From Scotland to India: A Conversation with American Historian Betty Unterberger

Lee W. Formwalt

Born in Scotland in 1922 and raised in the U.S., Betty Miller Unterberger began her college career at Syracuse University on a forensics scholarship. Bored to death with the speech curriculum, she took a citizenship course from Marguerite J. Fisher, the only woman professor she ever had. From Fisher, Betty developed an interest in political science and history. At Syracuse and later at Radcliffe College (now Harvard) where she went for her Master’s degree, Betty took American, British, Russian, and East Asian history. When she finally decided to go into American history, she had the background that made the history of American foreign relations a logical choice.

Betty was at Harvard during the Second World War and she took a course in diplomatic history from Thomas A. Bailey, who was visiting from Stanford. Bailey, a “fabulous lecturer” who “was like a combination of Saint Paul and Saint Vitus,” became one of Betty’s “lifelong heroes.” It was from Bailey that she first learned about American troops in Russia at the end of World War I. Intrigued by this little known episode in Russian-American relations, she went on to write her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, which became the basis for her first book. America’s Siberian Expedition, 1918-1920: A Study of National Policy won prizes from both Duke University and the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA.

Among the Harvard professors who had a significant impact on the young historian in training was Howard Mumford Jones, then dean of the Graduate School. Jones took a special interest in Betty who had a number of jobs as she made her way through college and graduate school. Marriage and children were not part of Betty’s plan for her professional career. She met Robert Unterberger who was studying physics, but it was Howard Jones who “actually persuaded me to marry this man.” Jones felt that Betty “had to work too hard to get through school, and here was this wonderful man that he admired very much, so after he got to know us, he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t say yes.” When Betty was sick with the flu, Jones came to visit her. “He sat on the chair and he said, ‘Why don’t you say yes to Robert? He would take care of you and you need somebody to look out for you.’” In her weakened condition, Betty relented, “Okay, I’ll say yes.” So Jones got on the phone and sent a telegram to Robert: “Betty will marry you. You better get here and clinch the deal.” He did, they married, and eventually they had three children.

Howard Mumford Jones also significantly influenced Betty’s research and writing. She’d go to his office and watch him dictate. So she asked him how he did that. Jones replied, “Well, I just do all my research, and then I read it through, and then I just sit down and I open my mouth and I just dictate.” Betty’s husband, “who insisted on my getting the latest technical equipment, bought me my first dictating machine,” and she followed the Howard Jones method the rest of her career.

In 1946, the Unterbergers went to Duke to enter the Ph.D. programs in history and physics. Robert went on to do important work in physics and is a highly recognized authority in his field. At Duke, Betty had a seminar class with Charles Sydnor and wrote a paper on Thomas Braidwood and the beginning of schools for the hearing impaired in the U.S. Sydnor told her it was “a fine paper. You could send it to the Reader’s Digest and . . . make $500.” “Send it to the Reader’s Digest?” she retorted, “I don’t want to be a journalist. I want to be a historian.” Sydnor smiled and said, “Well, then, send it to the editor of the Journal of Southern History.” Betty revised the paper, sent it off, and within weeks learned of its acceptance for publication in the next issue in 1947.

Upon completion of their Ph.D.s in 1950, the Unterbergers went to the West Coast. There Betty faced an immense personal struggle in her battle with cancer. Between 1950 and 1964 she endured four surgeries. But this was not her first encounter with personal tragedy. Her husband served in both World War II and Korea. Two days after the former ended, his jeep was blown up in a landmine in the Philippines. He was in the hospital for many months and advised not to go on for the PhD. Betty and Robert decided to go ahead anyway.

In California, Betty taught at Whittier College for a decade and there she came face to face with McCarthyism and the challenge it posed to academic freedom. At Whittier, Betty incorporated discussion into the course she taught on Soviet-American relations. But reading and discussing the Communist Manifesto made some Whittier board members uneasy and the president called her in and said he was “afraid he was going to have to let me go.”

Betty had signed the loyalty oath required of California teachers and when her book on America’s Siberian Expedition had come out and was reviewed in Russia, the Soviets “bitterly criticized it saying I was a bourgeois revisionist and a lackey of capitalism. I mean, what greater praise could I have had in the midst of the Cold War?” So Betty asked to talk to the Whittier board members. One of them invited her to lunch at his country club where “I told him what I was doing, that the heart of a free society was discussion, and that what I was doing in my classroom couldn’t be done in the Soviet Union. Our whole system was based on respect for the intellectual capacity of human beings. How could we teach our students to use their heads if they never had an opportunity to do it in a classroom? I asked, ‘Can you imagine a Soviet professor having his or her students read the Declaration of Independence alongside the Communist Manifesto? That’s what I do in my classes.’”

The Whittier board member enrolled in one of Betty’s classes, “and then he took another course. He was a total convert. He just could not believe the way the students participated, analyzed ideas, compared different viewpoints and really got engaged with learning.”

Betty moved on to the California State University at Fullerton where she was full professor and won the first distinguished teaching award in the California State University system. In 1968 her husband received a wonderful job offer as full professor in geophysics at Texas A & M, but he said he would not go because of her position at Fullerton. So both Unterbergers traveled to College Station, Texas, and were interviewed and hired as full professors. Betty discovered that she was the first woman appointed as a full professor at A & M.

I asked Betty what it was like for a woman to train and then practice in the male-dominated world of academe and in the especially male-dominated field of American foreign relations history. She noted that on several occasions at both Harvard and Duke male students and professors asked her, “What are you doing here? You’re a woman, you’ll just go and have children, and that will be the end of the money that we’re spending on you.” She also heard, “You’re taking bread out of the mouths of deserving male students,” especially veterans. During one of these encounters, she sat there, “and I resolved that I was not going to cry no matter what.” Afterwards she walked out the door “and I remember standing on the steps of that building, and it was a bright, sunny day, and tears were rolling down my cheeks, and I said, “I’ll show him.’”

And show him she did. But women historians “were always alone. You didn’t get to know anybody. That was what was so hard, that you didn’t get in on all these wonderful discussions about history or that you were always on the outside, and you longed so much to be on the inside. It was true also when you went to a professional organization. You didn’t know what to do, whether to sort of go in and meet with these men and talk with them or to stand and listen.”

Another problem was “if you were young and you were good looking, you had to face the sex thing. It was miserable.” Betty encountered this at one of her first teaching jobs when “this man would chase me around the desk in the English department.” One solution was to find male allies who would arrange their office hours at the same time as hers and make sure she was not harassed. Betty recalled Marguerite J. Fisher who told her, “Betty, just remember no matter who they are or what they are, there is always a bit of a barnyard in every man.” So “I learned to be very careful about being alone.” She also had to put up with the humiliation of being referred to as Mrs. Unterberger while all her colleagues were referred to as Dr.

There were some benefits to being alone, however, “because I learned what great inner resources we have, that we finally are forced to look for where we don’t usually look. We usually think that everything’s going to come from the outside. Well, that not true at all. The most important thing comes from knowing yourself and what tremendous strengths and insights and creativity that you do have.”

The big turning point in Betty’s career was when she was elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in 1986. “SHAFR was 99 percent male. There were virtually no women. I think Anna Nelson was in it and Joan Hoff. But I did a lot for that organization. I was a founding member of it. When they nominated me they wanted to run another woman with me, and I said no, I was not running against another woman. I said if I couldn’t run against a man, I wouldn’t accept the nomination. And so they ran Robert Dallek, and that was okay with me. And it was when I was elected that I suddenly realized that they were electing me because I was an historian, and that was so gratifying to me. I cannot tell you what that meant to me.”

Throughout her career, Betty has served her profession well in addition to her superb teaching and her excellent scholarship. In addition to her involvement with SHAFR, she has also served on AHA and OAH committees, in particular the OAH Committee on Research and Access to Historical Documentation (1980-1987). She has also represented the profession as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation and the U.S. Army’s Historical Advisory Committee. She has also served on history advisory committees for the Secretary of the Navy, the U.S. Defense Department, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

More recently, Betty has developed a strong interest in Pakistan and India and, in particular, the work of Pandurang Shastri Athavale, more commonly know as Dada (“elder brother”). Athavale is the founder and leader of Swadhyaya, an Indian spiritual self-knowledge movement that, according to Betty, “has liberated millions from poverty and moral dissipation.” In 1997, on her third attempt, she successfully nominated Athavale for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion ($1.3 million) because of the innovative nature of the Swadhyaya movement. Betty believes “that the Dada’s work is a model and example for personal and communal transformation that can be adapted and modified within the dominant cultures and philosophical bases of people all over the world.” Betty’s journey from a young forensics student at Syracuse University to the first western scholar to recognize the international significance of the Dada and his religious movement, has been long, fruitful, and fascinating. The profession and OAH are the richer for members like her.