Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Page 26

  There was more to Bolton than hero worship. He had been giving short takes on the borderlands since his 1917 mission essay, but his thought remained general, inchoate, asserted rather than argued. He seemed to be working up to a big statement about the significance of the borderlands in American history. Perhaps he was waiting for the right moment.

  In 1930 the right moment appeared on the horizon. Ephraim Adams was in a Pasadena sanitarium for advanced tubercular victims. In January Adams came down with pneumonia. Then his heart began to fail. Bolton arranged for Adams to receive an honorary degree from Cal in May, but he was not well enough to make the trip north to receive it. “It is very much like you to have thought of this,” Adams told his old friend. They were giving him the “rest-cure” in Pasadena, and Adams hoped to be teaching at Stanford in the fall. Adams returned to Stanford, but not to teach. His funeral was held in the Stanford crypt.12

  Adams's death left a vacancy in the chain of succession to the AHA presidency. In 1931 Bolton was named to fill the empty slot for the first vice presidency, which meant that he would finally become president in 1932.13 His presidential address would be the perfect moment to develop his ideas about the American borderlands. Or would it?

  As only the second president from west of the Mississippi Bolton felt obligated to represent the interests of the West. The Pacific Coast Branch had been founded to provide an opportunity for Far West members of the AHA to enjoy some of the benefits of the parent organization without the expenditure of time and money required to go to meetings in the East. On rare occasions the AHA meeting ventured to the Midwest or the South, but most meetings were on the Eastern Seaboard. With the exception of the “special” meeting in the Bay Area in 1915 during Stephens's presidency, the AHA had never met on the West Coast. This was a matter of concern to the growing contingent of western historians who belonged to the AHA. Before the Toronto meeting Bolton told one of his friends at Princeton that he might propose that one year out of four the AHA meeting should be held west of the Mississippi River. He supposed that such a proposal would be regarded as “radical” by eastern members.14 This issue and other western complaints would continue to fester during the 1930s.

  More than regional changes were afoot in the historical profession. During the 1930s Bolton's generation took over. His immediate predecessor as AHA president happened to be Carl L. Becker, Bolton's Wisconsin fraternity brother. Finally the “old guard” whom Bolton had complained about in 1922 was being replaced. Of course, the new leaders of the profession were not youngsters. Bolton and the others were in their sixties when they assumed the AHA presidency.

  Bolton's tenure as president probably convinced President Sproul to add to the historian's prestige by naming him the Sather Professor of History. The much loved Henry Morse Stephens had formerly held the Sather professorship, but it had remained unfilled since his death in 1919. In 1930 Bolton's salary was $7,500, and he had not had a raise since 1924, the year when he turned down $10,000 and the Texas presidency.15 With the Sather professorship, Sproul gave Bolton a raise to $8,000.16

  The raise was nice, but the effects of the depression could not be denied. The state legislature cut the total University budget by 26 percent between 1931 and 1939.17 Faculty, including Bolton, adsorbed some of the fiscal pain in the form of salary reductions, but his was restored after two years. Some of his colleagues did not see their 1932 level of compensation again in the 1930s.

  The honor of the AHA presidency and the Sather professorship no doubt meant much more to Bolton than the temporary pay reduction. New honors came to him in 1931 when the king of Italy made him Knight Commander of the Crown, a recognition that went nicely with his 1926 Spanish knighthood.18 Bolton's appreciative studies of Catholic missionaries had made him an international figure.

  Bolton's importance was recognized at home as well as abroad. For years Bolton had made annual recommendations to the Native Sons of the Golden West for two traveling fellows funded at $1,500 each. The fellowships had been invaluable to the graduate students, to the Bancroft Library, and to Bolton. After making recommendations in 1930, the Native Sons told Bolton not to bother referring any names for the following year. He no doubt figured that the depression had taken its toll, but the Native Sons had a plan. Instead of funding graduate students, they gave Bolton $3,000 for a research trip to Europe in the summer of 1931.19 He had long anticipated such a trip, but the demands of work at the University and the cost had prevented him from going. Now he planned a whirlwind tour of archives in search of material for a biography of Kino.

  Bolton was in Europe less than three months. It would prove to be his only trip to the Old World.20 He spent most of his time in Spain, but also went to France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and England. As usual, he regarded his research as a glorious adventure—an exploration in search of his hero that rivaled Henry Morton Stanley's search for David Livingstone in Africa. He had “ransacked the repositories of America and Europe,” he revealed in his introduction, aptly titled “An Adventure in Archives and on the Trail.” “Equally intriguing…has been my odyssey on Kino's trail,” a sentiment reminiscent of Parkman's claims about research in the open air.21

  Bolton returned from his barnstorming tour of European archives excited and refreshed, but he still had to attend to the mundane details of his job. Filling the Byrne and Ehrman professorships with top-notch people would be important to the University, the department, and Bolton. The University wanted to attract senior professors who would become new jewels in the Berkeley crown. One of the two new faculty would likely succeed Bolton as department chair. At Cal, retirement was mandatory at the age of seventy—in 1940 for Bolton. He wanted to bring in someone who would secure his legacy at Berkeley. For that reason the Byrne professorship was the most important because the Americanist would likely have the most influence on the program that Bolton had created.

  Bolton developed a list of four prominent historians as candidates for the Byrne: James Truslow Adams, Frederic Logan Paxson, Eugene C. Barker, and Arthur M. Schlesinger. Adams and Paxson quickly moved to the top of the list. Adams, a man of independent means who had never held an academic appointment, was probably a straw candidate as far as Bolton was concerned.22 Paxson appealed to Bolton for several reasons. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for his History of the American Frontier and had studied with Bolton under McMaster at Penn.23 Wisconsin had hired Paxson to replace Turner. As Turner's heir at Wisconsin, Paxson had the name most clearly associated with the history of the American frontier, but his interests were varied. His dissertation, and first book, examined U.S. recognition of Latin American republics.24 We can imagine Bolton thinking that Paxson was a historian who would fully understand and sympathize with Bolton's broad Americas concept. Consequently, Sproul offered Paxson the Byrne chair. Bolton promised to throw his hat in the air and cheer if Paxson agreed to come. He hoped that Paxson would be “sympathetic toward the larger aims” of the Berkeley department, especially “Hispanic America” and “the Western Hemisphere (such as I am developing in my History of the Americas).” Paxson accepted the offer.25 Now Bolton turned to the Ehrman chair. He recruited James Westfall Thompson from the University of Chicago for the professorship that Ehrman had endowed with $250,000—an immense sum in the midst of the depression. (The Byrne endowment was only $150,000.) A prolific writer, Thompson was perhaps the most important medieval historian in the United States at the time.26

  The Paxson and Thompson hires were home runs. Both men were stars who had been raided from top-flight universities. Each was at the top of his game and would add luster to the University of California for years. The University's ability to come up with big money for major professors during the depression spoke to Cal's growing power and prestige. Bolton's ability to recruit such men made him a hero at home and increased his professional clout. The president-elect of the American Historical Association could accomplish big things in the history profession—there was no doubt about that. Paxson's acceptance was pr
obably most important to Bolton's peace of mind. The big man from Wisconsin seemed simpatico with Bolton in every way and would help to secure Bolton's legacy, or so it seemed at the time.

  While Bolton was recruiting new professors, Frederick Jackson Turner toiled in the congenial atmosphere of the Huntington Library. Since moving to California in 1928, Turner had taught occasional courses at Cal Tech and worked on the “Big Book,” as his long-awaited project in American history was called (now with a bit of derision from historians who felt they had waited too long for it to appear). Turner's health was failing. His heart was weak, and he developed other infirmities. On March 14, 1932, he suffered a heart attack that he knew would be fatal. “Tell Max [Farrand] that I am sorry I haven't finished my book,” he told the doctor.27 He died that evening in his home. The funeral was in Farrand's residence on the grounds of the Huntington Library. Turner was cremated and his ashes were sent to Madison for interment.28 He had lived for seventy-one years, a full life by the standards of the day. Yet it seemed impossible to his friends and students that he was gone. Guy Stanton Ford was stirred when he read Farrand's memorial for Turner. Sitting at his desk in Minnesota at the end of the day, Ford kept thinking, “Is Turner really dead? Did he grow old, become deaf, halt in his springy stride?” Ford could not accept it. “It is strange how I cannot associate age or failing powers with Turner. They do not belong with him any more than rust on a Damascus blade.” Turner's death reminded Ford of his own mortality. “If Turner grew old we must all be growing old,” and “what came to such an embodiment of eternal youth, is even more inescapable for all the rest of us.”29

  Bolton had written occasionally to his other mentor, John Bach McMaster, but he had never been as important to him as Turner.30 In 1932 McMaster was in frail health but still labored at his memoirs. “Time was plentiful,” he wrote, but never completed the sentence.31 A heart attack took him on May 14, 1932.

  Bolton had seen Turner several times at the Huntington Library and even visited him at his Pasadena home shortly before his death. Farrand's memorial notice moved Bolton to comment on Turner's qualities as a professor.32 “Turner was not only one of the great scholars but also one of the great teachers of his generation.” It was a loss to the world that Turner had not been able to finish his long-anticipated book. “However,” Bolton philosophized, “I suppose that nobody ever finishes his job. Turner would have done enough if he had never written anything but his essay on the significance of the frontier.” Late in his own life Bolton still referred to Turner as the Master.33

  Eight months after Turner's death Bolton rather thoughtlessly remarked to Farrand that “I might drop dead and never finish my book.”34 But Turner reached out from the grave and published two volumes posthumously. Or rather, his constant friend Farrand published them for him. The first was a collection of Turner's essays on sectionalism compiled by Farrand, which won the Pulitzer Prize.35 Three years after Turner's death the “Big Book,” The United States, 1830—1850, finally appeared, with the concluding chapters completed by Farrand.

  While Bolton always praised Turner's work on the frontier and sections, his geographical perspective was far broader than his mentor's. In 1931 John Parish announced the Pacific Coast Branch's new journal, the Pacific Historical Review, and Bolton made a few suggestions to its editor. He was “disappointed in one particular.” As announced, the journal would be about the western United States, which Bolton thought too narrow because that region was “not an historical unit, or at least never was until relatively recent times.” The “entire Pacific Coast area from Panama to Alaska was a unit down to the middle of the eighteenth century,” and Bolton doubted “if any worth while study of the western portion of what is now the united States has been or can be made for this earlier period without keeping in mind the entire region.” Indeed, Bolton would have preferred that the journal include “the entire Pacific Coast area of the Western Hemisphere,” although he admitted that there might be practical reasons to place more modest geographic limits on the new journal. Nevertheless, Bolton was “not writing this note merely to register a difference of opinion, but am doing it in the hope that it may have some influence” on the “scope of the publication, which ought to mean much for the history of the Western Hemisphere,” he insisted. The journal would “miss its part and lose its opportunity if too narrowly conceived.”36

  Professor Parish, who was on the UCLA history faculty, got the message. The new journal should express Bolton's concept of hemispheric history, the hallmark of the California school. When the first number of the Review came off the presses, Parish declared, “The Basin of the Pacific was an entity. Its history was a unity.” Therefore the new publication would be “a medium of expression for this unity.” The Pacific Historical Review would welcome articles about the western states “of both North and South America, on the islands of the seas, and on the new and old countries of Australia and Japan, China and Asiatic Russia.”37 Because the annual PCB conference was a mini-AHA with all fields represented, editor Parish allowed that occasional articles from other regions would also appear in the pages of the journal. Pushed by Bolton, Parish conceived of an even broader publication than the Berkeley patriarch had imagined. Bolton's hemispheric outlook was there, but so was the echo of Stephens's Pacific Coast history that reached out across the sea to Asia. Thus the distinctive transnational perspective of the Pacific Historical Review was born.

  Bolton's advice about the new journal may have crystallized his thinking about his AHA presidential address. When he was notified of his election, he groused that he would “be in misery” for two years racking his brain for something to say.38 His address would have been a matchless opportunity to develop his ideas about borderlands history, but as his letter to Parish showed, hemispheric history was never far from his mind. At first he planned to speak on a narrower topic, Jesuit missionaries in Latin America—a lecture that would have offered a counterpoise to Francis Parkman's classic account of the Jesuits in French Canada. The choice of subject seemed especially appropriate for a meeting in Toronto, but as the meeting drew near, Bolton completely changed his topic. Perhaps James Truslow Adams's 1931 book, The Epic of America, changed his mind.39 Adams had written only about the United States, rather than “America,” as the title promised. This was one of Bolton's pet peeves. Whether in response to Adams or for some other reason, Bolton would deliver his famous and much criticized address “Epic of Greater America.”40 He would use his presidency as a bully pulpit from which to preach the need for American history that transcended petty national perspectives.

  Bolton had come to believe that what he called traditional national histories, taught without a broader context, were not only narrow but misleading and destructive. In announcing the appointment of Paxson and Thompson to their professorships, Bolton observed that the University of California had already become one of the nation's leading graduate schools in history with students (mostly Bolton's) who occupied important academic positions throughout the land. The new professors would add to the importance of Berkeley as a center for research and graduate training. Then he declared that although it was “customary to say that it is a greater achievement to make history than to write it,” that depended on “how history is made, and how it is written.” Historians participated “in the making of history, and their influence may be good or bad. Somebody has bungled things badly in recent history making,” he wrote without making clear exactly what had been botched. He averred that bad historians “whose interpretations were not only influential, but unsound and therefore vicious” were partly responsible for an unnamed turn of events (perhaps meaning the rise of European fascism). Paxson and Thompson would add to California's ability to produce “well trained historians” who were “as important to the world as well trained scientists, doctors, or lawyers.”41 Surely Bolton believed that he was making history as well as writing it, that his hemispheric view corrected unsound and perhaps vicious interpretations, and that his work and
that of his students would have far-reaching effects.

  When Guy Stanton Ford asked about Bolton's historical “points of view,” he replied that “the most expansive idea which interests me is the presentation of American history as Western Hemisphere History instead of Brazilian History, Canadian History, or united States History.” It was “absurd to assume that the Western Hemisphere has developed in isolated chunks,” he continued, “yet we in the United States have proceeded on that assumption.”42 The coincidence of Bolton's presidency and the Canadian meeting must have seemed almost providential. The Canadian city would give Bolton an appropriate stage on which to proclaim his hemispheric point of view.

  As the date of the AHA meeting approached, University of Toronto authorities informed Bolton that they would confer an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on him at the time of the conference. This was Bolton's fourth honorary degree, the first three having come from Catholic institutions: Catholic University of America, Saint Ignatius College (now the University of San Francisco), and Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California. More honorifics would follow, but the Toronto degree, combined with the AHA presidency, elevated Bolton to a plateau that few historians ever reached. The boy from Tomah who wanted to rise in society had indeed risen.

  Bolton's presidential address was the view of a man who was seeing it all from the top. Ten years previously he had lectured the AHA about the need for a hemispheric course. Then he was well established; by 1932 he was the top dog. His address struck all the familiar themes of his hemispheric Americas course. United States history that was taught from the perspective of only the thirteen British colonies that formed the United States had “helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists.” Because of the growing importance of inter-American relations and “from the standpoint of correct historiography,” it was time for a change to a synthetic general course on hemispheric history that would provide a foundation for national courses. His footnote to that sweeping statement said merely that “this point is so patent that it hardly needs demonstration,” adding that “a movement in this direction is well under way.”43 The movement, of course, was centered at Berkeley and carried to other campuses primarily by Bolton's students. “The Epic of Greater America,” enunciated at Toronto, Bolton no doubt believed, would accelerate and broaden the trend that he had begun in California.