S E V E N · Teachers and Students—
Worlds Apart
When Bolton took over the Berkeley history department, he was in the midst of a period of writing that began with Athanase de Mézières in 1914 and culminated in the publication of The Spanish Borderlands in 1921. During this highly productive time Bolton solidified his position as the preeminent historian in his field while developing hemispheric history as an undergraduate course that extended his thinking about borderlands and American history. He did these things amidst the multitasking environment of the department, the Bancroft Library, the university, and graduate mentorship.
“There was but one Stephens and no one can ever fill his place,” Bolton wrote to Turner.1 Nevertheless, President Wheeler gave Bolton a temporary appointment as department chair. As far as the history faculty were concerned, there was no question about who should get the position. The entire department had asked him to serve permanently. Bolton claimed that he did not care if he got the chairmanship, “because my position will continue to be the most important in the department, as it has always been.” Bolton had good reasons for believing that he was the top dog. With Teggart gone, he controlled the Bancroft and had the most graduate students. Eleven of the fourteen Berkeley history PhDs had studied under Bolton since 1911, and he had more MA students than the rest of the department put together. He was also chairman of the university board of research and of the editorial board of the university press, which published the monographic studies of the faculty as well as some graduate theses. He also served as coeditor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and as advisory editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review. He claimed that his position was “the most important (in history) west of Chicago or even Columbia,” a calculation that placed Turner just east of the meridian of demarcation. It did not matter who became the administrative head of the Berkeley department. “It is productive work and graduate students that count most, and here at California this tendency will be fostered more and more.”2
Bolton, now forty-nine years old, considered himself one of the top history professors in the country. Given the standards that he used—active research, publications, training of graduates, influence in the university and the profession—it was hard to argue with his logic. Bolton perhaps overstated his national reputation, but his judgment about who ran things in Berkeley was undoubtedly correct. In August the regents made his appointment permanent. Now Bolton truly held the keys to the Bancroft and made it his personal research kingdom. As department head (or chairman) he appointed summer school teachers, recommended new faculty to the president, and controlled the history budget, curriculum, and faculty teaching assignments, not to mention the appointment and distribution of graduate assistants and fellowships. With only temporary interruptions for leaves he would head the department and direct the Bancroft until his retirement twenty-one years later.
Chairman Bolton immediately began to think about reorganizing the undergraduate history curriculum. During Stephens’s regime he had taught undergraduate courses on Spain in North America, the Southwest under Spain, and the history of the trans-Mississippi West, as well as graduate seminars in these subjects.3 Stephens had taught History 1, the popular broad survey of Europe that had been the freshman introduction to history. No one could match the verve and drama of Stephens’s presentations, so Bolton eliminated History 1 and substituted a more restricted European survey. He added a new, two-semester class that he would teach, History 8, “a lower division course of wide sweep, covering the ‘History of the Americas,’ from pole to pole and from Columbus to now.” History 8 would be “an entirely new venture in the country and in the world,” he explained to Fred. “I shall probably have 300 students in it.”4
The History of the Americas became Bolton’s signature course at Berkeley. He had been thinking about it for a while, even proposed it when he considered moving to the University of Chicago. It was a logical outgrowth of his work on the borderlands, which required him to understand both sides of the border. Bolton subordinated national histories, including the history of the United States, to the general story of the Western Hemisphere—the same concept that Stephens had applied to Europe in History 1. At Berkeley national histories would be taught to upperclassmen after they had taken the basic hemispheric course. Bolton believed this idea made sense not only in California, with its Hispanic heritage, but also for every American university. It was a large, revisionist idea at the time, and Bolton thought his pedagogic rationale unassailable. His course was immediately popular at Berkeley. More than seven hundred students enrolled in the fall of 1919. The next semester, more than twelve hundred showed up in Wheeler Auditorium. There were not enough chairs for them. He continued to draw superenrollments for the rest of his career. It helped that the course was required for history majors until 1933, but its popularity extended across disciplinary boundaries. History 8 was a fundamental part of Cal students’ university education for decades. Scores of Berkeley doctoral students learned how to teach the course by watching and assisting the master in the classroom. Bolton’s History of the Americas was the core course that defined the California school of history, as it was commonly called, from 1919 through the end of World War II.5 Bolton continued to teach the history of the American West for upperclassmen. Priestley and Chapman taught courses on Mexico, Latin America, and California.
The outlook of the California school was hemispheric, but it looked out from California. This prospect pleased at least some university constituents—local patriots like Native Son Judge Davis—because it placed the Golden State on the world stage. Thus Bolton’s curricular administration yielded the bonus of enhanced local support. From a purely pedagogical perspective Bolton thought the curriculum offered fresh new insight into the history of the United States as well as the Americas; but some people thought that the California school simultaneously gave too much attention to Spanish America as well as California and regional concerns. Teggart had returned to Berkeley for a one-year appointment in 1921. His tenuous status did not keep him from attacking Bolton’s plan for history at the University of California. Much trouble had arisen, he argued, “owing to the conflict of interest between ‘History’ as a University study, and ‘History’ as a representative of local patriotisms.” The problem was that while thousands of students took history courses at Berkeley, they knew little about European history. “No one, I think,…would dream that any amount of ‘Spanish-American’ history would constitute a proper training in the subject known everywhere as ‘History.’”6 Teggart recommended the establishment of a local history unit separate from the history department that presumably would reemphasize Europe. Thus he would divide and diminish Bolton’s empire.
University administrators heard Teggart’s criticism and questioned Bolton’s ideas about history department staffing and curriculum.7 In the end Bolton had his way because the quantitative results were hard to argue with. In the early 1920s the University of California history department became the sixth-largest graduate program in the country behind Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.8 Nearly three-quarters of Cal students studied American history, most of them under Bolton. It was easy for him to demonstrate that his department was a success on every level and to discount critics like Teggart.
The placement of doctoral students in professorial chairs was one of the marks of Bolton’s growing professional power. His students were most successful in winning positions in the Southwest, as might be expected. They were especially popular at the University of Texas. Dunn, once he finished his degree at Columbia, took a position at Texas, where he had begun his studies with Bolton. Charles Cunningham, a Cal PhD, soon joined him. Cunningham was Teggart’s doctoral student, but they had a falling out. Consequently Cunningham asked Bolton to recommend him for teaching positions, which he did.9 A third Bolton student, Charles Wilson Hackett began teaching at Texas in 1919, but his unusual path to a Texas professorship revealed strains between teachers
and students who were all striving to achieve professional success.
Hackett had begun his studies with Bolton in Austin, followed him to Stanford, and finished at Berkeley. He wanted a job at Texas, but Cunningham got it. In 1918 Bolton urged Hackett to take a position at the University of New Mexico, so in September Hackett bundled his wife and infant daughter into his old car and headed for Albuquerque—a daunting automobile journey across deserts and mountains on unpaved roads. Charles Hackett’s first impression of Albuquerque and the university was decidedly negative. The worst thing was the prevalence of tubercular victims who lived in Albuquerque because of the climate’s supposed recuperative qualities. He begged Bolton to find him another place.10
Before Bolton could act, Hackett abruptly resigned and fled with his family to Texas.11 The department chair, Bolton’s old friend Eugene C. Barker, liked Hackett and thought he was a good teacher, but could not give him a permanent position, because Dunn and Cunningham were already there. The university was recovering from a political crisis. Governor James Ferguson had attempted to fire several faculty who were not to his liking, thus creating a national uproar over security of tenure.12 Ultimately the legislature impeached Ferguson and he was removed from office, but the episode thrust the university into a prolonged political fight that included considerations of faculty religious affiliation as well as their political leanings.13 Under the circumstances, Barker simply did not know if he would have funds to hire Hackett.14
So Hackett hung on as a temporary instructor, resenting Dunn and Cunningham, whose position he thought he should have had in the first place. His resentment boiled over in a letter to Bolton. He claimed that Cunningham and Dunn were disloyal to Bolton. Dunn looked upon Bolton as “hopelessly provincial” because he had not personally researched the Spanish archives. Dunn “tried to knife you,” Hackett claimed, in his recent review of Bolton’s Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, because Bolton had not used Spanish documents that had recently become available.15 Dunn’s antipathy toward Bolton had led him to support the hiring of Cunningham instead of Hackett in 1917. Cunningham believed that Bolton’s letter had landed him the job. “So as I see it your archenemy, Dunn, promoted a man who had no claim on the place, and you backed him at a time when I had no job.” What could other Texas students hope for “if I, a Texan, after working and coming up with the goods, have to be skuttled [sic] for a boob like Cunningham.” Meanwhile Dunn and Cunningham, who “hate you like a snake,” enjoyed the fruits provided by good tax-paying Texans like Hackett. He went on in this vein for twelve handwritten pages.16
Bolton, who must have been taken aback by Hackett’s vituperative letter, mildly replied that he had Hackett’s interest at heart.17 Of course, he could not tell him that Barker was keeping him informed of Hackett’s prospects at Texas.18 By January 1920 it was becoming clear that Dunn was going to leave the university for government or newspaper work. Cunningham too would leave the history department, so Hackett would finally get his chance for a permanent slot. “We will take care of Hackett in any…arrangement that we may finally make,” Barker promised Bolton. In the meantime Barker had to figure out how to keep Hackett and another new instructor, who was “worth more potentially to the department than Hackett.”19 The instructor’s name was Walter Prescott Webb, who would more than justify Barker’s faith in him.
Hackett’s claims about Dunn were not entirely a surprise to Bolton. Dunn, whose dissertation was on Spanish Texas, thought that he and Bolton were bound to become rivals in the field, but he had a plan to prevent this competition from becoming unfriendly. He suggested that he and Bolton divide the field between them and coauthor a documentary history of Spanish Texas. Such an arrangement would be fair to both parties, Dunn thought.20 Dunn’s letter must have come as a rude surprise to Bolton, who had done everything he could to help Dunn. Now his very junior protégé wanted to share Bolton’s glory. Bolton tactfully declined to divide the field.21 Dunn did not take the hint and continued to press Bolton on a cooperative project. Finally, Bolton agreed to work with Dunn, perhaps because he had thousands of documents from Seville that Bolton wanted for the Bancroft.22 Whatever the case may have been, the projected work never came to fruition, but Bolton got his documents.
The conflicts among Bolton and his graduate students were in themselves insignificant, but they illustrate the stresses of graduate study and graduate teaching and mentoring. Bolton had considered Dunn one of his most promising students and a good friend. Yet their relationship was inherently unequal. Bolton was the patriarch of a growing academic empire; Dunn, one of Bolton’s many minions. Just as Bolton dared to be regarded as Turner’s equal, Dunn wished to reconfigure his relationship with Bolton on a basis of equality. Mentor–graduate student relationships are often fraught with disparities of power, knowledge, ambition, and accomplishment. Such relationships can be ambivalent and volatile, as in the cases of Dunn, Cunningham, and Hackett.
The Turners and Boltons of the world were the great role models for graduate students. Ambitious students sought to match the accomplishments of their academic patriarchs. Dunn’s solution for the Oedipal dilemma was to share Bolton’s kingdom. His directness was extraordinary, but the problem that Dunn described was the common one. How does one break free and establish a professional identity that is not merely a function of one’s teacher? Given his relationship with Turner, this was an issue that Bolton must have understood implicitly. In the end he decided to patch things up with Dunn by agreeing in principal (however insincerely) to divide the kingdom by coauthoring a book with him. They did not write the book, but to the credit of both men, they restored their friendship, which lasted for the rest of Bolton’s long life.
Hackett and Bolton also remained friends, but in 1920 he was not the only graduate student of Bolton’s who was unhappy with his mentor. In 1920 Bolton published The Colonization of North America, 1492—1783 with his former student Thomas Maitland Marshall, who taught at Washington University in St. Louis.23 Although not intended as a complete text for History 8, it was organized along the lines of the Americas course. All the European colonizing nations were presented. British colonial and United States history was presented as one experience among many, although the Revolution turned out to be the crowning moment in the Bolton and Marshall volume. The collaborators disagreed over matters of style. Marshall preferred a “pleasing presentation” over excessive detail. Whatever literary shortcomings the coauthored book had, Marshall strongly believed, belonged entirely to Bolton. One of the first reviews knocked the book for its turgid style. “It is a bit nasty to say that I told you so,” Marshall wrote, “but such is the case.” They had planned a second volume on South America, but Marshall was not convinced that they should go ahead. “I am giving you the opportunity of severing the connection,” he explained. “Compromises are seldom satisfactory, as is shown by the criticisms of the first volume,” which were “along the very lines where we disagreed.” Aware that his letter had a disagreeable tone, Marshall closed by assuring Bolton that he “didn’t have cactus for breakfast.”24
On the whole the book was well received by reviewers, but placing the colonial history of the United States in the context of the multinational history of North America was new and unfamiliar. One of Bolton’s peers, Frederic Logan Paxson, who occupied Turner’s old chair at the University of Wisconsin, summed up the strengths and weaknesses of the book. “I think you are well within the truth in saying that the book gives a ‘shock to some old traditions,’ ” Paxson admitted to Bolton. While the book succeeded “admirably” in revealing United States history through a wide-angle lens that incorporated all of the European powers and their colonies, Paxson was not certain that it met the needs of college teachers. “You have created a new subject rather than elaborated a subject already taught in American universities.” Paxson doubted whether most universities would “teach the whole field of colonial history, interesting and valuable as it is.” He also worried that from the standpoint of
U.S. history “the thing we are driving at” would be “broadened and changed in its proportions.” As far as Paxson was concerned, the elaborate treatment of Latin America was “somewhat aside the mark.”25
Paxson’s reservations revealed the essential problems that many history professors had with Bolton’s Americas concept. The broad comparative courses that Bolton envisioned necessarily made the British colonies and the United States less central in the general scheme of things. Professors would have to retool by learning more about Spain, Portugal, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands. There was something vaguely subversive about insisting that the United States should be seen as one among many former European colonies. What was Paxson “driving at?” While he had trained under McMaster at Penn, Paxson was a thoroughgoing Turnerian. It was a large enough revision of American history to incorporate western states and territories in the national narrative. Adding Spain and all the rest was too much. It would be better to concentrate on the true engine of American development, free land and frontier institutions.26 Years later, when Bolton was considering adding Paxson to the Berkeley faculty, he would have done well to reread Paxson’s letter from 1920.
Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Page 17
