Governor Long (as he was generally known, even throughout his subsequent career) has excited interest--if that be the right verb--chiefly because in 1898, during this last public office and following the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor, his life was made somewhat difficult by his impetuous Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, the eponymous hero of the fourth floor stack himself. Although Roosevelt, justly enough, comes to mind as a writer on naval matters, Long himself was no stranger to the American navy, on which he later produced an informed and thorough study, The New American Navy (New York, 1903)--also to be found in the Roosevelt Collection. Harvard's Library played an early role in this interest; indeed, it may have planted and germinated the seed that would produce one of the leaders of the modern American navy. While a fourteen-year-old Harvard freshman, the future Secretary of the Navy notes, on 7 October 1853 (Journal 25):[3] "I have much time to read and write, and since I have so good opportunity of getting useful books from the College Library, I improve my time. I am now reading Cooper's Naval History which I find very interesting. Long would have found the book, James Fenimore Cooper's History of the American Navy, published that year, by G. Putnam and Sons, in Gore Hall, where the College Library was housed before the building of Widener. It is now in the stacks of 4S, at US 2092.15.5. Two days after this entry, on Sunday, 9 October, Long takes a break from his reading: "I went over to the Charlestown Navy Yard yesterday and saw some big men of war, one over 100 guns." The next entry has him turning fifteen and reading Virgil's Aeneid, to which we return anon.

John Davis Long as a senior in Harvard College, 1857. On Friday, 19 June, as an 18-year-old, he delivered his Commencement Ode. The opening shows his reflective sense of memory was formed at an early age: How bright were the hopes that incited the throng When wandering in search of the truth, We came to the fountain, whose waters so long Have nourished the bloom of our youth: How sad we are now, that this time-hallowed spot Shall echo our voices no more; Behind us, the past with sweet memories fraught; The future, uncertain, before.

My interest in John Davis Long might have ended with my initial and casual perusal of the 377 letters of the Papers--of which only twenty-four are by Long, the rest addressed to him, from naval personalities for the most part, and many are quite tedious. But one, on pages 348-49, caught my attention. It was from Henry S. Pritchett, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a letter of 7 January 1901, thanking Secretary Long for an address he had given at MIT, and proceeding to discuss the future publication of the speech in Technology Review. Long and Pritchett had clearly had other scientific discussions, but not just scientific, as emerged from the second half of Pritchett's letter:

       I thank you for reminding me it was the Aeneid and not the Iliad
     that you translated. This was a careless slip of the tongue on my
     part, as I have known the book almost from its publication, which
     occurred soon after I left college, although I did not know until
     a few months ago that the Mr. Long who translated the Aeneid was
     the former governor and present secretary of the navy. You of
     course did not know that during my college life I devoted myself
     principally to the classics, and went into a scientific education
     later. At one time I was much interested in all translations of
     the better known classics, having attempted a metrical translation
     of the Oepidus Tyrranus [sic] myself, which however, fortunately
     never saw the light.

My first reaction was a classicist's natural satisfaction (immediately tempered by a classicist's sense of the constancy of decline) in observing the president of MIT and the Secretary of the Navy discussing their translations of Sophocles and Virgil; but I also shared Pritchett's enlightenment, for I too had failed to connect the translator (whose work I knew and had been using) with the Secretary and Governor (with whom I was only just becoming acquainted). A quick HOLLIS search confirmed the identity and sent me back to the 4th level, this time outside the Roosevelt Collection to US 13608.35 (in the Massachusetts section), specifically to the two other works of hagiography on Governor Long to which I have been referring: the first, America of Yesterday, was a selection from the twenty-four volumes of Long s journal (which reside in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston), edited by Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Boston, 1923); the second was the editorial work of Long's daughter Margaret Long, The Journal of John D. Long (Rindge, N. H., 1956). Again the genres were those that I have come to admire, though now I looked to them with an interest that was more than simply recreational--for I was now dealing with a fellow Virgilian, one, moreover, who was emerging as a most likeable person.

Twenty years before the sinking of the Maine, Long, having just been elected Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives for the third time, notes in his journal (17 January, 1878) "A quiet day. Buy Bryant's Iliad and Odyssey. Read a book in the former." Five days later, presumably as a result of this activity, he records (22 January) "Begin this evening a translation of Virgil. Perhaps I shall finish it and publish." For the next year, we find steady references to his task, which enters into the rhythms of his family life, his activities in his law practice, and the workings of the state legislature. It is memory of Virgil and his boyhood love of Virgil and Latin poetry that brought Long back to the poet. One of his earliest entries in the journal comes from Monday, 24 July 1848; the nine-year-old boy writes excitedly:

        A cloudy, rainy, misty, and muddy day. Our school keeps two or
     three weeks longer. I have begun the study of Latin [Long's
     emphasis]. Zadoc [his brother] will hear me recite.
     And in the preface to the Aeneid he harks back to those days:
       Perhaps some will read this. If so, they will renew, as I after
       twenty-five years have done, not only the kindly acquaintance of
       this Roman story-teller, but the happy morning of the school-boy s
       shining face and eager heart.
 

Libraries ensure that memory survives. Widener Library, and its tangible, browsable, stacks, is a storehouse of memory, much like the Greek Mouseion of Alexandria, a home and support to scholars, who were also attendants of the Muses, those daughters of Memory. Like us, they were concerned with the Humanities, with preserving the memory of the best that has been thought and written. Everywhere we look we see the dangers posed by oblivion: oblivion of history, oblivion of humanity, and oblivion of the humanities. Conversely, memory is what connects us to what matters for our lives as scholars, teachers, and members of human communities. By browsing in the stacks of Widener, we met Virgil and his translators, and we met John Davis Long, translator of Virgil and Secretary of the Navy, and we saw him taking from the Harvard College Library the books that would help create his own life, as a poet, politician, father and husband, in short as an admirable human being.

Front cover of Long's Aeneid. His journal entry for Wednesday 11 June 1897 reads: "My Virgil issued today. Give a copy each to Mary, Margaret, Helen"--to whom the work is dedicated: TO MY WIFE AND MY TWO LITTLE GIRLS SO OFTEN THE CAMPANIONS OF MY WORK I DEDICATE IT

Long died of congestive heart disease in the house that he loved, in Hingham, Mass., on 28 August 1915, some two months after the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library opened. As President of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 1902 to 1914, John Long, who himself lost a nephew on the Titanic, would have received reports of the Library Visiting Committee (whose members included J. P. Morgan), and would have been at the meeting of the Governing Boards in November 1912, which approved plans for the building of Widener on the site of the previous library, Gore Hall. Six years earlier, on 26 September 1906, the beginning of Harry Elkins Widener's senior year at Harvard, Long had come to Cambridge, to attend a meeting of the Overseers, but also to deliver his son who was beginning his freshman year (Journal 302):

I took him into the college yard at the same entrance at which I went on a similar errand 53 years ago, in 1853. How well I remember that morning: Father walked with me up the avenue to the steps of the library, Gore Hall. On them we sat & there parted, I, going to my lessons, he, returning home. I was a little boy, only fourteen years old, a child, homesick. I remember that I cried, & though he did not cry I doubt not his heart broke more than mine.

There is, in Harvard's Massachusetts Hall, not far from Room 22, John Long's room in his senior year, a commemorative plaque, dedicated on his birthday, 27 October, in 1947, by his children, Margaret and Peirce. Long's journal entry from 28 September, 1856 (the beginning of his senior year) may have decided the location: "I begin to think that I love my room better than any other place in the vicinity." I hope this article will serve as another Harvard memorial for Long, whom I was fortunate to meet first through a chance encounter in Harvard's Elysium, the stacks of her Widener Library, where he now resides, among the collection of his old Assistant Secretary and a close neighbor to the poet who so touched him, and like them accessible to all of us who care to enter this storehouse of memory of which we are all both guardians and beneficiaries.[4]

Notes