Archibald MacLeish: Yaleman at Harvard

Two classmates from Yale College and Harvard Law School marched together at the 1950 Commencement. Dean Acheson was receiving an honorary degree, and his close "friend, Archibald MacLeish, was the Faculty member accompanying him.

"I think it was just as surprising a day for me as it was for Dean," MacLeish recalls. "As we walked past University Hall and Widener in the procession, I remembered this was the same path we used when we were law students, walking around learning our cases. Only today he was Secretary of State, and I, of all things, was Boylston Professor."

MacLeish, poet, former curator of the Nieman Fellowships, Librarian of Congress, and Assistant Secretary" of State, still thinks of his Law School days as an "exciting experience." Like most men, he has affection for the undergraduate college he a attended, but MacLeish feels his days at Harvard Law had much more of a lasting effect on him. He respects the Harvard man's "attitude toward learning," of feeling "personal responsibility towards what he knows and is learning."

Today, in his second year as Boylston professor, MacLeish's "excitement" over Harvard continues. It "simply towers. You have the feeling that idea of a university really exists here."

MacLeish is concerned over his place in the Harvard picture, for this professorship is his first academic post. "Whereas my colleagues have research and teaching experience to fall back on, I am like an army without depth. You only know what you have used, and the result is constant pressure." But MacLeish recognizes the "pleasantness of life" at a university after so many years in Washington.

"At a time like this, you miss being in direct touch with the situation. But I came to feel that, with the nature of the underlying crisis, you have to get away from day-to-day developments to gain perspective from a point of vantage. It is so confusing in Washington you're not sure what you believe."

MacLeish's government days included close association with President Roosevelt, whom he helped on speeches. He recalls that you could always feel FDR's presence in a room; "he seemed the most alive human being I've ever met."

In his time at the State Department, MacLeish concentrated on explaining the Department to the public. It was his project that brought representatives from 40 or 50 major U. S. organizations to San Francisco to watch the American delegation at the birth of the United Nations. Recent events have tended to confirm MacLeish's long-standing view that the Department's first concern should be to sell itself to the American public before devoting all its propaganda efforts to foreign areas.

No matter how many administrative jobs he has held, MacLeish still remains a writer in most minds. Poetry is his favorite medium, one whose limited appeal prevents commercialization. "You hope sometime to strike off lines that have meaning outside the time they were written."

Teaching has been a full-time job for him, and since he joined the faculty, he has had almost no time for creative writing. "It isn't like the books that most professors write in which they draw on their scholarship."

In spite of his own reservations about his ability, MacLeish seems finally to have found a permanent spot; his days of wandering from one interesting job to the next appear to be over.