Background

Samuel Bemis was born on October 20, 1891, in Worcester, Massachussets, the son of Charles Harris Bemis, a journalist, and Flora M. Bemis.

Education

Samuel Bemis was educated at Clark University in Worcester, where he earned a B. A. in 1912 and an M. A. in 1913, and at Harvard, where he completed a second M. A. in 1915 and a Ph. D. in 1916.

Career

Bemis began his teaching career in 1917 as an instructor in history at Colorado College. His first book, an expanded version of his doctoral dissertation, The United States and the Abortive Armed Neutrality of 1794, appeared the next year. In 1920 he moved on to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, as a full professor. Three years later, his second book, Jay's Treaty, brought him a Knights of Columbus award of the then princely sum of $3, 000, given annually to the college teacher who produces the best book on American history. After a year as research associate at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D. C. , Bemis was appointed professor of history at George Washington University in 1924, remaining there for a decade.

From 1927 to 1929 Bemis directed the European Mission for the Library of Congress, an assignment designed to improve the library's collections. The job took him to the national archives of western and central Europe, where he arranged for the photocopying of documents relating to American diplomacy and, to a lesser extent, general American history. He was especially proud of this work, which as part of a larger effort mounted by Herbert Putnam and Worthington C. Ford after Word War I, at last made the Library of Congress, Bemis wrote, a "national library, and certainly the best place in the world to write about the diplomatic history of the United States. "

His own books were suffused with the archival research he conducted during summer vacations and on sabbatical in the great libraries and archives of England, France, Spain, and Latin America. In 1927 Bemis won the Pulitzer Prize in history for Pinckney's Treaty. Over the next two years he directed the publication of the landmark, ten-volume series The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, acting both as editor and contributor, a role he repeated nearly forty years later when volumes XI-XV brought the series up to date (1963 - 1966). The Hussey-Cumberland Mission and American Independence was published in 1931. Four years later, Bemis collaborated with the bibliographer Grace Gardner Griffin on Guide to the Diplomatic History of the United States, 1775-1921, which immediately became the standard reference in the field.

Bemis left George Washington University in 1934, first for a visiting lectureship at Harvard and then for Yale in 1935, where he taught for the next quarter century, ending his career as Sterling Professor of Diplomatic History and Inter-American Relations in 1960. During his first two years in New Haven he wrote two books, each of which extended his reputation for readability, stylistic clarity, and solid scholarship. The Diplomacy of the American Revolution addressed historical problems that had been virtually ignored since 1852 and quickly became the standard diplomatic monograph in colonial history courses nationwide.

A Diplomatic History of the United States, published in 1936, went through multiple editions in the next thirty years as the course text in hundreds of colleges and secondary schools. In the 1940's, Bemis turned his attention south of the border and wrote several works on Latin America, including The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943), a book that reflected both his careful research and his unbridled nationalism, particularly in his recurring emphasis on the "forbearance" of the American government in the face of what he believed was ineptitude or corruption on the part of particular Latin American regimes.

Bemis was a careful writer, whose graceful prose appealed to both an academic and a popular audience. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy brought him the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1950. Its successor volume, John Quincy Adams and the Union, found a wide readership and critical praise in 1956. In all, Bemis wrote or edited nearly thirty volumes.

On his mandatory retirement in 1960 at age sixty-eight, under faculty policies then in force at Yale, Bemis was given emeritus status but was asked to continue as a graduate school lecturer in foreign policy for another year. In 1961 he served as president of the American Historical Association and simultaneously held a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two years later, Yale made him a doctor of humane letters and in its citation acknowledged his "perdurable wisdom" and "Worcester County wit" as hallmarks of his teaching. Although he once told an interviewer that he was "as cold as potato salad, " he was a highly respected figure on the New Haven campus. On his retirement, the undergraduate paper, the Yale Daily News, praised both his warmth and the concern he had shown for his students over the years. Bemis died at his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Achievements

• Samuel Bemis was a well-known biographer and specialist in American diplomatic history. He wrote: Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (1923); Pinckney's Treaty: America's Advantage from Europe's Distress, 1783–1800 (1926); The American Secretaries of State and their Diplomacy (18 vols. , 1927–1972); The Hussey-Cumberland Mission and American Independence (1931); The Diplomacy of the American Revolution. American Historical Association. 1935; Guide to the Diplomatic History of the United States, 1775–1921 (1935); A Diplomatic History of the United States (1936); Early Diplomatic Missions from Buenos Aires to the United States, 1811–1824 (1940); The Latin American Policy of the United States (1943); John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949); John Quincy Adams and the Union (1956). Bemis won the Pulitzer Prize in history for Pinckney's Treaty (1927) and in biography or autobiography for John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1950).

Works

More photos

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  • The Diplomacy Of The American Revolution

    (The American Revolution can rightly be called a turning p...)

  • Jay's Treaty And The Northwest Boundary Gap

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • JOHN QUINCY ADAMS And the Foundation of American Foreign Policy & the Union 2 Volume Matched Set

    (Beautiful Easton Press editions in like new condition. Ha...)

  • Pinckney's treaty;: America's advantage from Europe's distress, 1783-1800

    (BOOK)

  • The Latin American policy of the United States,

Views

Like many professional historians of his era, Bemis was unabashedly patriotic, with strong ties to the nation's past and especially to its values of democracy, constitutionalism, and justice. In assessing the motives of the American government in foreign affairs, he usually gave unqualified acceptance to the premise that they were generally good. Known affectionately as "Flaggwaver" or "American Flagg" Bemis, he defended himself by saying, "I wouldn't want to be called by any other flag. "

Membership

Samuel Bemis was president of the American Historical Association.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• An admiring colleague wrote that Bemis was a "historians' historian. "

Connections

On June 20, 1919, Samuel Bemis married Ruth M. Steele, with whom he had one child.

Father:

Charles Harris Bemis

He was a journalist.

Mother:

Flora M. Bemis

Wife:

Ruth M. (Steele) Bemis