Remarks on the Kennedy Medal and the Practice of History

EDMUND SEARS MORGAN

At its annual meeting on October 23, 2003, the Massachusetts Historical Society had the presented the John F. Kennedy Award to Professor Edmund Sears Morgan. The bronze medal, struck in 1964, the year following the president's assassination, honors both the man for whom it was named and the individual on whom it is conferred. The individual so recognized is deemed to have "rendered distinguished service to the cause of history." Infrequently and judiciously granted, the Kennedy Award is the highest honor the Society bestows. On its reverse side, the medal bears President Kennedy's words "Liberty without learning is always in peril & learning without liberty is always in vain." In accepting the honor, Professor Morgan joined prior recipients Samuel Eliot Morison, Dumas Malone, Thomas Boylston Adams, and Oscar Handlin.       The outgoing MHS president, the Honorable Levin Campbell, presented the medal to the Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University and author of such influential works as The Puritan Dilemma (1958); The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (1962); American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975); Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won the Bancroft Prize; and a recently released and much praised biography of Benjamin Franklin. After receiving the award, Professor Morgan in turn honored the MHS with a brief autobiographical address. We are pleased to share his comments with our readers.–The Editors.
MY RETURN to the Massachusetts Historical Society today is like a homecoming. Since leaving Boston and Cambridge in 1946 for those other precincts, I have continued to think of 1154 Boylston Street as the place where American history began for me. It is here that I put in my graduate student years, sitting at the reading room's massive oaken tables, in the presence of other historians or would-be historians who always looked as though they knew more about what they were doing than I did; it is where I was periodically visited by my mentor and friend Perry Miller, who always assured me that the others were really no more sure of themselves than I was. Gradually I came to feel a proprietary interest in the Society, growing familiar with the inscrutable Mr. Wheeler, who would emerge from the secret recesses of the library to hand me the documents that carried me instantly back to the seventeenth century. Steve Riley, the assistant librarian, was another reassuring presence. We started a friendship then that lasted a lifetime.	1
In 1942, when Perry and Steve went off to the war, I had just finished my dissertation; I went off to the machine shop of the Radiation Laboratory, the only machinist with a Ph.D. degree in the humanities, a fact I was careful not to advertise to the new friends I made there. But as I came out from the world of lathes and milling machines in 1946, I was happy to have the passport to that world of professors and would-be professors where I have lived ever since. A passport, of course, is all that it was. In the academy, it was taken for granted that I had done so. Academics do not normally place "Dr." before their names except south of the Mason-Dixon line or at the American Philosophical Society, where everybody is called Doctor. Elsewhere, the title is reserved for people who practice medicine. The Ph.D. is simply a ticket of admission that can be torn up at the door. But it is not a ticket of admission to membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society.	2
To be elected a member of the Society, as I was in 1949, was to join a company of scholars who lived beyond and, as it seemed and still seems to me, above academia. The members of the Society had been studying and writing major works of history long before serious historical research was claimed as the exclusive province of the professionals, that is to say, the professors in the academy. By earning the doctorate, I became one of those professionals, and the Society had already honored many other such professionals with membership. Significantly, the only other member of the Society now living who was admitted before me–Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.–was also a professional, though he had reached that status by a more difficult route, the Harvard Society of Fellows. But significantly also, his career has been as much outside the academy as within it.	3
I'm not sure when we professionals came to outnumber the other scholars in the MHS, but fortunately we have not been allowed to turn it into a professional society. It is not a part of any university and, I trust, never will be. It still invites amateurs into its ranks. It still honors scholarship that has nothing to do with the scramble for jobs and titles inside the academy.	4
I was struck by this fact when I received the letter from Bill Fowler announcing the honor just conferred on me. The Council's description of the award stated that it "will not be limited to any field of history or in fact to any particular kind of service to history. President Kennedy would have been a highly eligible first recipient." That description could serve as an ideal standard for membership in the Society, a standard that was evident a hundred years, even two hundred years, ago. Look at the membership list in Len Tucker's lively history of the MHS, and consider all those Adamses: John, John Quincy, Charles Francis, Henry, Brooks, and not least Thomas Boylston Adams. These were people who served history in many different ways. And there were others like them who both made and wrote history: Robert C. Winthrop and Henry Clay, George Kennan and Winston Churchill. The people who make history today are mostly too busy to write it until they retire, and we professionals will probably make up most of the MHS membership in the years to come. But I hope the Society will cling to its separation from the academy and remain independent of the constraints that a university imposes on its members.	5
The qualifications for membership today seem to be less restricted geographically and sexually than they were in the nineteenth century. We had only one woman member then and fewer men from outside New England. But the intellectual reach was perhaps wider. In Len Tucker's list I note the names of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant. More recently, would not Robert Frost and Stephen Vincent Benét have been good candidates? Might not Robert Lowell have been as appropriate as James Russell Lowell? The service of poets to history is perhaps debatable, but if there is one thing that historians need most today, it is sensitivity to the use of words. We need a little more poetic resonance in our prose.	6
We professionals, for lack of that sensitivity, have lost the public following that some of our members–Bancroft, Hildreth, Parkman, Prescott–enjoyed in the nineteenth century. In 1967 the Society's discovery of women had the happy effect of partially restoring its orientation to people outside the academy. Esther Forbes and Barbara Tuchman had a larger public than most other members have attained. I hope the Society's reach will extend to more historians outside the academy because they have written some of the most significant historical works of the past century. I think of George Dangerfield's studies of English liberalism and of the Era of Good Feelings. I think of Douglas Southall Freeman's life of Washington and Irving Brant's life of Madison. For us professionals, it is a humbling and salutary experience to recognize that writing great history does not necessarily require the kind of training we went through and now dispense to others.	7
That recognition came to me almost forty years ago in an experience that brings me back, if a little remotely, to a service John F. Kennedy performed for history that is not generally known. In 1962 I published a life of Ezra Stiles, an eighteenth-century minister and president of Yale, who left behind a trove of twenty thousand pages of manuscript correspondence and journals that offer a unique glimpse into the intellectual life of the New England of his time. I had worked over those manuscripts for ten years and was pretty satisfied with the resulting book. Like all historians who have labored long and hard to produce a text, I had hopes of winning one of the prestigious awards, like the Bancroft Prize, with which we professionals congratulate each other. When the announcement of the Bancroft Prize was made early in 1963, I looked with some excitement to see if I had won it. What I found was that I had not, but my sister had. My sister had never taken a course in history during her undergraduate years at Vassar nor in a year or two of graduate work in English at Radcliffe. Her book was on Pearl Harbor, and the next time I saw Sam Morison he complimented me on having a sister who had written the only historical analysis of Pearl Harbor worth reading.	8
The book was in fact a report written for the Rand Corporation, funded by the Air Force. Most of it was based on information in the public domain, but the Air Force was so alarmed by its disclosures that higher-ups had had it classified. Word of it got around to a few historians who had access to classified material. One of them who knew President Kennedy told him that it ought to be published. President Kennedy so informed the Air Force, overruling their restriction. The book was then published by the Stanford University Press and remains in my opinion the best thing on the subject.	9
I am not suggesting that Roberta Wohlstetter, my sister, should have been a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. She had very little interest in history as such. Her principal interest after writing the book, however, was terrorism, about which she became something of an expert, long before the days of Al Qaeda. The disclosures of Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision that so alarmed the Air Force have a curious resonance today. Roberta concluded that the Navy, which had access to Japanese codes, had read every message that Tokyo had sent its ships' commanders. The messages that pertained to the coming attack on the United States were so embedded in other, irrelevant messages that it would have been impossible in the week between transmission and attack to extract any warning that Pearl Harbor was in danger. In the years ahead, she assumed, we were unlikely to have as much as a single day to decipher signals and so could not possibly be prepared to defend ourselves against an attack. As some members of Congress proceed to second-guess American intelligence officers who failed to recognize that 9/11 was coming, I am reminded of the supposed intelligence failures before Pearl Harbor. It was a service to history to disabuse people of the illusion that Pearl Harbor could have been prevented by better intelligence. I regret to say that it was truly a greater service than my own decoding of eighteenth-century New England intellectual history. And in accepting this medal, I am particularly honored by the council's dictum that President Kennedy would have been a highly eligible first recipient. I am happy that he had a role in making possible the recognition that my sister received in 1963, when I didn't quite make it. I am proud that I have now been placed in the company of those who have done a service to history without academic limits and, especially, to have been placed there by the Society where American history began for me.	10
Images pages 1, 3, and 5 all John F. Kennedy Award of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Rudolph Ruzicki, designer; Joseph DiLorenzo, sculptor for The Medallic Art Co.; 1965 Bronze 90 mm. Collections of the MHS, [Medals, large–personal].

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