McCormick of Rutgers : Scholar, Teacher, Public Historian 9780313000805, 9780313303562

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MCCORMICK OF RUTGERS

Recent Titles in Studies in Historiography Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics John David Smith and John C. Inscoe, editors The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian England Anthony Brundage The Inside of History: Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné and Romantic Historiography John B. Roney Benson J. Lossing and Historical Writing in the United States: 1830–1890 Harold E. Mahan Herbert E. Bolton and the Historiography of the Americas Russell M. Magnaghi

MCCORMICK OF RUTGERS Scholar, Teacher, Public Historian

Michael J. Birkner

Studies in Historiography, Number 6 John David Smith, Series Adviser

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Birkner, Michael J., 1950– McCormick of Rutgers : scholar, teacher, public historian / Michael J. Birkner. p. cm.—(Studies in historiography, ISSN 1046–526X ; no. 6) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–313–30356–8 (alk. paper) 1. McCormick, Richard Patrick, 1916– 2. Historians—United States— Biography. 3. Educators—United States—Biography. 4. Rutgers University— Biography. I. Title. II. Series. E175.5.M375B57 2001 973′.07′202—dc21 00–034138 [B] British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2001 by Michael J. Birkner All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00–034138 ISBN: 0–313–30356–8 ISSN: 1046–526X First published in 2001 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright Acknowledgment The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from the oral history recorded by Michael Birkner reprinted with permission from Professor Richard P. McCormick.

In Memory of Charles M. Wiltse (1907–1990) and Michael J. McTighe (1949–1993) Exemplars

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments Introduction

xiii 1

Chapter 1

The Path to a Life with History

41

Chapter 2

Revitalizing the Study of New Jersey History

61

Chapter 3

Life at Rutgers: Doing Public History in the 1950s and 1960s

81

Chapter 4

Championing a New Political History

109

Chapter 5

The Turbulent ’60s at Rutgers

137

Chapter 6

Doing History: Reflections

157

Notes

175

Selected Bibliography of McCormick’s Publications

205

viii

Contents

Bibliography

209

Index

219 Photo essays follow pages 59 and 135.

Preface

Several years ago, over lunch with a more senior scholar who has written extensively on early republic politics, I expressed my intention to produce a book on Richard P. McCormick and his work. “Shouldn’t you spend your time writing History,” he observed, “instead of writing about historians?” Point taken; but as they have a way of doing, personal reasons impelled me forward. Having written History following the norms I imbibed from my teachers—among them, keep yourself out of your narrative—I have been intrigued by the increasing rejection, even within the academy, of detachment in History writing and the commonplace use of the first person pronoun in scholarly publications. This perception of a changing professional paradigm is shared by Michael Kammen, who recently noted that historians trained before the 1960s tended not to discuss their subjects with much sense of application to the present, much less inject themselves into their scholarship. Historians of McCormick’s vintage—even those with a pronounced liberal or conservative outlook on current affairs—did not reveal much about themselves, even when they wrote their memoirs.1 E. H. Carr’s dictum that before studying History one must know something about the historian naturally was familiar to me.2 But, in truth, I knew little of the personal lives of most scholars I admired. Of Rutgers University’s McCormick—a commanding figure in New Jersey studies

x

Preface

and a controversial one in my first area of expertise, Jacksonian-era political history—I knew virtually nothing beyond what I had gleaned from the jacket blurbs on his books and occasional conversation with several of his former students. Why pick on McCormick? Because his multifaceted career fascinated me as an example of how academics can exert influence beyond the walls of ivy. Because I have published work that both built upon and dissented from McCormick’s major premises about American political culture and wondered why McCormick framed questions, and posited certain arguments, the way he did. Because McCormick had deposited a substantial archive of papers at his alma mater, Rutgers University, and made them available to researchers. Because he would talk to me. And, beyond these particulars, because I wanted to do something that I hope other scholars of my generation will emulate—namely, engage in serious conversation with the most influential historians of their formative years in order to understand more clearly how they did what they did, how they felt about it, and why it mattered. Having devoted parts of five years on this project, I learned a great deal about what made Richard McCormick tick. But I also recognized and have reluctantly accepted the fact that there are some things I will never really know or understand about him—how he felt at the most difficult moments of his professional career, as a writer, or during a family crisis; how he rationalized his limits in trying to explicate the themes that most mattered to him; how he coped with the inexorable onset of middle age and subsequent physical decline; how fundamentally happy he was. Each of these issues is touched upon in the introduction that I have written and the oral history transcript that follows it. Ultimately, however, I am presenting a synoptic, limited version—I hope a passably accurate one—of one notable life with History.3

A NOTE ON THE TEXT My original goal in pursuing the Richard McCormick story was to produce an article-length oral history publishable in a historical journal. I had previously published such an article on Pennsylvania State University political historian Philip S. Klein and viewed that piece as my model for this enterprise.4 Gradually, given Richard McCormick’s multiple endeavors, the scope of the story expanded, and I realized that I was onto something more than an article. The transcriptions in this book reflect the substance and texture of eight taped interview sessions (totalling approximately eighteen hours) with McCormick. They represent an edited version of the spoken interchanges in those

Preface

xi

sessions, which began on March 17, 1995, and concluded on March 17, 2000. Richard McCormick reviewed all of the transcripts, restricting his comments primarily to correcting typographical errors, misspellings, and stylistic infelicities. Rarely did he change or amplify any of his substantive remarks. My own questions and comments were more vigorously pruned, and, in some instances, excised, in the interest of readability. The major change from the spoken to transcribed word relates to a rearrangement of subject matter. Recognizing that many readers would be more interested in some topics than others, I rearranged transcriptions to create more unified chapters, focusing, for example, on Rutgers University history, debates over the second party system, and the practice of public history in New Jersey after World War II. As a consequence, much of the material in chapters 3, 4, and 6 has been spliced together from various interviews. All of the material transcribed in the following chapters derives from the tapes, which have been deposited in the archives of the Rutgers University Library.

Acknowledgments

In the course of completing this project I have accumulated numerous debts. The New Jersey Historical Commission provided early, essential support, as did the grants advisory committee of Gettysburg College. I am grateful to Gettysburg librarians, most especially reference librarian Anna Jane Moyer and interlibrary loan assistant Susan Roach, for ferreting out fugitive information about Richard P. McCormick. In New Jersey, my mother, Mildred Birkner, and my brother and sister-in-law, John and Susan Birkner, provided hospitality during my frequent visits to interview Richard P. McCormick and work with his papers at the Rutgers University Department of Special Collections. In New Brunswick, Ron Becker, Tom Frusciano, and Ed Skipworth were consistently helpful in getting me the documents I needed. I am grateful to Rutgers University for granting permission to reprint chapter five of the transcript from my article “The Turbulent Sixties at Rutgers: An Interview with Richard P. McCormick,” The Journal of the Rutgers University Library 53 (1997): 42–61. Amidst a demanding schedule of her own, my wife, Robin Wagner, took on more than her share of family responsibilities during my frequent absences. Our children, Ben, Madeline, and Joanna, expected time from their dad that would otherwise have been spent getting this book done sooner, and I am fortunate they did.

xiv

Acknowledgments

I benefited from the thoughtful comments of an anonymous referee for Greenwood Press, who forced me to think more deeply about what I was trying to accomplish. John David Smith of North Carolina State University, the series editor, encouraged me to make McCormick into a book, gave the manuscript two close and helpful readings, and prodded me to the finish line. My greatest debt is owed to Richard P. McCormick. At first dubious that the enterprise made any sense, he warmed up to it and by the end was regularly, if good naturedly, chiding me for not moving faster. Over the course of many hours together, I gained a better appreciation for McCormick’s deep knowledge of American political culture and his interpretation of it. But more important, through the years of labor on this project, I came better to see how it is possible to balance responsibilities as a parent, husband, and citizen with manifold academic obligations. I cannot claim to have plumbed the depths of McCormick’s emotional life, but I know a well-lived life when I see it, and I hope I have presented a fair account of it.

Introduction

Early in his career as a Rutgers University professor, Richard P. McCormick discovered treasure in an unlikely place. Speaking for perhaps the hundredth time to a local historical association about the importance of knowing state history, McCormick soon learned that his comments had affected at least one member of the audience, a prominent New Jersey legislator. As he recalled many years after the fact, the solon was “charmed by my talk” and invited McCormick to go out for a few drinks, whereupon “he became more charmed.” Thereupon, “we went back to his house, had another couple of drinks, at which point he decided I was the salt of the earth.” In the course of the increasingly ebullient conversation, his newfound friend, Speaker of the Assembly Hugh Mehorter, told McCormick that he had “a considerable stash” of papers and other historical items in his house, and “he insisted on giving me all this material.” In addition to rare pamphlets from early New Jersey history and a scattering of documents, the boxes contained a well-preserved human skull—which Mehorter assured McCormick was the skull of Count Von Donnop, Hessian commander at the Battle of Red Bank. The skull was subsequently transported back to Rutgers, where it was stored in the Department of Special Collections and remains to this day one of its distinctive artifacts.

2

McCormick of Rutgers

Few, if any, speaking engagements could match that outcome. But in a long life with History, Richard McCormick had many serendipitous moments proselytizing for New Jersey History, and, more than most historians, he helped shape the practice of public history in his milieu. He did so without sacrificing his broader scholarly agenda, as his many writings on American political history attest. While luck has had something to do with the remarkable career he forged, it is McCormick’s energy, discipline, and vision that most stand out. He knew what he wanted to achieve as a historian, and while he did not accomplish all of his goals, in thinking back on a life with History, he had few regrets. Continuities are a hallmark of McCormick’s life experience. He has been married to the same woman for more than fifty years; has lived in the same house for nearly a half-century; has measured memberships on committees and in professional organizations less in years than decades. The same is true of his friendships and of regular golf outings and poker games. Of all the continuities in McCormick’s life, none supersedes his relationship to his alma mater, Rutgers University, where his connection (with the exception of a five-year stretch during the World War II era) extends back continuously since 1934. McCormick’s early life was unremarkable. Born in Queens, New York, in December 1916, he grew up there and briefly in Upper Nyack, New York, before moving as a teenager to what was then rural Bergen County. For McCormick and his sister, home in the 1930s was the tiny Northern Valley community of Cresskill. McCormick’s family, of Irish background on his father’s side and German on his mother’s, was of modest means; his father was a printer. As a teenager, McCormick’s passions, like his schoolmates’, embraced sports, games, and Saturday afternoon movies. The onset of a Great Depression in the early 1930s did not much affect this pattern, as his father kept on working and the family did not suffer appreciably even during the depths of the hard times.1 Insofar as young McCormick was at all cut from a different cloth than his peers, his love of reading was the distinguishing mark. Reading, he later recalled, was “an important part of my life from the age of seven on.” As a young man he first became infatuated with the works of popular series featuring Tom Swift, Tarzan, and Jerry Todd, graduating as he matured to romantic novelists like Henryk Sienkiewicz and, during high school, to the darker works of Russian masters Pushkin, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. Because Cresskill, like neighboring Bergenfield, did not have a high school of its own, McCormick attended nearby Tenafly High School in an upper-middle-

Introduction

3

class community bordering the Palisades, less than ten miles from the heart of Manhattan. Never having considered that he might aspire to a college education, McCormick followed the “general curriculum” at Tenafly High School. When in 1933 his typing teacher noticed his abilities and suggested college as a possibility, it was a revelation for McCormick, who as a senior lacked the necessary courses even to apply to an accredited college. It was soon determined he could spend an entire post-graduate year at Tenafly, making up four years of required mathematics, so as to qualify for admission to Rutgers. This he did. In the 1930s Rutgers was much more a sleepy college with a rich history than a leading light of American higher education. Enrollments, which had been moving upward to 1400 in the men’s colleges by 1929, sank during the Depression years to about 1200 in 1934, the year Richard P. McCormick entered. This figure encompassed not merely the College of Arts and Sciences, but Agriculture, Engineering, and the School of Education as well. These were not flush times for the university or its students. As McCormick would write in his 1966 history of the university, “increasing numbers of those who were struggling to continue their studies were forced to live at home and commute to campus, with the result that scores of dormitory rooms remained vacant and many fraternity houses were half empty.”2 Rutgers was nonetheless the right place for Richard P. McCormick. A shy and bookish person, he found himself energized on the beautiful old campus in downtown New Brunswick. He joined the debate team, which enhanced his self-confidence and public speaking skills. He embraced the usual routines of college students in that era—dormitory bull sessions, formal dances featuring such major orchestras as those led by Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington, fraternity parties, and dramatic productions. Spectator sports were a unifying thread for Rutgers students back in the 1930s, and McCormick rarely missed a football or basketball game—this, despite the fact that, as he recalled many years later, Rutgers’ schedule included the likes of Lehigh, Colgate, and Franklin & Marshall Colleges, not powerhouses in the modern-day NCAA Division I sports world. Because he was on a partial scholarship and also qualified for an early version of work-study through the National Youth Administration program then available at Rutgers and because food and dormitory costs were so cheap, McCormick lived well at Rutgers. As an underclassman, McCormick gravitated to a History major, studying with such professors as Edward McNall Burns, the distinguished historian of Western Civilization, and in American History with Ethan Ellis and Irving Kull, the latter an editor of a multivolume

4

McCormick of Rutgers

history of New Jersey. Although Rutgers numbered among its ranks some outstanding scholars, the faculty focused less on research than teaching and nurturing undergraduates. Rutgers’s new president, Robert C. Clothier, emphasized character building as one of the institution’s major priorities. “Our objective in educational work,” Clothier had declared in his inaugural address in 1932, “is not the development of men and women of high intellectuality alone, but men and women who are well-balanced, who are inherently honest and reliable. . . . We cannot ignore our responsibility for the development of these social-cultural-spiritual qualities.”3 Unsurprisingly, McCormick’s memories of Rutgers highlight his social experiences, his relationships with such influential deans as Frazer Metzger and Metzger’s assistant, Edward Heyd, as well as opportunities for personal growth. He starred on the debate team, presided over the History Club, managed the convening of the Model League of Nations at Rutgers, held a dormitory preceptorship, and gained election to Phi Beta Kappa. During the summer of 1936, McCormick was enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, another New Deal agency, working at the Morristown National Historical Park. This was his first foray into what is today the burgeoning field of public history. During some of his time in Morristown, McCormick led tours through the still unrenovated Ford Mansion, one of George Washington’s headquarters in his New Jersey campaigns. But most of his time there was spent “in a former barn out in Jockey Hollow” researching military history topics and, more importantly, getting his fingers into primary sources for the first time. As he would later recall, this “greatly stimulated my interest and commitment to history.” When the Ford Mansion renovations were completed and a library was opened as part of the new installation, McCormick had the opportunity during a second summer to continue his research at Morristown, work that reinforced his decision to become a historian.4 Graduating from Rutgers amidst the recession of 1938, McCormick chose to remain in New Brunswick as a master’s student at Rutgers, earning his keep in part by serving as the History Department’s only secretary. To judge by McCormick’s reminiscences many years later, it was a pleasant, undemanding life, although he put considerable effort into his thesis, “The War Aims of President Wilson and Congress.” It was not until 1940, when McCormick enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, that he was consistently challenged intellectually. At Penn, McCormick came under the influence of Roy Franklin Nichols, who had established himself as a pre-eminent student of American political culture. In 1923 Nichols had published a seminal

Introduction

5

study of American politics from 1850 through 1854, The Democratic Machine, followed in 1931 by a masterful biography of President Franklin Pierce. The Pierce book was significant less for its evocation of a political mediocrity than for its pungent account of the rough-and-tumble politics of the Jacksonian period into the 1850s. In these books and a host of other publications, Nichols almost single-handedly revived the study of American political history. He did so partly by demonstrating that political history represented, at its best, much more than a recounting of the particulars of election campaigns and politicians’ actions, and partly by his willingness to exploit insights and concepts from the social sciences.5 In all his writings, Nichols demonstrated a mastery of detailed narrative that encompassed the question “why” as well as the “what” and “how” of the major historical decisions and trends. As Nichols himself put it, “If the writing of history is to have its greatest significance and be more than a mere narrative of events, it ought to attempt to communicate the meaning of what men have done.” To this end, Nichols explored the whole question of motivation among humans, concluding that the “dynamics of human behavior” could best be understood in the context of biological concepts like “adaptation.”6 Embedded in these works, and others, were theories of American political behavior that would profoundly influence Nichols’s graduate students at Penn and, through his writings and theirs, the historical profession at large. Among the most important premises that Nichols emphasized was the focus on power in the political culture. Politicians, in this perspective, were fundamentally concerned with getting power and wielding it to serve their own (and sometimes their constituents’) interests. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Disruption of American Democracy (1948), Nichols had argued that the Civil War was not fundamentally the product of underlying social and economic forces such as had been emphasized in progressive historiography. Rather, he looked to the machinations of “vote-hungry” politicians who calibrated their appeals in a rapidly growing and culturally diverse society so as to encourage regional and cultural groups to pursue objectives that led to a result most did not seek or foresee: the breakdown of the Union. More generally, Nichols was pioneering an “electoral machine” theory of politics and political parties that would become central to McCormick’s own writing and identity as a historian of American political parties. Within Nichols’s political universe, and McCormick’s, sensitivity to regional variation in political practices and political culture is a centerpiece, as is the emphasis on parties as an independent variable within the American political system.7

6

McCormick of Rutgers

McCormick has acknowledged Nichols’s “tremendous” influence on him, and it is impossible, in reading the life’s work of mentor and student, not to be impressed by the congruity of their interests and point of view. Nichols’s graduate seminar was “unremarkable,” according to McCormick, but this was in contrast to his “brilliant” graduate lecture courses. “They influenced all of us greatly,” McCormick later recalled. “You had the engrossing experience of listening to a superior, well informed and imaginative mind at work. No other lectures ever so fully engaged and stimulated me.” With his emphasis as a lecturer on dramatic set-pieces, Nichols was a popular teacher at Penn. But he was not a hands-on director of doctoral dissertations, and in at least one instance—McCormick’s study of New Jersey during the 1780s—it is unlikely he even read his own student’s work.8 Still, Nichols was a model for McCormick and, beyond that, an influential guide to a niche in the historians’ guild. Most important, Nichols encouraged McCormick to make political history his specialty and invited his acolyte to join him in expanding the boundaries of scholarship on American political culture beyond the old Progressive paradigm of “masses versus classes.” Once McCormick landed a teaching position at Rutgers in 1945, Nichols suggested that his student’s wisest move would be to develop expertise in New Jersey History. And it was Nichols to whom the aspiring young scholar turned when he sought counsel on work in progress or recommendations for fellowships and grants. For Richard McCormick, the war years were laborious but not dangerous. Single and healthy, McCormick was an obvious target for the draft. He sought a commission in the Navy, but he did not pass his physical examination. Instead, having completed his course work at Penn, he accepted a position as a staff historian at the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, working under the direction of Temple University historian James Barnes. McCormick’s memories of the war years are double-edged. On the one hand, he recalls the pleasures of life in Philadelphia before its postwar decline, with good, cheap food and plentiful opportunities for entertainment. On the other hand, he emphasizes the demands of his job, which involved writing two lengthy monographs in an unheated warehouse through much of the war. He was doing useful work, but at the same time he was missing one of the great adventures of his generation: serving overseas in the armed forces. During these years (1942–1944), McCormick had to suspend work on a doctoral dissertation. Instead, he used his increasing sophistication as a scholar to write two institutional histories.9

Introduction

7

The war was still on when McCormick left Philadelphia to accept an instructorship in History at the University of Delaware, in Newark. One of his graduate school cronies, John A. Munroe, had previously obtained a job there, with much of his responsibility focused on teaching History to young reservists then training on the Delaware campus. Of the five classes per term to which he was assigned, McCormick taught one class to regular students, with the other classes comprised of seventeen-year-olds who were in the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (or ASTRP as it was called). The most important event of McCormick’s year in Newark had nothing to do with teaching. It was, rather, meeting his future wife, Katheryne Levis, then a chemistry graduate student at the university. Katheryne (Katch) Levis was a twin. She and her sister, Dorothy, made McCormick’s acquaintance at the graduate student table in the Delaware dining hall, together with that of McCormick’s friend and colleague John Munroe. After some months of going out in a “gang” rather than pairing off, John Munroe eventually asked Dorothy Levis to marry him, while McCormick came to a similar determination about Katch. The Munroes married in July 1945 and the McCormicks a month later. The couples have remained close ever since, and in their retirement have maintained cottages near one another on Cape Cod. In the Spring of 1945, before Katheryne Levis’s decision to accept McCormick’s marriage proposal, she had landed a position teaching chemistry in New Brunswick, at the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass College). By a remarkable coincidence McCormick received a call within weeks of his wife’s appointment at Douglass from his former professor Irving Kull, then chair of the History Department at Rutgers. Professor Robert Thompson of the department had died unexpectedly. Would McCormick be interested in replacing him? It was, McCormick later recalled, an “amazing” piece of timing, “almost miraculous” in the way things fell into place for him.10 As a graduate student at Penn, McCormick had paid no attention to New Jersey History. Among the topics he considered for a doctoral dissertation was a study of American military policy in the twentieth century. But in the summer of 1945, having just begun his teaching duties at Rutgers, McCormick had a fateful meeting in New York with his mentor. Nichols suggested that a focus on New Jersey History would make more sense, especially as Rutgers had recently been designated as the state university. In the weeks that followed the New York meeting, McCormick began to focus on the so-called “Critical Period” of New Jersey history, between the establishment of a confederation of thirteen sovereign states in 1781 and the ratification of the federal constitution in 1788, as the basis for his doctoral

8

McCormick of Rutgers

dissertation. The subject was still fresh, as there was no serious study of this period in New Jersey history. Primary source materials, largely unexploited, were readily available at Rutgers, the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark, and the state library in Trenton. McCormick’s dissertation was completed by 1948 and published by Rutgers University Press in 1950 as Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period, 1781–1789 . A tightly organized study that discussed both the social and political ramifications of forging a new republican path in New Jersey, Experiment in Independence distinguished itself from the regnant progressive historiography that highlighted persistent struggles between a commercial elite and the producing masses. McCormick, by contrast, examined the surprisingly successful efforts of the people of New Jersey to build a functional polity in the face of economic, ideological, and sectional strains. Conservatives, he found, were particularly happy with the outcome of events in Philadelphia in 1787 that created a strong federal union, but in fact the new Constitution “was welcomed by all classes” because it offered financial relief and a fresh start.11 Experiment in Independence established McCormick’s bona fides as a scholar; it has remained the standard work in its field.12 The book’s mastery of primary sources and its unsentimental depiction of political behavior highlighted some of McCormick’s signature qualities as a working historian. During his first three years at Rutgers, as he labored over Experiment in Independence, McCormick made a conscious decision to identify himself with the study and promotion of New Jersey History. He developed a popular course at Rutgers on state history, joined the New Jersey Historical Society, and began to agitate for the serious study of New Jersey History as the basis for creating a more positive state image. In 1948, McCormick conceived the idea of a Conference of New Jersey Historians as a mechanism for bringing together professional and lay historians from across the state to exchange ideas about both the study and the promotion of New Jersey History. Held at Rutgers, the first conference (like the two that followed it in 1949 and 1950) was a major success. Representatives of local and county historical societies, many of the state’s colleges and universities, and historians from public agencies like the state library and state museum, attended lectures, drafted resolutions for future action, and in general found common ground in their commitment to the cause.13 The New Jersey History conferences, followed up with newsletters that McCormick edited, were well timed. The postwar period marked new initiatives in many areas. The time seemed right to reinvigorate venerable, albeit dormant, institutions like the New Jersey Histori-

Introduction

9

cal Society—and, if possible, to encourage state investment in historical enterprises. For years the state library had limped along with minimal budgets. By 1950, a self-professed history buff, Republican governor Alfred A. Driscoll, proposed eliminating ten positions at the state library, reducing its budget by 30 percent, and eliminating all funds for the state museum. Only by convincing the governor and other power brokers in New Jersey that history mattered could this discouraging trend be reversed.14 In his early thirties, with increasing responsibilities at Rutgers and two small children at home, McCormick accelerated his activism in public history while moving up the ladder toward full professor at Rutgers University. At Rutgers, McCormick was well situated to promote New Jersey History. Experiment in Independence had appeared in 1950, to much greater attention in the state’s news media than scholarly history books, before or since, generally receive.15 His New Jersey History conferences had been more successful than he had anticipated, broadening McCormick’s contacts statewide, leading to numerous speaking engagements and ultimately, drawing him into a deeper connection with the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark. As McCormick later told the story, two of the leading figures of the Society, Damon G. Douglas and Charles B. Bradley, attended the second annual New Jersey History conference at Rutgers in 1949 and were impressed by what they saw. In a private meeting with McCormick, they asked his opinion about what to do “to vivify” the organization. McCormick advised hiring a knowledgeable outside consultant who would chart an ambitious but feasible course for it. Specifically, he recommended Edward P. Alexander, former director of the Wisconsin Historical Society, then serving in an executive position at Colonial Williamsburg, for the task.16 What happened next surprised McCormick. Evidently impressed by the young scholar’s vision and persona, Douglas and Bradley commissioned Alexander to write such a report. They also conferred privately with Rutgers University president Robert C. Clothier to determine whether Clothier would object to McCormick’s election as president of the New Jersey Historical Society. Clothier said he saw no problem with an assistant professor at Rutgers taking on such an assignment, and by the fall of 1950 the scheme was falling into place. McCormick would be nominated for the presidency of the New Jersey Historical Society on the very same day he was installed as a member of the Society’s board of trustees! McCormick was unprepared for the proposition when it was presented to him in his office at Rutgers, but he agreed to go along. Consequently, when the Society’s board met in December, the Alexander plan was formally un-

10

McCormick of Rutgers

veiled. McCormick was elected president and given the charge of implementing, so far as it was financially feasible, the substance of Alexander’s detailed and ambitious report.17 Thus began a productive seven-year tenure in that office. In a day when the state’s business and professional elite had much more commitment to organizations like historical societies than would subsequently be the case, McCormick’s new position not only meant increased visibility for him; it also substantially increased his influence in state historical circles and beyond. At the time of his election to the presidency of the New Jersey Historical Society, McCormick was thirtythree years old.18 Richard P. McCormick’s life in the first half of the 1950s, even recollected in tranquillity, emerges as a dizzying constellation of meetings, lectures, research, writing, and other professional activity. During the period that McCormick was laboring to implement the recommendations of the Alexander report to the New Jersey Historical Society, which entailed spending one day a week in Newark, he was teaching a heavy load of courses in New Jersey and U.S. History; consulting two days a month as research adviser to Colonial Williamsburg; publishing a steady stream of articles in the Journal of the Rutgers University Library and other periodicals; researching and writing his second book, The History of Voting in New Jersey; laying the foundation for writing a one-volume history of the state; preparing and giving numerous talks to New Jersey audiences and scholarly papers at professional conferences; working behind the scenes as an occasional speechwriter and historical advisor to Governors Alfred E. Driscoll and Robert B. Meyner; and attempting to achieve some balance in his life by playing golf and poker with his friends and fulfilling his domestic obligations.19 McCormick’s marriage was the rock on which everything else was built. His wife, Katch, handled all mundane chores at home, including balancing the family checkbook, while McCormick was out many evenings—often at distant points in the state—at meetings and giving talks. This was the 1950s, and in many American households the situation was different perhaps only in degree. Katheryne did not object to his schedule and participated when possible in social events connected with her husband’s work. During his presidency of the New Jersey Historical Society (1950–1957) McCormick put thousands of miles on the family Buick visiting every county in New Jersey, some of them repeatedly, on business of one sort or another. He was deeply committed to bringing New Jersey History to as many people as was humanly possible, and enjoyed what he was doing. In the course of his travels, McCormick made invaluable con-

Introduction

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tacts with fellow scholars, avocational historians and buffs, newspaper editors, and other media personalities. He lured several collections of important papers to Rutgers and continued to build his own reputation as the man to see when there was something brewing relating to New Jersey History.20 Still, from the perspective of the 1990s, one must marvel that the toll of McCormick’s travels on his health and his family life was not greater. He was fortunate that his wife was able and willing to handle many of the everyday responsibilities in his absence. At the same time, McCormick was engaged in his two children’s lives, teaching them to swim, ice skate, and play tennis; tossing baseballs and kicking footballs with his son, Dick, Jr.; and attending various sporting events and pep rallies with both children. Although absent from home much more frequently than a working-class dad might be, he was not a disengaged spouse or parent.21 During the first decade of his professional life, McCormick numbered among his professional associations, in addition to those already noted, connections with the American Association for State and Local History, the Institute of Early American History and Culture, the New Brunswick Historical Club, the Council of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin’s American History Research Center, and the West Jersey Proprietors. All of these affiliations entailed meetings, some close to home, some involving trains and planes to distant locations. For several years in the early 1950s, McCormick spent two days a month in Williamsburg as a consultant to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, an experience he remembers as one of the happiest connections of his professional life. Beyond these professional activities were clubs and committees related to his alma mater. His chairmanship of the Research Council and work on the advisory board of the Rutgers University Press were the most time-consuming and meaningful in terms of advancing scholarship. None of this even hints at the hours he spent updating and delivering classroom lectures, conducting seminars, advising students, and serving on committees at Rutgers, or of McCormick’s ongoing efforts to build Rutgers’s academic reputation. Nor does the constant motion help explain where, precisely, McCormick found the time to research and write many encyclopedia articles, popular essays, scholarly papers, and book reviews, or, most importantly, his second monograph, A History of Voting in New Jersey, which Rutgers University Press published in 1953.22 While serving as president of the New Jersey Historical Society from 1950 to 1957, McCormick averaged one day a week in Newark, working with the staff there to increase membership and strengthen publications and programs. Edward Alexander’s report had made

12

McCormick of Rutgers

the hiring of an executive director the linchpin of his plan, which was to be followed upon by a new emphasis on the museum (until 1950 essentially inactive) and a revived scholarly program, which entailed an annual conference and publication of significant bibliographical and monographic work related to New Jersey. Increasing membership of the Society was a central priority. McCormick oversaw progress in these realms and others. He helped hire a strong executive director, Alexander J. Wall, and encouraged a spirit of professionalism in the operations of the Society. He encouraged a new look for the Society’s quarterly journal, and he was ever alert to new opportunities for growing the Society—most especially corporate and professional memberships. By 1957, McCormick believed he had essentially accomplished his mission. With scholarly projects pressing, he resigned as president while retaining his seat on the Board of Trustees. In the course of his work at Rutgers and at the Historical Society, McCormick developed important relationships and ongoing friendships. Among the most fruitful and lasting of these was with Newark News reporter John T. Cunningham, whom he first met at one of the conferences he had organized on promoting state history. Cunningham, who later struck out on his own as a freelance writer with New Jersey history as his beat, shared McCormick’s passion for bringing the best New Jersey scholarship to the widest possible audience. For more than three decades the two men frequently worked together on statewide committees, at the Historical Society in Newark, and at the New Jersey Historical Commission. A prolific writer, Cunningham’s reputation rested on such books as This Is New Jersey, a synoptic study of the state’s twenty-one counties, New Jersey: America’s Main Road, a one-volume history of New Jersey, and histories of various New Jersey industries, among many other books and innumerable newspaper and magazine articles.23 For three decades Cunningham was McCormick’s coadjutor in many causes and on many committees, commissions, and boards. A scholar writing about New Jersey history fifty years hence will almost certainly conclude that the two most important figures in state history circles during the post–World War II period were John T. Cunningham and Richard P. McCormick. Also in McCormick’s historical orbit was Adrian Coulter Leiby of Bergenfield, a founding partner of the blue-chip New York law firm of Leboeuf, Leiby, and Lamb. Leiby’s abiding interest in the Jersey Dutch during the Colonial and Revolutionary periods led him into McCormick’s office at Rutgers in the mid-1950s. Leiby had drafted a book on the Jersey Dutch and their experiences in the bloody “neu-

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tral” ground of Bergen County during the Revolutionary War. He was convinced that divisions over religious enthusiasm (Coetus v. Conferentie) within the Dutch Reformed community translated into the divisions between support for or opposition to the independence movement of the mid 1770s.24 Following McCormick’s suggestions about further reading and restructuring the manuscript, by 1960 Leiby had produced the necessary revisions, and Rutgers University Press published The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley in 1962.25 McCormick would later call Leiby’s book “the finest work that I know of done in the last fifty years by a non-academic.” The book was a success d’estime for the press, subsequently enjoyed a modest paperback sale, and remains in print to this day.26 Adrian Leiby went on to write a half-dozen more books, all but one of them relating to the history of Bergen County or his home town of Bergenfield. The exception was a volume on the early Swedish and Dutch influence in New Jersey, produced—at McCormick’s behest—for the state’s Tercentenary celebration in 1964. Asked years later whether he met many other lay historians of Leiby’s quality in his lifetime, McCormick replied, simply, “none.”27 Because McCormick was reading steadily for both the Rutgers and Princeton University presses, he was in a position to advance work like Leiby’s that he believed was important. Conversely, McCormick blocked publication of work he did not find satisfactory. He refereed numerous revised doctoral dissertations on New Jersey themes ranging from biographies of prominent political figures and studies of everyday life in colonial New Jersey to analyses of political party development in various eras. Little serious scholarship on New Jersey History was published by any New Jersey press between 1950 and 1980 without McCormick’s imprimatur.28 McCormick’s referee reports yield clues to his orientation as a scholar. He discouraged antiquarianism. He sometimes emphasized that a submission was “boring” or “turgid.” McCormick always stressed the need for scholars to strive for analytical sophistication, to discern patterns in evidence, to do more with History than merely tell a story. As he wrote in a negative report on one manuscript, “surely [the author] could engage in more detailed analyses of election data to exhibit patterns and identify shifts [in voter behavior].”29 In his own professional reading, McCormick was largely indifferent to popular narrative histories. He was primarily interested in works that focused on structures and institutional change—particularly as related to political processes and the exercise of power. Consequently, over the years, books that elicited enthusiastic responses from McCormick included Forrest McDonald’s We the People, a frontal assault on Charles Beard’s interpretation of the

14

McCormick of Rutgers

“economic origins of the Constitution,” Noble Cunningham’s volumes on Jeffersonian party machinery, David Hackett Fischer’s prosopographically focused The Revolution of American Conservatism, Alfred S. Young’s massive study of the politics in eighteen-century New York, and the work of Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan. McDonald, Bailyn, and Morgan were especially lucid writers, but it was their analytical sophistication that earned McCormick’s deepest respect and appreciation.30 As a rule, McCormick read monographic literature and relevant secondary works more out of duty than for pleasure. His announced enthusiasm for often tedious monographs on aspects of the political process bespoke his respect for work well done. His own intensive reading in often dry monographs on politics and political systems was simply “part of the job,” as he later recalled. The fact remains that McCormick devoted untold hours to mastering an enormous literature on American politics and electoral behavior. McCormick once observed that his true satisfaction as a historian lay primarily in the “discovery” phase—working with documents and other primary sources and seeking meaningful patterns in the evidence he was sifting. Throughout his career, from the early writing on New Jersey political institutions through his prize-winning book on The Second American Party System, an essay on “The Comparative Method,” and a book on the “presidential game,” the latter two published late in his career, McCormick would emphasize his preference for “rigorous” methodology, or “controlled investigation,” focused on a particular problem using a particular tool. Almost all of McCormick’s published work reflected this orientation, and consequently relatively little of it found a significant audience beyond academe.31 McCormick’s aim of moving beyond traditional modes of historical writing led him to the New Political History, of which he can legitimately claim to be called a progenitor. The roots of McCormick’s interest in a new kind of political history are difficult to pinpoint with any chronological exactitude, but they are traceable to his connections with Nichols, his participation in a 1948 conference at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focused on a “new” history, and his growing fascination with the study of New Jersey voting data.32 McCormick’s work on changing voting practices in New Jersey from the colonial period into the era of so-called Jacksonian Democracy and beyond led him inevitably to the major theoretical works on political science. Among the most compelling to his way of thinking were V. O. Key’s masterwork on Southern politics; the newly translated work of the French political scientist Maurice Duverger; Austin Ranney on the doctrine of responsible parties; and Stuart Rice’s

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Quantitative Methods in Politics, which, McCormick later recalled, “encouraged me to believe that voting data could indeed be exploited in many ways.”33 Like many of his professional peers, McCormick was influenced by the Social Science Research Council’s Bulletin 64: The Social Sciences in Historical Study, published in 1954. As that report noted, scholars were increasingly interested in a “broader analysis of behavior to provide clearer insight in making hypotheses”; new focus on community studies and “grass roots” research; and more cooperation with fellow historians and other social scientists in their work.34 Bulletin 64 challenged historians to consider alternatives to their traditional way of doing History. This entailed moving beyond the Progressive interpretation of history, with its emphasis on heroes and villains, and a kind of dialectical progression toward ever more democracy in America. At another level, it meant abandoning the focus of traditional historical narrative on political and economic elites for explication of the “normal ideas of the average citizen in any time and place.” It also entailed using social science techniques to penetrate below the “surface” of events to the “major dynamics of the culture, the uniformities rather than those features that appear to be most colorful or unique.”35 Having studied with Roy Nichols at Penn and, more recently undertaken a study of voting records for a single state in which process (evolving election machinery) was emphasized over product (specific election campaigns and outcomes), McCormick was receptive to the call for a more scientific history, ground in verifiable hypotheses. He was eager to embrace a “new” political history that moved beyond the hoopla of election campaigns and major policy battles to consider the terrain below: the “long duree” of institutional evolution and adaptation. Fundamentally, as he observed in 1985, McCormick sought to delineate “the role of organized political behavior in our democracy,” with special emphasis on factors that influenced voter participation and the development and operation of political machinery. In this connection he was especially intrigued by the importance of the “constitutional-legal environment” in shaping the rules and conduct of politics.36 By the summer of 1956, having consulted with Roy Nichols, McCormick began the process of seeking financial support from the Social Science Research Council for a conference that would focus on such matters. McCormick planned to host the conference at Rutgers and invite scholars who were doing the most interesting work in the field, with hopes of setting an agenda for research aimed toward a new paradigm. McCormick’s prospectus called for a three-day colloquy wherein a dozen leading scholars would deliver papers and participate in informal discussions on American politi-

16

McCormick of Rutgers

cal behavior for the period 1760–1840 (McCormick’s own primary interest). Central concerns for the conferees, as McCormick described them, included identification of the best “procedures” for “understanding political behavior.” What data was available and might best be exploited to achieve a better understanding of the American polity? What specific aspects of political behavior had been underplayed or even ignored in previous scholarship?37 Enclosing a copy of his own research design in the proposal to the SSRC, McCormick emphasized his interest in understanding why voters in the period 1760–1840 went to the polls; what caused the growth in voter participation; and, in particular, to what extent “issues”—as opposed to electoral machinery and party competition or factors like the relative wealth of voters—mainly explained the increasingly democratic system of suffrage and voter turnout. As early as 1956, McCormick had concluded that comparative analysis was an important tool in working toward a new political history that was more sophisticated and truthful to the realities of the past than previous studies had been. By comparative analysis he meant asking the same questions about identical phenomena in differing environments and then analyzing the results. Only by comparing the different states in the context of their own histories, he argued, could convincing generalizations be made.38 The SSRC responded favorably to the proposal and funded the Rutgers Conference as well as a subsequent year-long research leave for McCormick.39 McCormick thereupon organized what became known as the “Conference on Early American Political Behavior” and invited scholars whose work he knew best and admired.40 Sessions were held at Rutgers in June 1957. The participants included Lee Benson, then of Columbia University and soon to take on the mantle of leading proselytizer for the “new” political history; Noble Cunningham of the University of Richmond; Charles G. Sellers of Princeton University; Richard D. Brown, then at the University of Connecticut; Harry Stevens of Ohio University, author of a new book on the early Jacksonian party in Ohio; and two of McCormick’s classmates from Penn, John A. Munroe of the University of Delaware and John J. Reed of Muhlenburg College. McCormick subsequently published a summary of the proceedings, emphasizing the assembled group’s discontent with the “narrow” approach then prevalent in political studies and the tendency to miss opportunities to compare and contrast political developments from state to state, even within a fairly constricted region. Too often, the conferees had agreed, “works purporting to deal with political developments on the national scene resort to generalizations that could scarcely be reconciled with actual conditions on the state level.”41

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The conferees called for a “new” political history that embedded the study of past politics in the cultural milieu of the state and nation and avoided single cause explanations of important political trends. They sought to move beyond the traditional focus on the machinations of political leaders by committing themselves to a comprehensive study of grass-roots attitudes and opinions in the political process. In other words, they would put voters front and center in their political analysis. Finally, the conferees expressly embraced a comparative approach to the study of political behavior and a new attention to the emerging technique of panel analysis (a particular concern of Lee Benson). In part, they were arguing that what political scientists were doing most suggestively to analyze contemporary American politics could be applied retrospectively to the study of past political behavior. It was an ambitious agenda, and, according to a leading proponent of the “new political history,” McCormick’s report was a “key document for anyone wishing to assess the efforts to reorient political history that were under way at the time.”42 With forty years’ hindsight, and the ultimate failure of the new political historians to achieve some of their most basic goals in the march toward a “scientific study of history,” it is clear that the agenda outlined in McCormick’s proposal for the conference and his summary was overambitious.43 But the arguments emanating from the New Brunswick conference were not mere gas from well-fed scholars. McCormick, Benson, and company were in the vanguard of a movement that would profoundly affect the study of political history over the next generation, that would occupy the efforts of scores of graduate students and result in vigorous exchanges between historians who identified with a traditional emphasis on issues, particularly economic issues, in understanding politics in the early republic, on the one hand, and Lee Benson and an emerging “school” of “behaviorist” historians on the other.44 The New Political History was no monolithic movement. It represented a congeries of fresh approaches to the study of American history, ranging from the militantly “scientific” analysis promised by Lee Benson to inclusion in research designs of relatively neglected quantitative evidence—electoral returns and roll calls, for example—among the mix of sources that would serve as the foundation for their analysis of past politics. Benson also introduced historians to the concept of “negative reference groups” in American politics.45 At one level, as championed by Thomas C. Cochran of the University of Pennsylvania, the “new” political history was fundamentally a rejection of the “presidential synthesis” in American history, with its insistent focus on the importance of top-down, rather than bot-

18

McCormick of Rutgers

tom-up historical action. But in terms of specific initiatives, those who embraced “the new political history” were not necessarily of one mind on either the questions that needed to be posed or the methods for answering those questions. McCormick’s identification with the new political history never approached that of Lee Benson or such Benson acolytes as Joel Silbey, Ronald Formisano, William G. Shade, and Allen Bogue, for several reasons. For one thing, McCormick himself was never as interested in relating voter behavior to class, religion, or ethnicity as Benson and other new political historians were. Viewing motivation of nineteenth-century voters as inscrutable, McCormick devoted his energies to subjects he believed he could more effectively test, such as the evolution of party machinery in the respective states and its impact on the election cycle. Second, although he proselytized for his version of History writing in various professional forums and publications, McCormick wrote no broadside or treatise that reached and captured a significant audience. His one foray into manifesto writing was entailed in the report he wrote on the 1957 Rutgers conference. But that document was published only in part, and in a journal read by only a small fraction of the political science and historical community.46 Third, McCormick was leery of two of the central elements of the emerging school of History associated with Benson: its emphasis both on quantification in recapturing the nineteenth-century political universe and the premise that negative reference groups were the primary stimulus to voting behavior. As McCormick (himself a quantifier) wrote to Allen Bogue in 1966, “quantifiable data make up only a portion of the evidence available to the historian. Moreover, if quantifiable data are to be used intelligently, one must have a vast knowledge of the historical context. . . . The data are not self interpreting.” McCormick added that quantification, done poorly, “can lead to an extremely imbalanced emphasis on those factors that can be quantified, to the exclusion of others of equal significance.” McCormick’s objections to aspects of Lee Benson’s pathbreaking The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (1961), doubtless accentuated some of these concerns. No less than the adherents of a more traditional approach to Jacksonian political history, McCormick acutely grasped the deficiencies in Benson’s interpretation of evidence in that book and the degree to which even his most modest claims to having done “scientific” History rested on “potentially verifiable hypotheses” that could, in his view, never be verified.47 For example, McCormick saw serious problems in applying methods of calibrating voter attitudes in the present to voter attitudes in a

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19

previous century. For one thing, the nineteenth-century political universe was different. The importance of parties and the pervasiveness of politics in masculine culture was a given in the study of nineteenth-century America; not so in the twentieth. Second, there was the straightforward problem of not being able to ask nineteenth-century voters why they felt or acted as they did. “We can’t do an opinion poll on the election of 1860,” McCormick told Allen Bogue, “the way that Campbell or Lazarsfeld would do one on the election of 1960.”48 The school associated with Benson, by contrast, tended to minimize that problem, assuming that the guiding principles of political analysis in the 1960s were applicable to earlier periods in American history. McCormick’s focus on party formation evaded the question of whether religion, ethnicity, personal loyalties, or economic issues most affected voting behavior in the respective states during the Jacksonian period. Instead, he devoted his energies to questions that he felt in the end were more manageable because they entailed hypotheses that could efficaciously be tested. For McCormick, it was possible that economics affected voting behavior in some places and ethnicity or religious factors in others, but it would be impossible to find an overarching interpretation that would reflect the realities of the Jacksonian polity—hence he would leave it to others to argue such matters.49 McCormick’s position was intellectually defensible, but it left him on the sidelines during some of the most vigorous and interesting debates among American political historians in the 1960s and beyond. In wake of the 1957 Rutgers conference, with the help of one of his graduate students, Carl E. Prince, McCormick began collecting and analyzing voting data that would serve as the foundation for an ambitious study of the development of the Second American Party System. Ultimately he created an unprecedented archive of state-level voting returns in presidential, gubernatorial, and, in some instances, congressional elections for every state except South Carolina. This data was correlated with estimates of the adult white male population for each election. From these sources he calculated rates of voter participation. The first fruits of this effort were disseminated in scholarly papers and articles for major journals. In 1959, McCormick published “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments: A Study in Voter Behavior,” in the Missississippi Valley Historical Review. This article exerted a considerable influence on political studies at that time and remains among McCormick’s favorites. In it he addressed the Progressive historians’ assumption that American voters have generally identified with major political parties depending on their personal wealth.

20

McCormick of Rutgers

Using New York and North Carolina as his test cases, he demonstrated that liberalization of suffrage requirements in both states little affected party alignments, thereby contradicting expectations that the newly enfranchised “masses” would upset the balance between the parties. Instead, they divided their partisan allegiances between the two parties in much the same proportion that the elites had. In important ways McCormick’s conclusions complemented the arguments of Lee Benson, whose study of New York’s presidential election of 1844 argued that the fundamental divide between parties had little to do with economic classes. McCormick’s findings thereby offered ammunition for scholars taking aim on the regnant interpretation of Jacksonian politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, The Age of Jackson. “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments” was reprinted in anthologies to represent an alternative view to Schlesinger’s identification of Jackson with the advance of American democracy.50 McCormick’s identification with the young turks in political history was reinforced by publication in 1960 of his article “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics” in the American Historical Review. In this piece, McCormick challenged the argument that Andrew Jackson brought unprecedented numbers of voters to the polls in 1824, 1828, and 1832. McCormick connected increased voter turnout not to Jackson’s charisma or the significance of discrete issues, but rather to the closeness of party competition in the respective states. Where one party dominated, as in Tennessee or Massachusetts, turnout was low. Where the two parties were closely competitive, as in most of the middle states, turnout usually was substantially higher.51 These articles were the prelude to McCormick’s most sustained venture into “comparative method,” The Second American Party System, which focused on the contest for the presidency as the basis for party formation. In this book and other writings, McCormick highlighted the change from sectionally and congressionally based parties in the Federalist era to the emergence of a genuinely competitive party system nationwide, albeit a “system” that in his view did not fully mature until 1840. In terms of influencing fellow scholars and, in key respects, of affecting the conventional interpretation of the morphology of the second party system, this book is McCormick’s most significant publication. His focus on the contest for the presidency as an organizing force in the emergence of a stable two-party system and his emphasis on the relative lateness of its maturation have gained wide acceptance among scholars. McCormick’s use of the concept of a second party system was in itself an original and a lasting contribution to the historical literature. His emphasis on the

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value of comparing the timing of the emergence of competitive parties in the respective states was fresh and illuminating.52 Perhaps most significant, in his two seminal articles and his book, McCormick had helped change the focus of the debate over Jacksonian politics. A leading political historian writing in 1986 ranked McCormick’s work with Benson’s Concept of Jacksonian Democracy as “the two most interesting revisionist studies in the 1960s. . . . They redefined the boundaries” of scholarly discourse about American democracy and political parties between the Age of Jefferson and the Civil War.53 Investigating voter participation and the relative balance of parties from state-to-state between 1824 and 1840, McCormick discovered that competitive parties formed at different times from section to section. This was an obvious but previously unobserved fact. He related the sequential shifts in party alignments to the contest for the presidency. Most particularly, he saw the sectional identification of the candidates as being of prime importance in defining and redefining the shape of the party system. New England, for example, which had been united in support of Massachusetts candidate John Quincy Adams in 1824 and 1828, broke apart after Adams’s defeat in 1828 and did not rally effectively on behalf of Whig candidate Henry Clay in 1832. Conversely, Tennessee presidential candidate Andrew Jackson enjoyed overwhelming support in the southern states (except Kentucky) in 1824 and 1828, but Martin Van Buren’s candidacy in 1836 provoked vigorous party competition in much of the country.54 In The Second American Party System, McCormick accepted the notion that the first party system was based on substantive “issues,” but he explicitly denied that ideas or issues were central to the emergence or the flowering of the second party system. For McCormick, the raison d’être for political parties was to nominate and elect candidates. Issues and ideology are discounted in The Second American Party System, and, indeed, they are largely ignored in the corpus of McCormick’s writing on American politics. Campaign spectacle was likened to pep rallies at sporting events, while fervent campaign rhetoric, for McCormick as for Lee Benson, was dismissed as “claptrap.”55 McCormick’s view of American politics was fundamentally skeptical, even pessimistic. Where his peers, including Lee Benson, perceived a growing agency of average people in speaking out for themselves in the period after 1815, McCormick emphasized the “cosmetic” nature of such political inventions as the nominating convention and the continued dominance of party oligarchies.56 In his view, parties were formed by leaders, especially coalitions of state party leaders. At bottom, McCormick saw the American consti-

22

McCormick of Rutgers

tutional sysem as inimical to party government and to majority rule. That was the “real nub of the matter” to him.57 Like McCormick, Lee Benson rejected “an interest group theory of politics” rooted in “economic determinism.” But unlike McCormick, Benson offered an alternative theory of voting behavior, centered on what Daniel Feller recently called “overlapping layers of religious, ethnic, and attitudinal influences upon political preference”—in a vulgarized form, ethnocultural influences.58 An encompassing class or ethnocultural analysis neither appealed to McCormick’s instincts as a historian nor did it fit what he had learned about the operation of parties in states like New Jersey. McCormick’s fundamental skepticism about popular will being reflected in legislative halls at the state and national level permeates much of his writing. Politics, in McCormick’s view, resembled neither a fight over fundamentals nor a rough and tumble “game without rules” as described by Philip Klein in a study of early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. Rather, American politics was (and in his view, remains) a game with evolving rules, rules designed by shrewd and self-interested political captains. Because no one appeal—for example, commitment to a high tariff, or opposition to selling off federal lands and sharing proceeds with all the states—could work for either party on a national basis, McCormick avowed that major parties were forced not merely to muffle sectionally devise issues but to conduct themselves essentially as electoral machines. The irony is that McCormick did not see parties, even in their nineteenth-century heyday, as providing particularly effective governance.59 American political parties, in this perspective, were “artificial” creations that primarily served the interests of the parties’ elite. They functioned well under “normal” circumstances but were poorly designed to handle fundamental challenges to politics-as-usual. The slavery issue, for McCormick, was such a challenge, and the second party system was not capable of “managing” it.60 The Second American Party System was honored with a prize from the American Association of State and Local History; it quickly went into paperback and was widely adopted in undergraduate and graduate courses. Important aspects of the book did not, however, go long unchallenged; indeed, parts of it were so vigorously contested that McCormick ever since has been identified less with the aspects of his book that gained wide acceptance than with his so-called electoral machine thesis, which has won a scant following among American political historians. To his critics, McCormick’s dismissal of much of what took place “out of doors” in American political culture, as well as the substantive debates in legislative halls and in public prints, seemed unnecessarily to drain American politics of much of

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the meaning they attached to these phenomena. McCormick’s description of the second party system as “artificial” because—unlike the first and third party systems—it did not reflect or manage the underlying sectional antagonisms in the nation—also found little acceptance. For example, Charles G. Sellers, who called The Second American Party System a “full blown” example of the “New Political History” and identified McCormick with the work of the emerging “ethno-cultural” school pioneered by Lee Benson, expressed a mixed reaction to the book. He respected McCormick’s conception of party as a powerful and autonomous entity within the American political culture, affecting what politicians said and did. But for Sellers, McCormick’s contention that the second party system was “artificial” because it did not face up to sectional issues and was eventually destroyed by them was unsatisfactory. “I would suggest,” he wrote, “that the non-sectional issues of fiscal policy were as ‘real’ in the 1830s and 1840s as the more sectional issues of tariff and internal improvement, and that the party system did in fact deal reasonably successfully with even these sectional questions.” It was the slavery issue, Sellers averred, that destroyed the second party system. “Could a ‘real’ party system have done better?” he asked.61 Other close students of the political system described a polity in which substantive issues provided grist for election campaigns and legislative debate—voters had choices and exercised them, thereby affecting political decision making. Lex Renda, one of McCormick’s students, put it along these lines: “on such questions as the Gag Rule, Texas annexation, the Mexican War, and even (for a time) on the issues comprised by the Compromise of 1850, the parties appeared, at least within the North and within the South, to offer voters alternatives.”62 McCormick’s resolute emphasis on presidential politics as the basis for the emerging second party system also came in for criticism. Michael F. Holt, whose 1973 book on the rise of the Republican party in Pittsburgh identified him with the new political history, rejected the notion that the party system formed exclusively around the presidential question and the regional identity of presidential candidates.63 Such an analysis, in Holt’s view, is “needlessly restrictive,” as it ignores legislative behavior in the Congress and political developments at the state level, focused manifestly on state issues. Presidential elections, in this perspective, were not the only significant factors to be considered in understanding and explaining party development.64 As Frank Otto Gatell put it, in reviewing McCormick’s book for the Journal of American History, “it was much

24

McCormick of Rutgers

more than the race for the presidency which transformed the Jackson party of 1828 into the Democratic party of 1840.”65 McCormick has always insisted that the arguments posited by critics of his book were themselves flawed, as were interpretations of the Jacksonian political system focused on economics, ethnoculturalism, or the market revolution as an organizing concept. But he never effectively engaged, much less refuted, scholars who insisted that patronage and “hard ball” politics could not explain the fervor of politics in Jacksonian America.66 His work has discounted “why” questions: for example, why people joined parties or cared deeply about elections, insisting it was not possible, in a heterodox democracy, to find answers that would serve equally well across a broad swath of the country. For many scholars, politics entails “systems of meaning” for politicians and voters alike, and if what mattered varied from place to place and time to time, understanding that people identified with parties on a level different from sports fans identifying with their local teams is important. McCormick’s insistence that he never meant the “electoral machine” concept to deny the existence or, in some instances, the significance of ideas or emotions in politics, simply did not register in the scholarly debate that accelerated during the 1960s. It consequently limited the influence of what in key respects was a seminal work of American political history.67 The Second American Party System was completed in 1962 but did not reach print until 1966 because of the vagaries of publishing cycles and book prizes. Long associated with the American Association for State and Local History, McCormick wanted his book to be considered for the biennial book prize awarded by that national body. This meant submitting the manuscript of the book, prepublication, to AASLH’s book committee, which subsequently awarded McCormick first prize, a handsome stipend and publication with the University of North Carolina Press. By the time the book finally appeared, McCormick’s book was not as fresh to some scholars as it might have been had it appeared when it was completed in 1962. For example, McCormick’s emphatic rejection of connections between the first and second party systems, and his positing of a three-party system concept, reached its readership after Walter Dean Burnham had laid out a five-party system concept that gained wide acceptance in the mid-1960s and beyond.68 Still, the book was widely considered an important contribution, and McCormick’s already hectic schedule at this time expanded to include new lecture engagements in and beyond New Jersey.69

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McCormick enjoyed opportunities to do more than lecture at major universities. Almost from the outset of his career at Rutgers, he was recruited for leadership positions at major academic institutions across the United States. In the early 1950s, Clifford Lord of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin lobbied intensively, albeit unsuccessfully, for McCormick to direct the American History Center there. Lawrence University invited McCormick to interview for its presidency. In the 1960s several leading universities—among them Rochester, Connecticut, Pittsburgh, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Nebraska, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—tried to recruit McCormick as History Department chair. Other institutions sought his services as an academic dean, among them West Chester University in Pennsylvania and Temple University.70 To all of those making entreaties, McCormick said politely but unequivocably that he was not interested in leaving New Brunswick. McCormick was not simply being sentimental about his alma mater. He did not hesitate, for example, to use some of these offers as leverage in seeking salary increases at Rutgers.71 But more important, as he would later recall, was the simple fact that he had everything he needed at Rutgers: a congenial department in which to work, resources for research at his fingertips or in nearby archives, access to power brokers in Trenton, and substantial influence in state historical circles. It would be impossible, he recognized, to duplicate his advantages anywhere else. And at bottom, as McCormick has emphasized, all he ever really wanted to do was to teach, research, and write. This he could well accomplish remaining where he was.72 Despite his increasing stature in the profession, the steady stream of royalty checks, prizes, awards, and the accelerating salary increases at Rutgers, McCormick’s outward life changed little. He continued to wear the same academic “uniform” of khaki slacks and weather-beaten tweed jackets, continued to chain-smoke Marlboros, and continued to reside in the same modest house in Piscataway that he and Katch had purchased in 1950. 73 McCormick’s main extravagance (such as it was) was his golf game, and even here he waited till 1966 before buying a new set of golf clubs as a special reward for his labors in finishing yet another book under deadline pressure. As McCormick was making his way at Rutgers University, he was engaged, on a variety of fronts, in public history ventures. Public history as a field had not been formally invented in the 1950s, but outreach to nonacademic audiences was an important priority for McCormick throughout his career. Sometimes this consisted of

26

McCormick of Rutgers

ghost-writing speeches on historical themes for Governor Robert Meyner or offering private advice to Governors Alfred Driscoll and Richard J. Hughes. Sometimes it entailed speaking out on controversies, like those that swirled at Rutgers during the McCarthy era and again during the Vietnam War. But, primarily, McCormick operated through the New Jersey Historical Society and as a member of ad hoc commissions associated either with historic buildings, like Morven and Drumthwacket, or with such events as the Tercentenary of the founding of New Jersey (1964) and the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence (1976).74 It may be that no individual had more influence over History at all levels in any single American state than Richard P. McCormick had in New Jersey in the era spanning the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower through Jimmy Carter. Part of his influence was simply heuristic. It was McCormick who taught several thousand Rutgers students what they knew about New Jersey history and McCormick who trained most Ph.D.s in New Jersey History, some of whom, including Carl E. Prince, Larry R. Gerlach, and Peter D. Levine, have remained his close friends over the years. Part of it was scholarly. In New Jersey History, McCormick determined which doctoral dissertations would become published books—and which would not. McCormick also wrote letters of recommendation for rising scholars to grant-giving agencies and tenure committees. These things are nearly invisible except to the individuals affected; but they are profoundly important in determining the shape of a scholarly community. In the realm of public history, McCormick was equally influential. Nothing documents this better than his efforts on behalf of a Tercentenary celebration in New Jersey. As early as 1957, he began lobbying for an organized statewide celebration of New Jersey’s 300th anniversary in 1964. In January 1958, McCormick wrote Governor Robert Meyner describing his vision of a Tercentenary Commission. Citing his conviction that there was a “latent” but “developing” interest in New Jersey History, McCormick argued that “we can use history to develop in our citizens a genuine feeling of identification with their state and their respective communities,” as the basis for more responsible citizenship. “What is needed to bring this historical awareness to a focus,” he noted, “to give this sense of identification real substance, is a grand mobilization of energies such as a tercentenary observance.” Pointing to the financial benefits of large-scale celebrations and to the manifest potential for “enlarging” knowledge of “our history” among schoolchildren and citizens, McCormick implored Meyner to appoint a committee, including himself, John Cunningham, and state librarian Roger McDonough, to draft a formal proposal for a serious and comprehensive Tercentenary obser-

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vance in New Jersey. McCormick’s letter and subsequent personal contacts with the governor won Meyner’s support. The committee was constituted as McCormick requested. Moreover, a proposal was submitted to the governor and subsequently rewritten as a bill providing for appointment of a Tercentenary Commission and a $25,000 appropriation for start-up costs.75 As McCormick tells the story, this nonpartisan plan ran into a roadblock in the form of a legislator from Essex County, Donald Fox, who opposed expending any state funds on the enterprise. McCormick visited Governor Meyner to explain the problem, whereupon the governor replied, “Dick, give him a little loving; that’s all it will take. Give him a little loving.” The next day McCormick went over to the State House, encountered Fox, and made his pitch. Knowing the Senate chamber was empty, he asked the legislator to join him there. As they walked toward the chamber, McCormick introduced his subject, emphasizing the merits of a statewide celebration of the Tercentenary. He then pointed up to the ceiling, with great names from New Jersey history inscribed in large letters, and with a deliberately tendentious flourish observed, “Senator, I know those names are all familiar to you. I’m sure they’re graven on your memory. But I won’t be content until, as a result of what this Tercentenary celebration will do for the state, those names are known to every school child in the state of New Jersey. Senator, you can make it possible, by giving your support for this bill.” The senator barely hesitated before assuring McCormick that he would back the bill, thus paving the way for planning to go forward and for the hiring of an executive director for the project.76 The appropriation establishing the Tercentenary Commission—which McCormick briefly served as acting chair—was, in his view, a huge step forward. “I am very hopeful,” he wrote to Kenneth Chorley in June of 1958, “that this Commission will be the instrument for promoting on all fronts widespread interest in the history of New Jersey.”77 In addition to the individual celebrations across the state, the Tercentenary events of 1964 created an enormous wave of interest in the state’s history, through newspaper and magazine articles, classroom projects, the New Jersey Historymobile that visited many communities, and locally-sponsored book projects like Adrian Leiby’s history of early Bergenfield.78 It was, as McCormick recalls, a force for the “rediscovery of New Jersey history” and a focus for new efforts to build pride in a state that long had an inferiority complex. Aside from the intangible benefits of stimulating Jerseyans’ awareness of their history, there were practical consequences of the Tercentenary as well. Out of the Tercentenary celebrations came a proposal to erect a state cultural center, which was realized several

28

McCormick of Rutgers

years later in the form of the present Cultural Center in Trenton, encompassing the State Library and State Museum.79 Another important legacy of the Tercentenary celebrations was the publication, between 1964 and 1966, of more than two dozen books on aspects of New Jersey History, in a series edited by Wheaton J. Lane and Richard M. Huber of Princeton University, published by Van Nostrand. With emphasis on virtually every significant facet of state history from constitutional and political history to labor history, education, urban history, and the arts, the Tercentenary series was a mixed success in terms of sales, but an undoubted ten-strike in terms of building a scholarly foundation about the state’s past. The books can be found in most public libraries throughout the Garden State and in many college and university collections across the country. McCormick’s survey history of Colonial New Jersey was the first volume in this series. Published in the Tercentennial year of 1964, New Jersey from Colony to State proved to be a popular and enduring book. It led to yet another wave of opportunities for McCormick to lecture at schools and service clubs, high school graduations and college lecture halls across the state. It subsequently was republished in paperback by the New Jersey Historical Society and remains in print decades after its first appearance.80 During the Tercentenary, McCormick continued to juggle his teaching and committee responsibilities on campus with a heavy schedule of public lectures that took him to Trenton, Newark, and other parts of the state as part of the commemorations of the Duke of York’s grant to the first proprietors of New Jersey, John, Lord Berkeley, and Sir George Carteret. He was quoted widely in the press, wrote numerous short pieces for publication on New Jersey history, and played an important behind-the-scenes role both in recruiting authors for the Van Nostrand series and vetting their work. The end of the Tercentenary hardly allowed him to break stride. With Rutgers’s bicentennial looming in 1966, McCormick began to spend increasing portions of his working day reviewing primary sources for a history of Rutgers University he had been contemplating virtually since 1948. Meantime, as the Vietnam War escalated under President Lyndon Johnson and the first campus teach-ins were held beginning in the spring of 1965, McCormick found himself drawn into one of the most bitter controversies of his career, the Genovese case. One of the brightest young scholars attracted to Rutgers’s History Department in the early 1960s, Eugene Genovese was becoming known in historical circles for a series of brilliant articles on the political economy of Southern slavery. Like several other faculty mem-

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bers in the department, Genovese was an avowed Marxist. His scholarship emphasized class and power relations and reflected a Gramscian sensitivity to culture. For historians, his early work was important in rejecting the notion that the antebellum South had much in common, culturally or economically, with the market-driven North. But Genovese became a household name, at least temporarily, for reasons that had nothing to do with his writing of history. On April 23, 1965, at a Vietnam teach-in at Rutgers, Genovese told the assembled crowd that “I do not fear or reject the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.”81 Genovese’s comments not surprisingly angered veterans’ organizations, people who had loved ones serving in Vietnam, and political conservatives generally. This quickly became a major political issue in New Jersey. Within days of the Rutgers teach-in, Warren County state senator Wayne Dumont demanded that Governor Richard J. Hughes fire Genovese. Anticipating that many independents and Democrats would cross party lines to express their patriotism, when Dumont captured the Republican nomination for governor in 1965, he made firing Genovese a centerpiece of his campaign.82 Angered by Dumont’s attempt to use Genovese’s remarks for political gain, McCormick joined several of his colleagues at Rutgers in denouncing this threat to free speech. McCormick spoke out privately and publicly in defense of Genovese, and he helped draft a statement on academic freedom that was widely circulated. He wrote to the local newspaper, the New Brunswick Home News, mocking Dumont’s “astonishing” assertion that as governor he would “fire” Genovese. Given the tenure system, McCormick said, it was not clear how Dumont would go about accomplishing his objective. “Concerned citizens,” he added, “should bitterly resent any attempt to make a political football out of the internal affairs of the state university.”83 McCormick had witnessed a firestorm of this kind once before, in the early 1950s, as the fires of McCarthyite hysteria against “reds” on college campuses led to the ouster of three Rutgers University professors who had invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned by Congressional committees about their possible ties to the Communist party. Efforts by Rutgers professors to defend the professors’ right to privacy were rejected by President Lewis Webster Jones and a conservative Board of Trustees. Indeed, shortly after making a joint presentation with two other representatives from the faculty to the president and the board on behalf of the controversial professors—among them the historian Moses I. Finley—McCormick discovered that the president had already approved and arranged for the distribution of a statement explaining why refusal to testify be-

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McCormick of Rutgers

fore a Senate investigating committee constituted grounds for a Rutgers professor’s immediate dismissal.84 But 1965 was not 1954. Governor Richard J. Hughes, himself a strong supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam commitment, refused to buckle in the face of Dumont’s increasingly sharp attacks on Genovese. The subsequent election campaign was consequently one of the most emotional in the state’s history, drawing national attention to the Garden State. Although he repeatedly emphasized that he believed Genovese was “outrageously wrong” in what he said at the Rutgers teach-in, Governor Hughes defended the professor’s right to speak his mind. As he put it in a debate with Dumont in September 1965, Hughes would “uphold the constitution” in refusing to seek Genovese’s ouster. He later suggested that Dumont’s behavior “smacked of the tactics of the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.”85 Riding prosperity and a strong record of accomplishment in his first term, Hughes suggested that Dumont’s emphasis on Genovese derived from his desperate search for an issue on which to base his campaign. As time went on, the fundamental radicalism of Dumont’s call for Genovese’s firing by the governor proved unappealing to thousands of Jerseyans who, like Hughes, may have found the speaker’s words distasteful but either respected his right to express a dissenting opinion or simply did not view the Genovese case as a serious enough basis for rejecting an affable and effective governor. For McCormick, election day 1965 proved to be a satisfying event. Richard Hughes buried Wayne Dumont in a landslide, winning a then-record plurality of more than 350,000 votes and carrying with him Democratic majorities in both branches of the legislature for the first time since 1914.86 New Jersey kept Richard J. Hughes in 1965, but Rutgers did not keep Eugene Genovese. Embittered by the experience of being a political football and convinced that even his erstwhile supporters, among them Dick McCormick, were condescending liberals, Genovese continued to agitate on the Vietnam issue and in 1966 he accepted a position at Sir George Williams University in Montreal.87 McCormick’s advocacy in the Finley case of the 1950s and throughout the Genovese controversy in 1965 marked him as a liberal on civil liberties issues. Though he was sympathetic to much of the reform agenda of Democatic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson, McCormick was temperamentally uncomfortable as a political activist, and his scholarship bears few traces of a “liberal” outlook on any historical theme. He never marched or waved banners along the lines of Boston University’s Howard Zinn or some of his Marxist colleagues at Rutgers. Nor was

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he readily identifiable, as were such leading political historians of his generation as Frank Freidel, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Eric Goldman, John Morton Blum, and William Leuchtenburg, as one of the “New Deal liberals” whose publications reflected their politics.88 Indeed, McCormick’s take on past politics marked him as a doubter of causes and a skeptic of bromides about American political institutions. Andrew Jackson was not merely not a hero to McCormick; in McCormick’s work he is not even a democrat. The political system, as McCormick described it in his scholarly work, was essentially a “game” played by shrewd and toughminded wheelers and dealers—a serious game, to be sure, in which power changed hands depending on the vicissitudes of election campaigns—but never a struggle over fundamentals like democracy versus aristocracy, or supporting a market revolution versus a more traditional, “gemeinschaft” social order.89 In some respects McCormick’s work reflects a radical vision similar to that exemplified in Richard Hofstadter’s famous book The American Political Tradition and in the neo-Marxist political analysis of Walter Dean Burnham. Yet McCormick never identified himself with “consensus,” Marxism, radicalism, or any school of history, and in his own department—a mixed bag of older conservatives and young leftists—he was a lone wolf.90 If any quality stands out about McCormick it is his fundamental commitment to moderation, whether in campus politics or his response to the rough-and-tumble political world of New Jersey politics. McCormick got along particularly well with Democratic governors Robert Meyner and Richard Hughes; but he was also friendly with moderate Republican governors Alfred Driscoll and Thomas Kean, for whom he periodically researched or wrote specific speeches and with whom he occasionally exchanged views on issues ranging from school bond referenda to esoteric historical topics. McCormick enjoyed having occasional access to the leading players in New Jersey’s political game, but there is no evidence that he was ever tempted to cross the divide between academia and professional politics. McCormick’s temperamental inclination to build bridges between competing interests was well evidenced during the upheavals on the Rutgers campus in the 1960s. During these tumultuous years he served as a force for conciliation and compromise, whether between competing faculty factions on curriculum matters; between a conservative Board of Trustees and a more liberal faculty on the question of admission of women and minorities to Rutgers College; or between angry students and a more conservative citizenry in New Jersey when the events at Kent State in May 1970 provoked takeovers of many administration buildings at major universities, among them Rutgers. McCormick’s role in each of these episodes

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McCormick of Rutgers

was significant and at times invaluable. He had credibility with all factions of the faculty and maintained lines of communication with a wide range of colleagues across disciplines and ideologies. He was close to such key Rutgers figures in the 1960s as President Mason Gross and Dean of the Faculty Arnold Grobman. Consequently, when crises erupted, McCormick gravitated to the center of the action. As he would later recall, he took great satisfaction in “keeping the lid on” at Rutgers at times when polarization on campus had “reached dangerous levels” and it appeared the university might just blow apart.91 He could equally well have taken satisfaction in knowing that whether the issue was curricular reform or admissions policies that favored a more aggressive effort to recruit minorities and a commitment to coeducation at Rutgers College, his point of view prevailed. Few of the major Rutgers University policy initiatives of the 1960s and ’70s—notably coeducation, recruitment of more minority students, and curricular reforms—lacked his input or his support. Within the History Department, as chair from 1966 through 1969, McCormick exercised less influence in some respects, because on policy, the differences between conservatives and radicals were too great to bridge. His major accomplishment as chair entailed assuring the stability and growth of History at Rutgers amidst turmoil and change. For example, he fought successfully to keep his most productive colleagues from accepting attractive offers elsewhere, both by sympathetically listening to them and stroking their egos, as in the case of the brilliant but mercurial Warren Susman, and by securing money from the administration that could match offers of Rutgers’s competitors.92 He lobbied hard for resources needed to attract first-rate graduate students to Rutgers. Above all, he made sure he and like-minded colleagues from the department were in the middle of the action at Rutgers, whatever the subject. Asked many years later what his greatest accomplishment was as chair during this turbulent era, McCormick laughed and said, “I survived.” The record shows he did better. Amidst the Genovese controversy, the growing agony of Vietnam, participation in the Tercentenary and its aftermath, and his numerous responsibilities on committees at Rutgers and History-related boards and commissions, McCormick was also laboring on yet another monograph—a history of his own university. The Rutgers project had been on McCormick’s agenda since his appointment as university historian in 1948, but it was not until 1965 that he was able to give sustained attention to it. Working virtually every free day and evening in his library study between the summer of 1965 and

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the summer of 1966, McCormick pored over thousands of documents and drafted a highly readable 300-page history of his alma mater. It was a point of pride that he was able to meet his deadline and to see the book published on November 10, 1996, exactly 200 years after the granting of the first college charter. But, as he would later recall, publication of Rutgers: A Bicentennial History left him “more exhausted than gratified.”93 The Rutgers history appeared in Richard McCormick’s fiftieth year. Never again would he produce as much significant writing as he had in the previous decade. But if McCormick was slowing down, it would be difficult to tell by his calendar. During the latter part of the 1960s, in addition to his deep involvement in the affairs of Rutgers College, McCormick continued an arduous routine of meetings across the state for the various boards and committees on which he sat, continued to be active in the American Historical Association and other professional organizations, continued to deliver papers, review books, direct doctoral students, referee book manuscripts, and work on his own projects. Indeed, at an age when many of his peers were looking more at retirement portfolios than gearing up for their next book, McCormick would commit an act of intellectual hubris (as he told an interviewer) by attempting to produce a book that would provide a “grand model” for the study of American politics. This enterprise was spurred in part by McCormick’s admiration for the work of David Easton, whose “systems” approach to political life “seemed to have application to the problems I wished to address.”94 Despite intensive work over many years, McCormick was never able to complete a satisfactory manuscript, though he did present a Commonwealth Lecture at the University of London in 1971, applying Eastonian analysis. In a much revised form, this paper was presented as McCormick’s presidential address to the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, and it later was published in the Journal of the Early Republic as “The Jacksonian Strategy.”95 While he was pursuing his “grand theory” of politics, McCormick’s abiding interest in understanding the changing American political system led him to write a significant book on presidential politics. Always concerned with the interaction between constitutional provisions and everyday political life, McCormick spent much of the 1970s investigating how the presidential selection process assumed a form quite different from that intended by the framers of the Constitution. The Presidential Game appeared in 1982, just as McCormick announced his retirement from teaching after thirty-seven years at Rutgers.96 In this book and other work, McCormick continued to emphasize the disjuncture between theory and behavior in American political history and continued to investigate “how politics actually operates in terms of power and policy in

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McCormick of Rutgers

the American democracy.” In the twilight of his academic career, at a symposium in his honor on political parties and the modern state, McCormick declined to present an elegant theory of politics, nor even to remind listeners of what he had contributed to scholarly discourse on parties. Rather, he offered an agenda for future scholars: to “elucidate” the connection between parties and the exercise of power in American democracy. “Along the way, we might also look at parties as social and cultural—as well as political—phenomena,” he observed.97 Since McCormick wrote those words nearly two decades ago, analysis of parties in the broader context of American culture has become the basis for much of the most interesting work in the field. McCormick’s own mature work, by contrast, continued in the vein he had long been working, focused as it was more on process than outcomes, more on elites than voters, more on back-room maneuvering than social influences on political behavior. McCormick examined the four different, not necessarily evolutionary “games” (rules by which elections were played) starting with the “haphazard” system, established by the Founders, in which it was possible that a vice-presidential candidate could actually gain the presidency. That flaw was corrected with the enactment of the Twelfth Amendment. The second, the “Virginia” game, was a caucus game dominated by politicians from the Old Dominion. Discussing developments from 1820 through 1832, McCormick depicted the “game of faction,” which cast aside the rules of the Virginia game, and was characterized by ad hoc practices and innovations. Finally, he documented the emergence of the “party game” between 1832 and 1844, in which two national political parties, using conventions to nominate candidates, “engaged in remarkably theatrical campaigns to rouse the mass electorate.” What fascinated McCormick was not the parties’ competing platforms or the passions expressed in legislative chambers and on the stump—much less the theater of politics—but rather, the process by which a closely competitive system of nationwide parties emerged in 1840. Probably McCormick’s most significant long-term commitment in the period after 1966 related to the founding and growth of the New Jersey Historical Commission. Long convinced that New Jersey’s self-image problems stemmed in part from an insufficient appreciation of the state’s distinctive history, McCormick had been instrumental in the serious commemoration of various anniversaries in New Jersey. He was dissatisfied, however, with the ad hoc nature of many of the state’s responses to these educational opportunities. He concluded that some agency was needed to help coordinate not merely special events relating to New Jersey History, but the enter-

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prise of doing and presenting New Jersey History. For models of what could be done, McCormick naturally turned to the operations of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where he had a working relationship in the early 1950s, and to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, with which Roy Nichols was intimately involved. McCormick’s enthusiasm for a state-funded historical agency was matched by that of a member of the staff of the state library, Bernard Bush, and by the executive director of the Civil War Centennial Commission, Everett J. Landers. It was Landers who first proposed a permanent state historical agency in March 1964. Together with Landers, Bush, and others of like mind, among them John Cunningham, McCormick pressed Governor Hughes to launch a New Jersey historical commission. In 1966, legislation sponsored by Raymond H. Bateman and Frederick H. Hauser was enacted, establishing such an agency—albeit with no funds, no staff, no operational mission. Not until 1969 was additional legislation passed and signed by Governor Hughes that made the New Jersey Historical Commission a viable entity charged with advancing the study and appreciation of New Jersey History.98 The agency was established, as Bernard Bush has recalled, at a time of creative ferment in many areas of state government. And it was immediately active on a variety of fronts, from awarding grants to scholars and local historical organizations to publishing a newsletter about New Jersey History to helping coordinate commemoration of the American Revolution Bicentennial.99 For McCormick, the natural centerpiece of the Commission’s work was scholarship. He believed strongly that good scholarship ramifies outwards and that support for research and publication was an essential element of what a new state historical comission could do. Whether working at the Historical Society in Newark or sitting on the New Jersey Historical Commission (based in Trenton) for many years, McCormick always tried, as he later recalled, “to promote a scholarly approach to New Jersey History,” which meant “facilitating the work” of scholars invested in the state’s history.100 McCormick’s greatest satisfaction at the Commission would come from the publication of the William Livingston Papers series, under the direction of his former student Carl E. Prince, and the launching of the Thomas Edison Project under the direction of Reese V. Jenkins.101 In his association with both the Historical Society in Newark and the Historical Commission, McCormick’s major frustrations were usually related to resources. The New Jersey Historical Society made some progress in the 1950s in balancing books and undertaking new initiatives, but the precipitous decline of the city of Newark following

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McCormick of Rutgers

the 1967 riots there stymied further progress. Subsequently, the Historical Society’s trustees made some monumentally bad management decisions, including efforts to run both “Morven” and “Drumthwacket” (both located in Princeton), the first as a historical museum, the latter as a governor’s residence.102 These projects were risky business, given the costs in money and staff effort that would be entailed for a society that even in the best of times was not financially flush. But the Society’s governors, against McCormick’s advice, went forward, with disastrous results. Not only did the New Jersey Historical Society go deeply into the red in order to pay its bills for the two projects, it suffered the public relations indignity of having Governor Thomas Kean refuse to move into Drumthwacket once the mansion was refurbished. Expensive furnishings were auctioned off at a fraction of their value, and the Society was forced to draw on its modest endowment to pay its bills.103 Eventually the Society turned control of Morven and Drumthwacket back to the state, but the damage had been done. McCormick himself grew increasingly frustrated with the priorities, management style, and budget manipulations of the Society’s board of directors. By 1985, his patience was exhausted and he resigned from the Board.104 Any full account of Richard P. McCormick’s career would entail an examination of his continuing role as an influential force at Rutgers University. McCormick was well positioned to have his views heard on issues that were central to the future of the university. Over the years, he had built a reputation as a nationally known scholar; he was willing to serve on time-consuming committees; he had a strong rapport with Rutgers President Mason Gross (1959–1971), Dean Arnold Grobman, and Provost Richard Schlatter. And, as we have seen, he was not a dogmatist but a consensus builder. Such qualities led McCormick, perhaps willy-nilly, into the deanship at Rutgers College in 1974. Having served on a search committee that was unable to make an appointment to replace Arnold Grobman when Grobman departed New Brunswick for the University of Illinois in 1972, McCormick found himself importuned to take the position by the new president of Rutgers, Edward J. Bloustein. At first he demurred, saying he had a scholarly agenda that would be compromised by a full-time administrative position. But Bloustein persisted, emphasizing McCormick’s duty to Rutgers, and that proved to be the key to getting his man. Once McCormick received Bloustein’s assurance that his appointment would not last beyond three years, he accepted. By an unkind coincidence, the front page of the Rutgers University Newsletter that announced his

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appointment as dean included as its main sidebar of page one this headline: “$3.5 million deficit seen for 1974–5.”105 Having previously worked effectively on behalf of minority recruitment, coeducation, and moderate curriculum reform, McCormick found himself as dean primarily focused on budget and personnel issues, as well as the perennial problem of restructuring Rutgers College’s unwieldy system of governance. It was a period of intensive labor, some of it controversial and exhausting, complicated by the continuing growth in the size of the student body as coeducation was fully implemented. By McCormick’s final year in the deanship, 1976–1977, the college’s financial situation had taken a turn for the better and he was able to conclude his service with accounts of progress on several fronts—notably, improvement of facilities at the Busch Campus, curriculum redesign, fulfillment of commitments to increased enrollment of minority students, a more focused policy of attracting talented students, and recruitment of high caliber faculty. He left the deanship, McCormick wrote to President Edward Bloustein in 1977, convinced that “Rutgers College has never been stronger in all its attributes than it is at this moment.”106 One of McCormick’s rewards for his service as dean was a year-long sabbatical. During this interlude, McCormick continued his labors on The Presidential Game, while researching and writing a substantial study of academic organization at Rutgers–New Brunswick, which was influential in a major restructuring that took place at the university in 1979–1980. He also chaired a committee that recommended changes in the governance of the university, and remained active on various public history boards and commissions with which he had long been associated. Upon rejoining the faculty as University Professor, McCormick was no longer the only historian at Rutgers focused on nineteenth-century American political history. His son, Richard L. McCormick, having received his Ph.D. from Yale during his father’s tenure as dean, was appointed to a tenure-track position in the Rutgers History Department in 1976 and soon made a name for himself as a leading political historian. In the late 1970s, Rutgers College students had the opportunity to take courses team-taught by the McCormicks, which, according to McCormick pere, entailed some serious, albeit good-humored, differences of opinion about the American past. Richard L. McCormick subsequently rose through professorial ranks at Rutgers before leaving New Brunswick for the provost’s position at the University of North Carolina. In the Spring of 1995 he was appointed president of the University of Washington. Thus in

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McCormick of Rutgers

1995, Richard P. McCormick not only celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his marriage and of his arrival as a young professor at Rutgers, he also rejoiced in the selection of his only son as president of one of America’s leading research universities.107 Today, Richard P. McCormick continues to talk and write history. Formally retired from teaching at Rutgers since 1982, he has continued to occupy his study in the Alexander Library and his office in the School of Library and Information Science at Rutgers, churning out essays, pamphlets, and books in a steady stream.108 He is a regular at the faculty lunch tables at Rutgers Commons, plays golf and poker with his oldest friends, and is now working on a history of women’s golf in America. Still in demand as a speaker on New Jersey themes, McCormick today turns down more invitations than he accepts. In 1995 he gave the keynote address at an issues convention on New Jersey history held at Princeton University, and he continues to advise younger scholars in the field.109 Only the more onerous aspects of his former life—the blue books, committees, the constant travel over congested New Jersey roadways—have been put aside in favor of a more relaxed regimen that includes long summers on Cape Cod. Richard McCormick’s life and times as a historian constitute a remarkable saga of hard work, scholarly productivity, and influence on many levels at Rutgers and throughout the state. If it is true that McCormick was a remarkably lucky man at various critical junctures in his life; it is also true that he earned his influence and amply repaid his scholarly and personal debts. He was a key figure at Rutgers during his thirty-seven years on the faculty, and on a different track, he helped New Jersey History become something beyond an oxymoron. McCormick made many friends along the way, and he made a real difference in the lives of many of the thousands of students he taught over the years at Rutgers. Insofar as he exerted influence in state historical circles, that influence was a product of the example he set and the good counsel he gave. His scholarship set a high standard, and, three decades after the publication of his most important work, his writings are still read and debated. McCormick’s career as a historian, then, runs against the grain of what Michael Kammen once described as the “historian’s vanitas”—relentless striving to “signify” and abiding anxiety that one, in the end, simply will not measure up.110 McCormick says he never worried about whether or how his work would be recognized, nor does he think much about roads not traveled. Practicing History because it was a satisfying way to make a living, he enjoyed his craft. That he was able to work in a place that meant much to him, and to get recognition and rewards for his labors, was welcome to

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McCormick but was never as central to him as the opportunity to puzzle through research problems and make sense of the past. In 1995, when Governor Christine Todd Whitman, in a budget-cutting mode, proposed the elimination of the New Jersey Historical Commission, McCormick was not on the front lines as he would have been as a younger man. But his voice was heard behind the scenes, and his spirit was present in the give-and-take in the state capitol. When another Rutgers historian, Jan Lewis of the Newark campus, began her testimony before a state legislative committee about the need for continued state support for the Commission, she was interrupted by the committee chair, who asked whether Lewis knew “Professor McCormick,” who had been the legislator’s teacher at Rutgers several decades earlier.111 The governor’s initiative was stymied when she could not win the support of several of the state’s most fiscally conservative Republican legislators, in some measure because, both in the classroom and as a great champion of public history in New Jersey, Richard P. McCormick had toiled more effectively than even he realized.

CHAPTER 1

The Path to a Life with History

MB: I understand from your entry in Who’s Who that you were born in Brooklyn.1 RM: Brooklyn communicates something. Actually, I was born in Ridgewood, Queens, which is just over the boundary line from Brooklyn. I was born December 24th, 1916, and was actually born not in a hospital, as people expect today, but at home. My father’s people were Irish; my mother’s people were German. They were very much working-class people. Both my father and my mother left school after the sixth grade—went to work. By the time I was born, my father was a printing pressman working for a large company in Brooklyn, the Robert Gair Company. We lived in a very simple railroad flat in Ridgewood. No electricity, no telephone, no central heating. Very modest circumstances. I attended Public School 93 in Ridgewood, which was just about two blocks away. We lived there until I was ten years old—July 1927. My father’s printing operation was transferred to Piermont, New York. We rented a house in Upper Nyack, which was within easy commuting distance of Piermont. So I attended the Upper Nyack Elementary School, a tiny school where we had two classes to a room. When I graduated [from Upper Nyack elementary school] in 1929, there were thirteen in the graduating class. At that point my father lost his job and obtained another one

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in Ridgefield, New Jersey, in the same line of work. So we moved to Cresskill. This meant that I was in a completely new community. I regretted very much leaving Upper Nyack, where I had been extremely happy, and had to enter high school in Tenafly. MB: Cresskill kids went to Tenafly? RM: Cresskill kids went to Tenafly. Well, none of the members of my family had gone to high school. I didn’t know anything about high school. I had no counseling. I went down a couple of weeks before school started to enroll, and the curriculum that seemed to be the easiest one to me was what was called the general curriculum. It was neither the commercial course nor the academic course. I enrolled in the general course, which required no mathematics, no languages, and seemed to be an attractive one. I was a very good student in high school, but when I came to the senior year, I had no idea what lay beyond that. The one thing that I was sure of is that college did not lay beyond it because I never had any thought of going to college, and I didn’t have the requisite preparation. MB: I’d like you to describe the environment in Cresskill. My sense of Bergen County, at least the lower Northern Valley, in the period you are talking about, is that it was quite rural. RM: It was undeveloped. And it was basically a lower-middle-class commuter suburb in contrast, let’s say, to Tenafly, which was a middle-to-upper-class suburb. MB: What I am getting at though is that the population was quite modest compared to the urbanized suburb of today. RM: Right. . . . MB: What kind of a childhood or youth did you have in Cresskill outside of school? What were the things that you most enjoyed doing? RM: Well, a variety of things. I suppose my chief interest was in reading. I read a a great deal when I was in high school. In fact, from the age of seven on, I had a library card and always did a lot of reading. My father was an avid reader. My mother had been, but her eyesight became so poor that she couldn’t do much reading. Reading was an important part of my life from the age of seven on. MB: Was there a decent library in the Cresskill area? RM: Tenafly library. MB: You went to the Tenafly library? RM: I used the Tenafly library. When we were in Upper Nyack, there was a good library in Nyack. When I was still in the city, there were branch libraries and my mother enrolled me in the library at

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the age of seven and would go with me and I would get books and so on. MB: Can you tell me a little about what you enjoyed reading the most? What books made the most impression on you? What did you dive into most avidly? RM: Well, in those days, the main books that a boy read were such things as the Tom Swift series, which included twenty or thirty books. The Tarzan series—there were several of these boys series. You would read one of the Jerry Todd series, then you would go on and read all the others. So that while I was in elementary school most of my reading consisted of that kind of literature. MB: How about high school? RM: Then, by the time I got to high school, my reading took a much more serious turn. By the time I finished high school, I had become very much interested in Russian literature. Not thinking of it as Russian literature as such, I just started to read—I don’t know quite why—Russian authors. I just found them far more appealing than the British novel. MB: Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. RM: Yes. Somewhere along the line, I also became interested in [Eugene] O’Neill and I remember one horrid summer when I became terribly morbid reading through all of O’Neill. [Birkner laughs] And then there was another binge on [Henrik] Ibsen. However, sprinkled through it would be such things as the adventurous tales of Richard Halliburton, who went off and had all kinds of glorious adventures . . . , [Henry] Sienkiewicz, the Polish writer— MB: The author of Quo Vadis? RM: That, but he also had two or three novels centering on the wars between Poland and Russia, exceedingly gory, long. But interesting, interesting novels. MB: Did you read newspapers? RM: Yes, yes. From the age of seven. MB: What were the favorites in your household? RM: We religiously received the old New York World. I was raised on the World. And then in the early 1930s, I do remember going to pick up the newspaper, which I did every afternoon on my way home from school, finding the World was gone and in place of it was a horrid looking paper called the World Telegram. I was devastated. MB: Well, the World was a great newspaper.

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RM: It became the World-Telegram, so for the rest of my time in school I read that newspaper. But I did a lot of reading. Well beside that, I had a lot of outdoor interests. I was very interested in ice skating, skiing, swimming. My father, who was crippled—he had polio as a child—the one thing he could do outdoors was fishing, fresh-water fishing particularly. So I did a lot of fishing with him and I had a group of four or five very close friends in high school—we palled around together. It had to be done rather economically because we were not in affluent circumstances. MB: By your high school years it’s the Depression, and I am curious how your family made out. RM: We had no problems whatsoever. We had no problems in the sense that my father was employed. There were always adequate resources in terms of the modest kind of life that we lived. My parents never owned a house. They rented all their lives, but we had no sense of deprivation. MB: Were movies a regular staple in your life? RM: Oh, yes. MB: Where was the first movie theater? RM: When I was living in the city, every Saturday afternoon there was a movie on Myrtle Avenue, the Evergreen Theater. I had a lot of kids on the block who were my age and we went around together. You would go to the Evergreen and there would be the westerns, and the shorts, and there would be a double feature and whatnot. It only cost ten cents, and that was a regular thing on Saturday afternoons. MB: Now this was— RM: In the city. Queens. MB: In the city. What happens when you’re in Cresskill? Is there an available movie theater? RM: Pretty much. Yes. There was a movie theater, one, in Tenafly. Then there would be the occasional movie theater in Englewood. You just hop on the trolley and go down to Englewood. MB: Were you a healthy kid? RM: Yeah. After the age of about three, I guess. I had had whooping cough, which left me with bronchitis for a couple of years, but after that I never had any serious illness. Never have had any. MB: All right, let’s recap this. You’re living a modest but happy existence as a youth and you go through high school on the general program and you’re doing well. I get the sense then that in your senior year you start thinking about what your future will hold.

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RM: My senior year I took a course in typing. I thought maybe that would be a good idea. My typing teacher, Reba Shain, was a graduate of the two-year course at Rider College, not having gone to a university herself. The amazing thing to me, I still do not understand it, [is this]. I was a bright student and I took four years of science for example, with the academic students. I took four years of English with the academic students. I took four years of History. Month after month I would be on the high honor roll. I was one of only two boys elected to the National Honor Society. I had an outstanding academic record. Not until I got to this typing teacher my senior year did someone say “you know, you’re a bright kid. You ought to go to college.” She had a brother at Princeton. I said, “Gee I don’t know anybody who ever went to college. Our chemistry teacher at Tenafly, Charles Diefenbach, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in chemistry from Rutgers in the class of 1922. Ms. Shain talked to Diefenbach and said, “You know, this is a bright kid, he ought to be going to college. What about Rutgers?” Mr. Diefenbach knew me well. I had gotten an A in his course in chemistry, and I knew him in another context as well. He brought me down to Rutgers in May of my senior year. Rutgers in those days had what was known as “prep school weekend,” where high school students were invited down to learn about the school. I came down and spoke with the people here and they told me that I lacked the necessary Carnegie units and that I would need four years of math—I had no math. The result was I took an extra year of high school; I took four years of math in one year. MB: And you were able to do this at Tenafly? RM: At Tenafly. In that way I had the necessary Carnegie units to be accepted and to enter Rutgers in September of 1934. MB: And that was where you fixed on going? I mean once you got into the notion that you would go to college, it was pretty much focused on Rutgers? RM Oh, I never thought of anything else, no. MB: Can you remember how much it would cost to go to Rutgers in 1934? RM: Everything all together—room, board, tuition fees, what-not—around eight hundred dollars. MB: Was this something your family could swing in the middle of the Depression? RM: Yes. With the expectation that I would be working while I was in college and that I would be working in the summer so that I could make some contribution toward that. The finances did not consti-

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tute a critical obstacle. My parents were perfectly willing to make that kind of commitment. MB: Now when you entered Rutgers, would it be fair to say that the school that you found was much more like a small liberal arts college than a mega-university? RM: Well, it was a very small institution. The so-called men’s colleges had around 1500 students. That is to say, the College of Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, Engineering, and School of Education all together had about 1500. There were about 1000 across town at the New Jersey College for Women. It was by the standards of this day a very small institution.2 MB: The faculty was probably less than 100 faculty members. RM: Well, in the College of the Arts and Sciences, yes. MB: So again, when I think of small liberal arts colleges today, that seems to be comparable. RM: Yes, yes. MB: What were your first impressions at Rutgers College? RM: Well, I came down, of course, with a certain amount of apprehension. I had little in the way of counseling on the matter of colleges or orientation. I had not spoken with anyone who had gone to college so I was apprehensive. It quickly led me to make very substantial changes in life and my approach to things. I early developed a sense of confidence that I would have no difficulty handling the academic work. But perhaps more important, I had been extremely shy in high school. There were a number of reasons for this. I was twelve years old when I entered Tenafly High School. I might retreat just a moment. Because I had a December birthday, when I entered kindergarten in PS 93 I was sort of on the bubble in terms of age. So after one day they took me out of kindergarten and put me in the first grade. However, this was not an ordinary first grade. They were experimenting with something called “rapid advancement.” The idea was that you would do one-and-a-half years in one year. Or to put it in the typical vocabulary of those times, you would do 1a, 1b, and 2a in one year. So here I was, possibly the youngest kid in the first grade and in this accelerated thing. OK, I had no problem. When we moved to Upper Nyack, I was always out of phase. I had completed 6a, that is to say the first half of the sixth grade so when I got to Upper Nyack what would they do? Would they put me back in the sixth grade or they put me in the seventh? Well, they put me in the seventh grade. MB: In effect that put you two years ahead.

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RM: Right. So I entered high school at the age of twelve. In retrospect, this was very unfortunate. Not academically, but socially. Moreover, Tenafly was a very elite community in which I did not feel entirely comfortable. I was younger than the other kids, and I had this small circle of very good friends and we did a lot of things in common, but I was shy in terms of the general student body. Well, for some reason or another, when I got to Rutgers, I decided to break out [laughs] a bit. In my first year for example, I astonished myself by going out for the debating team. I had been terrified about having to stand up before a class or anything like that, but I went out for the debating team surprising myself and again discovered a considerable ability in that area. Debating was a big thing at Rutgers in those days. We had over a hundred men participating in debates. We had the largest debate program in the country, and I became sort of a star. In my sophomore year, I began to coach the freshmen. I won speech prizes, so on and so on. Anyhow, this brought me out a great deal; so I became more active than I had been in high school, and I acquired confidence not only in my academic abilities but in this field of speech and generally became a lot more comfortable socially. MB: In your first two years at Rutgers, what were the most stimulating courses that you took as far as your personal development was concerned? What courses made a difference to you? RM: No question. The required freshman course here, comparable to similar courses at many other institutions, called the Development of Western Civilization. The course here was modeled very directly on the course at Columbia, which had been the first of these so-called Western Civ courses. It was a spectacular course. In addition to fairly adequate lectures in the course—lectures and discussions—there was also a wonderful list of readings that opened up all kinds of vistas in the areas of religion, science, philosophy, and economics as well as history. It was a very broad ranging, shake-up kind of course which I found very stimulating and indeed virtually everyone who took the course found it very stimulating. MB: Do you remember who your instructor was? RM: Oh, certainly. Oh, yes. My instructor that first year was a man named Mark M. Heald, who was in no sense a scholar. He had not completed his doctoral work, but for that particular type of teaching, he could hold the attention and stimulate the interest of the students so that it was a very rewarding course. MB: Was it a year-long course? RM: Yeah.

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MB: Did you have any inkling when you entered Rutgers where you would gravitate? RM: Yes, yes. I knew that I was going to major in History. MB: You knew that? RM: It had been my favorite subject in high school. I had a good History teacher with whom I had two of my high school courses. Her name was Virginia Hargraves. Like all of my other high school teachers, she was not a teacher’s college graduate; she was a graduate of Syracuse. She had a master’s degree from Columbia [working with David Muzzey], so she was very good. And I took a liking to History. Consequently when I went to Rutgers it was with the idea of majoring in History. Moreover, by the end of my freshman year, it was with the goal in mind of getting a doctorate and becoming a university teacher. MB: You actually had that in your sight from your first year in college? RM: Yes. MB: Now let’s look at the History Department at Rutgers in the 1930s. Who were the big figures and who were the people that influenced you most? RM: I do not know if you would say they were big figures. The big figures were within that local context. There was Professor L. Ethan Ellis, with a doctorate from Chicago and a publication record in the field of American Foreign Relations. He was a very solid methodical teacher, with whom I had my American History in my sophomore year and later had Diplomatic History. There was the chairman of the department, Irving Kull, who had not completed his doctorate at Chicago, had been at Rutgers since, I guess, 1918. [He] was not a productive scholar—in some ways not a very effective teacher. But he had often an odd way, if you will, a different way of looking at certain historical problems so that occasionally he would be stimulating. On the European side, the giant was Edward McNall Burns, who went on to write what was to become one of the largest selling textbooks in Western Civilization.3 Burns was an enormously learned man. Very impressive, nothing charismatic or flashy about him. I had my General European History and later on a course in political theory with him. There was Robert Thompson, who taught Latin American History and later, when I was a graduate student, taught the methods course. It was because of his untimely death in the summer of 1945 that an opening developed that I was called upon to fill. That’s how I came to Rutgers in 1945, although that’s getting ahead of the story.

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MB: Would you describe your four years at Rutgers as a good experience, a happy experience? RM: A very happy experience, rewarding in many, many different ways. When I look back on that in terms of course work and socializing and all the rest of it, it was a very happy experience. MB: This was of course, again, the height of the Depression. If I recall correctly from your book on Rutgers history, there were dormitory beds that were not filled at this time. And I have to assume that the campus was not enjoying the best of times. RM: Well, one would think that, and yet I think for most of us living through it, it was anything but a grim period. I always had employment throughout the four years that I was at Rutgers. The first year it was NYA—the National Youth Administration—which provided funds for the colleges for what we would call today work-study. I could earn something on the order of twelve dollars a month at twenty-five cents an hour. However, I could eat for five dollars a week. Twelve dollars took care of two weeks of my board with a little left over. Then, I would also have jobs at such things as selling programs at the football games, washing dishes at the fraternity houses on party weekends, and so on and so on. So that you could pick up money. And then, as I say, there was always summer employment and then, in subsequent years, the jobs got better. Until in my senior year, I had what, I think, was the best job in the college. I was working in the Rutgers bookstore. By that time I also had a scholarship. I had a preceptorship, which also gave me a room, so that I was living on the fat of the land. MB: How would you describe the facilities at Rutgers during this period? RM: Because we didn’t know any better, in effect, they seemed to be fine. We were not a demanding generation and we were not a very sophisticated generation. We didn’t appreciate, if you will, how small and cramped our library facilities were. Or how miserable some of our classrooms, which were in run-down former residences, were. No, I didn’t have a sense of deprivation. Very lively social life. The formal dances with all the orchestras: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Hal Kemp, etc. MB: They would come to Rutgers? RM: All of them. I had the pleasure of dancing to all of them. And in addition to those major social occasions, almost every Saturday night there would be a dance, either at Douglass or Rutgers, run by one of the clubs. Live orchestra—one dollar. So you could have quite a lively social life with rather modest expenditures. Very few stu-

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dents had cars. Very, very few. So the fact that I and 80 percent or more of the students didn’t have cars was no great deprivation. Most people didn’t have cars, unlike the situation today of course. I had quite a happy experience. MB: You mention selling programs at the football games. Was football an important activity at Rutgers in the mid-1930s? RM: Important. I think I went to every home game. I don’t know if I was rabid about the subject, but I enjoyed athletic events. I went to most of the basketball games and a lot of the swimming meets. MB: Who did Rutgers tend to play against? RM: Schools like Gettysburg. [Laughs] That is to say, it was a very modest schedule. The main opponents were, of course, Princeton which beat us every year—Lafayette, Lehigh, NYU and assorted schools like Ursinus, Colgate or Bucknell or whatever you threw in there. It was not a high-powered schedule. MB: It sounds very mixed in terms of the schools. And I guess there was no university system in New York for you to compete against. RM: No. MB: What about the actual day-to-day paths you traveled? What dorms did you live in? Where did you take your classes? Where did you hang out? RM: Well, the first year, because I got in late, I lived in what was then called the Quad in a dorm, Hegeman Dorm. A single room—and I had a single room throughout college; I never had a roommate—a single room cost $175 a year. That was the most expensive room in the college. It was a happenstance because I was late. Well, my sophomore year, I moved to the least expensive dorm, Winants; there it was $125. And I spent the next three years in Winants. Winants Dorm was the oldest dorm, built in 1890, and it is on the old main campus, Queens Campus. It was a convenient dorm because that’s where the dining hall was. I could drop down in the morning, have breakfast, and go to class. Some of my classes were on Queens Campus; in fact I had two courses in the Old Queens building itself. Old Queens is now confined, essentially, to the top administrative offices of the university. Then the usual path would be up College Avenue to Bishop House where the courses of history and political science were given. Nearby Winants, just the other side of Queens Campus, was the Voorhees Library, where I also spent a great deal of time.

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MB: When you were at college, was President [Robert] Clothier someone whom students would have interaction with? Whether he was or not, what was your impression of him? RM: He was very visible, and he had occasions where he was quite accessible to students. That is to say, he would have receptions for students. Or there would be a special reception for freshman students. Or there would be certain other occasions where he would be highly visible and you had the sense, at least, of knowing the man. He was not a remote figure the way most university presidents later became. You would see him walking around the campus and at athletic events. He was a real person, not some abstraction that you referred to as “the administration.” He knew students.4 MB: You have the advantage of having studied Rutgers history and of course having lived through much of it. How do you rank him as a president? RM: He was president at a very, very difficult time. He came in at the depth of the Depression in 1932. Then comes the war. After the war, the enormous, improvised expansion of the university to meet the needs of the GIs with all of the adjustments that that required. It was a very harrowing period. He was not academically trained. He had never been a college professor. He had formerly been Dean of Students at Pittsburgh; before that, he had been in personnel work. He was not a strong academic leader. He was not a fund raiser. He was not able to go out and persuade people to give large amounts of money. But I suppose his virtue was that he had some success in identifying good people within the faculty, on whom he could rely and whom he would support. He was capable of inspiring respect and loyalty to a considerable degree among his administrative staff, faculty, and students. In other words, it would be difficult to point to him, in any way, as an innovative leader or a great statesman of higher education—but a decent man. MB: How about other administrators? Were there people like Deans of Discipline who stood out among students during your four years? RM: You have to understand there is a difference between the colleges for men, based on College Avenue, and the Women’s College, based across town. The conspicuous figure and the unifying figure was the Dean of Men, Frazer Metzger. He was a constantly visible and influential figure for all of the men students. On the other hand, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Walter T. Marvin, was a relatively removed and little known figure. If you referred to “the dean,” everybody understood it was Frazer Metzger, not Walter T.

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Marvin. Of course, that is a very different situation from the kind of things you have today. MB: Did you have personal interaction with Metzger? RM: Oh, sure. Everybody did. MB: He checked on his students? RM: Well, you see he had a lot of functions. It was his office that handled student employment. He had one assistant, a young recent graduate named Eddie Heyd. I was in that office almost weekly the first couple of years looking for these odd jobs. You would go in and see the dean or you would see Eddie Heyd and get this and this and this. Dean Metzger was also, in effect, in charge of scholarships. He was the most visible and influential person there. He also handed out these preceptorships—that is, you lived in the dorm and [were] supposed to exert some influence in return for a free room. In those days too, each class met weekly in the chapel for an assembly program and Metzger presided over that. We were also obliged to go to half of the Sunday services at the chapel. Metzger presided there. He was highly visible. MB: Did you make any life-long friends while you were at Rutgers? RM: Oh, yes. MB: Can you name a couple? RM: Yes. Unfortunately, not all of them are living. One of my oldest friends, Howard Darnell, was my best man at my wedding. I met him the first day I was here as a freshman. He is a Quaker. Conversations with Howard and subsequently becoming acquainted with his family introduced me to that whole strange (to me), world of Quakerism. His ancestors had come to New Jersey in the seventeenth century, and this was a strong, long Quaker tradition. He had gone to Westown Friends School. Another old friend was Eddie Miller from Millville, New Jersey; we became acquainted freshman year and became very close. He later became a superior court judge in New Jersey. He is still living in Millville, and we keep in touch. MB: You’ve mentioned two of your friends. There were others, weren’t there? RM: Yeah. Ed Stevens with whom I became acquainted through debating and who actually got me my job in the bookstore. He went on to become a professor of speech at American University in Washington. And David Lilien, who was a year ahead of me but was one of my debate partners. Interestingly enough, he also entered academic life and became a member of the faculty here. Ed Stevens is deceased. David is still around.

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MB: What did he teach? RM: He taught speech here at Rutgers. MB: So these people were a regular part of your life inside and outside of class? RM: There were many, many others. MB: But those were the main people. Did you know Donald Sinclair [former Rutgers University Director of Special Collections] while you were here? RM: No. I really didn’t know Don as an undergraduate. He was a commuter; he didn’t live on campus. I think he majored in German and Classics so our paths did not cross—either socially or in the classroom. I really became acquainted with him when I came back here in ’45. MB: Am I right in thinking that you spent a couple of summers in your college years working for the CCC and the National Park Service? If that is true, could you elaborate on how that happened and what you did? RM: Yeah. That was a very important experience. Following my sophomore year in college, in the spring of that year, I had learned, somehow, that the Civilian Conservation Corps—the CCC—would accept what they called student enrollees. [These were] college students who were given some promise of being able to work in a field of their interest. Those opportunities were available, among other places, at Morristown National Historical Park. So I applied. It looked interesting. The money wasn’t great but the opportunity to have an experience in history was appealing. So I was accepted, and I reported to the “camp” at Morristown. Well, the camp turned out to be an ancient school building in Morristown; right in Morristown, not out in the country. It had been condemned; [it was] no longer usable as a school. I lived as a CCC boy. They issued you uniforms and all the rest you know, in that school. Each morning the whole complement, roughly one hundred CCC boys, would be trucked out to the park. Amazingly enough, I was given the opportunity of working as a historian. Now this eventually took two forms. At that time, of course, the park was still quite new. It had only been begun in 1933 and this was 1936. Washington’s headquarters for example, the Ford Mansion, had yet to be renovated in what might be termed the Park Service style. It was still an old-fashioned kind of house museum that had been run by the Washington Association. Well, I would, on occasion, be stationed there to take guided groups through.

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But most of my time was spent in a former barn out in Jockey Hollow doing research. I worked on such things, for example, as crime and punishment in the army at Morristown, chiefly going through Fitzpatrick’s Writings of George Washington,5 plus other sources, and preparing a report on the nature of the crime and the nature of the punishments. Then I did another paper on the systems of the guards—outposts—protecting the camp. Well, the important thing is that this was my first opportunity to really do History. I had by this time written a couple of term papers, but they were essentially based on secondary materials. This was fresh, and it greatly stimulated my interest and commitment to History. A year later, there was the opportunity to get a job with the Park Service at Morristown, as what they called, I think, a student technician—I am not sure of the correct title. Anyhow I applied for and got that job. And I was able to make an arrangement to live at the CCC camp. Not in CCC uniform or anything like that, but it was very, very cheap for me to live there for the summer. By this time the lovely museum and library building in the rear of the Ford Mansion had been opened. So I was among the first people to work in that building. That was wonderful. We had a library. I had my own office. Again, I worked on various projects. The park service was giving some consideration to the site of Washington’s Encampment at Middlebrook, just outside of Bound Brook, New Jersey. So I did a lot of work on that, including some research trips to the New York Public Library and utilizing the sources at Morristown and the Morristown Public Library. That summer, Fred Rath, who later went on to become head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, was newly out of college. He was working for the Park Service at Morristown, and we became friends that summer. It was a stimulus. Here was a Harvard graduate who by that time, I think, also had his master’s degree from Harvard. He was a real live historian, so to speak. He was working on problems with the Ford Mansion. Those two summers confirmed my commitment to the study of History and I always thereafter found research far more interesting than reading history books or listening to history lectures. I think the two experiences at Morristown had more effect than the courses I took at Rutgers as an undergraduate in strengthening my interest in History. MB: Which is not an uncommon story. Hands on, real life experiences often do reinforce a person’s tendency to a particular field, an interest in a particular field. Now, when you went back to Rutgers for your senior year did you know that graduate school lay immediately in the offing for you? What did you expect to happen to you?

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RM: I expected to stay on at Rutgers for a master’s degree. I expected that because the financial arrangements were attractive. In those days, believe it or not, an assistantship paid $900, plus tuition. Now that would be roughly equivalent to $9,000 today. Given my financial condition and also given the fact that, again, I had no counseling. None of my professors said, “you ought to apply to Harvard” or Chicago or whatever. They were quite willing to have me stay on for a master’s degree, so I did. I lived in the dormitory of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary—Hertzog Hall, in what were really elegant quarters, and [I] had adequate funds with my assistantship. I spent two years. My duty as assistant was to be the secretary of the department. [They] never had had any. So on those rare occasions when there was correspondence to be typed, I typed it. But mostly I sat around in the office and answered the telephone. There was one telephone in the building. If somebody with an office downstairs had a call, I’d run down and say “Mr. Ellis, you have a phone call,” and he’d come up to the office and take care of it. Things were simple, so that it was not a terribly demanding job. I spent the two years as an assistant and emerged with a master’s degree. MB: What did you focus on for your master’s degree? I assume American History, but how much more specialized did you get in terms of writing a master’s thesis or concentration? RM: I did quite a substantial thesis. We all had to do a master’s thesis in those days. What did I do it on? I did a study of “The War Aims of President [Woodrow] Wilson and of Congress.” [I wanted] to show the wide divergence between the war aims enunciated by Wilson over and over again and those held by Congress. Which led to the very obvious conclusions that they were not on the same wave-length. Consequently, the defeat of the League of Nations was quite foreseeable and was one element reflecting the disparity between the aims of the president and the aims of the Senate. That was my master’s thesis. MB: Were you a partisan of President Wilson when you were writing this thesis? RM: No I don’t think I was particularly partisan either way. I had no preconceptions, so to speak. But I had a seminar with Professor Kull on World War I and that is what focused my interest on this particular question of war aims. MB: Did Kull supervise your thesis and sign it? [Pause] You’re smiling. RM: Well, I wouldn’t say he supervised it. I went off and wrote it and submitted it and that was that.

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MB: I assume the faculty in 1938–1939 was roughly the same as it was when you entered. It wasn’t a different cast of characters. RM: Oh, no. The same. MB: To what extent did living through the Depression and your experience of life here in New Brunswick affect your political sensibility? RM: All right. I can answer that pretty clearly. There were two sides to it. [Keep in mind I was] coming from my working-class background. My father was a life-long Democrat, a union man. I was very strongly pro-Roosevelt, pro-New Deal—a New Deal Liberal. And I looked at the world in that way. But secondly, as was characteristic of a very substantial proportion of the thinking members of my generation, [there was] great cynicism regarding America’s involvement in World War I. There was so much literature in the 1920s and 1930s of what we would call a revisionist nature. Munitions makers, British propaganda, bankers, etc., etc. So I tended to be of an isolationist orientation. Again, as I say, this was the era of the Oxford Pledge and peace movements and that kind of thing. I suppose you’d say my political cast was New Dealish but also reflected this disillusionment with World War I. MB: What did you make of the dictators in Europe at this time? Did you see them as evil people but not part of the world we needed to be involved in? RM: Essentially. Very, very evil and deplorable. [I was] suspicious of England and suspicious of France, on the basis of their behavior in and after World War I. You may say it was an unrealistic attitude, but the attitude was whatever happens, America should not get involved. MB: President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt in 1940 was in a pretty tough fight with Wendell Willkie and with the third term tradition. That tradition may have been a bigger problem than Willkie himself. Roosevelt was not going to encourage the idea that he was going to involve America abroad. Did you believe him at the time? What’s your memory of how you reacted to that campaign and what was being said on both domestic and foreign affairs? RM: In October of 1940, by which time I was a graduate student in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, I went to Convention Hall to hear Roosevelt give one of his campaign addresses. And this was a very inspirational experience for me—that packed hall, everybody screaming, the president orating, and so on. I had no problem whatsoever voting for him in 1940 or, indeed, in 1944. The American people, obviously, were still overwhelmingly opposed to engagement at that time. On the other hand, as we know, sentiment

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was moving toward increased assistance of some kind to what was now left, mainly England—this beleaguered nation—after the fall of so much the rest of Western Europe. There was movement; still the temper of the country was not in favor of immediate involvement. That came, of course, with Pearl Harbor. MB: You have lived now fifty years beyond Roosevelt, you’re a historian, you’ve studied twentieth-century America as well as other periods. Do you have as high an opinion of Roosevelt now looking back as you did when you were young? RM: Yeah, he’s an icon. . . . MB: You mentioned that by the time you attended that speech in Convention Hall in 1940 you were living in Philadelphia, attending Penn. Let’s go back to your period at Rutgers when you were working on your master’s thesis and completing your course work for the master’s degree. Whom were you conversing with, and what were they telling you about starting to plot your future as a historian and getting a Ph.D. somewhere? RM: I don’t know that I talked to them much, but it just so happened that in the early Spring, I guess it would have been, in 1940, second year of graduate work, I had heard about Roy Nichols. Irving Kull, the department chair [at Rutgers], had been in the department back in 1918 when Nichols graduated and had participated in instructing him. He received a master’s degree here; the first master’s degree in History. So I was aware that there was this historian, Roy Nichols, who was a very good historian.6 MB: Nichols had a Rutgers connection. RM: Nichols had a Rutgers connection, and, moreover, by this time he would make occasional visits to Rutgers as a member of the Board of Trustees or as the member of this committee or that committee. I knew that he was going to be on the campus at a certain occasion and I arranged to have lunch with him. I told him that I was interested in going on to graduate work in American History. He encouraged that and invited me to write and apply for an assistantship at Penn, which I did. It’s the only school to which I applied. MB: You didn’t send out applications elsewhere? RM: None. In terms of applications, this was a letter. In due course I was advised that I had received an assistantship which, God help me, paid three hundred dollars a year. MB: So, three hundred less than you were getting doing— RM: Six hundred less, and living in Philadelphia. And believe me that was the rankest kind of exploitation, and I had to work and teach three quiz sections.

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MB: That presumably was at a wealthier school— RM: Oh, my! Well that’s another story. MB: Did you accept those terms? RM: I didn’t know what to expect. I’m not that aggressive in exploring other alternatives. I should have been, but I wasn’t. So I went to Penn. MB: What did you do in the summer of 1940? Before you went off to Penn, did you work at home? RM: I worked every summer. That particular summer I don’t remember. Summer of ’38 and ’39 I worked in NBC studios in New York. Where did I work that summer in 1940? [Pauses.] It may have been, I worked one summer at Bogota Paper and Board. It was a box factory in Bogota. I worked another summer at the factory of the Aluminum Company of America in Edgewater. I don’t remember which was which though. MB: But you were prepared to move to Philadelphia. Describe that experience of moving to this big city, which must have been a pretty lively and crowded city in 1940. Tell me a little bit about where you moved and your first impressions of Penn and Philadelphia generally. RM: Very lonesome; very, very lonesome. I’d spent six years at New Brunswick and had all kinds of relationships. Not only did I know people but people knew me. Moreover in the last two years I had it pretty good financially. I go down to Penn, get a miserable room at 3939 Pine Street, the cheapest room I could find. I then introduced myself, so to speak, to the other TAs and [department] members. Well, within a couple of weeks things began to brighten a bit. I discovered a pleasant group of TAs there at Penn and we soon formed the habit of eating together every night at Horn and Hardart, which was just across the street from the campus. There was a graduate History Club, which brought all of the History students together, and after a few months there I found myself its president. MB: Who were some of these characters whom you met who were TAs? The ones you hung out with and ate dinner with? RM: Well, over the long run the most important was John Munroe, who was a graduate of the University of Delaware and was teaching there and continuing his graduate work at Penn. He later became my brother-in-law and very good friend, and we are still, of course, extremely close. Then there was Harry Tinckom, an older student, who was the head TA, with whom I developed a close friendship. There was Robert Lunny, who was the TA in English History. I mention him because we became life-long friends, and I later hired Bob as the director of the New Jersey Historical Society. I spoke at

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his funeral a few years ago. There was William Salamone who went on to become a very distinguished figure in Italian History at the University of Rochester. Peter Topping, one of my poker buddies, was a student in the area of Byzantine History. Norman Wilkinson, who was later associated with the Hagley Foundation at Delaware. Another very close friend was Bob Burr, who went on to be a professor of Latin American History at UCLA, and so on.

Richard P. McCormick, age four, portrait taken several years before the family’s move to Bergen County, New Jersey.

McCormick as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, mid-1930s, taken against the backdrop of “Old Queens.”

McCormick’s mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Roy Franklin Nichols, in a characteristic pose, circa late 1940s. Nichols’s behavioral approach to political history had an abiding impact on McCormick’s scholarship.

During the early 1950s McCormick was active on many fronts promoting New Jersey History. This cartoon, published in the Newark News in 1950, captured several threads of his enterprise.

A McCormick family portrait, circa 1951. McCormick is reading to son Richard L. (“Dickie”) McCormick, while his wife, Katheryne Levis McCormick, holds their infant daughter Dorothy.

During his career at Rutgers McCormick took special satisfaction ferreting out original materials relating to New Jersey History and sharing his findings with students and the general public. In this photograph, circa 1955, McCormick is holding a broadside for a Whig Party rally in the 1830s.

Publicity photo of McCormick in mid-career, as he was about to spend a year as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 1961–1962.

CHAPTER 2

Revitalizing the Study of New Jersey History

MB: I wanted to get squared away on the sequence of your movement toward a Ph.D. because it was interrupted during the war. Did you finish your course work before you were called into service as a civilian employee of the government? How did that work? RM: Yes. I finished all of my course work and my exams in the Spring of 1942. I did it prematurely. Right after Pearl Harbor, Roy Nichols came around to all the American History graduate students with his date book, and he just told us when we were going to take our exams. The idea was to get us all through before we were called into service. So it was a rather tough experience, accelerating my preparation, but it all went off well. MB: What happened when you got through the orals? Did you know that you would be moving on to some form of service? RM: Not for sure. I had, right after Pearl Harbor, applied for a commission in the Navy, and I passed my preliminary physical and everything seemed to be in order. But then weeks or months later (I forget what) when I was called up for my second physical, I was turned down. So that I was not to go into the Navy. Subsequently, I was also turned down for my Army physical and was classified as 4–F. It looked like I was not going to be in the service. [At this point] Professor Nichols brought to my attention a job writing History at

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the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot. All things considered, that looked like a good possibility. That’s where I went. MB: How did you get hired for such a job? RM: Well it was a government position, a civil service position. MB: You went there, you applied for it, they interviewed you and accepted you. So you really did not have to change where you were living during the war. RM: No. I could afford a little better furnished room. MB: Were you disappointed or were you relieved about the result of the physical? RM: I would say I was disappointed. I subsequently tried a number of other opportunities for service which for one reason or another did not work out, but that’s the way it was. MB: How did you follow the war from the Philadelphia quartermaster’s office? Were you an eager reader of all the newspapers and listener of the radio? How did you follow the war? RM: I wasn’t much of a radio listener. I read the newspaper, and through my work at the quartermaster’s depot, I had a particular perspective, so to speak, on the war in terms of what was going on there. I saw it from that perspective as well as the larger perspective that you got in the newspaper. MB: What did you make of life in Philadelphia? I assume that Philadelphia was bereft of many of its young men, but other than that, a very lively town. RM: A number of my graduate student colleagues, curiously enough, Joe Tregle, Bob Elias, John Reed, John Munroe and a few others, remained around so that socially I was still a part of that group. It didn’t disappear during the war. In that sense there was a continuity. Getting up early in the morning and commuting by streetcar out to the Quartermaster’s Depot [and] working under very, very miserable physical conditions there in a huge, badly heated former warehouse, with an incredible amount of noise of business machines and typewriters and whatnot; it was very wearing. So that as I say, evenings I didn’t have much energy except for some light social things, some light reading, newspapers. MB: Where would the material that you wrote wind up? RM: It wound up ultimately in the archives of the Quartermaster Corps in Washington, classified. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I received copies of the two long studies that I did. It was dull stuff. First, there was a history of the physical plant there. That particular installation had been established during World War I. There had

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been a quartermaster installation in Philadelphia all the way back to the earliest period of the government, and I wrote the history of the development of that physical plant. Then my second study was of storage and distribution operations running from World War I down to approximately 1942–1943.1 MB: Did you have any supervision, or were you strictly on your own? RM: Oh, no, I had supervision. The head of the project was Professor James Barnes of Temple University. An excellent historian, [he had] done a biography of [John G.] Carlisle.2 Associated with him was his wife, Eleanor, who worked on her own project on the clothing of the WAC [Women’s Army Corps], but also served as editor to our little three-person group. Then we had two or three secretaries. I got along with Mr. and Mrs. Barnes. We had a good relationship. He fought as hard as he could to get decent conditions for us, but it was not entirely a pleasant working experience. MB: What did you make of wartime Philadelphia? Did you take advantage of the entertainments and so forth? RM: Yes. Oh, yes. It wasn’t too grim. There was still the Philadelphia Orchestra; there were still plays. At that time there were two or three legitimate theaters in Philadelphia. Transportation was a problem with gas rationing, but on that side of it I can’t say that it demanded great sacrifices. Of course, I took all my meals in restaurants. I did not have the rationing hassle that the American housewife had. MB: You were apparently in Philadelphia working in this job for about two years, and as I understand it you got an opportunity to move to the University of Delaware. What were the circumstances of the offer, and how did you wind up going down to work there? RM: Again, it came about essentially because of my good friend and future brother-in-law, John Munroe. In those days, virtually all civilian students, except for women, had disappeared from college campuses. What kept the universities going were these military groups that came in ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program], ASTRP [Army Specialized Training Reserve Program], and so on. There was a sudden influx of ASTRP students at Delaware and they desperately needed some instructors. I had had enough of the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot by then. I had finished the second major study. There was an opportunity to get back to the academic world, so that’s where I went. MB: How many people were on the History faculty at Delaware at that time?

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RM: Oh, half a dozen maybe. MB: So it was a pretty small place. RM: Yes. MB: And you taught four or five courses for them? RM: I have no idea what my teaching load was. I taught one civilian class and the other classes were comprised of these seventeenyear-olds who were in the reserve program, ASTRP. MB: Were they interested in studying, or were they just doing it because they had to be there? RM: It wasn’t bad. They were decent students. Young and not up to the usual college level grade, perhaps, but it was a good experience. And actually the course that we taught was a combination of history, geography, and military strategy. MB: It was during your period in Delaware that you met your future wife. RM: That’s right. MB: She was a graduate student in chemistry at the time? RM: She and her twin sister, Dorothy. MB: Katheryne and Dorothy Levis? RM: Yes. They had graduated from what was then the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, North Carolina, which is now simply the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. They graduated, both of them, junior Phi Beta Kappa. They graduated in 1944 and they obtained this fellowship for graduate work in chemistry at the University of Delaware. I became acquainted with them because as a bachelor living on campus, I ate at the campus dining hall where there was a table for graduate students. I became acquainted with them and I brought John into the picture. And that’s how we met the twins. MB: Was there ever any question that you liked one of the twins and he liked the other of the twins? RM: No. Several months went by and we dated collectively. There was no pairing off until April. MB: In other words, it was a gang rather than pairs. RM: The four of us, yeah. But in April, John paired off with Dorothy and they decided to get married; and in May, Katheryne and I came to a similar conclusion. They were married in July of 1945, and we were married in August of 1945. The twins came from Baltimore, so we were married in Baltimore.

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MB: So they came back from their honeymoon in time to celebrate your wedding. That’s wonderful. Almost immediately thereafter I gather you and Katheryne took up residence in New Brunswick because you were offered a position at Rutgers. RM: Well, it was a little more complicated than that. As I say, Katheryne and I became engaged in May, and very soon after that, she was offered a teaching position at New Jersey College for Women, now Douglass College, in the Chemistry Department. So while we were talking of marriage plans, here I was at the University of Delaware and she would be going to New Jersey. Well, in our starry state, we didn’t really pay a lot of attention to that. Then in June, I guess it was, suddenly, I received a call from Professor Kull at Rutgers saying that Professor Robert Thompson of the department had died. Would I be interested in the position at Rutgers? Well, it was almost miraculous. I remember Katheryne and I came up together, and I accepted the position, so our problem was solved. Here we would both be at Rutgers in September of 1945. MB: A remarkable coincidence. You of course knew the lay of the land at Rutgers, so it would not be a difficult transition for you. RM: It was amazing. MB: Describe Rutgers in the Fall of 1945. I have to assume that you are already starting to see an influx of veterans. RM: Well, I started teaching in July here. Again, there was a large infusion of ASTRP students here. I came up to New Brunswick, got a furnished room, and started teaching. Because we were an all-male institution, there were virtually no civilian students. In June, or the Summer at least, of 1945 (because graduation came at strange times), there were twenty-four in the graduating class. These were the civilians. In other words, it was overwhelmingly the ASTRP that made up the complement. Well, in the Fall, some of the veterans, a handful so to speak, came in and by January, they were coming in by substantial numbers. By the start of the academic year of 1946–1947, they were coming in droves. So that it was obvious that a vast expansion of the faculty and facilities was needed.3 Between ’46 and ’48, it was a very, very hectic time, with a large increase in faculty and the building of temporary facilities, some of which lasted thirty or forty years. It was a very exciting time. Particularly because of Rutgers’s designation as a state university in 1945, we felt an obligation to accommodate every veteran we possibly could. Of course, there was the expectation that the state would appreciate what was being done and would come forward with the necessary resources. That did not happen. The result was that when the veterans tailed off there after 1949–1950, there was a marked

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drop in student enrollment. Most of us felt very disappointed because the state did not come through with the resources to sustain Rutgers, and the fifties were a very grim period here.4 MB: Do you have any particular memories about teaching particular classes and having overflow crowds? RM: We still in the ’40s had not gone over to the large lecture system, which we actually adopted in the ’50s—by the mid-’50s, for economic reasons, even in a time of declining student enrollment. There had been the tradition of individual sections so that I would teach each year two sections of the basic American History survey course, and I wouldn’t have more than twenty-five or thirty people in class. I wouldn’t say it was swollen classes. We hired a lot of people. Many of them did not remain with the department after, say, 1950. I wasn’t conscious of being overwhelmed with students. MB: One of the things I want to explore is your growing interest in New Jersey History, your increasing reputation as a New Jersey historian, and the completion of your doctoral work. Your career is in segments, really, because you go off to Penn, do your course work, pass your exams, but don’t get to focus on your dissertation. You go off and do different work during the war years. You teach for a year at Delaware. You come back to teach at Rutgers. Am I right that you had a year off in the forties to finish the dissertation? RM: Well, let me just say a word about this involvement with New Jersey History. Until one evening that I met with Roy Nichols in New York City in the summer of 1945, I had no interest whatsoever in local history or in New Jersey History. Although by now I had lived in New Jersey for many years, my interest did not run in that direction at all. I didn’t know anything about the history of New Jersey, and I didn’t care about the history of New Jersey. But that conversation must be taken within the context, as I said before, that Rutgers had just become a state university. It seemed to us that Rutgers should have someone in the History Department who specialized in New Jersey History and [it turned out] that I would be that person. So I, in effect, made a commitment. I would do my dissertation, in this case, on New Jersey in the critical period. I would define myself as the person in the History Department who would be interested in New Jersey History. And all kinds of things flowed from that. I immediately joined the New Jersey Historical Society. Much of my research for my dissertation was done at the Historical Society, which gave me a view of that rather moribund institution. Over the course of the next several years, the fact that I had identified myself as a New Jersey historian and assumed this obligation, if you will, because of our re-

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cent designation as a state university, shaped a lot of decisions that followed. MB: One of those decisions, was to call a conference on New Jersey History. Would you elaborate on that? RM: It was perfectly apparent to me from my research at the New Jersey Historical Society that it was a moribund institution, and that it had not cultivated the people who had a serious interest in New Jersey History, particularly of an academic sort, but not exclusively so. Consequently, I took the initiative of organizing what was called the Conference of New Jersey Historians. The idea was to bring together people who were actually working, amateurs and professionals, in the field of New Jersey History. We held the first conference here at Rutgers and it got a good response. I then prepared a newsletter, which reported on the conference and also had information about bibliography and sources in New Jersey History, which I circulated to this group. Then we had a second and a third conference.5 At the second conference, a couple of members of the board of trustees of the New Jersey Historical Society appeared—Damon Douglas and Charles Bradley in particular. That set in motion a train of circumstances. In short, they were impressed by this turnout of people seriously interested in New Jersey. And they were impressed, I guess, by my initiative in developing this arrangement. The consequence of that was they asked to talk with me. I met with a group of the trustees of the Society at the Essex Club in Newark and set forth some of my ideas about what should be done to vivify the Historical Society. In particular, I recommended that they bring in an outside consultant to compose a program for the development of the Society. Well, they took me seriously and they retained the best man possible in the field at that time, Edward P. Alexander. Ed was a Columbia Ph.D. who had been head first of the New York State Historical Association then had become director of the Wisconsin Historical Society and had moved to Colonial Williamsburg as vice-president for Interpretation. So Ed came up. Meanwhile, Ed and I had some correspondence about the Society and the result was this marvelous report that Ed prepared, putting forth quite specifically a doable program for bringing the New Jersey Historical Society into the mainstream.6 MB: Before we talk anything about the substance of this report, it should be made clear that you were already elected president of the Society. RM: Not yet! MB: Okay, because you’re listed as president here during December of 1950.

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RM: Exactly! The report was presented to the Board of Trustees of the Society. The president was Charles Bradley, the grandson of former justice of the Supreme Court, Joseph P. Bradley, who was a graduate of Rutgers in the class of 1836. And Mr. Bradley was one of the most remarkable men I have ever known; I could go on at great length about him.7 Anyway, somewhat to my surprise, this rather conservative and not terribly active board, bought it. At that time, I had an office in Bishop House where the [Rutgers] History Department was housed. It was a strange office. You could get into it only by coming through a window. I was working in my office one morning and this very elegant man appeared outside my window and tapped on it. I lifted it up from the floor. He [McCormick laughs] crawled into my office. Of course I recognized him. This was the august Mr. Bradley. And to my astonishment he asked if I would agree to become president of the New Jersey Historical Society. I was then, what, thirty-three years old. MB: Can we get a date on when this event happened? RM: 1950. About September or October, 1950. MB: Well, Alexander had already been commissioned by then. RM: He had already done the report and the board had it. It hadn’t been printed of course. Mr. Bradley told me that he had already spoken with the president of the university [Robert Clothier], who agreed that it would be all right with him if I assumed that responsibility. And of course he had lined up the board. It was an astonishing proposal. Here I was an assistant professor, thirty-three years old, not at all known within the circles which those men traveled. Anyway, I said okay. So they arranged for a member of the board, Judge John O. Bigelow, to resign from the board to create a place. In November of 1950, I was the same day elected a trustee and elected the president of the Society. I thereby took on a considerable responsibility. Essentially, it was the responsibility of trying to carry forward, put into execution, this splendid plan proposed by Ed Alexander. MB: That certainly opens up a lot of different possible points of discussion. I suppose we ought to start by considering the condition of the Historical Society in 1948–1949. You had spent a good deal of time researching in that particular facility. You had a good lay of the land. What was the professionalism of the place? What were the resources? RM: The librarian was Mrs. Maude H. Greene, who was the daughter of a prominent amateur Somerset County historian, A. Van Doren Honeyman. You may be familiar with him. She had not, of course, been trained as a historian but had sort of grown up with it and was a very fine person, although not professionally trained.

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There were two other employees of the Society, both elderly women, one of whom had retired as a secretary from the Prudential. She had been Mr. Bradley’s secretary there, Ms. Palmentier. And another woman of considerable years was Ms. Coons, who presided over the reference desk, if you will, at the library. In addition, there was an aged janitor who lived with his wife in the basement of the Historical Society.8 MB: Was the Society then located at 230 Broadway? RM: Yes. Oh, yes. In this fine building into which the Society moved in 1932. Handsome building. They just got it up when the Depression hit the bottom, and from that time on it was austerity. The austerity of the Depression, the austerity of the war. So this was a very ancient staff. Fine people, doing the very best they could with the training they had, but it was like a morgue. I would go up there to do my research, and I would be up there all day and there wouldn’t be another person in the building except the staff. MB: That was my experience there twenty-five years later as well! RM: There wasn’t much in the way of a museum. The Society was running an annual deficit so that its finances were precarious, and the board, I suppose, was a caretaker board. [The board had] not for years displayed much in the way of initiative. That’s the way the Society looked in 1950. But now they’ve taken a daring step with this survey and an even more daring step by bringing this kid in as president. So for the next few years, it was a very active time. First of all, we brought in Alexander P. Wall, Jr., as director. His father was the long-time director of the New-York Historical Society, and young Al had grown up with that. He was a professionally trained person. We were very fortunate to get him. That was step number one and a very important step. Then we brought in Bill Britten to serve as his assistant, particularly to work on the development of the museum side. We brought in a very fine young man, Fred Shelley, a professionally trained historian and librarian to be the librarian in the society. MB: Did the older staff give way? RM: No problem. Shelley very quickly had an impact. He produced the first published guide to our manuscript collections.9 Well, he was, so to speak, too good for us, and we lost him very quickly to the Library of Congress. But he had made that great contribution. Then we developed a lot of programs. Bill Britten developed certain aspects of the museum with a particular emphasis on exhibits that would attract children. They developed a program of bringing in school groups. We had various publicity gimmicks. One of the things Ed recommended, for example, was a portrait of the month. Each month we would select a portrait from our collection, and that

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gave us an opportunity to put out press releases, which the press eagerly took, featuring interesting figures in the history of New Jersey. The magazine of the Society was in what can only be described as an antique format. The editor was a bank officer in Essex County, Mr. Ellis, and we soon arranged that Donald Sinclair would take over the magazine and he, in turn, got P. J. Cronkite, the head designer at the Princeton University Press, to redesign the magazine, so we brought it out in a modern format. Then, again implementing another one of Ed Alexander’s suggestions, we started the annual conference. This was an effort to bring together all of the local historical societies and others interested. We held the first conference in Burlington. I guess that would have been in June ’51. We had about three hundred people there. We brought in my friend, Cliff Lord, from Wisconsin, as chief speaker and had a pretty lively program. The conferences for the next several years turned out to be very healthy. Meanwhile, Damon Douglas became a very energetic trustee and head of the membership committee and brought in a lot of additional members and also started to bring in corporate memberships so that the financial situation improved. We managed to persuade a donor, E. J. Grassmann, to start a small publication fund so we could resume publication of some worthy items in New Jersey history. I customarily spent one day a week in Newark, partly consulting with Al at the Society and partly meeting with the trustees or trustee committees. It was a satisfying experience in the sense that you could see improvement there. But it did take up a great deal of my time because I also felt obliged to accept invitations to speak all over the state—to publicize the Society and its work and to strive to stimulate interest. So that I suppose I was giving forty or fifty talks all over New Jersey each year. That was a considerable drain on my time and energy.10 MB: This very time, of course, you are a young assistant professor, you are married and starting to have children. You have a lot going on in your life. First off, how did you juggle all of the different responsibilities that you had? RM: I don’t know. Of course, I have an extraordinary wife. Katheryne was not only very bright but also extremely able. She took on all kinds of responsibilities. For example, I have never made out an income tax. For years I never knew what bank our checking account was in. In every kind of financial operation, she took over. She was always my amanuensis. We never had adequate secretarial services at the university. She did all my typing. She typed my books, articles, letters, and whatnot. MB: You wrote your material out in longhand and she typed it up?

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RM: Still do. So that was a part of it. Her willingness and ability to take on an awful lot of responsibility and an awful lot of work. MB: Your son, Richard, was born in ’47; you had a daughter several years later. RM: June of ’50. MB: Does your wife at any point say, “enough is enough” on this speech making? RM: No. She was always supportive and looking back on it, when I think of the things that I did, it was probably unfair, but that’s a retrospective judgment. MB: Let me ask you about the good and the bad of this itinerant life you had. You had invitations coming in from everywhere from northern Bergen County to Cape May. You were declining some, but you were accepting many. First off, what was your basic principle as far as what you would accept; and second, based on the ones you accepted, what were the best experiences or the worst? You’re laughing now so I want to hear this. RM: Of course, it’s not hard to say what was the worst—speaking to service clubs. That was the least satisfying experience. I needn’t go into all the reasons why. MB: They just wanted a free speaker to take up a twenty-minute slot in their program. RM: It was rarely twenty minutes, however. By the time they got through recognizing all the visiting brethren and the birthdays and whatnot, you never knew how much time you were going to have. Anyhow, I did a number of those, but increasingly I tried to avoid them. The second least satisfying were high school graduation addresses. Nobody is interested in the commencement speaker, least of all at a high school graduation. But to be candid about it, sometimes I could get as much as fifty bucks for one of those, and given our economic situation at that time, that was not unwelcome. A significant proportion of the speeches were to women’s clubs because once in those early years—maybe around ’53, ’54–I spoke at the convention of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs. Well, in the next few years, invitations came in from women’s clubs all over the state. They were pretty good assignments, except that often you had to wait through the treasurer’s report and the garden club report—this kind of thing—that got kind of tedious. Then I spoke, of course, to a large number of county historical societies and many local societies. It took me around the state, increased my knowledge, perhaps developed some interest.

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Occasionally I turned up some interesting material. I spoke once to the Gloucester County Historical Society, and in attendance was Hugh Mehorter, who was at that time speaker of the New Jersey assembly. He was charmed by my talk. Afterwards, we went out to a bar and had a few drinks and he became more charmed. We went back to his house, had another couple of drinks, at which point he decided I was the salt of the earth. It climaxed by his telling me that he had a considerable stash of papers and other items that had been collected by Frank Stewart, a long-time local historian there and collector. He insisted on giving me all this material. We had cardboard cartons and we carted them out to my old car. Finally, he reached up to a top shelf where there was a rather small carton that we opened and here was a skull—a human skull. He assured me it was the skull of Count Von Donnop, Hessian commander at the Battle of Red Bank. He had died with the immortal words [on his lips], “I die a victim of my own ambition and of the avarice of my sovereign.” [Laughs] First thing, I came over to the library and transferred these boxes of manuscripts and pamphlets and God knows what plus the skull of Count Von Donnop. It remains among the treasures of the Department of Special Collections in the Alexander Library. MB: Do you remember what written material he gave you? RM: Well, actually there was some good pamphlet material there. Not much in the way of manuscripts, but the pamphlets were good. MB: I have the sense that people periodically sent you documents on the grounds that you were the New Jersey historian, therefore they wanted you to have it. This happened a fair amount of time, right? RM: Right. MB: Now, what were the best experiences as far as going out and proselytizing for New Jersey History? Was it the one-on-one contact with individuals who were taken by your speeches or was it something else? RM: Well, it’s hard to measure the impact. I think in many ways it was encouraging to the people there that they were not alone; that there were other people there who were interested in New Jersey. I hope that it had effects of stimulating their interest. One of the things that I tried to stress in my talks was the importance of the integrity of History. There had to be a research component in any kind of historical communication, whether it was in the form of a historic house or pageant; there should be respect for the integrity of History, and I hope that that had some effect. And through the work of the annual conference, we would have workshops that would be concerned with things like managing a small historical society li-

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brary; doing oral history; archaeology or whatever—“how to” sessions, in addition to subject-oriented sessions. MB: What kind of things did you learn driving through the state? RM: Well, you learn of course that there are great differences, cultural differences let’s say, particularly between North Jersey and South Jersey. When you get down into Burlington, Cumberland, Salem, Cape May, Gloucester, and so on, particularly in the smaller towns there—and there aren’t many large towns—it’s quite a different culture from the highly urban culture of North Jersey. So that becomes apparent. There is a noticeable difference between the urban and the rural and the modernized and the more traditional sections of the state. You also observe with respect to the county and local societies: they tended to be extremely provincial. That is, they might be interested in the history of Woodstown or Cape May County, but with regards to the history of the state as a whole—no. It tends to be a highly localized approach. Also, I learned from that experience and other sources that the era of the extremely able amateur historian on whom we had relied back in the 1840s, ’60s, and ’80s had essentially passed. It used to be that some pretty good local history was done by ministers of churches, who were educated people and wrote some very fine local histories. Lawyers who had a scholarly interest that extended beyond the writing of legal briefs wrote some very good local history. They had almost disappeared. There was, of course, the extraordinary emergence of Adrian Leiby in Bergen County, but he was very exceptional.11 MB: Would you like to describe how this lawyer/historian from Bergenfield, New Jersey, first encountered you? RM: I had some correspondence with him when he was working on his study of the Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley.12 He indicated that he would like to come see me, and we arranged that he would appear on a certain Saturday. I was in my office working, and he and Mrs. Leiby appeared, bringing with him the first draft, in effect, of his study. I had not met him personally, but was immediately impressed in meeting him with the intellectual qualities of the man and his genuineness—seriousness—about doing History. So I agreed to read the manuscript, and I wrote rather extensive comments on it—suggestions. There was no question about the quality of the research. It was excellent. He had done an enormous amount of work. But there were some problems of organization and other things. He took the comments quite seriously and went back and reworked some of it. I had another look at it and thought it was splendid. I recommended it for publication to the Rutgers Press. I think I would say it’s the finest work that I know of

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done in the last fifty years by a nonacademic. I wouldn’t even call him an amateur: he went beyond the boundaries of amateurism in terms of the quality of his work. I think it’s the finest work of that sort in my experience in the last fifty years. MB: It seems evident that Leiby’s book matured in two stages. At the first stage in the early fifties, he approached you and the manuscript must have been focused on the religious conflicts in Bergen County. RM: Coetus and Conferentie, yes. MB: Right. He wanted to publish that and approached you for help and you gave him a lot of help and he was unsuccessful at that time at getting it published either at Princeton University or Rutgers University Press.13 RM: Oh? MB: But he took the comments you made to heart, expanded the focus to be more oriented to the war itself as opposed to just the religious conflict, and that’s when he came back to you. Apparently this is when you said it was ready for publication, and he was forever grateful to you for that help. The book did very well, I think. RM: Yes. Then later he did the volume for the Tercentenary Series.14 MB: All told, I think he published seven books in his lifetime. RM: Amazing. MB: And he was working on a history of Bergen County when he died in 1976. He was an exemplary man. I take it, though, that he was very far from the norm. You didn’t meet many Leibys, right? RM: None. None of that [quality]. Well, that brings into the picture John Cunningham and that’s an interesting story. John was a reporter for the Newark News, which was then New Jersey’s foremost newspaper, and he was sent to cover our conference of New Jersey historians. He was bowled over by it. I do not remember whether it was the first or the second conference that he attended, but in any case he crawled through my window in my office in Bishop House, all excited about New Jersey History, which down to that time had not been an interest of his. We had a wonderful conversation. The result was that he decided to do a series for the Sunday magazine section of the Newark News on New Jersey Railroads. Lloyd Felmly, who was then the editor of the Newark News, was very agreeable to this. John turned out this series that ran over a course of a few weeks in this magazine. It had a very favorable reception. So from that time on, John’s beat, if you will, was New Jersey History.15

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In due course, he began turning out book after book. Some of them grew out of features he had done in the Newark News, but some of them were on the New Jersey Shore and New Jersey industry and so on. It became his full-time occupation. He established a little publishing house too. He became interested in stimulating more teaching of New Jersey in the schools. He turned out a textbook for that. He became, deservedly, the best known writer in the field of New Jersey History. He was also an extremely popular lecturer—lecturing all over the state. John and I have been very close friends now for over forty years and have continued to work together in various capacities. He came on the board of the New Jersey Historical Society and in due course became president of the Society. He succeeded me as chair of the New Jersey Historical Commission. We have had a close relationship for over forty years in this New Jersey History field.16 MB: OK. You’re on the road, you’re making yourself known as a leading scholar in New Jersey History. What is most gratifying to you about what you are doing and giving of yourself in this realm? Is it that you are just increasing consciousness of the value of studying History? That you are getting people to think of History in a less antiquarian way? What would you point to? RM: Well, at heart I suppose, what I had been most deeply concerned about is insuring a sound scholarly treatment of New Jersey History. True, I was promoting, in a sense, a wider popular sense of New Jersey History, but this always remained secondary to my larger interest in facilitating and promoting more scholarly studies of New Jersey. So that there were these twin elements, but the major one was on a scholarly side rather than on the popular side. But they had to be combined. MB: Yes. I would assume that an important aspect of what you’re trying to do is training people at Rutgers who are capable of doing good scholarly work in New Jersey History? You must have trained a good number of master’s and Ph.D. students who concentrated on New Jersey themes. RM: That, but for example, at the Historical Society, I was concerned with such things as bringing out that guide to manuscripts, of improving the services in the library, of trying to stimulate gifts to the library, materials that would be used for scholarship, establishing a publications fund that would make it possible to publish scholarly material. I always had that in mind. Similarly, with respect to the time when I was involved in the New Jersey Tercentenary Commission, obviously there had to be a very large public dimension to the observance of the Tercentenary, but what was of great in-

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terest to me was the Tercentenary Series publication—we did over twenty books. It was an amazing production of books within a space of just a few years. Similarly, with respect to the New Jersey Historical Commission, there was a popular dimension always in that, but I took a special interest in such things as launching the publication of the [William] Livingston Papers under the very able direction of my student Carl Prince; and launching the whole [Thomas A.] Edison papers project.17 That came out of the Historical Commission. Many other publication series that the Commission has engaged in, also such things as the guide to New Jersey manuscripts, guide to newspapers, all that sort of thing. So that I think if you look closely at these various activities that I was engaged in with respect to New Jersey History, while of necessity they had a popular dimension, I confess, my main interest always was trying to promote a scholarly approach to New Jersey History: to facilitate the work of scholars, to encourage scholars, to train some scholars so that here is where I personally found the greatest payoff. Never as much payoff as I hoped for, but nevertheless, I think it was enough to justify the efforts that I put into it. MB: What was your greatest frustration as president of the New Jersey Historical Society? RM: I didn’t feel terribly frustrated. I wish that I had been able to stimulate members of the board to be more aggressive in expanding our financial resources. I am not personally a good money raiser. It’s not congruent with my personality to go around asking people for money. I wish it were, but I am not good at that. We did have some success in fund-raising. We did increase the resources of the Society, but not as much as I had hoped. I wish that I had had Milford Vieser on my board when I was president. He came on the board much later. Mil Vieser was a sensational money raiser, and if we had been able to work together when I was president, it would have been very satisfying. But that’s the way it was. MB: He is now deceased? RM: Yes, just a few years ago. MB: What about the balance sheet on your years at the Historical Society? You left the Society stronger than when you took it over— RM: Yes. MB: But what made you leave the Society, and how did you feel at the time? RM: Well, I put in seven years. An enormous amount of time and energy and by that time every element of the Alexander program was in operation plus a couple of others. I was beginning by that time to

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turn, if you will, away from a preoccupation with New Jersey History, to a larger problem that eventually resulted in my book on the second American party system. I was moving over into that field so I felt that I had done what was expected of me at the New Jersey Historical Society and fulfilled my commitment there. I had become interested in this other, more national field so it was a good time to step out. We had just changed directors—Al Wall went to Sturbridge [Village] and Bob Lunny, whom I had known as a fellow graduate student at Penn, came in as director, so it was a good time to step out. MB: Since you mentioned Lunny, what was his background? He didn’t finish a Ph.D., so what did he do when he left Penn? RM: Well, actually, he left Penn to go into the Navy, had a commission, served in the Navy during and I think maybe for a couple years after the war. Then he married and became associated with the Delaware State Historical Commission or State Archives or something in essentially a museum capacity for a couple of years. That was his background. He had a museum background there in Delaware, he had historical training, and so he came in as director. MB: Let’s back up a bit. All the while you engaged in doing what we would call today public history, and you’re being a husband and father and so forth, and teacher, and promoter of New Jersey studies, including through your fifty or a hundred questions on New Jersey history—18 RM: [Loudly] Heh! MB: Questions I can’t really answer. I think I wouldn’t get a much better score than most of the kids in the state. But I want to ask you a little bit about the emergence or trajectory of your scholarship. Experiment in Independence appears in print in 1950. Would you say that you promoted that book personally in your attempt to promote New Jersey History? RM: Not at all. MB: No? Because you sent it to newspaper editors and said you would like them to review this book. That’s not what we would consider par for the course. RM: I have no recollection of that. MB: You sent it off to the major newspapers in the state and said, “I hope you’ll consider reviewing this book.”19 RM: No. I am surprised. I had no idea. Where did I get the copies to do that? MB: I don’t know whether you were buying them from the press or whether they gave you a bunch. You sent off about a dozen copies of

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the book to different opinion makers in the state of New Jersey and made a point of reminding them if they hadn’t done a review or thanking them if they had. RM: Humph. MB: I just wanted to get a sense that you are also getting into the media in several different ways—the discoveries you made, because of the quiz you devised or because of your conferences. Any comments about the whole architecture of that—how it fit into your whole pattern of life at Rutgers? RM: Hmm. I don’t know. I did have conversations with the people at the Newark News. MB: That’s another aspect. You were offering to write articles for the Newark News and Life magazine and for other publications. And you did encyclopedia work.20 RM: Yeah. MB: But that’s just all in a day’s work? RM: I guess so. I don’t see it emerging as a separate phase. MB: It strikes me that you are a person who has an enormous amount of energy and you’ve got an idea and you’re moving it. You’re moving it using different, you know, levers. RM: Yeah. I know I had some radio interviews. And I think the Newark News did a feature in the Sunday magazine on that “Hundred Questions,” and at one point there was talk of my doing a series, but I can’t write the way I would have to write for that kind of audience. So this never worked out, but it seemed like a way of getting some communication on a wider scale. MB: Did anyone at Rutgers openly or covertly express resentment that McCormick was in the news a lot, or question why wasn’t McCormick spending more time on campus? What kind of feedback were you getting from peers or administrators at Rutgers? RM: The first thing to be said was that my colleagues at Rutgers never exhibited any interest in what I was doing as a specialist in New Jersey History. I wasn’t conscious of their deliberately putting down interest in local history. But neither was it apparent that they saw it as a very desirable feature of the History Department—that is having a specialist in New Jersey History. I don’t think it impeded my academic progress particularly. I was a full professor a little before the age of forty, which in those days was better than par for the course. On the other hand, as I say, I didn’t have support from my colleagues. Whether it was resentment, I don’t know. It’s true, I was

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a more conspicuous figure, I suppose, with my name in the newspaper, pictures, I suppose. MB: You mentioned the name Cliff Lord a while ago. In the early 1950s, Lord had gone to the State Historical Society in Wisconsin and he wanted you there very badly. Would you describe that mating dance? RM: Well, go back a little bit. I became a member of the American Association of State and Local History. Then rather soon I became a member of the board of American Association of State and Local History—I don’t remember the dates. I remember the first meeting I went to. It was with my brother-in-law John [Munroe] and we went by train to Burlington, Vermont, around ’48, ’49, ’50–in there, I am not sure. And it was there that I met this galaxy of individuals. The story has never been adequately told, but you had, coming out of Columbia University, a number of Ph.D.s in the ’30s and into the ’40s who were in part influenced by Dixon Ryan Fox, who were also the victims of the academic depression of the ’30s and ’40s.21 And, consequently, these individuals went not into university history departments but into what is called public history. Who were they? Edward P. Alexander in his distinguished career. Clifford Lord and his distinguished career. Harold Dean Kater at Minnesota, Sylvester K. Stevens in Pennsylvania. Earle Newton in Vermont. MB: I don’t know of Newton. RM: Earle Newton started Vermont Life. Anyway, there was a group of half a dozen excellent young men all within a few years of each other who went into this field and who dominated that field for the next thirty years. I met them at that meeting. I became a member of the board of American Association of State and Local History. I served on it a couple of terms, I guess. I was on it long enough to be on the committee that arranged the sale of this tiny magazine American Heritage to [Oliver] Jensen, Thorndike, and [James] Parton, who transformed it into the American Heritage magazine that we know today. In any event, I found them a very able and stimulating group of people who, so to speak, furthered my education in state and local history. I remained close to them for many, many years and of course with Ed Alexander, particularly, right down to the present day. He is still alive and still very vigorous in Newark, Delaware. MB: Tell me about the Lord-McCormick connection. RM: Well, I met Cliff through the American Association of State and Local History. He was really, with the possible exception of Ed Alexander, at the top of this field, and at that particular time Ed was at Williamsburg and Cliff was still in the field. Very bright, tremendous energy, lots of imagination, lots of drive, very impressive fellow.

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We hit it off well together. He came and spoke at that Burlington County meeting. Good speaker. Then he decided to organize the American History Research Center at the Historical Society in Wisconsin. He decided he wanted me to head it, and he recruited very, very vigorously. Got me out there, entertained me. I had letters and telegrams from the governor and whatnot. He laid it on. All the bigwigs in Wisconsin. I didn’t want to go to Wisconsin. MB: Was that the bottom of it? Was that it? RM: I didn’t want to go any place! I had lots of opportunities to go all kinds of places, but I didn’t want to leave Rutgers for lots of different reasons. So the result was, he finally got Forrest McDonald. And Forrest was there long enough to write a couple of books and then went back into the academic field at Wayne State and Brown and then down South. He has had a very distinguished career.22 I could tell some interesting stories about Forrest, but it would take us too far afield. MB: [Laughs] But you maintained a friendship with Lord. You continued to serve on the advisory board there and occasionally even to go to Madison, right? RM: Yeah. Yeah. We had State and Local History meetings out there. A couple of other things took me out there. MB: So that is also a strand of McCormick enterprise during the 1950s. This interest in state and local history and you will maintain your relation with Lord over the years. RM: Yeah.

CHAPTER 3

Life at Rutgers: Doing Public History in the 1950s and 1960s

MB: Were you close to your colleagues at Rutgers? RM: I felt close to a great many members of the department. However, I did not hang around the office and spend a lot of time gossiping, chatting, whatever you might call it. Frankly, I was too busy for that, so I was less involved in on-the-scene socializing, I suppose, than many other members of the department. What happened essentially was, as we got into the 1960s, there was a considerable expansion in the size of the department, because we were now in the period of expanding the university to accommodate “baby-boomers.” Hence, we had a great many new people, who in many instances reflected what we might generally call the new influences of the 1960s in terms of politics, lifestyles, and academic interests; and as a consequence something of a generation gap manifested itself between the older members of the department—those who had, for the most part, joined the department between 1945 and 1960—and those who arrived later on. And obviously, the older members of the department were senior not only in years but in rank, and consequently wielded a great deal of influence in terms of tenure and promotion. That created some divisions, and, moreover, as I say, the generational differences as reflected in the 1960s also created differences. So, for a time, there was a great deal of tension in the department.

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MB: It’s clear that the fifties were a boom period in American higher education, certainly for state universities. Your student population is growing fast. RM: Whoa. Whoa. Oh, God, no. The fifties were not a boom time. You see, we lost the veterans and we encountered the low birth rates of the Depression; so the fifties, until the late fifties—Sputnik—turned things around. In the fifties, it was hard to get a job. MB: I accept that. I guess I was thinking of a higher percentage of people going to college and more accessibility to college. But your point is well taken. RM: The boom came in the sixties. MB: Let’s talk on the tape about something we have talked about off the tape—your loyalty to Rutgers. One red thread through your career is your commitment to this institution, your refusal to accept attractive offers from other institutions, positions of weight at good salaries. Would you comment on why you were so sure Rutgers was right for you in making a career as a historian? RM: Obviously, there was an element of sentiment involved. I was an alumnus. I had greatly enjoyed my undergraduate years here. I thought they were well spent. But beyond that, as a member of the faculty, I always thought I was well treated, fairly treated. When I had offers from other institutions, I always indicated that I wasn’t disposed to go. But usually these would result in some increases in my salary here, so that I had no complaints.1 In terms of family, my wife had developed very intense connections in the League of Women Voters, as a Democratic committeewoman, as Township Treasurer, as a member of the Board of Education. She also taught for fifteen years, at the College for Women, first chemistry, then mathematics. Then, the last ten years here, she had the very large and difficult job of director of space and scheduling. I had family, friends, and I had opportunities for teaching, for scholarly development. I also had all of these extracurricular activities that I found satisfaction in, that brought me in contact with a lot of people outside of the university—wonderful people like Paul Troast.2 Great figures like Kenneth Chorley, the president of Williamsburg, for whom I had great admiration.3 And many others, for example, Charles Bradley, the man I succeeded as president of the Historical Society.4 Fascinating individual. My life at Rutgers took me outside my community of academic intellectuals, introduced me to people like [Robert] Meyner, [Richard] Hughes, [Brendan] Byrne, and Tom Kean, with all of whom I had cordial relationships. So why pull up stakes? I suppose if my sole interest had been in scholarship, or if my sole interest had been in advancing myself economically, I would have

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gone. But there was more to it than that. I’ve never regretted the fact that I didn’t leave. I’m still here, as you see, thirteen years after my retirement. I’m still very much involved, not only with my writing here, but with activities at the university. MB: You made a life. RM: Yeah, Rutgers has been a very large part of my life, outside of my family. MB: To take a baseball analogy, you’ve been the Carl Yastremzski of the Rutgers community— RM: Or the Cal Ripken. [Laughs] MB: During the fifties and sixties you produced a series of books, articles, and reviews on aspects of New Jersey history, voting, and the emergence of a second party system. But at the same time you were also involved with public history in New Jersey. I understand that you spent time collecting documents about the early history of New Jersey, even going to Great Britain to do so. Whose idea was it to do this? RM: Mine. I’d applied for a Fulbright to enable me to do this, and I didn’t get the Fulbright. So I proposed to the Tercentenary Commission that I would take the summer of 1960 and do as much as I could in England over the course of the summer.5 They were delighted to provide the modest financing that was required. Fortunately, when I arrived in England—I’m not sure I knew it before I arrived—I learned that a man named Bernard Crick had completed this project which was supported by some agency, I forget which, in England, to identify materials related to America in all British archives. Meanwhile, I had spent weeks going through the various published guides to the British Public Records Office Manuscripts Commission—I had done a lot of homework. Crick was good enough to loan me the page proof—his book had not yet appeared—and that was wonderful. It enabled me to identify records I had not previously known about. That greatly facilitated my work.6 MB: Did you have to do a lot of preliminary writing to various archives to alert them that you were coming? RM: Not really. It was very important in England to be properly introduced. I had letters of introduction to key people at the British Museum, Public Records Office, and certain other repositories, and to Ms. W. O. Coates at the National Register of Archives for manuscript collections still in the hands of private families. I would check in with her. As a consequence of my relationship with Colonial Williamsburg, which had been cooperating with the state of Virginia in running the Virginia records project, I had a good briefing on who

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was who in these various depositories. So I went very well prepared and had the additional advantage of Crick’s book to aid me. MB: Were these Englishmen or Americans who were introducing you? RM: I had a letter from the president of Rutgers University, letters from friends at Colonial Williamsburg to Sir Francis Evans, who was then head of the Public Records Office. I was advised in advance that Sir Francis was particularly fond of Edgeworth Pipe Tobacco. So, I sent forward my letter of introduction when I got there, and he immediately sent down word and invited me up to his office. We had a formal chit-chat, then I said, “you know, you are famous throughout the scholarly world in the United States not only for your qualities as an archivist and a gracious host, but also for your fondness for Edgeworth pipe tobacco. And on behalf of myself and your many friends in America. . . .” I gave him two cans. Well, immediately he invited me to lunch. We went over to the Liberal Club, one of those vast old London clubs, and had lunch. And immediately after lunch he took me over to the man who ran the search room, introduced me and told him in effect, anything that Dr. McCormick wants, see that he is taken care of. I worked there for the better part of a month. MB: At the other places you worked, did you have positive experiences? RM: Very positive experiences. They were wonderful. What impressed me and in a way saddened me was to see the quality of the people in county archival positions. Cambridge and Oxford graduates with superb training, working for rather menial wages—but doing just a superb job. MB: Your goal was to identify this material— RM: That was not previously copied. You see, so much in the Public Records Office had already been copied. There was a Rockefeller project very early, through the Library of Congress, and other projects. I had been through those. I picked those things that had not been done, and I found enough to make it worthwhile. One of the nicest finds was down in the East Sussex Record Office in Lewes, where they had the voluminous papers of the Shifner family. The Shifners had estates that went back to the seventeenth century, the largest estates in New Jersey. And here were the papers documenting the lengthy history of this English landholding family. And I found some things in the Scottish Records Office, and here and there, as my report indicates. I made a trip to Ireland, where, unfortunately, there was very little to be found. I had hoped there might

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have been more materials on the Irish Quakers who came to South Jersey, but there wasn’t much. There was one exciting discovery. I was able to establish definitively who it was who led Cornwallis’s troops up the Palisades in Fort Lee for the invasion of New Jersey.7 What I found was an affidavit in his own handwriting by [Lord Charles] Cornwallis. He stated that John Aldington was the person who led the British troops up in the Palisades. Later I learned that this man had been in the British army, and later settled in Hackensack. Then, with the Revolution, he went back into service with the Pioneers—exploratory troops of the army. Being familiar with the area, he knew about this route. We had a press conference. I’d made friends with a man over there named Paul Cave. He did public relations, among other things, for the Isle of Jersey. That’s another story I should tell. Paul arranged a press conference. As I recall, the Aldington item made the first page of the second section of the New York Times. MB: Well, what happened to you in Jersey? RM: I went over as the official representative of the governor of New Jersey to present a gift—a plate—to the lieutenant governor of the Isle of Jersey. We were most graciously entertained by the lieutenant governor—General Erskine, the man who had quelled the Mau Maus in Kenya. He’d been on [General Dwight D.] Eisenhower’s staff, among other things. Marvelous guy. It was great. MB: Subsequently you made efforts to make it possible for Governor Meyner to visit there, but I don’t know that he ever followed through. RM: No, he didn’t. As for me—Cave’s interest was in promoting tourism to Jersey, so the more publicity he could get about my visit, the better. He was very nice. MB: Before we take leave of the fifties, I want to talk about the contagion that is known as McCarthyism. It had a touchdown at Rutgers University— RM: Indeed. MB: Moses Finley was a classicist and historian of ancient Greece at Rutgers/Newark in the fifties. You were frustrated by some of the things that happened to Moses Finley. I’d like you to describe that. RM: Moses had invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned about his past relationships with the Communist party.8 After a lapse of several months, another member of the Rutgers faculty, at the College of Pharmacy in Newark, Simon Heimlich, did likewise. At the time of his appearance before the committee, Finley had told the

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Rutgers administration about his impending appearance, and no action was taken. And there was no story in the newspaper. But then, several months later . . . there was a public outcry about this Rutgers Professor Heimlich invoking the Fifth Amendment about possible Communist associations. Governor [Alfred E.] Driscoll at the time made some remarks indicating his displeasure with this. The result was that the president of the university, President Lewis W. Jones, felt it necessary to appoint a committee—essentially a faculty committee—to advise him whether any charges should be brought against Heimlich. At that point an enterprising journalist dug up the fact that some months earlier Finley had similarly taken the Fifth; so Moses was thrown into the pot with Heimlich. Well, the faculty committee, headed by a very conservative man, Bennett Rich—a devout Presbyterian churchman, who later became president of Waynesburg College—decided there was no cause for further action. That was unacceptable to the trustees. Another committee was created, and on the basis of that committee, the trustees adopted a resolution which stated that invoking the Fifth Amendment when questioned in these circumstances would be grounds for “immediate dismissal.” No hearing, no anything. Well, I and others on our faculty thought this was an outrage. At that point I had never met Moses Finley. He was up in Newark, recently arrived. To this day I’ve never met Heimlich. An ad hoc committee of perhaps twenty members was formed, all but a couple of them from New Brunswick, to see what could be done to challenge or change this decision. I was probably the junior member of that committee. We sought to remonstrate with the Board over this issue, and it finally got to the point where we were to appear before the Board of Trustees to make a final statement of our case. I was one of three faculty members chosen to make this presentation. The others were Edward McNall Burns of the History Department and Horace Wood of the Biology Department at Rutgers/Newark. The three of us were deputed by the committee to make an oral statement to complement the written brief to the Board. We made this presentation, calling on the Board to reverse its decision. MB: Would you recreate the atmosphere in the room where you made the presentation? RM: The meeting was held in the basement of the president’s house across the river. It was a well attended meeting; there must have been at least twenty-plus people there, including Roy F. Nichols. MB: Nichols was on the Board at that time?

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RM: Yes. The atmosphere was neither warm nor hostile. We—that is, the three of us—felt very strongly about this matter. And I think we were all sort of depressed by what seemed to be the blankness with which our efforts were greeted. And then we learned that a committee of alumni members of the faculty and staff were to follow us and present a view supportive of the Trustees’ action. And at that time I was writing my history of New Jersey and had an office in Winants [Hall]. When I left the meeting, I went over to my office. The public relations office was in Winants. And as I went up the stairs, I noticed stacks of mimeographed materials. I looked at one. This was a lengthy statement of President Jones for distribution to the press, which had been prepared, of course well before we made our presentation to the Board, explaining why the Board had rejected our plea and acted as it did. So I went up to my office and cried. I never felt so humiliated, insulted, frustrated in my life. Before we had even made the case to the trustees, the answer was already delivered. MB: That couldn’t have made you feel good about President Jones. RM: I didn’t feel good about President Jones in general, of course. But I didn’t personalize things that way. But you know, I was young. I was innocent enough, I guess, to feel very badly about that, that the whole thing was just a charade. We had felt so strongly about this. In 1957 we were vindicated. The newly created Board of Governors of the university reconsidered that 1952 action and removed that resolution. MB: But you had lost Finley in the meantime. RM: To higher things. [Laughs] It was the best thing that ever happened to Moses, who went on to an enormously distinguished career—Regius Professor at Cambridge University, master of a college, a knighthood. Subsequently, when I got my Fulbright to Cambridge in 1961, Moses and his wife, Mary, were extremely kind, in arranging for me to have the privileges of a fellow and have rooms in Jesus College, which was Moses’s college. They arranged housing for us, schooling for our kids, and so on. We became very close friends. But it was a sad thing that happened here. We were among the first places—not the first, but among the first—to get hit with the Fifth Amendment thing, and the university just didn’t handle it very well. On the other hand, there was tremendous hysteria abroad, concern about reactions from the governor and state legislature. We had received the first half of an appropriation for what is now the Alexander Library. There was concern that if the trustees didn’t take the action that they did, the governor might pull back the money for the rest of the library. So there were these conflicting pressures.

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MB: When you went to Cambridge in 1961 and spent time with Moses Finley, what was his attitude about the episode? RM: We never talked about it. MB: Because it was past, or because it was too painful? RM: He had put it behind him. And then, more glorious, twenty-five years after the event, there had been established the Mason Gross lectureship, and Moses came back to give the three lectures called for under the terms of that lectureship. And of course there were references in the press to what had happened twenty-five years earlier. But Moses in his remarks never adverted in any way to it. He had just put that behind him and gone on to an enormously productive, satisfying career in England. MB: What we were talking about in the Finley case was a principle, not an action based on personal friendship. RM: Yes. MB: It must have been a discouraging time to be a faculty member. Academic freedom lay in the balance and your university wasn’t standing up for it. RM: That was a very significant feature of the times. However, there was also the fact that Rutgers hit bottom in the fifties. Declining enrollments, budgets cut, bond issues defeated. It was a very depressing time even without this [McCarthyite hysteria]. On the other hand, I had my extracurricular activities, which constituted a diversion, so I wouldn’t be worn down by this adversity. Perhaps I’ve also told you that a couple of years after I became president of the New Jersey Historical Society, I was investigated by the FBI. I probably told you about Judge [Guy L.] Fake and the FBI. MB: No, you have told me nothing about an FBI investigation. RM: Well, I had good relations with the trustees up there and I would go up almost every week and have lunch with one or another of them, and so on. One time I was asked specifically by Don Kitt if I might stop by his office before we went out to lunch, and I did. He told me with some obvious embarrassment, sort of blurted out, “I wanted to let you know that you’ve been cleared.” I hadn’t the foggiest notion what he was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked. He told me there was a person on the Board who had a very strong and irrational dislike for me. And he told a very old member of the Board, Judge Guy Laverne Fake, a former district court judge, that my active involvement in the Heimlich-Finley case suggested that I was probably one of those Reds, too. Fake had enough influence to bring this matter to the attention of the FBI, and the FBI, as I subse-

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quently found, went around and talked to people. My god, I was so mad. MB: What were your relations with Judge Fake and this gentleman who disliked you after that? RM: Judge Fake was senile. I had no concern about him. The other person verified, in an unfortunate way, the low impression I had of his character. MB: Was he a public figure? RM: No. I can tell you about him off the record only. . . . MB: We have already talked off the tape about your experience in Cambridge in 1961 and 1962, which sounds like it was truly delightful— RM: Delightful, but also very stimulating. Having to teach non-American students American History forced me to rethink everything that I had been saying for twenty years in my lectures to American students here at Rutgers. I found that very stimulating. MB: Were you obligated to give a public lecture? RM: No, but I lectured to a very large class in American History. I assigned no readings, I gave no quizzes, I gave no exams. All I did was appear twice a week for the length of the term—two twelve-week terms—and lecture on American History. I did conduct what Cambridge would call “supervisions.” I had six students at Jesus College who were doing American History, and I would meet with them weekly and assign them essays to write. We would get together and discuss the essays, and so on. That was very good. And then I gave a special course, sort of a truncated version of the course that I gave here on the History of American Politics. They couldn’t begin to understand American political parties, so utterly different from the English system. When I got down to the Progressive period and tried to explain to those very intelligent young men—no women at that time—our system of direct primaries: forget it. No way. How could you have political parties with direct primaries, they wondered. I would go over it and express my own misgivings about American parties and so on. But I have never been so utterly defeated in any teaching as I was trying to explain that to them. Anyhow, it was a great experience for me and for my kids. They were both in public schools, as they call them, over there. All in all, it was in some ways the best year of my life. It was great. MB: Was J. R. Pole at Cambridge at that time?9 RM: No. Jack, of course, was an old friend of mine by that time. I had met Jack in about 1947. He was a graduate student at Princeton. [Pause] No, this was later than that. Because I had substan-

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tially completed my book on the history of voting in New Jersey, when I encountered this Englishman in the old library. He told me what he was working on, and I explained what I was doing. We became good friends. When he came to America, which was frequently, we would get together, at AHA meetings and Mississippi Valley Historical Association meetings, as [Organization of American Historians’ meetings] were then called. We saw a good deal of him when we were in Cambridge. He subsequently left London and came up to Cambridge. He was at Churchill College in Cambridge. From there, he was fortunate to get the chair at Oxford, and went on to quite a distinguished career. MB: You’re saying that when you were in Cambridge, he was in London, and he would see you socially. RM: Yeah. He and his family would come up to Cambridge. . . . MB: Was it at Cambridge that you tried to exploit David Easton’s work for your scholarly purposes? RM: No, that came later, much later. At Cambridge I wrote all but one little section of The Second Party System. There was some work to be done on Rhode Island, and I couldn’t get the materials over there. But 95 percent of it was written in 1961–1962. MB: When the boom finally hits Rutgers in the early sixties, you’re able to build a department of national stature. What was your role in recruiting new talent? RM: We had generally in the History Department a collegial system. To begin with, department chairs were elected within the department, not appointed by the Dean of the College. The terms were only three years. Down to the mid-seventies, it was the tradition that a chair would serve for just three years. I had never wanted to be chair, but I took my turn, so to speak, ’66 to ’69, somewhere in there. The point I want to make is that we had a chair, not a head, of the department. Consequently, the decisions were pretty collegial. Down to the late sixties, the personnel decisions were in the first place strictly in the hands of the tenured people—I suppose with the full professors having a preponderant influence. In the sixties things changed somewhat. There was a necessity for some greater involvement of nontenured members of the department. And by the mid-sixties there were some pretty serious cleavages within the department, which formed along generational as well as ideological lines. But we took recruitment seriously, were trying to build the strength of the department, of course with an eye toward scholarship. I think we were pretty fortunate. We were particularly fortunate, because in 1966 we were put on the AAUP [American Association of University Professors] A-level with respect to salaries,

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and then in the late sixties and early seventies moved up to the top of the A-level. We were one of the best-paying state universities in the nation. Only one or two places—City University, maybe, and Berkeley—were ahead of us. So we were able to go out on the market and recruit some pretty good people. MB: To what do you attribute that advance in the salary structure? Was it a sympathetic governor, like Richard Hughes, or other things? RM: The sympathy of Hughes was very important. He was very good for Rutgers. Moreover, times were prosperous in New Jersey. The state was booming in the sixties. Under Hughes we got a sales tax. Under Brendan Byrne we got an income tax. So that the state was in good financial condition and we were able to sustain it. Also, we were one of the larger universities to have a union. I think St. John’s and Rutgers were very close in terms of early adaptation of AAUP to a faculty union. MB: You held a union card? RM: AAUP—that’s the union. The AAUP became the union. That was done with the cooperation, indeed the assistance, of the then president of Rutgers, Mason Gross. I think he figured that unionization was coming, and it was better to have the AAUP than the AFT [American Federation of Teachers] or the Teamsters, or whatever. So, in terms of money, we were in pretty good shape for recruiting. And we made some good appointments. MB: As an Americanist, I would think that Lloyd Gardner, Warren Susman, and Eugene Genovese were three of your more distinguished appointments. RM: Phil Greven. Young Rudy Bell, who was an Americanist at that time— MB: He then went on to write about anorexia nervosa in medieval Europe, didn’t he? RM: He’s now into Italian history. MB: Susman and Genovese are among the most intriguing and controversial characters of the past generation. I’d like you to talk a bit first about Susman, your assessment of him, and how he developed as a teacher and scholar and as a personality at Rutgers. RM: Susman came here as a replacement for John Higham. He had been a [Merle] Curti student, had taught at Reed, and at the time we hired him, he had not published his doctoral thesis, which he never did publish. He had two or three articles in obscure journals. But we had enthusiastic recommendations. And there were people in the department who had some acquaintance with him; so

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we hired Warren. As a member of the department he remained throughout his career a controversial person, with strong differences of opinion within the department as to his qualities. What soon became obvious was that he was an enormously successful teacher of both undergraduates and graduates. This was not a question of dubious popularity, that is, putting on a sideshow in class. His lectures, while often difficult to understand (I know, because I used to sit in on them; we gave courses together), engaged the students. And it was not only his performance in the classroom. He had lots of time available to talk with students, to follow through on interests that they expressed. At the graduate level, graduate students found him tremendously exciting. On the other hand, he presented a hell of a problem to the department in that he just did not publish. We faced this dilemma: Here was this extraordinarily bright, well-read person—his personal library was huge, ranging over tremendous areas of the culture of the United States, and he was very learned beyond American History. He had great success with students, real success. But no publishing. So as you can imagine, there were real divisions within the department as to his future, particularly with respect to promotion. When he was promoted to full professor it was without the usual elements in his vita. A few articles, that was it. But his influence extended far beyond the department. When you went to an American Historical Association meeting, an OAH [Organization of American Historians] meeting, you’d see Warren in the lobby surrounded by six people. Even more impressive, book after book after book came out in the seventies and eighties that would pay tribute to Warren in the acknowledgments. MB: I just finished reading a book by William Leach, called Land of Desire, which in its acknowledgments has extravagant things to say about Susman.10 RM: There were dozens of them. Dozens of books. He spent a tremendous amount of time reading manuscripts and writing extensive commentaries, critiques, suggestions—so that there were scores of people out there, in addition to Rutgers graduate students, who were indebted to him. And then, finally, of course, there appeared Culture as History, his collection.11 He never talked about articles. They were his “pieces.” The book met a very generous reception. I, of course, was very happy, and most of his colleagues, but not all, were very happy. And finally, that most dramatic death. I was giving a paper at the OAH in Minneapolis, in the room next to the one in which he was commenting. When I finished my paper, Larry Gerlach came into the room, waving his arms at me. When the session ended, we discovered that Warren had dropped dead.

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MB: Right in the session he was commenting on? RM: Right in the midst of his commentary. I had chatted with him in the lobby before breakfast. Literally, he got out of a death bed in the local hospital to go to that meeting. He knew he was risking his life to do it. But certainly, if Warren had to choose a way to go, this would be it. MB: In reading your correspondence, there are letters from Susman.12 He was not always happy at Rutgers. Did he finally come to terms with Rutgers? RM: He was a very, very complex figure. I am not going to try to psychoanalyze him. But a man of that brilliance, of those insights, who could not bring himself to publish, had to feel a kind of anguish, just on that score alone. He was always exceedingly kind, polite, and generous to me. I could never see why. We were so very, very different. And he was kind and close to my son when he came. MB: He was a distinctive character in the History profession. RM: Very much so. But you had to recognize that Warren was an exceptional case, particularly to the rule of one book for tenure, another one for promotion to professor. MB: I’d like to ask you about Eugene Genovese, who had a kind of mythic experience at Rutgers, for reasons that have little to do with his own work. Tell me how he came to Rutgers, and how he came to be a controversial figure at Rutgers. RM: Gene was hired about 1962, ’63. Warren was, I think, instrumental in identifying Gene, and he was hired as an assistant professor. He was on a couple of committees with me and he was very judicious and, I thought, responsible. I soon came to regard Gene as a very serious scholar. I remember one day walking into his office on the top floor of Bishop House and saying, “Gene, you know, sometime you’ve got to be promoted to associate professor. You’ve got those wonderful articles you’ve published. Why don’t you put them together with a couple more and you’ll have a book?” Well, he thought about it and [indicated] he’d do it, which he proceeded to do [in The Political Economy of Slavery], and in due course he was promoted to associate professor.13 He became a highly controversial figure as a result of that April 1965 teach-in we had here, in which he admitted he was a Marxist and that he did not fear a Vietcong victory; indeed, he would welcome it. Well, that hit the headlines. We were just getting a gubernatorial campaign under way. The Republican candidate [Wayne Dumont] demanded the ouster of Genovese and [incumbent Governor Richard] Hughes, while disassociating himself from Gene’s views of the Vietnam War, upheld academic

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freedom.14 I drafted a statement which was joined in by [Richard] Schlatter and [Peter] Charanis, which was approved by the Board of Governors, on the issue of Academic Freedom in the Genovese case. It was given some publicity.15 That sort of moved Gene into a whole different context. Down to that point, he’d been a very quiet and not highly conspicuous member of the department—very serious in his approach to both teaching and to scholarship. Now, he becomes a public figure. The war escalates, and Gene continues to speak out. So he’s an increasing source of controversy. Well then, one night, Gene had dinner with a fellow member of the department, about his age and experience, and discovered that fellow was making a lot more money than he was. We had recruited him from another institution; we have these disparities, you know. Well, that had a deep effect on Gene. He felt he was not being sufficiently appreciated and perhaps he was even being held back because he was such a controversial figure. Then there were also other difficulties. The upshot was that he resigned and went to Sir George Williams University in Quebec. He was there just a few years [1966–1968]. Then the year that my daughter entered the University of Rochester [1968], he moved to Rochester. I remember taking her up there to her room; the first issue of the college newspaper had big headlines, “Genovese Subject of Controversy.” I felt right at home! [Laughs] But I have enormous respect for Gene as a scholar. . . . He’s very interesting. He and Warren Susman were very, very close; then something happened, and they split. But in those Marxist regions you had all of these ideological divisions and I could never quite figure out Gene’s various movements. [Laughs] I never thought of Warren as a Marxist, and I don’t think he would ever describe himself as such. But he was one of the founders of the Socialist Scholars Conference that held its first meeting at Rutgers and then of Studies on the Left, which I think was initially edited by Jack Marchand, who had been a graduate student here. So he was into that orbit; I think Warren and Gene helped set up that socialist scholars’ conference. MB: Of course the division with Susman could have had something to do with Genovese’s emphasis on power relations and his belief that people like Herbert Gutman were ignoring critical issues in history. RM: Warren was a close friend of Gutman’s, of course. . . . They [Marxist historians] were always having feuds. . . . Gene came to us from Brooklyn Polytechnic. He had long since been kicked out of the party anyway, for “left wing deviationism,” as he told me. MB: In 1965 you emerged as a strong, forceful, and eloquent defender of Genovese’s right to speak out and enjoy academic freedom

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and on behalf of the principle of academic freedom generally. You organized people on this, you wrote letters to the editor, you responded to angry colleagues and alumni. Obviously Genovese must have appreciated that. But by 1966, he was unhappy with you because he saw you as reflecting a bourgeois perception of how people ought to behave. He thought you were patronizing him. Do you remember that? RM: Yeah. This grew out of a speech he gave to a packed audience in the gymnasium at Rutgers. I cannot recall all of the details. I thought the manner, tone, of his delivery of his message was out of line. And I wrote him to that effect. I don’t know whether a copy of that letter is in my files or not. MB: I haven’t found it. But I have seen Genovese’s response to it, and it is quite icy.16 RM: I do know this. When his big book—Roll, Jordan Roll—came out, he sent me a copy with a very warm and affectionate inscription. So whatever differences we had at some point, he thought kindly of me. MB: He didn’t leave Rutgers bitter at you— RM: The psychology of these things I don’t know. MB: I’d like to talk about a different kind of politics. You have had the opportunity to work with and correspond with a variety of governors of New Jersey going back a good long ways— RM: To Alfred Driscoll. MB: Driscoll would occasionally write you and ask for information or your opinion on things. You wrote him several flattering letters back giving him answers he sought, but also telling him that in the scheme of things, you thought he was a strong governor.17 RM: Right. He got the 1947 Constitution through. And even more remarkable in some ways, he got the Armstrong bills through, which thoroughly reorganized New Jersey state government. He was a very effective governor. Later on, much later on, I got to know him better, because he was one of the early members of the New Jersey Historical Commission. This was long after he had retired as head of Warner-Lambert. He was remarkably good about coming to meetings. I also knew his mother when I was on the Morven Committee. This was a committee back in 1953/54, charged with deciding what to do with Morven, which had been given to the state by [former governor] Walter Edge. . . . Anyhow, I hit it off extremely well with [Governor Robert] Meyner. Why, I don’t know. I’m trying to think when I first met him. One occasion I remember, I did a fairly early television show on WNET, which was then in the Mosque Theater in Newark.

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Meyner’s show followed mine. This was before he was married. We chatted. Then I was on the Morven Committee and the first people who were entertained by the governor and his wife, Helen Stevenson Meyner, were the members of the Morven Committee. They tried it out on us. So I got to know him in that connection. Then I wrote a speech he gave at the dedication of the Alexander Library at Rutgers. I wrote another one that he gave about the Germans at Gutenberg. Then, in 1957, I got the idea that New Jersey ought to celebrate its Tercentenary. So I wrote to Meyner, saying that I thought we ought to get started on this, and so on.18 He had me come down to Trenton. At that time Brendan Byrne was his chief of staff, so I got to know young Brendan. We talked, and it was agreed I would get together with my two good friends, John Cunningham and Roger McDonough, who was the state librarian. We met one Saturday morning in the Rutgers faculty club and talked. I drafted this proposal, sent it to Meyner, who said it was fine. He turned it over to a fellow named David Goldberg, a staffer charged with relations with the legislature. A bill was drafted [laughs], and I went down to the legislature on the day that it was to be acted upon in the Assembly.19 I’d never seen a bill passed before, and I thought this would be fun. And I knew that in the bill was a provision for $25,000 to get the thing started. One of the assemblyman, whom I happened to know, name of William Kurtz, from Middlesex County, got up in the usual way. You’d stand up and say, “I support this bill; it’s a good bill.” That would be the length of the speech. Then people vote and it’s over. Well, somebody rose and asked a question: “Is there any money in that bill?” And Bill Kurtz promptly responded, “Not a penny.” Whereupon they proceeded to vote unanimously. I’m looking to Goldberg, holding my head. He says, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s in there.” Sure enough, the $25,000 is in there. Well then, it goes to the Senate. I’ll never forget it. It gets held up in the Senate. There’s a senator from Essex, a prickly sort of prima donna by the named of Donald Fox. So I went in to see Meyner. I said, “Gee, we’re having trouble, you know; Fox is holding this bill up.” And he says, “Dick, give him a little loving; that’s all it will take. Give him a little loving.” So, I went right out of his office; the Senate was meeting that day. I found Fox in the hall. I knew that the Senate chamber was empty, because I had been around there. So I said, “Senator, I wonder if you’ll come into the chamber with me for a moment. You know, I’m interested in this Tercenentary bill, and it is going to be a wonderful thing.” I said, “Senator, I’m sure you’ve often looked up at this”—there’s a big ceiling with the names Clark, Boyden, Stockton, and other New Jersey worthies. I said, “Senator, I know those names

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are all familiar to you. I’m sure they’re graven on your memory. But I won’t be content until, as a result of what this Tercentenary celebration will do for the state, those names are known to every school child in the state of New Jersey. Senator, you can make it possible, by giving your support for this bill.” “Why of course I’ll support this bill,” he said. So it went through, and we had our Tercentenary Act. MB: Dick McCormick, lobbyist. RM: [Laughs] Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, I poured it on Fox. MB: There were still some rocky times ahead for the Tercentenary Commission. Meyner didn’t appoint the most enlightened committee, did he? RM: [Pause] No, I wouldn’t say that. As it turned out, his most important appointment was Paul Troast, the man he had defeated for governor. Paul Troast became one of my dearest friends and heroes. I was chair for a while, then Bob Crane, senator from Essex, took over. He died of cancer. Then finally Paul came in as chair. By this time I had left the Commission to go to England in 1960 to search for New Jersey records. I felt I should resign as chair, because I was being paid some enormous sum—I think $1000—to look for those records. Nevertheless, Paul insisted that I remain with the Commission, and I attended all the meetings and spoke. I think I did everything but vote. Now, some tensions developed down the line, between Troast and Dave Davies. Dave was an original. I’m very glad that I hired him. At that time I had also been chairman of the Historic Sites Advisory Committee, and in that connection I had business at Sal Bontempo’s shop. What was it called? Conservation and Economic Development, something like that. At any rate, I met this young man, [David] Davies. Well, when we got this $25,000 [laughs], which was worth a lot more then than it is now, I talked to Dave, presented him to the Commission, and he was hired. One of the first things I did was to bring him to Williamsburg, to have him talk with the people down there. Because the Virginia people had just finished the 350th anniversary of Jamestown. Dave was a free spirit with a minimal staff—a tiny, tiny staff. He did an awful lot. But there were occasions when he grated on Paul, who was a pretty conservative guy. However, he was never fired, thank God, and we put on a good show. Now, to me, the two greatest products of the Tercentenary were first, the state cultural center—that’s a monument to the Tercentenary. And the other was, we got a lot of books published and got a lot of local historical groups organized and underway. I was pleased with those payoffs. MB: Whose idea was it to do a series of books?

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RM: Ours. MB: You had a team of people directing this operation, including a man named Huber— RM: Dick Huber. Actually Dick did the work pretty much. MB: Who was Dick Huber? RM: Well that’s a good question. He had a Ph.D. in American Studies. He had taught briefly at Princeton. He was an extraordinarily handsome and charming person. I always suspected maybe he had married a lot of money. He was a Princeton graduate. He had no visible means of support. [Laughs] So he was available to do this. And Wheaton Lane. Again, a Princeton graduate; he took his doctorate at Princeton. Wrote a good book, From Indian Trail to Iron Horse.20 Lived at the Nassau Club, a bachelor. Did a little teaching at Princeton, but he was independently wealthy. MB: He was not a regular faculty member at Princeton? RM: No. So he was available. What assistance he provided Dick I don’t know. Then they made an arrangement with Van Nostrand, which took a licking publishing the books. MB: The series was not financially successful? RM: No. Some books sold. Many didn’t sell. Van Nostrand either didn’t have the resources to promote them, or didn’t apply the resources. They went out of business not too long after. [Laughs] I don’t think it was our series that broke them. The series was taken over by Rutgers Press, and then finally by the New Jersey Historical Society. At least my book [was].21 Rutgers Press published an edition, then another printing came out from the Historical Society. MB: That’s true, but your book was part of the original Van Nostrand Series. In fact it was the flagship book in the series. Was it not? RM: Well, I’ll tell you how that happened. I had been asked many times by Bill Sloane, director of the Rutgers University Press, to do a one-volume history of New Jersey. As soon as I finished the voting book, I set to work on that one-volume history of New Jersey. I quickly wrote the chapters through the American Revolution. At that point, I got very down on Bill Sloane. And I said, “The hell with it. I’m not going to push this thing through. I don’t want to give this book to the Rutgers Press.” So I laid it aside. This was in the mid-fifties. Well, when the Tercentenary project came up, I had the happy thought that there has to be a book on the Colonial and Revolutionary period. So I added a chapter on the period down to the Constitution, and that’s why I was able to turn it in so fast. Because it was largely finished. It looked strange to see three books coming out be-

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tween 1964 and 1966—the history of Rutgers and the party system book were both ’66. The Rutgers one, however, was written earlier. MB: The party system book got held hostage to the American Association of State and Local History. RM: Right—and the [University of North] Carolina Press.22 MB: How do you, looking back on it, assess the books from the Tercentary Series? They were important additions to the literature of New Jersey, weren’t they? RM: Several of them were. And it was wonderful to get them out. I think over the years people continue to refer to some of them. Others of them will go to a well deserved oblivion. MB: They had a virtue one rarely sees among history books any more; they were almost all quite brief. RM: Yeah, that was part of the deal. Except for Rudy Vecoli’s; that’s a very good book; in fact, that was the only book he ever wrote.23 That’s a real contribution. MB: One of the aspects of the Tercentenary was the Tercentenary bus. Do you remember that? RM: The Historymobile, you mean. Well, Clifford Lord had been the director of the Wisconsin Historical Society. While there he had conceived the idea and got the funding for this Historymobile. Well, he left the Wisconsin Historical Society to become successively dean of General Studies at Columbia University and then president at Hofstra. While president of Hofstra, he was appointed to the Tercentenary Commission. He was an advocate of the Historymobile. Ed Alexander had mentioned it in the Alexander survey, and so on. Roger [McDonough]24 and John [Cunningham] and I were concerned that we didn’t want this Tercentenary celebration just to be a skyrocket, soon gone and forgotten. We wanted to see some permanent consequences. And one of the consequences was the Cultural Center in Trenton. There were the books. There were Tercentenary committees in virtually every town in the state. They stimulated, or led to the formation of township historical societies and preservation of this house and that historic site. It gave a tremendous impetus to local involvement in historical and preservation matters. The Tercentenary also led to the creation of the New Jersey Historical Commission. So we felt that it was a good experience that led to things of enduring consequence in this state. MB: Before I turn to the Historical Commission, I might say that a good example of what you wanted to happen, happened in my home town. There was tremendous enthusiasm in Bergenfield for the Tercentenary. A Bergenfield man, Adrian Leiby, wrote one of the vol-

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umes in the series. I remember, as a boy of fourteen, visiting the Historymobile. I believe that Adrian Leiby’s history of early Bergenfield was timed to come out with the Tercentenary celebration in Bergenfield. It was a charming book.25 RM: Sure, sure. The Tercentenary was a rediscovery of New Jersey. New Jersey has always confronted this problem of being between these two giants, New York and Pennsylvania; Philadelphia and New York City. The Tercentenary put the spotlight on New Jersey. It got New Jersey citizens in an unprecedented degree and unprecedented numbers involved with their state. You can’t precisely measure what this means, but it seems to me that it represented a turning of the corner for the state, with the development of a greater sense of pride, interest, involvement—-which was further nurtured by such things as the Giants Stadium, Byrne Arena, and whatnot. So that New Jerseyans feel more comfortable with their identity now than, say, fifty years ago. MB: Can you describe the origins of the Historical Commission? RM: There was a Civil War Commission first. New Jersey had a commission, as did other states, to celebrate the Civil War. It had an executive secretary—a man named Everett Landers. As the time the Civil War Commission came to an end, it was Landers, as far as I can ascertain, who first broached the idea of a permanent commission. Rather than having a commission for the Civil War, then another commission for the Tercentenary, then another one for this, that, and the other thing, why not have a permanent historical commission? Conversations were held, involving a number of people, including myself, and out of it came the legislation—about ’66, ’67—creating the Historical Commission. So that’s how that happened. . . .26 MB: Did you ever worry that the Historical Commission would infringe on the responsibilities of the New Jersey Historical Society? RM: No, because all the way through I never saw any conflicts. You know, from 1947 on, I was always talking about the need for the state to spend more money on History, and here was another opportunity. Obviously I regarded the Tercentenary Commission as another example of an opportunity to get something done for History with state funds, which we did. The roles and functions [of the New Jersey Historical Commission and the New Jersey Historical Society] were very different. MB: Did the New Jersey Historical Society express objections to the creation of the Commission? RM: No.

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MB: Bob Lunny was there at that time, and he didn’t see anything wrong with that? RM: Remember, John Cunningham and I were still very much both engaged with the New Jersey Historical Society. So was Don Sinclair, who was on the Commission and on the Board. MB: So, you were looking after the interests of the NJHS also; you weren’t trying to undermine it or reduce its role? RM: No. . . . As a matter of fact, one of the consequences of the Tercentenary was the creation of the Murray Fund. Senator James Murray of Hudson County was on the Tercentenary Commission in his final years and died quite young. I don’t know who thought this one up, but an act was passed to appropriate an annual grant to the New Jersey Historical Society, which would be designated Murray grants, to augment the Society’s work in the field of History for the schools. Out of it came the appointment of Joan Hull as head of the educational effort and organization of the Jerseymen, which was the children’s division. MB: Was Governor Hughes interested in History? RM: Not particularly. On the other hand, he was interested in everything. Unlike Meyner, Hughes’s natural tendency was to be supportive person. If you went to him with an idea, he would try to think of reasons to do it. Meyner was a completely different personality type, who was always thinking of how he could avoid adding to the functions of government and keep the budget in line, that sort of thing. Now, Hughes and I hit it off, and for one reason or another, he had great confidence in me. We remained good friends down over the years. He was very kind and supportive. Hughes named Troast as chair [of the Tercentenary Commission], and they became the closest of friends. MB: What was Troast’s background? Was he a businessman? RM: Troast was a businessman. High school education. No college. Established a construction company in Clifton. It was a great success. One of the peculiarities of his construction business was that he wouldn’t take any government business. He built industrial structures and so on. Made a lot of money. He was not an educated man, not what you would ordinarily call a cultured man. Nevertheless, he became a trustee of Bucknell University. And more remarkable still, he became chairman of the Kress Foundation. This was the Kress Five and Tens. The Kresses had accumulated about $400 million worth of art. One of Paul’s big jobs, if you will, as chairman of the Kress Foundation, was giving away that art. He wouldn’t know a Picasso from a Michelangelo [laughs], but he was a fellow with just good

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common sense, integrity, judgment, willingness to listen, and so on. So he ran for governor. And I left out the big thing—he built the New Jersey Turnpike. This was back in Driscoll’s administration. MB: He built it on contract? RM: No, no, no. For not a penny. There was a turnpike authority, and he was named chair. He had to find a way of financing the building of this turnpike. Well, obviously, it would have to be financed with bonds. There weren’t many turnpikes in the country at this time. How good a bet would these bonds be? I remember Paul telling me that the decisive breakthrough occurred when he met the top people at Prudential and persuaded them that these turnpike bonds that they were thinking about would be safe and solid. And they decided that they would invest in it. So with that, he was off and running. And, as chair of the authority, he oversaw the whole financing and construction of the New Jersey Turnpike. After he became chair of the Tercentenary Commission, we met regularly in the turnpike office out here at exit nine. He was a great guy. MB: Didn’t Troast run for governor in ’53? RM: He ran for governor against Meyner in ’53.27 He was doing fine. Driscoll had been a successful governor, Troast had a great reputation. But what killed him was the Joey Fay letter, late in the campaign. Joey Fay was a racketeering union leader who was indicted. And Paul wrote a character reference letter for him, the kind of thing you don’t think a great deal about. Anyway, the Democrats got a copy of this letter, and a week or two before the election made it public. It seemed to tie Troast in with crooked labor leaders. So he lost. Here’s this inconspicuous former state senator from Warren County who beats Paul Troast. MB: So it was Hughes, not Meyner, who appointed Troast to the Tercentenary Committee? RM: No, he was appointed by Meyner. Hughes made him chair. MB: Back to the creation of the Historical Commission. That had to be passed through legislation. Can you walk us through how the Historical Commission came to be, and whether it was a difficult task? RM: It wasn’t difficult. The first year there was no money in it—not a nickel. MB: How was that possible? RM: Well, I went to Sal Bontempo, head of the department of what then was called Conservation and Economic Development. [It has since gone through several transitions of name and responsibility.] I

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went to Sal seeking funding, and he told me, “Dick, other states do things with money. We have to find ways of doing it without money.” MB: Sounds peculiar; how did you proceed if you weren’t going to have funding? RM: We met for a year without any money and talked about what we’d do if we got any money. It was a fine group of people, including Julian P. Boyd of Princeton University, Earl Schenck Miers, prominent author and former chair of the Civil War Centennial Commission, John T. Cunningham, and, ex officio, Roger McDonough, the state librarian. Finally, after a year we got enough money to hire Bernie Bush and perhaps a secretary. And then the money started to rise year by year, getting up ultimately to close to a million dollars, where it has been stalled for many years. MB: But the Commission was able to do some of the things you had in mind—for example, to promote long-term projects and ongoing scholarly projects and indeed popular history—things that could come up from the grass roots. RM: We got the Livingston Papers launched. We got the Edison Papers launched. We got the various pamphlet series; we got The Governors of New Jersey, the [Mary] Murrin bibliography, and the guide to newspapers, stuff like that. MB: Ethnic series— RM: Well, that came later. I’m trying to think of the sequence. A dozen or so years ago, in effect, money was put into grant programs—$300,000. I often regretted the fact that so large a share of the budget of the Commission went into these grants, many of which I think were very questionable. I had hoped that there might have been a strengthening of the staff of the Commission itself, rather than pissing away $300,000 a year on grants to every little proposal from all over the state. But that was the politics of the thing. MB: The more you spread money around out there, the more support you have for the Commission. RM: That was the theory; it didn’t work, of course. It didn’t develop a larger constituency for the Commission. MB: How does the Commission stand up, in your view, in terms of its bang for the buck and its quality compared to historical commissions in other states? RM: It had a late start. You know, try to compare it with Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland, to say nothing of places like Wisconsin; it gets started very, very late. It’s hard to get agreement on the division of resources between, say, scholarly studies and scholarly aids—that kind of thing—and products delivered directly to the

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not very large or enthusiastic audience for New Jersey History. I tried for years—I still try occasionally—to get a biographical directory of New Jersey legislators. South Carolina and Maryland do splendid things here. MB: Indiana did one; Pennsylvania is doing one. RM: Or, another one was, the messages of the governors of New Jersey. If you read them seriatim, they capture changing conditions in the state, changing problems. Tennessee many years ago brought forth a wonderful series of volumes. Good editor. The Messages of the Governors of Tennessee. I had hoped, in other words, there would be within the Commission, enough scholarship for a sustained research program. . . . MB: How has the emergence of a New Jersey Historical Commission as a power in the preservation and dissemination of state history impacted on the New Jersey Historical Society? RM: I don’t think it has impacted. The New Jersey Historical Society has increasingly moved, over the past twenty years, into an emphasis on its museum. That doesn’t conflict with the Commission. It has a long established library, most of whose resources were obtained a long time ago. That doesn’t conflict. It publishes, more or less regularly, New Jersey History. That doesn’t conflict. So, I think they’re pretty separate in their missions. Now, the Society for the past ten years has faced very serious financial problems. So also has the New-York Historical Society. So has the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. There’s a problem with these old-line historical societies. We ought to try to develop an understanding of why there is that problem, and how it can best be approached. Now the current leadership of the New Jersey Historical Society thinks the way to resolve it is to move down into the center of Newark, into what was formerly the Essex Club, and to devote an ever larger share of resources—if they can obtain them—to outreach programs and museums programs with, as usual, an emphasis on bringing History to the children. It is striking how the corporate and social types who largely compose the Society’s board always focus on children as the main audience for History and museum exhibits as the most effective medium for reaching that audience. I have problems with this mind-set and with the assumptions on which it is based. With such goals, the Board had little or no reason to be concerned with building the Society’s library or manuscript collections, publishing a scholarly magazine, or including scholars among its members. As a “retailer” to children, it scarcely has the resources to compete with “Sesame Street” or “Nickelodeon.” Yet, that’s the course on which they are embarked.

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MB: What would they do with their current building at 230 Broadway? Could it be sold? RM: It would have to be a highly specialized use. A large part of that building is a very functional library stack. And they have these quite large rooms that were designed for museum exhibits. I don’t know who could use it. MB: Where does the Historical Society get the money to do a project like this? RM: Oh, they had to raise about seven million dollars, something like that. I resigned from the Board in 1985 because I could no longer tolerate the financial irresponsibility of the leadership of the Board.28 And that’s a long story that we don’t want to get into, because we could take hours on it. Since then I have had minimal contact with the Society, so I’m not in a position to say what their precise plans are, or what their prospects are. I was on that Board for thirty-five years. When I retired, I had spent half my life on it. MB: That leads me to the question, the future of the New Jersey Historical Society. Will there always be a New Jersey Historical Society? RM: I don’t know. MB: Should there be? RM: There are resources there. If they’re frugally managed, they ought to be able to survive. I admit that there is the question of historical societies generally. . . . MB: If you look at the totality of it, the audience for and membership of historical societies has changed over the years. In your day a lot of people in the professions had felt a civic obligation to be part of a society, had a lot of pride in their state and interest in History. You recruited a lot of those people into the Society while you were president of the New Jersey Historical Society. I have the feeling that over time, as the discipline of History became more professional and specialized, a lot of these people lost their identification with and interest in the societies. RM: Walter Muir Whitehill did a book twenty years ago on the Independent Historical Society.29 Maybe we need some kind of a study now of what is going to happen, what should happen, to the whole Eastern-style private historical society. MB: I agree. When you look back at your participation as a public historian, can you tell me what gratified you most in your work? Was it any one thing, or simply that you brought History to more people? RM: As I think I suggested in one of our previous talks, bringing History to the maximum number of people was not my first concern.

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My first concern was always with the scholarly side—the development of archival and library resources, the publications and scholarship, so on and so on. Then, secondarily, trying to serve such constituency as existed for History. I saw the Society as a resource, rather than as a “retailer” of history. So that my satisfactions have come, largely, in terms of what was able to be accomplished in furthering scholarly objectives. With respect to the New Jersey Historical Society, this entailed the transformation of the Proceedings into New Jersey History, a better designed magazine, better scholarly articles, establishment of a publication fund at the Society. I could say the same general thing with respect to the Tercentenary Commission, the Historical Commission, even the ARBC, the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. There, the thing I feel proudest of is the involvement I had in transforming the National Historical Publications Commission into the National Historical Records and Publications Commission. MB: Would you elaborate? RM: I was a member of the Heritage Committee of the ARBC, chaired by Jimmy Biddle, who at that time was head of the National Trust.30 The committee was not very active; it didn’t have much of a program. I proposed that we try to do something in terms of the preservation of records—historical records—throughout the nation. This led to the creation of a subcommittee, an advisory committee—I’m not sure how it was titled—which had some of the best state archival people, the most effective of whom was Charles Lee of South Carolina. We worked together and tried to formulate a more detailed plan. We got a prospectus of the plan, and at the Boston meeting of the ARBC, about 1971, perhaps, we had the president of the American Historical Association there, the president of the OAH, the president of the Society of American Archivists, and so on. They all spoke in favor of the plan. The ARBC endorsed it. Then we had to fine-tune it. We then began to talk seriously with the number two person at the National Archives, Frank Burke. We felt the desirability of integrating this operation with the National Archives, with its enormous experience with records. Then we got to talk with the very fine young fellow who was at that time the head of the Archives, whose name escapes me. And the consequence was, finally, an Act of Congress. We had to negotiate with the National Archives, because they didn’t want to take on an additional responsibility at the expense of their long established publications program. We worked that out, and the bill was passed transforming the National Historical Publications Program into the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

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Our hope was that we could use this mechanism to stimulate the formulation of plans in all of the states for the better collection and preservation of their public records, and also their private records, so that there would be money available to assist this sort of planning. Then, down the road, [would be] the prospect of federal money, presumably supplemented by state grants, to carry through the preservation of records. Well, it hasn’t gotten very far financially. If I recall, there’s something like four million dollars a year for the publications program, a million or so for the records program; it just hasn’t taken off. One result of my work on this was that I was appointed to the state’s advisory committee on records, and served on it for many years. Rutgers has gotten . . . some good grants from them. It’s still a niggardly amount. . . . Not much came of the ARBC itself, because—I think it was in about 1972—President [Richard M.] Nixon abolished it. And that was the end of us.31

CHAPTER 4

Championing a New Political History

MB: Your work dovetails into the kind of issues Roy Nichols explored, as does the scholarship of other Nichols students—Philip S. Klein and John Munroe, for example. To what extent does a mentor inevitably influence a student? RM: Roy Nichols was not a directive person. He was much less directive, I suppose, than I am, in terms of relationships with students. I spent a lot more time with my graduate students and was a lot more directive of them than he was. I don’t say this at all as a criticism. He was a tremendous inspiration and source of support. However, strange as it will seem to you now, when I had completed my course work and exams and then stepped into a job at the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, I was thinking about a possible subject for a doctoral thesis. You won’t believe what it was. I was going to do a study on the relationship between American military policy and foreign policy in the twentieth century. That’s not a Nichols subject. But that’s where I was headed. Well, that job at the quartermaster depot was so exhausting that I never really got into the thing. When I got my job here at Rutgers in 1945, I went up and had dinner with Nichols at the faculty club at Columbia that summer. He always taught summer school at Columbia. We talked about a thesis. He had put many of his students at Penn on Pennsylvania subjects. . . .

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I was cognizant of the fact that Rutgers had just become the state university. Nichols was cognizant of that. And out of it came the decision that I would work on New Jersey in the critical period. Certainly that was Nichols’s influence. I had completely dropped this high-flown subject that I had in mind. What I’m saying is that Nichols’s seminar was not a rewarding experience. In terms of my dissertation, I don’t know whether he ever read it. There was never any indication, “go back and redo this chapter.” I remember having lunch with him at the Lido restaurant just off-campus at Penn. I had been calling this study “New Jersey in the Critical Period.” Somehow, out of this lunch conversation came a new title: “Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period.” The influence was that he was a model for whom I had enormous affection. . . . In one sentence he could communicate volumes. For example, the first time I had a nibble from another institution, of course I consulted with Nichols. He gave me some good advice: “Never decline an offer until you have received it.” Such lines would fasten themselves in my mind. He had heretical advice about teaching, which I would hesitate to quote for you, as to how much scholarly resources should be invested and then hopefully communicated to green undergraduates. MB: I gather that Nichols was a showman. RM: He was a good lecturer, he kept his lectures interesting, but he was not disposed to cast pearls before swine. So many of my colleagues, I fear, feel that they have to dazzle or awe their students with the profundity of their knowledge. Whereas these eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds—how much can they absorb, how much can they be expected to understand? I’m saying this in far more words than Nichols did. . . . MB: Nichols was obviously a very busy man. He was not a hands-on advisor for your dissertation. There must have been something that Nichols left you with that would affect you as a historian, and I am thinking here either in terms of a model as a scholar or some particular worldview that he saw—that he propounded—about the way politics worked. He wrote books focused on two kinds of themes: one, political machines; the second, cultural federalism. And the kind of very complex interaction of state, regional, and national currents. Tell me a little bit about how all this hits Dick McCormick. RM: In a couple of ways. I guess the first point to be made is my conversations with Professor Nichols about Historical matters or indeed about matters related to the Historical profession in general, were very occasional and the substance brief, but extremely telling.

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Nichols in the force of one or two sentences would say something that would have an enormous and lasting impact on me. It wasn’t a question of his sitting down and taking an hour to develop some theme with me. A few succinct sentences and, pfft, they scored. For example, one of the key ideas I suppose that runs through much of my work is the autonomy of political parties. There has been too much of a tendency to see political parties as vessels through which demands are aggregated; through which public opinion is funneled—they are seen as channels. Well, to a degree they are that, but they are also autonomous institutions in that they have their own interests to serve and they have to be seen in terms of that autonomy. Politicians do things for political reasons, for party political reasons—they are after all political machines. They are in the business of getting elected. I can dimly recall a conversation while I was still a graduate student. Not in Nichols’s office; it happened to take place in a large office in the History building at Penn. We may have been talking about the work that I was doing on Madison, I am not sure. But in any event, in just one or two sentences, he said this; certainly it was congruent with ideas that I had, but it pinpointed it, and I think it had an impact on me. That was one thing. Another thing was Nichols’s understanding of the local nature of politics. The nature of the American party system is such that you don’t have strong national party organizations. The important organizational dimensions of party existed at the state, county, and local level. The nature of these organizations was different—different times and different parts of the country and so on. In other words, this emphasis on localism and variety. I think that had an influence on me. As for the structural aspects, that’s a little harder. I have obviously been interested in the mechanisms. One of the books that I read very early, in fact I read it when I was in the seminar doing that work on Madison. There’s a book that’s virtually unknown today— MB: George Luetscher!1 RM: Exactly! Luetscher’s book. I have a copy of it. MB: It’s rare. RM: They’re very rare. That was an eye opener. Of all things, that book of Luetscher’s. I assume that maybe Nichols directed me to it, I don’t know. Ever since, I have been convinced that one of the very important influences on the behavior of parties from place to place is what I call the constitutional and legal environment, and it was very important in shaping parties. Parties in turn, shape that environment. A reciprocal relationship, as I found it, for example, in The History of Voting in New Jersey. And when I was working on my dis-

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sertation, all this talk about who could vote, well that’s important but far more important, in the 1780s and ’90s is the accessibility of the polls. So that when you change the laws from having one polling place in the county to having a polling place in every township, this really has an impact on voter turnout. MB: I assume that in the same vein, viva voce voting as opposed to private balloting would also affect that climate of voting. RM: Well, yes, but not entirely in the way you might suppose. Very early these handwritten ballots that they used in the early years were prepared in advance by party workers and distributed. Then very soon, by 1789, you have the appearance of printed ballots, printed by the party and distributed. So that illiteracy, for example, is no barrier to voting with the ballot. Anyhow, we don’t want to get too deeply into that. MB: No. What we were on right now is the Nichols influence. Does Nichols offer an over-arching theory of political behavior? RM: I don’t know that I could immediately answer that. I haven’t, so to speak, re-read his work with that particular question in mind. MB: Let me ask you this another way. To what extent did The Disruption of American Democracy2 affect the way you looked at politics and political history? Because it was a very powerful book, well deserving of the honors it received. To this day it is still one of the handful of really great books on the coming of the Civil War. Did that book influence you? RM: I don’t think I could single it out; I absorbed it, I’m sure. It came out in ’48 as I remember and I had heard a great deal of it in Nichols’s lectures. In fact, he collected the lecture notes a few of us made in that course and read them not in terms in checking up on us or anything but in the course of preparing to write that book. MB: How did you go about developing your ideas? RM: I got a push from Nichols into political history, but I think most of it was on-the-job training. And I learned certain things from my doctoral thesis. I learned some more by my collection of electoral data. And I read everything that the political scientists had ever written on political parties—both American political parties and also a great deal on European and English parties. So, a lot of self-education. And when I read the classic works on American political parties from [Mosei] Ostrogorski to [E. E.] Schattschneider, two things crossed up over and over again: first, political parties are good; political parties are essential in a democracy. Number two, although they were absolutely essential in the U.S., every writer insisted that they must be reformed.3

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MB: To make them more responsible? RM: Certainly. None of them approved of parties as they operated. And the reason they didn’t approve was because they were reluctantly obliged to see them as essentially electoral machines—that was their function—rather than as mechanism for assuming responsibility for a government. I learned early on something that to me is very important, something very important, but which is rarely mentioned. Britain has a government, we speak about the British government; Tony Blair heads the British government. France has a government; Japan has a government; most countries have a government. We talk about the Clinton administration, the Eisenhower administration. The nature of our Constitution is such as to preclude party government, except in the rarest and briefest of instances. The Founding Fathers went out of their way to try and make it impossible for the majority to govern in the United States. With their system of checks and balances, with their system whereby you have this constituency and these terms for the House of Representatives, that one for the U.S. Senate, this one for the presidency, and so on. They set up the most complex system because of their concern about the dangers of majority rule. And although we’ve made some modifications since, we remain with the two-year terms for representatives, six-year terms for senators, and four-year terms for president. Very, very frustrating for those who believe that the ideal is party government. But party government means majority government. And we Americans don’t want that. MB: It’s interesting to me, though, that some of your later books focus precisely on the practical breakdown of the system envisioned by the framers. RM: Like the method of electing the president. MB: Like the method of electing the president. RM: But here, again, the paradox is, we’re the people of the book. Go by the Constitution. There is not a constitutionally sanctioned method for choosing our president. The irony of that is extraordinary. We just stumbled into it. We don’t do it the way the framers intended. MB: As you have shown, it evolved. Different practices impinging on one another, affecting one another. RM: Ironic. MB: Your work on the willy-nilly emergence of that political system seems mainstream wisdom today. RM: I suppose the person in the profession at the polar opposite of me would be Joel Silbey.4 He seems to idolize American political

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parties. My attitude has been less worshipful, less appreciative, perhaps—a bit more cynical and concerned. Americans generally have been ambivalent about parties; they still are. MB: Did you have any overall program or design for yourself as a scholar? RM: Not at all, not at all; things just happened, accumulated, diverged, developed. No, when I joined the faculty at Rutgers in ’45, I made a decision to do my dissertation in the field of New Jersey History and to give some attention to the development of that field here. What directions it would take—I didn’t have any blueprint. But what I discovered—for example about the condition of the New Jersey Historical Society—prompted me to organize the Conference of New Jersey Historians and quite amazingly that in turn led to my selection as president of the Society. I certainly did not have that in mind when I started. MB: Once you revised your doctoral dissertation and published it, in 1950, as Experiment in Independence—5 RM: I didn’t revise it. MB: You just published it? RM: Yes, it was published by Rutgers University Press. MB: You didn’t have to do any further work on the dissertation? RM: Oh, no, no. MB: The book quickly took its place as a standard work in that field and I think half a century later you could argue that it is still the standard work in that field. Do you have any reflections on how you fit that book in the historiography of the United States in that period and also your sense of how well it does indeed stand up in that period over time? RM: Well, as a work of political history, which is primarily what it was, it has stood up well. It got a good reception, a big boost, among other things from Merrill Jensen, and I know that the recent multivolume publications on the federal Constitution and also on the first federal elections coming out of Wisconsin seem to have relied heavily on that work and were not able to find substantial sources of any kind that were ignored in the writing of that book. MB: It’s not often that a significant book can last that long without having a younger generation commit intellectual parricide on it. RM: Well, it is on a fairly restricted period, in the history of a fairly modest state. I wouldn’t look at it as a major breakthrough in the field of History. However, it was, I suppose, one of the earlier works to take issue with the Beard interpretation, showing quite convinc-

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ingly, I believe, that Beard was completely out of order as far as New Jersey was concerned. I made some contribution toward a larger debate, if you will, with respect to the Beard thesis.6 MB: Did you know pretty much as soon as you finished with Experiment of Independence that you would move on to do a study of voting in New Jersey? RM: Yeah, yeah, I had gotten interested in that because what I learned in studying voting behavior and elections in New Jersey was that far more was involved than simply the question of suffrage qualifications, on which interest had generally centered in previous studies; that such things as the location of the polls, the duration of the elections, whether they were to be by ballot or voice vote and so on, all had an important influence. That led me into the next, I think the minor one of the books I that I’ve done, on the history of voting in New Jersey. But I enjoyed it, and it was a bridge that led very directly to the book on the second American party system. I got deeply interested in this question of voter participation, which had been one of the things that I had looked at throughout the study of the history of voting in New Jersey. I began to collect data on voter participation in all of the states down to the Civil War, which at that time, was a hell of a difficult thing to do. Imagine: there was no xerox facility; there were no computers. I used an old Burroughs adding machine and that sort of thing. There were none of these hand-held computers, and moreover the sources had not yet been identified. That is, at that particular juncture in the ’50s there had not been a great deal of work done in this field of collecting voting data as the University of Michigan subsequently was to do. I was fortunate in that I got a grant from the Social Science Research Council, which enabled me to hire my graduate student, Carl Prince, and he was of great assistance in collecting and even more in processing this data. Processing it meant doing lots of divisions to calculate percentages. In the process of analyzing that data, certain things became very apparent to me, particularly with respect to the unusual way in which the second American party system emerged, region by region by region by region. Whereas I started out essentially with just this interest in studying voting behavior, I saw the opportunity for a very distinctive kind of study. MB: Well, let’s back up a bit and focus on how you get from New Jersey History to a broader consideration of the second American party system. Why did you get interested in one of the “big” themes in American political history? Can you explain why you were motivated to move in that direction?

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RM: In the mid-1950s I went through what you might call a process of intellectual retooling. It is difficult to try to reconstruct precisely what the process was, but I can talk a little bit about it. I think it is important to say, first of all, that I wrote Experiment in Independence and I was particularly fascinated by what I learned about the conduct of politics in the Confederation period—particularly that whole matter of election machinery, suffrage, and so on. I was sufficiently interested that I wanted to pursue that area, so I did another book, on the History of Voting in New Jersey. This was a continuation, really, of an interest that I had acquired while doing my dissertation. Well, what I learned from writing about the history of voting in New Jersey more strongly piqued my interest initially in the question of differential rates of voter participation, which I had by this time observed, not only over time, but from state to state. I could see that in order to understand that matter of differential voter participation, I would have to be able to bring into the picture, at the very least, political parties—most particularly these new political parties that were developing between 1824 and 1840. All of that is by way of background. To equip myself to deal, as I never had to deal before, with political parties, I went on a reading binge. And it came at precisely the right time. In the mid-fifties, a group of books appeared that seemed to have been written just to educate me. Austin Ranney’s marvelous book The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government was one.7 In it he examined the thinking about parties of half a dozen of the most influential figures who did in fact philosophize about and describe parties: Woodrow Wilson, A. Lawrence Lowell, Henry Jones Ford, Mosei Ostrogorski, Frank Goodenow, and Herbert Croly. And that was great, because Ranney summarized these views and analyzed them, and in effect assured me that the viewpoints set forth by those particular authors really covered just about all the bases in terms of how American political parties were regarded, described, criticized, evaluated. Excellent. Then, about the same time, V. O. Key’s book on American state politics appeared.8 Marvelous. Key was of course prequantification, but he had a remarkable sensitivity in analyzing the different environments, to use one of my favorite terms, in which parties functioned, and how those parties, in turn, were related to their particular environments. That was great. Then another book came out called Research Frontiers in American Political Science—a series of chapters in what was considered, at that time at least, to be research frontiers. One of the chapters dealt with state politics. I think it was written by Paul David.9 Among other things, it made the point that this offered a particularly fine opportunity to engage in comparative studies: that is to

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say, instead of confining oneself to look at the structure of politics in a state, which offered no possibility, really, for generalization, to look at the structures of politics in lots of states; then through the methodology of comparative analysis, see what generalizations you can draw about “x” kind of response. That was great. Another book that came out about the same time, by Belle Zeller, about American state legislatures, stressed the importance of looking at the states and seeing how they differed in the organization of their legislative politics.10 Again, it offered the opportunity, by looking at a lot of states, to arrive at some generalizations. All of these were very exciting. As a consequence of reading Ranney’s book, I encountered Henry Jones Ford—a figure who is almost completely forgotten today, but who did a brilliant book on American politics, in which he committed the unpardonable sin of announcing at the outset that he was not going to be concerned with what parties stood for, nor would he attempt to analyze the constituencies of the parties, but rather he would focus on the function that parties seem to play in the American political system. He made some very astute observations.11 I was charmed by Henry Jones Ford’s approach. But the solidest works were those by Lowell.12 MB: I take it you are being sardonic about the “unpardonable sin” remark, in the context of responding to the Progressive approach to History, with its emphasis on good guys and bad guys in politics. RM: Of course, of course. Then, somehow or other, I stumbled on another book that deserves more attention than it has received. This is Stuart Rice, Quantitative Methods in Politics.13 He gave from chapter to chapter examples of how you could quantify in a very simple, low-level way, essentially time series, political phenomena. That I found very supportive and to a degree, educational. Well then I read more and more widely in the political science literature. At the same time there appeared, I think in 1954, Bulletin 64 of the Social Science Research Council, The Social Sciences in Historical Study.14 I hadn’t thought about that kind of thing. I had no interest down to that point in historical methodology or historical theory. My training in the methods course that I took as a master’s candidate at Rutgers used Allan Nevins’s The Gateway to History.15 If you have any familiarity with that book you know that the last thing Nevins is interested in is philosophy of History or methodology. You do the research, you line up the data, you write it up, and that is History. And that’s the way essentially I had approached it. Well, these readings, and particularly Bulletin 64, expanded my mind and introduced me to the whole question of how to go about doing History and the different ways that one could do it. I suppose you could say it shifted me into the new social science era of doing History.

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MB: Was there any particular author of any of the essays in Bulletin 64 who influenced you? RM: William Aydelotte.16 MB: He did quantification with regard to voting patterns in the British House of Commons. RM: As I think about it, the Aydelotte piece was in a later SSRC [Social Science Research Council] volume called Generalization in History.17 MB: When does Maurice Duverger appear? Later on? RM: Yes, a year or two later. The American edition [of Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State] appeared in 1954, and I think I caught up with it a year or two later, after I had read the books I already mentioned.18 Duverger helped enormously in putting a lot of things into place, into confirming and supporting some of the directions in which I was moving, and I found it just hitting the mark in terms of setting this very, very peculiar constitutional and political system of ours in a broader context—that is, comparing parties in the United States with parties elsewhere in the world. Duverger in fact says they’re “pseudo parties,” because they’re so out of line with parties everywhere else. He can’t deal with American parties. MB: Is Duverger the source of the insight you play with in a lot of your work in which you draw historians’ attention to the impact of constitutions on parties, and vice versa? RM: Of course, of course. It’s inescapable. In Ranney’s book, where he discusses these half-dozen seminal thinkers on American parties, all of them, despite their varying estimates on parties, agree on the vital relationship between this weird constitution we have—that was deliberately designed to frustrate parties, to make party government impossible—the effect of that constitutional situation on the nature of American parties. And the result is that, with the exception of Ostrogorski, all of these folks thought that parties were highly desirable in a democracy, but that you could never have responsible party government in the United States without major constitutional change, because the Constitution makes responsible party government all but impossible. So yeah, I talk a great deal about the constitutional and legal environment, and I think I demonstrate in The Second Party System how important that is in shaping parties differently from state to state. MB: Right. And you explore that in much of your mature work, and not just in The Second Party System.

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RM: Yes. Anyhow, with this new equipment I got very excited. By now we are talking about 1956, the SSRC had become interested, through one of their committees, in comparative studies of politics and parties. I was encouraged by Pendleton Herring, who then headed the SSRC, to apply for a grant to do the studies that I had projected, essentially oriented around parties and voter participation. And then I had this idea of bringing a group together to talk about American political history. SSRC was very keen on this kind of thing, of course. The result was that I got funded both to hold this conference at Rutgers in June of 1957 and for a year’s research leave. That was great. I not only got my salary for a year, but I also got money for a research assistant. I was able to hire Carl Prince, my graduate student, to help me. And he did, in terms of collecting voting data with me and processing it with a Burroughs adding machine, calculating percentages, and so on. MB: Did the conference come first, or did the leave come first? RM: The conference was in June, and my leave began on July 1. MB: Tell me about the conference. Whom did you want to invite, and what success did you have in getting these people to Rutgers? RM: We had about a dozen people. Among them were Charles Sellers, Lee Benson, John Munroe, Richard Brown, Noble Cunningham, Harry Stevens, John Reed.19 MB: Was Allen Bogue part of the group? RM: No. I had written to him, but he was not part of the group. MB: Did Roy Nichols come? RM: Nichols came the last day. We had a wonderful time with him. Two or three others we had invited—Ed Morgan, Bernard Bailyn, and David Lovejoy—expressed interest but had other commitments.20 MB: Can you abstract the leading thing you came away from the conference with? RM: I felt reassured— MB: That you were on the right track— RM: Yes. MB: To what extent does the gestalt of the fifties direct the kinds of questions you ask and how you’re asking them? It seems that in an era of prosperity there is less contention about ideology, and you are freer to offer a structural interpretation or approach. RM: Could be. Let me say a word about this matter of ideology, which begins to come into the picture in the 1950s. I’m intellectually

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conservative as a historian, in this sense: I have the conviction that there are some types of questions that can be answered by a historian with a fair degree of assurance, if approached methodically and objectively. And there are other kinds of questions with which historians have not been able to deal successfully. Demonstrably, American historians have tried, over the past one hundred years, to define the constituencies of the Whigs and the Democrats. They have not, to put it mildly, reached any consensus. It almost saddens one and destroys one’s confidence in the efficacy of History to enumerate all the differing characterizations we have had of who the Democrats were and who the Whigs were. By the same token we are apparently finished now with our binge on republicanism. For thirty years, colonial historians in particular, but not exclusively so, have sought to exploit the very opaque concept of republicanism to illuminate a very important area of American history. Because I am not intellectually venturesome, I choose not to tackle problems that do not promise pretty secure results. That is essentially why I have stayed clear of the whole field of ideology, and have stayed clear of this other question of what the parties represented— MB: And steered clear of the kind of work that Lee Benson did. He was trying to find something that he could not ultimately nail down. RM: Lee called it panel analysis. At our conference in 1957, he introduced us to this concept, which he got from [Paul] Lazarsfeld. No one ever tried harder to be scientific than Lee. People have to understand that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy is a mere extended footnote to the ambitious work that he had planned to set forth with scientific precision—the causes of the Civil War—a task which, of course, he was never able to accomplish.21 So, I set my sights lower and tried to address questions that I thought could be answered with some degree of assurance. MB: At the risk of treading ground we’ve been over before, I want to elucidate your relationship with Benson and his work. I’d argue that your work is complementary to the work that Benson does. You don’t necessarily agree. Would you comment? RM: We were doing very, very different things. We were interested in very different kinds of questions. I’m sure I didn’t have any influence on Lee, and I’m not aware of any influence he had on me. While I read The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy with great interest, he was dealing with questions that I was not dealing with. MB: My point was not that you were trying to do the same thing, but that your work, which looked at structures, put ideology on the side shelf. So did the ethnoculturalists. Benson and his acolytes could use McCormick for their purposes the same way that Bernard

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Bailyn, writing The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, could use Robert Brown’s work on Massachusetts to serve his purposes. Bailyn’s work draws more easily on someone who posits “middle class democracy” than work that emphasizes class differences and class antagonisms in eighteenth-century America.22 RM: Again, I was dealing with different questions than Benson was. At the outset of The Second Party System there is a list of propositions, fifteen or so of them. It seemed to me, and still seems to me, that those propositions, or if you will, findings, have not been [effectively] challenged. Rather, they have more generally been ignored [laughs] because they don’t deal with what most people want to deal with when we talk about politics—that is, matters of ideology and constituency. Actually, what excited me most in doing The Second American Party System was its methodological novelty. By asking identical questions about similar phenomena as I observed them under differing conditions from state to state, I sought to apply as rigorously as I could the technique of comparative analysis. I had hinted at this approach in my 1949 article “Unique Elements in State History,” and I later described the method in “The Comparative Method: Its Application to American History” [1974].23 Oddly enough, reviewers generally ignored this aspect of the book, much to my disappointment. It still seems to me that comparative analysis is a splendid tool to use in addressing a wide range of historical problems that present themselves at the state level. But obviously my colleagues have not taken up the challenge. If we had only five states, instead of fifty, the comparative approach would be common. What I find most interesting about The Second American Party System, which nobody else seems to be impressed with [laughs], was the opportunity to apply the technique of comparative analysis in a structured way. That is to say, I tried to ask identical questions about the same phenomena in different environments. Through that process of comparative analysis, which is what I employed throughout the study, taking these twenty-odd laboratories, if you will, looking at voter participation, asking identical questions about party formation as related to voter participation from state to state. I found it extremely useful and rewarding, in making the case, which I made first in that article [“New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics”], that what was remarkable about the Jacksonian electorate was the low level of voter participation. That was explainable largely on the basis of the fact that most states were very lopsided in their presidential preferences, and where you have no real contest, you don’t get a huge voter participation. I was able to show a correlation between the lack of party competition and low participation. In the middle states you had early party formation, high participation, and

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so on. It was all a product of the application of this technique or methodology of comparative analysis. As far as I’m concerned, it remains the clearest—I say this in all modesty—it remains the clearest and the most extensive application of that particular methodology to the study of a significant problem in American history. MB: You just touched on a number of issues that I wanted to pursue. It seems to me that the second party system book is one of the first, if not the first, treatment of this period that undermines the notion that 1828 marked a sea change in the building of the second American party system. As a result of the kind of thing that you found, there seems to be a new awareness that the party system does not emerge in one election like 1828 or 1832, but it comes together at different times in different regions. RM: 1824 to 1840—and that it only lasted for a dozen years. MB: Which is something that went against the grain of conventional wisdom. RM: Still does. Still does. Also, I think it’s the first book in American political history to utilize, I think I would say, popularize, the concept of “party systems.” Now it is a part of everybody’s vocabulary. Before that book, we didn’t talk about party systems; it wasn’t a part of the vocabulary.24 Of course, I have been assaulted is my audacity in saying that American political parties are “primarily electoral machines.” That has deeply offended people. And secondly, people have been put off by the fact that I start out by saying I’m interested in party systems. I am not interested in the usual questions of the classes or sections that compose this party or that party, and I am not interested in what role issues played—supposed issues played—in forming the party. I will let other people do that. Go ahead and do it; you have been doing it now for a hundred and fifty years, you haven’t arrived at any consensus, you’re not close to one yet, but that’s all right, you go ahead—I’m going to do my thing, you do your thing. But that, people don’t like that. MB: You did write one important article however— RM: “Suffrage Classes”—25 MB: Which argued strongly against an economic basis of division between parties. RM: No, it doesn’t. It just states the data. That article on “Suffrage Classes” is dearest to my heart methodologically. Mathematicians use the term “elegance,” and I think there is an elegance about that article, in that I was able to locate two ideal environments in which to test the question of whether suffrage classes, as they were defined by the suffrage requirements in New York and North Carolina, af-

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fected party alignments. When I did that piece, standard methodology went back essentially to Frederick Jackson Turner and Orin Grant Libby—what they called “statistical cartography.”26 You would try to identify the economic groups in a particular voting district and then correlate that with the election returns. One of the most extensive uses of that technique was made by Dixon Ryan Fox in his Transition from Aristocracy to Democracy in New York.27 Even when we had great arguments there in the fifties between the Columbia School and the Harvard School, on the working-man’s vote, Edward Pessen and the others essentially did that.28 They would look at the census data and get a sense of the constituent elements in the district. Where you had a dual voting system, you had an ideal opportunity to ascertain whether or not these classes differed. The expectation would be of course that the lower classes, as defined by suffrage qualifications, voted differently from the upper classes. Well, in both New York and North Carolina, two rather different states, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Actually, when masses of new voters entered the electorate, they distributed themselves between the parties in the same proportions as the older, elite electorate. I didn’t set out to make that argument: this is where the investigation took me. MB: Your work undergirds a school of political history that is emerging in the late fifties, early sixties, what is called, rightly or wrongly, the ethnocultural school— RM: In what way? MB: Whether your intentions were there or not, your work complements the work of Lee Benson and Ron Formisano and others by downplaying the importance of substantive issue divisions and arguments between the parties. Your work does not necessarily say ethnocultural history is better than economic interpretation, it doesn’t say that, but it complements the ethnoculturalists’ argument in its assumption that economic divisions are not the most salient ones. Would you reject that? RM: I would reject that. I think what my work shows is that during the period of its formation, which was the period I was interested in, particularly between 1824 and 1836, that the largest influence on politics was what I called the “Contest of the Presidency.” I found that the response of the voters from section to section was largely determined by the identification of the candidates with their section or not with their section. New England votes overwhelmingly for John Quincy Adams, the South votes overwhelming for Jackson, and the Middle States, which are in between, split the vote. The “Contest for the Presidency” was critical in that it shaped the forma-

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tion of the second party system, and I would go on to argue that it shaped it without regard to what we have classically regarded as the determinants of party identification, namely classes or issues. Now, I would never deny that in the process of forming, parties take on a coloration on issues, and why they take on that coloration is a profound question, which is not easy to answer. That is to say, certainly by the middle 1830s the Jacksonian party became the anti-bank party. Now, whether Mr. X in New Jersey voted for Jackson because he was anti-bank, or whether he was anti-bank out of his loyalty to Jackson, is a very difficult question to answer. I believe that the United States, after the Twelfth Amendment, was fated, or doomed, to have a two-party system. A party system that had to operate in those days, in twenty-seven states, or however many, was not going to be a party system in which the parties were sharply defined in terms of classes or issues. The ambiguity that characterizes American parties is what threw my good colleague, Maurice Duverger, completely off balance. When he wrote his great work on political parties, he was able to classify political parties in all countries that had them, in terms of certain criteria. He comes to the United States, and he just has to throw up his hands. To him these aren’t parties in any sense in which that term is used in England or France or wherever— MB: Because of regional variations and so forth? RM: No. Start with the understanding that the Twelfth Amendment virtually obliged us to have a two-party system. When you have a two-party system, without proportional representation or any of the other qualifying features, the American political party has to make an enormously wide appeal. The result is the tendency of the parties to become, as I say, essentially electoral machines concerned with getting their members elected. Many features of our constitutional arrangements frustrate party governments. It’s very different from those countries where parties are expected to provide a “government.” Consider parties as they developed in England. There you had, first, strong interior-type parliamentary parties, which really didn’t become well extended into the constituencies until the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is a very different course of party formation from ours. Look at France and at some of the Scandinavian countries; our system is very different. It’s a presidential system. That’s unlike a ministerial system. Throw in the complexities of federalism, and the contrast is even greater. The point is you have to appreciate the distinctiveness of the American system of parties. MB: Well, I’d suggest that Benson and his followers found McCormick’s work congenial, while the people who argued for substantive differences on things like the banking and economic poli-

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cies of the 1830s rejected much of McCormick’s argument. Is that a fair statement? RM: I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that, about that relationship to the ethnocultural approach, because I was never especially enamored of it. I could talk a great deal about Benson’s book. It is an enormously flawed book. Over and over and over again he presents us with his “potentially verifiable hypotheses,” and on the basis of those “potentially verifiable hypotheses” he proceeds to erect a whole structure. Most of those hypotheses cannot be verified. Nevertheless, he has on page 276 [of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy], the most accurate description that I have ever encountered of what is so complex about American politics, complex particularly when it comes to approaching this matter of what the parties were composed of, and the stand that they took upon the issues. MB: You’re talking about positive state liberalism and negative state liberalism? RM: It has nothing to do with that. I used to love to teach that book in a seminar, both because of what Lee got away with, but also for that very pregnant summary of his that illustrated the problems of trying to relate parties to constituencies and issues. What I disagreed with was this “potentially verifiable hypotheses” thing. I mean for example, one of the problems is this: Benson is able to tell you how the Germans vote, how the Dutch vote, and so on. But the bulk of the electorate didn’t fit in into any of these ethnic categories, and he is unable to account for how that native American, nonethnic population divided. But I think he had something going for him, which he got from his Columbia sociologist associates, on negative reference groups. A very useful idea. MB: Which was, of course, exploited by some of his students like [William G.] Shade and [Ronald] Formisano who would go on to write their own books that would develop this negative reference idea in some detail, for particular states.29 RM: Well, there is another McCormick, as you know, who has written a very good piece on the ethnocultural interpretation.30 MB: Yes, indeed, but, a sharply critical piece. It’s a good analysis, which has stuck in the craw of some of the ethnoculturalists for a long time, judging by Ron Formisano’s recent American Historical Review article.31 I want to sharpen my understanding of your relationship to people like Charles Sellers and others who would argue that there are fundamental, meaningful differences between the parties, whether it was the bank per se, orientation to the market revolution, or something else.

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RM: Sure, that’s fine. I’m talking about party formation and what I have asked to be shown is that between elections, 1824, ’28, and ’32, when these parties were forming, that they formed on the basis of issues, or they formed on the basis of socioeconomic strata, or whatever else you want to call it. That’s all I am asking, and I don’t know if anyone has done that yet. Now, I don’t deny, at all, that as these parties assumed a full form, they projected different images, and their adherents took on the coloration of those images to respond to cues derived from those images. No doubt about it. MB: There is a difference between parties projecting images and partisans believing strongly in— RM: In creating a party in the Burkean sense, a body of men united to advance ideas—phooey. MB: Well, what about the idea of parties representing “systems of meaning,” as Harry Watson once put it?32 RM: We haven’t found any systems of meaning we can agree on. MB: How in retrospect do you feel about the people who attacked the McCormick thesis head on? I’m thinking in particular of Robert Shalhope’s work on Missouri.33 RM: That was trivial. The one piece that did get under my skin was the Ershkowitz and Shade article.34 The reason it got under my skin is because it came to be cited over and over and over again and anthologized. If you take just a casual look at the data on which that article is based, it is so flimsy that it should not have received the credence that it has been given. MB: What is it, that the sample was too small? RM: Sure, sure. It simply resonated with what a large number of scholars wanted to believe. MB: Did you referee the piece when it was submitted to the Journal of American History? RM: No, no, I never saw it. MB: So you never saw it till it was published? RM: Right. MB: It seems to me that you offer a rather skeptical view of American politics. You don’t accept the idea that any particular thesis is going to be applicable to the broad span of American political culture, whether ideology, economics, or ethnic and religious characteristics of voters. The system is simply too diverse? RM: Yes, sure, sure.

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MB: And what’s applicable in New Jersey is not necessarily applicable in New Hampshire or Georgia? RM: And you see, here’s the mystery. Why do the New Jersey Jacksonians, for example, adopt an anti-bank attitude? Why? Was it that this arose out of economic interests or was it the fact that Jackson laid down the party line, which was accepted by the bulk of the party leadership, so the partisans take their cue, and they’re against the bank. Now there were, I’m sure, people with economic interests involved who were pro- or anti-bank on the basis of their economic interests. But, in terms of the bulk of the people in the party, when it’s made a party issue, they fall in line. MB: Someone who fits your argument very well is Stacy Potts, a Jacksonian editor in Trenton, New Jersey. It’s not ideological for him. He sees where the leadership of the party wants to go on the bank issue, and then he rallies the party faithful with his editorials. He could have argued that the Earth was flat or round, depending on what Jackson said.35 RM: Or take Peter Vroom. He had no interest in the bank, one way or the other. But when the line was put down, Vroom became anti-bank.36 MB: And yet, so much of politics is emotional, and policy oriented, and you can tell the difference between the parties, at least by 1832. RM: Oh come on. Consider the national schisms. MB: What do you say to the notion that you’re just not interested in real people, in the electorate as living, breathing individuals? RM: I’ve been interested in doing the doable. Not all questions that History wants to address can be addressed with the assurance of a firm outcome. I can ask how did voter participation vary from state to state, how did it vary from state elections to a national election. And I can answer those questions and put them to use. I can ask when did parties form in a certain state, and I can answer that question. I can set forth categories: no parties, two parties, multiparties, et cetera, and with a high degree of probability, I can identify those different types of party situations. I can observe that at a certain point in time there is a surge in voter participation. I can observe that, strangely enough, if we assume that parties are based on issues arising out of Congress, it’s very strange that they’re different in the different regions. So why do they appear at different times? I find the most plausible explanation is the presidential contest, as described in my book The Presidential Game. I can deal with the kinds of questions I discuss in the first section of The Second American Party System. But ideology, no, I can’t do that. If you want

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to organize your investigations around ideology, I say, God bless you, do it. MB: We haven’t talked about your view of the parties as “artificial” creations and the impact of sectional issues on the workings of the party system. RM: Look, I don’t doubt that there was substance to politics in the formation of the Second American Party System. I have maintained that the sequence of party formation reveals the importance of sectional identifications of the candidates. New England could go overwhelmingly for Adams in 1828 but show coolness toward Clay in 1832. The South could embrace Jackson in 1828 and 1832 but prefer Hugh Lawson White to Van Buren in 1836, as forecast by opposition to Van’s vice-presidential candidacy in 1832. To put it another way, the sectional alignment so evident in 1828 was confounded when the National Republicans ran Clay in 1832 and was further disrupted when Van Buren emerged as the Democratic candidate in 1836. Thus, paradoxically, sectional influences resulted in intersectional parties. “Sectionalism,” of course, was not a hollow sentiment. Yankees and Southerners perceived themselves, quite correctly, as having very different interests. Realistically, then, parties should have formed on a sectional basis (as they had done by 1800 and were to do after 1856). Such could well have been the case if Jackson had designated Hugh White, rather than Van Buren, as his successor. Such a course in all likelihood would have brought us to civil war long before 1860. MB: What about the business about parties being “artificial”—that has taken some pretty hard hits. RM: I termed the Second Party System as “artificial” because it did not reflect the basic cleavage in the country. Perhaps I should have used the word “peculiar” instead. As I explain in my article “The Jacksonian Strategy,” the “responsible leaders” of the two parties were quite conscious of the need to mute, compromise, or evade sectionally divisive issues; they succeeded down to the 1850s, when the incongruous nature of the party system brought it to its doom. The beginning of the end can be dated to the actions of the two “irresponsibles”—[John] Tyler and [John C.] Calhoun—in teaming up to raise the Texas issue, which the “responsibles” had evaded for nearly a decade. MB: How do you respond to the work of Michael F. Holt, who embraced and popularized the notion of the party as an autonomous entity or independent variable—something Roy Nichols and you would be comfortable with—but at the same time argues strongly for

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the differences between Jacksonian-era parties on substantive questions?37 RM: Holt is an interesting historian. My son was briefly a student of Holt’s at Yale University and reported to me Holt’s criticism of my approach. But then, in reading Holt—the 1850s book—what interested me was, how much of me he had accepted.38 It gets down to this point, and then it branches out. I’ve been looking forward, for many years, to his book on the Whigs.39 MB: Holt offers an interesting hybrid approach to political culture. He puts great emphasis in the 1850s book on the party as an independent variable. RM: Well, this presents a problem. His initial work was on Pittsburgh.40 Harry Watson’s work was on Cumberland County [North Carolina].41 OK. So you work on Pittsburgh, you work on Cumberland County. Certain ideas form on the basis of that particular environment you have studied and the mix of factors you examine. Certain ideas form, and I think that carries over. And when you move, as Holt did, as Harry did, that carries over into the broader analysis. MB: But Holt tended, in the Pittsburgh book, to argue in a different direction than he would subsequently do in The Political Crisis of the 1850s about what made voters vote the way they did and politics operate as it did. RM: I’m going to be fascinated by how he accounts in his new book for a number of things, including the very short life of the Whig party—twelve years. I would say, eight years. In 1850 we can clearly see the impending collapse of the Whig party in the South. MB: I’m not sure. I think [Winfield] Scott ran better in ’52 than he’s given credit for running. [McCormick shakes his head in the negative.] No? Scott wasn’t that much of a disaster. RM: Oh, he was, he was. Compare him to Taylor in ’48. MB: But the party was still operating. RM: Ah, my friend, the difference is that in ’48 you have a slaveholder running, and in ’52 you had a Northern nonslaveholder running. So what the hell does the Whig party stand for? MB: I’m distinguishing between Scott as a distinctly unsatisfactory candidate who leads his party to a bad defeat— RM: Was he unsatisfactory because of his platform? MB: No. RM: So what is a political party then? I love to tell the story of the Harrisburg Whig convention of 1840. This is the classic story of po-

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litical parties. The manner in which they went about identifying a candidate, coming up with William Henry Harrison—you know, telling those guys to stay in the cellar till they agreed [laughs]—then with the utmost cynicism putting Tyler on the ticket, then refusing to adopt any semblance of a platform. Come on, come on. What a party. A classic pseudo-party. And you can match this with the way the opposition to Jackson operated in 1836. Or you can see it even better in the opposition to Van Buren as a vice-presidential candidate in 1832. . . . Have you read Charles Sellers’s book?42 MB: The Market Revolution? Yes, I’ve read it—a long time in coming, no? RM: I respect Charlie. He presents a challenging reinterpretation of the era, although I must say I do not find it convincing. I feel he presses his argument beyond plausibility. MB: Did you like the Polk books?43 RM: Oh, yes. Excellent. MB: Now the Polk biography puts a great premium on the theme of a man with an agenda. Old Mecklenburg. The image of an agricultural utopia. That kind of thing. RM: Oh yes. A man with an agenda. Polk was able to have a good deal of success imposing that agenda on his party. No question. [Pause] He killed himself in the process. He died, I think, within six weeks of leaving the presidency. MB: Certainly within six months. RM: It’s old fashioned political history, well done, very ably done. I liked William Cooper’s book. MB: The South and the Politics of Slavery?44 RM: Yes, I found that very congenial to most of the understandings that I developed about the South and the politics of slavery. MB: Are there other books that have made an impact on your own thinking besides political science works on parties and party development and responsible parties? RM: Another book that I found extraordinarily lucid and fascinating and persuasive was Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.45 And I never could understand, when I would assign that book, why it didn’t work. First I assigned it to undergraduate courses, and it was a disaster. Then I would assign it to graduate classes, and they would complain how difficult it was to read. And I never could understand that. To me, it was beautifully organized, well written, had a clear thesis. I really admired that book a great deal.

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MB: You have to be an educated person, however, to get the full purport of that book, with its wide range of references to often obscure European political thinkers, like Turgot and Quesnay, for example— RM: Brilliant book, brilliant book. MB: I think the book has enjoyed a minor renaissance in the past decade, with a new appreciation by scholars, if only in connection with Hartz’s passing.46 RM: Is that so? MB: I think so. I think it went into eclipse in the sixties and has come back into the conversation. RM: You know, in the sixties, it was the Left that consigned that book to oblivion. To me, it’s a terribly critical book, depicting a nation entrapped in this ideology which makes it so difficult, if not impossible, for it to relate to the rest of the world. It’s a very sobering book, a very disheartening book. He’s not singing paeans of praise to the liberal tradition. MB: I agree with you, but you ask yourself, what is it that the young scholars of the sixties are looking for in terms of a usable past? And what they’re looking for is not the assertion that Americans were born free and consigned to this ideology, as you say. They’re looking for a clash of classes, they’re looking for an underclass. RM: I know they are. MB: They don’t find Hartz a usable work of History. RM: I know. They find Sean Wilentz more usable.47 MB: Or Gary Nash.48 They read your work, or Hartz’s, or Hofstadter’s, and they don’t look for an implicit message. They see an explicit message that turns them off. That’s normal for scholars. We’re not oriented to reading texts the way that literary scholars are. RM: Well, as I say, I like Hartz very much. MB: What’s your view of scholars like V. O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham? RM: You’re talking about two different animals. Key was a master. Although I wouldn’t say he had any direct influence on my writing, Key had a direct influence on my teaching. I started many years ago to give a course called “The History of American Politics,” which I had to work up from scratch. As I got into more recent periods that book was excellent in shaping my understanding of certain aspects of American politics. Burnham [pause]—it’s a little hard in a paragraph or two to summarize what I think of him. There is an exagger-

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ation, I think, in Burnham’s work, and a kind of Marxist orientation that in some areas is offputting.49 But this isn’t to say that I don’t have respect for him. His influential work came long after I wrote The Second American Party System. But I used his work a lot in teaching my course in the history of American politics. MB: Do you accept the notion that there is a realigning process that can happen with a critical election and that the new system will hold for a number of years until something leads to a breakdown of that system? RM: Charlie Sellers tried to develop a theory— MB: The equilibrium cycle thesis—50 RM: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has been partial to that notion of yin and yang, or however you want to put it.51 I think it’s a concept to have in mind but not to press too far. Particularly I am concerned because of the changes that have taken place in the role and functions of parties, say in the last fifty years. Parties today are not the kinds of parties we knew down to the 1940s. So that to apply theories that might explain behavior in the early 1890s, when you had strongly organized and disciplined parties, to contemporary politics, is risky. Take things like the tremendous decline in national party conventions, supplanted by the direct primary. Take the emergence, very conspicuous by the 1960s, of a presidential campaign conducted quite independently of party agencies—the Committee to Re-elect the President, for example, raising enormous sums, not through party channels, but directly. I could go on; these are tremendous changes. The party used to serve a fund-raising function, a mobilizing function. That’s now been taken over, and altered, by other agencies. So all I’m saying is that theories we have about realignment in the 1890s might not be efficacious when applied to realignment in the 1990s. MB: You have this period, in 1964, ’65, ’66, where the books seem to cascade out. You have the colonial history of New Jersey, The Second Party System, the history of Rutgers— RM: [Laughs] What happened was, The Second American Party System was substantially completed in England. I polished it when I came home and submitted it for the manuscript prize of the American Association for State and Local History. They fiddled with it for quite a while, and finally it won the prize. There was quite an interval. Then, it went to the University of North Carolina Press. I didn’t have to do any rewriting, but it seemed to me it took a long time for them to get it out. It doesn’t come out till ’66. Four years. OK. Back in 1948, I’d accepted the obligation to write the history of Rutgers for the 1966 Bicentennial. So when I got back and finished the Second

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Party System, I looked at the calendar and noticed that ’66 wasn’t that far off. So I plunged into my work on the history of Rutgers. Oh my God. The last year particularly was just grueling. I’d be over in my study at the library at eleven o’clock at night, back there the next morning at eight. This went on week after week; I was worn to a frazzle. Finally I got the manuscript finished. I gave it to the Rutgers Press, and the Press sent it up to Quinn and Boden in Rahway to be printed. I never saw galley proof. I drove up to Rahway three or four times and hastily went through page proofs. [Laughs] The official date the book was supposed to be out was Charter Day, November 1966. I got the first copy. I had submitted the final manuscript in August of ’66, and I had it in my hands by November. MB: That’s pretty fast turnaround. RM: You’re God-damned right it is. [Laughs] It isn’t the elegant way to do it, but that’s what happened. As far as the Colony to State book is concerned, I had planned to write a one-volume history of New Jersey.52 MB: So, in 1964, ’65, ’66 you got some books out. Did you expect to slow down after that? RM: [Laughs] No, I didn’t expect to slow down. I reached for the stars, that’s what happened. I got delusions of grandeur. I was going to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. What I was looking for was a heuristic model of the American political system that I could utilize for the purpose of analysis. This is what led me to David Easton. But I also read everybody else. I had a year off and I read enormously in the political science literature, trying to find some way of conceptualizing in the broadest possible way this American political system. Well, it didn’t work. I very painstakingly studied all three volumes of Easton’s works. I found them very stimulating and interesting, but I couldn’t find any way of operationalizing them. Then I was invited to give the Commonwealth Lecture at the University of London, in 1971. Drawing upon this not very successful conceptual effort, and my knowledge of the period, I did a paper called “The Imperfect Union,” which involved my best effort to apply Eastonian concepts to explaining why the Civil War happened. I was never entirely satisfied with that paper, although it provoked interest and discussion after I had given it. It was a modified version of that paper that was my Presidential Address at SHEAR [the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic], called “The Jacksonian Strategy.”53 So that’s all that came out of two or three years of very intense study. After that came the deanship and that of course offered no opportunity for scholarship. After the deanship I agreed to do a large study of the history of academic organization in New Brunswick. At that

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time we were contemplating reorganizing. That’s a long story. So I did this study, and I gave it in the form of three public lectures. We did reorganize, replacing our former multicollege system with a consolidation of formerly individual departments into a single department of History or whatever discipline was involved. My work had contributed significantly to that reorganization effort. Then I began work on what became The Presidential Game, which was a fun book. I’d had this in mind for some time, and that came out the year I retired, 1982.54 MB: That book got very good notices. Why do you feel frustration with the reaction to The Presidential Game? RM: I don’t think it got such good notices. [Laughs] Did it? MB: Sure. RM: I don’t think it has had any influence in the sense that people aren’t interested in this kind of History any more. I do think it’s a neat conceptualization. MB: Among people who continued to do political history, I think the book was widely read and widely cited, and it was assimilated into the literature. The second question you raise is, “Who was reading political history in the eighties?,” and that is of course a fair question. RM: Yeah, yeah. Well, I thought it was a fun book, a clever book in the sequence I see there. It proposed a new structure for understanding the evolution of the presidential game. MB: You’ll be happy to know that at a recent Organization of American Historians [OAH] meeting, in Washington, one of the most widely attended sessions was on the future of political history in the 1990s. The fact that several hundred people attended suggests that it does have a future!55 RM: Well, good. There are so many things I would like to do, but one of the things is to write an essay on this latest effort to characterize the Jacksonian period in terms of the market revolution. This is number 62. MB: And it won’t be the last. [Laughs] RM: So much of the book is fiction. Harry Watson is more restrained in his arguments, and more plausible. MB: But he buys into the market revolution idea. I do too, as an organizing principle that has resonance, especially from a teaching point of view. RM: Did you ever hear of George Rogers Taylor?56 MB: Yes, sure.

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RM: So what else is new? MB: Taylor doesn’t use it as an organizing principle for the division of parties. He uses it as a concept for the age. RM: Yes, yes. And I think more legitimately so. I don’t think it works as an organizing principle for politics. MB: I realize there are market Democrats, and Conservative Whigs— RM: Our federal system of politics. [Laughs]

During the 1960s Rutgers was deeply affected by the Vietnam War and concomitant student unrest. Here, McCormick’s colleague Eugene Genovese is speaking at a 1966 teach-in, not long after becoming the focus of a political firestorm for saying he would “welcome” a Viet Cong triumph in Vietnam.

The 1960s witnessed McCormick’s peak of scholarly productivity, as he published three books in 1966 alone. In the fall of 1966 he shared a light moment with Rutgers President Mason Gross to mark publication of his history of Rutgers.

Discontent with the climate for minority students at Rutgers peaked in the late 1960s, leading to new initiatives for recruitment of students of color. McCormick, center, was appointed chair of a special committee that responded to student demands. Subsequently he wrote a book about the controversy.

All was not work in McCormick’s busy life. This photo captures the historian at play, on a burro ascending the Greek Island of Patmos, circa 1971.

McCormick’s connections with New Jersey political leaders were extensive, as he frequently counselled governors and testified before legislative committees. In this photograph from the mid-1970s, he offers his opinions to Rutgers President Edward Bloustein (far left), and (left to right), Governor Brendan T. Byrne, former governor Robert Meyner, and former governor William T. Cahill.

McCormick here is captured in a characteristic classroom lecture setting at Rutgers, late 1970s.

McCormick at the time of his retirement from Rutgers, 1982.

An informal portrait of Richard and Katheryne McCormick as they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, 1995.

CHAPTER 5

The Turbulent ’60s at Rutgers

MB: In looking at your career at Rutgers, it’s clear that things at the university begin to accelerate in the early 1960s. You write in your history of Rutgers that 1959 was a particularly notable year. You mention the inauguration of Mason Gross; a state bond issue; and the federal government’s increasing interest in funding higher education because of Sputnik and the imperatives of the Cold War. Is that still your impression? That 1959 was a critical year in Rutgers history?1 RM: A whole lot of things came together. The fifties were a bad period. The GIs left, enrollments dropped, state support was extremely weak and uncertain. Moreover, it became inescapable that our ambiguous status with respect to the whole matter of the state relationship was a serious handicap. Finally, the trustees bit the bullet and agreed to a major change in their relationship with the state, which was embodied in legislation in 1956 that placed management of the university in the hands of a new agency, the board of governors, the majority of whose members would be appointed by the state. This was of enormous importance in clarifying our role. We had been designated as the state university back in 1945, but it never really took. And we had suffered defeats in attempts to secure the passage of bond issues that would have enabled us to expand.

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MB: Was Governor Robert Meyner one of the obstacles you faced in that regard? RM: Governor Meyner, in a sense, was one of the obstacles we faced. On the other hand, his insistence that the ambiguous status of the institution must be resolved was decisive in inducing the board of trustees to face the handwriting on the wall, if you will, and to come forth with this new relationship. In that sense he precipitated what I regarded at the time—and still do—as a very essential change in the management of the university. In that sense he was a benefactor. [Laughs] All right. So we get this new status. At the same time other favorable circumstances come into the picture. There was Sputnik. That was extremely influential. It led to the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), more money, and so on. Then we get a governor who is very sympathetic to higher education, in the person of Dick Hughes. That was a plus. Then we get a very dynamic, charismatic young president, Mason Gross, who is a salesman for the university. And by that time we have become very, very conscious of the impending “tidal wave” of students. All of these factors coming together led to a great expansion in terms of numbers of students, to a series of successful bond issues, which together with other resources, provided us with $250 million in the sixties enabling us to rebuild our physical plant here in New Brunswick and build whole new physical plants in Camden and Newark. So it does mark the birth of a new era. All of these factors contributed to create that new era. MB: How does the History Department at Rutgers specifically get impacted by these changes? RM: Very favorably. We were fortunate that when the opportunity came in the sixties, the opportunity provided by increased resources, and also by increasing numbers of students, and within the framework of the sixties, a heightened interest in History among undergraduates, we were in a position to make some good appointments and enhance the standing of the department within the profession. We were also able to greatly expand our doctoral program, which during the fifties had been very small. Aided among other things by the NDEA grants, we could offer decent fellowships. The sixties were a boom time in New Jersey and we had relatively generous state support both in terms of capital funds and in terms of salaries. By 1966–67 we were on the “A”-rated AAUP [American Association of University Professors] scale, and this of course greatly aided our recruiting. We were among the top public universities in compensation. Things moved.

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MB: It’s clear to me, reading things that you have written or spoken, that you have a high estimation of Governor Hughes. RM: Oh, yes. MB: To what degree did you have interaction with Governor Hughes? You seem to have had a good relationship with Governor Meyner, despite some different priorities. You did some ghost writing for Governor Meyner, you pushed him hard on the Tercentenary idea, and in other areas. To what extent were you able to have a similar relationship with Governor Hughes? Did he call on you for historical references, ask you to help with speeches of a historical nature? RM: It was a different relationship. I had a good relationship with both Meyner and Hughes. Meyner was a funny guy. When he liked somebody, he would go all out for that person. If he didn’t like you, you were dead. For some reason, we struck it off very, very early. Among other things, I had served on the governor’s commission on Morven, back in 1954–55. I had already met Meyner before that commission, but through that commission I got to know him better and then, as you said, I wrote some speeches for him. Then in ’57 I wrote to him proposing the establishment of the Tercentenary Commission. By this time he knew me and he had confidence in me. So he backed me on that, and we got that legislation through. With Hughes, I had a cordial relationship. It was not as operationally involved as it was with Meyner. He liked me. But he liked everybody. [Laughs] He also liked my wife. Consequently, any time I wanted to have access to Hughes, I had it. I can’t say that I used this access in any way for the university, in terms of lobbying. I didn’t need to. Others, like Mason Gross, had good relations with Hughes. I would use it for such things as the Tercentenary Commission, and later with other History-related matters. But he was just a delightful, warm, wonderful person. And of course I had a good deal of enthusiasm for his general policy orientation. MB: In 1965 there was a contentious governorship election in which Wayne Dumont based much of his campaign on the Genovese case. Did your sympathies lead you to become politically active that year?2 RM: Only in this sense: I was involved, maybe I was the leader of it, in drafting a statement that was also signed by my colleagues Dick Schlatter, Henry Winkler, and Peter Charanis, upholding Genovese’s right to speak out.3 This statement was endorsed by the university’s Board of Governors, and it was given wide publicity. This clearly indicated, of course, that we were associated with the position Governor Hughes took in that controversy, not with the position that Dumont took.

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MB: Do you understand, as a historian, why Dumont took that position? RM: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. [Talks off tape] MB: The Dumont candidacy fizzled and Rutgers was able to move on. The campus, of course, by the latter part of the sixties, is the home of a lot of unrest, a phenomenon common across the Eastern universities. RM: All over. Kent State, Berkeley, wherever. MB: To what extent do you notice a distinct change in the student body at Rutgers in the late sixties? RM: In 1964 the most active political group of students on the Rutgers New Brunswick campus was Students for Goldwater. That situation changed very much over the next year or two. We had that sensational, climactic, teach-in in April of ’65, which was one of the early teach-ins on the Vietnam War, and the one that produced, among other things, the Genovese case. This marks the boundary, the introduction, of an era of rebellion, radicalism, changes in lifestyle, changes in the whole youth culture. It’s a very complex thing and has many different sources and many different manifestations. It was strongly apparent here, as I say it was at Columbia, Harvard, wherever you want to point to. My major concern as these new currents began sweeping through the campus, was to work against certain tendencies toward the polarization of the faculty. I did not play an up-front role, as did many of my History colleagues, in public opposition to the war in Vietnam. I didn’t march in demonstrations or speak in teach-ins. But there were certain issues before the faculty that were potentially very, very dangerous and explosive. Here is where I came in. I was concerned to try to prevent a complete breach within the faculty between the activists and those who were more oriented toward sustaining the academic programs. That was my role. MB: What was your awareness of what was going on at Columbia in 1968 and your thoughts about the role people like Richard Hofstadter, Peter Gay, and Fritz Stern took, political liberals who were defending the conservative values of the institution, trying to maintain dialogue, working to keep the university open? Did you identify with what they were doing, or did you see the Columbia issues as separate from Rutgers? RM: I’ll give you a couple of specific illustrations. There was the whole matter of the black student protest movement, which develops in the mid-to-late sixties and becomes quite evident by April 1968, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and is surging by 1969. This movement is manifesting itself at Rutgers, but also

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at campuses elsewhere. As it came close to the climax, if you will, I was aware, and I think some other members of the faculty were, too, that on all of these campuses where movements were underway, the blacks were presenting their demands, quite understandably, to deans and presidents and boards. I saw problems with that because many of the demands they were making fell properly within the province of the faculty, for example, in the area of admissions requirements, in the area of curriculum, and so on. At these institutions a dean, a president, or the governing board would respond. This would cause a fissure between the governing body and the faculty because of a lack of consultation. As things were reaching a boiling point here, some of us talked about this matter and one Sunday night a large segment of the faculty of Rutgers College met over at the Physics Building at Busch Campus. We decided that the demands that we knew were imminent at that time should be presented to and received by the faculty at Rutgers College. We asked Dean Arnold Grobman to call a special faculty meeting to receive these demands. He agreed to have this meeting. He was a very good dean. So a couple days later this faculty meeting was held in the gym. The gym was packed. The faculty was sitting on the main floor, together with a representative delegation of the black students, together with their attorney, Bill Wright, an alumnus of Rutgers. The galleries were packed.4 MB: A great way to have deliberation. RM: Well, we had a scenario prepared. The black students presented their demands. Then, I don’t remember whether I presented the resolution—I know I wrote the resolution and I probably presented it—which was to the effect that the faculty would not take up any other business until all of these demands had been addressed, and that a special committee be appointed (and we knew who the members of that committee would be) to meet immediately following the end of this meeting to prepare a response to these demands. And this was overwhelmingly approved by the faculty. I was named chair of this committee. It was the hardest working day I ever spent in my life. Our committee adjourned down to Milledoller Hall, which was the office of the Dean of the College, and we had also convened all the relevant committees of the college—Admissions Committee, Committee on Instruction, etc.—and we parceled out these demands. Those committees went to work. We—the central committee—went to work on several of them. Meanwhile, as part of that resolution in the morning, we had agreed the faculty would reconvene in the evening. Finally, these things came funneling back into our committee, and we had a whole staff of secretaries there, mimeograph machines going, and the result was that just before the evening meeting was to

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assemble, we had this lengthy mimeographed material responding to all of the demands that were within the province of the faculty (there were some that were completely outside our province). Our responses addressed such things as admissions, financial aid, curriculum, and so on. I hadn’t had a bite to eat. [Laughs] And as the last sheets came out of the mimeograph machines we walked back up to the gym. We presented our resolutions one by one by one. There was discussion, but every one of the resolutions passed. MB: Was the situation in the evening the same as in the morning? RM: Same. In the gym, faculty on the main floor, galleries packed with students—very orderly, very orderly. No chanting, no booing, no stamping of feet, no anything like that. It was a very orderly meeting, remarkably so. At the same time, there was a extraordinary sense in the air that we were involved here in quite a historic operation. One of the great difficulties that we had somehow to overcome, was that this was March. By March, we had virtually accepted our incoming class for the succeeding year. By mid-March, under standard procedure, we weren’t receiving applications. We had only a small number of black students admitted—maybe forty, maybe fewer. We were determined that we had to boost that figure, and boost it by September. How to do it? Well, there’d been an idea that had been kicking around but hadn’t gotten any place, and we seized on that. We established a Transitional Year Program—TYP—and because it was a new program we argued that we could accept applications for it, and that we would seek to raise the number of black students to 100. That passed. And that gave us the opening to go out and do some recruiting for this program. This so-called Transitional Year Program became what we know today as the Educational Opportunity Program—EOP—and that transition was made. That, quite frankly, was a gimmick to enable us to reopen the recruitment and admissions process. MB: This was March of 1969? RM: March of ’69. MB: What were the reactions, respectively, of the president, the dean, and the students? RM: They were all supportive. However, what had finally precipitated these actions was the fact that early in March the black organization of students at Newark had taken over a building.5 For two or three days there were negotiations between the students in the building and the acting dean at Newark. Mason Gross became involved. There were less disruptive demonstrations at Rutgers-New Brunswick. Here, the black students had gone through the cafeteria line and dumped all their food on the floor. A similar thing happened

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at Douglass. But attention focused on Newark. Press reaction was, shall we say, mixed. Some—many—journalists denounced this student takeover. Because they had crippled school for a few days, many people denounced the “coddling” of these students. So that the president, Mason Gross, who had involved himself there and also had involved himself at Camden, got hundreds of vicious letters. The files are full of them. There was considerable distress on the part of certain segments of the alumni. Finally, there was a legislative hearing in Trenton conducted by the House Education Committee, in which politicians had an opportunity to express their concerns about the manner in which this was handled. One of the consequences of it all was legislation that constrained Rutgers in its management of its funds. It set up stricter state controls over how Rutgers used its funds—a punitive measure. While within the university—speaking now of the president, the dean, and the students—there was strong support for change, outside the university there was considerable hostility to the actions taken by the black students and toward actions taken to address their concerns. MB: Were the black students willing to accept the faculty recommendations? RM: I worked very, very closely with the leadership of the black students. They constituted a remarkably dedicated, well-informed, concerned, responsible group. My respect for them was sky high. For example, we’d gone ahead and done all these things, and done so with the support of the dean and the central administration. But we had also provided that a committee would monitor to assure that these things were done. We met and scrutinized what was being done in admissions, in financial aid, with respect to the police force, and so on and so on. By April, it was obvious that we had a problem, in terms of where the money was going to come from. So, we held another special faculty meeting. By this time I was working very, very closely with another highly respected member of the faculty, a physicist, Bernie Serin, and like me, he had widespread respect among the faculty. He had a lot of credibility. So we worked out this scheme wherein individual faculty members would be asked to pledge one percent of their salary to help finance this program. And, by God, we had an astonishing number of them sign up for this. It was important as a manifestation of faculty support, but it was also very tangible. But we were still short of money. So in June, Leon Green and I—Leon was head of the black student organization—persuaded the Board of Trustees, with support from the administration, to tap their special funds for money to ensure the success of this initiative. That was a joyous afternoon when we got that commitment. Now, there were lots of rough spots in this program. I won’t deny that. It

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was done in a hurry, and even with honest deliberation you never know what the side effects will be. But we were able to meet our commitments as a faculty and as a college and avoid the kind of ruptures that had occurred at many other institutions. MB: When you revisited those days, by virtue of writing a book about them, did you come up with perspectives that surprised you as you were assessing those very interesting times? RM: I had forgotten the extent of the virulence of the opposition of certain of the political segments and the citizenry and alumni. At the time, my eyes were so fixed on the operational aspects of this thing, that I wasn’t aware as I was later how much opposition there was to change. MB: At the same time you have the black student protests, at least two other things are going on— RM: The Susman Report.6 MB: Tell me about it. RM: Warren Susman was a very gifted member of the History Department. The dean, Arnold Grobman, was a very open-minded guy. He asked Warren to let his imagination roam, to take a whole fresh look at the college and come up with proposals that he thought would be interesting and worthwhile to reshape the college. Well, it was quite a report. It was published, distributed to the faculty, and the students became very much interested, because Warren had an extraordinary relation with students. Susman produced a sweeping document, the very title of which tells you that. It was called “Toward the Reconstruction of an American College.” It covered everything related to the academic and social life, the whole organization of the college. Immediately, the faculty split almost down the middle, with a pro-Susman faction and an anti-Susman faction. Warren enjoyed enormous popularity with one faction of the faculty. Another faction of the faculty couldn’t stand him. [Laughs] It was personal as well as opposition to his ideas. This occurred at about the same time as the black student movement, but it came to a climax a little bit later. This polarization worried me greatly. Feelings ran so high on both sides. MB: Was he going to change requirements? Get rid of requirements? RM: There wouldn’t be much left of requirements. For example, you’d get rid of the old distribution requirements, like requirements for foreign language, science. So, there were vested interests involved. Also, deep-seated political differences. Anyhow, we had these rancorous meetings, and I was looking for a way to heal this. Well, at one of these meetings, a professor of German, Claude Hill,

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who had never been active at all in faculty affairs, came up with a proposal which he put before the faculty somewhat diffidently. It was immediately brushed off, because he had no standing. Most people didn’t even know who he was, I guess. But I saw something there. So I went to my trusted colleague, Bernie Serin, and I said, “Bernie, I think we’ve got something here.” We discussed it. Bernie lived near Arnold Grobman over in Piscataway. I went and tried it out on Arnold, and he said, “maybe we can do this.” A day or two later, the OAH was meeting in Philadelphia. I managed to catch up with Warren, who was always surrounded by a coterie of admirers. I caught him just as he was getting off the elevator. I had a good relationship with Warren. And I took him aside and said, “Warren, let me try this on you.” And I explained what Bernie and I had in mind. He had respect for Bernie and, of course, for Arnold. I said, “do you think this can work? Do you think we can do this?” And he agreed. So, another faculty meeting in the gymnasium. Again, faculty on the main floor, students packing the galleries. MB: So the students were intensely interested in this? RM: [Laughs] Oh, yeah, there were vigorous partisans and opponents among the students. . . . Anyhow, we presented this proposal. And it was pretty clear to me that the center of the faculty—the not-so-radical ones and the not-so-conservative ones, were eager to bring this festering dispute to a solution. On the other hand, there were those on the far Left and the far Right who were still interested in continuing the battle. After a couple of rather unpleasant episodes, we got the proposal through with a pretty substantial majority. MB: You refer to “unpleasant episodes.” Do you mean difficult meetings? RM: No. Some people were saying some pretty nasty things. We had the votes, however. MB: So, what was the change? RM: A modest change in the curriculum. A reduction in the number of requirements, but not as sweeping as the Susman report proposed, and minus several other features in the Susman report that were just too visionary. MB: Why do you think Susman went along? RM: It’s hard to say; it’s always hard to figure Warren. But, number one, he had a loyalty to the college. I think he was troubled by the controversy. He had great respect for me and for Serin. He was willing to listen to me and to Bernie and to Arnold. There were significant concessions, but not so great as to alienate the Right, if you will, and sufficient concessions to bring in the moderate Left. It was

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a compromise, in other words. So, we got that through and got that off our backs. Well, a couple of years later—1975, I believe—we went back and had another look, in a quieter atmosphere, and restored some of the requirements that had been eliminated. That was another interesting experience. And the third one that I was deeply involved in was coeducation. Very interesting story. There was a cocktail party in the spring of 1968 at Arnold Grobman’s. A half-dozen of us were sipping our drinks, chatting. Coeducation was in the air back then, and it came up in this conversation. And we discovered that everybody in this little group felt, “yeah, Rutgers College ought to be coeducational. Of course it ought to be coeducational. It’s ridiculous to still have an all men’s college.” So the thing went through the planning committee, it went before the faculty, in ’68. The faculty voted unanimously, with one abstention, in favor of coeducation. OK. So then I found myself chairman of the committee to bring this about. Well, we collected data, we looked at what had happened at other schools, we had input from the Women’s Equity Action League, which was perhaps more involved in this than NOW [National Organization for Women] was, I don’t know. Meanwhile, our resolution went to the Board of Governors. The Board of Governors turned it down. Not too surprising. So then we went to work further, collecting more information. Among other things, we consulted with the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] office in Newark, on the possibility of bringing a lawsuit. And that sort of dragged along. Meanwhile the administration appointed a committee headed by Henry Winkler to study the matter. It soon became apparent that the main stumbling block was the dean of Douglass College, Marjorie Foster. She foresaw—correctly—that if Rutgers College went coeducational, this would greatly impact her woman’s college. There was a great possibility that many of the strongest women candidates for admission would apply to a coeducational school rather than to a single-sex school. Foster was a formidable adversary. She had her supporters on the Board of Governors and around the state, and she even managed to gain support among Rutgers College alumni who feared that if you let women in there would be fewer spots for men. Then one night, Arnold Grobman and I met with the governing committee of the Rutgers College parents’ association, up at this apartment house at the end of George Street. I’ll never forget it. Somewhat to our surprise, we found the parents’ association wholly supportive of coeducation. Shortly thereafter, there was a meeting of the Rutgers Board of Governors in Camden, and they sent a delegation to Camden. This had an effect on the Board of Governors. They weren’t a bunch

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of crazy college professors. Meanwhile, there had been a committee of students, which wasn’t as active as you might have supposed, on the subject. Finally, in 1971, around there, the Board of Governors capitulated and agreed that Rutgers College could become coeducational.7 I was made chair of the committee to handle the transition. I had an interesting committee, men and women. We didn’t have many women on the faculty at that time, but there were some, and there were people from the Dean of Students’ office. So we went to work on that, we had about a year to work on it. It turned out that it wasn’t a very big problem. You had to change some urinals to something else, decide on patterns of housing, predict enrollments, and so on. So in September of 1972 we admitted our first cohort of women. MB: How many were there? RM: I don’t remember. MB: Small, medium, large contingent? RM: Small. But by 1979 there were as many women as men. Now, what facilitated this transition, as at many other places, was the decision to expand the size of Rutgers College. We had at that time, say 5000 students, I forget the exact figure. If you’re going to admit a freshman class of, say, 1000, you’re going to reserve, say, 300 spaces for women, and that’s 300 fewer for men. So the transition at first was gradual. The cohort of women was small, but growing. But at the same time the size of the college was increased; we didn’t get a kickback in depriving the vaunted males of their prerogatives. MB: What about the impact on Douglass? RM: It hurt them badly. Their admissions profile immediately started downhill. There was no question that that was going to happen. At first it was the decline of the admissions profile, not a decline in the number of students, because there was enough of a pool to keep admissions up. But in the past few years there has been a decline in enrollment at Douglass. We have Rutgers students housed over there. So it had that impact. MB: But this was a trend that was impossible to ignore, and it would have been foolish to ignore it. RM: We were the last nonmilitary men’s college in a public institution in the United States—that is, Rutgers College—to go coeducational. But that was a fun fight. MB: I’d imagine that less fun would have been the rancor on campus over the Vietnam War. RM: That was a completely different battleground.

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MB: Did you have teach-ins, did you have debates? Did you have protests? RM: As I said before, I was quite deliberately not an activist, as many of my colleagues were. Susman, Gardner, Weinstein, Bailey, Bell, they were all in this thing.8 I was not. As I say, my concern was to prevent the kind of damaging polarization that could flow from these various issues. I had my own feelings, and I’ve never been a political activist in terms of going out on picket lines, carrying signs, that kind of thing. MB: By 1967 you were chair of the History Department. Were you still in the classroom? RM: Half time. Maybe one course one term, two courses another term, something like that. I had finished writing the history of Rutgers. The final year was the most exhausting year I had ever gone through, trying to meet the November 1966 deadline. I had just completed The Second Party System, I had polished up the New Jersey book, I was becoming increasingly involved in some of these collegiate issues, and so on, so that I hadn’t spent the amount of time I should have over the years working on the History of Rutgers. In effect it is 1964 before I can really get down to work on it. MB: So, a lot of years to cover in very little time. RM: Oh, God. The worst year I have ever had. And when I handed in to the press the final pages in August of 1966, I went right across the river to the golf course and bought myself a new set of golf clubs. That was my reward for this horrible year. [Laughs] MB: It was a reasonable step to take on more administrative duties in the department after all of this. RM: Well, I had to. In those days, we had a policy of three years and out as chair. It was my turn. So, I did it. Actually, I had to do it a little earlier than I anticipated. Pete Charanis, who was chair before me, had a heart attack, so I had to step in about the last year of his administration, and I was chair during all this turmoil. As chair I was not only buffeted by all the turmoil that was going on, and internal divisions in the department that were related to all of this political stuff, but it was also the period—you couldn’t imagine it today—of offers. During my three years as chair, at least half the members of the department had substantial offers from other universities. MB: And you had to deal with that. RM: And I had to deal with that, get up the money to keep them, and so on. Also, we were still expanding. So we were doing recruiting. It was a tough time to be chair, with all that going on. And I never

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wanted to be chair. I did it because it had to be done, and I was glad to give it up in ’69. MB: When you left the chairmanship, what was your greatest satisfaction? RM: I survived. [Laughs] I managed to survive personally and I managed to keep the department together, although there were very, very deep cleavages—political, ideological cleavages. It was a harrowing experience. You had an old guard, as you might expect, and basically they were ideologically conservative and on academic issues in particular they were conservative. The younger members of the department tended to be ideologically Left and far more experimental. Trying to steer a course here—oh, brother. MB: How well did you do holding onto people who had offers from other institutions? RM: In most cases we held on to them. MB: Any major disappointment along those lines, losing someone you wanted to keep? Genovese left during your time as chair? RM: Yes, but that was presented as a fait accompli. Gene was not interested in bargaining at that point. I can’t think of any others we lost. MB: So you kept your talent and recruited new talent. RM: Oh, yes. MB: Any disappointments as chair? RM: I don’t think of it in terms of disappointments. I just think of it as very, very arduous, with competing offers, recruitment, political divisions within the department, tremendous ferment that was going on at the college—coeducation, black student protests. No time for research. MB: In May 1970 an event occurred at Kent State University—kids were killed. When you first heard the reports, did you say to yourself or your wife, “Oh, God, something is gonna happen here at Rutgers?” RM: No question about that, but I might just say parenthetically, I was more impacted by what happened in April of 1968—the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Just a day or two after the assassination—it was a Saturday—I was due to speak to the parents at Douglass, and so was Mason Gross. I had prepared some remarks, the usual thing expected of a university historian on that occasion, but that was not what the occasion called for. Remember, I was devastated by that event [King’s assassination]. Kent State—so many things happened in that arena that while I saw it as an event that

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had a character of its own, it was sort of a culmination; it wasn’t the kind of bolt out of the blue that the assassination of King was. I do remember walking down to Queens campus where there was a gathering of students, and Mason Gross with his wonderful touch with both faculty and students, addressing them. The students, with a sort of combination of anger and bewilderment—anger that this had happened, bewildered that their understanding of the situation, their diagnosis, their vision, seemingly had so little support in the public arena. MB: I was a college student at that time and my closest friend was at Rutgers. He was in that crowd. He wrote me a letter several days thereafter from the president’s office at Rutgers, saying he was part of a group of students who had occupied the president’s office— RM: Very politely, too. MB: And in that letter he wrote me from the president’s office he said, “by the way, President Gross said we were welcome to occupy his office so long as we keep it relatively orderly. This is not Columbia,” or words to that effect. Does this accord with your own memory? RM: Oh, certainly. Certainly. No cops. But Mason paid a price. MB: Because conservatives on campus and alumni would have been hostile. RM: Not just on campus, but across the state. He paid a price. MB: Not just hate mail this time—he lost some leverage as president, right? RM: He did. MB: Do you believe what he did as president that critical week made sense under the circumstances? RM: Certainly, yes. The alternative—Kent State was an alternative. MB: So you were in sympathy with Mason Gross. RM: Of course, yes. MB: How much longer did Mason Gross remain as president? RM: You’re onto something here, aren’t you? MB: I’ve always thought there was a connection. RM: There was. I say, the battering that he took from the black student protest incidents and the Vietnam demonstrations took a toll in terms of his support within the Board of Governors, within the alumni, among politicians, the general public. In hindsight, Mason got through the Vietnam demonstrations amazingly well. But when the blacks ooccupied the classroom building in Newark and he

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didn’t move the troops in—this was “capitulation to force” and so on. It was a very rough time. MB: It probably took a physical and emotional toll, too. RM: Physically, he changed tremendously. If you look at a picture of Mason in, say, 1968, and another one in 1972, there was a tremendous difference. He wasn’t in good health. He never took care of himself, but that was a whole different story. And there were other factors, but these things weakened him, no question about it. But, I say, the alternatives were worse in terms of the university, because the mistakes that might have been made, were rather readily repaired in the later years. Mistakes that would have really crippled us were avoided. MB: It seems that in many ways he did for Rutgers what Kingman Brewster did at Yale, as opposed to what Grayson Kirk was like at Columbia. RM: It took Columbia years and years to recover. And Cornell too. MB: I’d like to explore how you came to be appointed dean of Rutgers College. RM: When Dean Grobman announced that he was leaving to take a comparable job at the University of Illinois/Chicago, the usual search committee was appointed—faculty, students, one member of the Board of Trustees, and I was chair. We went through the usual procedure of collecting dossiers and conducting interviews and finally winnowed it down to three or four people. The upshot was that we didn’t find anyone who would accept who was also acceptable to the faculty. So a year of effort went down the drain. . . . OK, so I went to work for a second year. Meanwhile, there was an acting dean, Reg Bishop, who had also been a candidate for the job, but had not been recommended by our committee. MB: Was he a Rutgers faculty member? RM: Well, he had been an associate dean for years, Dean of Instruction he was called. When it looked as though the search wasn’t going well this second go-round, the committee—I suspect, prodded by Warren, but maybe others as well—recommended my appointment as dean. So one day I got a call from the president, by now Ed Bloustein, saying, “they want you to be dean.” I said, “no way.” I had never wanted to be an administrator. I’m a historian, scholar, teacher. So he put the arm on me, but I said no. A day or two later, Paul Pearson, then in the Provost’s Office, came around to see me and say, “You’ve got to do this.” People starting putting the heat on. So I had another call from Ed. He said, “You’ve got to do this, for the college. You have no choice.” So very reluctantly, I said, “all right, I’ll

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do it. But between us, I won’t do it for more than three years.” I knew that once I got out of the profession, so to speak, that long, it would be very difficult to get back in. So as of July 1, 1974, I became dean. MB: How long did you serve? RM: Three years. MB: And how would you characterize those three years? RM: I think most people would say I did a good job. I had a good relationship with the faculty, I had a good relationship with students, I had a good relationship with the central administration. But it was not my cup of tea. I taught the whole time, one course a semester. I gave my large lecture course the first semester, gave something else the second semester. But, I couldn’t do any research, and a deanship takes a completely different kind of mentality from being a scholar. Deans are absolutely necessary—I love deans. They are very important in the scheme of things. But it’s not the kind of work that I particularly enjoyed, though once in a while you get the feeling “I done good,” and that buoys you up. But I continually looked forward to the time when I could step down. As a matter of fact just at the point I accepted the deanship I was nominated for the vice presidency of the Professional Division of the AHA [American Historical Association], which would have been interesting. So I immediately wrote and removed myself from that. That would have been fun. And I paid a price. The rate at which things move—not keeping up with the literature, and so on. I missed it terribly. MB: Did you spend most of your time as dean on personnel issues, curriculum, other matters? RM: In those days I had 26 departments to deal with, budgetary responsibility for about 560 faculty. Rutgers College included, in addition to the liberal arts students, affiliated students in Pharmacy and Engineering. It grew to 8000 students by the time I finished in 1977. Moreover, the same issue of the Targum [the Rutgers University student newspaper] that announced my appointment as dean had a big headline, “McCormick appointed dean; budget slashed.” So we entered into a period of austerity. However, the period of austerity affected us less than other units because we were expanding. During my first year as dean I appointed a very good committee, and staff for it, to draw up a full-scale plan for the expansion of the college. The committee was headed by Dick Weidner, who was one of the associate deans. They brought in a very good report which said what was needed to carry through this expansion. That went well. We also were able to do a lot of recruiting because of the expansion. The main problem was trying to hold existing faculty, although

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other places were experiencing austerity, too. The height of the bargaining era had subsided by that time. MB: Were you involved as dean with the reorganization of the institution? RM: During my deanship, we had something called the federated college plan.9 It was a constant subject of controversy—study, restudy, adjustment. One of the things I became involved with as dean was fighting certain changes that had been proposed in the structure. It was obvious this federated college plan was not working. I promised Paul Pearson, who was in the Provost’s Office, that when I retired I would do a history of academic organization in New Brunswick, which I hoped would be of use in providing historical context for considering what kind of academic organization we should be headed toward. So, the year after I retired from the deanship I devoted almost exclusively to that study. When I finished, I told Pearson and his boss, the provost, Ken Wheeler, that what I would like to do is present my findings in the form of three lectures to the faculty and anybody else who wanted to come. They agreed. On three successive weeks I gave these lectures, trying to describe the peculiar way in which the academic organization as it existed in 1977 had evolved. Implicitly at least, it indicated the deficiencies of the current structure, and it [suggested] some of the directions that we might consider in the future. OK, that’s on the record. . . . This was followed by more reports, and finally the provost thought he had a report that he would go with in terms of future pattern of organization. So he organized what he called a “dog and pony show”—a group of four or five people to go from campus to campus explaining this projected scheme of organization. I was part of this dog and pony show. My contribution to the show [laughs] was to be constructively critical of the proposal and to shift the discussion in a somewhat different direction from what had been proposed. So they went back to the drawing board, and after a good deal of agonizing, the provost . . . came up with a new plan. That plan went to the Board of Governors to be submitted to further revisions and eventually emerged in May of 1979 as the plan that was to be implemented in 1980–1981. I had serious reservations about that plan, which I put in writing and sent around. There was no question that that plan in many ways represented a step in the right direction, but it resulted in an anomalous situation. We retained the various colleges, but the colleges had no faculties. Faculties were placed in the faculty of arts and sciences—1000 plus of them—but the faculty of arts and sciences had no students. The colleges had no faculties. The form of organization that we had in 1977 was unique in higher education. We revised it radically and came out with another scheme that was

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unique in American higher education. Now being unique doesn’t necessarily mean being wrong, but you have to wonder about it. . . . MB: You’re telling me that a Livingston College or Douglass College History professor would be recruited through the Rutgers College History Department, tenured through the Rutgers College History Department, judged by the same standards as the Rutgers College History Department. RM: No. We now have only one History Department. There is no Livingston department or Douglass or Rutgers History department. The dean of Rutgers College formerly had a faculty of 563 people, with budgetary responsibility; that faculty had the conventional power of a faculty, determining admissions requirements, determining curriculum, recommending for degrees, and so on. You see? Now, the faculty of arts and sciences determines curriculum, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences has the budget responsibility, and so on. . . . It’s very complex. And here we go again [he points to a copy of a draft proposal for further revision of the system]. I’ll be interested in analyzing this current scheme. MB: It seems like a hydra-headed monster. RM: The curse of this institution is geography. . . . Here we have the College Avenue campus, the Busch campus, the Livingston campus, the Douglass-Cook campus. . . . MB: What’s the Busch campus? RM: Across the river in Piscataway. MB: What’s there? RM: Most of the university now. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Pharmacy, Engineering, Discrete Mathematics, the library of Science and Medicine, the largest amount of dormitory space—that’s all at Busch. Then we have Livingston out in left field; across town Douglass campus, Cook [Agricultural] campus. Now we’re developing another one in the heart of New Brunswick—the Mason Gross School of the Performing and Visual Arts, and the new school of Public Policy and Urban Studies. We also built a huge new dorm in conjunction with the Medical School next to the railroad station in the heart of town. Our students live on buses. MB: Not ideal. RM: Not ideal. MB: But you’re going to have to live with it unless you go back to a decentralized system. RM: I’ll see what they come up with in this new proposal.

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MB: You retired in 1982 after thirty-seven years on the faculty. Obviously, it was not your idea to receive an honorary degree. How did that come about? RM: Warren Susman. Warren talked it up with other people and I was flabbergasted. You don’t usually give honorary degrees to retiring faculty. But Warren was very devoted to me for some reason. I was embarrassed, as a matter of fact, when I heard about it. Then, it was not simply an honorary degree, but they were going to have this colloquium, and they were going to have all these high powered guys—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Eric Foner, Walter Dean Burnham, Maurice Duverger, Joel Silbey. . . . We had this marvelous colloquium, and my son took it upon himself to edit the papers as a book.10 Then they paid to bring my students back for the colloquium. So we had a reunion of students. It was mind-boggling. MB: But gratifying, really. RM: Terrifying. [Laughs] Yeah, it was gratifying. But I’m not that good to call for that kind of stuff. So in that sense I was embarrassed.

CHAPTER 6

Doing History: Reflections

MB: Let’s talk more about doing History. The first thing is, can you tell me some of the range of things you taught? Was New Jersey History part of your repertoire? RM: When I joined the teaching staff at Rutgers in 1945, the standard teaching load was twelve hours a week—four courses. Of course in those days we had classes six days a week. . . . During the first five years I taught the American history survey, Latin American history, recent American history, and, starting in February of 1948, New Jersey history. It wasn’t until we got into the 1950s—I can’t give you a precise date—that graduate work began to play a significant role in the life of the department. But when it did, I gave one of what we called our “Problems” courses. I gave it on Saturday morning, to a fairly large number of graduate students, most of whom were going for master’s degrees, many of them teachers in the area, which covered American history from the Revolution to the Civil War. Then, as things developed within a few years, I began giving a graduate seminar, usually in alternate years, there was no precise formula. That related definitely to the Jacksonian period. Then in the seventies, we introduced junior seminars. The idea was for history majors to take a one-semester junior seminar in which they would be introduced to hands-on research. I found that

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extremely satisfying. I should also mention that it was in the mid-to-late fifties that we began to shift to the lecture system, which included recitation sections. I taught continually in the survey course in American history, the first semester of that course, which, incidentally, met first period, 8 o’clock. I taught that course in the lecture format from the mid-fifties until the time I retired [in 1982]. MB: New Jersey history? RM: That began, as I said, in 1948. It was a one-semester course. Then for several years I selfishly made it a year-long course, essentially because I wanted to develop it. It was a success, people enjoyed it and learned something from it. What distinguished that course and made it very agreeable to me was that every student did a term paper, but not your usual term paper. I would tell the students, “when you finish your paper, you will be the world’s outstanding authority on your topic.” And because I knew the sources in the library very well, and had a good grounding in New Jersey history, I could identify a limitless number of topics where they would know more than anyone else had ever known. Obviously the quality varied, but a sizeable number were well done. A couple of them were published in New Jersey History. MB: What kinds of things did you most highlight when you taught New Jersey history? RM: Well, it was basically a political history of the colony and state. It was more narrative than analytical, but I did try to associate the history of New Jersey with national history. For example, if you want to teach the history of transportation, there’s no better place to be than here in New Brunswick. I could relate the development of transportation in this area, and the state at large, to the general phenomenon, the “transportation revolution.” I could do the same with other aspects of national history. MB: Were you at a handicap in teaching that course, due to the lack of good secondary sources? RM: Yes and no. Yes, in that the secondary sources were limited and often of poor quality. No, in the sense that students are limited in what they are able to absorb and process. So that I think I had enough to give them a representative picture of the state in its various periods. I didn’t have enough to give them lots of enjoyable reading to do. MB: What was the typical size of the New Jersey history course? Was there a typical size? RM: By the mid-1960s, there were 30-40 students in the class. I would have individual conferences with each student, giving them a

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choice, within limits. Then I would have another conference to discuss sources. I would provide handouts on how to develop an outline, how to use sources, and so on. So, I did some teaching in that course. Don’t get me wrong, I was a very good lecturer. Put me in a room with 400 students and I was outstanding. But it’s not really teaching. It’s very different from a seminar or the kind of experience I could become involved with in the New Jersey history course. MB: Would you say you had a representative sample of Rutgers students in your New Jersey history course, or were they primarily teachers in training? RM: It varied. It attracted a fair number of students in journalism. I’m not conscious there was a preponderance of students in education. There were History majors in it. It was pretty varied. MB: I want to clarify when the transition was made to more emphasis on large lecture courses. This occurred in the fifties? RM: The late fifties. The way we did it in the American history survey, for diplomatic reasons more than pedagogic reasons, involved having all the Americanists lecture in the course. Then this one and that one dropped out. I stuck. Warren Susman stuck. By the mid-sixties, it was largely a McCormick and Susman operation. MB: I believe that Susman sometimes team-taught the course, or part of the course, with Lloyd Gardner. RM: There were two sections of the course. Susman and Gardner were doing the recent period. [Richard Maxwell] “Dick” Brown and I were doing the early period. But after that, Gardner dropped out and Brown went out west [to the University of Oregon]. MB: So, the course was a team-taught course in the sixties, then it devolved down to one? RM: Right. MB: To what extent did the people who were team teaching interact with each other? RM: At the outset we had [John] Higham, [Ethan] Ellis, McCormick, [Nathan] Miller—perhaps five of us. MB: Did you attend each others’ lectures? RM: [Sighs audibly] Yes, for a while. MB: Why do you sigh like that? Because they’re teaching to undergraduates, and you don’t need to hear that?

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RM: No, no, [I didn’t]. I used to tell my TAs, one of you needs to be there, but generally you should feel under no obligation. I told them, “You’re not to discuss my lectures.” Their focus was on the reading. MB: At one point in our discussions you told me that Rutgers was not a place you would even encourage graduate students to come in the ’50s. What did that mean in terms of staffing your large lecture courses? RM: [Laughs] We didn’t have many graduate students in the fifties, but then, we didn’t have many undergraduates, either. Moreover, during the late forties and early fifties we didn’t have recitation sections and didn’t need TAs. But this thing slowly develops during the latter part of the fifties—introducing it in the Western Civ course and the American History survey. Initially, they weren’t that large. We started in Milledoler Hall, which held maybe 100, 120 students. Ultimately we used Scott Hall, which could hold more than 400. Another reason, no doubt, for introducing the lecture system was so we could get TAs so we could have some decent graduate students. MB: You were a busy man. You were doing things on many tracks. Were there different phases of your career when you enjoyed teaching more, or did better, or not as well? RM: I would certainly acknowledge that teaching was only one of my preoccupations. I was doing a hell of a lot of other things. I didn’t spend all my time teaching and talking to students and so on. In the last ten years of my teaching here, it became less satisfying. There were two elements in that equation, and one was me. I was getting older, I was getting more removed from the mores and concerns of undergraduates. It wasn’t that I knew less history or had less ability to communicate. I just wasn’t relating as I once had, and I could sense it. The other thing, and I have no objective evidence to offer, the undergraduate students didn’t seem to be as stimulating, even in things like the junior seminar, when I worked with a group of no more than a dozen in producing these term papers. I didn’t think they were as interesting, stimulating, or lively. It was partly me, but I sense it was partly them. MB: I bridge some of this era, and I noticed somewhere in the late ’70s and early ’80s that we have a transition: Students are not grounded the same way coming out of high school into college. They’re no less intelligent, obviously, but their vocabulary is different, their frame of reference is different in terms of having knowledge of history or literature coming in—knowing who Gatsby was, for example, or Cotton Mather—they’re not going to have the same frame of reference. And I think that makes teaching harder, if you

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come out of the older tradition. My younger colleagues don’t have the same problem. They are used to multi-media, fast-paced interactions, and so on. RM: In discussing my teaching at Rutgers, I simply must mention my American politics course. I introduced that course in the very early sixties. The first year I taught it as a year-long course, then it became a half-year course. It was like the Jersey history course, my invention and there was no textbook. I had big classes. [Laughs] The funny thing was, when I became Dean, the History department surreptitiously hired my son and told him he could teach the history of American politics, which I had relinquished. When I went back to full-time teaching, we taught it jointly. That was a good experience. MB: When you say large, do you mean 40–50 students? RM: Oh, larger than that. 60 plus students. MB: Did you have a TA? RM: I didn’t have recitation sections, but Ray Gunn was a graduate student who took very full notes and typed them up for me. I have those typed notes. That was a very important thing, working up that course. MB: Did you assign your own books in the course? RM: Just The Second American Party System, which I put on reserve with other books. MB: I wanted to ask you about undergraduate theses. How high did you set the bar? Explain the Henry Rutgers program, for example. RM: That was introduced in the early sixties, as I recall. In your senior year, to be selected as a Henry Rutgers scholar was considered an honor. It took the place of two courses. Well, I had some good experiences and some very bad experiences with it. The catch was this: You have a bright kid with a good record, but, he’s young. The whole first semester goes by. He’s taking three courses. He’s having a helluva good time. He gets into the second semester, then I start to worry. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not so well. After maybe half a dozen years of this I was not eager to have a Henry Rutgers scholar unless I knew the student very well. MB: Let’s talk about graduate education for a bit. Obviously it gave you satisfaction to work closely with people who accomplished a major research project. Can you go back to your first memories teaching graduate students? RM: [Loud laugh] What was his name? This was a man—Lambert was his name—who claimed to have acted with Joe Jefferson. The graduate thing was so new at that time, that by taking him on as a

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seminar student—a seminar of one—I got a course off. [Laughs.] . . . It took a few years until people like Carl Prince, Fred Black, Herman Platt, Fred Herrman and a few others showed up, so that you could have a respectable seminar. If the truth be told—which we must—no more than one in three of those students that we had in the late fifties and sixties had the potential to earn a doctorate. Nowadays, this department has the financial resources to match or exceed Harvard—literally. But, occasionally, a Carl Prince, a Larry Gerlach, a Ray Gunn, a Peter Levine would show up. There were one or two out of the four or five [students] that you felt were legitimate. Unlike today, when they are all potential or actual stars. MB: To what extent did students come to Rutgers for graduate degrees in History because they had been recommended by their undergraduate mentors to study with Professor McCormick, to what extent was it just serendipitous they showed up at your door? RM: After The Second Party System was published in ’66, there were people who came here because their professors recommended it or because they knew what I was doing, but I don’t suppose there were more than a dozen in that category. One or two came down from Columbia University. I essentially stopped teaching graduate students by 1974, and even a bit earlier, because I felt that the job situation was at that time getting so bad that I didn’t want to have the responsibility of trying to place people. MB: Few graduate professors take that responsible position; they want more students. I want to ask you about the subjects your students pursued. To what extent did people come ready to pick their own topics? To what extent did they follow your recommendations? RM: [Laughs] I think I had a strong influence on their choice of subjects. Carl Prince didn’t come here with a burning desire to study Jeffersonian New Jersey. For one thing, I could help students because I knew the sources, knew the topics. It’s a rare student who decided, “I’m going to do this.” MB: What satisfactions did you take in working with graduate students? RM: The good side was when you got one that could succeed in doing a good dissertation, and finish it. MB: When you were a graduate student, you got a lot of wise counsel from Roy Nichols, but he appears not to have done much at all in correcting or shaping your manuscript. Were you out of the Nichols mold as an advisor?

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RM: It depended. With Carl Prince, with Ray Gunn, I put an awful lot of time in. With Larry Gerlach, no. He was a self-starter; he did it by himself. It was a superb piece of work, there was no point in fiddling with it. When I needed to involve myself, I did. I certainly would read every word of the manuscripts, and make suggestions as called for. MB: Tell me about your student Herman Platt. RM: [Describes Platt’s physical handicaps.] I had to find a thesis topic that he could handle. He couldn’t travel here, there, and everywhere. I knew about the [Charles Perrin] Smith manuscript in Trenton. We had in the Rutgers Library the auxiliary materials that would be adequate to meet his needs. That was the challenge—to find a topic in his orbit. MB: Did he do a good job with it? RM: Sure, sure. He didn’t do much more, because he can’t [get around]. MB: I know from your papers that you called his dissertation to the attention of Rutgers University Press. RM: And they accepted it. MB: When you think back on your career, do you have any hierarchy of satisfactions, in terms of teaching, scholarship, public history, or is it all just part of a good career? RM: I would put number one, as I phrased it in my valedictory remarks in 1982, “The Joy of Discovery.” The Joy of Discovery. Research a subject until you see how it is put together, have a hypothesis you can demonstrate to your satisfaction. Without question, that is what I got the greatest kick out of—whether it was the Second Party System or the Black student movement at Rutgers. MB: There’s no question but that when we think of scholarship today, there’s a divorce between what is well regarded in the academy and what the general public is interested in reading. Is that inevitable, or has the academy abdicated a certain responsibility? RM: The academy collectively has moved further and further away from such desire as it may have had at one time for reaching a broader public. This was a consequence of many things—for one thing, the enormous increase in the size of the academy. Thousands and thousands of historians, all of them seeking out some special niche in which they can purport to make some kind of a splash, also known as a contribution. Well, this has led to the atomization of the profession. That has not enhanced the appeal of their products for the public. Moreover, there has been a tendency in most of these subfields to develop their own meta-languages, which make the pos-

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sibilities of communication with a general audience more difficult. So that I’m not sanguine about the ability of the authorities to reach a general audience. On the other hand, we are now struck with the appearance of “Jefferson in Paris,” with its focus on the “liaison” between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. So that millions of people now get to “know” Thomas Jefferson not by reading Dumas Malone or any other of the biographers but through this powerful portrayal of Jefferson “seducing” this dusky maiden. We went through the same thing with the film “Glory,” which was such a bastardized, bowdlerized history of that regiment. Television specials, and whatnot. So that we have lost the opportunity to monopolize the audience. Now we have to share it with television and the movies. That’s pretty hard to do. MB: Wouldn’t you agree that what we do can inform the popularizers in a positive way? RM: They’re not interested. The scholarship with respect to Jefferson is there. The scholarship was there with respect to that Massachusetts black regiment. The main thing for them is the story, not what happened. MB: If you were teaching at Rutgers College now, would your approach to teaching students differ? Would you be trying to get across different things to them than you did when you were a young professor? RM: I don’t know what the students are like now. I haven’t taught since 1982. Students vary over time. When I was teaching, I had a good reaction from students. Now I might be such a fossilized old fogy that they wouldn’t relate to me; I don’t know. MB: I’m asking you in a backdoor way whether it’s just as important today that we try to give students the best account we can, even knowing that Jefferson in Paris is out there, Glory is out there, and so on. RM: In my teaching from the sixties onward I began to broaden the scope of the survey course, to take cognizance of the work that was being done with respect to the history of blacks in America, the history of women, the history of immigration, and so on. These interests emerged as important. I spent a great deal of time getting a grip on poststructuralism. I went through some dreary exercises and meta-languages. One of the important points of poststructuralism is that information is power, and to exclude certain interests or groups from the story of American history represents an assertion of power, whether deliberate or otherwise, and renders those left out powerless. So in this sense I think it is the responsibility of historians to try

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to revise their concepts of what constitutes the proper scope of historical inquiry to recognize these realities of power in society. MB: Do you think that the controversy over the National Standards in History reflects the fact that there are certain interests in our society that can’t buy into that? RM: Certainly. There’s no better proof that information is power than the fact that so much heat has been generated by this Standards debate or the whole multicultural issue. The great white fathers don’t give up easily. MB: [Laughs] And that is in part what this battle is about. RM: Sure. MB: I take it you are sympathetic to the people who have drawn up the new Standards. RM: Well, I haven’t read them. But, to the extent that generally they’re about more inclusiveness, good. But, like anything else, it can be carried to ridiculous extremes. That’s as much to be guarded against as exclusionism. MB: How do you feel as a historian about raising a historian? RM: I didn’t raise him to be a historian. [Laughs] When he went off to Amherst, it was with the intention of becoming a Presbyterian minister. But he had some powerful influences there. Leo Marx, for example. Dick majored in American Studies. I attended one of Marx’s lectures—he was a brilliant lecturer. He had a great effect on Dick. [John William] Bill Ward he also studied with. So, he came to it on his own. MB: Intriguing that he wound up pursuing a field adjacent to and overlapping yours. RM: As I have said, for several years Dick and I taught the American Political History course jointly. The kids had a wonderful time because we would more or less deliberately find occasion to disagree on certain subjects. This was, if nothing else, titillating to the students, but it also engaged their interest. It was fun. MB: Naturally, you had a different generational perspective on many issues. RM: Oh, yes. And he to some extent had been brainwashed by [Michael F.] Holt. MB: [Laughs] Were you familiar with any other father/son teams in teaching History? RM: Oh, there are a great many of them, but not teaching together at the same college at the same time.

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MB: Well, the Kleins [H.M.J., Philip, and Frederick Klein] taught together at Franklin & Marshall College in the 1930s, but not the same course together to the best of my knowledge. So your situation is possibly unique. RM: The Schlesingers [Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.] were together at Harvard. MB: There were the Ekirches [Arthur Ekirch, Sr., who taught at SUNY-Albany; A. Roger Ekirch teaches at Virginia Tech]. RM: Oh, it’s common. The Links [Arthur S. Link of Princeton University, William A. Link of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. The Perkinses [Dexter Perkins and Bradford Perkins of the University of Michigan]. MB: Tell me about how you managed your time. RM: I worked. MB: Well, where did you find the time to read all those books? You were busy on many fronts, lecturing, committees, public history, and so on. RM: Let me show you. [He pulls out several boxes from the shelf in his office in the Library and Information Science building, and leafs through notes he took on his readings.] Every book I ever read I took notes on. These are essentially my readings in what might be called the political science literature. I knew that I couldn’t read a book and remember it over an extended period, so I made a policy from the beginning and I’ve got tons of notes. MB: So do I, but my question is not as to your methodology of remembering what you read. Clearly, unless we have a photographic memory, as Allan Nevins apparently had, we all take notes. RM: He also had a staff of assistants. MB: Yeah. But what I’m asking is, when did you have time to read the books? Did you read them after the kids were in bed at night? Did you find three hours during the day when you could read? What did you do? RM: Except when I was in the final year writing the history of Rutgers, very rarely did I ever work after 10 o’clock at night, but I would usually work from around 7 to 10 o’clock. Of course, I also did a good deal of my reading during the day. I reviewed a lot of books. As I’ve already said, I didn’t spend a lot of time hanging around the office chatting. MB: What was your methodology in reviewing a book? You took a few notes, and then you— RM: No, I took voluminous notes and then I wrote it.

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MB: You wrote it in your own handwriting, and your wife typed it? RM: Right. MB: And then you looked at it, and you made other corrections that needed to be made, and then you sent it off to the journal? RM: I rarely made corrections. If, for example, you were to look at my hand-written manuscript for Experiment in Independence, and then you were to compare that with the published copy, you would have to do very, very close proofreading to find any changes. I had a practice of doing first drafts and final drafts. I never wrote a second draft of any book or article. I would make a careful outline, and not only would I make the outline, I would decide two pages would be designated for that, four pages to that, six pages to that, so that I would have a very good control over the amount of space that I devoted to a topic. One of the secrets, if you will, to my research technique, was my “T.T.” file. T.T. stood for “thoughts thunk.” In the process of research thoughts flash into your mind. You damned well better write them down immediately because two hours later you may not be able to recapture them. So that I would have this fat bunch of T.T.’s along with the substantive notes that I was taking. I don’t know how many people do that, but that was my method. MB: I do that, but I don’t have a good method of holding onto the “thoughts thunk.” I write them down somewhere but God knows where they end up. You need to have them organized and handy, and I never do. RM: I kept mine separated by projects I was working on. MB: That’s very wise. So, you were disciplined enough that you could get the most out of your time devoted to work. You didn’t waste time, didn’t lose focus. Charles Wiltse was like this.1 I have never met anyone who could write more lucid prose that required less revision. I saw him write into his eighties. He still did it in longhand on yellow pads and still had the knack for succinct and clear writing. RM: Well, I can tell you, I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. I’m not a good writer. I can write clear, succinct, grammatical prose, but I finally discovered the term to apply to it. I call it the masticated style. Having very carefully outlined this stuff, having chewed it over and chewed it over, everything I write is intensely organized, perhaps overly organized, and everything that comes out, comes out with great effort. Once I chewed it, I wrote with a great degree of parsimony. But, the result is not good writing as such. MB: It’s not literature.

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RM: It’s not literature. I’m not a capital “W” writer. My good friend David Oshinsky, he’s a writer. . . . 2 There’s no point in my trying to be. I just don’t have the talent for it. MB: I understand. So, you went with your strength, which is a straightforward style, and you’ve been consistent with that throughout your career. RM: Yes, unfortunately, that’s the only way I could do it. MB: Can I ask you another question about time-management, from the perspective of your mid-career? Were you satisfied with life the way you lived every day? Did you feel that the world was too much with you? Did you feel frustrated when, on a beautiful day, you were in a meeting or writing a review, as opposed to out on the golf course? What were your thoughts? RM: My basic thought was one of thanksgiving. I constantly reminded myself how fortunate I had been to have a job, which helped me earn a living. There was nothing I would rather do than what I was doing, and the proof of it was that after it proved to be the source of my living, I continued to do it. MB: You didn’t begrudge the time you were spending indoors, in an office or a library? RM: No. MB: You liked everything you were doing? RM: Certainly. MB: Come on, you couldn’t have always been happy with what you were doing. RM: For years, from the mid-fifties into the seventies, I would play golf once or twice a week. I would have my poker game. I would usually spend a good part of the weekend in family activities. Not all of it. I would frequently come over on Saturday morning or Sunday morning. For many years I taught a graduate course on Saturday morning. I didn’t feel constrained from the things I wanted to do. I would do them. MB: When you were on research leave and were reading through all this heavy political science literature, it was not bedtime reading. Was your brain telling you, “McCormick, this is where you ought to be”? RM: [Shakes head in the affirmative.] MB: So, you were doing your job, and doing it the best way you knew how to do it? You never minded taking the train to Newark or driving over to Trenton. Those things were part of the life you lived?

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RM: Right. MB: Let’s switch tracks. How does your worldview affect your work? We all carry intellectual and other baggage to our teaching and writing. You were hitting your stride in an era of prosperity and consensus in this country, the Eisenhower era. If there ever was a school of consensus historiography, that’s the era when your books were germinating. You had political views, as we’ve discussed. How did that impact on the issues relating to past politics and political systems? RM: I don’t know. To approach an answer indirectly, I’m always bemused when scholars on the Left are critical of my work and consign it to the dust bin of consensus history. In one sense, I see my work both in The Second Party System and The Presidential Game as expressing deep concern about certain features of the American political system and being critical of that system. This should commend itself to scholars on the Left, but it doesn’t. And I’ve never been quite clear why. MB: That’s one point of connection between your work and Richard Hofstadter’s. Hofstadter was a man on the Left, certainly in terms of his beginnings, and he was always a critic of mainstream American culture. As a historian, his work was sometimes lumped in with consensus history, much to Hofstadter’s consternation. Yet his books, whether you’re talking about The American Political Tradition or The Age of Reform, were more critical of American political culture than celebratory of that culture.3 RM: I was never remotely a Marxist. I’m not and never have been an activist, a champion of political causes. No question that, with my background, I was sympathetic with what emerged as New Deal liberalism, but that would probably come as close to identifying me ideologically as anything else. I have not had, as is so common in contemporary historical scholarship, an overt political argument to make. MB: Take the case of Charles M. Wiltse, with whom I worked closely at one time. Nobody could ever imagine, based on his volumes on Calhoun, that he was a staunch liberal, a devotee of FDR and Adlai Stevenson. But he was. And we are capable as human beings and scholars of not fitting neatly in boxes. So, you’re suggesting that you’ve been mistakenly associated in some quarters as identified with the consensus school. RM: I won’t say the consensus thing annoys me, since it’s so ridiculous and irrelevant. I simply don’t like to put people in pigeonholes.

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MB: Did your worldview affect your position on issues at Rutgers or statewide history-related issues? RM: At Rutgers I was frequently in the role of an activist, involved in trying to influence the course of affairs, taking an active role. I never took an active role in politics. I was active in what I would call public service: that is to say, serving half a dozen governors who appointed me to various commissions. I always felt obliged to accept those opportunities, but I didn’t do it as a partisan, and indeed, I wasn’t appointed as a partisan. I was appointed to positions by both Republicans and Democrats. Ironically, I had two presidential appointments in my life—one by Eisenhower and one by Nixon. So I was never known as a partisan in the sense of political parties. MB: I’ve never seen polemical writing on your part. I’ve seen some newspaper letters to the editor and columns you wrote objecting to specific things that were happening, but I wouldn’t call them ideologically oriented. They tended to say, “this is a bad policy,” or “we need to do this”—that kind of thing. RM: Yes, but I wrote from a liberal perspective. I might be critical of the New Jersey tax structure back in the 1960s for its regressive character and advocate a broad-based tax, like an income tax, but again I did not regard this as a partisan thing. But there is certainly no doubt that I’ve viewed public affairs from what used to be called a liberal perspective. I still do. MB: You campaigned for an income tax in the 1960s? RM: My wife Katheryne did; I didn’t. I did testify before one of the state tax policy committees, but I testified as a historian, taking the issue back all the way to colonial days, and talking about New Jersey’s peculiarity and why we behaved that way. MB: You said something to me in an earlier conversation that I found intriguing. You said that you always enjoyed doing research more than reading your peers’ books. RM: Oh God yes. Oh, yes. My identity is very, very clear. I enjoy discovery. I’ll research anything. Right now, I’m having a lot of fun researching the history of golf. . . . I’m an authority on early viticulture. I’m an authority on the earliest artesian wells in the United States. I’m an authority on the black entrepreneur William Whipper. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I just love discovery. I find that infinitely more interesting, stimulating, and rewarding than reading history books, particularly for the last twenty years, as I have developed some information about American History, some sophistication in reading History. I read these books and I find myself quarrelsome, skeptical, turned off or whatever. [Laughs] I don’t curl

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up with a History book. It’s part of what I have to do, frequently to establish context for writing I am doing. MB: How did this affect the way you taught graduate students? What did you convey to your students about the best path to becoming professionals? RM: The hardest thing I tried to do—the most important key—is conjure up questions—questions, questions, questions—and in association with that, at some point, preferably not too late in the game, the devising of hypotheses that can be tested. These are the things that I tried to do with graduate students. Unfortunately, back in the fifties and sixties, as I have said, it was an accident if Rutgers attracted a good graduate student. Why come here? We had no reputation at that time. The strongest students would go to Columbia or Harvard or Michigan or Yale or whatever. The result is that we had some pretty weak sisters, and it was very hard to get this thing across to them—that is, in exploring a problem to think of significant questions to ask of the phenomena that is being observed, and then, in terms of explaining the phenomena, devising hypotheses that could be tested with some degree of rigor. Those I would say were the two things. Now, I was interested in having them do original research. Unfortunately, so much of our graduate training in those days was a question of memorizing the bewildering variety of interpretations. You had to associate each name with a label. Well, that’s a hell of a way of learning History. MB: I agree. As we reach a close, you mention that insofar as you can you get students to think in terms of testable hypotheses. Yet there is a whole school that suggests that all we have with History is privileged fiction. How do you respond to that kind of work? Dominick LaCapra, for example.4 RM: LaCapra doesn’t write History, does he? MB: No, not in the sense of doing manuscript research. RM: Hayden White doesn’t write History.5 I spent a lot of time—this was after my retirement—reading poststructuralist theory, including White and LaCapra. White is even more unintelligible than LaCapra. I read a dozen or more books. There is something there. The major contribution that these people have made, both in terms of literature and historical writing, is their argument about the privileging of certain types of investigations and questions and the empowerment that can be associated with that kind of privileging. The literary people talk about it in terms of a canon. But in terms of History, all you have to do is look at the enormous vitality of women’s history and despite certain polemical overtones that we have to excuse, what it has revealed about a male-dominated his-

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tory over the course of centuries, and what that has contributed in terms of male empowerment. So in that whole area, I think that poststructuralist criticism, to use one of the terms, has been very useful, very valuable. On the other hand, I refuse to accept the cataclysmic epistemological conclusions on which the most advanced of these new theorists stand. To say that there can be no possibility of communicating a relatively correct understanding of anything in the language that we possess is just to destroy the basis of all knowledge. If nothing else, as an act of faith, I would have to reject that extreme a proposition. On the other hand, I think they have taught us things about the limitations of traditional thinking, objectivity, “that noble dream,” so on and so on. So I guess I come down somewhere in the middle. MB: They’re taking a reasonable point of view and driving it one step further. Instead of simply saying that History is something that we do in a time and place, or something that we do as an outgrowth of our essential qualities as human beings, they’re saying that History is something that we cannot do. RM: As I say, it’s epistemologically devastating. MB: It’s interesting that you are skeptical of writers who debunk the narratives historians write in pursuit of truth. Your own work has always been more analytical than narrative, hasn’t it? RM: Well, yes and no. History is a limited discipline, but it affords almost unlimited inducements for interpretations that approximate “storytelling.” Consider how variously the meaning of “Jacksonian Democracy” has been explicated. Pass rapidly over such early versions as those put forth by Turner, Beard, Dodd, or MacDonald. Marvel instead at the disparate stories concocted by Schlesinger, Hofstadter, Myers, Hammond, Ward, Benson, Pessen, and Watson. No doubt other interpretations lie ahead, and they, in turn, will stimulate further controversy and revisionism. My tendency has been to tackle what might be called second-level questions, questions that could be framed in terms of testable hypotheses. The big questions, especially those having to do with ideology, may well be beyond our capabilities. Historians who seek to answer them become essayists, or storytellers. The answers that have been given have not produced any lasting consensus. The next step, which some are already taking, will be to write History as fiction. Will Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer become our models? MB: Was it self-evident to you that scholarly life goes on after retirement, and so on? You weren’t going to simply spend your time on the golf course?

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RM: Oh, no, not at all. No. I mean, I retired five years early. I could have retired at seventy. I wanted to do that book, The Presidential Game, and I had other things in mind. I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve had a lot of fun. I haven’t been very productive, but I’ve gratified my curiosities. MB: I can hardly endorse your comment about not being very productive, given the books, pamphlets, and articles you have produced in a steady stream. The Nazi Professor book was an interesting book, The Black student revolt book was useful; you’ve got “The Whig Strategy of 1836” piece and other articles, some of them demanding, densely argued pieces. You’ve been out there. I’m sure your history of golf . . . will eventually appear. So you’re not simply sitting back and relaxing. As you look back on your own career as a historian, do you feel that you had a good run, that you fulfilled the hopes you had as a young man, that the experience of being a historian was worth all the effort? RM: I more than fulfilled any hopes that I had as a young man. I never anticipated the kind of joys I would get from the career. As I have reflected in my gray years on my career, I sometimes regret not having focused my energies more than I did, that is, not having focused more on my scholarly interests. I devoted so much of my time to the whole promotion of New Jersey History, for example, public history as we would call it today. Looking back I wouldn’t say I regret it, but I regret that I didn’t accomplish more there, considering the energy I put into it. And seeing such a thing as this mindless proposal by Governor Christie Whitman to abolish the New Jersey Historical Commission, which in one sense represented the peak of all that I had worked for and all of these connections with so many different organizations over so many years—it’s awful.6 But I don’t regret my extrascholarly activities at Rutgers—serving as chair, serving as dean, serving as best I could as a compromising force within the faculty. Although the deanship came at a very bad time for me, in terms of my scholarly development. MB: That’s an interesting comment. You were approaching your sixtieth birthday when you became dean. Very few scholars are still punching out stuff past their fiftieth year. . . . RM: People never believed it, you see. People so often saw me as the person to chair this or chair that, preside over this, preside over that—even to be considered for college presidencies and things of that sort. That wasn’t me at all! MB: Your game was reading, writing and teaching history. RM: Yeah. That’s about it.

Notes

PREFACE 1. Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 1. Kammen notes that even when scholars of the pre-1960s generation wrote autobiographies—he cites the examples of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., John D. Hicks, Roy F. Nichols, Thomas F. Bailey, and Dexter Perkins—they tended to “incredible blandness” about personal lives and motives in writing History. To this list one can add McCormick, whose reflection piece published in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1989 (“A Historian’s Education”) offers few nuggets for the biographer to chew on. Nonetheless, there are signs that senior historians are beginning to talk about their careers. A series of lectures sponsored and published by the American Council of Learned Societies beginning in 1983 has focused on personal perspectives on a life of learning. The series includes lectures by several leading historians, among them Carl Schorske, John Hope Franklin, and Natalie Zemon Davis. For more than a decade, the William and Mary Quarterly has periodically published reminiscences by scholars under the heading, “Early American Emeriti.” [See, for example, “Early American Emeriti, III,” Third Series, 52 (July 1995): 453–512. Ten distinguished early Americanists, including Edwin Gaustad, Benjamin Labaree, and Alfred Young, reflected on their lives and work.] For an example of oral history as a vehicle for capturing memories, focused on the “Wisconsin School” of radical history, see

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Henry Abelove et al., eds., Visions of History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). 2. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), especially chaps. 1, 2. 3. Elizabeth Hardwick captured the biographer’s inevitable feeling of futility by noting that biography is a “consistent fiction,” with the writer pursuing her quarry to “research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle, with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of a right leg fitted together.” Hardwick, quoted in Sylvia Nasar’s review of A Beautiful Mind in Washington Post Book World, August 2, 1998, p. 10. 4. Michael J. Birkner, “A Conversation with Philip S. Klein,” Pennsylvania History 56 (October 1989): 243–275.

INTRODUCTION 1. Basic biographical information on McCormick’s life can be found in Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1974), vols. 9–12, p. 595, and in the Richard P. McCormick (RPM) faculty file, Rutgers University Library (RUL) Special Collections. Information and quotes about McCormick’s youth and college years are derived from the oral history conducted by the author in eight sessions between March 1995 and March 2000. 2. Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 230. 3. Ibid., pp. 225–226; for information on Clothier, see special commemorative issue on the presidents of Rutgers, Journal of the Rutgers University Library 53 (June 1991), 29–30. 4. For a brief but helpful introduction to Rutgers life in the 1930s, see McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, chap. 10. See also Michael Moffatt, The Rutgers Picture Book: An Illustrated History of Student Life in the Changing College and University (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), chap. 3. 5. David M. Potter, “Roy F. Nichols and the Rehabilitation of American Political History,” Pennsylvania History 38 (January 1971): 1–20; reprinted in Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973): 192–217. 6. Quote is from Nichols, “The Genealogy of Historical Generalizations,” in Louis Gottschalk, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 142. Relevant here are David Potter, “Roy Nichols and the Rehabilitation of American Political History,” as quoted in Fehrenbacher, ed., History and American Society, p. 194; and Nichols’s autobiography, A Historian’s Progress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), chapter 4 and passim. 7. See Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), passim; idem, A Historian’s Progress, pp. 149–153; and Allen G. Bogue, Clio and the Bitch Goddess: Quan-

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tification in American Political History (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983), pp. 87–88, 96. Bogue points out that Nichols tended to focus on elites much more than grass-roots political behavior, something that is also true of McCormick’s work. 8. RPM oral history. Two other Nichols students, Philip S. Klein and Russell F. Weigley, have testified to Nichols’s brilliance as a lecturer. See Michael J. Birkner, “A Conversation with Philip S. Klein,” Pennsylvania History 56 (October 1989), pp. 253–255, and Russell F. Weigley, “Roy F. Nichols: Teacher,” Pennsylvania History 38 (January 1971): 44–50. Klein focused on Nichols’s ability to capture and hold the attention of undergraduates, while Weigley emphasized Nichols’s explication of ideas from his books-in-progress in his graduate lecture classes, a point also made by McCormick. 9. Other young scholars had experiences similar to McCormick, whether working in the armed forces, as Philip Klein, C. Vann Woodward, Wesley Frank Craven, and Samuel Eliot Morison did, or in civilian service. While serving in the U.S. Navy, Philip S. Klein wrote a 750-page, classified history of the supply-command for the Pacific Ocean theater of operations of the Navy. This study was never published. Birkner, “Conversation with Philip S. Klein,” pp. 260–261. For information on McCormick’s study, “A History of Storage and Distribution at the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, 1917–1943,” see Thomas M. Pitkin to McCormick, July 25, 1949, in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 4. 10. Oral history. 11. Richard P. McCormick, Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period: 1781–1789 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950), pp. ix, 272–278, and passim. 12. See, for example, comments in Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski, The Constitution and the States: The Role of the Original Thirteen in the Framing and Adoption of the Federal Constitution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1988), pp. 74, 273. Experiment in Independence was serialized on New Jersey radio in 1951 in a program titled “This is New Jersey.” See box 5, RPM Papers, RUL. 13. For resolutions at the 1949 conference seeking appointment of a state archivist and legislation to assure the preservation and publication of significant state documents, see typescript in RPM Papers, Box 7. 14. McCormick’s newsletter, the Jersey Gazette 2 (March 1950), provides information about Driscoll’s expressed interest in history and his determination to reduce expenditures for the state library and eliminate the state museum. The best available study of Driscoll is Alvin S. Felzenberg, “Alfred Driscoll,” in Paul A. Stellhorn and Michael J. Birkner, eds., The Governors of New Jersey, 1664–1974: Biographical Essays (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1982), pp. 214–219. 15. McCormick sent copies of his book out to New Jersey newspaper editors encouraging them to review it, and offered to write pieces based on it for Sunday magazines of such papers as the Newark News. See materials in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4. Correspondence respecting McCormick’s

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1949 article on early New Jersey for Life Magazine, which Life declined either to publish or pay him for, is in ibid. 16. See oral history; also RPM to Kenneth W. Duckett of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, June 19, 1953, in RPM Papers, Box 4, in which he describes the background to the changes at NJHS and his role in them, and RPM to Damon Douglas, Dec. 8, 1949, RPM Papers, Box 7, in which McCormick outlines his program to revitalize NJHS. Alexander forged a long and distinguished career in public history in New York, Virginia, Wisconsin, and finally as the first director (1972–1978) of the Museum Studies program at the University of Delaware. 17. The Alexander report was published in pamphlet form as The New Jersey Historical Society and Its Future (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1950). 18. See RPM to Damon Douglas, January 31, 1950, in which he tells Douglas that he is still “in something of a glow after Saturday’s amazing meeting. . . . If the board will follow through on what apparently was the consensus of our meeting, I think the Society is in for some very interesting developments.” RPM Papers, RUL, Box 7. 19. On work for Meyner, see, for example, the note from Meyner aide Ralph Doglen to RPM, February 24, 1954, enclosing a copy of the governor’s address at the 275th anniversary of Trenton’s founding. “You will recognize your stuff here,” Doglen wrote to McCormick. “Thanks.” RPM Papers, RUL, Box 6. In late 1950, McCormick compiled a listing of his speeches between September 1949 and November 1950. In a period of fourteen months he lists forty-four engagements, many in New Brunswick and environs, but also including talks on New Jersey history in perhaps half of the state’s twenty-one counties. McCormick addressed audiences that ranged from church and service organizations to the Young Republicans, 4-H, various historical societies and history clubs and even a dairyman’s convention. See “R. P. McCormick—Speeches, 1949–1950,” in Box 6, RPM Papers, RUL. This box contains McCormick’s correspondence about his speech engagements in the early 1950s, as well as invitations he turned down. Regarding his work at Colonial Williamsburg, see RPM to Dean H. G. Owen, March 26, 1954, Box 6, RPM Papers, RUL. 20. For examples, see oral history. Copies of McCormick’s appointment calendars for the years he was president of the New Jersey Historical Society, which reveal an extraordinary range of activity throughout the state, are available in Box 3, RPM Papers, RUL. 21. Richard P. McCormick, interviewed by Michael J. Birkner, Dec. 11, 1996; tape recording in author’s possession. Also, McCormick to Birkner, Dec. 14, 1996, copy in author’s possession. 22. The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of Election Machinery, 1664–1911 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953). For McCormick’s contribution in this work and subsequent scholarship on voting and election procedures in historiographical context, see Peter H. Argersinger, Structure, Process, and Party: Essays in American Political History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992), pp. 34–68.

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23. New Jersey: America’s Main Road (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1966); and This Is New Jersey (4th ed.; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) are two of the most popular of Cunningham’s thirty-three books. Like McCormick, Cunningham was an original member of the board of directors of the New Jersey Historical Commission and an initiator of the Tercentenary Commission; and, like McCormick, he served as president of the New Jersey Historical Society. In 1985 the two men jointly received the Historical Commission’s highest honor, the annual Award Pitcher. New Jersey Historical Commission Newsletter 16 (January 1986): 1, 6; interview with John T. Cunningham, June 16, 1997. 24. Leiby’s first submission of the Coetus-Conferentie manuscript was rejected by Rutgers University Press. For a critique, see Roger Shugg (director of Rutgers University Press) to RPM, Feb. 1, 1954, Box 4, RPM Papers. See also RPM to Leiby, Sept. 2, 1955, Leiby to McCormick, Sept. 7, 1955, Box 5, RPM Papers, RUL. 25. Adrian C. Leiby to RPM, August 30, 1960, and RPM to Leiby, Sept. 6, 1960, RPM Papers, Box 5, RUL. 26. For mention of the book’s failure to find a substantial audience, see Rutgers editorial director William Sloane to Earl Schenck Miers, Nov. 25, 1963, Earl Schenck Miers Papers, RUL, Box 17. 27. Oral history. Following publication of The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley, McCormick arranged for Leiby’s appointment to the Board of Trustees of The New Jersey Historical Society. Leiby served for roughly a decade before his death in January 1976. 28. For material on McCormick’s promotion of his students and for his referee reports rejecting manuscripts he believed unworthy, see RPM Papers, Box 5, RUL. 29. Despite reservations about John Pomfret’s convoluted prose, McCormick endorsed publication by Princeton University Press of Pomfret’s deeply researched studies of colonial New Jersey that have enlightened and baffled readers ever since. The Province of West New Jersey and The Province of East New Jersey appeared in 1956 and 1962, respectively. McCormick later affirmed his respect for these volumes, while expressing reservations about other work by Pomfret. See RPM to Michael J. Birkner, December 14, 1996, in author’s possession; McCormick referee report on Pomfret for Princeton University Press, RPM Papers, Box 5, RUL. Quote is from RPM report for Rutgers University Press evaluating Herbert Ershkowitz submission on the origins of the Democratic and Whig parties in New Jersey, April 25, 1967, RPM Papers, Box 5. 30. One of the few historians who took a more traditional approach yet received accolades from McCormick was Charles Grier Sellers of Princeton University, whose two-volume biography of James K. Polk was recognized and hailed as a masterwork by McCormick. See RPM to Sellers, April 20, 1967, Box 5, RPM Papers, RUL, noting that he had just reviewed the book favorably for the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. “It has been many years since I read a book that I appreciated and enjoyed as much,” he told Sellers.

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31. See Richard P. McCormick, “The Comparative Method: Its Application to State History,” Mid-America 56 (October 1974): 231–247; idem, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), passim; and idem, “A Historian’s Education,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d Series, 45 (July 1988), especially p. 556. The main exception to the rule of writing for a scholary audience was McCormick’s contribution to the Tercentenary celebration, New Jersey: From Colony to State (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1964). That book has been subsequently reprinted in paperback by both Rutgers University Press and the New Jersey Historical Society, and it remains in print. 32. In January 1948, McCormick attended and served as a “reporter” for a two-day symposium at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focused on this question: “Do we need a ‘new history’ of American political democracy?” The answer from the distinguished assemblage of historians who participated in the symposium was an emphatic “yes.” Proceedings of the conference, as well as an editorial by Roy F. Nichols entitled “Unfinished Business,” can be found in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 72 (April 1948). 33. Oral history; see also RPM to Allan G. Bogue, Jan. 12, 1966, RPM Papers, Box 5, RUL. For explicit acknowledgment of Duverger’s influence, see McCormick, Second American Party System, p. 4, and idem., “A Historian’s Education,” p. 556. Ranney’s work is The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government: Its Origins and Present State (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954). V. O. Key’s classic study is Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). McCormick vividly remembers traveling to Harvard in the mid-1950s to discuss mutual interests with Key. RPM conversation with author, December 11, 1996. 34. Bulletin 64, 1954: The Social Sciences in Historical Study: A Report of the Committee on Historiography (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1954), p. 16; Roy Nichols’s wife, Jeannette P. Nichols, was the author of the lead chapter, from which these quotes are taken. On the influence of Bulletin 64, see “A Historian’s Education,” p. 555; also Bogue, Clio, pp. 67, 92. 35. Bulletin 64, pp. 162, 163; quoted from section written by Thomas Cochran. To capture the resonance with McCormick’s own views, see RPM, “Unique Elements in State History,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 33 (1949): 55–61. 36. RPM to Allen Bogue, May 15, 1985, McCormick personal files; copy in author’s possession. 37. Much of this paragaph is drawn from materials in Richard P. McCormick’s personal file on the Conference on Early American Political Behavior; copy in author’s possession. 38. Concurrently, Lee Benson, then a research fellow at Columbia University, and various political scientists were asking some of the same questions. See Benson, “Research Problems in American Political Historiography,” in Mirra Komarovsky, ed., Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 113–183, 418–421, later

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reprinted in Benson’s Toward the Scientific Study of History: Selected Essays (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972), pp. 3–80. See also Stephen K. Bailey, et al., Research Frontiers in Politics and Government: Brookings Lectures, 1955 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1955); and Ronald P. Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 458–460. 39. Pendleton Herring to RPM, January 28, 1957, Richard P. McCormick personal files; copy in author’s possession. 40. Several of the invited scholars—notably Edmund Morgan, Bernard Bailyn, and David Lovejoy—pleaded other commitments and declined. On the conference, see oral history; also Bogue, Clio, 26–28. 41. McCormick’s summary appeared in the Social Science Research Council newsletter, Items (1957): 49–50. I have quoted from the original report, which was heavily edited by the Council before publication. For Allen Bogue’s explication of the report, which inexplicably emphasizes the role of Lee Benson in shaping the agenda of the conference, see Clio, pp. 26–28. Bogue does not mention McCormick and the conference in his essay on the new political history in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 231–251. 42. Bogue, Clio, p. 26. 43. See Daniel Feller’s trenchant essay “Lee Benson and the Concept of Jacksonian Democracy,” Reviews in American History 20 (December 1992): 591–604. Feller delineates the areas where Benson helped recast scholars’ understanding of Jacksonian-era politics, but also offers an unsparing analysis of his deficiencies as a “scientific historian.” For another sharp criticism of Benson’s pretensions to doing “scientific” history, see Peter Kolchin’s review of Toward the Scientific Study of History in Civil War History 18 (June 1972): 179–180. 44. Favorable assessments of Benson ‘s work, emphasizing his breakthrough in depicting political behavior as culturally conditioned, include Gene Wise, “Political ‘Reality’ in Recent American Scholarship: Progressives Versus Symbolists,” American Quarterly 19 (Summer 1967): 303–328; Michael Zuckerman, “Myth and Method: The Current Crises in American Historical Writing,” History Teacher 17 (February 1994): 230; William G. Shade, “Politics and Parties in Jacksonian America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 110 (October 1986): 506–507; and most important, Formisano, “Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” 453–477. For evidence that the “new political history,” now middle-aged, is again provoking vivid arguments about the contours and meaning of democracy in nineteenth-century American political culture, see articles by Ronald G. Formisano, Mark Voss-Hubbard, Michael F. Holt, and Paul Baker, respectively, in “Round Table: Alternatives to the Party System in the ‘Party Period,’ 1830–1890,” Journal of American History 86 (June 1998): 93–166. 45. Bogue, “The New Political History in the 1970s,” in Kammen’s The Past before Us, pp. 231–251. Also, Lee Benson, “An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinion,” in Don Karl Rowney and James Q. Gra-

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ham, Jr., Quantitative History: Selected Readings in the Quantitative Analysis of Historical Data (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1969): 23–63; and Bogue, Clio, 24, 42, 74–75, 90–91. 46. Bogue makes this point in Clio, 26–27. 47. McCormick to Bogue, January 12, 1966, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 5. Critiques of Benson by James Wright, Richard Latner, Peter Levine, Richard L. McCormick, Eric Foner, and Don E. Fehrenbacher are discussed (and refuted) in Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” especially pp. 461–469. In this essay, Formisano downplays the importance of quantification to Benson’s work. It is worth noting that Roy Nichols had never believed that History could be scientific in the sense that biology, chemistry, or physics were; see A Historian’s Progress, pp. 135–136. Yet Nichols—no quantifier—hailed The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy for showing “how much we can gain from the behavioral sciences. It demonstrates that the behavior of American Democracy is something that is shaped by community structure rather than directed by political management.” Nichols, review of The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy in Journal of Southern History 27 (1961): 539–540. 48. RPM to Allen Bogue, Jan. 12, 1966, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 5. McCormick was referring to Angus Campbell, coauthor of The People Elect a President (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1952) and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, coauthor of Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 49. See RPM, “Political Development and the Second American Party System,” in William N. Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 90–116; idem, The Second American Party System, especially pp. 3–13; and oral history, for McCormick’s perspective on the difficulties entailed in interpreting Jacksonian era political behavior. 50. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1945). “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments: A Study in Voter Behavior,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (December 1959): 397–410. See Allen G. Bogue, Clio, 59, 88, for the suggestion that McCormick’s work was in the mainstream of the new political history. 51. “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” American Historical Review 65 (January 1960): 288–301. This article has been reprinted in Rowney and Graham’s Quantitative History: Selected Readings, pp. 372–384, and other anthologies. 52. The Second American Party System, pp. 327–356. Roy Nichols acknowledged McCormick’s contribution in his own late reflections on the evolution of parties in America, The Invention of American Political Parties: A Study of Political Improvisation (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 327. An exemplary recent essay on parties and political systems in the early republic is William G. Shade’s contribution to L. Sandy Maisel and William G. Shade, eds., Parties and Politics in American History: A Reader (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994). Few historians have followed

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McCormick’s lead of comprehensively examining developments in the separate states at the same time—perhaps because it is so arduous a task. Two exceptions are William Gienapp, in The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Michael F. Holt, in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 53. Shade, “Politics and Parties in Jacksonian America,” 491. For all the fresh insights of quantifiers and other new political historians, the Schlesinger thesis remained resonant, if not indubitably regnant, into the 1980s and beyond. See, for example, Donald B. Cole, “The Age of Jackson: After Forty Years,” Reviews in American History 14 (March 1986): 149–159. 54. McCormick, Second American Party System, passim. 55. Benson, Concept, p. 81. Benson referred to the period after 1815 as the “Age of Egalitarianism”—a premise Richard McCormick and Edward Pessen could never accept. See Concept, chap. 1, 15; Feller, “Benson and The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy,” p. 594; and Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (rev. ed; Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1978), especially chap. 5. 56. For a recent effort to debunk the notion of a democratic Jacksonian-era polity, in the spirit of McCormick’s own analysis, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 855–885. The article is followed by three critical commentaries and a follow-up comment by Altschuler and Blumin (pp. 886–909). 57. McCormick acknowledged this in a letter to the author, December 14, 1996. 58. Benson, Concept, 164, 140; Feller, “Benson,” 591–600. Edward Pessen, who shared McCormick’s skepticism about parties as being more than electoral machines in the Jacksonian era, found McCormick’s major work an important demonstration that “the democratization of the nation’s political machinery . . . in fact created new forms of politics that were as easily dominated by small cliques as were the less democratic devices they replaced.” See Pessen, ed., New Perspectives on Jacksonian Parties and Politics (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1969), p. 4. For Pessen, McCormick’s work fit well with that of Benson and the ethnoculturalists, as it showed that American voters “did not vote by class.” 59. Again, see McCormick’s essay in Chambers and Burnham, American Party Systems and idem, Second American Party System, 354–356. Relevant in this context is Daniel W. Crofts, “Parties and Political Culture in Nineteenth Century America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 111 (January 1987), especially pp. 115–116, and Robert V. Remini, “The Emergence of Political Parties and Their Effect on the Presidency,” in Philip C. Dolce and George H. Skau, eds., Power and the Presidency (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), pp. 24–34. Crofts stresses the failure of McCormick and other new political historians to

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connect political activity with policy outcomes, while Remini asserts that presidential leadership and political parties could make a substantive difference even in a polity designed to check parties. Some of these issues are broached in pungent essays by Jean Harvey Baker and Norma Basch, respectively, in the round-table discussion focused on Altschuler and Blumin’s “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America.” See Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 894–903. It could be fairly argued that McCormick was right to bring and keep historians’ heads out of the clouds of ideology. It made sense to remind scholars that American politics is, in part, indeed a rough-and-tumble game played by professionals who do what needs to be done to gain and hold power. At the same time, McCormick’s refusal to see politics as more than a game (with or without sensible rules) drained his interpretation of realism at another level. For many participants in the Jacksonian political system, ideology and policy outcomes did matter. To say that these aspects of politics, along with ethnicity and religion, are not worth pursuing because one cannot accommodate them in an overarching theory valid everywhere in a diverse political nation is a startlingly self-limiting proposition. 60. The Second American Party System, p. 353. 61. Sellers’s review appeared in New England Quarterly 40 (March 1967): 155–157. See also Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, especially chaps. 1–4. 62. Lex Renda, “Richard P. McCormick and the Second American Party System,” Reviews in American History 23 (June 1995): 386. Joel H. Silbey, in The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 40–43, cites an “overwhelming” spirit of partisanship in voting behavior through the increasingly turbulent 1840s. Silbey rejects McCormick’s view that parties in the Civil War era were “at best, artificial contrivances that were helpless before the onrush of sectional conflict” (p. 34). See also Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, passim, and idem, “The Primacy of Party Reasserted,” in Journal of American History 86 (June 1999): 151–157. For a critique of Silbey, see RPM oral history, and Reeve Huston, “The Nineteenth-Century Political Nation: A Tale of Two Syntheses,” Reviews in American History 23 (September 1995): 418. 63. Michael F. Holt, “The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization, and the Emergence of the Second American Party System: A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voting Behavior,” in William J. Cooper, et al., eds., A Master’s Due: Essays in Honor of David Donald (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985): 16–58. Holt discusses his gradual abandonment of an “ethno-cultural” approach to voting behavior and acceptance of a more “rationalist” approach in the introduction to his Parties and American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), especially pp. 22–27 and “Rethinking Nineteenth-Century American Political History,” Congress and the Presidency 19 (Autumn 1992): 97–111. 64. Quoted from Michael F. Holt to Michael J. Birkner, August 7, 1995, in author’s possession. See also Holt, Rise and Fall of the Whig

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Party, p. 988, n. 31, and Donald J. Ratcliffe, “Politics in Jacksonian Ohio, Reflections on the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” Ohio History 88 (1979): 5–36. 65. Gatell review in Journal of American History 53 (September 1966): 361–363. 66. See, for example, the controversy engendered by Robert E. Shalhope, “Jacksonian Politics in Missouri: A Comment on the McCormick Thesis,” Civil War History 15 (September 1969): 210–225. In that essay, Shalhope argued that ideology did matter in the gestation of the second party system in Missouri and that McCormick ignored the importance of ideas in the formation of political alliances and the day-to-day operation of parties. Although McCormick later denied that such criticisms troubled him, he spent many hours seeking ammunition to refute Shalhope and admitted to one of his colleagues, Rudolph Bell, that Shalhope’s assault on his work was “very aggravating to me.” By this, McCormick probably meant that his critics were being obtuse! McCormick’s dismissive response to Shalhope was published as a “Communication,” Civil War History 16 (March 1970): 92–93. Most of the correspondence relating to the Shalhope article can be found in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 2. The one exception is RPM to John V. Mering, June 5, 1970, which is misfiled amidst American Historical Association program committee correspondence, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 1. 67. See, for example, Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development, passim; Silbey, The Partisan Imperative; Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Harry S. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); and William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). The quote about “systems of meaning” is from Harry Watson’s commentary on a session focused on state politics in the Jacksonian era, SHEAR Conference, Vanderbilt University, July 1996. See also Watson’s “Humbug? Bah! Altschuler and Blumin and the Riddle of the Antebellum Electorate,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 886–893. For a thoughtful assessment of McCormick’s Second American Party System and its “ambiguous” legacy, see Renda, “McCormick,” 378–389. 68. Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Face of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965): 7–28. 69. Following the publication of The Second American Party System, McCormick lectured about his work at Purdue, Michigan State, and Seton Hall Universities, as well as at Colonial Williamsburg and various New Jersey historical organizations. See correspondence in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 5.

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70. On the offers, see letters in Box 5; and for the feeler from Lawrence University in particular, see RPM to Dr. David A. Stevens, September 15, 1953, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4, in which McCormick says he is fundamentally happy at Rutgers. See also RPM to Dean John P. Gillin of the University of Pittsburgh, April 24, 1960, insisting that rejecting the position of History chair at Pittsburgh was “the hardest career decision I have yet had to make.” Pitt’s offer was attractive, but “my loyalties are here, and I want to continue to devote such talents as I may have to Rutgers and to New Jersey.” RPM to Rutgers president Mason Gross, April 24, 1960, discusses the pay raise McCormick would receive in the wake of the Pitt offer. RPM Papers, RUL, Box 6. 71. See, for example, correspondence noted above and correspondence relating to an offer made to McCormick in 1949 by the University of Illinois. In that instance, McCormick secured both a raise and a promotion at Rutgers. RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4. 72. Oral history. 73. On the move to River Road, see RPM to Roy F. Nichols, January 21, 1951, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4. 74. Extensive source materials documenting McCormick’s work as a member of various public and private historical boards, committees, and commissions can be found in the McCormick Papers at Alexander Library, Rutgers University. 75. See RPM to Robert Meyner, January 25, 1958; memo from RPM, McDonough, and Cunningham to Meyner, May 16, 1958; and Assembly Bill 48, introduced June 2, 1958, and subsequently signed into law by Governor Meyner on June 24, 1958, in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 7. 76. See oral history. 77. For background on the goals and proceedings of the Tercentenary Commission, see memo dated September 8, 1958, titled “New Jersey Tercentenary Commission,” RPM Papers, RUL, Box 7. 78. Adrian C. Leiby, The Huguenot Settlement of Schraalenburgh: The History of Bergenfield, New Jersey (Bergenfield, NJ: Bergenfield Public Library, 1964). The Historymobile, one of the most popular features of the Tercentenary year, was the brainchild of Clifford C. Lord. 79. The Tercentenary commissioners were also charged with planning and managing the state’s exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. RPM to Michael J. Birkner, December 11, 1996, in author’s possession. 80. McCormick spoke more than forty times in 1964 as part of a special lecture series connected with the Tercentenary, and this does not count other speaking engagements that year. McCormick’s colonial history of New Jersey, originally published by Van Nostrand in 1964, remains in print as a paperback published by the New Jersey Historical Society. For an example of a flattering review of the book, see David D. Hall in New Jersey History 73 (July 1965), 207–208. 81. Many sources treat aspects of the Genovese controversy. Among the most useful secondary accounts are Jeffrey L. Braun, “The Genovese Affair and Newspaper Coverage,” Rutgers College Senior Thesis, 1968, in Special Collections, Alexander Library, Rutgers University; Stacy Kelner,

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“The Genovese Affair,” Rutgers College Quarterly 2 (Spring 1989): 4–23; Jonathan M. Wiener, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959–1980,” Journal of American History 76 (September 1989): 409–410, 416. Many documents and clippings relating to the teach-ins at Rutgers can be found in the archives of the public relations division of the university, Special Collections, Alexander Library. 82. On the gubernatorial campaign, see newspaper clippings in Eugene Genovese biographical files, Rutgers University Special Collections; and Stanley B. Winters, “Richard J. Hughes,” in Stellhorn and Birkner, eds., The Governors of New Jersey, p. 225. 83. Quote is from RPM letter to the editor of The New Brunswick Home News, August 2, 1965, copy in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4. McCormick’s letter to Mason Gross on academic freedom and the Genovese case, coauthored with his History Department colleagues Peter Charanis and Henry R. Winkler, was printed along with the Board of Governors’ report to Governor Richard Hughes, August 6, 1965; copy in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4. 84. Thomas Franklin Richards, “The Cold War at Rutgers University: A Case Study of the Dismissal of Professors Heimlich, Finley and Glasser,” Rutgers University Ed.D., 1986, is the most comprehensive discussion of the Heimlich-Finley case. A brief but helpful analysis of the Rutgers University’s brush with McCarthyism is Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 171–179, 184–185. McCormick’s own account of this “nightmarish” period is useful but compressed. See his Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, pp. 293–296. Also relevant is RPM’s brief tribute, “Sir Moses Finley,” in Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 48 (December 1986): 63–64, in which McCormick notes that the Board resolution that occasioned Finley’s dismissal was voided in 1957 and that Finley returned to Rutgers in 1972 to deliver the first Mason Gross lecture there. 85. New York Times, August 12, 1965; Trenton Times, September 9, 1965; and miscellaneous undated press clippings in Eugene Genovese Biographical File, Special Collections, Rutgers University Library. 86. Winters, “Richard J. Hughes,” in Birkner and Stellhorn, The Governors of New Jersey, p. 225. 87. For Genovese’s sniping at McCormick, see Genovese to RPM, April 21, 1966, RPM Papers, Box 4. “What your position comes to,” Genovese told McCormick (in response to McCormick’s suggestion that Genovese could have toned down his public statements about Vietnam) “is this: A university can have communists (small c), provided they do not speak and act accordingly. If I had your outlook, I would have your restraint. I am afraid that, personalities aside, one flows from the other to a significant degree. But if I have to argue this with you—whom I regard as one of the very best men I have ever met—I am afraid that nothing very much is possible.” Genovese’s strong-willed persona and penchant for outrageous assertions are discussed in Karen J. Winkler, “A Historian Criticizes Value-Free Scholarship, Cites Need for Moral Judgment in Research,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 1986; Ronald Radosh, “The Bare-Knuckled Historians,” The Nation (February 2, 1970): 108–109; and

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James Surowiecki, “Genovese’s March,” Linguafranca 7 (December 1996/January 1997): 36–53. 88. Howard Zinn was a prominent civil rights and anti–Vietnam War activist who taught (and still teaches) at Boston University. Freidel, Schlesinger, Goldman, and Leuchtenburg were tagged by Kenneth Lynn in a Commentary essay as “liberal rhapsodists,” who “had grown up during the New Deal and had been indelibly marked by their enthusiasm for it.” Quoted in David M. Kennedy, “How FDR Derailed the New Deal,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1995): 91. Kennedy disassociated himself from Lynn’s views. 89. Compare McCormick’s approach in his major work with that of Harry Watson in his various writing, including most recently, “Humbug? Bah!” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 886–893. 90. For context, Susan S. Baker, Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Daniel J. Singal, “Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography,” American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 976–1004; Michael Kazin, “Hofstadter Lives: Political Culture and Temperament in the Work of an American Historian,” Reviews in American History 27 (June 1999): 334–348; and Michael J. Birkner interviews with Kenneth M. Stampp (September 27, 1993) and Jack R. Pole (November 13, 1995), tapes in author’s possession. McCormick’s self-depiction as a “liberal,” though “not a political activist,” is in RPM to Michael J. Birkner, December 14, 1996, in author’s possession. 91. McCormick’s role in shaping a response to the black student protest movement at Rutgers in the late 1960s, discussed in the oral history, can be supplemented by RPM’s monograph The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 92. For correspondence with Susman, much of which was generated during McCormick’s year as a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, 1961–1962, see RPM Papers, RUL, Boxes 5, 6. Susman’s letters throw considerable light on the persona of this brilliant but deeply insecure scholar/teacher. 93. “A Historian’s Education,” p. 57. 94. Ibid., 557–558; see also oral history. 95. RPM, “The Jacksonian Strategy,” Journal of the Early Repubic 10 (Spring 1990): 1–17. Like much of McCormick’s work, this article emphasizes the Jacksonians’ effort to “reduce stress on the Union” by avoiding “jarring” issues. In it, McCormick briefly chides historians who have focused their energies on ideology, ethnocultural influences, class relations, or political culture. “They tend,” he writes, “to ignore the importance of inter-regional conflict and the effects that it had on both Whigs and Democrats” (n. 32, pp. 14–15). 96. For a thoughtful, albeit mixed, review, see Joel H. Silbey in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Summer 1983. Earlier that year, in the same journal, Silbey had called McCormick’s Second American Party System “the definitive study of the formation of the party system in the political

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environment of the 1820s and 1830s.” See Silbey, “‘Delegates Fresh from the People’: American Congressional and Legislative Behavior,” p. 612 n. 16. Upon McCormick’s retirement in Spring 1982, the university not only awarded him an honorary degree at its commencement exercises, but arranged for a symposium in his honor featuring leading political historians to whom McCormick had often acknowledged intellectual debts. The proceedings were published in Richard L. McCormick, ed., Political Parties and the Modern State (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984). See New York Times, May 27, 1982, for an account of the commencement. 97. See for example, McCormick’s comments on the papers in Political Parties and the Modern State, pp. 153–154, and oral history. 98. RPM, “Origins of the New Jersey Historical Commission,” unpublished paper, January 20, 1991, copy in author’s possession; Bernard Bush, “The New Jersey Historical Commission: A State Agency in Public History,” The Public Historian 3 (Fall 1981): 33–44. 99. Bush, “The New Jersey Historical Commission,” 34–35. 100. See oral history; this would eventually become one of many sources of McCormick’s disillusion with the New Jersey Historical Society. For his part, Bernard Bush emphasized the “unity of purposes between scholarly and popular interest in history.” “The New Jersey Historical Commission,” p. 44. 101. Oral history. 102. For background on the history of Morven and Drumthwacket, respectively, see Constance Greiff, “Morven/Drumthwacket: The Spirit of New Jersey,” New Jersey History 98 (Fall/Winter 1980): 175–190. For background on the troubles that assuming responsibility for Morven and Drumthwacket brought on the Society, see NJHS files in RPM Papers, RUL, Boxes 9, 14. Some of this material throws into question the judgment of leading officers of the Society. 103. McCormick’s detailed objections to the Morven Project were expressed to Robert S. Corbin, June 26, 1968, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 9. For equally emphatic reservations about the Society’s plans for Drumthwacket, see RPM to Paul L. Troast, June 18, 1968, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 6. 104. For a future historian, the decline of the New Jersey Historical Society in the 1970s and 1980s, inextricably linked to its ill-fated designs for Morven and Drumthwacket, is well documented in RPM’s correspondence and related materials. For his resignation from the Society’s Board of Trustees, see RPM to Fred H. Roh, November 25, 1985, RPM Papers, RUL, Box 14. The final straw for McCormick in a long simmering dissatisfaction with operations at the Society was a decision by Society officials to transfer endowed funds from the publications budget to the general operating account, which McCormick said bluntly at the time was “both unethical and illegal.” 105. Rutgers College Newsletter, May 3, 1974, p. 1. 106. Oral history, and Michael J. Birkner interview with RPM, December 11, 1996, tape in author’s possession.

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107. For Richard L. McCormick’s appointment as president of the University of Washington, see Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 1995, p. A 18. At the time of his appointment, the younger McCormick was provost and vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 108. McCormick’s most significant publications since his formal retirement include “The Ordinance of 1784,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d series, 50 (January 1993): 112–122; “Was There a Whig Strategy in 1836?” Journal of the Early Republic 4 (Spring 1984): 47–70; his reflections, “A Historian’s Education,” cited above, n. 31; The Black Student Protest Movement, cited above, n. 91; “The Miracle at Philadelphia,” Utah Law Review (1987), 829–846; the pamphlet Equality Deferred: Women Candidates for the New Jersey Assembly, 1920–1993 , coauthored with his wife, Katheryne (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for the American Woman and Politics, Eagleton Institute, 1994); “Ambiguous Authority: The Ordinances of the Confederation Congress, 1781–1789,” American Journal of Legal History 41 (1997): 411–439; and a fascinating book of historical detective work focused on a Nazi professor at Rutgers and charges that his hatred of Jews explained the firing of a Jewish instructor of German at Rutgers in the 1930s. See David M. Oshinsky, Richard P. McCormick, and Daniel Horn, The Case of the Nazi Professor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989) and review by Michael J. Birkner, Pennsylvania History 58 (July 1991): 254–255. To this list one can add several works in progress, continued service on various boards, and delivery of “too many eulogies at memorial services for departed associates and friends.” RPM to Michael J. Birkner, December 14, 1996, copy in author’s possession. 109. McCormick’s speech, delivered on April 29, 1995, was summarized in New Jersey Historical Commission Newsletter 25 (June 1995): 4. Typescript in author’s possession. 110. Michael Kammen, “Vanitas and the Historian’s Vocation,” in Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 71–103. Aside from a remarkable array of awards earned from his college during his active life, and the conferring of an honorary degree by his alma mater in 1982, McCormick’s name went on a new residence hall, which was dedicated at the Busch Campus in October 1987. 111. Jan Lewis, “Saving the New Jersey Historical Commission: Lessons from State Politics,” Organization of American Historians Newsletter 24 (August 1996): 1, 6; quote is from p. 6.

CHAPTER 1: THE PATH TO A LIFE WITH HISTORY 1. For biographical material on McCormick, a good starting point is his own memoir “A Historian’s Education,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 45 (July 1988): 552–559. See also the biographical folders in the Rutgers University Archives, Alexander Library, including Phyllis Messinger’s article, “RU’s Official Historian Looks Back Over His Own Past,” New Brunswick Home News, December 21, 1981, p. 9, and

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McCormick entry in Contemporary Authors, vols. 9–12, first revision (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1974), p. 595. 2. See Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), pp. 225–251; and Michael Moffatt, The Rutgers Picture Book: An Illustrated History of Student Life in the Changing College and University (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), chap. 3. Evocative Rutgers scenes from the thirties are also captured in the pictorial pamphlet Life at Rutgers (n.p., Rutgers University, 1939). 3. Edward McNall Burns’s text, Western Civilization, has been in print under a variety of titles and remains available at this writing, in its 12th edition, from W. W. Norton and Company. 4. For more on President Clothier, see McCormick, Rutgers, pp. 225–227 and Thomas J. Frusciano, “Leadership on the Banks: Rutgers’s Presidents, 1766–1991,” Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 53 (June 1991): 29–30. The frontispiece of Moffatt, The Rutgers Picture Book, depicts Clothier conversing with a 1930s-era Rutgers student. 5. John C. Fitzpatrick edited a Bicentennial Edition of the George Washington Papers, in 39 volumes, between 1931 and 1944. 6. The best brief overview of Roy F. Nichols’s career is Carol Reardon, “Roy F. Nichols,” in Clyde N. Wilson, ed., Twentieth Century American Historians, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol., 17 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983), pp. 328–332. Reflections on Nichols’s character and historical outlook can be found in articles edited by William G. Shade in Pennsylvania History 38 (January 1971): 1–72, and in Michael J. Birkner, “A Conversation with Philip S. Klein,” Pennsylvania History 56 (October 1989), 243–271. For Nichols’s obituary, see the New York Times, January 13, 1973, p. 30.

CHAPTER 2: REVITALIZING THE STUDY OF NEW JERSEY HISTORY 1. McCormick’s two quartermaster histories were never published, but, according to Herbert Ershkowitz of Temple University, they are available in the Philadelphia city archives. 2. James A. Barnes, John G. Carlisle: Financial Statesman (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1931). 3. On the immediate postwar era at Rutgers, the best account is McCormick, Rutgers, pp. 271–277. 4. Rutgers’s designation as the state university is discussed in ibid., pp. 262–266. On the university’s struggles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, ibid., pp. 285–290. 5. Materials relating to the conferences of New Jersey History, including copies of McCormick’s brainchild, Jersey Gazette: A News-Letter for New Jersey Historians, are available in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 7. 6. Edward P. Alexander enjoyed a long and distinguished career in museum work as a curator and administrator and, subsequently, as the first

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director (1972–1978) of the University of Delaware’s Museum Studies Program. At the time he wrote his report, The New Jersey Historical Commission and Its Future (Newark: The New Jersey Historical Society, 1950), he was vice president and director of Interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg. A copy of the Alexander report is available in the RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 9. For McCormick’s account of the chain of events that led to its commissioning, see RPM to Kenneth W. Duckett, June 19, 1953, RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 4. 7. There is an appreciative commentary on Charles Bradley and the New Jersey Historical Society in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 9. Embedded in the minutes of a 1960 NJHS meeting, it chronicles Bradley’s services to the Society, which included a tenure as president from 1945 to 1950 and major financial contributions over a longer period. Although conservative in many ways, the eulogy noted, “he was among the first to see that [the Society’s] true value to the people of New Jersey lay in the dissemination of historical knowledge and to approve a program of activity designed to carry out that purpose through the limited use of capital.” 8. In his speech on “The History of New Jersey History,” to a History issues convention sponsored by the New Jersey Historical Commission, published in New Jersey Historical Commission Newsletter 26 (October 1995): 2, 4–5, McCormick referred to the New Jersey Historical Society in the late 1940s as a “mausoleum.” “The whole interior gave the appearance of genteel dinginess. Rooms well designed for museum exhibits were virtually empty, save for a clutter of darkened portraits.” 9. Fred M. Shelley, A Guide to the Manuscripts Collection of the New Jersey Historical Society (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1957). 10. Correspondence and related material document McCormick’s speech schedule for 1949–1965 in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 6. Engagement books for the 1950s are in Box 3. During the early 1950s, McCormick generally received between $25 and $50 for most of the speeches he agreed to give to civic organizations and school graduations. 11. A lifetime resident of Bergenfield, New Jersey, Leiby (1904–1976) was a successful corporate lawyer in New York with the firm of LoBoeuf, Lamb, and Leiby. In his middle years, Leiby became interested in the history of the Old South (Presbyterian) Church in Bergenfield. His research about the Coetus-Conferentie struggles in Schraalenburgh and more generally in eighteenth-century Bergen County led him ultimately to write extensively about religious history, New Jersey, and the American Revolution. 12. Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775–1783 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962). Leiby’s book remains in print. 13. For a critical assessment of an early version of Leiby’s manuscript, see Roger Shugg to RPM, February 1, 1954, RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 4. It is evident from McCormick’s comments off tape, as well as documents in his papers, that he offered considerable encouragement to Leiby as he attempted to refocus his research and produce a manuscript that would have broader appeal.

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14. Adrian C. Leiby, The Early Dutch and Swedish Settlers of New Jersey (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1964). 15. For corroboration of McCormick’s account of Cunningham’s initiation into New Jersey History, see Michael Birkner, interview with John T. Cunningham, in author’s possession; also “The Accidental Historian,” preface to the 4th edition of This Is New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 16. Cunningham’s comments on his relations with McCormick (which remained primarily professional rather than social), are laced throughout Cunningham’s multi-part oral history with Michael Birkner, in author’s possession. Cunningham left the Newark News several years before it folded in 1964 to become a freelance writer focused on New Jersey History. He and McCormick joined in numerous public history ventures, including service on statewide historical committees, and the boards of both the New Jersey Historical Society and the New Jersey Historical Commission. Cunningham and his son founded Afton Press, which specializes in New Jersey History, especially but not exclusively oriented to student audiences. 17. See Carl E. Prince, et al., The Papers of William Livingston, published in 5 volumes, first by the New Jersey Historical Commission, then Rutgers University Press, between 1979 and 1988; and Reese V. Jenkins, et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, in progress, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press since 1989. For background on the Edison project, see Thomas E. Jeffrey, “The Thomas A. Edison Papers: Publishing the Records of an American Genius,” Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 47 (June 1985): 23–38. 18. For correspondence and other documents relating to the New Jersey History quiz, see RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 6. An editorial from the Camden Courier, April 24, 1950, “Better Knowledge of State History a Desirable Aim,” dicusses how McCormick used this quiz to make his point that “the teaching of state history in our schools is insufficient and faulty.” The quiz was published by Rutgers University in 1951 in a flier titled How Well Do You Know New Jersey? A copy is in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 5. 19. McCormick’s self-promotion of Experiment in Independence is documented in RPM Papers, RUL, Special Collections, Box 4. He sent copies of his book to all the leading newspapers in New Jersey. The book was serialized on radio in 1951 on a program entitled, “This Is New Jersey.” 20. For examples of McCormick’s encyclopedia work and various popular history efforts, see RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 4. For example, in 1952 McCormick wrote the article on Rutgers for Encyclopedia Brittanica and was paid $17.00. Efforts to publish an article on New Jersey History in Life magazine in 1949, however, came to nought, and McCormick expressed his frustrations in a letter to a Life editor, Ted Robinson, Jr., January 3, 1950. Some of McCormick’s writing found its way into trade journals like the Magazine of New Jersey Counties and the Newark Sunday News. 21. See, in this context, Robert V. Remini, “Introduction to the Torchbook Edition” of Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the

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Politics of New York, 1801–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965), p. xxvi. 22. McDonald is professor of History at the University of Alabama. A prolific writer, he is best known for his studies of the intellectual origins of the American Revolution, the shaping of the Constitution, and the American presidency.

CHAPTER 3: LIFE AT RUTGERS: DOING PUBLIC HISTORY IN THE 1950S AND 1960S 1. Over the course of two decades, McCormick was recruited by at least a dozen universities, their soundings often encompassing invitations to chair the History Department. Some universities were interested in McCormick for a deanship. Details of these invitations and negotiations can be traced through RPM Papers, RUL Library Special Collections, Boxes 5 and 6. Of these opportunities, the closest call seems to have been a 1960 offer to chair the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh. In a gracious letter to Dean John P. Gillin, April 24, 1960, McCormick emphasized that “my loyalties are here, and I want to continue to devote such talents as I may have to Rutgers and to New Jersey” (RPM Papers, Box 6). For details on the financial offer Rutgers President Mason Gross made to keep McCormick at Rutgers, see RPM to Gross, April 24, 1960, Mason Gross Papers, Rutgers University Archives, Box 10. Aside from Gross’s appreciation for McCormick’s value to Rutgers, it would appear that the decision to raise McCormick’s salary substantially in response to the offer from Pitt was set in context of the university’s recent loss of a rising star, John Higham, to the University of Michigan. Higham and two other young historians had left Rutgers because of opportunities for higher pay at other institutions. On this, see Richard Schlatter to State Sen. Walter Jones, March 2, 1960, copy in Mason Gross Papers, Rutgers University Archives, ibid. 2. Troast, a Bergen County building contractor, civic leader, and philanthropist, was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey in 1953. 3. For a discussion of Kenneth Chorley’s contribution to the shaping of Colonial Williamsburg, see John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), pp. 215, 490–500; and Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), especially pp. 63–65. 4. On Bradley, see chap. 2, n. 7. 5. McCormick’s summer in England is documented in his the RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 5. 6. Bernard R. Crick and Miriam Alamar, eds., A Guide to the Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1961); see also, in this connection, RPM to Crick, April 30, 1960, in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 7.

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7. The Cornwallis discovery and information about New Jersey Tories that McCormick uncovered are documented in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 5. 8. For a discussion of McCormick, Heimlich, Finley, and the McCarthyite phenomenon at Rutgers, see introduction, above; documents in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 4; and Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 171–179, 185–186, 311–312. In April 1972, Finley returned to New Brunswick to deliver the Mason Gross lectures, which were subsequently published as Democracy Ancient and Modern by Rutgers University Press in 1973. Finley dedicated the book to “my friends and students at Rutgers University, 1948–1952.” 9. J. R. Pole, a distinguished British student of American history, first came to the United States after World War II to study at Princeton University. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on suffrage in early New Jersey and subsequently returned to England where he taught at the University of London and later Oxford University. Pole has published notable books on American historical themes, including The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 10. William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). 11. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 12. The Susman letters were written during the year McCormick spent in Cambridge, England, as a Fulbright professor, 1961–1962. Located in Boxes 5 and 6, RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, they portray a scholar/teacher who felt distinctly unappreciated at Rutgers. 13. Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965). 14. See, among other sources, Stacy Kellner, “The Genovese Affair,” Rutgers College Quarterly 2 (Spring 1989): 4–23; and the Eugene Genovese biographical file, Rutgers University Archives. 15. See RPM, et al., to Mason Gross, August 5, 1965, in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 4. This letter was reprinted in a pamphlet titled A Report on the Genovese Case (August 6, 1965), ibid. 16. Genovese to RPM, April 21, 1966, RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 4. 17. See, for example, RPM to Alfred Driscoll, 6, 1954, in RPM Papers, RUL, Box 5. There is no fully satisfactory study of Driscoll’s tenure as governor. A good starting point is Alvin Stephen Felzenberg, “The Impact of Gubernatorial Style on Policy Outcomes: An In-Depth Study of Three New Jersey Governors” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1978), especially pp. 125–142. See also Felzenberg’s entry on Driscoll in Stellhorn and Birkner, eds., The Governors of New Jersey, pp. 214–219. An uncritical but nonetheless informative overview of Driscoll’s governorship is Franklin Gregory, “Driscoll’s Leadership Put the New in Jersey,” Newark Star Ledger, January 16, 1972. This article was reprinted in a pamphlet

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and published by the citizens of Haddonfield as Alfred E. Driscoll: New Jersey’s Creative Governor (n.p., n.d.), Rutgers University Special Collections. 18. McCormick’s vision for a Tercentenary celebration is outlined in RPM to Governor Robert Meyner, January 25, 1958, and in a memo for Meyner coauthored with John Cunningham and Roger McDonough, May 16, 1958, both in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 7. 19. A copy of this bill is in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 7, as is the bill appropriating money for the celebration. 20. Wheaton J. Lane, From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and Transportation in New Jersey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939). 21. Originally published by Van Nostrand in 1964 as the first volume of the Tercentenary Series, McCormick’s New Jersey: From Colony to State was reissued in a revised, paperback edition by the New Jersey Historical Society in 1981. Rights to the book subsequently migrated to the Rutgers University Press. 22. On the complications McCormick faced getting his Second Party System book published by the University of North Carolina Press, see documents in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 5, notably RPM to Dr. William Alderson, Nov. 30, 1965. 23. Rudolph J. Vecoli, The People of New Jersey (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1965). 24. Roger McDonough was the New Jersey state librarian during this era. 25. Adrian C. Leiby, The Huguenot Settlement of Schraalenburgh: The History of Bergenfield, New Jersey (Bergenfield, NJ: Bergenfield Public Library, 1964). 26. On the creation of the Historical Commission, see Richard P. McCormick, “Origins of the New Jersey Historical Commission,” paper delivered January 20, 1991, in author’s possession. For a somewhat different view of the agency’s origins, see Bernard Bush, “The New Jersey Historical Commission: A State Agency in Public History,” The Public Historian 3 (Fall 1981): 33–44. 27. On Troast’s race for governor in 1953 and the impact of the “Joey Fay” case, see William Lemmey, “Robert B. Meyner,” in Stellhorn and Birkner, eds., The Governors of New Jersey, pp. 220–221. 28. For details on the financial problems of the New Jersey Historical Society and McCormick’s increasing disenchantment with operations at the Society, see documents and correspondence in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 14. 29. Walter Muir Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies: An Enquiry into Their Research and Publication Functions and Their Financial Future (Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1962). 30. McCormick’s files on his ARBC connection are in RPM Papers, RUL, Boxes 7, 10. 31. The ARBC was ultimately reconstituted, with former Navy secretary John Warner as its head, and oversaw a successful Bicentennial observance in 1976 during the administration of President Gerald R. Ford.

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CHAPTER 4: CHAMPIONING A NEW POLITICAL HISTORY 1. George D. Luetscher, “Early Political Machinery in the United States” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1903) [privately published]. 2. Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1948). 3. Moisei I. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties [Edited and abridged by Semour Martin Lipset from the original 1902 edition] (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964). E. E. Schattschneider, The Struggle for Party Government (College Park: University of Maryland Press, 1949); see also idem, Party Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942). 4. Of Silbey’s many publications on nineteenth-century American political culture, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) is among the most influential. See also The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841–1852 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967). 5. Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period, 1781–1789 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950). 6. See, for example, Forrest McDonald, “Charles A. Beard,” in Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks, eds., Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969), pp. 116–117. In his relentless critique of Beard, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), McDonald leaned on McCormick’s work for his treatment of New Jersey in the critical period. “This is the only secondary study used without reservation in the present work,” McDonald noted [foonote 14, p. 124]. For one of many more recent references to McCormick’s work on New Jersey in the critical period as the “standard” interpretation, see Eugene R. Sheridan, “A Study in Paradox: New Jersey and the Bill of Rights,” in Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski, eds., The Constitution and the States: The Role of the Original Thirteen in the Framing and Adoption of the Federal Constitution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1988), pp. 74, 273. 7. Austin P. Ranney, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government: Its Origins and Present State (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954). 8. V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). 9. See David’s essay in Mirra Komarovsky, Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). 10. Belle Zeller, ed., American State Legislatures (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1954). 11. Ford wrote numerous books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about American politics and political history. For a recent appreciation of his contributions to the field, see a special issue of PS: Political Science and Politics 32 (June 1999), featuring Richard M. Pious, “Henry Jones Ford: The Political Science of Forecasting,” Erwin C. Hargrove, “Political Scence Then and Now: Thoughts on Henry Jones

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Ford,” and George C. Edwards, III, “Henry Jones Ford and the American Presidency.” 12. A. Lawrence Lowell, Governments and Politics in Continental Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896). 13. Stuart A. Rice, Quantitative Methods in Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928). 14. Bulletin 64, 1954: The Social Sciences in Historical Study: A Report of the Committee on Historiography (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1954). 15. Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History (New York: D. C. Heath and Company, 1938). 16. A pioneer in quantitative history, William Aydelotte (1920–1999) collected some of his most influential essays in Quantification in History (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1971). 17. Aydelotte’s essay, “Notes on the Problem of Historical Generalization,” was published in Louis Gottschalk, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History: A Report of the Committee on Historical Analysis of the Social Science Research Council (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 18. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (original publication in Paris, 1951; first English edition, 1954; first paperback edition, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1959). 19. Correspondence and other documents pertinent to the 1957 conference at Rutgers is in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 3. 20. Among those who declined McCormick’s invitation to participate, the most notable scholar was Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. 21. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). For Benson’s discussion of the causation of the American Civil War, see “Causation and the American Civil War,” History and Theory, 1 (1961): 163–175; reprinted in Benson’s collection of essays, Toward the Scientific Study of History: Selected Essays (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1972), pp. 81–97. 22. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), passim, and idem, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), especially chap. 2. For elaboration on the theme of Bailyn’s conservative/consensus approach to interpreting the Revolution, see Colin Gordon, “Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Ideology, and Historians of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 46 (October 1989), esp. 679–683. For a polemic aimed at Bailyn’s failure to acknowledge class conflict in early America, see Jesse Lemisch, “Bailyn Besieged in his Bunker,” Radical History Review 4 (Winter 1977): 72–83. 23. Richard P. McCormick, “Unique Elements in State History,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 33 (September 1949): 55–61; and idem, “The Comparative Method: Its Application to State History,” Mid-America 56 (October 1974): 231–247.

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24. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 25. Richard P. McCormick, “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments: A Study in Voter Behavior,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (December 1959): 397–410. 26. See, for example, Orin G. Libby, The Geographic Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969; reprint of 1894 edition). 27. Dixon Ryan Fox, The Transition from Aristocracy to Democracy in New York, 1801–1840 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965; reprint of 1919 edition). 28. See, among other works, Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967) and Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class: A Study of the New York Workingman’s Movement, 1829–1837 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965). 29. William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). In these works Shade and Formisano followed the example of Roy F. Nichols, who had long argued for treating politics “as a form of social behavior.” See, for example, Nichols, “A Political Historian Looks at Social History,” in William F. Lingelbach, ed., Approaches to American Social History (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1937), 31. 30. Richard L. McCormick, “Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineeenth-Century American Voting Behavior,” Political Science Quarterly 89 (June 1974): 351–377. See also Richard B. Latner and Peter D. Levine, “Perspectives in Antebellum Pietistic Politics: The Salience of Ethno-Cultural Issues,” Reviews in American History 4 (March 1976): 15–24. 31. Ronald P. Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 453–477. 32. Watson’s comment was made at a session on state politics in the Jacksonian era at SHEAR, Vanderbilt University, July 1996. Relevant in this context is Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990) and idem, “Humbug? Bah! Altschuler and Blumin and the Riddle of the Antebellum Electorate,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 886–893. 33. Robert E. Shalhope, “Jacksonian Politics in Missouri: A Comment on the McCormick Thesis,” Civil War History 15 (September 1965): 210–225. McCormick’s response was printed as a “Communication,” Civil War History 16 (March 1970): 92–93. For evidence that Shalhope’s argument vexed McCormick considerably, see correspondence in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 2. 34. Herbert Ershkowitz and William G. Shade, “Consensus or Conflict? Political Behavior in the State Legislatures during the Jacksonian Era,” Journal of American History 58 (December 1971): 591–621. McCormick’s

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student Peter D. Levine rejects key tenets of this article in The Behavior of State Legislative Parties in the Jacksonian Era: New Jersey, 1829–1844 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977). 35. Michael J. Birkner, “Journalism and Politics in Jacksonian New Jersey: The Career of Stacy G. Potts,” New Jersey History 97 (Autumn 1979): 159–178. 36. For a different view of Vroom, accentuating his disagreements with Whigs, see Michael J. Birkner, “Peter Vroom and the Politics of Democracy,” in Paul A. Stellhorn, ed., Jacksonian New Jersey (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1979): 11–38. 37. Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 38. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978). 39. At the time of the interviews with McCormick, Holt had not yet completed The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 40. Michael F. Holt, Forging a Majority: The Rise of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969). 41. Harry Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 42. Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 43. Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk: Jacksonian, 1795–1843 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); idem, James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 44. William J. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); also, idem, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 45. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 46. See, for example, John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1984), especially pp. 103–104, 128–129; idem, “Knowledge and Sorrow: Louis Hartz’s Quarrel with American History,” Political Theory 16 (August 1988): 355–376; Benjamin Barber, “Louis Hartz,” Political Theory 14 (August 1986): 355–358; and Jeremy Rabkin, “A Liberal Country, After All,” The Public Interest No. 134 (Winter 1999): 68–81. 47. Viz., Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1878–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 48. Among many works, see, especially, Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

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49. Aside from his coedited work with Chambers (above, n. 24), see “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965): 7–28; and The Current Crisis in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). For historiographical context, see Peter H. Argersinger and John W. Jeffries, “American Electoral History: Party Systems and Voting Behavior,” Research in Micropolitics 1 (1986): 1–33, reprinted in Argersinger, Structure, Process, and Party: Essays in American Political History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992), pp. 3–33. 50. Sellers, “The Equilibrium Cycle in Two-Party Politics,” Public Opinion Quarterly 29 (Spring 1965): 16–38. 51. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Cycles of American Politics,” in The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986), pp. 23–48. 52. McCormick, New Jersey: From Colony to State (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1964). 53. McCormick, “The Jacksonian Strategy,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Spring 1990): 1–17. 54. McCormick, The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 55. Aside from the recent, popular sessions on political history at the OAH, signs of life for this subdiscipline abound in the pages of the Journal of American History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the American Historical Review. The topics most often discussed tend to focus on the relationship between governance and parties, or the impact of race and gender on political behavior—subjects beyond the purview of Richard P. McCormick’s most significant published work. See, for example, the round-table discussion “Alternatives to the Party System in the ‘Party Period,’ 1830–1890,” Journal of American History 86 (June 1999): 93–166, featuring contributions by Ronald P. Formisano, Mark Voss-Hubbard, Michael F. Holt, and Paula Baker, and the ongoing SHEAR list-serve discussions on the social bases of political behavior, on H-Net. 56. Taylor was a distinguished economic historian, whose book The Transportation Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951) was influential in describing the transition to market capitalism in the early nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 5: THE TURBULENT ’60S AT RUTGERS 1. See Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 315–320. 2. In April 1965, History professor Eugene Genovese spoke at a teach in at the university, saying he welcomed a Viet Cong victory in the conflict then ongoing in Vietnam. Many citizens of New Jersey responded with anger to Genovese’s assertion, and an effort was made to have Genovese fired. Republican gubernatorial candidate Wayne Dumont made the Genovese case a centerpiece of his campaign that year. Dumont lost decisively in the election to incumbent Governor Richard J. Hughes, and the

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issue faded. Genovese, however, chose to leave Rutgers in 1966 for Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada. Genovese subsequently emerged as the foremost American historian of slavery and the old South. Contemporary news clippings about the Genovese case are in the Eugene Genovese biographical file, Alexander Library Special Collections. McCormick’s involvement in the episode is documented in the RPM Papers, Special Collections, Alexander Library, Box 4. For a summary of the controversy, see Stacy Kelner, “The Genovese Affair,” Rutgers College Quarterly 2 (Spring 1989): 4–22. 3. Richard Schlatter, Henry Winkler, and Peter Charanis were members of the Rutgers Department of History. 4. For more on this scene, the context for it, and the outcome, see Richard P. McCormick, The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 46–55. Many valuable documents relevant to the issue of the black student movement and efforts to recruit African-American students to Rutgers can be found in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 15. 5. On the situation at Rutgers-Newark, ibid., 34–46. 6. Warren Susman’s treatise, “Toward the Reconstruction of an American College,” was published by Rutgers College in October 1968, and is available in pamphlet form in the Department of Special Collections at Alexander Library. 7. Many documents pertaining to the struggle for coeducation at Rutgers are in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Boxes 16 and 17. Of special interest is McCormick’s case for coeducation, as expressed in a letter to Douglass College dean Margery Foster, Dec. 14, 1970, in Box 17. As he told Foster, they agreed that women suffered disabilities in American society. But they disagreed about “remedies.” “You would fight to the last to hold on to the sanctuaries [in higher education]. I would maintain that the fight must be waged against inequality in the coed institutions.” See also RPM to New Jersey legislator Millicent H. Fenwick, November 4, 1970, ibid. 8. All members of the History Department at Rutgers College. 9. Material on the federated plan and other governance issues at Rutgers during the 1970s and 1980s can be found in RPM Papers, RUL Special Collections, Box 16. 10. McCormick’s son, Richard L. McCormick, an organizer of the conference marking his father’s retirement, edited a volume containing papers of the leading political historians McCormick mentions, along with his father’s brief and pithy recapitulation of some of his views on American parties and politics—emphasizing that the two are not synonymous. See Political Parties and the Modern State (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984).

CHAPTER 6: DOING HISTORY: REFLECTIONS 1. Wiltse (1907–1990) was a leading political historian of his era, best known as author of a multivolume biography of John C. Calhoun and editor of a 14-volume edition of the papers of Daniel Webster.

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2. Oshinsky, a professor of History at Rutgers, has written widely on American political themes and African-American history. He is one of McCormick’s coauthors in The Case of the Nazi Professor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 3. There is a large and growing literature on Hofstadter’s work. See, for example, Michael Kazin, “Hofstadter Lives: Political Culture and Temperament in the Work of an American Historian,” Reviews in American History 27 (June 1999): 334–348. 4. See, for example, Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); idem, History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); idem, “The Open Boundary of History and Fiction,” Comparative Literature 39 (Spring 1987): 185–187; idem, review of Hayden White’s The Content of the Form, in American Historical Review 93 (October 1988): 1007–1008; and idem, “Poetics of the New History,” Journal of Modern History 66 (June 1994): 354–359. 5. See, especially, Hayden White, Topics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and idem, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23 (1984): 1–23. 6. Early in her tenure as governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman proposed eliminating the New Jersey Historical Commission and farming out its responsibilities to a congeries of other state and private agencies. The plan met with widespread hostility in the state’s history and historical preservation communities. A New Jersey History alliance was formed, and the legislators and the governor’s office were deluged with letters opposing Whitman’s plan. Facing opposition to her plan by even otherwise loyal Republican legislators, the governor backed down. A slimmed down Historical Commission continues to serve the state—and biannually awards the Richard P. McCormick Prize for the best book manuscript on New Jersey History.

Selected Bibliography of McCormick’s Publications

BOOKS Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period, 1781–1789 . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950. The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of Election Machinery, 1664–1911 . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954. New Jersey from Colony to State, 1609–1789. Philadelphia: Van Nostrand, 1964. 2d ed., Rutgers University Press, 1970; paperback ed., Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1981. Rutgers: A Bicentennial History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966. The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. The Selected Speeches of Mason Welsh Gross. Coedited with Richard Schlatter. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980. The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The Case of the Nazi Professor. Coauthored with David M. Oshinsky and Daniel Horn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

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GUIDES, PAMPHLETS, PUBLISHED REPORTS Report of a Visit to Great Britain for the New Jersey Tercentenary Commmission from June to August, 1960. Trenton: New Jersey Tercentenary Commission, 1960. New Jersey: A Student’s Guide to Localized History. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965. Equality Deferred: Women Candidates for the New Jersey Assembly, 1920–1993 . Co-authored with Katheryne C. McCormick. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for the American Woman and Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, 1994.

ARTICLES “A Jefferson Letter.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 9 (June 1946): 33–35. “Democracy Works in New Jersey.” Rutgers Alumni Monthly 27 (1947): 20–24. “The First Election of Governor William Livingston.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 55 (April 1947): 92–100. “The First Steam Engine in America.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 11 (December 1947): 16–20. “Suffrage and the Constitution.” The Governor’s Committee on Preparatory Research for the New Jersey Constitutional Convention (1947). “The West Jersey Estate of Sir Robert Barker.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 55 (April 1947): 92–100 “New Jersey’s First Congressional Election, 1789: A Case Study in Political Skulduggery.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 6 (1949): 237–250. “Unique Elements in State History.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 33 (September 1949): 55–61. “New Jersey Defies the Confederation: An Abraham Clark Letter.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 13 (June 1950): 44–50. “A Swedish Contribution to New Jersey Historiography.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 13 (June 1950): 60–61. “The Future of Historical Activity in New Jersey.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 59 (July 1951): 230–234. “The Province of East Jersey, 1609–1702.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 70 (April 1952): 81–96. “The Revolution of 1681 in East Jersey: A Document.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 71 (April 1953): 111–124. “Political Essays of William Paterson.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 18 (June 1955): 38–49. “The Historical Society as an Educational Institution.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 75 (October 1957): 231–236. “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments: A Study in Voter Behavior.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (December 1959): 397–410.

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“The Unanimous State.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 23 (December 1959): 4–7. “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics.” American Historical Review 65 (January 1960): 288–301. “Rutgers and the Civil War.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 24 (April 1961): 40–45. “The Royal Society, the Grape, and New Jersey.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 71 (April 1963): 75–84. “Poor Slavish Dependents.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 28 (December 1964): 1–5. “Party Formation in New Jersey in the Jacksonian Era.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 83 (July 1965): 161–173. “Political Development and the Second Party System.” In William N. Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967: 90–116. “Perspective on New Jersey.” In New Jersey: Spotlight on Government. Trenton: League of Women Voters of New Jersey, 1969: 7–19. “A Further Account. . . .” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 34 (June 1971): 34–41. “The Liberation of New Brunswick: An Anthony Wayne Letter.” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 37 (December 1973): 10–18. “Rutgers: The State University.” In David Riesman and Verne A. Stadtman, eds., Academic Transformation: Seventeen Institutions under Pressure. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1973: 271–286. “The Comparative Method: Its Application to State History.” Mid-America 56 (October 1974): 231–247. “Van Buren and the Uses of Politics.” In Harry J. Sievers., ed., Six Presidents from the Empire State. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1974: 26–32. “An Historical Overview.” In Alan Rosenthal and John Blydenburgh, eds., Politics in New Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Eagleton Institute of Politics, 1975. “William Whipper: Moral Reformer.” Pennsylvania History 43 (January 1976): 23–46. “Introduction.” In The West Jersey Concessions and Agreements of 1676/77: A Round Table of Historians. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1979. “Alexander Johnston: An Appreciation.” Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 47 (June 1984): 12–22. “The Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler.” In Henry F. Graff, ed., The Presidents: A Reference History. New York: Scribner’s, 1984. “Was There a ‘Whig Strategy’ in 1836?” Journal of the Early Republic 4 (Spring 1984): 47–70. “Sir Moses Finley.” Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries 48 (December 1986): 63–64. “The Miracle at Philadelphia.” Utah Law Review (1987): 829–846.

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“A Historian’s Education.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 47 (July 1988): 452–459. “The Jacksonian Strategy.” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Spring 1990): 1–17. “The ‘Ordinance’ of 1784.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 50 (January 1993): 112–122. “A History of New Jersey History.” New Jersey Historical Commission Newsletter 26 (October 1995): 2, 4–5. “Ambiguous Authority: The Ordinances of the Confederation Congress, 1781–1789.” American Journal of Legal History 41 (1997): 411–439.

MISCELLANY “The Jersey Gazette,” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 13 (December 1949): 31. “Communication [A Reply to Robert E. Shalhope’s “Jacksonian Politics in Missouri: A Comment on the McCormick Thesis,” Civil War History 15 (September 1969)].” Civil War History 16 (March 1970): 92–93. “Comment.” William C. Wright, ed., The Development of the New Jersey Legislature from Colonial Times to the Present. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1976. “Introduction.” The West Jersey Concessions and Agreements of 1676–77: A Round Table of Historians. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1979. The Governors of New Jersey: A Conversation with Four Ex-Governors, led by Richard P. McCormick and John T. Cunningham. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1982. “Epilogue.” Richard L. McCormick, ed. Political Parties and the Modern State. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984. [With John T. Cunningham.] The Annual John T. Cunningham Lecture in New Jersey History. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1986.

PH.D. STUDENTS TRAINED BY RICHARD P. MCCORMICK David Bernstein Frederick Black Larry R. Gerlach L. Ray Gunn Frederick Hermann John Latschar Peter D. Levine Alvin Lynn Herman E. Platt Carl E. Prince

Bibliography

BOOKS Alexander, Edward P. The New Jersey Historical Commission and Its Future. Newark: The New Jersey Historical Society, 1950. Argersinger, Peter H. Structure, Process and Party: Essays in American Political History. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992. Aydelotte, William. Quantification in History. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1971. Bailey, Stephen K., et al. Research Frontiers in Politics and Government: Brookings Lectures, 1955. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1955. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. ———. The Origins of American Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Baker, Susan S. Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s. Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Barnes, James A. John G. Carlisle: Financial Statesman. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1931. Benson, Lee. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. ———. Toward the Scientific Study of History: Selected Essays. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972. Birkner, Michael J., and Paul A. Stellhorn, eds. The Governors of New Jersey, 1664–1974: Biographical Essays . Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1982.

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Index

Adams, John Quincy, 21, 123, 128 The Age of Jackson (Schlesinger), 20 The Age of Reform, 169 Aldington, John, 85 Alexander, Edward P., 9, 11–12; and New Jersey Historical Society, 67–70, 76, 79, 99 Alexander Library, 38, 72, 87; and McCormick, 96 Aluminum Company of America, 58 American Association of State and Local History, 11, 22, 24; and McCormick, 79, 99 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 90–91, 138 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 146 American Federation of Teachers, 91 American Heritage, 79

American Historical Association (AHA), 90, 106; and McCormick, 152 American Historical Review, 20; and Formisano, 125 American History Research Center, 80 The American Political Tradition (Hofstadter), 31, 169 American Revolution Bicentennial, 35 American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), 106–7 Armstrong Bills, 95. See also Driscoll, Alfred Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP), 7, 63–65 Aydelotte, William, 118 Bailey, Samuel, 148 Bailyn, Bernard, 14, 119, 120–21 Barnes, Eleanor, 63 Barnes, James, 6, 63 Bateman, Raymond H., 35

220

Index

Battle of Red Bank, 11, 72 Beard, Charles, 14–15, 114–15, 172 Bell, Rudy, 91, 148 Benson, Lee, 16–21: on voting behavior, 22, 119; McCormick on, 120–27; potentially verifiable hypothesis, 125. See also negative reference groups; panel analysis Bergen County, 2, 13, 42, 71, 73; Coetus and Conferentie, 74. See also Leiby, Adrian Coulter Bergenfield, 2, 12, 99 Berkeley, John, Lord, 28 Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, 26 Biddle, Jimmy, 106. See also National Trust for Historic Preservation Bigelow, John O., 68 Bishop, Reg, 151 Bishop House, 50, 68; and Cunningham, 74, 93 Black, Fred, 162 black student protest movement. See Rutgers University The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers (McCormick), 173 Bloustein, Edward J., 36; and McCormick’s deanship, 151 Blum, John Morton, 31 Board of Governors (Rutgers), 146–47, 150, 153 Bogota Paper and Board, 58 Bogue, Allen, 18–19, 119 Bontempo, Sal, 97, 102–3 Boyd, Julian P., 103 Boyden, Seth, 96 Bradley, Charles B., 9, 67–68; and Palmentier and Coons, 69, 82 Bradley, Joseph P., 68 Brewster, Kingman, 151 British House of Commons, 118 Bristish Museum, 83

British Public Records Office Manuscripts Commission, 83–84 Britten, Bill, 69 Brooklyn Polytechnic, 94 Brown, Richard D., 16, 119; and Massachusetts 121 Bucknell University, 50, 101 Bulletin 64. See The Social Sciences in Historical Study Burke, Edmund, 126 Burke, Frank, 106 Burnham, Walter Dean: and five-party system, 24, 31, 131–32; and McCormick’s retirement, 155 Burns, Edward McNall, 3, 86 Burr, Bob, 59 Busch Campus, 37, 141, 154 Bush, Bernard, 35, 103 Byrne Arena, 100 Byrne, Brendan, 82; and income tax, 91, 96 Calhoun, John C., 128 Campbell, Angus, 19 Carlisle, John G., 63 Carter, Jimmy, 26 Carteret, George, Sir, 28 Cave, Paul, 85 Charanis, Peter, 94, 139, 148 Charles Perrin Smith manuscript, 163. See also Platt, Herman Chorley, Kenneth, 27, 82. See also Colonial Williamsburg Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 4, 53–54 Civil War Centennial Commission, 35, 100, 103 Clark, Abraham, 96 Clay, Henry, 21, 128 Clothier, Robert C., 4, 9, 68 Coates, W.O., 83 Cochran, Thomas C., 17 Colgate University, 3, 50 Colonial Williamsburg, 9–11, 67, 79, 82; and McCormick, 83–84, 97

Index Columbia University, 16, 48, 67, 79; and Lord, 99; and Nichols, 109; and the working man’s vote, 123; radicalism, 140, 150–51, 162 Committee to Re-elect the President, 132 Communist Party, 85. See also Finley, Moses; Heimlich, Simon comparative analysis, 16, 20, 116–17; McCormick’s use of in The Second Party System, 121–22. See also New Political history “The Comparative Method: Its Application to American History” (McCormick), 14, 121 The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Benson), 18, 21, 125 Conference of Early American Political Behavior, 16–17 Conference of New Jersey Historians, 8, 67, 70, 114 Conservation and Economic Development, 102–3 Convention Hall, 56–57 Cooper, William, 130 Cornwallis, Charles, Lord, 85 Council of the State Historical Society at Wisconsin’s American History Research Center, 11 Crane, Bob, 97 Cresskill, 2, 42, 44 Crick, Bernard, 83–84 Croly, Herbert, 116 Cronkite, P. J., 70 Cultural Center, 99 Culture as History, 92 Cunningham, John T., 12; Tercentenary, 27, 35; New Jersey History, 74–75, 96, 99; New Jersey Historical Commission, 101, 103 Cunningham, Noble, 14, 16, 119 Curti, Merle, 91 Darnell, Howard, 52

221

David, Paul, 116 Davies, Dave, 97 Delaware State Archives, 77 “The Democratic Machine” (Nichols), 5 Depression, 44, 49, 51, 56; and the New Jersey Historical Society 69, 82 Disruption of American Democracy (Nichols), 5, 112 The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government (Ranney), 116 Dorsey, Tommy, 3 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 2, 43 Douglas, Damon, 9, 67, 70 Douglass College, 7, 65, 82, 143; coeducation at Rutgers, 146–47, 149; Douglass-Cook campus, 154. See also Foster, Marjorie Driscoll, Alfred, 10, 26, 31, 86; and Genovese, 95; and the New Jersey Turnpike, 102 Drumthwacket, 26, 36 Dumont, Wayne, 29–30, 93; and the campaign, 139–40 Duverger, Maurice, 14, 118; on political parties, 124; McCormick’s retirement, 155 Easton, David, 33, 90, 133 East Sussex Record Office, 84 Edge, Walter, 95 Edgeworth Pipe Tobacco, 84 Edison, Thomas. See Thomas A. Edison Project Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), 142 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 26, 85, 113, 170 Ekirch, A. Roger, Jr., 166 Ekirch, Arthur, Sr., 166 electoral machine theory, 5, 16, 22–24; party responsibility, 113; McCormick, 122; and the twelfth amendment, 124. See also Nichols, Roy Franklin Elias, Bob, 62

222

Index

Ellis, Ethan, 3, 159 Ershkowitz, Herbert, 126 Erskine, General, 85 Essex Club, 67, 104 ethnocultural school, 123–25. See also Benson, Lee Evans, Francis, Sir, 84 Evergreen Theater, 44 Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period (McCormick), 8, 77; Nichols’ influence on, 110, 114–16; editing of, 167 Fake, Guy Laverne, 88–89 Fay, Joey, 102. See also Troast, Paul Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 88–89 Federalist era, 20 federated college plan, 153 Feller, Daniel, 22 Felmly, Lloyd, 74. See also Newark News Finley, Moses, 29; and Rutgers University, 85–88 Fischer, David Hackett, 14 Fitzpatrick, John C., 54 Foner, Eric, 155 Ford, Henry Jones, 116–17 Ford Mansion, 4, 53–54 Formisano, Ronald, 18, 123, 125. See also Benson, Lee Foster, Marjorie, 146 Fox, Dixon Ryan, 79, 123 Fox, Donald, 27, 96–97 Franklin & Marshall College, 3, 166 Freidel, Frank, 31 From Indian Trail to Iron Horse (Lane), 98 game of faction, 34. See also party systems Gardner, Lloyd, 91, 148, 159 Gatell, Frank Otto, 23 The Gateway to History, 117 Gay, Peter, 140

gemeinschaft social order, 31 Generalization in History. See Social Science Research Council Genovese, Eugene, 28–30, 32, 91, 95; Vietnam war protest, 29, 93–94, 139–40, 149 Gerlach, Larry R., 26, 92, 162–63 Gettysburg College, 50 Giants Stadium, 100 Glory, 164 Gloucester County Historical Society, 72 Goldberg, David, 96 Goldman, Eric, 31 Goodenow, Frank, 116 Goodman, Benny, 3 The Governors of New Jersey, 103. See also New Jersey Historical Commission Grassman, E.J., 70 Green, Leon, 143 Greene, Maude H., 68 Grevin, Phil, 91 Grobman, Arnold, 32, 36; and the black student protest, 141; and the Susman report, 144–45; and coeduation, 146–47; and leaving Rutgers, 151 Gross, Mason, 32, 36; Mason Gross lectureship, 88; AAUP, 91; inauguration, 137, 138–39; Rutgers demonstrations, 149–50 Gunn, Ray, 161–63 Gutman, Herbert, 94 Hagley Foundation, 59 haphazard system, 34. See also party systems Harrison, William Henry, 130 Hartz, Louis, 130–31 Harvard University, 54–55, 123, 166; and radicalism, 140 Hauser, Frederick H., 35 Heimlich, Simon, 85–88. See also Finley, Moses Hemings, Sally, 164 Herring, Pendleton, 119

Index Herrman, Fred, 162 Heyd, Eddie, 52 Higham, John, 91, 159 Hill, Claude, 144–45 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 14, 104 Historic Sites Advisory Committee, 97 “The History of American Politics,” 89, 131 A History of Voting in New Jersey (McCormick), 11, 111, 116 Hofstadter, Richard, 31, 131; Rutgers in the ’60s, 140; American political culture, 169, 172 Holt, Michael F., 23, 128–29; McCormick on, 165 Honeyman, A. Van Doren, 68 Horn and Hardart, 58 House Education Committee, 143 Huber, Richard, 28, 98 Hughes, Richard J., 26; and Dumont and Genovese, 28–31, 35, 82; and salaries at Rutgers, 91, 93; and support of history, 101, 138–39 Hull, Joan, 101 The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Bailyn), 121 “The Imperfect Union” (McCormick), 133 Institute of Early American History and Culture, 11 Jackson, Andrew, 21, 123 Jacksonian era, 5, 14, 16, 18–19; interpretation of, 120; McCormick’s influence on the study of, 21; anti-bank attitude of, 124, 127; parties during time of, 129; market revolution during, 134 “The Jacksonian Strategy” (McCormick), 33; responsibles vs. irresponsibles, 128; model of American political system, 133

223

Jamestown, 97 Jefferson, Joe, 161 Jefferson, Thomas, 164 “Jefferson in Paris,” 164 Jenkins, Reese V., 35. See also New Jersey Historical Commission Jensen, Merrill, 114 Jensen, Oliver, 79. See also American Heritage Jerseymen, 101 Jockey Hollow, 4, 54 Johnson, Lyndon B., 28, 30 Jones, Lewis Webster, 29, 86–87 Journal of American History, 23; and Ershkowitz and Shade article, 126 Journal of the Early Republic, 33 The Journal of the Rutgers University Library, 10 “The Joy of Discovery” (McCormick), 163 Kammen, Michael, 38 Kater, Harold Dean, 79 Kean, Thomas, 31; and Drumthwacket, 36, 82 Kent State University, 31, 149–50 Key, V.O., 14, 116, 131 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 140 Kirk, Grayson, 151 Klein, Philip, 22; and Nichols, 110 Kress Foundation, 101 Kull, Irving, 3, 7, 55, 57; and McCormick’s job offer, 65 Kurtz, William, 96 LaCapra, Dominick, 171 Lafayette College, 50 Landers, Everett J., 35, 100 Land of Desire, 92 Lane, Wheaton J., 28, 98 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 19 Leach, William, 92 League of Nations, 55 League of Women Voters, 82 Lee, Charles, 106 Lehigh University, 3, 50

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Leiby, Adrian Coulter, 12–13; and the New Jersey Historymobile, 27, 73–74; Tercentenary, 100 Leuchtenburg, William, 31 Levine, Peter D., 26, 162 Levis, Dorothy, 7, 64 Levis, Katheryne (“Katch”), 7, 10, 25, 64–65, 70–71; and connections in New Jersey, 82; as activist for income tax, 170 Lewis, Jan, 39 Libby, Orin Grant, 123 The Liberal Tradition in America (Hartz), 130–31 Library of Congress, 69, 84 Life magazine, 78 Lilien, David, 52 Link, Arthur S., 166 Link, William A., 166 Livingston, William. See William Livingston Papers Livingston College, 154 Lord, Clifford, 25, 70; and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 79, 99; and McCormick, 79–80 Lovejoy, David, 119 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 116–17 Luetscher, George, 111 Lunny, Robert, 58; and the New Jersey Historical Society, 77; and the New Jersey Historical Commission, 101 Mailer, Norman, 172 majority rule, 113 Malone, Dumas, 164 Marchand, Jack, 94 The Market Revolution (Sellers), 130 Marvin, Walter T., 51 Marx, Leo, 165 McCarthy, Joseph R., 30 McCarthyism, 26, 29; at Rutgers, 85–88 McCormick, Dorothy, 71, 94 McCormick, Richard L., 37–38, 71; ethnocultural interpreta-

tion, 125; McCormick’s retirement, 155; Rutgers, 161; co-teacher with father, 161, 165–66; at Amherst, 165 McCormick, Richard P.: early life, 2–4, 41–43; Nichols’ influence on, 6–7, 109–12; scholarship, 8, 13–14, 33, 106; and promotion of New Jersey history, 8–9, 26, 66–67, 72–73, 75–76; as president of New Jersey Historical Society, 9–10, 35, 67–70; influence on political history, 21, 117–20; academic recruitment of, 25; at Rutgers, 25, 31–32, 36–39, 82–83, 148–49, 173; work and lifestyle, 25, 166–68, 170–71; political ideology of, 30–33, 119–20, 126–28, 133, 169–70; and Finley and Genovese, 29–30, 85–88; and the Fulbright, 83, 87, 89; as a teacher, 89, 131, 158–63; on ethno- culturists, 120–27; as co-teacher with son, 161, 165–66; and retirement, 155 McDonald, Forrest, 13–14, 80 McDonough, Roger, 26–27, 96, 99; and the New Jersey Historical Commission, 103 Mehorter, Hugh, 1, 72 The Messages of the Governors of Tennessee, 104 Metzger, Frazer, 51–52 Meyner, Robert, 10; Tercentenary, 26–27, 31, 82, 85, 95–97; speechwriting by McCormick, 96, 101–2, 138–39 Miers, Earl Schenck, 103 Miller, Eddie, 52 Miller, Nathan, 159 Mississippi Valley Historical Association. See Organization of American Historians Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 19 Morgan, Edmund S., 14, 119

Index Morristown National Historical Park, 4, 54 Morristown Public Library, 54 Morven, 26, 36; Morven Committee, 95–96, 139 Munroe, John A., 7, 16, 58; World War II, 62–63; American Association of State and Local History, 79; and Nichols, 109, 119 Murray, James, 101 Murray Fund, 101. See also New Jersey Historical Society Murrin, Mary, 103. See also New Jersey Historical Commission Nash, Gary, 131 National Archives, 106 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), 138 National Historical Publications Commission. See National Historical Records and Publications Commission National Historical Records and Publications Commission, 106–107 National Organization for Women (NOW), 146 National Park Service, 53. See also Morristown National Historical Park National Register of Archives, 83 National Standards in History, 165 National Trust for Historic Preservation, 54; and Biddle, 106 The Nazi Professor (McCormick), 173 NBC studios, 58 negative reference groups, 17, 125 Nevins, Allan, 117; and photographic memory, 166 Newark News, 12; and Cunningham, 74–75, 78 New Brunswick Historical Club, 11 New Brunswick Home News, 29

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New Brunswick Theological Seminary, 55 New Deal Liberalism, 31, 56; McCormick as, 169 New Jersey: America’s Main Road (Cunningham), 12 New Jersey College for Women. See Douglass College New Jersey from Colony to State (McCormick), 28, 133 New Jersey Historical Commission, 12, 34–35; elimination of, 39, 173; and Driscoll, 95; creation and development of, 99–105 New Jersey Historical Society, 8–11, 35–36, 58, 98; and the Alexander Plan, 9–10, 11–12, 76; publications of, 28, 70, 140; McCormick as president, 66–70, 75–77, 88, 114; Cunningham, 75; New Jersey Historical Commission, 100–101, 104; finances and future of, 104–107 New Jersey history: critical period, 7–8, 66; Tercentenary, 26–28, 32; and the Historymobile, 27, 99; Cunningham, 74–75; McCormick, 75, 77, 114; Hundred Questions, 77–78; State Cultural Center, 97, 99, 139; and the Jeffersonian era, 162. See also McCormick, Richard P.; Prince, Carl New Jersey History, 104; Proceedings into New Jersey History, 106, 158. See also New Jersey Historical Society New Jersey Tercentenary Commission, 75, 97, 98. See also Tercentenary Publication Series New Jersey Turnpike, 102 “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” 20; and voter participation, 121 New Political history: Nichols’ influence on, 5, 14, 16–18; scien-

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tific study, 17; McCormick’s shift to, 115–19; McCormick and ethnoculturalism, 123–25. See also progressive interpretation Newton, Earle, 79. See also Vermont Life New-York Historical Society, 104 New York State Historical Association, 67, 69 New York World, 43 Nichols, Roy Franklin, 4–6, 14–15, 35, 57, 61, 119, 128; influence on McCormick, 5–6, 109–12, 162; and Finley and Heimlich, 86; and themes of scholarship, 110–11 Nixon, Richard M., 107, 170 Organization of American Historians (OAH), 90, 92, 106; and the future of political history, 134; and the Susman Report, 145 Oshinsky, David, 168 Ostrogorski, Mosei, 112, 116, 118 Oxford Pledge, 56 panel analysis, 17. See also Benson, Lee Parton, James, 79. See also American Heritage party game, 34. See also party systems party machinery, 18. See also electoral machine theory party systems, 34; government by, 113; McCormick on, 21–22, 33–34, 77, 113, 122–24; formation of, 19, 34–35, 126, 128, 130; parties as “artificial,” 128 Pearl Harbor, 57, 61 Pearson, Paul, 151, 153 Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 35 Perkins, Bradford, 166 Perkins, Dexter, 166 Pessen, Edward, 123, 172

Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot, 6, 62–63, 109 Platt, Herman, 162–63. See also Charles Perrin Smith manuscript Pole, J.R., 89–90 The Political Crisis of the 1850s (Holt), 129 The Political Economy of Slavery, 93 poststructuralism, 164, 171 Potts, Stacy, 127 The Presidential Game (McCormick), 33, 37, 127, 134; criticism of the American political system, 169, 173 presidential synthesis, 17–18. See also Cochran, Thomas C. Prince, Carl, 19, 26; Director of New Jersey Historical Commission, 35, 76, 115, 119; as a graduate student, 162–63 Princeton Universtiy, 13, 16; publications of New Jersey history, 28; Morven and Drumthwacket, 36; Convention on New Jersey History, 38, 45, 50, 89; Huber and Lane, 98, 103 Princeton University Press, 13, 70; and Lieby, 74 private balloting, 112. See also voter participation progressive interpretation, 15, 19–20, 117 Quakerism, 52; Irish Quakers, 85 Quantitative Methods in Politics (Rice), 14–15, 117 Queens Campus, 50; “Old Queens,” 150 Quinn and Boden, 133 Ranney, Austin, 14, 116–17 Rath, Fred, 54 Reed, John J., 16, 62, 119 Renda, Lex, 23 Research Frontiers in American Political Science, 116

Index The Revolution of American Conservatism (Fischer), 14 The Revolutionary War in Hackensack Valley (Lieby), 13 Rice, Stuart, 14–15, 117 Rich, Bennett, 86 Robert Gair Company, 41 Roll, Jordan Roll, 95 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 30, 56–57, 169 Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (McCormick), 33, 132; completion of, 148 Rutgers University, 2; in the 1930s, 3–4, 137, 157; and McCormick, 6, 25, 30–32, 36, 51, 54–55, 75, 78–79, 82, 83, 109, 114, 170; history of, 28, 32, 99; and Genovese, 28–30, 139–40; and Nichols, 57; post-World War II, 65–66; and Bradley, 68; in the 1950s, 81–82, 88, 137, 157; and McCarthyism, 85–88; in the 1960s, 90, 138–39; and the History department, 90, 138; and the black student protest movement, 140–44, 149–50, 163; and coeducation, 146–47, 149; and Vietnam, 147–48, 150; and Mason Gross School of Performing and Visual Arts, 154; in the 1970s, 157. See also Douglass College; Educational Opportunity Program; Green, Leon; Rutgers: A Bicentennial History; Transitional Year Program Rutgers University Newsletter, 37 Rutgers University Press, 8, 11, 73–74; and Tercentenary books, 98; and McCormick’s dissertation, 114; Second American Party System, 133; and Platt, 163 Salamone, William, 59 Schattschneider, E.E., 112

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Schlatter, Richard, 36, 94, 139 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 20, 31, 132; and McCormick’s retirement, 155; and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., 166, 172 Scott, Winfield, 129 Scottish Records Office, 84 The Second American Party System (McCormick), 14; development of, 19, 21– 22, 77, 90, 115–18; use of comparative analysis, 20, 121; publication of, 24, 99, 148; theme of, 118, 127, 132–33, 161–63, 169 sectionalism, 128. See also party systems Sellers, Charles G., 116; on McCormick, 22, 119, McCormick on, 125; market revolution and Polk biographies, 130; equilibrium cycle thesis, 132 Serin, Bernie, 143, 145 Shade, William G., 18, 125. See also Benson, Lee Shalhope, Robert, 126 Shelley, Fred, 69 Sienkowicz, Henry, 2, 43 Silbey, Joel, 18; opposite of McCormick, 113–14; and McCormick’s retirement, 155 Sinclair, Donald, 53, 70, 101 Sloane, Bill, 98 Socialist Scholars Conference, 94 Social Science Research Council, 11, 15–16; grant to McCormick, 115, 117–19 The Social Sciences in Historical Study, 15 Society for Historians of the Early Republic, 33, 133 Society of American Archivists, 106 The South and the Politics of Slavery (Cooper), 130 Sputnik, 82, 137–38 State Federation of Women’s Clubs, 71

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State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 9, 25, 35, 67, 79–80 statistical cartography, 123 Stern, Fritz, 140 Stevens, Ed, 52 Stevens, Harry, 16, 119 Stevens, Sylvester K., 79 Stevenson, Adlai, 169 Stevenson, Helen, 96 Stewart, Frank, 72 Stockton, Richard, 96 Students for Goldwater, 140 Studies on the Left, 94 Sturbridge Village, 77. See also Wall, Alexander J. “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments” (McCormick), 19–20; methodology of, 122–23 Susman, Warren, 32, 91–94; and McCormick’s deanship, 151; and McCormick’s retirement, 155; and lectures, 159 The Susman Report, 144–46 systems approach, 33. See also Easton, David Targum, 152 Tarzan, 2 Taylor, George Rogers, 134–35 Taylor, Zachary, 129 Temple University, 6, 25, 63 Tenafly High School, 2–3, 42, 44 Tercentenary celebration. See New Jersey history Tercentenary Commission, 82, 100–102, 106, 139. See also Troast, Paul Tercentenary Publication Series, 74, 76, 99–100 This is New Jersey (Cunningham), 12 Thomas A. Edison Project, 35, 76, 103 Thompson, Robert, 7, 65 Thorndike, James, 79. See also American Heritage Tinckom, Harry, 58 Todd, Jerry, 2

Tom Swift, 2 Topping, Peter, 59 Transitional Year Program (TYP), 142 Transition from Aristocracy to Democracy in New York (Fox), 123 Tregle, Joe, 62 Troast, Paul, 82, 97; chair of Tercentenary Commission, 101; gubernatorial race, 102. See also Fay, Joey; Kress Foundation; New Jersey Turnpike Turgenev, Ivan, 2, 43 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 123 Twelfth Amendment, 124 Tyler, John, 128, 130 “Unique Elements in State History” (McCormick), 121 University of Delaware, 16, 58–59, 63–63 University of North Carolina Press, 99, 132 University of Pennsylvania, 4–6, 15, 17; in 1940s, 57–58; and Lunny, 77; and Nichols, 109 Upper Nyack, 2, 41–42 Van Buren, Martin, 21, 128, 130 Van Nostrand, 28, 98 Vecoli, Rudy, 99 Vermont Life, 79 Vidal, Gore, 172 Vieser, Milford, 76 Vietnam War, 26, 28, 32; teach-ins 140; and Rutgers, 147–48 Virginia game, 34. See also party systems viva voce voting, 112. See also voter participation Von Donnop, Count, 1, 72 voter participation, 15–18; during Jacksonian era, 20–21, 121–22; and Benson, 22; voter turnout, 111–12; New Jersey, 115–16, 119, 127. See also negative reference groups

Index Vroom, Peter, 127 Wall, Alexander J., 12, 69; and Sturbridge Village, 77 “The War Aims of President Wilson and Congress” (McCormick), 4, 55 Ward, John William, 165, 172 Warner-Lambert, 95 Washington Association, 53 Washington’s encampment at Middlebrook, 54 Watson, Harry: “systems of meaning,” 126, 129; and the market revolution, 134, 172 Weidner, Dick, 152 Weinstein, Donald, 148 Westown Friends School, 52 We the People (McDonald), 13–14 Wheeler, Ken, 153 Whig Party, Harrisburg Whig Convention of 1840, 129–30 “The Whig Strategy of 1836,” 173 Whipper, William, 170 White, Hayden, 171 White, Hugh Lawson, 128 Whitehill, Walter Muir, 105

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Whitman, Christine Todd, 39, 173 Wilentz, Sean, 131 Wilkinson, Norman, 59 William Livingston Papers, 35, 76, 103 Williamsburg. See Colonial Williamsburg Willkie, Wendell, 56 Wilson, Woodrow, 116 Wiltse, Charles, 167; liberal, 169 Winants Hall: dorm, 50; and McCormick, 87 Winkler, Henry, 139, 146 Women Army Corp (WAC), 63 Women’s Equity Action League, 146 Wood, Horace, 86 World Telegram, 43–44 Wright, Bill, 141 Writings of George Washington (Fitzpatrick), 54 Young, Alfred S., 14 Zeller, Belle, 117 Zinn, Howard, 30

About the Author MICHAEL J. BIRKNER is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Gettysburg College.