by Rebecca Sharpless

Rebecca Sharpless, director of Baylor University's Institute for Oral History, spoke with former OAH Executive Secretary Thomas D. Clark via telephone at his home in Lexington, Kentucky, this summer. Dr. Clark served as OAH Executive Secretary from 1970 to 1973, a pivotal time in the organization's history. It was during his careful watch that the OAH moved its headquarters to Bloomington, Indiana, and started this quarterly newsletter for its members.--Eds.

Rebecca Sharpless: Dr. Clark, we were going to start out very generally and talk a little bit about why you went into the field of history.

Thomas D. Clark: Well, I was born and raised in Mississippi nearly a century ago, and at that time, the Civil War was as vivid as if it was going on at the moment. I was there in the land of old Confederate veterans, a discussion of the war, a discussion of Reconstruction, and on top of that, right in the heart of the Choctaw Indian country.

My mother was a schoolteacher. She had a very definite interest in the history of the state, the history of our county and community, and, as a young boy growing up, I was exposed to that. At the University of Mississippi, I came into association with a wonderfully stimulating man, Charles S. Sydnor, who was a young historian himself at the time. He had just come out of Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. degree. I never had classes under Charlie Sydnor, but I had many long conversations, and he helped me to find some sense of direction in going into the graduate study of history. I think I simply followed a natural curiosity about the past.

R.S.: What kinds of things did you and Professor Sydnor talk about?

T.C.: At that time, he was very interested in slavery in Mississippi. He was getting into the source materials related to the history of the state. We talked about that. We talked about the profession of history a good bit. We talked about even the broader scope of national history. And certainly he gave me an insight into graduate training in the field of history. I could not tell you the hours that I spent talking with him, and he was a very patient, wonderful instructor, really, for a young person to come in contact with.

R.S.: And how did you decide on the University of Kentucky for your graduate work?

T.C.: In 1928 we were bankrupt, and I had to have some financial support. My family were cotton growers, and cotton had just gone to nothing by that time. And I made application for scholarships. I got one at the University of Kentucky and one at the University of Cincinnati, and I chose, somewhat fortuitously, be it said, Kentucky. I came here without knowing anything, really, about the history of this region. I became interested in writing a master’s thesis in the history of the Ohio Valley, and from then on, I've never lost interest in this region. But doing research for a master's thesis was the thing that really pointed the direction to where one might go as a research and teaching historian. I went to Duke, which was out of this area and out of the context of the history of this area, but, nevertheless, I profited greatly by graduate training at Duke.

R.S.: What professors influenced you at the University of Kentucky?

T.C.: A man came here from Columbia University who had no more idea of the American frontier than a cat [laughs], but he undertook to teach the course, and in his fumbling around, I did get a glimmer of the field of the American West. And I also got a notion of research and writing from him, but the big thing he did, he introduced me to the old Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and right from the start, I had an active interest in that.

R.S.: How did you choose Duke?

T.C.: I got a fellowship there at the last moment. I was almost frustrated in going on for a doctorate for lack of financial support, and just at the last moment I got a fellowship at Duke, right at the time that Duke itself was trying to become a university. And there, I came under the influence of a magnificent graduate instructor, William K. Boyd, who directed my dissertation. But I also came into association with at least a half a dozen other historians who were in their prime years of development. One of them was Richard H. Shyrock. I was his assistant, and I gained a lot from that man, not only in the way of instruction, but in warm, personal friendship.

R.S.: When you were a graduate student, what did you think the life of a historian would be like?

T.C.: Well, I already knew, by the time I got to the doctorate, that the life of a historian was going to be a pretty confining one, if you were dedicated, really dedicated, to the field. It was going to be a very demanding one. And so it has proved to be.

R.S.: In what way is it confining?

T.C.: Well, my gracious, doing research is just endless. It's a seamless web, really. I'm still entangled in a research problem. You never get all the questions answered. And the writing is a laborious job. Going over and over, checking, and paying attention to style--all of that is demanding.

R.S.: How do you decide when it's time to start writing and time to publish a project?

T.C.: As a young historian, I had my Rampaging Frontier [Manners and Humors of Pioneer Days in the South and Middle West, 1939] almost complete. A colleague of mine said, "You're too young to deal with humor, and you should put that off some years." Well, that bothered me to no end, and I talked with a distinguished man in the field of the American frontier. And he gave me a piece of advice that I've abided by ever since. If you've got something finished in your desk, get it out. Get that out and get on with the next project. Don't let manuscripts lie in your desk, moldering away. Get it out of there and hope you do better by the next one.

R.S.: How do you know when you're finished?

T.C.: When you run out of information. Space has something to do with it, obviously. If you're a publishing historian, you've got to pay attention to space, because you'll never find a publisher. And I've always lived by the philosophy you don't have to eat all of an egg to know whether it's a good egg or not. I think when you've covered the subject with a reasonable degree of thoroughness, then you're through.

R.S.: How do you go about getting your books researched and written and published?

T.C.: Well, first of all, you have to have--and sometimes that comes to you accidentally--a subject in mind in which you are interested, and a subject that you can live with, and a subject that will yield some kind of compensatory results, intellectually and for your own satisfaction, and then you set out. In doing research, you never know at the outset what you're going to find, and as you go along, that subject grows, you get leads, you come on information you never dreamed existed, you come on materials that throw light on things that you hadn't anticipated, and you simply are in the business of having to make a selection, what it is you are going to present and why.

R.S.: Do you write as you go along, or do you do all your research and then sit down and write it?

T.C.: I do a little bit of both. I sometimes will write out something to see how it's going to read, how it's going to sound, in some degree of finished form. This gives you a sense of what to do with the rest of your material. I don't think you can be a good historian without a pretty good library. Not only an institutional library accessible to you, but I had a really good private library that I collected over the years, and it's a wonderful thing to have a private library where you can reach up on the shelf and get both secondary and primary material.

R.S.: What other advice would you give those of us who are trying to do more publishing?

T.C.: I used to tell my students to read the King James version of the Bible for style and for a lot of imaginative writing, and then pick out some historians who have written successfully. I only met U. B. Phillips once, but I did fortunately have a considerable conversation with him at a key moment in his own career. I attended the American Historical Association the first time in December 1928, and there was a panel discussion of Phillips's "Slavery as a Central Theme of Southern History" [American Historical Review, Oct. 1928], and I sat almost by him at the time they were tearing that essay apart. And afterwards I sat with him, a young greenhorn graduate student, but I had gone far enough in research that I could talk with some intelligence with him. I became a great admirer of his writing style. He had an influence on me. I think any young historian should look to his elders. How did they handle problems? How did they write about it? What kind of turn of mind? What kind of intellectual contribution did they make? What kind of factual contribution? You get a sense of the purpose and direction.

R.S.: How did your professor at the University of Kentucky introduce you to the Mississippi Valley Historical?

T.C.: There was a great deal of discussion when I came here about the Draper and Durrett collections, and there was almost, I'd say, a Turnerian sense of the thrust of the frontier and its meaning. I was introduced to the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and read the essays, and then I attended the next meeting. I read a paper at one of the next meetings, and from that time on I was in some way or another closely associated with the Association. After 1931, I think I missed only one or two meetings. In time I became deeply involved in the affairs of the Association.

R.S.: What was the emphasis of the Mississippi Valley when you started attending in the twenties?

T.C.: The emphasis was, I'd say, in three areas, with a special emphasis on two. Obviously the western movement would be a central interest. Then there was an interest in, I think, expanding the confederation of American history. That was the old Review, and the association meetings. It opened the door for a lot of historians to write, to meet in the association with other historians, all of those things that are so important to scholarly development in the sense of one's particular areas of interest. There was a great deal of interest in local history in the early years of the association, but especially an emphasis on state history. All those things were contributed.

You had the old timers still on the scene, and they were still active, reading papers, still publishing books. For instance, William E. Dodd at the University of Chicago, James A. James at Northwestern, and Herbert Heaton at Minnesota, Grace Lee Nute at Minnesota, Ted Blegen, and all the others. Walter Webb, for instance, came on the scene from Texas; William C. Binkley, Charles W. Ramsdell from Texas; Avery Craven, Fred Shannon, Larson at Wyoming, and John Hicks. E. E. Dale of Oklahoma. There were many of us. Jimmy Sellers at the University of Nebraska. And to have known those people was a pretty heady experience for a young historian.

R.S.: And those early meetings were fairly small, weren't they?

T.C.: They were small indeed. Small and intimate. After the sessions and meetings in hotel rooms and those bull sessions of men reminiscing, telling stories, gossiping, all of that--perhaps that was more important than any papers they read or any of the scholarly discussions they had.

I can recall several sessions in which some very interesting things happened. For instance, when The New York Times at the outset of World War II published that very doleful report on the status of American knowledge of history, that was a warm session over that report in the meeting in St. Louis.

R.S.: Did the Mississippi Valley take steps to remedy that?

T.C.: Well, it undertook to do that, yes. They undertook in two ways, one never successful. I served on that committee for years. They had a section on teaching history. We never got far with that.

R.S.: What were you trying to do then?

T.C.: Trying to stimulate teachers, especially at the secondary school level, to develop themselves and gain some fundamental knowledge of the content of history and some sense of the movement in history, some sense of the literature, some sense of interpretation and analysis of historical fact and presentation of historical information. All of those things were involved. Some attempt to influence those cavemen and women who developed curricula for schools to take a close look at the curricula and then the qualification of teachers who were in the classroom dealing with the subject.

R.S.: Why do you think you didn't make more headway?

T.C.: Because the task was too complex, I suppose, and on too broad a national scale; [there was a] lack of communication between the profession and the public educational management and the training of teachers.

R.S.: What else stands out in your mind as issues that you thought about a lot?

T.C.: There was always, I think, some kind of discussion, sometimes some controversy, over the Turner thesis, which nobody ever settled and nobody ever will. I'm not necessarily a Turnerian. I used to have to scold John Guice to keep him from going overboard in the Turner interpretation. That discussion will go on until the end of time.

One of the problems that historians had was opening some channels or some conduits for publishing their work, and that was a real problem. Until the university presses came on the scene, historians were pretty confined as to publication sources, and that was always an issue.

R.S.: They were trying to publish with commercial houses then?

T.C.: That's right. Ultimately there were commercial houses that did publish history, and I had the good luck to deal with two or three of them, Scribner's, for instance, and Harper, but it was difficult. I had a wonderful association with Bobbs-Merrill Company, but those houses are gone.

R.S.: So what did the Mississippi Valley do to encourage more venues for publication?

T.C.: To a large extent, the Review itself was stimulating research and writing. I suppose the growing pressure of publish or perish had some influence, and then of course the emergence of the university press made a demand for manuscripts. The doctoral dissertation became a more mature piece of work than it had been before.

R.S.: At what point did the Mississippi Valley begin expanding to be national in scope?

T.C.: I think the impact of two world wars must be taken into consideration; the emergence of departments of history in universities being something more than just paying lip service to the humanities and to the political and military theories. I think Charles Beard, for instance, shook up the historians considerably with some of his ideas, which seemed pretty wild at the time. Oh, you could go on down. Some of the historians began to publish out of the old traditional ruts of military and political history and began to concern themselves with economic and social history, along with the others, and concern themselves with ideas. And as departments of history began to expand in universities, then of course that had a great impact on turning the old Mississippi Valley out of the purely local field, the narrow focus that it had, into a broader focus. By World War II, it was clearly evident that the field of American history was too broad and too demanding to be served just by an association that embraced all the areas of history. And certainly we should mention the expansion of the doctoral programs in history. We began to have a flood of dissertations coming out, dissertations that added new perspectives to and certainly presented volumes of new information in the field of American history. We began to take a more material and a broader look at our national experience.

R.S.: Within that national experience, then what is the role of regional history?

T.C.: I'm a strong believer in the importance of regional and local history for two reasons. I think the historian has some obligation, first of all, to justify his existence, not to dig up corpses and expose them to other historians and then bury them. I think history should have some fundamental meaning, not only to the profession itself, obviously, but to society in general, and that's one area where the historian has the possibility of reaching the general public. The second: that's an area where basic research, grassroots research can be done that collectively builds a very solid foundation to broader research projects and broader perspectives in the interpretation of even so large an area as national history itself. It's a seed crop. It's the foundation for the whole field of history. You go back in the classical area. Greek history, for instance, is nothing but local history. I can't think of any area of history in time or regional concern that hasn't had a profound local origin and local significance.

R.S.: Now, there was considerable discussion about changing the name of the Mississippi Valley Historical for a long time before it happened.

T.C.: Oh, heavens. I went through that bloody battle from start to end. It was absolutely necessary that the area of interest be expanded. That's basic. And you couldn't do it with a restrictive name. The journal, for instance, was not on those lists of journals that were published for various purposes. That was one of the major concerns. The second was as the old scholarship and perspective and the number of historians practicing grew, the title was not enough to give a real material emphasis to the field that it was forced to cover. Those were some of the basic things.

R.S.: What impact do you think the name change had?

T.C.: Read the Journal now, and read your Newsletter. It became a national American association and journal. It had a tremendous impact, got it completely out from under that restrictive regional umbrella. It brought it into close association, and I was also there setting up a national office, and as chairman of the committee on the future. It changed the direction of it completely.

R.S.: You just mentioned about the setting up of the national office at Indiana. How did that take place?

T.C.: When they changed the name of the association, they changed the name of the journal, and then we lost our printer. That put the association in an altogether different context, and Indiana made the bid, and Oscar Winther became the editor of the Journal. I had been editor of the Journal of Southern History with the office of the association one place and the editor of the journal at another, and it didn't work out. It just wasn't a comfortable way to operate. We had recommended the establishment of a national headquarters. The organization's affairs were at sixes and sevens. The records were terrible. It took us a couple years, really, to get straightened out as to who was a member and who wasn't. It was just chaos. I had never even given a thought to having any more to do with the organization than just being a member and being a well wisher, and one day Leo Solt and Martin Ridge came into my office and said they wanted to establish the national headquarters there and asked me if I would take the executive secretaryship to get the office organized, and I did. That was not one of the happiest moments of my life. I had what, two or three presidents die on me, and that caused all kinds of problems. I wouldn't go through that again for anything. But I got together a staff. Those girls worked their heads off, and they did a whale of a good job. We did get the national headquarters going. I got that house--they're still located in that old house there on North Bryan Street in Bloomington. Indiana University was thoroughly cooperative and gave us the house and gave us other support. The organization owes a heavy debt to Indiana University. We also worked closely with the American Historical Association. Paul Ward and I had the most amicable relations. We were caught up in so many joint ventures, we didn't have time to be competitive rivals. We had a common interest, of course, in the field of American history, and we had a very common interest in any congressional legislation or any influence we might have on congressional action, so it was necessary for us to work together and work very closely to achieve the objectives.

I do want to add one thing. The publication of the Journal was an expensive thing, in light of our budget. We lost that Cedar Rapids printer and had to go to a bigger commercial house. I proposed a newsletter. Let's get out of that expensive business and devote the Journal purely to its historic mission. I could not persuade that board, that wooden-headed board. They turned that down. I took it back a second time, and in my final meeting, they voted it more or less just as a going away present, and when I look at the Newsletter now I think how dumb that board was. It has become an institution within itself.

R.S.: What benefit did you think a newsletter would bring?

T.C.: You could communicate with the membership. You could open the channels for the kind of material, the kind of discussion, that would be beneficial to the profession but not necessarily in the field of strict historical research and publication, and news, obviously, just country paper news, that you had no business paying a high price to have included in a journal that lacked space to begin with.

R.S.: In these seventy years, what's the biggest change that you've seen?

T.C.: I will say much better research and considerable improvement in writing. I think historians have concerned themselves more and more with the mission of the historian and trying to interpret times and the facts of civilization and disseminating ideas. Certainly the perspectives have changed, and the impetus of historical writing and conception.

R.S.: What has been the contribution of the Mississippi Valley and the OAH over those years?

T.C.: First of all, it has drawn those persons interested in American history doing research and writing, teaching, consideration in any form of American history. It has been a stimulant, in some instances a major stimulant, in the understanding, presentation, interpretation, of our national experience. A second influence, it has obviously opened some means of communication, association, and stimulation to the rising generation of historians, and to the older generation, as far as that goes. It has, I think, been highly revealing in the fact that we don't know all the facts. History is a seamless web that every generation has to take a look back and interpret the history and the past experience in light of the present conditions and experience. That's what the meetings do. And then of course just a matter of professional communication.

R.S.: What are your hopes for the OAH as we move into the new executive secretary's administration?

T.C.: I would hope in some way that we would devise some means of presenting some intelligent historical interpretation to the public at large, that we make some dent on that barrier. We haven't done it up to date. That would be my first hope, that we could somewhere bring about a condition where we could communicate better to the public at large. My second hope is that it can have some impact, major impact, on the teaching of the subject in the secondary school system. That's where your seed crop is. That's one of the great frontiers that exists. There's emphasis now, putting teachers in a classroom with content competence and some experience competency in the field they are teaching. That's one of the challenges that the association can meet. And there's always the challenge of standing guard over what the nation itself does with its historic sources, what it does with the freedom of investigation, all those things.

Despite the fact that I said the executive secretaryship was trying, one of the things I'll take to my grave is real pride in having been associated with the old Mississippi Valley and then with the rising, brassy, upstart OAH.