Bolton likely knew about the sensational work of McWilliams. He certainly knew about his colleague Cook, who may have made copies of documents from the Mexican archives for Bolton.61 Bolton coedited Ibero-Americana with Carl Sauer and Alfred Kroeber when Cook's essays were published in the series. Cook's work in historical demography may not have struck Bolton as being especially novel. Early in Bolton's career he had recognized the undeniable fact that Indian demographic decline had been a lamentable result of Spanish conquest. Describing early-sixteenth-century events in the Caribbean, Bolton observed in 1922 that “in a very short time the islands became nearly depopulated of natives.” War, violence, and starvation were contributing causes, but “perhaps a greater number died of smallpox, measles, and other diseases brought from Europe.” Consequently, Bolton noted, the native population of the island of Española declined from about 250,000 to an estimated 14,000, nearly a 95 percent decrease, with similar reductions on other islands.62 Thus Bolton's sketch of the Spanish Caribbean prefigured Cook's thesis for demographic decline in California. Even the raw numbers were similar, except that the decline during the California mission era was not as drastic as the one Bolton had described for the Caribbean.63
Bolton never directly addressed this issue of California Indian population decline in print, and it is not known if he testified about it before the ecclesiastical court. However, his writings suggest that he would have argued that mortality from disease was unavoidable, that missionaries did what they could to treat the victims, and that Serra's intentions were good. He might well have added, as he did in his 1917 mission essay, that the Spanish missions were far preferable to the Anglo system of removal, reservations, and near-destruction.
Such ideas seemed humane and progressive before World War II, especially if the object was to valorize Hispanic-American Catholic history. However, Bolton's view of history would have less influence in the postwar era. The Holocaust had shocked Americans and caused some of them to reassess racial and ethnic prejudices. African Americans struggled for equality and were making gains, especially in the realm of higher education. American Indians were beginning the long march toward tribal sovereignty, a trek that included a radical reassessment of the meaning of Native American history. Throughout the world colonialism was on its last legs. Cook's work was in keeping with these developments. The “good intentions”—“it could have been worse” defense of the missions would find diminishing support among historians. After the war Bolton's views about missions seemed a mere apology for a destructive colonial enterprise.
The impact of the missions on Indians, Serra's still-unconsummated canonization, and Bolton's role in the Serra Cause continue to be matters of debate. The Vatican considered the Serra Cause with due deliberation. Thirty-six years after the court met in California, Pope John Paul II declared Serra to be venerable, the first of three steps to sainthood. In 1988 the pope beatified Serra, the second step. Then John Paul visited the United States, scheduling a stop at Serra's former mission in Carmel. In the United States the pope found substantial organized opposition to Serra. Protests by Indians and their supporters may have caused him to think again about the wisdom of sanctifying Father Serra, whose canonization remains on hold.64
The reaction against the Serra Cause lay in the future and would not affect Bolton when he was alive. Yet the evolution of the controversy clearly shows that in 1948 the earth was turning and that it was moving away from Bolton.
S I X T E E N · The Emperor Departs
Bolton's world was changing. He was still a revered figure on campus but no longer had the clout that he had possessed before he retired. The university itself had been transformed by the war and its aftermath. Bolton's students taught his old courses, but the Bolton school was no longer the undeniable center of gravity in the history department. All these changes were plainly evident to the elderly gentleman who daily lunched at the history department's table in the Faculty Club.
More changes were on the way. In the spring of 1949 the University of California Board of Regents passed a resolution that would traumatize the faculty and have lasting effects: the loyalty oath. Because he was retired, Bolton was only indirectly affected, but his colleagues and students would be at the very heart of the storm.
The political climate in California reflected the concerns of the Cold War.1 Many Californians feared that communists were plotting to overthrow the government. The sensational trials of Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, and others convinced many that there were reds in high places who should be rooted out. A California state legislator submitted several anticommunist bills including a constitutional amendment that would have stripped the regents of power to determine the loyalty of University employees. All of these bills failed, but they illustrated the tenor of the times in California and throughout the country. University professors became the special targets of red-baiters. Just before the loyalty dispute at Cal, two communist professors were fired by the Board of Regents of the University of Washington, where Bolton's brother Frederick was professor emeritus. At UCLA there was a controversy over whether to allow one of the fired Washington professors to speak on campus; permission was denied.
The developing crisis over communism was a particularly difficult one for President Sproul because it involved UCLA. As Clark Kerr (Sproul's successor) later said, “You can't understand the oath controversy without understanding the fact that there was already conflict between Sproul and the southern regents in general.”2 Believing that Sproul was too powerful and that the southern campuses (which by then included Santa Barbara and Riverside) did not get their fair share of state funding, the Southern California regents wanted to decentralize the administration of the University. Sproul opposed decentralization. Edward Dickson, as the longest-serving member and chairman of the board, was the most important southern regent. He had been instrumental in establishing UCLA and took a strong interest in whatever happened there.
The faculty response to the barring of communists from campus was temperate. The University of California had forbidden the hiring of communists since 1940. The faculty did not object. Likewise, for some time the University had required faculty and other employees to sign the oath of allegiance that all state employees signed as a condition of employment. Again, the faculty did not object. Sproul believed that professors would not balk at signing a stronger anticommunist oath that he believed would mollify southern regents and smooth the path of University appropriations in Sacramento.
When the regents met on the Santa Barbara campus in the spring of 1949, communism on campus was not on the official agenda but was a hot topic of informal conversation. Chairman Dickson was especially keen on barring communists from the University. He even called the board into executive session to discuss the subject. The concern of Dickson and other regents no doubt encouraged Sproul to submit an amendment to the standard state oath that Cal employees routinely signed. As amended, the oath affirmed: “I do not believe in, and I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”
In the discussion that followed, Dickson was evidently the first to suggest that anyone who failed to sign the revised oath could be fired. He explained to the regents that the Los Angeles City Council had recently adopted a loyalty oath for city employees. “We had three members who refused to take the oath,” he said, “and they were discharged immediately.”3 At that point no one expected a faculty revolt because of a revised loyalty oath, but Dickson's statement foreshadowed things to come.
Faculty concern about the new language developed as soon as they learned about it. Because the oath seemed to be associated with pending annual employment contracts, the faculty believed that signing the oath was a condition of employment that would have to be signed every year. In June the northern section of the Academic Senate met in Berkeley (UCLA and other southern campuses had their own section
) and agreed to work with the regents in order to make satisfactory changes to the oath. Only a minority of the faculty present opposed the new oath on broad principles. One of them was Ernst Kantorowicz, who by then was a tenured professor of history. The Jewish refugee who had fought communists in Germany read a statement to the meeting that condemned the new oath. He had made a study of oaths, he said, and declared that while the present one appeared to be harmless, “all oaths in history that I know of, have undergone changes. A new word is added. A short phrase, seemingly insignificant, will be smuggled in.” Recent history was a guide, he continued. “Mussolini Italy of 1931, Hitler Germany of 1933 are terrifying warning examples for the harmless bit-by-bit procedure in connection with politically enforced oaths.” History demonstrated that it was unwise to yield “to momentary hysteria, or to jeopardize, for the sake of temporary temporal advantages the permanent external values.” The regents were bullying the innocent professor to relinquish tenure or “his human dignity and his responsible sovereignty as a scholar.”4 These were soaring words, but few professors thought that the oath was more than a meaningless and disagreeable technicality, something to be signed and forgotten. They were wrong.
A complicated series of negotiations ensued between Sproul, the Academic Senate, and the regents. Eventually, each party felt that the others had acted in bad faith. The positions of the faculty and the regents hardened. In February 1950 the regents required that all University employees sign the oath as written in 1949 or, in lieu of the oath, sign an explicit affirmation that he or she was not a communist. Otherwise, nonsigning faculty would be fired on June 30, 1950. Professors believed that among state employees they were being unfairly singled out, because they alone were required to swear that they were not communists.
By this time everyone understood that the University was embroiled in a major controversy. “The situation here is approaching the proportions of a dangerous whirlwind,” Dickson wrote Regent Sidney Ehrman, who was considered to be a voice of moderation. “Every civic and patriotic organization—such as the American Legion, the Parent-Teachers’ Association, the Native Sons,…Knights of Columbus, Pro America, etc.” supported the regents, and were “organized into a joint committee for decisive action” if the regents rescinded the oath. Dickson characterized faculty objections to the oath on principle as “the ugly utterances of those who seek to conceal their un-American views under the cloak of academic freedom.” About one-eighth of the faculty had not yet signed the oath. “How many of them are Communists affiliated with subversive groups?” he wondered. “Somehow or other we must identify this unidentified minority.”5 The witch hunt was on.
Nonsigners who came within reach of Dickson were in for a hard time. He confronted Clark Kerr after he had publicly opposed the oath. “Dickson actually grabbed me by the coat lapels and shook me a bit, wanting to know why I would do a thing like that.” Kerr explained that he was a member of the Society of Friends, which objected to oaths on religious grounds. He added that he had a right to speak as a private citizen and that his position was the same as Governor Earl Warren's.6
For a brief period a compromise seemed to give nonsigners the option of presenting their cases to the faculty Committee on Privilege and Tenure. If the committee found that they were free of communist taint, the regents would employ them. But after several faculty successfully went through this process, the regents reneged on the agreement by a one-vote margin (with the help of Dickson's tiebreaking vote), thus plunging the faculty and regents into a hopeless morass of fear and mistrust. The regents fired thirty-one nonsigning faculty, including Kantorowicz and John Caughey, who had been among the most determined antioath professors. The legislature attempted to solve the problem by requiring all state employees to sign a new oath that included a statement about membership in subversive organizations. It was hoped that this would eliminate the faculty complaint that they were special targets. But the state oath included new wording about whether signers had belonged to the communist party in the past. Faculty objections were stronger than ever. The parties went to court.
The University of California loyalty oath controversy absorbed the attention of the faculty, administration, and regents to the exclusion of almost everything else. George Stewart, professor of English, described the atmosphere at Berkeley: “We woke up, and there was the oath with us in the delusive bright cheeriness of the morning. ‘Oath’ read the headline in the newspaper, and it put a bitter taste into the breakfast coffee. We discussed the oath during lunch at the Faculty Club. And what else was there for subject matter at the dinner table?”7
The oath controversy quickly became a cause celebre in academic circles throughout the nation. The AHA passed a resolution (thought by some members to be rather tepid) that emphasized the abrogation of tenure while ignoring the question of oaths. The Mississippi Valley Historical Association named a committee to draft a resolution about the Cal situation and appointed Professor Ray Allen Billington of Northwestern University to chair it. Billington queried Cal professors, including Caughey and Philip Powell, who was on the Cal faculty at Santa Barbara. Powell, a student of Priestley and Bolton who had served in the State Department and in the OSS during the war, was a very conservative man.8 While he supported efforts to uphold tenure, he thought the question of oaths “a little more vague and the hardest one to get across to the general public.” “The whole thing stinks,” he concluded, “so I just keep away from it. There has been exaggeration and hysteria on both sides, so as friend [Dean] Acheson would put it, I'll just wait and let the dust settle.”9 Conservative or not, Powell probably reflected the attitudes of most Cal professors.
Even though Caughey had lost his job, he stuck to his ideals. He had received a Rockefeller Foundation grant that funded work at the Huntington Library for several months, but this would not keep the wolf from the door forever.10 Caughey believed that the regents were imposing political conformity on the faculty. He hoped that the Billington committee's resolution would uphold academic freedom and condemn “thought control.” Billington crafted a resolution that demanded the restoration of tenure and that forthrightly condemned oaths as a threat to academic freedom and a violation of American traditions of freedom and democracy.11
Well-intended resolutions had no effect on the regents or the courts. The state supreme court eventually decided that the state had the right to require the oath of its employees. The fired faculty were given the opportunity to reclaim their jobs if they signed the oath. Most of them did. John Caughey was one of them; it must have been a bitter moment for him. Ernst Kantorowicz did not sign. He accepted a position at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, where he ended his days with the likes of Albert Einstein.
Bolton did not mention the oath in his correspondence, but it was impossible for him to escape discussions about the episode. He had an office at the University and lunched daily at the Faculty Club. Colleagues in the history department were actively engaged in the dispute, especially Kantorowicz and John Hicks.12 Bolton's students on the Berkeley faculty, Lawrence Kinnaird, Engel Sluiter, James King, Woodrow Borah, and George Hammond, were at risk if they did not sign. And Caughey, Bolton's student and coeditor, became one of the loyalty oath martyrs. It is safe to suppose that Bolton would have signed the oath if he had been required to do so. He probably would have advised Caughey and the others to sign it if they had asked him. Bolton's point of view likely mirrored Powell's. It would blow over if everyone would just stay calm. But the Cold War had turned hot in Korea and few cool heads could be found. The scurrilous charges of U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy added fuel to the fire.13
The Native Sons of the Golden West were not immune to the hysteria that surrounded them. Bolton continued to be a liaison between the University and the Native Sons, who provided fellowships to Cal's history graduate students. L. Mario Giannini, president of the Bank of America, was a prominent member of the Native Sons and a member of the Board of Regents, as his late father had been, Amadeo
Peter Giannini, the bank's founder. Mario Giannini, a staunch anticommunist, took a managerial view of the oath controversy: the inmates should not be allowed to run the asylum. Thus the regents’ decrees must be upheld. When the regents voted to permit the faculty Committee on Privilege and Tenure to hear the cases of nonsigners (a procedure that the regents subsequently revoked), Giannini was the only regent who voted no and resigned in protest. “If the original loyalty oath were rescinded,” he told the board, “the flag would fly in the Kremlin.”14 The Sons passed a resolution “commending Regent Gianinni [sic] for his stand and urging him to reconsider his resignation.” So, when Peter Conmy, past grand president of the Native Sons, informed Bolton that for the first time since 1913 the Sons would not fund a history fellow, he cited the loyalty oath. The Native Sons believed that state University professors gave “a poor patriotic example to the state.”15
Conmy enumerated three additional reasons for withdrawing funds. The Sons felt that the organization did not get sufficient publicity for its donations. Conmy was convinced that the University did not treat undergraduates well, because classes were overcrowded and professors were more concerned with research than teaching. Then he confessed that there was a personal reason for his objection to continuing the fellowship. Conmy believed that Cal had denied him a professorship in the history of education because he was a Roman Catholic. He went on to claim that there were no Catholic faculty in any important public University schools of education anywhere in the country. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he stood shoulder to shoulder with Catholics who suffered for their faith in communist countries, although he admitted that his sacrifice was “insignificant” compared “with the price paid behind the iron curtain.”16
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