In Memoriam: Robert G. L. Waite (1919-1999) (memorial)

Robert George Leeson Waite, pioneering psychohistorian and Brown Professor of History, Emeritus, Williams College, suffered a massive stroke and died on October 4, 1999, at the age of 80.

Born in Cartwright, Manitoba, where his father was a minister of the United Church of Canada, Waite grew up as a “P.K.,” a “Preacher’s Kid,” in the prairie towns of Manitoba and Minnesota. In telling stories of his boyhood, he could capture the flavor of life in these small towns, adopting the cadence, the expressions, and the lilting accents of the Scandinavian farmers and their families he knew so well. In the fall of 1937, Waite entered Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the midst of the Depression, when ministers of rural churches, like his father, were mostly paid “in kind.” To supplement his scholarship and to earn whatever spending money he could, Waite held a variety of jobs, from working in the open pit mines of the Mesabi range in northern Minnesota to guarding the purported corpse of John Wilkes Booth in a traveling carnival. Upon graduating form Macalester in 1941, he entered military service from which he was discharged three years later with the rank of corporal—a distinction he insisted that be included in his curriculum vitae. With weak eyes and a deaf ear, he was assigned to limited duties, one of which was guarding the Mendota Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Paul. In later years, he told his grandson that he performed his task so well that no enemy plane had ever dared to bomb the Mendota Bridge while he was guarding it.

At the end of the war, Waite began his graduate study in history at the University of Minnesota, from which he received an MA degree. He then entered Harvard University where he began his lifelong research interest in German history with particular emphasis on the Nazi period. His dissertation on the Freikorps movement in post-World War I Germany, written under the supervision of H. Stuart Hughes, was published under the title, Vanguard of Nazism (1952). Upon receiving

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his PhD in 1949, Waite was appointed to the faculty at Williams College, where he began his pioneering psychohistorical work on Adolf Hitler.

Waite’s interest in psychohistory was influenced in part by his own experience during his first year of teaching at Williams. Suffering from depression and what he called “black despair,” Waite thought he was a total failure and submitted his resignation. With the support, encouragement, and confidence of President James Finney Baxter, who refused to accept his resignation and personally arranged an appointment with a well-known psychiatrist, Waite was given a medical leave with the assurance that his job would be waiting for him. With his problems put in perspective, he returned to Williams and resumed his study of Hitler. Not only Waite’s personal experience but also his sense “that the career of Adolf Hitler raises questions that can be answered neither by psychology nor by history working alone,” caused Waite to turn to psychoanalysis.

Common-sense psychology would not prove adequate, he believed, in understanding Hitler’s pathological personality, and so Waite immersed himself in psychoanalytic theory and consulted with experts like Erik Erikson, Norbert Brombert, and Lawrence Climo, staff psychiatrist at the Austen Riggs Center. As Waite had anticipated, his Hitler biography, published in 1977 as The Psychopathic God, produced intense controversy in the profession. But he was undaunted. He was contemptuous only of those who did not take him or his work seriously and of those who denied the importance of the individual in history. Disregarding the role of the individual in history, he noted, was not unlike trying to stage Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Long before his book was published, Waite became an internationally known advocate for psychohistory, much sought after as an eloquent and engaging speaker not only at professional conferences and conventions but also at alumni gatherings and local history societies, in church pulpits and in high school classrooms. A man of strong views, even stubbornly held, Waite did not suffer fools, period, once walking out of a television interview that included the Nazi apologist, David Irving.

A deeply idealistic and courageous scholar, Waite was committed to history as a never-ending search for truth. To be “objective” meant for him that the historian must avoid distorting the evidence to fit a subjective interpretation. It did not mean that the historian should be morally neutral. “How can one be morally neutral about Auschwitz?” he would demand, his voice quivering with rage. And yet, as Waite’s commitment to psychohistory demonstrates, he sought not only to judge the past but also to understand it. These are two in many ways incompatible projects, however. Just as the therapist cannot treat a client she despises, so a historian cannot understand those whom she condemns. During the process of understanding, moral judgment must be temporarily suspended: one can neither condemn nor exonerate. Instead, one must transcend one’s own subjective responses in order to imagine oneself in the place of the other, in order to experience as much as one can the subjective response of the other. The tension between moral judgment and empathic understanding is often present in Waite’s work, not only in The Psychopathic God, but also in his earlier work on the Freikorps and in his psychohistorical comparison of Hitler and Emperor Wilhelm II, Kaiser and Führer, which he wrote in retirement and which was published in 1998. Indeed, for Waite that tension was especially acute, since as a scholar he confronted in Hitler and the Nazis, what he, in The Psychopathic God, called “the heart of darkness.”

Waite’s surprisingly successful solution to the problem of combining judgment and understanding was to rely extensively on quotations from those he was investigating. As he put it in Vanguard of Nazism, he quoted at length from the memoirs of the Freikorps fighters “to convey their spirit as accurately as possible by letting them speak for themselves.” Relying on their own words not only gave his readers access to the Freikorpsmen’s psychological and political universe, it also allowed Waite to condemn them in a way that was compatible with their own experience. He quoted the members of the Freikorps so extensively, Waite told the readers of Vanguard of Nazism, because “had I relied on paraphrase, it seems probable that I would not have been believed.”

A deeply committed, even passionate, teacher, Waite was a riveting lecturer. Pacing back and forth, grasping his bald pate, pausing to find the right words, he was able to engage generations of Williams students in appreciating the power of the past and our need to understand it. His lectures in the introductory European history course and his electives in German and Russian history attracted students in greater numbers than could often be accommodated. His students were surprised to discover that this warm, compassionate person could be a stern taskmaster who demanded respect for himself and for his discipline.

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Retirement from teaching in 1989 did not spell the end of Waite’s engagement with history or with life. He was active in the affairs of the First Congregational Church of Williamstown, served as expedition historian on numerous Williams alumni trips to Europe and other parts of the world, and was a much sought-after lecturer to community and alumni organizations. He taught courses and organized a “French” table at the retirement home in which he spent the last decade of his life. With his full beard, shaven head, knitted skull cap, and West Highland Terrier, Waite was a familiar figure in Williamstown.

Once an inveterate smoker, he accepted with a crusader’s zeal the Surgeon General’s warning about the dangers of smoking and took up needlepoint as a substitute. He took it with him wherever he went: at the panel “100 Years of German History” at the A.H.A. convention in Chicago an otherwise stuffy occasion was enlivened as an overhead mirror revealed Waite, the panel’s Chair, at work on a “No Smoking” needlepoint; in China he rivaled the Great Wall as an object of curiosity; and in London, while he was observing a criminal trial at Old Bailey, the judge halted the proceedings and ordered “the bearded gentleman in the front row to put away his tapestry. It is distracting the jurors.”

Productive to the very end of his life, Waite not only published the massive comparative study of Hitler and Wilhelm II, he recently wrote a light-hearted memoir entitled, Hitler, the Kaiser, and Me: An Academic’s Procession, which appeared only weeks before his death and now serves as his valedictory.

A man of courage, principle, and passion, Robert George Leeson Waite was an inspiring teacher, a pioneering scholar, and, in every sense of the word, a very human historian.

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