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Vol. 26:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 1998
Arthur S. Link: A Tribute
by Ted Brown, Jr.
Arthur S. Link, the dean of American documentary editors and a former member of the National Historical Publications Commission, died on March 26, 1998, at the age of 77. He began his career as a historian specializing in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on the South and the Progressive period and subsequently became the biographer of Woodrow Wilson and editor of the 69-volume The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. He was a past president of the Association for Documentary Editing.
Photograph by John T. Link, 1988.
Born in New Market, Virginia, in 1920, he received his early education in North Carolina and earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina, where he was, as he put it, "trained in Southern history . . . by the master, Fletcher Melvin Green." It was during his first summer as a graduate student at UNC (1941) that Link began to develop a serious interest in Wilson, whose political career inspired topics for his master's thesis, "The Wilson Movement in the South: A Study in Political Liberalism" (1942), and doctoral thesis, "The South and the Democratic Campaign of 1910-1912" (1945). His teaching career began at Princeton University and continued at Northwestern University, where he taught from 1949 to 1960, reaching the rank of full professor in 1954.
In December 1958, the New York Times reported that the Woodrow Wilson Foundation had selected Link, then a 38-year-old professor of history at Northwestern whom the Times referred to simply as "a Wilson scholar," to direct the Foundation's ambitious enterprise of editing and publishing the first comprehensive edition of Wilson's papers. At the time of his appointment as editor of the Wilson Papers in 1958, Link was well along his way to becoming the nation's foremost authority on the 28th president. More than a decade earlier, in 1947, he had published Wilson: The Road to the White House, the first volume of a projected multi-volume biography, which carries Wilson from birth through his election to the presidency in 1912. Although he never completed his biography of Wilson, Link's five volumes, which take Wilson through American entry into World War I, remain the standard biographical study of the 28th president.
Link thus brought with him to the Wilson Papers project in 1958 a well established critical understanding of Wilson and his times and substantial talents as a distinguished historian and biographer. Two years later, in the autumn of 1960, Link took up permanent residence at the Wilson editorial offices at Princeton, where his subject had served as a member of the faculty and as president. The critical response to publication of the initial volume of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson in 1966 was similar to the acclaim with which critics had received the Wilson biography and foreshadowed the reception of subsequent volumes in the documentary series. The Journal of American History, for instance, declared that "[t]he publication of this distinguished volume formally initiates what promises to be one of the great scholarly achievements of this generation."
The Wilson editors, led by the incredibly disciplined Link, adopted and followed the highest of scholarly and editorial standards: their tolerance of error was zero. Moreover, they defined "papers" broadly to include incoming communications addressed to Wilson, newspaper and other third-party accounts about him, and his lectures and speeches. By 1993, when Link and his colleagues at the Wilson project completed their work, the magnitude of their accomplishment had become apparent: 69 volumes of rigorously edited, carefully annotated documents had been produced. This accomplishment is all the more extraordinary when one considers that not a single word processor or other type of computer was to be found in the Wilson editorial offices at Princeton and that, through it all, Link often suffered from intense physical pain as a result of personal health problems.
By 1993, too, Link had also published a substantial number of monographs, articles, and other works (a bibliography of his works ran to more than twenty pages set in small print in 1991), had served in numerous professional capacities, and had been the recipient of many honors and awards. He was a member of the National Historical Publications Commission from 1968 to 1972; both vice president and president of the Southern Historical Association; and president of the Association for Documentary Editing, the American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. He served as a member of the editorial boards of both The Journal of American History and The Journal of Southern History.
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations established an Arthur S. Link Prize in his honor to recognize and encourage analytical scholarly editing and publishing of documents relevant to the history of American foreign relations, policy, and diplomacy. He was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1966 and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972. He was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Thomas Jefferson Medal (1994) for "distinguished service in the arts, humanities, and social sciences" and received the Julian P. Boyd Award from the Association for Documentary Editing (1981) in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the knowledge of American history and culture.
In 1945, Link married Margaret McDowell Douglas, a fellow graduate student at UNC. It was she, he was to say time and again throughout his subsequent career, who served as his best collaborator, counselor, editor, and critic. Margaret Link died in 1996. The Links had four children and four grandchildren.
To those of us who had the good fortune to know and work with him, he was the epitome of the gentleman scholar. To us, his most appealing qualities were not to be found in his entry in Who's Who or discerned from his many published works. Over the years, he was unfailingly gracious, accommodating, and helpful to all who requested his assistance with Wilson and the times in which he lived. He never failed to reply to the seemingly most insignificant of inquiries, the door to his office at the Wilson Papers project was always open to anyone interested enough to seek him out, and - perhaps ultimately most important - he was always encouraging and supportive not only of established academicians, but of young students as well.
In a preliminary assessment of the Wilson Papers in 1991, Dewey Grantham concluded that "[w]e are not likely to see again anything like The Papers of Woodrow Wilson." Now it can be added, with a profound sense of sadness and loss, that we are not likely to see again anything like Arthur Link.
(Ted Brown, Jr., is an attorney with the firm of Long Aldridge & Norman, Atlanta, GA.)
