George Kennan: Encyclopedia Arctica 15: Biographies

George Kennan (1845-1924) was born in Norwalk, Ohio, February 16, 1845. His parents were Thomas Kennan, graduate of Hamilton College, teacher, lawyer, and early telegrapher, and Mary Anne (Morse) Kennan, a relative of the inven– tor of the telegraphic alphabet. The electric telegraph played an important part in George Kennan's life and career. His first American ancestor, on the Kennan side, was James MacKennan who came over from Scotland about 1718. From his forebears George inherited a strong moral sense, a scholarly mind, tenacity of purpose, and longevity.

His schooling wasconcluded at the age of twelve when he had to go to work in his father's Western Union office in Norwalk, but he continued his studies, with his parents' help, preparing himself for the college he was never to attend. Perhaps more important than his books were his Saturday excursions into the neighboring woods, beginning often at midnight on Fridays. His father encouraged his interest in nature and woodlore and this aspect of his education was to stand him in good stead in later years, especially on his first Siberian expedition. In spite of his lack of formal education, he later received honorary degrees from Williams College (1910) and the University of Richester (1916). He was also made honorary member of several high school classes as well as the [: ] Wellesley College Class of 1892.

By the age of eighteen he was holding the positions of assistant chief operator of the Western Union office and Associated Press agent in Cincinnati,

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Ohio. Early in 1864, he received, over the wires, an offer of a job with the Alaskan-Siberian expedition of the Western Union Extension. At that time the Atlantic cable appeared to be a failure and the Russian-American Telegraph Company was organized at New York in the summer of 1864. The Western Union extension was planned to establish telegraphic communication between Europe and America by way of Canada, Alaska, Bering Strait, Siberia, and Russia.

On July 1st young Kennan, with three companions of the expedition, set sail from San Francisco on the Russian brig Olga for Petropavlovsk, a trip of fifty-two days. Here the party divided, Mahood and Bush going south to the mouth of the Amur River on the Chinese frontier while Kennan and Major Abaza (chief of Asiatic exploration) set forth by horseback and canoe up the wild, sparsely populated Kamchatka peninsula. At the town of Gizhiga, Major Abaza went west to meet Mahood and Bush at Okhotsk while Kennan, with one helper, a young American fur trader named Dodd, was [: ] assigned to survey the line between Gizhiga n and Anadyrsk, a settlement not far from the Arctic Circle. The prob– lems involved in this assignment would have offered a challenge to a seasoned explorer. The Ohio boy and his young helper were thrown on their own resources in a wild, trackless country, remote from civilization and inhabited by [: ] primitive nomadic tribes, with all details of transportation and subsistence left to their own devices. Yet, in spite of temperatures as low as 50 to 60 degrees below zero, blinding storms, and uncharted routes, Kennan and Dodd finally arrived at Anadyrsk early in January.

Not long after their arrival there, the young men organized and successfully carried out an expedition to rescue three Americans who had been stranded since September near the mouth of the Anadyr River. This trip, because of the barren character of that country, was considered by the natives themselves as very dangerous at any time and quite impossible in January.

The rest of the first winter was spent in search of a more favorable route for the [: ] telegraph line than the one they had already traversed, and they found a chain of wooded rivers connecting Okhotsk Sea with the Pacific Ocean near Bering Strait. In April they returned to Gizhiga to wait until late summer for the arrival of boats with supplies. The second winter was occupied with construction, the actual cutting of poles, but it did not lack arctic ad– venture at the same time. There was still much perilous travel in very low temperatures, experience with famine at Anadyrsk, and an expedition from [: ] Gizhiga to Yamsk over rugged, almost impassable mountains. After January, 1867, Kennan was made chief of the Asiatic division, directing construction.

In July 1866 the [: ] trans-atlantic cable was successfully laid but the official news of the abandonment of the overland telegraph project did not reach the men in Siberia until July, 1867. Kennan was ordered to sell as much as possible of the equipment on hand and return home as best he could. He tra– veled to St. Petersburg from Okhotsk, a distance of 5,714 miles, in eleven weeks by sleigh drawn by horses, reindeer, and dogs.

The details of this expedition are contained in his first book Tent Life in Siberia (1870), a revised edition of which was published in 1910. His in– tentions, as he wrote in the preface, were "to convey as clear and accurate an idea as possible of the inhabitants, scenery, customs and general external features of a new and comparatively unknown country," and he succeeded admirably in so doing. The book has the added value which a youthful zest for adventure and a lively sense of humor give to it and, although the young author had not had a scientific education, his thoughtful observations were worthy of a scientist.

By the time he reached Norwalk again in April 1868, almost three years of his life had been spent on a project which had ostensibly been a failure. It

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had cost the Western Union Company about three million dollars but it had laid for Kennan the foundation for his future career. He had obtained material for lectures, a working knowledge of the Russian language, and an undying interest in Russian affairs.

He gave his first lecture at Monroeville Corners, Ohio, to an audience of four who had to be hailed back, as they started to leave, with the promise of a "bang-up" lecture. This was the small beginning of a lifelong career as a lecturer in England, Canada, and Japan as well as throughout the United States.

In 1870, he went again to Russia but this time to the Caucasus. He tra– veled down the Volga and across the Caspian Sea to Petrovsk, Daghestan, and then spent about two months in the Caucasus, learning all he could of that part of Russia, its history, people, music, and natural phenomena. When he returned home, he added to his Siberian talks new lectures on "The Mountains and Mountaineers of the Caucasus."

For the next five years he held stock and the position of cashier in the Union Bank of Medina, New York, but quit the life of a business man forever when he went to New York City with his books and fifty dollars in his pocket. In 1878 he was sent to Washington to report the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for the New York Associated Press and in 1879, when President Garfield was shot, Kennan was put in charge of all the wires from the White House as long as the President stayed there.

He was married to Miss Emeline Rathbone Weld of Medina, New York, in September 1879.

On May 1, 1885, Kennan signed a contract with the Century Company for a series of articles on the exile system of the Russian Czars. Back in 1877 he had written for the New York Tribune an article entitled "A Defense of

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Russia and the Emperor Nicholas and the Crimean War." The Russian government feeling him to be kindly disposed toward its activities, gave him permission to visit the prisons and penal colonies of Siberia. He left St. Petersburg on May 31, 1885, and did not return to that city until March 20, 1886, after covering Siberia from the Urals to the Amur River.

This expedition involved much emotional strain as well as physical hard– ship. The latter consisted of extremes of temperatures, 8,000 miles of travel over Siberian roads in springless vehicles, loss of sleep, and exposure to vermin and fevers as he mingled with the exiles in their crowde ^ d ^ "etapes" and hospitals. He was now a man of forty and did not have the resilience which had come to his aid as a youth in the wilds of Siberia. More trying than even the physical hardship, however, was the strain on his sympathies as he learned firsthand of the sufferings of the exiles.

Always a conservative in politices, Kennan had set forth on thisexpedition with the sincere belief that the mass of political exiles were wild-eyed anarchists. He did meet a few violent revolutionists in Siberia but, in the main, he discovered the political prisoners to be people of refinement and culture, often young, and fired with humanitarian zeal. Such a one, for example, was Catherine Breshkovsky, "the little Grandmother of the Revolution," who later became one of his good friends among the revolutionists. Concern for land reform and constitutional change, desire for the three freedoms of speech, assembly, and press had sent many of them to Siberia. Some had had a semblance of trial, but many had been exiled by administrative process. In cases where the revo– lutionists had resorted to violence, he even condoned their actions, to some extent at least. after discovering the oppression and injudstices they had under– gone. An article in the Century , "A Visit to Count Tolstoi," revealed Kennan's views on resistance as well as those of the Count.

Before very long, Kennan found himself carrying [: ] messages between the exiles. In this capacity, as a sort of one-man clearing house of revolutionary data as well as personal letters, he had to watch his step carefully to avoid involving himself with the police or endangering the safety of the more friendly officials and the prisoners themselves.

His subsequent articles in the Century Magazine caused a widespread sen– sation, even though the author leaned over backward to be fair to both sides and to be factual rather than emotional in the presentation of his findings. Most of the articles were later incorporated in his two-volume book Siberia and the Exile System , published in 1891. This book not only received wide circulation in this country but was translated into a number of foreign languages and made a deep impression upon the entire liberal world of that day. The late President Kalinin of the Soviet Union is known to have remarked that the Russian translation which was illegally circulated among the Russian oppositionists became "the Bible of the early Bolsheviks." There is irony in the fact that Kennan never approved of the Bolshevist regime after the passing of the Kerensky phase.

One of the outstanding features of the book is the careful documentation of the facts recorded in it. This concern for accuracy is characteristic of the author, who was ever [: ] thorough in his investigations. The quantity of facts and figures, however, does not make this a dull book. It abounds in vivid descriptions of the exiles and their wretched living conditions, the Siberian countryside in all its variation of topography and season, and means of Siberian travel in the year 1885. And, in spite of its tragic message, it is lightened whenever possible by Kennan's appreciation of humor. The illustrations by George Frost, the artist who accompanied Kennan, also made an important contri– bution to the effectiveness and popularity of the book.

Frost [: ] became very ill toward the end of the trip and Kennan took him to London, where he stayed with him until he was well enough to sail for home. Then Kennan, this time with his wife for a companion, returned to European Russia where he continued his prison investigations, delivered letters from the exiles to their friends and families, and met and talked with as many officials, liberals, and revolutionists as possible. He was to go to Russia once more, in 1901 for the Outlook, [: ] but on that occasion he was expelled from the country by police order after only three weeks. In all, he made six trips to the Russian Empire and much of the material he collected there, manuscript, pictorial, and printed, is now contained in the Kennan Collection at the New York Public Library. A pamphlet, published by the library in 1921, describes a veritable treasury of source material for students of Siberia, the Caucasus and especially the Russian Revolution.

He never lost interest in the cause of Russian freedom. The attitude with which he returned from Russia in August, 1886, persisted to the end of his life and was clearly expressed in his Century article, "A Voice for the People of Russia" — "As for me, my sympathies are with the Russia of the [: ] people, not the Russia of the [: ] Czars, with the Russia of the provincial assemblies, not the Russia of the secret police, with the Russia of the future, not the Russia of the past."

He was made an honorary member of the [: ] National Polish Alliance of America and belonged to "The Friends of Russian Freedom" from its inception. A Kennan Testimonial Committee was organized in Philadelphia in 1890, its name changed later to "Siberian Exile Petition Committee." His interest in the political exiles in whose escapes he sometimes had a hand led him into a long, hard but unavailing fight against the Russian Extradition Treaty and, in 1893,

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he went to England to interest Baron Hirsch in the cause of Russian freedom. He lived to see the Revolution of 1917 but the sense of triumph with which he and his Russian friends greeted the overthrow of the Czarist regime had been sadly extinguished when he wrote, in 1923, "The Russian leopard has not changed its spots. The first essentials of republican institutions are freedom of elections, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, and these things the new Bolshevist 'constitution' does not guarantee — nor even promise." ( National Republican , Washington, D.C., August 11, 1923) Many of the revolutionists he had known were as unwelcome in the country of Lenin and Trotsky as they had been in the Russia of the [: ] Czars.

The years from 1887 [: ] to 1898 were largely occupied with literature and lectures. In 1898 the predominantly journalistic phase of his career began when he signed a contract to go to Cuba as a special war cor ^ r ^ espondent. He went there in a double capacity, for he was also vice president of the American Red Cross. A book, Campaigning in Cuba (1899), incorporated many of his Outlook articles. Another book, The Tragedy of Pelee , was the result of an expedition to Martinique to report the eruption of Mount Pelee. Other Outlook assignments were in connection with the Philippine question and the Russo-Japanes war. He and Mrs. Kennan sailed for the Far East in January, 1904, visiting Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and China. They spent the major part of their time in Japan and returned home in June 1905.

Kennan was also associated with McClure's and wrote articles for other papers as well on many varied subjects. He took considerable interest in rail– way problems, in particular a controversy between President Theodore Roosevelt and the railway magnate, E. H. Harriman, and in 1923 published a two-volume

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biography of Harriman. A small book, The Salton Sea , preceded this. In these later years, however, he did not completely neglect Russia in his writings, for in 1915 he published an entertaining book of short stories and sketches, A Rus– sian Comedy of Errors . He said of this book in a letter to a friend "there is no fiction in it except 'Napoleander'".

In 1888, the Kennans had visited their good friends, the Alexander Graham Bells, at Baddeck on Cape Breton Island and had purchased a home for themselves nearby. This Nova Scotian home became a haven from the strains of travel and life in Washington and frequentlyKennan went there to recuperate from illnesses brought on by his travels, such as Cuban fever contracted during the Spanish American War and a nervous breakdown suffered in 1908. In his last years he and his wife settled in Medina, New York, where Mrs. Kennan had lived as a girl. Here he became vice president of the Medina Publishing Company and wrote from time to time for the Medina Tribune under the heading "G.K.'s Column." Here, after a three-day illness, he died on May 10, 1924.

Such a long and varied life was not all composed of work. Kennan had many resources for recreation. Music, camping trips, sailing, and gardening ranked high among them. In religion he had, with much spiritual travail, abandoned the Calvinistic faith of his ancestors and his own childhood but he had established for himself a philosophy which he never clearly defined but which his life story proves to have been good. He had known many famous people during the course of his long life, received outstanding honors, and had been a member of several important [: ] societies. (He was, for instance, a charter member and first secretary of the National Geographic Society.) He neither over- nor under-estimated his own importance. It was a source of deep regret to him that he had no children, for he had acquired, in Japan, a strong feeling

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for the value of family continuity. He had one namesake in the Kennan family, the grandson of a cousin, but he did not live to see George F. Kennan become, in his turn, a recognized authority on Russian affairs.

Lecturing and journalism are careers whose fame is transitory but George Kennan's memory will endure because of the information he amassed and left behind for future students of Siberia and of the Russian Revolution.

Jeanette Kennan Hotchkiss