Parallel Lives: Two Historians' Memoirs

John Morton Blum. A Life with History. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xiii + 283 pp. Illustrations and index. $35.00.

Forrest McDonald. Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir. Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2004. vii + 198 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $24.95.

At first glance, these two memoirs by prominent American historians, both published by the University Press of Kansas, seem to have as much in common as Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger did in the movie Twins. Forrest McDonald's Recovering the Past is an unapologetic account of a contentious career, written by an author who remains proud of having supported Barry Goldwater in 1964; John Morton Blum's A Life with History is the rather bland life story of a scholar who spent most of his professional years in the comfort of the Ivy League, and who campaigned for George McGovern in 1972. On closer examination, however, McDonald and Blum turn out to share, if not DNA, then at least a number of experiences that set them apart both from their mentors and their successors. For both, a career as a historian only became possible because of World War II and the GI Bill, which opened up unexpected opportunities for them. Supported by spouses willing to subordinate themselves to their husbands' ambitions in ways that are hardly imaginable today, both pursued those possibilities with an energy and optimism that are equally hard to imagine a half-century later. Both achieved prominence in the profession, but now find themselves somewhat estranged from developments in it and in the nation at large. Nevertheless, despite the differences in their perspectives on the American past, both use their memoirs to make a positive case for the country that enabled them to transcend their origins and for the discipline that gave meaning to their lives.

Both these historian-autobiographers came from modest social backgrounds. Nothing in his Depression-era smalltown Texas childhood destined McDonald for the professorate: his ambition was baseball, and his skills were good enough to win him a scholarship to the University of Texas. He had just discovered that he could not hit a curveball when the war interrupted his undergraduate studies; during his year and a half in the Navy, he "settled upon the more realistic dream of writing the great American novel" (p. 51). After his discharge, powered by "boundless self-confidence and inexhaustible energy" and the ability to get by on a few hours of sleep, he returned to school, going "from second-semester freshman to a master's degree in two years and eight months" (p. 51). Having acquired a wife and two children, he did this while supplementing his GI bill subsidy with up to forty hours a week in part-time jobs. McDonald switched his interests from literature to history, he says, when he discovered that his professors disagreed about fundamental questions such as the origins of the American constitution. If no consensus on such subjects existed, he decided, "the field of American history must be absolutely wide open" (p. 54).

Blum, who, like McDonald, says little about his childhood or parents, joined the history profession by a different but equally unpredictable route. Neither of his parents had graduated from college, but a family friend persuaded Blum's mother to have her bright son apply for a scholarship at the elitist Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Despite encountering a certain amount of anti-Semitic prejudice, Blum (whose family had abandoned any religious identification) did well there, and Andover served as his stepping-stone to Harvard. Like McDonald, he served in the Navy during the war, and GI Bill support enabled him to embark on graduate study afterward. And, like McDonald, he had to make something of a leap of faith to imagine that he would be able to become a history professor. The advice of one of his Harvard professors, who bluntly informed him, "Hebrews can't make it in...