Memories of the Midwest Conference on British Studies

by Walter L. Arnstein

1.  Historians are often poor at recording their own history, and the same generalization holds true for historical associations. At the most recent meeting of the Midwest Conference on British Studies in Lawrence, Kansas, our current president, Barrett Beer, asked me to jot down my own recollections of the earliest years of the Midwest Conference on British Studies. I do so, very much conscious of the pitfalls as well as the virtues of "oral history," but perhaps my reflections may call forth complementary reminiscences by other members of the MWCBS whose own memories go back to the 1950s and 1960s.

2.  By the time I attended my first MWCBS meeting on the University of Chicago campus in October 1957, the organization must have been at least four years old. It had been founded at the University of Chicago by Charles Loch Mowat (that pioneer historian of twentieth-century Britain who returned to Britain a few years later) and Alan Simpson (a specialist in Tudor-Stuart history who later became president of Vassar College). During the early 1960s, Charles Gray, who by then had joined the University of Chicago faculty, served as MWCBS executive secretary. Other distinguished early members of the MWCBS included Charles Mullett (University of Missouri), William Aydelotte (University of Iowa), Lacey Baldwin Smith (Northwestern University), Leo Solt (Indiana University), and Lawrence McCaffrey (then of the University of Illinois, later of Loyola University, Chicago) at a time before his academic concerns came to be focused on the American Conference for Irish Studies. At that 1957 meeting, I remember Jacob Price (University of Michigan) speaking about the writings of Sir Lewis Namier at a time when that pioneering historian was still very much alive and active. Indeed I had run into him earlier that year in the corridors of the Institute of Historical Research in London.

3.  By the late 1950s, the tradition had begun that the organization should meet in Chicago every second year and elsewhere in the midwest during alternate years. In 1958 we met on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, where Victorian Studies had been founded less than two years earlier, and where the youthful John Clive of Harvard University served as plenary speaker; his topic was Victorian morality. It was the tradition of the MWCBS until a decade or so ago that not more than one paper session should be scheduled at the same time and that graduate students should be encouraged to complete their dissertations before being invited to present a paper. At the same time, the host institution was strongly encouraged to secure a distinguished plenary speaker. Both in 1963 and in 1970 that speaker was the dynamic (not yet Sir) Geoffrey Elton of Cambridge University.

4.  I retain distinct memories of both the 1962 and the 1963 meetings. The first took place at the University of Illinois's Allerton Park Conference Center, and Josef Altholz (University of Minnesota) and I (then at Roosevelt University, Chicago) drove south from Chicago together on Route 45. Except for a short stretch around Kankakee, Interstate 57 did not yet exist, and two-lane highways had to suffice. At Allerton Park we both presented papers to a meeting of the MWCBS for the first time, and for the first and, as things turned out, only time I met and talked to Edgar Erickson, who had taught modern British History on the University of Illinois campus ever since 1931. The possibility that I might in due course become Erickson's successor did not occur to me on that occasion. It became marginally more likely at the 1963 meeting of MWCBS at the University of Chicago. Maurice Lee (the then Tudor-Stuart History specialist at Urbana) took me aside after lunch and asked me whether I might be interested in teaching two summer session courses on the Urbana campus during the following year. I said "Yes," and therefore spent the summer of 1964 in Urbana. Less than three years later I was offered the opportunity to become Erickson's successor, and when the MWCBS met at the Allerton Park Conference Center again in 1970 (with Geoffrey Elton as plenary speaker) and in 1978 (with Martin Wiener of Rice University as plenary speaker), I was able to play the role of local arrangements chair. In 1970 Elton spoke of his policy of sending aspiring graduate students into the deep end of the academic pool by immersing them, without preconceptions, in a body of primary source materials and letting them try to swim. Martin Wiener provided us with a foretaste of his prize-winning Book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980.

5.  I retain memories also of other early annual meetings such as the one at Lawrence, Kansas, in 1968 with J. H. Plumb as plenary speaker and the one at Iowa City in 1972 at which I played that same role. In 1971 we met in Chicago at Roosevelt University. After retirement, I intend to look into some old letters and to open boxes in our attic that may hold relics of the first twenty years and more of the history of the Midwest Conference on British Studies. In the meantime, I encourage other veteran members of the MWCBS to provide their own recollections and thereby enable Newton Key to put together a reasonably comprehensive record of the activities of what will soon become a half century of professional fellowship.