Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands

by Albert L. Hurtado

  In 1943 Bolton thought that he had shored up Latin American history at Berkeley, but developments on the national scene undermined one of the cornerstones of Bolton's empire, his hemisphere-wide Americas course as the foundation for United States and other national histories. On April 4 the New York Times published a report on the results of a test on U.S. history given to college and high school students. Their ignorance was alarming, especially in the midst of a bloody war. If young men were marching off to die in some foreign land, they ought to at least know the history of their country and the ideals that they were fighting for, or so said critics of secondary and college curricula. The previous year AHA executive secretary Ford had established a committee on American history teaching at the college level. He wanted to get ahead of the “super-patriotic” forces whose “loose thinking and loud talking” about “what should be taught and how” might have some unfortunate influence because of war hysteria.61 The Times article spurred the AHA and other educational groups to action. The AHA, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and the National Council for the Social Studies formed a joint Committee on American History in the Schools and Colleges, while similar state and regional committees formed throughout the country.62

  The war hysteria that Ford feared was well represented by Richard Lloyd Jones, publisher of the Tulsa Tribune, who had been a Wisconsin student with Ford and Bolton.63 After reading Bernard DeVoto's call on the AHA to make citizens of college students in the July Harper's “Easy Chair” column, Jones wrote to his old friend Ford. “It has long been an editorial thesis and crusade of mine that education for citizenship has been neglected by our universities and colleges” where academic cynics “inspired contempt for the principles and practices of the founders of this Republic.” This was true, in Jones's estimation, in every state institution, including Ford's university of Minnesota. “You have too few Americans. You have Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, Finns, Germans who have come here to pluck the feathers out of the American goose and to remain foreigners.”

  Wisconsin was no better. Jones had gone to Wisconsin to work with Robert La Follette, only to become disenchanted when the “great progressive” named a state ticket based on ethnic considerations. After La Follette as leader of the Republican Party picked Swiss, German, and Polish candidates for state offices, Jones exploded. “Well for God's sake,” he said to La Follette, “is there an American to fill an office in Wisconsin and have you got any Americans who will cast an American vote?” “My strength is with the people who speak foreign languages,” the irritated La Follette replied, and that was the beginning of the end of Jones's relationship with him. Jones railed against the University of Wisconsin, on whose Board of Regents he served. Turner and Paxson were great teachers, Jones wrote, but they did not teach citizenship. Only Carl Fish measured up to Jones's patriotic standards. During World War I, Jones discovered that Wisconsin “was a German propaganda college” where courses in the German language were the only classes required of all undergraduate students.64 The publisher went on in this vein for more than five single-spaced typed pages.

  The U.S. Office of Education Wartime Commission, reacting perhaps to the sort of views that had been expressed in the Times, Harper's, and Jones's letter, asked for a series of reports “on how the content of college curriculum” could “be adjusted” to meet wartime exigencies. The University of Chicago responded with a report categorized by general fields: ancient and medieval history, modern Europe, the United States, the Far East, and Latin America. Professor Rippy was on the committee that wrote the report. The thoughtful section on the United States allowed that college surveys of U.S. history gave too little attention “to the hemispherical and world setting of our history,” a nod in the direction of the Americas for which Rippy may have been responsible. But the one-year survey that the Chicago report proposed contained none of the breadth that Bolton had been urging on the profession for more than thirty years. The outline of the colonial and early national period emphasized “English heritage.” Spain and Mexico were mentioned only in the context of U.S. expansion “at small cost.” The Chicago World's Fair was mentioned, but the Spanish-American War was not.65

  The section on Latin America, which Rippy presumably had much to do with, would have disappointed Bolton. It contained nothing about the hemispheric ideas Bolton had espoused. The report ignored the colonial era and emphasized themes of Latin American economic development fostered by the United States and Great Britain since independence. “Collaboration between Anglo-Saxons and the Latins of America must continue; it should be made to contribute to their mutual welfare and satisfaction,” this section concluded. The suggested readings included three titles by Rippy but nothing by Bolton.66

  In August California historians under the leadership of Edgar E. Robinson of Stanford University considered the American history curriculum. The meeting was attended by representatives from the University of California's Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, as well as other colleges and universities throughout the state. Junior college faculty held their own conference at Stanford a few months later. Robinson, who had studied under Turner, opened the conference with a keynote that explained the problem. Critics believed, with little reliable evidence at hand, that too little “American history” was being taught. There was not even any agreement on what American history was, Robinson noted, perhaps referring to Bolton's insistence that the term referred to the entire hemisphere, not just U.S. history. “Publicists,” as Robinson styled the critics, were “always saying ‘history teaches’ and again, ‘history repeats itself,’” nostrums that were generally believed, but these were not for Robinson. “Let the publicist on the radio and in the national magazines [call this] Americanism!” Historians knew better than to accept such easy generalizations, because of their detailed specialized studies, but Robinson observed that the history professorate could not go on teaching only specialized courses, or “history at random,” as he called it. “Unless we are freer than seems probable, we will be forced to define the subject matter as well as its value before many years more have passed by.”

  Then Turner's ghost spoke through Robinson. “The roots of American civilization lie deep in American geography, [in] our unusual history in building a nation where none existed, in wealth of man-power, in use of machines, and most of all in the liberation of the mind of man during the nineteenth century.” Robinson built to his conclusion. “American democracy is economic, social, and political, and our history for the first time in the annals of mankind reveals how man—a pugnacious animal at best—can live at peace and build for security and prosperity.” Historians could help. “Perhaps we ought to teach that story of Americanism, and…perhaps it would be well if colleges and universities made it a requirement for graduation.”67 Robinson's message to his colleagues was clear: if we do not establish a required survey of U.S. history, someone else—”publicists” perhaps—will do it for us.

  With the overwhelming influence of the university of California and so many of Bolton's students teaching in California colleges, one might have expected strong support for the Americas course as the basis for curricular adjustments. Such was not the case, however. The twenty-six-page summary of the two-day conference mentioned the Americas course only once in passing. None of the Berkeley faculty in attendance, which included Paxson and Hicks, as well as Lawrence Harper and Eugene I. McCormac, mentioned the Americas, pro or con. Bolton's student- professors in attendance, Cardinal Goodwin (Mills College), Charles B. Leonard (San Diego State), Peter Matsen Dunne (university of San Francisco), Theodore Treutlein (San Francisco State College), and Donald W. Rowland (university of Southern California), said nothing about the Americas course. Of Bolton's students only John Caughey suggested the history of the Western Hemisphere as a substitute for the U.S. history survey course under discussion. No one took up Caughey's suggestion.

  New voices were heard. “We have got to face the fact that history has suffered a good deal in public esteem,�
�� said Professor Hicks, adding that “we need to appeal over the heads of our students to their parents.” A young C. Vann Woodward (Scripps College) said, “We should make it plain that the humanities did not develop altogether in Europe or in Greece,” and referred to “American Civilization” in terms of the life of “the sections of the country and the peculiar regional and national situation.” Paxson, as chair of the Berkeley history department, worried over problems of staffing a required U.S. history survey, but he already knew the solution to that problem. Bolton and Henry Morse Stephens had lectured to hundreds, sometimes a thousand students, with graduate assistants helping in smaller sections. There was no mystery about how a new U.S. survey would be done at Berkeley. In the end the conference recommended that every college and university in California require students to take a one-year survey of U.S. history before graduation.68

  The near-silence concerning the Americas, Bolton's iconic course, was astonishing. Not only were the participants silent on that matter, but the discourse revealed that they consistently used the term “American history” to mean U.S. history. No one raised an objection, as Bolton surely would have if he had been there. It was as if the work of his lifetime of teaching, writing, lecturing, and cajoling anyone who would listen had been swept away in a moment. Had Bolton been at the conference, he might have changed the discourse, but he probably would not have changed the outcome of the meeting. Bolton quite suddenly was running against the historical tide.

  Bolton's influence on college curricula in California prior to 1943 should not be underestimated. The junior college teachers who met at Stanford in November included in their report an analysis of history courses taught in thirty of their institutions. Twenty-six of them offered the Americas.69 Nineteen of them offered the Americas and no courses on U.S. history. Only seven of the colleges offered courses in U.S. history. The junior college figures probably reflected the state of affairs at four-year institutions. Yet, like the university professors, the junior college history teachers in 1943 resolved that their institutions should henceforth require a course in U.S. history.70

  The Stanford meetings had a lasting effect in Berkeley and throughout California. Professor Hicks began to teach the new required one-year lower-division U.S. history survey, History 17. The course, which drew up to a thousand students, immediately influenced staffing requirements, which Paxson described to President Sproul in a projection of the department's ten-year needs in 1944. History 17, “long needed,” Paxson wrote, would be in even greater demand after the war. The Diplomatic History of the United States, which had been taught by Priestley, should be reinstated. “Every day it becomes more desirable” to increase offerings in U.S. history, Paxson reported. “The United States group badly needs permanent strengthening” by the hiring of an additional junior professor plus “additional recruiting” in the postwar era.71

  Hispanic-American history, “upon which much of the reputation of the Department” had been built, had suffered “crushing loss” because of death and retirement. Kinnaird (who was expected to return from his State Department assignment), Sluiter, and King would have to fill the gap, as it was “unlikely” that there would be “early need for additional strength in this field,” Paxson predicted. The university would “have to wait hopefully for these young men to gain prestige through their own performance.”72 Hicks became department chair a few years later, but he saw things exactly as his mentor had. “As a result of Bolton's emphasis on all the Americas,” he wrote, “Latin American history was about the only field in which we believed ourselves to be adequately staffed.”73

  Bolton's hemispheric course would continue to be taught at Berkeley and elsewhere, but it no longer had a privileged place in California's college curriculum. It would remain as an artifact of Bolton's attempt to revolutionize the teaching of American history and to place the United States in a broader context. As Bolton's students died and retired, the course would be dropped from college catalogs.74 Bolton's empire was in retreat.

  F I F T E E N · The Fading Pageant

  Bolton retired permanently in March 1944. His student and biographer John Francis Bannon believed that Bolton's return to the lecture hall had been an invigorating tonic.1 Perhaps, but it had also taken two precious years from the active retirement that Bolton had wished to fill with exploring and writing. Such time could never be reclaimed. While Bolton maintained that enthusiasm was the essential ingredient in successful teaching, his own performance may have become a bit stale.2 One student recalled that his wartime classes were filled with bored GIs who dozed in their seats. That many of them were awaiting overseas assignments may have accounted for their lack of interest in Bolton's timeworn lectures.3

  Two years of teaching and managing the Bancroft Library did not make Bolton younger, stronger, or healthier, but he kept up his strenuous schedule. Seven days a week he arrived on campus at 9 A.M., worked until noon, lunched at the faculty club, returned to the library, and went home to dinner just as he had always done. “I return to the university every night about 8 p.m., and go home at 11 or 12 p.m.,” he related. It was the same old Bolton, almost. Wartime rationing meant that Gertrude could not drive him to campus, so Bolton applied for a larger gasoline allotment. Otherwise, he would have to take the streetcar and walk a quarter- mile uphill to reach his home, which was “contrary to my physician's orders,” he explained. “I am uninsurable on the ground of what they call heart trouble.” He did not explain his symptoms, but high blood pressure and angina are likely guesses. Bolton probably would have been better off to have quit smoking and climbed the hill, but he got the enhanced “B” card and continued to work at his heroic pace, sedentary though it was.4

  The war had caused a shortage of cigarettes as well as fuel, but in Bolton's case, friends came to his aid. “Thank you for the Lucky Strikes and the matches,” he wrote a San Francisco donor. “I now can blow a smoke screen that will protect San Francisco from any Jap raid and build a fire big enough to burn their fleet to the water's edge if they come.” Another savior sent Bolton smokes from Albuquerque.5

  Heart trouble or no, Bolton gave every indication that he intended to pick up exactly where he left off in 1942.6 In the spring of 1944 he went to Palo Duro Canyon and the Big Bend country in Texas under the auspices of the National Park Service.7 The Palo Duro excursion helped him to nail down Coronado's route through Texas, although his projected book about the Spanish explorer was not finished. He continued to consult with Father Geiger on the long-delayed Serra Cause.8 His work on the Chronicles of California series continued apace. The State Department still wanted Bolton's services and invited him to give a course of lectures in Mexico City in 1945.9 He accepted.

  Bolton had one more chance to reinforce the faculty with a historian sympathetic to his view of history. Someone would have to take over as director of the Bancroft Library. Early in 1945 he began to recruit George Hammond for the job. Bolton and Hammond had been working closely on the Coronado project. Bolton had promised to publish his Coronado manuscript in a University of New Mexico Press series that Hammond edited. Bolton's manuscript was, as usual, long overdue, and Hammond was anxious to get it. He had already raised $1,000 in New Mexico for Bolton's uncompleted book.10

  In the fall Hammond agreed to join the Berkeley faculty and to head the Bancroft.11 A senior scholar with administrative experience and a strong record of publications in Spanish Borderlands history, Hammond was an excellent selection for the post. Bolton must have breathed a sigh of relief when Hammond arrived in Berkeley. Perhaps now his beleaguered empire was safe. The Bancroft was in good hands, but under Hammond's aegis the director's position would become a full-time administrative post. The age of kings who ran both the department and the library was over.

  While Bolton returned to his vigorous version of retirement, his friends arranged for new honors. They realized (even if Bolton did not) that at seventy-five the time for such recognition was limited. The University of Wisconsin conferred the Docto
r of Letters, an honorific especially dear to Bolton because it came from his alma mater.12 The occasion must have prompted memories of Madison in the 1890s, his teachers Turner and Haskins, and his fraternity brothers Ford and Becker. And perhaps he recalled that hopeful young man Herbert, the Wisconsin farm boy determined to rise and to make something of himself in the world. Well, he had done that, hadn't he?

  Several of his students prepared a second festschrift, with essays by Bolton's graduate students who had finished after 1932. The volume was meant to be completed in time for his first retirement in 1940, but the project was delayed until 1945. More than two-dozen essays by Bolton's last cadre of doctoral students make up Greater America, which was presented to Bolton at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco.13 The volume included a list of Bolton's graduate students and their publications that fills 123 pages, persuasive evidence of Bolton's influence as a teacher. Bolton's old friend and constant benefactor Sydney Ehrman helped to underwrite the book and presided over the gathering.14 More than two hundred people, including President Sproul, attended the event, which was covered in San Francisco newspapers.15

  With the end of the war, Bolton's students began to reemerge from government service. Woodrow Borah had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA). In 1946 he wrote Bolton a long letter summarizing his experiences. Borah had been in Europe with another of Bolton's doctors-cum—OSS agent, Albert B. Thomas. Borah set up OSS offices in Italy and Germany that scoured the archives for intelligence about Latin American relations with the Axis. Now Borah wanted to reenter academic life. Would Bolton help him?16

  By the late 1940s there was probably no chance that Bolton could muscle another of his students into the history department, but he still had friends in other parts of the university. He recommended Borah for a spot in the department of speech. Bolton described Borah as “one of the most brilliant and scholarly men we have had here in History.” He praised Borah's “great clarity of thought” and his “gift for forceful and cultured expression.” “Frankly,” Bolton noted, “I would prefer to see him in History.”17 In contrast to his 1940 letters, Bolton's recommendation mentioned nothing about Borah's Jewish background.