Jesse Macy

Jesse Macy (June 21, 1842 – November 2, 1919) was an American political scientist and historian of the late 19th and early 20th century, specializing in the history of American political parties, party systems, and the Civil War. He spent most of his professional career at his alma mater, Grinnell College.

Life

Jesse Macy, the thirteenth of fourteen children, was born to Quaker parents in Indiana, but the family moved to central Iowa in 1856 and started farming outside Lynnville, near the newly founded town of Grinnell. At age 17, he entered Iowa College, now Grinnell College. During the Civil War, he served in the Union army and he did not graduate until after the war, earning an A.B. in 1870.

During the 1870s, Macy started what would become a long-term correspondence with James Bryce, a noted British jurist and politician. In 1884, he completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. The next year, he returned to the Midwest to take a professorship at Iowa College. For the next forty-two years, Macy taught history and political science at the college.

In the 1890s, Macy defended radical aspects of the burgeoning social gospel taught at Iowa College by professor of Applied Christianity George Herron and college president George A. Gates. Macy supported liberal education in a newspaper article, saying:

Suppose some emissary of darkness had spied out our liberty and had arraigned Iowa College before the public as a place where young people were taught the dangerous doctrine of evolution. It may be that at so early a date the young professors would have been sent adrift and the public would have been assured that Iowa College was a place where only safe opinions were allowed! That is a place where only imbeciles and hypocrites are educated.