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Dr. John Adams Scott (1867-1947)

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A descendant of Sergeant David Scott and Sarah Jean Dalgity who were stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1801, John Adams was raised in Fletcher, Illinois. A brief biography from the  Dictionary of American Biography (supplement 4) by Albert B. Lord, follows

SCOTT, JOHN ADAMS (Sept 15, 1867 - Oct. 27, 1947), classicist, was born in Fletcher, Illinois, a small town in McLean County.  He was the first son of seven children born to James Sterling Scott and Henrietta P. (Sutton) Scott.  His father, born in Nova Scotia, had worked in Boston for a while in the carriage-making shop managed by his brother John.  Because of ill health, James Scott moved to the Midwest and became a farmer.  At a very early age, John Adams and his younger brother Walter Dill (later president of Northwestern University, 1920- 1939) worked on their father's 120-acre farm, and by 1880 they were managing it almost completely.  Scott's early education was provided by his older sister Louise, who tutored both him and Walter at home.  He graduated from the high school section of the Illinois State Normal School at Normal, Illinois, in 1887 and entered Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1895.

From 1891-1893, Scott was instructor in Greek in the academy of Northwestern University, and during 1891-1892 he was also a graduate student at Northwestern On Sept.1, 1892, he married Matilda Jane Spring of Centralia, Illinois; they had a daughter, Dorothy Louise, and a son, Frederick Sterling.

In 1893 he began graduate work in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit at the Johns Hopkins University, where he held the university scholarship in Greek in 1895 and a fellowship in 1895-1896.  He was a pupil of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, who in 1885 had edited The Olympian and Pythian Odes of Pindar.  Scott received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in June 1897; his dissertation, "A Comparative Study of Hesiod and Pindar," was published in 1898.  He returned to Northwestern as an instructor (1897), became professor of Greek (1901), and in 1904 he was named chairman of the department of classical languages.  With the exception of his dissertation, The Unity of Homer (the Sather Classical Lectures he delivered in 1921) was his first book.  From it stemmed Homer and His Influence (1925) and The Poetic Structure of the Odyssey, the Martin Classical Lectures, published in 1931.  The Unity of Homer was influential in turning the direction of Homeric studies in the United States from the German school of separatists to a new school of unitarians.  Scott was by nature partisan, and he devoted himself to the uncompromising defence of Homer as the author of the two great poems.  Appraisals of Scott as a scholar vary greatly.  In Maurice Platinauer's Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (I954), there is the following statement:

A skilful if unscrupulous controversialist, he succeeded by a careful choice of examples in conveying the impression that the greatest scholars of Germany were not only pedants but fools. . . . He certainly revealed the inaccuracy of some earlier statistics; but it  may be questioned whether in matters of vocabulary and grammar a statistical approach is the right one.

One must balance against this opinion Sterling Dow's evaluation:

Scott's The Unity of Homer did more than any other book to defeat, though it did not annihilate, those who believed the epics were a patch- work of different poems.  In fact it has been the most influential book in the whole Sather series. . . . Although many of his arguments, on the contradictions and other seeming difficulties in Homer, can now be seen differently, they still have major importance.

His other three books were of a religious nature.  They contained lectures given by Scott under the auspices of the John C. Shaffer Foundation of Northwestern for promotion of the appreciation of the life, character, teachings, and influence of Jesus: Socrates and Christ (1928), Luke, Greek Physician and Historian (1930), and We Would Know Jesus (1936).  A similar theme is represented in his article entitled, "The Church's Debt to Homer," in Classical Essays Presented to J. A. Kleist, edited by R. E. Arnold and published in 1946.  As indicated by these writings, Scott was deeply involved with religious and intellectual questions.  He tried to reconcile in some way pagan antiquity and Christianity, for both of which he had an unabashed and militant passion.

He was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church.  He enjoyed golfing and was a member of the Gull Lake Country Club, of which he was at one time president.  His was an energetic and vibrant personality.  In 1923 Scott was named John C. Shaffer professor of Greek.  He was a member of the  American Philological Association (president, 1916) and of the Archaeological Institute of America.  He was associate editor of the Classical Journal and edited its notes from 1910-1933.  From 1926-1927, Scott was councillor to the American School in Athens. On his retirement in 1938, he was Northwestern's senior professor in length of service.

At the age of eighty, he died in his sleep at his summer home in Augusta, Michgan.

[Sources include Nat.  Cyc.  Am.  Biog., XXXV; Am.  Philological Assn., Proc. and Trans. (1925); Classical Jour., Index vols. 1-25, 19 (1923-1924), 307, and vol. 43, p. 298; Sterling Dow, Fifty Years of Sathers (1965); obituary in N.Y. Times, Oct. 28, 1947.]

Albert B. Lord
Pg 728, Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement 4)