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Collections
George Kennan papers
George Kennan papers
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Collection Data
- Description
- George Kennan (1845-1924), American journalist, lecturer, and author, is best-known for his writings on Russia. He traveled extensively in Siberia from 1865-1867 with a Western Union telegraph surveying party, and again in 1885-1886 to research the Imperial Russian exile and prison systems. His writings and lectures influenced American policy and public opinion about Russia before the 1917 revolutions. In addition to his work on Siberia, Kennan covered the Spanish-American War and the Russo-Japanese War for the Outlook magazine. His papers include his correspondence and source documents collected from Russian exiles, a small amount of personal correspondence, drafts of manuscripts, a small number of photographs, and Kennan family papers.
- Names
- Kennan, George, 1845-1924 (Creator)
- Bialoveski, Adam (Correspondent)
- Breshko-Breshkovskai︠a︡, Ekaterina Konstantinovna, 1844-1934 (Contributor)
- Chaĭkovskīĭ, N. V. (Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich), 1850-1926 (Correspondent)
- Frost, George Albert, 1843-1907 (Contributor)
- Hotchkiss, Jeannette (Collector)
- Kennan, Emeline Rathbone Weld, 1854-1940 (Correspondent)
- Kennan, George F. (George Frost), 1904-2005 (Correspondent)
- Korff, S. A. (Sergeĭ Aleksandrovich), baron, 1876-1924 (Author)
- Lazarev, E. E. (Egor Egorovich), 1855-1937 (Correspondent)
- Pribyleva-Korba, A. P. (Correspondent)
- Shlikerman, Moises (Correspondent)
- Stepniak, S., 1851-1895 (Correspondent)
- Hotchkiss, Jeannette (Correspondent)
- Kennan, George, 1845-1924 (Correspondent)
- Dates / Origin
- Date Created: 1856 - 1987
- Library locations
- Manuscripts and Archives Division
- Shelf locator: MssCol 1630
- Topics
- Authors
- Journalists
- Lecturers
- China -- History -- 1861-1912
- Cuba -- History -- 1810-1899
- Russia -- Foreign public opinion, American
- Russia -- History -- 1801-1917
- Siberia (Russia) -- Description and travel
- Siberia (Russia) -- Exiles
- Soviet Union -- Foreign public opinion, American
- Political prisoners -- Russia
- Prisons -- Russia
- Revolutionaries -- Russia
- Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905
- Spanish-American War, 1898
- Kennan, George, 1845-1924
- Kennan family
- Genres
- Photographs
- Maps
- Sketches
- Drawings
- Correspondence
- Documents
- Notes
- Biographical/historical: George Kennan, journalist, lecturer and author, is best known for his writings on Imperial Russia. Born in 1845 in Norwalk, Ohio to attorney John Kennan and Mary Anne Morse Kennan, the young George left school at the age of twelve to take work as a telegrapher. During the years of the American Civil War, he worked with the Military Telegraph Corps, which later led to employment with Western Union. In 1865, at the age of twenty, he was chosen for a Western Union expedition investigating the feasibility of laying telegraph cable from Alaska across the Pacific Ocean to Siberia. Traveling as part of a small team and with no previous knowledge of the Russian language, Kennan and his cohort trekked for a year by horseback, telega cart, dog sled and canoe. They endured the vagaries of the Siberian winter sleeping in tents and quartering with the nomadic Korak population. In 1866, expedition members had already begun erecting telegraph poles across the Siberian landscape when they received the belated news of the success of the Atlantic cable, which nullified their project. Kennan used this opportunity to travel across the entire Russian continent to Europe, and then returned home in 1867. His first book based on these travels, Tent Life in Siberia, was roundly praised after its publication in 1870. Also in 1870, Kennan spent a year traveling in another outpost of the Russian Empire, the Caucasus. It was during this time that he began submitting articles to various publications, thus beginning his career as a journalist and cementing his reputation as an explorer and expert on Russia. Upon his return to the United States, he worked in business for several years in Medina, NY, where he met Emeline Weld, whom he married in 1879. In 1877 he moved to Washington, D.C. to begin work as an assistant manager for the Associated Press, a job he held until 1885. In 1881, based on his professional reputation and skill, he was called to the White House to manage the telegraph and press reports of President Garfield's assassination. In 1885, Roswell Smith, publisher of the The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, contacted Kennan with a commission for a series of articles on the Siberian prison and exile system. Kennan gladly accepted the assignment and arranged for a friend, artist George A. Frost, to accompany him and illustrate their voyage. Initially supportive of the tsarist government's efforts to maintain order against what he assumed to be a wave of Nihilists and revolutionaries, Kennan was soon surprised to find himself in sympathy with the radicals he so recently scorned. In his tours of Russian prisons and numerous meetings with exiles--among them Katherine Breshkovskaia, the "Grandmother of the Revolution"--he discovered many convicts to be from the educated classes, and found many guilty of crimes he felt to be legitimate opposition to the tyranny and arbitrary nature of the tsarist system. In his series of articles for the Century (published between 1887 and 1891), Kennan exposed the abuses of the penal system. He highlighted the inhumane practice of total seclusion and indefinite detention of arrestees practiced in the Peter-Paul and Schlusselberg fortresses in St. Petersburg, as well as wrote about the journey to Siberia, traveled on foot by already exhausted and malnourished prisoners. He discussed the years of grueling mining work to which many were sentenced, as well as the horrid living conditions in which they were maintained. The violence to which exiles were subjected--floggings, beatings, shootings and hangings--was also exposed in his articles. Collected together into a two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), his writings shocked the American public, and created high demand for Kennan as a public lecturer. According to the lecture schedule in his papers, between 1889 and 1900 he delivered more than five hundred talks on Russia, often appearing dressed in the rags and chains of exiles. Through this work, Kennan soon became the leading influence on anti-tsarist sentiment in the United States. Russia was not Kennan's sole focus, however. He also traveled to Cuba as a war correspondent for the Outlook magazine during the Spanish-American War, to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, and traveled to and wrote about the Philippines, Korea, China, and Martinique. Kennan's other interests included Native American rights and railway development in the United States. He was the author of a biography of E.H. Harriman, railroad magnate and financier of the Harriman Alaska Expedition. In addition to his work an as author, Kennan worked as an assistant manager of the Associated Press (1877-1885), vice president of the American Red Cross (1898), and vice president of the Medina Publishing Company. He also served as vice president of the American branch of the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom. The Society sought to raise funds for the support of anti-tsarist Russian exiles and counted among its founding members Mark Twain, Alice Stone Blackwell, and William Lloyd Garrison. George Kennan died following a stroke on May 10, 1924.
- Content: George Kennan's papers, spanning 1856 to 1924, document his Russian travels and research, and his relationships with Siberian exiles and radical revolutionaries. His professional writings and lectures are well-documented within the collection, and to a lesser degree, so are his efforts to influence American foreign and economic policy towards the Imperial Russian government. One finds a small glimpse into Kennan and his wife Emeline Weld Kennan's personal life through their correspondence, in particular concerning their friendship with the family of Alexander Graham Bell. Curiously, while this collection contains letters related to Kennan's 1865 and 1885 Russian expeditions, his travels through the Caucasus in 1870 are not mentioned. Included within the collection are correspondence, lists of Siberian exiles and biographical sketches of several individuals, often anonymous accounts and official reports on the system and its many abuses, a number of manuscripts by both Kennan and Russian authors, newspaper clippings and a small amount of printed matter, and personal miscellany including several photographs and addresses. Also included are some Kennan family papers, consisting of his wife's personal correspondence, and his grandniece Jeannette Hotchkiss's collected research notes, manuscripts, and correspondence. As the family authority on the elder Kennan, Hotchkiss intended to write a biography of her uncle. Notable within her materials are a small number of the letters of artist George Frost, Kennan's friend and fellow Siberian explorer. Many of the Siberian research documents and items of correspondence are identified by document numbers. While these numbers were present at the time of donation to the library, it is uncertain what they represent, and who assigned them. There are significant gaps in the numbering, and there does not appear to be a coherent organizing principle behind them. Nevertheless, the numbers and matching envelopes, many of which have a brief description of the document, have been retained. In English, Russian and French.
- Content: For an early description of the collection see the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, vol. 25, no. 2 (1921), p. 71-80. The album of "Portraits of Russian political exiles and convicts" referred to therein is now located in the Library's Slavic and Baltic Division under that title. Images are available online via NYPL Digital Gallery as part of the collection "Russia and Eastern Europe in Rare Photographs, 1860-1945."
- Acquisition: Donated by George Kennan, 1920; George Frost Kennan, 1988-1990; and purchases, 1945-1987.
- Content: Processing information: Processed by Laura Ruttum.
- Physical Description
- Extent: 3 linear feet (7 boxes)
- Type of Resource
- Text
- Still image
- Cartographic
- Identifiers
- NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b11904008
- MSS Unit ID: 1630
- Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): 9d3b9b90-57a9-013a-3243-0242ac110002