Andrew D. White

Andrew Dickson White, member of the Century Club during the unusually long period of fifty-two years, and therefore in a group for which to-day only seven other members can qualify, was a notably interesting figure in the not often correlated fields of education, public life, economic discussion, theological controversy, and historical literature. In the public mind of to-day, his career is associated with the Cornell University of which he was the real founder, and over which he presided from its beginning in 1867 during the eighteen succeeding years. Yet it is not so very long ago that the public would have recognized his name more readily through recalling the Embassy to Germany, the Venezuela Boundary Commission, and the Hague Peace Conference to which he was our leading delegate; or, still further back, by the Warfare of Science with Theology.

During all this time those admirably lucid historical and economic monographs, incorporated in his Lectures on History, his Paper Money Inflation in France, and his Seven Great Statesmen, were in course of preparation. Here was a mind of the Gladstonian scope, with a good deal more of stability in political and intellectual conception than Gladstone possessed, and combining practical wisdom and sweep of information with the native wit and fund of entertaining anecdote with which the early chapters of his Autobiography fairly sparkle.

That he was a warm admirer of Germany, all who knew him were aware. That he could not in his closing four years of life bring himself to believe that the Germany he had known and loved in his university days of the early fifties, and in his two diplomatic residences at Berlin after 1879 and 1897, had become the Germany which the rest of us now know her to be, was at times perplexing to the people who most admired him. But he never by word or hint defended the great crime of 1914, and he used to say, with a blow of his fist on the table, “I can never get over the breaking of the treaty with Belgium.” He would answer those who urged him to speak publicly on the wrong doings of Germany, that he had decided not to speak until the peace was arranged. The opportunity never came. By a striking and pathetic coincidence, the bell of the University Chapel was tolling for his funeral at exactly the moment when the other church bells in Ithaca were being rung to celebrate the news that the armistice was signed.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook