THE MORISON BROTHERS: A UNITARIAN HERITAGE Robert S. Morison: Research Scientist and Administrator 1906-1986 Elting E. Morison: Father of Contemporary History of Technology: 1909-1995 John H. Morison III: Industrial Executive. 1913- Robert S. Morison Elting E. Morison John H. Morison III   By 1720 the Scotch ancestors of the Morison brothers whom we celebrate crossed the Atlantic to settle in New Hampshire. There they found a greater measure of political and religious freedom which allowed them to pursue their search for that better way of life they were determined to achieve. John H. Morison, born in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1808, was a graduate of Harvard College and Divinity School whose distinguished service as a Unitarian minister led to his being honored by Harvard University with the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1858. Among the later descendants of this long notable family are three twentieth century brothers: Robert, Elting, and John. Each has made a contribution in separate fields of science, technology, and society in relation to practical affairs. Robert Swain Morison: MIT has celebrated his contribution to life as follows: Robert, after graduation from Harvard and the Harvard Medical School in 1934 became a research scientist and then joined the Rockefeller Foundation where he became Director of Medical and Natural Sciences. He then moved to Cornell University where he established and headed their first Life Sciences Division, from which he retired to join the Program of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at MIT. While he was a distinguished college administrator, one of his principal interests was the study and discussion of the medical and scientific problems of the day such as public health, medical ethics, aging and death. He was, among other things, one of the founders of the Hastings Institute for Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, a Trustee of the National Science Foundation and a member of the first General Motors Science Advisory Committee. As a scientist and teacher, he had an unusual capacity for absorbing complex technical and philosophical facts and ideas on a wide variety of subjects and then combining and translating them into essays or lectures that left his students excited and his colleagues fascinated by the depth of his knowledge and the clarity of his expression. Robert recalled autobiographically in 1951: "After attending the public schools in South Milwaukee and Milwaukee I went successively to Exeter, Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School receiving the M.D. degree in 1935. I then spent a year doing research and a small amount of clinical work at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Boston. For the next nine years I served as a teacher on the staff of the departments of Physiology and later of Anatomy at the Harvard Medical School. Since 1944 I have been with the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City where I am Associate Director of The Division of Medicine and Public Health. In connection with this work I make frequent visits to centers of medical activity in all parts of the world and have covered much of Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand on various trips during the last two years. "My wife was born in Russia in one of the German Mennonite groups which had emigrated to that country to escape the increasing militarism of Prussia under Frederick the Great. After living through the difficult days of the Revolution she left Russia for Germany in 1927, where she supported herself as a technical assistant in various laboratories. In the early days of the Hitler period she left Germany for England and finally arrived in the U.S. on Nov. 11, 1935, where she worked as a research assistant in the labratory of Dr. Alexander Forbes in Boston. " Elting Elmore Morison: The celebration of Elting at MIT stated: Elting (Harvard, 1932), after leaving the US. Navy at the end of World War II, became a member of the MIT faculty where he edited all the letters and papers of Theodore Roosevelt while teaching at the Sloan School of Management. His special field dealt with the relations between technology and society, out of which came two of his widely read books: Men, Machines, and Modern Times and From Know-How to Nowhere. He was a member of the MIT faculty for most of his teaching career, a member of the Lewis Commission in the late 1940's and was instrumental in the formation of STS (Science Technology and Society. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he became 'the father of contemporary history of technology.' He connected machinery and technological invention to social change, to individual imagination, and to politics in a way that has permanently redefined the field. Elting wrote autobiographically in 1951: 'I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 14 December 1909. My early years, however, were spent principally in South Milwaukee. to which we moved in 1914. There, in semi-rural surroundings that included a small orchard, a large garden, an attractive big team, a cow and two Shetland ponies, I had, with my two brothers a very pleasant and active childhood. I remember especially: Swimming and picnics on Lake Michigan; tennis on the court my father built beside the house— which we flooded in the winter for a hockey rink; riding, the ponies in summer, and hitching long lines of sleds behind them when the snow came. Perhaps because so much of my later life has been spent in the East, I am especially grateful that l was born in the Middle West, of a mother also born in the Middle West, and that most of my early years were spent in this part of the country. "The most significant elements in my education appear to be the weekly conferences, over a three year period, with my tutor at Harvard, the one year I spent in Leverett House, and the Harvard Crimson, where my older brother preceded me and my younger brother followed. Each of them became the President and I was the Editorial Chairman. From the sixteen courses I took to obtain the degree I retain surprisingly little. "The next three years, 1932-1935, I taught at two private schools and spent one year in the Harvard Graduate School in history. In June 1935 I married Anne Hitchcock Sims, and we returned to Cambridge in the fall, when I began a two year term as Assistant Dean of Freshmen at Harvard. "In 1938, we moved to Peterborough, where for the next four years, in circumstances that appeared then and still do appear perfect to us, I worked on the life of my wife's father, Admiral W. S. Sims, which was published in 1942 just before I entered the U.S. Navy. "During the war I was, for one year, on the staff of the Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier, and for three years in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. This latter duty, on the staff of Admiral Frederick J. Home, who directed the logistic support of the fleet, was the most instructive and useful experience I have had. "After the war we returned—with a family which included a daughter Mary, born in Peterborough in 1941, and a son Nicholas, likewise born in Peterborough in 1943—to Cambridge. In the summer of 1947 daughter Sarah was also born in Peterborough. "Our life in Cambridge has been full and satisfying these past five years. Anne has been active in what the Boston Transcript used to call Divers Good Causes, in addition to presiding effectively over a household that, at this writing, includes—besides three active children—a German Shepherd dog, two cats and seven kittens." Johns Hopkins Morison The MIT event concluded with these lines concerning John: John (Harvard 1935) once jokingly described himself as “the youngest brother who stayed home to make money so my older brothers could think lofty thoughts." But in fact, John Morison has been one of the more creative entrepreneurs and technological innovators in modern American life. After spending several years in Brazil and in the U.S. Navy in World War II he returned to New Hampshire to take over, with his father, an insolvent foundry in an effort to restore the industrial economy of that state after years of suffering in the depression and World War II. In the course of his lifetime, he transformed the Hitchiner Manufacturing Company into a multinational corporation, known as a “best practice" firm because of the sophistication of its technologies and its extensive worker education and participation programs. While their basic process is still the "lost wax,' technology described in the Old Testament, they do admit that they have added a "few new wrinkles with the help of our friends at MIT." John, the nonagenarian survivor of the three brothers, stated autobiographically in 1951: Precision casting equipment at the Bucyrus-Erie Company. "Nineteen thirteen seems to be dropping farther into the distance, but it is still the year of my birth, the last of three sons all born in Milwaukee. Presumably the difficulties of raising a family in such a sooty, urban existence had already been discovered to be insurmountable, for shortly thereafter we removed to the distinctly sub-urban life of South Milwaukee where some three acres of land, ponies, cows and vegetables offered the wholesome opportunity which growing boys obviously required. Such a happy existence lasted for eleven years when the cycle alternated again and soot and urbanity returned to favor when the need for 'better schooling' took preference over the happy life which beach, ravine and park afforded around South Milwaukee. "When the time came to move on, there seems to have been no question of where it might be, that matter had long since been settled in everyone’s mind with that minimum of argument which tradition imposes. Fortunately of the same mind, I quite happily became the youngest of three brothers all at Harvard in the fall of 1931. "They were happy years in a world otherwise depressed, but by the time they were completed in 1935 commercial enterprise again inquired for new blood and I entered the field in which I was most interested, that of foreign trade, in the Export Department of the Bucyrus-Erie Co. in South Milwaukee. In 1939 I began what turned our to be ten years of travel, interrupted only by a two-year tour of Florida duty with the Navy during World War II. A short trip to Mexico followed by Brazil started me out in the business of export living. It was nearly five years before I returned to this country. Constant travel over the entire country with more restful interludes in my apartment in Copacabana were a near perfect existence for a bachelor in his twenties. '`The early years of the war changed it but slightly for I left the business of selling machinery for a private concern to enter the field of operating it for a governmental affair, the Metals Reserve Co. We were engaged in the development of an adequate supply of mica and quartz crystals from the interior of Brazil. In 18 months it grew from two of us to two thousand, after which I left its political involvements for the apparently more dangerous, but less complicated, life of a Naval officer. I served out the war in a far pleasanter post, at a Naval Air Station in Florida. "I returned with many things from Brazil, but none could ever provide me with the joy and happiness which have been brought into my life by Olga, the last of whose eleven names is now Morison. The virtues of genetic mix are perfectly shown in this rare combination of French, Portuguese, Spanish and Irish which has made me realize how much straight Yankee lacks. A Brazilian from the tropics who has accommodated herself to the physical and mental rigors of a New England existence while bringing charm and beauty from her own country, she has earned her honorary degree. "We were married in 1944 in Peterborough and returned to Florida and the Navy for two years. In 1946 I went back to the Bucyrus-Erie Company and to Brazil for a year. "After much mental struggle we came back from several months in Brazil in 1949 to venture our personalities, our savings, and our welfare in a return to New Hampshire manufacturing and a home in Amherst, N.H. We left the security of the corporation pension plan for the dangers of trying to shore up a shaky company making precision castings. We are now finding what is required in such independent enterprise, the responsibilities and the satisfaction of achievement. It is not hard to see why the venture spirit symbolized the New England of a hundred years ago. " CONCLUSION On April 25, 2000 MIT held the first in an annual series, an endowed Morison Lecture and Prize in Science, Technology and Science made possible by a gift of $500,000 from John Morison and his firm, the Hitchiner Manufacturing Company. The Unitarian Church in Peterborough, New Hampshire   Supplimental Reading Click Here Recommended Reading Nathaniel Morrison and His Descendants by George Albert Morison (Nashua, N.H.: Transition Publishing, Second Edition, 2000). From Know-How to Nowhere by Elting E. Morison (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974). UNITARIAN NOTE The ongoing faith in life exhibited by generations of the Morison family is symbolized by their religious home in New Hampshire, the Peterborough Unitarian Church.