UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #230
CARSTENSEN, VERNON

CARSTENSEN, Vernon (1907-1993)1
Professor of History
At UW: 1945-1964

Interviewed: 1982	
Interviewers: Barry Teicher and Laura Smail
Length: 1.5 hours
Transcriptionist:  Premium Business Services (11/14/08)
Auditor:  Tyler C. Kennedy

	[See Index for Key Words]

Interview Session (1982): Tape 1 & 2
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:01
LS:  	-- Carstensen, the details on it will show up later. [break in tape] 
VC:  	-- take notes and go to write a story, and there just wasn’t anything there.  My friend was a splendid orator, but it was oratory, and there wasn’t -- there wasn’t much in what he had to say, and it was a, I think, not prejudice, but a feeling that he just was lightweight for the job, I don’t know.
BT:  	Well, you look at his credentials coming into the presidency, and you’re just astounded, especially after offering to post to Roscoe Collins.
VC:  	Yeah, you’ve heard that story, of Sellery’s, that they went east to get a pound and came back with a frank and didn’t know there was a difference in rate exchange.  You’ve heard that one.
BT:  	No, I haven’t.  
VC:  	Yeah, it’s all, I think, Sellery who hated Frank, Scott’s too.  You don’t have this thing running, or do you?
BT:  	I think she might.
VC:  	Oh.
BT:  	Well, that’s pretty common knowledge.  If you read some [word unclear] at Wisconsin by Sellery, so --
VC:  	Yeah, and his other one that he always liked was it’s the first time, second time a virgin has brought forth a savior.  Zona Gail went east and, uh, and brought the savior in the form ofGlenn Frank.
BT:  	Whom she defended to the death, by the way, as I recall.
VC:  	She, oh, yeah, yeah, right, because she’d been, he’d been her editor I think.  Well, you’ve got a lot of lovely things here.
BT:  	The Frank presidency itself, that’s just essentially what I’m working on right now, it’s just fascinating, the whole thing on his hiring and his firing and then the Snell incident and all those other --
VC:  	And the Experimental College with, who was that Scott --
BT:  	Micheljohn (sp? Meikeljohn?)
VC:  	Micheljohn, have you seen the little thing that, uh, that, his name won’t come for me, in the little biographical sketch of Micheljohn in Dictionary of American Biography?  
BT:  	No, I haven’t.
VC:  	It said a very interesting thing.  Micheljohn, who became the hero of academic freedom, etc., etc., ran Amherst as if he were captain of the ship.  He’d throw out any faculty.  Faculty hated him.  Tom LeDuke, Tom LeDuke, do you know --
BT:  	Yeah, yeah, I’m beginning to think we may have a reprint of that right now.
VC:  	Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is an interesting thing because we have that other picture of Micheljohn here and a very interesting thing he carried on.
BT:  	Yeah, it’s, uh, have you read Larson’s biography of Frank? 
VC:  	Yeah.
BT:  	What was your opinion of that?
VC:  	Uh, well, I knew Larson and liked him, and he’s a half journalist.  He picks up things and makes a good story.  I don’t think I was awfully enthusiastic, but I wasn’t awful, I didn’t want to denigrate it either.
BT:  	I thought it was kind of ironic that one of the points that Larson made is that Frank could speak so well, but there was not substance, and Larson could write so well without a great deal of substance.
VC:  	Yeah, Larson a few years ago, he’s a prodigiously energetic, uh, character.  He found the Army plans on how to protect the Dakotas in case of a war with Canada.  You wouldn’t believe there would you?  Have you been in the Army?
BT:  	No, but I would believe it anyway.
VC:  	He got hold of it and tattled it to the newspapers, and it was a three-day wonder.  Can you imagine defending North Dakota against the Canadian invasion?
LS:  	When was it written?
VC:  	About 1910 or something like that, I don’t remember the dates exactly.
00:04:15
BT:  	How would you characterize Glenn Frank?
VC:  	I?
BT:  	Yeah, personally from your --
VC:  	I never knew him, and I read the transcript before I knew that we were not going to go beyond 1925 at some point along the line when I was going through records and my -- I must confess that I was somewhat, I think, probably prejudiced against him because in my slow‑witted and unimaginative way, it seemed to me that he, if the transcript reflected anything, he wasn’t a man of his word.  He promised to devote full time to the University, and he would never cut off the speeches and the writing and so on, that he was doing.  And that kind of just, uh, of prejudiced me against him again, and on top of that, Dean Sellery, who was the tough old Scotsman from Canada, the [word unclear] historian here, was in retirement.  He read all of our manuscript as they, as we testified to.  I got fairly well acquainted with him.  He’s a man who’s reserved but candid and kind of inflexible.  His, he talked from time to time about Glenn Frank, particularly when he knew we weren’t going to write about him.  Then he said a few things, but with nice reserve on that Ferments of Wisconsin, too much reserve I think.  But I think that he probably also felt to prejudice against me, to make these two statements before, see, I think he was a lightweight who had no business being the president of a university.  He had one idea, and it was a great idea, but not one to pull on a faculty.  We’ll establish an Experimental College, where teaching is done properly and with curriculum is appropriate.
BT: 	 Just want the dean of L & S wants to hear, right?
VC:  	That’s right --
BT:  	[words unclear].
VC:  	And it was a pretty good, of course, it was a pretty good experiment.  You’ve got a lot of information on that, but also it was the kind of thing you’ll recognize would -- if you were writing a novel, and, uh, wanted to use something like that, you’d hesitate about having a president stupid enough to prejudice the faculty against him by saying you birds, particularly if you hadn’t done any work as a president, had never been a teacher to speak of, only a preacher, you wouldn’t have a president of a university go, take steps to, uh, inflame the faculty against you, would you?  Would you use that in fiction?  They’d say, no, they don’t get that far.
BT:  	It’s called plausibility.
VC:  	Yeah.
LS: 	 It’s stranger than -- this is an interview with Vernon Carstensen on September 20th, 1982, who, you’re in town for, what, two days is it?  And Barry Teicher is here, who is the, who is doing research on the, uh, the new, two new volumes of the University history, and I’m Laura Smail of the Oral History Project.  
VC:  	Now we can talk.
LS:  	Now we can talk.
BT:  	I want to continue this one more, this isn’t where I had planned on going, but this is so interesting.  You said that Frank’s one good idea was the Experimental College.  But was that really his?
VC:  	Oh, I don’t know.
BT:  	Because I’m realizing that when he was editor of Sentry, he published an article by Micheljohn on proposal for an experimental type of school.  
VC:  	Probably not his, but, uh, don’t you have to figure that if a president is bright enough to pick up good ideas and move with them, you have to give him credit.  And if he is bright enough to get a very able guy to do it, uh, and manages to do it without troubles, then you[words unclear].
BT:  	Of course, is he’s dumb enough to antagonize the faculty --
VC:  	That’s right.
BT:  	Well, did you read that thing that Sellery said about, uh, the second time they met, or the first time he was at Frank’s house for dinner, Frank took him into the study and showed him a dossier on all the major faculty members that he had had a detective do before he came to Wisconsin?
VC: 	 I remember that.  I wouldn’t have been able to recall it, but, yes.
BT:  	And Sellery just said they weren’t very complimentary, especially mine, and I slammed them shut, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.  And I have a feeling that his opinion was being very strongly formed that this man did not understand the academic, uh, mindset.
00:09:26
VC:  	Yeah, somebody told me, it was also part of the gossip, that Glenn Frank was going to fire Sellery as dean.  You’ve heard this.  He’d announced it.  I think this was, uh, Otto, Max Otto, the philosopher.  And Glenn Frank, uh, announced he was going to fire Sellery.  They all knew about it.  A number of people knew about it, wondered how they could stop it.  Excuse me, I’m getting, picking up a frog.  Um, Sellery was invited to come up to the president’s office from South Hall up to Bascom, which was the president’s office.  And I think Max Otto said he saw Sellery at 11:00 or something walk up the hill and wondered.  A few minutes later, Sellery walked down the hill, and Max Otto an old friend called him to be prepared to sympathize with him.  And apparently Glenn Frank, in the face of Sellery, didn’t have the nerve to throw him out.  Had you heard that?
BT:  	Well, I, the, I hadn’t heard that, but it doesn’t surprise me because one of the regent’s charges, Regent Wilke, who just list of particular, billed as particulars when they fired him, said he is never able to do face to face what he has to do, you know, in order to lead the University.
VC:  	Yeah, I wouldn’t, yeah, I wouldn’t have had courage to fire Sellery either.
BT:  	From what I heard, I would have never even invited him up to my office.
VC:  	I would say it in a letter and gone out of town for a week.
00:11:17
BT:  	If we could move back to, um, getting back to Volumes I and II for just, uh, for just a moment, could you just relate for us briefly the origins of your involvement with Volumes I and II with Curti?
VC:  	Purely accidental and in some ways mad, I had as a doctoral dissertation, written on the history of the University of Iowa up to 1880.  I was, I really fancied myself as a, as a frontier historian if the chances came along to do the origin and early years of the University of Iowa.  And at the time, there also was a promise that if there would be four or five of these done, the Historical Society would publish the monographs, awfully nice attractive thing.  I did that one and finished it in ’36.  And I think it was a pretty good job, and I think I had seen things in the history, The Creation of a State University that nobody -- I was probably one of the early historians to work on it.  You know, we were still, we still had Muncie, not Muncie, we had the fellow from Stanford History of Education kind of --
BT:  	Coverly.
VC:  	Coverly, yeah, the, well, I went away out to Washington, expecting one day I’d hear about revisions and whatnot.  And what I heard was the History Department had a big feud with The Historical Society, and there weren’t any of these going to be published.  So that was that on the, one day I think I got a little abstract published.  But that was all.  The problem with the project went on to 20 volumes of doctoral dissertations and master’s dissertations.  During the war, I left college where I was teaching, The Teacher’s College in Washington to work for Portermaster Corps in [word unclear] in ’44.   Curti got started on his project with support from the, from the Research Committee, and after, he had had two or three research assistants, and before he finished the first year, he was damn sure that it was going to take more than he could get, he and graduate assistants could do to get it finished by ’49.  And Merril Jensen, I don’t know what the story is here.  Merle says he got, that he picked up that the Iowa people sent him my dissertation, read it, liked it.  Merril Jensen had just come here.  I knew Merril quite well from Washington.  Merril said I know the guy.  He’s got only one head and fairly, pretty normal.
00:14:32
	So Curti then got hold of me, wrote to me, asked whether I’d be interested in coming to collaborate.  And this was in the spring of ’45 with the war running down.  I was in Washington at the time, scheduled to go back to Ellensburg, but the chancellor wouldn’t -- Curti, I never met.  It was awfully attractive.  Merle came into Washington, and we talked.  And I agreed, and I said, this is kind of idiotic in my, on my part.  How did I know we could get along, work together?   As it turned -- and I agreed to come to serve as, I would be coauthor and probably do most of the scut work, you know, look after the systems and things of that sort.  And came out, and I don’t believe that we managed to turn that thing out in three years.  And I taught part time.  Merle, of course, I was working on this full time, the history.  Merle taught his full load I believe.  You know Merle Curti, of course.
BT:  	Yes.
VC:  	His seminar, his course, he had six months in India, and with all that, he could, when it came to producing, he could do as much as I could full time.
LS:  	You mean writing?
VC:  	Yeah, yeah, I wrote a little more of the book than he did, but --
BT:  	Now how did you go about dividing and determining who was going to do what and dividing your --
VC:  	We got an outline and kind of divided them up, things like the mind of John Bass and I couldn’t have even come close to me.  I did the stuff such as the legislative things.  Merle couldn’t be bothered how the Legislature was teaching, training the University.  Uh, I did, I think I did Law School, and did engineering, did some of the agriculture, did extension.
BT:  	Did you work out the outline together?
VC:  	We worked out the outline together and then he took the chapters he wanted, and I took the others.
BT:  	How did you go about doing that?  Did you do research before you did the outline, or did it just kind of emerge?
VC:  	On the, we had staff of TAs, two to start with I think, and then four and six, and maybe four.  And we had, um, we set them to work.  I had much more experience with this kind of thing than Merle had.  I knew what the, where the documents were and so on, not where they were, but where, what we ought to be looking for, faculty records, for example, regents’ records, the departmental records if any survived, college records after the colleges came into existence.  They had no archives, and some, we found some things, as you probably know after we finished the damn thing.  
00:17:40
BT:  	We can get to that painful topic later.
VC:  	The, uh, well, actually, some marvelous stuff, I did this chapter on the beginning of intercollegiate athletics.  After we had finished the whole, both volumes had been out two, three years, and I’d caught hell from the athletic department where, what somebody called the muted irony of, in those chapters.  There was a chapter on the beginnings of intercollegiate athletics.  In a ventilating duct in Bascom Hall, under the president’s office, they were doing some remodeling, and they found half, a bundle of records including, would you believe it, the stuff of the 1880s that’s in the archives now.  I think its 1880s and 1890s that goes to the professionalism of track and baseball players.  And the faculty was trying to control it, and faculty couldn’t handle it any more than they can now. 
BT:  	You mean, you conducted your research, and you neglected to look in all the ventilating shafts before?  
VC:  	That’s right.
BT:  	Well, shame on you.
VC:  	But we did, we broke it up.  We, well, take the legislative stuff, and that was the laws and any hearings that we had, um, the House and Senate journals, the special reports, all that was published by the government, by the state government.  And then when the federal government was involved, which it was after, uh, the moral act, we had that category of records.  And we had the local newspapers and the, uh, the Madison newspapers.  Being too detailed on this, you could just see it I expect, these categories of -- oh, and then they, we had two, three fine collections of papers, Elijah Kayes was a regent for a long time, Napoleon Bonaparte Van Schleik, and a fellow name of Paul.  Paul kept good records of society, got them, and what we do is assign a graduate student to a, we tried to work all these things simultaneous kind of together, but assign one to the legislative, the state records, federal records, the archives or the manuscript collection, the faculty, etc.  And we had a weekly meeting in which we talked about what we were coming up with.  So we got through, we didn’t get everything, but we did pretty well I think.  
00:20:45
	And your archival grapevine tell you if you don’t already know that when we were here, up in Bascom Hall was this secretary of the -- well, I’m not sure what he was secretary of, the chap in charge of accreditation high schools, beginning in the late 1860s, early ‘70s, the arrangement worked out, and there’s a little said in Volume I about the relation of the University to the high schools.  If they got accredited, their graduates could come directly into the University without entrance examinations.  The accreditation was worked out with, between this, a secretary of the faculty.  And the superintendent of schools would write in and say could you send out somebody from the faculty to inspect our school?  We can probably pay him a little by advertising the lecture.  He’ll give a lecture.  And he would go out, give his lecture, spend the day in school, look at how they were teaching Greek, Latin, mathematics, geography, what a time, and come back and write a report, which was submitted to the faculty.  And the faculty would then, uh, approve that school for accreditation or whatnot.  We had those damn things up there.  I looked at a batch of them.  I talked to somebody in education.  Here’s a really superb, all of these reports were filed.  All you got in the minutes of the faculty was a reference that the report had been made.  Uh, some idiot secretary up there wanted new room for an idiot boss that she had and took the whole damn bunch of them and destroyed them, I think.  Now you can destroy things, and they always sometimes, they show up again.
BT:  	Well, you know, I have an office in the education building.  Perhaps I should crawl around in the ventilation shafts and see if I can come up with anything.
00:22:55
VC:  	After we, we got an archives, as you may or may not know.  I was made member of that, I guess chairman of the archives committee.
LS:  	Yes, you’re held responsible for starting the archives.
VC:  	No, kind of, but I really didn’t do it.  What I did was to threaten to -- uh, I told Fred Harrington, who was then chairman, that we weren’t getting anywhere with these damned archives.  And there had to be, we had to bring them together.  They had a state archives under Jess Bell, and I was going to write to the president of the university and say, inasmuch as the university is not interested in taking the proper steps to protect its records, I hereby, or your committee recommends that the university records be sent to the state archives.  Fred Harrington, who was really the mover on this, Fred was delighted.  He said give me a day.
LS:  	This was, E. B. Fred was president then.
VC:  	Yeah, E. B. Fred was president, and Fred went to Ingraham, and I don’t know what he said, but apparently he said this madman Carstensen is going to write a letter that’s going to be awfully embarrassing.  We’ve got to cut him off.  And Ingraham said, well, let’s give him a couple of, the equivalent of two TAs to start a survey of the records to go into the archives and the library will be finished in a year from now and we’ll have space.  And Fred apparently had this in mind all the time.  All he needed was somebody, and we got Richard Kirkendahl involved, who is now the Henry Wallace professor at Ames, and another fellow, Rick somebody, who -- you’re going to have to run?
BT:  	No, no, I just had, I was just shutting my -- it goes off on the hour.  I’ll have to shut it down.
VC:  	I’ll have to give you the chance to ask a question.  Um, we started in Ag Hall in tons of dirt, and there, they found almost all of the records that went to establishing what is the, I -- my memory gets a little vague on it.  The Russell and Henry were engaged in carrying on the national propaganda to get money for the county aged system I think.  And those records, it was Russell, he had bundled them up, setting toward successive people had pushed them further and further back under the eaves.  And they used the attic of Ag Hall for their nutrition experiments with mice and rats.   And some of them got away and chewed on documents.  But Kirkendahl and his, Rick Thompson, we never heard anything more from Thompson after he got his Ph.D.  But the two of them spent a couple months up there.  Kirkendahl still remembers that this is where he got started.  He’d come here without a, without a grant.  He did his Ph.D. with Curti.  Well, I talked on --
BT:  	Well, no, I have all afternoon.  I’m in no hurry.  I need to know what your schedule is so that I can –
00:26:11
LS:  	Did you need money for that, for those TAs to --
VC:  	Well that was the equivalent of a teaching assistantship.
LS:  	Yeah.
VC:  	And we were bucking for anything we could get to support our virtuous graduate students.  
LS:  	When did you get the space?  Oh, within --
VC:  	It was about a year, about a year later, but Jess Bell then undertook to direct these guys on what, uh, there’s an awful lot of stuff we didn’t say, but they spent, uh, I think they, a semester or longer, getting the ag stuff started.  And then once we, once we had space here, then we had to, oh, the fac -- got the faculty, as much of the faculty record down the archives as possible.  Alden White was slow to put that down.  Um, the regents were, we went after the regents to put the presidential papers and regents’ records, and initially presidents -- we didn’t have much presidential favor before Adams I think.  
	Maybe, well there’s some change stuff on a little, uh, vast, but they were pretty leery about letting anything out of the center of Bascom Hall until they found, by God, they had a lot more room.  And it was a marvelous change in ten years because, uh, at first you couldn’t pry it loose, and by the end of that time, Jess Bell had set up the kind of relationship of providing service for the records, which the girls up in the offices often couldn’t, couldn’t do if they wanted a document from ten years ago.  Jess got that stuff under control, and once they found that out, they could barely wait for a year to pass before they sent it down.
LS:  	So he was doing a good job then.
VC:  	Oh, he was doing a very good job.
BT:  	Is that right in the basement of the archives?  Is that why they moved in initially.
LS:  	No, they’re on the fourth floor of the library.
VC:  	Yeah, where are they?  Are they still there?
LS:  	They’re now down in the basement.  They have an enormous shelf space now.
BT:  	It’s been how many years since Volumes I and II have been published now?
VC: 	I have no, there, I think it’s 49.
LS:  	It should have been, yes.  Isn’t that --
VC: 	 I think so.
LS:  	And then it was reissued in, what, ’74?
VC:  	Yeah.
BT:  	Um, over the passing of the years, it’s more or less of a --
VC:  	Med School opened about 1870.  They had a grave snatching incident, which they traced to the professor of anatomy and two students in the anatomy class, and that was not viewed kindly.  I’d gotten halfway through when the woman who ran the Historical Society called me up and said Doctor So and So was a member of the first graduating class of the Med School was in town.  This was a long time ago.  And he was a man in his ‘80s.  If you call him, you might get a chance to talk to him a little.  And I called him, and I went and talked to him, asked him about the grave snatching.  Uh, he was a nice old doctor, still pretty sharp.  He had all his wits about him.  But he said, yes, he’d heard about it, but really didn’t, couldn’t help me.  Three or four months later, I got back on the damn thing and found he was one of the students, two students who’d been arrested and I’ve always, every time bright young people tell me about oral history, I remember that one.
00:29:55
BT:  Let’s go right to oral history since we have our oral historian here.
LS:  All right.
BT:  Um, Laura, why don’t you address, um --
LS:  	Well, it’s really, it’s, well, both of our questions, is what use would you liked to have made of oral history, and what, what use could be made of it now?  You know that we have, well, we have about 230 interviews with people, mostly faculty and some students, some administrators, and it’s always been something of a question of who, what was going to be an interest to historians 50 years from now, yes.
VC:  	No, we did, we were primitive.  We made some use of a primitive kind of oral history.  Since we went around to all of the departments in which they had a senior member or a retired member and asked whether we could get a memoir on the department from that person.  We didn’t ourselves make notes, although there were, we did have interviews with some, uh, elder statesmen on which I took notes and Merle Curti took notes.  And I’m not sure whether that was more or less, uh -- probably more efficient than if we’d taped it.
LS:  	I bet it was more efficient, yeah.
VC:  	Uh, because we had so much tape.
LS:  	Yes.
VC:  	You probably, do you still have the tape made or the record made by the Lighty of extension?  Does that mean anything to you?
LS:  	No.
VC:  	Um, we heard that all of the, it’s L-i-g-h-t-y, I think.  He was an assistant director of the extension division, had come in 1915 and was still around in 1946 and ’47.  We had heard that all of extension papers, the whole record just
00:32:05	End of Tape 1, Side 1
Tape 1, Side 2
00:32:06
VC:	 -- around in 1946 and ’47.  We had heard that all the extension papers, the whole record, that this was the creative extension division of the country, as you probably remember.  That all the papers had been destroyed.  Later we found that Lighty had taken them home and put them in his -- uh, uh, to come down to the archives and tape his recollections.  His recollections were abundant, and I think it ran for something like 30 hours.  And then –
LS:  	No, I hadn’t heard of those at all.
VC:  	And then he, whether they were transcribed or not, I don’t know, but  fellow by the name of was it, Rosentreker, that has a history of the extension division here at --I think it’s Rosentreker.  Well, if you don’t have it, you could get it.  He did it, for his doctoral dissertation, and it was published by the University.  Poor Rosentreker had to sit and listen for 30 hours to, um --
BT:  	Full-time job.
VC:  	Yeah, uh, but that was an uncontrolled kind of dictation.  Lighty was asked to recall what he recalled about the establishment and growth and achievements of the, of the division.  And once permitted to, he was apparently capable of a two-hour extemporaneous speech.  And if he prepared it, it would be four, so that this was not surprising.  This doesn’t quite answer your question.  We, Doctor Ev -- we interviewed Doctor Evans, who was kind of the founder of the hospital.  And I think there may even be some slightly incoherent notes that I took over in the University Archives.  Evans, we would have liked to have had on tape because he was articulate, informed, uh, man, who told us more than I got down.  And we’d liked to have had everything again.  So that I don’t answer your question, but the good ones we’d have liked to have had for the record for the --
BT:  	What about the types of things, uh, what types of documents didn’t exist that would have been nice to have had, that we might be able to catch through oral history?  I’m thinking of something like student recollections on life on campus, uh, inside stories from regents on events of the campus.
VC:  	The, uh, did, well, Fred, you won’t get to Fred Harrington atall, will you?  Fred was once going to prepare a --
LS:  	I think [words unclear].
VC:  	Huh?
LS:  	I’ve interviewed him.
VC:  	Have you?
LS:  	A couple times.
VC:  	Yeah, he said he was, once told me he was going to have a dictated, a fairly full account, his memories.
LS:  	Yeah, he would like to do that.
VC:  	Uh-huh, I hope you do get that out of him.  
00:35:26
Students, yes, if you could find student records or student memoirs, uh, they get so, students are so abundant.  And who do you know --
LS:  	That was one of my worries.  How do you decide who was the typical student?
VC:  	Yeah it all gets awfully complicated.  How do you write the history of a nation when you have trouble writing a history of a university?  I don’t know, but there are those problems.  The, uh, and the Student daily, which was fairly new, which we used quite a bit, but how representative the stuff was that we took, I don’t know.  We had a few collections.  We had a few student diaries.
BT:  	Uh-huh, and letters to editors.
VC:  	And a few letters, letters, yeah.  Yeah, we had all the papers of the, uh, oh, Buck, Buck, the first archivist of the United States was an undergraduate here and was an archivist when he was a freshman.  I’m sure he just, he had his parents keep every postcard and every letter that he sent back from the time he rode down to Madison on his wheel.  And he sent the whole batch to us.  We had it microfilmed, and we found very little of it useful because he told his parents about how much he had to pay for lunch and how much laundry cost, etc., that kind of thing.  If you can get, if you can get the students, what’s going to be, would be awfully good too, if you can get the, um, the great scientific or other discoveries.
LS:  	Well, there’s been some, some effort on that score.  I mean, if Farrington Daniels, there’s an interview with him.
VC:  	And his papers are complete I think in the archives, aren’t they?
BT:  	Karl Paul Link, Steenbock.
LS:  	Uh, no.
VC:  	Is Karl Paul Link still living?
LS:  	No, he just died.
VC:  	Oh.
LS:  	I think fairly recently.
VC:  	Yeah, Steenbock and Link were the two big ones.  Of course, Link has written rather imaginatively his enemies in ag he still [word unclear] about the discovery of Dicoumarol.  Somebody in genetics also made a contribution of, that Karl Paul Link didn’t acknowledge.  They’re very sensitive about those matters.
LS:  	But do you, that, that’s not useful for this volume though, do you think, talking to people about their discoveries?
VC:  	Well, you’re going to pay some attention to, uh, you’re not going to cover all of them.  But you’re going to look at the increase, say, in the number of members in the National Science, the National Academy of Sciences between 1925 and 1946.  And you’re going to pick up two or three.  You might take Hart and the work he did on, uh, [word unclear] what was it?  He developed a iron or a copper that, uh, could be used for anemia or Elvehjem with his, whatever it is experiments were on forlegra, or they found a cure forlegra art, and Elvehjem, Karl Paul Link, whose contribution was terrific and controlled blood clotting, and a few others.
00:39:45
BT:  	Uh, what --
VC:  	Maybe those might be the ones you tape, but --
LS:  	The equivalent now, you mean.
VC:  	Huh?
LS:  	The equivalent now, that is, they’re all gone.
VC:  	They’re gone, but, uh, you’re going to have, you’re going to do something on the growth of Wisconsin as a research institute.
BT:  	Oh, very much, it’s going to have a major --
VC:  	And the, uh, the number invited to become members of the National Academy of Sciences is the accrued index of the success of the quality.
LS:  	And you’re saying you’d then go and interview those people, for instance, the National Science Foundation people.
VC:  	Oh, oh, no, I guess I was just thinking of, uh, if you could find any of them, to talk about, if you found one or two of these people still living, or somebody could talk about what went into --
LS:  	All right.  I mean, I just interviewed somebody who was, Phil Cohen, who’s in physiological chemistry.
VC:  	Yeah, I knew Phil Cohen.
LS: 	 And, did you?  Well, he’s just fine.  He’s semi-retired, yes, he’s in things all over the place, Brazil, Mexico.  And I talked to him.  He was a graduate student here in the 1930s, and I talked to him about how he worked with students and a little bit about -- but I didn’t ask him how did you go about accomplishing what you accomplished in your scientific research because, I mean, would you put that?
VC:  	I don’t know.
BT:  	Gee, I wish John was here.  I could point to him because he’s handling the whole part on research.  
LS:  	That has, some people have been at it, I think --
VC:  	Yeah, maybe it isn’t a very good idea.  Maybe it isn’t a good idea at all, um, because if you’re, you can get the kind of outer dimensions, which you get from the record.  But then the minute you, uh, you single one man out, you may offend --
LS:  	You’re right down to the individual again.
VC:  	Yeah, and then you may offend all the others.
00:42:15
LS: 	 In this case, it was how, what encouraged you?  How did the environment here either discourage you or encourage you in your research?  And that was very interesting because you know what the Medical School was like for a long time.
VC:  	Uh-huh, and the [word unclear] Chem department, is it still a great department?
BT:  	Uh-huh.
VC:  	Well, this is a, going to be an interesting thing for you to tackle if you want to.  When you get testimony, Ingraham would be a nice guy to testify on this if he would.  Um, we had, at one time, on the University two in-grown departments, largely in-grown.  Economics, maybe one person who got a degree outside of Wisconsin, and it was not a very good department.  This was before Ed Young came in and kind of revised it.  And the talk would be if you wanted to see a department go downhill, hire your own Ph.D.s [word unclear].  Everybody knows that.
BT:  	That’s what Economics did.  Is that what you’re saying, that’s what Economics Department --
VC:  	Yeah, that’s what the people would say about Economics.  There was one occasion which E. B. Fred, and Brittingham got together, Brittingham gave umpteen tens of thousands of dollars to establish a professorship in social sciences, one of the weakest, the weakest department.  And they named sociology, and it took ten years before sociology would accept the money.
LS:  	That’s a new story.  I mean, I know about the, I know about the Brittingham money.
BT:  	They said the weakest department, that it was the, it was the --
VC:  	Yeah, uh, oh, Bert Fischer and [word unclear].
LS:  	And Bill Sewell.
00:44:07
VC:  	Bill Sewell, several of the rest of us were, that, active in the ‘50s to try to, to make, to try to crack WARF as we say, and you’ve got --
LS:  	Uh-huh, that’s been a main subject of my interviews.
VC:  	You’ve got a record over here.  Do you know who set it up to do, to open it to all?
LS:  	Well, Harrington is what I understand, but I--
VC:  	Well, no, Nafziger and I, you can find the records over here.  Uh, I got the, I got a copy of the charter and sent it to Ralph Nafziger, who is chairman of the social science division, with letters to E. B. Fred and Duvall and Elvehjem, saying, you know, there doesn’t say anything about restricting, uh, research support to the biophysical.
LS:  	I heard that, but I didn’t know who had done it.
VC:  	Physical and biological sciences, you’ll probably find a copy of the letter over in the archives because there were enough sent.  Uh, now how come we don’t share in the money?
LS:  	Yeah.
VC:  	The, it was out of that, E. B. Fred began to work toward, uh, making it possible to share.
LS:  	E. B. Fred, oh.
VC:  	Yeah, E. B. Fred and Elvehjem, they were a little embarrassed, and --
LS:  	[words unclear].
VC:  	Well, it’s interesting.  It’s, the story is all in the Nafziger and E. B. Fred, and I think there might even be some of my papers over there on social science division.  That was the beginning, they, uh, and it relates to restricting the, uh, the income from, what is it, the --
LS:  	WARF.
VC:  	No, uh, WARF money became available for social science research.  But at some point along here, E. B. Fred was complaining to Brittingham, as I got the story, about the social science people who were bitching about their not having enough money, etc.  And Brittingham said, let’s give them a professorship.  I’ll put up the money.  It wasn’t large, $50,000 or $100,000 something like that.  This is of a Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon, and they got Bob Tater together, they worked out a news release, which in effect said, Brittingham is giving another gift to the University, something to strengthen all the weakest departments.  And social science is -- it might not have been quite that obvious, but that’s the way it was interpreted, and then went on to name sociology.
LS:  	Actually, it was Guy Orcutt, and he came in Economics that they used that money for as I understand it.
VC:  	Was it?  I thought it was another numbers man in sociology.  Well, it doesn’t matter.
LS:  	It could be a different -- we may be talking about two --
VC:  	Yeah, um, well, I got, I drifted off.
BT:  	Well, that could be very interesting.
LS:  	Yes.
BT:  	Um, when we talked to –
00:47:30
LS:  	You’re not leaving oral history yet, are you?
BT:  	Oh, did you want to ask him about all this, okay.
LS:  	Well, I’m just, uh, it’s my feeling about oral history is that the best it can do is to point to places that you should then go into the archives and look.
VC:  	And look, I think that’s, I think that’s right.
LS:  	It can --
VC:  	And you better always check the data because I know my memory is not to be trusted.  Uh, Fred Harrington’s ought to be trusted more than mine, but most people will make mistakes of one kind or another.
LS:  	This really ties in with the fact that there’s a lot more information in the files now than there was.
VC:  	There is so doggone much that you, the point of having any more to deal with makes you shudder, doesn’t it?
BT:  	Yeah.  I’ve, uh --
VC:  	Yeah, I think I’d let, I’ve stayed with right with your statement on all of this.
LS:  	That it points, that it can point to a [word unclear].
VC:  	It can point, it can hide certain things.
LS:  	Yeah, yes, that’s right.
VC:  	But, yeah --
BT:  	Um, okay, when John and I had lunch with Professor Curti back at the beginning of summer, we asked him if there were any things that we should be aware of and we should be looking for when we research Volumes III and IV, um, any kind of hints he could give us on issues to be aware of, etc., and he named three or four.  For example, he said look at the Wisconsin idea and see what happened to that.  Look at the sense of faculty and academic community and see what happened to that over time.  Look at the, uh, the whole thing about political intervention and the role of the Legislature as it relates to the UW administration.  Um, based on your own experience on, on this particular time period, 1925 to 1973, is there anything that you could name right off that we should be aware of, that might not be real obvious in the records, any themes, anything like that? 
VC:  	Well, I’d certainly agree with everything that Merle told you.  
00:49:44
The, um, one of the things that might be interesting, I don’t think it’s all too important, but might be interesting for you to be alert about, and that is the way in which La Follette and the progressives and the Wisconsin idea all the rest as symbols came to be kind of sanctified by people who really didn’t agree with any of this.  When, um, Rennebohm was Governor, he could cite, or his speechwriters would cite the progressive Wisconsin, Wisconsin idea, and the La Follettes in, you probably remember that.
LS:  	No, but I’ve --
VC:  	In protection, in justification and support of whatever his program was.  Uh, he didn’t support any of them, but the, it’s the way Lincoln, all the Republicans have had to get right with Lincoln.  And Democrats, I suppose, with Jefferson.
BT:  	Or almost the way Reagan was quoting Roosevelt or who --
VC:  	Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.  It’s not awfully important, but it’s worth looking at.  The, you’re going to have a very interesting thing I think.  I never have known quite how to handle this.  On the one hand, uh, the University, which loomed so very large by 1915, and you talk, there’s talk in the national magazines about the university that runs a state, etc., and its work benefits the whole state.  Its, uh, beneficial discoveries reach out and touch the whole state.  On one hand, it is, the university is celebrated and continues to be celebrated as the kind of great secular cathedral for Wisconsin.  Uh, you have that.  On the other hand, you get a lot of people who want to attack the university, and you never quite know, uh, which is the serious phase when who’s a sociologist here, who is under investigation?  A fine old guy, who caused a lot of trouble in the teens, and he’s, oh, I should remember his name, Ross.
BT:  	Yeah.
VC:  	Ross, he was investigated by one of the Legislatures, one of the legislative committees.  They thought he was a red radical.  And Ross put on a great show, and everybody loved it, apparently, almost everybody except the troglodytes who didn’t like it.  He was called down to the Legislature to be interrogated about his ideas, and he brought all 32 volumes.  You’ve heard that story --
BT:  	Yes, I have, no, go ahead --
VC:  	-- down there.  Then they wanted to ask him about his ideas, and he said, which ideas?  That’s a story you’ve heard?
BT:  	Yeah, I had heard, I had heard something similar to that.
VC:  	Yeah, now, which is the, is the investigation the serious thing or is the great approval of Ross?  There was a [word unclear] approval of Ross for his outwitting Legislatures, a university professor.  I don’t know.
BT: 	Yeah.
VC:  	I’m not sure whether what I’m saying is breaking clear.
BT:  	Well, no, I think, I, yeah, there’s that delicate balance there as to who’s on first kind of type thing, and --
VC:  	Yeah, yeah, there’s the respect that runs almost along with the, uh, the University is something to attack.  
BT:  	Uh-huh, but at the same time, you have to depend, defend the freedoms that go along.  Well, there’s a story that kind of, that almost seems to sum that up.  Remember when the Red Meeting was broken up on campus in, I think, 1935.  A student meeting had a Communist speaker from out of town.
VC:  	Yeah, yeah.
BT:  	The jocks came after football [word unclear] and threw them in the lake.  And what the jocks were doing was buying what the media had been saying and what the legislator had been saying about this being a Red institution, etc., and they wanted to show that what they did to the Reds -- and as soon as they did that, the very people who had been criticizing the Reds on campus came out and said, you can’t do this.  This is the freedom of, freedom of speech.  And so these poor jocks were kind of caught on the horns of that dilemma and, you know, kind of did what they thought people wanted them to do and then got, they got crucified the next day for doing precisely that.
00:54:41
VC:  	Yeah, another thing, uh, well, you’ve looked at the plaque, and you probably have, if you haven’t come on it, you will encounter it, Ted Herforth’s little essay on the sifting and winnowing plaque.  Have you seen that?
BT:  	I haven’t seen the essay.
VC:  	Ah, there is a plaque, there is an essay that a, uh, a very conservative insurance man here in Madison wrote about the plaque, those magnificent words that, uh, that thrilled him and cheered him.  Now this is a nice, conservative, Republican insurance executive.  God, he used to telephone me.  He liked purple prose too, and he had a lot of it.  But he’d telephone me and want me to read his latest paragraph.  He finally wrote about, I think it was around 150 pages and wanted the regents to publish it.   He’d also been handing over a few thousand dollars a year to the regents for Herforth Scholarship awards in memory of his wife.  And what do you do with a ‑‑ and he was also thought to be loaded with money.  It turned out he did have half million or so and left a large chunk of it to the University.  What do you do with it, with somebody who’s admiring your institution?  Think it’d be nice if you published his essay celebrating the plaque, how it came to be.  It’s a --
LS:  	At least he wasn’t attacking it.  That would be a [word unclear].
VC:  	Oh, no, um, well, they got, I think Herb Wilde signed up to edit it and reduce it so it’s maybe 30-, 40-page thing.  Herforth screened every sentence that had to be sacrificed.  But here’s a wealthy, conservative, Republican business executive who is celebrating that hunk of metal up there nailed to the Bascom Hall.  In the period after World War II, if you go back on the history of it, the regents were out of their mind with anger at those impertinent young whippersnappers who tried to embarrass them by handing them that plaque in 1914.  Do you know that about it?
LS:  	No.
VC:  	It was handed as a criticism of the way the regents had conducted their, their business because they had thought of firing Ross, they made Turner so unhappy he went to Harvard.  Um, they were doing a lot of things 1910, ’11, in there.  And it was the class of 1910 which got money, I think, in 1915, instead of putting a stone on the campus or something of that sort, they decided they would, some La Follette admirer, a public relations guy suggested they would take that phrase out of Adams’s report on the Ely Trial, put it, cast it in bronze, and give it to the University.  And my sequences have gotten vague on it, but it was quite a dust-up, uh, that over, the, the, when they first made the plaque, the regents declined to accept it.  Then the -- I think that was, maybe they made it as a graduation present.  They came back five years later.  And by God, the regents were going to nail it to a building, or they were going to buy two square feet of, uh, of land down on State Street and erect it at the entrance of the University.  Well, Van Hise worked it out so that they -- and the students said five years later, they really hadn’t intended to criticize the regents.  All they’d wanted to do was to call attention to the glorious university.  So it, uh, got nailed to Bascom Hall.  But, you see, this was the, a part of the La Follette, progressive, disruptive influence, an attack on the conservatives.  Thirty years later, the plaque becomes something all the conservatives celebrate.
00:59:47
LS:  	Yeah.
VC:  	Now what the hell is going on here?
BT:  	Very, very interesting.
VC:  	You seem very interested in a lot of those things.
BT:  	Yeah, that’s very interesting.  I think that’s --
VC: 	 Now the way Ronald Reagan, you know, would not interfere with academic freedom when he was governor of California, and they had all the troubles around Berkeley, he wouldn’t [words unclear].  He’d like to string them up, I’d suppose.  
BT:  	Yeah [word unclear].
VC:  	Um, I’m still trying to fiddle around and see if I can think of anything else, but for the moment, on these, the big issues of the period, I think the Wisconsin Idea, um, that’s a, that’s one that give you troubles, I expect, and a lot of fun because it kind of, could be used both by, by the, uh, the devout and the sinful to cover all kinds of things.
BT:  	Uh-huh.  I heard an interesting statement this morning by a Regent Wilke at Frank’s dismissal hearings.  And he said that, um, he didn’t mention the Wisconsin Idea, obviously, but he said one of the charges against Frank is he had just let teaching go, I think the phrase he used was almost something like to hell in a bucket and that we all know that the main purpose of this great university is to teach undergraduates and to teach them alone.  And it’s nice if we can have a few famous researchers around here, but it’s teaching that’s number one at this university.  And he emphasized it over and over and over again, and I thought that’s kind of interesting in light of the whole Wisconsin Idea.
VC: 	 Yeah, you’ve been, have you got something, it was just coming into my mind on this is, uh, when I came in ’45, the idea at least in the History Department and other departments, seemed to me it was true, that the research was important, and you had to do it and had to do publication, but your first obligation was as a teacher.
BT:  	Now is this something that you were told, or is this something that you just kind of picked up as --
VC:  	Both told and, uh, you also saw it.  Um, Paul Knaplund, for example, who was the big, uh, the hippopotamus of the big, the most powerful man in the History Department would never miss an undergraduate lecture.  And he, himself, I think read many of the papers.  He interviewed every student in his big course on the British Empire once a semester.  And he had, he apparently had one of these memories, where he could  see a student once, get the face and the name and remember him three years later when he came in.  Uh, Bill Iselton would emphasize you didn’t, you never neglected your students.  Teaching was important, and later, it got so that, well, and we, you also had the mechanisms for it to go away to a professional meeting.  You applied for a leave of a day or two through your chairman and to the dean, for two reasons.  One, and you had to have your classes covered, one, to keep the classes covered, and the other, keep your industrial insurance operative in case you got in an auto accident.  That’s what they said.  But, no, the emphasis was, was pretty heavy there.  And the question, you ask anybody in any of the state universities about the importance of teaching.  They’ll all tell you it’s very important.  Where were you an undergraduate?
BT:  	UWM.
VC:  	Teaching’s very important.  Was it?
BT:  	Yes, I would say it was.
VC:  	Uh-huh, uh, they, in all departments?
BT:  	In the departments, in anthropology and English, the two departments I was involved --
VC:  	Uh, at Iowa where I was a, where I did work, they said that it was important, but nobody much cared if you, you know, the chairman of the History Department –
01:04:40	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side 1
0:00:00
 VC:	Uh, in all departments?
BT:	In the departments, in anthropology and English, the two departments I was involved --
VC:	Uh, at Iowa where I was a, where I did work, they said that it was important, but nobody much cared if you, you know, the chairman of the History Department, uh, got tired with his lectures and took a month off.  And nobody raised any objections.  That’s a little more like it is today.  I don’t know whether, uh, how it has changed.  But they, the importance of teaching regularly and well if you could, regularly, was part of the, of what was in the atmosphere.  
BT:  	A little more, I just want to ask if you, one or two more general questions.  Then I’ll have the main information.
VC:  	[words unclear] 
BT:  	Well, if the question --
VC:  	But you’ve got a question.
00:01:05
BT:  	Yeah, the question I was going to ask is obviously we’ll be doing a chat for President Frank, and one on President Dykstra, and at least one on E. B. Fred.  I don’t know.  He may take a couple, but, uh, who are the other major figures, like between ’25 and ’46 or even ’25 and ’73 if you wanted to jump ahead, who were not presidents of the University?  Sellery is, comes to mind.
VC:  	Sellery is obviously one.  Uh, I’d think Paul Knaplund.  Now there is a difficult one in some respects, but Knaplund was kind of a conscious of the University.  E. B. Fred, I think, was made unhappy by Paul Knaplund, who was the man who was stickler for, for propriety.  But Paul Knaplund, uh, it was to Paul Knaplund, we were told that the University owed the library.  The Legislature was about ready to cut out the library appropriations.   And Paul, who had been promised a university library for years, up until ’52, university and Historical Society were all in that little building because they kept getting promised a university library.  And I don’t know the details about that, but I’m told.  Paul mobilized all his former students, all of his friends around the state to bring pressure on both E. B. Fred, who was going to, or whoever was handling the legislative lobbying and on the Legislature to keep the appropriation from being dropped for the library.  
BT:  	Huh, I didn’t know that.
VC:  	Now one of the very small, minor things, during the, uh, during the period that we were using, we had a student going through the regents’ records for us.  And we got up to the regents’ vault, we had been insured free access as I am sure you’ve been insured free access, free access to all University records.  There was a full, uh, on the Ely Trial that Irv Wiley wanted, and the secretary of the regents told him, no, that file is sealed.  Irv reported it to Merle and to me.  We took it very seriously.  Instead of going back on the secretary, we went to Paul Knaplund and said, I really didn’t like what we said because I was here just on a temporary appointment at that time.  But we said that, uh, we’d been denied access to these records in the regents’ office.  It will, we don’t know yet what our decision will be.  We, on further consideration, we may feel that it is impossible to continue with the project and simply drop it, uh, because we can’t be in a situation in which we don’t have access to the records.  Or if we don’t view it as that, quite that seriously, we might want to drive past this roadblock and then in our introduction pointedly point out that, uh, it has been impossible for us to examine all records normally considered necessary for a study of this sort. 
00:04:57
	But we thought, Knaplund was chairman of the Centennial History Committee, and Knaplund said, well, now don’t discuss this any further, either of these possibilities until you’ve given me 24 hours.  And we said, fine.  And the next morning, Knaplund called and said, um, there has probably been some mistake on the part of the secretary of the faculty.  He didn’t really understand, uh, what went on.  Well, I called the president of the [word unclear], Mr. Sensenbrenner, and I explained to him what had happened and that this is something that should not ever happen in a university, and moreover the regents had pledged access to the records.  Sensenbrenner called the secretary and told him that he had no authority to withhold anything.  And he called me and told me that he had just made a mistake.  He didn’t know that Wiley was working with a history.  And we went, I then, I think, went over and got it.
BT:  	Was the file that hot?
VC:  	No, it wasn’t.  But there’s Paul Knaplund for you at his best.  And you’ll find a number of cases where academic freedom and proper procedures, etc., etc., come into question.  And Knaplund apparently emerged as a, uh, as a champion of the faculty.  So he should be kept in mind.  I think --
LS:  	Harrington speaks a great deal about him, and --
VC:  	Huh?
LS:  	Harrington speaks a great deal about him.
VC:  	Yeah.  The, I don’t think Harrington liked Paul, but he respected him.
LS:  	Well, he admired him.  I think he respected him, yes.
VC:  	Ingraham is certainly a large [word unclear].  E. B. Fred you’re already getting.
00:07:01
BT:  	Uh-huh, characterize E. B. Fred for me.
LS:  	Yes.
VC:  	I won’t because I don’t know, except I’ll say this.  There, from time to time, you might hear people saying E. B. Fred was something of a fuddy-duddy.  You’ve heard of that.
BT:  	Uh-huh.
VC:  	Um, he was a fuddy-duddy in the same way that Eisenhower it turned out was a fuddy‑duddy.  He’d use it to, uh, to confuse you.  He was a great guy to create committees.  He’d have a problem up there in his office and go out in the hall and waylay the first two or three professors that came along and have them come in and talk about his problem and often just used them as sounding boards.  And sometimes, you’d go to him and try to get something.  And you’d swear that he’s never going to, never can even get through to him because he wanted to show you this piece of hybrid corn that he had in plastic, and he wanted to talk to you about how they ran these breeding co-ops.  Usually, it was, he knew what you were after, and he wasn’t going to get, he wasn’t going to turn you down, but he wasn’t even going to let you get the point where you laid the question, asked your question.  But I remember on one occasion, he had, he was considering the appointment of a new dean of education, of all places, and somebody had told him that I knew a couple of people who were serving under the guy.   He was president of Iowa State Teachers at the time.  So he called me and said, is it true?  And I said, yes, I did know a few members of the faculty.  Well, I’d like to have you put in a telephone call.  Now this, I said, this is somewhat confidential, but I’d like to have you call these men.  And there are three things I want you to ask each one about [words unclear].  And he ticked them off, one, two, three, and write me a memo.  And if you could have it for me by 8:00 tomorrow morning, I’d appreciate it.  And on this case, none of this flimflam, not a bit of it, he was, uh, this, and it was one, two, three.  
00:09:37
	One, he wanted to know how he got along with faculty.  One, he wanted to know how he was on the matter of academic freedom, and how he was on research.  Uh, you can get, anything else you pick up, but I want information on those.  And it turned out I called the people he told me to, there was the, he didn’t even ask who I was calling.  He just, I did happen to know a couple people there.  I called them, got responders, and the fellow, at least from their vantage point looked, uh, magnificent, he came over here, but he didn’t want the job. 
LS:  	This was to, for education.
BT:  	Department of Education.
LS:  	How did you finally get one?
VC:  	I’ve forgotten where it was then.
LS:  	What stage of it, yeah.
VC:  	Yeah, but, uh, E. B. Fred was a, you’ve heard this before, I expect, a man devoted to the University, an operator.  Never, he was never one to, uh, to seek a high profile, I guess the phrase is.  He liked to work quietly behind the scenes if possible.  He could come out if the going got very rough.  But on the whole, he didn’t like to, the grandstand play such as Frank liked.  He always wanted to keep things quiet, be reasonable and come to good conclusions.  He was, somebody told me, shortly after he got to be president, that he had run, for all practical purposes, he had run the, would it be the Bacterial --
LS:  	Bacterial --
BT:  	Bacterial --
VC:  	-- Association for years --  
LS:  	As vice president.
VC:  	-- from behind the scenes.  But one year, they made him president.  And it was the worst year he’d ever put in because he had to be right out there in front.
BT:  	Interesting.  What about Dykstra?
VC:  	I don’t know anything about him, uh, at all, never met him.  Let’s see, did I, I may have met, no, he was out of town the time I came through, and he was here.  Uh, he wasn’t very good.
BT:  	That’s kind of the impression I’ve been getting.
VC:  	Some way, uh, oh, who did the history of the College of Agriculture?  
LS:  	Russell?
VC:  	No, wrote the history of the college.  His name, I should, I had it a moment ago.  His father was a member of the board for a time, was editor of [words unclear], and his father’s observation of Dykstra was he was just a big stalwart, no, a big stolid Dutchman, who couldn’t, had no notion what a university ought to be, but had run Cincinnati as a business, as a city manager, got it through a flood, hadn’t he?
BT:  	Yeah.
VC:  	But the University of Wisconsin was not --
BT:  	It’s really interesting that after all of the charges against Frank, so many of them revolving around the fact that he wasn’t aware of --
VC:  	An academic.
BT:  	He wasn’t, yeah, he wasn’t an academician, that they should go out and then hire the city manager from Cincinnati.
VC:  	Yeah.
BT:  	I would think that after that, they would go out of their way to bring in a college dean at least, if not president.
00:13:51
VC:  	Yeah, you never know what moves them.  Uh, yeah, I, I was amazed that they took Dykstra.
LS:  	But Dykstra had had an academic background.  I mean, his, the Cincinnati was the, was the immediately preceding job, but before that --
VC:  	Yeah, but he had been a, he had been a dean, yeah.  Uh, they, I remember we were much amused when we looked at the regents hiring Chamberlain, who followed Bascom.  And on that one, we have magnificent records, the Kayes records and Paul and one or two others.  So we had almost the blow by blow on that.  But if, the thing that amused us was that the regent, the search committee for all practical purposes identified the traits that they disliked in Bascom and then listed the opposite traits as the man, that they wanted for their new man and then sought to apply them to Chamberlain.  Now how well they did, I don’t, did it, I don’t know.  They got Chamberlain out of the U.S. Geological Survey.
BT:  	That’s right, yeah.
VC:  	And there, they got a man with, uh, well, who was just right for the transition from college to university.  He’s the guy who opened up the research, really gave them the idea of extension, started graduate work, etc., etc., quite a guy.  
00:15:43
BT:  	I started asking you this question before, and then the last tape ran out, and the same thing with this time, looking back on, on your Volumes I and II, retrospect, is there anything that you would do differently now if you were to write the volumes at this point in time?
VC:  	If, yeah, I suppose, but I’m not, I couldn’t identify any --
BT:  	There’s no major thing?
VC:  	No major difficulty.
BT:  	[word unclear] yeah.
VC:  	Uh, there are small things, I suppose, where we didn’t have the, or we didn’t have the information, and I suppose -- I haven’t really read them for ten or so years since I relooked at them.  I was pleased from the most recent edition of the Harvard Guide, they were still identified as the setting the standard for --
LS:  	Oh, good.
VC:  	That, it’s a very nice statement that Dick Showerman, Showerman, yeah, had put to then Frank Prudell, to say the university histories extend all the from a Curti-Carstensen Volume to shameless propaganda or something of that sort, which I thought pretty nice being on --
BT:  	I want to tell you that John and my job would be a lot easier if you guys wouldn’t have done such a good job.  It’s a tough act to follow, let me tell you.
VC:  	Uh, I, well, I think it was a pretty good job.  But I don’t think there’s anything in it that, uh, makes it hard to follow because what if they, I think the great virtue of it was the, uh, fairly complete and sensible coverage of the, uh, major aspects of the rise of a state university.  Your difficulty will be, it seems to me, that enormous amount of documentation that you face, and the difficulty of, which may have been being submerged in your, uh, being lost in the forest.
BT:  	To go back to a, this thing we were talking about before, John and I, I guess, are going to have to become experts at sifting and winnowing.
VC:  	Yeah.
BT:  	We’ll have to go get a copy of that plaque and place it on our office desk.
LS:  	Would you say you had a point of view, could you say what your point of view was about the history of the University in --
VC:  	Oh, here, maybe, as a matter of fact, I think if we were writing today, we would be less optimistic.  But a point of view, I think neither of us were, uh, were really caught in what you could probably say point of view.  What we were trying to do was look at the full record to the extent that we could and watch this institution emerge.  And it was a very interesting, I think very exciting kind of thing to, as you see these people flooding this land in the 1830s and ‘40s and ‘50s, with all the ideas that they had, and ideas is all people ever have in organizing their institution, their lives, and so on.  And a certain group calls it, well, they’re, they don’t call the university into existence.  These characters back in 1787, wasn’t it, with the Ohio, with the Northwest Ordinance, uh, not the Northwest Ordinance, but the Ohio, the sale of land the Ohio company had made their first two-township grant for a literary institution or something of that sort.  And it’s that hunk of wild land that, that gets them started.  And it’s the habit, habit?  Well, it’s something that they’re, this is their secular cathedral by golly, there’s, is being erected. 
00:20:12
	And I think one of the things that would, what would, uh, probably would be present if we wrote that history today would be, uh, some greater caution about the value of all the biological research and the physical research, we certainly sure as well would show.  We, uh, the experiment stations were magnificent.  For example, in Wisconsin’s, with those two early discoveries, the Babcock Milk Test, uh, suddenly made the scientists necromancers, and the work that Russell did on bacteriology control for bovine tuberculosis and canning, even though it’s pedestrian things, it’s important.  Uh, well, that, I don’t think anybody foresaw the herbicides and the insecticides, nobody foresaw the, where physics research would take us.  And we were still, we’re not entirely blind but optimistic when we were writing, but the future looked less bleak in terms of, uh, the rewards of scientific research when you were writing than it will be when Volumes III and IV come out.
BT:  	And that really come, will come to issue and come to a head in Volume IV during the --
VC:  	Yeah, yeah. 
BT:  	-- during the late ‘60s, certainly.
VC:  	Yeah, we, I think both of us, uh, along with almost everybody else is enormously impressed by what had been accomplished, particularly in the Ag College, particular with the health sciences there, vitamins, the, and the Dicoumarol, the Hart’s work on -- Dow Chemists were terrific over there.  And it was one of the ironies that it was the Ag College that made the great contributions to human health, not the Med School.  So it is true, isn’t it?
BT:  	Yeah.
LS:  	Would you say that one would want to look into what the University was doing in, for the future of society, and would say has it paid much attention to environmental research?  And, would that be something that an historian should think about in writing?
VC:  	They don’t really get around to it, do they, until the ‘70s and ‘80s?
LS:  	Well, maybe they don’t, but I’m --
VC:  	You had, you had Leopold, uh, well, you have the Leopold and the people over there who were, a few of them, who were concerned with preserving the good earth as it were.  Um, you had work on rural lands on them and things of that sort.  
LS:  	And water resources, I imagine.
VC:  	Well, yeah.
LS:  	It’s work to --
VC:  	Engineering is doing a little on that.  I don’t know how much of a story there is there, probably not as much as they would like to have.
00:23:54
LS:  	Do you think somebody who’s been an administrator can write this history?  Will he not be, would he not be too involved in defending a point of view?
VC:  	I --
LS: 	 I mean, neither of you were.  You were both just historians.
VC:  	Oh, no.  Is your man an administrator?
BT:  	Hmm.
LS:  	Don’t have a man, don’t have --
BT:  	No, we have, the ultimate writer, uh, we don’t know who the ultimate writer is.
VC:  	Oh, he hasn’t been picked yet.
BT:  	No, or she.
VC:  	Or she, it hasn’t been picked, yeah, yeah.  Um, yeah, you have then to take care to complete notes, don’t you?
BT:  	Yes.
VC:  	And having to pretty well, of course, you control, you will control pretty much what they --
BT:  	The direction.
VC:  	Yeah.
BT:  	Where things are heading, yes.  Fortunately, Xerox machines are abundant on this campus, or I think we would really be --
LS:  	Fortunately or unfortunately.
BT:  	Well, unfortunately.
LS:  	Best thing about notes is this thing --
VC:  	But what?
LS:  	It’s easier to read notes than to read texts, let alone to listen to, uh, tapes.
VC:  	Yeah, you had, is that a --
LS:  	Yeah, this is, this is the index of all the, uh, the ideas in the Oral History Project.
VC:  	Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi.
LS:  	See, if they were, if there are good ideas, one can catch them here.  You just, uh, which is what the computer was used for.
VC:  	Oh, the computer will, if I want to find out about --
LS:  	No, no, the computer, on the computer was put this index.  The material was indexed.  But you could tell from this where to look in anybody’s volume --
BT:  	The ideal thing would be able to then punch them up on the computer some day.
LS:  	Of course, it would, yes.
BT:  	Boy, do you have $2 million you’d like to leave to the University? 
VC:  	I thought --
LS:  	Which is what the John [word unclear] does. 
VC:  	Well, all of this stuff, Florida Foundation, what are you going to do about the Florida Foundation grants to the University.  I see you note, foundation, a note on foundations.  Emily Hahn is here.  
BT:  	I don’t know Emily Hahn.
VC:  	She had --
LS:  	[Words unclear] oh, you’re, she was a woman student in the 1920s who decided to go into engineering, just because goddammit nobody went into engineering.  And she did, she subsequently has become a very well known writer and she writes, she’s now, I suppose in her 60’s now.  She started out with things in the New Yorker.
BT:  	Why don’t I know Emily Hahn?
VC:  	Yeah.
LS:  	She sent a lot of writing recently on, on chimpanzees and gorillas and things like that, but she’s, she’s a freelance writer.  She was in --
VC:  	You’re going to have to know all those, aren’t they?
LS:  	Yes.
VC:  	Yeah, Emily Hahn graduated about the same time --
LS:  	She was in Dorothy Matthin’s class.
VC:  	Dorothy Matthin’s class, uh-huh, and her, she had an autobiographical volume, in which she tells about her years at Wisconsin.  I just happened to be reading and read that a month or so ago, so charming.
LS:  	Yeah, she’s a --
VC:  	Sellery had refused to let her take a course with somebody over in engineering.  So she moved over to engineering.  The engineers all hated her, and so she stayed.
00:27:23
BT:  	Well, that is another thing that we will be emphasizing in Volumes III and IV, I think, is the role of women in the University --
VC:  	Uh-huh.
BT:  	-- the increasing role that went on over time.
LS:  	No, decreasing and then increasing.
BT:  	Decreasing and then, yes.
VC:  	Yeah, that’s an interesting thing, the women fell off, didn’t they?
LS:  	Oh, very much so, yeah, after the teens and ‘20s.
VC:  	Yeah, and then came roaring back.  Now I still remember the time I was confronted when I was a subaltern dean in grad school by a woman from town, who had come in to, she’d made an appointment, and I knew she was going to ask why we, we didn’t give women more fellowships and scholarships in grad school.  And I had been forehanded and checked the data.  And when she came in and made her demand that she wanted a proportionate number of, uh, graduate scholarships and fellowships for beginning graduate students, for female graduate students, I told her I thought I could promise that.   I thought it wouldn’t even have to carry it to the scholarship/fellowship committee, although there might be some objection, but I, I’m not, I wasn’t sure, but didn’t think she’d like it.  Because the way it now stood, women were getting about 60% more of the beginning scholarships and the fellowships that their, than the proportion of their number in the total enrollment with warrant.  And it was wonderful to see her collapse on that.  We had a lot of bright girls, who came in, high scores, and they often didn’t stay.  They’d take a master’s, they’d marry some male, usually less bright than they were, and go to work supporting him to get a Ph.D.  He’d get the Ph.D., and then he’d go off with some chick, and leave the girl who put him through graduate school.  Well, maybe that didn’t happen very often, but our problem was keeping, keeping the girls in graduate school during much of that period.  They may not have been treated awfully well, and it was hard for them to get jobs.
00:29:58
LS:  	I think, I think there’s no question of that.
BT:  	Hard to get jobs because academic institutions weren’t hiring women?
VC:  	Right, they liked to have them for deans of women and not very much more than that.
BT:  	How was Wisconsin on that score?
VC:  	Not very good, they had people like Helen White and one or two others in the English Department.  History, for a long time, never had a woman as a member of the Department.  But I think they have two or three now, don’t they?
LS:  	Four.
VC:  	Four?
LS:  	Uh-huh.
BT:  	Still not on a percentage basis.
VC:  	Well, uh, I don’t envy you, but you’re going to have a lot of fun.
BT:  	Yeah, well, I think, essentially, Professor Curti’s advice to us was to have fun, enjoy it, and that’s what we’re hoping to do.
VC:  	Yeah, I think Curti would enjoy having, consulting from time to time.
BT:  	Yeah, I’ve, uh, we’ve been wanting to get back to him this fall.  We should be doing that shortly.
VC:  	I talked to him a week ago.  I’m going to see him in a day or two, and --
BT:  	Well, tell him we’ll be contacting him soon, perhaps about a lunch and discussing where we’re heading at this point.
VC:  	I don’t think of anything else to confess to.
LS:  	Well, I, I had sworn a vow not to give you anybody else, as I told you, in the History Department, so I thought, we have said a little bit about it, and that’s --
VC:  	No, I didn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t say anything about history.  I said something about Paul Knaplund, who’s one of the most powerful figures in --
LS:  	Well, look at the emphasis on teaching, which is --
VC:  	Oh, that is not just history.  That was, I think the same thing was true in English and political science and so on around the shop.  But after it got bigger, and they, the departments got not just one new person, you know, you get the new man in the monastery -- but if you get 15, or if you just get 5, nobody teaches it.
LS:  	Well, should we have recorded this interview?
VC:  	To do what?
LS:  	I said, this is an Oral History Interview.  Should this has been, is this a good thing to record?
VC:  	I don’t know.  I don’t know whether there’s enough in here to be --
LS:  	See, my feeling is the one thing, is that prominent people, it will always be interesting to listen to them somewhat, I mean, perhaps even 15 minutes or a half and hour.  It would be nice for somebody to hear your voice talking about, about this.  That’s on assumption, whether that’s enough of an assumption, I don’t know.
VC:  	Particularly – 
00:32:41	End of Tape 2. End of Interview.
END