Thomas Dionysius Clark

James C. Klotter

Thomas D. Clark died in Lexington, Kentucky, on June 28, 2005, just days before his 102nd birthday. The governor ordered flags flown at half mast over the state capitol to honor Clark. Earlier, the legislature had directed that the Kentucky Historical Society’s new building be renamed the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History; the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives already operated out of the Clark-Cooper Building; the University Press of Kentucky called the Thomas D. Clark Building home. Numerous endowments and scholarships bore his name. Three books had chronicled his career, including Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky: An Uncommon Life in the Commonwealth (2003). And Clark himself had written or edited some three dozen books, taught at universities for over forty years, and served as president of two of the major historical organizations. Clearly his was no ordinary historian’s life.

Clark’s life was extraordinary in so many ways. Named Kentucky’s Historian Laureate for Life in 1990, he apparently took the “for Life” designation seriously. When asked the secret of his longevity, he frequently told younger scholars, “Never stop working.” He never did.

Clark worked hard all his life. Born July 14, 1903, in Louisville, Mississippi, in a double log cabin built by his great grandfather, he was the son of a cotton farmer and a teacher. Forced to leave school to toil in those cotton fields, Clark later labored in a sawmill and worked on a boat that dredged Mississippi swamps. At age eighteen, he restarted his educational pursuits and graduated from high school four years later. In 1925, Clark entered the University of Mississippi, where he came under the influence of Charles S. Sydnor and began to study history. He also helped operate the Ole Miss golf course, to earn money for tuition. In that job, Clark spent considerable time with William Faulkner. A summer session at the University of Virginia earned him enough credits to graduate from Ole Miss, and he accepted a fellowship for graduate study at the University of Kentucky.

As Clark said later, he came to a new state and soon saw his first Republican. After earning his master’s degree a year later, he then entered Duke University’s PhD program. Under William K. Boyd’s rather loose direction, he received one of the institution’s first doctorates, in 1932. He also met his first wife, Elizabeth Turner. Married sixty-two years at her death in 1995, they had two children, Thomas Bennett Clark and Elizabeth Clark Stone. Clark subsequently married Loretta Gilliam, and their union joyfully endured until his death.

While in graduate school, Clark first held temporary teaching posts at what is now the University of Memphis and at the University of Tennessee. He then accepted a position at the University of Kentucky. Clark taught there thirty-seven years, from 1931-1968, and chaired the history department from 1942-1965. A hard-driving chair, he developed an ulcer, but forged a top twenty department by the time he retired in 1968. After leaving the University of Kentucky, Clark taught six years at Indiana University and promptly wrote a four-volume history of that institution. During his teaching years, he also lectured at some twenty other schools, both in the United States and abroad, including ones in Austria, Great Britain, Greece, India, and what was then Yugoslavia. He later recalled: “The classroom is the thing I treasure the most.”

Tom Clark also played a key role in the growth of professional organizations devoted to Clio. He served as president of the Southern Historical Association from 1947-48, and was managing editor of the Journal of Southern History from 1948-52. Phi Alpha Theta named him president in 1957 as well. In 2004, Clark received the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.

But perhaps his greatest impact came regarding what is now the Organization of American Historians (OAH). His presidency of the then-Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1956-57 was followed by six years as chairman of the executive committee. After that tour of historical duty, Clark was named chair of the Committee on the Future of the Association. He proposed the new name for the organization—the OAH—and helped in the transition from a regional to a national group. Clark then became executive secretary of the OAH as it organized its new offices at Indiana University. Acceptance of that position meant that from 1970-1973 he established the offices in a recently-purchased old house, cleared the bats out of it, pushed for a newsletter, and helped transform the OAH into a productive, modern historical organization. It honored him with its Distinguished Service Award in 1984 and its inaugural OAH Centennial Award in 2004.

And across the years, Tom Clark continued to write, using a two-finger technique on a battered manual typewriter. The first of the some three dozen books that bear his name appeared in 1933; the last one—his memoirs—will come out in spring 2006. Virtually all received favorable scholarly reviews; many used sources previously untouched by academic hands; most contained writing that made them accessible to wide audiences. The core of his most influential work came in the thirty years following 1937, and represented his interests in southern, western, frontier, and state history. 

Clark’s interest in the movement west brought forth his rollicking and readable The Rampaging Frontier (1939) and two decades later his much-used work, Frontier America (1959). Frontiers in Conflict (with John D. W. Guice) (1989) completed that trilogy. While writing initially when the Turner thesis held sway, Clark proclaimed his distance from it and represented more the transitional figure between that school and newer interpretations.

That same interest in the frontier involved Clark in studying the First West that was Kentucky. His History of Kentucky, written at age thirty four, represented a major feat of scholarship, given the poor state of archives at the time. It remained a standard text for some six decades. His The Kentucky (1942) in the Rivers of America Series and excellent Kentucky: Land of Contrast (1968) in the Regions of America Series both offered fresh examinations and solid interpretations of their subjects.

Clark’s strongest and, in some ways, most enduring work was in the field of southern history. In fact, his first major foray into the study of the land of his birth may have been his best book. Pills, Petticoats, and Plows: The Southern Country Store (1944) remains a classic. The author tramped across the region personally gathering country store records, and then fashioned a readable and even touching portrait of an institution so crucial to the South. His next two works, in 1948, performed the same service for newspapers in the region—The Rural Press and the New South and The Southern Country Editor. Three important books followed in the 1960s and represented his mature scholarly judgment and understanding of the South’s evolving Second Reconstruction. The Emerging South (1961), Three Paths to the Modern South (1965), and The South since Appomattox (with A.D. Kirwan) (1967) presented a southern way of life “caught in the great web of revolt against the past.” They told of revolution while “the ghost of the past stalked the land trying to reincarnate itself.” That same discussion of change continued in his path-breaking 1984 work, The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest.

Clark edited numerous other works—his important, multi-volume Travels in the South, for instance—and also wrote a series of Kentucky-based studies, particularly in the last three decades of his life. Many in the historical profession rediscovered Tom Clark only recently, when he gave wonderful talks, all sans notes or prepared text, at meetings of the Southern Historical Association in 2003 and 2004. After hearing him, new generations of scholars revisited his books, to their pleasure.

Yet, despite all of his scholarly production and professional service, in the end, Thomas D. Clark may be best remembered for his efforts in the field of public history. Seldom has a member of the academic community been so revered by so many, in any state. Part of that resulted from his efforts to build accessible research collections for scholars and the interested public alike. He played major roles in organizing the Special Collections at the University of Kentucky, the University Press of Kentucky, the State Archives, and the new Kentucky History Center.

But, more than that, Clark became “the people’s historian.” He not only read dusty tomes or faint microfilm behind some ivy-covered library wall, but also walked the land and talked to the people around him. Clark did oral history before it became fashionable, and his books and talks reflected the stories he heard. Moreover, the often critical but usually optimistic Clark became an advocate for constitutional change, educational reform, conservation, and a future-oriented public agenda. In a sense, he stood as the unofficial conscience of Kentucky, and, by extension, of America.

Clark argued that current generations have unparalleled access to centuries of knowledge and experience. But when a New York Times survey revealed how little history Americans knew, Clark agreed and added: “They know too little to wander safely out on Main Street alone.” Yet he placed much of the fault at the feet of historians: “We haven’t fed them.” Clark sought to remedy that, and accepted nearly every invitation to speak, no matter the group or size of audience. He gave hundreds of such talks after he “retired.” While he spoke well the language of academe, Clark also could talk—and write—so all could understand and learn from history. He continued to teach, just not in the classroom.

Thus, while Clark lived a long life, he made each year count. Our world will be a much poorer place historically without Tom Clark the historian, but it will be an even poorer place, in all respects, without Tom Clark the man.