Craig, Gordon Alexander

(b. 26 November 1913 in Glasgow, Scotland; d. 30 October 2005 in Portola Valley, California), America’s preeminent historian of Germany.

Craig was the oldest of three children born to Frank Mansfield Craig, a newspaper compositor, and Jane (Biss-dell) Craig, a nurse. Early in his life his family immigrated to Toronto, Canada, and then in 1925 to Jersey City, New Jersey, where Craig attended high school. He eventually became a U.S. citizen. In 1935, as a student at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, he visited Germany on a summer scholarship, boldly choosing to study the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic. Repelled by the Nazi regime, Craig nevertheless developed a fascination with Germany that he maintained over seven decades. In 1936, as the class valedictorian, he graduated from Princeton with a BA. As a Rhodes scholar, he attended Balliol College, University of Oxford, studying with B. H. Sumner and E. L. Woodward, two major diplomatic historians, and receiving a BLitt in 1938. In 1939 he was awarded an MA from Princeton and two years later received a PhD for his doctoral thesis, “Britain and Europe (1866–1869).” From 1939 to 1941 he was an instructor in history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. During World War II he worked as a political analyst in the Office of Strategic Services, then served with the U.S. Marine Corps as a captain in the South Pacific. On 16 June 1939 he married Phyllis Halcomb, who later directed day schools; they had three daughters and one son.

After the war Craig taught history at Princeton (1941–1961), rising through the ranks until he became a full professor. He was a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York City (1947–1948, 1949–1950) and was a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California (1956–1957). In 1961 he moved to Stanford, where from 1969 until his retirement ten years later he was the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities. At Stanford he served as the history department chair (1972–1975, 1978–1979) and chair of the faculty senate (1978–1979) and won the coveted Dinkelspiel Award for distinguished teaching. Craig’s lectures were legendary for being superbly organized, highly analytical, beautifully written, and flawlessly delivered—hallmarks of his writing as well.

Craig’s scholarship was distinguished by both depth and breadth. His first book, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (1955), made his reputation. Showing how Prussia’s officer corps remained a Statt im Statt (a government within a government), it won the 1956 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, an award given to the best first book by an author writing in European history. A series of published lectures, From Bismarck to Adenauer: Aspects of German State-craft (1958; rev. 1965), revealed admiration for both the Iron Chancellor (Otto von Bismarck) and der Alte (the old man, or Konrad Adenauer), but found little merit in most diplomats in between. In Germany, 1866–1945 (1978), a volume in the Oxford History of Modern Europe, he integrated broader cultural themes into tightly written political history. The Germans (1982) involved a series of essays focusing on such topics as religion, money, women, students, literature, language, and the Jewish population. With the political scientist Alexander L. George he wrote Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time (1983; 3rd ed., 1995), a systematic analysis of some 400 years of international relations. Craig also published The Battle of Königgrätz: Prussia’s Victory over Austria, 1866 (1964), The Triumph of Liberalism: Zürich in the Golden Age, 1830–1869 (1988), and Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich (1999). Collections of essays include War, Politics, and Diplomacy: Selected Essays (1966), The Politics of the Unpolitical: German Writers and the Problem of Power, 1770–1871 (1995), and Politics and Culture in Modern Germany: Essays from the “New York Review of Books” (1999). He helped edit two major works, The Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (with Edward Mead Earle and Felix Gilbert, 1943) and The Diplomats, 1919–1939 (with Felix Gilbert, 1953). He assisted in radically updating the former volume in 1986 (with Peter Paret and Felix Gilbert), giving it the subtitle From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age. In 1994, with Francis L. Loewenheim, he did the same for the latter volume, which received the title The Diplomats, 1939–1979.

Much of the general public best knew Craig through his Europe since 1815 (1961; 3rd ed., 1971), which served several generations of college students. Unlike many textbooks, which increased their scope and detail as the narrative moved toward the present, this work sought to give equal attention to the years before World War I. It also focused on war and diplomacy with an intensity Craig found lacking in older surveys. Also widely read were his reviews in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Review of Books, where he covered not only Germany but Switzerland, Austria, and Scotland, as well as wider issues of warfare, diplomacy, and literature.

During his career Craig received many honors. He held four honorary degrees, including one from the Free University of Berlin. He was an honorary fellow of Balliol College and a member of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. He was both a visiting scholar (1965, 1972) and senator (1980–1985) of Phi Beta Kappa. He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow (1969–1970, 1982–1983) and held a Commander’s Cross of the Legion of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Goethe Medal of the Goethe Institute, the Historikerpreis of the city of Münster, Germany, and the Benjamin Franklin–Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize of the German-American Academic Council. In 1982 he was elected as the president of the American Historical Association and from 1975 to 1985 served as the vice president of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. He also served as a consultant for the U.S. State Department, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, U.S. Air Force Academy, and U.S. Marine Corps Historical Division. Craig died of heart failure in Portola Valley at the age of ninety-one. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea.

In his prime Craig was somewhat short in stature, dressed in dapper fashion, and distinguished by muttonchop whiskers. His work always manifested urbanity, a graceful yet penetrating prose, close integration of literature and history, and judiciousness in matters of intense controversy. Few scholars have been as at home with opera, ballet, and poetry as with the details of diplomatic negotiation or the impact of military technology. More important, no single scholar has done as much to advance the field of German studies in the United States.

Craig’s papers and diaries are at Stanford University. Obituaries are in the Stanford Report (4 Nov. 2005), New York Times (9 Nov. 2005), Times (London) (16 Nov. 2005), and Perspectives 44 (Feb. 2006): 37–38.

Justus D. Doenecke