Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  The editorial controversies associated with The Spanish Borderlands quickly faded, yet these exchanges reveal much about the prevailing perspective on United States and American history in Bolton’s day. Johnson’s arch criticism and his desire to convert Bolton’s Hispanophilic story into a standard Anglocentric narrative shows how little impact Bolton could have on bedrock historical prejudice that had become naturalized as conventional wisdom among historians. Johnson gave in to Bolton’s perspective perhaps because he was tired of the long-running project and wanted to be done with it, or maybe because he thought Bolton’s points were trivial in the larger scheme of the Chronicles. Whatever the case, Bolton’s book laid out a basic narrative that has influenced historians and organized the study and teaching of borderlands history for many decades. It is true that the book contains many passages that display the author’s propensity for glorifying Spanish pioneers. However, Bolton’s interpretive stance was in part the inadvertent product of the publisher, editor, and unacknowledged coauthor, who pressed their own prejudices on Bolton. In combating the anti-Catholic and Anglophilic views of history common to his time, Bolton produced a Hispanophilic record of heroicized soldiers and missionaries. He emphasized the positive and lasting accomplishments of Spain, but ignored the terrible costs of European conquest for American Indians and Africans.58 Yet, with all of its shortcomings, his book became a foundation work that widened readers’ angle of ethnic vision. Thus Bolton helped to open American minds to the religious and cultural variety of the American experience.

  And what did Turner think about Bolton’s Americas and borderlands ideas? If anyone could help shift the American historical perspective it was he. Turner never specifically mentioned The Spanish Borderlands, but his letters to Bolton stated that his writings offered a new perspective on American history that supplemented Turner’s work.59 “You are not only adding valuable historical criticism to the Spaniards in the [southern] region of the United States,” Turner observed, “but you have really opened up…a new field.”60 “Your study of the advance and retreat of the Spanish frontier” he added, “is one that admirably fits with my own studies of the truly American advance, and makes it possible to understand the meaning of that advance more clearly.”61 The word “truly,” whether struck by Turner or someone else, shows that Turner’s first impulse was to privilege Anglo over Hispanic activities.

  Still, Turner said that Bolton’s work fit “admirably” with his own. How so? The most likely places to look for Bolton’s influence in Turner’s work are his essays on sectionalism.62 Turner intended these articles to add regional nuances and specificity to his broad frontier interpretation of American history. He thought that each distinctive section developed as a result of particular frontier influences on the pioneering populations that occupied them. While the history of the frontier explained the past, sections explained the continuing uniqueness of American history—its exceptionalism compared to Europe—and perhaps foreshadowed the future. Each section bore the imprint of its frontier past, but unlike Europe, which had broken into separate nations, American regional conflicts were resolved politically under a common constitution rather than by warfare, the Civil War being the dramatic exception.63 When Turner considered the Pacific Coast and arid regions of the Southwest, he thought of the impact of the environment on Americans who came from the East.64 He did not consider any lingering influence of Hispanic and Indian people, whom he considered mere relics of an irrelevant past. Turner mentioned that the Southwest was a section, but he did not describe its salient qualities or any continuing Hispanic influences. In a discussion of culture in the Far West Turner noted that literacy rates were “worst” where “Mexican stock abounded,” but said nothing more about Mexican or Spanish cultural contributions to the region.65

  Turner’s The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections, published posthumously, paid slight attention to the Hispanic past.66 He admitted that along the Gulf Coast “a special form of society developed from the meeting of the Spanish and American frontiers and the different habits, institutions, and purposes of the two peoples,” but did not describe this hybrid society or give it any importance. His chapter on Texas and the Far West featured Anglo-American incursion, invasion, and conquest and transformation of northern Mexico into an Anglo-American province. As he put it, “The formation of society did not become characteristically American and influential until well toward the end of the forties,” after Anglos had overwhelmed the Hispanic population.67 For Turner the “truly American” frontiers, sections, and history were Anglo-American.

  Despite Turner’s private praise for Bolton’s work, nothing in Turner’s writing indicates that Bolton had even the slightest impact on his thinking. Nevertheless, Bolton believed that his scholarship fit well with that of Turner’s. “My own work,” Bolton wrote of an essay on sectionalism that Turner published in 1926, “confirms your generalizations. Indeed,” he continued, “they go beyond national lines, and I have come to regard the Western Hemisphere and not the United States as the area within which we must study European expansion.” And then Turner’s “imitative disciple,” as Bolton had once called himself, asserted that Caribbean development was “much the same whether Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish, or English.” The historical similarities were “determined largely by geographical forces.” “Prairie,” he continued, “does not change essentially across the forty-ninth parallel. British Columbia probably has more in common with Oregon and California than with Ontario.”68

  In his eagerness to ingratiate and associate himself with his mentor, Bolton misconstrued Turner and ignored the main points of his own work. When Turner wrote that U.S. history must be thought of “in continental, and not merely in national terms,” he was speaking about the continental scope and environmental divisions that made for political and economic sections in the United States. He was not iterating a small version of Bolton’s hemispheric vision of history. Turner’s “glacial invasion of humanity…modifying but not obliterating the older landscape” was not an acknowledgment of the continuing influence of Indian and Spanish cultures but a description of Turner’s idea about successive patterns of Anglo settlement and development.69

  Of course there were environmental similarities of the sort Bolton mentioned to Turner that crossed national boundaries, but there were cultural differences that should not be ignored. We may assume, for example, that if Spain had colonized British Columbia, Catholic missions would have played a part in the process. In his “Mission as a Frontier Institution,” Bolton argued that history and culture made a difference. Had he abandoned that position? Probably not, but in corresponding with Turner, Bolton was insisting on their common identity as American frontier historians, not on their differences. Still, one must conclude that while Turner was trying to make finer distinctions about the development of the United States, Bolton was intent on blurring differences with ever broader historical generalizations. Bolton would march farther down this road even while immersing himself in exhaustively detailed research and writing. Turner was “glad to think” that he “had any influence upon [Bolton’s] career as accurate scholar and as interpreter of the large field which you have made your own.”70 Tellingly, he did not explain to Bolton how he had been influenced by the work of his student. Turner was a great teacher; he was not always an avid learner.

  Between 1917 and 1921 Bolton’s conception of hemispheric history, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution,” and The Spanish Borderlands emerged as the essential foundations of his historical thinking. His hemispheric concept was a broad-gauged and broad-minded attempt to unify more than four centuries of American history. He established fieldwork as an integral part of his research method. His work on Spanish Catholic missions and missionaries valorized and validated a group that was seeking wider acceptance in American society. Yet his efforts to associate this work closely with Turner’s reveals Bolton’s willingness to ignore troubling inconsistencies. Withal, he was more inclusive th
an most of his contemporaries, many of whom rejected or, perhaps like Turner, merely ignored him. Bolton believed that he was leading a movement to reorganize and revitalize American history on a broader, sounder basis. His hope was not realized during his lifetime.

  E I G H T · Of Presidents and Politics

  The presidency of the American Historical Association symbolized the pinnacle of professional achievement to which Bolton aspired. By 1922 five of Bolton’s teachers and patrons had been elected to that high office: McMaster (1905), Jameson (1907), Turner (1910), Stephens (1915), and Haskins (1922). If Stephens could reach the pinnacle from Berkeley, why not Bolton? There were signs that the AHA leadership thought he might be made of presidential timber. Two months after publishing his mission article in the Review, Bolton was elected to a three-year term on the AHA Council.1

  The nominating committee controlled elective offices in the AHA. Each year the committee placed a slate of nominees before the membership for election. The elective offices included the second vice presidency, first vice presidency, and presidency. Unlike nominees for the nominating committee and council, the vice presidents and president ran unopposed. The second vice president was routinely nominated for the following year’s first vice presidency, and the first vice president was normally tapped for the succeeding presidency. In 1921 there was a movement to nominate Bolton for the second vice presidency.2 As Bolton told the story, fate stymied his chances. He claimed that he stepped aside in favor of the ailing Woodrow Wilson, who did not live out his AHA term of office.

  The story of the 1921 nomination is essentially true, but there was more to it than Bolton’s gracious declination in favor of Wilson. It was considered bad form to mount an actual campaign on behalf of any particular person, although one suspects that campaigns were indeed carried on. In 1921 Victor Hugo Paltsits spearheaded a campaign to nominate Bolton for the second vice presidency. Paltsits was not a subtle man.3 When Paltsits’s active politicking on Bolton’s behalf became too obvious, Frank C. Hodder, Bolton’s friend on the nominating committee, alerted Bolton, who claimed to have no knowledge of the campaign on his behalf.4 Bolton asked Hodder to drop his name from consideration in order to avoid making a bad impression on the AHA membership.

  Hodder thought Bolton’s withdrawal prevented a potentially nasty fight that would have damaged Bolton’s reputation. If he had remained in the race, some would have suspected Bolton of approving the campaign. Besides, Hodder thought it was only a matter of time before Bolton became president.5 One month later Wilson’s name was being mentioned, and Bolton “heartily” endorsed him for the second vice presidency.6

  While AHA officers considered and reconsidered Bolton’s executive qualifications, the University of California was undergoing a presidential crisis. During the hysteria that accompanied the world war, President Wheeler had been attacked as pro-German on the frivolous (but nonetheless inflammatory) grounds that he had studied in Germany when he was a young man. At about the same time his health began to fail. It became clear that Wheeler’s days as Cal’s president were numbered. In the last few months of his crippled presidency an ineffective committee consisting of a regent, Ralph Merritt, literature professor Charles Mills Gayley, and law school dean William Cary Jones ran the university. Unhappy faculty called the committee the Triumvirate.

  Not all professors were unhappy with the prospect of committee rule. While still on leave in the East, Professor Teggart proposed the elimination of the office of the president in all universities. No one had defined what the qualifications for the office should be, Teggart argued, yet the successful candidate was given a free hand and an indefinite term of office. The remedy, he thought, would be a board of deans of the university schools.7 Teggart did not explain how a such a committee would interact with boards of regents, state legislatures, governors, or any of the universities’ constituencies, but that was not his main concern. Teggart, whose tenure at Cal hung by the slimmest of threads held by President Wheeler, had experienced unchecked presidential power firsthand. He wanted to weaken the office of the president (especially Wheeler’s office), by asserting that it was obsolete and subject to abuse. While he worked in the East to establish the American Association of University Professors, he published fourteen articles in national magazines and professional journals on topics that ranged from university administration to world peace.8 Two years in Washington had made Teggart a national figure in intellectual circles, instead of a has-been who was looking for work. When read in the light of Teggart’s publications, his impending termination looked like a peremptory abuse of presidential power.

  In July 1919 the enfeebled Wheeler resigned and was replaced by Bolton’s friend David Prescott Barrows. Teggart was one of the beneficiaries of the change in Berkeley administrations. Wheeler had intended to fire him, but Barrows demurred.9 Whether out of fear of a national protest or because of respect for Teggart’s considerable intellectual horsepower, President Barrows recommended him for a permanent faculty appointment as associate professor of social institutions. In 1923 the Board of Regents established a department of social institutions with Teggart as its sole member. Professor Teggart had finally found congenial company.10

  Bolton despised Teggart, but the ousted librarian had plenty of support from faculty in other parts of the university.11 While Teggart had sojourned in the East, an influential group of professors known as the Kosmos Club had worked to give the Academic Senate more power. Frederick Teggart was elected president of the Kosmos Club in 1920. Club representatives circumvented the Triumvirate and then president Barrows by talking directly with the Board of Regents, which granted extraordinary powers to the Academic Senate, whose members were elected by the faculty. This arrangement substantially reduced the powers of the university president, including control over hiring and promotion, admissions, approval of courses, degree programs, and allocation of research funds. The Academic Senate distributed its new powers and responsibilities through a faculty committee structure. The president and his deans were left to manage the physical plant and to handle noncurricular and other nonacademic matters. The power of the Berkeley faculty, especially prominent professors like Bolton, was unique in the American academic world. However, these changes made it hard for President Barrows, who accepted the presidency under one set of rules and expectations but had to govern under entirely new conditions.12

  President Barrows’s tenure in office was not long. The Academic Senate and Barrows differed on administrative matters. When there was conflict, the regents ultimately sustained the president, but the continuous need to negotiate and make adjustments wore on Barrows. In May 1922 Barrows announced his resignation to be effective the following year.13 Thus Teggart, whom Barrows had saved from termination, helped to prematurely end Barrows’ term as university president. Wheeler, Stephens, and Bolton had pushed Teggart out of the Bancroft Library and history department. Seemingly bereft of support, Teggart had forced his way back into the university and bent it to his purposes. It was a stunning reversal of fortune that Teggart engineered with intelligence and craft.

  Bolton now had an implacable enemy on the faculty. Teggart extended his bitter grudge against Bolton to the history department and Bolton’s students on the Berkeley faculty. In 1923 Teggart was evidently behind decisions by the Committee on Courses and the Executive Committee to quash the history department’s offering of year-long upper-division courses in colonial Latin American history, taught by Professor Priestley, and the Latin American national period, offered by Professor Chapman. Committee interference in history department curricular matters was unwarranted, Bolton complained to lame-duck president Barrows. There was no historian on the executive committee, he reminded the president, “only one [presumably Teggart] who might claim to be” a historian, who “has made a conspicuous failure of several professorships in different fields and in my opinion has no fitness to pass judgment upon the work of any Department of History or of any person in any Department of History.”14


  Teggart may have been behind an attempt in 1923 to deny a promotion to Chapman, his former graduate student who had defected to Bolton. When Bolton learned that some faculty objected on the grounds that Chapman did not merit promotion because the history department was “over-developed on the side of Western and Spanish American History,” he understood that the attack was on Bolton’s history department as well as on Chapman. Bolton defended Chapman and the department.15 Such attacks, whether inspired by a vengeful Teggart or from other faculty, did not affect Bolton’s control of the history department and the Bancroft Library. The criticisms, however, did not go away, and there was some truth in them. Bolton had loaded the department with his own people and shaped the curriculum along lines suggested by his own work.

  Bolton was not involved in the faculty revolt against Wheeler or Barrows. “The university is in the throes of reorganization on ‘democratic’ lines,” he wrote brother Fred. “Personally…I am not convinced that it is all to the good.” Faculty committees were “made up on the Jacksonian principle that one man is as good as another and that rotation in office is sacred; why should not shoemakers legislate for doctors?” he sniffed.16 It was not that Bolton did not participate in university politics. He simply preferred to politick on a personal level by appealing to the powerful people who controlled his world. He made every effort to accommodate governors, legislators, wealthy benefactors, regents, and university presidents whom he served. Throughout his life Bolton successfully negotiated with university presidents using personal charm and the influence of his scholarly reputation.

  Bolton respected institutional authority and the officers who wielded it. Insofar as he possessed power within the system as department chair, director of the Bancroft, and chair of the research committee, he happily used that power for the benefit of himself, his faculty, his students, and his projects. Bolton’s decisions about the distribution of resources were not always to the liking of his colleagues. One graduate student reported seeing Priestley dissolved in tears after Bolton had spent the entire annual acquisition budget for an item that he needed for one of his projects.17