Dwight Morrow: A Biography
by
[Harcourt, Brace, $3.75]
‘ CLEVER men are good — but not the best, wrote Carlyle. Dwight Morrow was not a clever man. He was too wise for that — and he was of the best.
Harold Nicolson speaks of him us an example of the civilized man. In a sense, no encomium can be higher, but in the phrase there is a suggestion of the artificial which puts one off the track. Morrow’s genius was not so much individual as companionate. His sympathies were hoops of steel, and every group with which he worked became a band of brothers. He was a modern instance of that loyalty which Professor Royce used to teach at Harvard. Here in truth, among us, was a Knight of the Round Table.
A cloud of witnesses agree that everyone who worked with him habitually did better than he knew. During the war, while Morrow was serving abroad under the distinguished alias of ‘an American expert attached to the Imports Subcommittee of the A. M. T. C.,’he was in a very literal sense all things to all men with whom he came into contact. French, Italian, English, knew him for their own true friend. There was a largeness about him which jumped prejudice at sight, and with all his Christian benevolence a realistic shrewdness which gave men fighting for their lives completest confidence.
Mr. Nicolson sets all this forth very engagingly, but he is an Englishman, and I do not know how congenial the American strain is to him. I am not sure whether Morrow’s simple birth and simpler upbringing, his wrinkled trousers (pants, rather), his comic little bowler hats and untamed hair, acquired merit for him in his biographer’s eyes. Yet I am confident that Mr. Nicolson recognizes a diplomat when he sees one, and in diplomacy he knew Morrow instantly for a natural.
How perfect an American saga was Morrow’s life! Born in the ‘free lodging’ of the president of a starveling college, he struggled through his education on a very little oatmeal. The traditional shoestring, which is the Lord’s best gift to young men who deserve it, brought him through four years of his beloved Amherst and three of Law School. Once at the bur, the steady climb began, and after his perfect marriage other miracles seemed almost commonplace.
One day when it was raining torrents in New York, little Morrow’s umbrella collided with another set of whalebones held in the superior grasp of a Morgan partner. In the breathless interchange of courtesies which followed, the partner realized that his collider was the Morrow admired, respected, and beloved by those that knew. And from this it came to pass in this American folk tale that Morrow entered a partnership the immensity of whose transactions dwarfed the enterprises of the Medicis, the Fuggers, even of the Rothschilds, into romances: of village life.
The most vulgar term in our vocabulary is ‘service.’ The garage and the department store between them have made it the symbol of advertisement for themselves and padded bills for their clients. Morrow took the poor bedraggled word in the literal sense of the New Testament, and by it he lived. He gave up place, and found power. The fulfillment of his career came as Ambassador to Mexico, and it was a perfect exemplification of his idea of service that while, as his biographer strikingly and candidly says, his achievement there was neither ‘comprehensive, durable, nor complete,’the spirit in which it was rendered has given to America a new conception of the brotherhood of nations when some are dark and some are white. It is not too much to say that if men are wise (how tremendous an hypothesis!) Morrow’s Mexican achievement, canceling almost a century of folly, will make the New World a new world indeed.
The present reviewer is well aware that on the long shelf of history there is scant room for substantial biographies of men not of the first rank of human achievement. Yet every reader of Mr. Nicolson’s intelligent and sympathetic narrative will recognize that here is the story of one of the ultimate men — such a man as those who look forward believe may one day people the earth, a man whose nature it was to love his neighbor as himself, who trusted his fellows because he understood them, who compromised with his hopes but never with his principles, and who had the gift, less human than divine, of making goodness charming.
ELLERY SEDGWICK