classes. He briefly considered law as a profession, perhaps because it was a more direct route to the sort of social and financial success that he coveted, but history appealed to him.14 Haskins demanded twice as much work as his other professors, “but the work is interesting,” Bolton thought, “hence easily done.”15
Herbert moved into a rooming house and settled into college life. The freshmen and sophomores recruited him for field day, “but rather than have one class haze me for helping the other I'll keep away from them both.”16 Football, however, attracted Herbert's attention. He played halfback in intramural games, scored a touchdown, and thought the game was great fun, although it was a bruising experience in those helmetless, padless, and dangerous early days of the sport. He gave it up after a few games. He enjoyed competitive rowing but abandoned that sport, too, as he devoted more attention to his studies.
Gertrude's presence in Madison sharpened Herbert's sense of purpose. Now he wished to achieve something not only for himself but also “for her sake, and [to] be somebody of whom she can be proud…her nearness to me keeps the motive more vividly before me.”17 Perhaps hoping to plant a seed in Herbert's mind, she passed along news of various friends who had recently married.18 Formerly, Herbert regarded the marriage of old chums as if he had heard news of their execution. Not now. Perhaps Fred's marriage had reconciled him to the inevitability of his own matrimonial future. By the beginning of 1894 the couple had reached an “understanding,” a locution that must have meant that they were privately if not formally engaged. Herbert had gone so far as to quit working on Sundays, which gave the couple more time together. Still Herbert insisted that he studied “all the more earnestly because…every time I see her I receive a new the strongest inspiration and incentive for work.”19
The couple could not marry until Herbert finished his studies in the spring of 1895. Until then he needed better bachelor living arrangements. He decided to join a fraternity. “The fellows here who belong to no society and stay in their shells all the time are in danger of losing their earmarks of civilization and lapsing into savagery.” It was as if Herbert believed that manners were a mere husk that covered the raw farm boys who had made it to Madison. Without constant reinforcement, the newly acquired veneer would slough off and reveal the rougher stuff that lay within. Herbert had worked too hard to make something of himself to allow that to happen. “I feel it to be almost a duty, and that not chiefly to myself,” he explained, “to mingle to a certain extent with as good society as my limited qualifications will make me eligible to.”20 He intended to rise in the eyes of his community, whether it consisted of the small town of Tomah or the university student body. For him, fraternity membership was a means to that end.
Fred, a former frat member himself, loaned his brother the fifteen-dollar initiation fee for Theta Delta Chi. Two other Tomah boys had rushed the fraternity but were voted down. Herbert must have felt some pride in knowing that he had been admitted to an exclusive club.21 Indeed, his fraternity proved to be more exclusive than he could have guessed in 1894. Like Bolton, two of his fraternity brothers, Carl Becker and Guy Stanton Ford, would become presidents of the American Historical Association. If professional connections and upward mobility were the objects of his membership, Bolton joined the very best fraternity for his purposes, although there was more than a bit of luck involved. The odds against three AHA presidents coming from the same fraternity chapter must have been enormous; that the three presidents-to-be studied with two other AHA presidents in the making is perhaps unique in the history of the profession.
Theta Delta Chi was exclusive in ways unappealing today. Like other college fraternities at the time, Theta Delta Chi excluded Jews.22 This was not a matter that Herbert discussed openly, but it was probably tacitly understood that the “good society” with whom Herbert wished to associate did not include Jews. While public and most private institutions admitted qualified Jews, Jewish college students faced social discrimination of the sort that fraternities dished out.23
Bolton shared the common racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices of his time. As he put it many years later, his outlook in college was “typically ‘American,’ that is to say, provincial, nationalistic. My unquestioned historical beliefs included the following: Democrats were born to be damned; Catholics, Mormons, and Jews were to be looked upon askance.”24 It is impossible to fathom how deeply these bigotries ran in the young Bolton's psyche, but in 1894 he was a conformist who sought the approval of the dominant society.
Bolton, Becker, and Ford accepted the institutionalized prejudice of their fraternity, but later in life each of them would interrogate deeply held intellectual and cultural assumptions. Becker is well known for questioning the purposes and explanatory power of history. He was deeply intellectual, philosophical, and skeptical about the historian's ability to re-create an objective account of the past through an uncolored reading of historical documents as the so-called scientific historians claimed to do. For Becker, written history (as opposed to the past itself) was transitory, to be rewritten by each succeeding generation in ways that would best serve that generation.25 Ford eventually settled on German history as his field. In the 1930s he became an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany with its “hideous intolerance.”26 By then, it would seem, Ford had left his anti-Semitic fraternity days far behind.
If by comparison with his fraternity brothers Bolton did not have quite the intellectual acuity and literary panache of a Becker, or the political courage of a Ford, he should not be condemned as intellectually lightweight or permanently prejudiced against Jews and other groups. Bolton had a good and sensitive mind.27 Even though he was deeply marked by Turner's incisive brilliance and Haskins's rigorous scholarship, Bolton had an indelible strain of romanticism that would influence his historical writing throughout his life. As a mature historian he would cast the history of the Spanish Borderlands in that romantic light. And he would abandon his youthful prejudice against Catholics and Jews.
Hard work, not introspection about social problems, occupied Bolton's time in Madison as the year 1893—94 wore on. Medieval history under Haskins and American history with Turner were claiming more of his attention. He won a top grade from Turner. Law was becoming less attractive to Bolton.28 History, or perhaps Haskins and Turner, had won him over.
By the end of the school year in June 1894, Bolton was again looking for summer work. Gertrude had decided to return to teaching in Minnesota in the fall of 1894 so that she could save money for their impending marriage. Bolton feared that she had exhausted herself to get good marks at the university.29 Herbert spent part of his summer teaching school in Neillsville, Wisconsin, but hated it. “I hope I may be ‘hanged by the neck until dead’ if I ever agree to teach another arithmetic class,” he wrote Fred.30
During the summer a crisis arose at the University of Wisconsin. While Herbert had no direct part in the affair, it demonstrated the vulnerability of faculty and the university to the manipulations of a striving politician. Oliver Wells, the superintendent of public instruction whom the Boltons despised, was ex officio member of the Board of Regents. He published a letter in The Nation accusing Professor Ely of advocating “utopian, impractical and pernicious doctrines,” including the right to unionize, boycott, and strike against employers.31 This was a very serious matter that threatened Ely's career and the university. The Board of Regents named a committee to investigate the charges. Some faculty feared that if substantiated, the accusations would lead to a witch hunt for other professors with politically unpopular views. Turner wrote a lengthy report that rebutted Wells's charges against Ely. In the end the regents exonerated Ely, and Wells was discredited. The regents also approved a declaration that the university “should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”32
There is no mention of this episode in the Boltons’ letters, but they no doubt knew about it. Certainly they knew all of the principals involved. While one might conclude that all was well that ended well, the incident offered other lessons for an aspiring
