Dumas Malone

UXL Newsmakers, (2005)

Dumas Malone

American historian and editor Dumas Malone (1892-1986) is known chiefly for a multi-volume, landmark biographical study of Thomas Jefferson, which garnered the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history. He also contributed widely to other literature about the third U.S. president. But he did not apply his scholarly versatility only to the analysis of Jefferson's life and times. Indeed, Malone added a large body of work to the study of American history in general, especially with his two-volume Empire for Liberty. While his work has earned mixed reviews, one reviewer conceded that Malone's level of familiarity with Jefferson was "nothing short of amazing."

Dumas Malone was born in Coldwater, Mississippi on January 10, 1892. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory College (now Emory University) in 1910 and his divinity degree from Yale University in 1916. During World War I, from 1917-1919, he served in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of second lieutenant, after which he returned to Yale, where he obtained his master's degree in 1921 and his doctorate in 1923.

Also in 1921, Malone contributed to An Outline of United States History, for Use in the General Course in United States History, Yale College.

Malone's first academic appointment was as a history instructor at Yale (1919-1923); he then went on to the University of Virginia as an associate professor (1923-1926) and professor (1926-1929). In 1925 he married Elisabeth Gifford. The couple had a daughter, Pamela. From 1926 to 1927 Malone was also a visiting professor of American history at Yale.

Combined Editing and Teaching

Malone was an editor of the Dictionary of American Biography (1929-1931) and editor-in-chief (1931-1936). He was director of Harvard University Press (1936-1943) and professor of history at Columbia University (1945-1959). He returned to the University of Virginia as a Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History (1959-1962), followed by an appointment as biographer-in-residence at the University of Virginia.

Wrote Biographies, Documented History

The major works of Dumas Malone are The Public Life of Thomas Cooper (1926), a critically acclaimed biography which traces the career of a militant southern thinker who exerted an influence on John C. Calhoun; Saints in Action (1939); Edwin A. Alderman: A Biography (1940); Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader (1963); and, with Basil Rauch, Empire for Liberty: The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America (2 vols., 1960).

The two volumes of Empire for Liberty were broken down into six parts: Number I: American Origins to 1789 (1964); Number II: The Republic Comes of Age: 1789-1841 (1964); Number III: Crisis of the Union: 1841-1877 (1964); Number IV: The New Nation: 1865-1917 (1964); Number V: War and Troubled Peace: 1917-1939 (1965); and Number VI: America and World Leadership: 1940-1965 (1965).

In addition to co-authoring and contributing to other books, Malone edited Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and P. S. du Pont de Nemours (1930) and The Story of the Declaration of Independence (1963).

Jefferson Biography Was Pivotal

Malone's chief accomplishment, however, was his biographical study of Thomas Jefferson—collectively titled Jefferson and His Time, six volumes of which were published: Jefferson the Virginian (1948); Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951); Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962); Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (1970); Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (1974); and Sage of Monticello (approximately 1981). It was originally conceived as a four-volume work. However, by 1970, with the publication of volume 4, Malone had gotten only as far as Jefferson's first term as president.

Critics Found Malone Fawning

The work was notable in its emphasis on Jefferson's pragmatism and political realism. It was characterized by lively prose. While Malone's familiarity with his subject matter has been called "nothing short of amazing," a major criticism was that Malone tended to glorify Jefferson, overlooking or de-emphasizing certain aspects of his life, character, and beliefs which would detract from the image of Jefferson as the "Great Democrat" and lover of liberty and equality. Thus, some critics have stressed that Jefferson's prodigious intellectual activities were made possible to some extent through his ownership of a large number of slaves—that Jefferson was, to say the least, blind to his own hatred of the urban proletariat and to his view of cities as the source of all moral evil. In political theory and practice what he really favored was not democracy but a rural judicial oligarchy (wherein power is concentrated in the hands of a few). That Jefferson himself was a notorious bigot toward most organized religions, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, shows that as an intellectual he was really of short stature.