UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview #266
McCORMICK, THOMAS
McCORMICK, Thomas (1933- )
Graduate Student; Professor of History
At UW: 1956-1960; 1970-
FIRST INTERVIEW
Interviewed: 1982
Interviewer: Earl Mulderink
Length: 31 minutes
Index by: Earl Mulderink
Abstract: In his June 1982 interview with Earl Mulderink, Tom McCormick offered his reflections and recollections of the extraordinary character of Howard K. Beale, who was a member of the history faculty when McCormick attended UW as a graduate student.
This interview was conducted for inclusion into the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Archives Oral History Project.
Key Words: Howard K. Beale; Merle Curti; Beale’s relationships with graduate students; civil rights; E. David Cronon; Saul Landau; Martin Sklar; research on Theodore
Roosevelt; William Appleman Williams; His influence on students.
SECOND INTERVIEW
Interviewed: 2005
Interviewer: Matt Levin
Length: 1 hour, 15 minutes, 42 seconds
Index by:
Series:
Stephen Pierce
Cold War University
Abstract: In his March 2005 interview with Matt Levin, Tom McCormick reminisces about the 1950s and 1960s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when he was a graduate student. He discusses the atmosphere in the department and graduate seminars, the growing concern about civil rights and the Vietnam War, and his views on Studies on the Left . Additionally, he shares reflections and opinions on the ideological temperature and changes of the history department, major figures in the department, and especially the charisma and influence of William Appleman Williams. This interview was conducted as part of the interviewer’s dissertation research, and has been submitted for inclusion in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives Oral History Project.

Thomas McCormick (#266)
Key Words: University of Wisconsin Madison; Cold War; liberalism; Fred Harvey
Harrington; Barbara Walter; civil rights movement; Ralph Abernathy; Saul Landau;
William Appleman Williams; Studies on the Left ; American imperialism; Cuban missile crisis; nuclear threat; McCarthyism; House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HUAC); Vietnam War; the “Silent Generation”.
FIRST INTERVIEW
First Interview Session (March 14, 2005): Digital File
Time Keywords
00:00:00 [begin Tape 1/Side 1 ]
Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:32 [no question] McCormick thought that Howard K. Beale admired Merle Curti but felt he was naive and unsophisticated because Beale had to have a clearly superior position in any relationship. As a result he didn't get along very well with William
Hesseltine and Merle Jensen who were also very strong characters. This sense of superiority led Beale to tell bemused stories of Curti in Paris hearing some political march coming up a street and Curti running out to join them; but since he couldn't read French he always found himself in front of a royalist political movement.
00:02:17 [no question] He observed that Beale’s fallback superiority was his wealth, acquired by family holdings of stock in Borden milk and speculation in Iowa farmland.
McCormick felt that Beale’s concept of civil rights probably flowed from a sense of noblesse oblige from this wealth. His mother's cause was feminism.
00:03:34 Question: His mother? Answer: Mrs. Beale was Howard Beale's role model. She was, by Beale’s admission, a bigot. It was acceptable because she had so much else going for her. He felt it was a function of class.
00:05:02 Question: He was cheap? Answer: He used his graduate students to rake leaves and to drive his car without compensation. His students felt exploited, but felt that they had to this to stay on his good side. He had a reputation for being very vindictive.
00:07:10 Question: Your relationship with Beale? Answer: TM sat in on some of his courses.
Beale felt strongly that senior faculty members should teach introductory courses.
But TM's major contact with Beale was during lunches, mostly in 1958 and ‘59.
00:08:18 Question: Talk about the lunches. Answer:
In 1958 and ‘59, TM, Barbara Walter and others had lunches with Beale, who had a tradition of inviting cream of crop of students to lunch. Usually these lunches were not with his own students, but with other graduate students. Follow up: Were they pleasant? Answer: Beale was useful to
TM in sharpening his intellect because Beale was so dogmatic. TM gained confidence
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Thomas McCormick (#266) by disagreeing with such a great figure in field of history.
00:12:13 Follow up: Perhaps this was more disagreement than he heard from his own students?
Answer: McCormick explained that Beale's seminars were “schizophrenic”—com- prised partly of sycophants and partly of New York Jewish Marxists who disagreed with him continuously. Saul Landau at Institute of Educational Policy Studies,
Marty Sklar, Schienberg, Herbert Gutman were all his students, and even those who disagreed with and had contempt for him were very loyal to him.
00:15:24 [no question] Although his work was “Beardian”, McCormick thought that in all of
Beale's work (on Theodore Roosevelt, Reconstruction, etc.) he emphasized tremen- dous importance of class and wealth. TM feels that Beale overused letters of
Roosevelt and didn't get enough hard facts from archival sources.
00:16:54 Follow up:
Why didn’t he finish his biography of Roosevelt?
Answer: Beale didn't finish biography of TR because he died prematurely. Curti claimed that Beale was such a perfectionist that there never would have been enough time in one person's lifetime to do detailed research that Beale attempted.
00:19:46 Follow up:
Was his “crusading faith” in democracy what narrowed his definition of imperialism? Answer: McCormick believed that this was the reason Beale and
Williams, for all their differences, got along—that they took democracy and self- determination seriously.
00:22:25 Question: Beale's interaction with his peers Answer: He was “a man without social tact,” which led to “perpetual war with Hesseltine,” Jensen and sometimes Curti.
Harrington was peacemaker. Beale reputation for being difficult had preceded him to
Wisconsin, and TM described Beale's personality as aggressive but prissy. Beale thrived on conflict. If there wasn't any, he would often generate it.
00:27:40 Question: Beale, in trying to get feel for Theodore Roosevelt's character, took on his mannerisms? Answer: McCormick described how he would wear Panama hats and imitate him, and he felt that Beale identified with Roosevelt as being members of same class. Beale said that TR was clinically insane during last years of his life.
00:31:10 End of First Interview Session.
End of First Interview
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Thomas McCormick (#266)
SECOND INTERVIEW
First Interview Session (March 14, 2005): Digital File
Time Keywords
00:00:00 [begin Tape 1/Side 1 ]
Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:44 [no question] Levin and McCormick talked about Levin’s project and how the two of them had heard about each other before the interview.
00:03:39 Question: How did you end up at UW? Answer: McCormick grew up in Cincinnati,
OH, and had a major professor who, while very conservative, thought UW had the best American history program in the country.
00:06:05 Question: What did you find when you arrived? Answer: Arriving at UW as a fairly
“middle of the road internationalist,” he said he got exposed to Harrington’s point of view very quickly when his master’s thesis got “shredded” in his “bloody seminar.”
In the sense that it was very Beardian, he thought, UW was in some sense an anachronistic department. McCormick explained details of the relationship between economic analysis and a critique of foreign policy, and how the department developed over time to embrace social history.
00:13:27 Question: Were there women in seminars? Answer: Yes; he recalled several who were in the foreign policy seminar and later became prominent historians. But he described the seminar as having a “macho attitude” of competitiveness, which made it difficult for the women in it.
00:15:47 [no question] He explained that there were a lot of issues evolving in the atmosphere of the late 1950s, with Brown v. Board of Education , and a high-profile visit by Ralph
Abernathy.
00:17:11 [no question] Observing that Saul Landau would know more about these events than he, he talked about his own social acquaintances later in graduate school.
00:19:45 Question: Williams? Answer: He said that he “more than fit in,” bringing “marxist with a small-m” (almost Christian socialism) orientation to the department.
00:22:08 Question: What kind of professor was he? Answer: Although a good teacher, he didn’t think Williams was as good an instructor as Harrington, whose polished,
Socratic style made the classroom more democratic. But he emphasized Williams’ charisma, and quipped about how most of Williams’ graduate students (though not all) succumbed to his revisionism.
00:29:00 Question: Studies on the Left ? Answer: While not formally involved in the journal, he
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Thomas McCormick (#266) knew all of those who were on the editorial board. He talked about how they got their funding, how he had a falling out with the journal, and debates about the editorial philosophy of the journal. He also reminisced about debates he had with the editors about their teaching styles and their professional philosophies.
00:34:05 Question: How did your politics change at UW? Answer: He considered himself a socialist by the time he finished, as did his closest friends, who also came from
Midwestern Protestant politically centrist backgrounds. He thought most of Williams students had to grapple with capitalism’s understanding of the “hunger whip,” but generally gravitated toward democratic socialism rather than Stalinist systems.
00:39:00 Question: The problem of funding in the humanities? Answer: He said it was impossible to be unaware of this issue because Harrington made his career on the issue of how WARF money only went to the sciences (which was later changed).
00:40:48 Question: The Cold War university connection? Answer: He said that for students at the time it was less about the institutional funding level than about the personal
(people being recruited by the CIA) level. By the early 1960s this began to change as the Cold War ramped up, but in the 1950s students came to UW as an escape from the corporate world and didn’t see the corporate-university connections yet.
00:46:10 Question: Nuclear issues? Answer: McCormick were concerned about it [break in audio], but for his cohort it was really at the level of wondering how American capitalism could find outlets for its energy (like Latin America) without continually bringing it into global conflict with the Soviets. But on the other hand, the Cuban missile crisis didn’t scare him. Thus, though he joined SANE in the 1960s, he objected to its virulent anti-Communist credentials and dropped out later.
00:50:35 Question: Did you experience McCarthyism? Answer: He didn’t experience it since it was on the wane at the time, but Williams was deeply impacted by it, and
McCormick reviewed Williams’ handling of, and interactions with, the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. They talked about how Williams’ views on
American empire were now accepted, though at the time they were path-breaking and kept him from getting other job offers.
00:56:18 Question: Sympathy for the Soviet Union? Answer: There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for it, especially after Kruschev’s exposure of Stalin’s abuses. But it was easy to mistake the Soviet role in the Cold War, he thought, as a determining factor when it appears the US was determined to pursue its foreign policy regardless of the existence of a Soviet or Japanese threat.
01:00:05 Follow up : Excitement about Cuba? Answer:
Yes; he talked about Williams’ early book on Cuba and how it was perceived not as a Communist rebellion but as a grass- roots anti-imperial movement. He and Levin marveled at the fact that Castro at the time was still able to maintain power.
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Thomas McCormick (#266)
01:03:11 Question:
“The Silent Generation”?
Answer: He thought that, while they may have been silent, they “weren’t deaf, blind and dumb.” He felt that the 1950s laid the preconditions for much of what happened in the 1960s, pointing to the concern with civil rights as proof that no period can be as dead as the 1950s are perceived.
01:07:36 Question: So what was the difference between the 1950s and 1960s? Answer: He could only answer with what was going on in his life personally, because he was immersed in professional concerns in middle Ohio. He thought that it wasn’t until he went to the University of Pittsburgh that he really got involved in Civil Rights, teach-ins, etc. He chronicled this personal journey for him that led him to oppose both the Vietnam War and the mentality of opponents of it.
01:15:11 [closing remarks and discussion]
01:15:42 End of First Interview Session.
End of Second Interview
End of Oral History #266
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