August 2007

Living Large as a Historian: An Interview with Gordon Bakken

Lee W. Formwalt

OAH Newsletter 35

Back in Bloomington after the Centennial Convention, I was talking to staff who had been working registration and they mentioned several of the OAH members they had encountered in Minneapolis. "Without a doubt," said Membership Director Ginger Foutz, "the most colorful member" they encountered was Gordon Bakken. A former OAH parliamentarian, and legal, western, military and women's historian at California State University, Fullerton, Bakken regaled several of the OAH staff with tales from his most recent research on women who killed men. I had the opportunity to talk to Gordon recently about his career in teaching and writing as well as his involvement in the profession and, in particular, the OAH.

When I asked him how he got involved in the history business, Gordon said it went back to "some very inspirational" history teachers at Emerson School and East High School in Madison, Wisconsin, where he grew up. From there he went to the University of Wisconsin majoring first in chemistry, then in English literature. "But I sat down in my junior year, and I started reading a lot of the books that my English professors and my history professors had written, and after I read Robert Kimbrough's Troilus and Cressida, I quickly decided I'm going into history. I had a lot more fun writing history than I did writing papers in English lit."

As an undergraduate at Wisconsin, Bakken "had some very good people in English and in history. Stan Kutler and Al Bogue, in particular, and the women's history side of it really comes from William L. O'Neil, who was both on my master's committee and doctoral dissertation committee. I read everything he had written. I stuck right with him and his emphasis on women's history was always an interest to me."

One of Bakken's first encounters with the recently rechristened Organization of American Historians was during his first year in graduate school when he attended the OAH convention at the Palmer House in April 1967. As Bakken remembered it, he "went to Chicago with hundreds of Wisconsin graduate students, and we went there to hear William A. Williams defend the Wisconsin school of diplomatic history. We went into this ballroom--I got there approximately forty-five minutes early to get a seat, and there were already over a thousand people in the ballroom doing the same thing--so I got my seat, and the people kept pouring in, and they started standing against the walls, and they were sitting on the floors. And the program went on, and William A. Williams was ripped to shreds by John Braeman of the University of Nebraska. Then Williams comes up there, and he strides to the podium and lays him low. And, of course, this is a fixed audience. As he finishes his speech, 1,500 Wisconsin graduate students jumped to their feet screaming and applauding. And I think damn, this is my profession, I want to be in this kind of a profession. So that was my first OAH convention, '67, and it was just really exciting."

While writing his dissertation (eventually published as Rocky Mountain Constitution Making 1850-1912), Bakken took a law minor at the university law school and began a fruitful relationship with J. Willard Hurst, the father of modern American legal history. After teaching for two years at Cal State Fullerton, he returned to the law school where he earned a J.D. degree and resumed his connection with Hurst. The result was his first book, The Development of Law on the Rocky Mountain Frontier, 1850-1912 (the dissertation became his third book). Back at Cal State, Bakken "continued working with Willard Hurst. Still teaching the four-four load, and Hurst and I would be sending papers back and forth. . . . I tell my students the story of how I was going to write a paper on something Hurst knows absolutely nothing about. But every time I do something, he's got me: 'You gotta look at this, that. . . .' So I said okay, I'm going to write on the western history of money, and I write this twenty-two page double-spaced paper, and I gave it to him fully annotated, and I said I got something. Three days later he hands me back--he typed with a manual typewriter--a single-spaced twenty-six-page comment, and I'm sitting there crying, I said oh my, look at all the stuff I missed. It turned out I didn't know he was writing the history of money. Came out with the University of Nebraska Press. But that's the kind of help you got, so quite frankly a lot of my work in graduate school was enabled by a lot of very able people, and in the law school was just some crackerjack folks that you could always go to, and Hurst was just tremendous. You walked by his office, you'd want to ask him a question, he waves his arm, come on in, come on in, and you'd have like an hour with him. I've got an hour with Willard Hurst, how could this be? I'm a lowly graduate student."

Bakken loved the research and writing, but the teaching load at Cal State Fullerton was heavy. "When I started, I taught constitutional history and historical methodology. Every semester. And then we had a faculty of thirty-four full-time tenure-track people in the early '70s, and then the size of the faculty kept going down until it finally got to fourteen. Now, the curriculum didn't go away, and for maybe ten to twelve years, I was teaching seven to eight preps a year, because constitutional history didn't go away, legal history didn't go away, the women's movement didn't go away. I teach two courses on women, both of them senior research seminars. So it was not unusual. Actually last year was the first year I had a three-three load, so I'm living large."

None of his colleagues teach four-four. "That has pretty much gone by the wayside, but they're teaching three-threes, or two-threes, and I tell them it can be done, and let me suggest some of the ways that it can be done. One of the biggest breaks I got was I had Warren Beck and Jackson K. Putnam here, both excellent western historians, they understood something about legal history, and they were great as readers on my material before it went out to journals."

I asked Gordon about the connection between his writing and his teaching. "I tell my students day one something about history teaching. I actually tell them the most dangerous person you'll ever have in a classroom is a person that doesn't know that he doesn't know. You leave this campus, and you go to graduate school and suddenly discover that everything you've read is so dated that it's virtually meaningless, and you're at least five years behind all of your peers. So very typically I'm the kind of person that involves students in the research that I'm doing. In graduate seminars they don't sit around and write a chapter of their thesis. They work on a big project that I'm working on where I probably know more about it than anybody obviously in the room. But I can direct them to primary sources. I can get them published. I have no count, but I have at least maybe fifty students in print in different forms. One of my graduate students came in, and he says, 'You know, I was just looking through this book, I thought it'd really fit into what I'm going to do in my thesis, and I opened it up, and I saw you wrote the introduction.' I said, 'Is that Ron Woolsey?' and he says, 'yeah, how did you know?' I said, 'he was a student of mine in 1969. Migrants West is his master's thesis, expanded.' 'No kiddin.' I said, 'Yeah, sold 20,000 copies, that son of a gun!' He got a front-page review in the LA Times book review section by Kevin Starr. That book just took off like a shot. I kept encouraging him and poor Ron called me up and said, 'Did you read that review?' He's in tears, and he goes, 'I can't believe it, I can't believe it.' I go, 'Ron, I told you it was good.' And he's gotten a second book out now, and he's a high school teacher."

As you may have figured by now, Gordon is quite the storyteller. But sometimes, he noted, he can get carried away with his enthusiasm. "One of the more famous lectures, which I did not repeat because of the impact was when I was talking about intertribal warfare, and I was using a text from some anthropologists and going through and at the end of this exchange--this is pre-guns--there was an exchange of arrows, these blood enemies, one had been hit three times, and he was laying on the ground, slowly dying, and the other war chief came upCand then I pretended to pull a knife out of my beltCgrabbed the other chief in the breastbone, and he cut open the breastbone, and then he reached into the man's chest--and I've got my briefcase sitting there, and I reach into my briefcase, and I've got a beef heart in there, and I bring out the beef heart--and I said he reached in there and he pulled out his heart--and I hold it up and I squeezed it so the blood ran off my elbow--and he ate it raw. I had students come back twenty years later talking about that lecture, said, 'I'll never forget the lecture.' 'Well, that's good, you got the point.' Other students come back and say, 'Are you ever going to give that beef heart lecture again?' I said, No, I had two people puke.' So that really wasn't a good idea. Sometimes there's a little theatrics in class, as you might tell here."

Service--to the campus and to the profession--is another important area in most professors' lives and that is certainly the case with Gordon who has served in numerous administrative posts and on campus and department committees. He was also very involved in two major national organizations--Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society, and OAH. His involvement with Phi Alpha Theta began when he was asked to take over as the advisor of the Cal State Fullerton chapter. "The first thing I did was join Phi Alpha Theta, and then I took a look at what the standards were to be the best chapter of the United States, and since I'm running it, I said, that's our goal. We're going to be the best in this country, and I'll tell you how we're going to do it, and we started working on it, and we won best chapter, took several years of really hard work, and we continued to win best chapter each and every year for twenty-six years. One of the things we did was produce a journal, the Welebaethan. The Welebaethan has been acknowledged as the best student journal in the country for I think it's six times. Every year I'd walk in there, I'd look at the kids, I'd say, 'Okay, UCLA is coming up our back right now, let me tell you.' I got the student government to start funding the cost of printing the journal, and we now have a very professional editing system. We have double-blind reads on every submission. We have a class called historical editing and we teach students how to edit, and we edit the student work, we get the students to learn how to illustrate, we learn a lot about layout and color design, and it has taken years to bring it to where it is. Most of the ones we produce are kind of knock-your-socks-off kinds of productions."

Bakken was eventually appointed to the national council for Phi Alpha Theta and served as president in 1996-1997. His presidential address was on women who kill men, the subject he had discussed with several OAH staff last March. "It was not published at that point, and the students were just, oh boy, and I'd kind of act out some of these murders: Yep, that's when he jilted his young bride, and they got out of the carriage, and he stepped out, and she alighted and brought out a pocket pistol and pow, right through the right eyeball at fifteen feet, and down he went, like the dog that he was."

At the same time he was involved in Phi Alpha Theta, Bakken served as parliamentarian for OAH. During his tenure, from 1990 to 2002, there was only one occasion when he had to make a ruling: AI think that was my first or second yearCI had to call a motion from the floor out of order. But typically my role with the presidents and a lot of OAH staff was anticipating problems and on some occasions just giving advice. And some people, like Mary Berry, you don't have to tell her how to do any of that stuff. Some people are extremely skilled at parliamentary procedure. Other people don't have a clue.

I wondered what aspects of OAH Gordon found important for him as a historian. For him the annual convention from his first in 1967 to the present have been significant, especially "the substantive sessions. I really have to thank people like Kermit Hall and Morton Keller, in particular, for straightening out the direction of one of the articles that I had published by sitting down and saying, 'We need to tweak this, Gordon.' So it was really good professionally to have those kind of people there, and the one thing, of course, about Kermit was that he was famous for his comments. You normally wanted to keep some kind of rubber gloves or jacket on for blood splatters, which was kind of funny, because one presentation I made at the OAH, myself and the other presenter were looking around, the room is filled, there are people sitting on the floors, they're standing, everywhere, there's no room here for the session. He says, 'Are they here to hear me or you?' and I said, 'I don't have anything that important to say.' They were there to hear Kermit."

As we were wrapping up our conversation I asked Gordon to share his motivation for generously supporting the organization each year."I think the first level of motivation comes from the fact that the organization is important to the whole of the profession and to the subject matter, American history, and I think that absent strong organizations, too often a lot of things like professionalization, like hearing what's going on, get lost. And I'm a big one to tell all my students, go to the meetings, meet the people, listen to what they have to say. Learn to go through a book exhibit, learn to meet the editors, and it's absolutely critical to professional success. You've got to find out what other people are doing. You have to ask editors, 'What are you interested in?' On an eyeball-to-eyeball basis, that's how it really works. So that, I think, is absolutely critical, and I think you have to support the infrastructure of the organization."

"Now, I do that for a lot of organizations. I do it at different giving levels, but basically everybody gets something every year. And this is one thing, I said this to some other people, I said, 'Why don't you just give away your royalties? Where are you getting it from? Let's think about what royalties represent. It's a great pat on the back, I think, to get published. It's a bigger pat on the back to say okay, you're going to make some money out of this, but on the other hand, let's just understand who's paying for what.' And I think giving back to organizations is critical, because as I said, that infrastructure needs to exist, the advocacy function of that organization needs to exist, and it isn't supported out of wind. It's supported with cash, and I'd hate to see organizations charge a fortune to have a person come to a convention. Keeping registration fees down, getting graduate students to come, that's how they understand what the profession is about, that's how I understood what the profession was about. Getting to the OAH in 1967 to understand how a convention works. You know, you stand around, and oh, look at all those people. You go around looking at name badges and you go whoa! But hey, most of these people are extraordinarily generous, so generous you just cannot believe it. Jim McPherson, I'd see Jim at a convention, I'd be walking along with a graduate student of mine, 'Jim, how are you doing?' and he stops, and I said, 'I want to introduce this student here who's working on a Civil War topic at Maryland.' Jim takes out forty-five minutes to talk to him. Glenda Riley took out over an hour and a half to talk to my graduate students about women's history. Glenna Matthews, over an hour talking to a different graduate student of mine about women's history. I mean, come on, you don't get that if you don't go to the convention. These people are incredibly generous people in terms of their time."

"One other thing is that I think senior faculty have a responsibility to advocate for professional organizations, to not only say it by name, but if somebody is interested, hand them a brochure, show them how to join, and then, of course, what I say is come to the meeting. Come to the meeting with me, because they're like, 'I can't go to a meeting by myself, what do I do?' Well, a lot of them can't, and they shouldn't. Now, I did, but I had a whole group of other graduate students going with me, and encourage that, because the students find out it's fun, the meetings are fun, they get to meet other graduate students, but you get to meet the professors, and I said most of them are just incredibly generous."

I mentioned the importance of the regional receptions at the annual meetings and how they provide a less intimidating environment for meeting and networking, especially for newcomers. "Right," he said, "it's an opportunity to circulate around and introduce people. If I can get a student there, which I did two years ago, I'd bring them around, I see who's in a room that I know and take them around, and just get the connections. You want the networking, because if you need something, you call someone up and say where would I find this? Have you ever run across anything like this? A lot of people say oh yeah. I remember doing that with one of Bill Cronon's students at the National Archives. She was just wondering around, I said what are you looking for? And I said, oh, okay, let me show you how to use the National Archives, and she came up to me about a year later and said you know, that saved me. I would've been there for weeks and never figured out what to do. I said well, that's why we're there, helping."

Gordon Bakken has been helping students for years and supporting his professional organization along the way. He’s certainly "living large."