RAdm Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976), USN historian
Samuel Eliot Morison, Rear Admiral, Reserve (July 9, 1887 –
May 15, 1976) was an American historian, noted for producing works of maritime history that
were both authoritative and highly readable. A sailor as well as a scholar, Morison garnered numerous honors, including two
Pulitzer Prizes, two Bancroft Prizes, and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. His general history textbooks were both
widely used and criticized by the parents of African American children and
civil rights leaders for justifying slavery.
Biography
Personal
Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston, Massachusetts to John Holmes Morison
(1856–1911) and Emily Marshall (Eliot) Morison (1857–1925) and named for his grandfather Samuel
Eliot. He married twice and was the father of four children by his first wife, Elizabeth S. Greene. (One of these
children, Emily Morison Beck became the editor of Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations.) After his wife Elizabeth's death in 1945, he married again to a Mrs. Priscilla B. Shakelford.
Morrison died on May 15, 1976 of a stroke at the age of 88, and his ashes are buried at Northeast Harbor, Maine.
Academic career
His schooling was typical for a member of a Brahmin family: he attended
Noble and Greenough School (1897–1901) and St. Paul's (1901–03) before enrolling at Harvard, where he would remain for much of his academic life.
Morison earned his AB from Harvard in 1908, studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris (1908–1909), and returned to Harvard
where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1912. His doctoral
thesis, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, became Morison's
first book.
Upon receiving his doctorate, Morison went to Berkeley to serve as
an instructor in history, and, in 1915, returned to Harvard in the same capacity. After spending 1922–25 at Oxford as Harmsworth Professor of American history, he became full professor at Harvard in 1925.
Morison was promoted to Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History in 1941 and retired from Harvard in 1955.
Morison continued writing prolifically after his retirement. He received the Balzan
prize for history 1962 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Books
Morison held that experience and research should be combined synergetically for writing vivid
history. For his Pulitzer-winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Morison combined his personal interest in sailing with his scholarship by chartering a boat and sailing to the various places that
Columbus was then thought to have visited.
Official Historian of US Navy during World War II
Unlilke World War I, for which the US military had not prepared a full-scale official history of any branch of service, it was
decided that World War II would be meticulously documented. Professional historians were attached to all the branches of the US
military; they were embedded with combat units to witness the events about which they would later write.
Toward this end, in 1942, he was commissioned into the Naval Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
The result was the unmatched History of United
States Naval Operations in World War II, a work in 15 volumes that covered every aspect of America's war at sea, from
strategic planning and battle tactics to the technology of war and the exploits of individuals in conflict. A one-volume
abridgement of the official history, The Two Ocean War, was published in 1963.
In recognition of his achievements, the Navy promoted Morison to the rank of Rear Admiral (Reserve). In addition, the
frigate, USS
Samuel Eliot Morison (FFG-13), was named in his honor. A bronze statue of Morison is on the Commonwealth Avenue mall in Boston, between
Exeter and Fairfield Streets.
The celebrated British military historian Sir John Keegan has hailed Morison's official
history as the best to come out of the Second World War.
One of his research assistants on that project, Henry Salomon, went on to conceive the epic NBC
documentary series Victory at Sea.
Criticism of textbook for justifying slavery
Morison and his Growth of the American Republic co-author Henry Steele
Commager were asked by delegations of African Americans[1] to remove racist passages from the 1950 edition of their widely used history
textbook. The following is an excerpt from the passages targeted as a false and objectionable justification for slavery.
- As for “Sambo,” whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered
less than any other class in the South for its “Peculiar Institution.” … Although brought to America by force, the incurably
optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his white folks.
According to several sources, the entry was not removed until 1962 despite requests for change to the earlier
editions.[1]
In the Spring 2004 edition of History of Education Quarterly, Jonathan Zimmerman[2] wrote the
following[3]
- Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot
Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave—or
"Sambo," as the text called him—was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about
Black complaints—"bushman squawks," Morison called them—against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told
Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was
married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn—and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison
agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, Black children would be described only as "nice little
seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I'll
be damned if I'll take them out for ... anybody," Morison told Commager.
[4]
The authors finally removed the passage in the 1962 version of their text book. The passage echoes the thesis of American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, popularized by most white historians until the mid twentieth
century, relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution.[5]
"The Phillips school of slavery historiography was not limited to the South or to a faction within the historical profession;
as recently as 1950, for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, of Harvard and Columbia Universities
respectively, propagated the traditional interpretation in one of the leading college textbooks of the era," according to the
American Social History Project at the City University of New York. [6]
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Leon F. Litwack found the widely used textbook
offensive [7] saying, "The textbook
was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version
of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already
read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An
Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880.
Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."[8]
Treatment of Christopher Columbus
In his book, Declarations Of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology [2], Humanist historian Howard Zinn criticised Morison's treatment of the impact of Spanish colonialism on the natives of the
Americas. Although Zinn acknowledges Morison as being "one of the few historians even to mention the atrocities committed by
Columbus against the Indians", Zinn is critical of Morison devoting only a single brief passage to Columbus' atrocities in his
book Christopher Columbus, Mariner.[3]
Books by Samuel Eliot Morison
Most of these have been reprinted and reissued.
- Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little Brown, 1955).
- The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848 (1913)
- The Oxford History of the United States (1927)
- Builders of the Bay Colony: A Gallery of Our Intellectual Ancestors (1930; 2nd ed., 1958)
- The Growth of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1930 [as Oxford History of the United States; 7th ed., 1980]. Revised and abridged edition
with Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Leuchtenberg. Published by Oxford University Press in 1980 as A Concise History of
the American Republic, rev. 1983.
- Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (Harvard University Press,
1936)
- Admiral of the Ocean Sea.(Little Brown, 1942).
- History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946)
- History of United States Naval Operations in
World War II (1947–1962)
- Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (editor) (1952)
- John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (Little, Brown and Company,
1959)
- The Story of Mount Desert Island (1960)
- The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (1963)
- The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
- The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1971)
- Samuel De Champlain: Father of New France (1972)
- The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (1974)
- A Concise History of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager
and William E. Leuchtenberg) (1976)
Awards
Lifetime achievement honors
Military and foreign honors
Book prizes
(years listed are when prizes were awarded)
Honorary degrees
Quotes
- "American historians, in their eagerness to present facts and their laudable concern to tell the truth, have neglected the
literary aspects of their craft. They have forgotten that there is an art of writing history." History as a Literary Art: An
Appeal to Young Historians (1946)
- "America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted;
and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named
after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy." The Oxford History of the American
People (1965)
- "But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period - Athens,
Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States - are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it
to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao." The
Oxford History of the American People (1965)
References
- ^ "Statement of Principle" (ms, 15 June 1944), frames 265–66; press release
by Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., 15 June 1944, frame 264, both in reel 22, Part 16B, Papers of the National Association For the
Advancement of Colored People (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994).
- ^ Declarations Of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology by
Howard Zinn (HarperPerennial, 1990) p.57. ISBN 0-060-92108-0
- ^ Declarations Of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology by
Howard Zinn (HarperPerennial, 1990) p.57. ISBN 0-060-92108-0
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