Samuel Eliot Morison: Remembered
Samuel Eliot Morison, the last Harvard historian to ride a horse to work, liked to canter to Cambridge on his gray gelding, tie it to a tree in the Yard, stuff his saddlebags with papers to grade, and trot back home to his four-story brick house at the foot of Beacon Hill. “Ours was the horsey end of town,” he wrote of the place where he was born, in 1887, and died, in 1976. Morison has been called the greatest American historian of the twentieth century. With that, as these things go, not everyone agrees. He spent nearly all his career at Harvard; he entered as a freshman in 1904, and retired, an endowed professor, in 1955. Summers he spent sailing: he loved nothing so much as the ocean. “My feeling for the sea,” Morison said, “is such that writing about it is about as embarrassing as making a confession of religious faith.”
Morison wrote more than fifty books and won two Pulitzer Prizes, but he is probably best remembered for his biography of Christopher Columbus, whose voyages he retraced, in 1939 and 1940, by yacht. When the resulting book was published, in 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so impressed that he agreed to allow Morison to join the Navy as what we might now call an “embedded historian”: for the remainder of the Second World War, Lieutenant Commander Morison fought the battles about which he later spent twenty years writing; the result, in fifteen dense, salt-sprayed volumes, was “The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.” He left the Navy in 1951, a rear admiral.
Besides the sea, Morison wrote about two things especially well: Colonial New England and historical writing. In a 1931 essay called “Those Misunderstood Puritans,” he fought hard against the notion that “the fathers of New England” were “somber kill-joys.” Morison blamed this myth on the Victorians, who cast the Puritans as prudes in order that they might feel, by comparison, broad-minded. As Morison pointed out, with characteristic clarity, relying on the nineteenth century to understand the seventeenth is a rather grave chronological error. “The right approach to the Puritan founders of New England is historical, by way of the Middle Ages,” he explained. “They were, broadly speaking, the Englishmen who had accepted the Reformation without the Renaissance.”
Reading Morison, you can almost hear yourself agree with him, even when you don’t. That was Morison’s gift. Except that it wasn’t a gift. Morison cared about writing, evangelically, but he had to work hard at it, and he railed against members of his profession who were unwilling to exert the same effort. In a twenty-five-cent pamphlet, “History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians,” printed in 1946, Morison complained, “American historians, in their eagerness to present facts and their laudable concern to tell the truth, have neglected the literary aspects of their craft. They have forgotten that there is an art of writing history.”
They had forgotten, that is, an American literary tradition begun by “the earliest colonial historians” and, above all, by William Bradford, the governor and first chronicler of the Plymouth plantation. In 1620, Bradford crossed what he called “the vast and furious ocean” on board the Mayflower, a hundred-and-eighty-ton, three-masted, square-rigged merchant vessel, its cramped berths filled with forty other religious dissenters who wanted to separate from the Church of England, and some sixty rather less pious passengers who were in search of nothing so much as adventure. Bradford called these “profane” passengers “Strangers,” but to modern sensibilities they can feel more familiar than, say, William Brewster, who brought along a son named Wrestling, short for “wrestling with God.”...
Read entire article at Jill Lepore in the New Yorker
Morison wrote more than fifty books and won two Pulitzer Prizes, but he is probably best remembered for his biography of Christopher Columbus, whose voyages he retraced, in 1939 and 1940, by yacht. When the resulting book was published, in 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so impressed that he agreed to allow Morison to join the Navy as what we might now call an “embedded historian”: for the remainder of the Second World War, Lieutenant Commander Morison fought the battles about which he later spent twenty years writing; the result, in fifteen dense, salt-sprayed volumes, was “The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.” He left the Navy in 1951, a rear admiral.
Besides the sea, Morison wrote about two things especially well: Colonial New England and historical writing. In a 1931 essay called “Those Misunderstood Puritans,” he fought hard against the notion that “the fathers of New England” were “somber kill-joys.” Morison blamed this myth on the Victorians, who cast the Puritans as prudes in order that they might feel, by comparison, broad-minded. As Morison pointed out, with characteristic clarity, relying on the nineteenth century to understand the seventeenth is a rather grave chronological error. “The right approach to the Puritan founders of New England is historical, by way of the Middle Ages,” he explained. “They were, broadly speaking, the Englishmen who had accepted the Reformation without the Renaissance.”
Reading Morison, you can almost hear yourself agree with him, even when you don’t. That was Morison’s gift. Except that it wasn’t a gift. Morison cared about writing, evangelically, but he had to work hard at it, and he railed against members of his profession who were unwilling to exert the same effort. In a twenty-five-cent pamphlet, “History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians,” printed in 1946, Morison complained, “American historians, in their eagerness to present facts and their laudable concern to tell the truth, have neglected the literary aspects of their craft. They have forgotten that there is an art of writing history.”
They had forgotten, that is, an American literary tradition begun by “the earliest colonial historians” and, above all, by William Bradford, the governor and first chronicler of the Plymouth plantation. In 1620, Bradford crossed what he called “the vast and furious ocean” on board the Mayflower, a hundred-and-eighty-ton, three-masted, square-rigged merchant vessel, its cramped berths filled with forty other religious dissenters who wanted to separate from the Church of England, and some sixty rather less pious passengers who were in search of nothing so much as adventure. Bradford called these “profane” passengers “Strangers,” but to modern sensibilities they can feel more familiar than, say, William Brewster, who brought along a son named Wrestling, short for “wrestling with God.”...