Confronting History: A Memoir

9 - Finally Home

9 Finally Home WHEN I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, in the autumn of 1956 I had no real sense that a whole epoch of my life had ended, that the years of apprenticeship were over. While my time in Iowa brought an end to a long period of searching and gave me a feeling of selfconfidence and belonging, the years in Madison had no such far-reaching consequences. I now had a foundation upon which I could build; there was no real rupture with the past, and themes like Americanization or the road to respectability no longer applied. In Madison I started on an intense academic involvement which at the same time led to a new intellectual understanding of my environment. The broadness of experience which in Iowa came with involvement in modern art or creative writing no longer existed. Moreover, I was no longer a novice in the American Middle West, and even here I could build on existing foundations. The story now becomes one chiefly of intellectual growth, and not of an attempted adjustment or the need to reinvent myself as teacher, scholar, and member of an academic community. At the time the distance between Iowa City and Madison seemed to me much greater than the six-hour drive which separated the two towns. That I would have to live on a lower salary than I had been offered at Iowa did not weigh heavily. My indifference to money, because it had always been there when I needed it-even when the family's earnings were low-paid off, and so did the fact that while I certainly liked luxury, thanks to Salem and Bootham I could do without it as well. I was excited to be joining such a lively and famous history department, and a university which seemed so much richer, so much more settled, than the University of Iowa. New research opportunities beckoned as well at a much bigger library, and I 150 Finally Home would have one free, if unpaid, semester's leave every other year in order to facilitate my research and writing. But, above all, I found myself immediately in the midst of a formidable cast of academic characters. Madison itself, however, was, at the time, not so different from Iowa City. Both towns had only one passable restaurant, which made life difficult for bachelors, who were confined to various"greasy spoons." Most of the better restaurants were outside of town; for example, in the Amana Colonies, pietistic settlements barely an hour away from Iowa City, were various restaurants specializing in excellent Germanic cuisine. From Madison one drove a short distance to the Swiss colony of New Glarus or to the Cornish settlement in Mineral Point. But then eating out was not as common as it is today, and with many good restaurants in town it is not such a special event as it was when one had to make an excursion. These were small cities, Iowa City much smaller than Madison. I remember when the first travel agency opened in Iowa City at a desk in the middle of the lobby of the main hotel, a lobby which was decorated with friezes showing the conquest of the West. Social life itself took place in the home, and I have the feeling that, among my circle, dinner parties were much more common than they are today. Academic life was the focus of all of one's activities. The structure of the history department at Wisconsin was not much different from that at Iowa: the key person in charge of day-to-day activities was the departmental secretary rather than the chairman, and I had learned long ago that to be in her good graces made life much easier. Miss Veva Cox at Iowa, who ran the department with an iron hand, had been immensely helpful, and so were the departmental secretaries at Wisconsin. How mistaken some of my colleagues were who treated the Cerberus of the office like a departmental servant. Among the faculty there was a rich social life which declined in the 1960s with the enormous expansion of the university-a departmental intimacy which would soon vanish forever. Not only among the faculty: who could imagine today the way in which I was promoted from associate to full professor not long after I had arrived. The president of the university, E. B. Fred, used to mix with the students as classes were changing in the main entrances of Bascom Hall...