Despite the unchanged status of the PCB, by the end of the 1930s it looked as if western historians had achieved a substantial professional victory. A string of western presidents and other AHA officers had broken the grip of the East Coast Old Guard. The most optimistic historians in western universities could imagine themselves rising to the highest levels of professional prominence, if their professional achievements rose to the level of a Bolton, Paxson, or Thompson. The PCB was a different story. It simply did not figure into the calculus that determined who was and who was not important in the AHA. Argue though they might, PCB members could not change that. National recognition of PCb members came not from their association with the PCB, but flowed primarily from the importance of their scholarly work. Insofar as an institutional connection was important, one's university affiliation (whether as an alumnus or a professor) was most important. In the 1930s Berkeley had come into its own, not the PCB. Bolton had built the berkeley history department's reputation through his own work and by hiring two men who became AHA presidents.
While the western revolt festered, Bolton continued to push his ideas about hemispheric history. His work had attracted the attention of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who thought the professor might be useful to Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. In 1935 he gladly accepted Hull's invitation to serve on the National Committee to Cooperate with the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, while noting that four of the other men appointed to the committee “were trained in my seminar,” having earned the doctorate at the university of California.9
Such honors were regarded as routine matters in the Bolton household. Paul Johnson, Eugenie Bolton's fiance, happened to be at dinner the evening that Bolton received Hull's invitation. Johnson described Bolton's manner as “offhand greatness.” Presiding at the table, Bolton struck Johnson as “an electric sort of person, full of energy and idiot humor.” Bolton casually mentioned that he had “received an invitation from FR.” The children were “mildly interested,” and Gertrude merely murmured that it was “quite an honor.”10 Bolton thought he might go to the conference if President Sproul would fund the trip, but he did not. Consequently Bolton regretfully declined to attend.11
Bolton was happy to give optimistic speeches that fostered better U.S.—Latin American relations. His perspective on hemispheric history fit neatly with FDR's Good Neighbor Policy. In 1937 Secretary Hull appointed Bolton to the National Committee on the Columbus Memorial, to be erected in Santo Domingo. “Any gesture which emphasizes the unity of the history and interests of all the countries of the Western Hemisphere,” Bolton replied, “I consider desirable.”12
In 1938 Bolton's reputation and connections gave him the opportunity to see South America for the first time. He had been invited to attend the Seventh Pan American Conference, scheduled to meet that December in Lima, Peru. He wanted to go, but money was an issue. He explained the Lima conference situation to his former doctoral student Irving Leonard, who was on the Rockefeller Foundation staff. “If I knew where I could raise the money to cover expenses I should very much like to go”; this may be the shortest successful application for Rockefeller funds on record. A few weeks later the foundation provided $1,000 for the trip.13 At about the same time, President Sproul authorized $1,000 from university funds, so Bolton had enough money to attend the eighteen-day conference and to travel extensively afterward.14
On December 2 Bolton began the long journey to Lima aboard a Pan American airliner. The flight to Mexico City retraced some of the travels of his Spanish explorers. He picked out the trail of Eusebio Kino. “The whole map lay before me in one eye-full—a vast region which cost him months to traverse on horseback, and we…covered it all in an hour.”15 After a long day with many stops en route the airliner finally deposited Bolton in Mexico City, where he met with the Pan American Trade Committee. In the Mexican capital there was time for entertainment that included a bullfight after lunch and a fine dinner at El Patio, “a high-class night club” where Bolton “heard fine music, saw expert stunt dancing, and a most orderly, well dressed and civilized company of patrons, half of whom [were] wealthy.” The following morning Bolton met more Mexican dignitaries, including “several ex-presidents of the Republic and other worthies,” before flying on to Lima.16
Bolton had little specific to say about the Lima conference, although he was impressed with the people he met. Cordell Hull topped the list of U.S. officials who were in Lima, but once the formal program was concluded, Bolton traveled with Dr. Ben M. Cherrington, chief of the State Department's Division of Cultural Relations. They crisscrossed the Andes, visiting each of the southern republics. The two men liked each other and cultivated a friendship that served professional as well as personal purposes. Bolton promised to write Secretary Hull about Herrington's work on cultural relations between the U.S. and Latin America.17
He saw old friends as well as new ones. Irving Leonard was at the conference. In Buenos Aires he met Eddie Dunn, who was the U.S. commercial attache there. Perhaps it was Dunn who arranged for an article about Bolton in the Buenos Aires Herald18 Bolton parted company with Cherrington in Caracas and flew to Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Haiti, and Cuba, where he made short stops before flying on to Miami. In Los Angeles a freak snowstorm forced the plane to land “seventy- five miles outside the city. Sunny California!”19
As usual, when Bolton returned to Berkeley, he faced a mountain of unanswered correspondence that took him weeks to deal with. While he restored order to his desk—insofar as his desk was ever in an orderly state—the subject of Latin American relations was never far from his mind. President Sproul asked him to speak at UCLA on Pan American Day in mid-April.20 “Would a talk on the Lima Conference be suitable for the occasion?” he asked his former doctoral student, history professor John Walton Caughey. Indeed it was. While in Los Angeles Bolton had taken the opportunity to speak with UCLA faculty and a Rockefeller Foundation representative about Cherrington's plan to visit the Pacific Coast in the summer. Then, on July 6, he delivered an address on “cultural cooperation with Latin America” to the National Education Association meeting in San Francisco.21 Indeed, Bolton was willing to speak on this subject whenever called upon. The preeminent historian of the Spanish colonial frontier had become a spokesman for friendly relations among the American nations in the twentieth century.
Bolton's promotion of the Good Neighbor Policy was entirely consistent with his interests and thinking about Latin America. As far as he was concerned, the Roosevelt administration was promoting his hemispheric point of view. He had noticed, as he told historian Fulmer Mood, that Roosevelt had “adopted the phrase ‘the Americas,’ which will help the good work go on,” meaning Bolton's good work. He added that he had been “summoned to Washington by the State Department” for a conference in November.22 His service to the State Department convinced Bolton that his Americas concept was taking hold throughout the nation and at the highest levels. In fact, the Good Neighbor Policy did not spring from a careful reading of Bolton's work but from the evolving recognition that the united States should treat other American nations with tact and respect.23 In Bolton's view, however, the national and international recognition he received was evidence of the far-reaching impact of his ideas. He was not entirely wrong to believe this. As he informed the director of the Hispano-American Education Bureau in New York, his syllabus on the history of the Americas was “used in more than a hundred colleges from which I judge it has been well received.”24 By 1939 he was a towering figure in American letters and one of the leading academic voices in Latin American history. The Good Neighbor Policy and his minor role in it gave him reason to hope that the world was moving in his direction.
Bolton's trip to Washington in November convinced him that the future for Latin American specialists was wide open. When a prospective graduate student inquired about the prospects for the field, he replied that there was “just now a very definite increase of interest in Latin American affairs which I am confiden
t will result in the establishment of new courses and a broadening of programs for the study of Latin American history and allied subjects.” His experience in Washington convinced him that there would be “a call for fifty additional teachers of Latin American subjects.” “This may be too optimistic,” he added, but Bolton was an optimistic man. “Most men have to create a market for their services,” he counseled the inquiring student, but “the opportunities are unlimited.”25
Bolton's essential optimism made him popular with graduate students, but he could be deaf to less cheerful dissenting voices. When Bolton spoke at the State Department, a local reporter called him the “Boss Debunker.” While in the capital, Bolton indulged “in the pastime of debunking history,” the newsman wrote. Bolton went through his usual litany of criticisms, chiding historians for neglecting Latin America, calling George Washington a “father by adoption” in some parts of the united States because the Southwest owed “its independence not to Washington, but to…Mexican forefathers.” He went on to explain that the American Revolution lasted not for seven years, but for fifty, that Harvard was not the oldest college in the New World, and that all of the sixteenth-century colonial homes were in Latin America, not Boston, Jamestown, or Charleston. “It was the English who killed the Indians,” the journalist learned from Bolton; “Latin Americans treated them kindly and preserved them.” These secondhand statements are easily recognized as a truncated version of Bolton's “Greater America” essay. They did not have the desired effect on the reporter. “All this is very interesting, but it won't get anywhere,” he wrote with his tongue planted firmly in cheek. “We have been told too long all the things the professor says are wrong are right. We do not want to unlearn the facts that have been taught us.”26
The little article was a bit of a send-up, and Bolton no doubt thought it very funny, as it was intended to be. Accordingly, he saved the clip. Nevertheless, the unnamed writer used humor to make a point. Bolton's hemispheric perspective and his critique of “American” history did not go down as well on the East Coast as it did on the West Coast. Easterners had no need of it. Westerners could embrace a history that diminished Boston, New York, and Washington while elevating their comparatively ancient Spanish origins. Bostonians, New Yorkers, and Washingtonians felt otherwise. Nevertheless, Secretary Hull and Cherrington found in Bolton a useful academic voice that was happy to utter a positive hemispheric message. Bolton continued to speak on these themes for the rest of his life.
The southwestern borderlands were the geographical and intellectual foundation for Bolton's broad outlook on the history of the Americas. Accordingly he continued to work on the Spanish explorers whom he credited with discovering the region. In October 1939 Bolton explored the vast terrain covered by Fray Francisco Silvestre Velez de Escalante and his companions in 1776.27 The Escalante expedition traversed a great circular route from Santa Fe to the utah basin and back. Bolton was determined to see it all with several companions including his former doctoral student George P. Hammond (then a dean at the university of New Mexico) and Jesse Nussbaum, a National Park Service archaeologist. The twelve-hundred-mile trip passed through New Mexico, utah, and Arizona and ended at the Grand Canyon. Bolton and his friends then searched a remote part of the Navajo reservation for a purported Escalante inscription. Next, they followed the part of the Escalante trail accessible by automobile to the south rim of the Grand Canyon where they continued with horses and mules. Nussbaum reckoned that this was “the most difficult trip” he had “ever taken with saddle and pack animals in 35 years of exploration in remote parts of the Southwest.” The stock was without water for more than a day. Bolton and his companions had a little water but no food during that period. Bolton never complained. He slept in his tent with his glasses and a light on so that “he could pick up a manuscript and study during the night should he awaken.” In Nussbaum's opinion, Bolton was a “splendid and courageous companion.”28
If Nussbaum's description of Bolton's heroic trail riding seems a little overdone, it is perhaps because the letter was written to impress the reader with Bolton's vigor. Bolton had asked the archaeologist to send the letter to an insurance company so that it could ascertain whether Bolton was insurable.29 He was approaching his seventieth birthday. Insurers were more interested in actuarial tables than in testimonials. In a few years Bolton would declare that he was uninsurable because of heart trouble. His request of Nussbaum may have sprung from the first manifestations of health problems that developed not because of strenuous days on the trail, but from decades of sedentary living while enveloped in a cumulus cloud of cigarette smoke.
In 1939 Bolton had many years left to live, but only a matter of months before retiring from the university at the mandatory age of seventy, which Bolton would reach in July 1940. His looming retirement exposed three important questions for the university to answer. First, and most obviously, who would replace Bolton? He was by far the most important history professor on the faculty whether measured by public renown, professional reputation, publications, or graduate teaching. Who would—who could—replace him? The university would also have to appoint a new director of the Bancroft Library. Bolton's retirement inevitably opened the question of the future of the history department. Would it continue along the lines of the so-called California school, which was based on Bolton's hemispheric concept? Or would some new area of emphasis be found? There was no doubt in Bolton's mind about how that question should be answered. Cal should maintain its preeminence in the field he had pioneered. That conviction conditioned his solutions for the other problems.
Bolton had a great deal to say about the future of the Berkeley history department, but other opinions mattered, as the discussions about a replacement for the retiring James Westfall Thompson showed. Bolton proposed two candidates: Crane Brinton of Harvard and Robert J. Kerner, who was already a full professor of modern European history on the Berkeley faculty. Frederic Paxson thought that Brinton was “a clever historical essayist” but had not yet proved that he was worthy of the Ehrman chair. On the other hand, the appointment of Professor Kerner would release his salary so that additional new junior appointments could be made.30 Paxson also thought it important to reward people who had served the department well. Thus Paxson recommended his colleague, Bolton concurred, and Sproul turned the matter over to a university committee to make a recommendation.
Paxson's advice about hiring senior professors from the inside to reward performance and avoid morale problems would be echoed in the discussion of Bolton's replacement. Paxson's financial argument is also worth noting. By appointing Kerner, Sproul would have two salaries (a total of $i6,500)to divide among the new Ehrman chair and one, perhaps even two, junior appointments. Assistant professors of history at Berkeley were getting $3,000 per year or less. In other words Sproul could give Kerner (who had been making $6,500 per year) a $1,000 raise, hire two assistants at $3,000 each, and save $3,000 per year, which is apparently what Bolton recommended.31 This was the sort of arithmetic that shaped the future of the history department.
The recital of these prosaic budgetary details sheds some light on the accusation that Bolton refused to hire Jews for the Berkeley history department, an allegation still heard today. Part of the savings from Thompson's retirement was taken up by the one-year appointment of the medieval historian Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, a German Jew. Kantorowicz had immigrated to the united States after losing his professorship at the university of Frankfurt because he was a Jew.32 He was an assimilated Jew and a strong German nationalist with decidedly right-wing views. After World War I he had taken up arms against communists. Even his biography of Frederick II was meant to serve a nationalist agenda. Although Kantorowicz was an early critic of the National Socialists, he would later be accused of being a Nazi in all but his Jewish heritage. The Nazis certainly did not recognize him as someone fit to teach German youth, so like other Jewish faculty, he was forced out of his professorship.33
Kantorowicz's early work
was in some respects idiosyncratic, but he is now recognized as a major figure in medieval historiography. He would have been a fitting candidate for the Ehrman chair. There is no reason to think that he was considered as a replacement for Thompson, but Bolton asked Professor Ferdinand Schevill of the university of Chicago about Kantorowicz's fitness for a position at Berkeley. Schevill judged Kantorowicz as neither a “great scholar or a superior intellect,” concluding that “a less than major position in your university is quite compatible with his attainments.”34 Bolton forwarded Schevill's remarks to Sproul without comment.
The Chicago professor's comments about Kantorowicz's book were harsh but not unique. The Frederick biography had been published without footnotes and included a lot of mythology and folklore about the medieval emperor. Critics attacked his work accordingly. Kantorowicz subsequently published a volume of documentation intended to disarm his detractors, but it did not silence them.35 Despite Schevill's unsupportive assessment Bolton invited Kantorowicz to join the Berkeley history department as visiting professor of medieval history for the 1939—40 academic year. He assigned Kantorowicz the standard course load of two undergraduate courses and one graduate seminar per semester and allowed him to pick the topics for each course. Bolton promised the Jewish refugee “a friendly welcome by all the members of the History Department.”36 Whether Kantorowicz was hired because Sproul insisted over Bolton's objection remains an open question.
If Bolton objected to Kantorowicz, anti-Semitism would not have been his only motive. Bolton was a critic of the German system of higher education. World War I propaganda had probably hardened his views. In 1920 he had observed that “among older university men” there was a “strong predilection toward” German university training. However, “it had become generally recognized that…American university degrees stood for much more than German degrees.”37 In the same year he answered “No” to four questions asking his opinion about the proposed establishment of a federal Department of Education. At the foot of the questionnaire he scrawled “Keep Federal hands off! Don't Prussianize education. ”38 Bolton may well have objected to Kantorowicz because of his German training.
Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Page 31
