Isaiah S Bowman: noted geographer and anti-semite

Last week, my friend (and distant cousin) Roger Baer sent me an article about a guy named Isaiah S Bowman from the Nov 15, 1975, Kitchener-Waterloo Record. He wanted to know whether this Isaiah was related to his (Roger’s) ancestor, Preacher Moses Bowman of Mannheim.

Now Isaiah S Bowman was a pretty important guy, one of the most influential geographers of his time. He was born in Wilmot Township on December 26, 1878, to Samuel C Bowman and Emily Shantz. Preacher Moses Bowman was indeed his grandfather, so he is a first cousin twice removed of my friend Roger.

When he was only a few months old, Isaiah’s family moved to Brown City, Michigan, about 40 miles northwest of Port Huron, and he became an American citizen in 1900, when he was 22. There is a Missionary Church in Brown City that was founded in 1885 and a Missionary camp nearby, so I am guessing that maybe Samuel C Bowman was a follower of the “New” Mennonite preachers Daniel Brenneman and Solomon Eby.

At age 18, Bowman started teaching at a rural school in Michigan, but he was soon offered a post at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) in Ypsilanti, on condition he study at an eastern university. He entered Harvard, where he studied under prominent geographer William M. Davis and graduated with a BA in 1905. He was immediately offered a position at Yale, where he taught and did graduate work, including three research expeditions to South America, in 1907, 1911, and 1913. He earned his PhD in 1909 with a dissertation (“The Physiography of the Central Andes”) based on his South American research.

Bowman taught at Yale until 1915, when he was appointed director of the American Geographical Society, which he completely reorganized and revitalized. When the USA entered the first world war in 1917, Bowman, as director of the AGS, was asked to assemble a team to prepare data for use in the peace conference that would be held when fighting ceased.

In December 1918, he went to France as the Chief Territorial Specialist in the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He quickly became a key advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and his chief advisor Edward House. In this capacity, he played an important role in the distribution of lands amongst the various combatants and the definition of boundaries in Europe, particularly the Balkan states.

During the war years, Bowman served as associate editor of the Geographical Review and the Journal of Geography. In 1921, he was appointed a director of the new Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), an American non-profit think-tank that specializes in foreign policy and international affairs. During the second world war, he was chair of the “territorial” section of the CFR’s War and Peace Studies project, and he served as a CFR vice-president from 1945 to 1949.

During the depression of the 1930s, Bowman served as chairman of the National Research Council in Washington. He also helped to organize the Science Advisory Board, which President Franklin D Roosevelt created (at Bowman’s suggestion) to advise all government departments on scientific issues. He served as vice chair of that Board. In 1931, he was elected president of the International Geographical Congress; he also served as president of the Association of American Geographers at this time.

Bowman was appointed President of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1935. During the early years of his tenure, he focused on getting Johns Hopkins onto a firm financial footing after the depredations of the depression. He was also instrumental in consolidating isolated areas of study into stronger departments. At the same time, he wrote and lectured on the role of the university and graduate schools in modern democratic societies. He was president of Johns Hopkins until 1948.

During the second world war, Bowman was appointed a State Department advisor to President Roosevelt. At Roosevelt’s request, he led a search for a refuge for Jewish emigrants from Europe as a result of Nazi anti-Semitism. But Bowman was himself an anti-Semite, thinking that Jews were a “threat to American culture,” so his team never considered the USA as a potential haven.

Bowman spearheaded the creation of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins in 1942. Researchers at the APL developed the “proximity fuse,” which allowed bombs to explode before actually hitting their targets, thus increasing their “lethality” by a factor of 5 or 10.

In 1944 and 1945, as a State Department advisor, Bowman participated in the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, DC, and the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco; he was thus involved in the establishment of the United Nations.

In 1945, Bowman established a quota system that limited the number of Jewish scholars and students admitted to Johns Hopkins, at a time when most American universities were dismantling such schemes.

After the war, Bowman tried to revitalize the study of geography at Johns Hopkins by establishing the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography, but the school was never able to attract the high-profile scholars required to sustain it. After Bowman’s retirement from the presidency in 1948, the school was downgraded to departmental status, and in 1968 his name was removed from the department.

Bowman authored 14 books and more than 175 academic articles and papers, on a wide range of topics. He received 13 honorary degrees, nine honorary fellowships, and six medals from American, Canadian, and Peruvian universities. Bowman Bay on Baffin Island and Bowman Coast, Bowman Island, and Bowman Glacier in Antarctica were named for him by the explorers Putnam, Wilkins, Mawson, and Byrd. He is a member of the Waterloo Region Hall of Fame.

Bowman married Cora Olive Goldthwaite of Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 28, 1909, when he was still a graduate student at Yale. They had three children. It isn’t clear whether they retained any church connections.

Dr Isaiah S Bowman died on January 6, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Like pretty much every person of Swiss Mennonite ancestry born in Waterloo County, Isaiah Bowman is a relative of mine—in a number of ways.

Through the Bowman/Bauman lineage, he is my great-grandmother Leah Snyder’s third cousin—her paternal grandmother, Barbara Bauman, was a first cousin to Moses Bowman. He is also Leah’s fourth cousin in several ways, if you go back a generation in the Bowman/Bauman family. And, if you go back yet another generation, he is a fifth cousin of my grandfather Peter B Martin.

But that’s not all, Isaiah’s great-grandmother (Preacher Moses’ mother) was Susannah Bechtel, sister of my ancestors Mary and Veronica Bechtel. This makes him a third cousin to both my paternal great-grandfather Isaiah Martin and my maternal great-grandfather John W Martin.

I suppose there are some who would think his anti-Semitism should disqualify Isaiah Bowman from any honour (or even consideration) whatsoever. But in humble Anabaptist spirit, I will leave that sort of judgement to the self-righteous.

Yes, he had his faults, just like all of us, and his faults were pretty glaring indeed. (I would, in fact, list his involvement in the settling of borders after WWI, at the Paris Peace Conference, right up there with the worst of his sins.) But he did some amazing and important things, especially for a Mennonite kid born on a farm near Mannheim.

While I’m appalled at some of his beliefs and actions, I also have to respect his achievements. That puts him slightly above my purported relatives General George Custer and president Andrew Johnson, for whom I have no respect at all.

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The following diagram shows how Roger Baer and I (in red font) are related to Isaiah Bowman and to each other (click on the diagram to view a larger image):

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Sources:

Ernie Ronnenberg, “Geographer Isaiah Bowman Adviser to Two US Presidents,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Nov 15, 1975.

John K Wright and George F Carter, Isaiah Bowman 1878-1959: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1959), http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/bowman-isaiah.pdf.

“Isaiah Bowman,” Waterloo Generations (https://generations.regionofwaterloo.ca/getperson.php?personID=I6886&tree=generations), accessed Jan 3, 2022.

“Isaiah Bowman,” Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Bowman), accessed Jan 3, 2022.

“Isaiah Bowman,” YourDictionary (https://biography.yourdictionary.com/isaiah-bowman), accessed Jan 3, 2022.

“Isaiah Bowman: American geographer and educator,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaiah-Bowman), accessed Jan 3, 2022.