Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  When Stephens returned to Berkeley, he faced the problem of appointing a respected scholar to the Berkeley history department, a need that Teggart reinforced with his high-handed behavior. But Wheeler and Stephens could do nothing to actively recruit Bolton away from Stanford without risking a controversy between the two universities. And then came the gift. On July 3, 1910, George Pierce Garrison suddenly died.92 Bolton still had strong personal ties to the University of Texas, so on July 30 he sent a telegram to President Mezes indicating his interest in Garrison's old job. “From the very first I have been very desirous of returning to Texas,” Bolton explained. He was interested in the entire Southwest, but “Texas is the center,” and because of the “sympathetic atmosphere,” Bolton's work could “be done better there than elsewhere.” He liked Stanford, but Bolton felt that “local patriotism” would force him “into the study of Pacific Coast problems” instead of Texas and the Southwest, which he preferred.93

  Bolton looked forward to building a “really distinctive and distinguished School of History” in Texas. For the next twenty-five years, Bolton believed, Spanish- American and western history would be the most promising fields in American history. Three universities would lead the way. Wisconsin covered the Old Northwest and Mississippi Valley, the University of Texas naturally commanded southwestern history, and the University of California dominated the study of “the Far West and the Pacific Coast” because of the Bancroft collection. With a “proper organization…nothing” could stop Texas's ascendance in the field of history. To all of these reasons Bolton added his “real fondness” for Texas.94 “A larger institution” had asked him to consider a place, “but my preference is for Texas.” Bolton did not reveal the identity of the university that had made the offer, but it must have been Berkeley, though Stephens claimed that Bolton was on his way to Texas before he recruited him.95

  Mezes offered Bolton the position but not a raise in salary.96 Within days of Bolton's receipt of Mezes's offer Stephens invited him to Berkeley, where he met Stephens and Wheeler. The three men reached an understanding. Bolton would be Stephens's “second-in-command with entire charge of…everything pertaining to American history.” If Berkeley could not have Turner, “let us have Turner's most promising pupil.” The Berkeley chairman was punctilious about having Bolton's assurances that he had intended to leave Stanford for Texas before Stephens contacted him.97

  Stephens recommended Bolton for a full professorship at $4,000. “It is clearly understood,” Stephens added, “that you will have resigned from Stanford to accept the call from the University of Texas, before any call can come from the University of California.”98 Bolton had not “resigned from Stanford” to go to Texas, as Stephens directed Bolton to acknowledge. He could not bring himself to tell such a bald-faced lie and would only say that he was “on the point of resigning” when the California position was offered.99 This sophistry was meant to justify Wheeler, Stephens, and Bolton in the eyes of Stanford critics while accomplishing the objective of pulling Bolton over to Berkeley.

  Would Bolton have gone to Texas if Cal had not hired him? Possibly, but barker's letters to Bolton reveal that an inside game was being played in Texas as well as in California. “Just once more: you can't come for 1910—1911.” As barker had artfully put it, “They won't take another man so long as you dicker with them—couldn't get one before next winter, if then; uncertainty may help me to get out of the rank of Adj. [assistant] Prof. into Asso. class; so if my logic seems good to you hang on without giving a definite answer.” He added a note asking Bolton to delay his decision until the September meeting of the Texas regents. Otherwise, barker wrote, “I would be merely what I am—nothing.” Bolton hung on through most of September, and barker was made acting chair of the history department.100

  “I have decided to cast my lot with you,” he informed the worried Stephens on September 21. “Now that the decision has been made,” he wrote, “I am all for California, and I shall not look back.”101

  Bolton's decision hinged in part on Stephens's assurance that the university would purchase some of his Mexican transcripts for $1,000.102 Wheeler agreed to this arrangement and Stephens asked Phoebe Apperson Hearst to provide the money. Hiring Bolton was California's victory, but Texas gained too. The Texas regents soon made barker's chairmanship permanent. He held the position for decades, constructively guiding the development of the history program, the library, and the university.103

  Bolton got a nice raise by going to Berkeley, and he needed it. The Bolton family now included six daughters. The Bolton's new baby, Jane, was born in 1910. “I of all the ‘boys,’” Herbert wrote his bother, “most resemble our father in exemplifying the proverb, ‘a rich man for luck and a poor man for babies.’”104 Money had more than practical significance for a family man who was strapped for cash. At Berkeley Bolton was going to pull down the same salary that Turner had commanded at Wisconsin.105 Bolton's new salary declared that he was on his way to the top of the history profession.

  Negotiations with Stanford, Texas, and California had not prevented Bolton from finishing his guide to the Mexican archives, but the manuscript still sat on his desk. “I hate to ‘turn it loose,’ to use a Texanism,” he explained to Fred.106 Three days after telling Stephens that he was “all for California,” Bolton sent the manuscript to Jameson. “I submit it to your tender mercy, with no comment as to what I think of it.” Bolton had worked on it for so long that he “could scarcely work on it any more—I was paralyzed in sight of it,” he confessed.107

  Once the manuscript was off of his desk, Bolton began to anticipate his move to Berkeley and the peerless resources of the Bancroft. “I shall be very glad indeed to have my work and office across the hall from the great Bancroft Collection,” he wrote Jameson.108 Much to his satisfaction, Bolton's new teaching responsibilities would consist mostly of graduate work. “You probably know that I am going to the University of California next year,” he reported to Turner. “The Bancroft Collection is a magnificent one and I could not have collected it better myself from the standpoint of my own purposes.” Bolton hoped to build a strong department in western and Spanish-American history at Berkeley. “My own interests lie on the border between the two and I expect plenty of help on the two flanks.”109

  Indeed, it is impossible to imagine a better situation for Bolton. He would be assistant department head with entire responsibility for building the program in American history. Through hiring professors and training graduate students, Bolton could shape the Berkeley history program, the field of Spanish-American history, and the profession. He could continue his own march to scholarly prominence with the finest library in his field literally at his fingertips. Hard work would make it so, but Bolton's success in California would not come without opposition or conflict. Frederick J. Teggart would see to that. In the summer of 1911 the regents made Teggart associate professor of Pacific Coast history in recognition of “the invaluable services…rendered without charge” in moving the Bancroft to Berkeley.110 Now slated to teach American history, Teggart would fall under Bolton's purview.111 Stephens appointed Bolton assistant curator of the Bancroft under Teggart, creating dual arrangements that would inevitably cause friction.

  In the summer before moving from Palo Alto to Berkeley, Bolton finally heard from Jameson about the long-delayed guide. Jameson was “the dean of the history faculty and can make or unmake one's future,” he explained to Fred. Jameson's opinion was all that Bolton could have hoped for. After carefully reviewing the manuscript, the editor praised its “remarkable merits in respect to both planning and general composition on the one hand, and to execution on the other.” The Guide would contain “an enormous amount of useful material” for future researchers, who would be “very grateful to you, and so am I.” Bolton quoted Jameson's praise to his brother. “These are boyish things for me to write, but they are very pleasing to me,” Bolton confessed.112 Forty-one years old, a full professor with a good salary at an improving univers
ity with the very best library in his field, Bolton for a moment revealed the uncertain Wisconsin farm boy who wanted to impress important people so that he could rise in the world.

  F I V E · In Stephens’s grove

  Like other institutions of higher learning in Bolton’s time, the University of California existed as a complex web of interlocking political, social, cultural, and economic relationships. We may imagine those connections as a series of intersecting rings, much like the circles used to illustrate set theory in mathematics. A large circle represents the university. A cluster of smaller circles signifies a collection of departments assembled to form a college within the university circle. A large circle that intersects with the university circle represents the Board of Regents, which consisted of influential men and women of wealth. Likewise the governor and the state legislature have circles that overlap with the university and each other. Students, alumni groups, fraternal organizations, historical societies, important donors, and other interest groups are represented by circles that indicate their relative force and relationships to the other circles.

  If completely and accurately elaborated, the set theory model eventually would become too cluttered to convey useful information. Nevertheless, the weblike interlocking network illustrates the complicated structures of power and influence within the university as well as its connections with public and private entities. A simplified diagram for Bolton’s situation in 1911 would have shown the large university circle, containing a much smaller history department circle, which enclosed an even smaller American history circle. The Bancroft Library intersected with both history circles and with a general university library administration circle. Because the circles represent human institutions and relationships, the diagram is perhaps too mechanistic. One must imagine the personalities who were in charge of each circle to fully grasp how the university functioned. Morse Stephens, Herbert Bolton, and Frederick Teggart presided over their respective circles, with President Wheeler reigning over them all. Overlapping areas of responsibility required cooperation, but convergence could sometimes cause conflict among strong personalities. While making every effort to cooperate with his colleagues, Bolton also sought to enlarge his circle of influence. Eventually some of the circles would merge into a single system of coincident parts with Bolton at the center.

  Lines of authority could be complicated, but there was no doubt about who was in charge of the university. Benjamin Ide Wheeler was known to Cal students as a kindly, distinguished-looking man with a white moustache who patrolled the campus on horseback. Born in Massachusetts, Wheeler had been educated in New England preparatory academies and had graduated from Brown University as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After earning a master’s degree at Brown, he continued his graduate studies at Heidelberg University, where he received the PhD summa cum laude. With special fields of interest in comparative philology and Greek, he taught briefly at Harvard before settling into a distinguished career at Cornell University. In 1899 the University of California offered him the presidency, which he held until his retirement in 1919. Wheeler is generally regarded as one of Cal’s great presidents. The honorary degrees conferred on him by Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Columbia, and other universities were emblematic of the respect that President Wheeler enjoyed in academic circles.1

  Wheeler’s inaugural address at Berkeley explained his ideas about the relationship between the university and society. The university president was “a representative to its public constituency,” Wheeler explained, “whether that constituency take the form of state or sect or community of graduates and friends.” The university president mediated “between the divergent ideals of the supporting constituency and those of the university life.” Ideally, Wheeler thought, presidential mediation meant “harmonizing the university to the demands of its constituency.” With these ideas in mind Benjamin Ide Wheeler embarked on his presidency of the University of California.2

  After nearly ten years of service in California, Wheeler had adopted a westerner’s point of view, at least for public consumption. In 1908 he told his audience how he felt about the American West. “I have always noticed when the train passes North Platte coming west,” he said, “that men stop wiping their necks at the edge of the collar…they begin to ask each other for a match, without reference to present condition of bank account or previous condition of servitude.” These social changes seemed to accelerate as the train continued westward. “By the time we have passed Buffalo Bill’s ranch, agriculture begins to yield to grazing, men sit on top of the horse instead of behind him, and the hat brims grow stiffer.” “Who has ever shifted his life from one side of this frontier to the other without feeling he is in another world?” he asked rhetorically. Out West “the air is thinner, but the skin is thicker,” he continued. “It has to be—a little. The sticks are thicker. And almost everybody carries one.” The western atmosphere even invigorated men’s cardiovascular function. “Hearts beat several times a minute more here than over yonder, but then there is more here for hearts to do than there.” As Wheeler warmed to his subject, he touched on Turner’s well-known tropes of frontier history—free men living on free land where they created a new society unencumbered by the restrictive customs of Europe. Despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American Indians, Latinos, and Asians in the western United States, Wheeler insisted that “only the people of the prairie schooners and their successors…really set their faces toward the West.”3 The West as a place and an idea about freedom, Wheeler implied, was the invention of Anglo-Americans, and it was their inheritance alone. To judge Wheeler by this speech, it would seem that he had completely absorbed the meaning and prejudices of Turner’s hypothesized frontier. One of Bolton’s important tasks would be to educate Wheeler and other Californians about the Spanish-American frontier’s importance in California history.

  H. Morse Stephens was a warmhearted, jowly, full-bearded fellow with a British accent and courtly manners. To Cal’s students he was avuncular and friendly, among the most popular teachers on campus. Stephens’s decorous ways and extravagantly expressive speech—one need only recall his florid Turner courtship letters to get the full flavor of his language—disguised a shrewd man who managed well the political currents in which the university sailed. His membership in the Bohemian Club was not an accident, one supposes, but a calculated way to meet some of the most powerful and wealthy people in California. Not all of the faculty admired him. Arthur W. Ryder, a classicist, remarked upon seeing Stephens surrounded by his colleagues at the Faculty Club, “There goes a fake giant surrounded by real pygmies.”4 Professional jealousy may have sparked Ryder’s bon mot, for Stephens was a man of real accomplishment and certain power on the University of California campus and in the historical profession.

  For all his personal foibles, Stephens deserves great credit for establishing the University of California as an important center of historical research and graduate study. He, like Turner and Garrison, understood that a school of history in the West could grow from local resources, local history, and local support. That is what Stephens meant in reminding Turner that he had “at once grasped” what Turner was doing at the University of Wisconsin when he visited the summer school in 1895.5 Accordingly, Stephens and Wheeler put together the money and political support to acquire the Bancroft and build a California school of history. Adding Bolton to the faculty set off the hoped-for chain reaction of scholarship and graduate study that created the California school of history, a school that Bolton stamped as his own.

  In the early twentieth century Stephens was a respected historian and a major force in the historical profession.6 Born and educated in England, Stephens had received his graduate training at Oxford’s Balliol College before teaching the history of India at Cambridge University. In 1894 he was called to Cornell, where he became a close friend of Wheeler. Stephens, ambitious to promote the reputations of Cornell and himself, proposed a national historical journal and co
nvinced the board of trustees to underwrite the new review that Stephens would edit. Harvard and Penn had similar ideas, but each wished to house the journal at its campus. Stephens shuttled among the eastern campuses to promote a diplomatic solution and agreed to give up any claim to the editor’s chair while assuring that the Cornell trustees’ generous financial support would remain intact. The group chose J. Franklin Jameson, then on the Brown University faculty, to edit the new magazine, with Stephens and others serving on an editorial board. Thus the American Historical Review was born. And thus, a recent immigrant, with “his genial social traits,” as Jameson recalled, “his talent for friendship, and his gift of entertaining speech,” shot to the top of the American historical profession. As for his scholarship, the claim that Stephens’s history of the French Revolution “bade fair to replace at last the classical narrative of Carlyle,” as his AHR eulogist wrote, was intended as a high compliment.7 President Wheeler called his friend to Cal in 1902 to run the extension program. Soon he also became the Sather Professor of History and head of the history department. Stephens was not a fake anything. He was one of the founders of the American historical profession and the creator of a respected University of California department.

  Stephens was one of those underappreciated academics who worked selflessly for the profession, his university, his department, and the colleagues who resided in it. Bolton became his right-hand man. As such Bolton came into regular contact with President Wheeler, university regents, and the important alumnae and supporters of the university. Stephens taught Bolton the political ropes in California, just as the smooth Garrison had done in Texas. Bolton was an avid learner. Stephens probably introduced him to Phoebe Apperson Hearst, arguably the university’s most important donor. The Bolton family was soon making weekend trips to Hearst’s Pleasanton estate, visits that no doubt were meant to solidify her enthusiasm for university benefactions.8