Harold C. Livesay, 1934–2018: A Personal View

I first encountered Harold Livesay when we both entered the graduate program in history at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1966. Though we were always mindful that we had come from the provinces and not from the Ivy League, our smoothed paths to Baltimore nevertheless came through the old boy network, so much a part of that privileged world. We were dispatched to Hopkins, and specifically to Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., bearing the imprimatur of our respective undergraduate mentors. In Harold's case that was Stephen Salsbury of the University of Delaware, and in mine, Louis Galambos, then at Rice University, in Houston, Texas.

By chance we were both assigned rooms in Apartment 3K at 3339 N. Charles Street, overlooking the main entrance to the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins. The recently renovated building was one of many nearby properties gobbled up by Hopkins in the manner of rich and expansive universities. We imagined that our particular apartment had previously been occupied by an aged coupon-clipper and a maid, before Hopkins bought what had been the Cambridge Arms and remade it into Wolman Hall. The once capacious apartment now housed five novice history graduate students, each paying rent of $60 a month. A slight whiff of glamour still attached to the premises, because in the mid-1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald had been in residence upstairs when he was writing The Crack-Up. Harold and I met there, and in Chandler's seminar.

The history department at Hopkins in the 1960s still operated very much in the research-dominated "German" university manner championed in the 1870s by Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins. It was a prestigious program. Renowned economic historian Frederick C. Lane had just retired after a long and distinguished career in Baltimore. David Herbert Donald had not long before replaced the legendary historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward, whose photo loomed down on the history seminar room in Gilman Hall. The graduate program was also highly autocratic, with no hint of any form of democracy. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that graduate students were considered something rather like chattel, virtually the property of their respective mentors.

Harold and I were extremely fortunate to belong to the department chairman, Alfred Chandler. He had a well worked out program for speeding his best students through to completion of the PhD. Harold and I went from our BAs to our doctorates in four years, at a time when the national average in history programs was more than twice that. Chandler had recently done seminal work in business history, especially his much-anthologized 1959 Business History Review article on "The Beginnings of 'Big Business' in American Industry" and his masterful 1962 book, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise. Harold and I found Chandler and the Hopkins graduate history program liberating and exhilarating. Excellence was expected and rewarded in a pragmatic, adult environment with a minimum of administrative folderol. Harold later wrote, "The first years in graduate school seemed to me the best I had ever known."

But even in that idyllic setting there were dragons. Dr. Chandler summoned us to his office not long after we had arrived. He informed us that part of his plan for our prompt completion of the doctorate was that we would pass the required German reading exam, scheduled only weeks away. This was most unwelcome news. I had taken only one course in German at Rice and had not found it especially congenial. Harold had never had any German. But we instinctively responded, "Yes, Professor Chandler," then staggered into the hall to digest this bombshell.

Harold had heard of a magical book called The Key to German Translation, authored by one C. V. Pollard and allegedly available only through the Co-op at the University of Texas at Austin. Since I was a native of that state, we agreed that I would telephone the Co-op and "talk Texan" to them in order to get copies of this elixir as soon as possible, podnah. Pollard declared at...