Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Less famous, but just as influential on Schlesinger, was Columbia historian James Harvey Robinson. His lectures at the university, and his seminal book The New History, were formative in Schlesinger’s thinking about the breadth of historical enquiry. Robinson argued that to write the “new history,” practitioners had to draw widely on other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, and must use those “allies” to write about aspects of history that lay beyond the traditional political sphere. By the time Schlesinger went back to Ohio State in 1912, he was a convert. He introduced elements of the New History into his teaching, and once at Iowa, offered a new course in “The Social and Cultural History of the United States,” often said to be the first of its kind in any university.

  Schlesinger’s second book, New Viewpoints in American History, put the New History into action. In a series of interpretative essays written for a broad audience, he ranged across American history, drawing particular attention to scholarship in social, cultural, intellectual, and particularly economic history that would not be well known outside the academy. His aim, he said, was “to bring together and summarize, in non-technical language” the state of the discipline for the general reader and “to show [its] importance to a proper understanding of American history.”

  Almost seventy years later, on rereading New Viewpoints, Arthur would be struck by the extent to which his father in this book had shaped his own preoccupations as a historian. “I was surprised to find how much my father had anticipated my own historical excursions,” he said in a lecture in 1988, “or, to put it more accurately, how much I unconsciously absorbed from his.” Not the least of these direct influences was the essay “The Significance of Jacksonian Democracy,” which emphasized the important East Coast influences on the frontier experience. Arthur would take up that idea in The Age of Jackson. Another gift he inherited was his father’s polished literary style, which, said one reviewer of New Viewpoints, “flows easily, smoothly, with here and there a refreshing eddy of humor.”

  Schlesinger wrote New Viewpoints for a broad audience of interested readers, but it also made an impact in the profession. “This is no doctrinaire history,” praised R. W. Kelsey in the American Historical Review. “He has come through the fires of economic determinism [i.e., Beard] with even temper. He can discern some good in both conservatives and radicals—and some bad. He seems to be progressive with one foot on the brake-pedal.”14

  Those qualities appealed to Samuel Eliot Morison, a rising star at Harvard who was a year older than Schlesinger. The two men could hardly have been more different in background. Morison was the personification of Boston Brahmin. He would spend most of his life in the gracious Brimmer Street house that his grandfather built on the “flat of Beacon Hill” and from where he would still ride on horseback to Harvard, the last faculty historian to do so. (“Ours was the horsey end of town,” he wrote later.) After his death, he would be honored among the Boston great and the good with a statue on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall near Exeter Street.

  Morison was known for a certain coldness of manner and asperity of tongue, once humiliating a colleague who dared visit his house one morning with the putdown, “Don’t you know that a gentleman does not call on another gentleman before noon?” But Morison was also a disciplined and enterprising historian, as passionate about studying maritime history as sailing his own boats, and committed to the writing of history as a sacred trust which, in the famous dictum of Leopold von Ranke, required the past to be presented “as it actually was.” He often complained that historians would produce better work if they were subject to an equivalent of the Hippocratic oath. And he was scathing about what he called the “chain reaction of dullness” in academic life: professors of “dull, solid, valuable monographs” who trained graduate students to write dull, solid monographs.15

  Many years later, a friend sent Arthur a copy of his father’s New Viewpoints picked up in a second-hand bookshop. Pasted inside was a bookplate with the image of a clipper sailing ship and the words “Ex Libris Samuel Eliot Morison.” Annotations abounded throughout. Next to one passage on conservatives and radicals, where Schlesinger had written that “the two schools have more in common than either would admit,” Morison had drawn a heavy black line in the margin and written “Très bien.” It turned out to be the most important judgment of Schlesinger’s career.16

  Morison, as it happened, was to spend another year at Oxford, where he was the inaugural holder of the Harmsworth chair in American history. While he was away in England, Morison suggested, why not appoint Schlesinger as a visitor at Harvard for the academic year 1924–1925? Frederick Jackson Turner, the university’s senior American historian (and, as author of the “frontier thesis” that the American West forged American democracy, its most famous), warmly supported the idea. Turner admired The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution; perhaps as significantly, he was grateful to Schlesinger for having introduced him to Charles Beard at an American Historical Association conference. “When I myself advanced in the profession and was in turn sought out,” Schlesinger would later write, “I discovered that the benefit did not lie only in the one direction, for acquaintance with younger men kept me informed of the interests of the oncoming generation.” At this earlier stage in his career, however, it was the younger generation making the most of an eminent acquaintance. A certain entrepreneurial ruthlessness in the game of academic politics was another quality that Arthur would inherit from his quietly ambitious father. With Turner about to retire, it was clear to everyone that Arthur Schlesinger was being given a tryout.17

  THE SCHLESINGERS LEFT for Harvard in the summer of 1924, just before Arthur turned seven. Surprisingly, given that he had lived in Iowa City since the age of two, Arthur seemed to leave without so much as a backward glance. In part, he assumed he would be away only for the year; perhaps more importantly, it had always been Xenia, not Iowa City, that felt like the family’s real home and where they celebrated important holidays. “What fun July 4 was for small boys seventy five years ago!” he later remembered happily.18

  Those small boys now included Thomas Bancroft Schlesinger, a brother for Arthur born in 1922. The two would have a complicated relationship even in childhood, with the more fun-loving Tom often irritating his straitlaced older brother. “We were nearly five years apart in age,” Arthur later wrote, “and no doubt, like too many older brothers, I had moments of exasperation.”19

  The Cambridge that the Schlesinger boys and their parents were moving to was twelve hundred miles and a whole world away from the midwestern one in which they had all grown up. On their leaving Iowa City, the local Lions Club had thrown a farewell lunch for Schlesinger, inviting locals to “come out and hear Art roar.” The contrast with Cambridge was marked. Tales of the snobbishness at Harvard towards midwesterners had already reached Iowa City. Even the esteemed Turner was said to have been deeply unhappy at Harvard, where, according to reports Schlesinger heard, “his testy Yankee colleague” Edward Channing had “made life so miserable for this son of a newer and rawer part of the United States that he had ever since regretted leaving Wisconsin.” Turner would later reassure Schlesinger this was not the case, but the new midwestern professor anticipated that he could “expect no different treatment.”20

  There was another reason besides class and region that may have left the senior Schlesinger nervous about the move. Harvard in the 1920s was in the middle of a nasty public row about anti-Semitism. In 1922 the college president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, had expressed concern about the rise of Jewish enrolment since 1900 from 7 to 21.5 percent. The university announced it was looking into “limitation of enrolment.” An uproar ensued. The New York Times ran the story on its front page. The Boston City Council passed a resolution condemning the university. A member of the Massachusetts Legislature moved to have Harvard investigated. Rather than retract, Lowell doubled down, suggesting that every college in America should take only “a limited propo
rtion of Jews.” This proposal drew a stinging rebuke from W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard’s first African American to be awarded a PhD, who condemned the “renewal of the Anglo-Saxon cult; the worship of the Nordic totem: the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic, South Sea islander—the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” As Alfred A Benesch, a Jewish alumnus of the college, wrote to Lowell in a letter published in the New York Times: “Carrying your suggestion to its logical conclusion would inevitably mean that a complete prohibition against Jewish students in the colleges would solve the problem of anti-Semitism.” By 1928 the share of Jewish freshmen at Harvard would drop to 16 percent, a result of Lowell’s vile restriction on “men who do not mingle indistinguishably with the general stream.”21

  Whether Professor Schlesinger would “mingle indistinguishably” as a faculty member at Harvard was an open question. Institutional anti-Semitism was swirling around the university throughout the 1920s and 1930s for faculty as well as students. “Eyebrows went up,” for example, when the Economics Department wanted to appoint the Jewish labor economist Leo Wolman; an offer was eventually made, but Wolman decided against taking the position. Similarly, Paul Samuelson, elected to Harvard’s distinguished Society of Fellows, was barred from teaching Economics I, the major course for undergraduates, and sent instead to teach “Jewish courses” in statistics and accounting. He eventually left for MIT, where he wrote the book, Foundations of Economic Analysis, that marked out a mathematical revolution in the discipline.22

  The Schlesingers had a loose association with the Unitarian Church. On arriving at Cambridge, Elizabeth would briefly teach at the local Unitarian Sunday school, but the family stopped going “after a fair trial” following protests from Arthur Jr., who by high school had ceased to believe in God. But Schlesinger Sr. was culturally Jewish on his father’s side and would have been perceived as such by contemporaries. His approach to the issue, one that was later followed by his son, was simply to ignore the matter. In his memoirs, Lowell’s intervention merits just one sentence: “As a Boston Brahmin he had, shortly before my going to Harvard, vainly sought to induce the faculty to restrict the admission of Jewish students.” The linking of “Boston Brahmin” with reflexive anti-Semitism is itself revealing, but whatever hostility or resentment lay beneath the surface, it remained unspoken.23

  In Arthur Jr.’s memoirs, the question of his Jewish heritage would only come up in the context of Bernhard Schlesinger’s changing religion when he married Katharine Feurle. Many years later, in an undated letter probably from the 1950s, Arthur would vigorously reject any suggestion that he was Jewish. When the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper wrote asking to include him in a series about leading Jewish figures, Arthur wrongly asserted that his “paternal grandfather, when he came to this country in the 1850s, was a Lutheran,” and went on to outline the family’s Congregationalist and Unitarian denominational affiliations. “This branch of the Schlesinger family has identified itself more or less unquestionably with the Protestant community over the last century or so,” he informed the paper. Then came a revealing, slightly awkward coda: “I write this with some embarrassment, because the tragedy of recent years has given this kind of question an understandable tension, and no one likes to seem to be running out of a situation or seeming to be what they are not. I can only report the facts and feeling in my own case, which I can hardly alter.” For all that the context and circumstances had been irrevocably changed by the Holocaust, this disposition was essentially one that Arthur had learned many years earlier watching his father navigate anti-Semitism at Harvard in the 1920s. Like Bernhard Schlesinger before them, Arthurs Sr. and Jr. both combined pragmatism, liberalism, and personal ambition. If getting ahead required some self-reinvention, so be it. But it would be Arthur Jr. who was left to answer the question of whether he cut the cloth of his liberal values to suit his ambitions.24

  Schlesinger Sr. initially struggled socially in his new Cambridge environment. “It proved slower to form close personal ties at Harvard,” he reflected, as “the professors guarded their privacy for research and writing.” He would not be the first or last midwesterner to find the Northeast emotionally chilly in comparison to home; the later song from Wonderful Town—“Why, Oh why, Oh why, Oh, Why did I ever leave Ohio?” might almost have been written for him. Whether or not it was a coincidence, his first real friend on the faculty was Jewish—the law professor and later Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. By skill or luck, he could not have made a better choice. Frankfurter, while not a practicing Jew, was unapologetic about his background. Before returning to Harvard as a faculty member after a brilliant undergraduate career, Frankfurter had taken a job at the waspy New York law firm of Hornblower, Byrne, Miller and Potter. “I’d heard they had never taken a Jew and wouldn’t take a Jew,” he would tell friends like Schlesinger, so “I decided that was the office I wanted to get into.” Frankfurter’s mother had told him early on to “Hold yourself dear!” That was a lesson that Schlesinger soon absorbed from his new friend.25

  Whatever social difficulties Schlesinger may have encountered, academically he remained in high demand. “We were not put off by the subterfuge of a ‘temporary appointment’ ” recalled Edward C. Kirkland, a graduate student who later taught at Bowdoin College. “We expected that the ‘new boy’ had been chosen to bring a message from the Olympus of Trans-Appalachia, whence Turner had come.” However, in the fall of 1924, just a few weeks after his arrival, Schlesinger received a tenured job offer not from Harvard but from Columbia University, where he would replace James Harvey Robinson—the leading light of New History. The position seemed a perfect fit. Schlesinger had enjoyed his graduate studies, was honored as a disciple of Robinson to be asked to replace him, and, with New Viewpoints, had already made an outstanding contribution to the New History. As important, Columbia was offering him a generous salary of $6,000 a year. Running into a Harvard colleague, Frederick Merk, at a football game, Schlesinger, politically or not, shared the exciting news. Two days later President Lowell made him a matching offer at Harvard. Soon afterwards, President Jessup traveled in person from Iowa City to Cambridge to make him an even higher offer.26

  The History Department at Harvard was on the cusp of becoming one of the strongest programs of study in the university and one of the best in the country, with new faculty appointments including Morison, Merk, William Langer, Crane Brinton, and Paul Buck (the latter also from Columbus, Ohio). But in 1924 Columbia had a reputation as an institution challenging disciplinary boundaries, including a dynamic history faculty; Young Turks Parker Moon and Carlton Hayes had arrived to replace luminaries such as Beard, Robinson, and E. R. A. Seligman.27

  In 1910, as a graduate student, Schlesinger had picked Columbia over Harvard. Now in 1924 he went the other way. He sounded out Frederick Jackson Turner, who “flatly and convincingly denied” that he had regretted leaving the Midwest. As he was the father of young children, Cambridge seemed “a better place to raise a family” than Manhattan. Promises were made that he would have freedom to develop social and cultural history. (“Social history?” students complained. “The history of laundry slips and ticket stubs.”) There was the pull of working in “a cradle of American liberty as well as of American literature.” And perhaps somewhere in the back of Schlesinger’s mind there lurked reservations about the shabby way that Columbia had treated his mentor, Charles Beard, who had resigned warning that the university’s efforts to “humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or controversial views” had made his continued presence “impossible.” A progressive such as Schlesinger did not take those words lightly. Too ambitious to return to Iowa, in the end he picked Harvard over Columbia, a decision he never came to regret. Schlesinger would spend the rest of his career in Cambridge.28

  The family had been living in an apartment on Hilliard Street, near Harvard Square. Now their possessions made the thousand-mile journey east to join them, where they
furnished rented houses in Avon Street and at 32 Avon Hill Street (the latter where Arthur and Tom would sled perilously in winter, dicing with the steep incline and new-fangled automobile traffic). Elegant though these colonial style houses were, they were also cold and drafty. When the Schlesingers looked for a house to buy near the university, most within their price range were lacking anything much in the way of modern conveniences. “In one unforgettable case,” Schlesinger recalled, “the daughter of a family having no electric lighting was engaged to a son of Thomas A. Edison, its famed inventor.” These eccentric ways of the Cambridge upper-middle classes, who often turned their noses up at vulgar displays of wealth or even comfort, were not for the Schlesingers. Instead they purchased a lot on a new estate, Gray Gardens, near the Botanical Gardens—a twenty-minute walk across the Common to Schlesinger’s office at Widener Library. The land cost $6,000—a year’s salary.29

  The colonial revival brick house the Schlesingers built for a cost of $20,000 at 19 Gray Gardens East would be the family home until shortly before Elizabeth’s death in 1977. The estate, with its narrow streets and neat little gardens divided by privet hedges, lacked the grandeur of Brattle Street and traditional “Tory Row” Cambridge, but it compensated with the suburban charms of a warm, comfortable modern home in a friendly neighborhood with space in which Arthur and Tom could run and play. Christina Schlesinger, Arthur’s daughter, later recalled that the garden in particular gave her grandparents real pleasure, not least “the tomatoes in the backyard that grandpa was so proud of.” Still struggling to make close friendships at the university, the Schlesingers compensated by inviting students to the house every Sunday for tea—a tradition they maintained until Schlesinger’s retirement in 1954. “When I became a professor myself,” Arthur would note wearily, “I marveled at my parents’ readiness thus to surrender every Sunday afternoon—I could never have done it.”30