Waldo Gifford Leland served as executive secretary of the American Historical Association from 1908–19. He was also the director emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. Leland passed away October 19, 1966.
In Memoriam
From the American Historical Review 72:2 (January 1967)
Waldo Gifford Leland, friend and leader of scholars, died October 19. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, July 17, 1879, he was of the second generation of professional historians. His passing breaks one of the last links of the present generation with the giants of the first. A student of J. Franklin Jameson and long one of his chief assistants at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he also knew Henry Adams and in Europe was a friend of Henri Pirenne. A New England gentleman who possessed the best qualities, the dignity and learning, of the late nineteenth century, he came of age just as the twentieth century was beginning and played a leading role in the development of scholarship in the humanities from 1903 to the present.
The offices he held, the work he did, the high standards he maintained, the wise counsel he offered to hundreds of aspiring scholars, all brought him fame, affection, respect, and admiration. Educated at Brown and Harvard he early attracted the attention of leaders of the profession, particularly Jameson’s. In 1907 he went to Paris to head a historical mission for the Carnegie Institution, to locate and to prepare guides to materials for American history. From 1907 to 1914 and again from 1922 to 1927 the Lelands often lived in France. He was also Secretary of the American Historical Association from 1908 to 1919. In 1927 he became director of the American Council of Learned Societies, which he had helped to organize, and he remained in that position until 1946. Through these most active years he not only aided scholars in Europe and America; he also received many honors. Called upon by the United States government to be consultant on many missions during the two world wars and the years in between, he always represented the interests of scholarship. Internationally his devotion to these interests brought him in 1938 to the presidency of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. He was always especially proud of his membership in the American Philosophical Society, the American Historical Association, the Society of American Archivists (president, 1939–1941), Phi Beta Kappa, and the Cosmos Club of Washington, D. C. (president, 1947). He never lost his love for France, which made him chevalier of the Legion of Honor, or forgot his obligations to Brown University (Board of Fellows over many years).
Among his many publications were guides to the archives of the United States, to the social and economic history of World War I, and, above all, his Guide to Materials for American History in the Archives and Libraries of Paris (Volume I, 1932; Volume II, 1943; and work in progress).
While Waldo Leland had predecessors of his same mold in the first generation of the profession, it is unlikely that he can have successors of this mold in later generations. But the twentieth-century world of scholarship is richer because he was part of it. And the many scholars he assisted will perpetuate his memory, as does the splendid portrait in the National Archives building.