THE "AMERICAN" DEPARTMENT

As the halls of the Boston Book Fair ring with applause for a handful of professors in modern American literature, some mention is due Harvard's department of Americana, of which these gentlemen form but a very small part.

Every high school and college in the country has an English Department, but when Harvard officially recognized a state of war in 1776 by conferring an LL.D. on General Washington, it was proclaiming for all time its intellectual independence from the Mother Country. Since that time the University has conscientiously tried to develop native talent in every field, and it can now be justly regarded as a center of American culture.

In history, art, philosophy, and letters of this country, Harvard has gathered specialists who not only teach but also practice their calling. The student has the rare privilege of learning the history of this oldest living democracy from such men as Morison, Schlesinger and Buck, of reading its literature under Matthiessen, Murdock, and Jones, and of studying its changing thought under Perry and Hocking, themselves able philosophers. So far as pure academic knowledge goes, other fields are equally well covered; but their contributions to the student are infinitely smaller.

The benefits from studying American tradition are twofold: the student emerges well instructed in his own social and intellectual background; but more important still, he also learns the American tradition, which is to deny tradition. Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address may not be as well written as many of Carlyle's essays, but it is a direct challenge, an inspiration to every young man who reads it. So it is with Whitman, Poe, and Hawthorne, and a hundred other American authors. American history teaches the same lesson: we honor Sam Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln for the originality of their several contributions.

Many years ago, a gentleman from Princeton took occasion to remind a Harvard audience that the American flag was a flag of revolt, that only perpetual revolt could bring consistent progress. Today Mr. Wilson is dead, but the Harvard department of Americana is trying to carry on this tradition of denying tradition.