In Memoriam

Among the hundreds of former students identifying Leopold as a mentor who profoundly affected their lives are former Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO), Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), former assistant secretary of state Phyllis Elliot Oakley, historian John Morton Blum (Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University), journalist Georgie Anne Geyer, and television and motion picture producer/writer/director Garry Marshall. Kolbe wrote, “I used to say with great pride that I learned American diplomatic history at the feet of one of the greatest scholars in the United States—Dick Leopold. I knew that statement would not be challenged in or out of academic circles. . . [He] believed that being a teacher and a mentor was a lifetime commitment, and for those who responded, it became a lifetime of friendship.” McGovern noted, “I believe that every thoughtful student who studied under Professor Leopold’s direction would agree that this country has produced no more dedicated and competent professor. He has not only mastered his field but he has had a lifetime passion to convey his knowledge and insight to his students.” Marshall recalled his difficulty answering long essay questions in final exam blue books and how Leopold “allowed me to answer with dialogue scenes rather than prose writing and graded me on content rather than style. It helped me tremendously and I think my early Bismarck dialogue aided me in writing sitcoms and movies for a living.”

The second son of Harry Leopold Sr. and Ethel Kimmelstiel, Richard Leopold was born on January 6, 1912 on the upper west side of Manhattan. He attended the Franklin School before enrolling in 1926 at Phillips Exeter Academy where he graduated cum laude in 1929. He then went on to Princeton University, graduating with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa in 1933.

After Princeton he pursued graduate study at Harvard University under the tutelage of Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., receiving a master’s degree in 1934 and a Ph.D. in 1938. Leopold’s doctoral dissertation became his first book, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (1940), which won the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning Prize as the best book on any subject relating to United States history.

During World War II, he was commissioned as a naval officer and worked at the Office of Naval Records and Library in Washington, D.C. where he devised a unique system—used long thereafter—for organizing materials relating to ongoing naval operations. After the war, he returned to Harvard for two years before joining the Northwestern University faculty in 1948. Over the subsequent three decades there, Leopold was instrumental in Northwestern’s successful effort to build one of the finest collections of American history scholars ever assembled at a single institution of its size. In addition to Leopold, the 1950s roster included Ray A. Billington, Arthur S. Link, and Clarence L. Ver Steeg. Leopold and Link became especially close collaborators, producing Problems in American History (1952, 1957, 1966, 1972), among many other works. In addition to hundreds of articles. Leopold also wrote Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition (1954), and The Growth of American Foreign Policy: A History (1962), which remained a seminal treatise in United States diplomatic history for more than a decade after its first publication. He became the William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University in 1963.

At the height of the Vietnam war protests in 1968, Leopold led the successful effort to prevent Northwestern from dismantling its Naval ROTC program, even though virtually all other comparable academic institutions were doing so. He made a three-fold case in favor of retaining the program. First, it benefited the nation. He was concerned about the potential need to mobilize quickly in times of war; he was also concerned about a military whose officer ranks came exclusively from the service academies and the limited perspectives they offered. Second, the program benefited the university. He noted the many noteworthy program participants who had enriched the university and who would have been unable to attend Northwestern without the NROTC’s financial support. Third, he argued that NROTC helped the students who participated. He was unmoved by those who argued that the program itself somehow proved the academy’s support for a controversial war or “the teaching of killing.” In his faculty address that turned the tide of the debate in favor of retaining the program, he said: “We do not ban the teaching of nuclear physics because someone might make a bomb; we do not avoid the study of Marxism because the student might become a Communist; and we do not discourage the study of sexual deviants because the student himself might become one.” Many of the program’s graduates went on to become career officers; some rose to the rank of admiral.

In 1969, Leopold was asked to head an independent investigation into Francis L. Loewenheim’s charges against the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. Loewenheim claimed that the FDR Library staff had withheld certain documents in connection with his research and further asserted that the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and National Archives had thereafter covered up his resulting charges. After a year-long investigation, the joint AHA-OAH committee that Leopold chaired issued a 447-page report, Final Report of the Joint AHA-OAH Ad Hoc Committee to Investigate the Charges Against the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Related Matters (1970). Contrary to Loewenheim’s allegations, the report concluded that there had been no conspiracy and that the professional bodies charged with investigating the original complaint had simply been ill-equipped to deal with the vicious and unprecedented assault that Loewenheim and his lawyer had launched against a group of academics.

Leopold served on numerous governmental advisory committees, including those for the Secretary of the Navy, State Department, Army, Marine Corps, Atomic Energy Commission, CIA, and Library of Congress. He was also a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee for The Papers of Woodrow Wilson and of the board of directors for the Harry S. Truman Library Institute. He was president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1970 and of the Organization of American Historians in 1976.

In 1984, Leopold’s former doctoral students established the OAH’s Richard W. Leopold Prize, which is awarded biannually. In 1990, former students, colleagues, and friends established the annual Richard W. Leopold Lectureship at Northwestern in his honor. This year’s lecturer was Samantha Power. In 1997, more than 230 former students collectively endowed the Richard W. Leopold Professorship in American history at Northwestern.

He is survived by a nephew, John P. Leopold, who lives in Centennial, Colorado. Plans for an early 2007 memorial service are underway. A former student, Steven J. Harper, has written Leopold’s biography, which Northwestern University Press has tentatively scheduled for publication in the fall of 2007.

Lawrence Levine

Lawrence Levine, a distinguished cultural historian and former president of the Organization of American Historians, died on October 23, 2006 at the age of seventy-three. He was Professor of History and Cultural Studies at George Mason University, where he had taught since 1995 as well as Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, where he had been on the faculty for the previous three decades.

Sylvia Freeman Wallace McGrath

Sylvia Freeman Wallace McGrath, Regents Professor in the Department of History at Stephen F. Austin State University, died September 1, 2006. She was born in Montpelier, Vermont, on February 27, 1937, but was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. Her parents, George and Martha Wallace, both taught at Michigan State University where George became a world renowned ornithologist.

She received her M.A. from Radcliffe College in 1960 and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1966, the year in which she married William Thomas McGrath. Their two children, Sandra Jean, born in 1968, and Charles George, born in 1971, were the center of the McGrath family life personally and professionally. They moved to Nacogdoches, Texas, in 1966 when William accepted a position in the Department of Forestry.

Two years later, after teaching parttime, McGrath joined the Department of History as an assistant professor where she taught for the next thirty-eight years. The university named her a Regents Professor in 1994. During the last six years of her life, she served as chair of the department. In 2004-2005, she was elected Chair of the University Chairs Forum.

Sylvia’s two major fields of interest were the history of women and the history of science which, in her decades of research and writing, she was often able to combine in innovative teaching and scholarship. The University of Wisconsin Press published her dissertation, Charles Kenneth Leith, Scientific Advisor, in 1971. She provided a chapter, “Scientific Foundations, Societies, and Museums,” for 100 Years of Science and Technology in Texas published by Rice University Press in 1986. “Unusually Close Companions: Frieda Cobb Blanchard and Frank Nelson Blanchard” appeared in Creative Couples in the Sciences, in 1996. She also contributed articles to the Encyclopedia USA and to The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century and published numerous book and media reviews. She continued preliminary research for a biography of Frieda Cobb Blanchard, the well known plant geneticist and zoologist, at the time of her death.

Throughout her life, Sylvia McGrath exemplified the best standards of sound scholarship and professional teaching. Her integrity, insistence on ethical values, and faith in others provided a caliber of service to her department, students, university and community that was truly exceptional and profoundly influential upon all who worked with her. She lived her life with a grace, dignity, and innate kindness that commanded great affection from those who loved her and enormous respect from all who knew her.

—Elizabeth Deane Malpass
Stephen F. Austin State University

John A. Munroe

John Andrew Munroe died on September 6, 2006, at the age of ninety-two. Munroe was born in Wilmington, Delaware and received his B.A. at the University of Delaware and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1942 he accepted a position in the Department of History at the University of Delaware where he taught until his retirement in 1982.

A prolific writer and popular speaker, John Munroe published more than eighty professional articles and many shorter pieces. He spoke frequently to fellow scholars and community groups and also developed two sets of televised lectures on Delaware history. For many years, he taught most of the students at the University of Delaware, where students were required to take a course on the history of the state. Munroe published numerous books including Federalist Delaware, 1775-1815 (1954), Louis McLane: Federalist and Jacksonian (1973), Colonial Delaware: A History (1978), and The University of Delaware: A History (1986). At the age of ninety he published his last book, The Philadelawareans and Other Essays Relating to Delaware (2004).

Munroe’s first book, Federalist Delaware, challenged Charles A. Beard’s then regnant thesis that clear and sharp economic interests separated mercantile-minded Federalists from Republican agrarians. The opposite was true in Delaware, where Republicans were dominant in the bustling city of Wilmington while Federalists held sway in rural Kent and Sussex counties. Writing in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Manning Dauer praised the book as “well-rounded, ably written, and balanced.”

Munroe’s greatest contribution to scholarship may have been his biography of the nineteenth-century politician and businessman Louis McLane. McLane was a congressman, senator, secretary of the treasury, ambassador to England, and president of two of the nation’s largest business enterprises, the Morris Canal and Banking Company and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In 1951-1952, Munroe discovered caches of family correspondence that were still in the hands of McLane’s descendants in Colorado. Writing in the American Historical Review, Charles M. Wiltse described the resulting biography as “an immensely readable book” that “add[ed] measurably to our understanding of the Jackson period.”

John Munroe is survived by his wife, Dorothy, three children, and seven grandchildren. In the words of University of Delaware President David P. Roselle, “John A. Munroe was the perfect embodiment of the gentleman scholar. He was revered as an accomplished historian, a learned professor, a caring mentor, and a delightful friend. He helped shape the history department here at the university, a department now housed in a building that appropriately bears his name.”

—Raymond Wolters
University of Delaware

David L. Smiley

Historian of the South, extraordinary teacher, memorable personality, David L. Smiley died on December 27, 2004, at the age of eighty-three. Born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1921, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, David attended Mississippi College before serving in World War II. After the war he earned his A.B. and M.A. at Baylor University before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in 1953.

Smiley retired from Wake Forest University in 1991, after forty-one years of teaching—in fact, mesmerizing—successive generations of students. He commanded a huge following, which was due, according to one of his colleagues, to “his keen sense of history, humor, fondness of telling anecdotes, and the way he combined the light touch and serious discussion in the same lecture.” He also loved to provoke his students with seemingly outrageous statements about history, to the end that many were moved to race to the library in an effort to prove him wrong. Usually they found that Smiley’s “wild” claims were solidly based in fact, but in the meantime, as numerous alumni testify, the students discovered how much they could learn for themselves. “My true education began in Dr. Smiley’s class” and “He made me think” are comments one still hears often today. Though his most popular course was that on the history of the South, he took no less pleasure in courses on ancient history, the American West, and women in American history.

As a scholar, David Smiley was best known for collaborating with William B. Hesseltine on The South in American History (second edition, 1960). He also published The Lion of Whitehall: The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay (1962) along with numerous articles and papers. One of his favorite topics was “The Quest for the Central Theme in Southern History,” about which he spoke to a wide range of historical gatherings. His article on this subject appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly in the summer of 1972.

Legendary professors not only give themselves with passion and dedication to teaching and scholarship; they also seek to improve the society into which they were born. David Smiley, profoundly opposed to segregation, worked hard with a small number of colleagues to bring the first black student into the Wake Forest student body. That student, Edward Reynolds, became a protégé and close friend of Smiley and is now a respected professor of African history at the University of California, San Diego. In short, David Smiley’s life exemplified his beliefs, whether as professor at Wake Forest or as a Sunday school teacher in the community.

A southerner living in the South and teaching southern history, David Smiley was anything but provincial. One day in 1968 he was called to the telephone. An instant later a voice was speaking to him in French from Washington, D.C. Despite his astonishment David replied quickly in his own French, whereupon he was informed that he was to be a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Strasbourg for 1968-1969. Upon returning from Strasbourg, David was seldom seen without his favorite beret as he bicycled back and forth from home to campus. On other occasions he delighted in carrying on conversations with visitors from Germany, even though the German he picked up during his service in World War II could hardly be called flawless.

Upon his retirement in 1991, in a letter of response to a former student, Smiley wrote that he could “look back upon a most rewarding life. A Mississippi boyhood with parents who encouraged and abetted my bookishness; a beach crossing into Normandy in 1944 that forced me to face the reality of mortality and the precious gift that is life; marriage to a caring woman who never once asked me to be anything other than what God made me to be, a talker and a reader; the very finest professional training in history at Wisconsin; and forty-one years of enjoying students in this charmed spot.”

His passing was mourned by his wife and daughter, and no less by a world of colleagues, former students, and friends. He was one of the most colorful, eccentric, and unforgettable characters to grace any college.

—Thomas E. Mullen
Wake Forest University

George Brown Tindall

Southern historian George Brown Tindall, Kenan Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is remembered as an early advocate of equality for black Americans, died Dec. 2, 2006 in Chapel Hill. He was eighty-five.

On the UNC history faculty from 1958 until he retired in 1990, Tindall pioneered the discussion of southern myths, which he said white southerners developed after the Civil War to explain how what they saw as a just and noble cause could have been lost. A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Tindall was president of the Southern Historical Association in 1973. His first book, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900, was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1952. In it, he converted his exhaustive research of primary sources into a readable account of segregation and the methodical disfranchisement of blacks into a state of economic dependency. His other books include America: A Narrative History (1984, 1988) and Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (1967).

Tindall was a major editor and contributor to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), an eight-pound, 1,656-page tome by 800 experts on the region that was recently updated. The volume’s coeditor, William Ferris, is a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a UNC history professor, and senior associate director of the university’s Center for the Study of the American South. He called Tindall a giant among southern scholars. “He was a great teacher and a great scholar, and his legacy as a southern historian is outstanding,” Ferris said. “His scholarship was extraordinary, but his personal warmth and generosity also were beyond measure.” Tindall also pioneered the study of diversity in the South beyond black and white, to the recognition of Irish, Jewish, Scottish and other heritages represented in the region, he said.

Tindall’s son, Bruce Tindall, a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, said his parents sent him to what likely was the first integrated day-care center in Chapel Hill, and that his father stood fast for human rights and civil rights through his academic career. He remembered his father organizing a meeting of historians in the 1950s for which he struggled with hotels to find a place that both black and white could sit down to dinner together.

George Tindall began his academic life with a bachelor’s degree in English from Furman University in his hometown of Greenville. He fought in the Pacific theater of World War II with the U.S. Army Air Force and rose from the rank of private to second lieutenant from 1942-46. He completed a master’s and doctoral degree in history at UNC, then taught at several other universities before returning to North Carolina in 1958.

Tindall advised twenty-six doctoral candidates and other students at UNC, many of whom now are history teachers and professors across the country. In 1991, some of his former students wrote essays in his honor, which was published as The Adaptable South. “In the fall of 1966, I walked into George Tindall’s seminar and my life changed,” wrote Elizabeth Jacoway. “Within a matter of weeks, the elegant gentleman with the wry wit and the bow ties had led me into a world of new concerns, deeper meanings and higher callings, and in his gentle way, he encouraged me to see that this could be my world, too.”

In recent years, Tindall attended weekly luncheon discussions on the UNC campus by southern studies experts, where “George was sort of the chairman of the board,” Ferris said. And until recently, Tindall could be seen riding his bicycle to class.

Tindall is survived by his wife, Blossom McGarrity Tindall of Chapel Hill; son, Bruce Tindall of San Diego; daughter, Blair Tindall of Santa Monica, Calif., and one grandson.

—University of North Carolina News Services