Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Page 21

  Bolton and the University of Texas would have been better off if he had simply declined the position and said no more about it. Going to Austin merely to give advice about how to do a job that he had refused to take showed poor judgment on Bolton’s part. When he addressed the regents, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, except Bolton’s, that he was dictating the terms of his contract.50 He wanted (presumably for himself) a larger salary and expense account, an end to political interference, academic freedom for faculty, subsidies for graduate work, more graduate assistantships, and campus improvements. The regents agreed to everything.51

  Still, Bolton seemed reluctant. Someone suggested that Bolton might consider taking the presidency on a temporary basis, perhaps during a one-year leave from Berkeley. Born of desperation, the one-year proposal was doomed from the start. Had Bolton accepted, he would have done all the heavy lifting required to get things moving in the right direction. Then, having made a huge personal investment in the university, he would have packed up and left. Perhaps the regents believed that Bolton would decide to stay rather than abandon all of his Texas accomplishments. Bolton could not have taken this proposal seriously, but he did not forthrightly reject the offer, perhaps to avoid offending his Austin hosts. Whatever the case, the Texans who waved goodbye as Bolton’s train left Austin believed there was a good chance that Bolton would be back.

  A gulf of misunderstanding separated the “maybe” that the regents inferred from the “never” that Bolton intended. A new blizzard of telegrams and letters fell on Berkeley. The regents would be glad to have Bolton if he stayed “a year, less than a year, or more than a year,” wrote Hackett. He could tell “the Legislature, the Board of Regents, and the whole University to ‘go to hell’ at any old time.” If Bolton did not go to Texas, it was “an absolute fact” that the presidency would go to Walter Splawn, former Texas economics professor and member of the state railroad commission.52 Because Splawn was a friend of governor Neff, the appointment was widely regarded as political, despite Splawn’s educational credentials, which included degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago.

  Barker held out hope that his old friend would finally give in to the pressure from Texas. One year’s vacation from Berkeley might do him some good. “Go ahead now and accept,” Barker wrote. “Get to Texas as soon as you can,” he concluded. This time Bolton would not budge, although he did not give what Texans understood as a Shermanesque absolute, final, and unmistakable “no” to their continuing importunities. Believing that he had turned them down several times, Bolton ceased to reply to begging telegrams from Texas. This left some of his supporters under the impression that he had not finally declined the presidency. Still believing that Bolton might come, Hackett wired Bolton that higher education in Texas would perish without him. “How can you remain indifferent?” Hackett wondered.53 The Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement of Splawn made his appointment even more distasteful to Hackett and others who opposed the politicization of the university.

  The earnest pleading of Barker and Hackett included information that would have discouraged Bolton even if he had been seriously considering the Texas offer. One of Hackett’s telegrams revealed that some Baptists associated with the governor were opposed to Bolton. “Pay no attention to a few disgruntled Neff Baptists,” Hackett wired. “University churches have endorsed you.” Barker, explaining away opposition, wrote that it was “just a part of the damned political slough that we are bogged in. It doesn’t amount to anything and will not trouble you after you accept.”54 Who would believe such assurances?

  Bolton had always avoided being drawn into political controversies, but Austin was a minefield of potential trouble. During his Texas visit, he had refused to discuss a fund drive to build a memorial stadium at the university, but Harry Moore, the publicity director for the stadium, now wanted his views about the building’s value. Moore imagined that Bolton was “a real red-blooded man” who supported athletics and the new stadium. Moore wanted to use a pro-stadium statement from Bolton for fund-raising purposes, but assured him that anything Bolton wrote would “not appear in a false light.”55 Even if accurately quoted, Bolton’s opinion about the stadium was bound to make someone angry. The regents and faculty supporters said he would have smooth sailing as president, but the reality of Texas politics, which involved religion, sports, and the Ku Klux Klan, argued very differently.

  The regents finally realized that Bolton would not take the presidency. They elected Splawn. Barker and Hackett were disappointed. Another member of the Texas faculty, Frederic Duncalf, wondered if the new president was “the sp(l)awn of the Devil.”56 The future of the University of Texas seemed uncertain at best, but Barker was hopeful that President Splawn would respect the faculty. Wanting to be certain that Splawn understood their position, the faculty asked Barker to speak for them at Splawn’s inauguration. The Texas professor stood and made a speech that stressed the importance of academic freedom for professors and political independence for the state’s university. It was a brave thing to do and deserves to be more widely known.57 What did Splawn think of Barker’s strong words? There is a hint perhaps in Splawn’s recommendation to eliminate advanced courses in the field of Latin American history. The history department had made a large investment in this field, which began with Bolton and was primarily in the hands of his student Hackett. Barker saved the day again with a forceful argument for maintaining a well-established program and against micromanagement from the president’s office. Splawn resigned in 1927. Some Texans thought that Barker should be the next president of the university, but he did not want it. Some faculty feared Barker’s fierce honesty. When it was reported that a new president had been appointed, Barker received a news clipping about it from an anonymous sender. Scrawled at the bottom were the words, “Hee! Hee! Ha! Ha! Ha! Not you, Thank god!”58

  The Texas episode snuffed any of Bolton’s residual ambitions to be a university president. If nothing else, he had received an education about the political realities of the job. Bolton had many qualities that fitted him for such a position, including a deep understanding of and dedication to the university’s mission, a pleasing personality, a commanding presence, and tact. In his mid-fifties, Bolton had made himself into the person that he had wanted to be—an imposing figure imbued with authority who was deserving of respect and positions of great responsibility.

  Yet Bolton’s response to the Texas offer revealed some traits that argued against his placement in such a difficult executive post. He disliked political controversy, but a university president deals with it constantly, though perhaps not to the extent of controversy-plagued Texas in 1924. Bolton wanted to please, but a president cannot please everyone. To avoid giving offense, Bolton was sometimes unable to speak directly to friends or to those in power. He sometimes dithered, as in the case of the Texas presidency, in which he at first agreed to visit Austin and consider the offer, then withdrew, then agreed to go to Texas to give advice, and then departed Austin leaving the impression that he might be persuaded to take the job. Bolton lacked the decisiveness that good executives need. Perhaps most telling, Bolton’s ego drew him back to Austin, where friends, students, and alumni were clamoring for him to save the university. He believed that he could say some words and do some good, but that was a vain and misguided hope.

  None of Bolton’s disqualifications for the presidency made him a bad person. Indeed, in other settings those same personal traits served him and others well. In some ways they remind us of the ambitious fatherless farm boy—diffident toward authority, ambitious to rise, polite, believing that hard work could accomplish anything and would be appreciated by those who gave out the rewards.

  After his Austin visit Bolton must have realized that his future was in the Golden State. Now he was truly all for California, as he had once told Morse Stephens. But another presidency still beckoned. In 1924 Bolton’s friends made a second serious effort to nominate him for the second vice presidency of the AHA. Seventeen memb
ers recommended him for the post, more votes than any other prospective candidate received. But the nominating committee discounted Bolton’s supporters because most of them lived on the Pacific Coast. Perhaps there was a lingering memory of Paltsit’s campaign for Bolton or a suspicion that Bolton was campaigning for the office.59 Bolton would have to wait for his presidency.

  N I N E · Race, Place, and Heroes

  Bolton's decision to stay in California did not mean that he had escaped the vicissitudes of local patriotism and widely held prejudices concerning race, religion, politics, and history. He did not record his personal beliefs about religion, but his scholarly work on Catholic missions had moved him away from anti-Catholic prejudice to an uncritical admiration for pioneer priests and the Church that they served. Bolton's ideas about other religious and racial groups are more difficult to track, because he carefully avoided making controversial statements that might reflect adversely on the university.

  Bolton employed a simple tactic when discussing subjects that might be unfamiliar, discomforting, or even offensive to Anglo-Californian audiences: he raised the discussion to a more general category of analysis. For example, when explaining Spanish colonization, he emphasized that like the English, Spaniards were Europeans. Spanish missionaries were Catholics, yes, but the important thing was that they were Christians. Europeans all, Christians all—that was the main thing. Bolton's easy generalizing elided the centuries of conflict between Spain and England, Protestants and Catholics while making all European Christians march toward the same great brotherly goal—a free and democratic Western Hemisphere. Not everyone was able to see history in the happy light of Bolton's ecumenism.

  Belief in eugenics was widespread in the United States and had gained a particularly tenacious hold on some Californians who feared that the pure “white” race might be polluted by intermarriage with blacks, Mexicans, Jews, Asians, and Indians, who were thought to be a lesser order of humans. Golden State eugenicists were especially concerned about Mexicans, whom they racialized as dark-skinned, mixed-blood mongrels who should be kept south of the border. The Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena advocated sterilization of people deemed unfit to procreate. Eugenics enthusiasts included respected intellectuals like botanist Luther Burbank, Stanford's David Starr Jordan, and Cal's Benjamin Ide Wheeler.1

  Bolton wrote little about his racial ideas, and there is little evidence to suggest that he was influenced by the eugenicists. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that his racial views included some of the common biases of his age. An examination of Bolton's ideas about race must begin with his early work on free blacks in the South before the Civil War.2 Bolton's history of the antebellum origins of the free-black class was rooted in contemporary racial questions. “People everywhere in this age of national expansion,” he explained, “are interested in the problems of racial contact.” Bolton expressed dismay that there was racial conflict in the land and that whites and blacks did not live in harmony. He believed that an understanding of the historical causes of racial conflict would create “an additional basis for…the formation of present day policies.” This was an important question because the Spanish-American War had added “new millions of an inferior alien people” that had “greatly increased the magnitude of our race problem.” Whether Bolton or an anonymous editor struck the words “an inferior” and interlineated “alien” is unknown, but both choices show Bolton's discomfort with people of color, perhaps even a eugenic strain of thought. It is clear, however, that Bolton thought it important to avoid the past mistakes of American race relations in the antebellum South, which had created a racial underclass subject to discriminatory laws. Frequently characterizing blacks with the language of their white governors, Bolton uncritically accepted the notion that free blacks were shiftless people who constituted a menace to white society. He argued, however, that black behavior resulted from the appalling conditions that he described. Racial friction in the antebellum South led to violence, and white elites believed that “blacks and whites, all free, could not exist side by side in peace. That they were wrong has not yet been fully demonstrated.” Who was the editor? Was it an ambivalent Bolton or someone who was more hopeful about race relations in the United States at the turn of the century? Bolton censured laws that put blacks on an unequal legal footing, but he did not speak out against de jure racial segregation in his own time—certainly not when he was in Texas.

  Had Bolton continued to think and write about African Americans, he would have left a more fully developed body of work that would be easier to judge, but he completely abandoned the topic for his work on the Spanish borderlands. However, he did leave one bit of personal writing that illuminates his racial views in 1923, when he was traveling through the South. “It is the land of Darkies,” he wrote.3 At each railroad station, he saw “the usual motley mob of Negroes.” At one stop, Bolton got off the train so that he could surreptitiously listen to their “ludicrous chatter. Young Sambo greets a middle-aged woman with ‘D'y'all want some money?’ rattling the small change in his pockets.” She replied, “gawd man, y'all haint got nuthin’ but nee-ickels. Ah's got ‘nuff one dollah bills to make y'all a shirt! Yuh! Yuh! Yuh! Yuh!” To him, the exchange was merely “typical of [blacks'] carefree banter.” He did not look for deeper meanings in a conversation about money between poor people, even though he saw poverty all around him in the form of “dilapidated farm houses and Negro shacks.” Perhaps Bolton's own past had inured him to rural poverty. Or maybe he thought that African Americans were bound to be poor and were content with their condition. This was the sort of thoughtless racism that infused American society in Bolton's time, and he was not immune to it.

  Bolton discovered in Mexico a strikingly different model for race relations. In the Spanish missions, Bolton found an institution that ameliorated racial conflict through a program of religious and cultural assimilation. When in 1917 Bolton referred to the mission as “an industrial training school,” it was hard to miss the implicit comparison with Reconstruction-era efforts to educate freedmen, booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and the system of Indian schools that the federal government had established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 He no doubt had these latter-day institutions approvingly in mind when he wrote about missions. It is ironic that when Bolton was worrying about the racial complications of national expansion in the 1890s, he fretted over “alien” people whose ancestors had been products of Catholic missionary activity. by 1917 Bolton's racial outlook had become assimilationist, not eugenicist.

  Perhaps that is why Bolton was willing to speak up for Native American legal equality. In 1916 he was at work on a case before the California State Supreme Court concerning Indian citizenship.5 The Lake County clerk had refused to register to vote Ethan Anderson, a Pomo Indian. With the assistance of a reform group, the Indian board of Cooperation, Anderson brought suit against the county.6 Evidently Anderson's lawyers asked Bolton for his opinion in the matter.7 Bolton argued that “all Indians living within the territory ceded by Mexico to the United States in 1848…became citizens of the United States; and that all such in California and their descendants are now by virtue of our present Constitution, entitled to vote, if they have the proper educational qualifications.”8 Indians had become citizens under the Republic of Mexico by virtue of the Plan of Iguala, he reasoned, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had guaranteed U.S. citizenship to all Mexicans in the Southwest if they wanted it. Thus, Indians residing in the Mexican cession became citizens.9 Bolton cited Mexican law, several relevant U.S. court cases, and the 1849 California constitutional debates to strengthen his claim. Anderson's counsel accepted Bolton's reasoning and asked the court to decide the case on that basis. ultimately, the court decided in favor of Anderson but on narrower grounds.10 Nevertheless, Bolton's participation in this case demonstrated his support for Indian citizenship and voting rights, while furnishing a striking contrast with Turner, who had described no place for Indians after the
frontier era had passed.11

  Bolton's many trips to the Southwest inspired comments on the Indians who lived there. In the summer of 1922 he toured New Mexico with an Indian guide and visited several Pueblo towns as well as prehistoric ruins. He was particularly taken with Zuni, “a city of terraced houses ranged in streets” that he found “interesting beyond expression.” He was glad to see the Zuni Pueblo before it was “too late,” Bolton explained, for he believed that it would not be long before all of the Pueblo towns would be entirely deserted. Bolton viewed recent developments in Pueblo country with mixed emotions. While he lamented the passing of old ways, he seemed glad to report the existence of Indian schools, the YMCA, and the widespread use of English. Still, he recognized that assimilation was not wholly successful among the Pueblos. “Americanization goes on rapidly,” he observed, “but many go back to their blankets even after graduating from Carlyle [sic].”12 Like many Americans of his time, Bolton was ambivalent about the assimilation of Indians into the dominant society. He believed in Indian citizenship and civil rights, but he also assumed that assimilation meant the destruction of Indian culture. Like most Anglo-Americans, Bolton failed to recognize that Indians were able to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining their distinctive identity as Native Americans.13