scholar

A great American

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

Messrs Hamish Hamilton's posthumous pub- lication of The Birth of the Nation, by Arthur

M. Schlesinger, Senior, is a proper occasion for commemorating one of the most learned, ingenious and subtle of American historians of this century. His fame has to a certain ex- tent been occulted by that of his son, Arthur M. Schlesinger. Junior. The two his- torians, father and son, had many intellectual and other qualities in common as well as a good many beliefs and prejudices. But they were historians not only of a different genera- tion but of a different kind.

'Young Arthur,' as so many people in the historians' gild' still call hini, was a classical historian of political history. Of course he has written a famous book as part of the testimony to the brief career of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I first met Arthur Schlesinger pure in 1925. I went out to Harvard Graduate School from

Oxford, a move made possible by the judgment, good or bad, of J. R. M. Butler (now Sir James Butler) and of Professor Samuel E.

Morison (now Admiral Morison). The rising young American historians of the Harvard Graduate School at that time were Sam Morison, who . had just come back from Oxford; Arthur Schlesinger. who had just arrived from Iowa; and Frederick Merk, who had come from Wisconsin as the pupil and heir of Frederick Jackson Turner. The most eminent of the older traditional New England historians was Edward Channing, the author of a long and learned history of the United States which perhaps went on too long and took too little notice of modern aims and achievements of historiography.

I remember getting to know all these his- torians. But I had not got on well, to begin with, with either Edward Channing or Arthur Schlesinger. Used to the Oxford system, which had suited me quite well (I took the,History Schools in the same year as Dr A. L. Rowse), I was not at all used to the kind of examining methods in the Harvard Graduate School. They seemed to me to be designed for no doubt worthy and hard-working but not par- ticularly acute young men from dull North American colleges. (There were, of course, a large number of acute, well-trained young men from very good American colleges, including Harvard.) Thus, my first attempt to answer a Harvard School examination paper was turned down with very harsh comments by a far from bright young man from the Middle West who found my manner too allusive and lacking in specific information (I think I may say that specific information has been one of my few assets for academic life). And I was told at the time that Professor Channing had suggested that I be asked to leave the school as I was not up to its standards. I was saved from this by the intervention of Professor Morison, whose pupil I had been at Oxford and (again I am only reporting what I was told, the 'scuttle- butt' of the School) that Sam Morison had said if I was turned out of Harvard, I would simply go to Yale.

I never got on very well with Professor Channing, whom I admired with serious reser- vations, but I very soon began to get on very well with Arthur Schlesinger. whose seminar I joined. He was then a young man who had written and published a very remarkable PhD

thesis, The Colonial Merchants and the Ameri- can Revolution, a book which became a clas- sic at once and which has since been reprinted

in a very expensive form. I discovered, for example, that underneath Arthur Schlesinger's rather prim or grim manner was a highly ironical mind. He used to listen to papers writ- ten for his seminar with great care and atten- tion and slowly dissect them, sometimes to the

serious discomfiture of the victim who was given a chance to learn what superior scholarship really meant; not all the victims enjoyed this discussion, but no doubt it was good for them.

He was also, although less consciously than Frederick Merk, a great professor for whom I had, and have kept, the greatest admiration, a son of the Middle West. It was a happy policy of Harvard never to have more than half its teaching body composed of Harvard gradu- ates, in this being more enterprising than Oxbridge was then, or indeed is now. And Arthur Schlesinger came consciously as a missionary to the old home of orthodox New England historiography.

Of course, he was not preaching to the totally unconverted. Sam Morison was as much an iconoclast as Arthur Schlesinger. but he was an iconoclast from inside the system, not from outside it. In his early years, Arthur Schlesinger found the world of Harvard, in- deed the World of Boston, not so much im- penetrable as not totally attractive. He thought

some of his new colleagues were outrageous snobs. Some of them were. He told me of the astonishment with which he learned that a young man from his own original university, Ohio State, who was having quite a success- ful business career in Boston and had fallen in love with the daughter of a prominent business man (not what one would have called a Proper Bostonian), had been surprised to learn that he was not up to the standards of Silas Lapham, not what the French call a parti sortable. It was Arthur Schlesinger's view that anyone who was a good match in Xenia, Ohio, was a good match in Boston.

Arthur Schlesinger was also active in politics in a way not totally approved of by the older Harvard professors, most of whom were Republicans or very stiff, old-fashioned Demo- crats. He was not at that time nearly as radi-

cal in politics as Sam Morison was, as the future admiral's share in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti showed. But he had a strong sense of the importance of the Middle West and scepticism of the exaggerated claims

made for what came to be called the WASPS

by the classical American historians (classical meaning, of course, Bostonian). He would have

agreed with Professor Richard Shryock of Philadelphia's definition of culture as under- stood in Boston : 'Culture is things Bostonians are good at; things other people are good at are not culture.'

But at a time of very depressing torpor in American life. Arthur Schlesinger, like a good many of the younger faculty members of Harvard, was one of the forces of criticism and even of revolt. He was in fact a devoted Democrat. He did not forget his mixed Jewish and Austrian Catholic ancestry or how much the role of the lesser breeds was ignored by official historiography. I can remember a party given for him at which one of the guests, a very distinguished historian and a friend of mine and of Arthur Schlesinger's, was ex- pressing his horror at the thought of the possible election of Barry Goldwater. Arthur Schlesinger addressed him as follows: 'What right have you to talk, Dexter? You voted for Hoover, so you helped to bring on the Depression, and you dare to call yourself an independent voter.' I greatly liked the attacked independent voter. so I turned to his host and said, 'Arthur, have you ever voted anything but the Democratic ticket in your life?' He said, `No.' And that is what you mean by being an independent voter?' 'Yes.' (Actually, I think he voted for La Follette in 1924, but certainly his independence was limited as a rule to the merits of the Democratic party.) The American academic world is today full of his pupils. and sons of his pupils, and business and public life are full of people who did not enter academic life but were impressed by the lucidity and force of his lectures to the senior class at Harvard. He did not perhaps evoke the devotion which the learning and simplicity of Frederick Merk did, and dis- played irony at the expense even of his sud- denly celebrated son. And he regarded with a certain amount of scepticism some of the more original ideas of the younger historians who called the 'social sciences' in aid.' He was not as fluent or in that sense as productive as his famous son. but he was a remarkably acute observer not only of Boston or of his native Ohio (which he felt should have been re-expelled from the Union after it was dis- covered that it had been admitted in a legally imperfect form).

He once went round the world on a Kahn fellowship, and his conversation on the results of this affair was extremely inter- esting. He formed. one is forced to say, a much higher opinion of French rule in Indo-China than of British rule in India. I asked him why. 'Well,' he said,- 'before I went to India from Indo-China I asked an important English businessman whose headquarters were in Cal- cutta, how you said "thank you" in Bengali. He replied, "I Kaye never said 'thank you' to an Indian at any time anywhere in my life."' 'The French,' he added, 'at least say "Thank you."' But for those who want to taste the flavour of Arthur Schlesinger's mind, and it is well worth the tasting, this, alas, short book will make it plain why he inspired so much respect in normally irreverent young men in the highly critical world of Harvard.