[Note. The following has nothing to do with South Carolina or church. It is my memoir of my major professor in graduate school. I am posting it here to give it a presence on the Internet and to encourage his other students to do the same.]
MEMORIES OF DONALD DAVID HORWARD
(1933-1921)
When Mister Rogers (Fred Rogers) gave a talk, he usually invited his listeners to close their eyes and remember the people in their lives who had helped them the most. The point was that none of us makes it in life alone. We are all helped along by the people who contribute to our lives. When you close your eyes, for whom do you give thanks? For me, outside of my immediate family, the first name that pops into mind is Donald David Horward. He enriched my life beyond measure. He died a few days ago, on October 31, 2021, at the age of eighty-eight. Today my sadness is tempered by the overwhelming gratitude I feel for having had this most remarkable person in my life. Here are my memories of Don Horward.
Donald D. Horward was a professor in the History Department of Florida State University from 1961 to 2005. His specialty was the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon (Europe 1789-1815). The Doctor of Philosophy program of the History Department offered a major field of study in the French Revolution and Napoleon, one of relatively few U.S. universities to do so.
Space here does not allow a complete accounting of his monumental academic career. He directed over one hundred graduate students, published numerous books, wrote hundreds of articles, amassed a world-class library, and gave countless papers and talks. He was awarded a long list of honors, the greatest of which was the French Legion of Honor. In my opinion, he was the star of the F.S.U. History Department, at least certainly among the non-Americanists. Naturally, students flocked to him as to a magnet. His contingent, "the Horwardians," basked in his dazzling glow and imagined themselves to be the crème de la crème among the graduate students in the Department. Et puis nous les Horwardiens parlaient français, si mal.
I knew history was my calling at the age of ten when I did my Fourth Grade project on Florida history. From then on, the study of history was the focus of my academic life. At Pensacola High School (2,200 enrollment) I was the most outstanding history student and was awarded the "History Medal" at graduation. Of all the honors I have won in my life, that is the one of which I am most proud. I went on to Florida State University, gaining a bachelor's degree in Education in 1965 and a master's degree in History in 1966. I taught history at a junior college in Orlando from 1966 to 1968.
In 1968 I gained admission to the doctoral program in History and returned to F.S.U. Early on, my first encounter with Don Horward did not go well. I forget the circumstances now, but he asked me, "Who is your major professor?" I shot back cheerfully, "You are!" He stared at me increduously for what seemed like a long time and moved away. Later, he sent me word through another student that that was not the way to do business in the Department. Nevertheless, he took me on anyway and never mentioned it. What he should have said was, "Mr. Caldwell, you must first ask a professor if he will accept you as a doctoral student in this Department. You are not to assume anything." In spite of my initial brash impertinence, we became good friends and I began to mature.
What really sealed our bond early on came in 1969 when Phi Alpha Theta, the history student honor society, held a contest for the best undergraduate and graduate papers with the awards to be given out at the annual banquet. Not expecting to win against stiff competition (there were more than 100 graduate students in the F.S.U. History Department at that time), I turned in a 75-page paper on the split between Talleyrand and Napoleon. Low and behold, the emcee called out my name for the best graduate paper and then called out Richard Long for the winning undergraduate work. We were both Horwardians. For weeks, Don went about the Department reminding the three dozen other faculty that his students were "the best." We were on the same page from then on. I had put my initial faux pas behind me.
It was a good thing that we were friends because I had an incredible amount of hard work ahead of me and needed all the help I could get. The requirements for the Ph.D. were extremely demanding. Most of the students who entered the program did not obtain the degree. There were the highly rigorous written and oral exams in five fields, one outside of History, then the dissertation, an original book written from archival sources.
I would like to say I sailed through it all with flying colors but that would not be true. My verbal exam by the panel of five professors did not go as well as I had expected. I did alright with most questions but then stumbled over some that a person aspiring to a doctor's degree should have answered easily. I have never been good at speaking spontaneously on my feet. After making what I thought as a good discussion of the economic background of the American Civil War, I was asked about the abolitionists. I went through a long list of secondary and obscure ones and then the professor started at me. He said, "You have given us all the obscure ones, but who was the greatest of the abolitionists?" My mind went completely blank. I struck out on what should have been an easy homerun. "Frederick Douglass" he shouted incredulously. My face turned bright red as I shook my head and my self-confidence collapsed. What an idiot I am, I thought. It was downhill from then on. When it came to tough questions on Eighteenth Century philosophers, I managed only thin responses, to the obvious disappointment of that professor. By the end, I was completely rattled.
Afterwards, I stood outside the room for what seemed an eternity. I was not informed of the conversation among the five in the room but I believe now, looking back, Dr. Horward saved my skin. By his forceful personality, he convinced the others to let me by on the promise that my dissertation would more than make up for my lackluster performance. My defeat would have been his defeat, and defeat was something he would not accept for either of us. I believe that because they did agree to pass me and I did turn in an impressive dissertation.
Since Horward's great interest was Napoleonic military history, and most of all the Peninsular War, he almost always guided his students to research topics into this area. Campaigns, battles, and generals were the usual dissertation subjects. I, however, was not much interested in military history. To me a battle is akin to a football game. There is only so much one can say about it.
These were the days of the 1960's and as a person who had grown up in the Jim Crow south, I was fascinated by the swirling cultural and social changes going on all around me. I wanted to know how societies of the past had managed great changes and no period in history was more exemplary of such than the French Revolution, the mother of all subsequent revolutionary movements. I was fascinated by the French Revolution with its good side, which was very good, and its bad side, which was infamously bloody. It seemed to me in the 1960's that nothing could be more exciting to study than the French Revolution. My problem was in finding the right topic for my dissertation.
Out of the blue, that problem was solved by a pure coincidence. I inherited a topic which turned out to be the perfect one for me. It allowed me to delve deeply into the heart of the history of the French Revolution. My gift came from Emma Walker Schulken who had been a History student at the University of Florida years earlier and had written a master's thesis on a political leader of the radical phase of the Revolution, André Amar. She had intended to go on with the topic on the doctoral level but had switched to major in Education. As a professor in the F.S.U. College of Education, she sent word to Horward offering to donate her box of research notes on Amar. She was cleaning out to move to a new job in Virginia. Thank goodness, Horward thought first of me and then, true to form, instantly called me in and sputtered orders for me to go straightaway to see Schulken. I raced over to the Education building. I could hardly believe my good fortune. There is another person who contributed greatly to my life and I am eternally grateful for her generosity. Owing to Schulken's magic gift, I was the only one of Horward's dozens of graduate students who produced a doctoral dissertation on the political history of the French Revolution. I was doubly fortunate because all this happened before my doctoral exams.
With the comprehensive exams out of the way, I headed off to Paris for my research. I spent the four months of September-December 1970 in France, most of the time in les Archives nationales which was then in the beautiful Eighteenth Century Rohan-Soubise mansion on the Right Bank. I read and made notes on countless original documents from the revolutionary governments. Amar had been the leader of one of the two governing committees at the height of the revolution. While I was in Paris, Don and Annabel Horward came over for his own research and we had a grand time in the most beautiful and wonderful city in the world. The friends I had made among the other American graduate students there became his friends and he kept up with them for years. He was sincerely interested in what everyone was studying.
By January of 1971, I was back in Tallahassee, at Alumni Village, the married student housing, ready to write my magnum opus on Amar and the French Revolution. My father lent me the money I needed to get by. I had no telephone, car, television, or air conditioner. I had a typewriter and a mountain of notes and copies of documents. I turned in a chapter at a time to Don who promptly returned it to me with many red lines. I never had to wait long to get a chapter back. I lost track of the number of times I had to redo material, all for the better. By June the dissertation was mostly done but still with much hard work to do.
Another lingering problem was what to do about a job once I had finished the degree. This was 1971 and the job market in academia was quickly running dry. Then suddenly, as with Schulken, a stroke of good luck appeared out of the blue. Horward learned of an opening for an Associate Professor at Jacksonville State University, in Jacksonville, Alabama, in modern European history. Since I had no telephone, as soon as he got the news of the job, he hopped into his Ford and raced out to Alumni Village and ordered me to call the dean at Jacksonville State. I was flat broke. I did not have a quarter to put in the pay phone. Not to be deterred, Don jumped into his car as the city bus was passing by. He decided to run down the bus to get change for a dollar from the driver. After a wild ride, he lost the race as the bus sped off into the distance. He then drove to a nearby convenience store to get change. With his quarter, I made the call and was hired on the phone, on the spot, for the job teaching surveys, upper level courses, and graduate classes in the J.S.U. History Department. It paid $13,500 a year, a good salary at the time and an astonishing fortune to me. Don never let me forget that I was so poor I had to use his quarter to get my job.
Having the job in hand meant I had to finish the dissertation in the next two months. Horward cleared the deck. I turned in chapters as fast as I could and he returned them covered in red as fast as he could. We went through this over and over. Although we were in a rush, he refused to sacrifice perfection for expediency. And, remember I had no air conditioner. An upstairs apartment with little to no ventilation in a Tallahassee summer is---well you know if you have been there.
Finally D-Day arrived, as I recall on August 9, 1971. I appeared before my panel of five professors to defend my dissertation. With the memory of the dismal verbal exam fresh in mind, I refused to assume any outcome. I did not know how the five would react, whether they would throw it out the window or venerate this book Don and I had created. As it turned out, I need not have worried. They all raved about it, one even calling it "dazzling." Don beamed. I beamed as I melted into my chair. I was not out of the room long before they brought me back in and addressed me as "doctor." If I had had the energy, I would have wept. Instead, I thanked each of them profusely and apologized for my missteps. My long, hard struggle for the doctor's degree in History was over. While I thanked Dr. Horward as much as I could, I could never repay him for what he had done for me. A few days later, my wife and I packed our few meager possessions in a tiny U-Haul and headed out for northern Alabama and a new life.
Donald Horward was the model history professor. From him I learned three guiding principles for my own career: be passionate about what you do; research your topic to exhaustion; and care for your students. While neither I nor any of his other students could ever reach his levels on these, we all knew we should try and we did. Our major professor was the lofty example to which we all aspired.
Over the years we maintained warm if infrequent contacts. The only time I think he got really annoyed with me was around the publications of the Napoleonic bibliographies. In 1985, he edited a book on the bibliography of Napoleonic military history with chapters being contributed by various authorities. It had been a lot of work and he was rightfully proud of it. Then, I told him I was continuing a project I had started years earlier. In 1985, I published a large two-volume comprehensive bibliography of the French Revolutionary period. As it had been well received, I planned to go on to another large two-volume bibliography of the Napoleonic age. At first he took a dim view as he saw it as potentially overshadowing his own bibliography. I tried to assure him the works would be very different. He said to me, in other words, Why should people use your bibliography since you are not an authority on Napoleonic history? Taken aback at this implied criticism, I replied that if people did not want to use my bibliography they could make their own and I was not concerned about what other people thought about my work. He never brought up the subject again, and, in fact, published a warm review of my 1991 bibliography of the Napoleonic period in The Journal of Military History.
As my two big bibliographies (four large volumes) found a certain amount of acclaim, Horward never hesitated to share in the credit. In one review, Raymonde Monnier, a French Revolution authority, said my bibliographies were called "le Caldwell" among scholars in France. La Fondation Napoléon noted Horward's retirement in its 2005 Bulletin: "One further highlight of Don Horward's teaching career is the huge two-volume, essential bibliography of works on Napoleon, the result of a Ph.D. by Ronald Caldwell, supervised by Don. This work is the Napoleonic student's vademecum and Don cannot be praised enough for having encouraged its inception." Thus, in time, Horward stopped worrying about what people might think of my work and starting praising it. I greeted all of this with open arms because nothing would mean more to me than my mentor's pride in my publications. In a way, for a moment, our old roles reversed. Instead of my basking in his light, he basked in mine. He had had nothing to do with creating my bibliography of Napoleon, but he had a lot to do with its aftermath. I was delighted.
There were three periods in Horward's career at F.S.U., 1961-1977, 1978-1989, 1990-2007. The first I will call "The Youthful Spring." He arrived in 1961, at the age of twenty-eight to become an instructor. Young, enthusiastic, bursting with energy, and ambitious, Horward soared quickly climbing in the History Department and gathering a devoted and growing student following. Four students finished their dissertations before I did, Gordon Bond in 1966, Jeanne Ojala in 1969, Gordon Teffeteller in 1969, and Daniel Gray in 1970. Erin McCawley Renn completed her work in 1971, the same as I.
Gordon Bond went on to have an illustrious career at Auburn University as chair of the History Department and dean of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1997, aged 57. Jeanne Ojala went on to a long career in the History Department of the University of Utah. She died in 2020, aged 86. Gordon Teffeteller taught for years at Valdosta State University. He died in 2017, age 86. Dan Gray taught at Troy State University at Ft. Rucker, in Alabama. He died in 1993, aged 48. Erin Renn went on to a series of jobs teaching in college and working in museums and history related areas.
I do not know if Renn is still alive but if she is, she and I are the "deans" of the Horwardians, the earliest surviving Ph.D.s of Don Horward, both finishing in 1971.
According to the American Historical Association Directory of History Dissertations, Donald Horward directed thirty-five Ph.D. dissertations. Fifteen of these were in the first period, 1961-1977. All of them dealt with Napoleonic history, mostly military, except for mine on the French Revolution and Richard Long's on Tuscany's relations with France during the Revolution. Horward was known to all as a highly energetic, outgoing, assertive, and caring mentor. This was especially true in the youthful vigor of his twenties, thirties and early forties.
After I finished in 1971, Horward produced nine more Ph.D.s in The Youthful Spring phase---1972, Milton Finley, Richard Long; 1973, Donald Howard Barry, Winslow Cope Goodwin (1926-1993); 1974, Mildred L. Fryman; 1975, John Severn; 1976, George Knight (1928-2013), Samuel Vichness; 1977, Susan Punzel Conner (d. 2020, age 73).
As time went by, age mellowed him, and in the end, at the conference to him last year, he had naturally grown markedly slower and quieter while still putting out the occasional spark of the old dynamic self. Those of us who were lucky enough to know and work with him in his dynamic youth were more fortunately than we may have realized.
By the mid-1970's the academic scene for History changed drastically. Jobs became few and far between if there at all. Instead of continuing to churn out Ph.D.s who could not find college teaching jobs, Horward resolved to reduce his graduate load. From 1978 to 1989, he guided only two students to Ph.D.s.
The lull was not to last. It was just not in Horward's nature to allow this inactivity to continue long. He was much too energetic. Perhaps he was stimulated by the great celebrations of the French Revolution bicentennial in 1989. He himself put on one of the best shows as he hosted a conference in Tallahassee that eclipsed by far anything ever seen in this history of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (around since 1971). It was dazzling. I know because I was there.
So, the third phase began in 1990 and ran to 2007. I will call this the Final Flurry, as if the aging master was resolved to produce as much of value and worth as he could in the limited time left. This was particularly true for the years 1990 to 2001 when he directed sixteen dissertations, a record number. This was where he was at the zenith of his maturity and his students benefited greatly from his long career of intense scholarship. Although he retired in 2005, at the age of seventy-two, he still directed two dissertations one in 2006 and the other in 2007.
In looking back, I have one major regret about my relationship with Don Horward. When I retired from Jacksonville State in 1999, he specially arranged for me to have a visiting professorship to teach a course in the French Revolution at F.S.U. Unfortunately, when he told me about it, I had already committed to another appointment and could not back out. I would have dearly loved to have been able to return to F.S.U. to share with the students what I had learned over the years about the Revolution. Nothing could have made me happier. As it was, I had to decline the offer. I am still sad about it, but I will always appreciate beyond measure his thought about me.
It is sometimes said we spend our lives seeking our parents' approval as if to justify our existences. Although Don Horward was only ten years older than I, I regarded him more as a father figure than a brother. So, in the end did I get his approval? I think so. He offered me a visiting professorship in a program he had built from scratch to monumental status. In the end, I felt all my hard work had been validated. I will wrap up that nugget and keep it in my pocket.
Everyone is unique, but once in awhile comes along the person who is so exceptional as to stand far beyond the rest. In the academic world of History, Donald D. Horward was that man. He enriched the lives of dozens on dozens of people who saw in him their better selves. He made us better academicians. He made us better historians. He made us better people. This is his legacy.
