Frederick Merk

**Frederick Merk, Teacher and Scholar:** A Tribute Rodman W. Paul Western Historical Quarterly IX (2): 141-148, April 1978. At the request of WHQ, Rodman W. Paul wrote this tribute to Frederick Merk (August 15, 1887 - September 24, 1977). Paul is Harkness Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology and is President of the Western History Association. At the close of last September, when members of the Western History Association were making final revisions in the papers they would soon be reading at the annual convention in Portland, the profession lost one of the most effective and best loved of all those who have taught western history in American universities. Frederick Merk died at the age of ninety in Cambridge. His whole career had been at Harvard, to which he came as a graduate student in 1916 to study under Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner, of course, had made his fame with work done at the University of Wisconsin, from which Merk himself graduated in 1911, but the timing of Turner's departure for Harvard was such that "you had escaped me in Madison," as Merk later remarked in a letter to his great mentor.{1} Between receiving his bachelor's degree in 1911 and winning in 1916 the Edward Austin fellowship for study at Harvard, Merk was on the editorial staff of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, for which he edited a volume of Civil War documents in 1912 and, much more significantly, wrote a definitive monograph on the Economic History of Wisconsin during the Civil War Decade, published by the society in 1916, a volume that has preserved its value so well that it was republished in revised form in 1971. Harvard accepted this book as Merk's dissertation, and Merk was able to move directly into intensive study under Turner and other members of the Harvard faculty. {1} Frederick Merk to Frederick Jackson Turner, Cambridge, July 4 [1927], Turner Papers, Huntington Library. The Merk-Turner letters cited here are all from this collection. He must have made a decisive impression, for Turner began to involve Merk both in teaching in Turner's famous History 17, "The Westward Movement," and in coediting the notable List of References on the History of the West, which from the time of its publication in 1922 was for many years the most important bibliography on that subject. Merk viewed his mentor with reverence and with deep personal feeling. In a letter to Turner's wife in 1926 he declared, "I have never had greater affection for any man, {2} while a year later, when he was writing to Turner himself to comment on Carl Becker's essay on Turner in Master of Social Science, Merk said:{3} [In History 17] you would say something, a sentence or two, with particular impressiveness, with "that lifted flash of the eye" which Becker describes … [and] I used to glory at the thought that I was in a kind of secret communication with you, that you were giving out something that only a few were privileged to see, and this spurred me on. The affection and respect must have been mutual, for in 1921 Turner caused Harvard to offer Merk an instructorship, under terms which meant that Merk would be sharing History 17 with Turner and would soon be offering the first half of the general introductory course in American history (with the second semester taught by Edward Channing). The remainder of Merk's duties would be to teach "the second half of a course in American institutional and constitutional history, of which Professor [Charles Howard] McIlwaine [sic] gives the first half. {4} In short, Merk, who had received his Ph.D. in 1920 (and had won Harvard's Toppan Prize in that year) was launching into his teaching career in association with some of the best-known American historians of the day. Although he had been offered a post with higher rank at