Hamilton Fish Armstrong

By the death of Hamilton Fish Armstrong the world has lost a well-informed, dispassionate observer of international affairs, but his friends have lost something much more difficult to replace—“a very civilized, sensitive, and vulnerable man,” as one of them described him, a man whose congenial company and unobtrusive wisdom we had come to think we could count on indefinitely.

Ham Armstrong was a member of The Century for over fifty years. At the time he was elected, in 1921, he was working for the New York Evening Post, but in the following year, when Foreign Affairs was born, the newly appointed editor-in-chief, Archibald Cary Coolidge, persuaded him without too much difficulty to throw in his lot with the new venture. The team of Coolidge and Armstrong, with the blessing of the Council on Foreign Relations, created something entirely new in the way of quarterly reviews. In the fiftieth anniversary issue Ham defined, with his usual clarity, the purpose for which Foreign Affairs was founded: it was not “to promote specific policies, however laudable, but to increase the interest of the American public in foreign policy as such and stimulate their consciousness that they were an integral part of a world society and had a concern for its welfare as a whole.”

On the death of Archibald Coolidge in 1928 there was never any question as to who would take his place. Ham Armstrong, the managing editor, stepped into his shoes as a matter of course. To say that he was a good editor would be a grievous understatement. As George Kennan put it, “the calling requires a special motivation, a special instinct, a special patience and persistence, that seem to lie in the very tissue of character and personality.” Ham had them all. The goal to which he was guiding public opinion was never lost sight of. Come what may, America could not avoid a major role in the world. De Tocqueville had sensed that more than a hundred years ago, but Ham Armstrong added a corollary of his own. The role that America inevitably was called upon to play required a rare spirit of magnanimity. There was no place in it for isolationism.

In 1933, shortly after Hitler rose to power, Ham was the first American to be granted an interview with the new chancellor. The Hitler phenomenon was not yet taken seriously by most of the world’s political leaders, but as a result of his interview the editor of Foreign Affairs learned something the professional politicians did not yet realize—that Hitler posed a terrible threat to the civilized world. Hitler’s Reich—the First Phase, one of Ham’s most prophetic books, opens with the ominous words, “A people has disappeared.” It goes on to predict that Hitler would trouble the world as long as he remained in power and that he would not be dis lodged easily.

Ham wrote many other books on the general subject of international relations, all of them of great value to the student of the origins and consequences of the two world wars. He was a prolific writer as well as a most conscientious editor. One of his books, very different from the others, entitled Those Days, tells the story of his growing up on West Tenth Street in New York City. Ham was one of the few men left in our kaleidoscopic world who lived all his life in the house where he was born. Those Days is a book that will be treasured by anyone and everyone who is in the least allergic to nostalgia. “Remembrance,” as Ham says, “is intangible property, the most valuable, as one grows older, of all one’s be longings.”

In one respect this autobiographical fragment is not so different from his other books. Whether he was writing about world affairs, or the house, the neighborhood, or the city that he loved, there was a glow of warmhearted integrity about it all. Ham was a many-sided man. He had been brought up in an artistic milieu and he himself had a great feeling for the arts. He was curious about many things. Sometimes silent and thoughtful, he could also be the gayest and most light hearted of companions. Whatever his mood might be, when one dug down into him one always struck that rock of integrity.

Arnold Whitridge
1974 Century Association Yearbook