CITY ON A HILL: HEIMERT KEEPS THE HARVARD FLAME ABLAZE
Published on Monday, June 07, 1999
By M. DOUGLAS O'MALLEY Crimson Staff Writer
In a tucked-away corner of Eliot House, Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan E. Heimert '49 still holds court in his office, which--like the great scholar himself--hearkens back to an earlier era.
The great scholars with whom he studied--Perry Miller who he says had a "massive" influence on his work and Kenneth B. Murdock--have long since died, and his fellow colleagues have retired. And while Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history, is older, Heimert has spent more years at Harvard.
In 1964, Heimert said a classmate referred to him as a "fixture" in his fifteenth reunion book entry.
A fixture in 1964, an institution today, Heimert will be retiring at the end of the next academic year, after a life tied to Harvard where he mastered a House, a department and a scholarly life.
Heimert, who has devoted the majority of his academic career to the study of American religion and Puritanism, has seen the academic world transform itself. The "learned" individuals have been replaced by "clever" men which he abhors.
"The clever ones have a gambit, a piece of theory that they can apply to everything as opposed to knowing everything," he says.
And Heimert has increasingly found himself in the minority as the generations shift and his colleagues become more distant.
"It's at the point that I only recognize the ones who are the faculty emeritii. Everybody is younger than I am," he says.
Yet, instead of merely fading into retirement, Heimert has reaffirmed his love for undergraduate teaching, describing the last five years as some of the most rewarding.
"I think the teaching has shown me really engaged students, more than at any other period in my teaching career," Heimert says.
He feels today's students are "serious," but in a different way than the career-minded students of the late 70s and early 80s.
"I think today's students are much more serious, much more intellectual than the late 70s and early 80s where they were serious about getting in to medical and law school."
"They're quite serious to understand the American past and do not say that history is bunk," he says.
And while Heimert has gained so much out of the last five years, a family legacy of diabetes has cast a shadow. Unable to work for two years for health reasons, he had surgery in an attempt to clear up his arteries in the February of 1997. He suffered a stroke and ultimately had to have his leg partially amputated.
Yet, as Heimert comes to the end of his academic odyssey through Harvard as he plans to retire at the end of the next academic year, he says his final stint at the University has perhaps been his most rewarding of his teaching experiences.
His teaching was most recently recognized in 1997 when he was a granted a Levinson award for teaching excellence, an award which he holds in higher esteem than the Lifetime Achievement Award he received from the Modern Literature Association in 1995.
Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. and soon moved to Chicago and finally to Elmhurst where he attended York Community High School. Neither his mother nor his father received a college degree although his father completed two years of school before his father's death forced him to earn a living for his family.
Heimert was far from groomed to attend Harvard's fair grounds. He discovered Harvard's existence only with the encouragement of teachers.
"The only thing I had known about Harvard was that it had been founded earlier than any other college," he says.
"I came here not only as a wide-eyed lad, but as a wide-tied lad," Heimert says, making reference to the distinct difference in Eastern and Midwestern tie size that branded him as a stranger to Cambridge.
Heimert quickly discovered his affinity for American history, but even as he completed his senior thesis on Abraham Lincoln he had not yet decided to enter the world of academia.
Intent on attending law school, Heimert applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School in the December of his senior year. After completing his thesis, he hopped over to the law school to see what lay ahead for him.
"Well, I discovered what was coming next, and I immediately started seeing if I could still apply to other law schools. There was less intellectual content--it was a trade school, not an intellectual enterprise."
Ultimately, however, Heimert's
pessisism about the state of academic affairs moves beyond mere rhetorical gestures. He says now if he was faced with the same choice upon graduation, he would have attended law school. And while he cannot retrace his steps, his daughter, Larisa, who attended Yale Law School for the "intellectual enterprise" it offered ultimately rejected the world of academia because it lacked the same freedom.
"She was responding to the entry of mere cleverness [into academia] that had taken over," Heimert says
Heimert feels the lack of respect for the past was epitomized in the September, 1997 dedication of the Barker Center for the Humanities, which unified disparate humanities departments but divided the Great Hall of the Freshman Union.
Heimert says his fellow colleagues celebrated the dedication not only because of its unifying purpose, but rather because it relegated the Freshman Union, a Harvard institution, to the history books.
"It got rid of the symbol of the old Harvard. The old Harvard was not a bad place--it was very good to me," he said.
Heimert would also find his future wife through his love of academics. He met Arline I. Grimes '59 when she was still an undergraduate and they started dating after she graduated.
After a three-year romance, they were married in Harvard's Appleton Chapel on Oct. 20, 1962. Of Heimert's four groomsmen, three were Harvard graduates and one was the son of a Harvard graduate. Even in love, Heimert found that Harvard shaped his life.
And while Heimert still maintains a love for Harvard, he believes it was ultimately his involvement in its inner bureaucracy that limited the time he could devote to scholarship.
Heimert recalls English Professor Kenneth B. Murdock, one of his mentors, advising him to always appear to be an inept administrator.
"Don't ever at Harvard show administrative skills--you'll just be given another promotion," he said.
When Heimert countered that wasn't that the American way of upward mobility, Murdock further explained his comment. "I didn't say a better job, but another job."
Murdock, who served as both Master of Leverett and Dean of the Faculty illustrated his point to Heimert by telling him about how he would write letters back and forth from the Leverett House Master to the Dean of the Faculty--addressed to and signed by Murdock himself.
Most prominent among Heimert's administrative roles was his position as a committee chair on the Committee of Fifteen, which decided the fate of the most egregious offenders of the 1969 University Hall takeover.
It this involvement which Heimert says marked him as too controversial to be selected as University president or dean of the Faculty. Other committee members suffered the same fate, including James Q. Wilson, who ultimately left Harvard.
Heimert's administrative involvement along with the responsibilities of being the Master of Eliot House led people to question whether he was washed up or not.
Yet, Heimert, more than a typical Faculty member or administrator, had to deal with the real student effects of unrest on a very personal House level.
"When one was Master, one was closer to the student unrest as opposed to a Faculty member with a nice office in the distance," he says.
Heimert's tenure at Eliot coincided with the social changes of the postwar decades.
Parietals rules prohibiting students from entertaining members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms at night were officially loosened in the spring of 1970. In addition, Heimert's time at Harvard saw the abolition of official rules governing the tradition of wearing a coat and tie to all meals in the House dining halls.
Ultimately, there was no way to discipline what Heimert calls an increasing number of "wayward students" in the late 60s and early 70s.
All students, not just card-carrying members of SDS, and even in the traditionally upper crust world of Eliot House were rebelling against Harvard--and its dress code.
"[A student asked about his attire] would have been more likely to say fuck you. Authority was desanctified," Heimert says.
Heimert, however, says he is resigned to the fact that Harvard will inevitably change over time. Although he marveled in 1995 on how different Harvard had become since he arrived in 1945, he said a member of the Class of 1895 would have similar thoughts if he saw Harvard in 1945.
Yet, Heimert still believes he has seen the most rapid change Harvard has gone through since it was a tiny divinity college in Newtowne--Cambridge's original name.
"The last 30 years have seen the most change in Harvard in its history, with the possible exception of its first 30 years," Heimert says.
For Heimert, even his impending retirement will not sever his connection with fair Harvard. He will continue to come in from his home in Winchester to teach history and literature tutorials and a class in the English department.
For a high school student who did not even know Harvard existed, the school has become an integral part of his existence over the last fifty-four years.
Roger Rosenblatt, who worked with Heimert on the Committee of Fifteen, said it best when he described Heimert in his 1997 book, Coming Apart. "A scholar of American religion, his was Harvard."
OBITUARY
ALAN HEIMERT, HARVARD PROFESSOR INFLUENTIAL AUTHOR ON RELIGION; AT 70
By Tom Long, Globe Staff, 11/04/99
Alan Heimert, a retired professor of American literature at Harvard University who wrote an influential and controversial book on religion and the American Revolution, died Monday in Washington, D.C. He was 70.
Mr. Heimert, who lived in Winchester, was visiting his son in Washington at the time of his death. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
In his major work, ''Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution,'' published in 1966, he theorized that evangelical preaching was the cause of the American Revolution, an idea that initially attracted an almost universally negative response. But Harry Stout, a Yale professor and authority on American religious history, described it as ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
Mr. Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1949, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He became a member of the Harvard faculty in 1959.
He was the founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which has brought more than 100 nonwhite South African professionals to Harvard for a year's study since 1981.
He was co-editor, with Perry Miller, of the anthology ''The Great Awakening'' and, with Andrew Delbanco, of ''The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology.''
Yesterday, Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, said, ''Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind.''
At Mr. Heimert's retirement dinner in 1992, Roger Rosenblatt, author of ''Coming Apart,'' a memoir of Harvard in the 1960s, described Mr. Heimert as a man with the courage of his convictions. ''Alan's effect on the 1960s, the imposition of that gray furious Puritan force on the decade of drugs, sex and faculty meetings, was so incongruous - it would have been hilarious - that is, had anyone remembered how to laugh in those years,'' he said. ''Yet, time and again, Alan strode to the center of the storm. And, being something of a storm himself, he often shocked the revolutionaries into calm simply because they had never seen anything like Alan before.''
He leaves his wife, Arline (Grimes); a son, Andrew of Washington, D.C.; a daughter, Lara of New Haven; and a sister, Marion Rees of Los Altos, Calif. Funeral arrangements are incomplete
Material from t he Associated Press was used in this report.
This story ran on page C19 of the Boston Globe on 11/04/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
ALAN HEIMERT, TEACHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, ENGLISH COURSE, 70 DIES
Harvard University Gazette
November 11, 1999
Alan Heimert '49, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and a former Master of Eliot House, died in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 1, at 70. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
"For four decades, Alan Heimert's capacious, penetrating understanding of the American mind and character has been an inspiration to his students and colleagues alike," said Walter Kaiser, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature. "Harvard has lost an incomparable teacher and counselor, and our country one of its wisest interpreters."
Born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 10, 1928, Heimert prepared for Harvard College at York Community High School in Elmhurst, Ill. He received his A.B. in government from the College in 1949, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1950, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960.
Heimert was a teaching fellow in history and literature at Harvard in 1952, then served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1955. He returned to Harvard and in 1961 became instructor of English. He was named associate professor of English in 1965 and became Powell M. Cabot Professor in 1969. He chaired the Department of English and American Literature and Language from 1972 to 1976.
He became a Tutor in Eliot House in 1951, and after service as both a resident and non-resident Tutor, he was Master of Eliot House from 1968 to 1991. As Master he dedicated himself to creating and strengthening House programs, including the teaching of House sections for large undergraduate courses. Heimert practiced what he preached, teaching sections of his renowned American literature survey course, English 70, in Eliot House.
In the five years prior to his death he took on increasing numbers of undergraduate students for individual and group tutorials, his favorite setting for teaching and learning, particularly in the concentration of History and Literature, with which he was affiliated for nearly four decades. "In History and Literature, he could always be counted on to teach tutorials," said Daniel Donoghue, professor of English and American literature and language. "The more he was given, the happier he was - and his students often went on to distinguished careers."
An expert on the Puritans and on 18th-century America, Heimert was the author of Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution (1966), which has had a significant, continuing impact on the study of that era in American history. He was co-author, with Rheinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1963), co-editor, with Perry Miller, of The Great Awakening (1967), and, with Andrew Delbanco, of The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (1985).
Colleagues, former students, and friends are quick to note that Heimert's scholarly interests were not a full measure of the man. He was founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which since its inception in 1981 has brought more than 100 South African professionals to Harvard for a year of study. During the turbulent 1968-69 academic year, he served on the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. He was also a member of the Committee of Fifteen and the University Committee on Governance from 1969-71.
"Alan was incisive, perceptive, wise, funny, and very smart," said Daniel Steiner, former Harvard vice president and general counsel, of Heimert's service in those years. "He had high standards and a great loyalty to, and a clear and noble vision of, Harvard College, and he fought the good fight over many years to maintain that vision. His strengths were many, his contributions lasting."
Heimert introduced thousands of undergraduates to American literature in his 32 years of teaching English 70, as well as training many teaching fellows who went on to become leading scholars. Over the 30-year course of his involvement with Harvard's History of American Civilization program, he advised more dissertations than any other member of the committee. He continued to advise graduate students on dissertations until his death.
"Alan, whose own passionate interests included not only the relationship of 18th-century religious revivals and revolutionary ideology but also Melville, American jazz, and the ending of South African apartheid, followed the careers of many of [his students] with uncommon generosity, dedication, and pride," said Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and professor of Afro-American studies. "He will be sorely missed by the international community of Americanists."
"Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind," said former student Andrew Delbanco, now Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
Heimert was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1986 and that year also was named a Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. In 1995 the Early American Literary Division of the Modern Language Association gave him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature. And in 1997 Harvard awarded him the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction.
Alan Heimert is survived by his wife, Arline Grimes Heimert, of Winchester, Mass.; his son, Andrew, of Washington, D.C.; his daughter, Larisa, of New Haven, Conn.; and a sister, Marion Rees, of Los Altos, Calif.
A service in Heimert's memory is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Memorial Church, with a reception to follow in Eliot House.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GAZETTE MAY 1, 2003 P.30:
Memorial Minute: Alan Heimert
Was Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 8, 2003, the following Minute was placed upon the records.
Alan Heimert, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, who for four decades was a member of this Faculty, died on November 1, 1999, at the close of his 71st year.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he attended school in nearby Elmhurst, where he obtained both his secondary education and a state tennis championship. He then came to Harvard and was graduated with an A.B. in Government in 1949, following which he earned an M.A. in History at Columbia. History itself interrupted his graduate studies, however, and from 1952 to 1955 he served as a non-commissioned officer in Japan and Korea. Upon being discharged, he returned to Harvard to prepare a Ph.D. in American Civilization, thereby confirming the scholarly and institutional allegiances that were to dominate the rest of his life.
For 38 years he taught in the English Department, where he served as Chairman and where he carefully nurtured promising seedlings in that legendary nursery of Americanist scholars, English 70. For 40 years he was associated with the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, from whom he received his doctorate; he directed more theses than any other member of that committee and served at various times as Chairman for a total of 14 years. For 45 years he was associated with the Committee on the Degree in History and Literature, where he also served as Chairman and tutored more undergraduates than anyone before or since. And for almost 50 years, he was a devoted denizen of the world of Eliot House, where he was to reign as Master for nearly a quarter-century.
During the cataclysmic days of the late sixties and early seventies, he strove, Neptune-like, to calm the turbulent seas, serving with distinction on the Committee of Fifteen, the University Committee on Governance, and the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. In 1970-71, he took a major role in revising the rules of this Faculty, where he later served as Parliamentarian for more than a decade. Ardently opposed to apartheid, in 1981 he founded the South African Fellowship Program, which he directed for almost 20 years, bringing well over 100 black South Africans to Harvard. For that achievement he was made an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
Alan Heimert was the co-author, with Reinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1967). He also co-edited, with his mentor Perry Miller, The Great Awakening (1967) and, with Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America (1985). Several of his essays have become landmarks in American studies, most notably his seminal study of the political implications in Moby Dick. His greatest work, however, which has been called "the most significant and provocative book on American religious history," is his Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966).
In 1960-61, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; in 1967 he was a visiting professor at Berkeley; and in 1986 he was Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. In 1986, he was also made a Fellow of John Harvard's college in Cambridge, England, and he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. In 1995, the Early American Literary Division of the MLA awarded him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching. And two years before his death, Harvard honored him with the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award.
This partial list of achievements gives small indication of the magnitude of the man himself, who always seemed considerably larger than life - an attribute better conveyed, perhaps, by the kinetic metaphor of Alan driving the Zamboni during intermissions at "An Evening with Champions," making the rough places smooth with vigor and determination, skill and chutzpah. Undergraduates easily saw through the curmudgeonly disguise with which he attempted to conceal the compassionate, benevolent father-figure underneath. Alan's unfaltering optimism and faith in the young derived from his profound belief in the capacity of every individual for moments of transformation or revelation; as many have attested, he himself had a gift for providing such moments, for being the great awakener who left his students forever changed.
To his incoming graduate students, Alan would explain that there were two things they had to do in graduate school, get a Ph.D. and get an education, and that one had almost nothing to do with the other. It was their paideia he cared about, and he trained his students to learn well, teach well, and write well, but above all to think well. Never wishing to have disciples, he encouraged resistance and dissent in their quest for truth. Hence, there is no Heimert school in American studies. There is, however, a very important Heimert community of distinguished former students, bound together by undiminished fealty to his memory and by, in Jonathan Edwards's phrase, "the mutual love of the brethren."
Community was of supreme importance to Alan, whether it was the congregation at Northampton or the crew of the Pequod, the alumni of English 70 or the members of Eliot House, or America itself - and he famously instilled in his Eliot House students a sense of communal obligation to do good and give back what one had received. But it is the community that constitutes Harvard about which he cared most. He was a passionate, articulate defender of Harvard's noblest traditions and of this university as a place where free people intelligently thought their way through problems. His standards were lofty and exigent, and, in the words of a close friend, "he fought for what he believed even when the winds were blowing in the other direction." Despite the dark disappointments and physical indignities of his final years, when those contrary winds threatened at times to reach gale force, Alan Heimert's lambent dream of Harvard continued to glow undimmed.
He leaves his beloved wife, Arline, his adoring children, Andrew and Lara, and a host of bereft students and friends, all of whose lives he immeasurably enriched.
Respectfully submitted, Daniel Aaron Sacvan Bercovitch Andrew Delbanco (Columbia) Laura Fisher Daniel Steiner Walter Kaiser, Chairman
Alan Heimert, 70, Professor And Expert on Early America
New York Times
November 3, 1999
By ERIC PACE
Alan Heimert, a longtime Harvard professor whose scholarship about 18th-century America was influential and controversial, died on Monday in Washington. He was 70 and lived in Winchester, Mass.
Professor Heimert had cardiovascular problems, said his son, Andrew, whom the professor and his wife were visiting in Washington. He was pronounced dead at Georgetown University Hospital.
At his death, Professor Heimert (pronounced HIGH-mert) had been for 30 years the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard, where he had been on the faculty since 1959.
In its announcement of his death, the Harvard news office noted, ''His major work, 'Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution' (1966), has had a significant, and ongoing, impact on historical understanding of American culture in the 18th century.''
Reached at Yale University, Harry S. Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity and an authority on American religious history, said yesterday that in his opinion ''Religion and the American Mind'' is ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
In the book, Professor Heimert ''took all of the existing categories for understanding religion, the American Revolution and what he called 'the meaning of America' and stood them on their heads,'' Professor Stout said. ''Conventional wisdom up until Heimert's book suggested that the only connection between religion and the American Revolution was to be found among a handful of Unitarians and deists that we associate with the Founding Fathers.''
What was most notably new in the book, Professor Stout said, was the greater importance that Professor Heimert ascribed to the impact of evangelical preaching as a cause of the American Revolution. That thesis ''shattered the consensus'' that prevailed at the time the book was published, Professor Stout said.
The initial response to the book was almost universally negative. Eminent historians of both religion and the American Revolution were quite uncomfortable and even angry at Professor Heimert's bold view. It was not until the late 1970's that a group of his own students and other admirers, including Professor Stout, ''rescued his reputation,'' according to Professor Stout, ''and showed through careful empirical work the many ways in which his view is deeply true.''
Professor Heimert was also founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which began in 1981 and has brought more than 100 young, nonwhite South African professional people to Harvard for a year's study. He was an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
The administrative posts he held at Harvard included the chairmanships of the Department of English and American Literature and Language and also of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization. He was master of Harvard's Eliot House for 23 years.
For more than three decades Professor Heimert taught a popular survey course in which thousands of Harvard undergraduates were introduced to American literature.
The honors he received included a lifetime achievement award from the Modern Language Association for his scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature.
He was born in Oak Park, Ill., and received a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1955 in Japan and Korea.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Arline; a daughter, Lara, of New Haven, Conn., and a sister, Marian Rees of Los Altos, Calif.
Colloquium Pays Tribute to Alan Heimert, Leading American Historian, Educator, and Author
(NEW YORK, October 13, 2004) The Libraries at Columbia University will honor Alan Heimert (1928–1999), a leading historian, educator, and author, who earned his M.A. in History at Columbia, and taught at Harvard University, influencing and inspiring generations of students. The inaugural event of the Heimert colloquium, featuring a speech by scholar Arnold Rampersad, will be held on Thursday, October 14, at 4:00 P.M. in room 523, Butler Library.
A professor of American Literature and English, Heimert taught at Harvard University for thirty years, where he also served as chairman of the Department of English and American Literature and Language. Heimert’s most influential work was Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966). “In that work,” according to Contemporary Authors, “he maintained that religious belief was a major driving force behind the American Revolution, a position controversial at the time of publication.”
Heimert’s private library was donated to Columbia University Libraries by his widow, Arline Grimes Heimert. Several hundred volumes are now shelved in the American History and Literature Reading Room (502 Butler), and scores more have enriched the collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A plaque on the wall of the reading room acknowledges this gift, as well as his contributions to the field.
Among Heimert’s students now teaching at Columbia are Barnard professors James Basker (President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute) and Margaret Ellsberg, as well as Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature Ann Douglas, and Professors Andrew Delbanco and Robert Ferguson.
Alan Brinkley, Provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia, will welcome attendees to the inaugural event, at which Arnold Rampersad, Dean of Humanities and Sara Hart Kimball Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, will speak on “Ralph Waldo Ellison, New England, and Black American Culture.”
The 2004 Heimert Colloquium is co-sponsored by the program in American Studies, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Department of English, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.
Published on Monday, June 07, 1999
By M. DOUGLAS O'MALLEY Crimson Staff Writer
In a tucked-away corner of Eliot House, Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan E. Heimert '49 still holds court in his office, which--like the great scholar himself--hearkens back to an earlier era.
The great scholars with whom he studied--Perry Miller who he says had a "massive" influence on his work and Kenneth B. Murdock--have long since died, and his fellow colleagues have retired. And while Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history, is older, Heimert has spent more years at Harvard.
In 1964, Heimert said a classmate referred to him as a "fixture" in his fifteenth reunion book entry.
A fixture in 1964, an institution today, Heimert will be retiring at the end of the next academic year, after a life tied to Harvard where he mastered a House, a department and a scholarly life.
Heimert, who has devoted the majority of his academic career to the study of American religion and Puritanism, has seen the academic world transform itself. The "learned" individuals have been replaced by "clever" men which he abhors.
"The clever ones have a gambit, a piece of theory that they can apply to everything as opposed to knowing everything," he says.
And Heimert has increasingly found himself in the minority as the generations shift and his colleagues become more distant.
"It's at the point that I only recognize the ones who are the faculty emeritii. Everybody is younger than I am," he says.
Yet, instead of merely fading into retirement, Heimert has reaffirmed his love for undergraduate teaching, describing the last five years as some of the most rewarding.
"I think the teaching has shown me really engaged students, more than at any other period in my teaching career," Heimert says.
He feels today's students are "serious," but in a different way than the career-minded students of the late 70s and early 80s.
"I think today's students are much more serious, much more intellectual than the late 70s and early 80s where they were serious about getting in to medical and law school."
"They're quite serious to understand the American past and do not say that history is bunk," he says.
And while Heimert has gained so much out of the last five years, a family legacy of diabetes has cast a shadow. Unable to work for two years for health reasons, he had surgery in an attempt to clear up his arteries in the February of 1997. He suffered a stroke and ultimately had to have his leg partially amputated.
Yet, as Heimert comes to the end of his academic odyssey through Harvard as he plans to retire at the end of the next academic year, he says his final stint at the University has perhaps been his most rewarding of his teaching experiences.
His teaching was most recently recognized in 1997 when he was a granted a Levinson award for teaching excellence, an award which he holds in higher esteem than the Lifetime Achievement Award he received from the Modern Literature Association in 1995.
Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. and soon moved to Chicago and finally to Elmhurst where he attended York Community High School. Neither his mother nor his father received a college degree although his father completed two years of school before his father's death forced him to earn a living for his family.
Heimert was far from groomed to attend Harvard's fair grounds. He discovered Harvard's existence only with the encouragement of teachers.
"The only thing I had known about Harvard was that it had been founded earlier than any other college," he says.
"I came here not only as a wide-eyed lad, but as a wide-tied lad," Heimert says, making reference to the distinct difference in Eastern and Midwestern tie size that branded him as a stranger to Cambridge.
Heimert quickly discovered his affinity for American history, but even as he completed his senior thesis on Abraham Lincoln he had not yet decided to enter the world of academia.
Intent on attending law school, Heimert applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School in the December of his senior year. After completing his thesis, he hopped over to the law school to see what lay ahead for him.
"Well, I discovered what was coming next, and I immediately started seeing if I could still apply to other law schools. There was less intellectual content--it was a trade school, not an intellectual enterprise."
Ultimately, however, Heimert's
pessisism about the state of academic affairs moves beyond mere rhetorical gestures. He says now if he was faced with the same choice upon graduation, he would have attended law school. And while he cannot retrace his steps, his daughter, Larisa, who attended Yale Law School for the "intellectual enterprise" it offered ultimately rejected the world of academia because it lacked the same freedom.
"She was responding to the entry of mere cleverness [into academia] that had taken over," Heimert says
Heimert feels the lack of respect for the past was epitomized in the September, 1997 dedication of the Barker Center for the Humanities, which unified disparate humanities departments but divided the Great Hall of the Freshman Union.
Heimert says his fellow colleagues celebrated the dedication not only because of its unifying purpose, but rather because it relegated the Freshman Union, a Harvard institution, to the history books.
"It got rid of the symbol of the old Harvard. The old Harvard was not a bad place--it was very good to me," he said.
Heimert would also find his future wife through his love of academics. He met Arline I. Grimes '59 when she was still an undergraduate and they started dating after she graduated.
After a three-year romance, they were married in Harvard's Appleton Chapel on Oct. 20, 1962. Of Heimert's four groomsmen, three were Harvard graduates and one was the son of a Harvard graduate. Even in love, Heimert found that Harvard shaped his life.
And while Heimert still maintains a love for Harvard, he believes it was ultimately his involvement in its inner bureaucracy that limited the time he could devote to scholarship.
Heimert recalls English Professor Kenneth B. Murdock, one of his mentors, advising him to always appear to be an inept administrator.
"Don't ever at Harvard show administrative skills--you'll just be given another promotion," he said.
When Heimert countered that wasn't that the American way of upward mobility, Murdock further explained his comment. "I didn't say a better job, but another job."
Murdock, who served as both Master of Leverett and Dean of the Faculty illustrated his point to Heimert by telling him about how he would write letters back and forth from the Leverett House Master to the Dean of the Faculty--addressed to and signed by Murdock himself.
Most prominent among Heimert's administrative roles was his position as a committee chair on the Committee of Fifteen, which decided the fate of the most egregious offenders of the 1969 University Hall takeover.
It this involvement which Heimert says marked him as too controversial to be selected as University president or dean of the Faculty. Other committee members suffered the same fate, including James Q. Wilson, who ultimately left Harvard.
Heimert's administrative involvement along with the responsibilities of being the Master of Eliot House led people to question whether he was washed up or not.
Yet, Heimert, more than a typical Faculty member or administrator, had to deal with the real student effects of unrest on a very personal House level.
"When one was Master, one was closer to the student unrest as opposed to a Faculty member with a nice office in the distance," he says.
Heimert's tenure at Eliot coincided with the social changes of the postwar decades.
Parietals rules prohibiting students from entertaining members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms at night were officially loosened in the spring of 1970. In addition, Heimert's time at Harvard saw the abolition of official rules governing the tradition of wearing a coat and tie to all meals in the House dining halls.
Ultimately, there was no way to discipline what Heimert calls an increasing number of "wayward students" in the late 60s and early 70s.
All students, not just card-carrying members of SDS, and even in the traditionally upper crust world of Eliot House were rebelling against Harvard--and its dress code.
"[A student asked about his attire] would have been more likely to say fuck you. Authority was desanctified," Heimert says.
Heimert, however, says he is resigned to the fact that Harvard will inevitably change over time. Although he marveled in 1995 on how different Harvard had become since he arrived in 1945, he said a member of the Class of 1895 would have similar thoughts if he saw Harvard in 1945.
Yet, Heimert still believes he has seen the most rapid change Harvard has gone through since it was a tiny divinity college in Newtowne--Cambridge's original name.
"The last 30 years have seen the most change in Harvard in its history, with the possible exception of its first 30 years," Heimert says.
For Heimert, even his impending retirement will not sever his connection with fair Harvard. He will continue to come in from his home in Winchester to teach history and literature tutorials and a class in the English department.
For a high school student who did not even know Harvard existed, the school has become an integral part of his existence over the last fifty-four years.
Roger Rosenblatt, who worked with Heimert on the Committee of Fifteen, said it best when he described Heimert in his 1997 book, Coming Apart. "A scholar of American religion, his was Harvard."
OBITUARY
ALAN HEIMERT, HARVARD PROFESSOR INFLUENTIAL AUTHOR ON RELIGION; AT 70
By Tom Long, Globe Staff, 11/04/99
Alan Heimert, a retired professor of American literature at Harvard University who wrote an influential and controversial book on religion and the American Revolution, died Monday in Washington, D.C. He was 70.
Mr. Heimert, who lived in Winchester, was visiting his son in Washington at the time of his death. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
In his major work, ''Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution,'' published in 1966, he theorized that evangelical preaching was the cause of the American Revolution, an idea that initially attracted an almost universally negative response. But Harry Stout, a Yale professor and authority on American religious history, described it as ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
Mr. Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1949, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He became a member of the Harvard faculty in 1959.
He was the founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which has brought more than 100 nonwhite South African professionals to Harvard for a year's study since 1981.
He was co-editor, with Perry Miller, of the anthology ''The Great Awakening'' and, with Andrew Delbanco, of ''The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology.''
Yesterday, Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, said, ''Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind.''
At Mr. Heimert's retirement dinner in 1992, Roger Rosenblatt, author of ''Coming Apart,'' a memoir of Harvard in the 1960s, described Mr. Heimert as a man with the courage of his convictions. ''Alan's effect on the 1960s, the imposition of that gray furious Puritan force on the decade of drugs, sex and faculty meetings, was so incongruous - it would have been hilarious - that is, had anyone remembered how to laugh in those years,'' he said. ''Yet, time and again, Alan strode to the center of the storm. And, being something of a storm himself, he often shocked the revolutionaries into calm simply because they had never seen anything like Alan before.''
He leaves his wife, Arline (Grimes); a son, Andrew of Washington, D.C.; a daughter, Lara of New Haven; and a sister, Marion Rees of Los Altos, Calif. Funeral arrangements are incomplete
Material from t he Associated Press was used in this report.
This story ran on page C19 of the Boston Globe on 11/04/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
ALAN HEIMERT, TEACHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, ENGLISH COURSE, 70 DIES
Harvard University Gazette
November 11, 1999
Alan Heimert '49, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and a former Master of Eliot House, died in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 1, at 70. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
"For four decades, Alan Heimert's capacious, penetrating understanding of the American mind and character has been an inspiration to his students and colleagues alike," said Walter Kaiser, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature. "Harvard has lost an incomparable teacher and counselor, and our country one of its wisest interpreters."
Born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 10, 1928, Heimert prepared for Harvard College at York Community High School in Elmhurst, Ill. He received his A.B. in government from the College in 1949, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1950, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960.
Heimert was a teaching fellow in history and literature at Harvard in 1952, then served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1955. He returned to Harvard and in 1961 became instructor of English. He was named associate professor of English in 1965 and became Powell M. Cabot Professor in 1969. He chaired the Department of English and American Literature and Language from 1972 to 1976.
He became a Tutor in Eliot House in 1951, and after service as both a resident and non-resident Tutor, he was Master of Eliot House from 1968 to 1991. As Master he dedicated himself to creating and strengthening House programs, including the teaching of House sections for large undergraduate courses. Heimert practiced what he preached, teaching sections of his renowned American literature survey course, English 70, in Eliot House.
In the five years prior to his death he took on increasing numbers of undergraduate students for individual and group tutorials, his favorite setting for teaching and learning, particularly in the concentration of History and Literature, with which he was affiliated for nearly four decades. "In History and Literature, he could always be counted on to teach tutorials," said Daniel Donoghue, professor of English and American literature and language. "The more he was given, the happier he was - and his students often went on to distinguished careers."
An expert on the Puritans and on 18th-century America, Heimert was the author of Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution (1966), which has had a significant, continuing impact on the study of that era in American history. He was co-author, with Rheinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1963), co-editor, with Perry Miller, of The Great Awakening (1967), and, with Andrew Delbanco, of The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (1985).
Colleagues, former students, and friends are quick to note that Heimert's scholarly interests were not a full measure of the man. He was founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which since its inception in 1981 has brought more than 100 South African professionals to Harvard for a year of study. During the turbulent 1968-69 academic year, he served on the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. He was also a member of the Committee of Fifteen and the University Committee on Governance from 1969-71.
"Alan was incisive, perceptive, wise, funny, and very smart," said Daniel Steiner, former Harvard vice president and general counsel, of Heimert's service in those years. "He had high standards and a great loyalty to, and a clear and noble vision of, Harvard College, and he fought the good fight over many years to maintain that vision. His strengths were many, his contributions lasting."
Heimert introduced thousands of undergraduates to American literature in his 32 years of teaching English 70, as well as training many teaching fellows who went on to become leading scholars. Over the 30-year course of his involvement with Harvard's History of American Civilization program, he advised more dissertations than any other member of the committee. He continued to advise graduate students on dissertations until his death.
"Alan, whose own passionate interests included not only the relationship of 18th-century religious revivals and revolutionary ideology but also Melville, American jazz, and the ending of South African apartheid, followed the careers of many of [his students] with uncommon generosity, dedication, and pride," said Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and professor of Afro-American studies. "He will be sorely missed by the international community of Americanists."
"Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind," said former student Andrew Delbanco, now Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
Heimert was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1986 and that year also was named a Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. In 1995 the Early American Literary Division of the Modern Language Association gave him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature. And in 1997 Harvard awarded him the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction.
Alan Heimert is survived by his wife, Arline Grimes Heimert, of Winchester, Mass.; his son, Andrew, of Washington, D.C.; his daughter, Larisa, of New Haven, Conn.; and a sister, Marion Rees, of Los Altos, Calif.
A service in Heimert's memory is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Memorial Church, with a reception to follow in Eliot House.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GAZETTE MAY 1, 2003 P.30:
Memorial Minute: Alan Heimert
Was Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 8, 2003, the following Minute was placed upon the records.
Alan Heimert, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, who for four decades was a member of this Faculty, died on November 1, 1999, at the close of his 71st year.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he attended school in nearby Elmhurst, where he obtained both his secondary education and a state tennis championship. He then came to Harvard and was graduated with an A.B. in Government in 1949, following which he earned an M.A. in History at Columbia. History itself interrupted his graduate studies, however, and from 1952 to 1955 he served as a non-commissioned officer in Japan and Korea. Upon being discharged, he returned to Harvard to prepare a Ph.D. in American Civilization, thereby confirming the scholarly and institutional allegiances that were to dominate the rest of his life.
For 38 years he taught in the English Department, where he served as Chairman and where he carefully nurtured promising seedlings in that legendary nursery of Americanist scholars, English 70. For 40 years he was associated with the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, from whom he received his doctorate; he directed more theses than any other member of that committee and served at various times as Chairman for a total of 14 years. For 45 years he was associated with the Committee on the Degree in History and Literature, where he also served as Chairman and tutored more undergraduates than anyone before or since. And for almost 50 years, he was a devoted denizen of the world of Eliot House, where he was to reign as Master for nearly a quarter-century.
During the cataclysmic days of the late sixties and early seventies, he strove, Neptune-like, to calm the turbulent seas, serving with distinction on the Committee of Fifteen, the University Committee on Governance, and the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. In 1970-71, he took a major role in revising the rules of this Faculty, where he later served as Parliamentarian for more than a decade. Ardently opposed to apartheid, in 1981 he founded the South African Fellowship Program, which he directed for almost 20 years, bringing well over 100 black South Africans to Harvard. For that achievement he was made an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
Alan Heimert was the co-author, with Reinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1967). He also co-edited, with his mentor Perry Miller, The Great Awakening (1967) and, with Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America (1985). Several of his essays have become landmarks in American studies, most notably his seminal study of the political implications in Moby Dick. His greatest work, however, which has been called "the most significant and provocative book on American religious history," is his Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966).
In 1960-61, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; in 1967 he was a visiting professor at Berkeley; and in 1986 he was Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. In 1986, he was also made a Fellow of John Harvard's college in Cambridge, England, and he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. In 1995, the Early American Literary Division of the MLA awarded him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching. And two years before his death, Harvard honored him with the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award.
This partial list of achievements gives small indication of the magnitude of the man himself, who always seemed considerably larger than life - an attribute better conveyed, perhaps, by the kinetic metaphor of Alan driving the Zamboni during intermissions at "An Evening with Champions," making the rough places smooth with vigor and determination, skill and chutzpah. Undergraduates easily saw through the curmudgeonly disguise with which he attempted to conceal the compassionate, benevolent father-figure underneath. Alan's unfaltering optimism and faith in the young derived from his profound belief in the capacity of every individual for moments of transformation or revelation; as many have attested, he himself had a gift for providing such moments, for being the great awakener who left his students forever changed.
To his incoming graduate students, Alan would explain that there were two things they had to do in graduate school, get a Ph.D. and get an education, and that one had almost nothing to do with the other. It was their paideia he cared about, and he trained his students to learn well, teach well, and write well, but above all to think well. Never wishing to have disciples, he encouraged resistance and dissent in their quest for truth. Hence, there is no Heimert school in American studies. There is, however, a very important Heimert community of distinguished former students, bound together by undiminished fealty to his memory and by, in Jonathan Edwards's phrase, "the mutual love of the brethren."
Community was of supreme importance to Alan, whether it was the congregation at Northampton or the crew of the Pequod, the alumni of English 70 or the members of Eliot House, or America itself - and he famously instilled in his Eliot House students a sense of communal obligation to do good and give back what one had received. But it is the community that constitutes Harvard about which he cared most. He was a passionate, articulate defender of Harvard's noblest traditions and of this university as a place where free people intelligently thought their way through problems. His standards were lofty and exigent, and, in the words of a close friend, "he fought for what he believed even when the winds were blowing in the other direction." Despite the dark disappointments and physical indignities of his final years, when those contrary winds threatened at times to reach gale force, Alan Heimert's lambent dream of Harvard continued to glow undimmed.
He leaves his beloved wife, Arline, his adoring children, Andrew and Lara, and a host of bereft students and friends, all of whose lives he immeasurably enriched.
Respectfully submitted, Daniel Aaron Sacvan Bercovitch Andrew Delbanco (Columbia) Laura Fisher Daniel Steiner Walter Kaiser, Chairman
Alan Heimert, 70, Professor And Expert on Early America
New York Times
November 3, 1999
By ERIC PACE
Alan Heimert, a longtime Harvard professor whose scholarship about 18th-century America was influential and controversial, died on Monday in Washington. He was 70 and lived in Winchester, Mass.
Professor Heimert had cardiovascular problems, said his son, Andrew, whom the professor and his wife were visiting in Washington. He was pronounced dead at Georgetown University Hospital.
At his death, Professor Heimert (pronounced HIGH-mert) had been for 30 years the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard, where he had been on the faculty since 1959.
In its announcement of his death, the Harvard news office noted, ''His major work, 'Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution' (1966), has had a significant, and ongoing, impact on historical understanding of American culture in the 18th century.''
Reached at Yale University, Harry S. Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity and an authority on American religious history, said yesterday that in his opinion ''Religion and the American Mind'' is ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
In the book, Professor Heimert ''took all of the existing categories for understanding religion, the American Revolution and what he called 'the meaning of America' and stood them on their heads,'' Professor Stout said. ''Conventional wisdom up until Heimert's book suggested that the only connection between religion and the American Revolution was to be found among a handful of Unitarians and deists that we associate with the Founding Fathers.''
What was most notably new in the book, Professor Stout said, was the greater importance that Professor Heimert ascribed to the impact of evangelical preaching as a cause of the American Revolution. That thesis ''shattered the consensus'' that prevailed at the time the book was published, Professor Stout said.
The initial response to the book was almost universally negative. Eminent historians of both religion and the American Revolution were quite uncomfortable and even angry at Professor Heimert's bold view. It was not until the late 1970's that a group of his own students and other admirers, including Professor Stout, ''rescued his reputation,'' according to Professor Stout, ''and showed through careful empirical work the many ways in which his view is deeply true.''
Professor Heimert was also founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which began in 1981 and has brought more than 100 young, nonwhite South African professional people to Harvard for a year's study. He was an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
The administrative posts he held at Harvard included the chairmanships of the Department of English and American Literature and Language and also of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization. He was master of Harvard's Eliot House for 23 years.
For more than three decades Professor Heimert taught a popular survey course in which thousands of Harvard undergraduates were introduced to American literature.
The honors he received included a lifetime achievement award from the Modern Language Association for his scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature.
He was born in Oak Park, Ill., and received a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1955 in Japan and Korea.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Arline; a daughter, Lara, of New Haven, Conn., and a sister, Marian Rees of Los Altos, Calif.
Colloquium Pays Tribute to Alan Heimert, Leading American Historian, Educator, and Author
(NEW YORK, October 13, 2004) The Libraries at Columbia University will honor Alan Heimert (1928–1999), a leading historian, educator, and author, who earned his M.A. in History at Columbia, and taught at Harvard University, influencing and inspiring generations of students. The inaugural event of the Heimert colloquium, featuring a speech by scholar Arnold Rampersad, will be held on Thursday, October 14, at 4:00 P.M. in room 523, Butler Library.
A professor of American Literature and English, Heimert taught at Harvard University for thirty years, where he also served as chairman of the Department of English and American Literature and Language. Heimert’s most influential work was Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966). “In that work,” according to Contemporary Authors, “he maintained that religious belief was a major driving force behind the American Revolution, a position controversial at the time of publication.”
Heimert’s private library was donated to Columbia University Libraries by his widow, Arline Grimes Heimert. Several hundred volumes are now shelved in the American History and Literature Reading Room (502 Butler), and scores more have enriched the collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A plaque on the wall of the reading room acknowledges this gift, as well as his contributions to the field.
Among Heimert’s students now teaching at Columbia are Barnard professors James Basker (President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute) and Margaret Ellsberg, as well as Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature Ann Douglas, and Professors Andrew Delbanco and Robert Ferguson.
Alan Brinkley, Provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia, will welcome attendees to the inaugural event, at which Arnold Rampersad, Dean of Humanities and Sara Hart Kimball Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, will speak on “Ralph Waldo Ellison, New England, and Black American Culture.”
The 2004 Heimert Colloquium is co-sponsored by the program in American Studies, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Department of English, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.
CITY ON A HILL: HEIMERT KEEPS THE HARVARD FLAME ABLAZE
Published on Monday, June 07, 1999
By M. DOUGLAS O'MALLEY Crimson Staff Writer
In a tucked-away corner of Eliot House, Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan E. Heimert '49 still holds court in his office, which--like the great scholar himself--hearkens back to an earlier era.
The great scholars with whom he studied--Perry Miller who he says had a "massive" influence on his work and Kenneth B. Murdock--have long since died, and his fellow colleagues have retired. And while Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history, is older, Heimert has spent more years at Harvard.
In 1964, Heimert said a classmate referred to him as a "fixture" in his fifteenth reunion book entry.
A fixture in 1964, an institution today, Heimert will be retiring at the end of the next academic year, after a life tied to Harvard where he mastered a House, a department and a scholarly life.
Heimert, who has devoted the majority of his academic career to the study of American religion and Puritanism, has seen the academic world transform itself. The "learned" individuals have been replaced by "clever" men which he abhors.
"The clever ones have a gambit, a piece of theory that they can apply to everything as opposed to knowing everything," he says.
And Heimert has increasingly found himself in the minority as the generations shift and his colleagues become more distant.
"It's at the point that I only recognize the ones who are the faculty emeritii. Everybody is younger than I am," he says.
Yet, instead of merely fading into retirement, Heimert has reaffirmed his love for undergraduate teaching, describing the last five years as some of the most rewarding.
"I think the teaching has shown me really engaged students, more than at any other period in my teaching career," Heimert says.
He feels today's students are "serious," but in a different way than the career-minded students of the late 70s and early 80s.
"I think today's students are much more serious, much more intellectual than the late 70s and early 80s where they were serious about getting in to medical and law school."
"They're quite serious to understand the American past and do not say that history is bunk," he says.
And while Heimert has gained so much out of the last five years, a family legacy of diabetes has cast a shadow. Unable to work for two years for health reasons, he had surgery in an attempt to clear up his arteries in the February of 1997. He suffered a stroke and ultimately had to have his leg partially amputated.
Yet, as Heimert comes to the end of his academic odyssey through Harvard as he plans to retire at the end of the next academic year, he says his final stint at the University has perhaps been his most rewarding of his teaching experiences.
His teaching was most recently recognized in 1997 when he was a granted a Levinson award for teaching excellence, an award which he holds in higher esteem than the Lifetime Achievement Award he received from the Modern Literature Association in 1995.
Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. and soon moved to Chicago and finally to Elmhurst where he attended York Community High School. Neither his mother nor his father received a college degree although his father completed two years of school before his father's death forced him to earn a living for his family.
Heimert was far from groomed to attend Harvard's fair grounds. He discovered Harvard's existence only with the encouragement of teachers.
"The only thing I had known about Harvard was that it had been founded earlier than any other college," he says.
"I came here not only as a wide-eyed lad, but as a wide-tied lad," Heimert says, making reference to the distinct difference in Eastern and Midwestern tie size that branded him as a stranger to Cambridge.
Heimert quickly discovered his affinity for American history, but even as he completed his senior thesis on Abraham Lincoln he had not yet decided to enter the world of academia.
Intent on attending law school, Heimert applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School in the December of his senior year. After completing his thesis, he hopped over to the law school to see what lay ahead for him.
"Well, I discovered what was coming next, and I immediately started seeing if I could still apply to other law schools. There was less intellectual content--it was a trade school, not an intellectual enterprise."
Ultimately, however, Heimert's
pessisism about the state of academic affairs moves beyond mere rhetorical gestures. He says now if he was faced with the same choice upon graduation, he would have attended law school. And while he cannot retrace his steps, his daughter, Larisa, who attended Yale Law School for the "intellectual enterprise" it offered ultimately rejected the world of academia because it lacked the same freedom.
"She was responding to the entry of mere cleverness [into academia] that had taken over," Heimert says
Heimert feels the lack of respect for the past was epitomized in the September, 1997 dedication of the Barker Center for the Humanities, which unified disparate humanities departments but divided the Great Hall of the Freshman Union.
Heimert says his fellow colleagues celebrated the dedication not only because of its unifying purpose, but rather because it relegated the Freshman Union, a Harvard institution, to the history books.
"It got rid of the symbol of the old Harvard. The old Harvard was not a bad place--it was very good to me," he said.
Heimert would also find his future wife through his love of academics. He met Arline I. Grimes '59 when she was still an undergraduate and they started dating after she graduated.
After a three-year romance, they were married in Harvard's Appleton Chapel on Oct. 20, 1962. Of Heimert's four groomsmen, three were Harvard graduates and one was the son of a Harvard graduate. Even in love, Heimert found that Harvard shaped his life.
And while Heimert still maintains a love for Harvard, he believes it was ultimately his involvement in its inner bureaucracy that limited the time he could devote to scholarship.
Heimert recalls English Professor Kenneth B. Murdock, one of his mentors, advising him to always appear to be an inept administrator.
"Don't ever at Harvard show administrative skills--you'll just be given another promotion," he said.
When Heimert countered that wasn't that the American way of upward mobility, Murdock further explained his comment. "I didn't say a better job, but another job."
Murdock, who served as both Master of Leverett and Dean of the Faculty illustrated his point to Heimert by telling him about how he would write letters back and forth from the Leverett House Master to the Dean of the Faculty--addressed to and signed by Murdock himself.
Most prominent among Heimert's administrative roles was his position as a committee chair on the Committee of Fifteen, which decided the fate of the most egregious offenders of the 1969 University Hall takeover.
It this involvement which Heimert says marked him as too controversial to be selected as University president or dean of the Faculty. Other committee members suffered the same fate, including James Q. Wilson, who ultimately left Harvard.
Heimert's administrative involvement along with the responsibilities of being the Master of Eliot House led people to question whether he was washed up or not.
Yet, Heimert, more than a typical Faculty member or administrator, had to deal with the real student effects of unrest on a very personal House level.
"When one was Master, one was closer to the student unrest as opposed to a Faculty member with a nice office in the distance," he says.
Heimert's tenure at Eliot coincided with the social changes of the postwar decades.
Parietals rules prohibiting students from entertaining members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms at night were officially loosened in the spring of 1970. In addition, Heimert's time at Harvard saw the abolition of official rules governing the tradition of wearing a coat and tie to all meals in the House dining halls.
Ultimately, there was no way to discipline what Heimert calls an increasing number of "wayward students" in the late 60s and early 70s.
All students, not just card-carrying members of SDS, and even in the traditionally upper crust world of Eliot House were rebelling against Harvard--and its dress code.
"[A student asked about his attire] would have been more likely to say fuck you. Authority was desanctified," Heimert says.
Heimert, however, says he is resigned to the fact that Harvard will inevitably change over time. Although he marveled in 1995 on how different Harvard had become since he arrived in 1945, he said a member of the Class of 1895 would have similar thoughts if he saw Harvard in 1945.
Yet, Heimert still believes he has seen the most rapid change Harvard has gone through since it was a tiny divinity college in Newtowne--Cambridge's original name.
"The last 30 years have seen the most change in Harvard in its history, with the possible exception of its first 30 years," Heimert says.
For Heimert, even his impending retirement will not sever his connection with fair Harvard. He will continue to come in from his home in Winchester to teach history and literature tutorials and a class in the English department.
For a high school student who did not even know Harvard existed, the school has become an integral part of his existence over the last fifty-four years.
Roger Rosenblatt, who worked with Heimert on the Committee of Fifteen, said it best when he described Heimert in his 1997 book, Coming Apart. "A scholar of American religion, his was Harvard."
OBITUARY
ALAN HEIMERT, HARVARD PROFESSOR INFLUENTIAL AUTHOR ON RELIGION; AT 70
By Tom Long, Globe Staff, 11/04/99
Alan Heimert, a retired professor of American literature at Harvard University who wrote an influential and controversial book on religion and the American Revolution, died Monday in Washington, D.C. He was 70.
Mr. Heimert, who lived in Winchester, was visiting his son in Washington at the time of his death. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
In his major work, ''Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution,'' published in 1966, he theorized that evangelical preaching was the cause of the American Revolution, an idea that initially attracted an almost universally negative response. But Harry Stout, a Yale professor and authority on American religious history, described it as ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
Mr. Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1949, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He became a member of the Harvard faculty in 1959.
He was the founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which has brought more than 100 nonwhite South African professionals to Harvard for a year's study since 1981.
He was co-editor, with Perry Miller, of the anthology ''The Great Awakening'' and, with Andrew Delbanco, of ''The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology.''
Yesterday, Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, said, ''Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind.''
At Mr. Heimert's retirement dinner in 1992, Roger Rosenblatt, author of ''Coming Apart,'' a memoir of Harvard in the 1960s, described Mr. Heimert as a man with the courage of his convictions. ''Alan's effect on the 1960s, the imposition of that gray furious Puritan force on the decade of drugs, sex and faculty meetings, was so incongruous - it would have been hilarious - that is, had anyone remembered how to laugh in those years,'' he said. ''Yet, time and again, Alan strode to the center of the storm. And, being something of a storm himself, he often shocked the revolutionaries into calm simply because they had never seen anything like Alan before.''
He leaves his wife, Arline (Grimes); a son, Andrew of Washington, D.C.; a daughter, Lara of New Haven; and a sister, Marion Rees of Los Altos, Calif. Funeral arrangements are incomplete
Material from t he Associated Press was used in this report.
This story ran on page C19 of the Boston Globe on 11/04/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
ALAN HEIMERT, TEACHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, ENGLISH COURSE, 70 DIES
Harvard University Gazette
November 11, 1999
Alan Heimert '49, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and a former Master of Eliot House, died in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 1, at 70. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
"For four decades, Alan Heimert's capacious, penetrating understanding of the American mind and character has been an inspiration to his students and colleagues alike," said Walter Kaiser, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature. "Harvard has lost an incomparable teacher and counselor, and our country one of its wisest interpreters."
Born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 10, 1928, Heimert prepared for Harvard College at York Community High School in Elmhurst, Ill. He received his A.B. in government from the College in 1949, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1950, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960.
Heimert was a teaching fellow in history and literature at Harvard in 1952, then served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1955. He returned to Harvard and in 1961 became instructor of English. He was named associate professor of English in 1965 and became Powell M. Cabot Professor in 1969. He chaired the Department of English and American Literature and Language from 1972 to 1976.
He became a Tutor in Eliot House in 1951, and after service as both a resident and non-resident Tutor, he was Master of Eliot House from 1968 to 1991. As Master he dedicated himself to creating and strengthening House programs, including the teaching of House sections for large undergraduate courses. Heimert practiced what he preached, teaching sections of his renowned American literature survey course, English 70, in Eliot House.
In the five years prior to his death he took on increasing numbers of undergraduate students for individual and group tutorials, his favorite setting for teaching and learning, particularly in the concentration of History and Literature, with which he was affiliated for nearly four decades. "In History and Literature, he could always be counted on to teach tutorials," said Daniel Donoghue, professor of English and American literature and language. "The more he was given, the happier he was - and his students often went on to distinguished careers."
An expert on the Puritans and on 18th-century America, Heimert was the author of Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution (1966), which has had a significant, continuing impact on the study of that era in American history. He was co-author, with Rheinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1963), co-editor, with Perry Miller, of The Great Awakening (1967), and, with Andrew Delbanco, of The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (1985).
Colleagues, former students, and friends are quick to note that Heimert's scholarly interests were not a full measure of the man. He was founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which since its inception in 1981 has brought more than 100 South African professionals to Harvard for a year of study. During the turbulent 1968-69 academic year, he served on the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. He was also a member of the Committee of Fifteen and the University Committee on Governance from 1969-71.
"Alan was incisive, perceptive, wise, funny, and very smart," said Daniel Steiner, former Harvard vice president and general counsel, of Heimert's service in those years. "He had high standards and a great loyalty to, and a clear and noble vision of, Harvard College, and he fought the good fight over many years to maintain that vision. His strengths were many, his contributions lasting."
Heimert introduced thousands of undergraduates to American literature in his 32 years of teaching English 70, as well as training many teaching fellows who went on to become leading scholars. Over the 30-year course of his involvement with Harvard's History of American Civilization program, he advised more dissertations than any other member of the committee. He continued to advise graduate students on dissertations until his death.
"Alan, whose own passionate interests included not only the relationship of 18th-century religious revivals and revolutionary ideology but also Melville, American jazz, and the ending of South African apartheid, followed the careers of many of [his students] with uncommon generosity, dedication, and pride," said Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and professor of Afro-American studies. "He will be sorely missed by the international community of Americanists."
"Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind," said former student Andrew Delbanco, now Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
Heimert was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1986 and that year also was named a Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. In 1995 the Early American Literary Division of the Modern Language Association gave him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature. And in 1997 Harvard awarded him the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction.
Alan Heimert is survived by his wife, Arline Grimes Heimert, of Winchester, Mass.; his son, Andrew, of Washington, D.C.; his daughter, Larisa, of New Haven, Conn.; and a sister, Marion Rees, of Los Altos, Calif.
A service in Heimert's memory is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Memorial Church, with a reception to follow in Eliot House.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GAZETTE MAY 1, 2003 P.30:
Memorial Minute: Alan Heimert
Was Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 8, 2003, the following Minute was placed upon the records.
Alan Heimert, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, who for four decades was a member of this Faculty, died on November 1, 1999, at the close of his 71st year.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he attended school in nearby Elmhurst, where he obtained both his secondary education and a state tennis championship. He then came to Harvard and was graduated with an A.B. in Government in 1949, following which he earned an M.A. in History at Columbia. History itself interrupted his graduate studies, however, and from 1952 to 1955 he served as a non-commissioned officer in Japan and Korea. Upon being discharged, he returned to Harvard to prepare a Ph.D. in American Civilization, thereby confirming the scholarly and institutional allegiances that were to dominate the rest of his life.
For 38 years he taught in the English Department, where he served as Chairman and where he carefully nurtured promising seedlings in that legendary nursery of Americanist scholars, English 70. For 40 years he was associated with the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, from whom he received his doctorate; he directed more theses than any other member of that committee and served at various times as Chairman for a total of 14 years. For 45 years he was associated with the Committee on the Degree in History and Literature, where he also served as Chairman and tutored more undergraduates than anyone before or since. And for almost 50 years, he was a devoted denizen of the world of Eliot House, where he was to reign as Master for nearly a quarter-century.
During the cataclysmic days of the late sixties and early seventies, he strove, Neptune-like, to calm the turbulent seas, serving with distinction on the Committee of Fifteen, the University Committee on Governance, and the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. In 1970-71, he took a major role in revising the rules of this Faculty, where he later served as Parliamentarian for more than a decade. Ardently opposed to apartheid, in 1981 he founded the South African Fellowship Program, which he directed for almost 20 years, bringing well over 100 black South Africans to Harvard. For that achievement he was made an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
Alan Heimert was the co-author, with Reinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1967). He also co-edited, with his mentor Perry Miller, The Great Awakening (1967) and, with Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America (1985). Several of his essays have become landmarks in American studies, most notably his seminal study of the political implications in Moby Dick. His greatest work, however, which has been called "the most significant and provocative book on American religious history," is his Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966).
In 1960-61, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; in 1967 he was a visiting professor at Berkeley; and in 1986 he was Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. In 1986, he was also made a Fellow of John Harvard's college in Cambridge, England, and he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. In 1995, the Early American Literary Division of the MLA awarded him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching. And two years before his death, Harvard honored him with the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award.
This partial list of achievements gives small indication of the magnitude of the man himself, who always seemed considerably larger than life - an attribute better conveyed, perhaps, by the kinetic metaphor of Alan driving the Zamboni during intermissions at "An Evening with Champions," making the rough places smooth with vigor and determination, skill and chutzpah. Undergraduates easily saw through the curmudgeonly disguise with which he attempted to conceal the compassionate, benevolent father-figure underneath. Alan's unfaltering optimism and faith in the young derived from his profound belief in the capacity of every individual for moments of transformation or revelation; as many have attested, he himself had a gift for providing such moments, for being the great awakener who left his students forever changed.
To his incoming graduate students, Alan would explain that there were two things they had to do in graduate school, get a Ph.D. and get an education, and that one had almost nothing to do with the other. It was their paideia he cared about, and he trained his students to learn well, teach well, and write well, but above all to think well. Never wishing to have disciples, he encouraged resistance and dissent in their quest for truth. Hence, there is no Heimert school in American studies. There is, however, a very important Heimert community of distinguished former students, bound together by undiminished fealty to his memory and by, in Jonathan Edwards's phrase, "the mutual love of the brethren."
Community was of supreme importance to Alan, whether it was the congregation at Northampton or the crew of the Pequod, the alumni of English 70 or the members of Eliot House, or America itself - and he famously instilled in his Eliot House students a sense of communal obligation to do good and give back what one had received. But it is the community that constitutes Harvard about which he cared most. He was a passionate, articulate defender of Harvard's noblest traditions and of this university as a place where free people intelligently thought their way through problems. His standards were lofty and exigent, and, in the words of a close friend, "he fought for what he believed even when the winds were blowing in the other direction." Despite the dark disappointments and physical indignities of his final years, when those contrary winds threatened at times to reach gale force, Alan Heimert's lambent dream of Harvard continued to glow undimmed.
He leaves his beloved wife, Arline, his adoring children, Andrew and Lara, and a host of bereft students and friends, all of whose lives he immeasurably enriched.
Respectfully submitted, Daniel Aaron Sacvan Bercovitch Andrew Delbanco (Columbia) Laura Fisher Daniel Steiner Walter Kaiser, Chairman
Alan Heimert, 70, Professor And Expert on Early America
New York Times
November 3, 1999
By ERIC PACE
Alan Heimert, a longtime Harvard professor whose scholarship about 18th-century America was influential and controversial, died on Monday in Washington. He was 70 and lived in Winchester, Mass.
Professor Heimert had cardiovascular problems, said his son, Andrew, whom the professor and his wife were visiting in Washington. He was pronounced dead at Georgetown University Hospital.
At his death, Professor Heimert (pronounced HIGH-mert) had been for 30 years the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard, where he had been on the faculty since 1959.
In its announcement of his death, the Harvard news office noted, ''His major work, 'Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution' (1966), has had a significant, and ongoing, impact on historical understanding of American culture in the 18th century.''
Reached at Yale University, Harry S. Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity and an authority on American religious history, said yesterday that in his opinion ''Religion and the American Mind'' is ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
In the book, Professor Heimert ''took all of the existing categories for understanding religion, the American Revolution and what he called 'the meaning of America' and stood them on their heads,'' Professor Stout said. ''Conventional wisdom up until Heimert's book suggested that the only connection between religion and the American Revolution was to be found among a handful of Unitarians and deists that we associate with the Founding Fathers.''
What was most notably new in the book, Professor Stout said, was the greater importance that Professor Heimert ascribed to the impact of evangelical preaching as a cause of the American Revolution. That thesis ''shattered the consensus'' that prevailed at the time the book was published, Professor Stout said.
The initial response to the book was almost universally negative. Eminent historians of both religion and the American Revolution were quite uncomfortable and even angry at Professor Heimert's bold view. It was not until the late 1970's that a group of his own students and other admirers, including Professor Stout, ''rescued his reputation,'' according to Professor Stout, ''and showed through careful empirical work the many ways in which his view is deeply true.''
Professor Heimert was also founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which began in 1981 and has brought more than 100 young, nonwhite South African professional people to Harvard for a year's study. He was an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
The administrative posts he held at Harvard included the chairmanships of the Department of English and American Literature and Language and also of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization. He was master of Harvard's Eliot House for 23 years.
For more than three decades Professor Heimert taught a popular survey course in which thousands of Harvard undergraduates were introduced to American literature.
The honors he received included a lifetime achievement award from the Modern Language Association for his scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature.
He was born in Oak Park, Ill., and received a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1955 in Japan and Korea.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Arline; a daughter, Lara, of New Haven, Conn., and a sister, Marian Rees of Los Altos, Calif.
Colloquium Pays Tribute to Alan Heimert, Leading American Historian, Educator, and Author
(NEW YORK, October 13, 2004) The Libraries at Columbia University will honor Alan Heimert (1928–1999), a leading historian, educator, and author, who earned his M.A. in History at Columbia, and taught at Harvard University, influencing and inspiring generations of students. The inaugural event of the Heimert colloquium, featuring a speech by scholar Arnold Rampersad, will be held on Thursday, October 14, at 4:00 P.M. in room 523, Butler Library.
A professor of American Literature and English, Heimert taught at Harvard University for thirty years, where he also served as chairman of the Department of English and American Literature and Language. Heimert’s most influential work was Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966). “In that work,” according to Contemporary Authors, “he maintained that religious belief was a major driving force behind the American Revolution, a position controversial at the time of publication.”
Heimert’s private library was donated to Columbia University Libraries by his widow, Arline Grimes Heimert. Several hundred volumes are now shelved in the American History and Literature Reading Room (502 Butler), and scores more have enriched the collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A plaque on the wall of the reading room acknowledges this gift, as well as his contributions to the field.
Among Heimert’s students now teaching at Columbia are Barnard professors James Basker (President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute) and Margaret Ellsberg, as well as Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature Ann Douglas, and Professors Andrew Delbanco and Robert Ferguson.
Alan Brinkley, Provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia, will welcome attendees to the inaugural event, at which Arnold Rampersad, Dean of Humanities and Sara Hart Kimball Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, will speak on “Ralph Waldo Ellison, New England, and Black American Culture.”
The 2004 Heimert Colloquium is co-sponsored by the program in American Studies, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Department of English, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.
Published on Monday, June 07, 1999
By M. DOUGLAS O'MALLEY Crimson Staff Writer
In a tucked-away corner of Eliot House, Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan E. Heimert '49 still holds court in his office, which--like the great scholar himself--hearkens back to an earlier era.
The great scholars with whom he studied--Perry Miller who he says had a "massive" influence on his work and Kenneth B. Murdock--have long since died, and his fellow colleagues have retired. And while Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history, is older, Heimert has spent more years at Harvard.
In 1964, Heimert said a classmate referred to him as a "fixture" in his fifteenth reunion book entry.
A fixture in 1964, an institution today, Heimert will be retiring at the end of the next academic year, after a life tied to Harvard where he mastered a House, a department and a scholarly life.
Heimert, who has devoted the majority of his academic career to the study of American religion and Puritanism, has seen the academic world transform itself. The "learned" individuals have been replaced by "clever" men which he abhors.
"The clever ones have a gambit, a piece of theory that they can apply to everything as opposed to knowing everything," he says.
And Heimert has increasingly found himself in the minority as the generations shift and his colleagues become more distant.
"It's at the point that I only recognize the ones who are the faculty emeritii. Everybody is younger than I am," he says.
Yet, instead of merely fading into retirement, Heimert has reaffirmed his love for undergraduate teaching, describing the last five years as some of the most rewarding.
"I think the teaching has shown me really engaged students, more than at any other period in my teaching career," Heimert says.
He feels today's students are "serious," but in a different way than the career-minded students of the late 70s and early 80s.
"I think today's students are much more serious, much more intellectual than the late 70s and early 80s where they were serious about getting in to medical and law school."
"They're quite serious to understand the American past and do not say that history is bunk," he says.
And while Heimert has gained so much out of the last five years, a family legacy of diabetes has cast a shadow. Unable to work for two years for health reasons, he had surgery in an attempt to clear up his arteries in the February of 1997. He suffered a stroke and ultimately had to have his leg partially amputated.
Yet, as Heimert comes to the end of his academic odyssey through Harvard as he plans to retire at the end of the next academic year, he says his final stint at the University has perhaps been his most rewarding of his teaching experiences.
His teaching was most recently recognized in 1997 when he was a granted a Levinson award for teaching excellence, an award which he holds in higher esteem than the Lifetime Achievement Award he received from the Modern Literature Association in 1995.
Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. and soon moved to Chicago and finally to Elmhurst where he attended York Community High School. Neither his mother nor his father received a college degree although his father completed two years of school before his father's death forced him to earn a living for his family.
Heimert was far from groomed to attend Harvard's fair grounds. He discovered Harvard's existence only with the encouragement of teachers.
"The only thing I had known about Harvard was that it had been founded earlier than any other college," he says.
"I came here not only as a wide-eyed lad, but as a wide-tied lad," Heimert says, making reference to the distinct difference in Eastern and Midwestern tie size that branded him as a stranger to Cambridge.
Heimert quickly discovered his affinity for American history, but even as he completed his senior thesis on Abraham Lincoln he had not yet decided to enter the world of academia.
Intent on attending law school, Heimert applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School in the December of his senior year. After completing his thesis, he hopped over to the law school to see what lay ahead for him.
"Well, I discovered what was coming next, and I immediately started seeing if I could still apply to other law schools. There was less intellectual content--it was a trade school, not an intellectual enterprise."
Ultimately, however, Heimert's
pessisism about the state of academic affairs moves beyond mere rhetorical gestures. He says now if he was faced with the same choice upon graduation, he would have attended law school. And while he cannot retrace his steps, his daughter, Larisa, who attended Yale Law School for the "intellectual enterprise" it offered ultimately rejected the world of academia because it lacked the same freedom.
"She was responding to the entry of mere cleverness [into academia] that had taken over," Heimert says
Heimert feels the lack of respect for the past was epitomized in the September, 1997 dedication of the Barker Center for the Humanities, which unified disparate humanities departments but divided the Great Hall of the Freshman Union.
Heimert says his fellow colleagues celebrated the dedication not only because of its unifying purpose, but rather because it relegated the Freshman Union, a Harvard institution, to the history books.
"It got rid of the symbol of the old Harvard. The old Harvard was not a bad place--it was very good to me," he said.
Heimert would also find his future wife through his love of academics. He met Arline I. Grimes '59 when she was still an undergraduate and they started dating after she graduated.
After a three-year romance, they were married in Harvard's Appleton Chapel on Oct. 20, 1962. Of Heimert's four groomsmen, three were Harvard graduates and one was the son of a Harvard graduate. Even in love, Heimert found that Harvard shaped his life.
And while Heimert still maintains a love for Harvard, he believes it was ultimately his involvement in its inner bureaucracy that limited the time he could devote to scholarship.
Heimert recalls English Professor Kenneth B. Murdock, one of his mentors, advising him to always appear to be an inept administrator.
"Don't ever at Harvard show administrative skills--you'll just be given another promotion," he said.
When Heimert countered that wasn't that the American way of upward mobility, Murdock further explained his comment. "I didn't say a better job, but another job."
Murdock, who served as both Master of Leverett and Dean of the Faculty illustrated his point to Heimert by telling him about how he would write letters back and forth from the Leverett House Master to the Dean of the Faculty--addressed to and signed by Murdock himself.
Most prominent among Heimert's administrative roles was his position as a committee chair on the Committee of Fifteen, which decided the fate of the most egregious offenders of the 1969 University Hall takeover.
It this involvement which Heimert says marked him as too controversial to be selected as University president or dean of the Faculty. Other committee members suffered the same fate, including James Q. Wilson, who ultimately left Harvard.
Heimert's administrative involvement along with the responsibilities of being the Master of Eliot House led people to question whether he was washed up or not.
Yet, Heimert, more than a typical Faculty member or administrator, had to deal with the real student effects of unrest on a very personal House level.
"When one was Master, one was closer to the student unrest as opposed to a Faculty member with a nice office in the distance," he says.
Heimert's tenure at Eliot coincided with the social changes of the postwar decades.
Parietals rules prohibiting students from entertaining members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms at night were officially loosened in the spring of 1970. In addition, Heimert's time at Harvard saw the abolition of official rules governing the tradition of wearing a coat and tie to all meals in the House dining halls.
Ultimately, there was no way to discipline what Heimert calls an increasing number of "wayward students" in the late 60s and early 70s.
All students, not just card-carrying members of SDS, and even in the traditionally upper crust world of Eliot House were rebelling against Harvard--and its dress code.
"[A student asked about his attire] would have been more likely to say fuck you. Authority was desanctified," Heimert says.
Heimert, however, says he is resigned to the fact that Harvard will inevitably change over time. Although he marveled in 1995 on how different Harvard had become since he arrived in 1945, he said a member of the Class of 1895 would have similar thoughts if he saw Harvard in 1945.
Yet, Heimert still believes he has seen the most rapid change Harvard has gone through since it was a tiny divinity college in Newtowne--Cambridge's original name.
"The last 30 years have seen the most change in Harvard in its history, with the possible exception of its first 30 years," Heimert says.
For Heimert, even his impending retirement will not sever his connection with fair Harvard. He will continue to come in from his home in Winchester to teach history and literature tutorials and a class in the English department.
For a high school student who did not even know Harvard existed, the school has become an integral part of his existence over the last fifty-four years.
Roger Rosenblatt, who worked with Heimert on the Committee of Fifteen, said it best when he described Heimert in his 1997 book, Coming Apart. "A scholar of American religion, his was Harvard."
OBITUARY
ALAN HEIMERT, HARVARD PROFESSOR INFLUENTIAL AUTHOR ON RELIGION; AT 70
By Tom Long, Globe Staff, 11/04/99
Alan Heimert, a retired professor of American literature at Harvard University who wrote an influential and controversial book on religion and the American Revolution, died Monday in Washington, D.C. He was 70.
Mr. Heimert, who lived in Winchester, was visiting his son in Washington at the time of his death. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
In his major work, ''Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution,'' published in 1966, he theorized that evangelical preaching was the cause of the American Revolution, an idea that initially attracted an almost universally negative response. But Harry Stout, a Yale professor and authority on American religious history, described it as ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
Mr. Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1949, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He became a member of the Harvard faculty in 1959.
He was the founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which has brought more than 100 nonwhite South African professionals to Harvard for a year's study since 1981.
He was co-editor, with Perry Miller, of the anthology ''The Great Awakening'' and, with Andrew Delbanco, of ''The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology.''
Yesterday, Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, said, ''Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind.''
At Mr. Heimert's retirement dinner in 1992, Roger Rosenblatt, author of ''Coming Apart,'' a memoir of Harvard in the 1960s, described Mr. Heimert as a man with the courage of his convictions. ''Alan's effect on the 1960s, the imposition of that gray furious Puritan force on the decade of drugs, sex and faculty meetings, was so incongruous - it would have been hilarious - that is, had anyone remembered how to laugh in those years,'' he said. ''Yet, time and again, Alan strode to the center of the storm. And, being something of a storm himself, he often shocked the revolutionaries into calm simply because they had never seen anything like Alan before.''
He leaves his wife, Arline (Grimes); a son, Andrew of Washington, D.C.; a daughter, Lara of New Haven; and a sister, Marion Rees of Los Altos, Calif. Funeral arrangements are incomplete
Material from t he Associated Press was used in this report.
This story ran on page C19 of the Boston Globe on 11/04/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
ALAN HEIMERT, TEACHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, ENGLISH COURSE, 70 DIES
Harvard University Gazette
November 11, 1999
Alan Heimert '49, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and a former Master of Eliot House, died in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 1, at 70. He suffered from cardiovascular problems, family members said.
"For four decades, Alan Heimert's capacious, penetrating understanding of the American mind and character has been an inspiration to his students and colleagues alike," said Walter Kaiser, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature. "Harvard has lost an incomparable teacher and counselor, and our country one of its wisest interpreters."
Born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 10, 1928, Heimert prepared for Harvard College at York Community High School in Elmhurst, Ill. He received his A.B. in government from the College in 1949, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1950, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960.
Heimert was a teaching fellow in history and literature at Harvard in 1952, then served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1955. He returned to Harvard and in 1961 became instructor of English. He was named associate professor of English in 1965 and became Powell M. Cabot Professor in 1969. He chaired the Department of English and American Literature and Language from 1972 to 1976.
He became a Tutor in Eliot House in 1951, and after service as both a resident and non-resident Tutor, he was Master of Eliot House from 1968 to 1991. As Master he dedicated himself to creating and strengthening House programs, including the teaching of House sections for large undergraduate courses. Heimert practiced what he preached, teaching sections of his renowned American literature survey course, English 70, in Eliot House.
In the five years prior to his death he took on increasing numbers of undergraduate students for individual and group tutorials, his favorite setting for teaching and learning, particularly in the concentration of History and Literature, with which he was affiliated for nearly four decades. "In History and Literature, he could always be counted on to teach tutorials," said Daniel Donoghue, professor of English and American literature and language. "The more he was given, the happier he was - and his students often went on to distinguished careers."
An expert on the Puritans and on 18th-century America, Heimert was the author of Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution (1966), which has had a significant, continuing impact on the study of that era in American history. He was co-author, with Rheinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1963), co-editor, with Perry Miller, of The Great Awakening (1967), and, with Andrew Delbanco, of The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (1985).
Colleagues, former students, and friends are quick to note that Heimert's scholarly interests were not a full measure of the man. He was founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which since its inception in 1981 has brought more than 100 South African professionals to Harvard for a year of study. During the turbulent 1968-69 academic year, he served on the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. He was also a member of the Committee of Fifteen and the University Committee on Governance from 1969-71.
"Alan was incisive, perceptive, wise, funny, and very smart," said Daniel Steiner, former Harvard vice president and general counsel, of Heimert's service in those years. "He had high standards and a great loyalty to, and a clear and noble vision of, Harvard College, and he fought the good fight over many years to maintain that vision. His strengths were many, his contributions lasting."
Heimert introduced thousands of undergraduates to American literature in his 32 years of teaching English 70, as well as training many teaching fellows who went on to become leading scholars. Over the 30-year course of his involvement with Harvard's History of American Civilization program, he advised more dissertations than any other member of the committee. He continued to advise graduate students on dissertations until his death.
"Alan, whose own passionate interests included not only the relationship of 18th-century religious revivals and revolutionary ideology but also Melville, American jazz, and the ending of South African apartheid, followed the careers of many of [his students] with uncommon generosity, dedication, and pride," said Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and professor of Afro-American studies. "He will be sorely missed by the international community of Americanists."
"Alan Heimert was a great teacher who inflamed generations of students with a passion for the life of the mind," said former student Andrew Delbanco, now Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
Heimert was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1986 and that year also was named a Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge. In 1995 the Early American Literary Division of the Modern Language Association gave him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature. And in 1997 Harvard awarded him the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate instruction.
Alan Heimert is survived by his wife, Arline Grimes Heimert, of Winchester, Mass.; his son, Andrew, of Washington, D.C.; his daughter, Larisa, of New Haven, Conn.; and a sister, Marion Rees, of Los Altos, Calif.
A service in Heimert's memory is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 19, at 3 p.m. in the Memorial Church, with a reception to follow in Eliot House.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GAZETTE MAY 1, 2003 P.30:
Memorial Minute: Alan Heimert
Was Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 8, 2003, the following Minute was placed upon the records.
Alan Heimert, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, who for four decades was a member of this Faculty, died on November 1, 1999, at the close of his 71st year.
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he attended school in nearby Elmhurst, where he obtained both his secondary education and a state tennis championship. He then came to Harvard and was graduated with an A.B. in Government in 1949, following which he earned an M.A. in History at Columbia. History itself interrupted his graduate studies, however, and from 1952 to 1955 he served as a non-commissioned officer in Japan and Korea. Upon being discharged, he returned to Harvard to prepare a Ph.D. in American Civilization, thereby confirming the scholarly and institutional allegiances that were to dominate the rest of his life.
For 38 years he taught in the English Department, where he served as Chairman and where he carefully nurtured promising seedlings in that legendary nursery of Americanist scholars, English 70. For 40 years he was associated with the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, from whom he received his doctorate; he directed more theses than any other member of that committee and served at various times as Chairman for a total of 14 years. For 45 years he was associated with the Committee on the Degree in History and Literature, where he also served as Chairman and tutored more undergraduates than anyone before or since. And for almost 50 years, he was a devoted denizen of the world of Eliot House, where he was to reign as Master for nearly a quarter-century.
During the cataclysmic days of the late sixties and early seventies, he strove, Neptune-like, to calm the turbulent seas, serving with distinction on the Committee of Fifteen, the University Committee on Governance, and the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies. In 1970-71, he took a major role in revising the rules of this Faculty, where he later served as Parliamentarian for more than a decade. Ardently opposed to apartheid, in 1981 he founded the South African Fellowship Program, which he directed for almost 20 years, bringing well over 100 black South Africans to Harvard. For that achievement he was made an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
Alan Heimert was the co-author, with Reinhold Niebuhr, of A Nation So Conceived (1967). He also co-edited, with his mentor Perry Miller, The Great Awakening (1967) and, with Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America (1985). Several of his essays have become landmarks in American studies, most notably his seminal study of the political implications in Moby Dick. His greatest work, however, which has been called "the most significant and provocative book on American religious history," is his Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966).
In 1960-61, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; in 1967 he was a visiting professor at Berkeley; and in 1986 he was Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. In 1986, he was also made a Fellow of John Harvard's college in Cambridge, England, and he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. In 1995, the Early American Literary Division of the MLA awarded him its lifetime achievement award for scholarship and teaching. And two years before his death, Harvard honored him with the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award.
This partial list of achievements gives small indication of the magnitude of the man himself, who always seemed considerably larger than life - an attribute better conveyed, perhaps, by the kinetic metaphor of Alan driving the Zamboni during intermissions at "An Evening with Champions," making the rough places smooth with vigor and determination, skill and chutzpah. Undergraduates easily saw through the curmudgeonly disguise with which he attempted to conceal the compassionate, benevolent father-figure underneath. Alan's unfaltering optimism and faith in the young derived from his profound belief in the capacity of every individual for moments of transformation or revelation; as many have attested, he himself had a gift for providing such moments, for being the great awakener who left his students forever changed.
To his incoming graduate students, Alan would explain that there were two things they had to do in graduate school, get a Ph.D. and get an education, and that one had almost nothing to do with the other. It was their paideia he cared about, and he trained his students to learn well, teach well, and write well, but above all to think well. Never wishing to have disciples, he encouraged resistance and dissent in their quest for truth. Hence, there is no Heimert school in American studies. There is, however, a very important Heimert community of distinguished former students, bound together by undiminished fealty to his memory and by, in Jonathan Edwards's phrase, "the mutual love of the brethren."
Community was of supreme importance to Alan, whether it was the congregation at Northampton or the crew of the Pequod, the alumni of English 70 or the members of Eliot House, or America itself - and he famously instilled in his Eliot House students a sense of communal obligation to do good and give back what one had received. But it is the community that constitutes Harvard about which he cared most. He was a passionate, articulate defender of Harvard's noblest traditions and of this university as a place where free people intelligently thought their way through problems. His standards were lofty and exigent, and, in the words of a close friend, "he fought for what he believed even when the winds were blowing in the other direction." Despite the dark disappointments and physical indignities of his final years, when those contrary winds threatened at times to reach gale force, Alan Heimert's lambent dream of Harvard continued to glow undimmed.
He leaves his beloved wife, Arline, his adoring children, Andrew and Lara, and a host of bereft students and friends, all of whose lives he immeasurably enriched.
Respectfully submitted, Daniel Aaron Sacvan Bercovitch Andrew Delbanco (Columbia) Laura Fisher Daniel Steiner Walter Kaiser, Chairman
Alan Heimert, 70, Professor And Expert on Early America
New York Times
November 3, 1999
By ERIC PACE
Alan Heimert, a longtime Harvard professor whose scholarship about 18th-century America was influential and controversial, died on Monday in Washington. He was 70 and lived in Winchester, Mass.
Professor Heimert had cardiovascular problems, said his son, Andrew, whom the professor and his wife were visiting in Washington. He was pronounced dead at Georgetown University Hospital.
At his death, Professor Heimert (pronounced HIGH-mert) had been for 30 years the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard, where he had been on the faculty since 1959.
In its announcement of his death, the Harvard news office noted, ''His major work, 'Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution' (1966), has had a significant, and ongoing, impact on historical understanding of American culture in the 18th century.''
Reached at Yale University, Harry S. Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity and an authority on American religious history, said yesterday that in his opinion ''Religion and the American Mind'' is ''the most significant and provocative book on American religious history.''
In the book, Professor Heimert ''took all of the existing categories for understanding religion, the American Revolution and what he called 'the meaning of America' and stood them on their heads,'' Professor Stout said. ''Conventional wisdom up until Heimert's book suggested that the only connection between religion and the American Revolution was to be found among a handful of Unitarians and deists that we associate with the Founding Fathers.''
What was most notably new in the book, Professor Stout said, was the greater importance that Professor Heimert ascribed to the impact of evangelical preaching as a cause of the American Revolution. That thesis ''shattered the consensus'' that prevailed at the time the book was published, Professor Stout said.
The initial response to the book was almost universally negative. Eminent historians of both religion and the American Revolution were quite uncomfortable and even angry at Professor Heimert's bold view. It was not until the late 1970's that a group of his own students and other admirers, including Professor Stout, ''rescued his reputation,'' according to Professor Stout, ''and showed through careful empirical work the many ways in which his view is deeply true.''
Professor Heimert was also founding director of the Harvard South Africa Fellowship Program, which began in 1981 and has brought more than 100 young, nonwhite South African professional people to Harvard for a year's study. He was an honorary life member of the South African Institute for Race Relations.
The administrative posts he held at Harvard included the chairmanships of the Department of English and American Literature and Language and also of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization. He was master of Harvard's Eliot House for 23 years.
For more than three decades Professor Heimert taught a popular survey course in which thousands of Harvard undergraduates were introduced to American literature.
The honors he received included a lifetime achievement award from the Modern Language Association for his scholarship and teaching in the field of colonial literature.
He was born in Oak Park, Ill., and received a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Harvard, a master's degree from Columbia and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard. He served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1955 in Japan and Korea.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Arline; a daughter, Lara, of New Haven, Conn., and a sister, Marian Rees of Los Altos, Calif.
Colloquium Pays Tribute to Alan Heimert, Leading American Historian, Educator, and Author
(NEW YORK, October 13, 2004) The Libraries at Columbia University will honor Alan Heimert (1928–1999), a leading historian, educator, and author, who earned his M.A. in History at Columbia, and taught at Harvard University, influencing and inspiring generations of students. The inaugural event of the Heimert colloquium, featuring a speech by scholar Arnold Rampersad, will be held on Thursday, October 14, at 4:00 P.M. in room 523, Butler Library.
A professor of American Literature and English, Heimert taught at Harvard University for thirty years, where he also served as chairman of the Department of English and American Literature and Language. Heimert’s most influential work was Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966). “In that work,” according to Contemporary Authors, “he maintained that religious belief was a major driving force behind the American Revolution, a position controversial at the time of publication.”
Heimert’s private library was donated to Columbia University Libraries by his widow, Arline Grimes Heimert. Several hundred volumes are now shelved in the American History and Literature Reading Room (502 Butler), and scores more have enriched the collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A plaque on the wall of the reading room acknowledges this gift, as well as his contributions to the field.
Among Heimert’s students now teaching at Columbia are Barnard professors James Basker (President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute) and Margaret Ellsberg, as well as Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature Ann Douglas, and Professors Andrew Delbanco and Robert Ferguson.
Alan Brinkley, Provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia, will welcome attendees to the inaugural event, at which Arnold Rampersad, Dean of Humanities and Sara Hart Kimball Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, will speak on “Ralph Waldo Ellison, New England, and Black American Culture.”
The 2004 Heimert Colloquium is co-sponsored by the program in American Studies, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Department of English, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.
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Alan Heimert
Nov 10, 1928 - Nov 1, 1999
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