In celebration of Women's History Month, for the first time the jury report on 1948 Biography winner Margaret Clapp is available for the first time at Pulitzer.org.
Clapp, a relatively lesser known Prize winner, enjoyed a long and fruitful career worthy of revisiting. A historian and onetime Associated Press Woman of the Year who was recognized in a particularly noteworthy class alongside such luminaries as James A. Michener, Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden, Clapp received a New York Times obituary upon her premature death from cancer aged 64 in 1974.
But while Auden's obituary from the previous year included effusive quotes from Christopher Isherwood and other notables on the poet and scholar's professional versatility, a subheadline in the Clapp piece declared that the historian "set [a] workmanlike tone" during her presidency of Wellesley College, diminishing a previous assertion that her 11-year tenure had been "one of the most notable in the history of the college."
If not a final ignominy, it was yet another slight in a trailblazing career. Born to a bookish family in East Orange, N.J. in 1910, Clapp "cultivated the clarity and eloquence" that characterized her academic work in lengthy dinnertime discussions with her family, according to Patricia Palmieri, who wrote the most comprehensive extant account of Clapp's life for "Notable American Women: The Modern Period," a biographical dictionary published by Radcliffe College and Harvard University Press in 1980.
After graduating from her local high school at the age of 16, Clapp went on to Wellesley College, receiving her undergraduate degree in 1930. But the Depression forestalled any hope of future study in the immediate future, prompting her to take a teaching position at Manhattan's Todhunter School, an elite primary-secondary girls' institution that was co-owned by Eleanor Roosevelt, who also served as a teacher and associate principal. Unlike other private New York girls' institutions of the era, which were often akin to finishing schools, Todhunter fused educational progressivism with rigorous courses in the arts and humanities.
During her time at Todhunter (which merged with the Dalton School in 1939), Clapp resumed her studies as a part-time graduate student, earning a master's degree in history from Columbia in 1937. At the time, the presence of women in the Graduate Faculties of Arts and Sciences — then considered to be the most prestigious units of the University — were negligible.
Fortuitously, Clapp's studies dovetailed with the professional ascent of the unlikely figure who would serve as her dissertation advisor: 1933 and 1937 Biography winner Allan Nevins. Born to Presbyterian farmers on the Illinois-Missouri border, Nevins pursued an eclectic career as a political reporter, literary editor and media writer before transitioning to academia, joining the Columbia history faculty after covering Al Smith's presidential campaign in 1928.
With no formal qualifications in academic history (his highest degree was a master's in English from the University of Illinois), Nevins set upon making the recondite accessible, playing a foundational role in the establishment of oral history as a subdiscipline and authoring an eight-volume popular history of the Civil War, "Ordeal of the Union" (1947-1971). According to his biographer, Gerald Fetner, "Nevins used narrative not only to tell a story but to propound moral lessons. It was not his inclination to deal in intellectual concepts or theories, like many academic scholars." An indifferent teacher in the classroom, Nevins was a proactive mentor as a dissertation supervisor, frequently steering graduate students to topics that furthered his areas of expertise.
It was in recurring references to a forgotten 19th century political and media figure throughout Nevins' coursework that Clapp found the subject of her dissertation. A near-centenarian upon his death aged 94 in 1911, John Bigelow was the abolitionist editor of the New York Evening Post before segueing into politics during the Civil War, serving as the Lincoln administration's minister to Napoleon III and an informal advisor to Otto von Bismarck on the cusp of the Franco-Prussian War.
Returning to America, he rejoined the Democratic Party, advised Samuel Tilden in the contested presidential election of 1876 and, as an executor of the former New York governor's estate, served as founding president of the New York Public Library. In his personal life, he was an ardent devotee of the 18th century pluralistic Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, popularizing his works amid the emergence of the Spiritualist and Theosophy movements in "The Bible that was Lost and is Found" (1893).
To Clapp, he was "an American Agricola, perhaps, called to a succession of jobs into each of which he put the whole force of a sagacious intellect and a persistent will; then, the job completed, quietly withdrawing [...] Never did he seek personal advancement or gain in the position he held." In an era suffused with the perceived demagoguery of Huey Long and the strident ambition of figures like William O. Douglas (an FDR confederate who ascended to the Supreme Court at the age of 40 in 1939), framing Bigelow as a disinterested, patriotic exemplar of nonpartisan rectitude meshed well with the scholarly imperatives of the Nevins group. In a 1948 interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, Clapp cited the financier and "park bench statesman" Bernard Baruch as the closest contemporary equivalent to Bigelow.
While holding lectureships at a variety of New York-area institutions, including the City College of New York and Rutgers University, Clapp reconstructed Bigelow's life through a variety of exceptional primary sources, earning her Ph.D. in 1946 and a tenure-track professorship at Brooklyn College a year later. According to Palmieri, the publication of her dissertation (as "Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow") by Little, Brown in 1947 did little to alter her daily routine, which centered around the commute to a Flatbush campus bursting with veterans completing their deferred educations and life with her mother.
It was during this quiet period that "Forgotten First Citizen" was entered for the 1948 Biography Prize. A jury comprised of New York Times Book Review Editor J. Donald Adams, Princeton University librarian Julian P. Boyd and longtime New York Public Library administrator Harry M. Lydenberg reached a tenuous consensus via a point system on biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, with Clapp's book a distant third — and only by virtue of a rapturous appraisal from Adams, who ranked it as his first choice. The critic praised its "skillful use of background," concluding that "it comes closer to what biography ought to be than any other of the entrants."
While there are no records of the Advisory Board deliberations that prevailed upon the body to choose the book, a recent Biography Prize to a competing work on Wilson and the award's initial clause "excluding, as too obvious, the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln" (but not Jefferson explicitly) may have played a role in the decision.
The meeting also marked the final Pulitzer-related duties of Frank Fackenthal, the longtime Columbia University secretary and acting president who served as the de facto administrator of the Arts and Book Prizes from their inception. Blocked from assuming the presidency in an administrative contretemps with his ailing predecessor (founding Advisory Board member Nicholas Murray Butler) and on the cusp of receiving his own special Pulitzer for his work, it is tempting (though utterly suppositional) to imagine that Fackenthal advocated for the book as a riposte against the institutional misogyny of the Butler era.
Although the Pulitzer elicited a new wave of press coverage of her book and recognition from the New Jersey state legislature, Clapp realized that it would have little bearing on her career. Despite her status as a protege of Nevins, it remained an era in which tangible credentials were often subordinated by the vagaries of "genius" and social connections. This ethos was personified by Harvard's Society of Fellows, whose early, elite and uniformly male affiliates, including two-time Pulitzer winner Arthur Schlesinger and literary scholar Harry Levin, were explicitly prohibited from taking doctorates altogether in favor of self-directed study and networking.
With little recourse in her field, Clapp returned to Wellesley in the autumn of 1949 — as its president. Following the lead of such progressive contemporaries as the University of Chicago's Robert Maynard Hutchins, she embarked on an ambitious expansion program (including three new dormitories and a new library wing) and increased faculty salaries by 150%. According to Palmieri, she "often opposed publicly the notion that women be educated solely for motherhood," stating: "[The] old feminism is dead and the new, inchoate."
It was just as the second wave of feminism was beginning to coalesce in earnest that Clapp left Wellesley in 1966, a dispiriting decision for staff and alumni who expected the historian to preside over the college's centennial in 1975. As demonstrations and a profound generational divide roiled campuses in the late 1960s, Clapp spent the next five years as a university administrator and diplomat in India, retiring early in 1971 as minister-counselor of public affairs in the New Delhi office of the United States Information Agency at the brink of the Indo-Pakistani War.
To those who came of age during the contraction of American academia in the early 21st century, it is all too tempting to view the postwar Long Fifties as a rose-tinted life of the mind, a halcyon age where the son of a lower middle class salesman like Richard Feynman could refute pernicious ethnic quotas to spearhead a revolution in particle physics and Lionel Trilling's exegesis of literature, liberalism and morality defined the era's humanistic currents.
Yet the arc of Clapp's career, despite her litany of hard-fought achievements, bears witness to the inviolable and exclusionary crust that undergirded American universities during this period. While she would go on to co-edit a collection of essays on university administration and was justly recognized as a dynamic administrator in journal articles from the period, Clapp never returned to the field in which she displayed unerring competence. It is therefore fitting that tomorrow's scholars can now embark on their own intellectual journeys at Wellesley's Clapp Library, renamed for this eminent scholar following her death.