Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison’s advice reads less like career counseling and more like a code of conduct - a quiet manifesto for what he thought history should be in the mid-20th century: disciplined, ethically anchored, and suspicious of fad. The list is telling. “Honesty of purpose” frames scholarship as moral labor, not just intellectual play. “Balance” signals an older ideal of objectivity, the historian as referee rather than combatant - a stance that, in Morison’s era, carried real institutional weight and also conveniently policed the boundaries of acceptable interpretation.

Then comes the phrase doing the real cultural work: “respect for tradition.” It’s both a virtue and a gate. Tradition, here, isn’t merely inherited method; it’s a social contract with the profession’s existing hierarchies - its canons, its archives, its stories of nation and civilization. For a historian who wrote within and about American power, tradition can function as ballast against radical critique: change, yes, but not too much; revision, but within the family.

“Courage” adds a heroic tint, implying that the historian faces pressures - political, institutional, or public - that require spine. Yet Morison’s “above all” lands on “a philosophy of life,” elevating history from technique to worldview. He’s recruiting young historians not to master tools, but to adopt a temperament: patient, serious, anchored.

The payoff he promises - “durable…satisfaction” - is almost monastic. It casts the profession as a long game of meaning-making, rewarding those willing to trade the dopamine hits of novelty for the slower authority of stewardship.