Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,728

This is the grave of Charles McLean Andrews.

Born in 1863 in Weathersfield, Connecticut, Andrews grew up the son of a Catholic Apostolic minister. I admit I had to look that one up; turns out to be just another Protestant splinter group. Anyway, Andrews was pretty well off and went to Trinity College in Hartford, graduating in 1884. He taught school for a couple of years and then went to the new graduate school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which was introducing the modern social sciences to the United States. Interested in early America, he became one of the first generation of PhDs in history in the United States, working under Herbert Baxter Adams, himself the person most responsible for bringing the new German methods home. Bryn Mawr hired Andrews in 1889 as a professor and he taught there until 1907. Johns Hopkins hired him that year and he taught in Baltimore for three years before Yale hired him. He taught at Yale from 1910 until he retired in 1931.

Andrews wrote extensively on early America and like most of the early historians on this topic, focused almost exclusively on New England. He published his first book in 1889. The River Towns of Connecticut was mostly about his home town. It’s long been my contention that for all the high tones about “objectivity,” most historians are really just writing about themselves. That very much includes me, I just openly admit it. Andrews was very big on the idea of objectivity and that has value too. He wasn’t a hack. A lot of the colonial history at that time was of the “Colonies Good, British Bad” school, justifying the necessity of the American Revolution. That wasn’t Andrews’ bag. He was pretty honest about what the British had brought to the colonies and instead followed how the colonies and the English leadership grew apart.

In 1924, Woodrow Wilson died. That year, Wilson was president of the American Historical Association. I don’t know anything about the politics of why this happened; obviously Wilson couldn’t do much anymore given his strokes, but I guess he had his fans from his presidency and his days as a scholar. In any case, with Wilson now gone, the AHA chose Andrews to take over as president. He probably was already elected incoming president and he remained president for 1925. He ended up having two presidential addresses and you can read them here if you want. The AHA is good at archiving that kind of stuff. Not honestly sure what else it is good for; it’s completely useless as an organization dealing with the challenges of historians not getting tenure track jobs as it mostly continues to serve elite historians at elite schools.

That’s the second biggest highlight of his career, though to him that might have been first. The competitor was when he won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1935 for the first volume of his four volume tome The Colonial Period of American History. I haven’t read this and to be honest, the way that the field of history works is that scholarship this old rarely gets read or even looked at. There are a few exceptions–Frederick Jackson Turner, C. Vann Woodward, Charles and Mary Beard perhaps–but I had never even heard of Andrews before picking up this grave. I’m not a colonialist of course, but I am a U.S. historian. Lots of these people I haven’t heard of before in fact. To be honest, I haven’t read some of the key works of the early labor history either; I know Philip Foner is a key figure in the profession and I could use his works if I was working on certain questions, but it’s not like I feel I need a deep dive into his books is necessary for me to be a perfectly competent labor historian.

Andrews’ other books include Ideal Empires and Republics (1901), Colonial Self-Government (1904), The Colonial Period (1912), Pilgrims and Puritans (1919), Colonial Folkways (1920), and The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (1924). Probably could have used some work on creative titles. What he really valued though was his explorations of British archives for material on early America, which he published for other scholars. Oh, and as for The Colonial Period of American History? He hoped it would be seven volumes but only got through four.

In 1928, Andrews’ daughter Ethel married John Marshall Harlan II, who later became a Supreme Court justice.

Andrews died in 1943. He was 80 years old.

Charles McLean Andrews is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other presidents of the American Historical Association, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Andrew Dickson White, president in 1884-85, is in Ithaca, New York and Henry Osborn Taylor, president in 1927, is in East Hampton, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.