The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir

CHAPTER 4

105 From Plagues and Peoples to Retirement CHAPTER 4 From Plagues and Peoples to Retirement 1976–1987 These twelve years saw the apex of my professional reputation but were also a time of diminution as our children left home, ties with the University of Chicago weakened, and my physical and perhaps intellectual energies began to decline. My mother died in Vermont in 1970, and my father followed her five years later while visiting us in Chicago. This closed a chapter of my life. Then in 1979 we sold the handsome house on University Avenue that we had bought from Mrs. Enrico Fermi in 1956. That was where my children grew up: home for them and for my wife and me as nowhere else. There we lived through the tense Black-White confrontations incidental to what was delicately described as neighborhood renewal; there my wife and children wrote and staged annual plays put on by neighborhood children in our basement; there friends and students came to parties and dinners; and there family gatherings had assembled at Christmas and Thanksgiving for twenty-two years. Two trifling burglaries and one hold-up, which occurred almost in front of the 106 THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH house when I was walking home one winter evening, also figure in memories of life on University Avenue. So does the accidental death of my boys’ best friend and immediate neighbor in 1977. So all was not sweet, but the apartment on Fifty-sixth Street to which my wife and I moved never became our home. Instead, the white clapboard house in Colebrook, Connecticut, which Elizabeth inherited from her aunt in 1967, took over. Little by little our lives shifted eastward. One reason was that when the academic boom collapsed in the 1970s, and when mandatory retirement at sixty-five, which had been the rule at Chicago, became illegal, it seemed profoundly unjust to me to hang around with a full professorial salary when younger academics were being dismissed. With the house in Colebrook beckoning , it was easy for me to propose that I taper off my teaching duties to match my physical decline. I therefore surrendered a portion of my salary, beginning in 1977, by going first to two quarters’ residence each year and then to a single quarter in 1982. By this arrangement , I would teach exactly as many quarters and receive as much salary as if I had retired at age sixty-five. In the meanwhile, I fondly hoped that the portion of my salary I passed up might rescue a career by supporting an assistant professor. To be sure, I never saw any sign that this actually happened, and discovered ere long that part-time residence drastically diminished my connection with students and, eventually, also with colleagues. Graduated retirement surely matches the gradual decline of one’s powers; but it does not fit institutional routine, and from that point of view my experiment was a failure, though, to be fair, it also freed me to undertake a variety of professional junkets and to write some more books and articles . As my family and professional life at Chicago diminished, outward signs of inward grace multiplied. Honorary degrees began to 107 From Plagues and Peoples to Retirement proliferate, starting in 1974 and continuing irregularly until the 1990s. Most such awards were vacuous, and on one occasion, to judge by the citation, I may have been confused with my father. I never equaled the prestige of his honorary degrees from Edinburgh and Paris. Glasgow was my most prestigious transatlantic award; Swarthmore, the most notable within the United States. My kind of history simply did not impress the major centers of higher learning here at home, even though a fluke made me president of the American Historical Association in 1984–85. Before that dignity came my way, I had been active on the AHA Council through most of the 1970s and had a good deal to do with relocating the American Historical Review to Bloomington, Indiana, as a way to save money for the association by transferring support costs to the University of Indiana. That transaction deprived the managing editor, Nancy Lane, of her job in Washington. A few years later our paths crossed again when she turned down Plagues and Peoples for publication by Oxford University Press, New York. She subsequently came to regret that decision and, years later, after handling the publication of my biography...