Arts and Letters

Less than a year has gone since the ashes of James Ford Rhodes were borne from Boston where he had lived continuously since middle life to Cleveland, the city of his birth. It was on January 22, 1927, that he died. But already the facts of his career have been set down by scholars of other Academies with the fullness of personal devotion, and his life is being written by the biographer named by him as his choice twenty years ago in a memorandum left for his son and confirmed at a later date by word of mouth. A tribute at this time may therefore more fittingly take the form of an estimate from affection and understanding rather than a sequence of detail; and this, especially, because my own intimacy with him did not begin until he had published the first two volumes—issued together in 1893—of his great history, and, having given up his sojourn in Cambridge, was, after an intervening year in Europe, beginning to be a familiar figure to the residents of the "inner Boston" that lies between "the Athenaeum on Beacon Hill and the Historical Society's building on the Fenway. Not all of Boston," (as Bliss Perry continues), "but it gives plenty of room for a triumphal procession."

I know only from others of his childhood's dream of writing history, and that this, fostered undoubtedly by living almost within earshot of our Civil War,—for he was born in 1848,—remained in leash for over twenty years from prudence and the exigent realities of iron and coal, his father's business. Yet it appears that he was sent abroad on the eve of his apprenticeship to study how these minerals were handled in England, Wales, and Germany, attended a course of lectures in the Collège de France, and was European Correspondent for the Chicago Times. He returned with a good reading knowledge of French and German to supplement his earlier studies for a single year, when he was seventeen, in the physical sciences and history as a special student in the University of the City of New York. That "the flighty purpose never is o'ertook unless the deed go with it" should be not less true of the steadfast one, and arguing from this equipment it would not have been strange had the inchoate ambition to be an historian remained latent if not been quenched. More readily so from the practical course of events which establish him again in Cleveland in 1870 as a partner in "the firm of Rhodes and Card, producers and dealers in coal, iron ore, and pig iron." Tradition, accredited by Dr. Harvey Cushing, pictures him at this time as "a dapper young man with the fashionable flowing side-whiskers he had cultivated in Piccadilly." Shortly after, too, he married the daughter of his father's partner and "set up housekeeping handsomely and happily in a large house directly opposite that of his parents," who lived in a fashionable neighborhood. If not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had golden opportunities for mere accumulation at his fingers' ends from early manhood. His father, Daniel Rhodes, who had "migrated as a lad from Sudbury, Vermont, to the Western Reserve shortly after the completion of the Erie Canal," and was prosperous, changed the name of his firm in 1874 to Rhodes and Company. Among the new partners taken in at approximately that time were his son James and Mark A. Hanna, who married James's sister. For more than twenty years he remained in business, though all the while an inveterate reader who kept "a series of commonplace books with notes and clippings" which he called his "Index rerum." A characteristic form of wisdom led him to subordinate his real tastes to the importance of amassing a comfortable fortune before he gave himself up to them. He withdrew from the firm in 1886, but to begin with went to Europe for a year, where incidentally he busied himself with the translation of a French novel by way of practice in the art of composition. On his return, with his first two volumes already undertaken, he removed from Cleveland to Cambridge, partly so as to be nearer to his material and partly because "his son at the early age of fifteen had just entered Harvard." Rhodes himself was at this time thirty-nine.

We, his friends of this Academy, know the rest, for his election to the Academy in May, 1905, less than six months after that of William D. Howells, chronologically first in order, did not occur until six of the seven volumes of the History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 were already in print and academic honor after honor had been conferred on him in eager recognition of a work of first-class literary importance by a fellow countryman. This fame, augmented by each addition until the earlier title was merged in the History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877, soon became European as well as national and his graphic, judicial, eminently readable chronicle of our national development had won him by accord a place among the great historians of the world. This title equally secure at his death as at the height of his production was all the more grateful to his admirers because of the charm of his genial disposition, the perfect honesty of his opinions, and his outright habit of disclaiming knowledge of that in which he was unversed,—a trait exceptionally rare among the mentally elect. Indeed, great simplicity and entire freedom from pretence or affectation were leading traits.

In his inaugural address as President before the American Historical Association in 1899 he said: "Holding a brief for history as do I your representative, let me at once concede that it is not the highest form of intellectual endeavor; let us at once agree that it were better that all the histories ever written were burned than for the world to lose Homer and Shakespeare." How eminently characteristic. He had a shrewd, just humor, never acid, yet never disproportioned or self-deceiving. He goes on in the next breath to add: "Yet as it is generally true that an advocate rarely admits anything without qualification, I should not be loyal to my client did I not urge that Shakespeare was historian as well as poet. We all prefer his Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to the Lives in North's Plutarch which furnished him his materials…. It is true, as Macaulay wrote, the historical plays of Shakespeare have superseded history." Yet who was more loyal to his chosen field? More industrious and self exacting? His lauded models were the masters of history who still live, particularly Thucydides and Tacitus, also Herodotus and Gibbon. In his own method of preparation, though not the very first to do so, he utilized largely, and especially for the decade from 1850-1860, newspapers as sources. "While considering my materials," so he publicly wrote in 1908, "I was struck with a statement cited by Herbert Spencer as an illustration in his Philosophy of Style: 'A modern newspaper statement, though probably true, if quoted in a book as testimony, would be laughed at; but the letter of a Court gossip, if written some centuries ago, is thought good historical evidence.' At about the same time I noticed that Motley used as one of his main authorities for the battle of St. Quentin the manuscript of an anonymous writer.'' Moved by observation that all newspapers both north and south for many years had been full of the absorbing slavery and abolition conflict, Rhodes, as Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., has vividly pointed out, "plunged with splendid courage into this extensive sea of information. With astonishing persistence he passed weary days, weeks, months in turning and scanning the dusty, musty leaves of the clumsy folios; more tedious exploration can hardly be imagined, but he found that the harvest amply repaid the labor of the reaping…. All this panorama he found thus spread before him at life-size, as it were, in these newspapers; and he could have seen it nowhere else."

Rhodes was devoted to the interests and believed in the purposes of this Academy, enjoyed greatly its exercises and the social opportunities it provided for enduring friendship. He was among the earlier members chosen, and he has often told me of the pleasure he had in the dinners of the Academy at a time when nearly all present were in their prime and death had taken scarcely one. In more recent days—for my membership in this body dates only from 1915—we used to come on together from Boston for a number of years to attend the meetings of the Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Who could have had a more delightful companion than he was? His entertaining but ever rational conversation, his shrewd humor, the charm of his smile, his genial presence, a veritable breeze from the West, radiating friendliness with a big, far-carrying voice,—how familiar were these characteristics to all who knew him. The charcoal drawing by Sargent, although not done until 1920 when age had begun to silver him, is life-like in its portrayal of his intelligence, sense of humor, and kindly graciousness. He entertained this Academy at least once at dinner at his hospitable house, 392 Beacon Street. Among the many honors which he received was the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1910. Harvard and then Yale conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Three years after the last of his first seven volumes appeared Oxford gave him the degree of Doctor of Letters. President Lowell has well epitomized his later career as follows:

The ambition of his youth had been fulfilled in 1906, when the seventh volume of the history carried the reader to the year 1877 and the abandonment by President Hayes of the policy of Reconstruction. But until his health began to fail he continued to study and to write. He published his Historical Essays in 1909, his Oxford Lectures on the American Civil War in 1913, a short history of the war in 1917, and then carried his former history of the country from the administration of Hayes through that of Roosevelt.

We of this Academy think today with reverence and affection of James Ford Rhodes as the great native historian of his time, and a most delightful character.