Genesis: Donald J. Greene and the Founding of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Donald Greene was teaching at the University of California, Riverside, in 1966–67. Probably late in 1967, he asked his three eighteenth-century junior colleagues if they were interested in forming a national eighteenth-century society. We were. Enthusiastically. Greene, after all, studied the relationships between religion, literature, and politics and had written a major revisionist book on Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century politics. He was among the most eminent students of eighteenth-century British culture. He embodied multidisciplinary scholarship. Greene never was awed by the Great and the Good because he was among them.

A few days after the invitation, John Norton, David Hansen, and I joined Greene for lunch at a local restaurant and discussed possibilities. The interdisciplinary society would of course encourage research areas other than literature. Its official journal would reflect such breadth of interest. The society would be North American and encourage regional branches. It would have geographical and disciplinary representation. When occasion allowed it would be more broadly international. It would have an elected executive board and secretary as cementing forces. My own efforts were to begin by organizing a western and, for the time being, largely Californian regional society for eighteenth-century studies. The talk was good and the options many. In the event, Messrs. Norton and Hansen soon left the Riverside English Department, and in the summer of 1969 I departed for the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

After I arrived in Wisconsin, I continued to exercise Greene's vision of supporting regional eighteenth-century societies. He saw these as a way of furthering eighteenth-century studies locally in order to expand them nationally. On 28 July 1970, he told Peter Stanlis that five regional societies had been established: "All to the good, I'm convinced—the wider the 'grass roots' are extended, the stronger and healthier the whole organization will be, I'm sure."¹ I hoped to put that concept into practice. I paid special attention to the Johnson Society of the Central Region, which soon was invited to become an affiliate of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and is now a thriving sixty-one-year-old scholarly enterprise. I encouraged the University of Wisconsin Press to offer a three-year contract for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. I attended several regional ASECS meetings during my amiably long tenure in Madison. As President of the Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1979–80, I hosted a large conference in Madison. I also served on two national meeting planning committees, presented a plenary paper and thereafter the Clifford Lecture for the national conference, and had the pleasure of serving on the Editorial Board of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1977–80) and on the Executive Committee (1996–99). Greene's vision of international affiliations never left my mind. I was part of the joint exchange committee for ASECS and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (1999–2000) and the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS)'s planning committee for the wonderfully successful 2003 meeting in Los Angeles. That happy conclave exemplified Greene's concept of regional, national, and international eighteenth-century societies as a unified and unifying intellectual and social force. I confess to special delight in returning to the fledgling ASECS's founding and to Donald Greene's seminal role during those years.

I now write with a combination of always unreliable memories and the more reliable ASECS archives. Paul Alkon, Greene's successor as Leo S. Bing Professor at the University of Southern California, wisely arranged to have these moved to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA, where they have been stored since 1994. The volunteer archivist Ann Soady expertly sorted them into useful preliminary files. The Society owes thanks to each helpful individual as well as the Clark Library. Some of the information I cite below comes from my own experience. Most of the narrative, however, draws upon the Clark's ASECS archives. They demonstrate our founder's extraordinary vision and manifold generosities. Predicting the past is almost [End Page...