REV. HARRY SIEVERS, R.I.P.

REV. HARRY SIEVERS, DEAN AT FORDHAM U.
The Rev. Harry J. Sievers, a Jesuit priest and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University, died Tuesday night after collapsing in his office on the university’s Bronx campus. He was 56 years old.
Father Sievers succeeded Fordham’s present president, the Rev. James C. Finlay, as dean in 1972, assuming responsibility for programs leading to master and doctoral degrees in 13 disciplines.
A frequent lecturer on the history of the American Presidency, he was the author of a three‐volume biography of Benjamin Harrison, 23d President of the United States.
He also served as assistant editor of America, the Jesuit weekly, from 1967 to 1969.
Father Sievers was born in Brooklyn and attended Regis High School in Manhattan. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1939 and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Loyola University in Chicago.
He was awarded a doctoral degree in history from Georgetown University in 1950 and was ordained in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1953.
As a graduate student at Georgetown, Father Sievers became interested in the career of Benjamin Harrison. His research resulted in the publication over the next 18 years of the Harrison biography.
A 1952 review of the second volume, appearing in The New york Times Book Review, said Fther Sievers had “painstakingly culled extensive materials on a very limited man.”
Father Sievers began teaching at Fordham in 1965 and was named chairman of the history department in 1971. Previously he had taught at Canisius College, Georgetown University and Bellarmine College in Plattsburg, N.Y.
From 1963 to 1965 he served as historical consultant in a boundary dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela, heading a Washington‐based research team. Venezuela later awarded him its Simon Bolivar Medal.

Benjamin Harrison, Hoosier Warrior, 1833-1865.
By Harry J. Sievers, S. J.
Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. $5.00.
A Review by Bell Irvin Wiley, Emory University.

Presidents have had more complete and generally
more adequate coverage by biographers than any
other group of Americans. Until recently there
was hardly a chief executive of whom a satisfac-
tory, if not an outstanding, life had been written.
A notable and glaring exception was Benjamin
Harrison, twenty-third president of the United
States, 1889-1893, grand son of William Henry
Harrison, “Old Tippicanoe,” who occupied the
White House for a month in 1841.
Biographers had reason for passing Benjamin
Harrison by. He was considered to be a stolid, un-
imaginative, colorless personality. Writers, as well
as readers, like a bit of glamor in their subjects.
Benjamin .Harrison, though admittedly able ,
seemed intolerably cold and prosaic. Another dif-
ficulty in the way was a restriction which prevented
access to the large collection of Harrison papers
in the Library of Congress. Fortunately this re-
striction was recently removed.
About the time the ban was lifted, Harry Joseph
Siever s, a graduate student at Georgetown Uni-
versity, became enormously interested in Harrison.
Report of this interest came to an Indiana founda-
tion that was on the lookout for a competent biog-
rapher of the Hoosier president. The result was
the foundation’s commissioning of Sievers, now a
history Ph.D. as well as a Jesuit priest, to write a
life of Harrison.
Only the first volume of the work, bringing Harrison’s
career through the Civil War, is now published.
But the quality of it is such as to leave no
doubt that the choice of Father Sievers for the task
was a most fortunate one. A sympathetic approach,
though not a worshipful one, a rich knowledge of
the period, a delightful sense of humor, and above
all an unusual gift of narration, give the author a
combination of talents that are sure to produce an
outstanding portrait of an unjustifiably neglected subject.

Harrison comes alive as the author’s skillful pen
spells out his career, through boyhood days,
Harrison comes alive as the author’s skillful pen
spells out his career, through boyhood days,
at “The Point” on the Ohio River, his education
at Farmer’s College and Miami University, courtship
and marriage of his ·beloved Carrie, beginnings in
law and politics in Indianapolis, and finally his
mellowing and growth as a combat leader of
Hoosier troops in the Civil War.
The fullness of the new portrait reveals the
errors of the old. True, Harrison remains
an able, hardworking, conservative character, disinclined
to small talk, studied and restrained in his utterances, and
far more abundantly endowed with determination than sparkle.
But beneath a somewhat cold exterior was a benign disposition and a
warm hear t. More than that, there was a touch of the poetic, as witnessed
in one sentence from a letter to Carrie, written while Ben was reading
law in Cincinnati: “Darkness is fast setting upon
this page and the straggling ray s of light are fleeing
as if frightened to join the sun behind the Western hills.”
Readers who prefer truth to tradition and who
delight in good writing can look forward with
pleasure to the completion of this highly promising biography.

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ALUMNI MAGAZINE 5 May 1953