Rockwell Dennis Hunt

By Ron Limbaugh, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of History, University of the Pacific

Editor’s note: As we learned from reading the 50th anniversary issue of the California HISTORIAN earlier this year, Dr. Rockwell D. Hunt was one of the founding fathers of the Conference of California Historical Societies. For more than a decade the author held the endowed Rockwell Hunt Chair of California History at the University of the Pacific. This brief tribute was presented at the 2000 California History Institute.

For nearly half a century Rockwell Dennis Hunt was one of California’s best known and most prolific historians. Born in Sacramento in 1868, he received a Bachelor’s degree from Napa College in 1890, just before it was consolidated into the University of the Pacific. Although I cannot prove the case, I like to think of him as the first UOP graduate to earn a doctorate in history. After receiving his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1895, the same institution that awarded a Ph.D. to Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier’s most influential historian, Hunt returned to California and taught history and economics at UOP until 1902. For some years he worked in public secondary education in San Jose, then in 1908 was hired by the University of Southern California to teach economics. In 1920 he became Dean of the USC Graduate School, a position he held until retiring in 1945.

In the interim, UOP gave a master’s degree to another young man who fell in love with regional history. His name was Robert Burns. When Burns became president in 1946, one of his first acts was to entice Rockwell Hunt out of retirement to direct a new undergraduate program at Pacific that Burns had conceived. The result was the California History Foundation, predecessor to the Holt-Atherton Library (now called the Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections). The foundation was essentially a joint product of Burns’ imagination and Rockwell Hunt’s reputation and hard work, for Hunt never slackened in retirement. He was a prolific reader and writer who came to Pacific fresh with new ideas for books and articles. With Burns’ blessing and with support from a fledgling UOP press which eventually foundered, Hunt added volumes to an already substantial record of publications. Most of his writings were historical in nature, beginning with his first book on The Genesis of California’s First Constitution in 1895. By the time he reached Pacific in 1946 he had authored seven books. Perhaps the most important was a biography of Hunt’s hero and fellow teetotaler, John Bidwell, whom Hunt called the “Prince of California Pioneers.”

While Director of the California History Foundation, Hunt became a proverbial book factory, turning out a volume about every other year until his death in 1964. In between major works he wrote articles on a wide variety of topics, everything from agriculture to Zionism. Hunt’s lifetime bibliography is almost a book in itself. He was responsible for at least 17 major works and 169 articles in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers. The State of California recognized this prodigious effort in 1954 when Governor “Goodie” Knight signed the proclamation naming him “Mr. California,” the first person in the state to hold that title. Promoted by the Native Sons and Native Daughters as well as the California Historical Society, the act bore an awkward but honest inscription that acknowledged Hunt’s “outstanding contribution to California life through his teachings and writings and of the many years he has devoted in service to his native state in various capacities.” After Hunt’s death, and during the years Ronald Reagan was California’s chief executive, the legislature conferred the same honor (but with better syntax) on Richard Coke Wood, Hunt’s successor at UOP and a cofounder with Hunt of the Conference.

Reading the titles of some of Hunt’s many publications is a revelation in itself, for it shows how sweeping were his scholarly interests. Although the bulk of his productivity involved regional history, as an economic historian and political scientist he was not limited by a provincial mind. He kept up with current events and often spoke his mind in print, perhaps to his later embarrassment, for though his hindsight was excellent, he lacked the foresight — a common human fault — to realize that today’s dreams may be tomorrow’s delusions. In 1915, for example, on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, he told California Christians that there was “not a little common ground” between Christianity and socialism. In the Nazi era he probably wanted to forget that a quarter century earlier he had published a piece entitled “Eugenics, A Nobler Breed of Men.” A lifelong foe of alcohol, in World War I he was warning Americans on the dangers of campus keg parties. In the troubling ’20s he advised readers on “Problems of Economic Reconstruction” and “Compensations of the Great War.” A moral conservative but an internationalist in foreign affairs, he wrote on prohibition in the “flapper era,” traditional values and democracy during the New Deal, America’s postwar global responsibilities in the late 1940s, and “Shredded Men and Desiccated Society,” an ominous title, at the height of the McCarthy era. Moral values and the duties of a Christian gentleman were important themes to Rockwell Hunt, who, like the youthful John Muir a century before, turned to the New Testament for guidance. As his final days approached, the title of an article in Together magazine summed up his lifetime philosophy: “Live Right, Love Everybody.”

The memories of Hunt’s achievements are fading fast today, 40 years after his death. California history has yet to earn the respect it deserves among members of the history profession, who generally have dismissed “local history” as not worthy of a grand theorist in the tradition of Turner or Toynbee. Yet as the world’s seventh largest economy at the beginning of a new century that will look to the Pacific Basin for dynamic new directions and leadership, California will eventually earn its spurs, and riding in the saddle of a potent heritage will be Rockwell Dennis Hunt. He deserves a place of honor in California’s “stately hall of fame.”