In Memoriam |
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In this issue: |
Theodore Lee Agnew Jr. of Stillwater, Oklahoma died April 15, 2007 in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of ninety. He was born December 21, 1916, in Ogden, Illinois, to Dr. T. Lee Agnew and Agnes Faris Agnew and was the eldest of six children. Educated in Ogden’s public schools, he later studied history at the University of Illinois, receiving his B.A. in 1937 and M.A. in 1938. Further study at Harvard University was interrupted by service in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946; eventually, he completed his Ph.D. in 1954. Ted was married December 25, 1942, to fellow graduate student Jeanne LeCaine of Port Arthur, Ontario. They reared five children. In 1947, he accepted an assistant professorship at Oklahoma A&M College (later Oklahoma State University) and was promoted in 1960 to the rank of professor. Jeanne had meanwhile received equivalent faculty appointments in mathematics. They retired in 1984, credited with sixty-two years of faculty service at OSU. He was active in professional organizations and was a fifty-year member of the American Association of University Professors, American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and Southern Historical Association. He also held committee posts with several of these organizations. Twice he was a member of OSU’s Faculty Council, serving as faculty chair in 1963-1964. Ted remained active in the U.S. Naval Reserve, retiring with the rank of commander in 1973. He held a Ford Foundation grant in 1952-1953 and was twice a visiting professor at Emory University. He wrote several small historical studies, including a chapter on Stillwater’s church in an OSU Centennial History volume, biographical sketches of Peter Cartwright (American National Biography) and others (Notable American Women), and a brief history of the Methodist Church’s South Central Jurisdiction (1939-1968). He left a nearly complete history of Episcopal elections in the United Methodist South Central Jurisdiction (1968-2004). Ted was fortunate in being able to combine lay work in United Methodism with his academic interests. Twice he taught Methodist history at Phillips Graduate Seminary. Active in First United Methodist Church, he served also on agencies of the Oklahoma Annual Conference and of the general United Methodist Church. In addition to being elected six times as a lay delegate to the United Methodist Church General Conference, he served at seven jurisdictional conferences, and, as he stated, “helped elect 26 of the 35 bishops chosen between 1968 and 2004.” His interest in the ecumenical movement made him an accredited visitor to the World Council of Churches Assembly at Vancouver in 1983, a member of the United Methodist Church General Commission on Christian Unity, and a board member of the Oklahoma Conference of Churches. With Jeanne, he attended World Methodist Conferences 1976-1996, including meetings on every continent. In his later years, Ted continued as a member of several groups, including Roundtable Sunday School class, American Legion, AARP, Payne County Retired Educators, League of Women Voters, and OSU Emeriti. He was predeceased by his wife Jeanne (May 8, 2000) and their infant son, and by brothers Donald and John. Survivors include daughters Susan, Tucson, AZ, and Marion (Roy Blomstrom), Thunder Bay, Ontario; sons Lee (Lonney Corder-Agnew), Oklahoma City, Hugh (Nancy MacLachlan), Washington DC, Peter (Lois), Syracuse, NY; seven grandchildren; one brother, two sisters, two sisters-in-law, a goddaughter, and many nephews and nieces. Memorials may be directed to the Oklahoma United Methodist Foundation (Agnew Family Endowment Fund, 4201 Classen Blvd, Oklahoma City, OK 73118) or to the First United Methodist Church, 400 W. 7th Avenue, Stillwater, Oklahoma. —The Agnew Family Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian who exercised a profound influence on the development of management studies, passed away on May 9, 2007 at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was born in Guyencourt, Delaware, on September 15, 1918, and received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1940. He attended the University of North Carolina in 1945 and 1946, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1952. From 1940 until 1945 he served as an officer in the United States Navy. Al taught on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1951 and 1963 and the Johns Hopkins University between 1963 and 1970, serving for four years as head of the history department. He then went to Harvard Business School in 1970 as a visiting professor and a year later became the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, a position he held until becoming emeritus in 1989. Al, who seems to have decided to become a historian at the age of 7, was initially interested in the field of southern history, but a growing interest in sociology during his graduate studies encouraged him to study the history of business organization. In search of a topic for his doctoral dissertation, he found by accident the papers of his great-grandfather Henry Varnum Poor, a well-known nineteenth- century railroad analyst, while cleaning out a storeroom in his great aunt’s home. This became the basis for his doctoral dissertation and subsequent first book on the development of modern business practices in American railroads. Over the following decades Al was an assistant editor for four volumes of the papers of Theodore Roosevelt while at MIT and editor or coeditor for six volumes of the papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Johns Hopkins, but his primary focus became business history. Al’s reputation was made by three majestic monographs. Strategy and Structure (1962) used case studies of four large American corporations in the interwar years to explore the emergence of the decentralized, multidivisional structure. The book was a radical departure in the field of business history, which had previously consisted of monographs on individual firms or industries. The book was striking in offering bold generalizations, including the maxim that “strategy precedes structure.” These insights were seized upon by scholars of business administration and by McKinsey consultants, who used the study to teach clients about strategic change and its impact on organizational structures. His next major book, The Visible Hand (1977) explained the rise of big business in the United States before 1940. Al argued that the “visible hand” of professional managers had replaced the “invisible hand” of markets as the principal allocator of resources. He traced this process to the coming of the railroad and telegraph in the nineteenth century. In striking contrast to critics of the monopoly power of large firms, Al argued that the growth of large enterprises was both economically rational and beneficial. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for history. In Scale and Scope (1990), Al provided a comparative history of managerial capitalism in the United States, Britain, and Germany based on a study of the two hundred largest corporations in those countries. The book explored the development of “organizational capabilities” of firms and the importance of being a “first mover” in capital-intensive industries. Al continued to research and write until the end of his life, publishing studies of the consumer electronics and chemicals industries in recent years. His extraordinary achievements were recognized by the award of numerous honorary degrees. He served as president of the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference, and was on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians. He remained generous and unassuming, and a great supporter of younger scholars. Al is survived by his wife, Fay, two sons and two daughters, two sisters, five grandchildren and two step-grandchildren, and one great grandchild. He will be long remembered as one of the most important American historians of the second half of the twentieth century. —Geoffrey Jones Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., one of the foremost scholars of the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson, died on March 30 of this year. Born in 1926 in Evans Landing, Indiana, he served with the U.S. Army, 1944-1946, and received a B.A. from the University of Louisville in 1948. He earned his M.A. (1949) and Ph.D., with honors, from Duke University (1952). He taught at Wake Forest College and the University of Richmond before joining the history department of the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1964. There he served as associate professor, full professor, the Byler Distinguished Professor (1980-1981), the Frederick A. Middlebush Professor (1986-1988), and the Curators’ Professor of History (1988-1997). In 1997 he became Curators’ Professor of History Emeritus. Cunningham was the recipient of several major awards and fellowships during his career. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Historical Publications Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a recipient of the University of Missouri Thomas Jefferson Award, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Medal, and the Missouri Conference of History Award. In 1994 he was selected to attend a formal dinner at the White House with other Jefferson scholars and President Clinton. Cunningham’s exhaustive research in the Library of Congress and the National Archives underlay his pathbreaking explorations of early nineteenth-century American politics. His insights provided the foundation for the work of today’s historians of Jefferson and politics. Cunningham’s prolific scholarship has shaped our understanding not just of Jefferson but of the very nature and development of party politics in the early Republic. Cunningham’s first book, The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801, was published exactly a half century ago. He proceeded to follow the Jeffersonian Republicans as they became the majority party in Congress and took control of the presidency in 1801. The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801-1809 (1963) examined issues of patronage (both the formation of a policy and the difficulties of putting it into practice), party machinery on the national and regional levels, and the broader subject of the party and the press, a topic that is significant for early American politics. The Process of Government Under Jefferson (1978) remains the cornerstone for any analysis of Jefferson’s presidency and indeed teaches us much about the evolution of the institution of the American presidency. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Over the course of his work, which included more than a dozen books and numerous articles, Cunningham developed a profound respect for the third president’s abilities to build a political party and a consensus. His biography of Jefferson, In Pursuit of Reason (1987), was translated into several languages, including Chinese. Noble Cunningham is survived by his wife Dana Gulley Cunningham. A tree-planting and commemoration of his life will be held on the campus of the University of Missouri this fall. Details will be posted on the department web site. —Barbara Oberg Robert M. Warner, third director of the Bentley Historical Library and former Archivist of the United States, died on April 24 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of heart failure due to complications from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was seventy-nine years old. He was a professor of history at the University of Michigan, a position he held throughout a career focused on the administration of educational and cultural institutions. In each position he held over a distinguished career, he had an uncanny sense of working through a single key challenge that in every case led to the transformation of the institutions he served. In 1957, while in graduate school at the University of Michigan, he took a position as assistant curator at the Michigan Historical Collections, a regional historical collection housed on the campus in the basement of Rackham, the university’s graduate school building. In 1966 he was named the third director of the Michigan Historical Collections. He came to the job with a great interest in developing the holdings of the collections. However, as director he knew that the future of the historical repository depended on having a separate building that would give the program a distinct identity. During his tenure as director he worked tirelessly to raise private funding for such a structure. Through the generosity of the late Mrs. Alvin Bentley of Owosso, Michigan, and of many other citizens and organizations of the state, funding was obtained and in 1973 the Bentley Historical Library building was realized. As he predicted, the new building significantly increased the profile of the collection on the campus and in the nation. In 1963, the Bentley Library began collecting the papers of a then obscure congressman from Grand Rapids, Gerald R. Ford. In 1974, with Ford’s elevation to the presidency, his papers were transformed into presidential documents. Warner then turned his attention to securing the Ford Presidential Library for the University of Michigan. The challenges were substantial. Harvard had rejected the Kennedy Library and Duke had problems with the idea of a Nixon Library on its campus. Warner, noting the opposition on those campuses to the “monumental” role of presidential libraries, proposed that the Ford Library be divided into two structures. A museum would be built in Grand Rapids and the library, containing Ford’s presidential papers and other administration records, would be built in Ann Arbor where they could be integrated into the academic programs of the University. The plan was accepted and realized in 1980, but never duplicated by other presidents. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Warner to be the sixth Archivist of the United States. When he began his term of office, he used to say, “the problems were the same as the Bentley Library, just bigger.” But they were considerably more complex. There were lingering issues regarding ownership of the Nixon Tapes. There were also severe budgetary and administrative challenges. The National Archives was then part of the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency with responsibilities for federal buildings, supplies, and transportation among other management responsibilities. The GSA considered the archives a records management and storage operation. Warner found little appreciation in those circles for the scholarly and public work of the archives. Early on in his tenure, he became convinced that the National Archives needed to be an independent government agency. Because of federal rules, he could not lead the movement to separate the archives from the GSA. However, he vigorously encouraged and coordinated work by a number of historical, archival, and genealogical associations to achieve that end. On April 1, 1985, President Reagan signed a bill that removed the National Archives from the GSA and established it as a separate, federal agency called the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Dr. Warner told the remarkable story of achieving National Archives independence in a book called Diary of a Dream (1995). In that book, he detailed the tremendous difficulties and complexities that threatened to block independence, and the behind-the-scenes acts of determination and courage by many that led to an independent National Archives. Independence made it possible for the National Archives to grow and thrive. An independent NARA was able to have a significant impact on information policy in the Federal government. With direct access to its appropriators, the National Archives obtained the necessary funding to build new archival facilities that met the highest standards in holdings preservation and to upgrade and renovate many of its other facilities. NARA also embarked on an ambitious research agenda in the area of digital records preservation and received funding to develop the Electronic Records Archives (ERA), which will allow NARA to carry out its mission in the digital age. An independent National Archives also vastly increased its educational programs. Dr. Warner’s determined efforts made this progress possible. In 2005, Allen Weinstein, the current Archivist of the United States, noted at the dedication of the Robert M. Warner Research Center in the Archives building on the National Mall, that Warner had worked “tirelessly with literally hundreds of supporters within the Archives and among our constituent groups, the Congress and the White House to make independence a reality. While there were many roadblocks in the way, Dr. Warner persevered and finally won.” With that accomplished, he returned to the University of Michigan to become dean of the School of Library Science. Though information technology was not his area of expertise, he readily saw that the school would need to adapt to advances in technology that were fundamentally changing the nature, creation, preservation, and use of information as well as the practice of the library, archival, and information professions. He also recognized that the school would need to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach, expand its scope, and forge strategic connections with other units of the university. Warner was instrumental in positioning the school to meet these challenges, and in paving the way for Daniel Atkins, a University of Michigan professor of electrical and computer engineering, to succeed him and realize the vision that eventually transformed the school into the School of Information. Robert Mark Warner was born on June 28,1927 in Montrose, Colorado, where his father, Mark, was a Presbyterian minister. In 1949, he graduated from Muskingum College, a Presbyterian school in Ohio, and then pursued advanced studies in history at the University of Michigan, receiving his Ph.D. in American History in 1958. While at Muskingum he met Jane Bullock, whom he married in 1954. She played a major role in all phases of his career and died in August 2006. Warner is survived by son Mark Warner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho in Moscow, his wife Amy and two grandchildren, Thomas and Samuel; and by daughter, Jennifer Cuddeback, an archivist at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, and her husband Jim. Warner was active in a number of associations and organizations. He was a former president of the Historical Society of Michigan, former president of the Society of American Archivists, and a former member of the governing councils of the American Historical Association and the American Library Association. For several years, Warner served as the secretary of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation. At the University of Michigan, while dean of the School of Library Science, he was the interim director of the University Library for two years. In 1992, upon appointing Warner as University Historian, university president James Duderstadt told the Regents, “I believe the history of The University of Michigan could be in no better hands.” He considered achieving independence for the National Archives as his greatest professional accomplishment. When reflecting on the long complicated political and bureaucratic battle to achieve that goal, he always expressed a confidence and faith that change was a manageable process and could be accomplished through our political system. He concluded in his memoir on the experience, published in 1995, that independence for the National Archives “was a victory not only for ourselves and for the Archives, but for our system of government as well.” —Francis X. Blouin Jr. —Lew Bellardo |
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