UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview #450
CRONON, E. DAVID AND JENKINS, JOHN W.
CRONON, E. David (1924-2006)1
Graduate Student; Professor of History; Dean of College of Letters and Science
At UW: 1949-1952; 1962-1994
and JENKINS, John W. (1946- )
Graduate Student; Researcher, College of Letters and Science
At UW: 1971Interviewed: 1994
Interviewer: Barry Teicher
Length: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Origination and organization of UW History Project; Glenn Frank and his
administration; Clarence Dykstra and his administration; Academic freedom;
Faculty governance; Student life; Outreach activities; Research, historical sources
and staff.
Digitized file is both indexed tapes together.
Tape 1
00:00:00
The year 1925 marked the end of the Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen
two-volume history of the University, written at the time of the centennial in
1948/49. After their fiftieth reunion, leaders of the class of 1925 persuaded
then-Chancellor Irving Shain to carry the project forward.
00:00:59
Shain approached DC, since he was the only historian among the deans, to
supervise the gathering of records for use in writing a volume on the subsequent
history of UW. He hired JJ and BT for this job. He was not directly involved in the
project until he left the deanship in 1989. JJ's and BT's work is the foundation of the
volume DC and JJ have just finished to be published by the UW Press.
00:02:37
JJ and BT gathered records for the project from 1981 to 1988, when the latter
became the UW oral historian. They did oral history interviews and organized a
database drawn from materials in the UW Archives and the State Historical
Society. They published a history of Summer Sessions and of housing at UW, and
1
See also individual interview, #026.
E. David Cronon & John W. Jenkins (#450)
developed papers on various aspects of the University's history.
00:04:35
The original format decided upon for the continuation of the history of UW was as
follows: volume III was intended to cover until the end of WWII; volume IV, until
the time of the Merger in the early 1970s; volume V, to the present. Volume III,
already completed, deals with the twenty-year period from 1925 to 1945, through
the end of WWII. There were only two presidents during that period: Glenn Frank
(1925-37) and Clarence Dykstra (1937-45).
00:07:19
1925 is a good year with which to start the volume because it marked the closing of
the Van Hise era. JJ talks about Charles Van Hise's replacement, Edward Birge,
who was considered a "stand-in" president but remained in office from 1918 until
1925. UW's relationship with the Progressive legislature deteriorated during his
tenure. Roscoe Pound refused the UW presidency.
00:10:17
Glenn Frank was appointed after the University launched a vigorous public
relations campaign, pressuring the legislature to approve the first adequate budget
in five years. Frank was the editor of the New York magazine Century. There was a
feeling of optimism and excitement in Madison at the opening of Frank's tenure.
00:12:42
The Regents took three important initiatives in 1925. First, they established the
Wisconsin University Building Corporation. It was essentially a "captive building
corporation," a creative device which enabled the University to construct buildings,
such as dormitories and the Memorial Union, that the legislature was unwilling or
unable to fund. It became the model for the present state building commission.
00:14:04
Second, the Regents approved the establishment of the Wisconsin Alumni
Research Foundation, which helped UW during the tough years of the Depression
to retain its stature as a top research institution.
00:14:29
Third, they passed the Grady Resolution, which established a policy of refusing
funding from incorporated educational foundations, especially those of Carnegie
and Rockefeller. These actions demonstrated the Regents' spirit of excitement
about the University's future under Frank. To illustrate this feeling, JJ reads a
selection from an address about Frank given over WHA by Progressive Regent
Michael Olbrich in June 1945.
00:16:12
Despite this reception, there were some faculty critics who pointed out Frank was
very young, his highest earned degree was a BA, his previous experience was
primarily in journalism and not in higher education, and he had been a teenage
itinerant preacher. For these reasons the faculty only grudgingly accepted Frank,
overlooking his fine mind, oratory skills, and appeal to the outside public.
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00:18:17
The Frank administration falls into two distinct periods. The first encompasses his
first four years up until the Stock Market Crash at the end of 1929, when Frank
enjoyed an extended honeymoon period. He was extremely popular in the state and
had a strong Board of Regents supporting him. He was able to get UW good
budgets and a good building program from the legislature.
00:19:11
Frank's achievements were considerable during this period. He hired Alexander
Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst College, to establish the Experimental
College, which remains the most famous example of Wisconsin educational
innovation. Frank was disappointed by the fact the College was not quite what he
had first envisioned it to be. Though it ultimately failed, it did last for five years and
gained UW significant national attention.
00:20:51
Frank was also the first president who seriously attempted to coordinate student
services for UW as a whole and to develop a more scientific basis of evaluating and
improving the articulation of UW with the schools of the state. He set up the Bureau
of Educational Records and Guidance to try to assure that young people coming to
UW were prepared for an education here. He improved the orientation program by
establishing a varsity welcome program. He was interested in the all-university
religious convocations and brought prominent national figures to campus to talk to
the students on religious topics.
00:21:54
Frank was responsible for the decision to separate the School of Education from the
College of Letters & Science in 1930 and to set it up as a more autonomous unit
within UW. The School was set up as a "coordinate school," which meant that all
L&S faculty members who taught education students were automatically faculty
members of the School of Education. This helps explain the relatively close ties
between the education faculty and the rest of the UW faculty.
00:22:56
Frank and UW fell on hard times after the Depression hit the state and funding
became a more serious problem as well as with the election of Philip LaFollette as
governor in the fall of 1930. The LaFollette sons, Phil and Young Bob, never liked
Frank, whom they viewed as a potential political rival in the state. Frank, a liberal
republican, was interested in a political career and may have had plans to parlay the
UW presidency into a run for the White House.
00:24:23
Governor LaFollette went out of his way to make Frank's life difficult, and a
number of conflicts occurred between the two over these years. In 1936/37,
LaFollette achieved a working majority in the Board of Regents, which took the
lead in forcing Frank's resignation. After a messy open public hearing in January
1937, which Frank had insisted upon, the Board voted by a one-vote margin to fire
him. Frank's firing brought a fury of protest from around the country down on the
governor; never again was Phil LaFollette elected to public office in Wisconsin.
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00:26:51
To the dismay of the LaFollettes, Frank stayed in the state after his firing and
remained active in national Republican politics, hoping he would have a chance at
the presidential nomination in 1940. After the convention, Frank returned to
Wisconsin and in less than three weeks managed to get enough signatures to get on
the primary Republican ballot for the fall elections. He ran a whirlwind campaign
to try to capture the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.
00:28:12
Frank and his son were killed in a car accident on the way to a speaking
engagement in Green Bay the week before the primary election. If he had
succeeded in getting the nomination, he may well have defeated Young Bob
LaFollette, the Progressive candidate. This is very interesting since Joseph
McCarthy managed to defeat Young Bob in 1946. DC speculates about the how the
political history of the state might have been different had Frank lived.
00:29:20
Frank was replaced by a candidate chosen by the LaFollette brothers, Cincinnati
city manager Clarence Dykstra, who had come to their attention in his handling of
the great Cincinnati flood of 1936. He was known as a consummate manager and,
of great importance to the LaFollettes, he had no political ambitions. He was more
successful at working with and involving the faculty in university administration.
This period is remarkable for the enlargement of the faculty's role in institutional
government.
00:31:08
The Dykstra administration was shorter than Frank's and was greatly affected by
WWII, because Dykstra played a significant national role as the first director of the
Selective Service Administration and in other war manpower issues. During the
war years, then, he was away from Madison much of the time and had a less active
role as president. On the whole, his administration was successful, and at least was
not marred by the "bitter personal partisan rancor" exhibited in the latter years of
the Frank administration.
00:31:56
Dykstra did encounter problems with Governor Julius Heil, who was elected on a
wave of anti-LaFollette reaction and was suspicious of Dykstra as the creature of
the LaFollettes. Dykstra's role in national war preparation activities eventually won
Heil's support for Dykstra and the University.
00:32:42
During the war, Dykstra encouraged UW to serve many military training programs
on campus. He grew increasingly concerned that the military, particularly the navy,
was only interested in UW as a military hotel, providing room and board but no
educational services. He took a leading role nationally in developing the
college-level wartime training programs, the Army Specialized Training Program
(ASTP) and the Navy B-12 Program. For a time, there was a significant influx of
these programs to UW. Dykstra was disappointed that the Army and Navy used
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UW and other campuses for military vocational training, instead of taking a
long-term view of the educational needs of the country during the war years.
00:34:10
Frank was an eloquent defender of academic freedom and human rights during his
tenure at UW. JJ illustrates how Frank defended the faculty's right to academic
freedom in a public statement, which he reads.
00:37:00
Frank was equally strong in his defense of the right of student publications to have
complete freedom of the press. The Daily Cardinal and The Octopus occasionally
offended alumni and preachers, among others. He gives the example of Frank's
resistance to the Regents' retaliation for the Cardinal's consistent opposition to the
ROTC program in the early 1930s. He warned the alumni to discontinue their
demand for a change of leadership on the paper. The only qualification he put on
this was regarding matters of "taste" likely to cause trouble with the University
constituency. Frank's record is better than that of most university presidents of the
period in defense of faculty and student rights of free expression.
00:39:17
There were also challenges to academic freedom during the Dykstra
administration. As an example, JJ gives the Regents' 1939 refusal of Governor
Heil's proposed "Red Purge," after the University of Michigan had taken similar
action. This approach to freedom of speech was unheard of at UW. Heil soon
acquiesced in the face of the Regents' opposition. Dykstra should get credit for
uniting the Board of Regents' opposition.
00:42:25
JJ discusses the community of scholars and the question of faculty participation in
the governance of UW. Van Hise was responsible for the founding of the
University Club, which served as a focal point for the faculty community. He also
encouraged the contacts between faculty members and the formation of faculty
committees to address university problems. The University Committee was
established during this period.
00:43:47
Frank tacitly encouraged the further development of the university community by
allowing the deans and faculty more freedom of action. Dykstra explicitly
encouraged the faculty. Taken together, this encouragement fostered the faculty
role in university governance taken for granted today.
00:45:32
The reason the faculty developed a much more impressive role in institutional
governance in these years was because it avoided confrontational approaches to the
administration and Regents. There was only one significant confrontation between
the faculty and Regents, in the mid-1930s when the Regents took a more direct role
in the intercollegiate athletic program.
00:46:13
End of side.
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E. David Cronon & John W. Jenkins (#450)
00:46:18
The Big Ten Conference required faculty control of inter-collegiate athletics. This
was a crisis for the Regents because if the UW faculty told the Big Ten that there
was no faculty control of inter-collegiate athletics at UW, it risked suspension or
even expulsion from the Conference. A face-saving compromise was worked out
by which the Regents agreed to accept faculty dominance.
00:47:17
Otherwise the faculty role, orchestrated mostly by the University Committee, was
one of great responsibility, as shown clearly by the instance of salary waivers or
cuts of 1932/33. In the second round, the University Committee established a
sliding scale for faculty pay cuts. In return the administration and Regents assured
the faculty the University would honor all faculty contracts and tenure provisions.
They also promised a modest level of promotions and salary increases so faculty
morale would not be destroyed. DC deems this a very intelligent approach to the
problems of the Depression in contrast to some other universities in the country
which laid off faculty. Remarkably, enough budgetary flexibility was achieved
through these salary cuts to maintain the faculty strength at UW.
00:49:44
Real communities of interest existed in the interwar years for students as well as
faculty. UW was a smaller and much more homogeneous institution during this
period; contact between and among faculty and students was much closer than
today. Just as the University Club served as a focal point for faculty social life, so
the Memorial Union served a parallel function for the student community after it
opened in 1928.
00:51:00
The student population ranged from about 8,000 in 1925 to a high of 11,000 in
1939/40. There was a marked decline in male enrollment after U.S. entry into
WWII. For the first time women outnumbered men in the regular student body
(3:2), prompting a considerable shift in the normal student life. They controlled the
extracurricular student life, including the Cardinal and the Badger.
00:52:51
The smaller, more homogeneous student body encouraged a real sense of
community among the students. The sense of student community manifested itself
in a number of ways in these years. He gives the example of student protection of
the University and student body after attacks made by John Chapple, an ambitious
republican politician from Ashland, in 1931. A student Work Day to beautify the
campus illustrates the spirit of the times.
00:58:25
The "Wisconsin Idea" was a term coined during the Van Hise administration,
referring to the idea the University would not only be a fine academic institution,
but also would serve a practical purpose in the state by helping to improve the life
of its residents. Three institutions helped bring the outreach function to full fruition:
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00:58:58
1) College of Agriculture's Cooperative Extension Service, through which the
College had agriculture and home economics representatives in each county of the
state. With the Depression, there was a major shift in its emphasis from the
increased production of crops to social and agricultural economics matters.
Agriculture dean Chris Christensen, an agricultural economist and advocate of the
Danish folk high school, heavily backed this move. He and Frank hired the
College's first artist-in-residence, John Steuart Curry. The social and production
emphases were combined during the war to encourage farmers to increase food
production for the military.
01:01:25
2) The University Extension Service (General Extension), which brought courses to
people throughout the state via mail and circuit riders. Twenty-six-year-old Chester
Snell was hired by Frank in 1926 to move Extension forward. Snell was eventually
fired by the Board of Regents. Under his successor, Frank Holt, a tentative system
of freshman and sophomore-level schools was established throughout the state only
to be dissolved during the war; it later returned in the guise of the UW Center
System. The Milwaukee Center established a cutting-edge adult education program
with encouragement from Frank and Meiklejohn.
Tape 2
01:03:47
3) WHA Radio, which turned out to be the biggest advance in outreach. There was
intense competition in the 1920s for the limited number of channels available on
which to broadcast. Commercial stations were squeezing educational stations out
of the market. WHA was able to survive, in part due to the efforts of Frank. By the
early 1930s, WHA and its Stevens Point sister station WLVL had become well
established and were able to reach the entire state with agricultural, home
economic, public service, and educational programming. Toward the end of the
decade, the assertion that the boundaries of the UW campus were the boundaries of
the state was accurate.
01:06:00
DC compares the problems of researching and writing volume III to the problems
encountered by Curti and Carstensen. Their problem was finding sources for their
history, since UW records were scattered across campus. A result was the
establishment of the UW Archives to preserve the historical records of the
University for future use by scholars. JJ and DC have encountered the opposite
problem—how to organize an abundance of records.
01:08:24
Volume IV, covering from the end of WWII to the advent of Merger, will recount
the more recent history of UW. There is an ample, unmanaged collection of
archival materials for this project. The authors of volume V, however, may
encounter problems due to the management and weeding of the collection after
1971. DC anticipates the completion of volume IV in time for the University's
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sesquicentennial in 1998/99.
01:10:22
JJ notes the challenge inherent in recounting history when participants are still on
the scene; it will be posed more in the writing of volume IV than III. Conversely,
volume III has benefitted significantly from information and insights provided by
those with first-hand experience of events. Since it covers a period of great turmoil,
interpretative problems may arise.
01:11:45
A benefit of covering a more recent period is the much greater number of oral
history interviews with students, administrators, and faculty. This documentation
of the history of UW will continue under the auspices of UW Oral History Project.
Oral history interviews are especially useful for getting insights into personalities.
A more complete, accurate, and interesting history emerges when oral history
sources are taken together with written records.
01:13:41
There has been considerable interest in the history of the University on the part of
those faculty, students, and administrators who lived through the period under
investigation.
01:14:50
At first, JJ and BT conducted the research for the project. Jean Cronon provided
crucial help by going through the Cardinal and Capital Times for the years
1925-45, noting articles crucial in developing story lines and getting differing
opinions on various issues. A series of research assistants have also worked on the
project. DC and JJ are involved in all aspects of the writing of the history.
01:17:58
They hope to produce camera-ready copy for volume III, including line drawings
from the Badger or Octopus, using their office scanner and personal computers.
Jean Cronon created a computer index of references to articles from the Cardinal
and Capital Times. It in effect amounts to a university index of these papers
covering the twenty years from 1925 to 1945, which has proven a very valuable
resource.
01:20:31
End of side.
END OF INTERVIEW #450
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