I can even now hear my mother speaking scornfully of particular people in Birmingham who were flamboyant self-promoters, or who seemed to be publicly self-serving. In her world, one was not supposed to put oneself forward. “If you have to blow your own horn,” she repeatedly said in various ways, “there must be something wrong with the music.” That contrasts with the more popular current mantra, “If you don’t blow your own horn, who will?” The attitudes that I derived from my parents not only seem quaintly anachronistic in celebrity-haunted America, they may be fundamentally disabling.
One of my favorite cartoons of contemporary Washington shows the President and another man standing in the Oval Office. They are looking out the French doors. The visitor says, “Beautiful sunset.” The President says, “Thank you.” The connection between what one does and what one takes credit for, never very strong in politics, is weakening as attention spans shorten, news cycles speed up, and the manipulation of public perceptions gets more sophisticated.
I have seen this trend at work in my own field. When I began at Tulane my eighteen-year career of being a college president, even while believing in, and using, participatory decision making, we always tried to keep the long-term good of the university as the policy objective. After the consultive process had produced that policy, then we turned our attention to the task of explaining it to the various audiences (students, parents, alumni, trustees, faculty, staff, the higher education community, and the general public). Increasingly, I think, decision makers ask simply, “What can we explain successfully to our various audiences? That is what we will do.” It is a short step from that to merely communicating instead of acting, substituting image for substance. This is easy enough to grasp in theory, but I find it unnatural and very difficult to put into practice.
My career is a good example of the aphorism that life is what happens to you when you are planning something else. The “something else” that I was planning was to teach history at the college level and be a scholar. I was very naive about what that life was actually like, and especially about how to prepare myself for it, but I benefited from some amazing good fortune.
As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, my love of history was stimulated and encouraged by an excellent history faculty. Their lives looked pleasant enough to me, so I decided to become a teacher. First, however, I owed three years of service to the Navy because I was at Vanderbilt on an NROTC scholarship. I spent those three years, 1956-59, on the USS James C. Owens (DD-776), a World War II era destroyer based in Norfolk, but usually at sea. That was a totally absorbing experience that I did not so much enjoy as find fascinating and rewarding. Nowhere else could I have gotten so much responsibility while so young, and come into contact with men from vastly different backgrounds from my own. Toward the end of my time aboard the Owens, I got a letter from the Office of Naval Personnel offering me the chance to teach at Annapolis if I would extend my service for two years. By then, I was married and had one child and very little money, and I thought that it would be a great idea to have a two-year transition to civilian life at full pay, the glorious sum of thirty-five hundred dollars per year. Besides, teaching history would be a good way to learn and to prepare for graduate school.
When I arrived at the United States Naval Academy in the summer of 1959, I was shocked to discover that my promise as a scholar had somehow gone unnoticed, and I had been assigned to the Weapons Department. I went hesitantly to see the Captain who was the head of the Weapons Department and explained that I thought I might be able to make a bigger contribution to the USNA in the English, History, and Government Department, called the “bull” department in Academy parlance, revealing a particular view of the hierarchy of knowledge. “Nonsense,” said the Captain, with the certainty of military command, “Bull professors are a dime a dozen. What we need is a gunnery officer fresh from the fleet to help shape up these midshipmen.”
I therefore spent the next two years during daylight hours drilling midshipmen in the operational niceties of naval gunnery, anti-submarine warfare, and the theory of surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles. On a couple of nights a week, I went into Washington and took history courses in the evening division of American University.
Occasionally I drew weekend duty and would have to chaperone the afternoon dances arranged for first-year midshipmen, called Plebes. The dances at tea time were therefore known as “Plebe Tea Fights.” Bus loads of young ladies from area colleges would arrive at the entrance to cavernous Dahlgren Hall, home of both the Weapons Department and the scheduled “vertical wrestling matches.” Disgorged from the buses, groups of young ladies would come down the broad stairway onto the huge gym floor. Plebes were herded behind a rope to one side. Outside the rope stood an upperclassman from the committee in charge of the event. He would size up each young woman descending the stairs in her proper 1950s tea dance outfit, reach into the milling herd behind the rope, grab a Plebe of the proper height, and propel him out to escort that particular guest. A surprising number of marriages came out of this system.
Now, it happened that the leading historian of the South, and the man I most wanted to study with in graduate school, C. Vann Woodward, was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, not very far up the road in Baltimore. It also happened that Lucy’s parents, Clifford and Virginia Durr, had known Professor Woodward since he was a graduate student at Chapel Hill writing Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel. On one of my mother-in-law’s visits to Annapolis, she arranged for us to go up and have tea with Vann and his wife, Glenn. The conversation was pleasant, though I was pretty much dumbstruck in the presence of the great man. Professor Woodward eventually excused himself from the group and told me to follow him into his study, where he quizzed me about my background and my interests. He told me that he was about to move to Yale University and that I should be sure to apply there. I did so, and I was admitted, although without a fellowship. I would be paying my own way.
As I was rejected at Hopkins, Harvard, and Princeton, I suspected that Professor Woodward had used his influence to get me in. Years later, he confirmed this suspicion when he was introducing me as the keynote speaker at a conference of history teachers. He went on to say that when he finally got to Yale, a year after I had arrived, since he had a Guggenheim fellowship that provided a year for research, he approached the Chairman, John Blum, and asked, “How is my boy Hackney doing?” John Blum said, “It’s OK, Vann. You’ll get the hang of Yale standards after you’ve been here a while.” I persevered. Eventually I figured out what the study of history was about, and Vann’s gamble was vindicated when my dissertation won the prize as the best in American history at Yale in 1966.
In my fourth year at Yale, when I was in the midst of writing that dissertation on the Populist and Progressive political movements in Alabama between 1890 and 1910, Professor Woodward called me to his office. He said that Princeton University was looking for someone in American history and he was sending me down. That is the way it was done in 1965. I went down, gave a talk to the department about my dissertation, met the senior Americanists individually, and had lunch with a large group of historians. Not having used the wrong fork, I was offered the job before I left campus that day. Woodward’s imprimatur was powerful.
Even though we remained good friends until his death in December 1999, I think Vann never really forgave me for becoming an administrator. It was a great waste of his investment in making me a good historian. I can only plead that it happened inadvertently.
Having three children, a lot of debt from graduate school, and the magnificent salary of eighty-five hundred dollars per year, I couldn’t afford to spend the summers doing research and advancing my scholarly career. My first summer at Princeton, 1966, I taught in a summer institute for high school history teachers run by Robert Lively, who had taken an interest in me because I was a discussion leader (a “preceptor” in Princeton lingo) in his large lecture course, and because I was also from his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. The second summer, 1967, I taught in the Princeton Cooperative School Program, an Upward Bound program for disadvantaged high school boys, mostly black, from the inner cities of New Jersey. The director was a good friend, John Flemming, from Arkansas by way of Sewanee and then graduate school at Princeton, who was also just starting out on a career that has led him to being one of the world’s leading scholars of medieval literature. In 1968, he