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T W O · A Gathering at Lake Mendota

The University of Wisconsin was less than fifty years old when Herbert Bolton arrived in 1893. The student body of nearly three thousand was small by today's standards, but it had grown rapidly from only five hundred in 1887. Located on College Hill along the shores of Lake Mendota, the university's environs were nothing if not scenic, but its political geography was as important as its physical location. Madison is the state capital, and the state house is within walking distance. Politicos had only to cast their eyes westward to see the fruits of the state's investment in higher education. Most Wisconsinites judged the university approvingly; some thought otherwise.¹

The University of Wisconsin was poised to become a great institution of higher learning. Funding from the sale of public lands under the federal Morrill Act had enabled the expansion of faculty, student body, and curriculum. By the 1890s Wisconsin was recognized as one of the emerging progressive centers of higher education.² Thousands of working-class urbanites, villagers, and farm boys like the Boltons were among the beneficiaries of this magnificent public donation.

Two young professors in the history department when Bolton arrived in 1893 would influence his development as a historian: Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Homer Haskins. Turner, at age thirty-one, was a rising star. The Wisconsin native had received his undergraduate and early graduate training at the state university, where he was influenced by William F. Allen. Turner had studied for the doctorate under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University before returning to the University of Wisconsin faculty. In July 1893 he read his influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the AHA meeting in Chicago. Frontier conditions and the settlement of the West, he argued, had made the United States what it was. This was a distinctive departure from the prevailing historical idea which held that the beginnings of American institutions and character were to be found in European antecedents. “It seems exceedingly valuable and important,” Haskins wrote of Turner's essay, “but I feel so ‘westernized’ that I cannot appreciate how it would appeal to an eastern man.”³ Turner's essay eventually established him as one of the leading American historians of his day, even among easterners. Needless to say, westerners (including Wisconsinites) were glad to learn that they were on the cutting edge of history rather than mere primitives who lived on the margins of American civilization.⁴

Haskins had also earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, where he became Turner's friend. He wrote his dissertation on the Yazoo land frauds but eventually became America's leading medieval historian, with interests in Norman institutions and the development of medieval science. Something of a child prodigy, he completed his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins at the age of sixteen, then studied in Paris and Berlin before returning to Hopkins for his doctorate. Professor Haskins was only twenty-three, the same age as the undergraduate Bolton. By the time Bolton met him, Haskins was known as a meticulous researcher who had mastered several languages. Haskins impressed Bolton because of his thoroughness and because he worked his students very hard, which appealed to Bolton's dogged work habits. One of Haskins's friends, F. M. Powicke, likened his approach to teaching and writing to that of a builder. First, he amassed sufficient research material with which to build his edifice; then, he deliberately laid its foundation, “each sentence…like a block of hewn stone, laid in its place by a skilful mason.” Haskins's construction “was directed by a clear and powerful mind, but every stone…was left to make its own impression, without the aid of external graces.” Anything “wild and extravagant” from Haskins “was unthinkable,” Powicke recalled. Yet, when listening to Haskins lecture, Powicke found himself “hoping, and I knew I hoped in vain, for a touch of mischief or something just a trifle hazardous.” The resulting intellectual structure, however, spoke “of purpose and achievement; its austere lines reveal unexpected lights and shadows.”⁵

Turner's teaching methods also impressed Bolton. His undergraduate lecturing style must have seemed offhand, perhaps even ill-prepared to the casual undergraduate, but Herbert was anything but a casual student. In a time when most professors delivered carefully prepared lectures from detailed notes, or perhaps written essays that were read word for word, Turner would walk into the hall with a stack of note cards often based on primary source material. Turner spoke to the students from the cards, which he would sometimes fumble while he looked for some particular datum; so the effect was informal, almost casual, except for his voice, which had a melodic, almost hypnotic quality. Bolton's friend, historian Carl Becker, wrote that Turner's “voice was everything: a voice not deep but full, rich, vibrant, and musically cadenced; such a voice as you would never grow weary of, so warm and intimate and human it was.”⁶ Turner's lectures were analytical and full of ideas, rather than strictly narrative. He amply illustrated them with lantern slides and maps, just as Bolton would do when he 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.

Theta Delta Chi was exclusive in ways unappealing today. Like other college fraternities at the time, Theta Delta Chi excluded Jews.²² This was not a matter that Herbert discussed openly, but it was probably tacitly understood that the “good society” with whom Herbert wished to associate did not include Jews. While public and most private institutions admitted qualified Jews, Jewish college students faced social discrimination of the sort that fraternities dished out.²³

Bolton shared the common racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices of his time. As he put it many years later, his outlook in college was “typically ‘American,’ that is to say, provincial, nationalistic. My unquestioned historical beliefs included the following: Democrats were born to be damned; Catholics, Mormons, and Jews were to be looked upon askance.”²⁴ It is impossible to fathom how deeply these bigotries ran in the young Bolton's psyche, but in 1894 he was a conformist who sought the approval of the dominant society.

Bolton, Becker, and Ford accepted the institutionalized prejudice of their fraternity, but later in life each of them would interrogate deeply held intellectual and cultural assumptions. Becker is well known for questioning the purposes and explanatory power of history. He was deeply intellectual, philosophical, and skeptical about the historian's ability to re-create an objective account of the past through an uncolored reading of historical documents as the so-called scientific historians claimed to do. For Becker, written history (as opposed to the past itself) was transitory, to be rewritten by each succeeding generation in ways that would best serve that generation.²⁵ Ford eventually settled on German history as his field. In the 1930s he became an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany with its “hideous intolerance.”²⁶ By then, it would seem, Ford had left his anti-Semitic fraternity days far behind.

If by comparison with his fraternity brothers Bolton did not have quite the intellectual acuity and literary panache of a Becker, or the political courage of a Ford, he should not be condemned as intellectually lightweight or permanently prejudiced against Jews and other groups. Bolton had a good and sensitive mind.²⁷ Even though he was deeply marked by Turner's incisive brilliance and Haskins's rigorous scholarship, Bolton had an indelible strain of romanticism that would influence his historical writing throughout his life. As a mature historian he would cast the history of the Spanish Borderlands in that romantic light. And he would abandon his youthful prejudice against Catholics and Jews.

Hard work, not introspection about social problems, occupied Bolton's time in Madison as the year 1893—94 wore on. Medieval history under Haskins and American history with Turner were claiming more of his attention. He won a top grade from Turner. Law was becoming less attractive to Bolton.²⁸ History, or perhaps Haskins and Turner, had won him over.

By the end of the school year in June 1894, Bolton was again looking for summer work. Gertrude had decided to return to teaching in Minnesota in the fall of 1894 so that she could save money for their impending marriage. Bolton feared that she had exhausted herself to get good marks at the university.²⁹ Herbert spent part of his summer teaching school in Neillsville, Wisconsin, but hated it. “I hope I may be ‘hanged by the neck until dead’ if I ever agree to teach another arithmetic class,” he wrote Fred.³⁰

During the summer a crisis arose at the University of Wisconsin. While Herbert had no direct part in the affair, it demonstrated the vulnerability of faculty and the university to the manipulations of a striving politician. Oliver Wells, the superintendent of public instruction whom the Boltons despised, was ex officio member of the Board of Regents. He published a letter in The Nation accusing Professor Ely of advocating “utopian, impractical and pernicious doctrines,” including the right to unionize, boycott, and strike against employers.³¹ This was a very serious matter that threatened Ely's career and the university. The Board of Regents named a committee to investigate the charges. Some faculty feared that if substantiated, the accusations would lead to a witch hunt for other professors with politically unpopular views. Turner wrote a lengthy report that rebutted Wells's charges against Ely. In the end the regents exonerated Ely, and Wells was discredited. The regents also approved a declaration that the university “should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”³²

There is no mention of this episode in the Boltons’ letters, but they no doubt knew about it. Certainly they knew all of the principals involved. While one might conclude that all was well that ended well, the incident offered other lessons for an aspiring professor of history. The conflict was resolved satisfactorily (from the standpoint of the faculty), but only because of the hard work of Turner and the wisdom of the Board of Regents. Moreover, Ely's defense was that he was innocent of the charges. What if he had advocated unions, strikes, and socialistic ideas in his classes? What might have happened under the hands of a more popular and skillful politician than Wells? The regents’ resounding and inspiring defense of academic freedom was good only for as long as they continued to support it. New regents with new ideas could put aside the resolution of the old board. And, of course, the statement applied only to the University of Wisconsin.

While the Wells-Ely controversy percolated in Wisconsin, one of Ely's former students, Edward W. Bemis of the University of Chicago, made the mistake of criticizing the railroads during the Pullman Strike. William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, quickly informed Bemis that his speech had caused Harper a great deal of annoyance. “It is hardly safe for me to venture into any of the Chicago clubs,” Harper complained. “During the remainder of your connection with the University…exercise very great care in public utterance about questions that are agitating the minds of the people.”³³ At the end of the academic year Bemis was dropped from the faculty without further explanation. If Bolton learned anything from the Ely and Bemis controversies, it was to avoid them.

When Herbert returned to the university in the fall of 1894, his younger brother Roy accompanied him. Roy had just finished high school, and his immediate enrollment in the university seemed to vindicate Bolton family sacrifices for higher education. Fred had worked for five years before attending college, and graduated at age twenty-six. Herbert worked intermittently before earning his baccalaureate at twenty-four. Roy enrolled in the university when he was seventeen and graduated in four years. Eventually he became a physician. For Herbert and for Roy the path to higher education was shorter than it had been for his older brother. Nor were the Bolton women left out of this educational parade of upward mobility. Each of the sisters attended college and some became schoolteachers. That the Boltons continued to attend college in the midst of the economic depression of the 1890s was a testament to their conviction that education would improve their lot.

Herbert's life in his final undergraduate year assumed the familiar routine of study, work, and planning for the future. His determination to study history was now fixed, largely because of the influence of Turner and Haskins, who were “ahead of all the others I have been under,” he told Fred.³⁴ He was taking courses in U.S. constitutional history, social and economic history, and medieval history. By March Herbert was strategizing a campaign for employment after graduation. As usual, no stone was left unturned.³⁵ Fred, who had been subsidizing Herbert for two years, planned to enter graduate school in Madison in the fall while anticipating additional study in the future at one of the great German universities. In the meantime, Herbert arranged for Fred to teach two “easy classes” in Madison to help meet expenses.³⁶

In June 1895 Herbert graduated from the university. Now he had letters behind his name and all the rights and privileges that they conferred. He went off to Neillsville for the summer to teach with Fred. He was slated to replace Fred as principal of Kaukauna High School, so he and Gertrude could set a date: August 20, at the Janeses’ home in Tunnel City. The Bolton wedding was quite an affair. Herbert and Gertie took their vows before one hundred witnesses, including some of his fraternity brothers, who sang college songs. The festivities lasted until evening when “amid showers of congratulations and rice and attended by the Theta Delta Chi yell,” the couple departed on a train. “We compassed our journey in due time,” Herbert wrote, “and very pleasantly.”³⁷

Married life in Kaukauna was good, but the newlyweds knew that it was only a temporary home before returning to Madison for Herbert's graduate studies.³⁸ He was already making plans. To make sure that the Wisconsin faculty did not forget him, he invited Turner to give a public lecture in Kaukauna.³⁹ Not about to let his day job get in the way of his ultimate goal, Herbert did just enough to keep his employers satisfied and worked at night to prepare for graduate work. “Duty on the one hand holds me to my school work, and desire to rise lashes me on to burn the midnight oil for personal advancement.”⁴⁰

After one year of study in absentia Herbert decided to go back to Madison. He hoped for a fellowship but knew that he could work at teaching and odd jobs as he had done while an undergraduate. The year in Kaukauna had been profitable. For the first time in his life Herbert had money in the bank. “We have saved about $100 every month.” Gertrude's household economy had no doubt helped that small nest egg grow. Teaching in a summer institute would add to the treasury.⁴¹ In the meantime Herbert was reading as much U.S. history as he could get his hands on, including works by Reuben Gold Thwaites, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, John Bach McMaster, James Ford Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, John Fiske, and Justin Winsor. In the summer he studied for an exam on slavery from Turner.⁴²

By the time Herbert reached Madison, Fred and his family were embarked on the long journey to Germany.⁴³ Herbert buckled down to study in earnest. His instinct was to specialize and to investigate primary sources rather than to cover comprehensively the whole field of American history for exams, the results of which would soon be forgotten (as long as one passed). Cramming, or “bucking,” for exams “takes time and grubbing,” he wrote to Fred,” but investigation takes brains and luck in striking something good.“ By November Herbert believed that he had already found a good thesis subject, what he described as “the Abolition vote of 1844 [and] its effect on the different parties.” Orin G. Libby, one of Turner's doctoral students, said it would “open up a new field of investigation.”⁴⁴ Libby was well qualified to appraise Bolton's subject. His published master's thesis was a pathbreaking study of voting patterns that foreshadowed the cliometric studies of the 1970s.⁴⁵

Once again Bolton fell under Turner's classroom spell. Turner conceived his seminar to be a collaborative effort in which everyone, including him, worked on topics. They met in the Wisconsin Historical Society and used the collections and library there. Bolton listened carefully and offered useful suggestions. Turner's criticisms were gentle but pointed up the shortcomings of ill-prepared work. Bolton assimilated Turner's collaborative seminar philosophy and his gentle but revealing interrogation technique. Like Turner, Bolton presented himself as a helpful and well-informed coworker, although he eventually became a bit more avuncular with his own students than “the Master” was.⁴⁶

Turner had his eye on Bolton. He asked him to teach extension courses at six dollars per student. Bolton agreed to do it for the money, which was always needed, and “to get a more personal hold on Turner.”⁴⁷ He even hoped he might land a job on the Wisconsin faculty if he did a good job in the classroom, although he knew it was a long shot.

There is no question that Herbert favorably impressed the faculty and students at Wisconsin. His fellow graduate students elected him as their delegate to the Federation of Graduate Clubs, which was to meet in Baltimore at the end of December.⁴⁸ The Wisconsin club paid his expenses, so Herbert jumped at the opportunity to go east. In Washington, D.C., he saw all of the sights that he could fit into forty-eight hours. He judged the capital to be “truly a magnificent city” with “an air of ‘swell-dom’ ” seen only rarely in other cities. Like any good tourist, he took in the Capitol, Library of Congress, Navy Yard, National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Ford's Theater, and the White House. Then he went down to Mount Vernon, saw “Lee's confiscated estate,” Washington's Masonic Lodge, and Christ Church, where both Washington and Lee worshiped. “I sat in both pews,” he added. Mount Vernon captured his imagination: “Truly a beautiful home in any age! And such a view up and down the grand old Potomac!” Then he “viewed The Tomb with such sacred memories for every American. Really such a visit is inspiring!”⁴⁹

After these breast-swelling sights, the Federation of Graduate Clubs meeting in Baltimore was a bit of a letdown. Still, in a room full of strangers, Herbert soon became a center of attention. The delegates elected him secretary pro tem for the meeting and secretary for the coming year.⁵⁰ This was the beginning of Bolton's national reputation among his academic peers.

To complete the PhD in two years Bolton needed a fellowship in his second year. The need became imperative in January 1897, when Gertrude gave birth to their first child, Frances. Turner thought that the prospects for a fellowship were good for Herbert and Fred, who would be back from Germany in the fall.⁵¹ “If one or two fellowships pan out right, then O.K.,” he told Fred; “if not then O___.”⁵² Turner wanted to keep Bolton at Wisconsin but offered to nominate him for fellowships at other universities including Harvard.⁵³ Such a fellowship did not necessarily mean a complete transfer away from Wisconsin. In the 1890s it was not unusual for graduate students to take a fellowship for a year at another university and return to their home institution to complete the degree. This was a way to broaden graduate training, and (from the perspective of Turner and Haskins) advertise the bright young graduate students of the University of Wisconsin to the elite East Coast schools.⁵⁴

Neither the Harvard nor the Wisconsin fellowship came through for the Boltons. The experience left the usually optimistic Herbert feeling a little abused. “Turner told me right up to [the vote] that my chances were strong.” “The policy of the Univ.…was to turn down home men,” he fumed. Turner and Haskins were now plumping Herbert for a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, but he had “no strong hopes.”⁵⁵

Herbert's judgment was a bit harsh. Turner probably told Bolton much the same thing about fellowships that he told Carl Becker. “It would give me pleasure to see you win a fellowship,” Turner explained. Of course, “we have to settle them purely on the basis of competition, but I should be glad, other things being equal, to see one of the men trained entirely by us win the honor. Of course I cannot make any promises, and you, I understand, are not asking for any.”⁵⁶ Herbert probably heard what he wanted to hear without registering Turner's careful qualifiers.

Nevertheless, Turner offered him a place as his assistant and some extension work. Herbert thought that things might turn out all right after all. “I felt pretty blue last night but there's a good deal of India rubber in me and I bound back into shape pretty easily.”⁵⁷ Herbert's disappointment was somewhat assuaged with his election to an alumni fellowship, but it did not pay as much as the one he had lost. “Turner says that if I get something in the East I'd better resign…which I think I'll do.” Three weeks later the university of Pennsylvania faculty elected him to a Harrison Fellowship.⁵⁸ Still, Herbert's failure to obtain major support at Wisconsin rankled. “It is the policy of the UW profs. to get outsiders and to widen their own reputations. I know Turner was very anxious to get me a place but he preferred it to be abroad. I hardly think that a fair policy.”⁵⁹

Herbert had drawn an astute assessment out of the disappointment that he felt over losing the Wisconsin fellowship. He had been a pawn in a larger game of professional and institutional politics. Haskins and Turner were brilliant young comers who assiduously cultivated their reputations with older men at more prestigious institutions. Promising graduate students like Bolton, Becker, and Ford could be moved around on the academic map to further the careers of their mentors. Improvements in the mentor's status sometimes created opportunities for students. Indeed, in April, the month before the fellowship election was held at Wisconsin, the prominent American historian John Bach McMaster had invited Turner to take a position at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he did not want the job, Turner visited Penn and returned to Wisconsin no doubt armed with knowledge about the Harrison Fellowship for which he recommended Bolton.⁶⁰ The move to Pennsylvania would benefit Bolton, but he resented being forced out of his alma mater in order to succeed in his chosen field. The graduate student who wanted to rise had gotten a lesson on just how that was done in the historical profession. He did not think it fair, but he would not forget the lesson.

Bolton left Wisconsin reluctantly, but he must have thrilled to the historical associations of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.⁶¹ Founded in 1740, Penn was one of the older institutions of higher learning in the united States. The university had struggled to become a first-rate institution until the 1880s when private endowments and an aggressive new administration began to improve things.⁶² In 1883 Penn hired John Bach McMaster to teach American history. Only thirty-one at the time, McMaster had an unusual background for a historian. He had graduated from City College of New York, where he had distinguished himself in the sciences. After college McMaster surveyed the Civil War battlefield at Winchester, Virginia, a task that supported General Philip H. Sheridan's Memoirs. McMaster's technical books on engineering qualified him for a faculty position at Princeton in 1877. He taught surveying and led Princeton's fossil-collecting expedition to the Wyoming Bad Lands. In these early days of bone collecting McMaster's experience as a surveyor no doubt outweighed his inexperience in paleontology. The experience gave McMaster a lasting interest in the American West.⁶³

McMaster began writing the History of the American People as a diversion from teaching Princeton boys the art of surveying. He intended his multivolume work to be a story about ordinary people that was entirely unlike the accounts of political affairs that dominated historical writing at that time. When the first volume appeared in 1883, it became an instant best seller. Almost overnight McMaster had become one of the nation's leading historians. Two months after his book appeared, a representative from Penn offered McMaster a new chair in American history.⁶⁴

McMaster's enthusiasm for Penn was matched with a deep hatred of Princeton. He detested teaching the surveying courses, and was certain that he would never be promoted or allowed to teach history at Presbyterian Princeton, because he was not a church member. Thus, when he headed for Pennsylvania, McMaster penned in his diary, “Left Princeton, Thank god forever.”⁶⁵

Bolton found that McMaster was a very different sort of teacher than Turner or Haskins. McMaster was a poor lecturer and inattentive mentor. Although he demanded much from his graduate students, his mentoring style is best described as benign neglect.⁶⁶ but McMaster had connections and used them to benefit his students. He arranged for Bolton to attend a dinner for Herbert M. Friedenwald, superintendent of manuscripts in the Library of Congress and formerly McMaster's doctoral student. “The party was very select, only the club and three history Fellows,” but it was costly at $1.50 per plate.⁶⁷ Bolton bore the expense so that he could make the connection with Friedenwald. To Herbert, fresh from the western provinces, Penn must have seemed the center of a social and scholarly world he had only dreamed of in Wisconsin.

Brother Fred had also moved east, to Worcester, Massachusetts, where he won a fellowship at Clark University. The Clark faculty had already accepted the thesis he had written in Germany for a doctorate in psychology, although he had yet to pass his exams.⁶⁸ Fred was developing a specialty in educational psychology. He soon arranged to publish his thesis as a book and began submitting articles to professional journals. Once again, Fred proved to be Herbert's role model.

By the end of October Herbert had decided on a thesis subject, the “status of negro as a slave in 1860; changes effected in his status by emancipation, reconstruction, and the attempts of the south to make these laws inoperative.” This was his general plan, “but think a doctors thesis may be written on the first chapter.”⁶⁹ His interest in slavery seems to have developed over a period of a year or so. He began studying slavery intensively in 1896 before returning to Madison for graduate work with Turner.⁷⁰ Within weeks he could report that he had already written the first few pages of his thesis after going through “at least 100 vols of state statutes and digests,” demonstrating the prodigious capacity for primary source investigation that would distinguish Bolton's career ever after.⁷¹ By the end of the fall term he had written forty pages for McMaster's seminar and hoped to finish the dissertation in six months.⁷²

Thesis writing did not go as smoothly as Herbert had hoped. In late December the meeting of the Federation of Graduate Clubs in Chicago took a week out of his crowded schedule.⁷³ Family life had its satisfactions, but “you know the difficulties of studying with small babes in small quarters,” he groused to Fred. Gertrude was nearly worn out. She had been reduced “to a mere nurse and kitchen maid,” he said. To make matters worse, Herbert caught a winter cold. On top of all those distractions he had to write “reports—reports—reports” for every graduate seminar, which were “fatal to thesis work.”⁷⁴

In February 1898 the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor added the prospect of war with Spain to Herbert's list of distractions. The catastrophe was widely believed to be an act of Spanish sabotage, and war fever was at a high pitch. One week after the explosion President McKinley tried to cool public passions against Spain with a temperate speech to a huge crowd at the University of Pennsylvania. Herbert may have been at the event; he sent the program to his brother without comment.⁷⁵

Herbert was “no jingo,” he told Fred. Nevertheless, he concluded that the united States was “not to be wholly condemned for interfering in Cuban affairs,” citing “disorder at our doors,” “un-Christian barbarities,” and the “Commercial interests of the united States.” Herbert thought that the United States would ultimately prevail if war came and that Spain should lose its last colonial possessions as a result. Current events compelled him to take a historical view of Spanish America, perhaps for the first time in his career. “At the opening of the century [Spain] was in possession of the whole American continent from the headwaters of the Missouri to Terra [sic] del Fuego.” But now “most of her possessions have been lost by revolution, all by incompetency.”⁷⁶ No one could accuse Herbert of Hispanophilia in 1898.

Bolton's ruminations about the Spanish Empire show a distinct lack of interest in what would become his chief field of study. He emphasized his disinterest in things Spanish when he speculated about “learning a language (Not Spanish)” and preferred picking up Italian so that he could master Renaissance history.⁷⁷ The days when he would defend Spanish civilization still lay far in the future.

Herbert's opinions about the war and Spain were influenced by McMaster, who thought the sinking of the Maine reason enough to go to war. McMaster's newspaper and magazine articles and speeches were widely publicized. Territorial expansion had been a good thing for the United States in the past, he analogized, and it would be a good thing now. McMaster thought that war would stimulate patriotism and might quiet social discontent in the United States, a position that eventually helped to convince historian Charles beard to conclude that the Spanish-American War was launched to quell domestic unrest. McMaster gave visual reinforcement to his bellicose ideas by decorating his office with Frederick Remington's “savage paintings,” as McMaster's biographer styled them.⁷⁸

McMaster's choice of art and his high-blooded rhetoric must have impressed Herbert. His prominence as a public intellectual was impossible to miss. Politicos who found academic support for their views deeply appreciated McMaster. As Henry Cabot Lodge said, McMaster's ideas about expansion and the war were significant because he spoke “with the authority of an historian.”⁷⁹ At Penn Bolton found a new model for professional success: a professor of history who wrote for popular audiences about the historical origins of the important issues of the day.

By the end of the school year Bolton's dissertation was not finished but Penn had renewed his fellowship. Bolton's work pleased McMaster, so one more year of effort would bring the degree if all went well. Fred's success brought renewed encouragement. He passed his examinations and secured the doctorate. Then came the perfect culmination of events when Wisconsin Normal in Milwaukee hired Fred. This justified everything that the Boltons had invested in higher education. If anyone doubted their wisdom, they had only to consider the esteemed professor, Dr. Frederick Bolton, the published scholar who lectured in Milwaukee. “I shall be glad when I have accomplished as much,” Herbert averred, and who could doubt his sincerity?⁸⁰

With another summer behind him and Fred's gleaming success before him, Bolton plunged back into his work at Penn. Hoping to alleviate the distraction of having a toddler in the house, he rented a three-room, third-floor flat with a living room that was arranged as a study for Herbert. “Herbert is so nicely shut off from us that he is quite certain that he will be able to accomplish a good deal,” Gertrude wrote.⁸¹

It was time to finish the degree, and Herbert intended “to make every day count toward the desired end.” Scholarship was not all that Herbert had to think about. He had more privacy in the new home, but in some ways it was not as convenient as their former Philadelphia room, where a neighbor routinely took care of Frances so that Gertrude could get out during the day. Now Herbert babysat when Gertrude had errands or social engagements. Gertrude was not entirely shut in. During the evenings while Frances slept and Herbert studied, she enjoyed the cultural attractions of Philadelphia. She attended lectures and musicals at the Drexel Institute, only three blocks from their apartment.⁸² Nor had she forgotten her scholarly interests. At home she studied English Medieval history, perhaps as Herbert's study mate.

Bolton plugged away “ under the lash ‘must’ ” in this crowded but companionable setting. “McMaster accepts all my ideas without much comment,” Herbert wrote. “I don't know whether that augurs well or ill. He may tear me to pieces at the end.” In December McMaster accepted Bolton's most recent “batch of ‘negroes’ with the comment that it was ‘ very good.’ ”⁸³ This was where matters stood at Christmas 1898.

In January disaster struck the Boltons when Frances developed a fever and then severe convulsions. The frightened Boltons, who were loving but inexperienced parents, doused Frances with cold water and called for a doctor who decided that Frances's intestines were inflamed. After two days and nights of nursing, Frances's condition did not improve, although the doctor visited twice daily and Herbert got a woman in to help Gertrude during the day. Then Frances developed hives and a severe cold.⁸⁴ The cash-strapped Boltons hired a nurse. The doctor prepared them for the worst when he said that Frances was “desperately sick.”⁸⁵ Complications set in. Frances's bowels had stopped and poison was building up. Her abdomen, face, and limbs were bloated “fearfully” and her pulse ran at 150 beats per minute. It was “now a question of which way the tide goes.” “We only hope,” Herbert told his brother. “My faith in the result is weak.”⁸⁶

With everything in the balance and the outlook bleak, on the last day of January the tide carried Frances back to the Boltons. The worst symptoms had abated and Herbert thought that she would survive, although the recovery period proved to be lengthy. It had been an expensive illness, but family members pitched in to defray expenses.⁸⁷

Amidst the uncertainty and chaos of late winter, Herbert returned to his thesis. McMaster thought that it was better than the work he had seen from Harvard and that it should be published.⁸⁸ With the dissertation approved, Bolton still had to pass his examinations. “I do not see how they can pluck me,” he mused, “but they might.”89 It was not likely that the Penn faculty would “pluck” Herbert at this stage of the game. They had arranged for him to lecture on his thesis before the Professors’ History Club, a group of faculty from Penn and other Philadelphia colleges.⁹⁰

If he won the degree, Herbert believed, his best opportunity for college teaching would be in a normal school. Sometimes he wished that he had taken pedagogy and psychology like his brother, because it would have given him “a pull” at the normal schools.⁹¹ If he could not get a normal school job, Herbert was willing, even anxious, to teach high school if the pay was good. He was tired of being poor, tired of annual searches for summer jobs, tired of subjecting his wife and child to the inconvenience and risk of a life without money to spare. And while he was sure that he was a good teacher, uncertainty about his other abilities dogged him. “I have never thought I am a whale at originality,” he explained to Fred, “but I always thought I could teach some.”92 Herbert's insecurity in the final stages of his graduate education was natural enough. Like many doctoral students, he had taken in a mass of data and detail and was uncertain about how to digest it. Nor did he know whether his work was worthwhile in the eyes of others. He thought it would take an additional year to turn it into a book, if that feat was even possible.

Examinations still loomed. He was prepared, but no matter what he had accomplished thus far, a few professors could take it all away from him. Yet the preliminary signs were all there. Bolton had received nothing but praise and recognition at Penn—two prestigious fellowships with an even better one promised, an invited lecture, generous support from a nationally recognized mentor, an office in a national organization. Turner was still thinking about him too. In April Turner informed Herbert that he had put his name in for a position, but he did not tell him where.⁹³ Herbert should have gone into his exams with a high degree of confidence, but like virtually all well-prepared graduate students, he worried nonetheless.

His anxiety was misplaced. Bolton passed written examinations in economics and European and American history in early May, days of “severe travail,” as he called the process.⁹⁴ The oral examination was the only hurdle that remained. Finally, Herbert could see the dawn coming. At Penn the orals were “supplementary ‘farces,’ ” he told Fred. “Unless I am inordinately asinine on Tuesday, I shall pull through.”⁹⁵ A few days later he reported that he had passed the orals “with no great honor and no bad scars or scares.” Now that the ordeal was over, he was glad that he was “no longer a school boy. That gives me more satisfaction than the degree, (which has depreciated much within 24 hours).”⁹⁶

But would it pay? Bolton still did not have a professional position, although McMaster had promised him a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn if a job did not materialize. Bolton was understandably concerned about his professional prospects, but he was in a very strong position to compete for jobs. At Wisconsin and Penn he had studied with some of the country's most important historians, who showed confidence in him at every turn. In the early summer, however, Bolton returned to Wisconsin without a job.

Bolton's fondest hope was that he would land a professorship with his brother at Wisconsin Normal. He expected Fred to help him get it, but there were no guarantees. He sent letters to high schools while teaching a summer institute for teachers in Appleton.⁹⁷ Then a job opened at Albion College, a Methodist school in Michigan. Herbert applied, hoping that his acquaintance with a prominent Methodist minister would help his cause.⁹⁸ Turner wrote for him too. Bolton's reliance on a church friend to vouch for him bordered on hypocrisy. He no longer belonged to the church. The word “church” appears only rarely in Herbert's correspondence with his brother; “prayer,” “god,” and “bible,” were never used. If he prayed for a good job, he never told his brother about it. Any appeals to god during his child's desperate illness likewise went unreported. Nevertheless, Albion called Herbert to Michigan for an interview. Methodist or not, Herbert was “elected OK ,” he wrote Fred. “You fix up the newspaper accts,” he added. “They are going to give me a column here, & [in] Detroit.”⁹⁹ Evidently Fred did more than fix up newspaper announcements, for soon Wisconsin Normal offered Herbert a position teaching economics and civics at $1,000 per year, $100 more than Albion, but $300 less than Herbert had hoped for. So much for Methodism at Albion; back to Wisconsin.¹⁰⁰

And so it came to pass that the Bolton brothers engineered the perfect ending to their years of struggle. Herbert's salary was small but it was secure, and he hoped for raises. Living near his brother in Milwaukee gave him great personal satisfaction. The feeling was mutual. As Fred wrote many years later, “No two young couples ever experienced greater mutual enjoyment than we did that year.”¹⁰¹ Surely this happy ending foreshadowed many years of contentment for the brother professors in their alma mater. Some happy endings are not destined to last.