Clinton Rossiter


Clinton Rossiter was an American historian and political scientist at Cornell University who wrote The American Presidency among 20 other books and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for his book Seedtime of the Republic.

Background

Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III was born on September 18, 1917, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Winton Goodrich Rossiter, a stockbroker, and Dorothy Shaw. Clinton grew up in Bronxville, New York, as the third of four siblings: Dorothy Ann Rossiter, William Winton Goodrich Rossiter, Clinton, and Joan Rossiter. He was raised to give priority to family and social expectations. He attended Westminster preparatory school in Simsbury, Connecticut and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1939, where he was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. In 1942, Princeton University awarded him a doctorate for his thesis Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies.

Career

Immediately after American entry into World War II, Rossiter joined the United States Naval Reserves and served for three years as a gunnery officer, mostly on the in the Pacific Theater, reaching the rank of lieutenant.
Rossiter taught briefly at the University of Michigan in 1946, moving to Cornell University in 1947, where he rose from instructor to full professor in eight years.
He served as the chair of the Government Department from 1956 to 1959, when he was named John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions.
During the 1950s, Rossiter served as series editor for "Communism in American Life," published by the fund for the Republic, a nonprofit organization funded by the Ford Foundation.
He spent the 1960–1961 academic year as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, England.

Personal life and death

He married Mary Ellen Crane in September 1947. They had three sons : David Goodrich Rossiter, Caleb Stewart Rossiter , and Winton Goodrich Rossiter.
Years later, his son would state that his father suffered a lifetime of debilitating clinical depression. He could no longer extract himself from it and overdosed on sleeping pills. External events had much to do with the last stages of this depression. His beloved Cornell was convulsed with racial conflict, including the infamous armed seizure of the student union building in April 1969. Rossiter became prominent as a moderate voice among the faculty, urging some understanding of the African-American students' frustrations but was branded a traitor by others on the faculty, some of whom refused to speak to him again.
Rossiter died in his Ithaca home on July 11, 1970 at age 52. The New York Times reported that his son Caleb Rossiter discovered his father's body in the basement of their home. The cause of death was ruled a suicide by the Tompkins County medical examiner and widely reported.

Legacy

For two decades after Rossiter's death, the academic mainstream in political science moved away from Rossiter's documentary, interpretative style, towards a quantitative, data-driven approach. However, in the 1990s and the early 21st century, political scientists have rediscovered the substantive and methodological concerns that Rossiter brought to his work and have found a renewed appreciation for his scholarly works.
In particular, following the events of 9/11, Rossiter's first book, the 1948 Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, was reprinted for the first time in nearly forty years. In that germinal study, Rossiter argued that constitutional democracies had to learn the lesson of the Roman Republic to adopt and use emergency procedures that would empower governments to deal with crises beyond the ordinary capacities of democratic constitutional governance but to ensure that such crisis procedures were themselves subject to constitutional controls and codified temporal limits.
His 1787: The Grand Convention is still hailed as among the very best accounts of the Federal Convention and the making of the Constitution.
Although much has changed in American politics since 1970, especially the meanings of important terms like "conservative" and "liberal", his book on that ideologically-charged subject remains a classic articulation of the integrity that words like liberalism and conservatism still have.
His edition of The Federalist Papers continues to be used as a standard text in high schools and colleges, but in the late 1990s, the publisher of that edition replaced Rossiter's introduction and analytic table of contents with a new introduction by Charles R. Kesler and a table of contents derived from Henry Cabot Lodge's 1898 edition. Rossiter's article, "A Revolution to Conserve," has been used to introduce generations of high school students to the origins of the American Revolution.
His 1964 monograph, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution, studies the evolution and current relevance of Hamilton's political and constitutional thought, and his 1953 Bancroft Prize-winning Seedtime of the Republic investigates the roots of American thinking about politics and government in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Major publications

Books