Allan Nevins

• 1. Introduction

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  Allan Nevins grew up on a farm in Camp Point, Illinois, the son of a stern Presbyterian farmer of Scottish descent and a German-heritage mother named Emma. He would go on to publish more than 50 books, supervise over 100 doctoral dissertations, and write what remains the most detailed political, economic, and military narrative of the American Civil War era. How does a farmer's son from a small Illinois town become one of the most prolific historians America has ever produced? The answer winds through two decades of journalism in New York, three decades of teaching at Columbia, wartime service in Australia and London, and a pioneering experiment in recording living memory that reshaped how historians do their work.

• 2. From Farm to Byline

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  Nevins earned a Master of Arts in English from the University of Illinois in 1913, and his first book appeared the very next year: a life of Robert Rogers, a Colonial American frontiersman and Loyalist. By 1917 he had also written a history of the University of Illinois itself, both produced while he was still a postgraduate student at the same institution.

  The New York Evening Post and The Nation drew him into journalism, and for roughly twenty years he worked as a reporter and editor in New York City while continuing to research and write history on the side. He resigned from The Nation in 1918. After publishing a full history of the Post titled The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism in 1922, he left that paper as well and moved to the New York Sun as literary editor, then to the New York World as an editorial writer.

  Covering Al Smith's political campaigns gave Nevins a close view of national politics. After following the 1928 Presidential Campaign for Walter Lippmann, he came away deeply troubled by what he saw as intolerance, religious bigotry, and racial prejudice in parts of American public life. As a historian, he was struck by the contrast with the very same region's contributions to religious freedom and the separation of church and state during the revolutionary era. It was a tension he would return to throughout his career.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., arranged for Nevins to spend a teaching term at Cornell University during a leave from newspaper work, planting him more firmly in the world of academic history.

• 3. Columbia and the Pulitzers

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  In 1928 Nevins joined the history faculty at Columbia University, a position he would hold for three decades until mandatory retirement in 1958. He stepped away from full-time journalism in 1931 to become a full faculty member, and in 1939 he succeeded Evarts Boutell Greene, his old teacher from Illinois who had also become his mentor at Columbia, as the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History.

  The Columbia years produced a cascade of major works. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage appeared in 1932 and won Nevins his first Pulitzer Prize. Four years later, Hamilton Fish: The Inner Story of the Grant Administration took his second. Those back-to-back prizes in the same category, biography, made him a rare figure in American letters.

  His two-volume biography of John D. Rockefeller, The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, came out in 1940 and he would later rewrite it entirely, publishing a substantially expanded version in 1953 under the title A Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist. His Gateway to History, published in 1938, laid out his thinking about the discipline itself.

  During World War II, Nevins served as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford from 1940 to 1941. He then worked as special representative of the Office of War Information in Australia and New Zealand in 1943-1944, and from 1945 to 1946 served in London as chief public affairs officer at the American Embassy. He was, in the fullest sense, a public intellectual who carried his scholarship into wartime service.

• 4. Inventing Oral History

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  In 1948, a year after publishing the first volume of his Civil War series, Nevins created the first oral history program to operate on an institutionalized basis in the United States. That program continues today as Columbia University's Center for Oral History.

  The idea was straightforward in conception but genuinely new in practice: instead of waiting for figures to leave behind written records, historians should sit down with living participants and record their accounts in a systematic, organized way. Nevins recognized that enormous quantities of historical knowledge were walking out of the world every year, simply because no one was asking the right questions and writing the answers down.

  From the 6th of May 1938, until the 18th of August 1957, Nevins also hosted a 15-minute radio program called Adventures in Science on CBS, broadcast as part of the network's Adult Education Series. The show covered a wide range of medical and scientific topics, usually airing in the late afternoon. For nearly two decades, he was speaking to a general audience about knowledge and discovery, treating radio as a form of public education that ran alongside his books and teaching.

• 5. Ordeal of the Union

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  The first volume of Nevins' Civil War series, titled The Ordeal of the Union, appeared in 1947 and won both the Bancroft Prize and a ten-thousand-dollar Scribners Literary Prize. What followed was a sustained effort that stretched across nearly a quarter century and grew into eight volumes in total.

  The series traces the coming of the Civil War and then the war itself, with a level of political, economic, and military detail that no comparable work has matched. Nevins died in 1971 before he could address Reconstruction, so the masterwork ends in 1865. The source notes that Nevins's Ordeal of the Union carries a slight but perceptible pro-Union bias, just as Shelby Foote's three-volume Confederate-focused history leans in the other direction. That comparison suggests how each work sits in the broader landscape of Civil War scholarship.

  The last two volumes of the series won the United States National Book Award in History in 1972, a year after Nevins's death. His biographers explained his underlying method: Nevins used narrative not just to tell a story but to propound moral lessons. He had no particular interest in intellectual concepts or academic theory. He preferred to emphasize practical notions about national unity, principled leadership, the social responsibility of business, and the ways that scientific and technical progress contributed to human welfare.

  In 1954, working with Frank Hill, he published the first volume of a three-volume biography of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company. That project, titled Ford: The Times, the Man, and the Company, occupied the same large-scale, multi-volume ambition as his Civil War and Rockefeller work.

• 6. The Rockefeller Controversy

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  Nevins wrote an authorized two-volume biography of John D. Rockefeller and revised it substantially a decade later. Business journalist Ferdinand Lundberg criticized Nevins for deferring too readily to power and thereby misleading readers about the true record of American industrialism.

  Historian Priscilla Roberts offered a more sympathetic reading. She argues that Nevins's studies of inventors and businessmen prompted a genuine reassessment of American industrialization and its leading figures. Nevins's own position was that economic development in the United States caused relatively little human suffering while raising the general standard of living and making the country an industrial power capable of defeating Germany in both world wars. He argued that the great capitalists of the industrial era should be seen not as robber barons but as men whose self-interest had played an essentially positive role, and who had done nothing criminal by the standards of their time.

  The source notes that in contending Rockefeller did nothing criminal, in light of his central role in the Ludlow Massacre, Nevins appears to have treated non-prosecution as equivalent to innocence. That distinction became a point of scholarly contention.

  Nevins's approach did help open a path for a later generation of biographers. Jean Strouse, Ron Chernow, David Nasaw, and T. J. Stiles followed his lead in writing serious biographical and historical investigations of figures like J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Those writers did not share Nevins's tendency to confer heroic status on their subjects, but they did use the same tools of deep research and biography to build a more complex picture of American economic history.

• 7. Legacy and After

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  After mandatory retirement from Columbia in 1958, Nevins moved to California and took up a position as senior researcher at the Huntington Library in San Marino. He also returned to Oxford from 1964 to 1965. Retirement slowed neither his output nor his civic engagement.

  He publicly supported John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential Campaign and wrote the introduction for the inaugural edition of Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. Together with his longtime Columbia colleague Henry Steele Commager, Nevins helped organize a political advocacy group called Professors for Kennedy during that election. The two men later parted ways in the late 1960s over Vietnam. Commager opposed the war on constitutional grounds; Nevins believed it was necessary as part of the Cold War struggle against Communism.

  Nevins headed the national Civil War Centennial Commission, edited its 15-volume Impact series, and finished the final volumes of his eight-volume Civil War history during this period. In 1966 he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

  He died in Menlo Park, California, on the 5th of March 1971. He is buried at Kensico Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. Historians including Ray Allen Billington compiled the volume Allan Nevins on History in 1975 to mark his contributions to the field. His granddaughter Jane Mayer became a journalist and author, extending a family pattern across generations. The Society of American Historians awards an Allan Nevins Prize each year in his name, keeping his legacy formally embedded in the discipline he spent his life building.