John Higham and the Nourishment of Memory

On July 14, 2003, my wife and I enjoyed a lovely dinner in Baltimore with John and Eileen Higham at an elegant, club-like restaurant they had discovered, rather improbably called "Louisiana." Although John seemed a bit frail that evening, it still came as a shock on the morning of the 26^th when his daughter, Margaret, telephoned to say that John had died in his sleep sometime during the previous night. At dinner on the 14^th John mentioned his urgent desire to finish a complex essay on ethnicity and race in recent American history that had been commissioned by the Social Science Research Council. He virtually completed it somewhere near midnight on the 25^th and did not wake up the next morning. John had a very strong sense of purpose, and this piece will be an important part of his legacy as an activist historian. I think he may have been aware that closure was not far off.

We reminisced at dinner, wondering when John and I had first met and how our friendship had developed so swiftly. Neither one of us could recall. We agreed that it must have been sometime around 1970, give or take a year. I have a considerable stash of letters and postcards from him spanning more than thirty years. (Unfortunately, the flow gets rather thin after the mid-1990s when most of our correspondence took place via e-mail, which I foolishly neglected to save. Sometimes, historians are not the most assiduous archivists.) After a while we not only wrote letters to one another, but also for one another when each of us applied for fellowship support from foundations.

We read each other's work in draft form, and friendship never tempered John's candor as an acute and tough-minded critic. I will always remain grateful for that. This kind of mutual mentoring is one of the true blessings of membership in our guild. He gave a series of guest lectures at Cornell in the mid-1970s, and in the fall term of 1991 he served as the Newman Visiting Professor of American Studies. My graduate students who took his seminar concerning ethnicity became the beneficiaries of John's sagacity, just as I had been for two decades. Our birthdays happened to fall on consecutive days in October, and our celebratory dinner in Ithaca with our spouses on the 26^th that year became a notably festive occasion in our relationship—and in subsequent memories.

John is justly remembered as a historiographer, and I want to comment on that passion in particular because he regarded historiography as a sub-set of social and cultural history. He did it so well because of his notable gift for discerning broad patterns within the profession and especially their phasing. But I shall also try to interweave a profile of his values and temperament because they are inseparable from his sense of the historian's vocation, and his own more personally. I will also call attention to some anomalies in John's outlook and professional behavior. Thirty years ago I might even have called them paradoxes, but John warned me at the time that when paradoxes pile up at too rapid a rate, in his words, they "grow rank."

John's judgment as a historiographer was astute—I would say pre-eminent among his generation—but too few people are aware, perhaps, of the astonishing extent to which he filled that role. And here we encounter the first (apparent) anomaly: John might well be considered an antiquarian in the sense that he genuinely enjoyed unearthing the remotest roots and subsequent flowering of many different phenomena, yet he could also be quite present-minded and even prophetic, never shunning the felt need to contemplate where our discipline was headed, and always wanting to pull back the pendulum of a major professional trend when he felt that it had swung too far in a faddish direction&#8212...