Feature: A Tribute to Russel B. Nye (1913-1993)
A TRIBUTE TO RUSSEL B. NYE 1913
Great teachers do more than teach; they inspire and they make connections. They inspire their students because they are superior role models in their public and private lives, because they care about the success of their students as individuals, and because they are infectious in their love of ideas. The best teachers also help their students make connections between ideas, places, and things. Connections are the keys to understanding, and understanding is the key to learning.
Most of us are fortunate enough to encounter such teachers only once or twice in our lives, and then we move on. We seldom go back and say thank you. It has been my good fortune to stay close to such a teacher for thirty years, until his death last week. He was Professor Russel B. Nye, Distinguished Professor of English, at Michigan State University.
Retired eight years ago, and felled by a stroke, Professor Nye lived on Oxford Street in East Lansing with his wife, Kay, who taught French for many years until her retirement. Professor Nye taught me, as a student of history many years ago, about the connections between ideas and actions in our national experience. he instilled in me, through his teaching and his manners, an appreciation for the cultural roots we all share with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Chief Sitting Bull, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Claire Booth Luce, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez. He also instilled in me an understanding of what it means to be a democrat in a republican form of government -- a government built on the ideas of the Enlightenment and the courage of men and women who died to establish the freedom we now take for granted as if it were permanent and secure.
I met Dr. Nye for the first time in 1962 during a trip to MSU at the invitation of its Honors College. As a young man just finishing two years at a community college, I was in search of the History Department into which I was considering transfer. After peering into office after office on the wrong floor of the right building, I was greeted by a gentleman who stepped into the hallway and said 'You look as if you are lost. Can I help you?' Little did I know that this was Professor Russel B. Nye, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, author of twenty books and hundreds of articles, and world-renowned scholar in American intellectual history and literature. Over the years, I took many of Professor Nye's courses, and he eventually became the director of my Doctoral Dissertation Committee in the English Department.
In the German university tradition the name for one's Doctoral Dissertation Director is 'Vater-Doktor,' or, in English, 'Father-Doctor.' Professor Nye is certainly Vater-Doktor to me -- my intellectual father. He inspired hundreds of us, his former students, to seek to achieve his integrity, selflessness, and love of wisdom. While visiting with Professor and Mrs. Nye some time ago in their East Lansing living room, he told me of some personal connections to our historical past that he had never before shared in his courses or our discussions and correspondence. These connections, I suspect, are part of what led him to become a teacher.
Like James Michener and many other Americans who achieved some part of the American Dream, Russel Nye was orphaned at an early age. His mother died when he was two, and his father died when he was nine. He was close to his Grandfather and Grandmother Nye in Viola, Wisconsin, and he went to live with them. His grandfather died only a few weeks later, and his grandmother passed away approximately a year after that. Ten years old and alone again, he went to live with an aunt and uncle in Viroqua, Wisconsin, some fifteen miles away. He graduated from Viroqua High School as captain of the football team in 1930, a year after stock market crash.
His boyhood during World War I and through the 1920's was memorable for the powerful political, social, military and economic forces that swirled around him. He spoke enthusiastically and wrote much about the rise of the Progressives and the LaFollette family in Wisconsin, and their influence on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal after the Depression.
And he remembered boyhood parades which included not only hundreds of World War I veterans but also many Spanish-American War and a few remaining Civil War veterans. His own father was wounded in the arm during combat in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War, and Professor Nye pointed out that one of the earliest forms of the GI Bill® was responsible for his father going to dental school after he release from military service. Professor Nye recalled his excitement when he attended the last parade of the Grand Army of the Republic in Madison, Wisconsin. He hurried to the end of the parade in order to speak with a black soldier who had lost both legs during the Civil War, and who had been pulled by comrades in a coaster wagon in that last parade of General Grant's G.A.R.
The black veteran was from Louisiana, and told young Nye that he had lost his legs in the battle at Petersburg, Virginia. During that battle a brigade of Yankee soldiers from Pennsylvania put their coal mining experience to work, and dug a tunnel from their position to the rebel soldiers' line of defense. At that point they extended their tunnel in the shape of a 'T,' and planted dynamite charges directly under the rebel soldier's line. After detonating the dynamite in the tunnel, the black soldier and Union comrades ran down into the newly blasted crater to finish off the Confederates who were wounded and dazed by the explosion. To their dismay, another unit of Confederates appeared at the rim of the crater, and the Yankees\s were picked off like fish in a barrel.
Men such as the legless veteran were living portraits. Professor Nye remembered them whenever he saw one of Matthew Brady's incredible photographs of Civil War Battlefields. At the mention of Matthew Brady Professor Nye instinctively gave a mini-lecture about the enormous impact of the camera on history - - pointing out that mankind has become able only recently to recall and pass on precise images of events from the past.
Dr. Nye also shared stories told to him by his grandfather about the old man's experiences as a Civil Was soldier in Wisconsin's Iron Brigade. Grandfather Nye fought in the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee). Six generals were killed at Franklin -- three from the Union and three from the Confederacy. Nye's grandfather said he survived the Civil War by keeping his head cool and moist, and his feet warm and dry. He learned from the other soldiers to use weeds as a liner for his Union cap; they provided moistness and coolness.
For Professor Nye, as an historian and as a grandson who had deep and tender memories of his Union soldier-grandfather, the Civil War was still alive and frightening. Friends of his grandfather died of wounds, dysentery, and infection to maintain the union and free the slaves, and he felt somehow close to those fallen men whose lives had not been lost in vain. Dr. Nye could still, in his mind's eye, see his grandfather planting potatoes in the garden in Viola, Wisconsin, wearing the same black cap that he wore all his life as a symbol of having served in General Grant's Grand Army of the Republic. Grandfather often sang the songs of the Civil War, and Professor Nye quoted the lyrics, 'The Union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah. . .,' 'Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old campground. . .,' and, in response to the President's call to the northern states for troops. 'We are coming Father Abraham, 30,000 strong. . .'