Herbert disliked Wells, but he had to cultivate him while he was in office. When finally he met Wells, Herbert ingratiated himself with pleasantries and good humor. In November 1892 Herbert voted against Wells, but the superintendent won reelection.58 Herbert had little choice but to go along cheerfully with a superintendent whom he happened to despise. This small incident foreshadowed a lifetime of pleasing the men who held authority over him. When in charge, Herbert expected to be obeyed; to his betters, he returned the favor with a smile on his face.
Success at Fairchild High School was important to Herbert, but it was a means to an end. He studied hard for the university and kept asking Fred for advice about his studies. The brothers were dreaming big dreams for farm boys with two-year teaching diplomas. They began to consider the doctorate as the consummation of their educational and social advancement. Herbert drew a figure at the bottom of a letter to Fred. At the left margin a fingerpost pointed to the right, followed by five arrows that ended at “Ph.D.” on the opposite margin. “I will follow in your wake, or break a road for myself,” he told his brother.59
The same letter contained another foreshadowing. Herbert asked Fred about bringing Wisconsin history professor Frederick Jackson Turner to Fairchild for a lecture. There is no reason to suppose that Herbert wanted to study with Turner, but the brothers probably knew enough about him to regard the young history professor as a role model. Turner was also a small-town Wisconsin boy, who was only five years older than Fred and nine years senior to Herbert. If Turner could do it, there was hope for the brothers.
Herbert was beginning to take more than a perfunctory interest in history. With a friend he read Prescott's Conquest of Mexico.60 He selected an assortment of histories for his school and hoped to read them, but feared he had “more good works” than he could “get time to read.”61 The little library included books about Hannibal, Alfred the Great, Peter the Great, William the Conqueror, Rome, and Greece. He also had Parkman's Pontiac, Fiske's history of the American Revolution, and miscellaneous books about U.S. history. This was not a bad little library, considering the state of historical scholarship in 1892. Dipping into it would have given him a broad education in history.
While at Fairchild Herbert found time for romance with a local woman, but she threw him over for someone else. The experience left him wounded and a little discouraged about women. “I would not trust any of them with my heart if I wanted it to remain whole. They would bust it, sure!”62 Fred was probably in no mood for Herbert's dreary philosophy about women and love, for he planned to marry his fiancee after he graduated from Wisconsin in June 1893.63 But Herbert continued with his casually misogynistic ramblings. “It is well for me that there is no danger of female eyes gazing on some of my charges made against their sex,” he wrote; “otherwise I should be doomed to lifelong celibacy.”64
Permanent celibacy was not the sort of life sentence that Gertrude Janes had in mind for Herbert. He had come to respect her educational and professional goals, although in the fall of 1892 he regarded her merely as an old friend. Nevertheless, his respect for Gertrude was growing. When he told someone that Gertrude “ought to be at the U.W.,” his friend replied, “Yes, nice thing—lots of money,” referring to the Janes family's comfortable circumstances. “I suppose that's as far as he sees,” Herbert thought.65 But Herbert now saw Gertrude as someone with serious mental ability, a likely prospect for the state university, where he was headed himself. In the spring of 1893 his feelings for her would deepen.
During the Christmas holiday Herbert went home to his family and likely saw Gertrude. Whatever transpired then, their relationship took a turn in the new year. In early February Gertrude visited Fairchild, and it was not because she was looking for a job. Herbert, who usually wrote long, detailed letters to his brother, resorted to breathless stabs of information. “Janes is here to spend Sat & Sun[.] Dance last night.” It must have been a big night. “Still in the ring, though slightly disfigured,” he told Fred.66 Gertrude had him now and Herbert was a willing captive.
In the fall Herbert went to Madison, while Fred and his new wife, Olive, moved to Kaukauna, Wisconsin, for a principalship at the high school. Once again the brothers traded places, now with Fred gaining practical experience and subsidizing Herbert's education. At last Herbert stood at the door of the institution that he had dreamed about since high school, an institution that he hoped would grant him the keys to the kingdom of professional recognition and social advancement. The professors he met there would change his life.
T W O · A Gathering at Lake Mendota
The University of Wisconsin was less than fifty years old when Herbert Bolton arrived in 1893. The student body of nearly three thousand was small by today's standards, but it had grown rapidly from only five hundred in 1887. Located on College Hill along the shores of Lake Mendota, the university's environs were nothing if not scenic, but its political geography was as important as its physical location. Madison is the state capital, and the state house is within walking distance. Politicos had only to cast their eyes westward to see the fruits of the state's investment in higher education. Most Wisconsinites judged the university approvingly; some thought otherwise.1
The University of Wisconsin was poised to become a great institution of higher learning. Funding from the sale of public lands under the federal Morrill Act had enabled the expansion of faculty, student body, and curriculum. By the 1890s Wisconsin was recognized as one of the emerging progressive centers of higher education.2 Thousands of working-class urbanites, villagers, and farm boys like the Boltons were among the beneficiaries of this magnificent public donation.
Two young professors in the history department when Bolton arrived in 1893 would influence his development as a historian: Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Homer Haskins. Turner, at age thirty-one, was a rising star. The Wisconsin native had received his undergraduate and early graduate training at the state university, where he was influenced by William F. Allen. Turner had studied for the doctorate under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University before returning to the University of Wisconsin faculty. In July 1893 he read his influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the AHA meeting in Chicago. Frontier conditions and the settlement of the West, he argued, had made the United States what it was. This was a distinctive departure from the prevailing historical idea which held that the beginnings of American institutions and character were to be found in European antecedents. “It seems exceedingly valuable and important,” Haskins wrote of Turner's essay, “but I feel so ‘westernized’ that I cannot appreciate how it would appeal to an eastern man.”3 Turner's essay eventually established him as one of the leading American historians of his day, even among easterners. Needless to say, westerners (including Wisconsinites) were glad to learn that they were on the cutting edge of history rather than mere primitives who lived on the margins of American civilization.4
Haskins had also earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, where he became Turner's friend. He wrote his dissertation on the Yazoo land frauds but eventually became America's leading medieval historian, with interests in Norman institutions and the development of medieval science. Something of a child prodigy, he completed his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins at the age of sixteen, then studied in Paris and Berlin before returning to Hopkins for his doctorate. Professor Haskins was only twenty-three, the same age as the undergraduate Bolton. By the time Bolton met him, Haskins was known as a meticulous researcher who had mastered several languages. Haskins impressed Bolton because of his thoroughness and because he worked his students very hard, which appealed to Bolton's dogged work habits. One of Haskins's friends, F. M. Powicke, likened his approach to teaching and writing to that of a builder. First, he amassed sufficient research material with which to build his edifice; then, he deliberately laid its foundation, “each sentence…like a block of hewn stone, laid in its place by a skilful mason.” Haskins's construction “was directed by a clear
and powerful mind, but every stone…was left to make its own impression, without the aid of external graces.” Anything “wild and extravagant” from Haskins “was unthinkable,” Powicke recalled. Yet, when listening to Haskins lecture, Powicke found himself “hoping, and I knew I hoped in vain, for a touch of mischief or something just a trifle hazardous.” The resulting intellectual structure, however, spoke “of purpose and achievement; its austere lines reveal unexpected lights and shadows.”5
Turner's teaching methods also impressed Bolton. His undergraduate lecturing style must have seemed offhand, perhaps even ill-prepared to the casual undergraduate, but Herbert was anything but a casual student. In a time when most professors delivered carefully prepared lectures from detailed notes, or perhaps written essays that were read word for word, Turner would walk into the hall with a stack of note cards often based on primary source material. Turner spoke to the students from the cards, which he would sometimes fumble while he looked for some particular datum; so the effect was informal, almost casual, except for his voice, which had a melodic, almost hypnotic quality. Bolton's friend, historian Carl Becker, wrote that Turner's “voice was everything: a voice not deep but full, rich, vibrant, and musically cadenced; such a voice as you would never grow weary of, so warm and intimate and human it was.”6 Turner's lectures were analytical and full of ideas, rather than strictly narrative. He amply illustrated them with lantern slides and maps, just as Bolton would do when he became a professor. To an attentive student, such as Bolton, Turner seemed to be creating history from the raw materials before his very eyes. Many of the undergraduates called the good-looking, approachable, and brilliant professor Freddie or Fred, but never to his face. His graduate students called him “the Master.”7
As historians Haskins and Turner could not have been more different. Haskins's history was founded on a massive archival base that seemed unassailable, if a bit prosaic. Turner was quick, incisive, intuitive, deeply immersed in primary sources, but willing to write in advance of supportive evidence for his brilliant ideas. There were similarities as well as differences between the two men. Both of them were inspiring teachers. Handsome and gregarious, they were ambitious for professional advancement and recognition. They were alive to the idea that they were helping to build a new university and a new profession. Turner and Haskins were active in the AHA, and each would serve as its president. Students, especially serious ones interested in history, found both of them to be accessible and helpful. Turner and Haskins had high hopes for the development of a graduate program in history at Wisconsin, and they needed earnest disciples like Bolton.
The rapid development of the University of Wisconsin and its impressive young faculty had not gone unnoticed in the hallowed halls of Harvard University, whose president, Charles W. Eliot, toured the university in 1891. Eliot pointedly asked Haskins and Turner why they had studied at Hopkins. “Didn't we know that Harvard was the place to study history,” Haskins wrote to historian J. Franklin Jameson, “that they alone had the libraries and instructors?” According to Haskins, Eliot spent much of his time in Madison maligning his Baltimore competitor. Eliot's rudeness aggravated Haskins. “Even in the West one is expected to be a gentleman.”8 Eliot was known as a reserved and forbidding figure at Harvard—William James called him a “cold figure at the helm.”9 but Eliot's manner at Madison was not merely due to his personality: he feared that upstart institutions would somehow undercut Harvard's paramount standing among American universities. If he had misgivings about advanced study at Hopkins, one can only surmise what he thought about graduate education at Madison, especially under tyros like Turner and Haskins.
A few months after Eliot's visit Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, showed up in Madison. Gilman was the man who had so speedily made Hopkins a force in higher education. Before going to Baltimore, Gilman had been president of the University of California and is credited with laying the foundations for that western university's rise to prominence.10 Described by one of his Berkeley friends as a pleasant and tactful man, Gilman's personal qualities served him well during his visit to Wisconsin.11 “The contrast with Harvard's agent was significant and helped the cause of Hopkins in the Northwest,” Haskins told Jameson. “We shall have nine and possibly ten Hopkins men in the faculty next year.”12 It was no wonder that eastern university presidents visited institutions in the West. Wisconsin and other developing colleges and universities sent their students to eastern graduate schools and hired the finished products of those schools. Sometimes, as in the case of Turner, the departing student and the returning professor were one and the same.
The Wisconsin visits of Eliot and Gilman illuminated the quandary over doctoral training in American universities. Once doctoral training became the sine qua non for elite institutions, they faced the dual problems of attracting the best students and then placing them when they were finished. Moreover, enterprising faculty at budding western universities were eager to establish new doctoral programs of their own. Thus, developing institutions added to the pool of doctors qualified for professorships, but there was no guarantee that the number of faculty positions would grow enough to absorb them. Even when the supply of PhDs exceeded demand, the pressure was great to maintain doctoral programs, because they were indispensable status symbols in which institutions had heavy investments. Bolton's professional life would be greatly entangled with these intractable issues, which remain salient today.
In Bolton's era, graduate education was developing rapidly at Wisconsin. In 1892 the university had hired the renowned political economist Richard T. Ely from Johns Hopkins to head a new School of Economics, Political Science, and History that would offer graduate instruction. Turner and Haskins had studied with Ely at Hopkins; Turner thought that Ely's presence would give Wisconsin a leg up on its new regional rival, the University of Chicago. The younger men chafed under Ely's sometimes heavy-handed leadership, but respected him nonetheless.13 In those days duty (and good judgment) required faculty to obey department heads, deans, and university presidents. Turner and Haskins kept to that form.
Faculty relations and the struggle for institutional recognition did not immediately concern Bolton. In his first semester he enrolled in Haskins's course on English constitutional history as well as German, algebra, economics, and elementary law classes. He briefly considered law as a profession, perhaps because it was a more direct route to the sort of social and financial success that he coveted, but history appealed to him.14 Haskins demanded twice as much work as his other professors, “but the work is interesting,” Bolton thought, “hence easily done.”15
Herbert moved into a rooming house and settled into college life. The freshmen and sophomores recruited him for field day, “but rather than have one class haze me for helping the other I'll keep away from them both.”16 Football, however, attracted Herbert's attention. He played halfback in intramural games, scored a touchdown, and thought the game was great fun, although it was a bruising experience in those helmetless, padless, and dangerous early days of the sport. He gave it up after a few games. He enjoyed competitive rowing but abandoned that sport, too, as he devoted more attention to his studies.
Gertrude's presence in Madison sharpened Herbert's sense of purpose. Now he wished to achieve something not only for himself but also “for her sake, and [to] be somebody of whom she can be proud…her nearness to me keeps the motive more vividly before me.”17 Perhaps hoping to plant a seed in Herbert's mind, she passed along news of various friends who had recently married.18 Formerly, Herbert regarded the marriage of old chums as if he had heard news of their execution. Not now. Perhaps Fred's marriage had reconciled him to the inevitability of his own matrimonial future. By the beginning of 1894 the couple had reached an “understanding,” a locution that must have meant that they were privately if not formally engaged. Herbert had gone so far as to quit working on Sundays, which gave the couple more time together. Still Herbert insisted that he studied “all the more earnestl
y because…every time I see her I receive a new the strongest inspiration and incentive for work.”19
The couple could not marry until Herbert finished his studies in the spring of 1895. Until then he needed better bachelor living arrangements. He decided to join a fraternity. “The fellows here who belong to no society and stay in their shells all the time are in danger of losing their earmarks of civilization and lapsing into savagery.” It was as if Herbert believed that manners were a mere husk that covered the raw farm boys who had made it to Madison. Without constant reinforcement, the newly acquired veneer would slough off and reveal the rougher stuff that lay within. Herbert had worked too hard to make something of himself to allow that to happen. “I feel it to be almost a duty, and that not chiefly to myself,” he explained, “to mingle to a certain extent with as good society as my limited qualifications will make me eligible to.”20 He intended to rise in the eyes of his community, whether it consisted of the small town of Tomah or the university student body. For him, fraternity membership was a means to that end.
Fred, a former frat member himself, loaned his brother the fifteen-dollar initiation fee for Theta Delta Chi. Two other Tomah boys had rushed the fraternity but were voted down. Herbert must have felt some pride in knowing that he had been admitted to an exclusive club.21 Indeed, his fraternity proved to be more exclusive than he could have guessed in 1894. Like Bolton, two of his fraternity brothers, Carl Becker and Guy Stanton Ford, would become presidents of the American Historical Association. If professional connections and upward mobility were the objects of his membership, Bolton joined the very best fraternity for his purposes, although there was more than a bit of luck involved. The odds against three AHA presidents coming from the same fraternity chapter must have been enormous; that the three presidents-to-be studied with two other AHA presidents in the making is perhaps unique in the history of the profession.
Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Page 4