In announcing the death of Harry V. Jaffa, the Claremont Institute, an influential think tank since the ‘70s, issued one of the most touching tributes any professional, especially a teacher, could hope for, using these words, “our longtime friend and teacher” and “he influenced three generations of students.” Friend and Teacher. Three generations. What a significant legacy, most especially because this one is grounded in truth, good moral character, respect for the immense dignity of each individual, honesty, candor, intellectual honesty, and dare it be said, a respect and love for what is true, beautiful and good. Dr. Jaffa was a man who did not merely seek and savor the truth. He studied it, defended it, argued rigorously for it and lived it, fearlessly… and taught others to seek and love it as well.
Professor Jaffa’s influence lives on, in his writings and in three generations of students who have gone on to become leading Constitutional lawyers, presidents of colleges and universities, teachers, parents, writers, and even statesmen who serve their constituents with true transparency, dignity, and common sense rooted in natural law, the dignity of the human person, and a thorough understanding of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and our Founding Fathers.
Harry V. Jaffa was the distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, and the author of 10 books, including Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, and Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution, to name a few.
Author John J. Miller captured well Dr. Jaffa’s early journey toward his teaching profession, in a profile Mr. Miller wrote on the professor in 2013. As Mr. Miller puts it:
Harry V. Jaffa was born in 1918, a few weeks before the armistice agreement that ended the First World War. “Harry” is his given name — it’s not short for “Henry” or “Harold” — and the “V” stands for “Victor,” in honor of the Allied victory. He grew up primarily on Long Island, where his high-school classmates included two other men who would make their mark in political theory: Francis Canavan, who went on to the priesthood and developed an expertise in Edmund Burke, and Joseph Cropsey, a fellow Straussian whom Jaffa first met at Hebrew school. Jaffa and Cropsey became fast friends. As adults, during breaks at academic conferences, they would still haul out their baseball gloves and play catch. Jaffa’s relationship with Canavan had to wait. “Back in those days, there were barriers between Catholics and Jewish people,” he says. “We grew close later on.”
As an undergraduate at Yale, Jaffa majored in English and dreamed of a life in the academy. “Reading books and talking about them was the only thing that interested me,” he says. “My greatest ambition at the time was to write a history of Elizabethan drama.” Yet his advising professor, Harvey Mansfield Sr. — the father of the well-known professor of government at Harvard — warned him [Jaffa] away from graduate school. “He told me it wasn’t an option because colleges wouldn’t hire Jews as professors,” says Jaffa. So after Yale, Jaffa went into the federal civil service. He met his wife in Washington, D.C., but otherwise was miserable. “I learned all about bureaucracy — and hated it,” he says. “It reinforced my desire to go to graduate school.” (read full article here)
As a young student, Professor Jaffa was influenced by another great teacher, Leo Strauss, and so the legacy of any good teacher whose principles are well-grounded in truth and good character live on, as evidenced below.
The full text of the Institute’s announcement follows:
We are grieved to report the death of our longtime friend and teacher Harry V. Jaffa, who passed away on the evening of Saturday, January 10, 2015. At 96 years of age, Professor Jaffa lived a full life and taught at least three generations of students. We are immensely grateful for his life, his work, and his mentorship. His memory will survive through his family, his now several generations of students, and, of course, through his many writings.
All of us at the Claremont Institute—from our incorporation in the late 1970s to the present—are students of Professor Jaffa, and we intend to further his legacy through our own work and by encouraging the work of others. We often say at the Claremont Institute that free government can be lost, and will be lost if men do not rise up to defend it. Harry Jaffa taught us that, and furthermore showed us the moral demands and necessity of statesmanship in defense of free government. We aspire to follow his example and to educate statesmen in the virtues and principles that he so admired.
Much has already been said by others about Harry Jaffa’s life, his many arguments, and his short career as a political speechwriter. In the course of time we expect to return to each of these subjects for inspiration and for love of our teacher and friend. But as his intellectual descendants, we think this is a fitting occasion to reprint the following about Professor Jaffa’s intellectual legacy, written by one of the founders of the Claremont Institute, Christopher Flannery—from Flannery’s Foreword to Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012).
“Harry Jaffa has written and said many beautiful things in a long lifetime of scholarship and teaching. Among the most beautiful have been his expressions of reverence and gratitude for his teacher, Leo Strauss. He credits Strauss with giving him a gift dearer than life itself. Strauss taught him what to do with his life—he brought Jaffa to reason. When the young Jaffa’s mind, unbeknownst to itself, was in the grips of the historicism and relativism that remain the conventional wisdom of our time, Strauss’s teaching ‘struck off [his] shackles,’ turned him from his illusions, and dragged him up from the cave of nihilism to the light of natural right.
Jaffa’s reverence for his teacher is made possible by the greater reverence his teacher taught him to have for truth. In the service of this greater reverence, Jaffa has spent a fair portion of his life arguing with those intellectually closest to him—not least among them, himself. A friend recently gave me a copy of Crisis of the House Divided, on the cover page of which Jaffa had written in pencil half a century ago, ‘For Willmoore Kendall who knows that amicus quidem Socrates amicior veritas.’
Jaffa used to argue to the knife with Kendall about the character of the American founding and the significance of Abraham Lincoln, late into the night on long distance telephone from Claremont to Dallas. When he later disagreed with himself on these questions, as he did most notably in his two great works—Crisis of the House Divided and A New Birth of Freedom—he might be forgiven for thinking the pursuit of truth had brought him up against an even more formidable opponent.”
Harry Jaffa on Film
Charles Kesler sat down with Harry Jaffa not too long ago to discuss Lincoln, American conservatism, and Jaffa’s political thought on our interview show, The American Mind. Here is the first segment, “What Would Lincoln Think.” The rest of the segments are available on The American Mind website.
Read more here: http://www.claremont.org/index.php?act=page&id=257
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And, from those of us at the Catholic Business Journal: Rest in Peace, Harry V. Jaffa. Our prayers are with you and your family and your three generations of students.