John Jay Chapman

Background

John Jay Chapman was born on March 2, 1862 in New York City, New York, United States. His parents were Henry Grafton Chapman and Eleanor Jay. His paternal grandmother, Maria Weston Chapman, was a militant antislavery worker in Boston, closely identified with William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. His mother's father and her grandfather, William Jay, a son of John Jay, first chief justice of the United States, were also active advocates of the antislavery cause. Chapman's friend, Owen Wister, described him as a "belated abolitionist, " but there was much about him for which his ancestry could not account. From childhood his vivid pattern was remarkably his own.

Education

At St. Paul's School, Concord, to which he was sent at thirteen, he carried to such personal extremes the religious tendencies of the place that both masters and boys thought him "queer, " and his parents took him home to New York. There he suffered a serious illness, after which his preparation to enter Harvard was continued under private tutors. At college, as a member of the class of 1884, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1885, he displayed brilliancy and audacity, but took no high rank as a scholar. A year of travel in Europe enlarged his intellectual, artistic, and social experience. Then began a course of study in the Harvard Law School, ended in January 1887 by a tragic event. This was the deliberate burning of his own left hand in a coal fire so destructively that it had to be amputated.

Career

During this marriage Chapman threw himself ardently into local politics, taking a most active part in the Good Government Clubs movement and in general opposition to Tammany Hall. Two books, Causes and Consequences (1898) and Practical Agitation (1900)--pioneer expositions of the dangerous alliance between politics and business in America--grew out of these experiences. The first of all his books, Emerson and Other Essays (1898), immediately preceded these, and gave clear notice that a critic and writer of rare power had entered the field of American letters. For his writing in general he framed a homely motto in later years: "What don't bite ain't right. " Under this rule he proceeded from first to last. At the end of the Spanish War Chapman and other Independents secured the consent of Theodore Roosevelt to run for the governorship of New York on an Independent ticket. Roosevelt's enforced repudiation of this candidacy when he accepted also the regular Republican nomination excited Chapman to fury, expressed largely in a sporadic journal, the Political Nursery, a vehicle of brilliant, impudent writing, which he conducted from 1897 to 1901. This quarrel over the governorship severed all personal relations between Roosevelt and Chapman for more than twenty years, when a son of each died as an aviator in France, and the sympathy of a common loss brought them together. As the nineteenth century drew to an end the tensions of Chapman's life placed his highly sensitive nature under a severe strain. For two years, chiefly at the Chanler countryplace, "Rokeby, " at Barrytown, on the Hudson, Chapman, helped by all the sympathy and understanding of his wife, made his way from darkness and seclusion back to health. From that time forth he eschewed all organized effort to better the world, and drew more and more on the inward forces of religion which had borne a vital part in his recovery. Outwardly he had changed, by the growth of the beard he wore for the rest of his life, from the tall young man of dashing good looks to a benevolent or fiery sage, eloquent in silence or in speech. There was one occasion for speech which must be recorded. On August 19, 1911, a Negro in Coatesville suffered death in a lynching of peculiar atrocity. For a year Chapman, the "belated abolitionist, " brooded over the tragedy as a national disgrace for which some public atonement must be made. On the first anniversary of the lynching he went to Coatesville, hired a small hall, and announced a prayer meeting, with reading of the Scriptures, and a brief address by himself. The service was attended by only three persons. Chapman's address, subsequently printed in Harper's Weekly and in his own volume, Memories and Milestones, was a burning deliverance, written in the vein of a classic. Apart from his main pursuit of letters, Chapman turned his trenchant pen to other matters, especially the cause of the Allies in the World War, the protection of American politics and education from what he regarded as the dangerous influences of the Roman Catholic Church, the perils of Harvard College from bigness and business. In his treatment of such topics he was essentially a crusading pamphleteer. Only one of his twenty-five books, all of slender bulk, dealt with a single topic. This was his William Lloyd Garrison (1913, 1921), which was rather an extended essay on agitation than a biography. His collections of essays--Emerson and Other Essays (1898), Learning and Other Essays (1910), Memories and Milestones (1915), Greek Genius and Other Essays (1915)-- gathered together many brilliant papers contributed to magazines. He produced besides six small volumes of plays, for children and adults, and translations from Homer, the Greek dramatists, and Dante. A book of his own poems, a brief study of Shakespeare, another of Lucian and Plato, represented other phases of his excursive mind, so preoccupied with the best that the author of this biography has ventured to call him by the coined term "aristophile. " Notes on Religion (1915) and, still more clearly, Letters and Religion (1924) spoke with sincerity and beauty for the search after spiritual truth which was the unifying thread of his life and thought. He talked as vividly as he wrote, and in John Jay Chapman and His Letters (post) many passages from his wide-ranging correspondence bear witness to the close kinship between the best letters and the best talk. Chapman's writings, highly valued by the few, never made a real appeal to the many. The diversity of themes, a fragmentary manner of treatment, a limited awareness of the social changes threatening the privileged class to which he belonged, an extravagant expression of extreme views--all these were obstacles to a general acceptance. On the other hand his thought and the most effective utterance of it, in terms of vigor, wit, and insight, commanded the attention of some of the ablest minds of his time. In such appreciation--as, for instance, from his friend William James--lies the prophecy of his place with posterity. From 1905 till his death in 1933 he lived chiefly at the country-place, "Sylvania, " on the Hudson in Barrytown. There were excursions to Europe and, by reason of his wife's delicate health, to the South. His final illness was brief. His death followed four days after an operation at the Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie.

Achievements

• He attacked the get-rich-quick morality of the post-Civil War “Gilded Age” in political action and in his writings.

Works

More photos

• book

  • William Lloyd Garrison

    (William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) , born in Massachusett...)

  • Cupid And Psyche

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

  • The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre

    (The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a G...)

  • The Mind On Edge: An Introduction to John Jay Chapman's Philosophy of Higher Education

    (John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) was one of America's greates...)

  • Emerson, and other essays

    ("Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses...)

Connections

He married Minna Timmins, of Boston on July 2, 1889. They lived in New York, where three sons were born to them. Victor Chapman, the first American aviator to fall in the World War, was the eldest. Soon after the birth of the youngest, Conrad, their mother died in New York, January 25, 1897.

His second marriage--on April 23, 1898, to Elizabeth Chanler, a woman of rare force and beauty, eldest daughter of John Winthrop and Margaret Astor Ward Chanler--was the blessing of Chapman's remaining thirty-five years. Their only son, Chanler Armstrong, was born in the spring of 1900, less than a month before Chapman suffered a severe breakdown.

Father:

Henry Grafton Chapman Jay

Mother:

Eleanor Jay

Spouse:

Elizabeth Chanler

Spouse:

Minna Timmins

grandmother:

Maria Weston Chapman

She was a militant antislavery worker in Boston

Son:

Conrad

Son:

Victor Chapman

He was the first American aviator to fall in the World War

Son:

Chanler Armstrong

Friend:

William James

Friend:

Owen Wister

References

• John Jay Chapman: An American mind
• The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman