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became a professor. To an attentive student, such as Bolton, Turner seemed to be creating history from the raw materials before his very eyes. Many of the undergraduates called the good-looking, approachable, and brilliant professor Freddie or Fred, but never to his face. His graduate students called him “the Master.”⁷

      As historians Haskins and Turner could not have been more different. Haskins's history was founded on a massive archival base that seemed unassailable, if a bit prosaic. Turner was quick, incisive, intuitive, deeply immersed in primary sources, but willing to write in advance of supportive evidence for his brilliant ideas. There were similarities as well as differences between the two men. Both of them were inspiring teachers. Handsome and gregarious, they were ambitious for professional advancement and recognition. They were alive to the idea that they were helping to build a new university and a new profession. Turner and Haskins were active in the AHA, and each would serve as its president. Students, especially serious ones interested in history, found both of them to be accessible and helpful. Turner and Haskins had high hopes for the development of a graduate program in history at Wisconsin, and they needed earnest disciples like Bolton.

      The rapid development of the University of Wisconsin and its impressive young faculty had not gone unnoticed in the hallowed halls of Harvard University, whose president, Charles W. Eliot, toured the university in 1891. Eliot pointedly asked Haskins and Turner why they had studied at Hopkins. “Didn't we know that Harvard was the place to study history,” Haskins wrote to historian J. Franklin Jameson, “that they alone had the libraries and instructors?” According to Haskins, Eliot spent much of his time in Madison maligning his Baltimore competitor. Eliot's rudeness aggravated Haskins. “Even in the West one is expected to be a gentleman.”⁸ Eliot was known as a reserved and forbidding figure at Harvard—William James called him a “cold figure at the helm.”⁹ but Eliot's manner at Madison was not merely due to his personality: he feared that upstart institutions would somehow undercut Harvard's paramount standing among American universities. If he had misgivings about advanced study at Hopkins, one can only surmise what he thought about graduate education at Madison, especially under tyros like Turner and Haskins.

      A few months after Eliot's visit Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, showed up in Madison. Gilman was the man who had so speedily made Hopkins a force in higher education. Before going to Baltimore, Gilman had been president of the University of California and is credited with laying the foundations for that western university's rise to prominence.¹⁰ Described by one of his Berkeley friends as a pleasant and tactful man, Gilman's personal qualities served him well during his visit to Wisconsin.¹¹ “The contrast with Harvard's agent was significant and helped the cause of Hopkins in the Northwest,” Haskins told Jameson. “We shall have nine and possibly ten Hopkins men in the faculty next year.”¹² It was no wonder that eastern university presidents visited institutions in the West. Wisconsin and other developing colleges and universities sent their students to eastern graduate schools and hired the finished products of those schools. Sometimes, as in the case of Turner, the departing student and the returning professor were one and the same.

      The Wisconsin visits of Eliot and Gilman illuminated the quandary over doctoral training in American universities. Once doctoral training became the sine qua non for elite institutions, they faced the dual problems of attracting the best students and then placing them when they were finished. Moreover, enterprising faculty at budding western universities were eager to establish new doctoral programs of their own. Thus, developing institutions added to the pool of doctors qualified for professorships, but there was no guarantee that the number of faculty positions would grow enough to absorb them. Even when the supply of PhDs exceeded demand, the pressure was great to maintain doctoral programs, because they were indispensable status symbols in which institutions had heavy investments. Bolton's professional life would be greatly entangled with these intractable issues, which remain salient today.

      In Bolton's era, graduate education was developing rapidly at Wisconsin. In 1892 the university had hired the renowned political economist Richard T. Ely from Johns Hopkins to head a new School of Economics, Political Science, and History that would offer graduate instruction. Turner and Haskins had studied with Ely at Hopkins; Turner thought that Ely's presence would give Wisconsin a leg up on its new regional rival, the University of Chicago. The younger men chafed under Ely's sometimes heavy-handed leadership, but respected him nonetheless.¹³ In those days duty (and good judgment) required faculty to obey department heads, deans, and university presidents. Turner and Haskins kept to that form.

      Faculty relations and the struggle for institutional recognition did not immediately concern Bolton. In his first semester he enrolled in Haskins's course on English constitutional history as well as German, algebra, economics, and elementary law classes. He briefly considered law as a profession, perhaps because it was a more direct route to the sort of social and financial success that he coveted, but history appealed to him.¹⁴ Haskins demanded twice as much work as his other professors, “but the work is interesting,” Bolton thought, “hence easily done.”¹⁵

      Herbert moved into a rooming house and settled into college life. The freshmen and sophomores recruited him for field day, “but rather than have one class haze me for helping the other I'll keep away from them both.”¹⁶ Football, however, attracted Herbert's attention. He played halfback in intramural games, scored a touchdown, and thought the game was great fun, although it was a bruising experience in those helmetless, padless, and dangerous early days of the sport. He gave it up after a few games. He enjoyed competitive rowing but abandoned that sport, too, as he devoted more attention to his studies.

      Gertrude's presence in Madison sharpened Herbert's sense of purpose. Now he wished to achieve something not only for himself but also “for her sake, and [to] be somebody of whom she can be proud…her nearness to me keeps the motive more vividly before me.”¹⁷ Perhaps hoping to plant a seed in Herbert's mind, she passed along news of various friends who had recently married.¹⁸ Formerly, Herbert regarded the marriage of old chums as if he had heard news of their execution. Not now. Perhaps Fred's marriage had reconciled him to the inevitability of his own matrimonial future. By the beginning of 1894 the couple had reached an “understanding,” a locution that must have meant that they were privately if not formally engaged. Herbert had gone so far as to quit working on Sundays, which gave the couple more time together. Still Herbert insisted that he studied “all the more earnestly because…every time I see her I receive a new the strongest inspiration and incentive for work.”¹⁹

      The couple could not marry until Herbert finished his studies in the spring of 1895. Until then he needed better bachelor living arrangements. He decided to join a fraternity. “The fellows here who belong to no society and stay in their shells all the time are in danger of losing their earmarks of civilization and lapsing into savagery.” It was as if Herbert believed that manners were a mere husk that covered the raw farm boys who had made it to Madison. Without constant reinforcement, the newly acquired veneer would slough off and reveal the rougher stuff that lay within. Herbert had worked too hard to make something of himself to allow that to happen. “I feel it to be almost a duty, and that not chiefly to myself,” he explained, “to mingle to a certain extent with as good society as my limited qualifications will make me eligible to.”²⁰ He intended to rise in the eyes of his community, whether it consisted of the small town of Tomah or the university student body. For him, fraternity membership was a means to that end.

      Fred, a former frat member himself, loaned his brother the fifteen-dollar initiation fee for Theta Delta Chi. Two other Tomah boys had rushed the fraternity but were voted down. Herbert must have felt some pride in knowing that he had been admitted to an exclusive club.²¹ Indeed, his fraternity proved to be more exclusive than he could have guessed in 1894. Like Bolton, two of his fraternity brothers, Carl Becker and Guy Stanton Ford, would become presidents of the American Historical Association. If professional connections and upward mobility were the objects of his membership, Bolton joined the very best fraternity for his purposes, although there was more than a bit of luck involved. The odds against three AHA presidents coming from the same fraternity chapter must have been enormous; that the three presidents-to-be studied with two other AHA presidents in the making is perhaps unique in the history of the profession.

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