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Samuel Eliot Morison

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Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison in his official U.S. Navy portrait
AllegianceUnited States of America
Service/branchUnited States Navy
Years of service1942–1946
RankRear Admiral (Reserve)
Battles/warsWorld War II
AwardsLegion of Merit with Combat Distinguishing Device "V"

Commander of the Order of the White Rose of Finland
Vuelo Panamericano Medal, awarded by the Republic of Cuba (1943)
Cavaliero Ufficiale of the Italian Order, Ordine al Merito della Repubblica (1961)

Commander of the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic (1963)

Samuel Eliot Morison, Rear Admiral, United States Naval Reserve (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian, noted for producing works of maritime history that were both authoritative and highly readable. A sailor as well as a scholar, Morison garnered numerous honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes, two Bancroft Prizes, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His general history textbooks were both widely used[citation needed], though criticized for their treatment of American slavery.

Biography

Personal

Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston, Massachusetts to John Holmes Morison (1856–1911) and Emily Marshall (Eliot) Morison (1857–1925) and named for his grandfather Samuel Eliot. His early childhood is charmingly described in a memoir of 1962, entitled "One Boy's Boston."

He married twice and was the father of four children by his first wife, Elizabeth S. Greene. (One of these children, Emily Morison Beck became the editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.) After his wife Elizabeth's death in 1945, in 1949 he married a Baltimore widow, Priscilla Barton. Morison again became a widower in 1973.

Morison died on May 15, 1976 of a stroke at the age of 88, and his ashes are buried at Northeast Harbor, Maine.

His grandson Michael Noyes Morison was known as "Franklin D. Churchill," storyline president of the Millennium Wrestling Federation. He died in June 2006.

Academic career

His schooling was typical for a member of a Boston Brahmin family: he attended Noble and Greenough School (1897–1901) and St. Paul's (1901–03) before enrolling at Harvard, where he would remain for much of his academic life.

Morison earned his AB from Harvard, where he was a member of the Phoenix S.K. Club, in 1908, studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris (1908–1909), and returned to Harvard where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1912. His doctoral thesis, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, became Morison's first book.

Upon receiving his doctorate, Morison went to Berkeley to serve as an instructor in history, and, in 1915, returned to Harvard in the same capacity. After spending 1922–25 at Oxford as Harmsworth Professor of American History, he became full professor at Harvard in 1925. Morison was promoted to Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History in 1941 and retired from Harvard in 1955.

Morison continued writing prolifically after his retirement. He received the Balzan prize for history 1962 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Books

Morison held that experience and research should be combined synergetically for writing vivid history. For his Pulitzer-winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Morison combined his personal interest in sailing with his scholarship by chartering a boat and sailing to the various places that Christopher Columbus was then thought to have visited. He also wrote about the man he described as one of the greatest pioneers, explorers and colonists of all time, Samuel de Champlain. He followed every of his voyages in the Gulf of Maine and traced others by airplane.

Official Historian of US Navy during World War II

Statue of Morison on the Commonwealth Avenue mall.

Unlike World War I, for which the US military had not prepared a full-scale official history of any branch of service, it was decided that World War II would be meticulously documented. Professional historians were attached to all the branches of the US military; they were embedded with combat units to witness the events about which they would later write.

Toward this end, in 1942, Morison was commissioned into the United States Naval Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. The result was the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, a work in fifteen volumes that covered every aspect of America's war at sea, from strategic planning and battle tactics to the technology of war and the exploits of individuals during the conflict. A one-volume abridgement of the official history, The Two Ocean War, was published in 1963.

In recognition of his achievements, the Navy awarded him the Legion of Merit and eventually promoted Morison to the rank of Rear Admiral (Reserve). In addition, the Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigate, USS Samuel Eliot Morison, was named in his honor.

The celebrated British military historian Sir John Keegan has hailed Morison's official history as the best to come out of the Second World War.

One of his research assistants on that project, Henry Salomon, went on to conceive the epic NBC documentary series Victory at Sea.

Criticism

Morison and his co-author Henry Steele Commager were criticized by African American intellectuals and other scholars for their very popular and influential textbook "The Growth of the American Republic", first published in 1930. The book's controversial section was written by Morison. The textbook was attacked for it's stereotypical depiction of slavery in America and of African American life after Emancipation and during Reconstruction.

The first two editions of the textbook echoed the thesis of American Negro Slavery (1918) by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, sometimes called the Phillips school of slavery historiography, although subject to intense criticism throughout the years for it's racist underpinnings, remained the most comprehensive and authoritative source on the history of American slavery[1] until it was successfully challenged by Kenneth M. Stampp in The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) and Stanley M. Elkins in "Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life" (1958). Although W.E.B. Du Bois had attacked Phillps' views,[2], and had written extensively about slave life, he did not do so using comprehensive, scientific methodology that Phillips had so effectively employed, and which was later adopted by Stampp and Elkins.)(also see: The Slave Community and Slavery in the United States

Phillips theories were considered by many to be ground-breaking and progressive when first proposed (Phillips was a member of the Progressive party) but by 1940 they were widely seen by black, and young white intellectuals under reporting the negative human effects of slavery. It relied on the one-sided personal records of rich slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution.[3] Criticism of the textbook was begun in 1944 by the NAACP and was soon taken up by students at City College where Morison taught. According to Jumonville, Morison was so convinced of the accuracy of his position that he believed for a time that communist agitators were behind the protests against the textbook. Finally, in 1950, under relentless pressure from students and younger colleagues, Morison, while denying any racist intent (He noted that his daughter had been married to Joel Elias Spingarn, the former President of the NAACP[4]) reluctantly agreed to most, but not all, of the demanded changes. There remained in the new edition a few elements from the Phillps school of analysis, such as: slaves were loyal and devoted to their masters because they were treated well, better than, for example, Northern wage laborers and Irish peasants.(also see: Wage labor, Wage Slavery and Famine#Ireland, and Morison continued to claim that there had been positive, civilizing effects from the American system of slavery. He also refused to remove references to stereotypes of African Americans such as Sambo, Uncle Tom and Pickaninny, that he thought were vital in accurately depicting the racist nature of American culture in the 19th and early 20th century, an era when even the most enlightened progressive thinkers routinely explained many aspects of human behavior as being a result of innate racial or ethnic characteristics.[5] (also see: Stereotypes_of_groups_within_the_United_States#Black_stereotypes)

In Morison's view, the vast majority of white Americans during the Reconstruction, and it's aftermath, were big hearted and generous racists, not at all mean spirited -- they believed that blacks were genetically inferior but held no ill will against them, and, in fact, found them charming and wanted to help them to adapt to a more civilized life. (Americans could afford to be generous, they were living in America after all) Morison's rather cartoonish version of the Reconstruction and turn-of-the-century America, with it's cast of black stereotypes, was considered by many to be a highly sanitized and/or naive version of history and was challenged by a rising generation of ethnic and revisionist historians in the late 1950s and 1960s who, continuing the effort begun by Du Bois in his 1935 book [Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880], would document the rising tide of violence and segregation laws directed against blacks in an effort to rollback their rights. (also see: Nadir of American race relations and Historian)

Morison did not agree to remove the black racial stereotypes and the remaining references to Phillips until the next edition, which appeared in 1962. However, schools do not immediately dispose of expensive textbooks when new editions are issued and old versions of the book remained in use for many years, well into the 1970s.

Books by Samuel Eliot Morison

Most of these have been reprinted and reissued.

  • The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848 (1913)
  • The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (1921)
  • The Oxford History of the United States (1927)
  • Builders of the Bay Colony: A Gallery of Our Intellectual Ancestors (1930; 2nd ed., 1964)
  • The Growth of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager, New York: Oxford University Press, 1930 [as Oxford History of the United States; 7th ed., 1980]. Revised and abridged edition with Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Leuchtenberg. Published by Oxford University Press in 1980 as A Concise History of the American Republic, rev. 1983.
  • The Founding of Harvard College (1935)
  • Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (1936)
  • Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (Harvard University Press, 1936)
  • The Puritan Pronaos (1936)
  • Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1940)
  • Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Little Brown, 1942)
  • History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946)
  • The Ropemakers of Plymouth (1950)
  • History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (1947–1962)
  • Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (editor) (1952)
  • By Land and By Sea (1953)
  • Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little, Brown and Company, 1955)
  • The Story of the 'Old Colony' of New Plymouth (1956)
  • John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (Little, Brown and Company, 1959)
  • The Story of Mount Desert Island (1960)
  • One Boy's Boston: 1887-1901 (Houghton Mifflin, 1962)
  • The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (1963)
  • The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
  • The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1971)
  • Samuel De Champlain: Father of New France (1972)
  • The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (1974)
  • A Concise History of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenberg) (1976)

Awards

(years listed are when prizes were awarded)

Lifetime achievement honors

Military and Foreign Honors and Awards

Book prizes

Honorary degrees

In honor of Samuel Eliot Morison

Quotes

  • "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." History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946)
  • "America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy." The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
  • "But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period—Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States—are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao." The Oxford History of the American People (1965)

References

  1. ^ Al-Tony Gilmore, introduction to Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community: The Scholars Respond, ed. Al-Tony Gilmore (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. x–xi, ISBN 0-8371-9879-8.
  2. ^ W. E. B. Du Bois, review of American Negro Slavery, in American Political Science Review 12 (November 1918): pp. 722–726, reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), ISBN 0-8050-3264-9.
  3. ^ "web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/doing/doinghistoriography.html".
  4. ^ Jumonville, Commager p. 147
  5. ^ "Gossett, Thomas F.; Race: The History of an Idea in America".
  6. ^ Fuerza Aerea Dominicana: Vuelo Panamericano
    Acontecimientos de significativa trascendencia histórica, que repercutó en todos los países latinoamericanos, del [C]aribe y Europa, lo fue el Vuelo Panamericano[.] El recorrido aéreo por los cielos americanos fue una proyección de la Quinta Conferencia Internacional Americana, donde los Estados Unidos pertenecientes en el cónclave aprobaron por unanimidad la Resolución mediante la cual se recomendó a los Gobiernos de las Repúblicas Americanas, honrar la memoria del Gran Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón con la erección de un Faro Monumental en su honor [...]. Los gobiernos de Cuba y la República Dominicana, receptivos de esa directiva, se decidieron por mancomunar esfuerzos para crear una escuadrilla aérea que rasgara los espacios etéreos en recorrido de Buena Voluntad por los países americanos, haciendo de ese modo un llamado fraternal [...]. La Escuadrilla Panamericana estuvo integrada por cuatro aviones. Tres de ellos procedían de Cuba y pertenecían a la Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, al Ejército Constitucionalista de Cuba y a la Marina Constitucional Cubana, respectivamente.

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