From Berkeley to Ole Miss: Celebrating Winthrop D. Jordan
Most historians put great emphasis in their studies on research into original sources. In American historiography the persistence of an empirical tradition is clear; less evident and less important for most historians have been methods of interpretation—the force of imagination or the power of concepts drawn from fields other than history. Winthrop D. Jordan departed from this common practice in most ways. He did more research than most, and he brought to all his studies a powerful imagination and an unusual knowledge of methods and concepts drawn from fields related to history. His taste for the empirical and his extraordinary imagination combined to make him one of the most important historians of his generation.
Jordan’s early years gave little hint of the scholar he would become. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1931, the son of Henry Donaldson Jordan, a professor of history at Clark University. His mother was Lucretia Mott Churchill, a descendant of New England abolitionists. Jordan was educated in New England, except for a short stay in an English boarding school, an experience he once described to me as revealing of the shortcomings of English educational practice. He never claimed, however, that he was ever more than an ordinary student, and when it came time to go to work—after graduation from Harvard in 1953—he turned to business, not to scholarship and teaching. The business he chose was life insurance, which he soon decided was better left to others. It was a fortunate decision, for him and for the rest of us interested in the past. So also was his turn to teaching, first at Phillips Exeter Academy and then, after studying history at Clark (M.A., 1957) and Brown (Ph.D., 1960), at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1963 until he left for the University of Mississippi in 1982.
It did not take long for the Berkeley history department to recognize that we had acquired an extraordinarily talented scholar. For his part, Win remained unaware of just how gifted he was. No one could question his talents after White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 appeared in 1968. In his first years at Berkeley, Win spent his scholarly time revising the manuscript that became the book. Sometime during this process, he told me that Jim Smith, then the Institute’s Editor of Publications, had suggested that he shorten the text. Win had not finished his revisions, and he admitted with a laugh that at that moment the manuscript was fifty pages longer than when it was submitted. It is a long book but certainly not too long.
White over Black reveals its author’s wide and deep research and sophisticated use of social psychology. Win took nothing for granted, and his use of psychology is discerning and well focused. Whatever the borrowings from other fields, it was Win’s imaginative use of empirical data that contributes most to its distinction. I cannot conceive of any serious attempt to understand white racism in America without reckoning with the insights provided by White over Black.
Win proved to be a remarkably good teacher of students at all levels. He developed the department’s first course for undergraduates on racism and black-white relations. And he also, with two of his colleagues, revised a new reading course for all graduate students in American history. In lecture courses he was a quiet speaker—not a show-off—but he always provided well-shaped arguments, always with data from the original sources. The sources were also a staple on lists of readings he required of undergraduates and graduate students. Given the intellectual power of these courses and Win’s kind and generous manner, it was no surprise that year after year he was one of the most popular teachers in the department—and one of the most effective.
Late in the 1960s, the University called on Win to serve as the first Dean of Minority Affairs. At the time the campus faced a demand for a “Third World College.” African American students led a movement sounding this demand, and the campus turned to Win as someone who combined high standards and the trust of minority students. As dean, Win provided a reasonable voice in the crisis and earned the regard of all parties involved.
When calm returned, Win went back to his studies and the classroom. A good many articles, book chapters, and several editions of a textbook, written with Leon F. Litwack, followed. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy, published in 1993, began as a lecture while he was at Berkeley. Though it does not have the range of White over Black, it has its own brilliance. Distinguished by its careful examination of fugitive sources, it might serve as a model of how a historian should handle evidence.
Prizes for distinguished historical work came Win’s way with both books. White over Black won four—the Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and the National Book Award for History and Biography. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek brought him another Bancroft Prize. Win should have been proud of this recognition, but he never mentioned the prizes. The work seemed enough for him, and his comments about his students demonstrated that he was as proud of them as of anything he had done.
The man eludes easy summary. He had a full life outside the university world. His talents extended to friendship, and he had friends among all kinds of people. He played a good game of squash, a less impressive game of tennis. He liked good stories, told them well, and listened attentively to those told by his friends. He was good to be with and not just because of his mind—he was fun. Most of all, his was a thoughtful, kind, and generous spirit.
Robert Middlekauff
University of California, Berkeley
Where to begin? As scholars, we all know of the monumental impact that Winthrop D. Jordan has had on the history profession. His White over Black remains the first and best place to go to understand the origins and meaning of race and slavery in America. Not only did it win a Bancroft Prize and a National Book Award for History and Biography, but just last year it was named the second most important book dealing with slavery and race in America (right behind W. E. B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk). Colonial historians are especially indebted to White over Black. Until the book’s appearance in 1968, most scholars who bothered to address the subject at all examined the institution of slavery and the racial views that it reflected and created in terms of the antebellum experience. They almost forgot, in other words, that American slavery had a dynamic and ever-changing history, that it was an institution shaped by attitudes and beliefs that predated American colonization That this fact seems so obvious and unremarkable today is, of course, a tribute to Winthrop Jordan.
Jordan’s other scholarly work is nearly as wide-ranging as the mind of its author. Win’s second Bancroft Prize came for Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, a densely detailed chronicle of an abortive slave rebellion in Adams County, Mississippi, in 1861. He also wrote The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States and coauthored with Leon F. Litwack two U.S. history textbooks, one for college students, the other aimed at the high school level. His many journal articles ranged from a brilliant psychological examination of the meaning of the colonial rejection of monarchy in 1776 to an analysis of the meaning of the term “mulatto” in the British colonies.1
It is impossible—for me at least—to think of Win Jordan “merely” as one of the best historians of the twentieth century. I first met Win in the spring of 1980. I had just arrived at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and he was coming there from the University of California, Berkeley, for one semester, as a temporary replacement for our African American historian. For some reason, my department chair decided that I was the perfect person to find him an apartment. I did so with considerable nervousness. I did not know for sure whether he was “white” or “black” (see below for the ultimate irony), nor did I know what Oxford landlords would think if he were indeed “black.” More problematic, what if the great Winthrop Jordan hated whatever I found for him? I need not have worried. He loved his apartment; his landlady turned out to be one of his most devoted friends. And the great Winthrop Jordan was clearly one of the most modest and unassuming men I had ever met.
Not surprisingly, everyone in the Department of History fell in love with Win Jordan. Much to our surprise and pleasure, he seemed to be rather taken with us as well. As the time for his return to Berkeley grew near, we all began to wax sad and nostalgic. One evening, a few of us were sitting on the floor in someone’s apartment, toasting one another’s virtues and vices, when I decided to ask the question that was at the back of everyone’s mind: was there any way that we could persuade him to stay? He looked at me quizzically and replied, “No one has asked me yet.” That seemed, at the very least, to be an invitation to explore the possibility. The end result? Win Jordan moved to Mississippi.
As the news spread throughout the historical profession that Winthrop Jordan was leaving Berkeley for the University of Mississippi, everyone wanted to know why. It did seem to be a strange career trajectory. But there were good reasons for the move. Win had been contemplating a move somewhere for quite some time. He had always thought that he should not remain in one place for his entire career. He had considered other offers, but none seemed quite right. Moreover, Oxford had its advantages. He could continue his research on Adams County much more easily from Mississippi than from Berkeley. And, just a few weeks before he was ready to leave, he met Cora Miner Reilly, a recent graduate of the University of Mississippi law school. To say that the two were smitten would be to greatly understate the obvious. Suddenly Mississippi seemed more attractive than ever.
Win returned full time to the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1982. There he quickly became the most valued member of the History Department, and one of the most adored. In time, we all became familiar with the singular set of circumstances that made him the historian and the person that he was. He was born on November 11, 1931 (Armistice Day, not Veterans Day, this devoted Quaker always reminded us), to Henry Donaldson Jordan, professor of history at Clark University, and Lucretia Mott Churchill, a great-great-granddaughter of abolitionists James and Lucretia Mott. He seemed—at least from hindsight—destined to be a historian. He grew up in a faculty house on the Clark campus and thus was thoroughly comfortable in an academic setting from the very beginning. As a young man, he used his father’s connections to get a key to the American Antiquarian Society and often roamed through the archives at night, long after the librarians had gone home.
But his interests were too wide-ranging to be confined to any one topic. He loved music, especially jazz, and fancied himself something of a drummer. For a while, he could not even be confined by his own name. In fifth grade, he suddenly began calling himself “Reynolds Greenleaf,” refusing to answer to any other name, accepting zeros on his homework when a narrow-minded and literalist teacher refused to recognize his newfound identity. He graduated from Andover in 1949 with the dubious distinction of “Most Improved Scholar” as his major claim to fame. From Andover he became an exchange student at Marlborough, an English public school. There he became acquainted with cricket and soccer, cold baths once a week, and fellow students who were delighted when “care packages” from the States arrived. The delicacy requested most often? Spam!
After a summer spent hitchhiking throughout England and western Europe, Win found himself at Harvard University. There he made plans to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a “real” doctor. Unfortunately for him, abysmal grades in chemistry led him to rethink that career path. Instead, he majored in “social relations,” a degree that, fortuitously, first led him to think about the meaning of and attitudes toward race in something approaching a rigorous scholarly manner. He never took a single history course at Harvard. The closest he came was a course in early American literature taught by a guy named Perry Miller. Win’s only memory of those classes was wondering why the professor seemed determined to spend so much time talking about the Puritans.
Win graduated from Harvard in 1953. Already married to his first wife, Phyllis Henry, he needed to find some sort of gainful employment. He had been a minimally successful Fuller Brush salesman in Boston’s South End until he left Harvard, but that altogether respectable profession was not exactly what he had in mind for the rest of his life. So he went to work as a management trainee at the Prudential Life Insurance Company, a job which was even less interesting than his brief career as a door-to-door salesman had been. Finally, he accepted a position teaching history at Phillips Exeter Academy, before deciding to return to academia full-time. He earned a master’s degree in colonial American history from Clark University in 1957 and a Ph.D. in the same field from Brown in 1960. He was a fellow at the Institute of Early American History and Culture from 1960 to 1963, a time when Williamsburg was not yet ready to come to grips with the reality of integration. Theaters were still segregated; outdoor movies demanded that cars enter separate entrances on the basis of race. Win’s abstract notions of racial justice were put to a very real test during his first sojourn in the South.
In 1963 Win joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He was interviewed for the job not at the AHA but at a cocktail party where other aspirants to the position were also present. And he remained at Berkeley for nearly twenty years, serving not only as a member of the Department of History but as associate dean for minority group affairs in the graduate school. He came to the University of Mississippi in 1982, where he was F. A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor and Professor of Afro-American Studies as well as the first holder of the William F. Winter Professorship in History. He was slated to receive the B. L. C. Wailes Award from the Mississippi Historical Society on March 3, 2007, the first “non-Mississippian” to achieve this honor.
A word about Win’s influence as a teacher. At the University of Mississippi, he taught a course that all first-year M.A. students were required to take. Students never stop talking about the introduction to the discipline that they received in History 550. Yet it was an experience that was almost impossible to describe. The course was a mix of historiography and history, with a bit of methodology and a dash of theory thrown in for good measure. Every class was different. Win always had a few books in mind at the beginning of the semester, but for the rest, he listened to his students, found out what interested them—or what they needed—and let the course take on a shape and dynamic of its own. Invariably, students were bewildered and even frustrated in the beginning. They hardly knew what to make of this man who sat quietly, puffing on his corncob pipe, asking a probing question here and there, and forced them to take charge of their own education. What, they wondered, did he want? What he wanted, of course, was clear, precise, and grammatical prose, thoughtful analysis, a careful attention to the sources, and an open mind. In return, he lavished attention on every one of his students. He made them welcome in his home, listened to their personal as well as their professional woes, and treated them as colleagues, not as apprentices. That his former students flew in from all parts of the United States to attend his memorial service is but a small indication of their respect, admiration, and love of Win Jordan.
Win was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in November 2006. Undaunted, he continued to work on what turned out to be his final article, an analysis of the “One Drop Rule” in the American South, putting the finishing touches on his manuscript just a few days before his death. Gracious, dignified, and funny to the end, he left this life as gracefully as he lived it.
The ultimate irony: A few weeks before Win died, he and Cora decided that they would use the services of Oxford’s one “African American” funeral home. It seemed like a simple enough gesture. Until, that is, Cora received her copy of Win’s death certificate. There, in the blank space for “race,” the secretary at Hodges Funeral Home had carefully typed the designation “black.” Cora is still struggling to deal with the legal ramifications of this effort to integrate yet one more southern institution. But we all are wondering how many historians will look at this certificate and wonder whether the author of White over Black was indeed an African American.
Sheila Skemp
University of Mississippi
Notes:
Return to text1 Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History 60, no. 2 (September 1973): 294–308; Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 19, no. 2 (April 1962): 183–200.
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