John William Ward

Who was John William Ward?

John William Ward, was a Professor of English and History at Princeton University from 1952 to 1964 and a Professor of History and American Studies at Amherst College from 1964 to 1971. In 1971, Ward became the fourteenth President of Amherst College, a position he held until 1979. As President, Ward sparked controversy by protesting the war in Vietnam through nonviolent civil disobedience at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts. He was married to Barbara Carnes Ward had three sons named David, Christopher and Andrew.

Best known as a central figure of the Myth and Symbol School of American studies scholarship, Ward was one of the few university presidents during the Vietnam era to participate in direct activism against the escalation of conflict in Southeast Asia, and was the only university president to be arrested for doing so. His decision to protest the war was informed by his basic view of history and the role of American mythologies in American life, including and most importantly the mythology of absolute freedom and equality implied by Jeffersonian democracy. For Ward, history was made when individuals put their ideals into action, and for this reason Ward spent much of his career exploring contradictions in ideology, especially emphasizing the contradiction between the individual's freedom to act in socially responsible manner and the increasing bureaucratization of life that limited the possibility of such action. His most well known book, Andrew Jackson: Symbol of An Age treats Andrew Jackson as a symbol embodying 19th century ideology. Other figures who Ward treated as symbolic of contradictions in America's myths about itself include John F. Kennedy, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Lindbergh, and the Anarchist activist Alexander Berkman.