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In this issue:
David Herbert Donald
George M. Fishman
Ronald Takaki
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David Herbert Donald
The poet Walt Whitman composed a great work in 1865, on the death of Abraham Lincoln, who died in the spring, when the lilacs were in bloom:
O how shall I warble myself to the dead one that I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet song that is gone?
The entire historical profession, but especially his legion of students, graduate and undergraduate alike, mourns the passing of David Herbert Donald, who died at the age of eighty eight on May 17, 2009. A renowned scholar of nineteenth-century America, Donald was especially gifted in the art of biography. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1961 for his biography of Charles Sumner, and a second in 1987 for his study of Thomas Wolfe. He served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1970 to 1971. In 2005, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois, named its award for excellence in Lincoln studies the “David Herbert Donald Prize.”
A native of Goodman, Mississippi, Donald claimed both Confederate and Union ancestry. His father, Ira Unger Donald, was a farmer, and his mother, Sue Ella Belford Donald, a school teacher. Donald attended Holmes Junior College in Goodman; Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi; and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he studied under the great Lincoln scholar James G. Randall and received his Ph.D. in 1946.
Donald quickly established his own reputation in the Lincoln field. He launched his publishing career in 1948 with Lincoln’s Herndon, based upon his doctoral dissertation on Billy Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and the source of so many stories constituting the Lincoln legend. He edited Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase in 1954. In 1956, he published Lincoln Reconsidered, a collection of provocative essays about the sixteenth president and the Civil War era.
Donald’s approach to historical subjects adapted insights gained from his interest in social science methodology. His two-volume biography of Sumner made use of psychology in probing the character of the stanch Massachusetts abolitionist. The Politics of Reconstruction, 1863-1867, published in 1965, employed political science techniques to explain Congressional voting patterns.
Making history come alive for general readers and specialists alike led Donald to bring out, in 1961, a new edition of Randall’s The Civil War and Reconstruction, which included a famously comprehensive bibliography. The same impulse prompted his coauthorship of The Great Republic in 1977, an unusual textbook comprising a series of extended analytical essays, rather than a plodding chronological narrative.
In 1995, Donald published the definitive (a word he never much cared for) one-volume biography of Lincoln. Asked why his judgments about Lincoln seemed so measured, Donald replied, “I didn’t think it was terribly important for me to stand on the sideline cheering and say, ‘oh, what a grand thing that was; my, wasn’t that statesmanlike’--we all know that. That isn’t important here. What we need to see is how leadership works, how a man with very poor training came to be such a skilled, adroit leader in a terribly troubled time.”
His work on the Lincoln biography opened new areas of research interest. Donald later published Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln’s Domestic Life, in 1999, and We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and his Friends, in 2003. The latter work explored the theme of friendship and the important role the presence or absence of friends can have in the shaping of character. At the time of his death, he was working on a biography of John Quincy Adams, focusing especially on the post-presidential years.
Donald possessed a reputation as a brilliant teacher and mentor. He cared deeply about the written and spoken word and imparted that care to his students, whose lives and careers he followed with deep, genuine, and abiding interest, as well as pride and support. His graduate students wrote not dissertations but books, and those books would be prominently displayed--he called them his “grandchildren”--on his coffee table. He was a spellbinding lecturer whose accounts, whether of a Boston mob hounding William Lloyd Garrison or of Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, drew actual applause from his student audience.
And he was, and not incidentally, also a gentleman, in the best sense--a Mississippian of kind manners who could certainly be direct, even critical, but never intemperate or unkind.
Donald began his academic career at Columbia University and taught at Smith College before returning to Columbia as a full professor in 1957. In 1959-1960, he held the Harmsworth Chair in American History at Oxford University. He served on the faculty at Princeton and then at Johns Hopkins before coming to Harvard in 1973 as the Charles Warren Professor of American History. He retired in 1991.
He is survived by his wife of many years, Aida D. Donald, of Lincoln, Massachusetts; a son, Bruce Randall Donald, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and two grandchildren. Mrs. Donald is an historian, a biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, and served for many years as assistant director and editor-in-chief of the Harvard University Press.
“His devotion to teaching and his concern for his students bind us to him,” wrote Ari Hoogenboom, in the Introduction to A Master’s Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald in 1985. “He did not excuse our failures or make light of our shortcomings but drove us to do our utmost.”
Students remember. We remember all sorts of things. We remember “to ‘eke’ means to supplement;” “’due to’ does not mean ‘because;’” “a good dissertation is a good book;” and “use a strong topic sentence.” We also remember receiving copies of prize-winning volumes inscribed to “one who will someday write a better book than this.” We remember long letters closing with “Faithfully yours.” We remember, with reverence and affection, David Herbert Donald.
--John M. McCardell, Jr.
Middlebury College
George M. Fishman
Teacher, historian, and activist, George M. Fishman passed away peacefully at his New Haven, Connecticut, home on June 30, 2009. Together with his wife Edie, he was a stalwart champion of quality public education for all children, workers’ rights, equality, and peace throughout his life.
Born in Philadelphia on January 6, 1917, Fishman was a high school social science and history teacher. He held a Ph.D. in history from Temple University. He was actively involved in African American and labor studies, as researcher, writer, and teacher. Fishman published articles in academic and popular journals, and a selection of his work, For a Better World. A Miscellany: Writings 1952-2002 on the African American People’s Freedom/Equality Struggles in New Jersey History, was completed in 2002.
From 1938 to 1941, Fishman was a staff member of a Work Projects Administration (WPA) teaching unit. It focused on African American life, history, and culture, and conducted classes for labor unions and community organizations. During World War II, Fishman was a radio man aboard a landing ship medium in the Pacific. He was awarded four medals for his service: American Theater, Asian-Pacific, Philippine Liberation, and Victory.
Following the war, Fishman taught social studies, history, and mathematics in the public secondary schools of Philadelphia and New Jersey. In 1952, he was forced to leave his teaching position as part of a general purge of progressives--including communists, labor activists, and civil rights advocates--from public life. Taking a job with Campbell’s Soup in Camden, New Jersey, Fishman worked as a union shop steward and leader of Local 80A United Packinghouse Workers of America, CIO until he was invited back to teaching in 1968 when the Philadelphia school system repudiated past discriminatory practices. He retired from teaching in 1984.
Fishman was a candidate for governor of New Jersey on the Communist Party ticket in 1985. His campaign was organized around the needs of public education, especially of multiracial urban schools.
In every community where he lived, George Fishman became well-known for his scholarship and activism on behalf of democratic rights, human rights, and peace. Stating that he lived “a life with purpose,” Fishman dedicated his life to local, national, and global causes alike. He took part in the struggles for unemployment compensation and social security in the 1930s, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and the broad movements for progressive change of today. In honor of their work, he and Edie received the Ida B. Wells Community Service Award from the NAACP in 1994.
Fishman was respected and loved for his vision, dedication, commitment, and courage. His active concern for the needs and well-being of friends, family, and the community was felt by many. George Fishman is survived by his wife, Edie; his daughter Joelle and son-in-law Arthur Perlo; and several nieces and nephews.
A memorial celebration will be held on Sunday, September 6 at 2:00 pm at the New Haven Peoples Center, 37 Howe Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Messages and memorial contributions can be sent to: Edie Fishman, 120-M Wooster Street, New Haven, CT 06511. E-mail to <joelle.fishman at pobox dot com> or phone 203-430-2334.
--Joelle Fishman
Ronald Takaki
Asian American historian and public intellectual Ronald Takaki passed away on May 26, 2009, after struggling for nearly two decades with multiple sclerosis. His wife, Carol Rankin, their three children, and seven grandchildren survive him.
Ron was born in Honolulu on April 12, 1939. His father died when he was seven years old, and his mother remarried and reared Ron and his two siblings. “In Palolo Valley on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, where I lived as a child,” Ron recalled in his history of Asian America, Strangers from a Different Shore (1989), “my neighbors had names like Hamamoto, Kauhane, Wong, and Camara. Nearby, across the stream where we caught crayfish and roasted them over an open fire, there were Filipino and Puerto Rican families. Behind my house, Mrs. Alice Liu and her friends played mah-jongg late into the night, the clicking of the tiles lulling me to sleep.”
That setting, multicultural Hawai`i, provided Ron with the theme that would become his gift to U.S. history. On the suggestion of a teacher, Ron left Iolani High School for the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he earned a history degree. He completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, and taught African American history at UCLA. The 1969 Third World Liberation Front strike at Berkeley was instrumental in establishing the Department of Ethnic Studies there, and Ron joined its faculty in 1972. He served as department chair from 1975 to 1977, received Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1981, and helped establish an American Cultures (diversity) requirement for all Berkeley undergraduates and the nation’s first Ph.D. program in Comparative Ethnic Studies. Ron retired in 2002, and that year received the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Just before his death, the Association for Asian American Studies awarded him their Lifetime Achievement Award for 2009.
A prolific author, Ron published A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (1971), and perhaps his best work of scholarship, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1979). The book launched his career in multiculturalism. “Unlike other books on the history of racism in America,” Ron explained, “this study seeks to offer a comparative analysis of racial domination within the context of the development of capitalism and class divisions in nineteenth-century American society. Where scholars have examined separately the oppression of blacks, Indians, Mexicans, and Asians, I have tried to analyze the ways the experiences of these different groups related to each other.”
Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (1983), patterned on social histories of African Americans under slavery, was inspired by an uncle who, within the “talk story” tradition of the islands, challenged Ron to write about subject matters closer to home, “a book about us,” in Uncle Richard’s words. Ron followed that advice with Strangers from a Different Shore, a landmark work in Asian American studies, and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993), which won the American Book Award. Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (1995) was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the event, and Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (2000) appeared amidst accolades to “the greatest generation.”
Written during Ron’s final illness, Double Victory claimed that the twentieth century’s “most significant event,” World War II, showed that America’s diverse peoples were determined “to chart the destiny of their lives, communities, and nation” and make America “live up to its ideals and founding principles.” In their twin fight against fascism abroad and racism at home, Ron wrote, “they stirred a rising wind of diversity’s discontent, unfurling a hopeful vision of America as a multicultural democracy.” That sentiment is a fitting tribute to a friend, colleague, and mentor.
--Gary Y. Okihiro
Columbia University
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