Arts and Letters

The tercentenary of the founding of Harvard University, the oldest in the United States (even if far from the oldest in the New World), was an event of international significance. Scholars from almost all nations were represented at the ceremonies, and the recipients of honorary degrees, chosen from the scholarship of the entire world, were selected with difficult and rare discrimination. Among those so honored was Charles McLean Andrews, a loved member of this Academy. In the bestowal upon him of the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, he was cited as "a great teacher and scholar, foremost among the living historians of America."

This special honor, considering the occasion and the words of the citation, was only the summation of a long line which he had received. We need not here recite the list of universities and learned societies which conferred degrees and honorary memberships upon him, though we may mention, as of special interest to us gathered here today, that in 1937 he received The Gold Medal of the National Institute and was elected a member of this Academy. Such matters, however, may be found detailed in any appropriate reference book, and in this very brief tribute I wish rather to speak of Andrews in relation to his own work.

New Englanders appear, to an exceptional extent, to be historically minded, and I recall that, lunching with Andrews at his delightful house in New Haven as far back as 1921, he told me that he did not have a drop of blood from any ancestral line which was not wholly New England, as contrasted with myself who had just remarked that I did not have a single drop that was, from any line of my own. As a sidelight on the kindly nature of Andrews I may be permitted to mention the occasion of this our first meeting. After having been in business (banking and other), for a number of years, and then the army in the last war, I had suddenly turned to the writing of history, and my first published volume, The Founding of New England, had then recently been brought out. Andrews had discovered the book and had written a charming review of it in the Saturday Review, the invitation to his house following. I was utterly unknown to the world of letters and a complete stranger to Andrews, but I shall never forget the hospitality of himself and his wife and the encouragement which he then offered me. This was the beginning of our friendship.

Andrews himself seems never to have had any doubt as to where his own life work lay. From the beginning it was in the field of history, and after graduating from Trinity College, Hartford, and Johns Hopkins, he wrote and taught at Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, and then, for most of his life, at Yale.

There are many kinds of historians, those who cling to the minutiae of some topic or period in monographs which none can dispute, like the scholar in Browning's "Grammarian' s Funeral"; and others who, like the artist in Kipling's poem,

Splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets' hair.

There are also those who are content with factual narrative, and those who try to interpret; those who detail the contents of rooms and those who find keys to unlock rooms. There are those who do the immensely important work of providing scholarly tools for others; and others, again, who, like Gibbon, sweep through the decline and fall of great empires and entire civilizations.

What did Charles Andrews do? I approach the question in all modesty because I have never pretended to be more than an amateur in the field of scholarship.

He did many things, and when I say he did many things, I am not thinking merely of his teaching and of his many writings. The bibliography of the latter includes more than a hundred important articles and books, to say nothing of more than three hundred known book-reviews and shorter articles. I am thinking of the types of his work.

One sort of work was bibliographical. He spent some years at the beginning of this century in searching the then almost unknown wealth of manuscript records relating to American history in the British Museum, the minor London Archives, and the Libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. Published in 1908 by the Carnegie Institution, these three volumes, involving monumental research and scholarship, have been ever since of a value and importance to all American historical study which it is impossible to estimate. A few months before his death, speaking to a graduate student, while looking at these volumes on his shelves which held so many of his other works, Andrews said: "If my name lives it is because I was author of those Guides." His four volumes of colonial history and other books might be superseded, he added, but the Guides never would be. Those, and much more editorial work, stand for one aspect of his scholarship.

Another was in a wholly different field, the field of fecund ideas. Now and then a historian, as I have just said, gives us a key to unlock hidden chambers of the past. Such a key, for example, was found by the late Professor Turner in his theory of the influence of the frontier. On the other hand, the idea which Andrews developed all his life was that the history of the American colonial period could never be understood if we thought of only thirteen incohesive and jealous colonies on our own Atlantic seaboard. To understand the period one could not take one's stand at Boston or Charleston or anywhere else except at the center of the then empire, in London, and look thence over all the American colonies, mainland and island alike.

Andrews himself never believed that any one key would open all the past. He had a most wise and healthy disbelief in an economic interpretation or any other sole interpretation of history. He realized that after all, history is only a record of the way we queer and very multi-motivated human animals have behaved in the past. He was wholly sound as to that, but his insistence on considering colonial history primarily from the center instead of from the many peripheries of empire was, I think, one of the most important ideas for the interpretation of our national story, as Turner's conception of the frontier was also from another point of view.

In his earlier years he had written some books, mostly college texts, on British, French, and even world history, but as the years passed, he was to devote himself almost solely to the colonial period of our own nation, though with a world background. I recall that once he rather chided me, in a friendly spirit, when I went on from my study of origins to later periods in our story. It may be said that our colonial history is a link between two worlds, the old and the new, not merely geographically but in time and development. Andrews made an enormous contribution, probably the greatest which an American historian will ever make, to the placing of the colonies in right and proper relation to the older world, but he was not interested in relating them to the subsequent development of the States. Perhaps I should rather say, as he was interested in the world about him, that he felt the study of colonial history called for such a different body of knowledge, method of approach, and temper of mind, that colonial America and independent America belonged to different spheres of thought and that a scholar who was specially fitted to explore and understand the one would not be competent for the other. After his retirement for age from Yale, Andrews had written four volumes of his magnum opus on the colonies when failing strength prevented his completing the final three as planned. He left, however, a short manuscript account of what he had intended to do, which is a gem of historical wisdom in itself.

Time does not permit of a full discussion of his work in other, or even in the fields already mentioned, but I would like to quote at the end of this inadequate appreciation, the words of his associate, Professor Labaree of Yale, who wrote that Andrews "gave us the example of a man devoted wholeheartedly to the highest standards of scholarship and of personal and intellectual integrity." I may myself add that he was such a scholar and such a gentleman as we of the Academy may well be proud to have counted among us, and whose name on our rolls will help to build up that corporate tradition of American culture for which the Academy stands, and which should be dearer to us than the contemporary reputation of any one of us individually.