17 August
The Great Depression of the 1930s dashed Jessup’s dream of elevating Iowa into upper tier of American universities. The Department of History was a chief example during the 1930s and 1940s of the diminished stature of scholarly pursuits at Iowa.
Schlesinger left for Harvard in 1925, and his carefully chosen junior faculty also soon departed: Raymond Sontag to Princeton and then Berkeley, Ralph Turner to Yale, John Wuorinen to Columbia, Walther Brandt to CCNY and then NYU, and Bessie Pierce to the University of Chicago. Other departures included John Parish and R.H. Harvey to UCLA, Ruhl Bartlett to Tufts, Donald McMurry to Lafayette, and John W. Hoffman to the University of Chicago. Fred Shannon, whose doctoral dissertation on the organization of the Union army, written under Schlesinger’s supervision, won the Pulitzer Prize, went to Illinois.
Winfred T. Root, a colonial American historian trained at Princeton and Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1908) was brought in from Wisconsin in 1925 to replace Schlesinger. Root had published in 1912 a book on the relations between Pennsylvania and the British government, but did no further scholarly work beyond that. He contented himself with controlling the department as its only head for 20 years until his death in 1947, justifying his position by issuing pious and florid disquisitions on the value of teaching [see Root, “The Teacher and A Liberal Education” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 33 no. 3 (Autumn 1947): 510-519]. “While allowance has to be made for the devastating impact of the depression on the university, Root has to bear a large part of the responsibility for the deterioration of the department during his tenure,” writes Stow Persons. “Terms of such length offered ample opportunity for arbitrary and capricious management, and as the years passed Root’s colleagues became increasingly alienated from him.” Few regular departmental meetings were held, and then only to discuss graduate student and instructional matters. Departmental policies and faculty recruitment were rarely discussed. “As soon as Root came into his office he went to a nearby coffee shop,” remembers George Mosse, who joined the department in 1944, and it was there that one had to visit him if one wanted to get anything done.”
Under Root, the department came to be dominated by men who had given up scholarly research. Cornelis de Kiewiet, a Dutchman with a Ph.D. from the University of London, had published one book on British colonial policy toward South Africa, but subsequently published nothing substantial. Walter Ross Livingston, a Ph.D. from Wisconsin, had published his dissertation, Responsible Government in Nova Scotia in the Iowa Historical Series in 1930 and a companion volume, Responsible Government in Prince Edward Island the following year. He did no further scholarly work at Iowa, but after serving in World War II as an Army historian, he prevailed on President Virgil Hancher, with Root’s support, to reward his service with promotion to full professor. Harrison John Thornton joined the department in 1929 and eventually published his doctoral dissertation, A History of the Quaker Oats Company (1933), but nothing further. Unflattering portraits of Thornton by Stow Persons and George Mosse reveal his corrosive influence on the department.
In his confidential memoir, Persons writes of Thornton:
“He can only be described as a pious fraud. He was said to have begun life in South Africa as a clergyman, and he certainly retained many of the unctuous mannerisms of the small-town preacher. He modeled his platform style on that of the radio commentator, Gabriel Heater. In spite of his professions of piety he was thoroughly unscrupulous. He had published some biographical sketches of former University notables on the strength of which had had been appointed university historian. For some years the Graduate College had provided him with secretarial assistance, a telephone (something other members of the department did not enjoy), and research funds to assist him in preparing a history of the university. Following his sudden death, about 1953, when the President asked for the transfer of his materials so that work could be continued by someone else, it was found that he had done nothing.
George Mosse has a similar recollection of Thornton:
“Most of my colleagues [in History] had been at Iowa for a long time, and their earlier scholarly promise had faded. They disguised this failure through their pompousness or the poses they took . . . Winfred Root [department head] had once been a very promising scholar and was a decent man, but easily swayed . . . Although Root himself was a benevolent dictator there were others who were vest-pocket tyrants . . . Harrison John Thornton had written one book (a company history) in the past and was engaged in writing the university’s history, but in reality his scholarly activity lay behind him. Instead, he was an old-fashioned orator of the kind once popular in the Middle West, not unlike the itinerant preachers who had toured the country providing motivational and uplifting speeches . . . However, his oratory carried over into private life, where it transformed into a certain pomposity. He took on a weighty demeanor and used many big words where one simple word would have sufficed.”
While mediocre professors like de Kiewet, Livingston, and Thornton found secure tenure in the department, promising scholars such as David Pletcher (who went on to win the Beveridge Award in 1957 for Rails, Mines, and Progress: Seven American Promoters in Mexico, 1867-1911), were denied permanent employment [see “Minutes of History Department Meeting, March 4, 1946”]. Morale sagged and faculty began to depart. “This time, however, not with pleasant memories, as with Schlesinger’s staff, but with bitterness,” writes Persons. “While other departments grew with the growth of the university the history department stagnated, both in the size of the staff and in student enrollments. The faculty numbered ten in 1924-25, and the same number in 1946-47.”