Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands
Page 38
When I was a child I spoke as a child. Now that I have become a man I have put away the things of a child. We see now through a mirror in an obscure manner, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I have been known.52
Afterword
The Debatable Legacy
In 1994 I gave a lecture at the Huntington Library about Bolton as a cultural mediator. Afterward, Wilbur Jacobs and I sat on the patio outside the snack bar. A prominent Turner and Parkman scholar, Wilbur was also one of the key academic figures in the establishment in the 1970s of the field of Native American history. Not incidentally, he had chaired my doctoral committee at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He regarded Bolton as an apologist for the Catholic missions, which had caused terrible damage to Indians. I tried to explain that Bolton's racial and ethnic views were complex and in some ways progressive. “He's just like Turner,” he replied. “Every time you think you have him on the side of the angels, he pops up somewhere else saying all the wrong things.”
I learned something important from Wilbur during that exchange. Bolton did not have late-twentieth-century sensibilities, and it was a mistake to try to demonstrate that he did. He was, of course, a man of his own time. Historians may strive for objectivity, but as Bolton's life demonstrates, they cannot completely escape from their own historical moment, their culture, or their own past. Even so, Bolton was more than a man of his own time. His life shows that a historian can challenge the world to broaden its outlook and take new meanings from history.
Bolton found a seam in American history where he could work among the religious and ethnic fissures of his time. He believed and taught that Spaniards contributed to human progress by extending Christianity and European civilization. Working in a time when eugenicists and the Ku Klux Klan preached racism and nativism, Bolton championed the merging of civilizations and cultures. He straddled the U.S. border with Mexico and adopted a transnational outlook that defied the common prejudices of his age.
Bolton's idea that cultures met and melded in the borderlands was important, but he only sketched the concept. What did it mean that cultures met and somehow fused? What did that say about American history in general? Surely it meant that Turner's moving frontier concept had to be modified somehow. On these matters Bolton was silent or maddeningly vague. He hinted that the Hispanic and Anglo experiences should be compared, but he did not do it. A rigorous comparison of North American frontiers would have required a reconsideration of some of Turner's ideas: the relationship of free land, individualism, democracy, and American exceptionalism, for example. In one sense Bolton's failure to provide such an analysis is not surprising. He preferred narrative drama to critical analysis. Nevertheless, Bolton's disinterest in making direct comparisons of the Spanish Borderlands and Turner's Anglo-American frontier remains perplexing because the need for comparisons seemed so obvious. Why did he not do it? Perhaps it is best to take him at his word: Bolton wrote that he was Turner's devoted disciple. He believed that somehow he was proving that the Master was correct. Perhaps it is just as well that Bolton left comparisons to others. His attempts at comparative history in “Greater America” dwelled on dubious similarities rather than telling differences among American nations. Bolton thought that the history of the Americas lit the way to a cooperative future. Troubling inconsistencies did not matter in his grand panorama of the Americas or the borderlands.
Turner's coincident reluctance to incorporate Bolton's borderlands in his version of American history was likewise disappointing. One can only conclude that Turner simply did not think that the borderlands were in the mainstream of American history. In Turner's view Hispanic Americans were among the people swept aside by a stronger and more vigorous Anglo-American population.
Bolton's inclusive American history had virtues, but it also had flaws. His romantic perspective led him to make generalizations that did not bear scrutiny. For example, he thought that all adventurers were much alike. Not long after Charles Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight, Bolton wrote, “Not alone Lancelot, and Galahad, and Arthur and the Maid, rode beside Lindbergh.…With him were Narváez, De Soto, and Coronado, too, and many another ‘who dared his own wild dreams to try’ in these Spanish Borderlands.”1 The mythical Lancelot, the historical Coronado, and Lindbergh were out for high adventure, and differences did not matter to Bolton. A hero was a hero. Bolton silently included himself in the crowd of he-men whom he mentioned. Was he not an explorer too? Did he not traverse deserts, mountains, and canyons in search of adventure and fame? Like Parkman, Bolton assumed the role of heroic historian, one who blazed his own trails in pursuit of some past hero's story.
Bolton's style is no longer in vogue, but in his own time he had many admirers. Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1950 AHA presidential address proclaimed that “a historical career can be a great adventure, and not in ideas alone; witness the lives of Bolton and Trevelyan, men who write history that sings to the heart while it informs the understanding.”2 Bolton thanked Morison for the “bouquet” and hoped that Trevelyan would not be offended at the comparison.3 Morison also admired Bolton's trail research and recommended that historians get out of the library to see the places where history had occurred.4 Morison, who sailed with the U.S. Navy during World War II and retraced the routes of maritime explorers in his own sailboat, was especially well attuned to Bolton's method and perspective. The bouquet was thrown from one historian-explorer to another.
Bolton's instinct was to be open-minded and inclusive, although he did not find a formula that could include everyone on an equal footing. He believed that human progress meant that American Indians should adopt European values and institutions. This unexamined assumption led him to celebrate the extension of European polities and religions without giving due attention to the damage done to Native Americans. During Bolton's lifetime few readers would have disagreed with him. Modern readers may reject Bolton's positive assessment of Spanish conquest and colonization but should be grateful that Bolton published the Spanish documents that are bedrock resources for ethnohistory and the new borderlands history.
Just as Bolton's publications have continuing influence, so do his contributions to the University of California. As director of the Bancroft Bolton facilitated the collection of books and documents about the Americas from all over the world. When Turner was asked to estimate the scholarly worth of the Bancroft in 1904, he supposed that the presence of too much Spanish and Indian stuff devalued the library, because he thought the “American” period was far more important. What if Turner had joined the Berkeley faculty and influenced the collection of new material for the library? Surely he would not have thrown the Spanish and Indian records out the library window. But just as certainly he would have encouraged the collection of Anglo-American materials from the pioneer era. Accordingly the emphasis and strengths of the Bancroft would be different today—not necessarily worse, not wrong, but different.
Bolton's placement at Berkeley made a difference not only in his career but in the development of the University of California. If Bolton had not been hired in 1911, who could have attracted the hundreds of graduate students who studied with him? Who would have created a distinctive California school of history, known around the world? Could Frederick Teggart have done that? Herbert Priestley? Bolton was the perfect person for the job before 1940. The postwar years—or perhaps they should be called the post-Bolton years—were another matter. Bolton's ideas were new and invigorating in 1911. In 1941 it was time for something else. After three decades, Bolton's time as the principal architect of the University of California's formidable reputation in history had passed, but the institutional importance of his work remained. John Hicks and the other historians who built the postwar history department did not start from scratch; they already enjoyed the institutional prestige that Bolton had established during his generation of stewardship.
Bolton was of that generation of professors who were loyal servants of the instit
utions that employed them, a relationship that seems rarer, if not downright archaic, today. Perhaps Bolton and his peers, who engaged the emerging system of higher education and professional scholarship when it was new, appreciated its novelty and significance in ways that their successors do not. Bolton, Jameson, Turner, and other historians in the first half of the twentieth century created something of lasting value that was just as important as their ideas and their books. They built institutions—universities, archives, libraries, graduate programs, funding mechanisms—that still serve us as the essential foundations of scholarship.
Despite Bolton's single-minded devotion to scholarship, he was not a cloistered academic. He thought that history mattered, and he worked hard to inform the public about it. His contributions to the National Park Service, the California Historical Survey Commission, the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the State Department bespeak a man deeply involved with his own society. But public engagement came with risks, even for a professor as well-regarded and professionally entrenched as Bolton. His gentle criticism of an establishment hero like Thomas Starr King, mistaken identification of colonial ruins in Georgia, and erroneous authentication of the fake Drake plate caused public debate that could have damaged his career and the reputation of the university. Deft management of Bolton's few blunders—and good luck in the case of the plate—saved him from embarrassment, but those close shaves should remind us that no historian lives in an ivory tower. The public intellectual who does not choose his public words carefully soon becomes a subject for discussion and possible discipline from powers that govern the university.
Bolton thought hemispherically, but he lived locally. Bolton regarded groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West and the California Historical Society (as well as E Clampus Vitus, for that matter) as local constituencies vital to the university and to his discipline. Bolton cultivated local patriots so that they would support academic studies, but he also tried to broaden their concept of history by including the Hispanic past. If it seems that Bolton trod too gingerly among the sacred monuments of local patriots, he was not alone. In his presidential address, Morison urged historians to “deal gently with your people's traditions,” lest they turn away from written history that deflates their heroes.5
Morison's admonition raised questions that should be asked about Bolton. How far should a historian go in praising heroes, local or otherwise? At what point does a historian become the architect of a false idol? Bolton went too far in exaggerating the qualities and accomplishments of his heroes. An admirable desire to include Spanish Catholic characters in American history motivated Bolton, but his uncritical adulation of Spanish colonizers pleased some and offended others, then and now. Bolton's assertion of heroic universality notwithstanding, in a diverse society a hero to one group may be a villain to another. Bolton wanted his heroes to speak to everyone for all time, but the world is too complicated for that. Ironically, Bolton helped to make American history more complicated by making it more inclusive.
Today Bolton's heroes are out of fashion, but his basic ideas about borderlands and the Americas, modified to suit the times, enjoy a resurgence in popularity. The academic world has its fashions, its momentary responses to new conditions and societal demands; so tomorrow's historians will no doubt move on to other topics and interpretive perspectives. Every generation writes history anew, and the relevance of Bolton's ideas will fade again. Yet he should be remembered for extending the borders of the American past, for making it more tolerant and diverse and less ethnocentric. Bolton opened the way to new interpretive possibilities in history. We have not reached their limit.
ABBREVIATIONS USED
IN THE NOTES
AHA American Historical Association.
AHR American Historical Review.
AHA-LC Papers of the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [box no., file name, as appropriate].
BFP Bolton Family Papers. BL , C-B 841 [box number, subject as appropriate].
BiP Ray A. Billington Papers, HEH [box number, folder title].
BL Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
BP Herbert E. Bolton Papers. BL , C-B 840. [Part I, II, or III, as appropriate][Out or In, as appropriate]: [box number, subject as appropriate].
CLSP Constance Lindsay Skinner Papers, New York Public Library, New York.
FA Max Farrand Collection, HEH.
HEH Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
HMSP Henry Morse Stephens Papers. BL.
IA Institutional Archives (HEH).
JP J. Franklin Jameson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [box no., file name].
NSGW Native Sons of the Golden West.
TU Frederick Jackson Turner Collection, HEH. [box no.].
MLRPBP Mary Leticia Ross Papers, 4–8. Papers of Herbert Eugene Bolton. Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow, Georgia.
MSS5064 Frank Lockwood, “Correspondence Concerning Herbert E. Bolton,” MSS 5064, Bancroft Library.
MVHA Mississippi Valley Historical Association.
PBP-LMU Papers of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. Charles Van der Ahe Library. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Hurtado, “Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands,” 149 – 167; Weber, “The Idea of the Spanish Borderlands,” 3 – 20; Truett, “Epics of Greater America,” 213 – 217.
2. Truett, “Epics of Greater America,” 233 – 241; Hanke, Do the Americas Have a Common History? esp. 3 – 10; Magnaghi, Herbert E. Bolton and the Historiography of the Americas, 117 – 154; Delpar, Looking South, 1 – 40. For recent examples of transnational history, see J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World; and Weber, Bárbaros.
3. Sandos, “Junípero Serra's Canonization”; Sandos, “Junipero Serra, Canonization, and the California Indian Controversy”; Hurtado, “Bolton, Racism and American History”; Hurtado, “More Shadows on the Brass”; Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands”; Weber, “Blood of Martyrs, Blood of Indians.”
4. For example, see Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Blackhawk, Violence over the Land; Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis; Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers; Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away.
5. Bannon, Bolton; and Caughey, “Herbert Eugene Bolton,” 40 – 67.
CHAPTER 1
1. Bolton, “On Wisdom's Trail,” 3.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Frederick Bolton to Eugenie Bolton Johnson, 10/29/1953, BFP:3, miscellaneous.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. BP:134.
7. Cozzens, “The Lost Trail,” quotes in February 11, 1875, p. 43; April 22, 1875, p. 125.
8. Edwin Latham Bolton to Commissioner of Pensions, 9/24/1881, BP In: Rosalind Cady Bolton.
9. Edwin Latham Bolton to Commissioner of Pensions, 9/24/1881, BP In: Rosalind Cady Bolton; Frederick Bolton to Eugenie Bolton Johnson, 10/29/1953, BFP:3, miscellaneous.
10. HEB to Frederick, 12/13/1885, BFP.
11. HEB to Frederick, 1/15/1886, BFP.
12. HEB to Frederick, 2/8/1886, BFP.
13. HEB to Frederick, 4/17/1887, BFP.
14. HEB to Frederick, 10/31/1888, BFP.
15. HEB to Frederick, 5/22/1887, 7/19/1888, 4/10/1889, BFP.
16. HEB to Frederick, 10/3/1888, BFP.
17. HEB to Frederick, 10/16/1889, BFP.
18. Frederick Bolton to Eugenie Bolton Johnson, 10/29/1953, BFP:3.
19. HEB to Frederick, 2/25/1889, BFP.
20. HEB to Frederick, 10/22/1888, BFP.
21. Sulloway, Born to Rebel, 83 – 118 passim.
22. HEB to Frederick, 7/2/1887, BFP.
23. HEB to Frederick, 7/17/1887, BFP (emphasis in original).
24. HEB to Frederick, 9/9/1888, 10/3/1888, 10/31/1888, BFP.
25. HEB to Frederick, 11/4/1888, 5/5/1889, BFP.
26. HEB to Frederick, 5/1/1889, BFP.
27. “Constitution,” in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 1, no. 1, Report of the Organization and Proceedings, Saratoga, September 9 – 10, 1884 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1885), 1, 11.
28. Novick, That Noble Dream, 22 – 24.
29. Proceedings of the AHA, 1886, 6.
30. Ibid., 63 – 64.
31. HEB to Frederick, 7/7/1889, BFP.
32. HEB to Frederick, 9/11/1889, BFP.
33. HEB to Frederick, 10/22/1889, BFP.
34. HEB to Frederick, 10/22/1889, 11/14/1889, BFP.
35. HEB to Frederick, 2/4/1890, BFP.
36. HEB to Frederick, 2/1/1890, BFP.
37. HEB to Frederick, 3/1/1890, BFP.
38. Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1 – 9 passim; Simon, The City-Building Process, 13 – 50.
39. Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers, 74 – 85.
40. HEB to Frederick, 3/7/1891, BFP.
41. HEB to Frederick, 9/6/1890, BFP.
42. HEB to Frederick, 9/13/1890, 4/17/1890, 10/11/1890, BFP.
43. HEB to Frederick, 9/27/1890, BFP.
44. HEB to Frederick, 4/3/1891, BFP.
45. HEB to Frederick, 7/9/1891, BFP.
46. HEB to Frederick, 11/9/1890, BFP.
47. HEB to Frederick, 6/20/1891, BFP.
48. HEB to Frederick, 3/20/1891, BFP.
49. HEB to Frederick, 7/9/1891, BFP.
50. HEB to Frederick, 6/13/1891, BFP.
51. HEB to Frederick, 7/25/1891, BFP.
52. HEB to Frederick, 7/15/1891, BFP.
53. HEB to Frederick, 8/33/1891 [sic], BFP.
54. HEB to Frederick, 10/18/1891, 1/10/1892, BFP.
55. HEB to Frederick, 12/8/1891, BFP.
56. Curti and Carstensen, University of Wisconsin, 1:508.
57. HEB to Frederick, 10/18/1891, BFP.
58. HEB to Frederick, 3/12/1892, 11/22/1892, BFP.
59. HEB to Frederick, 10/31/1891, BFP.
60. HEB to Frederick, 9/25/1892, BFP.