Professor of Philosophy
Centurion, 1908–1957
Born 24 April 1867 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Died 19 September 1957 in New Haven, Connecticut
Buried Grove Street Cemetery
, New Haven, Connecticut
Proposed by William R. Warren and Henry Rutgers Marshall
Elected 7 March 1908 at age forty
Century Memorial
Charles M. Bakewell graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1889, and took a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1894. He also studied philosophy at the Universities of Berlin, Strasbourg, and Paris. In 1905, after teaching at Harvard, Berkeley, and Bryn Mawr, he became Professor of Philosophy at Yale, and there he remained until he retired in 1933.
His entire life was given to philosophy; and he liked it so well at Yale that he rejected offers to head the Department of Philosophy at Harvard and to be president of the University of California. Particularly, he was influenced by Socrates, from whom he acquired his critical skepticism and his idealism, and by William James, from whom he got his pluralism. These tenets became so much a part of him that they profoundly affected the administration of the Yale Department of Philosophy and resulted in calling to the faculty men of diverse rather than similar philosophical positions.
After each monthly meeting of the New York Philosophy Club he and his Yale colleagues used to stop at Neale’s Bar next to the 125th Street railroad station, and there, and on the train going back to New Haven, he would talk about Socrates, and William James, and Emerson. He found life good and believed, to the end, that the ideal and the good refer, as religion maintains, not merely to man’s subjective yearnings, but to the object of his knowledge also. He used to quote from a Scotsman, in Lavengro: “Ay, but the heather on the heath is sweet, Sandy.”
He retired, as Professor Emeritus, in 1933; and he ran for Congress as Representative-at-Large from Connecticut, and was elected, as a Republican, to the 73rd Congress. He lost in two bids for re-election: the Democratic tide overwhelmed even the Fairfield County station-wagon set. He was too forthright to be a successful politician. He held, with Socrates, that when the skeptic insists that skepticism is true for everyone, then he is not a true skeptic, but, to that extent, a dogmatic believer; and he was impatient with dogmatism, and conformity, and the unconsidered platitudes and patter of public life.
His decision to continue at Yale, no matter what the inducements to change, was characteristic of Bakewell, for he well knew the manner of man he wanted to be, and as nearly attained this as is given to any of us.
George W. Martin
1958 Century Association Yearbook
