My Odyssey through History: Memoirs of War and Academe.

My Odyssey through History: Memoirs of War and Academe. By Charles P. Roland. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xx, 132. $29.95, ISBN 0-8071-2853-8.)

Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir. By Forrest McDonald. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 2004. Pp. viii, 198. $24.95, ISBN 0-7006-1329-3.)

Historians, especially those of a certain ripened age, will enjoy these two books, though they, like their authors, are vastly different. Charles P. Roland, born in 1918, is the older of the two authors and begins with an evocative account of his early years in a small town in western Tennessee. After his first two years at the junior college where his minister-father taught, Roland went to Vanderbilt and did well enough while also learning to drink and smoke (in moderation).

Two years of teaching high school followed, with a lot of happy dancing in jukebox clubs where big band tunes were the rage. Then a job as a historical aide in the National Park Service in Washington, D.C., enjoyably broadened Roland's experience and cultural horizons, but, caught up in the patriotic ferment after Pearl Harbor, he welcomed being drafted into the United States Army early in 1942.

Almost half of Roland's brief memoir deals with his military service and does so in an informative, entertaining fashion. After the ordeal of basic training, he gained admission to an Officer Candidate School. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he then participated in what was clearly hellishly rough training at Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi. The training would soon prove its worth in Europe. A captain by the time his infantry division arrived on the continent late in 1944, Roland quickly found himself intensely involved in the famous Battle of the Bulge, which he describes vividly.

Mustered out of service at the end of 1945, Roland returned to his job with the National Park Service in Washington. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he also enrolled as a graduate student in history at George Washington University. With virtually no time for social life, he began to feel caught in a grind when a casual suggestion from a friend inspired him to fly to Baton Rouge early in 1947. There his "life ... [took] a sea change of unimaginable proportions" (p. 95). The chairman of the history department at Louisiana State University, Bell Wiley, not only admitted Roland but also took him on as a research assistant. Subsequently serving as a teaching assistant for T. Harry Williams, Roland completed his Ph.D. dissertation (on Louisiana sugar plantations during the Civil War) under Francis B. Simkins. He served as an instructor at LSU until he was recalled to active duty during the Korean War. Bell Wiley, however, helped get Roland assigned to the Office of the Chief of Military History in Washington, which Roland came to regard as "the equivalent of holding a high-level post-graduate fellowship" (p. 105).

Compared with the space that Roland gives to his experience in World War II, he gives short shrift to his distinguished record in southern and, especially, Civil War history and to his teaching career, first at Tulane and then at the University of Kentucky. As a blurb on the dust jacket declares, Roland "is not just a scholar who has written history; he has lived it; and his Odyssey is quite literally our own."

The dust jacket of Forrest McDonald's book makes a surprisingly different claim: "A memorable memoir by one of the most prolific early-republic historians of our time--and possibly the orneriest of the bunch." Regardless of the validity or invalidity of that description, it is true that McDonald has written a feisty, candid account of his professional life. Born in Orange, Texas, in 1927, he went to the University of Texas "solely to play baseball" (p. 50). When that ambition was frustrated by the fact that, while he was a brilliant outfielder, he could not hit a curve ball, he "joined the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army" (p. 51). He reveals nothing about that phase except that he devoured a lot of what he calls "junk" reading and decided to become a novelist (p. 51).

He reentered the University of Texas at age twenty in January 1947 and proceeded to take an overload of courses while also working an average of forty hours a week at various jobs. (He had married and already had two children, with three more to come.) McDonald claims, no doubt correctly, that he had two special gifts going for him: "boundless self-confidence and inexhaustible energy" (p. 51). A history course with Eugene C. Barker helped McDonald decide to become a historian. Much of the course consisted of Barker's running denunciation of Charles A. Beard's classic Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913). In a subsequent government course, another professor proved to be a fervent Beardian. When McDonald mentioned that Barker taught that Beard was all wrong, the professor replied that Barker was a "senile old man" (p. 54). Stunned, McDonald "brooded on the matter" and then decided that "the field of American history must be absolutely wide open" (p. 54).

McDonald describes his master's thesis on Beard's economic interpretation (under Barker's supervision) as quite "puerile, but it impressed Barker and other[s]" sufficiently to encourage McDonald to pursue the doctorate and apply successfully for a grant from the Social Science Research Council, a grant that was subsequently renewed (p. 54). Intent upon exploring archives from Georgia to New Hampshire, McDonald put in twelve-hour days, slept in his car, cleaned up at truck stops, and ultimately ended up with over "5,000 pages of notes, every one crammed full." McDonald avows that he has "drawn on those notes for half a century and could still milk them for another dozen monographs" (p. 62).

Facing a tight job market in the early 1950s, McDonald, with the help of Fulmer Mood (Barker had retired), landed a position at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. There he undertook to write a history of the state's electrical utility industry, which appeared before his more important We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958). Concerning that widely hailed study, perhaps the most striking review was by David M. Potter, who asserted that McDonald had "tumbled a very large Humpty Dumpty [Beard's economic interpretation] from a very high wall of history, and American historical literature will never be entirely the same." (p. 86).

Despite his brilliant debut, McDonald ran into problems at Madison. Although he notes that he "was not yet the archconservative that [he] would become"--and had voted for Truman in 1948 and Stevenson in 1952--he was not comfortable in the "extremely left wing" ambience in Madison (p. 65). Accordingly he became, as he puts it, "a barefoot boy in the Ivy League" by moving to Brown University in 1959 (p. 90). He proceeded to publish too many books, most of them substantial and important. But just as the political, racial, and antiwar turbulence of the late 1960s made Roland uncomfortable at Tulane, McDonald ran into trouble at Brown. He left in 1967 to go to Wayne State University in Detroit. Later, the faculty there voted to unionize, and McDonald felt he "was simply too old to retool as a member of the working class" (p. 136). He and his second wife (who was also his valuable research assistant) bought a small farm in Florida. He soon moved from there to join his friend and collaborator, Grady McWhiney, at the University of Alabama. The account of how the two of them arrived at their famous Celtic thesis is a highlight of the closing portion.

Comments about various prominent historians are scattered through this memoir and will interest many in the profession.

ROBERT DURDEN

Duke University