Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  Six months after visiting the Pueblos, Bolton learned about the Bursum Bill, a proposed federal law that would have permitted white squatters on Pueblo lands to secure valid titles and water rights to the detriment of the Indians. The reaction of the Pueblos and their supporters was so strong that Congress scrapped the original bill and passed a more evenhanded law, the Pueblo Lands Act. In the meantime, opposition to the Bursum Bill invigorated the Indian reform movement that ultimately found expression in the Indian New Deal during FDR's administration.14 Bolton, outraged by the Bursum Bill, joined the rising wave of resistance to it. “All of us ought to join in a protest against the grave injustice to that remarkable people of the Southwest,” he wrote to anthropologist Edgar Hewett. He thought circulating a petition would be a good idea. “If I can help in the cause in any way,” Bolton offered, “let me know.”15

  Bolton's reaction to the Bursum Bill was in line with the interest in Indians that he had expressed earlier and that surfaced in his graduate teaching as well. by 1921 Bolton had supervised ten master's theses and doctoral dissertations that covered U.S. Indian policy in all of the southwestern states and northern states west of the Rockies. Bolton also directed work on Oklahoma Indians, the fur trade, southwestern tribes, and the Nez Perce, Iroquois, and Cayuse Indians. In all, his graduate students wrote thirty-six theses on Indian topics.16 For most other mentors, these figures would have represented the graduate teaching of a lifetime, but with more than four hundred graduate degrees to his credit, Indian topics accounted for less than 10 percent of Bolton's students’ graduate work. Nevertheless, the fact that his students completed ten studies of federal Indian policy between 1914 and 1921 suggests Bolton's interest in this topic at that time.

  But no one in 1921 would have argued that Indians were the main subject of Bolton's interest. Spanish missionaries occupied his attention more than anything else. Bolton's consistent praise of Catholic missionaries put him in the forefront of academics who wished to cast Catholic history in a positive light. Bolton was not alone in a crusade to rehabilitate Catholic friars, as Archbishop Hanna's request for hundreds of offprints of his 1917 mission article suggests. Bolton's friend Judge Davis had a special interest in preserving the missions, which was perhaps inspired by his own Catholic heritage.17 Davis considered himself a peer of Charles Fletcher Lummis, author of many articles and books, including The Spanish Pioneers. Although Lummis was not himself a Catholic, his book was distributed to every council of the Knights of Columbus in the United States.18 Davis described Lummis as “one of your ‘here-to-defend’ men,” while characterizing his relationship with Bolton as that of “fellows in the same regiment, you know!”19 Evidently Davis believed that he, Lummis, and Bolton were jointly involved in refurbishing the historical image of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire.

  Catholics were not the only religious group subject to prejudice in the United States. Bigots and eugenicists excoriated Jews on religious and racial grounds. Indeed, college fraternities like Bolton's blackballed Jews as well as Catholics. Nor did the academic world welcome Jews.20 Professors often inquired about the race of candidates for professorships, and Bolton routinely provided the information. Bolton described an applicant to his brother as a small man who “looked like a Jew,” but did not reveal if he actually was a Jew or merely resembled one.21 Someone else asked about the ancestry of Charles Coan, whose last name raised a doubt. Bolton assured her that Coan was “not a Jew, and his personal appearance would remove any suspicions.”22

  While Bolton evidently believed that Jewishness—or its absence—was apparent in a person's physical characteristics, he did not believe that Jews should be barred from graduate school or academic employment. Bolton trained Jewish students and worked hard to place them, although this was not an easy task, as the case of Abraham Nasatir shows. Nasatir was a gifted student who received the bachelor's degree from Berkeley at age seventeen. He was interested in the history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, so Bolton asked his former student Thomas Maitland Marshall to direct Nasatir's MA thesis at Washington university.23 Marshall refused, so Nasatir remained in Berkeley with Bolton, where he finished the MA (1922) and PhD (1926). Marshall met Nasatir while he was in St. Louis doing research. He characterized Nasatir as “a smart but very obnoxious Jew. When he leaves we hope the Jefferson Memorial will be left to us. We hope that we will not see his like again.” Bolton coolly replied that if he had refused to work with “a man of ability” because he was “obnoxious…half of my men would have been sent elsewhere.”24

  Marshall's vicious comments about Nasatir foretold the difficulty that Bolton would have in placing him. He wrote strong letters that recommended Nasatir as his “most brilliant student,” “a real scholar,” with “a very fine spirit,” though he was “youthful,” and “good naturedly egotistical.” because of his youth and enthusiasm, Nasatir needed the “kind guidance of some one who really likes him.” If he got the right kind of treatment, he would “almost certainly prove to be a great man.”25 Nasatir landed a one-year job at the University of Iowa, but Bolton's glowing recommendations failed to obtain permanent employment for him. Professor Arthur P. Whitaker explained that Nasatir's “race was against him” in the competition for a job at the Florida State College for Women. Bolton bristled at Whitaker's mention of race: “Such a thing would be inconceivable in another community.”26 Bolton knew better than that. Finally Nasatir landed a job at San Diego State Teachers’ College, where two of Bolton's students, Charles B. Leonard and Lewis B. Lesley, already were teaching history, but barriers existed even there. At first Leonard objected to Nasatir and another Bolton student, Clarence DuFour, took the job. Nasatir at last got the San Diego position when DuFour resigned in 1927.27

  In the 1920s anti-Semitism in academe was common throughout the country. In 1922 Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who worried that the proportion of Jews enrolled at Harvard had risen from 7 percent to more than 21 percent, proposed a quota on Jewish admissions. Lowell was surprised when Jews and others attacked his plan, which he thought would benefit Jews and gentiles alike. Harvard's gentility would not be adversely affected by association with unassimilated Jews, Lowell reasoned, and Jews would not be subjected to the increased anti-Semitism that would inevitably result if there were too many Jews at Harvard. To mute the criticism, Lowell appointed a committee to recommend a new admissions policy. The committee restated Harvard's commitment to admissions criteria “free from discrimination on grounds of race or religion.” It also recommended a plan to admit more students from the South and West, which was another way of limiting Jewish enrollment.28

  Even professors who wrote favorable recommendations for Jews were careful to let the readers know that the Jew in question would be socially acceptable, as when Carl Becker wrote to Bolton on behalf of Hans Rosenberg, “Neither in appearance nor in manner does he strike one as particularly Jewish.” Rosenberg was “likeable…polite and cultivated and modest, in no way aggressive or boastful.”29 Of course, simply disclosing that Rosenberg was a Jew would have been enough to disqualify him for employment in most universities at the time. Berkeley did not hire Rosenberg, but we do not know why.

  There is every reason to believe that Bolton was sincere in his condemnation of anti-Semitism, but he had practical reasons to curry favor with the Jewish community. At about the time that Nasatir was working on his master's degree, a Jewish lawyer from San Francisco, Sidney M. Ehrman, began to support Bolton's work with generous contributions. Ehrman had graduated with the Cal class of 1896 and had become a prominent San Francisco attorney. He had also joined the Native Sons. Every year Bolton went before the Grand Parlor meeting of the Native Sons to explain the work of the history department, the accomplishments of fellows whom the organization had funded, and the continuing needs of the history department. In 1922 Bolton declared that Californians ought to be ashamed that they had not published the first history of California, written by the Franciscan missionary Francisco Paló
u, Noticias de la California.30 Afterward, Ehrman, still a stranger to Bolton, touched his arm and asked how much it would cost to publish Palóu's work. Bolton said, “Well, $5,000.” “All right, the money is yours,” Ehrman replied.31

  From that moment Ehrman underwrote the publication costs of most of Bolton's books. He also gave to Bolton a substantial cash gift—an honorarium, he called it—when Bolton published Fray Juan Crespi, Missionary Explorer of the Pacific Coast. In all, Ehrman may have given as much as $50,000 to subsidize Bolton's work. Bolton and Ehrman became personal friends. The Boltons crossed the bay to keep dinner and opera dates with the Ehrmans in the city. In summer they were guests at Ehrman's Lake Tahoe lodge, and Bolton invited Ehrman along on some of his southwestern expeditions to retrace the routes of Spanish explorers.32 Bolton must have been pleased when the governor appointed Ehrman to the University of California Board of Regents in 1930.

  By the standards of the time Bolton's ideas about race and religion were tolerant, and the history he wrote was inclusive, though not universally so. He believed that it was his duty to convert narrow-minded people to a broader view of the past. The Native Sons of the golden West seemed to be an appropriate audience for Bolton to work on. Some of Bolton's presentations pandered to his listeners’ interests in Anglo history, as in 1922 when he extolled Chapman's work on Spanish California, which was funded by the Native Sons. Chapman's “most impressive thesis” was that “Spain's hold on California, weak though it was, made it possible for the United States, when the time came, to absorb California.” Otherwise, “our country today probably would be bounded on the west by the Rocky Mountains.” The logic was tortured, but the meaning was clear to listeners who heard with Anglo ears. Hispanic history was a prologue to the United States’ amoeba-like and presumably benign absorption of California. This sort of pap prepared the way for Bolton to dun his listeners for money to transcribe, translate, and publish Spanish documents and to restore the ruined missions for the edification of California's citizens and tourists. “It seems almost ungracious” to ask for money, “but we are all working together,” he said. “You are not working for your own glory, nor for the glory of your Native Sons’ fellows,” Bolton assured them; “you are working for the glory of California, and so are we.”33 Applause erupted in the room.

  After making his pitch for funding, Bolton moved on to somewhat more contentious ground. “I wonder how many of you realize that this…very week we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the beginning of representative government in California.” Democracy did not begin in California with the raising of the Stars and Stripes in 1846, he explained, but with Mexican independence. First, there was the Revolution in the British colonies, and that event eventually inspired democratic revolts in Spanish America. Thus, California was “the heir of two great struggles for freedom.” Not satisfied that he had made his point, Bolton added that “one might say that some of the results of the revolution of 1776, which gave birth to the stars and stripes, coming by way of Mexico beat the flag to California by a quarter of a century.”34 He struck out a sentence explaining that Indians were a substantial part of the electorate in Mexican California.

  Bolton also informed the Native Sons that the University of California school of history was embarked on a revisionist course of great importance. In praising the work of the Native Sons fellows, he said that Cal was creating “a new synthesis of American history.” “I say,” Bolton declared, “American history as it generally has been written, has not been American history,” but a provincial story told from an East Coast perspective. Californians had “a higher vantage point and we are trying to show that American history is made up of many national streams.”35

  Bolton's appeal to the Native Sons for an enlarged view of American history enlisted well-educated, broad-minded men like Judge Davis, Sidney Ehrman, and other Native Sons, at least for the time being. Davis's and Ehrman's status as religious minorities may have nurtured their willingness to enlarge American history from the “higher” perspective of California, as Bolton put it. But Bolton's appeal also drew in California boosters who liked the idea of their state's University leading the nation to a new view of history that cast California in an important role. Bolton's new history would not be merely a story of California and the nation, but California and the world. Bolton's borderlands and Americas history appealed to westerners for the same reason that Turner's frontier history did: it made their region important and by extension it made them important.

  Yet Bolton understood that his appeal for a larger, more inclusive sense of American history must not unduly challenge those Native Sons who had a narrower, more filiopietistic sense of the past than the Davises and Ehrmans among them. He balanced lessons about Mexican democracy and multinational history with praise for those whom he called “the first Americans in this state,” which meant immigrants from the United States who had begun to filter into California late in the Spanish era. In 1923 he sketched the pre—gold rush American pioneers who settled in various parts of the Mexican province. Bolton mapped California's Anglo-owned land grant ranchos and explained them as a precursor to the Bear Flag Revolt, but did not bother to mention that most of these men had become Mexican citizens and that few of the Bear Flag rebels—a small minority of Anglos in California—owned land in Mexican California.36 No one should be shocked that Bolton elided some of the inconvenient details of California history in a series of fifteen-minute talks to a general audience. Anyone who has lectured understands the tyranny of the clock. The relentlessly ticking second hand can change more history in a minute than Napoleon's army did in a year. Yet Bolton understood what to leave in and what to leave out. by carefully choosing his words and topics, Bolton won the favorable opinion of the Native Sons, as well as a steady source of funding for himself and his graduate students. It would not always be so.

  Some important subjects in Anglo-California history were so sensitive that Bolton sought the opinion of Judge Davis. His comments on Mary Floyd Williams's thesis about the 1851 San Francisco Committee of Vigilance well illustrate this point. The manuscript had originally been written under Teggart's guidance, and Bolton edited the final version for the University of California Publications in History series. Then he sent it to Davis, perhaps sensing that this delicate topic should be vetted by someone of the judge's stature and sensibilities before printing it for the world to see. Californians had long debated whether the hangings that the vigilance committee had carried out were justified. Many believed that the executions were lynchings dressed up as justice that blotted the character of the Anglo founders of San Francisco.37 Some of the sons of the founders—Judge Davis, for example—were now numbered among San Francisco's elite and belonged to the Native Sons of the golden West.

  As it happened, the thesis in question portrayed the San Francisco vigilantes as upstanding men who put the safety of the community above strict adherence to formal law. When law failed to protect them, Williams—or perhaps Bolton—wrote, “they did to the outlaws among them the things that seemed right in their own eyes.” These actions, in her view, were in the American “spirit” of things and were necessitated by the general lawlessness that prevailed at the time.38 The vigilance committees, according to Williams, were a form of direct democracy that supplanted corrupt and ineffective (but duly elected) officers and regular courts.

  And what did the judge think of this line of reasoning? Splendid! Publish it as soon as possible and with no further editing, which might ruin the book. Not only did the manuscript make early San Franciscans look good, but there were other reasons to publish it as well. “Certain things are transpiring in the world, including the United States,” the judge hinted darkly, “which may make us all realize before long that some of these problems of…law and order…will be present with us soon again.”39 The judge, it seems, advocated the use of vigilantes to stave off Bolsheviks and Wobblies. And so the book was published as part of the ongoing search for a useable past, as well as a ce
lebration of Anglo pluck and resourcefulness in the face of a crime wave.

  Not all extralegal activities of the 1850s were regarded as fair game, however. In 1927 the dean of the graduate division complained about the MA thesis of Richard Mitchell, a study of Joaquin Murieta, California's legendary Mexican bandit. The dean thought that the topic was not very uplifting and that it contained no heroes. Bolton snapped back that the thesis had merit as a study of social conditions in frontier California. Then he compared it with Williams's study of the vigilance committee, in which he had found no great heroes but which seemed to serve a useful purpose anyhow.40 The Murieta thesis was approved and Mitchell eventually became principal of Beverly Hills High School.41

  Bolton's determination to broaden the perspective on American history without offending Anglo sensibilities is perhaps most apparent in his school text, California's Story, coauthored with his former colleague from Stanford, Ephraim D. Adams. The textbook was an important part of Bolton's comprehensive influence on history education at all levels in the state.42 Bolton's interest in elementary and high school teaching grew naturally out of his experience as a teacher and his brother's field, educational training. Bolton had teamed with Barker to publish their own school text in Texas. Soon after arriving in Berkeley, Bolton had partnered with Teggart on a California history text, but his estrangement from Teggart doomed their project. Adams was a more congenial collaborator. Authorial responsibilities were divided neatly in half. Bolton contributed the story of the Spanish and Mexican eras, while Adams wrote about everything that followed. Bolton took editorial responsibility for the entire text.43

  Bolton and Adams did not risk alienating California patriots with their textbook. Their preface fulsomely declared that “the authors have emphasized those qualities of courage, self-sacrifice, and service which have been typified in the State's great men. The devotion and heroism of the early [Franciscan] Fathers, the boldness of the Vigilantes, the initiative of the pioneers, the generosity of men prominent in later years—all contribute to that type of citizenship toward which it is hoped all users of this book will strive as an ideal.” Leaving aside any criticism of childhood aspirations to vigilantism, which normally have to be tamped down a bit in the school yard, one must acknowledge the forthright manner in which the authors promoted the worship of California's heroes. Bolton and Adams singled out modern-day Californians who exemplified admirable qualities, including Hubert Howe Bancroft, David Starr Jordan, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, and the brilliant botanist (and leading eugenicist) Luther Burbank, as well as industrialists, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, and contemporary public figures such as Hiram Johnson and Herbert Hoover.44