Remembering Paul Conkin

He read a book each weeknight, after finishing his chores, and returned it the next day to the small school library that served the students who lived near the family farm in Chuckey, Tennessee. Most everyone lived on a farm and most everyone had chores but not everyone had the ability to read through an entire book each night and remember each page.

Paul K. Conkin left that tiny secondary school to attend a small denominational college, Milligan College. Milligan College is now a university, and it proudly advertises its U.S. News & World Report ranking. Its Wikipedia page boasts of such notable academic alumni as Frank Knight, one of the founders of the Chicago School in economics, and William G. Dever, a prominent archaeologist specializing in the history of Israel and the Near East in Biblical eras. It does not mention Paul Conkin.

Conkin graduated in 1951 from Milligan with a degree in chemistry but history had always been a strong interest, so with some encouragement he applied to one graduate program, Vanderbilt’s. He obtained his M.A. in 1953 and the Ph.D. in 1957. That time period included a two-year stint in the Army, stationed in Europe, interrogating those captured or fleeing from the Soviet-controlled parts of Germany. He could write his reports remarkably fast, 30 pages on a good day; he wrote quickly, confidently, and did not have much patience with slow readers. His superiors also discovered he had memorized the rulebook ­— they tended to leave him alone.

He enjoyed his tour of duty but was eager to get back to Vanderbilt to finish his dissertation, which he did in two years. When I was his student at Vanderbilt I would on occasion visit the stand in the main library where all the history dissertations stood bound in monastic black. Even after thirty years his caught the eye due to its sheer size — almost 600 sheets of compressed onion skin paper! It became a personal ritual to pull it out with two hands from the bottom shelf and heft it toward new recruits as I worked through my repertoire of Conkin stories.

Tomorrow A New World: The New Deal Community Program went on to win the AHA’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1958. An auspicious start to a career that promised to take Conkin to the top of the profession — and in some ways he arrived. The University of Wisconsin appointed him its inaugural Merle Curti Professor of History in 1976. He had by then achieved national recognition as an authority in two different subject areas. In New Deal studies — his little book on FDR and the origins of the welfare state, better known as The New Deal, sold so well that at one point he could not think of an American college or university where the book was not being used. The second, the intellectual history of the United States, became in Conkin’s hands less a discrete subject matter and more of a way of establishing lines of communication between the present and the past.

His command of the latter surprised no one who had the opportunity to hear him lecture or speak off-the-cuff (Conkin spoke in complete paragraphs). His formidable abilities found sufficient outlet in putting together into a single volume eight well-wrought, if at times intricate, intellectual biographies: they covered three stalwarts Edwards, Franklin, Adams, the ever-present Emerson, the founding pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey, and ended with a poetic touch, Santayana.

Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers is not much read or cited today — it barely shows up in syllabi or graduate reading lists — but when it came out, in 1968, it found fans. At least I think it did. My undergraduate advisor recommended it to me after I got accepted to Vanderbilt. I was very excited to order it from the college bookstore, my first book order. I was equally chagrined when I realized I could barely decipher whole sections. It only took about 10 years before I felt I could crack its more intricate parts.

During that formative decade I had the benefit of Conkin’s tutelage. That included his trademark push for precision and clarity. Most who knew him would add relentless to push. He was a great mentor in that he always prioritized the demands of the subject at hand. As a graduate student I always thought the subject was the subject — be it, to mention some books he wrote after arriving in 1979 at Vanderbilt as the history department’s new Distinguished Professor ­— economics (The Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists), institutional history (Gone With The Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University), cultural criticism (The Southern Agrarians), historiography and the philosophy of history (Heritage and Challenge: The History and Theory of History), political biography (Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon Baines Johnson), American political theory (The Four Foundations of American Government), or the history of American religion (notably, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost, The Uneasy Center: Reform Christianity in Antebellum America, American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity).

But, as it turned out, the subject was not the subject. The subject as traditionally conceived ­— and Conkin never really said exactly this, he just acted on it — was simply the opportunity nature provided for us to grow as human beings. Growth occurred through clarification. Clarifying our wants, our motives, our loves, our values, our hatreds, our pleasures, even clarifying what could not be clarified, required enhancing our communicative powers. The type of history Conkin did relied on communicating exclusively through the written word. So Conkin always put forth his best effort to make sure every word added to, and did not detract from, the true story about the past he wanted to tell you. And to make sure the story he told was told according to the best conventions historians employed. He made it his mission to depict, to qualify, to point out lurking ambiguities — he loved both those words — to tell you the truth as he saw it as if speaking to you face-to-face.

He did not think precision and clarity were cardinal intellectual virtues. But he did not think them vices, either. He did think historians not sufficiently conscientious in how they used language. Through his example he conveyed the message that the profession as a whole suffered from an underdeveloped intellectual conscience.

John Milton Cooper once called Conkin “the foremost intellectual critic among American historians.” Anyone whose work Conkin reviewed, either before or after publication, knew this judgment to be sound. He could at times be unyielding in his written comments. I know that from firsthand experience. But it was never personal, not really, even if it took a while to realize that. He dedicated his professional life to thinking well, to writing clearly, to informing his readers; to using his historical work to help the past and present understand each other, to, at minimum, bring a no-worse future into being.

These preoccupations fully revealed themselves in another spate of books he began publishing shortly before taking emeritus status in 2000: When All The Gods Trembled: Darwin, Scopes, and American Intellectuals; A Requiem for the American Village; The State of the Earth: Environmental Challenges on the Road to 2100; and, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929.

His death this past July 23 at 92 saddened me. I am more saddened, though, by how his body of work seems to have faded from professional awareness. One still sees sporadic endnote references to Conkin among intellectual historians, mainly because he, along with John Higham, edited a 1979 volume of essays that became a benchmark: New Directions in American Intellectual History. Conkin wrote the volume’s “Afterword.” I think he should have written a “Foreword” instead.