Soldier. Scholar. Sire.

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soldier.

History professor George Billias died last year at 99.

scholar.

But his life’s work and his Clark legacy are ageless.

sire.

By Anne Gibson, Ph.D. ’95 / illustration by paul ryding

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(Above) The scholarship came first — among the archives, in the field, at the typewriter. (Right) The accolades followed.

hey gathered in Tilton Hall on an unseasonably warm September Sunday to pay tribute. Family and friends who had treasured his attention. Former colleagues and students who valued his counsel. Scholars awed by his intellect.

Rare is the man who, in death, can fill a room as large as Tilton. But when George Athan Billias, professor emeritus of history, passed away on Aug. 16 at the age of 99, the concern was whether the space was large enough to accommodate the celebration of his expansive life. He’d taught history at Clark from 1962 to 1989 and authored many books, including a seminal volume on American constitutionalism, but his reach extended beyond the classroom in ways deeply felt and eloquently articulated. The speakers recalled his sacrifice and heroism as a soldier at some of the most notable battles of World War II. They remembered his talent for establishing deep and abiding friendships that spanned generations and ideologies, crossing social and ethnic lines. They painted a portrait of an exuberant, proud Greek-American and a self-described “provincial son of New England.”

His wit, they agreed, never diminished over nearly 10 decades. At one point during the event, a photograph was passed around the room showing a smiling Billias posed at a family gathering in a toga and laurel wreath — proof that he loved a good time.

He completed his memoir in his final days, perhaps heeding the long-ago admonishment of colleague and collaborator, the late Gerald Grob, who, when George contracted blood poisoning shortly before a fastapproaching book deadline, told him, “It’s all right to die, but finish the manuscript first.”

That memoir, “Becoming a Scholar, Soldier, Sire: The Time of My Life,” captures a life in three acts. And what acts they were.

‘Touched by fire’

When George Billias wrote that his years serving in World War II “matured me more than any other single experience in my life,” he undoubtedly spoke for many fellow veterans of America’s “Greatest Generation.” He served with the 9th Armored Division as a medical administrative officer in the European theater, grateful to have the means of saving lives, rather than taking them — a mission he extended to wounded Germans as well.

The role did not protect him from the carnage of front-line fighting as he and his men rescued, treated, and evacuated their wounded comrades. Toward the end of the war, when his unit pushed into the heart of Germany,

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he witnessed what he described as the “mind-numbing atrocities” of newly liberated Nazi concentration and labor camps. Working day and night without relief, he oversaw the evacuation of casualties under intense enemy artillery fire at the capture of Remagen Bridge. He was also part of the combat command awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for “extraordinary heroism and gallantry in action” at the Battle of the Bulge. The man who as a child had idolized the ancient Greek hero Odysseus had himself earned a hero’s designation.

In his memoir, Billias wrote: “[W]ar, strangely enough, can transform the fighting into an act of love. Men do not fight for God, flag, or country. They fight for their army buddies. Comrades in combat become brothers, willing to die for one another … I learned, too, a terrible dark beauty about war: it can become an aphrodisiac. Going into combat creates a rush of adrenaline that is like no other. When you pit your life against death, you experience a great sense of exultation. I do not mean to romanticize war because I hate it. But I can understand how some people can become war lovers.”

Billias’ maturing process came with scars that extended beyond the tinnitus and hearing loss he incurred on the battlefield. “The war ended, but not for me,” he wrote. “We were ‘touched by fire,’ and in my case, the burning goes on.”

In the 1960s, many Clark faculty and students actively protested U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Initially, as a veteran, Billias believed their actions were wrong. At his request, a U.S. State Department representative visited Clark to deliver a brief on the American position. But, according to Billias, the spokesman’s presentation was “so patently weak and his arguments so unconvincing that I was converted instantly to the students’ point of view.”

Though Billias supported the Clark demonstrators, he expected them to attend class, “be courteous and not shut down any speaker with whom they did not agree.” For him, a university was a “sanctuary for ideas” — a place where all voices should be heard.

In a presentation about Clark’s history created for new faculty members, Billias and Tom Dolan ’62, M.A.Ed. ’63, described how Billias and chemistry professor Knud Rasmussen had accompanied two busloads of Clark student activists to the October 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon. Billias described the fear that came from seeing the 82nd Airborne Division armed with machine guns in the nation’s capital, soldiers with rifles stationed at the entrances to buildings around the city, and thousands of police deployed against American citizens.

In May 1970, Billias, this time with Clark chemistry professor Ed Trachtenberg, accompanied several hundred Clark students to a sit-in at the draft board office in downtown Worcester. When asked by a police officer to intervene, Billias replied that he had no authority over the students. Nonetheless, worried for their safety, he asked student-leader Joshua Miller ’70 if he would consent to students being arrested one-by-one and escorted down the stairs instead of following the original plan of going limp and being carried away.

Miller agreed, and the arrests were made without incident. When the students were jailed, Billias remained to distribute food and coffee and telephone their parents. In the midst of all this, he recalled, one of the students said to him, “You know what this means, Professor Billias — I won’t be able to turn my paper in on time.”

For him, a university was a “sanctuary for ideas” – a place where all voices should be heard.

‘Ideas are weapons that can change the world’

Post-WWII, Billias earned a bachelor’s degree at Bates College and married Joyce Anne Baldwin. Whatever honors and awards he garnered throughout his life, he considered their three children — Stephen, Athan, and Nancy ’77 — to be his proudest accomplishment. It is telling that at least half of his 500-plus-page memoir is devoted to reminiscences of family — his Greekimmigrant parents, siblings, Joyce (who passed away from cancer in 1976) and his second wife, Margaret, his children and his grandchildren. Of the birth of Stephen, his first child, he wrote:

“No experience equals the joy of holding in your arms your newborn child the first time. It is as close to immortality as we get.”

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George Billias (left) considered his WWII military service one of the seminal chapters in his life.

A burning need to understand the terrible events he had witnessed in World War II and to use that knowledge to explore the pressing questions of the day spurred him to complete a doctorate in history at Columbia University. “I became a teacher in the belief that ideas are weapons that can change the world,” he said.

Before accepting an appointment in 1962 to direct Clark’s graduate program in history, Billias served as a civilian military historian with the Air Defense Command and the Eastern Air Defense Force, and taught American history at the University of Maine at Orono. It was at Clark, however, where he found his academic home, and where he discovered his joy of teaching.

At the September celebration of Billias’ life, former students remembered a teacher who urged them to produce their best work while earning their respect and affection.

John Hench, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’78, retired executive of Worcester’s American Antiquarian Society, said Billias paved the way for Hench to attain his dream job. “He encouraged us as we moved through our own careers, complimented us as we celebrated professional achievements, and cheered milestones in our personal lives.”

In a tribute read at the September celebration, Michael Leffell ’76 recalled that Billias put “both elbows” into his teaching.

“He never made me feel that my research, writing, or analysis was weak,” he said, “only that it could always be more precise. There were always more questions to ask, insights to glean, paradigms to pursue, and, of course, another draft would always be better.”

Former Massachusetts state senator Richard T. Moore ’66 summed up Billias’ impact as teacher and mentor in a written reminiscence:

“He earned the affection and admiration of undergraduates for the enthusiasm, intensity, imagination, and energy which he injected into his teaching; the regard and esteem of his students for the personal attention he devoted to their education; and the thoroughness of the guidance he provided in their studies.”

Billias once recalled his daughter Nancy ’77 telling him of a remark by a former student she ran into many years later. “That man taught me how to think,” the student said of Billias. “On my first exam I repeated verbatim the answers from my class notes. But in the margin he wrote, ‘No, no. I’m interested in your ideas, not mine.’”

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‘A heroic endeavor’

In his role as scholar, an activity that he continued until his death, Billias authored, edited, and co-edited a number of volumes on early American history, including a biography of Revolutionary War General John Glover. “General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners” was named by The New York Times as one of the outstanding books of 1960.

A particular aspect of Glover’s story must have resonated with Billias. During the Battle of Long Island, sailors and fishermen secretly transported 9,000 Continental Army soldiers under cover of darkness across the East River to Manhattan, out of reach of the besieging British Navy. Glover’s men would later ferry Washington’s troops across the Delaware on Christmas Eve night to attack Hessian mercenaries at Trenton. In his Bronze Star citation, it was noted that Billias established a ferrying system across the Rhine, allowing wounded Americans to be evacuated.

Billias’ book “Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman,” published in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, is an important biography of the man who, in addition to being a signer of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Massachusetts, and vice president under James Madison, is best remembered for giving rise to the term “gerrymandering.”

With Gerald Grob, Billias co-edited the two-volume “Interpretations of American History,” now in its eighth edition and for many years the standard college text on American historiography.

At the age of 90, in 2009, volume one of his magnum opus, “American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, 1776-1989: A Global Perspective,” was published. Twenty-plus years in the making, it was awarded the James P. Hanlan Book Award from the New England Historical Association. As the publisher states, the book reveals the “spread of American constitutionalism — from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean region, to Asia and Africa — beginning with the American Revolution and the fateful ‘shot heard round the world’ and ending with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989.”

The topic required Billias to explore the constitutional history of more than 160 countries covering a span of more than 200 years. Harvard University historian David Armitage called the book “a heroic endeavor whose results will be debated and plundered by generations of scholars to come, and whose impact on a wider audience may help to encourage a broader consciousness of America’s more benign contributions to shaping the contemporary world.”

Volume two, in progress at the time of Billias’ death, will be completed by two of his close friends, Frank Couvares, a former Clark professor now with the Department of

History at Amherst College, and Peter Onuf, professor of history emeritus at the University of Virginia.

Billias need not have been too concerned about his own mortality. He will live on through the global community of scholars with whom he shared ideas; through his children and students; through Clark’s George Athan and Margaret Rose Billias Endowed Scholarship Fund; and in the memories of his vast network of friends.

Few who attended the September celebration of George Billias’ life are likely to forget it. Billias made sure of it, choreographing the event himself before he died — from the selection of speakers to the choice of benediction to the singing of “America the Beautiful,” a fitting coda for the historian and patriot. He capped the day off with a perfect bit of fun: an “ice cream bonanza.”

As always, George had made sure to put the finishing touches on his manuscript.

A chapter concluded

Sidney Hart, M.A. ’69, Ph.D. ’73, once recalled that when history professor George Billias perceived that something wasn’t quite right, the pitch of his voice would rise as he delivered a proposed solution.

So it was when Hart was writing his doctoral dissertation that dealt with themes of American nationalism, he heard that familiar pitch. Hart planned to conclude his thesis in the year 1810, but Billias, his adviser, suggested he extend the timeline to include a chapter about the War of 1812.

“By that point my time, money, and energy were running out,” Hart remembered in a 2012 story on the ClarkNow news site. “If I included a chapter about the war, there was no way I could have finished the thesis that year. Professor Billias graciously recognized that.”

More than four decades later, Hart, the senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, resurrected the theme in a big way. He curated an exhibition observing the war’s bicentennial, “1812: A Nation Emerges,” which included memorable portraits, paintings, and objects — including a red velvet dress worn by Dolley Madison — that captured a conflict one historian described as “the second American Revolution.”

Hart remained close to Billias over the years. “It was his teaching, the example of his scholarship, and his humanity that got me to the finish line at Clark,” he said at the September tribute to his professor. “That was why I continued to seek his advice and friendship, and why I will miss him.”

The Smithsonian exhibition allowed the now-retired Hart to tie up a 40-year-old loose end dating back to his mentor’s recommendation about concluding his thesis with the War of 1812. Just before the exhibition opened, Hart sent his mentor the catalogue with a note that read, “Consider this the last chapter.”

“He read the catalogue and asked me a series of questions,” said the former student. “Fortunately, I passed the test.”

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