Arts and Letters

Andrew Dickson White touched American public life at many and important points. He won the title of Academician both by scholarship, by literary performance, and by public service. His life was a fortunate and a happy one. He could take no credit for clambering out of poverty, since his parents were in comfortable circumstances. He began life without knowing either poverty or riches, but with a sound training at the academies of Cortland and Syracuse and at Yale College. European travel broadened and enriched his mind and laid the foundation for those educational and public interests that dominated his maturer years. On returning to the United States he hesitated a little, as others have done, between education and politics, and finally chose both. He justly considered institution-building as the highest form of public service, and to it he devoted a great part of his life activity. Cornell University is his monument and a dozen other undertakings have been helped by his hand and guided by his vision. His legislative service in the State of New York was rather significant than important, although it gave him a hold upon the working political forces of the State that he never lost. His foreign service was acceptable in high degree both to his own people and to the governments to which he was successively accredited. In Germany, in particular, he was heartily received, and in Germany among both scholars and public men he exercised a wide and strong personal influence.

From boyhood Dr. White had profound respect for literature and its makers, and his strong scholarly instinct carried him inevitably into the field of authorship. His bibliography is rich and long, but perhaps the two titles included in it that are most to be remembered are his History of the Warfare of Science and Theology and his Autobiography. The former is his chief contribution to history and its understanding, and its composition and completion occupied his mind for quite a quarter-century. His purpose in writing this book was, as he himself has declared, to strengthen not only science but religion. His purpose was to aid in freeing science from trammels which for centuries had been vexatious and cruel, and also to strengthen religion by enabling its teachers to see some of the evils in the past which, for the sake of their charge, they ought to guard against in the future.

His Autobiography is a work of singular charm. It not only tells the story of an honorable and distinguished life, but it throws a flood of light upon personalities and happenings of the greatest interest to all mankind.

Dr. White was elected to the Academy on January 28, 1908, to fill Chair 32. He died full of years and of honors on November 4, 1918.