The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir

CHAPTER 1

1 From Childhood to World War II CHAPTER 1 From Childhood to World War II 1917–1941 Iwas born on 31 October 1917 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. That day happened to be the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, and my father, who was then teaching church history at a newly established Presbyterian college in Westminster, B.C., noted that fact with some satisfaction. Later in life I was more impressed by the fact that my birth occurred a week before Lenin inaugurated the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—a different, and more fleeting, historical landmark. These coincidences did not make me into a historian. Instead it was my father’s example. He was a medievalist by training and took the history of the Christian church in western Europe as his bailiwick, teaching courses and writing books that spanned the centuries from Constantine’s time to the twentieth century. He had encountered an ecumenical version of church history in 1912–13 at Edinburgh, where he won a year’s scholarship, and became convinced that what united quarreling Protestant sects was more important than the theologi- 2 THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH cal wrangles that divided them. Thereafter he sought to turn church history into an exploration of the commonalities that bound Christians together, instead of using it to show how a particular denomination had preserved the true faith, while everyone else had fallen away from it across the centuries, as church historians had done ever since the Reformation. An irenic, transdenominational version of church history was novel, even radical, in 1912. It became my father’s life work to propagate such a vision of the Christian past, and I eventually came to recognize how closely my own career as a world historian replicated that of my father. For I, in my time, set out to look across civilizational, just as he had looked across sectarian, boundaries. But it took me a long while to live down youthful differences with him, in matters intellectual as well as personal. This memoir, in effect, is an effort to achieve an appropriately balanced appraisal of his and other influences that combined to shape my understanding of history in particular and the world in general. My father was a farm boy from Prince Edward Island in Canada who, having excelled in school, went on to college and then became a Presbyterian minister. He combined theological training with graduate study, first at McGill University, where he earned an M.A. in English , then at the University of Chicago, where he got a Ph.D. in history in 1920. My mother’s career was rather more exceptional. She was born in Vancouver Island at the opposite extreme of Canada and was of Scottish descent, yet also went to McGill and, like my father , emerged as valedictorian of her class. At that time in Canada it was most unusual for a woman to attend college, especially coming, as she did, from raw frontier society in British Columbia, where higher education was an exotic irrelevance in nearly everyone’s eyes. But a favorite teacher, who had gone to college herself in Nova Scotia, 3 From Childhood to World War II urged my mother to pursue a college degree. With this encouragement , Netta Hardy’s ambition flamed so high that it carried her across the continent to attend McGill, since no college in British Columbia then offered a B.A. A wealthy uncle funded her adventure. This distressed her parents, who felt that, as their eldest child, she should stay home and help to raise her eight younger siblings until such time as marriage took her away. My birth came only nine and a half months after her marriage, and this both embarrassed and pleased my mother. Above all, it meant that she was rapturously received into the McNeill family by my father’s parents in Prince Edward Island, simply for having given birth to a son who would carry on the name. I gave her, in effect, a new family to belong to, and one that respected, even reverenced, higher education. For my McNeill grandparents sympathized with and admired my father’s career, even though it meant that their only surviving son would not be available to help with farm work and succeed to the family farm as my grandfather aged. For my mother, therefore, I was not only her eldest and...