Bridging the Pond, as it were, a British expert in American history. Not in the New York Times, for this is a British person, even if his specialty was the US. Witness the obituary above about a US soldier, Modesto Cartagena; his obit won't appear in British media, for he is outside of their focus. Yet, this man is something of an anomaly: his exertise was US history, yet he likely was utterly unknown in the US itself.
The London Times has his obit. The American Historical Association awarded him a prize in 2002. NPR has a link to the London Times obit. And more. This is Guardian's obit.
Jack Pole, who has died aged 87, was one of the most erudite and insightful of British historians of early American history, and one of the first British historians of America whose work was taken seriously by US historians. He had the courage to tackle the big ideas of American ideology – among them liberty, equality and representation. He also anticipated, in work shared with his friend Jack P Greene, the modern interest in Atlantic history. Throughout his career, he showed great intellectual independence. Because he could take a very broad view, and root it in detailed mastery of the archival sources, he compelled respect even from those who did not expect to agree with him.
Indeed, the Nassau County OPAC has nine entries under his name. *
His intellectual method, in fact, resembled his style in the game of cricket, the other great obsession of his life. Crouched at the wicket, he would defend, if necessary, for hours, with infinite tenacity, then abruptly deliver the most elegant of off-drives or a blatant slog over the bowler's head.
If I had any idea what that meant ...
For 10 years until 1989, he held the Rhodes chair of American history at Oxford University and a fellowship at St Catherine's College. He succeeded in ensuring that American history should be taken seriously at Oxford, and caused waves by insisting that it should be taught only by qualified specialists. He was also one of the ringleaders in the successful move to deny an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher, not (as Conservatives who did not know him maintained) out of snobbery, but because he considered that Thatcher had damaged British higher education.
Of course, by American history the obituarist means US history. That inaccuracy aside, interesting points: that taking US history seriously needed to be debated seems absurd; give that over to snobbery. And that US history needed to be taught by specialists is another absurdity: surely those who opposed such would be aghast to have any other academic subject not taught by such specialists.
The London Times obit starts off this way: Professor Jack Pole was the foremost British historian of the United States in his generation, and his books and articles won him recognition and acclaim in the highest ranks of US historians. He was an expert on the American Revolution but he wrote on all periods and linked the history of the US to that of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Yes, US history, not American history.
For such a careful researcher, Jack was a prolific author. His 1966 book Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic first established his reputation. In 1983 he published The Pursuit of Equality in American History, which many scholars regard as his best book, though his 1975 work, The Decision for American Independence, has been influential for generations of students.
Jack was born in London. His father, Joe, a journalist and later head of publicity in London for the Hollywood studio United Artists, and his mother, Phoebe, daughter of the Rickards haulage and taxi-owning family, were classic Hampstead intellectuals of the period. They moved in a world of academics, psychoanalysts and socialists. Jack's father knew all the stars of Hollywood's golden age, and Jack himself received a Christmas card for many years from Charlie Chaplin.
Academics, psychoanalysts and socialists: the politics of the first two groups are not specified, nor are the occupations of the third.
Jack was sent to King Alfred's, the progressive school in Hampstead. It was there that he began his love affair with cricket. It is said that until late middle age, his batting average – mostly accumulated on behalf of the Trojan Wanderers, the team he founded with his lifelong friend, the music critic David Cairns – exceeded his years. The Trojan Wanderers survive, a nomadic team for which the conductor Colin Davis, the tenor Robert Tear and many others (including myself) have turned out. On one occasion, an Indian academic was pressed into service to make up the numbers and put in at number 11. When he made 60 in a few minutes, it turned out that he had admitted not to playing a bit in India, as Jack thought, but to playing for India.
Pole's service in the second world war was as an anti-aircraft officer, first at Scapa Flow in Orkney, then in the campaign against the Italians in the Horn of Africa, famous for the exploits of Orde Wingate's Gideon Force. After the war he went to Oxford to read history. The decisive connection of his life came when he went on a scholarship to Princeton, in New Jersey, and met three British students who became lifelong friends, Cairns, Anne Robbins (daughter of the economist Lionel Robbins, who became an editor at Penguin) and the historian Gerald Aylmer.
Jack and Cairns started the first cricket team at Princeton. But the high point of his years in the US, perhaps, came when Jack, David and his sister Margaret, and Anne drove across the continent in an elderly Chevrolet, sleeping in the open air most nights. In Hollywood they were treated royally by the friends of Jack's father. At Princeton, Jack came under the influence of the great American liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, and while working for his PhD he became, for a time, an instructor at the university. There he met and married Marilyn Mitchell, with whom he had a son, Nicholas, and two daughters, Ilsa and Lucy. The marriage was dissolved in 1988.
Dissolved. How understated a term.
In 1953 Jack returned to a lectureship at University College London, where he taught until he was called to Cambridge to be reader in American history and government and a fellow of Churchill College, of which he became vice-master (1975-78). In 1979 he moved to Oxford. In his early 70s, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. However, he continued to work in spite of the disease for many years. Jack was a talented painter and, with the onset of more serious symptoms, he converted effectively to a style that involved stippling the paint instead of brushstrokes.
Stippling is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stippling
Almost a decade after his diagnosis, in 2005, he came out with a definitive edition of The Federalist Papers, in which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay laid out the fundamental political ideas of the American revolution. It was a subject ideally chosen to engage Jack's grasp of the relationship between history and political philosophy. He is survived by his three children and five grandchildren.
• Jack Richon Pole, historian and cricketer, born 14 March 1922; died 31 January 2010
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 March 2010 18.41 GMT
- Article history
The Times obituary takes an entirely different tack: it is jaunty, and offers details glossed over or ignored in the Guardian obit. To wit:
Jack Richon Pole was born in London in 1922. His father, Joe Pole, had arrived in Britain from Ukraine as a boy. The Jewish family were en route to New York but got no farther than Glasgow. Joe was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War and later he worked as a journalist and as the head of publicity for United Artists in London. There he met Jack’s mother, Phoebe Rickards, from a more anglicised Jewish family who ran a fleet of horse-drawn carriages, and later, taxis. She had been a suffragette and was once arrested in Hyde Park. Later she was a prominent Labour member of the council in Finchley and frequently crossed swords with the local MP, Margaret Thatcher. When his mother died, Jack Pole received a handwritten letter of condolence from Mrs Thatcher, by then the Prime Minister.
It says so much more than the Guardian's obit. The connection with Thatcher isn't detailed in the latter; only passing reference is made to it. This one offer rich detail.
This radical background left Pole with an ingrained lifelong hatred of social and racial injustice. He campaigned for the rights of Commonwealth immigrants in Britain in the 1960s and supported the struggle for black civil rights in the US. He was sent to progressive schools: first, aged 4, to the experimental Malting House School in Cambridge founded by the educationist Geoffrey Pyke, which Pole disliked, and then King Alfred School in Hampstead where he was much happier.
On leaving school he went straight into the Army and for most of his six years in uniform he served in antiaircraft batteries, at Scapa Flow, in Somaliland and on the South Coast trying to shoot down V1 flying bombs. He went up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1946 where he took a First in modern history. His closest friend in the college, F. M. L (Michael) Thompson, also became a distinguished professor of history. Pole could have become a French historian, but he chose to work on the then unfavoured subject of US history and studied for his PhD in Princeton from 1949. It was unusual for a young British historian to be trained in the US at this time, but it was the making of Pole’s career. It introduced him to the US, its leading historians and their most recent work. During one summer holiday he and another notable English historian, Gerald Aylmer, took a road trip across America. Pole met Marilyn Mitchell in New York. They married in 1952 and had three children. The marriage was dissolved in 1988.
Theree's that word, dissolved, once again.
At Cambridge and then Oxford he set about building up US history and freeing it from the prejudices of more hidebound colleagues who objected to the study of such a new country and of such a brash popular culture. At Oxford he changed the syllabus, increasing the number of options in US history and changing their nature. The final-year undergraduate special subject on “Slavery and Secession” had been a history of the Civil War as a struggle between white men. Pole changed this to “Slavery and Emancipation” with a focus on the struggles of black men and women. The course looked beyond 1865 to consider the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War to safeguard black civil and political rights in perpetuity. Pole brought to the study of US history in both universities the latest ideas and research; he also attracted star US historians to Cambridge (as the Pitt Professor) and to Oxford (as holders of the visiting Harmsworth chair). The historian to whom he was closest was Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University, the most fluent and sophisticated of all postwar American historians.
That opinion of Hofstadter is offered, but the obit has no byline.
Pole’s first published works were on Abraham Lincoln. They included a powerful tribute to the Civil War President delivered at Cambridge on the centenary of his assassination in 1965. He wrote and edited several books, sometimes with US co-editors, and compiled many selections of documents. His textbook, Foundations of American Independence 1763-1815 (1973), introduced many a sixth-former to American history. But as a populariser he had high standards and was publicly critical of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke’s version of US history in his 1972 TV series America.
How interesting, for Cooke's series was quite popular here.
Pole published a series of works on the colonial origins of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the framing of the Constitution, and the debate over its ratification. Perhaps his most important book was Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (1966) which immediately took its place with the revisionist work of such leading US historians as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. Together, these historians explained the revolution in the colonists’ own terms and with due regard for the political language in which they expressed themselves and why they had rebelled.
Pole’s book examined the development of representative politics in the key colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, relating this to English antecedents, tracing the growth of a revolutionary consciousness in the 1770s, and examining the new political arrangements developed by each state in independence. Mixing institutional history, constitutional scholarship and the history of political thought, the work was immediately hailed as a classic.
I've always objected to anything being immediately hailed as a classic. How can that be? A classic is something that stands the test of time, as I understand it.
Of equal stature is Pole’s study, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (1978). In it he examined different types of equality in US history — political, civil, racial, social and economic — and traced them through the experience of different groups, from slaves and labour radicals in the 19th century to New Deal workers in the 1930s and feminists in the 1970s.
Pole was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. In retirement he painted, read poetry and continued to play cricket into his seventies, by which time he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
In 1957 he had co-founded a cricket team, the Trojan Wanderers, which meandered its way through the cricket grounds of Oxbridge and the south of England for many years and gave Pole — no very talented player it must be said — the greatest pleasure. His supervisions and tutorials were wont to end with a cricketing story or the appreciation of a notable player. In later life his companion was the English scholar, Janet Wilson.
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