Edward Everett Hale

Edward Everett Hale
1865 engraved portrait from his book, Illustrious Americans
Signature

Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822 – June 10, 1909) was an American author, historian and Unitarian clergyman. He was a child prodigy who exhibited extraordinary literary skills and at age thirteen was enrolled at Harvard University where he graduated second in his class. Hale would go on to write for a variety of publications and periodicals throughout his lifetime.

Biography

Edward Everett Hale in 1855.

Hale was born on April 3, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale (1784–1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and the brother of Lucretia Peabody Hale, Susan Hale, and Charles Hale. Edward Hale was the nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, while his father was the nephew of Nathan Hale who was executed by the British for espionage during the Revolutionary War. He was also a descendant of Richard Everett and related to Helen Keller.

At the age of thirteen Edward Hale enrolled in Harvard, as the youngest in the class of 1839. While there he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes, and was considered the Class Poet. He graduated second in his class.

Hale was licensed to preach by the Boston Association of Ministers and in 1846 was settled in the Church of the Unity in Worcester. He was pastor of the Church of the Unity, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846-1856, and of the South Congregational (Unitarian) Church, Boston, in 1856-1899. In 1903 he became Chaplain of the United States Senate. He maintained a home in South Kingstown, Rhode Island where he and his family often spent summer months.

Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins in 1852; she was the niece of Connecticut Governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins Baldwin on her father's side and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher on her mother's side. They had nine children: one daughter and eight sons. Hale died in Roxbury, by then part of Boston, in 1909.

Career

From The Critic (1901)

Combining a forceful personality, organizing genius, and liberal practical theology, Hale was active in raising the tone of American life for half a century. He had a deep interest in the anti-slavery movement (especially in Kansas), as well as popular education (especially Chautauquas), and the working-man's home. He was a constant and voluminous contributor to newspapers and magazines.

He published a wide variety of works in fiction, history and biography. He used his writings and the two magazines he founded, Old and New (1870–75) and Lend a Hand (1886–97), to advance a number of social reforms including religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and education reforms.

Hale edited the Christian Examiner, Old and New (which he assisted in founding in 1869 and which merged with Scribner's Magazine in 1875), Lend a Hand (which he founded in 1886 and which merged with the Charities Review in 1897), and the Lend a Hand Record. Throughout his life he contributed many articles on a variety of subjects to the periodicals of his day including the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the Christian Register, the Outlook, and many more. He was the author or editor of more than sixty books—fiction, travel, sermons, biography and history.

Edward Everett Hale sculpture by Bela Pratt in the Boston Public Garden Boston, Massachusetts

Hale first came to notice as a writer in 1859, when he contributed the short story "My Double and How He Undid Me" to the Atlantic Monthly. He soon published other stories in the same periodical. The best known of these was "The Man Without a Country" (1863), which did much to strengthen the Union cause in the North, and in which, as in some of his other non-romantic tales, he employed a minute realism which led his readers to suppose the narrative a record of fact. These two stories and such others as "The Rag-Man and the Rag-Woman" and "The Skeleton in the Closet," gave him a prominent position among short-story writers of 19th century America. His short story "The Brick Moon", serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, is the first known fictional description of an artificial satellite. It was possibly an influence on the novel The Begum's Fortune by Jules Verne. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1865.

The story "Ten Times One is Ten" (1870), with its hero Harry Wadsworth, contained the motto, first enunciated in 1869 in his Lowell Institute lectures: "Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand." This motto was the basis for the formation of Lend-a-Hand Clubs, Look-up Legions and Harry Wadsworth Clubs for young people. Out of the romantic Waldensian story "In His Name" (1873) there similarly grew several other organizations for religious work, such as King's Daughters, and King's Sons.

Hale once said, "I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do."

Hale is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory of Jamaica Plain, Suffolk County, Massachusetts. A life-size likeness in bronze statue memorializing the man and his works stands in the Boston Public Garden.

Personal life

Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins, granddaughter of Lyman Beecher, in 1852. They had nine children:

• Alexander, b & d 1853; Ellen Day, 1854–1939; Arthur, 1859–1939;Charles Alexander, 1861–1867; Edward Everett, Jr., 1863–1932; Philip Leslie, 1865–1931; Herbert Dudley, 1866–1908; Henry Kidder, 1868–1876; Robert Beverly, 1869-1895.

Attitude towards Irish immigrants

Hale supported Irish immigration, as he felt it freed Americans from performing menial, hard labor. In a series of letters in the Boston Daily Advertiser, he noted the "inferiority" of the immigrants: "...compels them to go the bottom; and the consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted."

Quotes

Throughout his lifetime Edward Hale made a number of statements that reveal his wise and stately character and now serve to mark his distinguished literary career.

• 'Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?' No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country.
• I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.
• If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough.
• In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
• Make it your habit not to be critical about small things.
• Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
• The making of friends who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man's success in life.
• To look forward and not back, To look out and not in, and To lend a hand.
• War - hard apprenticeship of freedom.
• Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately.

Further reading

Works by Hale

• Illustrious Americans, coauthored by E. E. Hale, Entered into the Library of Congress by W. E. Scull, 1896, Public Domain
• Old and New. Edited by Hale. v.1 (1870); v.6 (1872–1873); v.8 (1873); v.11 (1875).
• The Man without a Country
• The Life of Christopher Columbus. Arc Manor LLC. 2008 [1891]. ISBN 9781604502381. http://books.google.com/books?id=zVLduNTu0VwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+life+of+christopher+columbus+by+edward+everett+hale#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved May 16, 2011. 

Works about Hale

• C. D. Merriman (2006). "Edward Everett Hale". The Literature Network. http://www.online-literature.com/edward-hale/. Retrieved 2008-01-26. 
•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hale, Edward Everett". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• Works by or about Edward Everett Hale in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Edward Everett Hale at Project Gutenberg
• Edward Everett Hale public domain audiobooks from LibriVox
• Edward Everett Hale at Find a Grave
• Letters on Irish emigration at Harvard University