Francis Butler Simkins: A Life

3 A Provincial Confronts Modernity

three A Provincial Confronts Modernity At the University of South Carolina, Simkins had begun to doubt many of the white South’s romantic and traditional ideals. He felt a growing sense of liberation from the old values of Edgefield, and he expected to become even freer in his thinking as he progressed through his graduate studies. The thought of the academic challenges that lay ahead excited him as he moved into Hartley Hall, a men’s dormitory on the Columbia campus. His schedule for the fall semester consisted of six classes, three in European history and one each in modern U.S. history, economic history, and ancient and medieval political theory. Each class counted three points. University regulations required students to earn thirty points and to write a master’s essay in order to gain a master’s degree.1 For Simkins, completing the program in one year seemed a reasonable goal. Three of these courses were especially significant in light of Simkins’s later career as a historian. He took modern U.S. history, taught by Benjamin 38 B. Kendrick, a Georgia populist and a scholar of the Reconstruction period. Kendrick’s academic interests revealed the influence of his Columbia mentor, William Archibald Dunning. His political ideas, however, bore the imprint of the Georgia politician Tom Watson, although his beliefs dealing with race and religion were more liberal than Watson’s. Kendrick’s broadmindedness, for instance, could be seen in his respect for Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of the Nation and a staunch supporter of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People in its earliest days. Kendrick integrated the influence of figures as disparate as Watson and Villard into his social and political thought.2 Teaching modern U.S. history gave Kendrick a podium from which to present his populist leanings. Simkins listened as his professor condemned the late nineteenth-century captains of industry. The populists, Kendrick told his students, provided the best way out of the industrial wasteland that modern America had become. The class also dealt with other issues important to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. history: the impact of railroads, U.S. foreign policy, and the imperialistic designs of American military strategists at the turn of the century. Simkins received his first exposure to the study of the Reconstruction period under Kendrick’s guidance.3 Later in his career, Reconstruction and populism became Simkins’s main areas of interest. A second course of significance to Simkins was William R. Shepherd’s class in modern European history. The course, which bore the title “The Expansion of Europe,” dealt with the European impact on America and the Atlantic region as well as other topics related to European exploration. Simkins was intrigued to discover that Shepherd was a native Charlestonian and a scholar of Latin American history. The historian James Patton said that “the exoticism of Latin American history and civilization,” as well as the South Carolina background of Professor Shepherd, piqued Simkins’s interest in the subject.4 The third course, which particularly influenced Simkins, was a class in ancient and medieval political theory, taught by William Dunning.5 More famous for his writings on the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, Dunning also published two volumes on political theory, one in 1902, the other in 1905.6 Most of the material for the ancient and medieval political theory course that Simkins took came from these two Dunning volumes and from Francis William Coker’s Readings in Political Philosophy.7 Simkins did not become a historian of political theory, but Dunning’s class gave him his first contact with the esteemed professor. Dunning was sixty-two years old in September 1919, and Simkins described him as “very old at the time of my coming to Columbia.” Ill health had dogged A Provincial Confronts Modernity 39 40 Francis Butler Simkins:     A Life the professor for many years, the result of stress from his wife’s illness and the financial strain that attended it. Dunning also suffered from overwork, his poor health being one of the reasons he refused the offer of John Hopkins University officials to replace Herbert Baxter Adams. That the final volume of his trilogy on political theory was not published until 1920 indicated that his problems interfered with his research and writing.8 Simkins performed satisfactorily in all his courses during the first semester. He received a “P,” or...