Eugene P. Boardman

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University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Document 727
7 December 1987

MEMORIAL RESOLUTION OF THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

ON THE DEATH OF EMERITUS PROFESSOR EUGENE P. BOARDMAN

Gene Boardman was "quiet but active and forceful, cool in his judgments"--in the words of a professor who supervised his work as a teaching assistant in the History Department in 1936-37. A neighbor who knew him in the 1950s and 60s added: "He was filled with humanitarian common sense." At this University, he pioneered in the East Asian field and with a course in History of Religions and was known as a devoted teacher but his career, as Who's Who in America briefly indicates, went far beyond the campus.

Eugene P. Boardman, the son of Charles W. and Irmgard I. Boardman, was born on October 5, 1910 in Aurora, Illinois. He grew up in Delavan and graduated from Beloit College in 1932 with Phi Beta Kappa honors. An early indication of his social consciousness was a paper for which he was given a prize at Beloit--"Race Prejudice: Its Significance and Control." He spent the next three years teaching English, biology, and social science in the Preparatory School of the American University in Beirut and traveling extensively in the Middle East and Europe. Upon his return, after a brief stint as a high school instructor at Delavan, he entered the History graduate program here. With the noted American historian, John D. Hicks, as his major professor, he completed a thesis which also reflected his interest in minorities--"A Historical Survey of Japanese Exclusion and Discrimination in the United States"--and received his MA in 1937.

Since his interest was increasing in East Asian history, he had to go elsewhere to work in that field. He entered Harvard where he was one of the first students of John K. Fairbank who was to become the dean of modern Chinese studies in this country. He earned another MA there in 1939 and was working on his dissertation when he enlisted in the Marine Corps in June 1941. He was one of a dozen young graduate students recruited to be Japanese language intelligence officers.

His war service was distinguished and he eventually attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the post-war reserves. He was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack and participated in the Tulagi and Guadalcanal campaigns in the First Marine Division and at Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian with the Second Marine Division. The Secretary of the Navy best summed up his service in the citation for the Legion of Merit: "Working long hours under fire and at times in positions of great danger, Captain Boardman translated captured documents and interrogated prisoners of war, thereby contributing materially to the prosecution of the campaigns and the probable saving of many American lives." He suffered from combat fatigue and had four attacks of malaria during the war. In the fall of 1945, he served as chief interpreter at the war crimes trial of General Yamashita. He believed that this was a miscarriage of justice and argued to this effect in an article which appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette in June 1946.

After the war, he began work on his dissertation which he had left unfinished five years before. He completed it and was awarded the PhD degree in 1947. In the fall of 1946, he accepted a position as assistant professor in the History Department and offered the first course taught here in, what was then termed, Far Eastern History. Later, he offered courses in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history as well as a seminar in historiography. He was an outstanding undergraduate teacher. Several now prominent China scholars were first introduced to the field as undergraduates in his East Asian civilization course. In the 1950s and 60s, he was one of the country's best known teachers of graduate students as well and he supervised many MA and PhD theses. Several of his students, Jackson Bailey and Sidney Brown among them, subsequently achieved prominence as teachers and scholars in the field. He also headed the first inter-departmental program in East Asian Studies which he helped organize in 1953. Throughout his career he was always most helpful to Asian students who came to Madison. He published Christian Influence upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion: 1851-1854 in 1952 as well as several articles in his field. In addition to a Fulbright grant which took him to Hongkong in 1951, he spent a year as a Senior Research Fellow in Chinese Studies at the East Asian Institute of Columbia University in 1956-57 and served on the American Historical Association's Asian-African Committee. As a historian, he sought to observe world areas as total cultures. This led him to stress, among other features, the role of language and religion in understanding civilizations. He firmly believed that knowledge of a culture's language was an essential key to understanding that culture's thought processes.

The son of a Congregationalist minister, Gene also had the opportunity to observe the world of Islam in Beirut and, during his travels in East Asia, various Oriental religions as well as the impact of Christian missionaries. While at Columbia he talked with several professors there and at the Union Theological Seminary to add to what he had observed to prepare a course in History of Religions. In this pioneering course, he was scrupulously objective and careful to make clear that it was not his task to teach religion but rather to teach about religions and their role in history.

In 1948 he became a member of the Society of Friends. Throughout the rest of his life he played a prominent role in this group. He served several terms as Clerk, the chairman of the congregation, and as Recording Clerk who kept the records and later as Librarian and Archivist. He was serving as the latter at the time of his death. As the presiding officer he demonstrated his tact at skillfully guiding, but not leading, discussions to make sure that the results reflected the sense of the group. One who participated in many of those meetings recalled: "He was quite a statesman." He spent 1965-66 as a lobbyist with the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington in an effort to convince Congress that the government should change its China policy. He later published his recommendations in A New China Policy--Some Quaker Proposals.

Retirement from the University in 1980 gave Gene more time to devote to his abiding interests in music and politics. A talented pianist and organist who helped pay his way through Harvard playing at churches, he later was a member of the Philharmonic and Civic Choruses and sang in the chorus or in bit parts with the Madison Civic Opera. He also had more time to help the Democratic party as he began to work several hours a week at party headquarters. Then, he also contributed to the environmental efforts of Rock Ridge Community near Dodgeville. In the spring of 1987, Edgewood College awarded him an honorary doctorate in humane letters. At that time, the College president saluted him: "His career and life have exemplified the values of Christian humanism, his teaching reflected a global perspective and interdisciplinary approach and he is a strong proponent of liberal arts."

He is survived by his former wife, Betty, and by three daughters, Susan, Sarah, and Erika, and three sons, Christopher, Andrew, and Benjamin, and eight grandchildren.

MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
John W. Barker
Maurice J. Meisner
Michael B. Petrovich
Edward M. Coffman, Chair

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