Background

Johnson was born on January 12, 1853, in Washington, D. C. , the second of two sons of Nimrod Hoge and Catherine Coyle (Underwood) Johnson. He had an older half-sister, the daughter of his father's first wife. Though the Underwood family, Presbyterians from County Tyrone, Ireland, had been Washingtonians since 1800, Johnson, like his father, was a child of the Old Northwest. His Hicksite Quaker grandfather, Nathan Johnson, of Scottish, English, and Dutch descent, had moved in 1804 from Loudoun County, Virginia, to Ohio and thence to Indiana.

Young Johnson was raised in Centreville, Indiana, where his father was a county judge. Henry Underwood Johnson, Robert's brother, represented this district in Congress, 1881-1889.

Education

Johnson attended Earlham College at nearby Richmond, Indiana, graduating at eighteen.

Career

Two years in the Chicago agency of the educational books of Charles Scribner's Sons led to an opening on Scribner's Monthly in New York. Not yet of age, Johnson was engaged for a three months' trial as editorial clerk in May 1873, thus beginning an association with that notable publication, soon retitled the Century, that lasted forty years. The fellowship of such goodly men as his colleagues Josiah Gilbert Holland, Richard Watson Gilder, and Alexander Wilson Drake and the magazine's contributors served to foster in Johnson a broad range of interests, high (if rigid) standards of literary and artistic excellence, and, not least, that sense of devotion to the commonweal which was a Century hallmark.

When Gilder was named editor in 1881, Johnson became associate editor, a wheelhorse who made many of the day-to-day decisions and did much of the planning as well. He shepherded leading military survivors of the Civil War through the celebrated series of Century articles, 1884-1887, which he and Clarence Clough Buel then amplified into Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. The idea for the series had been Buel's, but Johnson expanded it, coaxed recalcitrant generals to take up the pen, applied standards of accuracy that were notably exacting for the time, and employed all his considerable tact in keeping contributors from one another's throats. Though the footnotes show traces of sectional bias, the enterprise was a landmark on the long road to reconciliation. It also almost doubled the Century's circulation. One episode affords a glimpse of Johnson in action. General Grant's first offering, on Shiloh, read like an official report. Calling at Long Branch, Johnson got the General to reminiscing about the battle and discreetly took notes. These he handed to Grant and besought him to write as he had talked. The rewritten article and those that followed suggest that the advice, proffered with grace, was not ignored.

A pack trip through the Yosemite country in California with John Muir in 1889 impressed Johnson with the devastation being wrought by thousands of grazing sheep. Visualizing a park like Yellowstone, he outlined two Century articles for Muir, enlisted Gilder's support, and in the next year was largely instrumental in persuading Congress to create Yosemite National Park. Thereafter Johnson and the Century did yeoman work in the cause of forest conservation. Johnson was equally effective in furthering another Century cause, international copyright. He was secretary of the joint committee of authors, publishers, and leaders of the printing crafts which secured passage of the act of 1891 ending the long-standing practice of pirating the work of foreign authors, and he remained interested in the subject until his death.

As Gilder had wished, Johnson succeeded him upon his death, which occurred in 1909. By then the development of mass-circulation techniques in magazine publishing had gone far enough to raise doubts as to which century the editors of the placid, impeccably tasteful Century had in mind. Circulation had been dwindling for years. A resourceful editor, Johnson was yet too thoroughly imbued with its traditions to modify them, and after the death of Frank H. Scott, president of the company, differences with the trustees on this score led to his resignation on May 31, 1913.

From his youth he wrote verse; and indeed he kept at it until over eighty. Much of it celebrates a deed or an occasion, after the fashion of Edmund Clarence Stedman, his friend and poetical mentor. Esprit and some metrical felicity fail, with few exceptions, to compensate for the conventionality of both form and content. Seven previous volumes were incorporated in Poems of Fifty Years (1931), followed by Aftermath (1933), and Heroes, Children and Fun (1934), all published by the author.

Johnson died in New York City in his eighty-fifth year and was buried beside his wife at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Achievements

• Johnson is best known as the editor who used his media platform to promote the creation of Yosemite National Park and the start of the conservation movement. He was also a famed poet who was often called on to recite at public gatherings, with 1891's "The Winter Hour and Other Poems" and 1902's "Poems", being his most notable collections.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Italian Rhapsody, and Other Poems of Italy

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • North to Antietam: Battle and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume II

    (North to Antietam: Battle and Leaders of the Civil War, V...)

  • The Yosemite, By John Muir and dedicated By Robert Underwood Johnson: Robert Underwood Johnson (January 12, 1853 – October 14, 1937) was a U.S. writer ... 1914) also known as "John of the Mountains"

    (In celebration of the centennial of the founding of Yosem...)

  • Songs of Liberty and Other Poems

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

Politics

During World War I Johnson devoted himself so unstintingly to providing ambulances and later war relief for Italy that President Wilson, an erstwhile Century contributor, named him ambassador to Italy in January 1920, Johnson serving until July 1921.

Views

A man whose strong sense of propriety tended to distort his judgment, Johnson inveighed frequently against cubism, free verse, the use of slang in fiction or diction, magazines "that distain good manners, " and other departures from traditional forms; and these he upheld, sometimes to the embarrassment of colleagues in the Academy, to the end. A kindly disposition and a sense of humor were saving graces.

Membership

Johnson's long-term interest was the Hall of Fame, of which he was named the director by New York University in 1919, serving until his death.

Still another, one which Johnson perhaps held dearest, stemmed from a meeting at the Century office with Stedman, Gilder, Edward MacDowell, and others in 1904, out of which came the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Johnson formulated its plan of selection and was its secretary for the rest of his life.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he was also an organizer in 1904 and a member of the National Citizens Committee of the Third Hague Conference, Independence Hall Conference to found the League to Enforce Peace, National Association of American Speech, Civil Service Reform Association, Sons of the Revolution, and the Authors, MacDowell (honorary), Century and Sierra clubs.

Personality

A large man of leisurely temperament, Johnson was a deliberate worker known to the staff as its "most conservative follower of good form - good form in literature, good form in one's social relations. "

A multitude of interests occupied Johnson's later years, when his ribboned pince-nez and whitening mustache, blending into a full beard that framed his handsome features, gave him the aspect of a patriarch.

Connections

Johnson married Katharine McMahon of Washington, D. C. , on August 31, 1876. Their two children, Owen McMahon, the novelist remembered for his evocations of life at Lawrenceville School and Yale, and Agnes McMahon, were raised in the modest brownstone house on the periphery of the Murray Hill district in New York where Johnson lived most of his life. Mrs. Johnson died in 1924.

Father:

Nimrod Hoge Johnson

Mother:

Catherine Coyle Underwood

Spouse:

Katharine McMahon

Grandfather:

Nathan Johnson

Daughter:

Agnes McMahon

Son:

Owen McMahon

colleague:

John Muir

He was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America.

References

• Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
• The History of the Sierra Club 1892-1970
• The joys and tribulations of an editor,