HISTORY

II. THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY

Section A) The 1930s and Early 1940s
Section B) The War Years to the 1960s

The period from the 1930s to the 1960s forms the next logical unit and major installment in our story. The early days, graced and led by the Bournes, Benton, Thorndike, and Schmitt, had seen the maturation of the units that collectively comprised the History Department, and of course the discipline and profession of academic history in general. Traditional emphases were placed upon American and European (or "Western") history, largely construed in political, diplomatic, and institutional terms. Even in this age, however, new fields of historical inquiry and discourse, such as social history or the history of ideas (as pioneered for example in science by Thorndike), were beginning to find practitioners. In addition, specialized journals and conferences, of national or topical nature, multiplied avenues and opportunities for research and publication. This new spirit blended happily with the old; and an earlier, essentially nineteenth-century conception of the "amateur-" or "gentleman-" scholar, had quietly but firmly passed away by the middle third of the twentieth century. Undergraduate women were still seen largely, but not by any means exclusively, as future elementary or secondary school teachers, or as future spouses and pillars of community responsibility and respectability; male students were normally viewed in more professional-preparation terms, with history being one of the liberal arts in the cursus honorum to careers in such professions as medicine or law, or in the business or public sector.

This new age, and a new generation of teacher-scholars, impressed themselves on Western Reserve University. The various units moved closer together and ultimately merged into a single Department of History in 1952, impelled by a growing community of interests, especially on the graduate level. Indeed, the university's general academic reputation nationally was grounded largely on the reputations of its English and history departments (along of course with those of the medical and other professional schools). The new generation was at first spearheaded and symbolized by Robert Binkley, John Hall Stewart, Donald Groves Barnes, and Arthur Cole; these scholars were joined, or in some cases replaced, a bit later by Harvey Wish, Jack Erickson, Carl Wittke, Marion Siney, and Red Cramer.

A) The 1930s and Early 1940s

Major personnel changes coincided with the start of the 1930s, impelled and symbolized by the retirement, after a career of thirty-eight years, of Henry Bourne. Robert Binkley was hired as the new head of the Mather department, and Arthur Cole as the Head (and only full-time member) of the Graduate Department, created in the wake of the establishment of the Graduate School. Haydn Professor Elbert Benton headed the Adelbert department to 1934 and served, as mentioned above, as the dean of the Graduate School to his retirement in 1941. Cole was also named chairman of the History Division—an umbrella unit devised to symbolize, and perhaps encourage, the coming together of the Mather, Adelbert, and graduate units (the Cleveland College unit still remained wholly and formally separate; its only faculty member for most of the 1930s was Roy Robbins, who did, however, also hold a joint appointment in Adelbert). With Cole came the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, which he edited here from 1930 to 1940. (It was renamed The Journal of American History in 1964.) Incidentally, he had been on the board of editor's of the American Historical Review, and was thus associated with Bourne. Others who were hired in the early 1930s were John Hall Stewart at Adelbert in 1930—to fill Bourne's field in French history; Palmer Throop in medieval history at Mather in 1934; Donald Grove Barnes in English history and as head of the Adelbert department in 1934; Meribeth Cameron in far eastern history also in 1934 (when Eleanore Ferris retired); and Summerfield Baldwin III, in medieval history at Mather in 1936. This gave the appearance of modest growth, and by 1936 there were ten members of the combined departments on the campus. But the appearance was deceptive, because even by 1931 the university was facing a severe financial crisis. In attempts to salvage the institution there was a certain amount of juggling with endowment funds, something that the dean and alumnae of Mather College believed affected their part of the university most adversely. To help deal with the pressures on the budget from 1931 to 1937 a part of basic faculty salaries was withheld and put in what was euphemistically called a Salary Reserve Fund. In 1931-1932 those who were paid up to $3,000.00 were unaffected, but those paid $3,001.00 to $4,500.00 received 4% less, those $4,501.00 to $6,000.00, 8% less. By the next year the situation had deteriorated further, and 15% was withheld on all salaries up to $6,000.00, 20% on $6,001.00 to $9,000.00, and 25% on those above $9,001.00 In 1933-1934 withholding was at a still higher rate: beginning at 25% and going up to 50% on salaries of $14,500.00 and above. Almost no one was paid that much! Only in 1936-1937 was a beginning made at restoring salaries to their base rates of 1931. So far as it is known, none of the money in the "Reserve Fund" was ever restored: it had, indeed, become Western Reserve's property. Obviously the History Department suffered along with everyone else, but few had the chance to go elsewhere. The university was fortunate to have such a loyal "captive" faculty.

Robert Binkley was the most innovative member of the department in that period. When he came here at 33 years of age, he had already had an interesting life. During his sophomore year at Stanford University he enlisted in the U.S. Army Ambulance Service and served in France from January 1918. He was wounded in action and was cited for exceptional bravery in removing men under fire. Upon his discharge in 1919 he joined Professor E.D. Adams of Stanford in gathering research materials on the War and Peace Conference for the new library which Herbert Hoover was about to establish at Stanford. He worked in France and in England where he had a hand in securing a large part of the enemy propaganda collection of the British Ministry of Information, papers that were about to be junked since the Ministry, as a special wartime creation, was about to be abolished, and no one else wanted this material. Binkley returned to Stanford to finish work on his B.A. and then to go on for graduate work. He also had a part-time job helping to organize the Hoover Collection, and in 1923-1927 he was the reference librarian at the new Hoover Library. This experience in dealing with archival materials also sparked an interest in their preservation, which led him to investigate microfilming and other techniques. Since he had ready access to so many unusual sources, it is not surprising that he frequently published articles in the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and the Historical Outlook, and soon became well-known. He taught at Washington Square College of New York University, 1927-1929, and soon had his students using such primary materials as the British Calendars of State Papers until the New York Public Library found it necessary to restrict their use—just to prevent their virtual shredding. In 1928, Binkley presented a paper at the First World Congress of Libraries and Bibliography in Rome, on "The Problem of Perishable Paper." In December 1929 his article on "Ten Years of Peace Conference History" in the Journal of Modern History led to an invitation by William Langer to write a volume in the "Rise of Modern Europe" series; he was also the prime mover in the new Joint Committee on Materials for Research which was formed by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, becoming its chairman in 1932 and remaining so until his death in 1940.

Binkley thus came to Western Reserve uniquely prepared to apply the use of source materials in the freshman European survey course. Mather students all wrote term papers on the events of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Library facilities were expanded, partly because of generous gifts from the Mather Alumnae Historical Association, and full use was made of materials at the Cleveland Public Library. Such essays, handsomely bound in two volumes, still grace the shelves of Kelvin Smith Library as testimony to this historical labor of love. It is also obvious that Binkley thoroughly enjoyed teaching. After his death many students paid tribute to the excitement he generated. He had a certain flamboyance—he always wore his academic gown to his lectures, wanting, he said, to get his full money's worth out of it, and he pursued some rather esoteric subjects. A.B. Erickson used to tell the story of how involved Binkley became in examining the effects of the cultivation of turnips in Lithuania.

While many saw only the problems created by the Depression, Binkley saw the opportunities presented by the W.P.A. which might be used for the benefit of society as well as the white-collared unemployed. Here in Cleveland he headed a project to make inventories and digests of local public records and of the local press, including especially ethnic papers published in foreign languages. This project resulted in the publication of The Annals of Cleveland, and it became the model for others elsewhere. In 1935 Binkley collaborated with Luther Evans, the Librarian of Congress, to establish the History Records Survey on a national basis. His interest in a more efficient use of library facilities also resulted in the creation of a regional union catalogue of books in Ohio and some Michigan libraries, which was kept up to date by the member libraries which sent information about their acquisitions. It was housed here, most recently, in the basement of Freiberger Library, until it was superseded by modern computer access to library holdings.

Binkley had many non-academic interests which must have made him a delightful man to know. His publications included plays, short stories (he had submitted several under assumed names—one to the True Story magazine's contest in 1926), and, in collaboration with his wife Frances, a book on marriage: What Is Right With Marriage? More inventive was his book on Responsible Drinking, published in 1930 when the Great Experiment was obviously not working. In it he proposed a system of registration of dealers in and drinkers of alcoholic beverages; the manufacturers would be made responsible under civil law for the damages done by those who drank, just as automobiles and their drivers were insured for the damages they did. It is no wonder that some of the more staid members of the Western Reserve faculty wondered what they were getting when he arrived on campus. But others joyfully joined with him in the making of wines in 50-gallon barrels.

Donald Grove Barnes, who came in 1934, was also a "character," and he increasingly dominated the department at Adelbert and, after 1940, the Mather department as well when he succeeded Binkley as its head. Before he came to Cleveland he had taught at the University of Oregon (1920-1930), and the University of Washington (1930-1934). At the latter institution one of his graduate students was A.B. (Jack) Erickson, who followed Barnes to Western Reserve to complete work for his Ph.D. Barnes had had a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928-1929 and came with the promise of being a great researcher. One of his Oregon colleagues described Barnes in his letter of recommendation as "hard on his students, yet they dote on him. This is because he is so thoroughly a 'human being'. His eyes everlastingly gleam with fun, and he rolls off drollery and good-natured sarcasms, laughs with his whole heart and is steadily on the job, clear-headed and sound-headed and thoroughly in earnest." Those who know him in class and out sometimes had reason to know about his sarcasm—some would have denied its good nature. But everyone knew his love of rollicking stories which he could spin by the yard. Verner Crane, one of his friends at the University of Michigan once told of having met Barnes at a bar at an A.H.A. convention, and how Barnes had gone on with his laughing outbursts for some time. After Barnes left, another historian asked Crane who that man was. Crane identified him and his academic affiliation, and the other chap said, "oh, yes. More western than reserved." Barnes was also an avid sports fan who attended all of the professional baseball and football games, and he could "talk" both sports like an expert. But above all Barnes was a fine scholar, the author of a number of important books on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. He held the Haydn Professorship from 1947 to his retirement in 1962.

Arthur Cole was a man who took himself and his accomplishments very seriously. As the Graduate Professor and chairman of the division, he ran a tight ship and held high standards. He also felt that graduate students and faculty should fraternize at certain levels, and particularly that all should share his extra-curricular enthusiasms, such as folk-dancing and ice-skating. Erickson used to recount how Cole had decided to instruct him in doing a figure-eight backwards on ice skates. Erickson, a native of Minnesota, had been virtually born with skates on, and played on the University of Minnesota hockey team and later in professional hockey. But Erickson, knowing Cole's grand ego, went along with the lesson. Cole fell down.

Particularly after Barnes became head of the Mather department in 1940-1941, there were evidences of friction, and perhaps jealousy, between these two men. As Division Chairman, Cole felt that he should have a voice in hiring new personnel. And this is where Siney came in. In the spring of 1941, it was known that Meribeth Cameron was leaving to become the dean at Milwaukee Downer College, now part of Lawrence University; she later became the academic dean at Mount Holyoke College. The Mather Committee on Instruction agreed to replace her and fill the modern European field left vacant by Binkley's death with one person, preferably a woman who could in time become the department head. Cole was teaching that semester at Columbia (he later said that he went to help Western Reserve save money), so Barnes directed the search, keeping Cole informed by letter. What Cole didn't understand was that the expressed preference for a woman had, by early April, become a "formal and inflexible necessity." Quite innocently, it seems, Cole suggested to R. John Rath, a graduate of Columbia, that he should stop over in Cleveland during his spring vacation when he was en route to St. Louis. Rath arrived unannounced and definitely not wanted by Barnes, who knew how "touchy" the Mather faculty were about interference from outside. Apparently Barnes wrote Cole a scorching letter (it isn't in the Archives); Cole felt it politic to write a long letter of explanation to President Leutner, enclosing his reply to Barnes. Cole said that by then he had ruled out three women candidates, so he thought there was a hundred-to-one chance that a man would be acceptable. In any case, Cole wasn't here when Marion Siney came for an interview in April, and whether he would have approved is problematical. By then no woman of chairman-like stature had been found, and from the budgetary point of view there was much to be said for hiring an instructor at $1,800.00 a year.

Siney found the department a friendly place. Coming from the University of Michigan, which always had an adequate number of students, she was a little astonished that at lunch with her new colleagues, Jacob Meyer talked so earnestly about attracting more students. Meyer, a very active Mennonite, was a very gentle and, in some ways, an other-worldly man. He was certainly in sharp contrast to Baldwin. Baldwin had a brilliant and penetrating mind, but his methods were a complete puzzle to the average student. He came from a staunch Methodist family—among them the founder of Goucher College—but he had as a graduate student at Harvard followed Professor Robert Lord into the Dominican Order; he withdrew, however, before he took his final vows. His great-aunt was Frances Willard, founder of the WCTU, but this tradition he also forsook. One of his colleagues who frequently sat next to him at commencements and convocations wrote of being "sustained... by breathing in the aura of whiskey which surrounded him." Siney found him urbane and charming, not "prickly" as did some others. He left in 1943 to become the chairman of the History Department at the University of Akron.

John Hall Stewart became a long-time pillar of the Adelbert department. He, too, set very high standards for his students. He was probably, eventually, better known across the country than any other member of the department, at least partly for his expansive nature and the gracious hospitality he and his wife provided for years at the A.H.A. conventions. They had a wonderful party to which were invited all WRUers, French historians, and Canadians (John was a Canadian citizen until 1944, and he taught a course in Canadian history). After he did research in Dublin in 1950 on Ireland during the French Revolution, there was usually also an Irish contingent at the parties.

The Bourne era did leave behind a valuable legacy for the new generation: the Mather Alumnae Historical Association. This organization forged a close link between the Mather department and its former students, creating a relationship that no other department in the university enjoyed. The women continued to meet annually, sometimes in the earlier days presenting essays they had written, and hearing outside speakers. In 1922, the Association began the practice of making an annual gift to be spent on history books for the college library, and after 1923 it also gave a $25.00 prize to the student who presented the best essay based on historical research. Mary O'Callaghan (later Mrs. Gerald Lavelle) won the initial prize in 1925. By that time the Association had about 200-250 dues-paying members and a turnout of 80 or so at its meetings. Among its leaders were Annie Spencer Cutter, Myra Hills, Vera Smisek, and a bit later Mrs. Lavelle.

The more long-lasting work of the Association came as a result of its desire to honor Henry Bourne upon his retirement. He vetoed a proposal that the Association be renamed for him. There were already two funds in his honor that had been established by the Classes of 1899 and 1911—which together produced an income of $735.00 in 1978-1979. An important decision was taken in 1933 to collect money which it was hoped would ultimately be used to establish a Bourne Chair in History. Initially, however, the Fund provided subsidies that made possible the publication of Palmer Throop's book Criticism of the Crusade: A Study of Public Opinion and Crusade Propaganda, which was published in 1940, after he had gone to the University of Michigan; John Hall Stewart's France, 1715-1815: A Guide to Materials in Cleveland (1942); A.B. Erickson's The Public Career of Sir James Graham (1952); and the book of essays written by Binkley and edited by Max Fisch, Selected Papers of Robert C. Binkley (1948). Other sums were provided from the fund for Barnes' purchases in England of a collection of seventeenth-century pamphlets, and for other library purchases usually ranging from $500.00 to $750.00 per year.

Other large expenditures were authorized to support an annual series of lectures and a seminar for the benefit of the Mather students. The first of these in 1941 brought Dean Marjorie Nicholson of Smith College for a lecture and Dorothy Stimson, professor of history and academic dean at Goucher College, to hold a week's seminar on the history of science in seventeenth-century England. The students found this an interesting experience and for one, at least, it brought special rewards. Phyllis Allen, later Professor Phyllis Richmond of the CWRU School of Library Science, wrote an essay, "Problems Connected with the Development of the Telescope, 1609-1687," which not only won the Association's prize that year but was soon published in Isis, the major journal in the field. However, undergraduate interest in these enterprises waned in the later 1940s and they were abandoned.

Throughout the rest of its existence, until 1967, the Association continued to support various needs of the department and finally secured its most cherished objective. In July 1954 it proposed to the board of trustees that securities with a market value of $25,000.00 should be transferred from the Bourne Fund to establish the Henry Eldridge Bourne Chair in History, leaving securities worth approximately $13,000.00 in the original fund. It was pointed out by the administration that $25,000.00 was inadequate to establish such an endowment, "but is acceptable in this instance because of Dr. Bourne's distinction and his significant contribution to Western Reserve University, and also because of the Alumnae Historical Association's interest and devotion to Dr. Bourne and the university." The choice of the first Bourne Professor seemed an obvious one: John Hall Stewart. He was a well-established scholar, and he was in the correct field to continue the Bourne tradition. He held the chair until he retired in 1969. One mark of Stewart's distinction was the French government's conferring on him the Palmes Academiques.

Like many other organizations, the Association lost members more or less steadily in the 1940s and 1950s; in the early 1960s it had about fifty members. The older members who had been so devoted to Bourne died or became infirm, and attempts to recruit new members among recent History majors largely failed. Professor Stewart and successive department chairs—Carl Wittke and C.H. Cramer—worked closely with the Association and new faculty members were inevitably invited to address the annual meetings. In 1963—thought almost unthinkable—the Association invited male history students to join. In 1965 no meeting was held, and at the last one in 1966 there were eight faculty and nine alumnae members present. Soon it was decided to disband although the Bourne Fund has continued for a variety of uses, including the establishment of an annual undergraduate prize in honor of Annie Spencer Cutter.

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B) The War Years to the 1960s

The age of World War II had a major and negative impact on enrollments, especially of course in Adelbert College and on the graduate level. Financially strapped, the university made little or no effort to prevent such members of the history faculty as Arthur Cole and Summerfield Baldwin from accepting offers elsewhere. Nevertheless, the impact was only temporary, and atypical of longer-term trends and characteristics. On the eve of the war and in its early years there was even some modest faculty growth, albeit in that anomalous and orphan-like creature known as the Cleveland College unit, when first George Hunt and then Jack Erickson were hired to replace Roy Robbins. More important, the Mather and Adelbert Europeanists began to come together in joint planning of the Western civilization courses. These courses were required both for the B.A. as well as for the major in history. They took up one-third to one-half of the individual teaching leads (the remainder split between upper-level and graduate courses) and provided the bulk of enrollments. Barnes was head of both departments, and under his often heavy hand some at least symbolically meaningful cooperation was evident. Moreover, the average number of master's degrees awarded actually increased over their pre-war per annum figures, and the Mather Alumnae Association continued its range of important activities unabated.

Then, towards the end of the war and in the years immediately following, significant new faculty were added: Harvey Wish in Adelbert (1945), Carl Wittke in the graduate unit and as dean of the Graduate School (1948), Clarence "Red" Cramer in Cleveland College (1949), all preceded by Erickson moving full-time into Mather College (1944). These appointments represented a continuity with, and revitalization of, the era ushered in by Binkley and Cole, and carried on by those who had remained, chiefly Barnes, Stewart, and Siney. From the early 1950s the fruits of this revitalization were seen in significant increases in the awarding of both master's and doctoral degrees: the graduate component had at last come of age. Teaching and research areas were largely dominated by American social-intellectual history (Wish and Wittke), British political-institutional history (Barnes and Erickson), and European political-diplomatic history (Stewart and Siney). The growth in the graduate program and population, however, was not truly matched by significant institutional support, library purchases aside. Fellowships were few, and a pattern of largely local, self-supporting, and often part-time students (including many high-school teachers in the master's program) rapidly emerged. By the mid-1960s there were over 100 graduate students on the books, some long inactive, in a department that was clearly too small to mount a rigorous program on so ambitious or extensive a scale.

But at least, and at last, there was a Department. In 1952, largely it seems under the guidance and leadership of Wittke, all four of the separate units—hitherto loosely and occasionally conjoined as a Division—were integrated into a single and permanent unit, the Department of History. All current and future appointments were now in this one department, although faculty offices were scattered among two or three different campus buildings. Wittke was the chairman of the department, in addition to his continued role as the dean of the Graduate School. The Barnes regime was ending; but not easily.

Carl Frederick Wittke, who had had a successful career at Ohio State University (1916-1937), serving as chairman of that History Department from 1925, and then as professor of history and dean at Oberlin College, came to Western Reserve University as professor of history and dean of the Graduate School in 1948. Just before he reached that decision Wittke had both a disappointment and several flattering offers of other positions. There is evidence that he had expected to become the president of Oberlin in 1946 and that he found his position thereafter vis-à-vis the actual president selected and the board of trustees less than satisfactory. He was soon considered for a variety of positions: as president of the University of Arkansas (1946), as professor at the University of Wisconsin (1947), at the University of Illinois as dean of Liberal Arts (1947), and in 1946 as director of the Western Reserve Historical Society, when Benton's death created that opening. In connection with this last offer he dickered for a joint appointment as professor of history at Western Reserve University with an additional salary from that source. He proposed to give courses in immigration and in Canadian history, both fields in which he had done pioneering work, as well as editing a six-volume History of Ohio (1931-1946). In the end he rejected the offer because he thought the Society could not afford to pay his salary—which would have been $3,000.00 less than he was receiving at Oberlin—and still have anything left to support "the kind of publishing that a good director would want to do." A little over a year later, when Wilbur White resigned the Graduate School deanship at Western Reserve University to become the president of the University of Toledo, Wittke was offered the position at the same salary he had at Oberlin.

He came intending to write, an expectation which he certainly fulfilled. To make it possible he needed a reliable secretary. He already had one at Oberlin, and he wrote, in long-hand, a glowing letter about her to Dean Simon urging that she be hired at Western Reserve. She was. Many thought Thya Johnson really ran the Graduate School, because most afternoons Wittke was at home, writing. Over the years the books appeared: The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling (1950); Refugees of Revolution (1952); The Irish in America (1956); The German Language Press in America (1957); and William Nast: Patriarch of German Methodism (1960)-- all building on his earlier basic book, We Who Built America, The Saga of the Immigrant, which he had published in 1939.

Wittke prided himself on his position as a liberal, and at times an agnostic, and he devoted time to many good causes. Within the university he was known as a forthright, no-nonsense administrator, both in the Graduate School and in the History Department when he became its chairman in 1952. This had come about at first on a temporary basis, while Barnes was on sabbatical in England during the spring semester of 1951-1952. It was in that interval that there began what some regarded as the cause celebre within the department. There had already been some differences of opinion among the Europeanists about the scope of the western civilization course and the textbook which they should all use. Barnes withdrew from teaching the course ever again. As a "parting shot" he wrote a letter in which, among other things, he indicated that he expected the course to suffer "from intellectual hardening of the arteries."

When he left town in February 1952 he also left behind a letter setting forth what courses he wished to give the next semester and a request (did he regard it as a fait accompli?) that there be a redefinition of the fields that could be offered to Ph.D. candidates. But a committee was established and they proposed, and the department members present approved of, changes that went beyond what Barnes had recommended. The real fracas came after arrangements were made about which courses Erickson should teach. He was by then a full professor, and his book on Graham was in the press. It seemed logical to the others that he should teach courses in the field of his special competence. He proposed to give a seminar in nineteenth-century England, and since Barnes was to teach two sections of the sophomore survey course in English history and two graduate 400-level courses, this did not directly interfere with Barnes's schedule. When news reached Barnes that this had been agreed to, he at once sent back a sharp protest, insisting that in a regular academic session no member of the staff should be allowed to take over the course of another member without obtaining his consent. Erickson, he said, had never intimated privately or in a department meeting that he wished to teach the doctoral seminar. Barnes shared his grievance widely with British and American scholars whom he met socially and at the Public Record Office in London, and, according to him, they all regarded it as outrageous. So Barnes returned to Cleveland irate with Erickson, and almost at once with Stewart. Some weeks later he took Siney to a concert at Severance Hall, came back to her apartment, and in the conversation went over his discontents. It was then that she revealed that she, too, had voted to permit Erickson to teach the seminar. Barnes, with a look of astonishment on his face, said, "Well, I'll be damned." He picked up his hat and coat and left—never to return.

Under all of these circumstances it was impossible that Barnes should become the chairman again; Wittke was the only member of the department who could have dealt with him. There were continual problems about who would teach what. The height of absurdity was reached in 1956-1957 when Barnes again went on sabbatical and rather than let Erickson teach the English history survey course Barnes insisted that it be canceled. It was, but to the great disgust of Erickson who thought that Stewart and Siney were guilty of cowardice for abstaining when the matter was put to a vote. They were simply tired of the whole controversy. Over the years Barnes got back onto fairly friendly relations with Stewart and Erickson but he never did with Siney. This was the only downright fight in the department that she ever experienced. Considering what went on chronically in some other departments, the History Department was lucky, but it wasn't pleasant.

The Wittke regime was otherwise tranquil. Wittke prided himself on running an economical, indeed a cheap, department, and on the fact that everyone in it did his work without fuss and fret. He was a traditionalist in most ways, not least with respect to the position of women. He wasn't hostile, just not inclined to do much to further their cause.

Jack Erickson proved to be, by force of circumstances as Barnes' protégé and junior colleague, and by his own willingness to take on new tasks, the all-purpose man in he department. At the outset it was understood that he would join with Barnes, Stewart and Siney in teaching the European Survey course. As for his advanced work, Barnes later insisted that he and Erickson had had an agreement that Erickson's teaching in English history would be confined to the pre-eighteenth-century period. That meant that a Victorian specialist could only give graduate courses in the Tudor and Stuart periods. From the time in 1944 when he returned from his wartime job as regional economist for the Office of Price Administration, he developed a wide variety of courses which no one else wanted or was willing to give. He covered such widely scattered fields as Russian and Chinese history and the Reformation—he had had sound training in that area from Henry Lucas at the University of Washington. He also soon took an active part in University affairs, for instance on the university athletic committee. He thoroughly deserved his promotion to associate rank in 1946 and Barnes, who was anxious to help Erickson's career, by 1951 was pressing for his next rise on the academic ladder. Barnes, who also recognized the claims to consideration of John Hall Stewart and Harvey Wish, proposed the promotion of all three men. When he met opposition in the committee on instruction, he made it an "all or none" proposition. The Committee relented, and recommended the promotion of all three to professorial rank, a very wise decision if they wished to retain Erickson's services. As recounted above, even that did not free Erickson from Barnes' domineering; but from 1962, Erickson came fully into his own as a stalwart of the graduate program, as well as the most popular undergraduate teacher in the department.

Harvey Wish was the first post-war appointee in the Adelbert Department, coming in 1945. He had taught as an assistant professor at DePaul University, 1936-1942, and as an associate professor at Smith College in 1944-1945. He came to Western Reserve at associate rank, the first Jewish faculty member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His personality was in sharp contrast to other members of the department. Erickson had a wide range of interests in athletics, politics and the like. Stewart had come to be known for his musical activities. For instance, during the war he had become director of the university band when the Music Department was depleted and disinterested in promoting any such activity. Later he performed as a tuba player with an amateur Dixieland Jazz group of professional men; eventually he became a member of the Brass Band Club of Great Britain and an honorary member of St. George's Brass Band of Dublin. But Wish had no discernible interest in anything other than history and his career. No other department member spent so much effort on the latter—not that they weren't interested in success, it was just that they didn't work at it so obviously. Wish, like others, came from a family with few resources, and had lived through lean years during the Depression, but he was more scarred by the experience. Fortunately, he married a woman who was devoted to him and who was as careful of money as he was. Without their saving practices (for instance, he returned a large number of light-bulbs which he bought the day before on sale at the University Bookstore, because Anne decided that they couldn't have so much money tied up in them), his relatively early death, and Mrs. Wish's generous bequest, the History Department would not have been able to establish the Wish Memorial Lecture Fund which makes this annual series possible.

When Wish was granted tenure in 1948, the letter from Dean Simon added this statement: "I think it only fair to advise you that the Committee on Instruction in History agreed during the winter that it did not see any possible future for you at Western Reserve University." Perhaps this, and what he believed to be his low salary, explains his attempts, which became chronic, to secure a position elsewhere: at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Wayne State University, and Michigan State, where he was offered a position in 1957 at $11,000.00. Wish decided not to leave Cleveland—in a period when one of his correspondents in East Lansing suggested that Wish regarded Michigan State University as "being in the sticks." He taught almost every summer, frequently one session here and the other one elsewhere, in Colorado or California by preference.

Wish's publications came out steadily, many of them designed to be used in courses in social and intellectual history. Once one of these books was published—Oxford, Longmans, or Prentice-Hall—his correspondence (or, more often the replies he received, since there are few of his letters in the Archive's collection), shows how anxious he was that the publisher should advertise it widely, and keep it in print; that some book-club should adopt it; and that it should be favorably reviewed. An unfavorable review could generate correspondence with the editor, the reviewer, and many of his friends about the injustice of it all. Naturally he was pleased with those who wrote favorably.

Wish made his first trip to Europe as a Fulbright Professor in 1954, being based at the University of Munich and at Aix-en-Provence. He gave lectures over a wide area: in Vienna, Freiburg, Copenhagen, Lund, Stockholm, and Uppsala. In many ways he came back a changed man: he had some interesting "small talk." Thereafter his correspondence shows his activity in seeking other appointments abroad. He taught the second semester of 1955-1956 at the University of Hawaii as the Carnegie Visiting Professor. In 1961 he had the John G. Winant Distinguished Professorship in American Institutions under the auspices of the British-American Association of London. He had all of the arrangements made for lecturing later that year in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Spain, but he fell ill and could not carry out the plans.

In a period before African-American studies were in fashion, Wish did much to encourage an interest in the subject here. This is reflected partly in his continued contacts with blacks who had been his students and in his own writing—e.g. Slavery in the South, which he published in 1965. His invitation to give a lecture during Negro History Week at Texas Southern University in 1965 was an indication of his acceptance as a historian in this field. On that occasion there was, it seems, some small incident--"a breach of courtesy by a faculty member"--for which the chairman of the History Department there (Howard H. Bell) apologized. Bell went on to say that student reaction of a really enthusiastic sort was reserved there for a Dick Gregory or a Martin Luther King, or for athletes, band leaders, woman judges, and even historians if they were black historians. "When," Bell said, "you figure up the balance I believe you will accept the fact that your visit to campus did a lot of good. The students have, for the first time in memory, listened to a white scholar while celebrating Negro History Week."

Wish took part in other innovations on this campus. He and Lyon Richardson of the English Department were the founders of the graduate program in American Studies. He, along with Erickson, and later Marvin Becker, gave history courses on television, an enterprise in which Western Reserve was a pioneer.

His relationship with his students were in many cases very close. His correspondence shows the infinite care he took in trying to find jobs for them and to support them in any troubles they encountered. To name but one example, there was Won Sul Lee, who had returned home and had a successful career as director of higher education in the South Korean Ministry of Education. But Lee wasn't entirely happy with his work and was anxious to return to teaching in the United States. It was largely through Wish's efforts that Lee secured a job at Adrian College. Lee's letters to Wish show that in some ways Lee regarded Wish as a second father. Perhaps this characteristic is also evidenced by Wish's chiding of former students if he thought they had strayed from high professional standards. There are two letters at the Archives in which he complained in rather hurt tones that these students had not given proper acknowledgment of their debt to Western Reserve and to him in their published articles.

One recognition of Wish's attainments by the university came in September, 1963, when he was named the Elbert J. Benton Professor of History. This and several other "named" chairs were supported by the Leonard Hanna Fund, and although they are not attached to any particular departments in the University, Carl Wittke had held this chair previously. It became extinct with Wish's premature and unexpected death in 1968, but was revived in 1980 when David D. Van Tassel was appointed to it. Another sign of recognition within the profession came in 1965 when Wish was elected to the presidency of the Ohio Academy of History, an organization that in 1962 had given him its book award for his study of the profession, The American Historian.

When the Cleveland College unit moved to University Circle and was merged with the rest of the department in 1952, C.H. (Red) Cramer came into prominence. If the 1940s were the Barnes years and the 1950s the Wittke era, the mid-1960s were destined to be the Cramer years. Cramer had been hired at Cleveland College in 1949 as associate professor of business and history and associate dean, a position he held until 1954, being acting dean part of that time. He had been one of Wittke's students at Ohio State and his integration into the History Department was easily done. His ties with it became more obvious when he became dean of Adelbert College in 1954, a position he held until 1969. Before Wittke retired the department expanded by one when Marvin Becker was hired in the medieval and Renaissance fields in 1957. With Jacob Meyer's retirement in 1959, Jack P. Greene came in the American colonial field. Wittke himself had gone up the ladder: he was named the Benton Professor in 1959, and academic vice-president in 1961, upon Simon's retirement. On his own retirement in 1963, he received many honors: an honorary degree from Ohio State University (it happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from that institution), a decoration—the Order of Merit—from the West German government, and a Festschrift dedicated to him by a large number of distinguished colleagues and professional friends, which was presented during the meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association held in Cleveland that spring. After his death, the Carl F. Wittke Distinguished Teaching Award was established. Thus far four members of the History Department have received it: Jack Erickson, Carl Ubbelohde (twice), Michael Altschul, and Alan Rocke.

With Wittke's imminent retirement there was, of course, the question of who his successor as chairman should be. Some members of the department had reservations about having another dean wearing two hats, but, for a variety of reasons, there was no obvious other choice than Cramer. His appointment worked out excellently. He worked hard to improve conditions, reducing the teaching lead for instance. The department moved into a single headquarters, the old Case presidential mansion on Bellflower Road—promptly re-named "History House" (since torn down). Wish and Stewart remained in Baker Building, and Cramer himself spent more time in Adelbert Hall as Dean of the College than in History House. The sense of community, however, was enormously enhanced and further strengthened by a sharp increase in graduate funding through government NDEA fellowships ( a byproduct of the post-Sputnik years). Cramer himself was already following the Wittke tradition of being a publishing dean. His Life of Robert G. Ingersoll had come out in 1952, and his Newton D. Baker in 1961. His history of the Cleveland Public Library, Open Shelves and Open Minds, was published in 1972 after he resigned the deanship in 1969, thus setting him on the path of writing institutional histories. Here also he followed in Wittke's footsteps, because in his retirement Wittke had written a history of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cramer's own major work in this regard was, of course, the history of CWRU published in 1976, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the university. This was followed by a series of volumes on the professional schools, a series cut short only by his illness and death in 1982.

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