Second Interview with Stanley Payne (December 18, 2018)

Partial Transcript: "So Stan, where were you born?"

Segment Synopsis: Stanley Payne (SP) was born in Denton, Texas in September of 1934. He described Denton as a small, modest town, going through the Great Depression. He had enough to eat growing up, but there were no luxuries. His father had been ruined by the Depression, but was able to find work as a carpenter to support his family. His family did not own a car while he was growing up, and so they walked everywhere. His father did carpentry work for the main construction company in Denton. SP was not sure how his childhood home was heated, but knows that it was not by coal. His parents were from Colorado and his mother had completed two years of nursing training at a sanitarium in Chicago. His father started working at the age of 14 because his father died. SP discussed how his parents came to Texas.

Keywords: Carpentry; Colorado; Denton, Texas; Great Depression; Nursing

Partial Transcript: "So given your family background and I would say modest
opportunities for education in that setting anyway, how did you get from there
to an interest in history and a career as a scholar?"

Segment Synopsis: SP said that there was no one in his immediate family who really encouraged him to get an education. He was an avid reader from the age of six or seven. His interest in history was generated by reading historical novels when he was young. He was the top student in his history class at sixteen years of age. The teacher, who was also the principal of the school, suggested that SP go on to college and major in history. When SP said that he did not want a career in teaching, the teacher responded that he could write history.

Keywords: High School; History; Teachers

Partial Transcript: "So about the age of ten or twelve, your family left Texas
and moved to California?"

Segment Synopsis: SP and his family moved from Texas to California when he was ten or twelve. He discussed the small college that he attended in Napa Valley. His interest in Spanish history started in Texas in 1943, when the State of Texas required that all students learn a foreign language. Most schools taught Spanish, including the school that SP attended.

Keywords: California; Napa Valley; Spanish; Spanish History; Texas; World War II

Partial Transcript: "So what was Napa like in those years?"

Segment Synopsis: SP's mother was a Seventh Day Adventist and he attended a Seventh Day Adventist college. He had a history professor in college who had a strong influence on him.

Keywords: College; Napa Valley; Seventh Day Adventist

Partial Transcript: "So let's step back a bit. Was your family religious?"

Segment Synopsis: His mother was religious, but not intensely religious. He described the Napa Valley from 1950-55 as being a small, rural community with only a few farmers. He discussed the changes that the college that he attended as an undergrad has undergone.

Keywords: California; College; Napa Valley; Relgion

Partial Transcript: "So how did you end up in New York at Columbia?"

Segment Synopsis: SP spent two years at Claremont University on a fellowship for graduate school. He applied to PhD programs at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Columbia. He decided to attend Columbia because he felt the university and the city it was in would provide the best professional contacts. Spanish history was not largely studied in North America when SP was in graduate school. He attended Columbia from 1957-1960.

Keywords: 1950s; Claremont University; Columbia University; Graduate School; Harvard; Spanish History; University of Chicago

Partial Transcript: "So what was New York like in 1957? What was Columbia
like?"

Segment Synopsis: SP described Columbia graduate school in the 1950s as emphasizing the individual work of the student. Students did not have to take many classes. This worked well for SP because he was fairly independent and used to working on his own.

Keywords: 1950s; Columbia University; New York City; Spanish History

Partial Transcript: "So tell me about that and about Spain in those years. What
did your research entail at that time?"

Segment Synopsis: SP was in Spain when the dictatorship was still firmly in place during the 1950s. When he was in Spain in 1958, SP did not realize that the culture and structure that he was encountering was as a result of the Franco regime. The country was more conservative and traditional than it had been twenty-five years earlier. He was researching the early history of the Spanish fascist state party for his dissertation. He engaged in oral history research in Spain and was able to extensively travel around the country.

Keywords: 1950s; Franco Regime; Oral History; Spain; Spanish Culture

Partial Transcript: "So what were your impressions of life in Spain in those
years?"

Segment Synopsis: SP called Spain in the 1950s an underdeveloped country. It was not like the other western countries and was more akin to the eastern European countries in terms of economic development. SP said he did not fully comprehend the capacity for rapid accelerations in modernization while he was in Spain. Just after SP left Spain in June of 1959, the Spanish government implemented an economic policy that encouraged foreign investment and accelerated development.

Keywords: 1950s; Economic Development; Spain

Partial Transcript: "So do you think that being in the right place at the right
time, getting that initial insight into the motivations of those who I assume
were on the right in the Spanish Civil War in most cases, that this gave you,
that this formed your approach to this conflict, to this
period..."

Segment Synopsis: When SP was doing research in Spain, he was surprised that the fascists he encountered and interviewed seemed like normal people and were even sometimes likable. His first book was published in 1961 and was very well received. Harvey Goldberg used SP's book for a few years in his course on the history of revolution.

Keywords: Fascism; Harvey Goldberg; Revolutions; Spain; Spanish Civil War

Partial Transcript: "Well, maybe I'll ask you here. When did you meet Juan
Linz?"

Segment Synopsis: SP met Juan Linz on his second or third day in Madrid. Juan Linz wrote to SP before he came to Spain because he saw that SP had been awarded a pre-doctoral grant to do research in Spain and Juan had been awarded a post-doctoral grant for research on Spanish politics. SP said he learned more from Juan about Spanish affairs during his first semester in Spain than he did from anyone else.

Keywords: Juan Linz; Madrid, Spain; Spanish Politics

Partial Transcript: "And you were really the only one doing that at that point.
I mean what were the main questions that were being asked about fascism in those
years?"

Segment Synopsis: SP talked about how historians and social scientists started studying and examining fascism extensively in the 1970s. He discussed the questions and approaches that George Mosse took to studying fascism. SP talked about a conference in Norway that he attended in 1972 where he realized that he could complete a comparative analysis study of fascism.

Keywords: Fascism; George L. Mosse; Norway

Partial Transcript: "Well let's go back to the trajectory of your career. So
you got your graduate, your doctorate degree in what year was that?"

Segment Synopsis: SP obtained his doctoral degree in 1960. His first job was teaching at Columbia College. He said jobs were not easy to get at the end of the 1950s. He then got a three year contract to teach a survey course on comparative civilizations at Stanford. However, the University of Minnesota offered him a tenured track job in 1960 and so he taught there instead of Stanford. He enjoyed teaching at the University of Minnesota, which had a small history department and stayed for two years. After publishing his first book in 1961, SP received job offers from the University of Illinois and the University of California-Los Angeles and he accepted the position in Los Angeles. He taught at UCLA for six years and then came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968.

Keywords: 1950s; Columbia College; Stanford University; University of California-Los Angelos; University of Minnesota; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "So what was the department like at UCLA in those
years?"

Segment Synopsis: SP called UCLA's history department a "reasonably good department." There was not an intense inter-departmental intellectual life during Stanley's time. SP and the interviewer discussed Eugene Webber, who was crucial in SP coming to UCLA.

Keywords: Eugene Webber; George L. Mosse; History Department; University of California-Los Angelos

Partial Transcript: "Well maybe we'll take a little aside and I'll just ask you
about your political engagement in those years."

Segment Synopsis: SP was surprised by the intense politics at UCLA at the end of the 1960s, which was not present at the beginning of the '60s when he started. He described UCLA as mainly a commuter campus that did not have the campus life of universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before the radical politicization of UCLA in 1969, the campus reflected the rest of southern California life, which was dissociate of politics.

Keywords: 1960s; Campus Life; Radical Politics; University of California-Los Angelos

Partial Transcript: "Okay, so we're at 1968 and you are on your way to Madison.
So, I imagine George was involved in your hire...."

Segment Synopsis: George L. Mosse was the chair on the history department's hiring committees in 1968, when SP was hired by UW-Madison. When SP first came to UW-Madison, it had the largest history department out of all the other universities that he had been involved with. The department had 67 professors. He called the structure of the history graduate program in the late 1960s informal and individualized. The faculty had a lot of autonomy because they could bring in as many graduate students as they wanted. There was a lot of money for TAships. SP called the 1960s the "golden age of the history boom in North America."

Keywords: George L. Mosse; Graduate Students; History; History Department; Radical Politics; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "That department must have been incredibly active. The
hallways must have been buzzing and it must have been an exciting time to be
there."

Segment Synopsis: SP described the campus of UW-Madison in 1968 and 1969 as incredibly active and buzzing. George Mosse was the first person to say hello to SP when he moved into his office in 1968. At George's suggestion, the department got the money to have a visiting lecture series on fascism. SP said that after the Sterling Hall bombing in 1970, the student radicalization died down. The history department was thriving at the end of the 1960s because there was large undergraduate enrollment and lots of jobs. SP and the interviewer discussed how the trend in history changed after the 1960s to a focus on the "minuscule."

Keywords: 1960s; Fascism; George L. Mosse; Trends in History

Partial Transcript: "So did you, were you aware of George's work before you
came to UW?"

Segment Synopsis: George Mosse's involvement with the Journal of Contemporary History caught SP's attention. The journal was unique in its comparative and contemporary approach to history. SP said he did not publish many articles in the Journal of Contemporary History.

Keywords: George L. Mosse; Journal of Contemporary History; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "What was the European group like at UW in those
years?"

Segment Synopsis: The European history professors within the UW history department in the '60s were very individualistic and many had strong personalities. Full professors had the power to admit their own graduate students without a committee selection process, which changed in the 1970s. . SP had no idea how many of the history graduate students at UW-Madison in the late 1960s actually ended up getting their PhD's.

Keywords: European History; History Department; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "So when you came in 1968, that was the year when George
stopped spending a lot of time in Madison."

Segment Synopsis: The interviewer discussed George Mosse's hiring arrangement with UW-Madison and how he actually didn't do that much teaching compared to other history professors. SP pointed out how Mosse was hired by the history department because of his teaching abilities. During the first thirteen years that he worked at UW-Madison, Mosse was a "campus personality'' according to SP and a leader in campus affairs. SP felt that later in his career, Mosse found more intellectual stimulation from his colleagues in Jerusalem rather than from his graduate students in Madison. When Mosse was not teaching, he wanted to be doing research elsewhere.

Keywords: George L. Mosse; Graduate Students; Jerusalem; Research; Teaching; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "I assume that the two of you were on committees together,
that you perhaps informally were building the field at Wisconsin in terms of,
well, the study of right wing movements, the study if
fascism..."

Segment Synopsis: SP said that the emergence of the study of fascism and right wing movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s was done informally at UW-Madison, especially since George Mosse was gone a lot during this period. While SP and Mosse were working and studying parallel areas and times in history, they each did their own thing. George Mosse suggested to him that he write a general history of fascism, which SP published in 1985. The interviewer felt that SP and Mosse pioneered a revisionist approach to current interpretations of fascism. SP talked about how the University of Minnesota developed a formal center of fascism and neo-fascism in the 1990s, but it did not last.

Keywords: Fascism; George L. Mosse; University of Wisconsin-Madison; University of Minnesota

Partial Transcript: "So you arrived on campus just at the point where the
anti-war movement was developing into a more confrontational, radical approach
and I recall in those years that there were so many sectarian groups on the
left..."

Segment Synopsis: The interviewer discussed the various radical, leftist groups on campus at UW-Madison in the late '60s. SP felt that the radical movements taking place on campus in the late '60s were destructive to the university because they went against the ideal of impartiality within scholarship. The history department did not suffer any internal politicization or splits from the radical movements taking place according to SP. The faculty sympathetic to the new left, like Harvey Goldberg, did not weaponize the movement for departmental relations, which maintained the history department's harmony and unity. SP called Harvey Goldberg an "old fashioned historian." The history department successfully maintained its internal unity and culture in the 1960s, despite the vast political differences between the professors.

Keywords: History Department; Leftist Movements; The New Left; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "So I mean, the whole field has been so transformed both in
terms of, over the course of your career, in terms of the areas that are given
more attention, more resources..."

Segment Synopsis: The divisions within the history department did not emerge until the mid '90s with the new appointments and new political fields such as women's history. SP called the '70s and '80s periods of slow transition for the history department with the aging of the Cold War. In the 1970s, the history department was filled with mainly young, tenured professors. George Mosse retired in 1987. SP discussed the emergence of "political correctness" within university administration and the tenurization of professors starting in the 1990s.

Keywords: History Department; Political Correctness; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "But maybe we should get back to your work. So, how has
your work been received in Spain?"

Segment Synopsis: SP's first two books on Spanish institutions of the right were very well received. There was censorship in Spain until 1966 and so SP was unable to publish a book in Spain until 1972. He discussed the process of researching and writing a book on the Spanish Revolution in California. His work was critical of both the right and the left in Spain, which did not please the left in particular. He discussed political correctness in Spain. SP was considered a conservative scholar in Spain, which is defined as someone who tries to recount objective history.

Keywords: Censorship; History; Political Correctness; Spain; Spanish Universities

Partial Transcript: "But what about with fascism would you say racism maybe
would have been a connecting ideology of all fascist
movements?"

Segment Synopsis: SP discussed how Italian fascism did not have a racist component. While many Italians in the mid-20th century had a racist attitude towards people from east Africa, these attitudes were not uniquely fascist and shared by many other Europeans. SP pointed out how the leader of the Dutch fascist movement allowed Jews into the movement. He talked about how the fascists had an ideology, even if it was not out rightly stated by the fascists themselves. SP discussed the various political parties that supported political correctness.

Keywords: Dutch Fascism; Italian Fascism; Political Correctness; Racism

Partial Transcript: "He operated within the Democratic party, but he didn't do
anything to really support or sustain the party."

Segment Synopsis: The interviewer and SP discussed President Obama and his involvement with the politics of the Democratic Party. SP believed that the Democratic Party was weaker in 2016 than it was in 2008.

Keywords: American Politics; Barack Obama; Democrats; Presidential Elections

Partial Transcript: "Well we should perhaps discuss your teaching
career."

Segment Synopsis: SP said he always enjoyed teaching undergraduates at UW-Madison. For many years, he did not use any teaching aids and just lectured his classes and wrote on the blackboard. When he developed his popular class on World War II, he incorporated documentaries and other types of media into the course. SP did not always enjoy teaching survey courses because he felt he had to dramatize certain things to get his student's attention and convey understanding. He enjoyed an empirical type of teaching and teaching upper class courses. His favorite course to teach was on European wars. He discussed the problem of low enrollment of undergraduates in certain course topics.

Keywords: Course Enrollment; Survey Courses; Undergraduate Teaching; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "So you found the students accessible,
interested..."

Segment Synopsis: SP liked the undergraduate students at UW-Madison and characterized them as very sympathetic. He typically taught large survey courses with teaching assistants, but would occasionally teach small, undergraduate seminars. He always put an emphasis on writing when he taught undergraduate seminars. During SP's time at UW-Madison, he never had more than fifteen graduate students. Most of his PhD students at Wisconsin published their dissertations and went on to have careers in academia.

Keywords: Dissertations; Graduates; Students; Teaching Assistants; Undergrads; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Partial Transcript: "I think people go into history for all kinds of reasons
beside the potential of making money."

Segment Synopsis: SP said he got into history and his PhD program at exactly the right time. He did not expect to make as good of a living as he did. SP estimated that about fifty percent of his graduate students went on to have academic careers.

Keywords: Academia; Careers; History

Partial Transcript: "Well perhaps we should finish up and just discuss George
as a teacher..."

Segment Synopsis: The interviewer described George Mosse's approach to teaching as provocation. Mosse believed that he had to confront the ideologies that students brought to his classroom. The interviewer and SP believed that Mosse's teaching style would have made students in today's college setting feel uncomfortable and unsafe. SP called Mosse's teaching style "politically incorrect." The interviewer talked about Don Downs, who was a current professor with a charismatic, but provocative approach to teaching.

Keywords: Don Downs; George L. Mosse; Political Correctness; Teaching; University of Wisconsin-Madison