Endowed Professorships

LOUIS MORTONDaniel Webster Professor

Few academicians have read, written or thought about the phenomenon of war - the use of force in human experience - more than Louis Morton, chairman of the History Department and the Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth.

He still doesn't like the fact that man repeatedly throughout his social history has turned to war to pursue societal goals when other means fail. But to Professor Morton, whose quiet, courteous and contemplative ways are the antithesis of all war represents, the study of war is like the study of disease.

"Neither war nor disease goes away if ignored, at least not the virulent varieties," he said when asked why he chose military history as an area of scholarship.

"As with disease, you've got to try to understand the cause, course and effects of war if you want to cure or control it. And in my view war is one of the oldest diseases of mankind; no organized society to my knowledge has ever long been free of war

Actually, it took a historic event of cataclysmic proportions to turn Professor Morton to his specialty. Initially interested in colonial American history, he was a member of the faculty of William and Mary and a research associate at Colonial Williamsburg, when he was uprooted from that gracious environment by Pearl Harbor and found himself with the Army in the Pacific with a front-row seat for one of the epic amphibious military campaigns of all time.

In his case, the Army, after training him to be a signal officer, recognized his civilian vocation and assigned him to be a historian with the Army in the Pacific Theater. There he gained the recognition that led to his appointment, at the end of the war, as chief of the Pacific Branch, Office of Military History, Department of the Army. He was later promoted to be deputy chief historian on The War in thePacific, of which he wrote two volumes: The Fall of the Philippines and The War inthe Pacific: Strategy and Command.

Since World War II, he has continued to translate his scholarship into books. He is co-author of Command Decisions inWorld War II, Total War and Cold War,The Historian and the Diplomat, and Schools for Strategy: Education andResearch in National Security Affairs. The latter book grew out of a study he did on how the Cold War was affecting educational institutions, for which he received the Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1959, one year before he joined the Dartmouth faculty.

Professor Morton is currently general editor of a 17-volume series on Wars andMilitary Institutions of the United States, being published by Macmillan, of which seven volumes have been printed and three are in press. Describing these volumes as "among the best surveys of the military history of the United States published to date," he hopes "one of my achievements will be the completion of this series."

With this record, one almost does a double take when Professor Morton says he expects to give up the chairmanship of the History Department, which he has held for five years, because he has "a lot of serious writing to do," But the statement was serious. He had learned the hard way - a heart attack experienced a year ago - that there comes a time when a scholar must husband his energies for the things most important to him.

Ironically, Professor Morton's ability to analyze and organize material actually has gotten in the way of his scholarship, in recent years, because of that capacity, he has repeatedly been "drafted for administrative responsibilities by both the College and other agencies.

During the academic year 1971-72 he served as Provost of the College, sharing the responsibilities of President Kemeny and acting for him in his absence, and at the same time he studied the need for that position. As a result of that experience, he recommended the post be abolished as part of the overall administrative reorganization recently accomplished.

As chairman of the History Department, Professor Morton is proud that for the second year in a row, history has emerged as the most popular major in the College, in marked contrast to the national trend.

Even though he eschews the utility theory of history, even though he acknowledges that modern technology, population pressures and other factors have created for modern society significant discontinuities with the past, he still feels strongly that a sense of history is important to perspective in human affairs. He is therefore gratified that an important number of Dartmouth students share his awareness of history.

Importantly, history to Professor Morton has never been a musty tracing through the dead past. He not only has lived in the crucible of the recent history he teaches - War and Peace in the 20th Century - he is shaping the department to deal with the new history being written about the Third World, largely heretofore ignored or viewed through Western eyes. Thus, the department now has scholars in Latin American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Russian history, in addition to the traditional areas that constitute the mainstream of Western history.

Also active as a consultant to government in numerous ways, Professor Morton is chairman of the historical advisory committee of NASA, earning that agency's Apollo Achievement Award in 1970 for helping to organize the historical records of what he calls "one of the most exciting ventures in the long quest of man for knowledge." He lectures periodically at the National War College and the similar institutions of each of the services. He is chairman of the Joint Committee on Historians and the Federal Government.

Professor Morton received a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1935, a master's degree from NYU Graduate School in 1936, and a doctorate from Duke University in 1936. He was Professor of history at the University of Wisconsin when he visited Dartmouth for a seminar on military policy in the summer of 1956 and, in his words, "fell in love with the place." Thus, when he was invited to come to Dartmouth, it took no persuasion for either him or his wife, the former Ruth Goldstein, a former opera singer who directs the Hanover Opera Workshop.

Professor Morton is the third incumbent of the Daniel Webster Professorship, established in 1882 by alumni subscription memorialize that statesman and Dartmouth alumnus Class of 1801 who went on to become a giant in his own time. Earlier incumbents were John B. Stearns '16 of Hanover, professor of Latin Language and Literature Emeritus, and Arthur M. Wilson, Norwich, Vt., Professor of Biography and Literature Emeritus.