At a Meeting of the
Faculty of Vassar College
held
November seventeenth, nineteen hundred
and seventy-six, the following
Memorial
was unanimously adopted:
Charles Carroll Griffin was born on May 24, 1902, in Tokyo, where his
father was Professor of Economics at the Imperial University. His family
returned to the United States in 1913, settling in Westboro, Massachusetts.
Charles attended Harvard, receiving his B.A. in 1922. Then, seeking horizons
beyond the academic, he was off to South America for seven years, two in
Argentina and five in Uruguay,'in the employ of the National Cement Company.
He returned home with an interest in Hispanic American culture and a knowledge
of the Spanish language that were to last him the rest of his life. Beginning
graduate work at Columbia, he also served as an instructor in Spanish there in
1930. His next venture the following year was as a Research Associate of the
Library of Congress, to go to Madrid, where, enrolling at the Centro de Es-
tudios Históricos— at that time perhaps the most significant concentration of
liberal intellectuals in the Republic—-he supervised the transcription of
historical documents in the Archives of Seville and Valladolid. The next year
he was again at Columbia where in 1933 he was awarded the M.A. Nineteen thirty-
four brought two important personal events: marriage to Jessica Frances Jones,
a graduate of Reed College, and the acceptance of an instructorship in history
at Vassar.
The early forties brought a period of great concern in the United States
for closer relations with Latin America. Men who knew the field were in demand,
and Charles Griffin was ready to supply the need. In 1940 he went as exchange
professor to the Universidad Central in Caracas, Venezuela, the first United
States citizen to serve under the program set up by the Buenos Aires Convention
for International Cultural Relations. A letter written later by the Director
of the university to our ambassador pointed out that "Dr. Griffin's lectures were
the first ever given in a school of higher learning in Venezuela . . . regarding
the discovery, the conquest and the colonization of North America.” An article
in a Venezuelan magazine in 1941 characterized him not as the typical "fat,
red—faced North American", but as an aristocratic Castilian: until one heard
his "slight Anglo—Saxon accent", one might have mistaken the tall, slender
professor for a resident of Burgos or Segovia in a play by Lope de Vega or
Calderbn. It might have added, "or a portrait by El Greco."
Charles came back to Vassar in 1941, as associate professor; but was off
again in February 1943 to the State Department in Washington, where he served
as Assistant Chief of the Division of Liaison and Research in the Office of
American Republics Affairs. He returned to Vassar in 1944, this time to a full-
professorship.
Charles served as visiting professor at many places including Columbia,
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Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Wisconsin, and at the Universidad de Chile. But
happily for Vassar he always returned here where his own course in South American
history had entered the curriculum, a break—through in the tradition that most
history offerings should deal with our European background and the United States.
For years it was traditional that every member of the department should teach
the one introductory course offered, a survey of European civilization. Charles
later regaled his younger colleagues with accountsci'his struggles to cope with
"all those popes and emperors."
Although most of his teaching at Vassar was in United States political and
diplomatic history, his scholarly work lay entirely in Latin America. At in-
tervals he represented the United States as forwarder of pan-American affairs,
in Chile in 1950 and in Ecuador in 1959, in l962 at the Salzburg Seminar on
American Civilization, and as delegate to the Conference on Contemporary Latin
American History at Bordeaux. He published four books on Latin American history
(one with a Spanish translation, one written in Spanish and published in Ca-
racas), and was contributing author to five others. (A selective bibliography
is appended to this Minute.) In addition he contributed articles to practical-
ly all the scholarly periodicals in his field, and also to the more general
historical journals. His last major scholarly achievement was as editor-in-
chief of Latin America: A Guide to Historical Literature (1971), the first
inclusive bibliography in that field. His place as leader among Latin American
historians was recognized first by appointment to the Board of Editors of the
Hispanig American Historical Review, and as Managing Editor from 1950 to 1954.
In 1970 the Conference on Latin American History gave Charles its "Distinguished
Service Award", in the form of a handsome plaque which, characteristically, he
kept trying to hide from view.
Few of his colleagues or students at Vassar were aware of the extent of
his scholarly activities or of his international reputation. "Charles is such
a modest chap," wrote his chairman on one occasion, "that it is only when one
digs it out of him that it becomes evident" how extensive his achievements and
honors were. Self—doubt, humility, and an awareness of his own frailties made
him wonderfully understanding of the anxieties of others, and made him the
best of all people to turn to for sympathetic advice. Countless colleagues,
friends, and students could say, with Sarah Gibson Blanding, ". . . when things
got really tough I could always talk with Charles and knew without any doubt
I was getting the best and most unbiased opinion possible. Of all my colleagues
I counted on him the most."
At Vassar Charles served four terms as chairman of the history department.
For the last two years before his retirement in 1967 he was first Acting Dean
of Faculty and then Dean of Faculty. He felt a deep commitment to the local
community outside the college, and took an active part in politics. Among
other activities he served on the Dutchess County Committee of the Democratic
Party and as Director of the Dutchess County Council on world Affairs. In
1968 he became the first Executive Director of the Associated Colleges of the
Mid-Hudson Area, and from 1968 to 1970 served on the Board of Trustees of the
Southeastern New York Library Resources Council. He was a member of the Board
of Trustees of Marist College, and in 1969 became secretary of the Board.
But it was as a member of this faculty that we knew Charles best. For him,
loyalty to Vassar was no mere catch—phrase, but involved him in genuine financial,
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and perhaps even professional sacrifice. He turned a deaf ear to offers to
return to the State Department at a salary far above anything Vassar could
give him. He did the same to other attractive offers from the Rockefeller
Foundation, Stanford, U.C.L.A., and Cornell because, to quote a letter from
his chairman to President Blanding, "of his interest in working at an institu-
tion in which he believed as heartily as he does believe in what we try to do
at Vassar." In February 1950 Miss Blanding wrote him while he was Visiting
Professor at the University of Wisconsin, enclosing a new contract, saying, "I
hope like fury you are going to feel like signing. We have missed you and . . .
have kept our fingers crossed wondering if Wisconsin was going to wean you away
from us. As you can see, we have jumped your salary . . . which I am sure is
not as much as Wisconsin could pay you [in fact, Vassar's new offer was only
two-thirds what Wisconsin was paying him], but is all we can stretch at the
moment." Charles happily accepted the economic sacrifice and returned to Vassar.
He, of course, would not have called it a sacrifice. He had abundant ex-
perience of great universities, and none of them gave him the intense intellectual
and emotional satisfactions that Vassar did: students who delighted in and
responded to his broad-ranging intellect and provocative, questioning teaching;
colleagues who could be waylaid for speculative discussion or riotous argument;
department, comittee, and faculty meetings in which he could observe the wit
and cantankerousness, wisdom and perversity, mental agility and abnormal psy-
chology of his colleagues. He took affectionate delight in displays of insti-
tutional absurdity and human folly, which Vassar offered in prodigal abundance.
Charles never forgot what it had been like to be a young, inexperienced
instructor, ”. . . Newer and younger [faculty] members . . . instinctively feel
him to be their friend,” his chairman once wrote. One of them later recalled:
"I first knew Charles at a crucial time in my life—-at the beginning of my career.
He quickly became for me a kind of mentor, such as I had never in graduate
school . . . By watching him in action in faculty meetings . . . talking to him
at faculty tea, or simply chatting with him on an evening . . . I got some idea
of what it meant to be a scholar, a teacher, and a man of integrity. Charles
and I had our differences--we really were not very much alike——but his example
for me was central to my life."
Charles came to Vassar at a time when, as he recalled three decades later,
"the college . . . was more self—contained than it is today." The Vassar
comunity dominated the social as well as the professional lives of a large
proportion of the faculty. Depending on their tastes, they used it as a vast
salon in which to hammer out their ideas in friendly yet critical company, as a
stage on which to develop and display their eccentricities, or a kind of en-
counter group in which to express their inner hostilities and aggressions.
Charles did his best to maintain the notion of the faculty as an intellectual
community even into the fifties and sixties, when outside at“factions, whether
professional or personal, were drawing the attention of both zaculty and student body
away from the college.
It was a mystery how Charles managed to produce the extraordinary bulk of
his publications and pursue his professional activities on top of a heavy teach-
ing load. For he always seemed to be found in the back parlor of Swift, in the
Retreat, or at faculty tea, engaging in anecdote or argument, covering every
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subject under the sun. ". . . His intellectual curiosity was insatiable, as
his fund of knowledge was almost fathomless," one colleague recalls. ". . .
What I think of most in connection with him was not just his helpfulness and
companionability," writes another, "but those glorious, continuous, shimmering
days and nights we all had at Raymond Avenue. That for me was the Golden Age
. . . we all belonged to Charles's extensive, amusing, and beautifully domestic-
ated world."
Charles played an active role in Vassar politics, serving on most major
committees, and as president of the local chapter of the A.A.U.P.; in the 1930's
he was much involved with the Teachers‘ Union. He firmly believed in maintain-
ing the authority of the faculty as a corporate body, and in seeing that the
body exercised its powers wisely and responsibly. when Alan Simpson was inau-
gurated as President, Charles spoke in the name of the faculty. "The Faculty
of Vassar College has never been a placid, harmonious body," he warned the new
president. "Because of our nature as questioners, our training as critics, and
our diverse associations and interests we are likely to provide opposition as
well as support to your endeavours."
Charles spoke often in faculty meetings, and one never could be sure in
advance what stand he was going to take on an issue. while his commitment to
basic principles—-academic freedom, faculty power, individual liberties--never
faltered, he embodied the definition of an intellectual as one who is continual-
ly and systematically questioning his own opinions. He belonged to no camp, and
voted and acted as his conscience and intellect directed.
Impressive as he was in faculty meeting, Charles was at his best in a small
group, late at night. He delighted in the varieties of human nature, the in-
tricacies of thought, and the techniques of politics. But above all he loved
conversation. For him, as for Dr. Johnson, conversation offered the best alle-
viation for the pain of existence. It was his chief joy, a means of adding to
his stock of knowledge, of encountering new ideas--the more subversive and he-
terodox the better--and of savouring the pleasures of articulate sociability.
Of colleagues in other disciplines he could ask a simple, sincere, and yet so
basic a question that one found oneself rethinking ideas long taken for granted.
Charles was a moderate historical relativist, for whom the conviction that
absolute certainty was an imposible ideal was.not a depressing, but an ex-
hilarating belief. For he enjoyed the process of debate more than he cared
about the outcome. But while pragmatic and flexible in his approach both to
questions of historical truth and educational policy, he never abandoned his
moral convictions for the sake of expediency. Intensely sensitive to personal
attacks, he acted accoridng to his conscience as chairman, as dean, and as
individual, never swerving from what he was convinced was his duty for the sake
of popularity or a quiet life.
President Simpson has summed up the qualities for which we loved Charles:
"A dearer man we never knew--gentleman, scholar, wit. I never saw him without
thinking of the motto of New College, Oxford——‘Manners makyth man‘. He was . . .
a model of good sense, good-heartedness, and fidelity. when I asked him for
help he always replied that he would do anything for Vassar—-and did so."
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Respectfully submitted,
Donald Olsen, Chairman
Mildred Campbell
Evaln Clark
Christine Havelock
Antonio Marquez
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Bibliographical Note
His publications include The United States and the Disruption of the
Spanish Empire, 1810-1822 (1937), Latin America (1944); The National Period in
the History of the New World (1961, with Spanish translation in 1962), and Los
Temas Sociales y Economicos de la Época de la Independencia (published in Caracas
in 1961). He edited and contributed to Concerning Latin American Culture (l940),
and contributed chapters to Ensayos sobre la Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Mexico,
1951), a commemorative volume in honor of Emeterio Santovenia (Habana, 1958),
Conocimento y desconocimento en las Americas (1958), to vol. XI of the new edition
of the Cambridge Modern History on Latin America, 1870-1900 (1961), and to A.P.
Whitaker, ed., Latin America and the Enlightenment (1961). In addition he contri-
buted articles to the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Maryland Historical
Magazine, the Inter-American Quarterly, Revista de Historia de America, Boletin
de la Academia de Historia (Caracas), Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale, and the Vene-
zuelan Revista Nacional de Cultura. His last major scholarly achievement was to
edit the bibliographical volume, commissioned by the Library of Congress, Latin
America: A Guide to Historical Literature (1971).