In a way, the replacement position at the University of South Dakota was another step back. My salary was $12,000 for the year, $2,000 less than my starting salary at San Diego State University three years earlier. But I was absolutely delighted to get the job, and as long as we lived frugally, which we did, we could get by on my earnings and the income from Steffi’s jewelry. We soon discovered the advantages of the business-friendly American system of taxation with its generous deductions for business-related expenses. The loopholes and tax credits designed to serve the interests of large corporations are indefensible. But the basic system allowing small businesses to deduct actual expenses such as heating costs, phone bills, and other upkeep is quite essential to the financial well-being of self-employed crafts persons, especially when they work out of their own homes.

As in the previous year in Eugene, I proceeded ahead to South Dakota and Steffi followed with Nicky via Amtrak at Omaha, Nebraska, at the end of October. But this time Trina accompanied me to Vermillion, as she was now entering sixth grade and we thought it best that she start the school year at her new school—her fourth school in six years. Nicky started first grade in Irasburg, a decision we later regretted as it put him a year ahead of himself for the rest of his school career. He made the varsity baseball team as a high school senior in Spokane, but graduated at seventeen before he had reached his full height and strength. Trina and I set out for South Dakota on 21 August 1977, reaching the Chicago area on August 24th and our destination the following day. En route I experienced the following epiphany, playing cards with my bright eleven-year-old daughter:

Defeated at the game of “Liar” by Trina despite my best efforts. Feeling more and more aggravated not just by Trina’s success in fooling me (the idea is to get rid of one’s cards by hook or crook, but if one is caught, one must take the whole pile), but by her manner of absorbing setbacks without psychological defeat: a continuous laughter not apparently warranted by events, but most disconcerting to opponents already baffled by her strategy. For the brief time of the game I could sympathize strongly with Nicky, who is of course always in the position I found myself in, unwillingly, in this game.

We made occasional sight-seeing stops along the way, one of them at Herbert Hoover’s birthplace in West Branch, Iowa:

Defensive tone throughout, trying to exonerate Hoover from culpability in the Depression. Isolated quotes from obscure speeches framed and spot-lighted to show that he was not unfriendly to labor interests. He even called on private insurance companies to go into unemployment insurance in the 1920s! A newspaper column from 1935 (!) assured the visitor that Hoover had tried to warn against over-speculation in the late twenties. Much coverage of Hoover’s war relief work, but no mention of the Bonus Army. But, surprisingly, his negative reputation may have produced a positive effect. The building is much less ostentatious than the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson libraries. There wasn’t much there, and less is better in these things. The attendants, too, seemed friendlier, more personable, as if grateful that we should have bothered to stop by.

Vermillion was a picturesque little town, close to the Missouri River. It looked more like a farming village than a university town, except that it had more bookstores than one would have expected to find on the prairie. I actually experienced a greater culture shock on first coming to Vermillion than either in San Diego or Eugene, where the differences from the East Coast were less noticeable. A feeling of isolation was hard to avoid. The closest town of any size was Sioux City across the border in Iowa, about twenty miles away. Sioux Falls, which today has branches of both USD and South Dakota State University, was quite a bit larger, but it was sixty miles to the north. I soon discovered that for permanent residents the destination of choice for relief from rural monotony and cultural aridity was Minneapolis, some 200 miles to the northeast. We settled into the comfortable Craftsman-style home at 116 North Yale Street of Donald Pryce, the faculty member I was replacing for the year. The department faculty, fewer than a dozen, was a close-knit group with quite a bit of friendly socializing among them. We were immediately included in their various activities, including tennis, and, in bad weather, basketball. I was somewhat disconcerted, however, by their shared disdain for their hometown, out “in the middle of nowhere.” When the first winter storm struck in early October, I could appreciate some of the disadvantages of the harsh continental climate to which they were subject. But as someone desperately trying to get a foothold in the profession, being stuck in a place like Vermillion did not seem like the worst fate to me! This was not the dominant consensus among my colleagues, however. Most of them actually envied me for not having tenure, because it meant that I didn’t face the prospect of having to spend a good part of my life out in the sticks. I was free (in the sense of being unhindered by inner restraints, such as prudence) to look for another job. In my journal I noted that in their view “the very fact that I have to look for a job provides me with the same kind of advantage as a binding deadline does for someone who needs to get a project done.” The younger members of the department were frequently applying for positions elsewhere, usually deanships in the hopes that the administrative track might provide a means to get away. They were also very aware that only through publications and other professional achievements could they hope to improve their career chances. Teaching, no matter how conscientiously practiced, was not going to get the job done. As the chair of the department, Steve Ward, blithely put it, “We teach for show and write for dough.”

I shared an office with young Bob Hilderbrand, a tall, athletic, easy-going native of neighboring Iowa and a University of Iowa PhD who was replacing an American historian on sabbatical leave for the year. Bob eventually managed to gain a permanent position at USD, where, unlike most of his colleagues, he felt quite at home—so much so, in fact, that he contemplated staying in Vermillion the following year even if his job was not renewed. In the event, however, he went on to spend his entire very productive career at USD. Bob represented the best of “prairie populism,” an open-minded, progressive attitude worthy of the state’s popular senior senator, George McGovern. Bob was flush with the confidence of youth. “I know I will write novels some day,” he told me when I revealed to him that this had been my secret ambition. “I’ve got it in me. It’s just a question of when it will come out. Writing novels for me is a diversion. I can do it in my free time.” Whether he ever wrote those novels I don’t know, but he did write several excellent history monographs, including what is probably the leading academic study of the Bretton Woods Monetary Conference after the war and the origins of the United Nations. He was not a pedant, but he did take his responsibility for teaching the correct rules of grammar to his students very seriously. “Now at the start of my career I have to make a fundamental decision,” he said. “Am I going to enforce the correct usage of the pronouns ‘which’ and ‘that,’ or is insisting on this distinction just a hopeless cause?” Bob and his wife were Mormons, which led to an amusing misunderstanding at one of our social gatherings. As cream and sugar were circulating after dinner in anticipation of the coffee to come, we both made reference to the approaching poison. “No such decadence!” we agreed. But whereas I meant the cream (because of my lactose intolerance), he meant the coffee!

I soon became aware of the peculiar sartorial obsessions of the department, which always made me feel somewhat negligent in my personal appearance. Perhaps it was the informality of life on the prairie that made the university-connected personnel so conscious of dress and so enamored of formal attire. Our chairman Steve Ward, an historian of Britain, set the tone. His improbable model was the sophisticated British don. It struck me as ironic that in the heart of the Great Plains, of all places, I should encounter the greatest sensitivity to proper dress. Bob Hilderbrand rationalized his habit of wearing ties every day as a way of distinguishing himself from his students. “Otherwise I’d be completely one of them,” he said. This led me to reflect that I deliberately avoided wearing ties—in order to reduce the distance between myself and my students. “My accent is what skin color is to Blacks,” I wrote in my journal. “Try as I may, I can never fully blend in. It is an involuntary badge of otherness.” Bob’s easy relations with his students and other members of the department made me even more conscious of my involuntary outsider status. In the spring of 1978 I reflected on the department’s sartorial conventions:

The tennis game last fall as Ward’s partner against Wolff and Watterson: only now do I realize what a faux pas it was to have taken off my jersey. Only now do their rules and conventions exert their constraints on me. Only now do I realize that my failure to wear tie and coat to classes—more a token of conformity than of rebellion on my part—must strike them as perverse. This is especially noticeable when one of them doesn’t wear tie or coat: it appears not just out of place but out of character. One feels sorry for and slightly contemptuous of him. His democratic or liberal gesture just seems like backsliding.

Nonetheless my reaction to South Dakota was overwhelmingly positive:

So much easier to get a handle on it than on California (or just San Diego) or Oregon. In fact it seems as if California and Oregon only now fall into place in the light of my experience of South Dakota. I should feel less comfortable here, but I don’t. Perhaps it is because I am basically a missionary type—and here I really do have a mission: teaching the critical approach to students who study history for its conservative, antiquarian appeal, and, even more difficult, teaching critical German history to students of largely German stock who want to hear what’s good about their past.

With Hilderbrand I attended the AHA annual meeting in Dallas in search of a job for the following year. I placed some hopes in an interview I had scheduled with the representative of Hampshire College, Anson Rabinbach. He was the well-known editor of the outstanding journal New German Critique and today is a professor at Princeton. However, he canceled the interview at the last moment, pleading too much to do and leaving the dozens of candidates who had signed up angry and disappointed. Some of us even went so far as to write a letter of complaint to the AHA, pointing out that such late cancellations not only meant the loss of that particular interview but of a valuable time slot, as it was then too late to sign up for an alternate interview. No wonder the job fairs at annual meetings came to be referred to sarcastically as “meat markets.” The incident led me to reflect on the apparently unavoidable dialectic of the personal and the political in movements of the left:

The “callousness” of the party functionary in a cause ultimately designed to rid the world of callous relations; but you can’t be “humane” to every individual and effectively further the cause.

I helped my own cause that spring by becoming the only USD faculty member to give a paper at the annual Mid-American History Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, for which I had applied as soon as I learned that I would be teaching in South Dakota that year. The paper was a spin-off of my work on H. S. Chamberlain’s World War I pamphlets and precipitated an animated discussion. My session moderator, Evelyn Haller, paid me the compliment, “That was the liveliest session I’ve ever been at,” and wished me well in my job search: “You have so much to offer.” Steve Ward also appreciated my initiative, an appreciation reflected in the excellent recommendations he wrote for my job applications that spring. The job hunt continued to absorb much of my time, inducing me to write in my journal of “my fear that by refusing to permit myself to hope for success in the job hunt (in order to avoid disappointment) I am actually failing to mobilize all potential resources in that hunt.” My most promising opportunity once again came late in the year. In the first week of May 1978 (the last week of classes) I was invited to a campus interview at Gonzaga University in Spokane. A Jesuit university was the last place I expected to end up, but the interview went surprisingly well. The topics of the trial class I was asked to teach were fascism and Nazism, the subjects closest to my research interests and field of specialization. I was fortunate, too, in that I was given an honors class in Western Civilization to conduct. It was not hard to get its bright students to ask questions and participate vigorously in the discussion. At the end I got an additional boost when on leaving the classroom several students urged the assembled departmental faculty to “hire him” and “sign him up.”

A few days later I received a call from the departmental chair, Father Tony Via, informing me that the department had voted unanimously to offer me the position. I was so thrilled by this offer that I accepted it on the spot. Fr. Via urged me to take the full 48 hours they were prepared to grant me for so important a commitment, but I didn’t want to take the risk that due to some unlucky fluke their offer might yet be withdrawn! In retrospect I realized that my eagerness might have come across as desperation, a reaction that was not likely to enhance the value they might attach to their new acquisition. It might have been much more politic to leave them with the impression that in hiring me they had beaten out strong competition for my services from other prestigious universities! This was not the case, however. It was I who had beaten out what I later learned were 125 applicants for the job (only one of whom, however, besides myself, was invited to campus for an interview). I did receive two additional tenure-track offers in the days that followed (my first tenure-track offers since getting my PhD in 1974), but they were not of a kind to make me regret having made too hasty a decision in choosing Gonzaga. One was from Kansas Wesleyan, where I would have constituted the entire history department with responsibility for all fields from ancient to modern. The only thing going for Kansas Wesleyan was my admiration for the Methodists for having opposed the British slave trade so fiercely in the nineteenth century! The other tenure-track offer was from Fayetteville State College in North Carolina, an all-African American college with a teaching load of five courses per semester. Accepting this arduous assignment might have eased my conscience about having failed to fulfill the community service obligations of my Leadership Development Fellowship back in 1970, but I can’t say that I regretted my commitment to Gonzaga even for a moment!

Painting easter eggs in Vermillion, SD, spring 1978

That spring I read that Bob Hope would be the commencement speaker at Gonzaga in 1978. His invitation seemed a fitting way to commemorate the untimely death of his friend and Gonzaga’s most illustrious alumnus, Bing Crosby, of a heart attack on a golf course in Spain the previous October. Crosby, a native of Spokane, never actually graduated from Gonzaga, having left for Hollywood with his band as an undergraduate before receiving his degree, but he became one of the university’s most generous donors. In the 1950s he had provided the funding for Gonzaga’s library, and during my recruiting visit there was some speculation that he might have left some of his sizable estate to his Alma Mater. This was not the case, however, as he had turned against the university in the 1970s when the anti-war movement began making inroads among students and faculty even in such hotbeds of conservatism and conformity as Spokane. Gonzaga was certainly not untouched by the emancipatory trends of the late 1960s and 1970s. While on my recruitment visit I had the chance to view the President’s Report, which featured an essay by the university president, Fr. Bernard Coughlin, on the importance of addressing the problem of social and economic inequality. The Jesuit order had only recently announced its celebrated “option for the poor,” giving top priority to its mission of promoting social justice. The Jesuits were particularly active in missions in Central America, where social conflict was rife and liberation theology was beginning to take root, especially among the base communities of the unpropertied and dispossessed. I was surprised and cheered when Fr. Via compared the present moment in time to the Church’s belated but ultimately successful efforts to come to terms with secular liberalism in the nineteenth century: “It’s time that we came to terms with the socialist movement as well.” There was even some talk of making peace, not with the Soviet Union, but with Eurocommunism, which was then enjoying its brief ascendancy in Italy. When the tide again turned after the Reagan election in 1980, I found myself in an unexpectedly contentious struggle for tenure against the conservatives in the department. I thanked my lucky stars that I had been hired at a time when the Jesuits were still so open to egalitarian values and causes.

Steffi and the children were already back in Vermont when I told her of my hiring over the phone. Her reaction was unexpected: “Vielleicht warden wir noch fromm (maybe we’ll yet become pious)!” My USD colleagues were very happy for me. I could tell that my stature had risen in their eyes when Steve Ward–always impressed by appearances–said, “I didn’t know you had such a new VW van!”