In addition to his respected professional status, or better said, infusing it, Ferrell represents the Midwest in birth, career attachment, and in many ways, outlook. Born in a Cleveland, Ohio, hospital May 8, 1921, he and a younger brother, June, and parents Ernest Sr. and Edna, faced the volatility rooted in the economic swings of his age, living at times near urban environs, then on a family farm (a savior from bank collapse), near Custar, Ohio. As with perhaps the majority of heartland faithful Americans, the budding Bob Ferrell attended a Methodist church in his early years. Teachers of the Good Book, family and friends, inculcated a lifelong, evangelical orthodoxy that continued with extended family, including endless correspondence with Aunt Ocie. Ocie, a sister of Ferrell’s mother, alongside Uncle Mark, spread the Gospel as missionaries in China, and the message was rarely lost on Ferrell in the letters passed to him. Ernest Sr. and Edna made the evangelical tie indelible by assigning the middle name Hugh to their son, the namesake of a missionary in China, Hugh Hubbard, a cousin. One might say, Ferrell’s genealogical roots grew from white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant soil (the derided WASP to many postmodernists), and, by extension, he consciously or otherwise internalized Midwest breadbasket conservatism, that of close family ties with fealty to faith and farming. Ferrell grew out of the family shell to become more iconoclastic in outlook and values than his progenitors.
The zig-zag in other-than-Midwestern birthright came twice for the future historian, and these were significant changes of scenery. Ferrell packed his bags for the Second World War after three years at Bowling Green State University (1939–1942), a school just a few miles from his home at the time. The war years would expand the horizons of Ferrell, which led to momentous decisions afterward, namely the focus on history and away from music education. The second Midwest variance came with acceptance to Yale, the Ivy League school in New Haven, Connecticut, and history graduate studies (1947–1951). Much will be said about this fortunate connection, and it certainly colored his world, to his benefit. New Haven trumped a Bowling Green pedigree, and Ferrell capitalized on the former. After graduation, the Yale alum with distinction unhappily held a one-year appointment to an Air Force intelligence job in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon work reintroduced the war veteran to the Washington-based bureaucracy he came to abhor as part of his service. By the fall of 1952, Ferrell found his way back to the Midwest—this at Michigan State College (later university) by means of Yale mentor Samuel Flagg Bemis’s former school chum. The move permitted the final leap to Indiana’s flagship state university the following year, another Yale network advantage. This is where Bob Ferrell found fertile ground, in one of those “I” states that Midwestern outsiders can never keep straight (not Illinois or Iowa), but in some ways very similar to them along with Ferrell’s native Ohio, thus, the title the Midwest’s best Ivy League storyteller.
NOTES
1. Robert H. Ferrell, “Contemporary Authors Online,” Gale, 2018. Biography In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1000031397/BIC?u=loc_main&sid=BIC&xid=2d7b177a. Accessed October 2, 2018. Ferrell’s Unjustly Dishonored, published in 2011, is not included in the citations.
2. Letter to Murf, Marion, Karl and Stephen, February 25, 1952, Box 84; letter to Bob and Kit, July 12, 1953, Box 44; letter to Chris and Bob, September 15, 1953, Box 44; All correspondence referenced is housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, unless otherwise noted. Letters cited are from Robert H. Ferrell unless otherwise identified.
3. “Favorite Profs,” Indiana University Alumni Magazine (Fall 2013), 11.
Showing appreciation is an opportunity to reflect on friends and colleagues whose efforts have made this work possible. As the Preface underscored, the late Robert Ferrell contributed the most. Carolyn (Ferrell) Burgess, Mr. Ferrell’s daughter, along with her husband Lorin, indulged my exploration and opened their home and life to me as I sought background information and photographs on her father and family. Historians Michael Brooks and Gregory Pfitzer read the entire manuscript, provided insightful suggestions, and supported the project; efforts like these remind us of what true mentorship continues to be, without expectation of reward. Their positive feedback, along with James Gifford at Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, got the manuscript through the editorial doors of several publishers. Other historians, academics, and constructive critics improved the end-product by their engagement with various chapters, most notably, historians David Brown (Elizabethtown College) and Eric Sandweiss (Indiana University) and social science education professor Ronald VanSickle (University of Georgia). Professor Randy Mills (Oakland City University) shared sage publishing advice. Nick Cullather (Indiana University), a former student at IU, reflected on stories of Ferrell’s inspiration and later-day professional frustration. Amy Spungen (Editing and Writing Service), smoothed the initial draft of chapter 2 and celebrated the drama I sought to convey in storytelling. San Antonio’s Jim Lowry, Jr. provided significant legal advice while I worked my way through publishing contracts.
Other Ferrell family members, friends, and beneficiaries of his efforts deserve recognition for sharing their insights about his personality, ideology, hard-driven nature, kindness, angst, relationships, and much more: Dr. Robert Bryant, Charles Blankenship, A. Lovell Elliot, Dennis Ferrell, Terry Feehan, and David Frasier, to name several writ large in my notes.
Institutions and their representatives were also integral to the completion of the project. Generous guidance from Sarah and Jody Mitchell at the Lilly Library at Indiana University helped me navigate Ferrell’s Papers and the reading room challenges and capture camera-ready images. Erika Dowell and Joel Silver, associate director and director of the Lilly Library, respectively, made the archives readily accessible and user-friendly for researchers. Other institutional representatives of great value to the project included Verna and John Rose and Jim Conrad, at the Waterville Historical Society; Lisa Alsee, at the Lakewood Public Library; Martha Gubernath, at the Lakewood United Methodist Church; Nanci Young, at Smith College Archives; Tiffany Tully, at Anthony Wayne High School and Beth Walker and Jenean Carlson, at Lakewood High School and City School District Office; Connor Wagner, a former Scout at Boy Scout Council #440 in Cleveland. Of import too were the efforts of Eric Kuntzman, editor, and his assistant, Alexandra Rallo, at Lexington Books, for shepherding this project to completion.
Unfortunately, not all who merit attention for their efforts on the book’s behalf may be identified, so let me thank them even as they remain anonymous. This, along with the other shortcomings in the book, are mine alone.
So why a book titled Beyond Truman: Robert H. Ferrell and Crafting the Past? It is almost unimaginable for any devotee of twentieth-century presidential biography to be unaware of Robert Ferrell. Well known for painting intimate details of political elites, famous and infamous, the Hoosier author steadied his microscope on President Truman more than most. Other presidents had to endure the stethoscope, one might say, of Ferrell’s search for medical malpractice. Diplomats and soldiers also did not elude the historian’s investigative eye. Yet, looking at the content of books alone misses the larger story, the intrigue, or better said, the man, the motivations, even the mischief of Ferrell and his times.
This Buckeye-turned-Hoosier found his way of thinking about and doing history at odds with a growing chorus of colleagues during his career. A self-described “traditionalist” or empiricist, he criticized the efforts of many postmodernists, the New Left, and social and cultural historians because they were upending the basis of what he, and many others, believed was legitimate, worthwhile, ethical history. Concentrating on the subfields of American diplomacy, the presidency and war, itself, was a sign that his training owed much to the nineteenth-century Leopold von Ranke school, which emphasized that statecraft was the legitimate area of historical inquiry and that state documents were the proper sources to excavate. Elite, Eurocentric, and top-down foci