“Memory,” said the aging abolitionist, “was given to man for some wise purpose. In 1884 Frederick Douglass wrote this reflection on why the past and our memory matters. For now, we wanted everyone in our GLC network to know of Dick’s passing and something of why it matters. Much more can and will be said about Dick’s legacy around Yale and beyond. He was a history major at Yale.Īs long as our Center exists, we will remember and honor Dick Gilder’s commitment to us and repay it with our devotion to our craft, to our colleagues across the globe, to our students, and to the public education he has helped us foster. He set in motion an institutional means by which to cross all manner of political, economic, racial, and ethnic boundaries in grasping the meaning of the past.
He trusted historians, expertise, research, and the great arts of teaching. He put his confidence and his resources behind the effort to create knowledge about human exploitation and to spread that knowledge around the world. He wanted Americans and people everywhere to face the past however it shapes us. In his support for the study of slavery, its abolition, and its legacies across time and all borders Dick never blinked in his openness to understanding this terrible but so instructive story about human nature and human affairs. The Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History (the most ambitious and successful private philanthropic support for the teaching of history in the United States), the Central Park Conservancy, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of Natural History, and numerous other institutions in New York and in the wider world have benefitted from Dick’s curiosity, passion, and sheer joy in civic commitment. Dick’s impact with philanthropy has left indelible marks beyond Yale, as well. Those were rare moments of empathy and understanding in the lives of literary and academic professionals joining in appreciation of the love of books with a titan of the stock market, a world most of us never saw.Īt Yale, Dick’s mark of generosity is almost immeasurable, from the rowing teams’ boat house, to the drama school, to science programs, to the class of 1954 endowed chairs, to the beloved and beautiful nave of Sterling Library. The scholars and writers around that table, I think, relished the sense of a businessman’s deep admiration and grasp of our craft. Dick attended those gatherings and in the early years of my tenure as director of the GLC he would very much weigh in with his thoughts on each book. For many years we met for the jury’s final deliberations to determine each year’s winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize in the seminar room of the firm, overlooking Central Park to the north, in mid-town Manhattan. As late as four years ago he still worked from a desk among colleagues in the middle of that firm’s traders and investors. In 1968 Dick founded the brokerage firm, Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co. Thousands of people have attended our conferences, hundreds have held our fellowships, countless teachers have participated in our seminars, and dozens of scholars have engaged with or, indeed, won our Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which Dick and Lew created.
Dick’s generosity has in great part sustained the Center for nearly twenty-two years. According to a friend, Dick enjoyed a good final day: he played a board game with a friend, smoked two cigars, had a good scotch, and passed peacefully with no pain.Īt the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale, we mourn our founder who, along with his dear friend in philanthropy and partner in their love of history, Lewis Lehrman, and in close association with the late David Brion Davis, the world’s leading historian of slavery, created this unique institute in 1998. He and his wife, Lois Chiles, had been living in recent months in Charlottesville, Virginia. Above all Dick was a great New Yorker, an extraordinary and generous Yale University graduate, class of 1954, and a visionary citizen and lover of the history of his country, its flaws and its triumphs.
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