Lawrence A. McLouth

Lawrence Amos McLouth taught German language and literature in New York University for thirty-two years. In that field of instruction, which he had selected for himself in early life and for which he had prepared himself by thorough University study at Heidelberg, Leipzig and Munich, his scholarship was profound and his teaching, especially of graduate students, very useful. It was the literary rather than the philological side of the Germanic language which primarily attracted him; the Ottendorfer Library of Germanic Literature was his own idea and for many years his special care.

Professor McLouth continued to teach German in the University throughout the war, but his attitude regarding the war itself and the responsibility for it was from the first unswervingly anti-German. He saw no reason, however, why a literature whose highest flights had been inspired by hatred of militarism and autocracy should be proscribed because the people for whom it was written had rejected its lessons. The sound common sense of the people at large approved the attitude—even though the teacher of German literature must himself have read with odd sensations the account of the performance of Schiller’s “William Tell” to an enthusiastic pro-German audience at the New York German Theatre, during the invasion of Belgium in the autumn of 1914, with the imperial flag draped over the proscenium.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook