Huntington Cairns, born 100 years ago this year, helped build the literary and art worlds

Date published: 11/7/2004

WASHINGTON--In 1965, a gentle genius named Huntington Cairns left Washington for retirement on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. That same year, Congress established the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

There was poetic justice in this. For a quarter-century before his retirement, Cairns almost single-handedly had performed--one could say, had outperformed--the intended roles of the federal endowments.

This year marks the centennial of Cairns' birth. The son of a Scottish immigrant businessman in Baltimore, Cairns was an intellectual prodigy in high school, and his father arranged for him to meet the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken.

Young Cairns asked Mencken for advice on college. When the boy stated his interest in the legal profession, Mencken urged him to skip undergraduate liberal-arts studies and go directly to law school--not an uncommon step in those days.

Cairns graduated from the University of Maryland law school at the age of 20. He won first prize in his class for his thesis on a topic foretelling his career: the laws of charitable trusts.

While practicing law in Baltimore during the 1920s and early 1930s, Cairns became a self-taught scholar of the highest order in classics, philosophy, and literary criticism.

He wrote prolifically on these topics and began a magisterial three-volume study of the intellectual history of law. In 1934, Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau asked him to serve as a part-time special counsel to the Customs Service on enforcing laws banning importation of pornography. The classicist Cairns became the government's arbiter between obscene trash and artistic erotica.

In 1937, he moved to Washington to work full-time as assistant general counsel of the Treasury. While holding this post, Cairns helped popularize great books and ideas through a remarkable national radio program, "Invitation to Learning." Broadcast by CBS in 1940 and 1941, the program was a Socratic dialogue featuring Cairns, Allen Tate, and Mark Van Doren discussing a classic work of philosophy or literature each week.

Cairns' panoply of talents soon caught the attention of Paul Mellon, who was developing the National Gallery of Art bequeathed to the people of the United States by his late father, Andrew Mellon.

Date published: 11/7/2004