Briefly Noted      

Faculty/Staff      

Alumni/ae     

1929—Robert H. Bates. Mystery, Beauty, and Danger: The Literature of the Mountains and Mountain Climbing Published in English Before 1946. (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2000)     

1943—Norval White and Elliot Willensky. AIA Guide to New York City. (Times Books, 4th Edition, 2000)     

1945—Whitney L. Balliett. Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2000. (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)      

1949—Thomas Hoving. The Art of Dan Namingha. (Abrams, 2000)      

1953—Townsend Ludington, Editor. A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States. (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)    

1954— Alan Broughton. The Origin of Green: Poems. (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001)    

1961—John Irving. Witwe für ein Jahr. [CD] (Kein & Aber Records, 1999)      

1971—Benjamin L. Miller. Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York, the Last 200 Years. (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000)      

1983—Michael Griffith. Spikes: A Novel. (Arcade Publishing, 2001)     

1987—Wendy Vanasselt, Associate Editor. World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems, the Fraying Web of Life. (World Resources Institute, 2000)     

1988—Ziba Kashef. Like a Natural Woman: The Black Woman’s Guide to Alternative Healing. (Kensington Books, 2000).      

Briefly Noted     

1950—Thomas Merriam. “Edward III.” In Literary and Linguistic Computing. (v. 15, no. 2, 2000)

“The Misunderstanding of Munday as Author of Sir Thomas More.” In The Review of English Studies [new series] (v. 51, no. 204, 2000)      

1952—Keith R. Johnson. “In Loco Parentis,” an essay on mentoring. In A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance, by Sarah Ban Breathnach and Friends, Edited by Michael Segell. (Scribner, 2000)      

1972—Martha B. (Gerson) Lufkin. “Forfeiture of an Antiquity Claimed by Italy, With Help from the U.S. National Stolen Property Act: The ‘Steinhardt’ Case.” In Art Antiquity and Law (v. 5, issue 1, March, 2000)

“My Two Trips to the Supreme Court” and “And in Clause III(b), the Booties.” In Shark Tales: True and Amazing Stories from America’s Lawyers, compiled by Ron Liebman. (Simon & Schuster, 2000)      

1987—Mark V. Cushman and Joel B. Grossman. “Extradition.” In The Constitution and Its Amendments, Vol. II, edited by Roger K. Newman. (MacMillan Reference, 1999)

“The Fiscal and Monetary Powers of the U.S. Congress.” In The Constitution and Its Amendments, Vol. II, edited by Roger K. Newman. (MacMillan Reference, 1999)      

1989—Benjamin D. Hill. “What Hylas Should Have Said To Philonous: A Problem With Berkeley’s Account of Perceptual Error.” In Southwest Philosophy Review. (v. 16, no. 1, January, 2000)     

1992—Matthew D. McGill.“Unleashing the Limited Public Forum: A Modest Revision to a Dysfunctional Doctrine.” In Stanford Law Review. (v. 52, no. 4, April, 2000)

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ’33 graduated from Exeter at age 15, eager to embark on his many lives as scholar, teacher, author, government bureaucrat and political activist, lives he has chronicled in his new memoir.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ’33, in his introduction to A Life in the 20 ^th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (Houghton-Mifflin, 2000) invites comparison with other American autobiographies when he mentions Henry Adams, whose The Education of Henry Adams is arguably the most famous and most celebrated work of the genre. One might observe that Adams’ effort to look back at the 19^th century took him roughly 500 pages. Schlesinger’s first volume on our century, which takes us only to mid-century and him to age 33, is already that long and he has at least another volume and many hundred pages yet to go before he brings us up to the present. I suspect wags might wonder—and no doubt many Republicans might do so aloud—if Adams can tell his century’s tale and his part in it in 500 pages, do we really need twice as much of Schlesinger and his?

In fact, the journey from the Xenia, OH, of Woodrow Wilson’s America to Cambridge, MA, of Harry Truman’s is well worth making. An instructive observation made by Robert Frost to author Roger Kahn suggests at least part of the reason why this is so. When Kahn, seeking the Great Man’s approval, pointed out that he was not only a sportswriter but also had written on more respectable and serious topics than baseball, Frost replied, “Of course. Nearly everybody has to lead two lives. Poets. Sculptors. Nearly everyone has to lead two lives at the very least…. When I was young my family worried all the time that I was going to waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they worried that I would waste my life and be a poet. And they were right.”

Though Schlesinger has been neither pitcher nor poet, by age 33 he had proven Frost right indeed, leading far more than the two lives we all lead—scholar, best-selling author, teacher, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, government bureaucrat, journalist, political activist. And in and out of these lives meander many of the century’s interesting characters: Isaiah Berlin, various Roosevelts, a Churchill or two, both Alsops, the Grahams of the Washington Post, James Forrestal, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Kenneth Galbraith, Felix Frankfurter, Archibald MacLeish, any historian worth knowing (if they can be counted as “interesting” to the general reading public), as well as countless other minor characters who, in the delicious character sketches Schlesinger renders, sound every bit as interesting, maybe more so, than the more recognizable people we meet.

Further, there are some fairly significant events in this period to talk about—the 1920s, the Depression and FDR’s New Deal, WW II, postwar reconstruction. If family friends include such pooh-bahs as those cited above and if their stage is so alive with activity, why spare the verbiage? Further, if one tosses in the purely whimsical as well—martini recipes over the years, for instance, or a short riff on the sartorial correctness of the bow tie, it all adds up. What it adds up to is three decades with the Schlesingers in the American Century. Quite a family. Quite a century. And thus, quite a story.

A Thoroughly Academic Family

Tying these lives and people together are the intellectual passions of both Senior and Junior Schlesinger and the academic communities that nourish them. Principal among them is, of course, Cambridge, MA, though we first glimpse the midwest of the ’20s and college campuses in Ohio and Iowa, and first into focus is Schlesinger Senior. Father Schlesinger is professor of history in small-town America at a time that is, as son Schlesinger admits, a sunny time, an innocent time. He describes an America of Lions Clubs, of Norman Rockwell, of solid middle-class American values, not to mention a parade of characters right out of central casting for a Frank Capra movie. Yet, in a balance true of the entire book, these respectful and affectionate memories are accompanied with more serious business. In this case we learn about Arthur Sr.’s contribution to American historiography, specifically as an advocate of the New History that sought, for the first time, to leaven the heavy doses of political and military history—then accepted as the only history—with social and cultural history.

Schlesinger’s is a thoroughly academic family, enriched, so family legend goes, with the blood of the first great American historian, George Bancroft, and, respectful of the traditions of fact-gathering historians, everyone in the family seems to collect all manner of archival material—letters, diaries, anecdotes, and other aides-mémoires. Further, everyone reads—they read fast, they read a great deal and they read well. Dad reads 547 books by the time he is 14, Mom keeps copies of Epictetus’ Discourses and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations by her bedside. Thus, as the family moves to the heady reality of Cambridge and young Arthur takes up this family pastime, we are presented with a whole chapter on young Arthur’s boyhood reading, and later the details of his movie habit—on average 96 movies a year between 1930 and ’35. (When did he have time for all that reading?) And this isn’t just a litany of titles, but rather a small essay on the place of movies in America’s culture and psyche in times of depression and want.

Exeter and Harvard

Though Schlesinger certainly observed the Depression, it seems not to have cramped the family style. Thus, when young Arthur graduates from Exeter too young for Harvard—that would be 15—off they go on a round-the-world trip, amply recorded and preserved in the young teenager’s diary, though without serious ruminations on what it all means.

More serious are the Harvard years, where academic heroes and longtime friendships abound. Here Schlesinger is mentored by Perry Miller, F.O. Matheisson, Bernard DeVoto and others who, Schlesinger reminds us, were rewriting America’s story and challenging the interpretations of that story given us by the historians of the ’20s and earlier times. Catastrophes such as depressions and other seismic shifts in history alter our perspective on the past, another theme that Schlesinger returns to often in small essays within the larger narrative, as when he discusses the Jackson period or the Civil War. And it is as a Harvard undergraduate that Schlesinger begins his illustrious writing career, first with a college thesis that becomes his first published work, a biography of a little-known 19th-century figure, Orestes Brownson. Interesting choice of topic, since Brownson’s academic-turned -public-figure somewhat mirrors Schlesinger’s own life. Brownson, however, evinced a somewhat promiscuous intellectualism much in contrast to the New Deal orthodoxy of Schlesinger, which was born in these Harvard years.

A year in England’s Cambridge on a fellowship, followed by a three-year appointment to Harvard’s new Society of Fellows, allows Schlesinger time to begin focusing on a larger canvas of American history than that afforded him in Brownson. This time he begins with that family connection, George Bancroft, which soon turns into a complete reinterpretation of the Jackson period, which will later appear as his book, The Age of Jackson, to high acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize. At this time, as labors on Jackson continue, Schlesinger hears Reinhold Niebuhr for the first time and hears of the duty to action Niebuhr’s Christian ethics demand. He also meets more of those attractive, bright, engaging young New Dealers who are putting that philosophy into action, whether or not they have ever heard of Reinhold Niebuhr. Schlesinger’s lifelong activism and periodic abandonment of academia is largely stimulated by these two influences.

WW II and Washington

While the Depression may not have unduly disturbed the Schlesingers, a world war surely does: Anyone who wants to play a role can find a spot, and thus begins his Washington experience. Schlesinger joins government service as a writer, first in Washington, then London and then, to see the war close-up, in Paris. As with other venues, fascinating characters emerge, brought to life by wonderfully candid and expressive sketches. We might wish for more about his family, which by now includes wife Marion and two children, soon to be four, though the importance and influence of family is part of the private life that remains private. With war’s end another year’s writing, this time for Fortune, maintains the Schlesingers in Washington where we become flies on the wall at those Georgetown cocktail and dinner parties we used to hear so much about. Arthur was there and thus so are we.

Yet this was not just a time of martini-fueled bonhomie. It was also a time of friends falling out, the time of Communists in every government office and imminent Russian takeover, another one of those seismic shifts brought home to Schlesinger when his overseas clearances are held up by nosy Department of Defense bureaucrats. Fortunately, highly placed newspaper publishers call the right people and clear the way. But this small personal irritation merges with the ’48 election and the growing McCarthyism to highlight the tensions of postwar America, when friendships were mortgaged to ideology.

Not so with Schlesinger, at least for the most part. Though there were occasional lapses of amity with this person or that, cordiality returned when battles ceased and tempers cooled. And in the retelling, despite the fervor with which intellectual and political conflicts were waged at the time, no grudges seem to be maintained, no old scores left to settle. In fact, equanimity and cheerfulness abound in this narrative. With enemies Schlesinger is charitable and gracious, sometimes being as critical of himself as he is of adversaries. Yet there also is not a whit of apology or recantation for his abiding faithfulness to New Deal liberalism, a constancy and loyalty to old principles that will infuriate ideologues both right and left. But one gets the sense that Schlesinger sleeps well at night.

This first volume ends with the Schlesingers comfortably situated on Irving Street in Cambridge, a short walk to the Harvard campus, where young Arthur takes up his place beside his father and the other luminaries of the history department. Of course, this too will be a temporary academic assignment, as other government and professional challenges, those other lives of his, will move him in different directions in the years ahead. But that’s for volume two, or perhaps volumes two and three. After all, he still has fifty more years of publications, political service, professorship, friendships with all manner of amusing people, to say nothing about American history and international relations, to tell us about. And who’s counting, anyway?

—John D. Herney '46, '71 (Hon.)

A Treasure Amid the Trash

In Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York, the Last 200 Years (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), writer Benjamin Miller ’71 has found historical treasure in an unlikely spot: in the refuse of New York City, and the sometimes rancid city politics surrounding it. An article in the New York Times last November praised the book for resurrecting “the forgotten scandals, scoundrels and saints of the city’s garbage past. [It] is full of stories that seem straight from Dickens and Jacob Riis.” Some of the most Dickensian stories concerns the aptly named Barren Island, which, from the mid-19th century until the early part of the 20th, served as New York City’s town dump, teeming with household waste, including animal carcasses. The island was also home to a small community of immigrants whose job it was to deal with what the rest of New York discarded, sorting the garbage by hand to salvage metal, paper, rags, bones—anything that could be “recycled” and sold. Miller’s subject is often unsavory, but his prose is clear and compelling throughout.

John D. “Jack” Herney, who stepped down last June after a five-year term as dean of faculty, is an instructor in history.