LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

her.”¹⁸

      Herbert was so consumed with the welfare of his child that Garrison's letter scarcely registered. The Texas professor offered Bolton a position, which would become permanent “providing Prof Bugbee does not recover from consumption—an improbability.” The starting salary would be $1,500 with the rank of instructor the first year and the possibility of promotion through the ranks to “head of the school.” “The work will be European history. What do you think of the prospects?” he asked Fred.¹⁹ Herbert worried about the impermanent nature of the appointment, but Garrison assured him that Bugbee was unlikely to live and that prospects at Texas were bright. Garrison's words seemed unambiguous, but after his experience with Dartmouth Herbert was looking for fine print and disappearing ink. He wanted his brother's advice but could not wait for a reply. “I wired that I would accept.” Once the decision was made, Herbert found his courage. “I am going in to win and hope to succeed.”²⁰

      Herbert knew that Haskins had recommended him for the Texas job, but there is no reason to believe that he knew Jameson and Turner may have been involved. If Haskins knew about the Texas position, surely his best friend, Turner, knew. Bolton's name may have come to Garrison from University of Texas president W. L. Prather, who had a doctorate from Penn and who was also searching for a likely candidate.²¹ The ambitious (and sometimes jealous) Herbert complained about “pull” when it benefited others, but he had plenty of pull, even though it operated out of his sight. Bolton's offers from Wisconsin Normal and Texas show how murky the hiring process was at the turn of the twentieth century. Searches were not advertised. The selection process was opaque and connections mattered; inside candidates often got the nod. A few prominent historians and university presidents controlled the professional destinies of aspiring academics, who often did not know that they were being considered for a professorship. Although Doctor Bolton was still a pawn in other men's games, this time he was the happy beneficiary of the secretive dealings of presidents and professors.

      Herbert's decision to go to Texas settled his professional future, but important personal matters hung in the balance. Helen's health slowly improved, but Herbert was reluctant to leave until Gertrude gave birth. He lingered in Milwaukee until their third daughter, Laura, was born on October 7. “Easy labor, fine child, mother doing nicely,” he scrawled in a hasty note to Fred.²² The following day Herbert was on the train south, leaving Gertrude and the children, who would follow in December. It was the most decisive journey of his life.

      As Bugbee convalesced in El Paso, a letter arrived from his admiring friend and former student, Eugene C. Barker. Texas had hired the new man from Wisconsin, Barker wrote. “He is rather good looking, a blond, about six feet tall; and I believe he will prove a pretty good teacher.” Barker, peeved with Garrison for having given Bugbee's summer courses to Bolton instead of him, “exploded.”²³ Explosions in front of Garrison were not wise. He expected professional behavior at all times, and the men who worked under him soon understood that there was an iron hand in Garrison's velvet glove.

      Garrison and the university made a fine first impression on Bolton. “Prof. Garrison is a royal good man, well-trained, 48 years old.” Garrison's age (seventeen years older than Bolton), meant that Bolton might eventually head the history department (or “school” as it was then called), even if Garrison remained in harness into his sixties. “Barker is a young fellow, perhaps 26, rather ‘green’ looking, but pleasant,” Bolton wrote. Bolton's teaching load was relatively light: two European history courses in three sections that each met thrice weekly. His university accommodations included a “beautiful recitation room, with good maps and a private office,” in Old Main, which in Bolton's time was still comparatively new.

      Garrison had some “odds and ends” for Bolton in addition to teaching. Founding editor of the Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, Garrison gave Bolton editorial assignments. The new instructor did not complain. Garrison was “building up a centre for southwestern history for which Texas has unsurpassed opportunities,” Bolton thought. He quickly intuited that Garrison would encourage him to work in this new field, southwestern history. “I shall get up Spanish at once, which they say is easy.” All in all, Bolton thought he had “fallen into good quarters” where he thought he could rise to the top.²⁴ For the first time Bolton believed that he was well positioned to succeed in his chosen profession.

      Bolton liked Austin. The October weather was “perfect.” The city was “a big village in type and appearance, the good and bad all mixed.” The capitol impressed him. He lodged in “a ‘swell’ residence” where Garrison had put him “to avoid making a social error before I get started.” He noticed that almost everyone rode single footers (horses with an unusually quick and comfortable gait almost as fast as a trot). They were “common as niggers,” he wrote, an unfortunate choice of terms that signaled Bolton's quick assimilation of white southern sensibilities and values.²⁵ “I like the southern people extremely well,” he told his brother. He found them to be “kind, courteous, hospitable,” and the students “much more courteous than in the north.”²⁶ He did not mention that the university was racially segregated.

      Moving to Texas to teach European history for a fifty-dollar raise had been a gamble. Once he surveyed the situation in Austin, Bolton knew that he had won his bet. Now he could specialize in history instead of teaching everything under the sun. Noticing that he was a more demanding teacher than either Garrison or Barker, he decided to modify his own teaching so that he would have more time for research. Even the administration stars seemed to be aligned in Bolton's favor. President Prather's association with Penn probably helped Bolton, who judged Prather to be an “honest, warmhearted, provincial man” who would “give one free scope.” The Board of Regents had treated Bolton “liberally,” paying him from September 1, rather than docking his pay for the days he had missed while waiting for his daughter's birth.²⁷ Texas was going to be a good thing for Bolton, and Bolton intended to be a good thing for Texas.

      But the University of Texas was not quite as calm as it seemed in Bolton's first appraisal. The university had been embroiled in political controversies concerning funding, its relationship with Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, and whether the university should serve the immediate, practical needs of the state's farmers or less concrete but loftier scholarly goals. Funding of the university by munificent land grants and oil revenues would eventually secure its future, but this inchoate treasury was also a source of political conflict.²⁸

      The university was vulnerable to powerful political figures in Austin. In 1897 a state representative asserted that some university professors “not in sympathy with the traditions of the South” were teaching “political heresies in place of the system of political economy” cherished by Texans. A house committee investigated the charges. They questioned professor of political science David F. Houston, and Garrison. Both men assured the legislators that nothing was being taught that reflected poorly “on Southern institutions or that would be unacceptable to Southern people.” The committee closely questioned Houston (a South Carolinian) about his Harvard University Press book on nullification in South Carolina, which the committee believed to be “unacceptable from a Southern standpoint,” and “contrary to Southern teachings.”²⁹ Houston explained that he had written the book before coming to Texas and that he did not assign it or refer to it in his classes. The committee learned that the regents hired faculty on the basis of fitness rather than which region they haled from. Nevertheless, “other things being equal,” the regents hired “Texas men first and Southern men next.” The committee was satisfied that nothing was taught at the university that was “objectionable to Southern people,” but called for an annual investigation of the university by the state legislature to make certain that this happy circumstance was not disturbed. The regents appended a statement to the report that no political or religious tests were used in the selection of faculty, who were expected to be “in sympathy with the people whom they teach,” and that while the university “was in no sense partisan, sectarian, or sectional,” it was “in sympathy with the life, character, and civilization of the Southern people.”³⁰

      At about the time Bolton arrived in Austin, controversies had arisen concerning certain professors’ interpretations of historical events

Скачать книгу