Jefferson B. Fletcher

Jefferson Butler Fletcher. [Born] 1865. Scholar and teacher.

He was an authority on the Renaissance as he was the embodiment of its finest ideals—of chivalry, courtesy, learning, and courage—tempered with a modesty that was all his own. If you look in Who’s Who you will find only a half-dozen lines. It says “A.B. Harvard, 1887.” It does not say that despite his small size he quarter-backed a Harvard football team when quarter-backing was taken as consent to mayhem. Who’s Who says “Lieutenant, A.E.F.” It does not tell of his citations won on the Marne at the age of fifty-three or of the half-pound fragment of a German shell imbedded in a copy of Peter Ibbetsen which Lieutenant Fletcher was reading in his dug-out. And of course Who’s Who could not say what his friends say, that, while shaving in the morning, he would do a cross-word puzzle, solve a chess problem or translate a dozen lines from Dante.

A story may be told in the privacy of our own House: Santayana, in Persons and Places, had written patronizingly of Fletcher, “He was a very good fellow, with a richer nature than most philologists, and firm morals.” A Centurion colleague, reading that, was indignant at the brush-off; and his comment was corrosive: “Jeff,” he said, “any day in the week had more on the ball than [Santayana] ever had.”

In the Century we take no back talk from anybody about our own.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

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Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1946 Memorials