Albert Shaw

Albert Shaw. [Born] 1857. Scholar, dean of American political scientists and municipal experts, dean of American magazine editors.

He received his undergraduate education at Iowa College when the Dakotas, across the border, were yet Indian Territory and the Sioux came to town to sell their buffalo robes at a dollar a coat. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins when that university lived in a stable and put all its money into making scholars. He edited the Minneapolis Tribune when the limestone blockhouse at Fort Snelling in Minneapolis was a remembered sanctuary to many yet alive.

In New York he founded and edited the Review of Reviews and there was no editor of his long editing life so widely quoted, none whose opinions had the weight of his.

Straight as an Indian out of his boyhood, he bore his years with vim and vigor and charming courtesy right up to the end. He was a month short of ninety when he died, having been the adviser of Presidents, particularly of Centurion Woodrow Wilson, his classmate in the graduate school of Johns Hopkins; advisor to Ambassador Bryce on The American Commonwealth; in his day the nation’s leading expert on municipal government; his countrymen’s symbol of political reform.

Standing at Marietta, Ohio, in 1857 Secretary of State Lewis Cass had made a speech saying: “The man is now living who felled the first tree of these forests and there are men now alive who will not pass away until the United States has attained one hundred million people.” Across the State, in Butler County, was a baby, Albert Shaw, who lived to see Mr. Cass’s improbable prophecy over-fulfilled.

He missed the magic fifty years of Centurion fellowship by only a few months. Of our membership only Poultney Bigelow is his senior in years upon the earth [sic: Charles Ripley Gillett and Clifford P. Grayson were also senior to him in age].

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

Henry Allen MoeMember profile currently not available; contact Archivist for information on this Centurion
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1947 Memorials