Memoirs of an Obscure Professor

9. Academic Anecdotes

9 Academic Anecdotes My major interest as an academician was American intellectual history, or, the history of ideas in America, and most of the hooks I published during the first part of my career dealt with various aspects of American thought. But I was also interested in biography, and I never discussed the ideas of thinkers like Edwards, Emerson, James, Veblen, Holmes, and Dewey in my classes without first telling students something about their personal backgrounds. I taught the survey of American history from time [Q time, too, and when talking about the social and political outlooks of presidents like Washington, Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy, I always began with biographical sketches_ I soon discovered that well-chosen anecdotes about the presidents not only enlivened my lectures but also summed up. in a nutshell. some of the general points I was trying to make about them. In 1978, I completed a lengthy - and difficult - study of freedom and determinism in the history of American thought. and after that I was eager to do something of a biographical nature for a change and to direct my next book to the general reader rather than to the specialist. Struck by the number of stories - dramatic, funny, poignant - I had collected through the years about the presidents, it occurred 205 Memotrs Of an Obscure Professor 206 to me that it might be fun to do a book making use of these stories and others that I might dig up. There were a number of books in print containing biographical sketches of the presidents, but they were largely factual summaries of the presidents' lives and work. What I proposed to do was something differem; I wanted to concemrate on the presidents as human beings - on their characters, personalities, and temperaments - and I wamed to make use of anecdotes about them that illustrated, underlined, and even extended some of the points I planned to make about them in my biographical essays. The result was Presidential Anecdotes (1981), a book of essays and stories about each of the presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, stressing personalities rather than policies. I did two more books organized in a similar fashion: Presidemial Campaigns (1984) and Presidential Wives (1988). In 1991 I also did a book on Congress, Congressional Anecdotes, which contained essays and stories about members of the House and Senate from 1789 to 1989. At this point it seems only fair for me, in a book entitled Memoirs oj an Obscure ProJessor, to tell a few tales about my experiences in the groves of academe between 1935, when I entered Yale as a freshman, and 1983, when I retired from my position as Lyndon Baines Johnson Professor of United States History at Texas Christian University. "When a man falls into his anecdotage," wrote Disraeli in 1870, "it is a sign for him to retire." **** Misspelled During my junior year in college I heard Robert Frost give a lecture and read some of his poetry, and I'll never forget the story he told about his experience as a teacher at the University of Michigan. Forced to give a final examination, he said, he simply asked the students to write down what they had gotten out of his course. Later he told a friend that one stu- Academic Anecdotes dent wrote that he hadn't gotten a damncd thing out of the course, and he gave him a "n." Asked why he didn't give him an "A" he said the student had misspelled "damned. " Substitute Teacher One afternoon when I was an undergraduate, I heard the writer Stephen Vincent Benet speak in Yale's Wolsey Hall. I remember only the introduction to his lecture, in which he describcd his brief experiencc as an English teacher at Yale. A friend of his in the English department asked him to take over his fifty-minute class one day, when he had to be away, and the assignment was the first act of one of Shakespearc's comedies . Benet discussed the assignment, he said, but it didn't take long. so he went on to talk about the rest ofthc play. But he quickly ran out of things to say about it so he went on to discuss some of the other Shakespeare comedies, and before he knew it. he had gone through all of them. Glancing at the clock, he found he had plenty...