FIVE

Itinerant Scholar

Berkeley > Cambridge > Princeton

 

 

 

 

 

 

A photograph taken of Bingham at Yale showed the six feet four, sandy-haired explorer-to-be standing a full head taller than his classmates, looking like a somber, skinny power forward from a Soviet basketball team. He likely had a lot on his mind. After graduating in the spring of 1898, Hiram III returned to Honolulu to join the family business, as superintendent of a mission devoted to aiding the down-and-out. But Bingham’s years at Yale had taught him to question his father’s fundamentalist faith, and he lasted only six months before tendering his resignation. He later explained that he had left “because I found it impossible to teach the very orthodox beliefs which those in charge of the Mission expected to be taught.”

Something else may have been crowding Hiram III’s thoughts during those first months back in Honolulu. The previous summer, on a trip to the Yale-Harvard yacht races near New London, Connecticut, he had met a shy, sheltered young woman named Alfreda Mitchell. Her mother, Annie Tiffany Mitchell, was an heiress to the Tiffany jewelry fortune. Annie’s husband, Alfred, was an entrepreneur; his peripatetic career prior to settling down comfortably as a man of wealth had included stints operating whaling ships, serving in the Union Army and prospecting for gold in California.

Alfred Mitchell had fond memories of his seafaring days in Hawaii, and around the time Hiram Bingham III began doubting his future as a missionary, the four Mitchells were entering Honolulu Harbor aboard their yacht Archer. Two days after their arrival, Bingham paid the first of many social calls at their winter cottage on Waikiki Beach. Considering that Mitchell’s father-in-law, Charles Tiffany, had thought Mitchell wasn’t good enough for his daughter, Bingham might have expected a little more sympathy. Instead, Mitchell packed his daughters off to Japan.

Bingham took the hint, bought a ticket to San Francisco and enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He would pursue a master’s in history. Annie Tiffany Mitchell cabled encouragement to the new scholar in California: “When you get your M.A., you can have your A. M.”

Hiram II, on the other hand, was flabbergasted by his son’s secular turn. Hiram III did not help matters by explaining that his love for Alfreda was the light by which he now navigated his life. The elder Bingham, convinced that his son was aboard an express train to hell, reminded him that “the greatest force in a man’s life should be supreme love to Jesus, supreme loyalty to the Saviour of the world.... If it is not, I have everything to fear for you.”

Demonstrating the drive that would later serve him well in his explorations, Bingham fulfilled the requirements for his graduate degree in a single academic year, all while giving a series of lectures on Hawaii and managing to cut something of a figure on the social circuit. The San Francisco Chronicle noted his attendance at a private dinner dance, entertaining “a merry group of this season’s debutantes.” He was, perhaps, a young man in too great a hurry; one grandson noted later that in writing his thesis, Bingham had “copied a number of long passages without the use of quotation marks.” By the fall of 1900, Bingham was in Cambridge pursuing a PhD in history at Harvard. He and Alfreda were married at the Mitchell home in New London on November 20, in a ceremony presided over by Yale’s former president.

At Harvard, Bingham had chosen to specialize in a new, but potentially important, field of study—South American history. For his PhD dissertation topic, Bingham wrote about the Scots Darien Colony. This ill-fated settlement had been an attempt by Scottish explorers at the end of the seventeenth century to establish a trading beachhead in what is now Panama. Unfortunately, they chose an especially inhospitable spot of jungle, known today as the Darién Gap, which still remains among the least developed areas in the Western Hemisphere. Bingham received his doctorate (and a $10,000 gift from the Mitchells) in 1905. His greatest hope was for a Yale appointment,” one son remembered. Bingham repeatedly called on the university’s president, Arthur Twining Hadley, to see if there was anything he could do for him. There wasn’t. Harvard showed no interest in offering him a teaching position, either.

Unexpectedly, Bingham received an inquiry from Woodrow Wilson—yes, that Woodrow Wilson—who was then building his reputation as a brainy, liberal university president at Princeton. Would Bingham consider a position as a “preceptor”—one of Wilson’s energetic young faculty leading innovative small discussion groups—teaching history and politics? After seeking permission from his in-laws, who had purchased and furnished a Cambridge mansion for the newlyweds, Bingham accepted the three-year assignment.

Princeton was not a good fit. Bingham struggled to stay on top of his course load. He squabbled with Wilson over special treatment that the president wanted for the son of a wealthy alum. An attack of appendicitis provided Bingham with an excuse to request a year’s leave of absence, supposedly to convalesce. Having recently turned thirty, he was more concerned with thinking about his future. As it turned out, both he and Wilson were contemplating major life changes. Wilson was considering a move into politics; Bingham was looking for adventure. Seven years later, under very different circumstances, they would be two of the most famous men in America.