A Twentieth-Century Odyssey: Memoir of a Life in Academe

Rating:
Summary: A teacher/scholar remembers and instructs
Review: This "memoir of a life in academe" in nine chapters with 219 pages looks at first glance like a straightforward autobiography. A reading quickly shows that this "realist" in the study and teaching of American Diplomatic History and foreign relations in general has used this foremat to continue his distinguished university teaching career (Iowa State; Univ. of Illinois; Univ. of Virgina, principally). All who have had academic lives at the first rank will read with empathy; those of us who achieved less stature will quickly find out why they didn't rise to the very top.

For the author (born in 1915) was a dedicated worker who cherished high ambitions and sacrificed to seek perfection. Enroute, he encountered poverty and underemployment, a detour into the military, two different doctoral programs (Oklahoma; Chicago), and ever-increasing distinction in lecturing and scholarly publications. "...I experienced two lives," he says, the second of which was "rather a smooth ascending venture that ultimately reached heights beyond what I could anticipate."

My own memoir (An Independent Scholar in Twentieth Century America; 1996) is twice as long but half as penetrating. Ever the historian, Graebner never gets far away from the major episodes of war in the history of the United States. He takes a "realist" view, coining (or converting) a term not in large dictionaries, "triumphalist," to describe the moralist/idealist; humanist/Wilsonian interpretations of others. He praises "accommodation" and has no use for confrontations of the Cold War, Korean, or Vietnam kind, which the Founding Fathers would have avoided in the name of detached national existence.

Graebner's book The New Isolationism (1956) won him general recognition beyond that which his more orthodox historical writings brought. Targeted was the Eisenhower/Dulles aim of containment of communism, especially the unrealizable goal of freeing Eastern Europe. Graebner "loathed" the Soviet Communist System, but he never feared it, he declares. However interpreted, this reads strangely to this reviewer.

Nevertheless, the author sees the years of coexistence as a "golden age" free of major conflicts like World Wars I and II. In a dozen and more large books he has done all he could to advance his views, taking some lumps from critics enroute. This memoir should be read for his uncompromising views on America's relations with other states in 1846 and 1963-76, and as a reminder that when a scholar gives all he has in him for generations the results will be monumental and the rewards will turn out to be ultimately gratifying.