Arts and Letters

Allan Nevins, former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, died on 5 March, 1971. He was a great public figure and an adorable private figure. He was one of the distinguished historians of the century, and advisor to generations of scholars, and of statesmen, too, and an indefatigable friend and generous patron to the community of learning here and abroad.

Much that Allan was, did, and stood for, will live on far into whatever future is vouchsafed the world of learning. There are the imposing shelves of books which he wrote and edited—quite literally shelves, for Allan Nevins was probably the most productive of all major American historians—more productive than Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Henry Adams, in whose company he indubitably belongs. There are the scores, even hundreds, of students and disciples who carry on, as best they can, the Nevins tradition of teaching, research, and writing, for here too, Allan was pre-eminent, training more scholars than any other historian in the country. There are the affluent enterprises which he initiated and brought to life—the great Oral History project which provided a new dimension of history—one as old as Homer or the Icelandic Sagas, to be sure, but new in our time, and which is now national and even international in scope. There is the AMERICAN HERITAGE foundation and magazine, metamorphosed from the struggling organization for state and local history; it would never have come into existence without Allan's imagination and tenacity. There is the magnificent Bancroft Fund for which he was so largely responsible, and the great collections of books and manuscripts now flooding into the Library of Columbia University which this fund made possible. There is the Chair of Economic History, set up by Allan himself, eloquent, as is so much that he was and did, of his limitless devotion to Columbia University. There are the impressive collections which he brought to the Huntington Library, and his own contributions to library collections everywhere, in Britain and in Australia as in the United States.

All of these will flourish and spread their benign influence wherever learning is cherished: all testify to the affluent vision and the creative generosity of Allan Nevins.

He was a scholar, a teacher, a journalist, an editor, a librarian, an author, a public servant: he was more, even, than the sum of these parts. He was a veritable institution, a foundation, perhaps, except that he was too human, too ebullient, too dynamic, too kindly, ever to be mistaken for an institution. What he was can be defined better by his traits of character than by his formal contributions.

He had deep and even passionate commitments, rooted no doubt in his Scots upbringing—commitments to those ideas he cherished, those causes he served, those fortunate men and women to whom he gave his friendship. He had a commitment to history that was all-embracing and almost religious, for he served history as a priest serves his church, and watched over his students as a prelate watches over his neophytes. It was this commitment that inspired that cascading energy, that diligence, that zeal, which went into the mastery of whole libraries and archives, and the production, in turn, of new libraries and archives. We have to go back to the prodigies of the eighteenth century—to men like Johannes Muller and Albrecht von Haller and Diderot for comparison.

With commitment went tenacity. When Allan set himself a task (and when did he not?) he carried it through with implacable determination, and with élan. Nothing could deflect him from the pursuit of those objectives to which he had pledged himself, and as he had confidence in the rightness of his objectives, he outmaneuvered evasion, conquered opposition and shamed indifference, and brought men of good will to his side. Who, after all, could resist that eager enthusiasm, that eloquence, or that logic? Thus he carried through his plans for the creation of an historical magazine which should appeal to a larger audience than that of the professional historian; thus he realized his ambitious project for nation-wide programs of oral history; thus he penetrated the formidable barriers of traditionalism and lethargy to introduce reforms in the teaching of American history in British universities. Thus he rescued the Civil War Centennial from the incompetence of the antiquarians and the designs of party hacks, and gave it respectability.

This was his special talent, to give respectability to every cause he espoused and every enterprise he adopted. For more than half a century he served causes, and individuals, with unflagging devotion. "Always attach yourself to something bigger than yourself," he counselled the young, and he provided them with an unfailing example of this categorical imperative. His loyalty to his students and his friends was proverbial, and every one of his hundreds of graduate students could testify to his devotion, and many to material and practical as well as intellectual and moral support. Every colleague could count on him to volunteer for whatever promoted the cause of learning; every amateur could turn to him for advice and encouragement, confident that he would rally to talent wherever it appeared, within or without the Academy. Every institution that he served was the stronger for his service: the University of Illinois whose history he wrote and to which he returned to celebrate the virtues of the land-grant colleges in one of the most perceptive of his books; the New York Historical Society where he functioned as Fellow; the Society of American Historians which he brought into being; Oxford University where he served twice as Harmsworth Professor and to which he was a generous benefactor; the Huntington Library; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; most of all Columbia University which he served for thirty years as teacher, spokesman, and benefactor.

His enthusiasm was contagious, and brought the most laggard and the most skeptical to his side. His industry, too, was contagious—and both hortatory and admonitory—for with Allan pounding away at his ancient typewriter (he did most of his own typing), dealing with gaggles of graduate students and scores of doctoral candidates, raiding libraries and archives everywhere in the country, organizing historical projects and launching historical enterprises, who could remain idle? No one could quite live up to the Nevins standard of industry and productivity, but as long as he was around, almost everyone felt that he had to try.

In whatever he undertook Allan was positive and constructive. He was critical but had little interest in criticism as such; he had exalted standards but took no satisfaction in exposing the baser standards of fellow scholars. Nor did he indulge himself in the luxury of intellectual dalliance or in literary cleverness, in the sportive playing with ideas for their own sake. He wanted results, and he got them. He did not tear a student's thesis to pieces in order to demonstrate his own mastery of the subject, but helped the student to rewrite it—even if this meant doing much of the rewriting himself. He did not attack anachronisms in ancient universities, or the fustiness of professional associations, merely for the satisfaction of scoring points, but addressed himself to the problem of modernizing them with proposals so practical that it was difficult to resist them. He was the delight of every editor and every publisher: he wrote scores of articles and hundreds of reviews, and they were always on time; he could whip literary ideas into shape and find the right people to bring them to life. He was wholly free of the pervasive vice of the Academy—the assumption that its task was merely to formulate ideas, and that it was the obligation of others to bring them into reality; he himself took on the responsibility of translating his recommendations into reality.

In his combination of grand strategy and tactics, Allan was Napoleonic. We can picture him looking out from his aerie on the sixth floor of Fayerweather Hall—that vast book-lined and paper-littered room, where the very air vibrated with his energetic presence—looking out not merely on the campus of Columbia University, but over the whole world of history, and planning campaign after campaign to insure the triumph of Clio. Planning them, and, when necessary, leading them. Thus he launched a campaign to build up the history collections of the University Library and carried it to triumphant conclusion with the munificent Bancroft Fund. Thus he campaigned to get American History into the high schools and influenced state legislation everywhere in the country. Thus he campaigned for oral history, which he himself launched, financed, and institutionalized. A hundred oral history projects at home and abroad constitute a monument to that stroke of creative imagination and of tireless labor. Thus too the campaign to give respectability to business history, which he himself so splendidly vindicated with his biographies of Peter Cooper, and John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. Thus the campaign to rescue the Civil War Centennial from the hands of incompetents and give it some scholarly integrity, which resulted in a multi-volume history of neglected phases of the war. Thus the campaign to persuade public figures to write their autobiographies, or at least to provide the materials for biographies, which led him to write, or to sponsor, biographies of Herbert Lehman and Cordell Hull, and to assist in the authorship of those by General Eisenhower and Senator Kennedy. There were personal forays, too, which we should not ignore—to help promising students who labored under handicaps, physical or financial, to rescue academic veterans like the great but forgotten Richard Ely, or to turn aspiring amateurs into skillful professionals.

All of this was part of Allan's limitless generosity—a generosity which he could indulge because he was prepared to work unceasingly and to deny himself even the amenities. More important than material, he had what is rare in the academic world, intellectual and moral generosity. He was generous with his professional colleagues, especially those who were young. He was without jealousy, envy, or malice: in forty years of intimacy I never heard Allan make a malicious remark about a fellow scholar. He could rarely bring himself to be critical of others, but did not himself resent criticism, indeed did not even notice it. As he had no time for academic gossip, so he had no time for academic feuds, and he took the initiative in dispelling misunderstandings, salving wounds, and healing rifts.

He had an almost inexhaustible capacity for friendship: he liked to quote Dr. Johnson that you must keep your friendships in constant repair. Probably no other historian of his time had so large, so miscellaneous—or so loyal, a circle of friends. He made friends in all walks of life: with his colleagues at Columbia and other universities, with his associates in journalism, with his friends at the Century Club, with the groups he brought together for fellowship wherever he happened to live, in Bronxville or in Pasadena. He managed to have friends in the competitive world of publishing and the fluctuating world of business, and the exalted world of politicians and statesmen: where Allan was concerned, Henry Adams's observation that a friend in power is a friend lost did not seem to apply. Somehow he found time for an immense correspondence, not only with fellow scholars, but with graduate students, authors, journalists, admirals, and generals—for he did not subscribe to the fashionable disdain of the military—and with friends and neighbors, letters that revealed the man in every line, full of affection and humor and high spirits, and full of ideas, too.

This is not the place to detail Allan's scholarly achievements—that prodigious output of books, thirty or forty of them, crowned by the great eight-volume history: The Ordeal of the Union which he managed to finish before death stopped his hand; the twenty-five volumes illuminated by his editorial commentary; perhaps fifty more which benefited from his editorial supervision. Nor is this the occasion to recount the honors and recognition which came to him in such full measure: the Pulitzer Prizes, the Bancroft Prize, the Scribner Prize, The Gold Medal of this society, the presidencies of so many public and private organizations, the almost two score honorary degrees from universities here and abroad. All of this is part of the public record, and illustrates how in Allan Nevins the public and the private were inextricably blended. For as Allan cultivated his own interests he cultivated the public interest; as he sought to illuminate the past to satisfy his own curiosity, he illuminated the current scene—and the future, too—for the edification of a larger public. He taught not only the thousands of students who heard him lecture and the hundreds who sat in his seminars, but the American people who read what he wrote, or read what those who had been educated by him wrote.

May we not say of him what Pericles said in that greatest of orations, that he is one of those fortunate men who "rest in the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action…. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men, and their story is graven not on stone alone over their native earth, but lives on woven into the stuff of other men's lives."