Merle Curti

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University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Document 1202
6 May 1996

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

ON THE DEATH OF EMERITUS PROFESSOR MERLE CURTI

The death of Merle Curti on March 9, 1996, at ninety-eight, takes from us a giant in the field of American history. Born September 15, 1897, near Omaha, of Swiss and Yankee ancestry, he attended Harvard College and remained to receive his Ph.D. in American history in 1927. After teaching at Beloit, Smith, and Teacher's College-Columbia University, Curti came to the University of Wisconsin in 1942, where he remained until his retirement in 1968.

Curti pioneered two major subfields: intellectual history and social history. His Growth of American Thought (1943) won a Pulitzer Prize and remains in print. His The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (1959) effectively launched the so­-called “new social history.” This pathbreaking collaborative work employed the then-innovative techniques of quantification and demographic analysis of census records, tax lists, and other data to explore social structure and mobility in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin.

His two-volume history of the University of Wisconsin (1949), written with Vernon L. Carstensen, won praise for embedding the story in a larger cultural and intellectual context. His final book, Human Nature in American Thought (1980), appeared when he was eighty-three. And these are but the highlights of an awesome vita that includes some twenty scholarly books; textbooks and edited works; and more than fifty articles exploring a vast terrain of U.S. history from the peace movement and philanthropy to dime novels and world's fairs. Wherever one dips into this vast corpus, one is rewarded with limpid prose and shrewd interpretive insights.

This imposing output is doubly astonishing when one recalls that Curti was also a dedicated teacher who devoted much time and energy to his popular undergraduate lecture courses and to a full range of graduate teaching--including directing an astounding total of eighty-six doctoral dissertations! "No teacher," E. David Cronon has written, "could more deftly ask just the right question in such a way as to open a new vista before a discouraged or unimaginative student while at the same time leading him to believe that he was somehow instructing and enlightening the master" ("Merle Curti: An Appraisal and Bibliography of His Writings," Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 1970-71, p. 121).

This great exemplar of humanistic scholarship also championed the social scientific study of history. His co-authored 1936 report Theory and Practice in Historical Study, the work of a committee on historiography convened by the Social Science Research Council, called for greater methodological rigor and more attention to the theoretical underpinnings of historical knowledge.

A natural leader who served the historical guild in many capacities, Professor Curti was honored with the presidencies of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA, forerunner of the Organization of American Historians) in 1951-52 and the American Historical Association in 1953-54.

For the UW-Madison History department and the larger university community, Merle's passing also takes from us a beloved colleague and friend. His gifts for conversation and letter-writing were legendary. Despite his many honors (including eleven honorary degrees and visiting appointments at prestigious universities in the United States, India, Japan, and Australia), he lacked any hint of pretension and always directed any conversation away from himself toward the other participants.

His holiday greetings struck a warmly personal note, sometimes embellished with a hand-written passage from his favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. (In his final months, when his once-vast library had dwindled to a few books, a volume of Dickinson remained near his bedside.) When well into his nineties he organized a dinner for a resident at the Methodist Retirement Center on the occasion of her 100th birthday while simultaneously extending friendship and helpful advice to a young History graduate student who had sought him out.

Merle Curti offered a living link to the American past. As a Harvard undergraduate, he caught the eye of Samuel Eliot Morison, who one Sunday took him for a walk around Walden Pond that ended at Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord home for tea with Emerson's two unmarried daughters. Whether the conversation turned to Willa Cather, John Dewey, Emma Goldman, Charles A. Beard, Mary Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, or Mahatma Ghandi, Merle could often add a first-hand anecdote or report a personal conversation.

Curti passionately espoused liberal causes and social justice. In 1952, as president of the MVHA, he persuaded a bitterly divided executive board to shift the organization's convention to Chicago from racially segregated New Orleans. In 1944, when Wisconsin's University Club denied a room to a Negro graduate student, Arthur E. Burke, Curti with Helen C. White and others spearheaded the campaign that overturned this discriminatory policy. Those who knew and admired Merle's gentle, soft-spoken manner sometimes underestimated the intensity of his commitments. Though unfailingly polite, he always made his ethical and social values crystal clear, and acted upon them.

Merle Curti brought scholarly distinction, moral clarity, and largeness of spirit to his chosen profession and to this university, which he graced with his presence for twenty-six years. Fortunately, his spirit lives on. The Organization of American Historians awards an annual Curti Prize for the best book in American intellectual or social history; his papers at the State Historical Society represent a treasure trove for researchers; and Merle's portrait in the History department's Curti Lounge evokes fond memories of his warmth and gentle humor. Thanks in large part to Merle's generosity, the department is able to honor his memory through the annual Curti lectures, the Merle Curti professorship, and Curti teaching fellowships awarded to advanced graduate students. (After his retirement Merle also fully endowed the Frederick Jackson Turner chair, which he himself had held from 1947 to 1968.)

Merle Curti in 1925 married Margaret Wooster, a psychologist and statistician whose intellectual influence he generously acknowledged. Widowed in 1961, he married Frances Bennett Becker in 1968; she died in 1978. He is survived by his daughter Martha (Mother Felicitas Curti, O.S.B.), three grandsons, and a great-granddaughter. His daughter Nancy Alice Holub died in 1994.

With characteristic modesty, Merle summed up his creed as a historian in 1993: “By and large I have thought of my work ... as reflecting and possibly giving support to my hope and (wavering) conviction of the human potential for more decency and empathy in collective action.” In the same vein, he quoted a favorite passage from Camus: “I do not want to lead. I do not want to follow. I just want to walk by your side.”

Though we enjoyed the gift of his presence far longer than we might have expected, he will still be sorely missed.

MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
Paul Boyer, Chair
William Cronon
Suzanne Desan
Gerda Lerner