Narrator:  Curti, Merle E. and Carstensen, Vernon
Interviewer:  Barry Teicher 
Date:  1986
Location:  Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History:  #333
Subject: Background to writing The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848-1925; Starting University Archives; Cooperation with departments; Problems with sources; Highlights of UW history; Relationship with Legislature; Important presidents and faculty; Charles Van Hise presidency; Curriculum and research; Women and UW; Origins of Wisconsin Idea, tradition of faculty governance and academic freedom; Richard Ely trial and sifting and winnowing statement; Libel suit against book.
Transcriptionist:  Premium Business Services (11/14/08)
Auditor:  Tyler C. Kennedy

00:00:00.0

[Start of tape 1]

MC:  I’d been out at their house, and I think I was in China at the moment.
BT:  You’re set in there.
VC:  He isn’t on the air yet.
BT:  We’re set.
VC:  Oh, he’s on the air.
MC:  The early members of the faculty, there weren’t many of them, they had to cover a lot of subjects, were generally speaking, the products of small liberal arts colleges, particularly Williams College, where there were good academic standards, but where the emphasis was on the classics and mathematics.  So Greek and Latin figured very heavily in who is usually positive.  
BT:  Yes, and --
MC:  Very good, very good, I mean, Jim, at least as I always remembered, was very crisp and clear on his recollections.
BT:  And what, and Glaser is interesting because he was from Manitowoc, and he wasn’t what you would think of as the typical experimental college student.  But he said it absolutely changed his life in lots of ways, very positive ways.
MC:  He doesn’t know what he would have been if he’d gong to a regular college, so --
BT:  Well, that was an interesting --
MC:  It was a little like the Reed College kids.  By having been in it, they assumed they were geniuses.  And many of them carried on that way.  They still, I mean, and I think got more productive because of it.
BT:  Sort of an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
MC:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BT:  Oh, the one other rule for this interview that I should lay down right away is I’m going to be an invisible narrator.  In other words, they’re not going to hear me on the final version.  I’ll be edited out.  So I’m going to ask that when you answer questions, you answer, try to remember to provide a little context rather than just starting out by saying yes.  Say the Civil War had such and such a positive impact or something, just so that, and I’ll remind you if you don’t.  I’ll stop you and make you start again.
VC:  Yeah, well, as long as you’re going to edit it, you can always, we can always throw in 30 or 40 other words that you can daub in where you need them.
BT:  Get that, Ralph?  And also, if you want to stop at any point and take a break, just let me know, and remember, this is going to be edited, so if you [words unclear] or stumble, that’s fine.  We’ll --
VC:  If we strangle or if the, if smashed a sentence beyond recall, we know you’ll cut it out unless you want to practice real malice.  Say this is the way they -- these old guys talk.
MC:  On the few occasions that I’ve listened to something I was saying, I was so horrified by what I said and by the way I said it that I decided never again to put myself in a position to --
VC:  Where they type your tape, that’s where you’re in a real problem.
MC:  Yeah, Paul Hass, who edits the magazine, sent me the tape of what I must have said at the occasion of this reception that the society gave for me.  And his proposal was that I fix it up a little bit and it would be published in the Magazine of History, and I said it would be over my dead body that -- it would be terrible, however --
BT:  Well, I hate to put you in this position again once more Professor Curti, but that’s why you’re here.
VC:  They’re not going, they’re not going to type it up.
MC:  Oh, heavens, I said it would be over my dead body.
VC:  Yeah, I remember having once having, I had the manuscript.  I read the manuscript.  The person who was transcribing, they, the program, didn’t know I had a manuscript and sent me the transcription typed up.  And it was perfectly marvelous how my, uh, enunciation or something went wrong, or the girl who was typing didn’t pick up the periods and the new paragraphs, and I decided it’s best to have a manuscript if you’re going to be published later.
BT:  Well, I’m going, so I’m going to, if I laugh, I’ll laugh silently.  If I --
VC:  Well, if you laugh, you can laugh.  We can take that out too.
BT:  Can you get the laughing filter out up there, guys?  Also, please, if I address a question to either one of you, or one of you starts talking, the other one is free to cut in, to just have a dialogue that we would, we would prefer something like that if it’s appropriate.  So let me check with the people upstairs.
MAN:  [words unclear]
VC:  Well, he thought he had the mike closed, and--
BT:  No, Mike’s right.  I’m talking about you, what you just said.
VC:  Oh, oh.  Oh, I don’t care whether it’s recorded or not because you’re going to edit out all the --
BT:  That’s right, this will be edited.
0:04:55.0
MAN:  Okay.  We’re ready.
BT:  Okay.  Are we rolling?  Um, I think we’ll just begin with, um, the writing of the book itself, how that came about.  And I think the best place to start is with Professor Curti.  And if you could provide some background on how Volumes I and II came to be, and perhaps then draw in on Professor Carstensen and his involvement.
MC:  Yeah, having myself written a book on the social ideas of American educators, I had got interested in the history of higher education, and I felt that most of the histories of colleges and universities had been written without any context.  They had been institutional histories.  And I decided sometime, I would like to try my hand at writing the history of a university and put it in terms of context.  So when I got to Wisconsin in 1942, I began to hear about the centennial, which was coming up in 1948.  And it occurred to me that, uh, I might suggest to them the writing of a centennial history of the university.  And this met with good response.
	Professor Knaplund, the chairman of the History Department was quite keen about it.  Dean Ingraham of L & S was very sympathetic.  And a committee had been appointed, an overall committee for the planning of the centennial.  And that committee was responsive to the idea.  So some money was found, and I was asked to undertake this.  I was doing some teaching and a lot of other things, so I was only giving part time to it.  I did have a few research assistants, and as I got into it, I saw that if this was ever to be finished by 1948, that it would have to be either a very superficial and a very thin book, and, therefore, that there ought to be, uh, there ought to be a coauthor.
	Meantime, I had read as many dissertations of histories of universities that I could get by interlibrary loan.  The best one by far was by somebody I’d never heard of before, one Vernon Carstensen, on the history of the University of Iowa, the State University of Iowa, which was simply superb and did the kind of thing that I had hoped to do, putting the history of the University of Iowa very much in terms of, uh, the whole political, economic, and social context of Iowa history.  And my colleague, Merril Jensen, it turned out, knew Vernon Carstensen very well and located him as then Washington working on war history.  
	So that was, uh, how Vernon Carstensen came and did the magnificent job, not only with the history, but in establishing the archives to the University History, which was an additional contribution that he made to us.  So that’s the way, I think, the thing got started.  
BT:  Tell us about your first contact, when you were -- just wait one second after a question too, so there’s some --
VC:  Yeah, well, I’d been working, had gone from Iowa to Washington State, taught there awhile.  There’s where I met Merril Jensen, then signed up as a civilian historian for the War Department, had gone to Washington and was there, expecting to return to Ellensburg in 1945, when came a letter from Paul Knaplund out of the blue saying would I like to come to Madison and join Merle Curti in doing the history of the University of Wisconsin?  Well, it delighted me, and I had, I’ve often thought, gosh, it was risky.  I didn’t know Merle, except I knew his work and admired it a great deal.  But to join something like that would have been, I would have considered risky.
	But I said a kind of yes and then met Merle.  I remember the Washington Hotel, and we talked a little about it.  And maybe I’d agreed by that time, maybe not.  But I got to Madison and just at the time the war ended in August of 1945.  And from there until 1948, I don’t think either of us had any time because there was an enormous amount of work to be done even though the Research Committee gave us two, and then four, and finally six research assistants.  
0:09:54.2
	We tried to cover all of the work in the Legislature from 1836 to 1925.  We tried to go through the newspapers.  We tried to go through all of the manuscript collections.  We tried to find the records of the regents.  And they were pretty careless in the 19th Century in taking care of the records.  They kept their barebones minutes, but not all the supporting paper.  And parenthetically, we had Volume I in type, that is in print in galleys, not in pages, when they were clearing out some of the, uh, of the basement of the old administration building across from the Historical Society.  Well, that still stood.
	And somebody called and said, there’s some old paper here.  Would any of you be interested in it?  They had a couple of kids cleaning out the cancelled bills and so on.  Here was a box of the papers that came to the regents from 1848 to ’57 I think, and I had to take a month.  You were off in New England at that time I think.  I had to take a month and go through all of those papers, and it did change.  We had to add some things, but the thing I was so pleased with that we had been able to do pretty well out of other sources the story that unfolded if we got, the papers that came to the board, reports of committees, applications, denunciations from citizens because they were admitting women, things of that sort.
MC:  I think we should make it very clear initially that at the time we began this history and during the writing of it, there was absolutely nothing that could be called a University Archive.  Material was scattered here, there and everywhere.  There, some of it was in the attic of Agricultural Hall, some of it in the basement of Bascom Hall, the presidential papers.  Some of them had been badly affected by the dampness --
VC:  And the rats.
MC:  -- and the rats.  Uh, so what, we were greatly handicapped by not having a central place where they basic records of the University’s history had been kept.  Uh, we worked under the most, the most unfavorable conditions, and we were also working against time because as things moved on, the University, the committee made it clear that they felt this appearance of the history must be one of the major events of the centennial.  So I think no one can quite understand what the problems of doing this really were in view of the inaccessibility of so much of the material and, uh, of the difficulties of finding it and in some cases, which Vernon will elaborate, of getting actual permission to use it.
VC:  Well, I think you know that a little better than I do, but you’ve heard of the Ely Trial.  Ely was charged with, I’ve forgotten the precise thing.  But he did things that professor, he supported strikes, didn’t he?
MC:  A boycott, he supported strikes.
VC:  He was denounced and the regents decided to have a trial, they kept a record, and Ely was exonerated in the great statement.  The sifting and winnowing statement on the plaque comes from the exoneration by the regents.  But when we came up to that point in reading, using the regents’ records, we had access, of course, to all records.  The secretary of the regents told our research assistant that that file on Ely was marked private and confidential, and hence, he was not to, we were not to have access to it.  It required our trip to Knaplund and Knaplund’s telephone call to the president of the board, Mr. Sensenbrenner, and Sensenbrenner’s telephone to the secretary of the regents before we got access to that collection of papers.  And we thought, of course, we were onto something if it was so secret that not even the secretary of the board had permission to look at it.  Actually, it was one of those cases that are so frequent, uh, among the spooks or other people, the suspicious people.  They don’t know what’s in the record.  And not knowing, they’re afraid that something dangerous might be revealed.
0:14:59.7
MC:  They suspect the worst.
VC:  Yeah.  Standard Oil, for many years, wouldn’t let people into their records because they thought, they had material in there that was worse than the things that had been said about them outside.  And when they did finally let people in, they found, heavens, they didn’t keep the bad things that were said about them.  They kept the good things.  The same, the same is true of some church records, same is true of the Hudson’s Bay records for a long time.  They wouldn’t let anybody look at them for fear that the charges against Hudson’s Bay Company would be proven true in their records.  The idiots had no notion that they, if they were to be exonerated, it would be there.
	Well, the Ely papers were, included, I think, nothing that we hadn’t already seen.  But it was a little packet that somebody had put together and named it confidential.  One other thing on the records, after we got the archives started, and there’s the irony of it.  We got the archives started after the two volumes had been produced.  And, of course, there were more records coming.  So it was a good thing to have them, have the records started.  But in a ventilation tunnel, not a tunnel, but the ventilation pipe, big, fairly big with a trap door, a little tin door in it, we found in about 1952 or ’53, a whole batch of records that we would like to have seen because they involved the beginning of the attempt of the faculty to supervise athletics.  
	In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the cheating that was done was mostly using professional runners and baseball players instead of football players to go to contests.  And the poor faculty had no more luck supervising athletes then than they do now.  But we had great [word unclear] records were shoved into the ventilation system.  We got those down into the archives.  And I might just mention a plug for the archives.  If you’ve seen the second printing, you maybe have the second printing here.  In the little bibliographic note, you’ll find a listing of all of the books that came out of the archives after it got started.  A chunk of documents as rich and as varied as the records of the University of Wisconsin is a challenge to all kinds of historians.  And I think Jess Bell put together a list that included maybe a dozen or 15 books that were, that came directly or indirectly out of the archival collection.  Go ahead.
BT:  Now, you must have gotten -- tell me a little bit about the people, professors and departmental chairs, etc., that worked with you during that writing of the history.  I assume that you had help from somewhere.
MC:  Yes, we did --
BT:  Let’s reflect the question.
MC:  -- and we found, in general, the chairman of departments were a little curious as to what we wanted.  And in some cases, departmental archives had been pretty well kept out of their files, were in fairly good order.  And in several cases, the, uh, chairmen of departments consulting with our colleagues made memos or brief sketches of what seemed to them to be the principle developments in a given department.  In some cases, their memos were real essays.  For instance, Doctor Ackerknecht, who was the professor of the history of medicine in the medical school, did a very elaborate study of the history of the medical school.  And in other case --
VC:  Which we used almost --
MC:  -- which we used virtually as it was.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  And in other cases, these little essays were, in all cases, they were helpful and in some cases, very helpful.  Uh, I think the writing of the history had some effect on all of the departments in making an effort thenceforth to keep their files even in better shape because thanks to Carstensen’s efforts, the University Archives did get established.  So this was his, one of his great contributions.
0:19:55.1
	And with that, I think the departments began sending their older files to the archives and were a little bit more interested in keeping good files there thereafter.  So we were, of course, very much indebted to members of the faculty, both chairmen and in some cases older members for contributions, both orally and in some cases written memos or little essays.  All of them were, as I can remember, Vernon can contradict me if I’m wrong, all of them wanted to be helpful.  And, uh, and I think the, in the beginning, some of them seemed to wonder just what we were about, and why --
VC:  Yes, some were a little puzzled.
MC:  They were a little puzzled.
VC:  And some had a, uh, a very large ignorance of the history of their department.  And this was true of some of the schools.  Um, the engineering had almost no records.  As I remember, law had fairly bad records --
MC:  Which was interesting because you would have expected, uh, law to have good records.
VC:  Extension had pretty good records, although, let’s see, I’ve forgotten what the point was there.  There are some records got destroyed while we were using them.  One mag -- one set, I still mourn its loss.  From the late 1870s on until the 1930s, the university faculty was charged with the responsibility for going out to examine high schools to accredit them.  And the situation, uh, seemed to be something like this.  A school wanting to be accredited for a four-year program for a university so the students could be admitted, graduates could be admitted to the university, would write to the -- the, uh, the secretary of faculty and ask to be inspected.  
	And a member of the faculty would go out, visit classes, maybe make a public lecture, and people would pay $.25 or something to raise the money to cover the expenses.  And on coming back, the professor, and it usually was just one, that might be two, but usually it was only one, would write a report on the teaching, the qualifications of the teachers, and the teaching.  And on the basis of that, the faculty would vote to admit without examination to the freshman class.  There was in Bascom Hall probably a collection of I wouldn’t guess, but I suppose 500, 600, 700 of these reports, running from the ‘70s up to about the 1920s, giving little vignettes of the public schools, the high schools of Wisconsin.  
	And I had seen, had had an opportunity to examine a few of them and was coming back, and an over-eager secretary looked in it and decided this is of no consequence and threw the whole batch out.  I could have wept when I found out -- you could reestablish most of that stuff I suppose in other ways, but it would be a monumental task.  And here it was all together, a picture of how our schools operated or different schools over the state.  Wouldn’t that have been a dandy to have now?
MC:  And it would have, of course, also given us, uh, and historians of education generally a very good idea of what conceptions of standards were.
VC:  Yeah, and those who say our standards are so low now might have seen some schools that had really low standards, who where you had teachers who couldn’t both read and write, if they could read or write, that’s as much as you could expect of them.
BT:  How did the two of you go about dividing your work up?
0:24:22.9
VC:  Oh, that, let’s see, now we had, the way we were organized, we had weekly meetings of our, of the students and Merle and I, and we talked over what we had done.  And I think we were in it six months, weren’t we or so, before we agreed, and this -- I don’t think any of us could claim a monopoly on having developed the structure.  But out of those first months of research, we formulated, I think, a kind of plan of what the major themes probably would be and discussed those with our research assistants.  We talked about them, we tried probably a number of outlines, didn’t we?
MC:  I think so.
VC:  And finally hit on a kind of a general one with the major themes that we were going to develop, and that’s about the way it happened, and then we talked further.  And in case you’re interested in the actual mechanics, we took, we worked it pretty much as you see it in the table of contents now.  Merle would take one chapter, I’d take another.  We were all the beneficiaries of all the research work and discussion and the notes that had been collected.  And we’d write it, and the, uh, graduate students who were working at the time would read the essays, add or subtract as the case might be.  And then we’d run it into, through the first typing.  That’s about the way we worked.  
	Of course, I also discovered that to work and kind of double team with Merle Curti, I was awfully glad he was teaching nearly a full course and writing another book and so on because by my working full time, six days a week, I could keep up with Merle while working two --
[Crosstalk]
MC:  He did, of course, infinitely more than I did.
VC:  I don’t think so.  We do, we wrote about equal amounts, but --
MC:  No, no, uh --
VC:  -- the trouble with Merle is he’d write this darn stuff all, bingo, he’d remember everything, and it would all fall into place.  I’d sweat and go through it and so on, but I almost kept up.  But that, thank goodness, you were busy --
MC:  No, no, that’s not my version of it at all.  Vernon did the major part of this [words unclear].
VC:  Well, I did bookkeeping.
MC:  It is true that I was teaching a fairly full program.
VC:  And running a batch of graduate students.
MC:  And I had many too many graduate students.  But in any case, I think we [word unclear] quite right, uh, the outline, the structure emerged pretty much the way Vernon says.  Uh, we had agreed in the beginning that we didn’t want a merely institutional history.  We wanted to thresh it out and do as much as we could to show, uh, what the state, the people who were running the state, what they expected from the university and how the early chancellors and members of the faculty responded.  And I think we, we were also very much interested in knowing as much as we could about the kind of students who came here and what was actually taught in the classes.  
	This is often very hard to get at because we found relatively few students’ notes for, for the history, for the histories of medieval universities.  Historians have found in many cases notes which these medieval students took on the lectures.  We found very few things, but we did find, uh, one or two splendid series of notes from lectures that Frederick Jackson Turner had given.  But in general, uh, we, this was one of the lacunae.  We didn’t have a great deal from -- often students, uh, later at reunions would reminisce about President Bascom and his famous courses.  
	He covered many subjects, philosophy, psychology, theology, social ethics, and apparently was a remarkable teacher.  Sometimes we had some reminiscences about what people remembered as having got from President Bascom.  And, uh, in general, there was inadequate records for the faculty themselves, as there was, as to what they conceived their, their courses to be and actually the changing contents as years went by.  So we would have liked to have had more material of that kind than we were able to find.  
0:29:37.9
	Relatively few student letters, uh -- I came across just a few years ago a book which would have been really very useful, had it been published at the time we were doing this.  It was published in about 1971.  A student here has written his autobiography, and he went into great detail in regard to student life and particularly the professors that he worked with and, uh, the student clubs and organizations.  This was Jeffrey, for the moment I’ve forgotten his name, Horace Gregory, who --
VC:  Oh, yeah.
MC:  -- who went on to become a very distinguished classicist, writing distinguished translations of the Latin classics and becoming a great teacher at Sarah Lawrence and a poet, perhaps a minor poet, but a very good poet, whose poems appeared regularly in The Nation, in the New Republic, and have been collected in several volumes.  Finally, the English Department, shortly before his death, got around to recommending him for an honorary degree.  And I was immensely pleased both because, uh, he seems to me to have been one of the rather outstanding students from the early 1920s.  We stopped technically at 1925.  But he was here from about 1919 to 1924, then went to Greenwich Village and had some flirtations with leftward movements.  But we found there were very few things of this kind that were available.
VC:  We did have, the Solon Justus, Justin, Jun -- Justin Buck --
MC:  Buck.
VC: -- Solon Buck’s letters.  He was first archivist of the United States.  He let us use his, uh, all his correspondence.  He was an archivist from the time he came here, I guess, and he’d instructed his parents.  He rode down on his bicycle, and he wrote to his parents every week and instructed then to keep his postcards and his letters in order.  And -- Justin, Jun -- Justin Buck --
MC:  Buck.
VC: -- Solon Buck’s letters.  He was first archivist of the United States.  He let us use his, uh, all his correspondence.  He was an archivist from the time he came here, I guess, and he’d instructed his parents.  He rode down on his bicycle, and he wrote to his parents every week and instructed then to keep his postcards and his letters in order.  And I remember that, uh, we went, I guess I went through most of that and got a note or two.  Mostly, he reported on what we had for Sunday dinner, and where I kept my wheel, and a few things of that sort.  But I do remember, he was here in the early 1890s, I believe. 
	 And at that time, this was before the appearance of the first dean of women.  He lived in a rooming house, and he described the other people in the rooming house.  It was a heterosexual rooming house.  We didn’t have it, we didn’t have the dean of women to see to it that the girls were properly protected.  Everybody in the house, not all of the people renting rooms, I think, were students.  It was adjacent to the campus.  It had a few girls who were students, a few boys, and a few other people, and I remember having paused at that one a little, my goodness.  I thought deans of women and segregation were born with the University.
	But it weren’t so at all.  It isn’t until we get the dean of women to supervise, uh, the behavior of the girls that we get segregated rooming houses.  Of course, Chadbourne --
MC:  Chadbourne, now was --
VC:  -- which you know, do you still call it Chadbourne?
MC:  Yeah.
VC:  Or is it --
MC:  No, still Chadbourne.
VC:  -- Holidays Chadbourne or something?  That was a, that was a, the first one was a great dormitory.  First girls’ dormitory west of the Mississippi, except we aren’t west of the Mississippi, are we?
BT:  Think so.
VC:  In the west, and they --
MC:  Good Wisconsin limestone, and quite a --
VC:  Yeah, and the Engineering Department used to, you won’t use this, I’m sure, but they used to boast about the fact that it was the only four-story privy in Wisconsin.  Uh, and they had, and I bet they still have in the Engineering Department, the blueprint, which shows the privy.  And they had some people who had to come and clean it.  Once a year --
0:34:56.5 
MC:  And in their ribald moments, the students made the most of this.
BT:  I can believe it.  Let’s talk for a second about students.  Now you say you had a few, um, reminiscences, one after, who came a little too late for the -- and the other one you mentioned, where did you go about getting most of your information on student life?
VC:  Well, they had a student newspaper.  They had their yearbook.
BT:  Could you just start that with we got most of --
VC:  Yeah, we got most of the information from, uh, the, such things as the student newspaper.  They had a literary mag from time to time, and that would have those long, thoughtful, brooding articles about what is life, and where does it lead?  And for a while, they had senior examinations, some of which were kept, are kept in the archives.  They were carefully drawn out and were apparently available for inspection.  But it was their daily newspaper, their literary paper, the few of the things we saw, oh, we saw things in the, we went through all of the Madison newspapers.  
	And any time they got into trouble or achieved great things when La Follette, for example, won the interstate oratorical contest.  And there was a great parade around the square to celebrate it.  These things got into the newspaper.  Or when the students rioted, there was a time they broke up a, one of the theaters downtown and were seen drinking beer and things like that before the riot started, that would get into the newspapers.  Now that’s on the far fringes of misbehavior.  We also had, um, in the 19th Century, beginning in the ‘50s, men’s literary societies and debate clubs with manuscript records kept, their debate topics, of their concerns and interests.  We went through that material.  
	Parenthetically, we’re now in Vilas Hall, aren’t we, named after William Freeman Vilas, whose father had come from Vermont with a little money.  He bought lots, including the lot under which the Humanities Building is now located.  Um, he was a minor politician.  His, what was his 16-year-old son as a student in the University in the ‘50s, late ‘50s, sorry, in the late ‘50s, got, was anxious to organize a literary society.  And he and a couple of his friends, maybe they got hold of a lawyer or something, I don’t know.  But they drew up a charter for their literary society.  These kids went down to the Legislature and asked the Legislature to pass a bill chartering their literary society.  And they got it through.  I don’t know whether 16-year-olds would do that anymore.  But then Vilas was --
MC:  They might.  Some of them are quite sophisticated.
VC:  Uh, Vilas was quite a case.  Well, anyhow, you have those records, and they run through the whole, the rest of the century.  And they tell us quite a bit about what was important.  The literary societies developed here, something called the joint debate, about which I think we say something in the history.  And it was interesting that the people, as the persons, the men mostly.  Women seldom made it.  They went through a comp -- went through a competition within the societies to pick, I believe, the four outstanding debaters, usually seniors, and they had the joint debates in the spring of the senior year on a subject that had been identified a year before.  
	And it wasn’t unusual for these people to put in as much as a whole summer of research on the topic to be debated.  I remember one account of a man who subsequently became a very important official in the Seattle, a Seattle, a Chicago traction company, who had been invited, he was on the, on the, uh, side against public ownership of street, railways, and power companies.  He was invited down to Chicago, uh, to be in part of their organization for a summer.
0:39:51.5
	Uh, and his side won.  They came out against the public ownership of traction companies, and after he graduated, he was invited back to join the company.  And within 20 years, he was one of the high officers in the company.  That suggested something when I ran into that, and subsequently, I remember encountering a record of the, looking at the subsequent careers of the young people who had made it in joint debate.  They were the, uh, governors, the senators, the judges, the people who, uh, were, went quickly to fairly distinguished careers.  
	Now the Speech Department at one time argued that it was joint debate that made them.  I think we took a different view, didn’t we, Merle?  We decided joint debate was the way you got, you attained distinction.  And these young people were the people who wanted recognition.  And they got it in joint debate here as they got it later in politics or law or whatever they went into.
MC:  Yeah, and some of them made, uh, capital at commencement by giving, uh, commencement parts.  The newspapers were, I think, the best sources we had for commencement.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  And commencement was a fiesta.  It was a state day, almost a state holiday.  The newspapers in Milwaukee reported commencement in great detail and particularly these debaters, these literary society people, as against the athletes really flourished.  They had their day on commencement.  But in regard to the student papers, the Aegis I think, published, somewhat more substantively serious articles, and it was in that that the young Fredrick Jackson Turner, an instructor in rhetoric published, uh, some very notable essays, one particularly called “The Significance of History.”  
	This was in a student paper and in many ways, it is as important an article as is better-known Significance of the Frontier in History, because in this article, in the student paper, the Significance of History, Turner outlined what he thought historians should do and I think one could argue that virtually everything that historians have done since that time was anticipated, even quantification, certainly urban history and immigrant history, it was a remarkable program for historical research appearing in one of these student papers.
BT:  What did you learn in general about students over time at UW, starting with the very first students up until the period ended.
MC:  Well, of course, in the beginning, there were very few students qualified for even such entrance, entrance requirements that the University put.  There were very few high schools and academies in Wisconsin, so the University started really with a preparatory school.  And they first instruction was really not much more than preparatory school instruction.  And it continued that for a long time.  Early classes were very small, and I think the students, uh, were to a considerable extent Madison students, although there were some from other places.  
	But I think, I think we, one would find in the history something in regard to the changing character of the student body, certainly the increasing size.  It never became very large in, in the 19th Century.  It was still something we might think of as a small liberal arts college with a law school and an agricultural school, attached to a small liberal arts college until the 20th Century, until the Van Hise period.  And I think, uh, there’s so much to be thought of it in terms of modern university as it was something on the, on the road hoping to become a modern university.
0:44:50.0
VC:  But I think you, wouldn’t you say, Merle, the students gave the impression of being more sedate, more mature, when they came to the University, but also in some respects, wonderfully naïve.  We have a record of one student in the ‘50s.  The record isn’t very clear, but it’s there, of when the student dormitory was North Hall, I think.  He needed wood for his stove, so he went out on the campus and cut down a tree.  I don’t think a student now would, he might cut down a tree, but he wouldn’t cut down a tree for his stove.  The, uh, students, they probably still do this, some of them.  
	Remember we had that one chap whose name won’t come back to me, who later became a bishop, who wrote about in his reminiscences, he went home every week or every other week and brought back 10 or 20 pounds of beans and dried beef and things of that sort, and he did his own cooking.  John Muir talks about boiling oats or oatmeal in his room in South Hall.  Now, you have that one end of the students.  You have them working and much more, they’re much more unsophisticated, of course.  Now you’ll get freshmen students who have probably, they might have been in Rome or in Africa or might even have taken the trip to the Orient, that kind of thing that isn’t, wasn’t true --
MC:  These were largely farm boys --
VC:  Yeah, and girls.
MC:  -- and girls, after the girls came.
VC:  We accepted the girls reluctantly.
MC:  Very reluctantly, but I think many of them were earnest, hoping, looking at the University as a way of getting ahead.  The fathers of the University like to emphasize the civic functions of the University, that it was to make good citizens and strengthen the Republic.  They also, of course, recognize the utilitarian value, the need of developing trained farmers and lawyers.  Uh, there was no medical school, but there was hope that sometime there would be a medical school.  But I think they, at least in their rhetoric, they expressed fervent hopes that the University would contribute to the --
[End of Tape 1]
[Start of Tape 2]
0:00:00.0
VC:  -- their area between, which is now between the University Library and the Historical Society was the drill ground, and, um, I remember one incident there of the boys who were opposed to the, uh, the lieutenant or whoever it was, who was very unpopular man.
MC:  Lomo or Logan.
VC:  Huh?
MC:  Was it Lomo?
VC:  Yeah, they got from somewhere a long what we call a hayfork rope of 1 inch in diameter, manila rope of the kind used to haul hay up into the barn, 100 feet long, and get five people or six people on each end of that long rope.  And when the squad is marching toward you, you run to them with the rope about 12 inches above the ground and try to trip them, or you do trip them.  And the commander didn’t like that.  He called the police.  We had that kind of ruckus, and the students stole the rifles from the, and shipped them down to Edgerton or something, that kind of behavior.  
	Then in the ‘90s, in, over in the women’s dormitory, we had a real panty raid, uh, which you remember that one, 1889 or 1898 or ’99, something like that.  The boys came, it wasn’t a panty raid really.  The boys broke into the laundry and took the private underthings of the, of the girls and carried them away.  And this caused a great deal of consternation.  And I remember, we even found a piece in a German language newspaper from Milwaukee that shook its head over that because they, they, these boys, they are going quite beyond the limits of gentlemanly behavior.  
	The women, uh, got together and agreed they would have no truck, actually a word they used, no intercourse with the men until the garments were returned.  And at that time, they could use that term without, uh, causing any trouble or misunderstanding.  But that was worked out eventually.  There was a future governor of Wisconsin was one of the, uh, laundry room raiders, and nobody got sent out, sent home, nobody got expelled.  But we were in that thing at the time, just after World War II, when we had the first panty raid.  And, uh, there was a lot of head shaking, etc.  
	And either you or I, I’ve forgotten which one, got hold of George, was it George Taylor, the public relations man, and said, for God’s sake, why don’t you send out the story on grandpa did it too and the story of the raid in 1898 or ’99, we had the exact date, and he did.  And I think it, either the newspapers got tired of the panty raid, or this story just let the air out of the balloon.  I prefer to believe that they let the air out of the balloon.
BT:  Now, we get into the 20th Century, and we see some of the same types of behavior on the part of students that you might want to mention, things like the bag rushes and the green-cap tradition, things like that.
VC:  Oh, that’s recurring.
BT:  What about academically in terms of the parental attitude that Professor Curti talked about, where it was kind of a civic responsibility as a parent, did that attitude change in the 20th Century?
VC:  Oh, yes, don’t you think?
MC:  I think with, uh, Van Hise beginning Chamberlain, and then with Van Hise, uh, the University sought to make itself a real university in terms of, uh, supporting original research and both at the experiment station, there had been beginnings of the experiment station, but I think it wasn’t until the late 19th Century with Chamberlain and the return to the century, that the research functions of a modern university were recognized and began to be supported.  But a great many regents had to be educated by President Van Hise to see the importance of research in terms of a state university.
0:04:45.3  
	And, uh, the regents seemed to feel that anyone who did research must be slighting teaching, and that the fundamental obligation was to teaching.  So this was a background of, uh, a controversy involving Fredrick Jackson Turner, probably the best-known member of the faculty in the first decade of the 20th Century, who had been given by his friend Van Hise certain privileges for more time for research.  Some of the regents resented that.  No doubt some of the faculty may have, but some of the regents certainly did, uh, and protested against it.  
	And Turner was always being asked to go to other and more prestigious universities.  So in order to keep him here, concessions were made so that he could do more research.  So the battle for the recognition of research was a very real battle.  It just didn’t suddenly happen.  There was opposition, and there were struggles, and when Turner finally left to go to Harvard in 1910, he wrote a letter to President Van Hise, and he said that he hoped what he had tried to do, uh, unpleasant though it had been for everyone, was, would pay off in terms of a greater recognition by the University of the importance of research in all fields as well as in the more utilitarian ones.  
	So I think we could say that, uh, the history of the University was not a merely prosaic thing, which just developed in an orderly fashion.  There were many ups and downs, personalities, particularly on the part of the presidents countered a great deal of the problems of leadership.  Uh, struggles to get some research supported and recognized, it’s, the history becomes all the more interesting because of the fact that the answers weren’t all at hand.  They had to be worked out pragmatically by experience and always the Legislature and, and very close to the whole thing, watching appropriations necessary.  
	So I think the, I’m not sure, but it seems to me that this history must have done much more than any history at the time of any other state university in showing that something of the struggles involved in the development of a, of a supported university.  Wouldn’t you think so?
VC:  Yeah, I would think so.  I was going to come back on your, your research problem that you mentioned.  In 1892 or ’93, the University of Chicago was the new president there, with Rockefeller money, whatever the new president was, offered Chamberlain, President of the University of Wisconsin, a professorship of geology at a salary $1,000 larger than he was getting as president here and with a teaching obligation of something like three hours a week.  Uh, this was a little outrageous.  
	William Freeman Vilas, I think, was on the board of regents, and he may have been president of the board and was indignant that this president at Chicago would hire the president of the University of Wisconsin to become a mere professor and offer him a job like that.  And I’ve often wondered, and I don’t think we know anything about this, what effect that had on the will that William Freeman Vilas wrote establishing the Vilas professorships at the Wis -- University of Wisconsin, which explicitly provide that the professor will teach no more than three hours a week.
MC:  I think as a warrantable inference that it has a real influence.
VC:  And the, and he sets a salary, which is above, or he set a salary, which was the size of the salary that lured Chamberlain to Chicago.  And Vilas was not the kind of man who, who thought that a heavy teaching load couldn’t be handled because he taught at the Law School and had taught as much as 20 or 25 hours a week.  But he was a, he was a phenomenon.  But I’ve always liked that kind of connection, but the Vilas experience was not one that did travel or the knowledge of Vilas’s view had not traveled very far at the time Turner left.
0:09:54.2
MC:  Right.
BT:  We, you mentioned Van Hise and the growth of research.  Now there’s another term that becomes, many people associate with the University of Wisconsin, and that’s the Wisconsin Idea.  Um, in your research, when did you see that idea developing, and how was it given definition in those early years up through, let’s say 1925?
MC:  Well, I think there was, from the very beginning, the assumption on the part of the presidents of the University, many of whom were ministers actually in background and some of the regents that, uh, the public support of the University, so far as it was publicly supported, would pay off in terms of what the University would contribute to the state.  But it was never made very explicit.  But I think it was there in the rhetoric.  And I don’t know when the term, the Wisconsin Idea, first appears.  I’ve always imagined that it was very early in the Van Hise --
VC:  Uh, 1912, I think, with the publication of a book by that title.
MC:  By a journalist.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  But I was wondering, you think that’s the first time that they --
VC:  I think, Merle, you’re right, that the, the notion of really applied learning, you use the knowledge to improve your world.  That’s talked about almost from the beginning.
MC:  Almost in the beginning.
VC:  Uh, it’s talked about quite seriously by Bascom.  It gets a sharper focus with Chamberlain, who will translate the vague idea into things such as the agricultural extension and the other extension.  He gets it started a little, and then it sags.  And then with Van Hise, who is a Chamberlain student, Van Hise manages to build on, I think, on what Bascom had brought, what Chamberlain brought in terms of broad ideas, and what Adams brought in terms of political operation.  He got along well with regents and with legislators and with the leading citizens of Madison.  
	And Van Hise takes all of these and charges forward and gets, and along, things have to come together right, Van Hise and La Follette.  And La Follette wants to use the expertise of the University.  Uh, and the extension people are here, and they’re going to educate the whole state.  It all works out together.  We even have delegations coming from India to study at the University of Wisconsin in the first or second decade.  It’s during the Van Hise period.
BT:  Let me see for a second here.  Oh, yes, politics, you had mentioned La Follette.  Uh, let’s talk for a moment about the early years of the University in terms of religion and politics.  What kind of a role did religion and politics play in the early years, and if you could maybe bring that up into, skip up to the progressive period and talk about the --
MC:  Well, of course, there was the provision in the Constitution of 1848, uh, regarding there was to be a separation of church and state as far as public institutions are concerned.  At the same time, uh, several of the early presidents of the University had an ecclesiastical background.  They had studied for the ministry if they hadn’t actually preached.  And there was chapel, which was required.  By the early 1870s, the students just weren’t going to chapel much.  
	And there seemed to be no way of requiring them to, and President Bascom decided that, uh, that required chapel should be given up.  I guess chapel entirely should be given up rather than maintain the fiction of chapel when students didn’t come to it.  And if I’m not, if we’re not incorrect, I think Wisconsin was the first of the state universities that gave up required chapel. 
0:14:50.7
VC:  Nobody fretted much about it when they had it.  They fretted a little.  It was the godless university as far as Beloit and Lawrence and other universities were concerned.  But they were lucky.  Wisconsin was lucky that they had a number of church-related schools so that the University had an opportunity to grow, uh, church-related schools that kept one church from grabbing the federal endowment, which might have happened if we’d been of one persuasion.  But Beloit couldn’t get it, and they were going to see that Lawrence didn’t get it, and so on.  I think that may have played an element in it.  But the University, even though they had a chapel, they were, you remember called by, the man at Beloit sent us the letter --
MC:  Eaton, President Eaton.
VC:  -- that identified the Wisconsin, the godless state university.  The politicians had to be taught a little about supporting a state university because that wasn’t quite in the document, in their experience.  During the 1850s, there was a move in the Legislature, not awfully seriously perhaps, but a move to sever the University from the states payroll as it were, give it to Dane County, and let it be the Dane County High School, which it was.  Do you remember, uh, a, when they got the Ag College grant, the Morrow lands, that the Legislature fought for and got.  And or that is the regents fought for and got assigned to Madison.  
	And from then on, it was kind of touch and go.  The Legislature for a period seemed persuaded, or a number of them, that the University should live on the income from the land endowment.  But then came John Spooner in 1852, if I recall, who sponsored the first piece of legislation, a great piece, which began with the declaration, with a statement that inasmuch as the land was given by the federal government for the support of the University, and the land was sold early and cheap for the benefit of the state.  
	Therefore, and something to this effect, the state owes the University the difference between what was got for the land and what the land is now worth, that money to be used to support the University.  When I first got here, Bill Evjue was saying the same thing in the Cap Times.  It was a great statement, and I think substantially correct, that the, the land endowment was squandered, and if the guardian squanders, the inheritance of the orphan, he is required to make up for it, isn’t he?  And the Legislature was asked to make up for it.  And I think the Legislature liked that solution because then members could always go back to their community and say you wouldn’t want us to cheat, would you, words to that effect?
	In any event, beginning in the ‘70s comes the push for, among the politicians to get support for the University.  And, uh, increasingly that becomes an element.  I don’t say that the University ever supported, that the Legislature ever supported the University overgenerously, but they did pretty well, and as time goes on, you see the regents of Wisconsin and Michigan particularly exchanging notes on how they can get more money out of the Legislature.
MC:  Right, well, going back for just a minute to the problems of religion, as Vernon suggested, the denominational colleges did put in a claim for the Morrow Lands.  They would, they would they tried to argue that they were, they were better qualified than the University at Madison to properly use these.  But I think it wasn’t until, I think until President Van Hise’s day around about 1910 that the University officially did, the administration did say, uh, probably the best way of meeting these criticisms that we are a nonreligious institution is to encourage the leading churches in Madison to establish student centers.
0:20:07.9
VC:  Oh, I’m glad you remembered that.
MC:  And, uh, that thus it would be more difficult to claim that the University was completely indifferent to religion.  And the, they did begin to do this.  St. Paul Center was one of the early ones.  But I remember that as late as, uh, 1945, there were some students who wanted to have religion taught as a formal subject in the University.  And the, it was remembered that, uh, the Constitution had been very explicit in as declaration, separation of church and state.  And, uh, somebody suggested that religion be taught by the chaplains of these centers and the University give credit for those.
	The faculty was opposed to that because the faculty felt that it would have no control over the standards of such courses on religion given in these religious centers.  And gradually and without any big rumpus, uh, the University began to introduce courses concerned with religion.  Of course, it had always been taught, the history of religion had always been taught in history courses and in literature courses, but I think there began to be -- and in philosophy courses, but I think there began to be, uh, I’ve forgotten what -- Hebraic studies, I think there began to be taught in Hebraic studies something one could call comparative religion.
VC:  Did somebody or anybody ever teach the course in the Bible as literature here?
MC:  I don’t, I can’t remember.  One would have thought somebody might have taught it, and it might have been done.  But I --
VC:  I know something like that was done at Iowa, and they, and there was no difficulty with that.
MC:  Yeah.
VC:  Because it was a qualified scholar doing it.
BT:  You mentioned before that several of the early presidents were ministers.  I’d just like to turn to some of the early personalities on campus and have, um, either or both of you respond to them.  Lathrop is the first one that comes to mind.  What did you learn about President Lathrop?
MC:  I’m not sure that he was an actual minister, but he --
VC:  No.
BT:  Could you define, I’m not sure Lathrop was a minister so we know who you’re talking about?
VC:  Yeah, I’m not sure --
MC:  I can’t remember.
VC:  I don’t think Lathrop was a minister, and I think in that, no, I’m going to back down.
MC:  I can’t be sure.
VC:  This is something you’re going to strike out of your --
BT:  Okay.  I certainly will.
VC:  Yeah, we’ll start, we’ll start with Lathrop as a president.  He was kind of an itinerant college president, university president.  I think he was president of --
MC:  Indiana.
VC:  -- Indiana --
MC:  Missouri.
VC:  -- Missouri, uh --
MC:  And then he went back to Missouri.
VC:  -- and then went back to Missouri and presided, when did he, how long did he stay here?  Was he the man who admitted women?  No, women were admitted during the Civil War.
MC:  No, that was in the Civil War. 
VC:  Well, they snuck in before that, in the classes on pedagogy and then became more numerous during the Civil War, and then were admitted formally.  Well, Lathrop was a, uh, a cautious man, I think.  He, when he came to Madison, he bought pews, not in one church, but in two.  Or maybe he was going to be sure that, uh, if he had to go, he’d go, he’d get to the right place.  He also was a minor speculator in land I think.
MC:  Yeah.
VC:  He bought some of the University land at auction.  Whether he kept it or not, I don’t know.  Um, I don’t have much an impression of him except kind of in reverse, where the faculty, after Lathrop left adopted a resolution at some time or another.  You remember, uh, kind of a cloudy one suggesting that the regents appoint a president, although in their experience, he had usually meant nothing more than an additional, than an extra large salary, some friendly faculty.
0:24:56.9
MC:  In any case, President Twombly had been a Methodist minister, an active Methodist minister.
VC:  Oh, yeah, he’s your favorite, isn’t he? 
MC:  And Bascom, Bascom had, was qualified as a congregational minister.  And I guess that was --
VC:  Do you remember the, uh, resolution the regents considered and then declined to approve but still recorded in their minutes about dismissing Twombly?
MC:  I’m sure you can do better than I can.
VC:  I can’t remember, but it’s something that he had no capac -- no learning to teach, no capacity to teach, and something else.
MC:  No capacity to administer.
VC:  Uh, administer, three things he didn’t have that were needed, uh, but he was celebrated some 20 years ago by a group of students who organized a society, a very bright young mathematician who had read the book apparently, read the history.  And he organized a Society to Remember John Twombly and invited everybody to join it.  Merle and I appeared as sponsors of the society.  And it cost nothing, and within a short time, he had a membership he claimed of 10,000 or so.  Remember John Twombly, and he was going to name the Peterson, I think it was the Peterson Building, is that the administration building?
MC:  Yeah.
VC:  -- for John Twombly, why?  Because during John Twombly’s period, the president had not increased the tuition of the students.  And for a while he and his gang had, this was while the building was under construction, site of the John Twombly Memorial Building.  The, uh, and we were --
MC:  We were quite amused by it.
VC:  Yeah, well, he, I’ve forgotten who was chairman.  I think Dave Feldman was chairman.  I ought to strike that Dave Feldman name.  I’ve forgotten who was chairman of the building names committee.  I was a member of it, but, um, one of two of us were going to respond to the petition of 5,000 students that this building be called the John Twombly Building.  Oh, it was Ed Young.  Ed Young was the chairman.  So you can strike that out too.  But he wouldn’t call a meeting of the committee because he knew he’d lose the vote.  And for two years, we didn’t have a meeting of the Building Names Committee.
MC:  We didn’t have it, no.
VC:  And the chairman was going to prevent John Twombly’s name from being --
MC:  Twombly wrote a wonderful letter when the regents summarily dismissed him without notice.  He said I didn’t ask to come here.  I gave up my Methodist church in the Boston area to come here to be your president.  And now you fire me at a time when the Methodist conferences are not meeting, when I can’t get another [word unclear], and I demand financial recompensation.  It was a marvelous letter.
VC:  And I guess they gave it to him, and he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard, so he was a man of some standing, but a total incompetent when it came to running the University apparently.  They, uh, Sterling was a --
MC:  Then he became acting.
VC:  Yeah, he was a staunch man, who apparently held the things together.  Um, oh, the, who was that antifeminist?  I had him a minute ago, uh, who was president?
MC:  Uh, yes.
VC:  We have the girls’ hall, uh --
MC:  Chamberlain.
VC:  No.
MC:  No, Chadbourne.
VC:  Chadbourne.
MC:  Chadbourne.
VC:  Chadbourne was unwilling to come here as long as they had coeducation.  And the reason they put Chadbourne Hall way down here in the corner, the girls said, was to keep them isolated from the rest of the campus that time --
MC:  North and South Hall were dorms.
VC:  Yeah, Park was the extreme end of the campus.  And the girls also said he was going to put a high fence all around it.  Well, Twombly had his female colleagues set up separate from the regular college except, and it worked, I think as a separate little college for a while, but he didn’t stay very long.  When he left all this absurdity departed.
MC:  They had some lady instructresses.
VC:  Yep, and then the women moved into the classes and began to get all the good grades.  And the boys denounced them for that.
0:29:46.7
BT:  Could you, either of you relate the story of the naming of Chadbourne Hall with President Birge you think?
VC:  Oh, yeah, they --
MC:  I think we tell this --
VC:  -- Birge told that story to us about, uh, Chadbourne Hall, and it was miss, it was -- I’ve forgotten who it was that proposed it.  Uh, he went to, a Bascom daughter, I think, and he said he named it Chadbourne Hall or proposed Chadbourne Hall as a punishment for Chadbourne for having opposed, uh, coeducate -- female education.  And it amused Birge still that the regents accepted the name and that for all eternity or for the immediate future, uh, Chadbourne would be attached to the finest girls’ residence hall in Wisconsin.  I kind of like that kind of vengeance on a man.
BT:  Professor Curti, you talked before about Bascom, and I know that you wrote the chapter on President Bascom.  Could you just give a brief summary of some of the highlights of the contributions that John Bascom made to the University?
MC:  Yes, I think Bascom representing some of the, uh, in many ways most humanistic traditions of his time thought of the unity of all knowledge.  He didn’t like the growing specialization that separated one subject completely from some other subject.  He felt that, uh, knowledge was inseparable and shouldn’t be fragmented.  This was a, I think he had an organic conception of the unity of knowledge.  This was not unique.  I think this was, uh, in the tradition going back at least to the renaissance.  And, but he, uh, he gave instruction and wrote textbooks in mental philosophy, or he actually used the term psychology, Christian ethics, economics, what he called political economy.  
	It was economics and political science.  He gave instruction on all of these courses and to seniors as was customary in the day in liberal arts colleges, an overall subject on the evidences of Christianity, perhaps under a slightly different topic, which he showed again bringing all knowledge together including science.  He, uh, he was interested in, without committing himself, for or against the theories of evolution.  In this senior course, he attempted to, uh, show the interrelationships between knowledge and the Hebraic‑Christian conception of ethics and the contributions of the Greeks to humanistic ethics.  
	And students who took this course often referred to it as being perhaps the best part of the education they got at Wisconsin.  But he wrote these many books, he was like Twombly and others, dismissed by the University from the presidency and went back to Williams College where he taught, uh, the subjects he’s been teaching here.  He did come back for a commencement, and --
VC:  La Follette met him, didn’t he?
MC:  Yeah, La Follette met him, and he came back for a commencement.  And did he get an honorary degree?
VC:  I think so.
MC:  I think he got an honorary degree.  I think the University sort of felt a bit ashamed of his treatment, or his rather shabby treatment and the way in which he was dismissed.  Uh, but I think his contribution was we would now call general education, and he disliked the separation of science from the humanities and the social studies, and he felt that they were all interrelated.  And in a way, this was the philosophy that Meiklejohn had when he started the Experimental College, that is the unity of knowledge and the interrelation of different kinds of knowledge or our own integrated liberal studies.  I think Bascom must have been, uh, a very remarkable teacher, and his zest for learning was certainly very real and very genuine.
VC:  And he gave, didn’t he -- the impression I get is that he brought a sense of standards to the University.
MC:  Yes.
0:34:49.5
VC:  There were a lot of universities in the 1870s and ‘80s, uh --
MC:  They were pretty sloppy.
VC:  -- were pretty sloppy, but Bascom gave them some sense --
MC:  Yes, he did.
VC:  -- of what ought to be involved in learning.
MC:  Right.
VC:  Uh, and didn’t La Follette sing Bascom’s praises in his autobiography --
MC:  Oh, very much so, yes, very much so.
VC:  -- and elsewhere?  
BT:  Well, Bascom sort of laid the groundwork then for, I know that you told me in our last interview that Chamberlain became one of your favorites over time.
VC:  Yeah.
BT:  Could you talk for just a moment, just as Professor Curti did, about the contributions of Chamberlain to the University?
VC:  Well, Chamberlain was a geologist, but he was a man, seemed to me of really a spacious outlook.  He accepted such, the notions of Bascom of high standards, but he had, he was more of a, uh, well, I won’t say more of.  He was simply interested in learning in all respects and in research.  And he had the idea that, uh, well, he wasn’t afraid of anything because it was old, and he wasn’t afraid of anything that was new.  The only test he wanted to apply was whether it would contribute to making a better university. 
	 And he had the idea of extension work in agriculture and industry and for general knowledge.  All of these things he wrote about.  Only two were, uh, he saw very little of anything except the beginnings of agricultural extension.  There was a little engineering extension work, but that didn’t go, and a little public lecture business.  But they didn’t have the mechanism.  That would come under Van Hise.  And what was needed there was not the idea but the means of carrying it forward.  And then it was under Chamberlain too that the graduate school gets organized.
MC:  Yes, and Chamberlain, uh, felt that the Ph.D. was at least, uh, and outward and visible sign of having met certain standards of scholarship.  And when Turner wanted to be promoted without having got a Ph.D., Chamberlain was insistent that this couldn’t be.  He would have to go to the Johns Hopkins, which was the principle prestigious university for Ph.D.s and get his Ph.D. before he could hope for professorial standard, uh, standing here, as an example of Chamberlain’s insistence that there are such things as scholarship and research qualifications.  They can be measured, and there are minimal measurements.  And if anyone wanted to be a professor here, they must meet these.
VC:  And there is, somewhere we found, picked up correspondence between Wilson, who was president of, Woodrow Wilson, was president of Princeton at the time and Chamberlain.  And there are some Wilson letters I think along with some Roosevelt letters in our archives.  Uh, but Wilson had said that Chamberlain was one of the best judges of men anywhere in the country, and that in getting new members to his, for his faculty, he looked to see who Chamberlain appointed and then hired him because he had more money, which I -- do you remember that one?
MC:  Yeah.
VC:  -- which I thought was a very nice and more flattering than I thought Wilson was able to be of other people.  
BT:  Now you said that Chamberlain laid a lot of the groundwork, and Van Hise provided the mechanism.
VC:  Yeah.
BT:  Could you define that but maybe start out by saying who the first Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin was because it sort of ties into --
VC:  Oh, the first Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin was Van Hise with Chamberlain as his major professor, who was president and apparently still teaching.  Um, the, well, I don’t know how you really talk about the, who invents the mechanism, but in extension, you could probably get it as well, I mean, as clearly as anywhere.  In 1904 and ’05, Charles McCarthy, maybe I’m, my dates are a year or two off, down the Legislative Reference Library, was worried about the number of proprietary schools that were selling correspondence courses, other courses in the state of Wisconsin.  And somebody asked him to make a survey.  
0:39:47.6
	It’s McCarthy who starts the Van Hise on the business of extension.  Van Hise initially didn’t want to go.  But McCarthy picks up the inform -- makes a survey.  Surveys aren’t necessarily recent.  Finds out that umpty‑$100,000 a year are being spent by young people to learn the mathematics, to learn, uh, doing blueprints, mechanical drawing, etc., etc., from these proprietary schools.  And not all of them are reliable.  
	Why not have the University, which is teaching farm kids this and that, why not have the University establish its correspondence courses and other, uh, other extension work?  Well, he gets the information, he gets to the governor, and as you look through some of the McCarthy information, McCarthy is going to see that a director is appointed to organize an extension division for the University if Van Hise doesn’t, even though McCarthy’s down here in the state legislature.
MC:  Legislative Reference Bureau.
VC:  And he’s got, and, and this is part of the genius of Van Hise too, who could see when he was being pushed and not resist.  And Van Hise decided to capitulate and then went for a first‑class, well, he got a few people in to kind of start it.  But then he got the man who would organize it, an engineer from Penn State, uh, oh, one of us ought to remember the name, uh, who comes with, it takes a year to plan the correspondence courses and the other programs for extension.  Now, what you have is Van Hise being pushed, Van Hise being bright and quick and selecting a man after -- he turned down two or three that McCarthy wanted.  
	And that’s probably is the difference between making a success out of extension and a failure because I think a couple of those that McCarthy wanted would have organized a little show but wouldn’t have gotten the big structure that, uh, that the director, who was there for 25 years of extension, what he brought out.  And he provided the mechanism for that.  Well, then in agriculture, you have something else going, the county agents developing.  
	That’s something else that was invented.  And in grad school, you have ultimately a graduate school emerging.  All these things keep bubbling up during the Van Hise Administration as ways of getting done things that Chamberlain had wanted to do.  And then, in between them, those two, was Adams, who had done such a magnificent job of being friendly to everybody.  
BT:  And when Van Hise died unexpectedly, he was succeeded by, um --
MC:  Birge.
BT:  -- Birge.
VC:  Birge, yeah, Birge had come here in the 1870s, and who had studied with the great Swiss naturalist.
MC:  Agassiz.
VC:  Agassiz, would you believe that.
MC:  -- who came in the 1840s.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  Maybe ‘30s.
VC:  And when, and Birge once told us, didn’t he, or did he write this -- that when he faced the problems after World War I, yeah, World War I, of the difficulties of returning veterans, of inflation and so on, he remembered what had happened after the Civil War.  
BT:  I would like to propose that we take just a short break here.  I think --
VC:  Well, it’s --
MC: What time is it getting to be?
VC:  It’s about 3:00.
BT:  Do we have about 20 more minutes or so?  I just want to talk -- the one area which we have neglected somewhat is the faculty.  And I’d like to get back and talk a little bit about that early faculty and then wrap it up --
VC:  Yeah, you should turn us off the air for the moment so I can say something.  I want to --
MC:  -- something in rhetoric in connection with such debating as they may have had.  Uh, so I think that we have to think of, uh, very limited offerings.  There was no history.  Whatever history was taught was taught as ancient, as Greek and Roman history by whoever was teaching ‑-
VC:  Yeah, Allen, Turner’s teacher.
0:44:49.1
MC:  It wasn’t until 1867 that we had an historian, and William F. Allen came.  He had been trained at Harvard and some graduate work in German universities.  And, uh, he had a very broad conception of history, including not only ancient history but modern history.  And he gave a distinguished scholar giving lectures at Johns Hopkins and at the Lowell Institute in Boston and writing some 800 or 900 reviews for The Nation, which was a very prestigious journal.
VC:  And he collected slave ballads.
MC:  And he collected slave ballads, and say, the spirituals.  So he was one of the first really distinguished scholars, I guess, that the University had in terms of national reputation.  But Bascom, who taught everything except the sciences, and he taught even, uh, what we would call the history and philosophy of science, I think primarily, uh, was a lecturer so the classics teachers taught the text without very much consideration of literature.  I think they were grammarians and interested in grammar and the discipline of the language.  And the lecture method, I think, was Bascom’s method.  Oh, I think he did try to have some discussion, but his classes were large, especially the senior class.  So I don’t know how much discussion actually there was.  I think it was primarily probably lectures.  I don’t know much about the teachings of the sciences.  We know that their laboratory equipment was meager and that they had to struggle to get, uh, whatever they, I guess the science, which first attracted some attention was astronomy -- 
VC:  Yeah, and they --
MC:  -- where, I guess, uh --
VC:  They got the Washburn, uh, Observatory.
MC:  -- the gift of the Washburn Laboratory, did give the University of Wisconsin some standing in astronomy.
VC:  Not only that, the astronomy sold the time signal to the newspaper, to the railroads --
MC:  -- to the railroads.
VC:  -- up until the 1880s.
MC:  Which was again an example of what later was to be thought of as the Wisconsin Idea.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  But, uh, so I think probably the instruction was not completely -- was very similar to that given at other institutions, uh, with very little emphasis on student investigation.  I don’t think papers were part of it.  The students learned to do what we would think of now, if they took, if they went in for debating, there they had to do something like research.  But I think it was pretty much, the conception of the professor has the knowledge, and he hands it out to the students.  And I don’t think there was a great deal of active thinking on the part of the students as far as their instruction.  And they got more of that in the literary societies and in the debates.  Uh, but certainly they, these scholars had the conception of, uh, the importance of knowledge and they devotedly and genuinely believed that what they were doing was important or they had something to give.  And I think most of them, uh, were very sincere in wanting to do the best that the situation permitted.  Uh, there were many reorganizations of the University and a good deal of lacking of what we would call stability.  And it was some time before the students were prepared really to do real college work of any advanced sort.  But I have the feeling that they, uh, that Bascom’s books were certainly well known, so that by the 1870s, the University was known through him and his books.  And, I guess, the astronomy and probably beginning the agricultural experiments gave the University some national, national standing.
VC:  I’ve only a couple tidbits to offer on the faculty.  One involves James Davies Butler --
MC:  Ah.
0:49:38.2
VC:  -- who taught down in little Quaker college in Indiana for a while and then was invited here by I think in the 1850s, to teach Greek and Latin.  And there’s a letter, a couple of letters in the Butler file, uh, to a relative in the East, one of them raising the question of why he would leave a good respectable Christian college to go to a godless university.  And his response was that, oh, because the possibility that the university would, would dismiss all its faculty or would go bankrupt or something, he said, well, he was going to get a higher, much higher salary, double his salary, double his stated salary by going to Wisconsin.  
	And that was great, and he’d have students here.  Where he was, he didn’t have many students, and even though they stated a salary, he never collected any.  And so he, the chances of his losing anything in Wisconsin weren’t very good.  Well, he la -- he stayed until the reorganization of the ‘60s and then became a writer for railroad promotions.
MC:  Oh, yes, kind of a freelance writer.
VC:  And in the age when he was past 70, he went to China and traveled up the Yangtze River.  He’s a great character.
MC:  Yeah, he must have been a rather colorful figure.
VC:  Yeah, the other one, and I don’t know where I picked up this story, but it involves Slichter’s coming to teach mathematics.  He had a master’s from Northwestern, I think.  Bascom hired him to come up and teach mathematics.  He came a young man.  I’m not sure whether he was married yet.  I think he may have been, beginning his academic career.  The first year he was here, Bascom announced that he’d come in and visit class at a stipulated time.  And he came, stayed the whole hour, and then asked Slichter to come and talk to him later.  
	Slichter went in, and Bascom gave him a critique of his teaching, told him what he did well, what he did poorly, and told him that he’d be teaching here again another year.  The second year, Bascom again told him he’d come in at a certain day to visit his class, a class.  He came, he visited, and asked Slichter to come and, come in and talk to him.  And again, there was criticism of what he’d done well and what he’d done badly, and then Bascom told him he would now be a professor.
MC:  So that was the only thing --
VC:  The two --
MC:  -- no academic tenure in our sense of the word.
VC:  And, uh, he moves immediately from instructor to professor having passed the president’s check.
MC:  Most of the presidents until Van Hise, uh, I don’t know about Chamberlain, but they were rather paternalistic, I think, in their attitude toward the faculty.
BT:  Now, you mentioned that there was a great deal of, I guess rote would be one way of saying with the learning and faculty students.  When did a change come about in that attitude?
MC:  Apparently, it probably differed in different departments.
VC:  Yeah, and it probably begins in 1890s, wouldn’t you gather.
MC:  I would think so.
VC:  I think Turner coming from -- coming back from Hopkins with a Ph.D., I think Ely coming in with his experience in German universities, Chamberlain with his view, I suppose in the social sciences, it’s coming in, uh, Van Hise, according to Vance, if, as I remember Vance [words unclear], Van Hise is taking his students on field trips.
MC:  On field trips.
VC:  And you get that kind of exchange.  So I’d suppose the late 1880s, 1890s is the time it’s going.
MC:  Yeah, it seems to be less parochial and traditional in the old sense of the small college.
VC:  But now you’ll go and probably find us wrong on that.
BT:  I’m wondering if it would correspond at all with the research emphasis of --
VC:  Oh, I’d suppose --
MC:  I would think so.
VC:  I’d suppose it’d be quite a bit of correspondence.
MC:  Turner’s emphasis on, uh, having his students use the primary sources and the historical society, uh, Allen had begun that in the 1880s.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  But it was very unusual, I think, anywhere, but I think with Turner making a great point of teaching even undergraduates from the original sources and putting in write papers.
0:54:50.9
BT: What about women on the faculty, when did they first begin to assume a fairly active role?
MC:  Well, I don’t know.  When the home economics people were they, were, I think the first ones.  There were, um --
VC:  I don’t think you would ever say they had an active role before, uh, probably the 1970s or ‘80s if they’re even active then.
MC:  Yeah, with some --
VC:  There were women from time to time.  The generation of Helen White had a number of women, and then for a long period, uh, there were no women coming up.  Because women had kind of, they kind of gave up, didn’t they, after Helen White?
MC:  I think there were no women in the History Department until, uh, when was Diane appointed?
VC:  Uh, be after 1964.  
MC:  It was well after that, probably 1970s.  Uh, there were, in the English Department, they, I think the English Department was one of, I think by the early part of the present century, the English Department sort of, uh, lifted itself by the bootstraps, and they had some very good scholars, who were called to Yale and other places.  Um, but I think, and McCarrens was the great innovator in the study of American literature.  
	Uh, I think a few years ago, the 100th anniversary of the first teaching of American literature at an American university was observed here.  Leslie Fiedler came, and to my sadness, spoke very disrespectively of the man who had done so much to promote American literature, Harry Hayden Clark.  It was in such bad taste.  Harry Hayden Clark directed an innumerable number of useful --
VC:  He had 70 or 80, didn’t he?  
MC:  And they were, you know --
VC:  -- good solid --
MC:  -- good substantial things.  Uh, but I think by the early part of the century with, I can’t remember the, he was an Elizabethan scholar, went to Yale.
VC:  Yeah, there were a few in home ec and a few in, didn’t, in science, one or two of the sciences.
MC:  I think there must have been a few in science.  
BT:  One or two more questions on the faculty, then we’ll wrap it up.  The term faculty governance is one that is used a lot in association with UW.  When did that term begin to acquire real substance in history?
VC:  Well, the, the story is told that during the Civil War, when there was no president, faculty began to have some spirit and some control.
MC:  They had to do whatever was done.
VC:  But I think that, uh, really it probably comes later with the Van Hise --
MC:  I think so.
VC:  -- period, when you get a faculty who are, faculty made up, or faculty having a fairly large number of, uh, persons who are towering scholars in their own right and who are concerned with the welfare of the institution as Turner was, for example.  Turner’s interests not only embraced what was going on in the History Department --
MC:  But in athletics.
VC:  Athletics and extension.
MC:  And extension.
VC:  He has one excellent article or, uh, letter to Van Hise on what the Extension Department ought to be and do.  And when you have faculty with wide interests, and faculty members who are themselves maybe as important as the president, then they do have meetings that are important, and when they speak, the president listens.  At least, that’s what they hope.
BT:  The other term that is often talked about by faculty traditionally is academic freedom.  Um, could you just discuss that concept in UW’s history briefly?
0:59:26.8
MC:  Well, of course, this conception is generally attributed to the 19th Century German universities, Lehrfreiheit, uh, and I think it came into America as Americans went and got their Ph.D.s in German universities and came back and began to, uh, staff American universities.  And I think they, probably the idea had existed before, but I think the term academic freedom tended to be an offshoot of that.  I think that there probably were individual cases where what professors taught, uh, was challenged by either students or --
VC:  Regents.
MC:  -- or regents.  
VC:  Or politicians.
MC:  But I don’t think it was, uh, greatly formalized in any way institutionalized until the Van Hise period.
VC:  Well, we get the, the great Ely case.
MC:  The Ely case in 1890 --
VC:  Three or four.
MC:  1893 or ’94.
VC:  Yeah, and there, there you get the statement that Adams wrote for the Regents’ Committee on the fearless sifting and winnowing.
MC:  And Ely hadn’t been a product of German universities himself.
VC:  Yeah, and in that one, you get the classic statement, which in many ways, um particularly since the students of the class of, what, 1910, got that statement out, and you’ve seen the Ted Herforth article on that, and nailed it to the, the, uh, wall of Bascom.  It became a declaration for all to see.  I remember Paul --
MC:  Then it was challenged.
VC:  You remember.
MC:  We didn’t really get sued for liable.  When Volume II came out, it became a, a kind of statement, um, I remember --
VC:  Yeah, and a symbol.
MC:  Who was the, who was the man who edited, um, the La Follette magazine for so, The Progressive for so long?  Um, he, he died a year or two ago.  Um, he said he came here as a student from New York, got off at the railroad station, walked up to the University, walked up the hill, Bascom Hill, and saw that statement on the, uh, wall.  And he said, this is the place for me, and he never left Madison.  
	Uh, well, that key, that statement, I heard the -- the wife of a regent once told me, that has given the regents more trouble than anything in this century because every time they do something that they think they ought to do that maybe restricts those wild people over in Madison, somebody yells they’re violating their academic freedom.  Well, what’s involved here, of course, is the thing that’s absolutely correct.  If you’re going to explore ideas, there must be a freedom to explore them fully and honestly and completely.  And that’s the thing that the great plaque --
MC:  Yeah, and, of course, this goes back to, to the Greeks.
VC:  Oh, yeah.
MC:  The Greeks and John Stewart Mill and a lot of others.
VC:  A lot of others too.
BT:  Nice to have it sitting there reminding you.
VC:  That’s right, that’s right.
BT:  Um, you ended the history in the year 1925.  Why did you select that date?
MC:  Yes.
VC:  Because we didn’t even know we were going to --
BT:  Would you put that in context?
VC:  Yeah, we didn’t, we picked 1925.  That was the end of the Birge Administration.  We were flat out going full speed, and we didn’t know we were going to be able to get that far in time to make this, the centennial.  Now you’ve got a lead time, which the press wanted, of about a year and a half for the manuscript to get to them.  That means we, for, to be published in early ’49, actually the first volume got out in ’48 I think, we have to be through in ’47.  And, uh, we felt that we were, we had done more than we could do.  
	And if Merle Curti hadn’t been capable of doing two men’s work or three, we’d have never made it.  Uh, as it was, we ended in ’25.  Now if we had gone beyond ’25, we’d have gotten into the, uh, tremendously complicated period of the ‘30s with the depression and the ‘30s, the dismissal of Glen Frank and all of the problems involved there.  Uh, and that’s going to be a terrific thing.
1:04:52.0
MC:  And we knew we couldn’t do anything more than the most superficial part of it.
VC:  Yeah.
MC:  Anything we would do after that would be disgracefully superficial --
VC:  We had to look at --
MC:  -- so we had better stop.
VC:  -- be aware of what’s happening nationally.  We had to be aware of what’s happening within the various disciplines nationally, what’s, we had to go through the newspapers and the legislative stuff and so on.  It’s a whale of a lot of, uh, tons of material, and, uh, we thought we were, we were darn lucky to have --
MC:  To get as far as we did.
VC:  -- a part of our sanity and some of our health to have gotten to 1925.
BT:  How was the, uh, book generally received once you published it?
VC:  We got very good reviews.
MC:  I think we got good reviews.
VC:  And we liked -- we got one bad review, which we didn’t like, but --
MC:  What was that one?
VC:  It was something in the, uh, this wonderful thing about Merle Curti.  We get threatened with a liable suit, and the guy’s going to throw us in jail.  And Merle laughed happily over that one.  We got a bad review, and Merle took that seriously for a while.  The, but this was in, uh, that professor of higher education, who didn’t like our index --
MC:  Another Allen.
VC:  -- who didn’t like our index.
MC:  Oh, he didn’t like our index.
VC:  Uh, the -- one of the things I liked about it, this kind of -- well, don’t take it too seriously, but I kind of liked it.  About five, six, seven years after the book was published, I met one of the regents, whose name won’t come back to me, who said he’d read the books and quite enjoyed them, and that I might be amused at the fact that Governor Rennebohm was a member of the regents then.  And I know he had been given Volume I as Governor and told he’d get Volume II as soon as he finished reading Volume I.  
	The governor read them, and the awful thing this regent told me was the governor read them, and when he became a regent, he remembered them.  And when the regents would get excited about certain things, uh, Rennebohm would say, oh, hell, Curti and Carstensen tell you about when that happened in such and such a time.  Don’t make the same kind of mistake the regents made then, this in connection with the misbehavior of students at Randall against the military.  And Rennebohm remembered that, uh, case in the 1880s down here and said all the regents do is make it worse, so stay out of it.  
	Let -- what do you suppose we hire the president for and these other people?  Uh, and this chap who was telling me the story concluded, he said the time you would really have been amused, I’m sorry you weren’t there, was [Elvehjem had a proposition that he wanted to bring to the regents, and he finished making the proposition and turned to Rennebohm and said, I don’t care what Curti and Carstensen say, I want it this way, which I thought was one of the nicest --
MC:  Oh, that’s a great one.
VC:  -- nicest reviews we had.
MC:  Yeah, that was very nice.
BT:  Cut.  I promised you a half an hour, and I made it up in 20 minutes, so that --
VC:  -- a footnote, and I was the guilty one.  I had quoted something from the president of 
Stanford at the time --
MC:  Yes, David Star Jordan.
VC:  -- David Star Jordan, who said that Allen was a capable man but had cheated at the cards.  I didn’t know that was libelous.  How would I know?  It just seemed a good figure of speech.
MC:  Uh, thereafter, I always used this in my seminars, tell students that in quoting, you, uh --
VC:  We never found out whether that would be libelous or not because that was an educational recommendation.  And an educational recommendation is not libelous, uh, or a comment.  Well, with this E. B. Fred was a little fretful.
MC:  He was quite upset.  
VC:  And the regents were not altogether happy because they had the copyright to the damn book.
MC:  No.  They had the copyright.
VC:  But Merle --
MC:  I think they did consult the, uh, lawyer’s attorney or the attorney general.
VC:  Oh, they sent us down to the attorney general, who sent us to an assistant attorney general.  Do you remember that chap was a great cook?  
MC:  Right.
VC:  And we went down with Tom Webb and, uh, Tom was fretful about it.
MC:  Oh, he was very fretful.
1:09:44.9
VC:  But Merle was as blithe as anything.  He knew that we weren’t going to --
MC:  I didn’t think anything could come of it.
VC:  Well, we were actually, we were rather hoping we could goad him into a, a lawsuit because, um, that would bring attention to the book.  And we thought it would be great to have a university history sued for liable.  But the lawyers are, the lawyer was cautious, and he helped prepare letters.  And I remember he said, uh, avoid an excess of clarity and something else in writing to the guy.  He said he’s pretty old, isn’t he?  He writes this way.  I said, you look at the stuff he wrote in 1914, and it’s the same.  He hasn’t aged a minute.  At some time, this lawyer agreed that if we went to jail, he’d get Tom Webb a cell adjoining ours.  And Tom didn’t know whether he was fooling or not.
MC:  He didn’t, and Tom didn’t know whether he would like to be next to us.
VC:  But as it worked out, with this lawyer writing these long, obfuscating letters, Allen first agreed not to have the whole book, uh, both volumes withdrawn.  Uh, he’d be satisfied to have one volume withdrawn, Volume II.  Then he wanted the chapter taken out.  And then he wanted the page taken out.  And then he was down to a point where he wanted the footnote changed if we ever published again, and that, we agreed to do.  Uh, along with the fact that Webb would send, would find all the people he knew who had bought a copy of the book would get a note saying would you obliterate everything in volume, in footnote so and so.
MC:  And here’s something to paste over it.
VC:  And we, and the chairman of our department then, Chet Easen actually got that note and got his pen and inked out.
MC:  I discovered that.  I was having dinner at the Easens, and there were the two volumes, and I decided to pick it up and see, or maybe inadvertently.  And there I saw he had painfully pasted that over.
BT:  Did he give you a blank, uh, give you something to paste over it?
VC:  Yeah, there was something to paste over it, or to ink it out.  Uh, well, then, we had agreed if the book was ever published again, to change the footnote.  
MC:  And that was done.
VC:  And when Ed Young decided to, uh, run a new edition, Tom wrote to me, and he wrote to you, and we agreed.  We had agreed to change the footnote, and I think I undertook to make the change.  Uh, what he said, Allen’s dead.  Why not let it go?  And in a way, that’s right, but, you know, you can’t tell.  We might meet Allen again sometime.  But in that connection --
MC:  But we had, we had both, at least I had assumed, and I think Vern had assumed that he was long since dead when, this was in 1914, and this was 1945 or ’46 --
VC:  ’48, or ’49, ’50.
MC:  Yeah.
VC:  The other thing is that, uh, Allan Nevins organized the Oral History Project in New York, in Columbia.  And among the first people that he worked, first persons he went to was this fellow, uh, Allen because of Allen’s work in surveying municipalities in school districts.  And I talked to the young man who subsequently went to work for Ford, who did the Allen oral history.  
	And he said, oh, you’re Vernon Carstensen.  I’ve heard a lot about you and a fellow by the name of Merle Curti.  I said, where’d you hear about us?  Well, I’ve been working with Allen and taking his account.  And every damn time I go to talk to him, he spends the first 30 minutes denouncing those two characters in Wisconsin, who had said the nasty things about him.  And that, I’ve been intending to get a hold of that part of Allan Nevins’s stuff.  Well, that’s your --
MC:  That’s the story.
BT:  That is indeed a story.  Can I get you both to sign a release here?
VC:  We don’t know yet what we’re releasing.
MC:  What are we releasing?
BT:  Everything.
[End of Tape 2 and End of Oral History# 333]