Mr. William D. Perkins

Perkins, DexterAmerican National Biography Online

Perkins, Dexter (20 June 1889-12 May 1984), historian and educator, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of William Perkins, an importer, and Cora Farmer Perkins.
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An excellent scholar, Perkins majored in history at Harvard and was named to Phi Beta Kappa prior to receiving his A.B. degree in 1909.He continued his education overseas and earned a diploma from the École des Sciences Politiques (Paris) in 1913 ; in the following year he also received his doctorate from Harvard.His dissertation, The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1826, was his first written analysis of this landmark in American foreign policy, which would serve as the focus of his career.

Perkins entered the teaching profession as an instructor at the University of Cincinnati in 1914.In the following year he moved to the University of Rochester at the same rank.He married Wilma Lois Lord, one of his former students, on 2 May 1918 ; the couple eventually had two sons.Following the entry of the United States into World War I, Perkins joined the U.S. Army infantry as a private in June 1918.By the end of the war he had risen to the rank of captain and managed to merge his interest in history with his military duties, serving from October 1918 until February 1919 in the historical section of General Headquarters in Chaumont, France.Perkins later attended the Paris Peace Conference (where he was charged with reporting on the proceedings to the American Expeditionary Force commander, General John Pershing and was discharged in June 1919.

At the conclusion of the war Perkins returned to the University of Rochester, where he was promoted to assistant professor.He became an associate professor in 1922, and in 1925 he took on the additional duties of departmental chairman.In 1927 his dissertation was published under its original title and soon brought Perkins recognition for his insights into both the Monroe Doctrine's authorship (shared equally between John Quincy Adams and James Monroe) and its effect (while initially valueless--the European powers had not been a legitimate intervention threat in 1823--it set the tone for later American diplomatic strategies).Peer recognition came in 1928, when Perkins became secretary of the American Historical Association, a position he held until 1932 (he also served as corresponding secretary until 1939).

Perkins continued to work on the doctrine and its impact, producing The Monroe Doctrine, 1826-1867 (1933), The Monroe Doctrine, 1867-1907 (1937), and Hands Off : A History of the Monroe Doctrine (1941), later revised as A History of the Monroe Doctrine (1955).In addition to his work on the doctrine, which Perkins described as perhaps the most important single document in American diplomatic history, he also wrote America and Two Wars (1944), The United States and the Caribbean (1947), The Evolution of American Foreign Policy (1948), Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (1956), The American Way (1957), and The New Age of Franklin Roosevelt (1957).

Well respected outside of academia, Perkins was appointed the city historian of Rochester (1936-1948) and held a panel chairmanship on the National War Labor Board during World War II.Near the end of that conflict he served as official historian at the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, where he observed the birth of the United Nations organization firsthand.He was elected moderator of the Unitarian Churches of the United States and Canada in 1952 and chaired the council of the Harvard Foundation for Advanced Study from 1951 to 1956.

On the basis of his scholarly reputation, Perkins was invited to give lectures both abroad and at home.He was a Commonwealth Fund Lecturer at University College of the University of London in 1937 and was named the first visiting Pitt Professor in American History and Institutions at Cambridge (1945-1946).In 1946 he began lecturing at the National War College in Arlington, Virginia, and continued to do so until 1954.He returned to England for a series of lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1948 and 1952, and in the spring of 1949 he delivered the Gottesman lectures at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, which were later published as The American Approach to Foreign Policy (1951).His longest affiliation was with the annual Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria ; after teaching there during the summer of 1949, he returned as the seminar's president each year from 1950 until 1961.

After spending much of the early 1950s building up the Ph.D. program at Rochester, Perkins moved in 1954 to Cornell University, where he held a chair as the first John L. Senior Professor of American Civilization until 1959.The crowning achievement of his professional career came in 1956, when he was elected president of the American Historical Association.Long troubled by what he considered to be an overemphasis on publication at the expense of classroom instruction in academia, Perkins argued in his inaugural speech, We Shall Gladly Teach, that the greatest challenge confronting historians today is the challenge of the classroom. Late in his career, Perkins argued that American foreign policy had been unique in its generally open and moralistic approach in dealing with other nations.He also spent a considerable amount of time attacking members of the so-called revisionist school of history.Deploring what he called history by hypothesis, Perkins became a de facto spokesman for the consensus school in arguing that the United States had entered both world wars of the twentieth century on the basis of the need to preserve national security.Following a long retirement, Perkins died in Rochester, New York.

Although Perkins's conclusions about American diplomatic history were attacked during his later years (particularly during the 1960s), the good reputation of his scholarship has remained intact.His advocacy of a balanced approach to academic work--combining excellence in teaching with substantive research--has continued to be an ideal, especially as universities have had to reassess the criteria for tenure.

Bibliography

Perkins's papers are held at the University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. His autobiography, Yield of the Years (1969), is an excellent source of information on his life and career.

Mr. Perkins graduated in 1948 in Manilla High School.

He was the grandson of Conrad and Louise (Kuhn) Posz and Mr. and Mrs. William D. Perkins and great-grandson of Jehu Perkins, one of the first commissioners of Rush County and who Perkins Street, in Rushville, was named in honor of.

Mr. Perkins was an avid reader and historian and actively supported the Homer Art Festival, Future Farmers of America and 4-H Clubs of Walker Township.