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Long-lost
history donated
to Mansfield Library
For
those interested in University of Montana history, a long-lost
manuscript recently donated to the Maureen and Mike Mansfield
Library is the equivalent of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The
never-published history, "Narrative of Montana State
University, 1893-1935," is old enough to use the name
UM was known by from 1935 to 1965. It was written by Mary
Brennan Clapp, a longtime UM faculty member and wife of
the University's longest-serving president, Charles Clapp,
who led UM from 1921 to 1935 before dying in office at age
51.
"Researchers
have been looking for this work for years," UM archivist
Jodi Allison-Bunnell said. "We knew it had been written,
but we never knew what happened to it until recently."
The
manuscript covers UM's beginnings and the terms of its first
five presidents. Two copies of the work - each about 450
pages on onionskin paper - were supplied to UM by Clapp's
descendants. Mary's handwritten notes are still legible
in the margins, and one version is marked "corrected
copy." Both are copies of an original manuscript that
has disappeared.
John
Hagens, Clapp's grandson and an economist living in West
Chester, Penn., was the driving force behind returning the
history to UM. Interested in genealogy and researching his
family history, he came across the manuscript last January
while visiting his mother (Clapp's daughter), Lucie Hagens,
in Los Angeles.
"There
were two manuscripts that surfaced," he said. "They
had been in my mother's and aunt's (Peggy Smurr of Turlock,
Calif.) closets for close to 40 years. It was very interesting
to me: A lot of the University's problems back then weren't
dissimilar from the ones today, and there was a lot to be
learned. Returning this to the University seemed like the
right thing to do."
So
Hagens, who worked in the Carter White House during the
late 1970s, e-mailed UM President George Dennison about
donating the work, and the University's current president,
himself a historian, encouraged Hagens to contact the campus
library. The rest is, as they say, history.
"There
are a lot of people mentioned in the manuscript," Hagens
said. "I'm sure there are a lot of people who worked
at the University or attended the University who would like
to know more about their roots. Hopefully the University
will publish it sometime in the future."
He
said his grandmother was an interesting woman. Mary Clapp
grew up in the prairie town of Devils Lake, N.D., and earned
a master's degree from the University of North Dakota in
Grand Forks, where she taught in the English department.
She moved west to Missoula in 1921 when her husband became
UM president.
President
Clapp helped guide UM through the lean Depression years
- at one point taking a 20 percent pay cut along with the
faculty even after his own budget committee suggested he
not be subjected to it. But his untimely death in 1935 -
in those days there was no pension - left his wife alone
with eight children. So she moved from the president's house
into a home on Eddy Street and went back to work, joining
UM's English faculty until the mid-1950s.
Clapp
worked on her campus history for more than a decade after
UM President James McCain (1945-50) asked her to prepare
it. But, according to Allison-Bunnell, when Clapp finished
the history around 1961, she was told there was no money
available to print it, and the work still was unpublished
when she died in 1966. Her manuscript was largely forgotten
after another work, "The University of Montana: A History"
by H.G. Merriam, was published in 1969, but that book deals
with the years Clapp concentrated on, 1893-1935, in a much
more brief fashion.
Hagens
said his grandmother was a fine writer. She published a
book of original poetry, "And Then Remold It,"
in 1929, which was reprinted as part of an expanded work
titled "Collected Verse" in 1951. A Montana poetry
contest also was named in her honor, and she was a founding
member of the Montana Institute of Arts, which encouraged
writers and brought in prominent speakers. Clapp certainly
wasn't afraid of using language with a certain flair in
her history.
For
example, the work is dedicated "To the Treasure State,
whose greatest treasure is its young people, for whom the
University was chartered." When describing the Missoula
the first UM president encountered in 1895, she wrote, "It
has pretty good board walks -- though their square nails
are slightly sprung in places and often catch on the finishing
braid of the long skirts of the ladies." A passage
about the land chosen for the University says, "In
winter it was the playground for Hellgate blizzards."
The
history is rife with interesting tidbits. She writes how
the home of Judge Hiram Knowles was remembered for its beautiful
parties and was said to have had Mark Twain as a guest.
She mentions how the first UM students only had to be 14
years old and that the average weight for players on the
first football team was only 151 pounds. A tale is told
about how on April 29, 1907, in the middle of the night,
"marauders" bound a security guard and stole the
hands from the Main Hall clock. The hands were later "brought
back in a wagon by a driver who gave no name and waited
for no thanks."
Clapp
also didn't shy away from controversy. She writes how the
first president, Oscar Craig (1895-1908), didn't get along
with Professor Morton J. Elrod, the founder of the Flathead
Lake Biological Station, and didn't recommend him for re-employment.
Craig's successor, Clyde Duniway (1908-12), later decided
the dismissal was "cold blooded and even scandalous"
and rehired Elrod, who is known as a beloved professor and
one of the most prominent figures in UM's history. Clapp
writes that Duniway himself was fired later by the state
Board of Education, probably because of a flap over the
hiring of law school faculty.
She
also devotes a large section to economics Professor Louis
Levine, who was suspended by the state education chancellor
in 1919 for publishing a study that concluded the mining
industry wasn't paying its fair share of taxes. His academic
freedom trampled upon, Levine was later reinstated with
back pay after an investigation.
Of
course the most-detailed section of Clapp's history is devoted
to her husband's years as president. She tells how, because
of deep-rooted antagonisms that had developed at UM, her
husband delayed his inauguration for a year, in case he
couldn't develop some sort of harmony among the faculty,
administration and various departments. He didn't want to
"spend the best years of his life on a grumbling volcano."
As he wound up staying at the University until his death
14 years later, a collaborative working environment must
have been achieved.
Clapp's
history, "Narrative of Montana State University, 1893-1935,"
is available to the public at the Mansfield Library in the
K. Ross Toole Archives. Books written by Clapp also are
available.
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