Francis Jennings

Jennings (friends and family always called him "Fritz") was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1918, a few weeks before the close of World War I. Because he grew up in a poor, coal-mining town, Jennings witnessed injustice and deprivation up close. This experience, together with an insatiable curiosity about books and ideas, quickly drew him to radical causes. By the time he enrolled at Temple University in the mid-1930s he was sure he wanted to be a teacher and, somehow, to change the world. After graduation he stayed in Philadelphia to teach high school English and social studies and to become a union activist. He also married Joan Woollcott and started a family.

World War II soon disrupted Jennings's teaching career. He spent four years in the army, two of them as the chief clerk of a headquarters unit in England. (That experience inspired Fritz to doubt the credibility of all official pronouncements, particularly those issued by high-ranking military officers.) When he returned home, he went back to his high school students and his teachers' union. He earned a master's degree in education and two more children were born. But events beyond the horizon intervened again. In 1951 the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began an investigation of labor activities in Philadelphia, and focused some of its attention on Jennings, now president of his union. Disgusted with those who questioned his radical past, Jennings resigned his teaching job and decided to become a professional historian. He enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania. The wonderful irony of Fritz's career shift, however, is that while federal authorities were responsible for chasing him from the classroom, federal dollars (in the form of the G. I. Bill) made his graduate studies possible.

With children to raise and bills to pay, Jennings spent more than a decade working towards the Ph.D. degree, which he received in 1965. Along the way he taught at a private prep school and a series of local colleges. These included the Camden campus of Rutgers, Delaware Valley College of Science and Agriculture, and Glassboro State in Glassboro, New Jersey. His relatively slow pace through the Penn program gave him a chance to work closely with Richard Dunn and anthropologist Anthony Wallace, and to reflect on the kind of contribution he might want to make to scholarship. Sometime during the 1950s he discovered American Indian history and the appalling way historians had treated native people. Fittingly, his first published article, "Francis Parkman versus his Sources," was a meticulous dismemberment of the nineteenth-century historian's description of Native Americans (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , 87:3 [1963], 306-23). Encouraged by Dunn and Wallace, Jennings persisted. His dissertation, "Miquon's Passing: Indian-European Relations in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1674-1755," was a tour de force. It demonstrated the centrality of Indian people and Indian diplomacy in eighteenth-century colonial life, and poked large holes in the reputation of more than one of Pennsylvania's founding generation.

Despite his innovative scholarship, Jennings was not embraced by the academic establishment. As he continued to teach at local, undergraduate institutions--Moore College of Art (1966-1968), and Cedar Crest College (1968-1976)--and to write in relative obscurity, he published essays in Pennsylvania History, the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, American Quarterly, and Ethnohistory. The latter journal, and the organization that supports it, the American Society for Ethnohistory, became a central focus for him. Jennings served on the executive board of the society and was its president in 1973. (He always loved to relate that he delivered his presidential address at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.)

Jennings's career took another unexpected turn in 1975 when, at the age of 57, he published his first book, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. A collection of essays on specific topics in colonial history--Indian population, the Pequot war, popular images--the book was a frontal attack on the generations of scholars who, he argued, had internalized the racist language of the seventeenth century and overlooked the violence and brutality of European settlement. By insisting that America began not with "discovery" but invasion, Jennings set himself apart from those who viewed the fate of the continent's indigenous people as somehow inevitable or natural. Jennings's angry, forceful prose still touches readers a quarter century after its publication. And once again, the outside world intervened. His journal articles and his pathbreaking book attracted the attention of Newberry Library officials Lawrence W. (Bill) Towner, the president, and Richard H. Brown, head of the institution's rapidly expanding academic programs. Jennings was unaware that the library had recently teamed up with Native American anthropologist D'Arcy McNickle to launch a research center on American Indian history at the library. They needed a director, and in 1976 they persuaded Jennings to take the job. Fritz enjoyed recalling his meeting with Towner to discuss the offer. Because he did not want to get the institution in trouble with its donors, he told Towner about his radical past. He loved to repeat Towner's reply: "Don't worry about all of that. You come up with the ideas and I will raise the money."

The five years Jennings spent as McNickle Center director were exciting and productive. A steady stream of young fellows came through the center; he began the Documentary History of the Iroquois project with the assistance of William Fenton; and another major project, the Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, set up shop down the hall. At the same time summer institutes for high school teachers took place every summer, and older scholars visited to give seminars and lectures. Prodded by D'Arcy McNickle and Alfonso Ortiz (who succeeded McNickle as chair of the center advisory committee after the latter's death in 1977), Jennings also struggled to reach out to Native American communities. These efforts were sometimes clumsy, but they began a tradition of collaboration that has become a hallmark of the "new" Indian history. While at the Newberry, Jennings was also elected to a term on the executive board of the OAH (1978-1981).

Joan Jennings's struggles with rheumatoid arthritis prompted Fritz to retire in 1981. They moved to Martha's Vineyard to be close to family, and Jennings embarked on what is probably the most productive retirement in our field. He first completed two books on the Iroquois in the eighteenth century which he believed with Invasion completed what he called "the Covenant Chain Trilogy": The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1984) and Empire of Fortune (1988). Following his wife's death in 1989, he returned to Chicago to become a Senior Research Fellow at the Newberry. From that perch he wrote The Founders of America, and Benjamin Franklin, Politician. He tried moving south for a time, but he missed his Chicago community too much. In 1995 he returned to take up residence at the King Home, a unique retirement residence for men, in Evanston. Despite occasional ill health, Fritz quickly settled in and became a leader in his new home. He interspersed trips down to the Newberry with a growing list of King Home activities: a daily crossword puzzle group, a play reading group, and conversations with new friends. They called him "the professor" and watched in awe as he sat in the common room, working on a new book. The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire was published a few months before his death. No less polemical than any of his previous work, Creation drew from the same well of research and argument as its predecessors. Despite his disagreements with other scholars, Jennings never questioned their common bond. "My work," he noted in this last book, "was made possible by traditions of dedicated scholarship and freedom of discussion that have evolved in my native country."

The week after his death, the King Home held a small memorial service for Fritz. It featured some of the music he loved and--recalling Alice Roosevelt's comment that her father the president loved the limelight so much that he envied the corpse at a funeral--a recorded eulogy by Jennings himself. He noted that the group would be spared clergy and a reading of the Twenty-Third Psalm ("Who would want a lord who does nothing but protect sheep for future slaughter?"), promising champagne for all who remained to the end of the ceremony. Characteristically, he delivered.

Frederick E. Hoxie
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign