Rhodes Scholar (1905) Bernadotte E. Schmitt received the BA degree from UT in 1904 at age 18. As a Rhodes Scholar, he attended Merton College at Oxford, where he received an Oxonian BA in 1908 and an MA in 1913. He received the PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1910. He had a distinguished teaching career, primarily at Western Reserve University (1910–25) and the University of Chicago (1925–46) as the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Professor of Modern History. He served as a visiting lecturer in a number of US and international universities, including UT, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, and the Institute for Graduate Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
The book for which he won the Pulitzer, The Coming of the War: 1914, appeared in the midst of a growing debate over the origins of World War I. Schmitt held Germany culpable. Other historians challenged Smith, and the controversy produced many scholarly monographs. The book, 10 years in the writing, won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association in 1930 and the Pulitzer in 1931. He edited the Journal of Modern History from 1929 to 1946 and, working for the US Department of State, served as United States Editor of Documents and German Foreign Policy 1918–45, the tripartite project of the British, French, and US governments for publishing the archives of the German Foreign Office captured in March–April 1945. He retired from the Department of State in 1952.
He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as president of the American Historical Society in 1960 and received honorary doctorates from Pomona and Western Reserve during the year. He was also a fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
In 1971 his wife established a $50,000 endowment to provide funds for three History Department undergraduate scholarships annually and for the Bernadotte Schmitt Graduate Research Award. A Chair of Excellence was established in the UT History Department in his name in 1988. He is a member of the Alumni Academic Hall of Fame.