a summer community Captain Gary, who was a great character along the in 1881 by Bishop [William] Doane of Albany, who coast. He didn't believe in insurance, SO when the fog settled on the west side of the harbor, and by President came in he would anchor, and that once caused a great [Charles W.] Eliot of Harvard on the right. My family deal of dismay on the part of a young man who wanted were relations of the Eliots and saw a good deal of them to get to a dinner party in Bar Harbor. So he went to the first and last, but their particular relations were with the captain and said, "Aren't we going ahead soon?" Doanes, as my grandfather Eliot was a leading "Dunno," said the captain. "Too thick now." Episcopal layman. He and my grandmother came up "Well," he said, "it's clear overhead." here as early as the 1880s and stayed with the Savages - "But we're not going that way," said Captain Gary. the Herman Savages - in a cottage that is still standing, And that was that. behind the site of the Rock End Hotel. The Richmond was succeeded by the Mt. Desert, We Morisons went to the Rock End Hotel, of the Boston and Bangor Steamship Company, and overlooking the whole of the Northeast Harbor fleet she, after doing excellent service for over twenty years, and Gilpatrick's Cove. The proprietor was Herman was succeeded by the J. T. Morse, which many people Savage, and he ran a very good hotel. Opposite the still remember, although it's now thirty or forty years Rock End Hotel was a beautiful point of land, since she made her last voyage to the island and her Smallidge Point, then owned by Aunt Hannah hoarse whistle was heard on the Western Way. Smallidge. The title to it was SO very elaborate that Her one permanent officer during that time was several people who tried to buy it were frustrated. But the stewardess, Maggie Higgins, who was known to Mr. William W. Vaughn, our cousin, was not. He got 62 Downtast 24 (July '78). 62-67 Photographs courtesy Northeast Harbor Library hat in The late Samuel Eliot Morison, shown at the helm of his yawl Emily Marshall some yearsago (opposite page) be- gan his life-long association with the sea during summersat Northeast Harbor when sailing picnics were in vogue. was releases from heirs as far west as California, bought the year and had their name put on it SO nobody else would out whole point from Aunt Hannah Smallidge, and built take it by mistake. ggy and subsequently let or sold - all the houses on it. -There was a great deal of rowing in those waters. last The Vaughns had two children. One of them, Sam, Sam and I would use our boat or his for fishing in the the exactly my age, was a particular pal. I want to tell you morning, and we always caught SO many flounders, and about the kind of life we kids, say four years old up to sometimes a number of sculpins as well, that we gely twelve or so, led in those days. It all centered around peddled them around for nothing to the different Gilpatrick's Cove, where Abram Gilpatrick, a cottages, the cook at the Rock End Hotel refusing to wonderful old gentleman and seaman, had a boat entertain anything such as flounders caught by the livery. guests. ent Mr. Vaughn extended his pier to go over to In the afternoon there were three things that ily Smallidge Point and the story goes that he was everyone did. One was sailing. Many families had a em compelled by the government to put a drawbridge in it Friendship sloop for the summer, that type that has the because Abram Gilpatrick's brother, Arthur, who had a suddenly regained popularity and is now being built ing general store at the head of Gilpatrick's Cove, wanted over on Southwest Harbor and Manset. These up to get his goods in from Boston by sea. And I can Friendship sloops were owned by natives who distinctly remember a schooner being warped through lobstered and fished from them in the winter. Then in ng, that drawbridge at high tide in order to discharge her the summer they painted them up, mounted a topmast multiple cargo at Arthur Gilpatrick's. Arthur sold and a topsail, and the boats became a very comfortable everything from nails to coffins. There was hardly any day sailer, with their wide-open cockpits. Every article of luxury or necessity that you couldn't buy at morning the older members of the colony at the Rock Arthur Gilpatrick's in those days. End Hotel and the nearby cottages would go out in their Sam Vaughn and I started learning to row in or someone else's Friendship. nd, Gilpatrick's Cove. Abram had a beautiful fleet of Particularly admired was a sloop, not a Friendship, nah rowboats built in Old Town on the model of the old built by one of the constant summer visitors at the Rock hat Whitehall, and they were let out to summer visitors by End, Captain Lewis McClain of Baltimore. Captain But the hour, day, week, or summer. Most of the people McClain was a veteran not only of the Civil War but of who came for all summer, like us, had a boat for the some Indian war preceding it, and was the oracle in our 63 community on all military subjects and a great many other things, too. Captain McClain didn't think a Friendship sloop was good enough SO he had one built to his own specifications in Baltimore and had her towed all the way up here. He named her the Oriole after the protected bird of his native state. It was considered a great compliment to be asked to go out in her. I was asked only once. I innocently said to Captain McClain, who always held the tiller, that I supposed when he came up here in the summer on the steamer Mt. Desert he always took the wheel from the captain. That was not considered funny by Captain McClain. I was silenced and not invited again. The people who didn't have a Friendship sloop in the summer always had one of Abram Gilpatrick's rowboats. And the favorite afternoon sport for our family and many others was to take tea things on board and a kettle of water and row to some beach or island and there make tea about four-thirty or five o'clock. Our favorite destination was Valley Cove on Somes Sound because there a spring of sweet water gushes out from the beach halfway between high water and low water. Thanks to this, my father didn't have to carry a The Rock End Hotel where the Morisons stayed for the summer. kettle of water. We also picnicked on Greening Island before there were any cottages on the eastern end, on Bear Island and Sutton, and even once or twice on View up unpaved Main Street around the turn of the century. Cranberry. There was no swimming pool here until 1898. It was built by the enterprise of Mr. Vaughn and was very much frequented around the noon hour by all the kids. That's where I learned to swim. Before that we never went swimming for the water was considered too cold. One of my earliest memories is seeing some wretched neophytes of the Baptist faith being dunked in a baptismal ceremony at the site of the swimming pool. They all wore a full suit of clothes and came up looking very, very damp and distressed after being completely immersed in the orthodox way by the minister who was doing the christening. T HE other outdoor sport of the time was buckboard riding. There were several livery stables here, of which I remember best that of my friend old Wilbur Herrick right in the middle of the village; another, Frasier's stable, was on the road to Asticou. In the afternoon, summer visitors at the hotel would hire these buckboards, first having to send a small boy with the message because there were no telephones then, and would drive to all parts of the island - Bar Harbor, Jordan Pond, Bubble Pond, and even to the western side of the island. People were so keen on driving that they would sometimes take the J. T. Morse in the afternoon to Southwest Harbor, hire a team there, and drive all around the western side of the island. Then they would hire some kind of a motorboat to bring them back from the Claremont House in the early evening. The people who had cottages did a good deal of entertaining, asking those who lived at the hotels to 65 Buckboard riding on Mt. Desert's network of carriage roads was popular. Background: the Harbourside Inn. come to supper and SO on, a feature of which always terrific walker. She thought nothing of taking me and seemed to be lobster Newburg. At that time lobsters my brother, when we were only five to seven years old, cost about ten cents a pound, SO the entertaining was not all the way through the village and up Asticou very expensive. Mountain, which is now named Eliot. And when my Not that the food at the Rock End Hotel or the father and his brother climbed Sargent Mountain even Kimball House was bad. From the point of view of a begged, at age eight, to be taken up there. And, of small boy, there were tremendous bills of fare with course, Sam Vaughn tagged along, too. That was enormous numbers of perfectly fascinating choices. It considered one of the great days of the summer, to go made it well worth while to learn to read early SO you up Sargent Mountain and get the wonderful view out to could help choose your own food. It was always my sea and inland. ambition to be able one day to have everything on the One of the odd walks that we took was the ice-slide bill of fare. Once, I sneaked down for the one o'clock walk. About 1890 an enterprising group that exported dinner before my parents, and when Bertha Carter, the ice from Maine farms to New York, New Orleans, and nice waitress who came year after year, said, "Now, even to India, decided that a slide through the woods Sammy, what would you like for your dinner?" I said, from Lower Hadlock Pond to Northeast Harbor would "Everything on the menu!" be just the thing. That rather took Bertha aback and she said, "But They built it. They had an icehouse at Lower the fried chicken. You know your mother doesn't allow Hadlock, at its outlet by Wasgatt Brook, and another you to eat fried things, and there's this and that which one at the shore of the harbor. And the ice would be your parents don't allow you to eat." So I finally said, shoved along this wooden trestle through the woods, in "Oh, well, all right. Forget it. Bring me something you great cakes, under the road via tunnel, and stored in that think I'd like." One rule was that you should not have icehouse on the edge of the harbor until some schooner more than two desserts, and there was a terrible time came to take it away. And I can just remember seeing choosing on the days when they had ice cream, men pushing these cakes of ice along the trestle and watermelon, and blueberry pie. Which two would you through the tunnel. take? After it ceased to be used for that purpose - for The people who came to the Rock End Hotel, and the ice-exporting business was thrown out completely most of those at the Kimball House, also, came here by the cheapness of artificial ice by about 1895 - the year after year, taking the same rooms by the season children loved to walk along the trestle, which in many and then paying board for as many people as inhabited places must have been as much as fifteen feet above the them. We had guests from Boston and New York and ground, to Lower Hadlock Pond, then proceed everyone seemed to enjoy the kind of life we had. through the woods to Upper Hadlock, and then back We did a great deal of walking, too. For several by another path. years as a child I had an English governess who was a All the trails around here were laid out before there 66 Sloops of the Northeast Harbor fleet ready for an afternoon race. Southwest Harbor is visible in the distance. d were any cars on the island. It was a very wonderful tribute to the natives with whom we were intimately d, place for walking, horseback riding, and buggy riding. allied. They were naturally intelligent, if not u Another industry of the time was granite intellectual; they were natural navigators with y quarrying. Hall's Quarry was then going strong. When compasses built into their heads SO they could find their en my parents built a house on Somes Sound, it used to be a way home from pulling lobster traps without a compass of familiar sight to see those three-masted schooners on board; they were natural teachers, for they passed as sailing up the sound to load granite at Hall's Quarry along to their children and to us newcomers some of the go with a southwest wind, and then waiting for a art and mystery of the sea which they learned the hard to northwest wind to sail down the sound, very heavy way in the days of sail and sweep. laden, carrying the granite to Boston, New York, or It was a privilege to grow up with men such as de Philadelphia. Abram Gilpatrick and Lewis Stanley to teach me to row ed After we got a little older, Sam Vaughn and I took and sail, and to know intimately men like Wilbur d to sailing. We all raced fourteen-foot North Haven Herrick who had all the horse lore there was and knew ds dinghies in keen competition, formed the Northeast the ways of birds and fish and the land and all growing Id Harbor Yacht Squadron, ahead of the real one, and had things. a wonderful time with them. Sam and I even had our The native inhabitants of Mt. Desert Island were er first cruise around the whole of Mt. Desert Island in a friendly and kindly people, always ready to turn to and er North Haven dinghy, sleeping on the floorboards with help a neighbor, or even a stranger, in need, an be an old launch tarpaulin over us, and cooking our inheritance from the days when pioneer isolation and in breakfast - the only meal we had to do ourselves - loneliness made human kindness of more value than at over a one-burner kerosene stove. And I think it was on anything else. er that cruise that I became absolutely wedded to things of I hope that we summer visitors from heavily g the sea, my greatest pleasure as well as my professional populated regions, where courtesy and friendliness d support. have all but been crowded out, have absorbed The time came, of course, when all this had to something of those human qualities which, over and or change. The watershed for me was the year 1901 when I above the magnificent scenery and the water, make Mt. ly ceased to be a day scholar in Boston and went to St. Desert to me, after spending over eighty summers here, he Paul's School. After my grandfather Eliot died, we still fresh, exciting, and a blessed country. y went abroad for a couple of years, and when I got back le in 1903 it seemed that Northeast Harbor had greatly Samuel Eliot Morison died on May 15, 1976. He d changed. wrote his own epitaph, and it is inscribed on his k The thing that had changed was ourselves. gravestone in Northeast Harbor: Now to conclude these rather haphazard Dream dreams then write them re memories of childhood and youth I just want to make a Aye, but live them first. 67 Northeast Harbor Library Archives Finding Aid Samuel Eliot Morison Collection Summary Information Creator: Library Extent: 1 record carton box Abstract: Collection includes manuscripts, typescripts, newspaper clippings, photocopies, letters, and pamphlets written by or about Samuel Eliot Morison. Call Number: 2014.49 Language: English Access and Use Acquisition Information: unknown Access Restrictions: This collection is open to research and reproduction. Background Information History: Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) was a lifelong Northeast Harbor summer resident. He donated to the library his collection of nautical charts that were used in researching The European Discovery of America (1971)-Samuel Eliot Morison Map Collection. Scope and Content and Arrangement Scope and Content: Collection includes manuscripts, typescripts, newspaper clippings, photocopies, letters, and pamphlets written by or about Samuel Eliot Morison. Subjects: America -- Discovery and exploration. Naval history, Modern. Morison, Samuel Eliot, -- 1887-1976. Arrangement: Arranged in folders by topic, in no particular order. 1 Container List: BOX 1 record carton box Publications by SEM (Folder 1) The Scholar in America by SEM, 1961 Nathaniel Holmes Morison by SEM, 1957 The Young Man Washington by SEM, 1932 (2 copies) The Commerce of Boston on the Eve of the Revolution by SEM, 1923 The India Ventures of Fisher Ames, 1794-1804 by SEM, 1927 The Pilgrim Fathers: their significance in history by SEM, 1937 The Fifth Cosmos Club Award by SEM, 1968 Publications by SEM (Folder 2) History as Literary Art: an appeal to young historians by SEM Augustus Peabody Moring, .by SEM, 1964 The Arms and Seals of John Paul Jones by SEM, 1958 Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of Birth of George Washington by SEM, 1932 Plymouth Colony Beachhead by SEM, 1954 New Light Wanted on the Old Colony by SEM, William and Mary Quarterly, 1958 Vol. XV (p.359) Publications by SEM (Folder 3) The Battle of Surigao Strait by SEM, United States Naval Institute Proceedings, 1958 Vol. 84 No. 12 (p.31) Portrait of a Friendship part 1 by SEM, The New England Quarterly, June 1983 (p.166) Portrait of a Friendship part 2 by SEM, The New England Quarterly, September 1983 (p.398) Publications by SEM (Folder 4) The Columbia's Winter Quarters of 1791-1792 Located by SEM, The Oregon Historical Quarterly, March 1928 (p.3) The Course of the Arabella from Cape Sable to Salem by SEM, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1932 (p.285) The Peace Convention of 1861 by SEM, 1961 Memoranda and Documents by SEM, reprint from The New England Quarterly, 1960 The Centenary of Prescott's Death by SEM, reprint from The New England Quarterly, 1959 Elba Interlude, June 1944 by SEM, reprint from Military Affairs, 1947 The Dry Salvages and the Thacher Shipwreck by SEM, reprint from The American Neptune, 1965 Doctor Morison's Address November 21, 1935, 1936 Doctor Morison's Farewel, 1939 Letter of Columbus by SEM, 1959 John Cabot, the mysterious sailor who gave England rights to North America, Smithsonian Magazine April 1971 Reminiscences of 97 & 100 Beacon Street, Noble and Greenough Graduates Bulletin, 1974 Book Review of Lief Eriksson Discoverer of America by SEM, reprint The New England Quarterly, 1931 Why Japan Surrendered by SEM, Atlantic Magazine, 1960 2 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963 by SEM, typescript Publications by SEM (Folder 5) DuPont, Talleyrand, and the French Spoliations by SEM, Massachusetts Historical Society, November 1915 (p.63) The Roosevelt Collection of Naval Art by SEM, reprint, 1963 Harvard's Seals and Arms by SEM, The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, September 1933 (pg. 1) The Invention of America by SEM, History and Theory, 1963 (pg. 292) Publications Foldered Separately Memories of Northeast Harbor by SEM, Down East Magazine, July 1979 (p.62) (Folder 6) Following Magellan's Wake in His Strait by SEM, Smithsonian Magazine, February 1971 (p.45) (Folder 7) Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin, October 1933 (Folder 8) Harvard Alumni Bulletins, May 1926, February 1930, March and May 1930, March and June 1934, November 1935, January & April & July 1936, February & April & October 1939 (Folder 8) Captain Codman on the Mutiny in Dorchester Church and the Seamanship of Saint Paul by SEM, The American Neptune, April 1942 (p.99) (Folder 9) Notes on Writing Naval (not Navy) Englis, by SEM, The American Neptune, January 1949 (p.5) (Folder 9) The Landing of the Fedhala, Morocco, November 8, 1942 by SEM, The American Neptune, April 1943 (p.99) (Folder 9) A Complete Bibliography compiled by K. Jack Bauer, 1977 (no folder) Morison Notes and Manuscript (Folder 10) An Informal Evening of Song and Story programs, 1959 (2 copies, one has SEM's notes from the lecture pasted inside) Manuscript, unidentified writing by SEM Morison Messengers (Folder 11) December 1980, 2 pages March 1981, 5 pages June 1981, 5 pages (with large brown envelope) October 11, 1981, 2 pages (with white envelope) April 17, 1982 (with white envelope) May 17, 1982 June 17, 1982 (with brown envelope) July 17, 1982, 1 page USS Samuel E. Morison (Folder 12) National Security and the Law of the Sea, 1979 by Elliot L. Richardson (2 typescripts) Commissioning Ceremony USS Morison, October 11, 1980 (1 pamphlet) Launching of the Guided Missile Frigate Samuel E. Morison, July 14, 1979 (1 pamphlet) Clippings about the USS Morison 3 Morison Obituaries (Folder 13) Obituaries from various papers, biographical pieces from various papers Morison Biographical Materials (Folder 14) Samuel Eliot Morison, chapter 6 photocopied from Memories of Men and Women American and British by Alfred L. Rowse, 1980 (pages 154-181) Celebrating Columbus as His Historian by Henry Mitchell, photocopy of newspaper article from The Washington Post Wednesday October 13, 1976 Samuel Eliot Morison - The Amphibious by Frederick John Pratson, Yankee April 1975 Library Salutes Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, Boston Public Library News, 1962 For SEM-July 9, 1975, poem by August Heckscher Portrait of a Friendship: selected correspondence of Samuel Eliot Morison and Lincoln Colcord by Parker Bishop Albee, Jr., The New England Quarterly, June 1983 Samuel Eliot Morison, reprinted from Harvard University Gazette, June 10, 1977 The Development of Harvard University edited by SEM My Day with Admiral Morison by Clinton W. Trowbridge, Christian Science Monitor, 1991 The Effects of Samuel Eliot Morison's Childhood on His Career as a Naval Historian by Hank A. Jordan, January 15, 1980 (typescript) Morison Book Reviews (Folder 15) Clippings and letters, reviews of SEM books One Boy's Boston, Walter Muir Whitehill, The Stinehour Press, 1964 Morison Correspondence (Folder 16) Antha E. Card (secretary of Admiral Morison) to Admiral McElroy, June 21 1966 Robert Pyle to Commander Larry Andrews, September 23, 1980 Admiral Chester Nimitz to SEM, August 5, 1965 (accompanied by pamphlet Universal Declaration of Human Rights with inscription to SEM from Admiral Nimitz) Richard Nixon to SEM, July 6, 1972 (facsimile) Donald R. Martin to Librarian, February 1, 1960 (gifting the US Naval History pamphlet to the library) W.B. Woodson (USS SEM Commander) to Morison Family and Friends, June 10, 1986 SEM tribute letter to Mrs. Gertrude Fay, librarian, August 14, 1973 Morison Magellan Expedition (Folder 17) Clippings about Morison's Magellan expedition Our Magellan Expedition by Priscilla Barton Morison (Folder 18) Our Magellan Expedition by Priscilla Barton Morison, 1972 Typescript, July 26, 1972 Manuscript notes Compiled by Hannah Stevens, Archivist, November 2014 4 IN MEMORIAM 0 SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON (1887-1976) S INCE the death of Samuel Eliot Morison on 15 May 1976 numer- ous tributes to him as a historian and as a man have appeared; more are in preparation or in press. As he was the last surviving founder of the NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY, as well as its perennial pilot, it is fitting that an account of his role in the journal should be offered to present-day readers. It will, however, be chiefly con- fined to that single aspect of his career, in view of the multiplicity of other tributes. Morison was a New Englander by inheritance and inclination. Having been born in Boston on July 9, 1887 at 44 Brimmer Street, at the foot of Beacon Hill, he was living in the same house when he died, less than two months short of his eighty-ninth birthday. A member of the Harvard class of 1908, he was a member of the uni- versity's history department from 1915 until his retirement in 1955. For his 1912 Ph.D. he presented a dissertation on the life of his ancestor Harrison Gray Otis, using family papers that were pre- served in his birthplace. The work was published the following year in two volumes by Houghton Mifflin Company. Morison was elected to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts on March 5, 1912 before he had published anything, and to the Massachusetts His- torical Society and the American Antiquarian Society in 1914. After an interlude of teaching at Berkeley, Morison returned to Harvard; in 1916 he took over Professor Edward Channing's course in colonial history. During World War I he served as a private of infantry in such disparate posts as the Depot Brigade at Camp Devens and the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in Paris. Returning to Harvard in the summer of 1919, he immersed himself in aspects of the Massachusetts past that were sympathetic to his seagoing temperament. Writing at white heat, he produced in eleven months The Maritime History of Massachusetts, which be- came a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1921. In the spring of 1922 Morison went to Oxford as the first Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History, and there wrote The Oxford History of the United States, 1783-1917 On his 459 46o THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY return to Harvard in 1925 he was promoted to a professorship of history and in 1926 was appointed Historian on the 300th Anni- versary of Harvard College, which would be celebrated a decade thereafter. He was soon laying plans for The New England Quar- terly, An Historical Review of New England Life and Letters. In those simpler days one did not seek a foundation grant permitting the assembly of a large staff before embarking on an enterprise. Morison recruited as fellow editors his colleague and contempo- rary, the Ohio-born Arthur Meier Schlesinger, who had come to the Harvard history department in 1924, a younger Bostonian, Kenneth Ballard Murdock, Assistant Professor of English (to whom I wrote a tribute in the March 1976 issue), and a Yale scholar, Stanley T. Williams. Lawrence Shaw Mayo, Assistant Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was recruited as Managing Editor, while Stewart Mitchell (Harvard 1915) volun- teered to be secretary. To provide the cost of printing the early issues, a few friends made gifts. The QUARTERLY was a strictly noncommercial venture, paying only the printer and the post office; everything else was a labor of love on the part of the editors. An editorial announcement in vol- ume I, number 1 (January 1928), unsigned but bearing Morison's unmistakable mark, stated that it had "been founded for the benefit of those who are interested in the history of civilization in New England; and in the hope of making them more numerous." To prime the pump and inspire others, Morison wrote the first article in the number, "Squire Ames and Doctor Ames." To the April 1928 issue he contributed "Forcing the Dardanelles in 1810 With Some Account of the Early Levant Trade of Massachusetts,'' while in the course of the first volume he reviewed thirteen books. In volume II (1929) he published one article, "Elbridge Gerry, Gentleman Democrat," and reviewed fourteen books; in volume III he felt that he had sufficiently primed the pump with articles, but reviewed twenty books. What deft and incisive reviews they were! In April 1928 he con- cluded a short but favorable notice of Later Years of the Saturday Club, edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, with this sentence: "If ex- cellence in the writing of memoirs be an index of the decline of letters, literature in New England must indeed be in a bad way; yet this book of sketches gives a rather refreshing feeling of intel- lectual vitality." In the December 1928 issue he said good things about the first two volumes of Albert Bushnell Hart's collaborative IN MEMORIAM 461 The Commonwealth History of Massachusetts, yet noted: "Al- though rumor hath it that editor Hart wields a mean blue-pencil, it seems to us he has allowed too much overlapping. Several con- tributors appear to be bursting with a desire to tell the world the whole history of Massachusetts." After citing numerous instances, he continued: "Cotton Mather pops up in half the chapters of the second volume, besides having a whole one to himself. A judicious pruning of these overhanging branches might have left space for a more adequate treatment of such subjects as common-school edu- cation, maritime enterprise, and of architecture." One of these deficiencies was dealt with in volume III, for in his review of that in the October 1929 issue Morison noted: "The reviewer feels some delicacy at dealing with this volume, as many of the authors have obviously leaned rather heavily on his published works, and one has done him the compliment to make a neat digest of several chapters of his Maritime History, without acknowledgment. How- ever, as it has been done accurately, reproducing even whole sentences intact, there is perhaps no cause for complaint." With maritime histories proliferating, Morison dealt out blame and praise where deserved. He would begin a review (July 1929): "On no phase of our maritime history has SO much trash been writ- ten as on whaling. Bookshops are cluttered with 'Thar she blows!' yarns, hack histories of whaling, picture-books and children's books, fit companions to department-store ship models. Mr. Hoh- man, on the contrary, has given us a concise history of New Bed- ford whaling at full tide, based on authentic records, and written with skill, appreciation and fair-mindedness." He could conclude another review (October 1932): "No seaman could ever wish for a better monument than Frederick C. Matthews' American Merchant Ships." Yet in the January 1931 issue he could tell off another author for dipping "liberally into the slush-pot" rather than letting "the clipper ships supply their own color," and conclude: "It is easy enough to pick flaws in style; but the clipper ships were such noble and beautiful creatures that I resent their being subjected to such journalistic vulgarity." In the March 1934 issue Morison published an article "Harvard School of Astronomy in the Seventeenth Century." In all of the first ten volumes he continued to review books, although in de- creasing numbers as other able reviewers, often his students, pre- sented themselves. Perry Miller, who came to Harvard as a graduate student in 1930, published his first article, "Thomas Hooker and 462 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Democracy of Connecticut"- product of Morison's colonial seminar-and his first review in volume IV of the QUARTERLY. Thereafter Miller was a constant contributor, as well as an editor from 1946 until his untimely death in 1963. Clifford Kenyon Shipton, another of Morison's disciples, con- tributed three articles and twelve reviews between 1933, when he took his Ph.D., and the completion of volume X in 1937. Raymond P. Stearns, who took his degree in 1934, published two articles and three reviews in the same period. Clearly the QUARTERLY was suc- ceeding in making those interested in the history of New England civilization more numerous. The QUARTERLY was always a volunteer effort for its small band of editors. None of them had time to try to drum up enough new subscriptions or advertisements to make the journal self-support- ing. Consequently it continued to rely on annual contributions from a few friends to meet the deficit. In 1931 the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, of which Morison had become president on his return to Harvard from Oxford in 1925, joined this group with a modest annual grant. In the first decade, 1927-1937, some thirty- seven individuals, as well as the Society, made annual gifts to help pay the printer. In the academic year 1937-1938 Sam Morison took a sabbatical from Harvard to begin his voyage in the wake of Columbus. At the same time Stewart Mitchell, who had been Managing Editor since 1929, turned over that post to Milton Ellis of the University of Maine, and the routine production of the QUARTERLY moved from Cambridge to Orono. During Sam's absence, Arthur M. Schlesinger took the helm. Only in volume XI (1938) was the name Samuel Eliot Morison not on the masthead, but in 1939 it was back, and he was again reviewing books. Although the editorial board rotated in the earlier years, the March 1942 issue contained a statement that "Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, our Editor in Chief, was voted ineligible for retirement." Consequently when in June he was commissioned in the Naval Reserve and left for sea, his name remained, although once more Arthur Schlesinger acted in his place. The December 1944 issue was the last in which Milton Ellis acted as Managing Editor. With the March 1945 number Professor Herbert Brown of Bowdoin College took over, beginning a labor of love that has already continued for thirty-one years. Herbert Brown moved the printing of the QUARTERLY to The Anthoensen IN MEMORIAM 463 Press in Portland, Maine, where it has remained ever since. As the number of individual donors decreased through death, the Co- lonial Society of Massachusetts took over the major share of financ- ing the QUARTERLY, and from March 1945 appeared on the title page as joint publisher. When I became Editor of the Colonial Society in 1946 I joined the board of the QUARTERLY, ex officio. From the June 1946 issue Sam Morison was once more Editor in Chief. Most volumes until his death contained book reviews by him. In March 1954 he contributed personal reminiscences of his youthful encounters with Henry Adams, and in September 1960 a similar piece on his kinsman Charles Eliot Norton. The centenary of the death of William Hickling Prescott in 1959 led him to write an essay review and to edit Robert Carter's recollections of Prescott. In the decades after the war Sam Morison was chiefly occupied with his naval history and with voyages not specifically concerned with New England. He could see that the journal's tone was firmly established; that Herbert Brown was receiving, unsolicited, from a wide range of contributors more articles than there was space to print. Consequently Morison wrote less frequently for the QUAR- TERLY than he had during the first decade. Nevertheless he was al- ways ready to lend a hand when needed. He had set the course in 1928 and for forty-eight years remained the sure pilot. It is hard to think of the QUARTERLY without him. WALTER MUIR WHITEHILL. THE COLLEGE PUMP Giants parted before him, and then, second wife, Lilian Bombach. as he walked on, it closed be- Liberty in America, Bailyn sum- hind him at a respectful dis- marizes, "was not an academ- tance. And SO he paced back ic mono graph series written and forth through the crowd, in crabbed prose but a series passing immaculate on dry of extended discussions writ- "Your wooden arm you hold outstretched land. Finally an old friend ten clearly, at times colloqui- to shake with passers-by came on the scene, went up to ally, even casually, to make the Morison, and said, 'Sam, what point for a broad audience that are you doing?" 'Doing?' said Oscar Handlin liberty had never been a secure OSTON BRAHMIN. The towering Ad- Morison with surprise. 'Doing! state in America's history but B ams University Professor emeritus What do you think I'm doing? Mixing!" an unsteady, erratic progress as its citizens Bernard Bailyn, Ph.D. 53, LL.D. 99, This was indeed "a magisterial figure from struggled, at times bitterly, against obstacles concludes his new collection of es- a distant world"-who could without dis- to live freely without the control of external says (see Open Book, page 51) with an ap- comfort lecture "in naval uniform or in rid- restraints." pendix containing his Memorial Minutes ing breeches." Bailyn continues: "The latter for two fellow towering Harvard histori- was less surprising to those who recalled that ans. Trumbull professor of American histo- when he started his teaching career he used ry emeritus Samuel Eliot Morison (d. 1976), to gallop over to Massachusetts Hall from AFLAME. Surpassing pictorial evidence of who lived for most of his life in the same Brimmer Street and pack up his blue books the spectacular September 6, 1956, fire that Brimmer Street house where he was born in saddlebags before continuing his ride." destroyed Memorial Hall's clock tower (The (inherited from his grandfather), could not College Pump, September-October 2017), a have been more thoroughly marinated in his 64-year-old color video of the blaze has sur- surroundings-nor in the University whose faced, acquired by Ray- tercentenary history he crafted SO enduring BROOKLYN BOY. Loeb University Professor mond Traietti, assistant HM ly. His Boston heritage molded his reserved emeritus Oscar Handlin (d. 2011), by con- director of Memorial Visit harvardmag. character, too, as Bailyn notes: trast, grew up "the son of Russian Jewish Hall, and posted to You com to learn about the "Professional colleagues found him an immigrants who ran a small grocery store," Tube by McKay professor video's mystery history. imposing but stiff, unbend- and unsurprisingly crafted dif- of the practice of computer science David Ma- ing, and rather taciturn per- ferent kinds of studies of the lan. Feel the burn, twenty-first-century style, sonage. The story is told that past, including The Uprooted, at youtube.com/watch?v=ARe_NzhAal8.tub once Morison attended the the textured, landmark book com/watch?v=ARe_NzhAal8 PRIMUS VI national historical conven- that began as "a history of the tion, and to everyone's sur- immigrants in America" until prise, he appeared on the ho- he "discovered that the immi- tel mezzanine crowded with grants were American history." wheeling-dealing, gossiping As resonant today was his academics. Into the melee he multivolume history of lib- strode, tall, erect as always, erty in the United States, be- his hands cocked in his jacket Samuel Eliot Morison gun with Mary Handlin (they pockets, peering myopically ahead into the wrote The Dimensions of Liberty) and then, af- middle distance. The crowd fell silent and ter her death, brought to fruition with his 64 MARCH APRIL 2020 Havvard Magazine ALUMNI during the U.S. Census 2010 count that re- bargain"- citizenship path in exchange Now, he says, it's highly unlikely, even sulted in four newAsian-majority state leg- for more effective border and other enforce- with a Democratic president, that anything islative districts and the first Asian-plural- ment-appeared viable. "Were we 100 per- like those or other reforms discussed dur- ity congressional district in the state. cent behind the bill? No," he says. "Did we ing the past two decades could be broached. Today, Choi leads the intensive, grass- feel it was important to move the compre- But the truth is, "whether Donald Trump roots effort New York Counts 2020. Obsta- hensive bill forward and get it passed? Ab- gets re-elected or not, the issue of how we cles to an accurate count remain, he says, solutely. In hindsight, the fact that people treat immigrants-our fellow Americans despite the Supreme Court's ruling against on either side of the aisle were talking about and future citizens-is only going to get the Trump administration's effort (which a path to immigration reform he trails more important," Choi argues. "Will we the NYIC helped fight) to add a citizenship off, then continues: "We would have been re-affirm that America is indeed a nation question to the census form. Widespread glad to engage in that dialogue and push of immigrants? Or will we allow the Ste- fear is making people reluctant to partici- that process forward. That was a substan- phen Millers of the world to erase this from pate, he continues, especially as "the admin- tive, and real, conversation." our collective history?" istration continues to use its tools and levers in the redistricting process-attempting to make sure that only citizens count in draw- Overseer and HAA Tracy K. Smith '94, Princeton, N.J. Chair ing political districts, instead of all people of the Lewis Center for the Arts, Berlind as the Constitution requires." Director Elections professor of the humanities, Princeton Uni- The proposed legal-counsel legislation versity; twenty-second poet laureate of the raises similar questions about fundamen- THIS SPRING, alumni can vote for new Har- United States tal rights. Losing an immigration case can vard Overseers and Harvard Alumni Associ- Miki Uchida Tsusaka '84, M.B.A. '88, be as dire as a prison sentence, he main- ation (HAA) elected directors, beginning on Tokyo. Managing director and senior part- tains-and expecting people to navigate April 1, by paper ballot or online. Completed ner, Boston Consulting Group the legal and bureaucratic systems on their ballots must be received by 5 P.M. (EDT) on Ryan Wise, Ed.L.D. '13, Des Moines. own "is farcical." As for children "trying to May 19. All holders of Harvard degrees, ex- Director, Iowa Department of Education; 'represent' themselves in court? It's flat out cept officers of instruction and government dean-designate, Drake University School unconscionable." at Harvard, and members of the Harvard of Education Choi also co-chairs the Fair Immigra- Corporation, are entitled to vote for Over- (Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Wise are tion Reform Movement (FIRM), which seer candidates. All Haryard degree-holders current Overseers-since 2018 and 2019, has spearheaded issues especially relevant may vote for HAA elected directors. respectively-completing the unexpired to young people caught up in the crisis, like The HAA nominating committee pro- terms of Overseers who concluded their DACA and the Dream Act, and would love posed the candidates listed below. Anoth- service early.) to see comprehensive immigration reforms. er slate of Overseer candidates was seeking Ideally, on the federal level, he'd prioritize to gain nomination by petition, with sig- For elected director: creating a cogent path to legalization for un- natures due February 1, as this issue went Santiago Creuheras, A.L.M. '00, A.L.M. documented immigrants and an expedit- to press. The HAA-nominated and petition '01, C.S.S. '01, Mexico City. Senior consul- ed method for clearing backlogged family slates are covered at harvardmag com/over tant on sustainable infrastructure and en- visas. (Waiting SO long to reunite, he says, seer-slates-20. Updates will appear at har ergy, Inter-American Development Bank is a major factor driving undocumented wardmagazine.com. Kelsey Trey Leonard '10, Hamilton, On- immigration.) tario, Canada. Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Beyond that, and probably most crucial For Overseer: McMaster University to narrowing the political divisions over Raphael William Bostic '87, Decatur, Michael D. Lewis '93, Cambridge. Strate immigration policy, is the need for radi- Georgia. President and CEO, Federal Re- gic technology adviser, iCorps Technologies cal re-envisioning of what immigration en- serve Bank of Atlanta Mallika J. Marshall '92, Weston, Mas- forcement means," Choi adds. "The fact is Katherine Collins, M.T.S. 'II, Boston. sachusetts. Medical reporter, CBS Boston; that our system is gargantuan, bloated- Head of sustainable investing, portfolio physician, Massachusetts General Hospital filled with private prisons operating for manager of the Putnam Sustainable Future DavidR. Scherer '93, Chicago. CEO and huge profits with a force of agents-who Fund and the Putnam Sustainable Leaders principal, Origin Investments; co-founder, see themselves as cops, and immigrants as Fund, Putnam Investments One Million Degrees "criminals," he continues, and "a court sys- David H. Eun 89,J.D. '93, New York City. Sajida H. Shroff, Ed.M. '95, Dubai, Unit tem where judges are politicized instead Chief innovation officer, Samsung Electron- ed Arab Emirates. CEO, Altamont Group of being part of the third branch and the ics, and president, Samsung NEXT Benjamin D. Wei '08, New York City. separation of powers." Susan Morris Novick '85, Old Westbury, CEO, Nova Invite Such fundamental reforms seemed at least N.Y. Senior vice president, Merrill Lynch; Joyce Y. Zhang '09, San Francisco. CEO, possible in 2013, he points out, when the U.S. freelance journalist, The New York Times Alariss Global Senate passed a comprehensive reform bill, Diego A. Rodriguez, M.B.A. '01, Palo Vanessa Zoltan, M.Div. '15, Medford, by a 68-32 vote margin, with 14 Republicans Alto. Executive vice president, chief prod- Massachusetts. Co-founder and CEO, Not in favor. Some form of a bipartisan "grand uct and design officer, Intuit Inc. Sorry Productions www.alumni harvard HARVARD MAGAZINE 63 THE NEW ENGLAND QVARTERLY DECEMBER 1958 Vc1.31,#4 THE HARVARD PRESIDENCY SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON TH HE presidency of Harvard College is a unique institution in the United States. As the head of the senior institu- tion of learning in the country, the Harvard president enjoys a prestige from his office alone. In addition, a majority of the presidents have been men who would have made their mark anywhere. And there have not been very many of them. In 169 years we have had thirty-three or thirty-four presidents of the United States-according as you count Grover Cleve- land once or twice. In 320 years there have been only twenty- five presidents of Harvard College, counting the first one, who did not have the title. For Harvard presidents, like Federal judges, are appointed during good behavior. Nine of the num- ber died in office; the rest resigned. The longest term, Presi- dent Eliot's, was forty years; the shortest, that of John Rogers, twenty-one months. Senator Saltonstall remarked during the Senate debate on Dr. James B. Conant's appointment as High Commissioner to Germany that all Harvard presidents he had known were "controversial characters," and that the alumni liked it that way; for they wanted their president to be a leader, and lead- ers arouse controversy. Senator Saltonstall should know-he belongs to the ninth generation, in direct line, of Saltonstalls who were graduated from Harvard College. 435 436 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Harvard's first head, Nathaniel Eaton, who seems to have had no other title than "the Professor," was, on the face of it, a most promising choice. He was a brother of Theophilus Eaton, founder of the New Haven Colony; and the early Har- vard classes wished that he too had gone to New Haven. An alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the University of Franekev in the Netherlands, he had studied divinity un- der a famous master and published a Latin dissertation on the Sabbath, which the New England Puritans considered "high- ly edifying." Yet he proved a failure as head of the College. It may be said in Eaton's favor that he must have had some- thing to do with obtaining the Harvard legacy, for John Har- vard was his friend; but we should add that he embezzled about half of the money. We may give him credit for the Har- vard College Yard, SO called because it was carved out of the Cambridge cowyards; but he made it hideous with the yells of students being beaten. We should thank him for setting up high scholastic standards, but regret that he had SO heavy a hand with youth. Master Eaton and his wife, who ran the housekeeping de- partment, both punished and starved the students. The pay-off came after Eaton had beaten an instructor to a pulp with "a walnut tree cudgel big enough to have killed a horse." The General Court of Massachusetts Bay held an investigation in the course of which it came out that Mistress Eaton served the students with sour bread and mackerel "with their guts in them," and let them go without beer for as much as a week at a time. That was too much. In the seventeenth century it was common enough to flog college students, but beer was considered as essential to learning as books. So Master Eaton was dismissed by the Board of Overseers-then composed of the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts Bay. The twenty or SO scholars scattered to their several homes, and no college was kept for a year. Some thought it would never reopen. But in the summer of 1640 the Overseers en- gaged, on his first day ashore, a thirty-year-old minister named THE HARVARD PRESIDENCY 437 Henry Dunster, fresh out of the University of Cambridge, and made him president. Youngest in the line of Harvard presidents, the Reverend Henry Dunster was one of the ablest. Yet it is a curious fact that his title, which has been almost universally adopted by American universities for their head, was originally meant to be No. 2. In most of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the president was the senior tutor; and that was all Dunster expected to be at Harvard. John Winthrop, Jr., visiting Eng- land in 1641, was commissioned to procure as rector magnifi- cus of the college the Reverend Johannes Amos Comenius, a famous educational reformer from Moravia, then a "displaced person" from the Thirty Years War. He had shown an interest in educating Red Indians, SO it was thought that he might like to try his hand on Harvard students. He declined; and by the time this was known in New England, Dunster had held the first Harvard Commencement, finished the first college build- ing, and won such golden praises that he was officially recog- nized as the top man. Since then, the president has been the head not only of Harvard College but of the university that has grown up around it. Dunster insisted on extending the course for the bachelor's degree from three to four years, and modeling it on the me- dieval three philosophies (grammar, logic and rhetoric), mathematics, and ancient languages that he himself had stud- ied at Cambridge. And he made the College independent and autonomous by procuring for it, from the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, the Charter of 1650. All in all, President Dunster may be regarded as the second founder of Harvard College. But he came to grief over a point of theology. After searching the Scriptures and the church fathers, he decided that infant baptism was wrong. For Dun- ster to go "antipaedobaptist" was as if a college president to- day should announce his conversion to Communism. So Dun- ster, after refusing to recant, had to resign. His successor, the Reverend Charles Chauncy, a distin- 438 8 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY guished Greek scholar from the University of Cambridge, had already been in trouble over baptism. At Plymouth Church he insisted on total immersion of infants, which, as Governor Bradford complained, was "in this cold country not so con- venient." Overruled by his ministerial colleagues, Chauncy was about to take ship for England when he was persuaded by the Corporation to accept the Harvard presidency on condi- tion that he keep his unorthodox views to himself. Reflecting, no doubt, that a college president would have small oppor- tunity to administer infant baptism, Chauncy accepted, made a good president, and died in office. (This Corporation, set up by virtue of the Charter of 1650, consisted of the President, Treasurer, and five Fellows, origi- Carp. nally the college tutors. It fills its own vacancies, subject to the confirmation of the Board of Overseers. It is this long-lived Corporation which has elected every President of the College and University, from Chauncy on. By the time of Chauncy's death, in 1672, there were over a hundred Harvard alumni available, and the Corporation decided to try one as President. Their choice fell on the Rever- end Leonard Hoar, Class of 1650, who had just returned to Boston from England after taking a medical degree. Dr. Hoar's views were very advanced; he wished to establish a botanical garden and a chemical laboratory. But he failed as president through faults of character. Overbearing and pomp- ous, he alienated first the teaching fellows and then the stu- dents, and found himself presiding over an empty college. He resigned within three years and died, it is said, of a broken heart. Nevertheless, the Corporation has gone right on electing Harvard and New England men to the presidency. Every sub- sequent president has been a graduate of Harvard College; and after the early English-born presidents there have been only three, Kirkland, Hill, and Pusey, who were not born in New England. All save the last three presidents have been Congregationalists or Unitarians, and at least fifteen out of the THE HARVARD PRESIDENCY 439 twenty-five were, or had been, ministers before they were elected president. After Hoar's resignation the presidency went begging. A minister was considered indispensable; but no English parson could be tempted to come and Yankee preachers were difficult to separate from their churches. The Reverend Urian Oakes, a witty and cantankerous Cambridge minister, was induced to take on the Harvard presidency as an additional job. It killed him. The Reverend John Rogers was then persuaded to move from Ipswich; he too died in office and during a total eclipse of the sun. Pious Puritans thought that must mean something; exactly what they did not know, but at least it proved that the Almighty was interested in Harvard College. An eclipse it was, in a double sense; for during the last fif- teen years of the seventeenth century Harvard reached her all-time low, under a very distinguished president, the Rev- erend Increase Mather. The times were troublous, but the main trouble with Mather was that he refused to be pried loose from his Boston church, whose members insisted that the reverend gentleman would be "less serviceable to Christ by his removal to Cambridge than by his continuance in Boston, the Jerusalem of this land." So Mather tried to be a commut- ing president, and at a time when the journey took two hours by ferry and horseback. The Corporation maintained a horse for him at Charlestown, but President Mather would favor the college only on ceremonial occasions, or by surprise visits to see whether the students were working. He was also absent for months and even years, on lobbying missions to England. Finally the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed a law that Harvard's president must reside in Cambridge; and Math- er resigned. But that law is still in force. Harvard presidents cannot commute, even from Boston. A new era began in 1707, when the Corporation elected the first layman to the presidential office, John Leverett, who had been a successful tutor in the college under Mather. Gover- nor Joseph Dudley of Massachusetts (a Harvard man, too) en- 440 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY gineered a deal by which the General Court promised Presi- dent Leverett a salary of £150 annually, in return for the Governor's recognizing the college charter, the validity of which the Crown had denied. And the 1650 charter is still in force, after a fresh validation by the State Constitution of 1780. President Leverett was a true liberal for his times; he in- vigorated the entire curriculum, obtained money from Eng- land for the first professorial chairs, and encouraged the read- ing of new books and free discussion among the students. He managed to hold his own despite forays and sniping by the Reverend Cotton Mather, who wanted his job, and the rivalry of Yale (founded 1701), whither the more pious New England parents now preferred to send their sons. Leverett was succeeded briefly by the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, another liberal clergyman, and then by the Rev- erend Edward Holyoke who reigned over Harvard-the word is well chosen-for thirty-two years. Holyoke was a cleric of stern port and commanding aspect, known as a firm opponent of England in the disputes that heralded the Revolution. He encouraged public speaking and the study of political and na- tural sciences, and he helped train the Adamses and Otises and Hancocks, who took SO prominent a part in the American Revolution. When a fire broke out in Harvard Hall, on a win- ter night in 1764, the seventy-five-year-old President Holyoke, clad only in nightgown, wig, and high boots, took personal charge of fighting the fire and saved Hollis Hall next door. Holyoke had remarked on his deathbed, "If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become president of Harvard College." His successor, the Reverend Samuel Locke, soon had reason to subscribe to this sentiment. The student body, smelling revolution in the air, became riotous and in- subordinate. A maidservant in the presidential household was found to be pregnant. Mr. Locke, though disclaiming direct agency, accepted the moral responsibility for the girl's mis- adventure and resigned, greatly to the astonishment of the tutors, who felt that they knew more about the affair than did the President. THE HARVARD PRESIDENCY 441 Locke's successor, the Reverend Samuel Langdon, although a classmate of Sam Adams and a friend of John Hancock, failed to survive the revolutionary turmoil. By overlong pray- ers and ninety-minute sermons he SO disgusted the student body that in 1780 they demanded his removal; and he prompt- ly resigned. The Corporation, which hitherto had consisted almost ex- clusively of professors and tutors, now began to include "solid men of Boston" like John Lowell, James Bowdoin, and Oliver Wendell. This change in the major governing body was to the good; it furthered the English tradition that a university should not merely train professional scholars, but should ex- pose all manner of young men to learning, in the hope that they would at least see its value and later help to support their alma mater. First fruit of this gradual change in the Corporation was the election of the Reverend John T. Kirkland, a liberal Unitar- ian minister, to the presidency in 1810. Kirkland made a re- markable president owing mainly to the amenity of his charac- ter and to his worldliness. His fame spread, and students from the South and West began coming to Harvard. Under his benevolent rule Emerson, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Ban- croft, and other famous writers were educated. But even Kirk- land learned what it was to be "humbled and mortified." Na- thaniel Bowditch, the navigator, was appointed treasurer; he sic attacked the President for adding bonuses of $300 to the statu- tory professorial salary of $1,700, and for abating term bills of needy students. In consequence of this and other "improvi- dent virtues," the college accounts showed a scandalous deficit of almost $5,000! And Kirkland was badgered into resigning. The next six presidents remained in office only an average of six years each, and only one of them died in office. Josiah Quincy, Kirkland's successor, had been a member of Congress. His presidency coincided with an era of student brawls, the only way the boys could let off steam in an age when there were no organized athletics. Many a night President Quincy, a tall, martial figure, horsewhip in hand, could be seen in the 442 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY College Yard breaking up a riot. When he retired to Boston, of which he later became the mayor, he was heard to remark that he couldn't sleep on account of the "deathly quiet" of the city compared with the nocturnal uproar of Cambridge! Quincy was the first of many Harvard presidents to take a firm stand on the principle of academic freedom, when sections of the press demanded that Professor Henry Ware be fired for es- pousing the cause of the Negro slave. Quincy's successor, Edward Everett, perhaps the most dis- tinguished character who ever accepted the office, did even more for the Negro-he attempted, at least, to "integrate" Har- vard College. For the first time a colored boy, Beverly G. Wil- liams, applied for admission. There was no doubt of his quali- fications, as he had ranked high in school, but there were protests from a Harvard student's father in Georgia. To him President Everett wrote, "Should he be offered I know of no reason why he should not be admitted. He associates on terms of perfect equality with the boys of his school, among whom are sons of several of our Professors, a son of my own, and two young men from Georgia." Williams, however, did not "offer," and the distinction of being the first Negro to graduate from Harvard went to someone else. Everett found the office of Harvard President little to his liking after being congressman, diplomat, and Governor of Massachusetts. The dignified gentleman who had been mini- ster to the Court of St. James's found himself debating with a worried faculty what should be done with students who wore blue swallow-tailed coats to Chapel, threw chestnuts at Pro- fessor Ware while he was lecturing, entertained "two females" in a college room at midnight, and attended a cockfight or- ganized by Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, Jr. of Baltimore. So Everett resigned in 1849 to reenter politics. During the next twenty years Harvard had a succession of short-term presidents-Jared Sparks, James Walker, Cornelius C. Felton, and Thomas Hill. And then, in 1869, there began a new era for Harvard, and THE HARVARD PRESIDENCY 443 indeed for American higher education, with the election of Charles William Eliot, a thirty-five-year-old professor of chem- istry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eliot was a controversial figure from the start. Twice his name was tossed back by the Overseers to the Corporation; only after nine weeks was it confirmed. His inaugural address was a challenge to American higher education. It crackled with aph- orisms, such as "The only conceivable aim of a college gov- ernment in our day is to broaden, deepen and invigorate American teaching in all branches of learning"; "Two kinds of men make good teachers-young men and men who never grow old." He developed the free elective system for under- graduates; he reformed the moribund medical and law schools and made them the best of their kind; he established the Grad- uate School of Arts and Sciences. On public questions he was ever positive and vocal. Liberty was a word often on his lips, and a principle always in his heart. Majestic in presence, clear and dignified in speech, he spoke SO that nobody could doubt what he meant; uncanny in his judgment of men, he seldom made a mistake in promotions or appointments. He impressed students and the public alike as a truly great man, and rose to an eminence in the American educational world that none could dispute. In private life one of the best amateur sailors of his day, he steered his academic vessel on the great wave of American expansion between the Civil War and World War I, and by the time he resigned in 1909 he had amp- ly fulfilled the promise of his first Commencement address: "We mean to build here, securely and slowly, a university in the largest sense." When Eliot resigned, there was talk of electing Theodore Roosevelt, who was just out of a bigger job. Eliot himself fa- vored David F. Houston, then president of the University of Texas. But for an outgoing Harvard president to suggest a successor has proved to be the "kiss of death" for the one SO designated. The Corporation is always susceptible to the "time for a change" argument. This time it elected a fifty-two-year- 444 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY old professor of government, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, a Bos- ton lawyer and scholar who had been battling Eliot's policies in the faculty for several years. President Lowell quickly became a controversial figure when he advocated the tutorial system, an expensive method of instruction that most Americans regarded as a medieval relic at Oxford. Then he accepted the gift of Mr. Harkness of Yale to carve up the overgrown Harvard College into residen- tial houses. He founded the School of Business Administra- tion, today one of the most important graduate schools in the University, but then a project which many alumni thought out of place in the academic world. Above all he was a cham- pion of academic freedom, notably in the Laski and Chafee cases, during the anti-Red furor that followed World War I. After Lowell's resignation in 1933, James Bryant Conant, Professor of Chemistry, was elected President-much to the surprise of the trustees of his old school, the Roxbury Latin, who had failed to choose him for their board on the ground that he was not sufficiently well known. Others, too, were dis- turbed. Professor Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher, remarked, "The Corporation should not have elected a chem- ist to the Presidency." "But Eliot was a chemist," said someone, "and our best president, too." "I know," replied Whitehead, "but Eliot was a bad chemist!" Conant was not only a distinguished chemist, but a lot more besides. Just turned forty, he offered as Emerson wrote of Lin- coln "no shining qualities at the first encounter; he did not offend by a superiority." His friends, who knew of his wide knowledge of literature and the sciences, and his rare combina- tion of shrewdness and sincerity, believed that he had it in him to be a great president; and that is what he proved to be. In an era of boy presidents, timid presidents, superannuated presidents and window-dressing presidents, Conant stood out as an educational statesman. He kept the flag of academic free- dom flying "through change and through storm." He ren- THE HARVARD PRESIDENCY 445 dered expert service to his country, enhancing both the scope and quality of scientific research for the armed forces. A hu- manist too, he devoted much of his energy to improving facili- ties and living conditions for the graduate students, who had been somewhat neglected in the Lowell regime. He brought the School of Education out of the doldrums to be one of the best in the country. But President Conant's country demanded SO much of him during both the hot war and the cold war that he had to leave the conduct of the University largely in the hands of the deans. President Conant resigned in 1953 after twenty years in office and was promptly appointed High Commissioner to Germany. As usual the Corporation had plenty of advice as to his successor. A dozen Harvard professors and deans and numerous characters in public life, from General MacArthur to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, were "mentioned." True to form, the Corporation chose a "dark horse," Nathan Marsh Pusey, then President of Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis- consin. Then forty-six years old, he was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School. At Harvard College he "concentrated" in English, but later turned to the ancient classics and taught them at Wesley- an University. It is said that the Corporation, after voting for Pusey, had qualms about his social habits, having heard that Lawrence was a teetotal institution. A Harvard graduate living at Ap- pleton was asked to entertain him, and report. Shortly after, the Corporation received a telegram from this gentleman, which read: "Relax! Pusey Just Finished Third Old- Fashioned!" The president elect received the news among his classmates attending their twenty-fifth reunion. The story goes that the class president, Principal William G. Saltonstall of Phillips Exeter Academy, had to seek him out and ask him to stand up and "say a few words"; and about all his classmates remember of that speech was, "Out my way there are a lot of people who 446 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY don't know the difference between red and crimson!" It may be too early to predict whether Nathan Pusey will be one of the great Harvard presidents, but he seems to possess in good measure the qualities cited by one of the oldest and most beloved of Harvard graduates, Mr. Charles C. Burling- ham of New York (Class of 1879), when a successor to Conant was being discussed. Mr. Burlingham wrote to the Alumni Bulletin that the new president should be a Harvard man; should have respect for academic traditions; should be a rela- tively young man, alive to changing conditions in the world; not necessarily a great scholar but one who has had personal experience of university affairs, with a "vision to see things and the force to put them through"; one who will not appease those who hate learning, but will resolutely defend the fortress of academic freedom. Another alumnus, commenting on Mr. Burlingham's spec- ifications, dryly remarked, "The supply of archangels is limited!" Is there any generalization that one can make about these twenty-five Harvard presidents over a period of 320 years? I think we may say that all, except possibly Master Eaton, the bad boy of 1639, have been men who put spiritual values ahead of the material. Their deeds have rung true to the note of ex- cellence which Dunster was the first to sound; they have reso- lutely opposed mediocrity, that curse of modern American education. The center of Harvard still is that exact spot where the little college was set up in 1638, on the edge of the great Ameri- can wilderness. And as they walk through the College Yard, the President and Fellows of today cannot fail to be reminded of past mercies, and to pray that God will continue to bless an institution which the early Puritans, out of their poverty and faith, dedicated to the cause of Truth and the advancement of Learning. Morison: An Appreciation BERNARD BAILYN* What follows was written as a memorial Minute on the life and services of Samuel Eliot Morison, for presentation to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Such memorial Minutes are expected to be brief- 1,000 words, more or less. But when I attempted to sketch Morison's career and his services to his alma mater, I found it impossible to confine myself to that limit. The Minute that was eventually submitted was longer than it should have been, but it was still much reduced from what I originally wrote, and it is that full version that appears below. I wish to thank my colleagues at Harvard, Paul Buck, Oscar Handlin, John H. Parry, and the late Frederick Merk, who shared with me their recollections of Morison's career. AMUEL ELIOT MORISON, the greatest American narrative his- S torian since Francis Parkman, died on May I5, 1976, in Bos- ton, in his 89th year. He was then still living in the house at 44 Brimmer Street in which he had been born and which he had in- herited from his grandfather, Samuel Eliot, who had built it in 1870. alas Such continuities lie at the heart of Morison's career, shaped his muska achievement as a scholar and writer, and help explain his extraordi- nary service to Harvard College and University. flower His contribution to the life of his alma mater fits no ordinary pattern. Except for one term at the University of California and three years at Oxford as the first Harmsworth Professor, he taught at Harvard all his professional life. But while his classes were always well re- garded, they were never particularly popular, and he had very few graduate students. There is no "Morison school" of American his- torians, though many historians were influenced by him. His respect for the History Department and for his contemporaries in it was great; but while he fulfilled his teaching obligations with his usual efficiency and style, he assumed no administrative duties of any kind and did not shape the development of historical studies in the Uni- versity. Yet his contribution to the life of Harvard, like his contribu- * This appreciation by Mr. Bailyn, Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard Uni- versity, was read on December 2, 1977 at a Special Evening Gathering of the Society entitled An Evening with Samuel Eliot Morison. 1977 BERNARD BAILYN Proc if the MHS 3rd Scries, 89 (1977): 112f. Morison: An Appreciation II3 tion to the literature of history, was enormous, and altogether unique. Peculiarly positioned to experience personally, as it were, the whole course of Harvard's history, he revealed it to the world and to itself as no one had ever done before and as no one will probably ever do again, and this was in miniature what he sought to do for his native state, for the life of those who sail the seas, and for the American nation. Morison's family had been prominent in the history of Massachu- setts and of Harvard almost from their founding. His father's people were Anglo-Irish, his mother's English; both lines were established in Massachusetts by the end of the 17th century and quickly became associated with the College. One 18th-century great-great-grand- father, Samuel Eliot, endowed the professorship of Greek literature that still bears his name but did not attend the College; he was the last in the family to suffer from such a disability. Two generations later-the generation of Morison's grandparents-the Eliot cousin- age seems to have become Harvard: one cousin of that generation, Samuel Eliot, the historian's beloved grandfather, served as Over- seer; a second was Pres. Charles William Eliot, whose father had been Treasurer of the College; a third was Prof. Charles Eliot Nor- ton, whose father, Andrews Norton, had been Dexter Professor. To this maternal line of Eliots, "frugal and ascetic, dedicated to literature and other good works," was joined the very different strain of the Otis family, "genial, worldly, and luxurious in their tastes," Mori- son's grandmother Emily Marshall Otis being the granddaughter of the Federalist grandee Harrison Gray Otis. The Morison family had strayed away from Boston at one point-to Baltimore, where they di- rected the Peabody Institute-but only temporarily; Morison's father returned in due course, having acquired "more courtly manners than the general run of Boston young men," which may have helped him in his courtship of Samuel Eliot's daughter. Morison's parents settled in with the Eliot household on Brimmer Street, and the historian grew up at the very heart of proper Boston society. He recalled it in later years as an affluent but not extravagant community, provincial in some ways but wide in culture, tolerant, liberal, and devoted to reform causes. "When a family had accumu- lated a certain fortune," Morison wrote of the Boston of his child- hood, "instead of trying to build it up still further to become a Rocke- II4 Massachusetts Historical Society feller or Carnegie or Huntington and then perhaps discharge its debt to society by some great foundation, it would step out of business or finance and try to accomplish something in literature, education, medi- cal research, the arts, or public service. Morison followed this pat- tern perfectly. "It was never suggested," he wrote, "that 'Sammy' should go into business, or make money, or do anything but what his tastes and talents impelled him to do, no matter how unremuner- ative." As expected, he attended private schools in Boston, where he was taught a strictly classical curriculum, and then went off to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, where the same kind of education was continued. By then he had long since become expert in the two sports that most interested him and that he continued to enjoy almost all his life: riding and sailing. He was as familiar with the many stables that then flourished in the Charles Street and Beacon Hill area as he was with the North Shore waters and the coast of Maine, which proine he came to love above all other places on earth. None of this was exceptional for a boy of his social position and physical vigor, nor was his entrance into Harvard with the class of 1908. For him the College represented no break with the culture of his origins. His immediate family was constantly involved in the management of the College, the faculty was closely integrated into the Boston society Morison knew, and undergraduates were always in evidence. On Sunday afternoons, he recalled, upperclassmen came calling on families like his: "one could see them, resplendent in frock coat, fancy waistcoat, and high hat, carrying a cane, walking up and down Commonwealth Avenue to call on the mammas who had invited them to dine or dance." He fitted into this college life easily, a handsome, vigorous, and affluent young man, and proceeded with no great distinction through a course of studies that emphasized mathematics, until in his junior year his academic interests took fire. It was then that he found in his- torical study the perfect field for his lifework. He had been brought up in a city that "fairly reeks with history, in a family which had taken part in historical events since the founding of the colonies, and [had] been given an old-fashioned classical education with a founda- tion in ancient languages." But more important than all of that was the discovery, through his teacher, Prof. Edward Channing, of the writings of his grandfather's friend Francis Parkman. In Parkman's Morison: An Appreciation II5 narrative volumes on the century of conflict between England and France in the New World Morison found an inspiration that never faded. For Parkman was not only a captivating narrator whose stories read like novels but also "a man of the outdoors, an accomplished horseman, fisherman, and hunter, a lover of the great northern for- est"; he wrote not as a library scholar but as a participant, following Polybius' dictum that a historian should be a man of action. He visited the scenes he described, lived as did his subjects on the fish and game he could catch, shot the rapids, joined a band of Sioux Indians at one point and a monastery at another in order to know personally the experiences and sensibilities of those whose lives he proposed to de- scribe. And yet Parkman had the self-discipline and thoroughness of the most devoted research scholar, and the literary skill of a novelist. It was that remarkable combination of scholarship, literature, and action all fused into the service of historical self-awareness that in- spired the 24-year-old Morison and set the goals of his prodigiously productive life. A romantic? "No tags, please," Morison replied to this reiterated charge: "read me first!" But he was a romantic, from the moment his interest in history dawned. He cast everything he wrote into a dramatic structure of human struggle, and conveyed in every way he could the passion that he knew underlies human events. From the very beginning he thought of himself as a storyteller (his- tory, he never tired of repeating, had to be a story: "Who will read Sir Lewis Namier tomorrow?") and the stories had to be involving and in some way heroic. The mere recital of facts was as meaningless as "scientific" analysis, all trends and factors, devoid of people, conflict, passion, values, and accomplishment; and he had no interest in com- piling social data. The fit of Morison's choice of career with his temperament and natural gifts was remarkable. Inspired by the romance of history, he nevertheless had extraordinary technical abilities. He was exception- ally self-disciplined, a good linguist, and capable of the most exacting and concentrated study of documents and the most prolonged efforts of composition. He had an instinct for accuracy on details, unstrained common sense in interpretation, and an almost flawless ear for natural and effective prose rhythms. Above all, he had the urge, indeed the passion, to express his personality in writing. Sometimes, he wrote, "some incident, view, or scrap of poetry strikes a bell that reverberates 116 Massachusetts Historical Society through the deep and brings to the surface impressions and memories extending over many years. When that happens I feel impelled to write something immediately." He was incapable of writing history that was wholly external to him. He did not pick subjects defined by the objective progress of historical knowledge; he did not define problems systematically or attempt to resolve the strategic blockages in historical understanding. He proceeded as a poet, taking as sub- jects personal interests, things he loved and knew personally. It was this need for personal self-expression, filtered through the demand- ing objectivity of historical narration, that carried him through six decades of continuous creativity as a historian and that defined the subject he wrote about. He began his professional career, after a year of study in Paris, with a doctoral dissertation on the life of his great-grandfather, Har- rison Gray Otis, using family papers conveniently stored on Brimmer Street. Published in 1913, this solid two-volume "life and times" biography-rather charmless by Morison's standards but a distin- guished piece of historical writing by normal criteria-established his professional reputation. But though the politics of his Federalist fore- bears was a personal subject of great interest to him, it did not touch the deepest springs of his personality, which were then, and always remained, a passionate love of the sea-a love, he said, SO great "that writing about it is almost as embarrassing as making a confession of religious faith." In his second book, The Maritime History of Massa- chusetts (1921), he found direct expression for his love of the sea, and was able to pour into it all the knowledge he had acquired of sailing the Atlantic waters and all the lore he had picked up from the old sailors whose memories went back to the days of the great clipper ships. It was his first work of art, and it remains a wonderfully read- able and informative book, and yet a very personal document. He must have known as he wrote it-"in one swoop, on a wave of eu- phoria; only eleven months elaps[ing] between the beginning of research and the finished copy"-he must have known that he had found his perfect subject in the stories of those who had sailed the seas, and with it a unique and idiomatic manner of writing history. By the time it appeared he was a lecturer in history at Harvard, having taught for a term at the University of California and having served briefly in the army and with the research team of the American Morison: An Appreciation 117 delegation to the Versailles peace conference. In 1922 he was ap- pointed the first Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, where he remained until 1925. While there, with his usual diligence, he completed an edition of documents of the American Revolution and the two-volume Oxford History of the United States, the forerunner of the immensely popular survey he published with Henry Steele Commager in 1930, The Growth of the American Republic. But the great events of the Oxford years took place not in England but in Spain, which he visited in 1925. In the Colum- bian Library in Seville he was shown Ferdinand Columbus' copy of the works of the tragedian Seneca, with the strange prophecy of the discovery of America, next to which Morison saw inscribed in Fer- dinand's hand "this simple but glorious annotation 'This proph- ecy was fulfilled by my father the Admiral in the year 1492. " At that moment, Morison later recalled, he determined to get on with the work on Columbus he had been contemplating, to follow his voyages personally by sail and SO to get to the truth of the question of Columbus' own contribution to the epochal discovery. On the same trip Morison was taken to the Chapter House of the Cathedral of Toledo, and there he saw the great series of portraits of the cardinal archbishops from the beginning of the Christian church to the present. "And when I looked at that, I said, how short our annals are in the United States. What would be the longest series of people I could find? Ah, I have it the Presidents of Harvard Col- lege, from 1636 on. With the Harvard Tercentenary only II years away, plans should be made to write the whole history of America's oldest institution, and Morison decided to do it. Upon his return to Harvard, now as full professor, he proposed to President Lowell that he be appointed Harvard's official historian on its 300th anniversary and be given full access to the archives and subsidies for the eventual publications. Lowell agreed, and Morison's first major project was launched. The books that resulted, published on schedule in 1936, were The Founding of Harvard College; the two-volume Harvard Col- lege in the Seventeenth Century; the extraordinarily readable survey, Three Centuries of Harvard; and the edition of essays, The Development of Harvard University, 1869-1929. Of these five volumes, which to- gether comprise the Tercentennial History of Harvard College and Uni- versity, the first three volumes, on the early years, form a masterpiece 118 Massachusetts Historical Society of historical writing; along with the later Columbus biography, they are probably the finest products of Morison's pen. They not only elevated Harvard's history to a new plane of sophistication and com- pleteness and celebrated the Puritans' commitment to learning in an unforgettable way, but revealed aspects of American cultural history until then unknown, and made a major contribution to intellectual his- tory generally. The College and University could now be seen as na- tional rather than regional institutions, consistent with President Conant's effort to broaden their constituencies to the nation at large. Again, the personal identification, the personal expression, the muted emotion, rigorously disciplined and objectified, generated the motive force; again, the story was of people, not of stylized or quantified creatures-passionate beings, wayward souls, natural, striving, ambi- tious, frustrated, and familiarly human people. Again, Morison fasci- nated his readers by conveying his own fascination with the human subjects, the personalities, he was writing about. Offshoots of this major effort appeared in characteristic profusion: Builders of the Bay Colony (1930), a volume of biographical studies of the Puritan leaders; The Puritan Pronaos (1936), an intellectual his- tory of Puritan New England; and a string of monographic essays on technical problems he encountered in writing the Harvard histories. In addition, during the same years Morison founded and largely edited The New England Quarterly, a journal that still flourishes, now in its 50th year of publication. When the Harvard volumes were through the press Morison turned back to his other resolve of 1925, to write an exhaustive bi- ography of Columbus based on a personal retracing of the discoverer's ocean voyages. Harvard friends and the College itself produced the funds and equipment he needed, and Morison launched the famous Harvard Columbus expedition. His two vessels roamed the ocean seas in 1939-1940, following Columbus from Spain to the Canaries, then through the Caribbean islands and along the Spanish main, verifying every reported landfall, checking every observation and journal en- try. The resulting biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), vindi- cated Columbus' claims and established him for the first time as a skilled navigator. The book, which proved to be extremely popular, also magnified Morison's and Harvard's fame, brought the historian the first of two Pulitzer prizes, and paved the way for the easy accep- Morison: An Appreciation II9 tance by President Roosevelt and the United States Navy of Mori- son's next major project, his monumental History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II. Like the Harvard history, the naval history was Morison's idea. Roosevelt, a Navy man whom Morison had known slightly, admired the Columbus book and welcomed Morison's proposal that he be ap- pointed the nation's official historian of naval operations in World War II. The Columbus book helped too in securing the Navy's ac- ceptance of Morison's terms: that he be free from all but security censorship; that he be allowed to withhold publication until he could consult enemy documents; and that he have free access to all United States naval vessels on active duty as well as working space at appro- priate naval bases. Here was the ultimate opportunity for all of Morison's ambitions, the perfect fusion of all his interests. He would participate personally aboard any vessel he chose in the greatest naval war in history; he would have the complete support of the United States government; and he would have access to all the evidence, printed and oral, public and secret, that could be produced. Only Thucydides, among historians, had seen SO great a struggle at such close hand and enjoyed the freedom afterwards to write the story out in full. Morison was 55, recently appointed Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, when, as official historian with the rank of lieu- tenant commander, he joined his first naval operation; he was 75, retired from Harvard and from the Navy with the rank of rear ad- miral, when in 1962 he published the 15th and final volume of his naval history. It is a fabulous achievement. A participant's history, based on a veritable mountain of documentation (six-foot high stacks of reports for each major engagement of the war), it attempts to portray the entire panoramic scene of battle on all the oceans of the globe while depicting in finest detail exactly what happened in every engagement and why. The apparent ease with which Morison as- sembled this immense story, with the help of a very small staff of assistants and his faithful secretary, Antha Card, is almost miraculous. Even more remarkable is the unflagging drama of the narrative and its integrity as a single story. No one could write these thousands of pages of narrative without some repetitions in episodic structure, some artificiality of staging, some self-conscious dramatics. The miracle is 120 Massachusetts Historical Society that there is SO little of this in such a well-ordered mass of narrative detail. The honors that fell to him when the dimensions of this accom- plishment became clear surpass those accorded any modern historian. He was treated like royalty when he traveled abroad, and in his own country he had become an institution long before the United States Information Service recognized the fact in 1975 and filmed for the record and for foreign audiences an hour-long interview with him at his house in Northeast Harbor, Maine. By then, the year before he died, he had long since put the naval history behind him and had completed the last of his major projects, which he had conceived in vague form while working out the Colum- bus book decades before. It was a comprehensive narrative of all the coastal explorations of North and South America, based on personal retracings, by sailing vessel and airplane, of the voyages of discovery which had revealed the boundaries of the New World. With the as- sistance of his friends James Nields and Mauricio Obregón, of Bogotá, Colombia, Morison sailed and flew in the track of all the discoverers, from the Norsemen to Water Raleigh-most elaborately Magellan, whose circumnavigation he retraced-verified their journals, mapped their expeditions, recorded their adventures, photographed their land- falls and the ruins of their settlements, and boiled the whole massive story of their accomplishments into two big volumes crowded with maps, photographs, portraits, and charts, which he called The European Discovery of America. The first volume appeared in 1971, when Mori- son was 84; the second in 1974, two years before he died. When this final work was finished he called on the Rev. G. Harris Collingwood, rector of the Church of the Advent, where Morison regularly wor- shipped, and asked Collingwood if it would be possible for him "to make a public statement of my thankfulness for God's mercy. Today I finished the volume of the Southern Voyages; it was a plan of writ- ing I began fifty years ago." Morison's energy at every stage of this lifelong career of historical writing was prodigious, and he worked with apparent ease. Down to World War II he never wrote in the summers but spent those months sailing, traveling, and reading, and he advised young historians to do likewise. But as he grew older time became more precious to him and, as he wrote at the age of 76, "knowing that death will break my Morison: An Appreciation I2I pen, I now work almost the year round, praying to be spared to write what is in me to write." In his last 30 years he turned out one small book almost every summer, while moving ahead on his major projects. The many works of these years are not all of uniformly high quality. The discipline that had controlled the personal expression in the Harvard series and the naval history began to slip. The writing be- came somewhat self-indulgent, the author's personality increasingly intrusive. But the books continued to charm, and Morison's protean creativity remained unimpeded. A preliminary bibliography lists a total of well over 50 volumes, and no one knows how many journal articles, edited documents, scholarly notes, speeches, and private pub- lications he wrote. And yet, for all of this, he remained an amateur rather than a pro- fessional historian, much like his master, Parkman, though he had skills and knowledge that Parkman never dreamed of. He had no interest in keeping up with the latest developments in historical in- terpretation or technique, dismissing applied psychology and analyti- cal, not to say quantitative, history as a betrayal of the historian's obligation to tell the human story of what has happened. He was in due course elected to the presidency of the American Historical As- sociation, but he did not attempt to shape the policies and he played no role in the politics of that organization. Professional colleagues, even those who knew him well, found him an imposing but stiff, un- bending, and rather taciturn personage. The story is told that once Morison attended the national historical convention, and to every- one's surprise appeared on the hotel mezzanine crowded with wheel- ing-dealing, gossiping academics. Into the melee he strode, tall, erect as always, his hands cocked in his jacket pockets, peering myopically ahead into the middle distance. The crowd fell silent and parted be- fore him, and then, as he walked on, closed behind him at a respectful distance. And so, with his characteristic half-smile directed at one and all, he paced back and forth through the crowd, passing immaculate on dry land. Finally an old friend of his from Boston came on the scene, went up to Morison and said, "Sam, what are you doing?" "Doing?" said Morison with surprise. "Doing! Why what do you think I'm doing? Mixing!" To the postwar generation of students at Harvard he was a magis- terial figure from a distant world. He insisted that the men in his I22 Massachusetts Historical Society classes wear coat and tie, and he himself lectured at times in naval uniform or in riding breeches. The latter was less surprising to those who recalled that when he started his teaching career as assistant to Albert Bushnell Hart he used to gallop over to Massachusetts Hall from Brimmer Street and pack up his blue books in saddle bags before continuing his ride. He seldom made specific appointments, suggest- ing to people who wanted to talk with him that they "just stop around some time" at his study in Widener Library. But when they did, they often found him preoccupied with his own work and forgetful even of who the visitors were. He was an utterly private man, sensitive in a most complex way, uneasy with people who were not part of his own social sphere, and removed from the everyday broils of academic life. His remoteness from the ordinary scene was at times amusing. He recorded laconically in one autobiographical account that he had won what he called "the usual prizes given to historians." But in fact these "usual" prizes in his case included: two Pulitzer prizes, two Bancroft Prizes, the Loubat Prize, the Jusserand Prize, the Christopher Award, the St. Thomas More Award, the Mahan Award, the Emer- son-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kennedy Award of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Presi- dential Medal of Freedom, seven battle stars of the U. S. Navy, the Legion of Merit with Combat Clasp, the Order of Merit of the Italian government with the rank of Commendatore, I2 honorary degrees, and the unique Balzan Foundation Award, which he and three Euro- peans shared with the Pope. Morison cultivated his privacy. He gave instructions that no me- morial service be held for him at Harvard, and took steps to see to it that no one would write an intimate biography of him. In the end it was a vulnerable sensibility that he was protecting; but it was always exposed. He could no more suppress his feelings than he could stop writing. He was deeply attached to his first wife, Elizabeth Greene, writing for private circulation a book in her memory when she died in 1945. For his second wife, Priscilla Barton, 19 years his junior, he displayed an affection bordering on adoration. To her he dedicated almost every book he wrote after their marriage in 1949, and when she died in 1973, he published privately a profoundly felt and moving memoir of her life and of their marriage. He had begun it in 1970 Samuel Eliot Morison, Historian, Is Dead Continued From Page 1 teaching appointments at the figure: "Old Bruin-The Life of University of California and at Commodore Matthew C. an for his enthusiasm. These Harvard. Perry." It, too, was adjudged were characteristics of his Professor Morison's interest a minor masterpiece of re- prose that suffused virtually in mathematics was not en- search and writing. of his books. tirely wasted, however, for he Professor Morison was often last year, Professor Morison used his knowledge of it in crusty and witty in his judg- was described by Archibald navigation. "The proudest mo- ments of American personali- MacLeish in a Bicentermial ment of my life was making ties. For example, in his mag- poem as "our Yankee Admiral a landfall in the West Indies num opus, "The Oxford Histo- of the Ocean Sea. You on the first Columbus expedi- ry," he gave these assessments know better, none better how tion in the face of doubts from of some Presidents: the Bay wind blows fierce in my shipmates," he remarked ""Thomas Jefferson was no the soul." It was an apt de- in 1969. social democrat but a slave- scription, for Professor Morison After serving in the Army holding country gentleman of was the author of a biography in World War I, Professor exquisite taste, lively curiosity of Christopher Columbus under Morison was an attaché to the and a belief in the perfectibili- the title "Admiral of the Ocean Russian division of the Ameri- ty of man. His kind really be- Sea," and he himself was often can Commission to Negotiate longed to the 18th rather than addressed as Admiral because Peace, and he was also a dele- the 19th century." he was a retired rear admiral gate on the Baltic commission 'President Jackson had so in the Naval Reserve. Much of J. Walter Green of the Paris Peace Conference. many limitations that it is his renown, moreover, was Samuel Eliot Morison Displeased by the Versailles doubtful whether he should be based on books about the sea. Treaty, he resigned in 1919 included in the ranks of the and besides, he had the com- cuted by James I as part of his and resumed teaching at Har- really great Presidents. His ap- manding presence of an old- vard. proach to problems was too cringing policy toward Spain. fashioned admiral. His courses included one on personal and instinctive, his Like Francis Parkman, the "These men, and the thou- the history of Massachusetts, choice of men, at times, la- great 19th-century American sands of mariners whose re- from which sprang "The Mari- mentably mistaken; and, unlike historian, and Thucydides of mains lie under the seamless time History of Massachu the Roosevelts, he had little ancient. Greece, Professor Mori- shroud of the sea, deserve to setts," one of his most suc- perception of underlying popu- son combined impeccable schol- cessful. books, as well as lar movements, or of the fer- be perpetually remembered as arship with adventure in chron- "Builders of the Bay Colony." ment that was going on in the icling voyages that he himself precursors of two great em- As a teacher, Professor Mori- United States." re-enacted. This gave his books pires in North America." son was among Harvard's most ""Lincoln wielded a greater a special vividness and depth, Professor Morison's favorite popular, for he not only took power throughout the war than which won for them not only book, however, and the one of st students out of the class- any other President of the academic laurels but also such room on field trips to historic which he was the proudest, United States prior to Franklin popular accolades as the Pul- sites, but also lectured to them itzer Prize, was "The Oxford History of the D. Roosevelt; a wider authority with grace and wry. wit. than any British ruler between "My constant aim has been American People," published in In 1922, Professor Morison Cromwell and Churchill, Con- to write history and historical 1965. "It's my legacy to my went to Oxford for three years temporary accusations against biography in a manner that country," he told this reporter as the first incumbent of that him of tyranny and despotism would be authentic and inter- in a conversation in 1969 at university's new chair of Amer- read strangely to those who testing: the tall, spare, salt- ican history. There he worked his Boston home. "It represents know his character, but not to water-beaten professor said in on a textbook for British stu- students of his Administration. an Interview several years ago. my cumulative knowledge over dents of United States history, Lincoln came near to /being have always endeavored to almost 50 years and my parts of which were enlarged the ideal tyrant of whom Plato live and feel the history I mature thinking about Ameri- into "The Growth of the Amer- dreamed, yet, nonetheless, he write," he went on in his Bos- can history." ican Republic," a textbook for was a dictator from the stand- ton voice. "For example, 'The The 1,176-page volume (its American students that was point of American constitution- Maritime History of Massachu- title derived in part from its written in collaboration with al law." setts' was a product both of publication by the Oxford Uni- Prof. Henry Steele Commager q"A mean, thin-lipped little research and of my hobby of versity Press) traced the ma- of Columbia. It became a clas- man, a respectable mediocrity, sailing along the New England jor strands in the nation's his- sic, going through a number [Coolidge] lived parsimoniously coast. tory from prehistoric man to of editions from 1930 to 1970. but admired men of wealth, "In preparation for 'Admiral the assassination of President Appointed a professor at and his political principles of the Ocean Sea: A Life of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In- Harvard in 1925, Dr. Morison were those current in 1901. Christopher Columbus,' I made tended for the general reader, devoted the next 10 years People thought Coolidge bright- voyages to the West Indies and the book, without neglecting largely to studies about that er than he was because he sel- across- the Atlantic in sailing political history, treated popu- school, culminating in a multi- dom said anything; but, as he vessels, checking Columbus's lar sports and pastimes, eating volume "Tercentennial History admitted, he was 'usually able routes, methods and landfalls. and drinking customs, develop- of Harvard College and Uni- to make enough noise' to get "And for 'The History of U.S. ments in fine arts, music and versity," which appeared in what he wanted.* Naval V Operations in World medicine, sexual mores and the 1936 and which won for him q"Franklin D. Roosevelt was War, [it came to 15 volumes] Indian. And, of course, there the Jusserand Medal and the one of the most remarkable I obtained a commission in the were paragraphs in praise of Loubat Prize, both academic characters who ever occupied United States Navy, took part great ships and their builders, distinctions. that high office. A patrician many operations [he won such as David McKay and his After that, he embarked on by birth and education, en- seven combat stars and a Le- Flying Cloud. his study of Columbus for the dowed with an independent for- Merit with a combat Typical of Professor Mori- 450th anniversary of the dis- tune, he was a Democrat not and learned at first hand son's feeling for these ships, covery of the New World in only by conviction; he really how the Navy fights.". and typical also of his general 1942. Between 1937 and 1940 loved people as no other Presi- prose style, was this descrip- Won $51,000 Prize he made four trips in sailing dent has except Lincoln, and tion of 19th-century American vessels in the waters that Co- as no other American states- The naval narrative with its sailing vessels: lumbus had explored, crossing man had since Franklin. Ap- crackling prose was unofficial "These clipper ships of the and recrossing the Atlantic in preciation he prized in return, - some called it "Sam early 1850's were built of wood 1939-40 as commodore of the but opposition did not sour Morison's history" - and won in shipyards from Rockland in Harvard Columbus Expedition. him. He combined audacity the Swiss-Italian Balzan Foun- Maine to Baltimore. Their "No biographer of Columbus with caution; stubborn as t dation Prize of $51,000 in 1963. architects, like poets who trans- [before me] appears to have ultimate ends, he was an O HISA Columbus biography had mute nature's message into gone to sea in quest of light portunist as to means, an taken the Pulitzer Prize in song, obeyed what wind and and truth," Professor Morison knew when to compromise." 1943: and a second such prize wave had taught them, to cre- said rather tartly in the pref- "Eisenhower was one of was awarded him in 1960 for ate the noblest of all sailing ace to his "Admiral of the best men ever elected Pre "John Paul Jones," a life of the vessels, and the most beautiful Ocean Sea," adding: dent of the United States. Revolutionary War figure who creations of man in America. "And you cannot write a he failed in the historic UL Common U1- we international scene, and America: The Southern Voyages of gold leaf, their one purpose ographies] that means anything the President's want of experi A.D 1492-1616" was an extên- of speed over the great ocean to a modern réader merely by ence on the domestic scene. sion of Professor Morison's routes was achieved by per- studying them in a library 'With the death of John earlier interest in Columbus, fect balance of spars and sails with the aid of maps. It may Fitzgerald Kennedy something butomore, it was a synoptic ac- to the curving fines of the be compared with those ancient died in each of us; yet the coulft of the voyages of dis- smooth black hull; and this books on natural science that memory of that bright, vivid covery and exploration under- harmony of mass, form and were compiled without field personality, that great gentle- taken by Columbus, Magellan color was practiced to the mu- work or experimentation." man whose every act and ap and Sir Francis Drake. Two of sic of dancing waves and of The book, hailed alike for pearance appealed to our pride the crowning achievements brave winds whistling in the its erudition and good writing, and gave us fresh confidence those of Columbus and Magel- rigging commended Professor Morison in ourselves and our country Ian were made in the service These were our Gothic ca- to President Franklin D. Roose- will live in us for a long, long of the King of Spain, while the thedrals, our Parthenon; but velt, himself a sailor, in 1942, time. thirdewa. under British patron- monuments carved from snow. when the historian proposed to Professor Morison's first For a few brief years they write "a full, accurate and ear- wife was Elizabeth Shaw Then greatest voyage of all, flashed their splendor around ly record" of the Navy's role Greene, a painter, whom he Professor Morison concluded, the world, then disappeared in World War II. For the pur- married in 1910. They had four was the one led by Ferdinand with the finality of the wild pose, he was commissioned a children-Elizabeth Gray (Mrs. Magelian through its most dif- pigeon." lieutenant commander in the Edward Spingarn); Emily Mar- ficultistages and completed by Primarily a narrative writer Naval Reserve (he was retired shall (Mrs. Brooks Beck); Pe- Sebastian de Elcano. in the 19th-century mold, Pro- with the rank of rear admiral ter Green Morison and Catha- Magellan sailed from the fessor Morison told history in 1951), and between 1942 rine (Mrs. Julian Cooper). River Plate with nearly half the dramatically and splendidly. and 1945 he covered almost In 1949, four years after his earth's circumference stretch- He was less given, however, all the battle areas and naval first wife's death, he married ing dunknown before him, Pro- to discerning the dynamic operations of the war. Priscilla Barton, some years his fessor Morison pointed out. He processes controlling social He was an eyewitness to the junior. She accompanied him brought his fleet (less one ship change, a circumstance that North Africa landings in 1942 on his travels to the Far East that deserted) through the 300- differentiated him from such and participated in the Central to revisit scenes of World War mile that modern sailing other historians as Frederick Solomons campaign the follow- II and on his trips to collect manuals describe as impossible Jackson Turner, Charles Beard ing summer and in the Gilbert material for his biographies of for sailing ships and dangerous and William Appleman Wil- Islands assault. He was at Jones and Perry. She also B for steam," and took off west- liams. His impact on the intel- Salerno in 1944, and he saw shared her husband's hobby of ward with nothing to guide him lectual life of history was, it the battle for Okinawa from sailing his yawl out of North- him but an idea of the latitude seemed, slight in an age when the bridge of the Tennessee, east Harbor on Maine's Mount of some of the places on the concept history, or interpreta- In all, he served on a dozen Desert Island, his favorite va- farther side of the Pacific and tion, was more esteemed than ships, jotting down his notes cation resort. Mrs. Morison died erroneous notions descriptive history. in pencil on yellow pads. These, in 1973. abou width and shape. His New England was the earli- with official reports and ene- first touch with civilized life my records, became the basis Professor Morison considered est and most profound influ- after leaving the Canary Is- ence on the patrician historian. for his narrative, the first vol- that life had dealt well with lands was in the Philippines, He was born July 9, 1887, in ume of which came out in 1947. him. "I've had a very happy in March 1521. Boston at 44. Brimmer Street, The complete work took 15 career," he remarked in 1969. "I have been very fortunate Professor Morison's biography a mansard-roofed house in the years. Beacon Hill area that his grand- During these years Professor in combining a hobby of sail- of Champlain, if a less-majestic father, Samuel Eliot, had built Morison also wrote eight other ing with a profession of histo- work than "The European Dis- covery of America" was none- in 1869 and in which Professor books, including "The Story of ry. have no complaints theless an attractive, lively the Old Colony of New Plym- against life at all.". Morison lived. His parents portrait of a person that the au- were John and Emily Eliot outh," "Intellectual Life of Co- thor clearly considered to be Morison, who raised their son, lonial New England" and "John one of the eminenti men of the he once recalled, in "an atmos- Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biogra- century Age of Explora- phere where scholarship, re- phy." This, too, was the fruit note ligion and social graces were of on-the-scene research into Like its forerunners, this happily blended." Jones's principal battles. book was full of sea lore, and After preparation at St. Almost 10 years later, in bore traces of the fact that Paul's School, the young man 1967, he produced another bi- Mr. Mortson had followed entered Harvard in 1904, hop- ography of .an American naval Champlain's footsteps through ing to major in mathematics. Canada and along the New Eng- He was detoured to history, land ,Loast. he said in 1968, by Prof. Al- Professor Morison's magis- bert Bushnell Hart, who sug- terial volume on the Southern gested that the Harvard junior voyages had been preceded, in write a theme on an American 1971 by his book on the North- figure who meant something to explorations. His chronicle him personally. The choice was Adm. Morison, 88, covered the period from A.D. his great-great-grandfather, 500 to 1600, and as was his Harrison Gray Otis, the Fed- eralist leader, whose papers Historian, Is Dead won't he undertook many of the trips himself, before describing were filed in the student's them The book contained the wine cellar. customary Morison bursts of The theme led to a doctoral By ALDEN WHITMAN gustõ. His final paragraphs thesis and to Professor Mori- Samuel Eliot Morison, the conveyed the flavor. They read: son's first book, "The Life and undisputed Grand Old Man of "In closing let us not forget Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, American historians, died yes- the gallant ships and the brave Federalist," which was pub- mariners who lost their lives lished in 1913. "It was a terday in the Massachusetts succès d'estimé, selling only General Hospital, Boston, from pursuing these voyages for a century after Cabot, or men 700 copies," he recalled more the effects of a stroke. He was like Raleigh who financed them: than a half-century later when 88 years old and lived in Bos- Cabot himself and both Corte he revised it as "Harrison Gray Otis, 1765-1848: the Urbane ton during the winter and in Reals lost with all hands no Federalist." The book, though, Maine in the summer. brieknows where; Gilbert, lost was the foundation for his ear- A prodigiously productive with all hands off the Azores; ly reputation and his first writer, Admiral Morison pub- Frobisher, mortally wounded in the-war with Spain; John Davis lished "The European Discovery slain by Japanese pirates: Vr: CEMETERIES of America' when he was 80 razz, killed and afon by CEMETERY PLOTS & Bronze Memorial years old, and a book on aanhibals; Raleigh, beastly Beth Israel Cemetery Wopäbridge, N.J. Best offer over S800. 316-825-4538. Samuel de Champlain when he was 82. A master narrative his- torian, he was a pleasure to read for his figure of phrase