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In this issue:
J. Merton England
Winthrop Donaldson Jordan
Hal Rothman
Edward Lewis Schapsmeier
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
J. Patrick White
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J. Merton England
J. Merton England, the first National Science Foundation (NSF) historian and the first recipient of the Richard W. Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians, died on January 25, 2007. He was born in Deepwater, Missouri, on November 30, 1915, and he received his B.A. (1936) from Central College (now Central Methodist University) and his M.A. (1937) and Ph.D. (1941) from Vanderbilt University. From 1942 until 1946 he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Washington, D.C., as a writer and editor. He joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky in 1946, becoming a full professor in 1957. While on the faculty there, he was on the editorial staff of the Journal of Southern History, serving as managing editor from 1953 through 1958. He was also a Fulbright Professor in England, 1956-1957. In 1961 he joined the staff of the NSF as program director for institutional grants. England was named the NSF historian in 1971 and held that position until his retirement in 1986.
Although he began his career as a student of the American South, England’s variegated career resulted in publications on a great range of subjects. His first publication, a 1943 article in the Journal of Southern History, was based on his research for his dissertation topic, “The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Tennessee.” While on military duty he completed an important study of women in Army Air Corps: Women Pilots with the AAF, 1941-1944 (1946). While at Kentucky, he initiated a study of antebellum American schoolbooks, resulting in publications in American and English journals. He returned to his love of the history of education during his retirement, editing the diaries and journals of a rural Ohio schoolmaster. This research resulted in the book Buckeye Schoolmaster: A Chronicle of Midwestern Rural Life, 1853-1865 (1996). During his retirement, he also published a historical study of the NSF institutional grant program in which he had participated.
England’s most significant publication—and the one for which he will be remembered—was A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945-1957, his detailed legislative and administrative history of the NSF through Sputnik. Published by the NSF in 1982, the book remains the definitive study of the early years of the foundation, especially for its understanding of how politics impacts a government bureaucracy attempting to fulfill its mission. Patron for Pure Science was recognized as the outstanding contribution to the understanding of the history of the federal government in 1984 by both the OAH and the Society for History in the Federal Government. England received the first Henry Adams Prize from the latter organization.
J. Merton England is survived by his wife, Mary Clare England, from whom he was separated, four children, and four grandchildren.
Marc Rothenberg
National Science Foundation
Winthrop Donaldson Jordan
Winthrop Donaldson Jordan, age seventy-five, passed away on February 22, 2007, at his home in Oxford, Mississippi. Jordan was William Winter Professor Emeritus of History and African American History and F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor at the University of Mississippi. He served on the faculty at the university from 1982 until his retirement in 2001, and before that was professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1962 to 1982. Winthrop Jordan was one of the leading historians of slavery and race relations throughout his professional career. His early essays on the origins of slavery in North America and the development of racial distinctions made a splash during the early 1960s. These essays provided early evidence of scholarly brilliance, fulfilled with the publication of the magisterial White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968). This book was remarkable for its depth of research, its treatment of sources, and its erudition of writing. White Over Black won four major awards following its publication, including the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. Perhaps the greatest sign of the value of White Over Black is that, after nearly four decades, it remains an influential study, widely considered essential to any understanding of white attitudes towards race and slavery, and still central to several contemporary historiographical debates. One element of White Over Black that stands out among other studies from its time is that it employed gender as a category of historical analysis, and it gave serious consideration to social and psychological anxieties about sexuality. While this mode of analysis is common today, it was decidedly uncommon at its time. Among the many then-controversial findings was the suggestion that Thomas Jefferson likely fathered children with one of his slaves. Recently, American Heritage named White Over Black second only to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk as the most influential book of the twentieth century regarding race relations.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Jordan investigated every imaginable source to reassemble persuasive evidence that a slave conspiracy was uncovered and suppressed violently in Mississippi at the start of the Civil War. The resulting study, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (1993) demonstrated the breadth and wisdom of Jordan’s expertise in the historian’s craft. Tumult and Silence relates on numerous levels, from local history at its best, to a primer on historical methodology, to a commentary on broader themes regarding slave conspiracy and insurrection. Tumult and Silence won three major awards, including another Bancroft Prize. Jordan continued in his scholarship, starting several other projects including at least one essay that will be published posthumously.
Jordan’s many scholarly accomplishments can easily overshadow numerous other qualities that, on their own, would set him apart as an extraordinary man. As a teacher and mentor, Jordan trained an impressive group of graduate students. By all reports Jordan was a model colleague who contributed to a friendly departmental environment. He was an example of collegial behavior to his graduate students. A descendent of prominent Quakers such as Lucretia Mott, Jordan was also active in the Society of Friends, helping establish the first Quaker meeting in Mississippi. Jordan’s family included three sons, three step children, and ten grandchildren. He is survived by Phyllis Jordan, the mother of his children, and his wife, Cora Miner Jordan.
David J. Libby
San Antonio, Texas
Hal Rothman
Hal Rothman died Sunday, February 25, 2007, of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was forty-eight years old. Hal faced his disease with such good humor and determination that for those of us who knew him, the bar for dignity and grace in the face of suffering has now been raised beyond our reach. He never gave in to ALS. He could not beat it, no one can, but Hal, typically, thought there was nothing that he could not beat. The disease eventually silenced him, but he fought it all the way, even when he accepted that he would lose. Toward the end, he could only communicate by using his eye movements to trigger a sensor to select letters and type e-mails. Finally, he could not even do that.
Before he went quiet, Hal produced what we all hope to produce: a body of work that will outlive us. He was one of the leading environmental historians in the country, one of the leading western historians, and with the publication of his Devil’s Bargains (1998), perhaps the country’s foremost historian of tourism. He was also (and he would demand this be included) a proud and prolific public historian who did extensive work on and for public agencies. Hal taught and also fought. He was a public intellectual who wrote about the West regularly in newspaper columns and elsewhere. For those of us who live in the West and care about it, Hal’s commentaries were sometimes irritating, far more often amusing, and always challenging.
Hal taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose department he for a period chaired, and if ever a city and a historian were made for each other, it was Las Vegas and Hal Rothman. He took the city seriously and demanded others do the same. His Neon Metropolis (2003) is the best book ever written on Las Vegas; it is a book that anyone who hopes to understand the place—and the forces that created it—must read. Like Las Vegas, Hal was not shy, and his brashness astonished and attracted. Many of those who initially were not quite sure about what to make of him became his friends and admirers. They admired him for his work and for his loyalty. In a world where not much can be counted on, Hal could be counted on. Many people counted on him—his community, his congregation, and his family. His pride in his wife and children was palpable. Alongside this, his responsibility as an academic might seem trivial, but it was quite real. He was for many years the editor of Environmental History, and he did much to make environmental history a recognized historical field.
I have never known a historian happier in what he did, prouder of his students, and so eager at the end of the day to get up and do it all again. The world is a poorer place without him.
A fund has been established to help his family. Hal Rothman Family ALS Fight Fund (Account #: 81005997), Silver State Bank, 8901 W. Sahara Avenue, Las Vegas, NV, 89117.
Richard White
Stanford University
Edward Lewis Schapsmeier
Edward Lewis Schapsmeier was born February 8, 1927 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to parents Lena Marie Stallman and Henry Schapsmeier, immigrants from Westphalia, Germany. He attended Creighton University in 1945 and completed a bachelor’s degree at Concordia University. He received a master’s degree at the University of Nebraska in 1955 and his doctoral degree at the University of Southern California in 1968. He taught American history at Ohio State University before accepting a tenured position at Illinois State University where he would happily mentor many graduate students and eventually earn the honor of distinguished professor.
Edward published numerous books and articles including Henry A. Wallace of Iowa, The Agrarian Years 1910-1940 (1968); Walter Lippmann: Philosopher–Journalist (1969); Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and The War Years, 1940-1965 (1970); Ezra Taft Benson and the Story of American Agriculture: The Eisenhower Years, 1953-1961 (1975); and Dirksen of Illinois: Senatorial Statesman (1985).
In three of his major research figures, Edward saw a strong correlation between politics and religion. Wallace, professing a liberal Christianity, was a New Dealer and pacifist. Dirksen, on the other hand accepted a conservative religion and was a cold war warrior and free enterprise advocate. Benson, a high-ranking Mormon leader, was a strict moralist and defender of traditional free enterprise farmsteads, while at the same time using government policies designed to subsidize them. Eisenhower adopted this hidden hand policy of condemning big government, and utilized it when he thought it necessary.
Edward retired to Palm Hill in Largo, Florida for a decade, where he played golf daily and socialized with friends and neighbors. He suffered a stroke in 2006 and moved to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. He died on February 10, 2007 at Angel Grace Hospice at age eighty.
He is survived by his twin brother, Frederick H. Schapsmeier; wife Mary of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin; step-daughter, Diana Hoffmann of San Diego, California; and nieces and nephews.
Frederick H. Shapsmeier,
University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh (retired)
Sandra Smith-Dill, niece
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the eminent historian of American diplomatic, political, and intellectual history, passed away on February 8, 2007 at the age of eighty-nine. Professor Schlesinger taught at Harvard University in the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1960 took leave of his teaching career to join the administration of newly elected John F. Kennedy as presidential assistant. Upon shaking hands with his new boss in the Oval Office, the historian said, “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing here.” With a smile, the president responded, “Neither am I.”
Schlesinger would write two books based on his experience with the Kennedys: A Thousand Days (1965) covered the tragically short-lived Kennedy presidency, and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978) was written out of similar grief and reverence after the assassination of his younger brother in 1968. The first work won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1964 Schlesinger became the Albert Schweitzer Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he taught for thirty years until his retirement in 1994. Toward students he was both approachable and amiable, willing to hear all points of view, convinced that history is “an argument without end” and convinced that argument itself should be enjoyed as serious intellectual adventure.
Schlesinger’s first book, Orestes Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress (1939), was a Harvard senior thesis completed at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. During World War II, he served in the Office of War Information (OWI) and Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Before going overseas, he had finished The Age of Jackson (1945), and as the cold war emerged he wrote The Vital Center (1948), an influential essay that urged the anticommunist Left to take a stand against the Stalinists of the Communist Party and the Progressives, such as presidential candidate Henry Wallace, who believed that America should accept the Soviet Union rather than confront it with George Kennan’s containment policy.
Although Schlesinger wrote in the 1950s, he never regarded himself as a “consensus” historian, as Daniel J. Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, and Louis Hartz were so classified. But even while writing about continuity, the idea of liberal consensus would not go away. Schlesinger saw the Kennedy legacy as the last best hope of continuing the liberal tradition inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the thirties. He wrote three masterful volumes that covered the eclipse of the Democrats by the Republican ascendancy in the 1920s, resulting in the depression and the “crisis of the old order,” followed by the advent of the New Deal, a story Schlesinger carried up to 1938. The liberalism that the consensus historians wrote about represented a laissez-faire philosophy of liberty standing opposed to government. Schlesinger, in contrast, wrote of a progressive liberalism that looked to a government contending with the “market revolution” of the Jacksonian era and the power of big business. From his father, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, the son had inherited a sense of history as patterned, which he developed in The Cycles of American History (1986). Schlesinger’s vision of America saw the country turning toward government and social causes in periods of liberalism and against government to indulge in private satisfactions in periods of conservatism. One might conclude that Americans turn one way when facing insecurity and poverty and another when enjoying confidence and prosperity. But Alexis de Tocqueville also saw a conflict between idealism and materialism struggling within America’s “democratic soul,” and Schlesinger became the historian of that moral drama.
Schlesinger decided to put aside finishing his multi-volume study of the Roosevelt administration to write his memoirs. He had to put aside finishing that project as he became caught up in the recent Iraq war and revised and updated The Imperial Presidency and wrote War and the Presidency. His two sons, Stephen and Andrew, are editing his journals and unfinished manuscripts.
Throughout his career Schlesinger addressed issues that remain with us today. Writing against the grain, he took on the popular school of libertarian thought propounded by F. H. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944). Schlesinger insisted that the New Deal prevented American from falling for the totalitarian temptation and the path to serfdom, and that in America the state played a guiding role in economic development without jeopardizing freedom. He also saw the American mind as guided by two mutually reinforcing perspectives, William James’s pragmatic philosophy which approached life with an experimental temperament and Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology that reminded us that there is no escape from the reality of evil and human fallibility. Both perspectives questioned whether knowledge can ever claim the certitude of absolute truth. In his last years Schlesinger also went against the trendy cult of multiculturalism, arguing, in The Disuniting of America (1991), that the fragmentation of America society into ethnic claims can only divide us instead of unite a country through a tolerant and even miscegenation. Schlesinger’s refutation of multiculturalism, and the political correctness of identity politics, extended his long quarrel with determinism, especially as he saw young people claiming to be conditioned by ancestry instead of deciding for themselves who they truly are and thinking and acting with a will of their own.
Convinced that history moves by freedom rather than necessity, Schlesinger was interested in speculative theory and quite prepared to follow philosophy and subject events to causal analysis, as he did in his writings on the origins of the cold war. But mainly Schlesinger saw history as a narrative art, an act of the literary imagination as well as a probing into factual evidence. Students could well learn how to write history by reading Schlesinger to find out how he opens up his subjects, especially in his books on Jackson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, where the setting creates the emotion that draws the reader back into the past. In some ways he presaged the postmodernist sensibility of our time, for he too understood that if truth has any chance of making itself felt, it depends on how the story is told. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was the best kind of historian, a teacher as well as a scholar, who wrote with passion at the pitch of perception, a civic-minded public intellectual who sought to make the treasured values of the past resonate in our turbulent present.
John Patrick Diggins
Graduate Center, City University of New York
J. Patrick White
J. Patrick White, professor emeritus of American constitutional law and political history at Northern Illinois University, died on July 12, 2006 at age seventy-nine in Iron River, Michigan, where he had lived since retirement in 1993. He enrolled in the University of Michigan (UM) in 1945 but entered the U.S. Army in 1946 before returning to UM, where he earned an A.B. (summa cum laude) in 1949, an M.A. in 1950, and the Ph.D. in 1957.
Pat White was an instructor at the University of Maryland, College Park (1955-1959), which included a stint in the University College Overseas Program teaching American soldiers in Europe. He then served as an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University (1959-1960) and assistant dean in Liberal Arts & Sciences in the same institution (1960-1961) before joining the history department at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in 1961. In the course of his thirty-two years at NIU he was director of the Peace Corps Training Program for Malaysia (1961-1964), director of Foreign Study Programs (1964-1968), and assistant chair of the department of history (1970-1976). Pat White’s interest in constitutional history centered on the roles of judges and courts as policymakers and on the paradox inherent in having an essentially conservative and undemocratic institution define public policy in a society increasingly committed to democratic values. He focused particularly on the Populist and Progressive eras when the courts were perceived by reformers as bastions of a “judicial oligarchy” impervious to popular control.
Although he published articles in Far Eastern Survey and Maryland Law Review, Pat was known and greatly appreciated primarily as a teacher and administrator. He taught generations of undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom he inspired to follow a career in the law. In 1986 he was one of three recipients of NIU’s coveted Excellence in Teaching Awards. He was equally valued for his selfless dedication to the historical profession and to NIU, where he served on innumerable committees at the departmental, college, and university levels. After retirement, he created and generously funded the J. Patrick White History Education Endowment to provide assistance to students in the Department of History’s Secondary Teacher Certification Program in history and the social sciences.
J. Patrick White was a life member of the OAH, the AHA, and the Southern Historical Association. He will long be remembered as an outstanding teacher, administrator, and benefactor to higher education.
George W. Spencer
Northern Illinois University
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