Dictionary's End

Calvin Coolidge is not in the Dictionary of American Biography because he died too late (1933) for Volume IV (Chanfour-to-Cushing). Last year Jane Addams and Edwin Arlington Robinson likewise died too late, William H. Woodin was in time. Last week this unique race between Death and the alphabet closed as the editors of the Dictionary completed a twelve-year labor, published their 20th and final volume (Werden-to-Zunser). Also last week the editors violated their inflexible alphabetical order for the first time.

Heading Volume XX was a four-page biography of the New York Times's late, great Publisher Adolph S. Ochs (1858-1935), written by onetime Timesman Elmer Davis. It was Publisher Ochs who made the Dictionary possible. When the American Council of Learned Societies met in 1924 to discuss a U. S. counterpart of Sidney Lee's great British Dictionary of National Biography, there was not $500 in the treasury to pay the officers' traveling expenses. Approached by his scholarly editorial writer, Dr. John H. Finley, Publisher Ochs promised that the Times would put up $50,000 a year, enough to cover the spread between the cost of the Dictionary and its price ($12.50 a volume). Altogether the Times contributed $632,000.

The resulting Dictionary is handsomer than its British sister, far freer and less formal in style. The first is owing to Publisher Charles Scribner Sr., the second to the Dictionary's original editor, Historian Allen Johnson, both of whom died in time to fit into their proper volumes. It contains fewer biographies (13,633) by more contributors (2,243). Originally Editor Johnson decided to set a limit of 10,000 words to each biography, but that was exceeded in five instances: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson.

To qualify for the Dictionary a U. S. citizen must have made some "original contribution to American life." On this principle many minor Revolutionary heroes and obscure Congressmen are omitted, but Volume XX contains an ample history of Samuel Stockton White (1822-79), a Philadelphia manufacturer of dental supplies who notably improved the fit of false teeth. Bridge Expert Shepard Barclay contributes biographies of his late colleagues Dr. Milton C. Work and Wilbur Cherrier ("Quick Trick") Whitehead whose maxim was: "The law of averages is God's law and you can't go very far wrong on that."

Leading contributors were two members of the Dictionary's staff, Historians Harris Starr and George Genzmer, with 342 and 335 biographies respectively, mostly of educators and clergymen. Curator Carl Mitman of the National Museum in Washington free-lanced 328, chiefly of inventors. Most of the longer biographies were farmed out to academic experts or enterprising authors like James Truslow Adams, who wrote more than 100. Mark Van Doren did Emerson and Whitman, Brother Carl did Hawthorne and Henry James. Associate U. S. Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler turned out to know most about Louisiana Jurist Joseph Arsenne Breaux (1838-1926). Author Hervey Allen, whose Israfel is a standard life of Edgar Allan Poe, got the Poe assignment long before he turned out best-selling Anthony Adverse. Typical of the Dictionary liveliness was a friendly dispute it provoked last week between the New York Herald Tribune's Bookman Lewis Gannett and its Columnist F(ranklin) P(ierce) A(dams), as to whether black Vaudevillian Bert Williams was famed for doing the cakewalk.

Editor Dumas Malone, who left the Harvard history department to supervise the last half of the Dictionary, was back at work in Cambridge last week. Because every day's obituary column since 1924 has made the Dictionary obsolete. Editor Malone hopes to raise funds to publish a supplement by 1940.

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