An Old England Man

Mt j ~Y career has not been confined to universities but was interrupted by six years of war service, four of them in the Middle East, and by three and a quarter as a member of the House of Commons. Moreover, in my undergraduate years at Durham, to which I went as an Open Scholar from a grammar school, no American history was taught, nor was it in any serious fashion at any of Britain's universities. Indeed, when the First Class Honours that I was awarded in I937 carried with it a graduate scholarship to New College, Oxford, it was expected that I would go on there to continue the study of the administration of Warren Hastings's Bengal (I772-I774) that I had begun as my thesis requirement for my undergraduate degree. When, instead, I applied for and secured a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (since the donor's death in I959 renamed the Harkness Fellowship of the Commonwealth Fund) and chose to study at the University of Virginia, I was breaking with tradition, and, aged twenty-two, beginning the study of United States history as a novice. As far as I can remember, in my undergraduate years, when essays were required fortnightly, I wrote only one on an American theme: What were the causes of the War of American Independence? I sought to take what was then an unfashionable line in ascribing the blame to a few hot and designing men in Boston. Handled skillfully or with greater good fortune would Independence have come then, or even at all? Cynics might say that, under many different titles, I have been embroidering the same thesis in extenso for some fifty years. Not until I walked the Lawn at Charlottesville and tried to recapture the hopes of its founding father, Thomas Jefferson, did I know that I was in fact the first Harkness Fellow to study south of the Mason-Dixon Line-once I had grasped who Mason and Dixon were, and what that frontier's significance was in nineteenthcentury American history. Hitler and Mussolini intervened, for me and my generation. I abandoned plans for a doctorate and settled for a master's degree, conferred on a memorable and sunny day, June 5, I940, and by no less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mussolini had declared war that morning and struck at a France that was collapsing. F.D.R.'s Charlottesville speech was stirring and historic: The hand that held the dagger has stabbed it in the back of his neighbor. I sailed in the summer from Canada-the U.S. being then neutral-into an air raid over nighttime Liverpool, with shrapnel falling like heavy confetti on the deck. It was my sharp introduction to six years of war: square-bashing in Yorkshire with the K.O.Y.L.I.s, then Intelligence in Cairo and points east and west, and, after

History · Race, History, and American Society