Peter H. Wood

Interviewee: Peter H. Wood (Maryland & Merton 1964) [hereafter ‘PHW’] 

Moderator:  Jamie Byron Geller [hereafter ‘JBG’] 

Date of interview: 1 March, 2024 

[begins 00:03] 

JBG: This is Jamie Byron Geller on behalf of the Rhodes Trust, and I am here on Zoom today with Peter H. Wood (Maryland & Merton 1964), to record Peter’s oral history interview, which will help us to launch the first ever Rhodes Scholar Oral History Project. So, thank you so much, Peter, for joining us in this project. Before we begin, just a few formalities. Would you mind, please, saying your full name for the recording? 

PHW: I’m Peter Hutchins Wood. 

JBG: Wonderful. And Peter, do I have your permission to record this interview? 

PHW: Yes, indeed. 

JBG: Thank you so much. Peter, where are you Zooming from today? 

PHW: I’m in Longmont, Colorado. I’ve lived here for the last dozen years, on the edge of the Rocky Mountains. My wife has been teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but I like to think of it as being on the edge of the Mississippi Valley. Because I was born in St. Louis, I still relate to the great Mississippi River. The little stream out here near my house will eventually end up in the Gulf of Mexico, so I feel connected in that way. 

JBG: Lovely. And you mentioned, Peter, that you were born in St. Louis. When were you born? 

PHW: I was born 1 May 1943, right in the middle of the Second World War. My father was a doctor, and my mother was also a scientist and ended up teaching high school science. They were both from New England but had moved to St. Louis in the late 1930s. So, I was born there and raised there until I was about 12, and then we moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where Dad became the head of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. So, I really had two childhoods that complemented each other nicely. 

JBG: I would love to dive into both of those chapters in your childhood a little deeper, and I’m curious if those felt distinct, your time in St. Louis compared to your time in Baltimore. 

PHW: Oh, they were very distinct. I mean, partly, younger and then older, but also because St. Louis was a very Midwestern city, and even though it’s on the same latitude with Baltimore, Baltimore was a very southern city. I went to private schools all the way through, but in St Louis it was progressive—boys and girls, no coats and ties. Baltimore was very different. So, they were different. In retrospect, I see that in St. Louis we lived in a well-to-do, segregated, white suburb with lots of lawyers and doctors, but it was almost rural, in the sense that we could go catch crawfish in the local stream and we had a big field to play in, and so, it was a marvellous childhood in that way. I was a big baseball fan from an early age, so I lived and died by the St. Louis Cardinals. Basically, I learned a lot from baseball, as so many kids did in those days. It was the national sport, much more than it is now, and I learned geography and mathematics, and how to calculate averages. Most of the ball players came from small towns all over the country, and so I learned geography that way. My hero, Stan Musial, grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania, a little coal-mining town full of Polish immigrants. So, I started learning about my country through my baseball teams and my baseball cards, I think. 

JBG: Interesting. And did you play yourself? Was playing baseball part of your childhood? 

PHW: Oh, yes. I thought I was probably going to be a big league baseball player, and I wasn’t. By the time I got to Harvard, my batting average was about .160, so I switched and played lacrosse, which was a very “Baltimore” game. That was another one of the contrasts of moving from one city to the other: in Baltimore, everybody played lacrosse, especially in the private schools, and my friends there thought I was crazy to play baseball. That was a real culture shock. So, it was almost like moving to another country. But, you know, I adapted, learned to play lacrosse. But St. Louis was – how can I describe it? – I guess, the biggest influence for me was not the Cardinals, it was my family. I was third of five children, and so, literally in the middle, literally and figuratively. That had a big influence, I think, on my personality. By being in the middle, I was always trying to balance things on both sides.  

My parents were remarkable people. My father [William Barry Wood, Jr.] had been a famous athlete when he was in college, and then he became a very prominent, successful doctor and scientist. Basically, he was very single-minded, you know, very modest. He preferred to stay in his lab; he didn’t like the fact that many people recognized him and knew about his college exploits and things like that. My mother had majored in child development as a student at Vassar, and both of them had taken break years. He took a year living in the Ojai Valley in California before going to college. I think it’s what we would now call “redshirting,” because he was a good football player. Later, my mother (partly, I think, probably to wait for him to graduate after she graduated from Vassar), spent a year teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Kentucky.  

As I think about it, they both were trying to break out from a fairly stuffy, upper-class, New England world. (Her father was a very good surgeon at the Boston Women’s Hospital.) New England very much was the world of their parents, and for them to get out, to move to the Midwest, was a big shift for them. Barry had gone to medical school at Johns Hopkins, but then moved to St. Louis. I remember when his mother and father came to visit us in the late 1940s, they asked if it was safe to drink the drinking water! I mean, they thought they were out in the middle of the prairies somewhere, and we got a laugh out of that. So, they had fought that fight for me, and I grew up feeling I was a Midwesterner, even when I moved farther east and farther north and farther south and then farther west. St. Louis is still, in a funny way, my home. 

JBG: Was it a professional opportunity that brought them to St. Louis originally? 

PHW: It was. My father was the youngest professor of medicine ever appointed there, I think. He was not yet in his 30s! He had done some very good research, and so he had earned it. Yes, it was a professional opportunity, but also, I do think there was this feeling of, ‘This would be good for us, to get away from [10:00] New England, and it would be good to us to raise our family, not in Newton or Brookline, but in some place that is different.’ So, they did make that choice, but they also made the choice – which had a huge effect – of sending us all to private schools rather than public schools. They were supportive of the public schools, but I think a little (rightly) suspicious of them as not being very good compared to some good, progressive schools. They could afford it, and so we all went to private school.  

That can make a big difference. You know, it meant that I got a much better education, probably, than many Midwestern kids my age, but it also meant that I was cloistered and segregated from the way society really works. The link was, as it was for many doctor/lawyer families in those days, through Black help, you know, having a cook or a maid or someone to help with the children. There were, really, three successive African American women who were a big part of the household and who were my friends. I mean, I had no notions of race. It was just that these were really nice people who seemed to care about me and who had a much better sense of humor, probably, than my parents did. They were jovial and glad to look out for me after school, and so on. Later on, that had a big effect, because when I started thinking about issues of race, I just assumed that everybody was equal and everybody should be friends with everyone else, you know, and that was laid in at a very early age. 

JBG: Can I ask, Peter, if academically, there was a subject that you tended to gravitate towards through your childhood, if you had a specific academic interest? 

PHW: No, there really wasn’t, at first. As I said, my father was a very focused scientist and very single-minded in his research, and my mother was almost the opposite, in terms of being interested in everything. She was interested in literature and in science and in natural history, and so on, and she was very attentive to what each of her very different children were up to. I inherited some of that. I was interested in lots of things. One of the reasons I love history is because it’s totally interdisciplinary. You know, you can use anything that can be brought to bear, and she had some of that. So, she would encourage each of us, and I think I was pretty eclectic as a kid. I learned that I faint at the sight of blood, so it was clear I wasn’t going to become a medical doctor, probably. But I was interested in nature. My older brother became a scientist, and so, hearing them talk at the dinner table about science was a very natural thing.  

We did a lot of reading aloud. My mother would read to us regularly, so all kinds of literature became interesting, and the trips to the library were regular. Trips to the St. Louis Art Museum, I remember. This was right after World War II. We only had one car. She would drive my father in to work at the hospital, and then we would stop at the St. Louis Art Museum on the way home. It was just this amazing, big place with wonderful pictures, and I learned then, I think, that I was pretty visual. I still am. I’m a slow reader, but I respond to visual things. That’s one of the reasons I’ve spent time studying Winslow Homer, the great New England artist. And that was there at an early age—this idea that I could enjoy museums, and I should feel comfortable there and shouldn’t feel like an outsider or an intruder.  

The other aspect to that, which will come up again and again, I think, is of gradually realizing (not at the time, but realizing in retrospect) that I was always on the inside track, somehow. I’ve said my father was prominent and respected, and so, ‘Oh, if this is Barry Wood’s child, then we should be nice to him.’ You know, so that was true. But also, their move to the Midwest was like many other people moving to the Midwest, so that the head of the St. Louis Art Museum was a man named Perry Rathbone, whom they had known in New England, and he was an art scholar. You know, the Midwest was trying to improve its museums and find these well-trained New Englanders, and so, boom, there was an inside track. And that’s happened again and again in my life, of only realizing later that I had an easier path than lots of other people in my age group. 

JBG: Thank you for sharing that, Peter. I’m curious about your journey to Harvard. You did your undergraduate at Harvard. 

PHW: I did. I did. 

JBG: And I’m curious what your field of study was, and what your vision was for your career at that time, if you had one, if that was formulated yet. 

PHW: Well, as I said, we moved to Baltimore when I was about 12. It was at the same time that the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles, so that was reassuring, that they were moving to Baltimore also. 

JBG: That is a lovely parallel. 

PHW: Yes. It mattered, you know. I went to, as I said, a private boys’ school there, which was very different. It seemed uptight to me, coming from the Midwest, but it was also very demanding and had wonderful teachers. I was amazed, later on, to get to college and meet friends who only had one or two good teachers on their way to college, while I had only had one or two bad teachers in my whole career. As a high school student, I really learned to love History and English particularly, again, through wonderful teachers. When I got to college, I thought I would probably study one of those things.  

The question was, should I go to another small institution like the private school I was in? Should I go to Amherst or Williams, or should I try something bigger? I think I felt I had really, sort of, outgrown that sort of small environment and wanted to be someplace larger. My father and my grandfather had gone to Harvard. My older brother had gone to Harvard. And I’m sure those were reasons in my thinking, but I also knew that it was awfully good, and I thought I should test myself against the best.  

So, once I got there, I was the usual naïve freshman, but I had a wonderful advisor who said, ‘Oh, look, you have Advanced Placement in history. That means you could take this big social history course that’s taught by Oscar Handlin.’ I said, ‘Who’s Oscar Handlin?’ And then he said, ‘Well, go, you’ll find out.’ And he was a very distinguished, very impressive professor who was, sort of, helping to open up the world of social history. He’d written a famous book about immigrants. [20:00] He was Jewish himself and had grown up in the Bronx, I think, and had a very different take from the Brahmin professors around him, and I was very inspired by that. I knew I liked American history, but social history was not even a category that existed or that I understood.  

Like everyone else, I thought you studied presidents and political campaigns. The idea of social history was really planted in me as an undergraduate, along with lots of other undergraduates of my cohort. You know, it was emerging as a new way to look at American history and a much broader way, and that was very appealing. Then I took a course with a very prominent and talented early American historian and realized that if I was going to do American history, that seemed the most challenging era. Bernard Bailyn set it up that way. I mean, he was almost like ‘Bear’ Bryant, the famous football coach at Alabama, who used to tell his recruits, ‘I’m not sure you’re good enough to play for Alabama.’ Bailyn cast that aura at Harvard. Even with all these smart undergraduates, he framed everything as, ‘I don’t know if you’re even going to understand this, but,’ and then he would tell you some interesting thing. So, you wanted to learn more and be on the inside and gain his approval and read the books that he thought were good, and that was a formative experience for me. 

JBG: Was history your major? 

PHW: Yes, history became my major, and as a senior, I wrote my honors paper on the Puritans’ relations with the Indians in the seventeenth century, and particularly the role of disease. So, on the one hand, that was illustrative of the fact that early American history was New England history in those days, especially in the Ivy League. Most of the major scholars studied New England, in old ways, writing biographies, and in new ways, using computers to do demographic studies of New England towns and stuff. New Englanders kept wonderful records, and all of these big Ivy League colleges were in New England and exploiting those records. To show you were broad-minded, you would write an article about Virginia, or something. You know, that was the edge of the world, but you certainly didn’t go beyond that, didn’t talk about Canada or the Caribbean.  

And so, my senior paper, as I said, was about New England, but it was about the interconnection, the clash, between two cultures, particularly in the case of disease. The native peoples were being exposed to diseases they hadn’t seen before or experienced—the devastation of smallpox, which ran all through New England. And that was also a way to relate to my dad, the doctor, you know, who had actually written a little book about diphtheria epidemics in early New England. He had historical interests of his own. But also, you know, I was coming to it thinking medicine/science/disease is an important part of the way history works, so I should focus on that. But it was very New England centered, so my life has been breaking out away from that and trying to make early American history much broader and, I hope, more interesting. 

JBG: And during that time, did you have a vision of the direction that you expected your career to take, of what you hoped to do with your studies? 

PHW: You know, I really didn’t. You know, so much was going on around us. I went to Harvard in 1960 and graduated in 1964, and I was busy studying and playing lacrosse. I was aware of what was going on more broadly, but not as much as my roommate, who became part of the Freedom Summer and taught in Mississippi. And so, I was one step removed from all of that that was going on, but I was certainly aware of it, and had been from the time of my early childhood. As I said, my mother was constantly nudging us to think about these things. I remember, to jump back to 1954, when I was still a kid in St. Louis, reading the sports page, and I remember her picking up the newspaper and pointing me to the front page instead, and saying, ‘Here, I think you ought to read this,’ and it was the Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: And she knew it was important, and she wanted me to be aware of it. So, anyway, the groundwork was already there, I think.  

JBG: Would you mind sharing a little bit, Peter, about your journey to apply for the Scholarship? 

PHW: I have no idea. The head of Eliot House, the wonderful dorm where I lived, was a classics professor, a very good classics professor, but he was unusual in his attention to undergraduates, and in his capacity to understand their individual strengths and push them in certain directions. I knew from my father, who was in medical school, he said, ‘We would get these letters from John Finley, and they were unlike any letters we would get, because he would always make this student seem like just the person you need to take into your medical school.’ 

JBG: John Finley was the head of Eliot House? 

PHW: It was John Finley, and he described himself as a ‘shoehorn’ for getting his students into the right places. So, he would overestimate each of us, I think, in certain ways, but he was very perceptive about how we differed from our roommates or our cousins. And so, with each senior, he would invite you into his office and take notes, and just, sort of, interview you for 20 minutes or so. He’d find out, you know, ‘What does your mother do? What do you like to do? How many siblings do you have?’ He would gather up these titbits of information. And then, if you went too far, he would say, ‘No. Stop. I don’t need that.’ He didn’t want to hear about all your screw-ups, you know. But then, instead of just saying, ‘Sam is a very nice student and would be good in law school,’ he would say, ‘Sam is a cross between Winston Churchill and a magpie,’ or something, and so, you’re thinking, ‘What the heck is he talking about?’ And then, when you met the person, you would realize, ‘Oh, I kind of see what he was talking about there.’ So, he had this way of getting a reader’s attention and saying, ‘You should pay attention to this person.’ Anyway, how did I get put up for the Rhodes? I think after one of these interviews, he said, ‘Oh, I think we’ll put you up for a Rhodes.’ And Eliot House had actually won more Rhodes Scholarships than most colleges. 

JBG: Wow.  

PHW: And partly because of his attentiveness, he was interested in well-rounded students. He recruited people, you know, who were playing a varsity sport and getting good grades. So, the Rhodes fit his ideal of what [30:00] you should be, and he enjoyed that. Actually, in my class, there were three of us from Eliot House who won Rhodes Scholarships. 

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: And that was not unprecedented. So, he had a lot to do with it, I think, and it’s one of those things, again, in retrospect, where I can look back and see, ‘Whoa,’ you know, I was totally privileged. If I had been at some other school with some other recommenders, I would have gotten lost in the shuffle, even in a shuffle that only included clever white boys, in those days. So, I was told to go talk to someone and I remember going and talking to some professor, and then being told afterwards, ‘Oh, that was a screening for the Rhodes interviews,’ or something, and I hadn’t even-, I just, sort of, did what I was told.  

And then, another example of this is that, when I went to the regional Rhodes interviews, they were in Baltimore, my hometown. They were at Johns Hopkins University, where my father was vice-president. The chair of the committee had to be a non-Rhodes Scholar, so, it was Milton Eisenhower, the president of the university. So, he knew who my dad was and all that stuff, and I had an obscene advantage. I remember – I don’t know if they still do this – they used to have a little mixer/cocktail party beforehand, and I remember meeting some of the other candidates, a really interesting guy from West Virginia, who had none of the privileges that I had, and I could see that he felt like a real fish out of water even being there, and they treated him that way. You know, I could see it, even as the process was going on.  

But I knew this world pretty well. In fact, I remember coming out-, you know, you’re all sitting in some anteroom, nervously, and a young guy from West Point came out, looking rather shaken, and we said, ‘How did it go, George?’ He said, ‘Well, it was okay, but they asked me what I would do if I didn’t get a Rhodes, and I didn’t have a very good answer.’ And again, given this sort of training among the elites, I realized, ‘Oh, okay, I need to have a clever answer for that.’ You know, an honest answer, but something convincing. Sure enough, they asked me that, and I said, ‘There are lots of ‘roads’ ahead of me, and this would be a good one.’ In other words, that, sort of, elitist approach, like, ‘I don’t need you guys very much.’ Again, it’s back to the ‘Bear’ Bryant football analogy: ‘I’m not desperate to play for your team. I could go play for another team.’ So, by that time, here I am, a college senior, and I’m semi-conscious of all the privileges and advantages that I’ve had.  

The other thing about a Rhodes is that, you know, you’re supposed to be distinctive. They don’t want some cookie-cutter person who is just going to follow orders. One of the questions they asked me was, ‘What do you think about Kennedy’s initiative to send a man to the moon. Should we really put so much money into it?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually, no. I don’t think we should do it. I think all that money should go into education, and if we had a push to improve American education as big as the push to get to the moon, that would change society.’ And, you know, not only was that a good, iconoclastic comment, but Milton Eisenhower leaned across the table and said, ‘By God, I would too,’ which was a signal to all these other old men that he thought Wood was pretty clever. So, little moments like that still stand out in my mind. I was becoming more and more aware of how stacked the system was and how privileged I had been from the get-go. 

JBG: Do you recall, Peter, the moment of learning that you’d been selected? 

PHW: Well, I guess, yes, they just call you into the room and say, ‘You’re all nice guys, but these are the two,’ and the other fellow, Tom Gerrity (Maryland & Merton 1964) didn’t live there, so I feel as though he may have stayed at our house or something. Anyway, again, what I remember most from that, obviously, I felt lucky. But I felt discouraged for the other folks whom I had gotten to know by that time and who were cleverer than I was. And one of the old Rhodes leaned across the table and said, ‘Gentlemen, here’s what you need to know about Oxford. You need to do rowing,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, God, this really is a boys’ club. There’s no way that that’s my highest priority, that I’m going to learn to row.’ Now, I’m sure he had a great experience rowing, and I ended up having a great experience playing on the lacrosse team, but the Good-Old-Boy aspect was very clear to me.  

And I’ll just stick this in, because it became clearer to me later on. One year, I actually served on the regional committee in North Carolina, or it was the North Carolina committee that was going to recommend people, maybe. I don’t know. And they were just beginning to interview women, and there was a woman from a small college in Greensboro, who was very interested in animal rights, which was a very far-out concern in those days. It wasn’t the norm. And as she was going out of the room, even before she’d closed the door, one of these rather prominent Rhodes Scholar journalists started laughing, like, ‘Wow! Give me a break. She’s interested in animal rights!’ You know, ‘Good luck, lady.’ And I knew she heard it, and I was….  

Anyway, that was a decade later and further on in my progression. But it was like, ‘Wow, we are so slow to catch on!’ That’s the story of my life; it has been watching how slowly the Establishment has changed when it needed to change fast. And, you know, there have been changes, and certainly the Rhodes has changed, but not fast enough, and not far enough, and dealing with all the kinds of pushback that progressive change elicits. 

JBG: So, thinking about your time studying history at Harvard, as you were setting out to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship, did you have a vision for what you intended to read at Oxford? 

PHW: No. I didn’t even know how Oxford worked. And again, this is like the St. Louis, Baltimore, best of both worlds. Harvard and Oxford were the best of both worlds, because they were very different. I didn’t know how Oxford worked, and I didn’t know that young English students had to choose their majors by the time they were 12 or 14, or something. You know, I had had a liberal [40:00] arts education, I had had a little bit of this and a little of that and felt lucky and comfortable about that, and part of my early interaction at Oxford was of realizing, ‘Oh, these people are really just studying history and they’ve been doing it already for five years.’ I remember our tutor asked us to read Rousseau. I talked to a friend and I said, you know, ‘Have you finished the reading,’ the normal American question. Like, ‘What chapter can I skip?’ He said, ‘Yes, but the French is a little difficult.’ And I said, ‘Oh, my God, you’re reading it in French?’ And he said, ‘Oh, my God, you’re not reading it in English, are you?’ It had never occurred to me to even try to read it in French. It had never occurred to him to read it in English, or at least, that was his posture, because there was always a one-upmanship posture thing going on.  

But they were very serious and very focused about the discipline of history in ways that were different from what I had experienced at Harvard. And the other thing that was different was, not only were they doing one subject, but they were doing it all the time, and I realized that, in my undergraduate education, you would do it semester by semester. You would break your butt until the final exam, and you’d cram all this stuff into your head, and then you’d spit it all out. Then you’d move on to the next semester and forget whatever you’d done. Whereas, as you know, the Oxford system requires you to keep it in your head for a couple of years and then take a big, comprehensive set of exams at the end, and that was completely different. Because, when my friends would ask me, ‘What do you think of Mozart?’ I would say, ‘Well, I haven’t had that.’ I realized that my world was divided into, ‘Okay, I studied that, so I’m supposed to know a little about it. That, I didn’t study, so I don’t need to know anything about that.’ And they had narrowed down at age 14 and so, if they were going to learn anything about the world, they would do it on their own.  

So, they learned about music, they learned about art, but not by taking a class, not by saying, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve had medieval art.’ You know, they would just know about medieval art. And so, when vacation time came, the English ‘vac,’ most of the Americans were ready to party or go explore, you know, do what they had done back in Peoria. The English boys would go home and take a stack of books and read them. So, they were learning all the time, whether they were at school or not at school. That was enlightening for me, you know, that knowledge didn’t need to be broken up into these specific classes.  

And for a history major, this sounds naïve to say, but I had just assumed that there was one best book, one right way, one right answer when it came to any historical question. You look for the best book and you read it. But at Oxford, my tutor would say, ‘Well, next week, we’re studying Gladstone, and I want you to read these three biographies.’ I remember saying, ‘Well, in case I don’t get to all of them, which is the best one?’ And he was, like, ‘You don’t get it. They’re all different. These are different people with different interpretations and we’re going to talk about that.’ And that was a big difference.  

The other difference was, ‘Not only are we going to talk about it, you’re going to write a paper about it and come in and read it to me in tutorial, just the two of us,’ or there might be two or three students, and I’d never had that as an undergraduate. You know, you would write a paper, and then you would slip it under the professor’s door or something and it would come back with some red marks on it. But you never had to read your own prose out loud. So, that was a huge difference that certainly helped me, later on, realize the difference between clear prose and less clear prose. If you were going to read it to your tutor, you really better make your point clearly. 

JBG: Were you in Oxford, Peter, reading for an MPhil, or were you doing a second BA? 

PHW: I was doing a second BA, because, partly, that just seemed the logical thing to do. As I said, I didn’t understand all the different degrees. I didn’t understand the differences between the colleges, so I’m not even quite sure how I ended up at Merton. Somebody told me that it was a good college, or something. But if I had gone to Balliol, it would have meant that I had very different tutors. I would have encountered Christopher Hill or some other people who would have pushed me in a different direction, and who knows?  

But I had wonderful tutors at Merton. I think partly, I was intrigued just because it was such an old college. For someone who is thinking about studying early American history, I loved the fact that that made Harvard, founded in 1636, seem, ‘Oh, yes, that’s recent.’ You know, ‘We can study that,’ as Merton was twice as old. So, I was lucky to be at Merton. I had a couple of good American friends there and lots of good English friends as well. All my tutors were good, but one of them, five years after I left, a very modest fellow named John Roberts, published a history of the world! 

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: You know, while he’d been tutoring me and others, he’d been writing a history of the world. 

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: It was later expanded and reprinted, and he did a television series about it and everything. Just enormous breadth of a kind that I couldn’t even imagine, that partly came from his good education and his bright mind, but that also came from British imperialism, you know, that he had grown up in England, thinking, ‘Oh, India. We all need to know about India,’ whereas in the United States, that was not the first thought that came to your mind in the 1960s. 

JBG: Did you live in college both years? 

PHW: No, I didn’t. I lived in college the first year, and the person who had the most influence on me, probably, besides these wonderful tutors and good classmates, was my scout. The scouts were a very important part of your life and happiness at Oxford, and in those days, it seemed as though they particularly liked the Americans, because the Americans were less class conscious. You know, I just thought he was a nice guy. I mean, I had no idea who he was, but he turned out to be a very lively, talkative cockney fellow named Alf, who had been a machine gunner in World War II and who was clearly working-class England, but was interested in history. He knew much more English history than I did, you know. And so, he would bring me a cup of tea in the morning and say, ‘Oh, what are you studying this week, Wood?’ And I would tell him, ‘Oh, I’m trying to learn about Charles II.’  

He’d say, ‘Oh, yes, Charles II,’ and he would go off, and then he would come back with some little, sort of, comic book version of Charles II: ‘Here, read this. Read this.’ But he was interested in it, you know, so that was impressive, because in the United States, you wouldn’t talk to a plumber or a gas [50:00] station attendant and have a discussion about Andrew Jackson or something. You couldn’t do that. That was intriguing. But it was also, again, part of this continuing education, part of my growing class consciousness, that, you know, he was serving tea to all these blokes and these upper-class Englishmen were benefiting from that. Certainly, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I didn’t have anybody waiting on me in that quite that bizarre way. 

JBG: And you mentioned you lived out of college your second year? 

PHW: Then I got married in the second year, to Ann Douglas, a very talented and smart and beautiful young American whom I had met at Radcliffe, and who was studying at Oxford as well. And so, we lived in Kidlington, outside of town, and that exposed me to a different world. You know, it created a different situation for me. I think it was only recently that Rhodes Scholars had been allowed to be married, actually. I forget what the date was, but it was legit, and so, we got married. It didn’t work. We were too young. We probably shouldn’t have gotten married, but it was a wonderful time. She was a better scholar than I was and a wonderful person. 

Another piece of my education came at the end of our second year when we both decided we wanted to go back to Harvard to do graduate work. I got a letter from the history department giving me a complete, full ride for five years. You know, just a blank-check fellowship that they could afford to give. And she got admitted to the Harvard English Department, but with nothing, with no support at all! At first, I thought, ‘Well, that’s just the way life is,’ and then I saw how upsetting it was for her. I mean, she realized that it was insulting and weird, and then, gradually, I did too. She did a wonderful job in graduate school and graduated a year ahead of me, but, you know, working on her own and having to over-achieve. So, that was a very good first-hand glimpse into the kinds of gender discrimination as well as class discrimination that was all around us in those days. 

JBG: I would love to jump to your time at Harvard pursuing your PhD in a moment. Before we do, you mentioned that you continued to play lacrosse while you were in Oxford. 

PHW: Yes. 

JBG: I’m curious about that and other ways that you might have filled more social time outside of your studies. 

PHW: Well, I didn’t even conceive that I had that much social time. As I say, I was involved with Ann, I had a relationship that was developing. So, studying was a big thing, but I had been captain of the Harvard lacrosse team. I ended up being captain of the Oxford lacrosse team. That was a wonderful experience for me, because it got me out of the classroom and out of Oxford. We would travel to play other teams, and again, this contrast with the American way. You’re playing the same sport, but it’s being played in very different ways, and so, it’s a whole different ritual, and I was learning from that.  

The rules were very different. You didn’t wear a helmet. But what was most different was after the game. I mean, in American sports, now, they do pretend to shake hands after games and things. They didn’t do any of that back in the 1960s. You just went away and into your separate worlds: separate locker rooms, separate buses and you went away cursing the guy who had hit you over the head or something. Whereas, in England, after the game, you would all shower in the same locker room and then you would all go out for a beer. So, you knew as you were playing the game that, you know, ‘Whatever happens, I’m going to have to drink a beer with this guy afterwards.’  

That was a whole different atmosphere. You know, the competition is a little less important and the fellowship is more important. That was very educational. The other aspect of it was that in England, lacrosse was basically a women’s sport, and field hockey was a men’s sport, whereas, in the world I had come from, all the girls were playing field hockey and the boys, who thought they were really rugged, were playing lacrosse. So, when I came to England and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I play lacrosse,’ and the girls would look at me, like, ‘Really?’ That was different. So, it did broaden my experience there in wonderful ways, and I’m still in touch with some of those teammates. 

JBG: You mentioned some travel with the lacrosse team. Did you have much other occasion to travel while you were at Oxford? 

PHW: I did. Ann Douglas – Ann Watson she was in those days – my future wife, we travelled together, especially that second year. We took a wonderful trip all through Wales and I forget how far north. We got as far north as York; I remember that. She had been reading English literature, and we were both very eager to see places we had read about. I remember going to Tintern Abbey and Carnarvon, and other places. That was a big part of the education. And then, we spent time on the continent as well, in France and Belgium. I remember going to Bayeux, which I had read about and I knew about the Norman Conquest and had always wanted to see the Bayeux Tapestry and was able to actually see it, you know, and eventually write about it in my final exams. 

There again, this was one of these stacked-deck situations. I mean, it was clear to my tutors that I didn’t know much European history, and so, one of the sections you had to do involved England from 400 to 1200, or something, and my nice tutor said, ‘Well, Wood, in your case, I think we’ll start in 1066,’ the time of the Norman Conquest, you know. So, I knew lots about the Norman Conquest, and he, unbeknownst to me, put a question that said, ‘Explain the Norman Conquest in the context of the Bayeux Tapestry.’ In other words, he had stuck this into the exam just as a sweet spot for me, and I nailed it. You know, I wrote a wonderful long essay, image by image, talking about the Norman Conquest. 

But it came back to haunt me because my examiners, the graders, didn’t know whether to give me a ‘first’ or a ‘second.’ This one essay was a ‘first.’ You know, ‘This guy really knows his stuff.’ But everything else was, kind of, mediocre. So, as you know, they could call you back for what they called a ‘Viva,’ an oral exam. Ann and I were both in Germany studying German, and I had to go all the way back to Oxford for this thing called a viva. I didn’t even know what it was, [1:00:00] and I walked in and, you know, within 20 minutes, they knew that I wasn’t as good as my essay on the Bayeux Tapestry, and they sent me back to Germany with a ‘second.’ But that was a stacked deck. He was trying to do something nice for me, but that was too nice. And my life has been full of those experiences. 

JBG: So, this was 1966, when you went down from Oxford, Peter, is that correct? 

PHW: Yes, it was. Yes. 

JBG: Okay.  

PHW: So, I started back at Harvard in the fall of 1966, which was a very different world from the early 1960s. You know, a lot had transpired in the two years that I was away. But go ahead. 

[technical issues 1:00:58-1:02:23] 

JBG: And did you go right from Oxford to Harvard to continue your studies for a PhD? 

PHW: Yes. 

JBG: Wonderful. And what was that experience like, returning to Harvard? 

PHW: At some point in there, and I don’t know whether it was that summer or the next summer, I had some interesting summer experiences. One summer, I had been on the Experiment in International Living. As a junior, I had gone to Poland and spent an exchange summer there, and that was important to me. So then, a couple of years later, I think just when I had come back from Oxford, the State Department began a program bringing African students to American universities. It was called ASPAU. I forget the acronym. They would pick two or three promising students from more than a dozen African countries – you know, they were competing with the Russians about all this – and they would disperse them to American universities. But in order to get them all through the culture shock, they flew them all into New York and bussed them up to Putney, Vermont, and ran an orientation week. And because I had had experience with that same facility, the Experiment in International Living, I was invited to be one of the counselors. 

JBG: Oh, wow. 

PHW: And so, I spent a week with all these African students – very sharp, very friendly, very diverse – most of whom had never met anyone from these other African countries. So, they were all getting to know each other. You know, this was a period of great African liberation. A lot of their countries were becoming independent. They were excited to be coming to America. And then, all of a sudden, here they were up in the woods in Putney, Vermont. They were bursting with energy and ready to go, but wanting to know, ‘What’s it going to be like when I get to the University of Kansas?’ One of them was going to the University of Hawaii. I think this was almost the same program that Obama’s father was on a couple of years later, you know. 

JBG: Wow.  

PHW: So, it was these bright African students being sent off to these various schools, and that was a wonderful experience for me. And then, another summer, maybe in the late 1960s, I worked for a thing called the Upward Bound Project, which was a Kennedy-era initiative to try to give summer uplift and experience to inner-city kids, and so, I lived in Teaneck, New Jersey with inner-city kids from Newark, and that was a really interesting experience too, because in three-quarters of the year, I was at upper-class Harvard, and then having these summertime experiences that were very different. 

JBG: And your experience living abroad in Poland was in your junior year of undergrad? 

PHW: Yes. That was in 1963, but it meant that they knew me, and I had experience. So, when this other thing came up-, I’m not sure of the dates, but it was mid-1960s, all these experiences, and these were my personal experiences. What was going on in the wider world was the civil rights movement. It was in full gear. As I said earlier, I was one step removed from it but very interested in it. I mean, you couldn’t not be touched by it one way or the other, and also in watching how the elders were responding to it, both regionally and generationally.  

Eventually, I would see that at Harvard, because by 1969, I was a junior administrator at Eliot House, the very dorm where I had lived, so I was very comfortable there. I was made the Assistant Senior Tutor and then the Senior Tutor, which gave me this weird situation when the college, sort of, blew up in 1969. Huge demonstrations, partly over Vietnam, partly over race relations, partly over teaching African American students, and why didn’t they do that, and so on. Just the way I said, from childhood, I was the middle of five children, here I was again, right in the middle. I could see what all these administrators were concerned about and the institution they were trying to protect and maintain, and I could see what all these students were upset about. My job was as a, sort of, go-between, and it was challenging. But again, very informative, and in my own work by that time, I was beginning to dive into African American history, so it was all coming together. 

JBG: Would you mind sharing more about that, Peter? The focus of your PhD at that time? 

PHW: So, I came back to Harvard in 1966. Even if you were doing American history, they had a foreign language requirement, and you had to pass a language exam. I think I had failed the German exam, so I had to do a summer school course, and this would have been the summer of 1967, when the Detroit riots broke out. I remember vividly, because this was a pivotal moment for me, watching the Detroit riots unfold over three or four days on a little black-and-white Sony television [1:10:00], and realizing quite quickly that the commentators for the evening news didn’t really know what was happening.  

Roger Mudd, a young reporter who had been in Vietnam for CBS, was covering Detroit just the way he had covered Vietnam, from a helicopter. He was hovering up above, looking down, and trying to explain why there was all this violence going on down there, and he had no idea who these people were or where they had come from any more than he understood Vietnam. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s supposed to be explaining it to us and he doesn’t understand, really, what’s going on, and none of the people around him at CBS or the New York Times or anyone else seem to know what’s going on.’  

As I said, I had long been interested in civil rights and race relations, and I was deeply committed to studying early American history. My father, as I’ve said, was a doctor. A good doctor, the first thing they do with an illness is to try to find out when it began, you know, ‘When did it start? When did you first start feeling this pain or this nausea?’ And I wondered, at that moment, you know…. I knew how these people had got to Detroit. They had migrated from the South. Roger Mudd didn’t seem to know that. And I knew why they had migrated from the South. They wanted to get out from under. But I wondered how far back I could go, you know, whether their world coincided with my study of colonial America at some point. 

I literally went to Widener Library the next morning, where the shelves in the history section were arranged colony by colony, and I started in Massachusetts, looking for books about Blacks in early America. I could find a few books and articles in Rhode Island and Connecticut, talking about very small but interesting Black populations, and in Virginia, there were one or two books. When I got to South Carolina, there was nothing, and I thought, ‘So, either there were no Black people in South Carolina, or nobody has ever really written about this.’ And that became my obsession and my dissertation, which was eventually called ‘Black Majority,’ because that was the one of the thirteen British mainland colonies that was more than half Black at the time of the American Revolution.  

That still is, to many people, a shocking realization and a surprise, but it certainly was in those days, even to many of my professors. As a graduate student, you’re always looking for a dissertation topic that is outside of what your elders seem to know about. You know, you’re trying to find something new. And there were only thirteen English colonies, and so, at first, it was, sort of, total surprise. You know, how could this have been overlooked for 100 years? And if it had been, what did that mean about the way history was framed, about the way these New England professors thought? And so, on the one hand, for a graduate student, it was a dream come true, of finding an exciting, large topic that hadn’t been tackled very well before. But it also led me into a very dismaying and difficult and different aspect of early American history that was not the Johnny Tremain, fifes and drums, Washington Crossing the Delaware version of American history that most Americans grew up with. 

JBG: As your focus started to turn towards South Carolina, what did your research look like at that time? Recognising that this was a little bit of an uncharted area of study, it sounds like, so, did that bring you to South Caroline? 

PHW: I should say that, to my professor’s credit – and this was Bernard Bailyn, who was my advisor – he didn’t prohibit it, you know, the way some of those professors could say, ‘No, you can’t study this, you have to do that.’ Because he had a subversive streak himself. He liked to find things other people hadn’t thought about, and he made a career doing that very well, but most of his students ended up following in his footsteps and what I call ‘colouring in the squares.’ You know, doing more of what he had been doing, about the ideological origins of the Revolution and what John Adams thought about this and that. 

This was totally different. So, he basically said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to find very much, but you can do this.’ Because the cliché that they had all been telling themselves in the North was that, ‘It would be nice if we could learn about this, but unfortunately, the records aren’t there. We just can’t do it, and so it’s not even worth trying.’ So you asked about the initial research – when I started, even before I’d been to South Carolina. When I started reading books, I was reinforced in my awareness that this was a huge hole. I could open a book on South Carolina, and there would be almost no references to African Americans. I could even look in the index, under ‘Negro,’ and there would be nothing there.  

Let’s say it’s a book of printed documents: nothing about Negroes. But then, when I actually went through the documents, they were there all over the place. In the eighteenth-century source, they were being mentioned, but the twentieth-century indexer was, ‘Oh, that’s not worth indexing,’ any more than a tree would be put in the index. And so, I started to get a clearer and clearer picture. It was discouraging in terms of the historiography, but it was encouraging in terms of the fact that there really was material. I was part of a whole cohort of people who were saying, ‘We need more African American history.’ This goes back to the social history impulses that I was describing: ‘We need to talk more about immigrants, we need to talk more about the enslaved, we need to talk more about women.’ I mean, all these things were happening.  

Anyway, I was able to plunge into that and realize that there was enough material. My thinking was that this was what I would call ‘a worst-case scenario.’ You know, I wanted to go as far South as I could and as far back in time as I could, and especially to a place where people were saying, ‘Oh, the records don’t exist; don’t bother to look.’ If I could write a dissertation or a book about that earliest period, then for someone studying Blacks in nineteenth-century Arkansas or something, it should be easier. You know, there are going to be more records. The same patterns are going to exist, of people saying, ‘Don’t study that,’ and trying to suppress it, but the material is going to be there. And so, if I could show that we can go back to square one, so to speak, and then push forward from there….

And again, this goes back to what I was saying about my father’s experience as a doctor: go find out when disease began. And if you think of American racism as a troubling cancer that we’ve never been able to eliminate [1:20:00], you want to know, ‘When did this tumor begin?’ And it’s in the seventeenth century, in dramatic, scary, terrible ways. 

JBG: I’m curious how long this journey was, towards when you started your PhD and when you first published Black Majority. 

PHW: Okay, so, I started graduate school in 1966, and then, by 1967, I’m already thinking about, ‘What should I write a dissertation about? Is there a colonial history topic that would also involve race relations issues and that would involve cultural contact?’ As I said, my undergraduate paper had been about Native Americans and Europeans, and so I was interested in colonial history, and in history more generally, as the coming together of cultures. You know, very different cultures, trying to understand each other, help each other, exploit each other. Colonial history, early modern history, is full of those encounters, all over the world, and so South Carolina became my laboratory for looking at that.  

And so, even in 1968, 1969, I was doing the rest of my coursework, but I was starting to do reading about South Carolina, and then in 1970, that was the 300th anniversary of the founding of the colony of South Carolina in 1670, and so, in Columbia, South Carolina, they were having a Tricentennial Celebration. They had set up big exhibits and they had a conference. One of my colleagues in the graduate program, a man named Ken Lockridge, had been one of these people who had been studying New England towns, but he had been invited to chair a session in South Carolina. We were having lunch together, and he said, ‘You know, I don’t really want to go down there. I don’t have time for it. But you seem to be interested in South Carolina. Why don’t I tell them you could go fill in?’ So, I flew to Columbia, South Carolina, and the very first day I was in the state, I was chairing a session on South Carolina history. 

JBG: This was your first time in South Carolina? 

PHW: This was my first time in South Carolina. 

JBG: Wow.  

PHW: I was faking it, you know, but learning, the good and the bad, and first of all, finding that they were very gracious, that Southern hospitality was a very real thing, and nobody would say anything negative to you. It was all very nice, but they were also surprised that I was interested in South Carolina history. So, as soon as the semester was over, I went back to Columbia, where the archives were, and rented a room and just spent weeks and weeks digging in the primary sources, and every Monday morning, I would come into the Archives, and they would say, ‘Oh, are you still here?’ I realized that they saw lots of Northern scholars who would drop in for a day or two just to say that they had done research in South Carolina, and they would find a little tidbit they needed and then they would leave. So, it was the real definition of carpetbaggers. 

The fact that I seemed to be staying and digging deeply, they didn’t know what to make of it. They would say, ‘What are you interested in?’ ‘Well, I’m studying African American-.’ One of the graduate students was working at the library desk there (he was a graduate student in history!), and he said, ‘Oh, were there slaves in those days?’ I actually put that in the introduction to my book; I told that story. So, ten years later, when I went back to South Carolina, one of the graduate students met me at the airport and said, ‘Hello, Dr Wood, I’m Joseph Smith. I know there were slaves in those days.’ He was afraid that he would show up in one of my books as a dolt.  

But they were steeped in the Lost Cause tradition, which was very focused on the Civil War, and they didn’t think much about the Revolution. I mean, there were occasional exceptions, but South Carolina had a lot of loyalists, it had a lot of people who supported the British, so not something to be proud of. Their focus was on the Civil War, even in their Tricentennial Exhibit. I remember in 1970 going to this exhibit and, again, they had hired history grad students to show people around, and they had a cotton gin and various little elements of the past, and big, blown-up photographs of Civil War generals on one side. He pointed them out very proudly and said, ‘That’s Robert E. Lee, and that’s Jackson.’ Then over here, on the other side, were all these Union generals, and he said, ‘That’s McClellan, and that’s that son of a bitch Grant,’ and I said, ‘Oh, really? He’s wearing a US Army uniform, and you’re calling him a son of a bitch. What is this?’ He said, ‘Oh, excuse me. Where are you from?’ I didn’t understand. He just assumed that everybody was going to still be playing that game, and that was the change that was taking place. You know, if it was ten years later, he would have been in a different world.  

So, they were intrigued by what I was doing, and very often, their loyalty trumped their fading Lost Cause ideology. It was like, ‘Okay, as long as you’re digging in the South Carolina past, that’s pretty cool.’ Because on the one hand, they didn’t want other people intruding on their history, but on the other hand, they were struck by how little they knew about their own history, or how stilted it had been. They were starting to understand that.  

So, I got a mixed reaction from various folks, but they were very friendly about showing me what I wanted to see. And I was happy finding more than I expected, in being able to tell this story in a coherent way from the beginning. And I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know how much I’m going to find. Maybe this book will go from 1670, maybe I’ll have to go up the War of 1812, or something.’ But by the time I got to 1740, I had found enough material to write a whole book, and I had found a logical ending point, which was a huge slave revolt that nobody knew anything about. 

JBG: Wow. 

PHW. Because they didn’t understand slavery in South Carolina, they also didn’t know there had been a major slave revolt in South Carolina, called the Stono Rebellion. I made sure to put that in the subtitle of my book just so that people would have to write it down and think, you know, ‘What’s the Stono Rebellion?’ Just two years ago, we had a conference in Charleston on the Stono Rebellion, and it was the first time in more than 280 years that South Carolina had even formally acknowledged the existence of this traumatic experience, which really shaped a lot of South Carolina history, a lot of later American history. 

JBG: Wow. And were you back and forth from Cambridge to South Carolina through the rest of your PhD? 

PHW: Yes. I took I don’t know how many trips. You know, summer trips, and over vacations. I think it was mostly over a couple of summers, and then realizing I had more than I needed, or I had enough to tell a story. Then it became a process of writing [1:30:00] that, and I did that mostly in New England. I finished in 1972 and so, I was writing, sort of, from 1970 to 1972, and that was a very hard time for me, which may have actually helped me in focusing on the trauma that I was looking at in the book. It’s the period when the national picture is falling apart: it’s Watergate, it’s Nixon. And my parental family was ending: both my parents died quite suddenly in the early 1970s when they were in their early 60s, so, I suddenly lost both parents. And then my marriage ended. Ann and I decided to go separate ways, and that was terribly hard, but all three of those things at once meant that I poured a lot of energy into writing the book, and that became my focus. It was certainly the hardest time in my life. 

JBG: Well, I’m very sorry, Peter. Thank you for sharing that. I recall you mentioned in our last conversation that part of this time was spent at Princeton. Is that right? 

PHW: So, as I said, Ann graduated a year before I did, in 1971, and she had done a terrific job in graduate school and was offered a job in the Princeton English Department—the first woman in their English department. 

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: And then, the question was, well, would there be a job for Peter there also? And lo and behold, there was. I mean, they were actually looking for an early American historian, and I was given the job even before I finished my PhD. Again, part of this privilege, and now they could say, ‘Oh, he’s a Rhodes Scholar,’ you know, ‘You should take him,’ blah, blah, blah. So, we moved to Princeton and Ann plugged into the English department. Not easily. I mean, there were a lot of resistant Princeton professors, and it was an even more cloistered place than Cambridge, for sure, or than Oxford. So, I was finishing up my dissertation there while she was starting teaching. And so, I would have started teaching at Princeton the next year, but our marriage ended. I was not eager to stay in Princeton. I mean, that was hard. 

I was offered a job at the Rockefeller Foundation; that was something that I had always thought about doing, working for the Rockefeller Foundation. And again, the pattern is clear. This was an inside job. My father had been on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. My mother, at Vassar, had known the woman who married John D. Rockefeller III. So, it wasn’t an unknown world to me, but it was a chance to try out something new that I knew I wanted to explore. Because my father was on the board, I knew what kind of work they did. I knew that their motto was ‘The wellbeing of mankind throughout the world,’ a very pompous motto, but almost like the Rhodes’ ‘Fighting the good fight,’ and in some ways parallel to the Rhodes, in that both John D. Rockefeller and Cecil Rhodes were exploitative, clever, white men selling natural resources at the highest price they could get and then, later in their lives, were wanting to put something back. I won’t say they were repentant, but they were not as ruthless as some of their other robber baron colleagues.  

So, that idea, of setting up, whether it’s a scholarship program at Oxford or a foundation in New York, but something that would be trying to make the world a better place. But that would not be denying this: ‘If we’re going to make the world a better place, we’d better find some clever, white men to do it for us.’ So, those were the similarities. The Rockefeller Foundation in the 1960s was beginning to change, but mostly, it was a very scientific organization. They did a lot of medicine; they did a lot of agriculture, the ‘green revolution.’ But the ‘green revolution’ hinged on rice, and here is this guy who has been writing about rice in South Carolina, and he’s Barry Wood’s son, so we’ll give him a job.  

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: I was one of three people giving out grants in the humanities, so it was a very small group. In foundation terms, very small amounts of money, but from another perspective, it was incredible leeway. In other words, I could do whatever I wanted in terms of visiting places, exploring projects, helping young people explore the social history that I was involved in. I was active in helping Women’s History to get started, and Oral History to get started. I could give strategic grants in ways that were really rewarding for me and, I think, helpful for the field.  

But, again, it was going back into this world of very high privilege, of wheeler-dealers talking to each other, and university presidents cutting deals, and it didn’t enhance my sense of human nature very much. I mean, I was troubled by a lot of what I saw, but I was also fortunate just to be able to meet so many amazing people. I would have lunch with Gloria Steinem or with Roberto Rossellini! It was a weird world in that regard. But people would take you seriously, because they didn’t want to upset somebody who worked at the Rockefeller Foundation.  

So, it was an interesting experience, and it not only meant that I moved from Princeton and started life again on my own, but it meant that I missed the worst part of an academic career, which is being an untenured junior professor. By the time I went back into academia in the mid-70s, my book had appeared and I was given tenure at Duke and that started another thing. But in fact, my relationship with Duke and North Carolina all began through the Rockefeller Foundation. They came asking for money for doing oral history, and they were interested in civil rights history.  

I was able to give Duke a grant to run a summer project and to pay for their first Black graduate student, a man named Gene Walker, a wonderful guy from Atlanta, Georgia. So, they came in and said, you know, ‘We just need money. He’s a great guy.’ They actually brought him to New York, and I met him and was very impressed. Just a sweet, powerful person, and, you know, ‘Just give us money to get Gene into graduate school.’ And that was [1:40:00] the kind of thing I could do. You know, that was a small amount of money compared to-. So, I said, ‘Okay, I can do that. We’ll do it.’ And then that led to an ongoing relationship with people at Duke and then helping get the Oral History Program started at Chapel Hill as well, and then spending time in Appalachia. So, it introduced me, not only to the people in the Triangle at Duke and Chapel Hill, but it also introduced me to the Highlander Center, and that became a big part of my life and one of the reasons, really, that I moved south in the mid-1970s.  

I really had a choice, when I decided to leave the Rockefeller Foundation, of taking a job at Duke, which was very appealing in an academic world, or going to work for Highlander, which was a whole different thing. That was a grassroots civil rights organization in East Tennessee. And again, the daughter of the founder had come in looking for a grant to make documentary films, and she went back to Tennessee and said, you know, ‘I met this nice, young guy. He seems to be interested in the kind of stuff we do.’ And the director, another young man, named Mike Clark, came to see me right after that. Unlike all these university presidents, who were eager to get money any way they could, Mike simply said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what we do, but you’re not going to like it.’  

Again, this is back to the ‘Bear’ Bryant football analogy – ‘This is what we do, but you’re not going to like this.’ And I was interested, but it was clear that I was partly interested just because he seemed to know what he was doing; it wasn’t, like, fishing around for money. He was just saying, ‘This is what we’re doing,’ you know. ‘And if you’re interested,’ he said, ‘Why don’t you just come down to Knoxville and I’ll meet you at the airport and I’ll drive you around Appalachia and introduce you to three or four of the programs and people that we’re involved with.’ And that was a life-changing experience. I think he probably calculated it in his mind, but he knew that the best thing to do was just show this guy what we’re up to.  

From then on, I would tell people, even when I’d decided to move to North Carolina, I would say that I taught at Duke and I learned at Highlander, because I would drive across the mountains every three months or so to go to a workshop at Highlander. Eventually, I was on their board and eventually, I chaired their board, and that was a whole different world for me. Again, it was the kind of world that I had seen in those summer experiences working with African students or inner-city students in New Jersey, but this was grassroots, but with careful thinking behind it. The first director and founder, a guy named Myles Horton, was an extraordinary individual. And, you know, Rosa Parks had actually gone to Highlander and spent time there before she sat down on the bus.  

Highlander was one of the few places during the civil rights movement where Blacks and whites could get together in the South in one place, and they paid a price for that. They were raided by the state troopers and they were accused of being communists, because they sided with Martin Luther King. But I was intrigued by it all, and they were intrigued by me, partly because I had these Rockefeller Foundation connections, but also because I was interested in history. In those days activists were so engaged that they didn’t have time for much history, and so, someone who seemed engaged but really thought that the past was very important, and it would actually help – if we understood the past better, maybe we could do better in the present – that was intriguing to these folks. And so, we had a really nice relationship and, as I say, I just learned a lot from them. 

JBG: It sounds like this is a relationship with the Highlander Center that still exists, that certainly existed throughout all of your time at Duke and, it sounds like, today as well. 

PHW: It does. I’m much farther away now, living in Colorado, and they’ve gone different ways, and I don’t know the personnel there as well, but I’m still very supportive and interested in what they do. And some of the people that I first met there, I’ve stayed in touch with: John Gaventa (Tennessee & Balliol 1971), who was also a Rhodes Scholar, actually. He went to Vanderbilt. His parents had been missionaries in Africa. He went to Oxford a couple of years after me, but then he worked at Highlander. His English wife, Juliet Merrifield, also worked there, and we are still in close touch. One of his sons lives here in Colorado, and so, we compare notes often, and he and his wife have both been inspirational to me, doing a kind of grassroots work that I never quite did, being at a place like Duke. You know, if you’re in an elite school, whether it’s Harvard, or Princeton, or Duke, it’s a different deck of cards. And so, it was really important for me to maintain these ties with people who were using their skills in a somewhat different way but were all headed in the same direction. 

JBG: Yes. So, you were on the faculty at Duke for just about 40 years, I think. Is that right? 

PHW: Almost, I think. Yes, I started in the mid-1970s and I officially stopped teaching, I think, in 2008, so it was a long time. 

JBG: Yes, and I imagine it’s so difficult to share highlights from a 40-year career of that magnitude, but would you mind sharing a little bit more about your work at Duke and your work with both graduate and undergraduate students?  

PHW: Well, it was rewarding, would be the only word for it. Certainly, it changed over time; the institution changed, and the department changed; I changed. But, as I say, I had gotten to know some of these historians even when I was at the Rockefeller Foundation, so I hit the ground running, basically, when I arrived there. As I say, I had tenure, I knew some of these people, and there was this sense that we could really do something interesting in this history department. It was using oral history, so a lot of it was civil rights oriented. This was the late 1970s, early 1980s, when the civil rights movement was in the rear-view mirror, but just barely, so you could talk to a lot of these people and study and then work backwards from there. But starting with this first student, Gene Walker, whom they brought in, I watched the department build almost geometrically, because Gene was so impressive that then, the next year, two or three other Black students wanted to come to Duke, to graduate school.  

And then, at one point, we got Jennifer Morgan from Oberlin, who worked with me and did early American history, but she partly came because her grandmother lived in Durham, I think. You know, she had roots in Durham and knew that it was okay. In those days, Black students going to graduate school thought twice about going to the South. By now, the Northern schools had opened up, there were more opportunities, so to go to the South was not an automatic given, by any means. But once we built a cohort, Jennifer then brought two or three of her friends from Oberlin the next year, you know. So, after that, we had no trouble recruiting. We would just say [1:50:00], ‘Well, you know, go have dinner with these guys and ask them if it’s working,’ and they did the recruiting for us. 

And there was a kind of synergy. You know, they were all learning from each other, inspiring each other, and at a certain point, I think in the 1980s, I think we were training more than half of the Black PhDs in history coming from Duke, because there were so few in the whole country. Ten years later, a lot of other schools were doing better at it, but they didn’t have the location and the resources for studying the civil rights movement. So, if you know you want to study recent Black history, why not be in North Carolina instead of New Hampshire? And so, they built a remarkable community and went on to extraordinary careers. 

For me, as an early American historian, I was on the edge of all that. And just the way, at Highlander, I was trying to say, ‘You know, history is important even for activists,’ the same thing was true in the department. I was able to say, ‘You know, civil rights history is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s go back to the beginning.’ And I was lucky to recruit half a dozen of the best of them back into that eighteenth-century world. Julius Scott, a wonderful scholar who has passed away now, who was at the University of Michigan, was part of that, a leading part. Vince Brown, who’s now a professor at Harvard. There were a number of them, you know, who were lured back into the early American sphere and that was very satisfying for me. It’s been satisfying to see what they’ve achieved since then. 

JBG: That’s amazing. And in addition to your work at the Highlander Center, while you were at Duke, you shared with me last time we spoke a little bit about your work with Southern Exposure, and I wonder if you would mind sharing about that as well.  

PHW: Well, it’s a wonderful group, called the Institute for Southern Studies, and they were more or less my age, a little bit younger, and mostly white southerners who had been inspired by the civil rights movement and had never given up on it, and who wanted to change the South. You know, came from the South, and realized…. There were a couple of really good African Americans as well – Leah Wise was involved – and they had experiences that I had never had, but a kind of commitment that I shared and enjoyed. But they were also on the edge of the academy. Some of them were teaching, like Jacquelyn Hall, who was running the Oral History Program at UNC, but most of them were doing other things, but with a shared commitment.  

They started putting out a journal called Southern Exposure, which was not academic. It was aimed at other likeminded folks, and it was really trying to show both the best and the worst of the South, show that it was more diverse and more exciting. So, they were brushing aside the sort of Lost Cause nonsense that they had been raised with and trying to look differently at the South, both the present and the future, but also the past. And so, here is this young historian at Duke who is also interested in the Southern past and who is eager to do some non-academic writing. You know, to write short articles with illustrations that will reach a very different public from the academic world, and they are having a good time doing it.  

It was almost a collective. They would play volleyball together and cook hot dogs and then do all the printing and the mailing of the journal and licking envelopes and that kind of things. It was a community, and very different from the exciting academic community that I was involved in, and in a way, different from Highlander as well. And it was in my backyard, you know; I was very close by. It was a relief to me. It really helped me find the best of the South and such extraordinary people, and with a kind of Southern openness and generosity that was not part of my New England education or my St. Louis, Baltimore, uptight private school education. 

JBG: That’s really lovely. And, Peter, did you retire from Duke in around 2008? Is that right? 

PHW: I did, yes. You were asking about how it changed over time, and the high point was in 1980s and 1990s with this cohort of exciting graduate students, white and Black, men and women, just a very varied and interesting group. But the academy was changing, and Duke, in fact, was changing academically. Their English department was becoming very theoretical, and the activism of the older days was disappearing, and they were recruiting different kinds of undergraduates in certain ways.  

And then, in the early 2000s, there was a scandal with the Duke lacrosse team, and a lot of them had been my students and I got, kind of, tangled up in that, in that I was very upset by the way that they had behaved and the way that the university handled it. And cell-phones were coming into use, and that was one of the biggest changes for me, that students were more interested in their cell-phones than they were in coming to office hours and having conversations. That was where I did a lot of my best teaching, was one-on-one with students, and it so was a different time.  

So, I had thought, by the time I got to my 60s, that I would be living off of the energy of my students. You know, that if they were asking tough questions, then I could respond with good answers and more questions, but that engagement was disappearing. It was harder to create really, really deep…. You know, you couldn’t have an extended conversation with anyone, because everyone was learning to write in little, short tweets and becoming comfortable with it. So, by the 2000s, students were more comfortable writing me an email than they were coming to my office to chat. And that was hard, so it was becoming less rewarding.  

I still had wonderful students and I was lucky to be there, but I also felt that younger people should be taking over. From the career I’ve described, I was encountering, from the beginning, lots of old, white men who were staying in their jobs too long. You know, I saw that from an early age, and I wanted to [2:00:00] to retire early and do other things. By that time, I was married to another historian, Elizabeth Fenn, who had been teaching at George Washington University and then briefly at Duke. But she was interested in Western history and was offered a job at the University of Colorado. She’s younger than me, and so, when I retired, she took a chair here at Boulder and we moved West. 

JBG: So this is the 50th anniversary of the release of Black Majority and you’ve just released an edited edition. I was wondering if you would mind sharing what inspired you to revisit your work 50 years later. 

PHW: I had thought that, retiring, I would spend a lot of time on climate-change issues, and I’ve managed to do some of that. But I was surprised when I got to Colorado that there was so little knowledge and understanding of African American history, and so I got involved with high school teachers in trying to fill that gap. And then, Black Lives Matter happened, and that made me think that maybe-, it certainly showed that we had not progressed as far as we thought we had and that, at least from my historian’s perspective, a lot of it was based on continuing ignorance about Black history. You know, false notions that really were the lingering after-effects of the Lost Cause Southern racism, and that had actually spread and infected parts of the North and West. 

You know, Boulder County here, where I live, was run by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. So, there was work to be done. And also, I had become more and more interested over the years in the very period that Black Majority deals with. I could see it in a broader perspective. The late seventeenth century has always intrigued me particularly, and I was able to see that it was a time kind of like our own in some ways, because it was a raging battle between what I would call rationalist thinking, on the one hand – I mean, this is the age of Spinoza, and Harvey at Oxford who discovered the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century. There was a lot of scientific change going on, especially with microscopes – Leeuwenhoek – and with telescopes, and the world is opening up to people in amazing new ways. But at the same time, that’s being repressed and combatted by religious forces and political forces. So, there is a real battle going on. And this is the time of the spread of slavery, and so, the question is, is slavery going to be discontinued and frowned upon and thrown out, or is it too good to be true? Is it going to lead on to Cecil Rhodes, you know, this world of white, male Brits exploiting the world’s resources and justifying it in all kinds of complicated ways.  

And then, there’s a turning point there, an early turning point, in the late seventeenth century, what Jonathan Israel calls the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. There are real possibilities for rethinking the world dramatically, on the one hand, and there also are tremendous economic and religious and social forces trying to hold that back. I feel as though we’re in the same sort of situation today, on a much greater scale, but where the issue may not be enslavement so much as climate change, but where you have the same sorts of splits between rational thinking and respect for science on the one hand, and anti-democratic, anti-science fundamentalism on the other. 

JBG: You shared with me last time we talked, Peter, about some of the work you’ve done with younger students during your time in Colorado, and I was wondering if you would like to speak to that.  

PHW: I wish I had done more. One of the things you learn about Colorado is that they always want to get on to the next new thing. So, as I say, I did work with middle school teachers, but then, the next ‘cool thing’ turned out to be something else, and they were off, so that that caved in on itself, unfortunately. But I did have a chance to take a couple of groups of middle school students to South Carolina, and I worked with a fourth-grade class that wrote books about the Middle Passage and published them and illustrated them. They were raring to go; they wanted to learn more. But again, because of the way the wind was blowing, it didn’t all pan out.  

As I say, I wish I could do more. I don’t have children and grandchildren of my own. I no longer have students, which were a wonderful kind of relationship, and so, getting involved with middle school students was great. (I talked yesterday on Zoom with one of my Duke students who became a doctor in Chapel Hill, working with young people, five to fifteen years old, and it was fun just hearing how energizing that was for him.) And then Covid came along, and that made it even harder as well.  

So, I haven’t been able to do as much as that as I would have liked, and as a culture, we’re not very good at that, and especially, we’re not good at creating intergenerational connections very much. I knew that as a young person studying American history; I knew that one characteristic of the United States from the beginning was that it was forward-looking and that it didn’t pay very much attention to its elders, but I did have a chance. I was encouraged to think about doing a 50th anniversary of Black Majority and, you know, hope springs eternal. So I thought, ‘Okay, maybe there is a broader audience now for this early story.’ I’m pessimistic about that. I have low expectations, because I think we’re more presentist than ever. 

Even when we talk about Black history, we work backwards from the present. I went to a session at the Front Range Community College here in Longmont last week. It was Black History Month, and they had a whole board with pictures of important African Americans, all of whom were from the twentieth and twenty-first century! Michael Jordan was up there and various folks, and then there were two people from the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and nobody before that. So, even on that board during Black History Month, there were no Black people from before 1800 even suggested or represented. And that’s where we are, you know, just like that poor graduate student in Columbia, South Carolina who said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know we had slavery in those days.’ People know about Reconstruction, they know about the Civil War, they know about antebellum cotton plantations a little bit, but anything before that is just [2:10:00], ‘Oh, yes, there was probably slavery then.’  

So, there’s no understanding of the generational scope of enslavement, of eight or nine or ten or eleven generations of people under these conditions. (I don’t call them ‘Plantations’ anymore. I tend to refer to them as ‘slave labor camps,’ because that’s really what they were.) I’m working on a book now – I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to finish it – but it’s called Blackout, and it’s about that long duration of time in which African Americans were not only being exploited physically and morally and emotionally in all kinds of ways, but mentally as well. They were not allowed to read and write, you know?  

It’s hard for any of us to even imagine-, I mean, you don’t know anybody who is illiterate. You may know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. But imagine if you couldn’t read and write, and your parents couldn’t, and your neighbors couldn’t, and your children couldn’t. But the white folks in the big house could read and write, and they were telling you that you couldn’t read because you were too stupid. You’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, give me a chance,’ and they’re saying, ‘No, we’re not going to give you a chance.’ And the very fact that they’re prohibiting you from learning to read and write shows that they have a sneaking suspicion that you might get good at it and you might learn some stuff, and you might find out about the wider world.  

So, this is my new Black Majority. Just the way, 50 years ago, when I realized, ‘Oh, my God, nobody has looked at African Americans in South Carolina,’ now I’m saying, ‘Oh, my God, everybody has been studying slavery for 50 or 100 years and nobody has really focused on this Blackout.’ And when they do write about Black education, they’ll say, ‘Oh, slaves were not allowed to read and write, but Frederick Douglass could read and write.’ So, they quickly jump to the wonderful exceptions and tell you about Phillis Wheatley and her poetry. Well, that’s all very nice, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule that 90% of these people were not allowed to read and write and were punished severely.  

The obvious corollary to that is that, at a certain point, you start to feel that you’re stupid, rather than just ignorant. In the back of your head, you may say, ‘Well, gosh, maybe they’re right. Everybody I know who can read and write is white; maybe we Black folks, maybe God didn’t plan for us to read and write.’ You know, you internalize some of that racist language, which is saying, ‘We’re going to prohibit you from reading and writing, but then we’re going to call you stupid for not being able to read this newspaper.’  

We’ll see how far I can get with that. I’ve always liked studying things that are obvious in retrospect. You know, that are ‘hidden in plain sight,’ let’s put it that way. So, the Black majority in South Carolina is, like, ‘Well, hey, guys, it’s been there for hundreds of years. It’s just, nobody talked about it.’ And I’ve tended to do that with other things as well. 

JBG: I’m curious, as you think about this phase of your career and the book that you’re working on now and some of the other current work that you’re doing, if you would mind sharing what motivates and inspires you today. 

PHW: Well, as you can tell, my love of history is abiding, and it’s partly because it allows you to think about so many different things. You know, everything has a past, every place, every person, every culture, and so, the limits of understanding it are our own limits in our own heads in terms of what evidence we’re able to find and how we’re able to put it together. That story is constantly changing, and I feel now, as I felt 50 or 60 years ago, that we do better as individuals and as cultures if we understand our past. Certainly, this is the whole notion of psychiatry and therapy, that if you’re kidding yourself about your own past, you’re going to bump into lots more problems in the future and keep repeating them, probably.  

I apply that to cultures as well. I feel as though, interesting as our society is, it’s been a culture of denial almost from the beginning. You know, that there has been this huge lie in the way we talk about our collective history as a culture, and that if we could engage in the therapy we need, if we could overcome our denial and really talk about it, we could knit the family back together. I talked at the beginning about being in the middle of the five siblings, and being in, certainly at least in relative terms, a very healthy family. I mean, there were problems, I’m sure, but realizing that you can have a coherent collective where everybody is respected for who they are and what they do.  

And you know, that’s the way my mother saw her five children, I think. It may not be the way they saw her, but that issue now, if you expand it to a whole culture, is how do you get a varied culture like our own to also be coherent? And I think in my lifetime, that’s what we have lost. I mean, it was not coherent even in the mid-twentieth century. There were these terrible rifts that we’ve been trying to uncover and discover and talk about and heal and ‘do therapy’ and make changes. But as I said earlier, we haven’t gone far enough, fast enough. You know, we’ve only been lying on the couch once a month instead of three times a week.  

We haven’t done the historical therapy, and that involves, as I keep saying, going back to the beginning. ‘Where does this begin? When did you first start-? Where did these hatreds and rivalries begin?’ Again, in the family, in the individual situation, the more you realize about how deep it is and how hard it is, you go to therapy for two months. And then you say, ‘Okay, am I done now? I’ve talked about that awful experience in the third grade. Can I go home?’ ‘Well, yes, if you want to, but if you want to stick with it, we can go deeper and we can understand more about it.’  

I’ve always felt that that opportunity was there in the 1960s and 1970s. The culture was prosperous; it was victorious against a wicked foe. The defeat of fascism was rewarding and impressive and costly, but we were on the right side. We came out well, and we were in a position to address lots of our prior problems. That’s when, in my Rhodes interview, I said, ‘If we put all this into education, maybe we could change some things.’ That’s a window of opportunity in the 1960s and 1970s, to really [2:20:00] secure civil rights, to really open opportunities for women, to really address planetary problems. You know, Earth Day starts in 1970. People were aware that we had gone to the Moon, and one of the rewards of it was getting that picture of planet Earth as this little marble where we’re all in it together.  

So, my notion of where history ought to go would be to write more and think and talk more about us as a species, not as men and women and Brazilians and Chinese. I mean, we’ve done a lot of that work. We know about all of these different cultures. But we have real trouble seeing ourselves as a species. You know, we don’t accept Darwin. In American culture, religious fundamentalism has become more and more dominant and is taking over the national government and the culture in ways that we have naively overlooked. We’re very far from accepting evolution, and from seeing ourselves as the one species that has caused all this: you know, the fires that are going on in Texas or the storms that are hitting Japan. And it’s going to get worse, and so those are things that are uppermost in my mind these days. 

JBG: Thank you, Peter. As we close our conversation, I would love to ask you a few questions related to reflecting back on your Oxford experience and your experience with the Rhodes Scholarship. First, I was wondering if you would mind speaking to what impact the Scholarship might have had on your life. 

PHW: I think most Rhodes Scholars, I guess, realize that it’s a blessing and a curse. You know that it opens all kinds of doors. The experience at Oxford is usually amazing. I know I felt very lucky to be there, but I know that some of my scientist friends from the United States in those days felt they wanted to get back to a well-funded lab in Berkeley or somewhere. So, it’s rewarding in itself to get a wonderful two-year gap, and it opens all kinds of doors for you later on, legitimately and illegitimately. I mean, it’s been a mixed blessing, and I have to wonder. If I had not gotten a Rhodes, I would have joined the Peace Corps, probably, and lived in West Africa for two years, or learned Spanish and gone to Bolivia, or done something totally different, you know, met different people and formed different opinions.  

But the route I’ve been describing is one that begins within the Establishment and stays there, and yet is looking at it close-up and critically. In other words, being part of this, sort of, anointed elite, but also very suspicious of it, and very aware of its foibles and its failings, its shortcomings and its complacency and bigotry and extreme wealth. So, going back to what I was saying before, the opportunities of the 1960s and 1970s are crushed in the 1980s, and the world I’ve lived in, from roughly the late 1970s to the present, has been one of expanding inequality, even in the United States, and much more drastic than we understand, because most Rhodes Scholars and most of the people I grew up with, we’re not in the super-rich, but we’re schmoozing with the super-rich. We’re always wanting to move one step higher and be closer to power, and we’re very poor at understanding people whose life experiences have been drastically different. That can get played then, by politicians, into anti-immigrant feeling and antisemitic feeling and anti-Muslim feeling and recurrent anti-Black feeling.  

So, the loss of cultural coherence that I talk about is related to the growing economic and social inequalities that we live with now. I remember, around 2000 or so, when the word ‘billion’ just started to come into being. When I was a kid, you know, you talked about millions. People who were really rich were millionaires. And then all of a sudden, there were a few people who were actually billionaires. The radio commentators would mix up the words. They’d say, ‘Is that with an “m” or with a “b”? Are you talking about someone with a billion dollars?’ And now we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, just obscene wealth at the top that’s really comparable to the ancien régime in France, or the robber barons at earlier times, and I think even worse. So, it’s true nationally, it’s true globally, and if Rhodes Scholars are going to fight the fight, that’s a fight they have to think about and deal with and not become part of the problem. 

JBG: I think that leads really beautifully into my next question, Peter, which is, we’re at a moment where we just celebrated the 120th anniversary of the Scholarships and are envisioning what the next chapter of the Scholarship looks like, and so, I’m curious what your hope would be for the future of the Rhodes Scholarship? 

PHW: Well, I do take pride and satisfaction in the ways that it has broadened itself, no question about it, and become more egalitarian, and that’s marvellous, but at the same time, it has been affected by this, kind of, growth in a pro-business mentality that has pervaded, certainly our culture, and much of western culture in the last generation. And so I’m not as impressed with the emphasis on entrepreneurship and getting ahead and founding big companies and doing that kind of thing, and I’m sorry to see that play a role.  

You know, there is something exciting that can happen when you bring together a group of people who are talented and young (and relatively idealistic, because they’re relatively inexperienced) and see what sort of synergy that can create. But, as I say, there’s always the chance of simply becoming part of the problem. So, it’s always an open question, just as it was with Cecil Rhodes himself. There’s a famous line from Winston Churchill, when people complained that he was drinking too much. He said, ‘I’ve taken more out of the bottle than the bottle has taken out [2:30:00] of me,’ or something. He understood that he was in a risky position.  

I think Rhodes Scholars are in a risky position, because the planet is in a risky position, and Rhodes Scholars are going to drown just as easily as everybody else. And if they have helped create climate change, then that’s too bad. My Rhodes classmate, Gus Speth (South Carolina & Balliol 1964), turned his life into working against climate change at a time when it was still not fashionable. He was part of the solution in the Carter administration. In the 1970s, Gus was saying, ‘Look, we have an opportunity to address this.’ He was part of a whole cohort of scientists and administrators and people who saw that we could do something.  

To me, an emblem was when Ronald Reagan was elected and took the solar panels off the roof of the White House. We’re still living with that mentality, where we have a whole party and then some who really believe that this is a hoax and an exaggeration. But science doesn’t play with hoaxes; natural forces are natural forces. We all need to understand that and work harder, no matter what age you are. So, at age 80, I still feel that way. 

JBG: Thank you, Peter. And in closing, I was wondering if you had any words of advice that you would pass on to either the Rhodes Scholars who are at Oxford today, or future Rhodes Scholars. 

PHW: Well, you’re in a privileged position, and so you need to learn to listen more than speak, and you need to push the boundaries always. The very fact that you’ve been successful in the first 20 years of your life can lead to being cautious and thinking, ‘Well, I’m doing better than Joe over there, so that’s all I need to do.’ There’s a whole world of radical change that may or may not come from Rhodes Scholars, but it will come from Rhodes Scholars who listen to less fortunate people. 

JBG: Thank you. And is there anything that you’d like to share, Peter, before we close, that we haven’t had the opportunity to talk about yet? 

PHW: We’ve covered a lot of the ground. I think the one thing that we didn’t touch on that’s a source of great pride still for me is my involvement with the art world and with, particularly, the painter Winslow Homer and with the complicated ways that I got involved in studying his Black images through the Menil Foundation in Houston, which was another one of those non-academic realms that had a big influence. It came through the Rockefeller Foundation, because Roberto Rossellini said, ‘Hey, I’m going to Houston. Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll meet these people?’  

When these people saw that I had that beautiful Géricault painting on the cover of my book, they thought, ‘Oh, he must know a lot about Black images in western art.’ The Menil Foundation was just starting up a huge big project studying the image of the Black in western art, and so, I was able to relive, in the art world, the same experience I had had in the colonial history world, of saying, ‘Wait a minute. Where are the Africans? Where are the African Americans?’ That was what the Menil Foundation was doing, but they weren’t paying much attention to American artists. I had always been very interested in Winslow Homer, and so, working with Karen Dalton, who was at the Menil Foundation, we were able to put together a whole exhibition of “Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks During the Civil War and Reconstruction Years.”  

Just as with the colonial historians, that came out of the blue for most of the art scholars. It was, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I never realized.’ And it was because they knew so little American history. They didn’t know much about the Civil War. They knew much about the history of American painting, but not about the social context in which it was taking place, and so they had missed this really important element of Homer as a painter and some of his most revolutionary and greatest paintings, I think. I was able to write three books about Homer and focus on some of those paintings and see the art world respond to that and absorb it in a way that was very rewarding for me. I think I’ve had probably more of an influence on American art history than on colonial American history. Probably, I don’t know. 

JBG: I’m thinking back to what you shared at the beginning of our conversation about your mother taking you to the St. Louis art museum and those early experiences. 

PHW: Absolutely. In those days, the St. Louis Museum may have had one or two Winslow Homers. I don’t know, but people had them in their homes. In the mid-twentieth century, this New England culture that was trying to be—I don’t know what they were trying to be—but they had Winslow Homer reproductions in their studies. (They also had Vincent Van Gogh reproductions. Van Gogh was being rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century. I remember when a big Van Gogh exhibit came to St. Louis, and it was a big deal for St. Louis, because it was the thing we talked about. You know, it was, like, ‘We can appreciate these sunflowers too, and they’re willing to come all the way to St. Louis, and we get to go see them in the St. Louis Art Museum.’) And so, there was this sense of Homer, but completely in the white context. He was an artist for sailors and for nostalgic, nineteenth-century schoolyards and things, but his Civil War experience and the Black experience were not as well understood.  

JBG: Wow. 

PHW: But yes, the St. Louis Art Museum. And interesting, this gets us back to this theme of being on the inside. I talked about Perry Rathbone who directed the museum. Later on, when I was through college, my cousin, Jim Wood, who has passed away now, became the director of that St. Louis Art Museum. And in fact, he later went on to head the Art Institute in Chicago. He was the one who helped me find that Géricault painting that’s on the cover of Black Majority. It’s back on the cover of the new 50th anniversary, so I’m very proud of it. He was a wonderful friend and relative. 

JBG: Wonderful. Well, Peter, thank you so much for being part of this project, for joining us in this first phase. I feel very honored to have had this conversation with you and I’m very grateful for your time. 

PHW: Oh, Jamie, this is a treat. I appreciate it, and we could go on a long time. It’s interesting to try to think back over these stories and make new connections. I appreciate it. 

JBG: So, I’ll stop our recording there.  

[ends 2:39:39]