Scope and Content Note
The papers of Hermann Hagedorn (1882-1964) span the years 1912-1933, with the bulk pertaining to Hagedorn’s World War I loyalty work and to his postwar biographies of Leonard Wood and William Boyce Thompson. Consisting of Family Correspondence , Subject File , Research File , and Miscellany series, the collection reflects a small but significant portion of a literary career that spanned more than five decades and included, in addition to several volumes of poetry and children’s books, nearly three dozen novels, plays, edited letter collections, and historical biographies ranging in subject from Theodore Roosevelt and Edwin Arlington Robinson to Robert Brookings and Albert Schweitzer. The papers include some material in German.
Born in New York City in 1882, the son of the “Iron Chancellor” of the New York Cotton Exchange, Hermann Hagedorn grew up in the home of German émigrés who had left Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. The Family Correspondence and Subject File in these papers focus solely on the World War I period when the young Hagedorn’s Germanic background and American upbringing were severely tested because of the wartime crisis. A graduate of Harvard, but trained at the University of Berlin and with three siblings who had chosen to return to Germany as residents, Hagedorn was vocal in his support of preparedness and universal military training before the United States entered the war. Anti-pacifist and pro the Allied powers, in late 1916 he spearheaded the formation of a group of writers called the Vigilantes. In his papers are several files of draft memoranda, bulletins, correspondence, and questionnaires concerning this organization and another group, the League of Loyal Americans of German Origin, which Hagedorn attempted to promote in the interest of raising the image and loyalty of German Americans to greater heights. The league idea apparently failed after Hagedorn was appointed racial adviser on German-Americans to the United States commissioner of education, but included in his papers is correspondence with German-language publishers and civic leaders about the state of their community’s relation to non-Germans and their views, pro or con, on the need for an ad hoc body of ethnic Germans who would propagate patriotism and assimilation.
By far the largest portion of the Hagedorn Papers relates to his publication of full-length biographies of Wood and Thompson. Included in the Research File on both of these subjects are typed and handwritten notes which Hagedorn organized in rough topical fashion. Research correspondence on Wood as army chief of staff contains the reminiscences of prominent men and women who were acquainted with the general from his earliest days. Other topics of importance include Wood’s health, his participation in the war against Geronomo, his responsibilities in the Philippines and Cuba, and his relegation to an American command at Fort Leavenworth instead of the supreme leadership of the Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. Correspondents on these matters and Wood’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 include Newton Diehl Baker, Bernard M. Baruch, Albert Ridgely Brunker, Grenville Clark, George B. Cortelyou, Harvey Cushing, Johnson Hagood, James G. Harbord, Harry Samuel Howland, Frank Ross McCoy, Arthur Wilson Page, Elihu Root, Frank Maximilan Steinhart, Henry Lewis Stimson, S. M. Williams, and Louise Adriana Wood. Among the correspondents who aided Hagedorn in his study of William Boyce Thompson, the Montana mining magnate and Red Cross director in Russia during World War I, were Charles Fanning Ayer, Cornelius Kelleher, and Raymond Robins. Hagedorn’s research letters and notes cover the gamut of Thompson’s diverse career, but are focused on his role in heading relief efforts in Russia and in favoring recognition and aid first to the government of Aleksandr Fyrdorovich Kerensky and then to the Soviets. This part of the collection is enriched by personal exchanges between Hagedorn and Thompson and also by a small file of original letters between Thompson and his wife Gertrude while he was enroute to Petrograd in the summer and fall of 1917.