480 Sherman Pkwy, New Haven, CT 06511, United States
Hendrick attended New Haven's Hillhouse High School, where he edited the literary magazine, but had to defer college until he had earned the tuition by working at various clerking jobs.
College/University
Gallery of Burton Hendrick
Yale Univeristy, New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Hendrick studied at Yale where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees.
480 Sherman Pkwy, New Haven, CT 06511, United States
Hendrick attended New Haven's Hillhouse High School, where he edited the literary magazine, but had to defer college until he had earned the tuition by working at various clerking jobs.
(The influence of free and universal education, together w...)
The influence of free and universal education, together with that of political institutions which at every point inculcate self-respect and stimulate ambition, must be accorded much weight in keeping the Republic the freest of all civilized nations from pauperism and crime.
Burton Jesse Hendrick was an American journalist, biographer and historian. He was an editor of the New Haven Morning News, wrote for McClure's Magazine, and was also associate editor at Walter Hines Page's World's Work.
Background
Burton Jesse Hendrick was born on December 8, 1870, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. He was the fourth son and fifth of six children of Charles Buddington Hendrick and Mary Elizabeth (Johnson) Hendrick. The families of both parents had long resided in the New Haven area. The father, a watchmaker, and inventor, was descended from Hendrik Hendrickson, who had come from the Netherlands to New Amsterdam in 1650 and had moved soon after 1664 to Connecticut.
Encouraged by an older sister who was a librarian, Burton Hendrick early showed an interest in literature and a talent for writing.
Education
Hendrick attended New Haven's Hillhouse High School, where he edited the literary magazine, but had to defer college until he had earned the tuition by working at various clerking jobs.
He entered Yale when he was nearly twenty-one and quickly distinguished himself as a writer, becoming editor of both the Banner and the Courant and financial editor of the Yale Literary Magazine. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1895.
Hendrick's initial ambition was to become a literary scholar, and it was to finance further study that he entered newspaper work. In 1896, after brief reportorial assignments, he became editor of the New Haven Morning News and at the same time began graduate work in English at Yale under the direction of Henry A. Beers.
To help finance his second year of graduate study, Hendrick accepted an assignment as the ghost-writer of Dragons and Cherry Blossoms (1896), an account of travels in Japan by Alice Parmelee Morris. In 1897 he received his Master of Arts degree from Yale, and a few months later the Morning News ceased publication.
Hendrick, unable to obtain an academic position, accepted a job in 1899 as a staff reporter on the New York Evening Post. Here, under the tutelage first of E. L. Godkin and later of Horace White, he learned well the skills of accurate and detailed reporting that would give distinction to his later work. An article he submitted to McClure's Magazine caught the attention of the publisher, S. S. McClure, who in 1905 asked Hendrick to join the staff at the then lavish salary of $100 a week.
Hendrick entered a distinguished company of writers, including such investigative reporters as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker, who were making McClure's a national pulpit for progressivism. Although a series of articles that he wrote in 1906 on the scandals revealed by legislative investigation of the New York life insurance industry was as valuable to the cause of reform as any other expose published by the magazine, Hendrick never regarded himself as a muckraker in the same category as Steffens and Tarbell, and his articles were generally less imprecatory.
When Steffens and others left McClure's in 1906 to take over the American Magazine, Hendrick declined to join them. He remained with McClure's until 1913, when he became associate editor and chief editorial writer of World's Work, then edited by Arthur Page, son of the founder and former editor Walter Hines Page, who had just been appointed an ambassador to Great Britain. Hendrick found the more leisurely, less sensational tone of World's Work more congenial to his temperament than the frenzied editorial offices of McClure's.
Hendrick is perhaps best known as a biographer and popular historian. After ghostwriting the autobiography (1919) of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, he published his first book under his own name, The Age of Big Business (1919), a volume in the Yale Chronicles of America series. During the 1920s he won three Pulitzer Prizes: for The Victory at Sea (1920), the wartime memoirs of Adm. William S. Sims, on which Hendrick "collaborated"; for The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page (1922-1925), on Page's wartime ambassadorship; and for The Training of an American (1928), on Page's earlier years.
Hendrick resigned from World's Work in 1927 to devote all his time to writing biography and history. With a large subsidy from Louise (Whitfield) Carnegie, widow of Andrew Carnegie, he spent five years in researching and writing The Life of Andrew Carnegie (1932). There followed The Lees of Virginia (1935); Bulwark of the Republic (1937), a "biography" of the Constitution; Statesmen of the Lost Cause (1939), on the leaders of the Confederacy; and Lincoln's War Cabinet (1946). All of these works, carefully researched and marked by a felicity of style that gave them wide popularity, showed Hendrick's early journalistic training; they were accurate and detailed but lacked sharp, critical evaluation.
His subjects all emerged as heroes. Hendrick nonetheless won recognition, even within the historical profession. He served on the Pulitzer Prize jury in history from 1930 to 1938, and on the jury for a biography from 1940 until his death.
He was engaged in writing a biography of Louise Carnegie when he died in New York City of a coronary occlusion. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.
Hendrick remained curiously apolitical, a detached commentator on, rather than a participant in, progressive reform. Although he strongly supported the antimonopoly philosophy inherent in Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom (including its application to organized labor), Charles Evans Hughes, whom he had first met as the chief government counsel in the life insurance investigations, was the only national political figure to win his unqualified support.
Membership
Hendrick was elected in 1923 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was its secretary from 1926 to 1932.
National Institute of Arts and Letters
1926 - 1932
Connections
On December 29, 1896 Hendrick married Bertha Jane Ives, the daughter of a New Haven manufacturer and a graduate of Mount Holyoke College. They had two sons, Ives and Hobart Johnson.
During the last several years of his life, Hendrick and his wife were separated, by mutual consent, and he took up permanent residence in the Yale Club of New York.