Claude Fuess

Alpha Delta Phi House, Amherst College

Fuess was born on January 12, 1885 in Waterville, New York to Louis Phillip Fuess and Helen Augusta Moore. His paternal grandfather Jacob Fuess was from Annweiler am Trifels, Germany in the Bavarian Palatinate. He fled Germany during the Revolution in 1848 and emigrated to the United States, landing in New Orleans and making his way to New York City.[8] He had one younger brother named Harold L. Fuess, an active member of local government in and around Waterville including Town Clerk of Sangerfield, New York.[9][10] Originally spelled Füsz, the family changed the spelling to Fuess due to its difficult pronunciation for Americans. According to Fuess, he and his family pronounce their name Fease.[11] Oftentimes he would go by one his nicknames. Those he knew in high school and at Amherst College called him "Dutch." At Phillips Academy he was known as either "Jack" or "Claudie" or once Headmaster "B.D." (Bald Doctor).[12] Someone even wrote the following poem titled "Fuess Please" in 1930 to illustrate the difficulty of his name:

He'll exclaim, "Oh what's the use!"
When he hears you utter "Fuess."
And he'll like it even less
If you say it's Mr. Fuess.
If you want to hear him cuss
Just be sure to call him Fuess.
All his wonted calm he'll lose
If perchance you murmur "Fuess";
But he'll thank you on his knees
If you will but call him "Fuess."[13][14]

Despite such difficulty Fuess decided not to simplify his name because of the legal obstacles he would face and the honor it held to him personally and in Bavaria.[15]

Fuess was an avid reader at an early age. He played football for Waterville High School's first team and cycled for the school's first track team. Cycling events included half and one-mile races around a half-mile dirt track.[16] He entered Amherst College in the autumn of 1901 at the age of 16 and graduated in 1905. While at Amherst he grew interests in forensics, debate, and public speaking.[17] He continued to train for Amherst's cycling team but was unable to race when the New England Committee abolished the cycling races from its athletic program.[18] He was a member of the fraternity Alpha Delta Phi.[19] He took courses in debate, public speaking, and German.[20] In the fall of 1905 he entered Columbia University. After earning his M.A. in 1906, he accepted in 1908 an invitation to be an assistant in Columbia's English Department.[21] He earned his Ph.D at the same institution in 1912, his thesis titled "Lord Byron as a Satirist in Verse".[4][22]

He was awarded a Doctorate of Letters, an honorary degree from Amherst College in 1929 for his career as an English teacher and author.[23] Fuess continued to keep close connections with Amherst for the rest of his life. He was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Alumni Council, President of the Society of the Alumni, for two years National President of Alpha Delta Phi, and President of the Amherst Corporate Chapter of Alpha Delta Phi. In addition, he published Amherst, The Story of a New England College in 1935 to illustrate the evolution of educational thought.[24] Frederick Allis, who discusses Fuess in his book Youth From Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy, Andover characterizes his relationship with Amherst "clearly a love affair."[22] Fuess earned a total of eight honorary degrees over his lifetime.[4]

The Andover Battalion, 1918

Fuess spent a substantial portion of his career at Phillips Academy, a coeducational secondary boarding school which was at the time an all boys school. Fuess received an invitation from the current headmaster Alfred E. Stearns to a position in the English Department. At first he declined, convinced he would join the faculty at Columbia University. Stearns knew their English Department was short one teacher and needed someone in the area with a college degree. After making a convincing job offer, $1200 a year with room and board, and receiving a telegram from a professor at Columbia urging him to take the job, he accepted. He began his tenure in the fall of 1908 living in Draper Cottage.[25][22]

As an English teacher he focused on teaching his students to articulate themselves and nurturing their natural instincts of curiosity and a desire to learn.[26] In 1913 he assumed editorship of the quarterly publication Phillips Bulletin.[27][28] In the summer of 1918 he was asked by John Pershing to commission 200 of his students as Second Lieutenants to serve in the First World War, which he did. That September Fuess himself was commissioned as a Major in the Quartermaster Corps at Camp Johnston in Jacksonville, Florida. He soon caught influenza and was honorably discharged in January 1919.[29] He soon became a popular figure among the younger alumni who knew him and known as one of the best English teachers of his time.[4] John U. Monro, Class of 1930 and later Trustee of Phillips Academy, found himself throughout his life "dependent for survival" on the "solid growing pleasure he takes in the use of language he traces back easily to Jack Fuess."[30][31]

Alfred Ernest Stearns

In March 1933, Alfred Stearns was forced to resign in the midst of a scandal. He was a widower and married his housekeeper, someone "beneath his social class."[32] Upon the resignation of Alfred Stearns, Fuess was appointed acting headmaster of the school which had just begun a new era. The successful banker Thomas Cochran had worked closely with architect Charles Platt over the past several years to transform the campus and construct a number of new buildings, notably the Addison Gallery of American Art.[33] At the same time however, the Academy was in the middle of a traumatic moment in its history. Professor and Judge James Hardy Ropes, President of the Board of Trustees, died suddenly; Thomas Cochran, now considered a driving force of the school, was in poor health among others on the Board of Trustees. Similar to when Fuess accepted the job as an English teacher in 1908, he was reluctant. This time he was interested in a job as Professor of Biography at Amherst College, which would allow him to continue his writing career more freely. For the next month, the Board of Trustees interviewed a number of candidates for Headmaster outside of the school.[28] They soon concluded to "stick with someone whom they knew and respected, someone, furthermore, who knew Phillips Academy thoroughly and whose election would reassure the Andover community."[12] On May 28, 1933, Fuess was formally elected 10th Headmaster by the Trustees.[12]

During the first few years of his administration Fuess worked to acquire funds to renovate Bulfinch Hall to house the school's English Department. In the past it had served as a gym and at that point a dining hall. With a gift totaling $725,000 from Edward Harkness he was able to renovate the building and install English classrooms as well as provide five teaching foundations including on-campus residences for each. "My heart is very full over these gifts from Mr. Harkness," he said announcing the project at Commencement in June 1936. The gift sparked a boost in morale for the school amidst the Great Depression.[34] By the time if his retirement in 1948[4] the English Department had grown from four to sixteen faculty members.[35]

As Headmaster, Fuess received mixed reviews from the student body. Some had much respect for Fuess while others less so. One student said the following of him:

"We thought Claudie was born to be a college president...and I think we admired him for putting up with the likes of us so patiently and so affably while he was waiting for the lightning to strike. I have no idea what his "policies" were. I just know he always performed as we thought he should....I can see him now, dressed like a banker with pince nez in place, standing in the middle of a gym floor crowded with students, saying just the right thing. The charisma was several layers down, but it was there, and we knew it was there, and we loved him for it."[36]

Another was much less favorable:

"One thing is definite, however. He hadn't the slightest interest in boys. Out of roughly 700 boys at Andover, I would doubt that Mr. Fuess could name a hundred. Fifty had parents so rich that he could not ignore them in his money raising activities. Fifty were such hell raisers that he couldn't ignore them. I was in the latter category."[37]

Just months after George H. W. Bush and family friend Godfrey A. Rockefeller graduated in 1942, Fuess without warning announced his plan to ban secret societies. Having been in place since the 1870s, the plan caused an uproar among alumni and the issue gained some newspaper attention. Fuess and the Trustees, including President of the Board Henry Stimson, never disclosed why they decided to act at that moment, but they cited an incident in 1934 that resulted in the death of a student, described as such:[32][38]

"In 1934 one undergraduate had been killed during the course of a Society initiation. A group of alumni had joined the undergraduates for part of the ceremonies that were held in a barn on the outskirts of Andover. On the way back the initiate rode on the running board of a car driven by one of the alumni. The roads were slippery, and the car crashed into a telegraph pole, crushing the boy, who died in Dr. Fuess's presence in the hospital a few hours later."[32]

Fuess also said, "the purpose for which the secret societies were founded no longer seems apparent." At the time of the incident Phillips Academy brushed it aside, not blaming the secret societies. While alumni against the decision accused Fuess of "facism", those who agreed with him noted that secret societies "promoted exclusiveness", operated "on a special privilege basis," and created "social cleavage."[32] Attention on the issue settled over the next few years and in 1949, the school quietly enacted a ban, two years after Fuess stepped down from Headmaster.[32][39]

By 1947, Fuess knew he wanted to retire. He would have served a total of 40 years at Phillips Academy, 25 as an English teacher and 15 as Headmaster. In addition his hearing began to fail, requiring a hearing aid.[40] In 1948 Fuess officially retired and was succeeded by John Mason Kemper.[39]

Phillips Academy student body 1910

Caleb Cushing by Mathew B. Brady

Fuess specialized in political biography, completing his first on Caleb Cushing in 1923.[41] At that point he had already been writing and editing for over a decade, mostly school textbooks and compilations of other works. He wrote another biography in 1930 on Daniel Webster, further establishing his writing career in that field. He continued to author a number of biographies afterward. Fuess was also a historian.[6] He wrote several books on New England academic institutions including Phillips Academy and Amherst College and their respective towns. The following is an excerpt from his obituary in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society on his writing style:

It might be said that in his writings he was concerned with the truth, as he comprehended it, and not with facts. It was the skillfully written biography rather than the learned one which won the praise which he was quick to bestow.

— American Antiquarian Society, October 1963[4]

His writing career no doubt had its failures. Fuess received a request from Frank Waterman Stearns to write a biography of Stearns himself. He died in 1939 and in 1941 his family requested the project be abandoned.[6] In 1933 he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society but his first paper was met with dissatisfaction among its members.[42] His biographies on Calvin Coolidge and Caleb Cushing were criticized for painting the men in too favorable a light. According to the authors of an unauthorized biography of George H. W. Bush, Fuess failed to mention the opium trafficking industry that brought both families (Coolidge's and Cushing's) their wealth. They described Fuess in their book as "the designated chief liar for the 'Bostonian Race'" and "one of the most skillful liars of the modern age."[32]

Upon his appointment as Headmaster in 1933 Fuess decided to finish his current projects, notably a history of Amherst College and a biography of President Calvin Coolidge, instead of devoting his time completely to the school. He finished both projects by 1940. Allis argues in his bicentennial history of Phillips Academy that Fuess' occupation with his writing career hindered his effectiveness as Headmaster.[7]