Citizen-Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

A collection of essays reflecting on Edgar as friend and colleague and on the subjects of his scholarly work

Citizen-Scholar comprises essays written in honor of Walter Edgar, South Carolina's preeminent historian and founding director of the University of South Carolina (USC) Institute for Southern Studies. In the opening overview of Edgar's impressive academic career, editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., discusses Edgar's role as the Palmetto State's omnipresent public historian, radio program host, author of the landmark South Carolina: A History, and editor of The South Carolina Encyclopedia. The former George Washington Distinguished Professor of History, Claude Henry Neuffer Chair of Southern Studies, and Louise Fry Scudder Professor, Edgar has been recognized with inductions into the South Carolina Hall of Fame and the South Carolina Higher Education Hall of Fame and has received the South Carolina Order of the Palmetto and the South Carolina Governor's Award in the Humanities.

The first section of Citizen-Scholar features personal essays about Edgar and his legacy from author and historian Winston Groom, USC vice president Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, USC president Harris Pastides, and historian Mark M. Smith. The essays that follow are written by some of the nation's most renowned scholars of southern history and culture including Charles Joyner, Andrew H. Myers, Barbara L. Bellows, John M. Sherrer III, Orville Vernon Burton, Bernard E. Powers Jr., Peter A. Coclanis, John McCardell, James C. Cobb, Amy Thompson McCandless, and Lacy K. Ford, Jr. The second section of the collection includes essays spanning a range of regional, national, and international topics, all associated with Edgar's research. These essays were written as a tribute to Edgar, both as a historian and as a public scholar, a man actively involved in his profession as well as in his community, both locally and statewide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611177510

Book preview

Citizen-Scholar

Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar

Citizen ∼ Scholar

Essays in Honor of

Walter Edgar

Edited by

Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.

With the Assistance of Evan A. Kutzler

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2016 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-750-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-61117-751-0 (ebook)

Front cover photograph

Bowtie courtesy of Brittons, Columbia, South Carolina.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

• Part 1. Citizen-Scholar •

Walter in Metamorphosis

Winston Groom

Walter Bellingrath Edgar: The Permanent File and Academic Citizenship

Many Anne Fitzpatrick

Walter Edgar and Squash

Harris Pastides

Walter Edgar as Listener

Mark M. Smith

• Part 2. Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar •

Furling That Banner: The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Flag in South Carolina, 1961–2000

Charles Joyner

Walter Edgar and the Southern Military Tradition

Andrew H. Myers

The Grand Jury in Colonial South Carolina: An Index of Societal Concerns

Larry D. Watson

The Worlds of John Tunno: Scottish Emigrant, Charleston Loyalist, London Merchant, 1746–1819

Barbara L. Bellows

Rediscovering Milo H. Berry: Columbia Artisan and Businessman, 1843–1907

John M. Sherrer III

Localism and Confederate Nationalism: The Transformation of Values from Community to Nation in Edgefield, South Carolina

Orville Vernon Burton

Is the Rubicon Passable? African Methodism and the Gospel of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century South Carolina

Bernard E. Powers Jr.

Another Faithful Index: Inventive Activity and Economic Innovation in Nineteenth-Century South Carolina

Peter A. Coclanis

William Gilmore Simms and His World after the Civil War: A New Look at Joscelyn

John M. McCardell Jr.

From Cracklins to Gourmet Bacon Puffs: The Complex Origins and Shifting Shape of Southern Foodways

James C. Cobb

Extended Horizons: Lowcountry Women in World War II

Amy Thompson McCandless

Twenty-First-Century South Carolina’s Economic Development Dilemma: The Evolution of a Crisis, 1950–2014

Lacy K. Ford Jr.

Notes

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

B Company staff in high school

Walter Edgar advising in Grenada

Walter Edgar and Harris Pastides playing squash

Walter Edgar atop books

Walter Edgar in Vietnam

Walter Edgar with Mary Anne Fitzpatrick

Walter Edgar, class of 1961

Young Walter Edgar with stick

Youthful cadet Walter Edgar

Walter Edgar in high school play

Introduction

For anyone who has done some exploring into the history of South Carolina, Walter Edgar needs no introduction. He is, quite simply, the most preeminent historian of the state. Throughout his academic career, which began when he became an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina in 1972, Walter has been directing his keen historical eye and understanding most closely at the culture and history of the state in which he has lived for five decades. The first two books he edited, The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 1732–1742 (1972) and The Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives: Sessions Lists, 1692–1973 (1974), looked forward to the historical vision that would be the mark of all of Walter’s scholarship: a deep and profound concern with South Carolina’s colonial history, together with a wide and capacious interest in the sweep of the entirety of the state’s history, including its fraught political history, right up to current issues and controversies. Of the dozen or so other books that Walter has authored or edited, three stand out as landmark works of scholarship that have shaped—and continue to shape—our understanding of South Carolina’s history and culture: South Carolina: A History (1998), Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (2001), and The South Carolina Encyclopedia (2006). There might be a few people somewhere who know more about the minutiae of a particular historical moment that took place in some small corner of the state, but I’d be comfortable betting the house that there’s no one who has a more capacious knowledge of South Carolina history than Walter.

It’s no accident that Walter spent his entire career at the University of South Carolina, a public university whose primary mission is to serve the people of the state. At USC Walter taught scores of undergraduate and graduate students, and his two-course sequence on South Carolina history (History 409: The History of South Carolina, 1670–1865; History 410: The History of South Carolina since 1865) was one of those legendary courses one finds at most universities, a course that everyone knows about and in which everyone tries to enroll—and a course that, if a student is fortunate enough to take, he or she never forgets. Needless to say, Walter’s courses were always filled to the limit. In their course evaluations, students characteristically raved about Walter’s skills at making history alive and compelling, even to those who initially thought they didn’t care much for the subject matter. "He makes the student want to learn and listen, commented one of his students, while another noted that Walter’s class was the only eight o’clock class that I’ve had that I didn’t want to sleep." High praise indeed.

At the same time that Walter was instructing and inspiring scores of undergraduates, he was also working closely with a number of graduate students, not only by teaching seminars but also by directing M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations. It would take an oversized and reinforced bookshelf to hold all the bound copies of theses and dissertations that Walter either directed or served as a reader for. Many of Walter’s former graduate students have gone on to successful careers in academia and elsewhere, with a number following in his footsteps and becoming distinguished professors and scholars of southern and South Carolina history. Several of the contributors to this volume have either worked with Walter as a graduate student or alongside him a colleague. Other contributors came to know Walter either personally or professionally (or both), enjoying his enthusiasm and wit and learning from his scholarship—and in fact there’s a lot to enjoy and learn, as anyone knows who has ever read Walter’s work or heard him speak.

And speaking of Walter speaking: I doubt there is a more recognizable voice in the state of South Carolina. For several years now, Walter has hosted one of South Carolina’s most listened-to radio talk shows (and podcasts), Walter Edgar’s Journal, which airs every week on South Carolina Educational Radio stations. During the show’s hour, Walter engages in conversation with a notable person or two, exploring the arts, culture, and history of South Carolina and the South. The topics are as diverse as the state itself, ranging, as the South Carolina Educational Radio and TV webpage notes, from books to barbecue, from current events to colonial history. If you think it’s easy to converse on the airwaves, week in and week out, with people whose interests go off in all directions and whose personalities differ as much as those of mules and parakeets, think again. Walter handles the conversations, all of them, with grace, charm, and wit. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him even stumble. It’s a never-ending masterful performance. Besides his weekly journal, Walter also broadcasts on South Carolina Educational Radio South Carolina from A to Z, brief commentaries that air throughout the day on topics that span from, well, A to Z. I’m particularly fond of this latter broadcast because when in 2007 I was driving to Columbia to start working with Walter at the Institute for Southern Studies, the first voice I heard upon crossing the state line from Georgia was Walter’s, providing me with a brief bit of historical insight into the state that was to be my new home. Besides these two shows, Walter for a time hosted another show on South Carolina Educational Radio, South Carolina Reads, in which he spent an hour each week reading out loud notable works of southern fiction. Who says historians don’t care or know anything about literature?

His extensive work with South Carolina Educational Radio points to a commitment that Walter held fast to his entire career: to share his academic work not only with other historians but also with the general public. He has always been, in other words, a public scholar, a professor actively involved in his profession as well as his community—locally and statewide. When I first started working at the Institute for Southern Studies, I quickly got a sense of Walter’s public involvement. Good luck trying to catch him: if he wasn’t in class, he was probably being prepped in his office for a television interview, or running out the door to speak to legislators or to deliver a talk to a community group or at a commemoration somewhere in the state. Or sometimes he was headed out to Charleston, where often he taught a four-semester course, spread out over two years, on the history of South Carolina that was open to the public. When he wasn’t teaching that course in Charleston, he was teaching it in Columbia. Occasionally I caught sight of him departing for a barbecue cook-off of which he would serve as judge (yes, he’s certified to do that). He served on numerous boards of local civic, religious, and educational organizations. And of course besides all this, he was actively involved in the life of the university, directing the Institute for Southern Studies for over three decades, as well as serving on important department, college, and university committees. Sometime during the day or night, he must have also worked on his own scholarship, though when he squeezed time in for that has always escaped me.

Not surprisingly, given his long and distinguished career, Walter has received a large number of significant awards and distinctions recognizing his scholarly work and public service. At the University of South Carolina, among many other distinctions, he was the George Washington Distinguished Professor of History, the Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies, a Carolina Trustee Professor, and a Louise Fry Scudder Professor. Honorary doctor of letters degrees were awarded to him by Coker College, Coastal Carolina University, Newberry College, and Davidson College (where Walter, many years before, had received his B.A. degree). But three awards tower above the rest: in 1999 Walter received the Governor’s Award in the Humanities for Academic Achievement; in 2008 he was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame; and in 2010 he was named the Lindsey Society Laureate, becoming the third person to be inducted into the South Carolina Higher Education Hall of Fame.

Also honoring Walter is the book you have in your hand. It’s a Festschrift (a German word, combining Fest [celebration] with Schrift [writing]), a volume of essays written to honor a person, in this case, Walter, the man and his long and distinguished career. Not all the essays take the same tack. Some of the essays are personal reflections by the writers about their friendship with and their admiration for Walter. Winston Groom, for example, who was a childhood pal of Walter’s, reflects on their growing up in Mobile and their later keeping up through the years. Two administrators from the University of South Carolina, Dean Mary Anne Fitzpatrick and President Harris Pastides, provide insight into Walter’s remarkable career at USC, together with his skills, as reported by Pastides, on the squash court. Mark Smith, a longtime colleague in the History Department at USC, discusses Walter’s extraordinary abilities as a historian, characterizing him as an investigator who misses nothing, finds meaning in the smallest details, and hears the softest voices and the tiniest sounds emanating from historical records.

Two other essays, by Charles Joyner and Andrew Myers, while not quite as personal as the ones just mentioned, reflect deeply on issues and matters with which Walter was deeply involved during his professional career. Joyner’s essay looks closely at the Confederate flag controversy that rocked the South Carolina political scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, providing an insightful narrative of the unfolding events (including Walter’s efforts to help the opposing sides forge a compromise), as well as filling in broad historical and cultural contexts for understanding the dispute and its resolution. Myers’s essay likewise provides expansive historical context, in his case for understanding Walter’s long and distinguished military career and its influence on his development as a scholar and teacher. As Myers shows, the roots of the southern military tradition extend deep into the history of the South and the life of Walter Edgar.

The remaining essays, making up the largest group, are different from the others in that they do not discuss extensively Walter’s life and career. While Walter’s presence no doubt lurks in terms influence in these essays, he is for the most part not visibly present. So why are these essays in the volume? They are included because they are essays written in honor of Walter, not unlike the way that books are often dedicated to someone who played a role in the book’s creation but who doesn’t appear in the book. All these essays are by experts in southern history, and most focus on areas that dovetail closely with Walter’s own interests as historian and cultural critic. An obvious example of such dovetailing is Larry Watson’s essay indexing the types of cases brought before grand juries in colonial South Carolina. Watson makes clear his admiration for Walter’s magisterial South Carolina: A History, and in a sense the information Watson presents can be understood a specific illustration of Walter’s more general insights into South Carolina’s colonial judicial system. Barbara Bellows’s essay, exploring the life and times of John Tunno, a Charleston merchant who had emigrated from Ireland and who by the time of the Revolutionary War had become an outspoken loyalist, likewise dovetails closely with Walter’s historical interests. Let’s just say Tunno faced many trials and tribulations before hotfooting it back to London after the British defeat. As Bellows notes, Walter’s first edited book, The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 1732–1742, was one of the starting places for her work on Tunno. Likewise fitting in with Walter’s interests is John M. Sherrer III’s essay on Milo Berry, one of a small group of cabinetmakers from New Jersey who moved to South Carolina in the 1830s and 1840s and eventually became influential artisans in the state. A former graduate student of Walter’s, Sherrer constructs a spirited narrative focusing on Berry’s many years in Columbia, along the way providing sharp insight into the state’s business and artisanal practices during Milo’s era.

Four other essays honoring Walter explore aspects of nineteenth-century South Carolina. With eyes directed on the town of Edgefield during the Civil War, Vernon Burton investigates the interplay between the competing claims of Confederate nationalism and localism that shaped the community’s life on the home front. As Burton shows, the war ushered in a time of flux and change so radical that the necessity of forging new kinds of community ties brought about a new way of looking at the world. The Civil War also had a profound impact on the rise and expansion of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) in South Carolina, the history of which is subject of Bernard Powers’s essay. Looking particularly closely at the church’s aggressive missionary work following the Civil War, Powers makes a strong case that the A.M.E. was both the quintessential embodiment of the Gospel of Freedom and a powerful force in the state’s economic development. Economic development is also an issue for Peter Colcanis, whose essay examines economic innovation and inventive activity in antebellum South Carolina. Examining closely the early American patent system and its records, Colcanis comes to a rather startling conclusion, at least to those who have never questioned the stereotype contrasting Yankee inventiveness with southern indulgence: that antebellum South Carolinians were actually quite resourceful and innovative, particularly in the areas of agriculture and transportation. Certainly William Gilmore Simms, South Carolina’s greatest nineteenth-century writer, was himself quite resourceful, and in his essay John McCardell argues that Simms’s postbellum novel set during the Revolutionary War, Joscelyn: A Tale of the Revolution, might best be read as both a veiled autobiography of Simms and a veiled biography of Simms’s late close friend James H. Hammond. Although not Simms’s most well-known work, Joscelyn emerges in McCardell’s reading as an important text for understanding Simms’s efforts to comprehend and recover from the devastation that he and South Carolina faced following the Civil War.

Three final essays focusing primarily on the twentieth-century and contemporary South round out the collection. Noting the recent surge in interest in southern foodways, James C. Cobb provides a lively discussion of the origins of some of the staples of the southern table including barbecue, grits, and cornbread—as well of the rituals that bring southerners to the table—church dinners and funerals. With wit and humor as sharp as his insight, Cobb in the end shows us how quickly culinary innovations and adaptations can become ‘traditional’ and regionally defining. More focused in time and space is Amy Thompson McCandless’s study of how World War II affected the lives of women in the South Carolina low-country, particularly in Charleston. As McCandless reveals, wartime disruptions of previously settled social and economic patterns opened up, albeit briefly, an extended horizon for many women, giving them a glimpse of the possibilities for richer, fuller, and more independent lives. Finally Lacy Ford examines the high-stakes issue of economic development that continues to plague South Carolina policy makers. Ford argues that contemporary policy makers have a lot to learn from the often ill-informed and misguided efforts marking the state’s economic history of the last six decades. Near the end of his essay, looking to the future, Ford comments, Today, more than three score and ten years later, those South Carolinians, like Walter Edgar, eager to build a better South Carolina must still teach these hard lessons of southern history all over again, again, and again, as Walter did and does, knowing full well that the lessons taught will not always be the lessons learned, but teaching them anyway because there are still rocks to move and gullies to fill.

Ford’s words here on Walter, underscoring his commitment to the studying and teaching of history in order to make South Carolina a better place, I’m sure speak for all the contributors to this collection. Certainly they do for me. And I think Ford and the other contributors would likewise agree with my final words: The collection you now hold in your hands is but a small tribute to Walter Edgar, a volume written out of respect of and admiration for one of South Carolina’s finest scholars and citizens.

Part 1

Citizen-Scholar

Winston Groom

Walter in Metamorphosis

Walter and I like to think that we are each other’s oldest classmates. When we were five, before entering grade school, we both attended the summer Vacation Bible School at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Mobile Alabama. The church was a forbidding-looking English Gothic brownstone structure built in 1909 on what was then the western edge of town right across the street from Walter’s home, a large white two-story Greek Revival style residence. From eight in the morning until school let out around lunchtime, we’d dabble in paints, mold clay, cut things out of paper, sing songs, and for all I knew, read the Bible. Walter actually applied himself to these things while I—I am reminded sometimes even today—would fling the paint and clay and paper and anything else all around the room, irrespective of who or what it might hit. I believe I remember thinking then how lucky Walter was, because while I had to walk three or four blocks to school, he had only to the cross the street.

For real school Walter went to UMS, short for University Military School, a boys’ military academy founded in Mobile in 1893, and I joined him there in 1955 until graduation in 1961. Walter was an exemplary student, a model of discipline and studiousness. Our senior year he was the captain of the cadet corps. I, on the other hand, was a lowly sergeant who over the years had actually managed to march a rut in the parade ground walking off demerits—and it’s still there, sort of like the Sunken Road at Antietam.

The only thing of note I did at UMS was to organize a senior class play. It was an idiotic farce called Dramaticus Nonsensicus starring none other than Walter Edgar as Constant Hope or some such, who was eternally preyed on by a villain named Snidely Whiplash. I myself escaped the humiliation of having to get up onstage and look ridiculous by being the director of the play. A year or so ago I came across the playbill of the show as well as a number of excellent photographs, many depicting Walter in his blond wig, heavy eye makeup, lipstick, and tight black dress. I would submit them along with this essay, if for nothing other than to revivify Walter’s mortification, but they have somehow slipped back into the primordial slime in which they lay hidden through all these years, and all my moves. (Found ’em!)

And one more thing. When Walter and I were sophomores, we were initiated into a local fraternity called the Deltas. High school fraternities have been around in Mobile since the nineteenth century, and this one was known to be socially picky and particularly vicious to its pledges, or rats as we were called. They would beat us unmercifully with paddles, and if you violated any rule you were subjected to a terrifying procedure called Rat Court. A particularly sadistic torture consisted of making the rats pull down their trousers and sit on a fifty-pound block of ice trying to pick up a green pea (a baby green pea if memory serves) between our buttocks. Failure to do this resulted in being swatted on your freezing behind with a paddle usually wielded by a large football player. The lone member of our rat class ever known to perform the torture successfully was a hefty fellow who, until this very day, is renowned for his feat.

Walter, of course, went on to a fancy private college in North Carolina, while I was relegated to the University of Alabama. As freshmen we both signed up for ROTC. That was in 1961. By our graduation in 1965 Vietnam was beginning to break in its full fury, and both Walter and I landed there, in separate places and separate times, but we saw our share of the fighting.

I followed Walter’s career from afar after I went on to become a reporter in Washington for ten years, and then as a writer living in New York for another decade, where the only thing of value I wrote was checks. But I remember driving back to Mobile through South Carolina on Saturdays and listening to Walter’s excellent radio program on the state public broadcasting system. In fact, after I began writing histories, he invited me on several shows, which I have particularly appreciated and enjoyed. We reconnected when he invited me to the University of South Carolina campus to speak—well, I forget to whom—but there were a lot of them, and they were nice. As Mobilians are apt to do, Walter and I renewed our friendship with our involvement in Mardi Gras. Walter had joined this particular mystic society—which will turn 150 in a couple of years—right out of college. Both of our fathers were members. I, however, had waited until about ten years ago when some friends, including Walter, persuaded me to come aboard. Walter and I rode next to each other on the float, right along with the twenty-somethings, and he did that for nearly fifty years. Last year, when he turned seventy, Walter told me he was hanging it up, and I didn’t blame him; I hung it up too.

Walter, I salute you. I think of all the students you have taught over the years, who will carry the knowledge you’ve imparted all over the great globe itself. It must be a rich feeling to educate people; and just think—it all started in the summer of 1948, in an old English Gothic church at the All Saints’ Episcopal Vacation Bible School.

Mary Anne Fitzpatrick

Walter Bellingrath Edgar

The Permanent File and Academic Citizenship

From the time I was a child, I was always kept in control by teachers and administrators who warned that any infraction of the rules would go into my permanent file. The permanent file became in my mind the repository of all information, bad and maybe even good, that an organization possesses about its members. As a dean I now have access to the permanent files of my faculty.

Walter Bellingrath Edgar is an expert in the old South and in colonial and early national U.S. history. I have known Professor Edgar since I joined the USC faculty as dean in 2005, and over the years I have been proud to nominate him for a number of prestigious awards. For this short tribute, I began by spending some time reading his permanent file to see if I could uncover the details of the extraordinary career of this exemplary academic citizen.

Walter finished his doctoral degree with a dissertation entitled The Libraries of Colonial South Carolina in 1969 and left to serve his country in the U.S. Army, including a tour of duty in Vietnam. On his return in September 1972, he began teaching part-time for the Department of History, while holding prestigious postdoctoral research appointments. The records indicate that Walter taught one course each semester and directed graduate student work without any cost to the university’s budget. During the time before he was appointed to a full-time position he was publishing a prodigious amount of scholarship. The letter to the dean requesting his appointment is very straightforward. The chair discusses the quality of Walter’s teaching and mentoring, as well as that of his research and publications. Indeed Walter was appointed as an associate professor with tenure! He soon was promoted to full professor.

The honors and awards that Walter accumulated during this academic career are too numerous to mention. And the reader is struck by the modesty of this scholar. There are no letters to the dean touting his own achievements, simply the annual curriculum vitae listing the work completed and the recognitions garnered in a given year. And Walter regularly performed the hat trick of receiving awards for exemplary teaching, masterful research, and extensive service to the larger community.

The file notes that Walter returned to active duty in 1984 to assist in Grenada and in 1991 to assist at Fort Jackson during the Gulf War. He also had productive sabbaticals and consultancies with major humanities organizations, as well as a semester at the prestigious Middlebury College teaching and giving advice on their museum.

Walter became the director of the Southern Studies Program in 1980. He built the program into an institute (the Institute for Southern Studies) and ably led it for the next thirty-two years. Walter’s experience, research achievements, and interests made him eminently qualified for the position, and over the years the deans of the college have commented on Walter’s extraordinary leadership. My favorite comment is: I appreciate the style with which you guide the Institute’s activities. Throughout the years of his leadership, the institute developed an undergraduate program and held a number of international conferences that led to recognition for the university in the wider scholarly community.

When the Institute for Southern Studies was started it was a very specialized research group that had occasional programs for small groups of scholars and a few donors, all of whom considered themselves to be the elite of old Columbia. When Walter took over the program he was committed to it being a resource for all the people. He started doing public programs and sponsoring research in a variety of disciplinary and cultural areas, in effect giving ownership of the intellectual resources of the university to the people. This was a fundamental change in vision, and I believe it has had an enormous impact on the state and on the university.

Although our college is rich in faculty who study the South, Walter was chosen as the Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies in 1995, an honor he held until his retirement. Four years later Walter wrote the book South Carolina: A History, a popular and academic masterpiece as the State newspaper headline acclaimed. In that article Clarence Mohr states that Edgar’s book offers a convincing demonstration, if not a textbook case, of the mutually reinforcing relationship between teaching, research, and public service.

Walter has been praised for his work in a number of areas: recruiting to USC a number of promising and outstanding senior faculty; fundraising on behalf of the university and the Institute for Southern Studies; and securing millions of dollars in federal and foundation funds to support research. Walter has received honorary degrees, recognition from the governor, election to the South Carolina Higher Education Hall of Fame and more.

I have completed my review of the permanent file. It makes clear that Professor Edgar is the complete academic citizen. Over the course of forty years, he has educated thousands of students and taken history out of the classroom and into the community. He is a great teacher because he deeply believes in the importance of sharing the fruits of his research and scholarship with everyone. He is a great scholar because of his impeccable research and his passionate commitment. The public has responded with remarkable interest and support. I am one of those who so responded, and as a dean new to South Carolina I learned a great deal about the history and culture of this state from Walter’s writing and lectures. I am grateful for his tutelage.

Walter’s permanent file testifies to his long and successful career, but what it does not reveal is Walter’s graciousness and charm. I walk away from this assignment with a deepened respect not only for Walter but also for the craft of history and the difficulty scholars face in telling a story from the written record. Few historians are better at their craft.

Harris Pastides

Walter Edgar and Squash

Although Walter Edgar’s wiry build could suggest a dietary preference for zucchini, butternut, and acorn, this paper is not about vegetables, but rather about Walter and the game of squash.

Squash, or its predecessor, racquets, has been played in England since the late sixteenth century. It gained in popularity in the nineteenth century and eventually became an international sport. The first formal squash club in the United States was established in 1924, and initially the game became popular in Boston, in Philadelphia, and on Ivy League campuses. In fact many liberal arts colleges, especially in the Northeast, fielded men’s and women’s intercollegiate teams; but, alas, that was not the case below the Mason-Dixon Line.

The squash racquet, once made from laminated timber (like the racquets proudly displayed in Walter’s home study), is now made of lighter carbon-based materials, including graphite, boron, and titanium. Such is the fabrication of Walter’s current racquet. In 2003 Forbes rated squash as the number one healthiest sport to play. Also true is that squash has been implicated as a cause of possible fatal cardiac arrhythmia in older men with heart disease; such is the enigma of the game, calming and intense all at once.

In 1998, upon my arrival at the University of South Carolina, I was intent on continuing my addiction to an almost daily squash match. I had been introduced to the game while a graduate student at Yale when my Pakistani roommate, Farukh Iqbal, patiently explained that there was no reason to wait for a racquetball court in the high-traffic area of the Payne Whitney gymnasium when there were nearly fifty open squash courts. My love of the game grew while living in the five-college community of Amherst-Northampton, Massachusetts. There I had five weekly partners, all faculty from Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts, one for each day of the workweek. Once I’d landed in the South, I was not sure what to expect.

Although I suspected there wouldn’t be a broad squash-playing community, I asked around and learned that a person very committed to the game was Walter Edgar. That was usually followed by, of course, you know Walter Edgar. I did not, but, happily, I soon did, not primarily as Carolina’s Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies, but as someone willing to clear an occasional hour to meet me at the Blatt P.E. Center for a game of squash.

Walter had refined his game while on sabbatical at Middlebury College in 1986, and he and I soon became fast buddies. We did, however, quibble about one thing: the squash ball. We had each grown accustomed to a different type of ball. Walter’s ball of choice was as hard as a rock and bounced reasonably high. When it hit an opponent in the back of the thigh, it was usually followed by an excruciating yelp and, most certainly, a horrific black-and-blue mark. My preferred ball was a soft black one with two yellow dots—signifying to squash cognoscenti that, even when fresh, it had almost no firmness to it. It could, in fact, be squashed in the hand. This was the genesis of the sport’s modern name; the double-yellow-dot ball is so soft that it can be dropped from eye level and barely rises two inches off the ground.

After humoring each other for several weeks, we reached a compromise; we would play with each ball every time we met. Now in most circles this would be viewed as a terrible idea. Why? Well, just as you warmed to one style of play, the ball would be exchanged, and a completely different style would begin. Nevertheless we grew comfortable playing this way and even developed a strategy to determine which ball would begin the session, Walter’s or mine. The goal, of course, was to psyche out the opponent by first securing a win using the opponent’s ball and then finishing strong using your own. But that strategy rarely worked: Walter usually won the hard-ball match and I usually conquered Walter with the double-yellow.

Over the years Walter Edgar and I used squash to develop additional pathways to a deepening friendship. The pathways, it turned out, were beer and scotch. After our late-afternoon squash contests, Walter often invited me to his home on Hollywood Drive for a beer. This was an extraordinarily pleasant way to end our workdays. We would say hello to Betty and relax in Walter’s den. Over a beer or two, we began to talk about the world beyond squash, at least the world of single malt. We also chatted about family and especially Walter’s daughters and his new grandson, Liam.

Lest you think that our meetings were all fun and games, let me point out that the locker room, before and after a match, is one of the greatest settings for inspired conversation. Devoid of coat and tie (and most articles of clothing for that matter), and far from the faculty office and the proximity of students and other colleagues, men will often share deep thoughts and even life-changing reflections.

Two cases in point:

Walter to Harris: I have an offer to leave the University South Carolina, and I think I need to consider it seriously.

Harris to Walter: "You’ve got to be kidding. Why would you want to do that?

That did not happen, which was great for my competitive addiction, but even greater for our cherished university. And this:

Harris to Walter: I’m thinking of becoming a candidate for the presidency.

Walter to Harris: You’ve got to be kidding. Why would you want to do that?

That did happen, which was also great for our competition and friendship and I’m sure was fine for Walter. The ultimate judgment of whether or not that was good for our cherished university has yet to be determined.

This camaraderie and conversation is certainly something that I continue to cherish about my sessions with Walter—almost as much as I cherish the ongoing encounters on the court.

After the Strom Thurmond Fitness and Wellness Center was completed—with an updated squash court built to international specifications—Walter and I were tempted to change venues. But we soon came to our senses. To conduct our combat in a shrine dedicated to young minds and bodies was not for us. By that I mean that our egos were not up to it.

Today Walter and I find it harder to schedule our matches. I live in the Osborne Administration Building, where it is harder to navigate an opportunity to slink away, even for a higher purpose. Also Walter and Nela have developed an unlimited zeal for both travel and their growing family, which makes his availability limited as well. Nevertheless our continuing competition, part duel and part affection, still forms the basis for an enduring friendship.

Just two guys pounding a little black ball as hard as they can.

Mark M. Smith

Walter Edgar as Listener

Pssst. Listen up. Let me tell you some secrets about Walter Edgar. This is not idle gossip. Far from it. What I’m about to share is essential if you really want to know about how and why Walter Edgar has become such a fabulous historian, arguably the most widely read and certainly the most listened to historian of South Carolina.

There is much to explain. Walter Edgar’s outreach and ability to communicate his research and scholarship—to, in other words, teach in the broadest sense—is remarkable. According to South Carolina Educational Radio around thirty thousand people listen to Walter Edgar’s Journal, his immensely popular radio show, every week. That’s tens of thousands listeners annually who listen to Walter and his guests, who learn about the latest in historical and literary scholarship on the South. Walter reaches multiple constituencies: average men and women, children, black and white, listen to his show, learn from his show, and become intellectually engaged, curious, aware, and excited as a result of the experience. Walter’s radio shows are, simultaneously, acts of disseminating scholarship, of teaching, and of public service. Very few historians in the country do anything like it. Walter transcends the public/academic divide, speaking to multiple audiences in a way that is extremely rare. He makes the local important and has done more than any other historian to give the state a national, even international profile. He