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Maxwell Hicks Savelle, historian and professor, taught at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1967. Born on January 8, 1896, in Mobile, Alabama, Savelle attended high school at Barton Academy in Mobile, graduating in 1912. He enlisted in the Navy in 1918, and after his discharge in 1919, attended Springfield College in Massachusetts. He then transferred to Columbia University, where he earned an A.B., an M.A. (1926), and a Ph.D.(1932). He worked as an instructor at Columbia University from 1926 to 1932 while researching and writing his doctoral thesis. Savelle began teaching at Stanford University in 1932, but left Stanford in 1947 to teach at the U.W. During his career, Savelle studied and taught abroad several times with the aid of fellowships. He also served as a visiting faculty member at different universities during summer sessions. In 1967, having reached mandatory retirement age, Savelle stopped teaching at the U.W. but remained involved with the University as Professor Emeritus and continued his career elsewhere. He worked as a research scholar at the Newberry Library from 1967 to 1968 and taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, from 1969-1974.

Savelle’s main areas of scholarship were American colonial and diplomatic history, and his studies included travels to other countries to study America’s early development and international relationships and to teach American history. He completed his doctoral dissertation while studying in Spain in 1930-31 on a Cutting traveling fellowship. In 1938-39, he took a sabbatical from Stanford when he was awarded another traveling fellowship by the Social Science Research Council. He traveled to Europe through Asia and spent several months conducting research primarily in France, but also in Spain, Germany and Great Britain. Savelle took a leave of absence from the U.W. in 1950 when he was awarded a Fulbright to conduct further research in France. The focus of Savelle’s studies in France was diplomatic history, especially of the Bourbons. In 1957, because of financial difficulties, Savelle declined a second Fulbright that was to help support a trip to the University of Chile to establish an American civilization program. During the 1960-61 academic year he again took leave from the U.W. to teach at the University of Madrid, Spain, as a Fulbright lecturer in American history. He did make a trip to Chile on a Fulbright, but not until 1963. In 1976, Savelle received the Ferra Award of the Americas from the Academy of American Franciscan History in recognition of his contributions to American and Latin American history.

Having spent time in Spain and having married a Spanish national, Carmen Zappino, in the summer of 1931, Savelle had a personal interest in the Spanish Civil War and was outspoken in support of the Republican cause. Savelle was in France when hostilities broke out in 1936, but his wife and son were in Spain. They were evacuated with assistance from Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

In the fall of 1955, Savelle and Professor Howard Lee Nostrand sued the U.W. Board of Regents and the State Attorney General’s office on grounds that a loyalty oath act, passed by the state legislature that year, was unconstitutional. The act required that state employees sign an oath of allegiance which included swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party or any other subversive organization. Subversive organizations were defined in part as those on a list kept by the U.S. Attorney General’s office. Savelle and Nostrand contended that the oath act violated the First, Fifth and 14th Amendments and Section Ten of the U.S. Constitution. Thurston County Superior Court, in which the suit was filed, responded by ordering a temporary restraining order preventing the U.W. from carrying out the terms of the oath act until its constitutionality could be determined. Judge Charles Wright, who had instituted the restraining order, found the act unconstitutional, but his decision was reversed on January 29, 1959, when the State Supreme Court determined that only the part of the act referring to the U.S. Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations was objectionable. Only that part of the act was thrown out by the court. On January 22, 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal by Savelle and Nostrand. They continued their opposition, however, and with reinforcement from more than 50 other U.W. employees, sought a permanent injunction by filing a class action suit in U.S. District Court on June 6, 1962. The suit was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.W. campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. In 1963 the court upheld the constitutionality of the oath act, but on June 1, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that both a state loyalty oath for university faculty established in 1931 and the 1955 act were unconstitutional.

In the 1970s, Savelle was involved in the “People Project: A New Birth of Freedom,” an effort by various Seattle civic groups and institutions to solve some of the social problems of the era. Savelle served on the Task Force of the Freedom of Speech and Religion and he helped to develop and administer a survey which attempted to determine the priority of various problems.

Textbooks written by Savelle on colonial American history and western civilization have been used across the United States. While he authored numerous historical works, some of his best-known are The Diplomatic History of the Canadian Boundary (1940); Seeds of Liberty (1948); A History of Colonial America, written with Darold Wax (1973); and Origins of American Diplomacy (1967).

Max Savelle died on August 12, 1979, after being ill for several months.