Allan Nevins — an Appreciation

ALLAN NEVINS — AN APPRECIATION by John Allen Krout COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THIS RATHER AUSTERE era of historical writing it is not often that a professional historian elbows his hard-won notes off his desk and sets himself the task of defining the nature and scope of history. Fortunately for us that is exactly what Allan Nevins did almost a quarter century ago. The result was published in 1938 under the title The Gateway to History. A gateway it has been ever since to generations of college and university students, in- tent upon teaching as a career, and also to a host of amateurs merely seeking "a very Doric entrance to the historical domain." Its pages are bright with the qualities which Professor Nevins over the years has exemplified: erudition, enthusiasm, clarity, and brilliance. "History," he writes, "in its protean forms touches the realm of ideas at more points than any other study, and in the best of its forms it is compact as much of ideas as of fact." One doubts that he fully realized this truth when, as a boy in an Illinois farmhouse, his imagination was first stirred by the events recorded by Macaulay and Prescott and Parkman. But he learned it quickly as newspaperman, teacher, biographer, and editor. His life long he has been trying to persuade his fellow coun- trymen that if history is read "by the blazing illumination" of an aroused intellectual curiosity, it will richly provide the materials out of which each successive generation may fashion the philoso- phy it so sorely needs. Allan Nevins was already at home in the world of letters when Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes persuaded him in 1928 to join the Department of History at Columbia University. His editorials vi AN APPRECIATION in the New York Evening Post, The Nation, and the New York World had shown how happily were combined in him the talents of the painstaking scholar and the literary artist. His interest in aspiring students quickly became highly personal and stubbornly enduring. He was concerned not only to guide the young historian toward an understanding of historical method but also to make him aware of the opportunities which history, as a form of literature, offered to the writer, the editor, the critic. For almost two decades he carried the responsibility for all those in the Department of History who were candidates for the master's de- gree and were writing a master's essay; and yet he found time to give a hand to scores who were preparing doctoral dissertations for publication. When his colleagues protested that he was carrying too heavy a load, he would reply with a wry smile that no task had really seemed burdensome since he left the Illinois farm. What moments he could call "spare," he devoted to his own writing. And most of it was exciting. In 1933 the Pulitzer Prize for biography came to him for Grover Cleveland: a Study in Courage, and again in 1937 for Hamilton Fish: the Inner His- tory of the Grant Administration. Ten years later he received the Bancroft Prize and the Scribner Centenary Prize for the first two volumes of The Ordeal of the Union. Now in the fifth of ten volumes, the Ordeal portrays on a heroic scale the cruel test- ing of American national unity from the Compromise of 1850 to the close of the Reconstruction Era. To appreciate Professor Nevins's monumental achievement one needs only to compare his volumes with James Ford Rhodes's History, so long regarded as the classic interpretation of this period in American life. His inquiring mind, fortified by his enduring energy, has led Allan Nevins into many bypaths off the main highways of history; but his chief concern about mankind's story is unmistakable. He has given it monolithic form in the address which he delivered to the American Historical Association, as its President, in De- cember, 1959. He would have the professional historians and the popular historians forget their earlier recriminations and join in a common effort to give greater attention to a. humanized and at- AN APPRECIATION vii tractive presentation of the record of the past. In the last analy- sis, he insists, the historian is the servant of the great democratic public. "That public has come through a terrible period of con- fusion, effort and disaster, and lives on in a period of intense strain. It needs all the sense of pattern, all the moral fortitude, all the faith in the power of liberty and morality to survive the assaults of tyranny and wrong, that historians of every school can give it." The contributors to this Festschrift, all of them recipients of the doctorate under Professor Nevins's supervision, have had in the present enterprise the benefit of the encouragement and guidance of Donald Sheehan, Associate Professor of History and Assistant to the President at Smith College, and Harold C. Syrett, now Professor of History at Columbia and editor of the Alexander Hamilton papers. They represent hundreds of students who would honor Professor Ν e vins as scholar, author, and teacher. They have enjoyed his exciting lectures, have learned of new areas for historical research in his seminars, and have been instructed by the way in which he has applied his concept of the nature and scope of history to the subjects on which he has written. Most of all they have been moved by his ability to show then) how en- grossing the pursuit of history can be. The late Stuart P. Sherman of the University of Illinois once remarked that Allan Nevins in his younger days was a remark- able combination of St. Vitus and Benjamin Franklin. If the ob- servation be true, surely the Franklin strain has grown stronger with the passing years. Indeed, one might say today of Professor Nevins what Carl Van Doren said of Franklin: "More than any single man, a harmonious human multitude." March 1,1960 .

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