Interview with Mark Stoler

Mark Stoler: May I keep this roll is going on. Okay,

Skye Doney: So this is June 15, 2018. This is Skye Doney sitting down with...

Mark Stoler: Mark Stoler

Skye Doney: to talk a little bit about Madison in the 1960s. History department. George Mosse, et cetera.

Mark Stoler: Just go?

Skye Doney: Yeah.

Mark Stoler: Okay, as a retired professor. Okay. I was in Madison from 1966-1970. I came into the 20th century US Diplomatic History seminar with John de Novo. My focus was US history, US diplomatic and military history, which is what I taught for the most part, and World War II, which is where Mosse came in. And the year that I came in, they changed the rules on the minor field. It used to be that the minor field had to be in another department. And they changed it so that it could be within the department. And I, I love European history. It was what I originally wanted to study, but for numerous reasons I wound up in US, but with the diplomatic angle, I'm doing Europe, so I was able to minor in European history. And I took two semesters of Mosse's cultural history of Europe in 1968-1969. Yes, it was a fairly wild time. I had never heard a lecturer that could... spellbinding, absolutely spellbinding. Everyone said, well, Goldberg, but after sitting in on a series of Mosse lectures, I went to Goldberg lectures. And I 00:02:00said, I know he's Goldberg has got the groupies following him. But Mosse appealed to me much more. He was teaching me things. The reading list was incredible. And I'm sure you know what it was, you know, it started with Goethe, The Sorrows of the Young Werther and then it went to Rousseau, Confession or The Social Contract. Tom Brown School Days was in it. Herder was in it. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, that was first semester and second semester was Lavonne the crowd(?) and I have lost track what I know stunned us we all expected Stark(?), Kemu(?). Instead, he went for the existentialist theologians: Buber, Tillich, Maritain. And I know I have missed some. But the the personal story that I mentioned to you, that still is with me, he was giving a lecture on the intellectual split in the fender ciacle(?). And said, the intelligentsia split, the defenders of the status quo became the professors became the defenders of the status quo. The artists became the attackers. And I just rolled me back on my heels. And I went to his office, it was lunch hour, and I knocked, and I don't know if he had office hours, or let me and he's munching on a sandwich. And I say "you, that comment? What do you do at age 23? If your head is in one place, but your heart is in the other?" And he said, "Simple, you become a cultural historian like 00:04:00me." And I just said, "That's a cop out, you can't!". And we both laughed. And obviously, it was mine to work out. But he was not my major professor, but it was, I think, the most thought provoking two courses I ever took in my entire life. And I became friendly with some of his graduate students along the way. And there were two episodes, a couple of episodes that I remember from the class. And I thought you had heard these but you said No, okay. He had shifted, because, as was pointed out during the session, the politics had shifted, and had gone far left. And I was there when they tried to disrupt his class.

Skye Doney: Really?

Mark Stoler: Yeah, yeah. And I remember him saying something very similar to what you have. At the same time he refused to allow police into the room he said that was just as intimidating. He wouldn't allow that.

Skye Doney: Why did the police want to come in?

Mark Stoler: To prevent people students from is a wild time. Why do you think this building is constructed like a fortress? Yeah, I will. Okay. I...

Skye Doney: The topic, can you go into it? Why? You remember.

Mark Stoler: Yes.

Skye Doney: The disruption.

Mark Stoler: Okay, the disruption. A bunch of us, by the way had started the first underground FM radio station in Madison. We called it "Up Against the Wall FM", instead of "Up Against the Wall MF". And we rented time 11pm to 3am. And it was the Mifflin Street Riots. And I went into a building, I just saw what was 00:06:00starting and went up to the third floor knocked on the door, student was there as me, I said, "just look out your window and use your telephone and tell them at the radio station what is happening." And what I saw is a scene I'll never forget. Okay, on one side, students, were taking those garbage dumpsters and putting them into the street to set up a blockade and setting it on fire. On the other end of State Street marching down in a V column was police and National Guardsmen with masks on, I don't know if the bayonets were shealthed or unsheathed. And out of the sides of the V, tear gas canisters are coming, and it turns into a full scale street battle. And I said to myself, "Am I in the Paris Commune in 1871? Or am I in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1969?" It was a very wild, violent time. And in fact, when I left Madison in 1970 to take my job at the University of Vermont, two weeks later, was the blowing up of the Math Research building and death of a student. In Mosse's class I remember him doing this multiple times, maybe once in the fall semester, once in the spring, because Nietzsche was the carry over reading. And when we got to Nietzsche, or Marx, or Freud, he would say, stop his lecture and say, and yes, children. I know you've all read your Herbert Marcuse, and you're going to combine Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. And I am here to tell you that all you're going to get out of that is fascism. And the whole class would boo him and he bow at the waist. "Thank you. Thank you, you fools. Marcuse is a German, no German has ever understood the United States. That's why they've lost two World Wars. If you want to be a radical in this country, you have to understand better still come from Iowa. Go read William Appleman Williams." And it was you can tell it just stayed with with me. The story going around. And this was simply a story I that I heard from other grad students, I have no idea if it was true, and in a sense, I hesitate 00:08:00to put it down because the other things I've told you I know, were true, but this could be urban legend. Okay. Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964 and Williams is Mosse were friends, good friends, and they saw what was coming. And supposedly, Williams is saying, "My country, my country, what am I going to do?" And Mosse threw a Luxembourg passport on the table and said, "That's what you're going to do." And Williams looked at him like, "Are you crazy? This is my country." And Mosse because of his own experiences said supposedly said "Your country is as good as your passport. And if it goes as bad as we think it's going to go, you know." Again, I have no idea if that story is true or not. Have you ever heard it?

Skye Doney: I have not, no. But I know that Mosse has had an affinity for his Luxembourg passport which got him out of many jams. He tells a story often of being on a train in Europe, and in Luxembourgian seeing his passport coming up and speaking to him and having to acknowledge that you'd actually never been to Luxembourg.

Mark Stoler: Yeah, I made it to Luxembourg for the first time. But in a very different way, the one related. My fusion of diplomatic and military history. I've done a lot of teaching for the Armed Forces, so ironic since I was never in the Armed Forces. But I began to offer World War Two courses. And when I got the origins of fascism, the Mosse notes came out. I still have them. And I used those notes to try to explain fascism and its origins to the students. And it's, you could see the glazed look on their face. How can freedom be being part of a group rather than individualism? How is this possible? And it took me years before I finally came up, and I made them watch "Triumph of the Will" in the course. And I said it and again, they couldn't relate to that at all. And I said, "How many of you have been to a large rock concert?" And the hands went up? I go, "To quote, my favorite poem, "how does it feel to be that surge of people" and suddenly, you could see, yes, I get it now. And I say, put uniforms on that. Go back to the Riefenstahl film. Now, I'm not telling you that rock concerts are fascist, but I'm saying is there is an emotional group appeal of fascism, that you must understand it does not feel rational to you. But it is rational to them.

Skye Doney: Did you ever use the same reading as Mosse like Labonge(?) to try and get out the crowd or what it is about a mob? The difference between a mob and a crowd?

Mark Stoler: No. No, I didn't. Because the course in one semester had to cover the entire war in all its aspects. And I'm trying to remember and I may remember, by the time we are finished, I cannot remember now. I use the textbook to bring them through World War One. I mean, I lectured, but textbook readings, World War One, and rise of Nazism. And then the first real book that they went into were conflicting interpretations on the origins of World War Two. I had them read a piece of AJP Taylor, just to shake them up a little bit. And what was the role of Hitler in the whole thing? I wish I could remember that. It was in a major problem series. And there was simply there was that one or two lectures on fascism. And then in the in discussion group. Well, was Japan a fascist government? On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, no. And we would go into this. And sometimes I taught with a colleague who has specialized in Asian history, and he would say no, and I would say, well, but wait a minute here. The other thing, and I don't even know if Mosse knew him. Does the name Raul Hilberg? The original scholar of the Holocaust, he was my colleague at Vermont, 00:14:00though, in the political science department, and obviously far senior to me. And the first time he offered a course on the Holocaust, we I taught US foreign policy in the history department. He taught it in the political science department. And we'd sometimes say the opposite things. Because our politics were quite different. And I, for example, would describe the Monroe Doctrine as an expansionist document and he defined it as an isolationist documents. To which my quip would be well, "how isolationist is it to define half of the world as your sphere of influence?" Williams coming out. But I took Hilberg's course in the Holocaust. And I'll never forget, he's talking about the SS and the lightning bolts, and he draws two of the lightning bolts on the board and said, "I actually have seen this recently." And he puts the letters "K" "I" before the two lightning bolts, "KISS", the rock group, and you're gonna hear the gasps come out of the audience. Hilberg was quite a teacher, also like Mosse, and this is same as he was an Austrian Jew, who escaped and found himself in 1945 in Hitler's library. And it determined his scholarly career, in many ways. His advisor was Franz Neumann. And when he said he was going to do a dissertation on the Holocaust, Neumann and everyone else said, "That will be the end of your career. Don't do it." And it took many years. There was no field of Holocaust history. Now, it's, of course, a very flourishing field. And I, of course, Mosse became part of that. And I do not know if they knew each other at all.

Skye Doney: I don't know, off the top of my head, if they corresponded.

Mark Stoler: Yeah, yeah. But the irony of two central Europeans, being the two most brilliant lecturers I ever heard. And I think my lecture style owed a lot to Mosse. It was not the same. It owed one thing to Williams, who was the opposite of Mosse in terms of lecturing. You expected fire to come out of his mouth when you except very low key, very logical, very rational. But he always would take off his jacket, loosen his tie and roll up his sleeves to start the lecture, which Mosse, of course, stayed in the uniform. I don't know if you're interested in a Williams story.

Skye Doney: Please, yeah, absolutely.

Mark Stoler: Okay. Williams, I took that course in the spring, I believe, no, it was the fall of 67, or spring of 68. And this is, I'm sorry, my thoughts, ran. This is when students were confronting the professors. And there was an inverse relationship. The farther left you were, the more you got hammered by the students, you know, practice what you preach. And Goldberg got hammered the hardest. Hamaro (?), the lightest. Surprise. Williams had been quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal, as referring to the new left as quote "a bunch of orangutangs." And he walks in, and someone has written across the Blackboard "orangutang power" and there's a stalk of bananas on the lectern. And everyone's waiting to see "how is he going to respond to this." He laughed. He laughed, took off his jacket, pulled out piece of paper. And said, "I'd like to read to all of you the letter I just sent to the State Journal," which was, once again, you have take your misquoted this that and everyone's feeling pretty good. "However, you did quote me correctly on the new left being a bunch of orangutangs. They are exhibiting the same frontier, Trinitarian, anti-intellectual behavior that has gotten us into this mess in the first place." And that was the end of the confrontation. Right there. It was an interesting time. It was an interesting time.

Skye Doney: You said you were in Mosse's class when he was when it was disrupted?

Mark Stoler: Yes.

Skye Doney: When? What happened?

Mark Stoler: Students, you've got it in the cartoon. Students came in saying "close it down." And I cannot remember the follow up. He just said "this is not acceptable. This is Nazi behavior and I will not bow to it." But how could he continue to lecture over the students yelling? I don't know what happened at that point. He might have just walked away from the lectern. The TAs, who were in the room may remember and one of them was Anson Rabinbach who is at Princeton now, I believe. Yeah. He might remember the episode. Might be able to tell you what what happened. But I take it the cartoon you invented? Excuse me, the cartoon you have you didn't invent out of thin air. So someone else's told you about it to? Can you tell me what did they say? How did you stop it?

Skye Doney: There's a lot. There's a lot of different versions. And it's still not clear what happens after the disruption other than Mosse won't back down.

Mark Stoler: Yes.Yes.

Skye Doney: He wouldn't give into them or wouldn't yield to them.

Mark Stoler: Yep. Yep. That's what I should have said that. That's what I remember. He would not give them the platform. But I cannot, I cannot remember anything beyond that. I cannot think of anything else, unless you can probe me with questions.

Skye Doney: You were in the department at a very interesting time. What was the cohort of students like, the history students?

Mark Stoler: Graduate students? Was there a sense of community? Or... The graduate cohort was so large. It numbered in the hundreds.

Skye Doney: Really?

Mark Stoler: Yes. And that was simply, I think 200 were allowed in, in the class of 60 undergraduates and '66 that were let in. It was huge. The department was huge. In fact, what Wisconsin taught me was that I never wanted to teach in a school of this size. To me, it was the most logical thing in the world that those 00:22:00student riots broke out. It was about as atomizing and alienating as was possible to be. You could go your entire career, especially as an undergrad, and never even talk to anyone over the age of 30. It was a city unto itself. And I don't know if the population now is larger or smaller. But the graduate students formed groups. There were affinity groups. Mine were not in European history, except the European grad students that I met, doing the minor field. My cohort, were basically diplomatic and military historians and historians of the West. Students of de Novo, Williams, Allan Bogue, Paul Glad. That would be pretty much most of my friends were in that group. And there was some very close friendships made during that time period. And in fact, I don't know if his name has come up at all. Richard Zeitlin, who was the director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum here in built it, was an Allan Bogue, and we were studying for prelims together. And we were studying, we started so far in advance, and we met we were sitting directly across from each other, not in the State Historical Society where we had carols (?), but instead in the Union in one of those small rooms, and we just kept looking at each other, and struck up conversation, friendships, friendship. He introduced me to other Allan Bogue students. And I'll give you one story because I just repeated it with a mutual friend of ours. We were convinced that we were going to fail prelims, and that we were simply not good enough and that we had to study our asses off. Unbeknownst to us, everyone else was watching us and pacing themselves by the pace that we were keeping, reading a book a day, and just trying to master. You're given an impossible task. In those days prelims, all of American history, all of it, you have to know everything there is to know. But of course, the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know. And I became convinced that it was a way to humble you before the discipline. That that was its real aim. Which it did, which it 00:24:00did. But we became paranoid. Someone was doing a psych study for a master's degree on us. But we would, we would read all day, and then a bunch of us would go watch the news in the Union, and then go down to the cafeteria for dinner. And the one of the students, Tom Phillips, who had already Allan Bogue students who had passed his prelims, would throw a question out at us, but not the type of question you'd see written on an exam, but just what you'd expect from 23-24-year-olds to see and to force us to argue with each other. So you ready for his question? One night when evening. "Gentlemen, it was all male, who is the greatest shithead in all of American history." And Rich, who was studying US relations with Latin America, said "Theodore Roosevelt." And I said, "Woodrow Wilson, "and everyone at the table knew there was no resolution here, because what Rich was saying is the out and out imperialist, and I would say no, the liberal hypocrite. Wilson intervenes, militarily, more than any other president in US history until we get to Bill Clinton, I think in terms of number. In 00:26:00Mexico, in Dominican Republic, in Haiti, in Russia during the Civil War, World War One, of course. And I think I've missed one, one or two. So and I think we honed each other in that group. By doing this, no one, you know, we couldn't sit with anyone else. We couldn't talk with anyone else who was just history, history, history, until we take the damn exam. And they had changed it. It used to be a three day exam. And they changed it to a one day, eight-hour exam, where you came in, you got the questions, you took them home. It was honor system. Cheating would have made no sense, given what they were looking for. And you had two questions for every century of American history, and you had to choose one of the two for each century. Now, if Vermont is an example, and we don't have a doctoral program, we have a master's program. But what you had to study for prelims has become much more compact. Is that correct?

Skye Doney: I don't know. I had four fields: modern Germany, modern France, early modern France, and early modern religion and science. And so still covers a lot of books. Yeah.

Mark Stoler: I still remember some of the concrete the prelim questions.

Skye Doney: I think I was scarred for life.

Mark Stoler: Yes.

Skye Doney: It was part of the process. Yeah, I will wake up and remember being asked questions.

Mark Stoler: You had an oral part of it? After the written. A two-hour oral test. Of prelims or of the dissertation?

Skye Doney: Prelims.

Mark Stoler

Wow! No, we did not have that. We had oral defense of the master's thesis and the doctoral thesis. So, strictly written exam? Yup. The year that the we we took them it was strictly written. And as I said, two questions in 17th 18th century US history, two questions in 19th century, two in 20th century and choose one of the two. The questions were three part questions: In what ways was did World War One in the 20s mark the triumph of the progressive movement rather than the demise of the progressive movement? Which is cutting edge scholarship at that point on that. Show you how far back it was. Recently, the, oh and they name three classic colonial history writers, Morgan, Miller, Morrison approach. The Miller being Perry Miller has come under attack, how and why? And what this was was the new social history, saying intellectual history is not going to be enough to explain the Puritans and in fact, it's taking you down the wrong track. So the more things change, the more they remain the same. Yeah. Go ahead. Is there anything else you remember about being in a class with Professor Mosse that you wanted to share? Overpowering presence of a man. Just filled the room, not in a demagogic way at all. And you have, of course, you had to listen. And what was coming out of his mouth was brilliant. He had us reading the cultural history of Europe. And then I believe that was the textbook, if you will, and then he had all those primary sources. And of course, the grad students were reading more than the undergrads and on my own, I read "Crisis of German Ideology" with that wonderful picture of Hitler in the knight's armor on the front. I remember constant references to Herman the German in the Teutoburg Forest which cracked the class up every time he did it. Two others, okay. We got to Jung. Jung was big on the reading list. And as an aside, says, "You know, I took part in seances with Carl Gustav Jung." Or a seance. It might have been singular. We communicated with votan. And everyone started laughing. And he said, "Oh, yes, yes, I know, you liberal positivists. You know, you think reality is what you can touch? Well, I claim that logically, you can neither prove nor disprove what I just said. And therefore my memory holds on this." We had heard stories about his background. He didn't talk about it. He did not talk about it. But it was, of course, legend. We had also heard stories about Williams and of course, that that story that I told you, and we knew that Williams had been a graduate of the US Naval Academy. And he came back there for a conference which was here he which he referred to Annapolis, as it was a conference of diplomatic historians. He referred to it as the "Navy school for wayward boys." But as I said, department was just, you wanted to take more courses. You wish there was enough time. I took David Lovejoy for colonial history. I took Richard Suel (?) and Norman Ristort (?) for early US. Took Collingsworth for late 19th century US. Paul Glad for domestic in the 20th century. Had three diplomatic historians teach me because the first year both de Novo and Williams were on leave. So they brought in Robert Freeman Smith, who we had for one year. So we had in my group, we had all three. And again, I don't know if this is the case. Madison, it was easy to get into the graduate school. It was more difficult to get into the seminar that you wanted to get into. In fact, I had wanted to be in Robert Kales(?) seminar in European diplomatic history, and we became friendly in my last years at Madison, and he told me he had turned me down because he had seen what I had studied three languages in college. I'd studied Spanish for the requirement and then reading knowledge of French and German. And he said "Your grades. It was clear that you struggled with language." I got mostly B's and C's, one D in German. And he said "You would have been tortured in your scholarly career." I felt so he pushed me into, in a sense de Novo took me in US diplomatic. My specialty became Anglo-American relations during the World War Two era. That's what I did most of my writing in, and yeah, it was a hell of a lot easier to do research in queue (or Q?) at the British public records office. Now, confusingly called the British National Archives, which is what we call ours in this country. I would have had a much rougher time, and I don't think as successful a career as a result of this. So I was very grateful to Kale for what he did. The department was huge. And in fact, I don't think any of us knew everyone in the department. Merle Curti was still here. We heard stories about southern gentlemen. He was Steve Ambrose's doctoral advisor. Heseltine. Heseltine. And the story was that Williams actually cried in the hall when Heseltine died. But that was before my time. And now all I'm doing is giving you urban legends, rather than history. To be on campus from '66 to '70. Someone talked about what we call the 60s didn't really begin until around 64-65. And then it was like an express train, picking up steam. And by the end of it is one of my colleagues in Vermont said, there were no rules, you realize, it felt like you were punching your way through a paper bag, that all the rules that you had been taught, just simply did not apply. It was a lot of drugs, sex and rock, and roll. Which distracted a lot of my friends who never finished. But I was obsessed with history. And yeah, I did my share of all three. After my 00:36:0000:34:0000:32:0000:30:00studies every night. And apparently, it it worked out. A good system. Yeah. Yep. First things first. Yeah. I still have my Mosse notes. I don't know if that would be of any value to you.

Skye Doney: Yes, I would very much like that.

Mark Stoler: Okay, I will have to find them. I believe they're in deep storage. But I keep my books and records stored. The University of Vermont took records that they felt were appropriate to my 37 years there. Which I have to go through. The rest I put into record storage and I can call up any box at any time. But you're gonna have to give me some time on that. And I may give you photocopies rather than the originals because I love those Madison spirals.

Skye Doney: Yeah, any any version, is most welcome in our archive.

Mark Stoler: You're, you were post-Mosse, you were telling me but here and tell me again.

Skye Doney: Rudy Cosary (?) I don't know at all. I don't know at all. Rudy was a colleague of Mosse. They were here at the same time.

Mark Stoler: Okay. And are you in the department? Yeah. I'm a 3rd-year grad student with Suzanne Desan, who does French Revolution. French revolution? Okay. All right. I'm back with the Europeanists. It's all right. And I'm going to go to the session on Williams.

Skye Doney: Okay, well thank you very much, Mark.

Mark Stoler: Thank you. Thank you. I hope it was of some value to you.

Skye Doney: Very valuable. We appreciate it.

Mark Stoler: My, my pleasure. Really.