at the state university, where he was influenced by William F. Allen. Turner had studied for the doctorate under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University before returning to the University of Wisconsin faculty. In July 1893 he read his influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the AHA meeting in Chicago. Frontier conditions and the settlement of the West, he argued, had made the United States what it was. This was a distinctive departure from the prevailing historical idea which held that the beginnings of American institutions and character were to be found in European antecedents. “It seems exceedingly valuable and important,” Haskins wrote of Turner's essay, “but I feel so ‘westernized’ that I cannot appreciate how it would appeal to an eastern man.”3 Turner's essay eventually established him as one of the leading American historians of his day, even among easterners. Needless to say, westerners (including Wisconsinites) were glad to learn that they were on the cutting edge of history rather than mere primitives who lived on the margins of American civilization.4
Haskins had also earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, where he became Turner's friend. He wrote his dissertation on the Yazoo land frauds but eventually became America's leading medieval historian, with interests in Norman institutions and the development of medieval science. Something of a child prodigy, he completed his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins at the age of sixteen, then studied in Paris and Berlin before returning to Hopkins for his doctorate. Professor Haskins was only twenty-three, the same age as the undergraduate Bolton. By the time Bolton met him, Haskins was known as a meticulous researcher who had mastered several languages. Haskins impressed Bolton because of his thoroughness and because he worked his students very hard, which appealed to Bolton's dogged work habits. One of Haskins's friends, F. M. Powicke, likened his approach to teaching and writing to that of a builder. First, he amassed sufficient research material with which to build his edifice; then, he deliberately laid its foundation, “each sentence…like a block of hewn stone, laid in its place by a skilful mason.” Haskins's construction “was directed by a clear and powerful mind, but every stone…was left to make its own impression, without the aid of external graces.” Anything “wild and extravagant” from Haskins “was unthinkable,” Powicke recalled. Yet, when listening to Haskins lecture, Powicke found himself “hoping, and I knew I hoped in vain, for a touch of mischief or something just a trifle hazardous.” The resulting intellectual structure, however, spoke “of purpose and achievement; its austere lines reveal unexpected lights and shadows.”5
Turner's teaching methods also impressed Bolton. His undergraduate lecturing style must have seemed offhand, perhaps even ill-prepared to the casual undergraduate, but Herbert was anything but a casual student. In a time when most professors delivered carefully prepared lectures from detailed notes, or perhaps written essays that were read word for word, Turner would walk into the hall with a stack of note cards often based on primary source material. Turner spoke to the students from the cards, which he would sometimes fumble while he looked for some particular datum; so the effect was informal, almost casual, except for his voice, which had a melodic, almost hypnotic quality. Bolton's friend, historian Carl Becker, wrote that Turner's “voice was everything: a voice not deep but full, rich, vibrant, and musically cadenced; such a voice as you would never grow weary of, so warm and intimate and human it was.”6 Turner's lectures were analytical and full of ideas, rather than strictly narrative. He amply illustrated them with lantern slides and maps, just as Bolton would do when he became a professor. To an attentive student, such as Bolton, Turner seemed to be creating history from the raw materials before his very eyes. Many of the undergraduates called the good-looking, approachable, and brilliant professor Freddie or Fred, but never to his face. His graduate students called him “the Master.”7
As historians Haskins and Turner could not have been more different. Haskins's history was founded on a massive archival base that seemed unassailable, if a bit prosaic. Turner was quick, incisive, intuitive, deeply immersed in primary sources, but willing to write in advance of supportive evidence for his brilliant ideas. There were similarities as well as differences between the two men. Both of them were inspiring teachers. Handsome and gregarious, they were ambitious for professional advancement and recognition. They were alive to the idea that they were helping to build a new university and a new profession. Turner and Haskins were active in the AHA, and each would serve as its president. Students, especially serious ones interested in history, found both of them to be accessible and helpful. Turner and Haskins had high hopes for the development of a graduate program in history at Wisconsin, and they needed earnest disciples like Bolton.
The rapid development of the University of Wisconsin and its impressive young faculty had not gone unnoticed in the hallowed halls of Harvard University, whose president, Charles W. Eliot, toured the university in 1891. Eliot pointedly asked Haskins and Turner why they had studied at Hopkins. “Didn't we know that Harvard was the place to study history,” Haskins wrote to historian J. Franklin Jameson, “that they alone had the libraries and instructors?” According to Haskins, Eliot spent much of his time in Madison maligning his Baltimore competitor. Eliot's rudeness aggravated Haskins. “Even in the West one is expected to be a gentleman.”8 Eliot was known as a reserved and forbidding figure at Harvard—William James called him a “cold figure at the helm.”9 but Eliot's manner at Madison was not merely due to his personality: he feared that upstart institutions would somehow undercut Harvard's paramount standing among American universities. If he had misgivings about advanced study at Hopkins, one can only surmise what he thought about graduate education at Madison, especially under tyros like Turner and Haskins.
A few months after Eliot's visit Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, showed up in Madison. Gilman was the man who had so speedily made Hopkins a force in higher education. Before going to Baltimore, Gilman had been president of the University of California and is credited with laying the foundations for that western university's rise to prominence.10 Described by one of his Berkeley friends as a pleasant and tactful man, Gilman's personal qualities served him well during his visit to Wisconsin.11 “The contrast with Harvard's agent was significant and helped the cause of Hopkins in the Northwest,” Haskins told Jameson. “We shall have nine and possibly ten Hopkins men in the faculty next year.”12 It was no wonder that eastern university presidents visited institutions in the West. Wisconsin and other developing colleges and universities sent their students to eastern graduate schools and hired the finished products of those schools. Sometimes, as in the case of Turner, the departing student and the returning professor were one and the same.
The Wisconsin visits of Eliot and Gilman illuminated the quandary over doctoral training in American universities. Once doctoral training became the sine qua non for elite institutions, they faced the dual problems of attracting the best students and then placing them when they were finished. Moreover, enterprising faculty at budding western universities were eager to establish new doctoral programs of their own. Thus, developing institutions added to the pool of doctors qualified for professorships, but there was no guarantee that the number of faculty positions would grow enough to absorb them. Even when the supply of PhDs exceeded demand, the pressure was great to maintain doctoral programs, because they were indispensable status symbols in which institutions had heavy investments. Bolton's professional life would be greatly entangled with these intractable issues, which remain salient today.
In Bolton's era, graduate education was developing rapidly at Wisconsin. In 1892 the university had hired the renowned political economist Richard T. Ely from Johns Hopkins to head a new School of Economics, Political Science, and History that would offer graduate instruction. Turner and Haskins had studied with Ely at Hopkins; Turner thought that Ely's presence would give Wisconsin a leg up on its new regional rival, the University of Chicago. The younger men chafed under Ely's sometimes heavy-handed leadership, but respected him nonetheless.13 In those days duty (and good judgment) required faculty to obey department heads, deans, and university presidents. Turner and Haskins kept to that form.
Faculty relations and the struggle for institutional recognition did not immediately concern Bolton. In his first semester he enrolled in Haskins's course on English constitutional
