Charles Callan Tansill

Background

Charles C. Tansill was born in 1890 in Fredericksburg, Texas. He was the son of Charles Fiske Tansill, a government telegraph operator, and of May Cordelia Callan. His father was descended from a Virginia Catholic family; his mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants. The family moved to Washington, D. C.

Education

In Washington, D. C. Tansill attended Brookland Public School and the Emerson Institute. He enrolled in the Catholic University of America in 1908 as a scholarship student and received his B. A. degree in history in 1912. After earning his M. A. (1913) and Ph. D. (1915), Tansill taught American history for one year at his alma mater. Then, feeling the need for study at a more prestigious university, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. He studied with John H. Latane and received a second Ph. D. in 1918. His dissertation was The Canadian Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 (1922). 1915.

Career

Tansill quickly established himself as a productive scholar and a popular teacher. He joined the Department of History at American University in Washington as an assistant professor in 1919 and was promoted to full professor two years later. He proved to be an effective and enthusiastic teacher who took special interest in training graduate students to use the wealth of archival sources in the Washington area. He eventually directed more than fifty doctoral dissertations.

During the 1920's, Tansill also served as an adviser on diplomacy to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and worked in the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress. Tansill's book The Purchase of the Danish West Indies (1932), written while he served as the Albert Shaw Lecturer in Diplomatic History at Johns Hopkins in 1931, examined the history of the American acquisition of the Virgin Islands. The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798-1873 (1938) was an objective and thorough scholarly study.

In 1938 Tansill emerged as a controversial figure with the publication of his most influential book, America Goes to War. This study appeared at a time when revisionist historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles A. Beard, and Walter Millis were challenging the orthodox view that the United States entered World War I solely to defend its neutral rights. Although Tansill claimed in his preface that he had no thesis to exploit, his book was clearly in the revisionist vein. Assuming that everyone agreed that American entry in the war had been a grave mistake, he sought to explain how that error had come about. Unlike many revisionists, he did not offer a narrow economic interpretation; but his study did include a thorough account of the close economic ties between the United States and the Allies. His major focus was on President Woodrow Wilson's aides, Robert Lansing and Colonel Edward M. House, and he suggested that their strong bias in favor of England led Wilson to adopt policies that ended in war with Germany. The book was well received at the time. Even traditional historians praised its scholarship. Yet some critics argued that Tansill's anti-British bias undercut his claim to objectivity.

America Goes to War marks the high point of Tansill's career; thereafter everything began to go sour. He first encountered difficulty when he gave vent to his intense anti-British and isolationist views. In a radio address in Berlin in 1937, he called Hitler "an inspired leader" and praised the Nazi regime. When he returned to the United States, he was forced to resign his professorship at American University. He was unemployed for the next two years. In 1939 he finally obtained a professorship at Fordham University, where he taught for five years, leaving in 1944 to teach at Georgetown University.

After World War II, Tansill became obsessed with anti-Communism. Serving as an adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy, he charged Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman with betraying America. In 1952 he published Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941, a polemical book that blamed Roosevelt for Pearl Harbor. The opening sentence revealed his bias: "The main objective in American foreign policy since 1900 has been the preservation of the British Empire. " After his retirement from Georgetown University in 1958, Tansill wrote several articles for American Opinion, the organ of the John Birch Society. In one of these he called for the impeachment of President John F. Kennedy.

Tansill died in Washington, D. C. His death went unnoticed by the historical profession, which had dismissed him as a right-wing extremist. But he was an able and productive diplomatic historian before he succumbed to his prejudices.

Achievements

• He is famous for being the Professor of History at American University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University. He wrote fourteen history books.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Pennsylvania-Maryland Boundary Controversy: A Dissertation (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Pennsylvania-Maryland Boundary Controver...)

  • Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States Part Two

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States, V1

    (This is a new release of the original 1927 edition.)

  • Back Door To War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941

Views

He was a eugenicist and a segregationist.

Connections

On February 17, 1915, Tansill married Helen C. Parker; they had five children.

Father:

Charles Fiske Tansill

Mother:

May Cordelia Callan

Spouse:

Helen C. Parker

Daughter:

Mary Ann Sharkey

Daughter:

Helen Baker Purcell

Daughter:

Grace Lee Morton

Son:

Dr. William R. Tansill

Son:

Charles B. Tansil