On September 19, 1919, the Academy hosted a conference of ten scholarly associations that resulted in the establishment of the American Council of Learned Societies. The purpose of the conference was to decide how American organizations could most effectively participate in the new Union Académique Internationale (International Union of Academies), a humanities research federation that had been founded in Paris earlier that year.
Professor Charles Homer Haskins of Harvard University, an Academy Member (1913), represented the United States at the first meeting of the UAI, along with Professor James T. Shotwell of Columbia University. Both men, along with the European representatives, felt strongly that American scholars should participate in the new organization, but at the time there was no single national group dedicated to the humanities as a whole. Instead, individual societies were devoted to separate fields within the humanities. The solution was to gather these existing societies into a centrally organized federation that would speak for the United States on the international stage.
On August 22, Theodore W. Richards and Harry W. Tyler of the American Academy and William Roscoe Thayer and Waldo G. Leland of the American Historical Society issued a joint invitation to thirteen scholarly societies. Twenty delegates from ten organizations met on September 19, 1919, at the Academy's building at 28 Newbury Street in Boston and, after a day of deliberation, established the American Council of Learned Societies Devoted to Humanistic Studies. Its stated mission was "the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of the humanities and social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of national societies dedicated to those studies."
Charles Haskins was elected the first chair of the executive committee. At a Stated Meeting on December 10, the Academy voted to "accept and ratify the covenant and constitution proposed and submitted for such a Council, thereby assuming a place as one of the constituent societies."
Sources
Letterbooks, vol. 18, pg. 55-59, 63. "Records of Meetings, 1919-1920," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 55, no. 10 (November 1920), pg. 483-503.
J. P. Chamberlain, "The International Union of Academies and the American Council of Learned Societies Devoted to Humanistic Studies," American Political Science Review, vol. XIV, no. 3 (August 1920).