Indiana. Somewhat austere in manner, he was the pioneer in America, before the turn of the century, of scholarship on Russia and Eastern Europe, indeed of international studies generally. Director of Harvard's Widener Library for a time, he was all his life a voracious traveler and inquisitor as well as a meticulous scholar of documents. At one point, in 1914, with an old Boston China Trade fortune behind him, he repaid his hospitality debts in Germany, where he had taken his doctorate, by a formal dinner for 100 at the famous Adlon Hotel in Berlin. He also proclaimed that he would oppose any Harvard appointment relating to European history if the candidate did not have a working command of at least French, German and Russian.

Then 57, he waspersuaded to accept the editorship on a half-time basis, provided the Council would find a qualified younger man to work in New York full-time and handle all the mechanical work of putting out a magazine, while also participating fully in the editing.

So a second principal character came on stage, where he will remain for the rest of my remarks. Casting around, the Council's leaders consulted Edwin F. Gay, one of the original Directors and then the distinguished Editor of the New York Evening Post. Gay strongly recommended a man who had been one of his reporters in Europe, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, whom Coolidge had encountered on one brief occasion, stoutly expounding a view at odds with official orthodoxy. A graduate of Princeton in 1916 and then only in