Charles H. Sherrill

The smiling face, the bright eye, the easy conversation of Charles Hitchcock Sherrill were familiar at the Century lunch-table. His conversation covered many fields, ranging from politics and army matters to athletics and stained glass. On all of these topics, General Sherrill was an expert. On all he had strong opinions, and no one who talked with him could fail to learn something from his own singularly varied experience. In athletics, where he had begun by winning a series of track titles as undergraduate at Yale, his interest never flagged. During his later years, he had an outstanding part in organizing and conducting the Olympic games; in these he became a centre of warm controversy, both in America and Germany, because of his attitude on the exclusion of Jews from competition by the fantastic Hitler government. But Sherrill also, in addition to zealous work in the Republican campaigns, cut a figure in diplomacy. He served as our envoy to Argentina in the Taft administration, and to Turkey under Hoover. Sherrill’s impressions of Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk], with whom his relations were personally cordial, were such as to give to listeners a new view of post-war Turkey. He had often met Mussolini; whose ideas, however, on Sherrill’s favorite topic of Bismarck, were never altogether clear, even to Sherrill.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1937 Century Association Yearbook