CHAPTER 4

THE BEGINNING OF FORMAL STUDY

The second half and particularly the last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid development in the American educational system. Even before the Civil War, ambitious young men, dissatisfied with the rigid curricula of the American colleges, had begun to go to Europe, chiefly to Germany, to study and secure the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. To a large extent the German universities came to take the place of even Oxford and Cambridge, the chief goals of the few pre-Civil War students who had gone to Europe.

In the same way, foreign scholars began to come to America. Again these were largely German or at least German-trained. Some of these men received, through some chance contact, direct invitations. Others, forced by the shifts of German politics and the Revolution of 1848, left their homes and joined the mass emigration to America that was already beginning. In either case, their influence was to the good.

In 1867, Johns Hopkins University was established as a definite post-graduate school, granting the doctorate. It was the first such establishment in the United States and President Gilman secured a distinguished faculty including such foreign scholars as Paul Haupt in Semitic Languages and Maurice Bloomfield in Indo-Iranian. Other outstanding men were soon appointed and the ideals of German scholarship were solidly established. Undergraduate work at Hopkins was regarded as merely an incidental in the first years of the institution’s life.

The example of Johns Hopkins was not directly followed but it exerted a marked influence upon some of the more important of the older institutions. Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton and a few others began to offer more advanced instruction and step by step the modern American graduate school, with its special course of study, was evolved. This process required some decades and each institution approached the problem in its own way, integrating the new work in accordance with its own traditions. As these developing universities broadened their interests and the range of their activities, it was only natural that sooner or later they would come to take into consideration the study of the Slavic peoples and their culture, especially of Russia.[25]

The first step was taken at Harvard under the influence of Archibald Cary Coolidge.[26] In a very real sense, Coolidge was typical of the men whom we have considered in the preceding chapter. He was born in Massachusetts in 1866 and graduated from Harvard in 1887. He then went to the University of Freiburg for his doctorate, receiving it in 1892. During these five years, however, he took time out from his actual attendance at courses to serve as Acting Secretary of the United States Legation in St. Petersburg in 1890–1891 and to act, in 1892, as private secretary to his uncle, then United States Minister to France.

He returned to the United States in 1893 and took a position in the Department of History at Harvard. The next year he introduced a course on the history of northeastern Europe. This was, in other words, a course in Russian and Polish history. It was the first time anyone had offered a course covering Russia which did not view her history solely in terms of contacts with the West, the Eastern Question, the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the relations of Russia with the countries of Western Europe.

Professor Coolidge was an enthusiast and was deeply convinced of an American need to study the Slavic World. He expounded these views in a paper delivered before the American Historical Association in 1895. By the next year he had added a course at Harvard on the Eastern Question. At about the same time he secured the appointment of Leo Wiener as Professor of Russian Literature. This marked the actual beginning of Slavic studies in an American university.

Professor Coolidge never gave up his interest in the work. In addition to the courses that he gave, he superintended the building of the Slavic collection in the Harvard Library and served constantly as an adviser to the United States government on Slavic matters. He brought out, in 1915, a volume on the _Origin of the Triple Alliance_ and during World War I was one of the committee of scholars formed under the leadership of Colonel House to prepare materials for the American Delegation at the Peace Conference. In 1918 he served as a special representative of the American government in Sweden and north Russia, and in 1921 he was sent by the American Red Cross to negotiate with the Bolshevik government on famine relief. In 1922 he founded _Foreign Affairs_, the organ of the American Council on Foreign Relations and the leading journal in this field. He personally acted as editor until 1927 when he relinquished the task to Hamilton Fish Armstrong who had been in the American service in Serbia during World War I. When Professor Coolidge died in 1928, he was the undisputed dean of American Slavic historians and the inspiration for a large part of the work that was then being done in the United States. His influence on the development of studies in history was greater than that of Leo Wiener on languages and literature.

Leo Wiener (1862–1939) published in 1902 and 1903 an _Anthology of Russian Literature_. This incorporated almost all the translations previously made, including excerpts from the greater Russian writers. The first volume, which included Russian literature up to Karamzin, still remains the best collection in English of the older literature. Where translations were unavailable, Professor Wiener made his own in prose. He also published in 1904 and 1905 a translation of the chief works of Tolstoy. Unfortunately in his later years, he lost interest in Russian and devoted his energies to studies of Ulfilas and the Gothic texts and many other questions far removed from his original field.

A great many of the scholars who became prominent in Slavic history before and during World War I were students of Professor Coolidge, who thus became the dominant force in the development of historical studies for many years. Among these was Frank A. Golder (1877–1929) who developed Russian history at Stanford University. He stressed, as we might expect, the American contact with Russia in the north Pacific and the Russian explorations in that area. In 1914 he published _Russian Expansion in the Pacific (1641–1850)_ and later edited the accounts of Bering’s voyages.

Another of Coolidge’s students was Robert J. Kerner (1887–1956), born in Chicago. Kerner took his A.B. at the University of Chicago and then after study in Europe received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1913. He was at first connected with the University of Missouri, but in 1928 went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he spent the rest of his life. He was made Sather Professor of European History in 1941. When he retired, in 1954, he was also Director of the Slavic Institute of the University of California. Professor Kerner, who was of Czech origin, did most of his work in Czech history, especially the period following the Battle of the White Mountain. In 1932, he published _Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century: a Study in Political, Social and Economic History, with Special Reference to the Reign of Leopold II (1790–1792)_. He published other works on the Western Slavs and the Balkans. He was recognized by the scientific societies of both Czechoslovakia and Romania before World War II and was decorated Commander of the White Lion of Czechoslovakia, and Officer of the Crown of Romania. Belgium also honored him for his work at the Peace Conference of 1919 as well as for later services.

Another pupil of Professor Coolidge, Robert Howard Lord (1885–1954) took his degree in Harvard in 1910 and remained there on the faculty. In 1915, he published _The Second Division of Poland_. During and shortly after World War I he was very active in Polish studies and served on the House Commission of Scholars to prepare materials for the Peace Conference in 1919. However, he suddenly gave up this field of scholarship, resigned his post, completely withdrew from previous scholarly contacts and began to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Perhaps the most important of all of the Harvard students of this period was George Rapall Noyes (1873–1952). A native of Massachusetts, he studied with Professor Wiener. From 1898 to 1900, he held a Harvard University Fellowship for study at St. Petersburg. Upon his return, he spent a year as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and then went to the University of California as Assistant Professor of English and Russian. In the first year of his work at California he had only five students in Russian and one in Czech, but as the numbers grew he gradually dropped his work in English and by World War I he was able to devote himself entirely to Slavic studies.

During the War, he secured Alexander Kaun as his assistant. Kaun was born in Russia in 1889 and studied from 1905 to 1907 in the Free University of St. Petersburg. He then came to the United States and from 1909 to 1916 taught Hebrew in Chicago. He went to California and in 1917 became Assistant in Russian. He took his M.A. and Ph.D. there and remained on the faculty, rising to the rank of Professor in 1943. Kaun was decidedly leftist in his sympathies and was a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia in its narrowest sense. He was one of that group far more interested in theoretical than practical reforms. This brought him very close to those members of the intelligentsia who were most inclined to sympathize with Communism; it determined his views on Maxim Gorky and Andreyev, the subject of two of his works. He also contributed many articles on Soviet literature. Professor Kaun died in 1944.

In 1920, George Z. Patrick was added to the University of California staff. Born in Nizhny in 1883, Patrick traced his name and ancestry to an Irishman who went to Russia after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Educated in the _Faculté de Droit_ in Paris and the Moscow Law School, from which he was graduated in 1912, he came to America with one of the Russian commissions sent by the Provisional government. After its fall, he went to California and in 1920 was appointed Lecturer in French and Russian. In 1923 he dropped his French work and devoted himself entirely to Russian. In 1940 he was appointed to a full professorship. However, his health was poor and after years of suffering and long periods of inability to work, he died of tuberculosis in 1944. Patrick was undoubtedly the best teacher of Russian that the American universities have had. He was a charming and sincere man and was the best beloved professor in the field.

The addition of Kaun and Patrick to the staff at the University of California allowed Noyes to give up most of his Russian work and devote himself primarily to Polish. He visited Poland in 1921 and was welcomed at the University of Krakow where he stayed for some months. The Polish government decorated him as Commander of _Polonia Restituta_ and several Polish scholarly societies elected him to membership.

Even in his early days at California, Noyes commenced his work of translation. Among the earliest was a collaboration, the _Heroic Poems of Servia_, with Leonard Bacon of the English department. Later Noyes, with the aid of numerous assistants, translated most of the important works of Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski, and also many Russian dramas including a volume, _Masterpieces of Russian Drama_, ranging from Fonvizin to Mayakovsky. It was his practice to write out a very careful prose translation and then have some of his students and associates set them, when necessary, into verse. Noyes really founded a special school of translation.

He was an earnest and sincere student, mild but demanding, especially of himself. He carefully laid out his projected work for years in advance and maintained a rigid schedule. Any pressure of university duties or unforeseen calls upon his time he met by including in his work schedule all those periods which he had left himself for vacations. When he died in 1952, he was the last of the old generation. He left a gap in Slavic scholarship that has not yet been filled.

The interest in Russian on the Pacific coast was reflected not only in the appointment of Golder to Stanford’s history department. In 1918, Henry Lanz was appointed Professor of Russian Literature and Philosophy there. Lanz had been born in Moscow in 1886. He was not a very prolific writer but one of his works on rhythm of language received a prize from Sweden. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he made another trip to Europe and stayed for some time in one of the monasteries on Mount Athos. He died in 1945.

Another outstanding figure of the period was Samuel N. Harper (1882–1943) of the University of Chicago. Harper was the son of the first president of the University of Chicago. He studied in the _Ecole des Langues Orientales_ in Paris and was closely associated with the group of English Slavists who, under the leadership of Sir Bernard Pares, K.B.E., gathered at the University of Liverpool and after the war formed the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London. Harper was in Russia with Pares during the Revolution of 1905 and was very friendly with such liberal Russian leaders as Paul Milyukov. In 1906 he published an English translation of Boyer and Speranski’s Russian Reader and in 1908 a volume on the _New Electoral Law for the Duma_. Through his connections at the university and Charles R. Crane, both Milyukov and Maxim Kovalevsky were brought to Chicago for lectures. Harper was a constant adviser to the United States government on Russian affairs. He was convinced that the Russian people, if they had the power, would definitely accept the Anglo-Saxon theories of democracy, a position which he maintained in his dealing with the Russian emigres after the Revolution. He was solidly anti-Bolshevik but in the thirties he accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, about the same time as Pares did.

Harper had a wide knowledge of Russian history, and when he was not traveling, lectured in Chicago and conducted courses in Russian. Yet he did not build a department of Russian and, despite the large Slavic population of the city, showed little interest in introducing other Slavic languages or cultures.

Another important center, started just as World War I was beginning, was at Columbia University. Although Dr. Judah A. Joffe had been appointed a lecturer in Russian for one year, in 1909, to prepare some articles and lectures on Russian literature for a volume on European literatures which the university was publishing, the serious work was begun only when John Dyneley Prince, then Professor of Semitic Languages and an authority on Assyrian and Sumerian, offered courses in Russian and Slavonic philology. Prince was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1868 and was an 1888 graduate of Columbia. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in Semitic and conducted excavations in Mesopotamia. He was later Dean of the graduate school of New York University and then was brought to Columbia.

In addition to his academic work, Prince was greatly interested in conservative New Jersey Republican politics. He served as both Speaker of the House and President of the New Jersey Senate when Woodrow Wilson was Governor. In 1921, President Harding appointed him United States Minister to Denmark and President Coolidge in 1926 transferred him to Yugoslavia. He was absent from the university therefore from 1921 to 1933, when as an ardent Republican he retired from the diplomatic service after the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Prince was an unusually talented linguist who fluently spoke nearly all European languages, including Hungarian and Turkish. He was also a master of several Algonquin Indian dialects and a masterly singer of folksongs. He had previously turned this unusual ability to good use in his political campaigns among the New Jersey voters of various foreign nationalities. When he turned to Slavic, he easily mastered nearly all the languages and soon was able to speak them readily. In addition, he was an excellent philologist and it was in this field that he most enjoyed himself. He published a _Russian Grammar_ in 1919 under great difficulties because of the general lack of proper type. Later he published grammars of both Latvian and Serbo-Croatian. He was also a great friend of Professor Michael I. Pupin, the distinguished Serb professor of electricity.

All these abilities made him determined not to allow the department, at Columbia, to be limited only to Russian. He offered courses in 1914 on a graduate level with Ivan S. Andreyevsky as assistant. At the same time, through University Extension, he started credit courses in Polish with Dr. Albert Morawski-Nawench as instructor. Dr. Morawski-Nawench was a Polish journalist and editor who had received his doctorate at the University of Vienna. Czech was offered by Alois Koukol, a Presbyterian minister, born in Kutna Hora and educated in Prague.

In addition to these courses, Prince opened in Columbia University Extension a special school of spoken languages. These were non-credit courses and Prince hoped to develop them, in time, into something like the _Ecole des Langues Orientales_. Courses were offered in some twenty languages. This undertaking was nipped in its infancy by Prince’s appointment to Denmark, for after his departure the original program was abandoned. It had considerable effect for some years, however, both upon the Department of Slavonic Languages and several others.

In 1917, Prince invited Clarence A. Manning to be Lecturer in Slavonic languages. Manning had received his doctorate in Greek and Latin at Columbia in 1915 and had become interested in Russian while on a Cutting Fellowship, traveling in Europe at the outbreak of World War I. He was on leave of absence from the university in 1918–1919 while serving in the Corps of Intelligence Police and the Translation section (M.I. 6) of the United States Army War College. During Prince’s absence, he served as acting executive officer of the department.

On his return to Columbia, in 1933 Prince resumed his professorship but because of failing health and eyesight he retired in 1937. He died in 1945. In this early period, two doctorates were conferred. One was conferred on Mr. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Director of the Slavic department of the New York Public Library, for a study of Dostoyevsky’s ideology; the other on Milivoy S. Stanoyevich, for a work on early Yugoslav literature.

In addition to these main centers, there were several other developments worthy of mention. Professor William Lyon Phelps, the distinguished professor of English at Yale University, published in 1911 a popular work, _Essays on the Russian Novelists_. He was assisted in preparing this by Max S. Mandell who for a decade continued to give courses in the Russian language. Mandell also published a translation of the plays of Turgenev and several other works.

Professor Clarence L. Meader of the Department of Classics at the University of Michigan also introduced courses in Russian and published a translation of the plays of Andreyev. Professor Harold H. Bender of Princeton, starting from a study of linguistics, came to stress the influence of the Baltic and Slavic languages, especially Lithuanian. In neither case was there a department definitely established at this time.

There were also a great many professors in various other fields who did valuable work on Slavic subjects. It would be impossible to list all of these works though some should be mentioned.

Professor Vladimir Simkhovich was appointed a professor of Economic History at Columbia in 1904. There he continued work which he had started at the University of Jena in 1899 on _Die Feldgemeinschaft in Russland_ and, in 1908, _Die Bauernbefreiung in Russland_. Several dissertations on Slavic subjects were accepted by the faculty of political science at Columbia, such as the _Eastern Question_ by Professor Stephan Duggan in 1902 and the _Making of the Balkan States_ by W. S. Murray in 1910.

Professor Ales Hrdlicka, the distinguished Czech anthropologist and authority on the population of the Aleutian Islands, published several works on the Czechs and on the _Races of Russia_ for the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collection for 1919.

Professor E. A. Ross, a sociologist of the University of Wisconsin, was in Russia during the Revolution and published _Russia in Upheaval_ in 1918, _Russian Bolshevik Revolution_ in 1921, and _Russian Soviet Republics_ in 1924.

Paul R. Radosavljevich, Professor of Experimental Psychology at New York University, published in 1919 the two volume work, _Who are the Slavs?_ This was a serious attempt to study Slavic psychology and to identify, if possible, features common to all Slavic nations.

A psychology professor, Will S. Monroe of the New Jersey State Normal School in Montclair, traveled extensively in both Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria and published _Bohemians and Czechs_ in 1910 and _Bulgaria and its People_ in 1914.

Other men who were active, some of them students of Professor Coolidge, were: Professor Arthur I. Andrews, Tufts College; Professor A. J. Shipman, Princeton; Professor Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Smith College, and Professor Bernadotte Schmitt, University of Chicago. Most of these knew Russian or one of the Slavic languages but at this period there was no generally accepted rule that the students of Slavic themes had to be familiar with the original sources and many of the dissertations and books published were by men who used materials available in French, German, or rarely, Latin.

There were also many scholarly books by persons who had little or no university connections. Included in these are the translations of _Russian Poetry_ by Babette Deutsch, the wife of Dr. Yarmolinsky, and the volumes by Julius F. Hecker.

America’s entrance into World War I revealed the American people’s need for more accurate knowledge of Slavic affairs. This was especially shown by the confusion which prevailed, even in official circles, concerning the Russian Revolution and the rise of Bolshevism.[27] It became still more apparent when the committee, brought together through the efforts of Col. Edward M. House, to consider the effect of the peace found themselves hampered by lack of material on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire. The German materials on these people were suspect, and the Russian a sealed book to all except a very few of the committee members, and there was almost no one to deal with materials in the native languages, especially when the material was not Slavic.

Before the War, German had been the chief foreign language taught in the American schools and universities. However, hostilities brought general anger against the Germans and also against certain German professors who placed themselves all too readily at the service of the German government. This resulted in widespread opposition to the use of German and, in fact, to any foreign language. Some states, such as Nebraska, where there was a large population of German origin, went so far as to forbid the teaching of any foreign language within the limits of the state, a ban which was later overruled by the United States Supreme Court. Even where this extreme was not reached, the number of students of German declined almost to nothing and many members of the university faculties either were dropped from their posts or were faced with that possibility.

In this crisis, and in the hope that the Russian Revolution would promote democratic contacts and trade with the United States, some of these former German professors announced courses in Russian. There was often something humorous and grotesque about this, for there were few if any textbooks and the professors themselves had little knowledge of the language. The situation in some cases was scandalous. There is little reason to do more than mention the existence of this situation. Even well-known scholars lent themselves to it, only to report a few years later that there was no call for Russian. As a result, the sudden flurry of Russian courses was without result and in the years after the War, they were more or less quietly abandoned. It accentuated the common notion that Russian could not be learned, an idea energetically fostered for various reasons. No one took the trouble to realize that the necessary preliminaries, such as the publication of grammars, were yet to be done. There were no books available, save a few published in England, and no real teachers, save some chance immigrants who owed their opportunities more to good fortune than to ability or training. Yet the war period did serve to strengthen those departments which had been previously established. It brought a few new individuals into the picture and above all it aroused a sense of need that was slowly to be satisfied.