Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands

by Albert L. Hurtado

  Stephens had granted Bolton control over the American part of Berkeley’s historical domain.9 The other Americanists included Assistant Professor Eugene I. McCormac, a Yale PhD who had already published his dissertation on Maryland’s indentured white servants. In years to come, his publication and teaching would range over the colonial and early-republic periods.10 Donald E. Smith, also an assistant professor with a new PhD, had evidently come with Stephens from Cornell in 1902. He was listed as the history department secretary and also as an assistant professor of geography. Before Bolton arrived, Smith completed his doctorate in history at Berkeley with work on the viceroyalty of New Spain.11 The third Americanist was Frederick J. Teggart, who taught Pacific Coast history as well as historical bibliography and historical theory. With the assistance of Smith Teggart published Spanish California documents from the Bancroft collections.12

  Outside the history department there was a collection of prominent faculty with interests in Bolton’s field. Although he was listed as a professor in Berkeley’s political science department, Bernard Moses was a noted historian of Spanish America.13 After earning the PhD at Heidelberg University, Moses joined the University of California faculty in 1876. At one time Moses had been head of the history department, but when he took a leave from 1900 to 1902 to serve on the U.S. Philippine Commission, Wheeler took the opportunity to bring in his friend Stephens to fill Moses’s place as head. When Moses returned to Berkeley, he moved into the political science department. Bolton recalled him as a “rather cold and austere” man whose teaching was more “intellectual than inspirational.” Still, Bolton credited Moses with calling attention to “the importance of Spain’s great work for the spread of European civilization in the western hemisphere,” and for teaching the first formal college course in Latin American history in the United States.14

  Political science professor David Prescott Barrows, though not a Latin Americanist by training, had interests in common with Bolton. A graduate of Pomona College, Barrows was awarded the PhD by the University of Chicago in 1897. From 1900 to 1907 he served as superintendent of schools in Manila and director of education for the Philippine Islands. Wheeler called him first to the school of education and later appointed him professor in the political science department. His experience with postcolonial Hispanic society in the Philippines and extensive travels in revolutionary Mexico gave Barrows and Bolton much to talk about.15

  Because of Bolton’s contributions to the Handbook of North American Indians, Alfred L. Kroeber, who headed the department of anthropology, recognized Bolton as a kindred spirit. A student of Franz Boaz, Kroeber received the first PhD in anthropology granted by Columbia University. At first he directed the university’s small museum in San Francisco (a job he detested), but by the time Bolton arrived, he had moved to the Berkeley campus. Working with native tribes of California, Kroeber would become one of the towering figures in the anthropology profession. Kroeber was soon inviting Bolton to participate in anthropological conferences, and they served together on numerous university committees as senior members of their respective departments.16 By chance, the famous Yahi Indian Ishi became a resident of the university museum during Bolton’s first semester at Berkeley. While not a part of the faculty or student body, Ishi became Kroeber’s friend and informant. The trip across the bay to the campus was one of Ishi’s favorite excursions. There is no evidence that he and Bolton ever met, but Ishi was a familiar figure on campus.17 He was one of the few people of color whom Bolton would have seen while strolling the Berkeley grounds.

  Bolton arrived in the midst of a great campus building boom. Construction of the Doe Library with its magnificent reading room and facilities to house the Bancroft Library was under way. Made possible by the bequest of Charles Franklin Doe, the new library would be Bolton’s professional home for nearly forty years. The university had many generous donors, but none were greater than Phoebe Apperson Hearst, heir to the mining fortune of her husband, Senator George Hearst. In 1896 she had provided funds for an international competition to draw an architectural plan for the university. “I have only one wish in this matter,” she wrote, “that the plans adopted should be worthy of the great University whose material home they are to provide for; that they should harmonize with…the beauty of the site…; and that they should redound to the glory of the State whose culture and civilization are to be nursed and developed at its University.”18 She would spend nearly $200,000 on the plan. Hearst funded women’s scholarships and built Hearst Hall, a women’s gymnasium and social center. She underwrote the construction of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (completed in 1907), supported the university museum and worldwide archaeological research, and had continuous influence on the university through her gifts and as a regent.

  The winner of the architectural competition was the French architect Emile Henri Bénard, who conceived a monumental plan that would have been impossibly expensive to construct. Architect John Galen Howard revised and built Bénard’s concept in a more economical form. The erection of landmark structures such as Doe Library, Wheeler Hall, and Sather Tower during Bolton’s first years at Berkeley marked the advancement of the Bénard-Howard plan.19

  When the university opened the Berkeley campus in 1873, the site appeared to be an open, gently rolling field with few large trees. Over the years redwoods, oaks, eucalyptus, and other trees were planted, giving the campus a heavily wooded appearance. The faculty built their clubhouse in Faculty Glade. Organized in 1901, the next year the Faculty Club opened the Great Hall, an impressive room that resembled a hunting lodge. The masculine character of the place was in keeping with the club’s membership, which was exclusively male even though there were a few women faculty at the university.

  Fourteen faculty, including Stephens, lived at the Faculty Club.20 At night, after the library closed, he sometimes recited his favorite lines from Rudyard Kipling from the window of his third-floor apartment:

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet

  Lest we forget, lest we forget!21

  He no doubt intended the performance to edify undergraduates who might be tempted to unwholesome activities.

  Student life was lively. A continuous round of formal, informal, and spontaneous doings for men and women students animated the Berkeley campus. Hazing of various sorts was ubiquitous among the men from the different classes. As one historian of the university put it, class hazing resulted in “a spirit of individualism and lawlessness” so severe that it became “continuous class hostility and warfare which partook of primitive and savage periods of life.” Some unrestrained students became “flagrant violators of statutory law” involved in “the destruction of property and the endangerment of life.”22 When students destroyed street car property in 1902, the public outcry finally roused President Wheeler to action. From that date Wheeler gave more responsibility to the student government, which gradually brought hazing and other abuses under better control.

  Sports were important, especially football. In 1898 San Francisco banker and mayor James D. Phelan offered sculptor Douglas Tilden’s life-sized bronze depiction of two football players to the team that won two out of three annual games between California and Stanford. Cal won the first two games and claimed the statue, placing it on a shady path near Strawberry Creek.23 Numerous sorority and fraternity houses surrounded the campus. Theta Delta Chi, Bolton’s old frat house, had a chapter at Berkeley and listed him as a faculty member of the fraternity.24 The fraternities and sororities observed the usual ethnic, racial, and religious prejudices against people of color, Jews, and Catholics.

  University enrollment was open to men and women without racial restrictions, but class pictures indicate that the general student body was decidedly white.25 Trying to identify race on the basis of nearly century-old black-and-white yearbook photographs and names is prone to error, yet a few observations are in order. Of 372 student pictures the class of 1911 included only one indisputable person of color, Nai Lamoon, probably a Thai man.
There might have been one Hispanic, Joseph Dias. There were no discernible African Americans, although the quality of the photographs does not reveal subtle skin tones. Nor can one pick out faces that are unambiguously of mixed racial descent. Names reveal four men and one woman who were perhaps Italian. There was a scattering of names that could be Jewish but might be German or Polish. On the basis of names and photographs the class of 1911 was overwhelmingly of northern European extraction. This demographic estimate, while lamentably incomplete, should not astonish anyone. Female enrollment is the only category in which the Cal student body showed a progressive tendency. More than 42 percent of the people shown in the class photographs were women.

  This was the relatively homogeneous group of undergraduates that Bolton found in 1911. He never said anything about the makeup of the undergraduate student body, but he paid much closer attention to the graduate students. He understood very well that it was his job to attract graduate students to the University of California. A large number of graduates already were built into the Cal system because all high school teachers were required to have a fifth year of college training beyond the bachelor’s degree. Bolton applauded this requirement but thought that these graduate students “would not amount to much for higher work,” although they would improve the quality of the state’s teaching force.26 At the end of his first year four women completed the master’s degree under his direction, the first of hundreds of his graduate students who would fill the teaching ranks in California’s primary and secondary schools. Training school teachers was a good thing, but Bolton (not to mention Wheeler and Stephens) aimed to train doctors. Accordingly, Bolton brought in doctoral students from Texas and Stanford. In 1909 he recruited Charles W. Hackett, a talented University of Texas undergraduate, for the Stanford graduate school.27 When Bolton moved to Cal, Hackett followed him, although he finished the master’s program at Stanford before moving across the bay.28 Thomas Maitland Marshall, a University of Michigan product, got his master’s degree with Bolton at Stanford and moved to Berkeley, where he became Bolton’s first PhD in 1914.

  Bolton picked up one student who was already enrolled in the doctoral program: Charles Edward Chapman, a native of New Hampshire with a bachelor’s degree from Tufts and a law degree from Harvard. Chapman was also an exceptional athlete who had played professional baseball and moonlighted as a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds. When Bolton moved to Berkeley, Chapman was working with Frederick Teggart.29 Although Chapman did not mention Teggart by name, he was the only plausible professor (other than Bolton) to direct a doctoral student in Spanish-American history. Evidently Chapman had been promised a position on the faculty if he completed his degree. For some reason Teggart had decided that Chapman should not get the doctorate. “At length one of my enemies…proposed to Professor Bolton that I should be failed in my examination, in order to keep me from getting an appointment in the Department.” Bolton carried this news to Chapman, who dumped Teggart for Bolton, duly completed his doctorate in 1915, and received a regular appointment as assistant professor of Hispanic-American and California history. He eventually published a guide to the archives of Spain similar to Bolton’s on Mexico.30 Needless to say, Chapman was an ardent admirer of Bolton.31 One may reasonably suppose that Teggart did not appreciate Bolton’s role in saving Chapman’s career.

  Among Bolton’s first group of doctoral students, none was more important to him than Herbert Ingram Priestley. A native of Michigan but raised in Southern California, Priestley had graduated from the University of Southern California in 1900. He had taught school in the Philippines from 1901 to 1907 before returning to his alma mater for the master’s degree.32 After a few years as supervising principal of the Corona city schools, east of Los Angeles, Priestley corresponded with Bolton about studying with him at Berkeley.33 In 1912 the university hired him as an assistant curator of the Bancroft, a post he continued to hold after completing his degree under Bolton in 1917. Students remembered him as the heart and soul of the Bancroft Library.34 As soon as he had the doctorate, Priestley was appointed assistant professor of Mexican history. With Chapman and Priestley Bolton shaped the American section of the history department in his own image.

  In his first ten years at Berkeley, fourteen graduate students earned the PhD under Bolton. It was just the beginning of a long parade of doctoral students whom Bolton hooded at commencement. He was close to these men, whom he called his “boys.” Sometimes he took them into his home as temporary boarders. The experiences of J. Fred Rippy, a Tennessean who arrived in Berkeley in 1917, suggest how involved Bolton was with his graduate students in that period. After finding an apartment that would accommodate himself, his wife, and mother-in-law, Rippy went to the Bancroft Library, where he met Bolton for the first time. “Have you found a place to live?” Bolton asked. When Rippy replied in the affirmative, Bolton was disappointed that he had not asked for Bolton’s help, but by chance, the Rippys had rented an apartment across the street from the Bolton family home on Scenic Avenue. Bolton told Rippy to call on Mrs. Bolton and his daughters. “They will be glad to help any way they can,” Bolton said. He was sincere. A few days later Bolton arrived on Rippy’s front porch at 7:30 A.M., asking if he was ready to go to campus. Rippy was ready, and Bolton was favorably impressed. Thereafter they briskly walked six blocks to campus each morning. Rippy had a hard time keeping up with Bolton on the street and in the library. When the student complained that he did not have enough time to do research, Bolton gave him a library key. “I often work in my office until eleven or twelve.” “Be careful,” he added, “or this might get us both into trouble.”35 Over the years Bolton provided many of his students with library keys.36 Of course, they loved him for it. They became coworkers in Bolton’s historical enterprise, working day and night in the Bancroft’s vast holdings. They also became coconspirators against petty bureaucratic rules imposed by the university, including those that Teggart made and enforced.

  Bolton’s nocturnal habits included chain-smoking cigarettes as a stimulant for late-night study. There is no record of when Bolton started smoking, but one of his children thought he took it up late in life. “He had a peculiar way of puffing that gave him away as a rank amature [sic],” his son recalled. “I doubt if he ever inhaled; his hands, though, were always tobacco stained.” Bolton may have started the habit in college, as many college students have done before and after Bolton’s time. Perhaps his “boys” introduced him to smoking as a relaxing social ritual. Whatever the case, Bolton was a confirmed smoker with a habit that many observers noticed. Lucky Strike was his brand. His customary welcome to office visitors was “Come in! Sit down! Have a Lucky?”37 That Bolton’s smoking was remarked on at all in an age when cigarettes were almost universally accepted suggests that his habit was pronounced. On the other hand, no one thought Bolton’s drinking habits out of the way. He was probably a social drinker, but evidently nothing more than that. Smoking supported decades of demanding study sessions that extended far into the night; heavy drinking likely would have made him less effective in the graveyard shift.

  Obsessive, nicotine-fueled late-night sessions were needed to complete the heavy publication schedule that Bolton had in mind. He prepared a report for President Wheeler, “Need for the Publication of a Comprehensive Body of Documents Relating to the History of Spanish Activities within the Present Limits of the United States.”38 John Francis Bannon, Bolton’s student and biographer, believed this to be Bolton’s earliest comprehensive statement describing the Spanish Borderlands project.39 Bolton proposed publishing twenty-five volumes, if the money could be found.

  During his first five years at Berkeley Bolton cleared his desk of old business from his Texas days. The first item was the long-delayed guide. “I have never had such luck with any manuscript,” Jameson apologized.40 Bolton adopted an ironic attitude. He told his brother that the Guide had “not yet appeared to damage my reputation. Blessed are the printers.”41 The Mexican Revolution ad
ded to the delays. In January 1913, just as the final preparations for printing the Guide were under way, Bolton learned that fighting in Mexico City may have damaged the government repositories. He feared the revolution might destroy the archives or force them to be relocated for safekeeping. Bolton had spent years making sense out of Mexico’s scattered documentary record for the Guide. The revolution might shuffle the deck again and make his painstakingly assembled Guide worthless for future research, a mere artifact of things as they had been before 1913. The building that housed the Secretaría de Gobernación, where Vice President Corral (now deposed) had given Bolton an office for three years, seemed to have suffered the most, but Bolton had little reliable information.42

  Jameson reckoned that “ordinary damage incident to street fighting” was not worth reporting on. He expected the conflict to continue for several years. “We could not keep up with events of that sort.” He suggested that Bolton ascertain damage to the archives through correspondence in order to prepare a short supplement if needed.43 In the end, there was no supplement, only a brief disclaimer about the inability to determine the extent of damage caused by “recent disturbances in Mexico.”44

  Bolton was also concerned about acknowledging the government officials in the defunct Díaz regime, but Jameson convinced him to thank the people who had assisted him, “as we usually do.”45 Thus Bolton acknowledged the “official courtesies” of Díaz, Corral, and many other officials and dignitaries of the ancien régime.46 Scholars on both sides of the border were grateful to Bolton for providing the most comprehensive handbook to Mexican archives in existence. The utility of the Guide has diminished with the passage of time, but even today it retains some usefulness.