A Secret History of Learned Societies

On 14 November 1979, Ron Rosbottom, Executive Secretary of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, wrote a long letter to the ASECS Steering Committee. "The Society is at a transitional point in its history," he wrote. "Despite Don Greene's repeated reminders that he handled everything with a few boxes of files and a mimeograph machine, ASECS has grown considerably in the past few years. … We cannot continue to fly by the seat of our pants." Ten years after a constitution was drafted, the first officers were elected, and the first annual meeting was held, ASECS required more administration than a single secretary could handle. "We are no longer a small group of devotees to the eighteenth century," Rosbottom continued, "but a major learned Society with all the complexity and diversity of responsibilities that implies." Correspondence alone took up much of his time. "We receive around 150 pieces of mail per week," he reported, and until he purchased a cassette recorder, he was typing "about 40 drafts of letters per week."¹

Rosbottom proposed that a second person be brought in to assist him, "not simply another clerk," he explained, "but someone with major responsibilities." In fact, he had already recruited one of his colleagues, John Sena, to act as Associate Executive Secretary and proposed that the Society both confirm Sena's appointment and make the position official. Rosbottom stressed that in addition to helping with the newsletter and the program for the annual meeting, Sena acted "as a companion and colleague to whom I can turn for immediate responses and reactions about numerous matters." The beleaguered secretary noted that with Sena's help his phone calls to members of the Board had decreased significantly.

In December, the Board approved Sena's appointment as Associate Executive Secretary, but the constitution was never amended to make this ad hoc solution permanent; he was the first and last person to hold this position. When the Society sought someone to succeed Rosbottom as secretary in 1981, Sena was the obvious candidate.² But, Sena withdrew his name from consideration. "The responsibilities of the Executive Secretary are awesome," he explained. "To assume them would be to terminate virtually all other areas of academic life."³ Fortunately, others stepped forward, and R. G. Peterson was selected to succeed Rosbottom as executive secretary.

The work, of course, only increased as ASECS and its operations continued to grow. By 1991, the Board was seriously considering the idea of a "paid, full-time, 'permanent' Executive Secretary," in light of what President Jane Perry-Camp called "the enormous burden of the Executive Secretaryship in directing ASECS's complex, varied, and ever-increasing activities."⁴ The Modern Languages Association and the American Historical Association were now run by paid professional staffs in New York and Washington, but ASECS did not have the resources to take this step. Its administration remained in the hands of a dedicated member rather than a paid professional. Peterson was succeeded by Ed Harris, Harris by Jeffrey Smitten, and Smitten by Byron Wells—all members of the Society who served part-time while continuing to hold academic positions.

And so, as we thank Byron for an extraordinary twenty years of voluntary service to the Society and thank Lisa Berglund for her willingness to pick up where Byron leaves off, I thought we might honor them by reflecting on the contribution of secretaries of learned societies to the intellectual life of the long eighteenth century, to which we, as a society, remain devoted.

Secretaries and Learned Societies: Long-Eighteenth-Century Origins

Let me begin with the word secretary. It comes from the word "secret" and referred originally to a subordinate entrusted with his master's secrets. Secrets eventually came to be associated with letters: the materialization of the master's thoughts in writing. The secretary was the person to whom the master entrusted those thoughts in order to be able to transmit them to a distant other and to produce a record of that communication. If a secretary at one end of a correspondence created the letter, a secretary at the other end...