“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good . . . .”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
He called on a March 1970 Saturday morning. I was tucked up in my tiny studio apartment’s single easy chair. Ted the Turtle rested on the big rock in the middle of his home—a clear plastic sweater box filled with water. He was waiting for his raw hamburger treat. Seriously! I’d been grading stacks of undergraduate U.S. History survey class essay tests for most of the previous twenty-four hours. And had sorted the lot into: good; well-maybe; and what-on-earth-have-they-been-doing categories. I’d put perhaps half-a-dozen aside for the sheer creative absurdities of their answers. Waiting to assign final grades when I had the lay of land.
And the phone rang.
Answering required juggling the tests in my lap and vaulting over the heaps on the floor.
I didn’t recognize the gravelly Scotch-damaged, smoker’s voice at first. I’d never heard it on the phone. My major professor, Dr. Thomas Govan, had just finished reading the draft of my master’s thesis. And said he was calling to tell me that it was very good. Well-written, cogent, compelling. I couldn’t find my voice fast enough to avoid an artless pause. I hope I said thank you. Dr. Govan filled the silence with a couple slight suggestions. And then ended in his familiar half-drawl, half-cough with another brusque “really good.” An incredible departure from academic protocol and propriety. The purest academic praise I’d ever enjoy.
I’d started graduate work in history at the University of Oregon in the fall of 1968, sandwiched in between summer rangering at Gettysburg National Military Park. And anticipated majoring in a blend of Civil War and Renaissance history. What else!
That first semester was dicey in every single way. I knew absolutely no one. I’d rented a room sight unseen from the widow of a former history prof. It turned out to be a Dickensian garret in a house heated by a sawdust burning and smoking furnace. I studied at a desk lit by a naked light bulb dangling on a cloth cord. In order to take a bath I carried an open-faced reflective electric heater into the bathroom. And tried not to trip. My landlady marked my third of her refrigerator with masking tape. I had Instant Breakfast for breakfast, a Student Union hamburger with salad for lunch, and a bowl of Campbell’s Soup and an apple for supper. And I’d never seen so much rain in my life – or clouds that stank of wood processing mills and hovered immediately above Knight Library’s Deco/Romanesque cornices.
On the academic front, I’d not anticipated the leap between college-assigned weekly reading of a chapter or two and graduate school-assigned weekly reading of a book or two. The professors were good—good teachers, interesting humans. By Christmas, I could manage, though it’s fair to say that that first semester in Eugene was as intensely dark as I ever want to experience.
Second semester I made some changes: answered an ad for a roommate whose mother cooked at a neighboring college and provided us with endless left overs; ditched my solitary fellowship for an internship that meant I’d work with and meet other graduate student assistants; babysat for a Brethren family of five children for the sheer diversion of small people. Somewhere along the way, I met Dr. Govan. And changed my major.
Thomas Payne Govan was born in 1907, a Southerner of Irish heritage. The youngest of five children whose irresponsible alcoholic father became an intolerant, fundamentalist teetotaler. Govan’s oldest brother encouraged his sibling’s interest in scholarship. By the outbreak of World War II, Govan held a Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, had married his wife Jane, and secured a teaching position at the Episcopal seminary and college in Sewanee, Tennessee. An Army officer during the War, Govan wrote military history first in Washington D. C. and then in Manilla, in MacArthur’s command.
After the War, Govan returned to chair Sewanee’s history department until the College’s early 1950s fateful decision to ban African American students. Govan left in protest and worked as an historian for the Episcopal Church. He returned to university teaching in the 1960s, first at New York University and then the University of Oregon.
Govan and Jane arrived in Eugene in 1967, a year before I did. He was an Early National United States scholar with the discipline to understand the less glamorous components of that history: finance, banking, religion, and the underpinnings of European governments and philosophers. Govan was sixty then, having published what would be his one major work, a biography of Nicholas Biddle, who, among other roles, served as President of the Second Bank of the United States. Govan intended, after years of study and research, to next write a biography of Alexander Hamilton.
I found no similarity between the men I’d met in Thomas Bailey’s The American Pageant (a standard college text of the day) and the men that Govan described. We were still thirty years away from Ron Chernow’s historical biography of Hamilton and the access he had to long-buried and now available, digitized records. Govan had come by the depth of his knowledge and his philosophy of human nature in laborious, painstaking volume-by-volume reading—and thinking.
If Gettysburg taught me that history was not an academic jigsaw puzzle but comprised of people as real as I, Tom Govan taught me about human nature and its ineluctable role in all human affairs. Throughout his life’s work, he had delicately unraveled the characters we knew so glibly as founding fathers. And, layer by layer revealed their individuality, their brilliance and fallibility, the breadth of their education in an array of fields, their pride and their humility, and most of all, the various understandings that they held about how and why people act.
Govan died a decade after his Saturday morning call. I would give anything now to ask him whether I got it right—whether the doctrines, the principles on which he taught us to examine history and on which I’ve relied, accurately reflect his beliefs.
First, I understood him to acknowledge humans’ extraordinary capacity for good and our incredible capacity for evil—and all gradations between. Govan didn’t run that sentence together. He always paused to let both components rest in our minds.
I heard, as I’d never heard from the Church of the Brethren, the utter importance of grace: the reality of being accepted notwithstanding whatever good or ill we’ve done. Grace not based on diligence or good works or false piety, but the universe’s incomprehensible gift—given without strings–of new if slow beginnings.
I heard Govan quote and apply a line again and again from Robert Penn Warren: “the powerful painful grinding process by which an ideal emerges out of history.”
Finally, I understood Govan’s long-researched understanding that governing humans—creating and running a government—requires the deepest belief in those three principles. Of knowing that the structure of any successful government, most especially a constitutional democracy, must offer humans the ability to do good and, by various checks and balances, must also include the means to rein in our worst impulses. And to be patient.
It seems simplistic, childish once on paper. Govan knew it to be anything but. At the time, I felt as if Govan’s abiding principles came from The Book of Common Prayer and Warren’s All the King’s Men. I don’t think I was wrong. After rejecting his dad’s fiery and flip fundamentalism, he came to an intellectual and emotional faith in a higher power on which all his understanding of human nature rested. And he seemed to know that out of all the historians and novelists we could read, Robert Penn Warren had best, most powerfully, laid bare the tangle of human intentions and unforeseen consequences that surround us all.
Like all great professors, Govan loved teaching. I was one of many students who flourished with his encouragement and kindness and his “at home” evenings with Jane and Scotch and wine. He admonished us to think big, to explore or re-research a big issue, an important moment in history, something of consequence rather than to hunt down an obscure, fiddly character just to say we’d done something new. He drank that teaching elixir of love for his subject and great affection for the students who bore down and meant to understand the past. He was, of course, also full of suggestions for undone research.
I chose a historiographic project for my thesis—a study of the process through which history is told and written. After Thomas Jefferson retired from public life, he sat down with a batch of notes that he’d made during his most active years, especially the 1790s. He edited them specifically for the purpose of insuring that his view of those early years was heard. He called them the Anas. We know the word from terms like Americana—things, discrete things–about America. In fact, the Anas constituted an especially ripe collection of snide gossip and unflattering portrayals mostly of Alexander Hamilton—the man Jefferson disliked and feared as his rival for public affection. Taking Hamilton’s principles about the checks and balances needed to govern, Jefferson twisted those into a portrayal of monarchical intentions–a web of innuendo. He turned Hamilton’s painstaking understanding of human nature and the need to harness it thoughtfully into the charge that Hamilton disdained the American republic. Neither Govan nor I saw that in Hamilton’s writings or behavior.
With that as background, I studied whether Jefferson had been successful. Whether and how his depiction of Hamilton influenced 19th and 20th century historians and our primary history texts. Whether even the wording of the Anas appeared verbatim. It did, as did the ideas Jefferson wanted to inculcate. Even over time, as historians came to credit Hamilton with some uncanny wisdom about governing, they still dipped periodically into Jefferson’s deliberate smears—too tempting to ignore from that “saintly” source.
My thesis is titled “Hamilton, Jefferson and the Anas: Three Pieces in an Historiographical Puzzle.” In that far distant past, the final version—the one after Govan’s reading—was typed late at night by some graduate student’s wife and was accepted. I sailed through my orals in new white platform heels and a brown polka-dotted, sailor-collared dress so short I dared not bend over.
That spring of 1970—on the heels of Kent State shootings and National Guard soldiers watching me from the roof of the ROTC barracks as I walked between the library and my apartment–I was content to leave the University of Oregon and Ted the Turtle. Eager to return to my Gettysburg friends. To teach, I thought. Dr. Govan had, instead, urged me to pursue a doctorate. Though high school history teaching was in no way my cup of tea, I do not regret choosing public history and historic preservation as my profession.
I very much regret keeping in only the lightest touch with Dr. Govan in that following decade. Against a backdrop of his passion for history, his clarity about what we should consider, and the gift of a generous and unlikely phone call, I left Eugene believing in myself as a historian. ©
When I needed information that I couldn’t remember, I turned gratefully to John Crocker, Jr.’s A Rebirth of Freedom, The Calling of an American Historian, Thomas Payne Govan, 1907 to 1979. Both photos are in Crocker’s book from the Govan papers.
