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“A More Valuable Exponent of Human Understanding:” Three Fellows from the Guggenheim Foundation’s First Class

Portraits of Violet Barbour, Isaac Fisher, and Aaron Copland that they included in their applications to join the first class of Guggenheim Fellows in 1925.

 

In 1925, Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife, Olga Guggenheim, established the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in honor of their late son. John Simon had died at the age of 17, not long before he was set to begin his first year of college. The Guggenheims worked together with the Foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe, on their vision: to promote “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding and the appreciation of beauty, by aiding without distinction on account of race, color or creed, scholars, scientists and artists of either sex in the prosecution of their labors.”  

President Moe understood that the first class of Fellows would signal the Foundation’s commitment to excellence and establish its reputation looking forward. The first Committee of Selection considered seventy-four applicants and ultimately awarded 15 Fellowships to a collection of writers, artists, scientists, and scholars, including a historian, a composer, a neurologist, a mathematician, and more. Initially envisioned as travel grants, the Fellowships made it possible for these individuals to travel widely—often Fellows visited multiple countries, and sometimes even multiple continents.  

To celebrate our upcoming centennial in 2025, we’re highlighting three Fellows from our very first class: Isaac Fisher, an educator and scholar of race relations, as well as the Foundation’s first Black Fellow; Violet Barbour, a historian of European trade and the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship; and Aaron Copland, the “dean of American Composers” who was only 24—the youngest in the 1925 Fellowship class—when he was awarded his first Fellowship. Read on to learn more.  

 

ISAAC FISHER 

Isaac Fisher was born to formerly enslaved people in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana. As a 16-year-old, he learned about the Tuskegee Institute and applied to attend. To earn the train fare necessary to travel to the Tuskegee Institute campus in Alabama, he arranged to give a lecture entitled, “Will America Absorb the Negro?” Throughout his life, his oratorial skills would prove to be instrumental in providing many other life-changing opportunities. While at Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington heard a small speech Fisher gave, and was so impressed he became Fisher’s mentor and lifelong friend.  

Isaac Fisher in Africa. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville

After he graduated from the Tuskegee Institute as valedictorian, Fisher became a prolific educator and scholar of education systems, acting as principal or president of high schools and colleges across the south. In 1925, after resigning from his position as an editor for the Fisk University News, Fisher applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to study, as his application said, “dangerous trends in world race relations.” He first traveled to Washington, D.C. to conduct research at the Library of Congress, then to London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin (all cities whose countries had colonial holdings in Africa), and then to the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. He ultimately was able to extend his Fellowship over two years.  

Fisher had been outspoken about his desire for peaceful interracial relations, and so he was surprised by the particular scrutiny he endured from the European border officers in Africa. He wrote to Henry Allen Moe, “The tragedy of it is not personal but international, for today European governments have bolted and barred the door in Africa against the best educated Negroes in the world. … How blind we are!”  

Fisher wrote a manuscript about his experience that was in part turned into an article, “Black and White in Certain Parts of West Africa” in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in November 1928. Long after the Fellowship ended, Fisher marked his Fellowship years as some of the most impactful of his life. In a letter of condolence to the Foundation upon Henry Allen Moe’s death, he wrote,  

 

“To me, ‘one of the least’ of the citizens of the United States, the greatest vision of life at large was that which came when I, a Negro, unfettered and unrestrained, was given a Guggenheim Traveling Fellowship twice in succession, as part of the flowering of Mr. Guggenheim’s far-reaching gift to human education and human understanding. In my words spoken and written, I know I have been a more valuable exponent of human understanding because I had seen and better understood many races in many places of the world—as a result of the Fellowship which I received from the Foundation.” 

 

VIOLET BARBOUR 

Violet Barbour, the inaugural Guggenheim Fellowship class’s sole female member, had not only attended college at a time when that was rare for women, but had also earned a Ph.D. Her dissertation had become the book, Henry Bennet, Early of Arlington, Secretary of State to Charles II, which won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Prize in 1913. When she applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was an associate professor of European and English History at Vassar College, where she would remain for the entirety of her career. She used her Fellowship year to make progress on a project that was already underway: a biography on Sir George Downing, an Anglo-Irish diplomat and financial reformer who played a significant role in the English acquisition of New York City from the Dutch. (Many places, including Downing Street in London, are named after him.)  

However, right before Barbour left to travel to England and The Hague, another biography on Downing was published, requiring a pivot in focus. She wrote to Henry Allen Moe:  

 

“I’m throwing overboard the biographical theme, and rearranging and broadening my work with the intent of putting it into a book to be called The State of Trade in the Period of the Dutch Wars, or something like that, with two chapters on Downing’s particular contribution. It’s a good deal more work, but also more fun that the biography pure and simple.”  

Barbour kept in touch with Moe over the next decades, updating him on her progress. The book, she explained to him in a 1927 letter, “gets made and unmade like a bed” with every piece of new information and discovery. She finally completed her book, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century, in 1950, the same year she retired from teaching.  

Though it took nearly 25 years to complete, Capitalism in Amsterdam sold quite well for an academic book of this nature, even being granted, as Barbour quipped, “the dignity of paperbackery” due to its popularity. To this day, it remains an authoritative text on Dutch economic history. 

 

AARON COPLAND 

One of the most popular and beloved American composers, Aaron Copland was known throughout his career for his widely enjoyed musical style and prolific creative output. During his first Fellowship—he was granted an extension in 1926—Copland travelled all over Europe, with the broad intent of studying “contemporary European music,” per his project plan. Shortly after returning from his travels, he founded Cob Coss Press, a music publisher which encouraged the work of young composers.  

Throughout his nearly 70-year-long career, Copland earned nearly every accolade available to someone in his field. To name only a few, he won a 1945 Pulitzer Prize in music composition for “Appalachian Spring,” an Academy Award in 1950 for his composition for “The Heiress,” and a gold medal from the Academy of Arts and

Noguchi’s set for “Appalachian Spring,” 1944. via the Library of Congress.

Letters in 1956. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, numerous residencies at MacDowell, and a Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. He received honorary doctorates from eight universities. In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; in 1986, he was given the National Medal of Arts and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Copland was consistently creating and collaborating. He seemed to take great pleasure in having his work in conversation with other art forms, and he frequently worked with other Guggenheim Fellows. His opera “The Tender Land” was inspired by the work of photographer Walker Evans (1940, 1941 & 1959 Fellow); Martha Graham (1932, 1943, & 1944 Fellow) choreographed Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Isamu Noguichi Copland’s first film score was for the documentary The City, by Ralph Steiner (1974 Fellow); and he curated two series of concerts that all featured Guggenheim Fellow composers.  

In an essay on Copland’s work, composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1960 Fellow) wrote: “He has never turned out bad work nor worked without an inspiration. His stance is that not only of a professional but also of an artist—responsible, prepared, giving of his best.” 

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