Death v. Historian

A bald, white-mustached and be- spectacled man, whose red lips and rotund girth belied his 74 years, bent feverishly over a manuscript in Harvard's Widener Library one day last week, writing for all he was worth. Reluctantly he went home that evening, planning what he would do on the morrow. That night he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Next afternoon he was dead.

He was Edward Channing, professor emeritus of history at Harvard, son of two Emersonian Transcendentalists, Poet William Ellery Channing and Ellen K. Fuller. He had written so feverishly in order to accomplish what no man ever had done before: to complete a scholarly history of the U. S., a thoroughgoing picture of the lives and times of all North American colonists and U. S. citizens from Norsemen to Hoover. That this was no easy task he had set himself may be judged by the failure at it or despair of it entertained by his best predecessors and colleagues. Statesman George Bancroft (1800-91) surely meant to round out his ten-volume History of the United States, the first volume of which was issued in 1834, but his subsequent activities as President Folk's Secretary of the Navy, and as Minister to England and to Germany, prevented him from getting further than 1782. A great historian must also be a literary craftsman. Literature as well as history was created by Francis Parkman and Henry Adams, but neither of them re corded more than one period in American affairs. Nearest to achieve Dr. Channing's ambition have been two contemporaries: University of Pennsylvania's Professor Emeritus John Bach McMaster, who dealt with the period from the Revolution to the Civil War, and the wealthy, retired iron & coal merchant, James Ford Rhodes (1848-1927), who produced a masterpiece on American History since 1850. Many a historian has written short, one-volume comprehensive histories of the U. S. for reference and school use. Dr. Channing himself published one such in 1898. Three years earlier he had begun his larger work. So well did he succeed that his sixth volume (The War for Southern Independence) won the 1925 Pulitzer prize. In 1929 he retired from teaching at Harvard, where his "History 10" was a popular course, and began the last lap of his race with Death, saying: "Two more volumes will come if the gods permit."

Last week his executors announced that the seventh volume was already in publishers' hands; the eighth was so nearly completed when Dr. Channing died that little more must be added from his copious notes. He had won.

Critics united in praise of his lifework, some calling it the greatest history of the U. S. ever written. One dubbed his style arid, but said that the interest of the living subject-matter more than compensated.

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