Paul F. Boller - Memoirs of an obscure professor and other essays

Cover

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Memoirs of an
Obscure Professor
and Other Essays

Paul F. Boller, Jr.

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Books by Paul F. Boller, Jr.

This Is Our Nation, with Jean Tilford (1961)
George Washington and Religion (1963)
Quotemanship (1967)
American Thought in Transition, 18651900 (1967)
American Transcendentalism, 18301860 (1974)
Freedom and Fate in American Thought (1978)
Presidential Anecdotes (1981)
Presidential Campaigns (1984)
A More Perfect Union, with Ronald Story (1984)
Hollywood Anecdotes, with Ronald L. Davis (1987)
Presidential Wives (1988)
They Never Said It, with John George (1989)
Congressional Anecdotes (1991)

Copyright 1992, Paul F. Boller, Jr.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boller, Paul F.
Memoirs of an obscure professor and other essays / by
Paul F. Boller, Jr.
p.cm.
ISBN 0-87565-097-X (cl). ISBN 0-87565-098-8 (pbk.)
1. Boller, Paul F. 2. HistoriansUnited StatesBiography.
3. United StatesHistoriography. I. Title.
E175.5.B65A3 1992
973'.07202dc20 91-30356
CIP
Cover illustration by Charles Shaw
Designed by Whitehead and Whitehead

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I WOULD like to thank former students David Broiles, David Carlson, Paul and Karen Faler, Marilyn Hill, George and Elaine Hopkins, Lee Milazzo, Peggy Nash, Diane Orr, Douglas Sloan, Marshall Terry, and Patricia Wallace for helping me get my facts straight in my reminiscences about Southern Methodist University in the years I taught there. A nod, too, to former SMU colleagues, Gene Benton and Larry Perrine, for helping me with my memories.

I'm enormously grateful as well to the following people for writing me, sometimes at great length, about the life and work of the Japanese Language Officers (JLOs) at Boulder, Colorado, and in the Pacific Ocean area during what Studs Terkel called "the Good War": Harry Allen, Carl Bartz, Wendell Furnas, Carl Nelson, Roger Pineau, Griff Way, and Ed Whan.

TCU Press director Judy Alter and editor Tracy Row were a pleasure to work with and I appreciate their helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript.

TCU professor of history Donald L. Worcester deserves special mention. Not only was he the first to encourage me to write this manuscript for the TCU Press; he also read the first draft and helped me make crucial decisions about what to

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include and what to leave out. Don is an emeritus professor, but he is as busy as he ever was, teaching and writing, though never too busy to help students, friends, and colleagues in their own research and writing. Don honors the academic profession.

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BACK in 1953, when the Chicago Tribune took umbrage at something I had written and contemptuously dismissed me as an obscure professor, I was amused, but my friends and associates at Southern Methodist University, where I was teaching, were gleeful.

How's the Obscure Professor today? they asked when they met me on the campus. Or: Well, Your Obscurity, how are things going? Are you still hiding your light under a bushel? Look, I told them, what's so bad about obscurity? It's a helluva lot better than celebrity! You don't have to truckle to public opinion if you're obscure, or do any grand-standing. Also: you can change your mind about things without provoking hoots and hollers. And, best of all, you don't have to sound off on everything under the sun.

In the years since then I have published books that won favorable attention, and I have even gone on book-promotion tours. But I haven't really changed my mind about the advantages of obscurity, and I still recall the Tribune's choice of words with amusement and even affection. Soon after retiring from teaching at Texas Christian University, thirty years after the Tribune's blast, it occurred to me that it might be fun, even instructive, to describe what it was like being an obscure professor at one of America's less renowned cam

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puses during the McCarthy years. There have been many books and articles about the tussles with extreme rightists that took place at the nation's top ten universities during the McCarthy period, but next to nothing written about the experiences of people working at less celebrated campuses during those years. It was high time, I thought, to present a minority report on the subject, and the first essay here attempts to do so.

While working on the McCarthy essay for this book, I came across the excellent American Heritage series, commencing in 1989, with the title My Brush with History, and I couldn't help recalling that I had had a few minor brushes of my own during World War II. Some of the Heritage pieces were by celebrities, but most of them were the recollections of people like me who were not famous but who had had chance encounters with some of the Big Events of the twentieth century or had happened to meet a few of the Great and Powerful People in this world at some point in their lives. The topic fascinated me. So after completing my memoir of the McCarthy years, I started in on another essay that ended by dealing not only with my own personal little brushes with history, but also with a larger topic that has yet to be studied in detail: the work of specialists in