May 15, 2008 12:07 pm
—
By SHIRLEY O’SHEA
Contributing Writer
During his 28-year career in
the Foreign Service, Cooperstonian
Hugh MacDougall lived
and worked in distant, undeveloped
— by Western standards
— lands such as Guinea and the
Ivory Coast in west Africa, Mozambique
and Tanzania in
southeast Africa, Burma (now
Myanmar) in southeast Asia,
and Brazil — all colonies during
those years, or former colonies.
Upon his retirement in 1986, he
chose to come home to the village
where his relatives lived
for over a century, to pursue an
interest in one of the foremost
literary chroniclers of the postindependence
United States,
James Fenimore Cooper.
On Saturday, SUNY College
at Oneonta will award MacDougall
an honorary doctorate for
his contributions to Cooper
studies, including his long-time
participation in the college’s biannual
International James
Fenimore Cooper Conference &
Seminar, and his establishment
of the James Fenimore Cooper
Society in 1989. “I was very
pleased and I was surprised,”
MacDougall said recently about
learning of the upcoming honor.
“I hadn’t seen it coming.
“I’ve been very closely involved
with SUCO’s Cooper activities
since 1989,” MacDougall
said. “I’ve edited the papers that
are presented at the biannual
Cooper conference, so they know
me well. I’m very honored. It’s
an honor to Cooper studies as
much as it is to me. I think it’s
important that Otsego County
remain an important center for
Cooper studies and activities,
since Cooper spent half his life
and more than half of his writing
career here in Cooperstown.”
MacDougall was born in Boston,
Mass., and lived in Concord
before his family moved to Putney,
Vt., where his parents were
among the founding teachers at
the Putney School, “one of the
earliest coed boarding schools,”
according to MacDougall. He attended
the school himself, from
1946 to 1950, and thereafter
shipped off to Harvard, from
which he graduated cum laude
in 1954, with a degree in social
relations. At that time, Mac-
Dougall’s father was working as
a hydraulic engineer in
charge of a river development
project in Angola, then
a Portuguese colony in southwestern
Africa. MacDougall
went to visit his parents
there. “I got bit by the idea of
the Foreign Service and by
the idea of Africa,” MacDougall
remembers. “It was the
first foreign land I got to see
in any detail. I just found it a
fascinating sort of place.”
When he returned to the
U.S., MacDougall entered
Columbia Law School in New
York City. “Law was something
I had an affinity for,
because I was close to the top
of my class,” MacDougall
said. He was on the board of
editors of the school’s law review,
and clerked for two
summers at a “big Wall
Street firm,” he said. However,
“I couldn’t face the rest
of my life incorporating soap
companies,” MacDougall recalled.
While at Columbia,
MacDougall attended the
university’s School of International
Affairs, and graduated
in 1958 with degrees in
law and international affairs.
After he was admitted
to the New York State Bar,
he took the Foreign Service
exams, and passed.
From 1961 to 1963, Mac-
Dougall served as a consular
and then political officer in
Conakry, Guinea. (A consul
is an official posted in a foreign
city who is charged with
protecting the interests of
citizens of his or her own
country there.) He was the
second person to hold that
position, he said. “I made the
passports and typed the customs
declarations myself,”
MacDougall remembered. “I
was frequently down in the
port getting goods cleared.”
While he was in Conakry,
the Cuban Missile Crisis
took place, and MacDougall
remembers “watching out
the window for the arrival of
the ship with the Soviet missiles.
The ship duly arrived.
Some other folks in the embassy
stuck a Geiger counter
in the backseat of my little
Volkswagen to make sure
nuclear stuff really was
aboard this Russian ship,
which I guess it was.” For his
services in Guinea, MacDougall
received the Superior
Honor Award (Silver) for
having made “a significant
contribution to the foreign
policy objectives of the United
States,” according to the
citation.
After his Guinea posting,
MacDougall was dispatched
to Recife, capital of the Brazilian
state of Pernambuco,
on the northeastern coast of
Brazil. “That was a fascinating
part of the world to live
in,” MacDougall said, mentioning
the widespread cultivation
of sugar cane in the
region.
MacDougall studied African
affairs at the Sorbonne
in Paris from 1966 to 1967.
“It was an interesting time to
be in Paris,” MacDougall
commented. “Student riots
shut the city down.” From
there, MacDougall was posted
to the American Embassy
in the Ivory Coast, in western
Africa, from 1968 to
1970. Afterward, MacDougall
went to work for the Office
of Economic Opportunity,
in New York City. The
experience put him “in touch
with real life again,” Mac-
Dougall said. It was in New
York that he met his future
wife, Elinore, a fellow Cooperstonian,
who at the time
worked at the welfare department.
They were married
Dec. 26, 1970, in Cooperstown.
In 1971, MacDougall took
up a post as deputy principal
officer for the American Consulate
General in Mozambique,
which at the time was
still a Portuguese colony.
Mozambique had “an interesting
mix of races,” according
to MacDougall, and “was
not racist in ways other European
countries had been.”
Again, MacDougall earned a
Superior Honor Award (Silver)
for “advancing the policy
and program objectives of
the United States à during a
period of complex and
strained relations.” One year
after MacDougall left the
colony, it became an independent
nation, in 1975.
Serving in Africa during
the decolonization of some of
its lands was “very exciting,”
MacDougall said. When he
studied international affairs
at Columbia, Africa was
“mostly colonies.” He witnessed
the dismantling of colonial
administrations, and
the chaos and suffering that
often ensued. “When the father
of the country dies,
there’s a greater tendency
for things to fall apart,” Mac-
Dougall remarked. He recalls
not being able to visit Uganda
because of Idi Amin’s dictatorship
there. “I saw refugees
from Uganda in
Tanzania,” he said. He also
talked about a paper he authored
on the political situation
in Liberia at the time, in
which his predictions as to
the country’s future were
completely voided by the assassination
of its president
by a group of drunken soldiers.
“I’m not one who believes
you can easily predict
the future of any country,”
he said. “It’s not a very useful
exercise. There’s always
going to be surprises.”
MacDougall served as
counselor for political affairs
at the American Embassy in
Tanzania from 1974 to 1977.
The country had a “rather
good socialist government,”
MacDougall said, and is
presently “doing well.” During
his posting there, Mac-
Dougall negotiated the release
of three American
students and a Dutch nurse
who worked with the primatologist
Jane Goodall. For his
services in Tanzania, Mac-
Dougall received two Meritorious
Honor Awards (Bronze),
the second of which was for,
in part, his “personal effort
and initiative” in the hostage
negotiations.
According to MacDougall,
the last of his foreign postings
was in Burma, now
Myanmar, in the American
Embassy, from 1981 to 1984.
Then, after two years as the
chief of Mid-Level Political
Officer Training at the Department
of State’s Foreign
Service Institute, he retired
to Cooperstown.
During the summer of
1986, MacDougall’s motherin-
law lived at 8 Lake St.,
and he and Elinore assisted
her while the couple rented a
house on Elm Street. Several
years before, the bookish
MacDougall, who had been a
fan of Charles Dickens’ 19th
century novels, thought, “I
ought to have a look at
(James Fenimore) Cooper.”
He read Cooper’s novels, as
well as biographies of the
writer and criticism of his
work. “The more I read, the
more interested I got,” Mac-
Dougall remembers. In 1984,
immediately after returning
from Burma, MacDougall
journeyed up to SUCO to attend
the biannual Cooper
conference. “I’d never been to
a literary conference in my
life, and I didn’t know what I
was getting into,” MacDougall
said. He met leading
Cooper scholars, and in 1986,
the year of his retirement,
MacDougall himself gave a
paper at the conference, on
the relationship between
Cooper and Cooperstown.
“Cooper was a writer of
ideas,” MacDougall said. “He
had a deep understanding of
American culture. He had
ideas about America and its
problems, such as ecological
and environmental problems
and racial problems, a lot of
which remains as true today
as when he was writing
about them.”
Cooper composed his novels
— there were 32 of them,
including the well-known
“Leatherstocking Tales” —
“in terms of the format of the
so-called romance, which followed
a fairly specific pattern,”
MacDougall explained.
The genre, which derived
from the novels of Sir Walter
Scott, typically presents a
“young, middle-class couple
that contemporary readers
could identify with.”
“The young couple has adventures
and sees exotic people
and places,’’ he said.
There is always something
preventing the young couple
from getting married, but
they do get married. However,
the romance is less important
than the setting and
adventures, which take place
in the recent historical
past.”
Eventually, MacDougall
decided that a society devoted
to Cooper studies was
called for. In 1989, he suggested
a James Fenimore
Cooper Society, and he received
a “great idea, go
ahead” response from the
late George Test, an English
professor at SUCO. “With
the support of the Cooper
family, I organized the society,
but it was basically a
one-man operation until last
year,” MacDougall said.
Presently, the Society has
150 members from all over
the world and it publishes a
newsletter three times a
year, and sponsors a Cooper
panel at the American Literature
Association’s conference.
The Society also has a
website, http://external.
oneonta.edu/cooper, which
MacDougall set up himself,
and for which he serves as
Webmaster. “The idea is to
have as much about Cooper
in one place as you could,”
MacDougall said. All papers
presented at the SUCO and
ALA conferences, and obscure
Cooper texts, including
a novel by Cooper’s daughter,
Susan, are posted on the
site.
“I would like to have a society
of a permanent nature,”
MacDougall, who is the organization’s
corresponding secretary,
said. “I just hope it
keeps going.”
In addition to his Cooper
studies, MacDougall has
served as the Village Historian
from 2005 to the present.
“I feel a special responsibility
to learn and tell people
about the history of this
area,” said MacDougall. “I
try to do what I can to find
out the history of this place
in its real context, and find
ways of making that available
to Cooperstonians. I try
to dig into the corners that
other people don’t think
about.”
MacDougall’s other commitments
are numerous —
including, but not limited to,
founding member of the Center
for Continuing Adult
Learning in Oneonta and
member of its Curriculum
Committee; membership on
the boards of the Cooperstown
Rotary, Friends of the
Cooperstown Village Library,
Otsego 2000, and the Cooperstown
Art Association.
He was a member of the village
board of trustees, and
served on the village’s planning
board, from 1987 to
1989.
MacDougall the retired
Foreign Service officer, says
now that he has “no great desire
to travel. I like to be
around my books. I’ve got
enough things to do right
here, and I hope to be around
to keep on doing them.”
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
Photos
