REMINISCENCES OF THE COLUMBIA HISTORY DEPARTMENT
1923-1975
mbued with these ideas, a student going from the College to the graduate department of history found it an easy transition. A newcomer from another institution might at first sight think that the old separations were still in force. He was told that for the master's degree he was expected to take four or five lecture courses and one seminar "in his field," and on turning to the catalogue he would find courses listed as being in American or European history, Ancient or Medieval, English or some other national category, each limited in span and taught by a specialist. Only two bore the broad title of "Thought and Culture," one given by Lynn Thorndike, "From the Renaissance to the French Encyclopedists"; the other by David Saville Muzzey '23C, on the period 1750 to 1900 in Europe and the United States. There was besides a course in the history of science, and one requirement: historiography. The display looked very much like the standard curriculum at any other university.
But catalogue labels failed as usual to convey the spirit of the contents. To start with the course in the history of science so as to forget it promptly, it was in the hands of an ill-prepared man suffering from several disabilities and it consisted exclusively of names and dates coupled with repetitious praise of the scientific method and derision of older beliefs. It gave the subject a bad name and did not survive the early retirement of its proprietor.
Again, the course in historiography was a misnomer, being what used to be called a "vaudeville course": each week for two hours straight one of the distinguished figures in the department, and occasionally a visitor, would come and do his turn by describing the range of his concern or the work of a great historian of the past. The lectures were well prepared; one learned miscellaneous facts, but not the technique of historiography. That omission was remedied thirty years later when Professor Henry Graff and I designed and gave a course that fitted the label.
At the earlier time, the remainder of the offering was of superior quality and nearly every course embraced more than was forecast in the description. For example, William R. Shepherd's "Expansion of Europe" was a vast panorama of social and cultural exchanges among four continents following the discovery of the New World. Gathering facts never before assembled had entailed wide-ranging research that Shepherd consigned to his written lectures, and these expanded each year like Europe itself. Full of his subject, he delivered them as if from memory, and every listener looked forward to the published volume. Alas, it never found a posthumous editor and publisher. On Shepherd's retirement the work in Latin American history was ably taken up by Professor Frank Tannenbaum '21C, who was equally competent in the history of labor relations.
Muzzey's course in thought and culture had the merit of interweaving the ideas and movements originating from either side of the Atlantic and relating intellectual differences of temper to social conditions. As for Lynn Thorndike's, it was at first a cause of dismay. Though a lecture course, not a seminar, it was a study in the bibliography of the subject. Yet one learned a good deal of the substance as well, because in pointing out the scope of each of the sources, Thorndike gave thumbnail sketches of men and events; but it took synthetic power to organize the pieces into a history of the period. He was of course famous for his part in the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages, especially its scientific accomplishments. Volume after volume of his History of Magic and Experimental Science came out, full of facts newly dug out of the Vatican library or elsewhere and so detailed that reading him was a form of research in itself. On the other hand, his single volume on the history of civilization is a model of narrative speed and clarity.
The subject Hayes made his own was Nationalism. It had of course no geographical boundaries and took the student beyond politics and into all forms of literature, as well as into music and the fine arts. His seminar on the subject could thus be taken twice, in successive years; the members would bring to it ever fresh reports on the manifestations of the ubiquitous ism.
The other seminar in Modern European history, Charles Downer Hazen's, was exactly the opposite: it repeated, year after year and was none the less indispensable, because it taught method. The topics were not chosen by the student but assigned. One called for delving into the voluminous Clarke Papers for seventeenth-century radicals, another compelled one to master the figures in one of Disraeli's budgets, and so on—each as it were featured a type of difficulty. Hazen had every item at his fingertips, and the omission of a single essential point in the report to the class brought the question, "Did you not find, Mr. X (or Miss Y), that. . . . ?'' Known as "the Chevalier" on account of his Legion of Honor for work in France, Hazen was gentle but implacable; an amended paper must be turned in with the lacuna filled. It was no surprise that his two-volume history of the French Revolution was vivid and memorable—no textbook—by virtue of the skilful use of the small detail; and it was characteristic of his unacademic conception of history that he said he reread Carlyle's French Revolution once a year.
Austin Evans's courses in medieval history were less entrancing, but solid also and, the subject being culturally remote, it was necessarily broader than a chronicle of politics. Scholarship on the Middle Ages has by now moved far from his understanding of it, but the substance has changed less than the inferences and interpretations. The Ph.D. candidate who must choose for his oral examination a major subject and two minors could readily build on the Evans course for one of the minors. The difference between major and minor was that questions on the latter would not touch on the bibliography.
The second minor might be in American history and there the array of courses was especially rich. In colonial history, Evarts Boutell Greene, the first American born in Japan, was supreme. Though not a facile lecturer, his charm in seminar induced an interest equal to his own in—everything; for example, the ethos of Puritan New England compared with Hawthorne's view of it in The Scarlet Letter. It involved a study of church records for confessions of fornication before marriage—so frequent that it often appears on the books as FBM—and a brief inquiry into the world-wide practice of bundling. At every point, the department showed by its breadth of interest that it was indeed committed to the "new history."
Other scholars in American History—David Muzzey, Dixon Ryan Fox, John Krout '25GSAS '63HON, Allan Nevins '60HON—each had his enthusiastic band of followers who would recommend to the neophyte this or that course as an absolute obligation before it was too late. For—hard to believe—there would come a time in life when one would cease to sit and listen, notebook in hand.
Particularly attractive was Nevins's fluent style, characteristic also of his biographies—Grover Cleveland, Henry Ford, Hamilton Fish, of which the last received the Pulitzer Prize. He had had a prominent career in journalism and wanted to entice the public to read history. He spurred the founding of the history magazine American Heritage and created a new genre: oral history on tape. He organized the Society of American Historians and established the annual Bancroft Prize for the three leading works in the subject.
The story of the British Isles and empire was in the hands of Robert Montgomery Schuyler and J. Bartlet Brebner, the one a gentle, multicompetent New Yorker, the other a cheerful Canadian, who made the "North Atlantic Triangle" an important historical subject. His Explorers of North America is a classic. The quiet humorist Schuyler dealt with English constitutional matters and the limited sway of Free Trade ideas; he edited the Political Science Quarterly and he wrote an early paper on the supposed relevance to causation in history of Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle.
A gentleman from Virginia, Geroid Tanquaray Robinson '30/gsas '67HON had the daunting task of handling all by himself the whole of Russian history and, after a time, the growing number of students energized by Sputnik.
Meanwhile, the formidable William Linn Westermann, who deciphered the stacks of Greek papyri found near the Nile delta, was the drill master of the small band of seekers after ancient history. He inspired more admiring wonder for his expertise than affection for his person, because his attitude toward students (and some colleagues) was on the German model. Rigorous scholarship requires frigorous human relations.
Enough has been said so far to show that, unlike today, students in the late 1920s had immense respect for their teachers and noted their foibles as part of the common lot, rather than as a warrant for assuming equality and acting as customers. Asking for a better grade would have been a sign of delirium. There was great courtesy on both sides and no bandying of first names, but it was not unusual for a seminar leader to invite his students to an evening buffet at his house or for an outing in the country. Nor had learning as yet been discovered to be a cover for an oppressive social system. The result was pleasure in the hard work of ascertaining and interpreting fact and joy in the knowledge that one was an apprentice in a worthy guild. The young and their elders were alike "members of the University."
Apprenticeship was none the less exacting. After obtaining the B.A., which should not exceed four years, the M.A. took one year of courses, a day-long written examination, and a substantial essay. The Ph.D. called for two more years of course work, an oral examination in subject matter, and a dissertation examined on the galleys of a book, whether accepted for publication or to be privately printed at the author's expense. The orals were conducted very formally, in the Trustees' Room, by a committee of at least five professors flanked by two more from cognate departments serving as observers.
To the candidate preparing for the ordeal the major seemed a boundless expanse: modern European history stretched from 1500 to the present and from the Azores to Vladivostock. After the Second World War, perhaps as a concession to the returning veterans who were married and had children, the demand was greatly reduced: one could choose a single century, Russia was left out of Europe, and the examinee was often asked at the outset what he knew best. The dissertation was in typescript and its examination was little more than copy-editing.
But both in the earlier period and under this relaxed scheme, Columbia maintained strictness, whereas—again in both periods—some of the leading universities were content to test the candidate through an informal conversation in the sponsor's office with two or three other faculty members. The rationale was that they knew his or her quality from acquaintance during the preparatory years. Continued. . .
