Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics: (Timeless Classic Books)
(To describe the career of a man who is now chiefly rememb...)
To describe the career of a man who is now chiefly remembered as the rival of Abraham Lincoln, must seem to many minds a superfluous, if not invidious, undertaking. The present generation is prone to forget that when the rivals met in joint debate fifty years ago, on the prairies of Illinois, it was Senator Douglas, and not Mr. Lincoln, who was the cynosure of all observing eyes. Time has steadily lessened the prestige of the great Democratic leader, and just as steadily enhanced the fame of his Republican opponent. The following pages have been written, not as a vindication, but as an interpretation of a personality whose life spans the controversial epoch before the Civil War.
Allen Johnson was an American historian, teacher, biographer, and editor, most notably of the Dictionary of American Biography.
Background
Johnson was born on January 29, 1870, in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father, Moses Allen Johnson, worked as "agent" (manager) of the Lowell Felting Mills. He died in 1874, was a native of Lynn, and descended from Richard Johnson who came to Massachusetts in 1630. His mother, Elmira Shattuck, was a lady of refinement and cultivation, studious - even of New Testament Greek - and of gentle and lovable character.
Education
Allen was the valedictorian of his high school class at Lowell in 1888, and one of the founders of a small society which read historical books, debated questions arising from them, and studied parliamentary law.
From 1888 to 1892 he was a student in Amherst College, and was graduated as Bachelor of Arts in the latter year, rating high in scholarship and winning a prize in debate.
Spending 1898 in Columbia University, he received in 1899 its degree of doctor of philosophy, publishing a dissertation on The Intendant as a Political Agent under Louis XIV (1899).
Career
A boyhood spent in a manufacturing city doubtless helped to give Johnson an appreciation of industrial life, and he himself was persuaded that his boyish experience as an amateur printer was useful to him as an editor.
After graduation, Johnson was for two years, 1892-1894, instructor in history and English in the Lawrenceville School, New Jersey. The next year he held a graduate fellowship at Amherst, reading philosophy and history and assisting in the teaching of the latter. Then for two years, 1895-1897, he studied history in Europe, three semesters at Leipzig under Lamprecht and Marcks, and one at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris. From 1898 to 1905 he was professor of history in Iowa (now Grinnell) College, at Grinnell, Iowa, eminently successful in teaching. Next, Johnson was at Bowdoin College, where he served as professor of history and political science from 1905 to 1910. There he taught with vigor and skill, improving upon the commonplaces of historical instruction by introducing the maturer students to the critical study of sources and to philosophical consideration of the bases of historical statements. An especially fruitful innovation was his practice of dividing the more advanced classes into groups of four or five for intensive and personal conference, a practice costly to the teacher but in which the sagacious President Hyde discerned great promise. Never deficient in public spirit, Johnson while at Bowdoin prepared for the American Historical Association a detailed report on the archives of the state of Maine.
In 1910 he was called to a professorship of American history in Yale University, where he remained till 1926. There his teaching, always marked by exceptional clearness, breadth of view, and sympathetic interest in adjoining subjects, was at its best with graduate students. Fruits of his teaching were his Readings in American Constitutional History (1912), later supplemented by Readings in Recent American Constitutional History, 1876-1926 (1927), in which William A. Robinson collaborated; and, following a course in historical method given during his last years at Yale, The Historian and Historical Evidence (1926). The last-named book is a series of suggestive essays, not a complete and well-rounded treatise upon its subject, and would seem slight if put into comparison with the thorough-going work of the revered but heavy-handed Bernheim. But the intention was to provide a book of advice and suggestion which the not-too-patient American student would actually read, and it was so attractively written as to achieve that purpose. Another merit was its appreciation, natural to Johnson, of the value and use in historical thinking of modern philosophical studies, and especially of the recent acquisitions of experimental psychology.
The principal work of this laborious scholar in these years, outside of his teaching, was his editing of the attractive series of fifty small volumes entitled The Chronicles of America (1918-1921). The purpose with which Johnson undertook this formidable task was to provide the intelligent general reader with a history of the United States composed of volumes each having a certain unity, readable, yet conforming to high standards of scholarship. His own volume, Jefferson and his Colleagues (1921), delightful to the general reader yet satisfactory to the scholar, shows how he meant this difficult reconcilement to be achieved in the series. By unstinted labor on his own part, great editorial skill, and unsparing rigor in dealing with contributions, he kept the series well to the level which he had set. Soon after its completion, he spent the academic year 1924-25 in a journey around the world, varied by lecturing in educational institutions in Japan and China.
Along with his high reputation for scholarship in American history and his recognized ability as a writer, it was his editorial success with the Chronicles of America, and the vigor with which he kept them to his high standards, that caused the committee of management, in the spring of 1925, to invite him to become the editor of the Dictionary of American Biography. After thirty years of teaching, Johnson removed to Washington and at the beginning of February 1926 began the work which, from that day to the day of his death, was to engross all his remarkable powers. This is not the place in which to estimate the success of his labors upon this Dictionary, but it is permissible to dwell upon the breadth of view with which he took all sorts of men and women and all parts of the country into equal consideration, the pains he took to obtain the best advice as to persons to be included and writers to be engaged, his extraordinary ability as an organizer and capacity for administrative detail, his firm resistance to all pressure toward favoritism, ancestor-worship, and bias, the special measures he adopted to ensure accuracy, and the constant application of his keen critical judgment, ripe experience, and fine literary taste to the scrutiny of manuscripts. His rigor was disconcerting to some contributors, but it was salutary to the Dictionary, and his correspondence abounded in appreciation, sympathy, and helpfulness.
The death of Allen Johnson, struck by an automobile in the evening of January 18, 1931, in the streets of Washington, was as sudden as it was premature; but his sense of the pressure of his arduous editorial task upon a constitution never robust had caused the appointment of Dumas Malone as his colleague, a year and a half before; and this provision, the extraordinarily methodical care with which he kept his papers, and the forethought with which he had extended preparations into the later letters of the alphabet, made it possible for the work to go on without any interruption. Six volumes came out under his care, the sixth soon after his death; but, with every appreciation of the work of his successors, the whole series will in a sense be his monument.
An earlier fruit of Johnson's Yale period was the second of the four volumes of the Riverside History of the United States, entitled Union and Democracy (1915), an orderly, systematic, and well-balanced narrative of the period from 1783 to 1829.
Personality
Johnson's classmates uniformly depicted him as a quiet, studious youth, not robust, in every way a gentleman; his favorite studies were history, political science, and literature; his recreation was tennis.
Connections
Johnson was married on June 20, 1900, at Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Helen K. Ross, daughter of Henry A. and Mary Ross. From the shock of her death in 1921 he never fully recovered. They had one son, Allen S. Johnson.