Necrology

William Robert Hutchison '51

May. 21, 1930-Dec. 16, 2005

William Robert Hutchison ’51, L.H.D. (Hon) ’91, the Charles Warren Research Professor of American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School and recognized as “the dean of American religious historians,” was born on May 21, 1930, in San Francisco, CA. His parents were Ralph C., a Presbyterian minister and college president, and Harriet Thompson Hutchison. “Bill” Hutchison entered Hamilton in 1947, following his graduation from Easton High School in Easton, PA, where his father was president of Lafayette College. He joined Delta Upsilon and soon distinguished himself in a variety of extracurricular activities as well as academics. He wrote a column for The Spectator, co-edited the humor magazine Royal Gaboon, played in the Band and sang in the Choir, and ran cross-country. He also served on the Student and Interfraternity Councils and chaired the Chapel Board, Campus Fund, and Publications Board. Elected to Was Los and the journalism honorary Pi Delta Upsilon, and a Fayerweather Prize scholar, he won the McKinney Prize Speaking Contest, the Cunningham Essay Prize, and the Pruyn Prize Oration. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors in history and public speaking in 1951.

As a Fulbright scholar, Bill Hutchinson went on to Oxford University, where he earned a B.A. degree in modern history in 1953. That year, he returned to the States to begin graduate studies as a Coe Fellow at Yale University. He obtained his Ph.D. in American history in 1956 and, a year later, an M.A. from Oxford as well. His teaching career began in 1956 as an instructor in history at Hunter College. Two years later, he joined the faculty of the American University in Washington as an associate professor of American studies. Promoted to full professor in 1964, he established and chaired the American studies program in American’s School of International Service. He moved on to Harvard in 1968 when appointed as the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, a post he would hold until 2000, when he was named research professor upon his retirement.

Over the ensuing years, Bill Hutchison received several Fulbright grants and lectureships in addition to a Guggenheim fellowship, and he did research and was a visiting lecturer in Europe as well as the Far East. At Harvard, he chaired the department of church history and spent five fruitful and satisfying years (1974-79) as master of Winthrop House, one of the University’s undergraduate houses.

Bill Hutchinson’s distinguished scholarship was already evident in his first book, The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (1959). Based upon his doctoral dissertation, it won, in manuscript, the prestigious Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. He subsequently focused his research and writing on the history of American religious thought, becoming one of the leading authorities in that field. In particular, his works provided penetrating insight into the American Protestant past. They include American Protestant Thought: The Liberal Era (1968), The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976), which won the National Religious Book Award, and Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (1987), which was hailed by John King Fairbank, the eminent historian of China, as establishing the basis for development of a new field within the realm of comparative world history.

In addition, Bill Hutchison coedited Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880-1920 and Many are Chosen: Biblical Themes in Western Nationalist Movements, 1880-1920 (1994), and edited and co-authored Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (1989). His most recent path-breaking study, described as an “ambitious appraisal of American religious history,” was Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (2003).

Besides impressive scholarship that was also reflected in numerous journal articles, he trained dozens of graduate students who looked upon him as a much beloved mentor. Many of them have become distinguished scholars in their own right, and, in 2002, they established in his honor the William R. Hutchison Fund to support doctoral students in religion at Harvard.

The lanky Bill Hutchison, who, wearing a helmet and smoking a pipe, customarily commuted from his Cambridge home to the Harvard campus on a three-speed Schwinn bicycle, possessed a charming joviality that belied a serious-appearing countenance. With a wry wit and a weakness for bad puns as well as old vaudeville routines, he often enlivened his lectures “with carefully-prepared jokes, humorous asides, and song lyrics.” Those who were in the overflow audience for his Baccalaureate Address in the then new Wellin Hall at Hamilton in 1991 (on the weekend he received his honorary doctorate from the College) will recall his joyously informal and humor-filled “sermon” on “Pluralism and Belief.”

Bill Hutchison, who enjoyed mountain-climbing, camping, and cross-country skiing in his younger years, was also fond of tennis and playing handyman around his property in New Hampshire. He continued to have an interest in singing, most recently with the Chorus Pro Musica, and “put in a lot of time for the Quakers” as an active participant in the Cambridge Friends Meeting. In the words of his daughter Elizabeth, his Quakerism “was closely related to his lifelong interest in religion and pluralism, and his liberal political ideals — as well as his very intellectual approach to faith.” It is significant that Religious Pluralism in America, his last major work, was a chronicle of historical developments that gradually led America from mere tolerance of religious differences to actual acceptance of religious diversity, a “new pluralism” that he welcomed.

William R. Hutchison, an ever-faithful alumnus who credited Hamilton with making for him “the life of the mind” a seductive reality, died on December 16, 2005, of stomach cancer, while hospitalized in Boston. He is survived by his wife, the former Virginia (Ginny) Quay, whom he had married on August 16, 1952, in Princeton, NJ. Also surviving are a son, Joseph C. Hutchison ’78; three daughters, Catherine Winnie and Margaret S. and Elizabeth Q. Hutchison; and 10 grandchildren and a sister. Last January, in posthumous recognition of his lifetime accomplishments, the American Society of Church History (of which he was a former president) conferred on Dr. Hutchison its Distinguished Career Achievement Award.

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