Robert G. L. Waite

Robert George Leeson Waite (February 18, 1919 – October 4, 1999) was an American Canadian historian, psychohistorian, and the Brown Professor of History (1949–1988) at Williams College who specialized in the Nazi movement, particularly Adolf Hitler.

Early life and undergraduate education Waite was born in Cartwright, Manitoba, on February 18, 1919. His father was a minister of the United Church of Canada. He grew up as a "preacher's kid," in the prairie towns of Manitoba and Minnesota. When describing his life, he captured the flavor of these small towns, adopting the cadence, regional expressions, and accents of the Scandinavian farmers and the families with whom he grew up.

In the fall of 1937, Waite entered Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the midst of the Great Depression. To supplement his scholarship and to earn whatever spending money he could, Waite held a variety of jobs, from working in the open pit mines of the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota to guarding the supposed corpse of John Wilkes Booth in a traveling carnival.

Depression and academic impact Waite's interest in psychohistory was influenced in part by his own experience during his first year of teaching at Williams College, where he suffered from depression—what he called "black despair." The young professor convinced himself he was a total failure and even submitted his resignation. Then the college president, James Phinney Baxter, refused to accept his resignation and personally arranged an appointment with a well-known psychiatrist. Waite took medical leave with the assurance that his job would be waiting for him.

His struggle with depression influenced his studies greatly, particularly when he began researching the psychohistorical profile of Adolf Hitler. He frequently told colleagues: "the career of Adolf Hitler raises questions that can be answered neither by psychology nor by history working alone."

Publications Vanguard of Nazism, 1918-1923, (Harvard U.P; Oxford U.P, 1952) Hitler and Nazi Germany, (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) Vanguard of Nazism: the Free Corps Movement in Post-war Germany, 1918-1923, (Harvard University Press, 1969) Juvenile Delinquency in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945, (State University of New York at Binghamton, 1980) The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, (Da Capo Press, 1993) Kaiser and Führer: A Comparative Study of Personality and Politics (University of Toronto Press 1998) Hitler, The Kaiser, and Me: An Academic's Procession, (R.G.L. Waite, 1999)