“Mr. Wyoming,” historian T.A. Larson Mines Wyoming politics and culture
Nine flat tires and an eternity of gravel road was the introduction to Wyoming for Taft Alfred “Al” Larson (1910-2001) in 1929. The future Wyoming historian was then a University of Colorado undergraduate. He and other CU students were driving on the Lincoln Highway heading to Salt Lake City to watch a college football game. The highway was just starting to be oiled, as Larson recalled later.
The fans made it to Salt Lake via Laramie in one long day, only to see their team lose 40-0. However, Larson in a 1992 interview with historian Mark Junge said, “We got so we could fix flats really quickly.”
Yellowstone employee
Larson’s next experience with Wyoming was far more pleasant. He worked four years as a summer employee of a concessionaire at Yellowstone National Park. His jobs were menial: groundskeeper, cabin cleaner and night watchman, but the scenery was magnificent, and he gained an appreciation for Wyoming.
Larson was at CU for six years, receiving BS and MS degrees in history, concentrating on the history of England—his Master’s thesis was on church and state in 14th c. England. He chose CU because at the time it was thought that dry air was a benefit for people like him who suffered from chronic bronchitis.
Larson grew up on a farm near the Missouri River in northeastern Nebraska. He recalled that though his immigrant parents might have had only an eighth grade education in Sweden, they were “great believers in education because they had so little of it.”
Later Larson said, “my father continued that attitude, that you’ve got to be prepared, and work hard.” His father was his only parent from the time Larson was eight—his mother died of the Spanish Flu in 1918.
Progressive outlook
At CU, Larson developed a different outlook on politics than the Republican philosophy that had dominated his Nebraska upbringing. “ ‘Fried rats and pickled cats are good enough for the Democrats’—that was a popular slogan around my hometown [Wakefield, Nebraska],” said Larson, when talking about the local support for Republican President Herbert Hoover.
His father had the attitude that high tariffs promoted by Republicans were good for the economic interests of farmers, while Democrats at the time promoted low tariffs with an emphasis on free trade. Larson first became eligible to vote in 1932 while at CU, and he voted for Franklin Roosevelt. “The changes of the great depression really caused a lot of questioning about the capitalistic system then,” he said.
Trades England for Wyoming
Larson received his Ph.D. degree in English history from the University of Illinois in 1936. His dissertation topic was on crown and clergy in the reign of Edward III of England. Then Larson learned that there was a one-year opening at the University of Wyoming, substituting for a professor who was on a year’s leave in France.
Larson agreed to the one year appointment, and, following that, embarked on a trip to Europe himself, leaving for England in 1937 to study at the University of London. He had to sign documents pledging that he would not seek employment in Britain as a condition for his visa—times were equally tough with the depression there too. While in England he “published his first article in the prestigious English Historical Review” according to his UW colleague Deborah Hardy.
When he returned to the U.S. in 1938, it was to accept another appointment to the UW history faculty, this time for a permanent position. Two years earlier, when he first joined the UW faculty temporarily, it was on the condition that he develop a course in Wyoming history, taking over that subject from Grace Raymond Hebard who had developed it, but who had died in 1936.
That became part of his obligation to the history department. “Most of what I knew about Wyoming I learned after I came to the campus,” commented Larson.
Hebard was wrong
One of the first things Larson learned was that Hebard made a lot of errors in teaching the history of Wyoming. She may have become a history enthusiast but she had no historical training—she was trained as a draftsman, Larson discovered. He further discounted her advanced degrees by correspondence in Political Economy, which in his opinion left her unschooled in the proper technique for historical research.
“I didn’t have to study very much to discover that she was wrong on the Esther Morris story and she was wrong about Sacajawea,” said Larson in the 1992 interview with Junge.
He described Hebard’s technique as developing a theory first, then discounting anything that came along that didn’t fit the theory. His chief aim became to set the record straight on the “myths” that Hebard had created, namely that Esther Morris was the mother of women’s suffrage and that Sacajawea had died as an old woman on the Wind River Reservation of Wyoming.
But along the way he developed an appreciation for the wisdom of the earliest politicians of Wyoming, who, regardless of their motivations, had adopted women’s suffrage as part of the constitution of Wyoming Territory. He later said: “This is one of Wyoming’s chief distinctions—the Equality State—we adopted that nickname early. I had to find out why.”
Books follow
It turned out that Larson’s chief contribution to the history profession would be as an educator and author. Though he did publish a few scholarly papers in his long career at UW (1938 – 1975), he is chiefly remembered today for the 16,000 students he taught in Wyoming history classes at UW and for his five books on Wyoming history.
Chief among these is the 600+ page volume “History of Wyoming” first published in 1965, and reissued in 1978 as the “History of Wyoming, second edition.” Both were published by the University of Nebraska Press. The revised second edition has gone through several printings. The original 1965 edition must be rare, since a copy is currently listed on Amazon.com for $572.97.
His first book was “Wyoming’s War Years, 1941-1945” which was published by UW in 1954. Out of print now, this book was hailed in an Amazon review as an “outstanding overview of the home front.” Larson had two years to observe the home front from the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 until his stateside wartime service in the U.S. Navy from 1943-1946 while on leave from the UW faculty. He served as a commissioned officer at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, north of Chicago. Among other responsibilities, he spent several months compiling a history of this base, the largest training station in the Navy.
The War Years book is dedicated to the “1,095 men from Wyoming who gave their lives for their country”; their names are listed in the appendix. The pre-publication announcement says it describes the pangs of rationing, the scramble for scarce goods, and the strenuous promotion of home-front drives to support the troops. The pre-publication cost was $5.50 including sales tax and postage, but a rare unused copy is available from Amazon at $768.57 (December 2020).
His other two books are “Bill Nye’s Western Humor,” which Larson edited in 1968, and “Wyoming: A Bicentennial History” published in 1977 as part of the States and Nation series by W.W. Norton & Co. Hailed as a model for an overview of a state, Larson commented in 1992 that the Bicentennial book was easier because the topics were simpler than those for other states where many more themes had to be explored. The Bicentennial book continues to be available, currently in a Kindle edition.
In the interview with Junge, Larson noted that “My war history was a good book and was a real contribution, but World War II lost interest for a lot of people by the 1950s when [it was published]—we were in the Korean War. There’s more interest now [1992] in World War II than when that book was written.”
Junge compliments Larson as the “first true historian that Wyoming has seen” and asked how Larson would evaluate the two history books as accomplishments. Larson’s response was to note that for his first book on Wyoming history, he had to go to primary sources that sometimes displayed bad writing habits. Though they provided the facts, there was a danger that when “practically all your sources are not well written by literary standards, why, you’re apt to lapse into that sort of stuff too.”
Larson said modestly that by time he got to the Bicentennial book, “I had a pretty fair knowledge of Wyoming history.” He thought that gave him the freedom to be more intuitive in his writing. He further lamented that because of the few number of colleagues working in the same field, his writing did not get critically evaluated as it might have been, had he been working with others well qualified to judge it. Peers might have pushed him to a “really high level,” Larson said.
Legacy
Larson thanks his wife Mary (1916-1989), who he married in 1947, as contributing “in a hundred ways” toward the publication of his War Years book. For the 1965 book, he also mentions his daughter Mary Lou, who went on to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Santa Barbara. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and director of the Anthropology Museum at UW.
As an influence on his career at UW, Larson most often mentions English professor Wilson O. Clough as a friend and critical reader of his manuscripts. Clough also figured in some of Larson’s appointments to committees that attempted to get UW out of some predicaments with UW trustees. One was in the late 1940s when the trustees wanted to evaluate all social studies texts for possible subversive content. Larson chaired the faculty committee that approached the trustees with statements about trust and academic freedom, which eventually won out in tense negotiations.
Another came in 1959 when Larson became director of the School of American Studies for almost 10 years, succeeding Clough in that appointment which was during a particularly contentious debate about how the substantial bequest from the William Robertson Coe estate should be administered.
Larson became chair of the History Department in 1948 and served for 20 years in that capacity. He fully retired from the faculty in 1975 but soon was elected as a Democrat to the Wyoming House of Representatives. He served four terms, and was on the influential Joint Appropriations Committee during his entire legislative career. He retired from the Legislature in 1984.
Although I knew him only by reputation, in 1987 we both spoke at a hearing chaired by a member of the UW Board of Trustees over whether or not to tear down the Cooper House, which UW had just acquired. The hearing was packed with people wanting to speak, Larson was among the first. He discounted the connection with Ernest Hemingway and saw no historical significance to the property—no reason for retaining the building.
As the hearing dragged on, speaker after speaker (including me) talked about all the reasons why the house had significance to us. To his credit, Larson stayed to hear all the speakers. At the end, he asked permission to speak again. He said: “I’ve changed my mind.” All the Laramie speakers following him made him realize that he was overlooking what contributes significance to a building—its more than history alone. That really impressed me, that someone so respected would demonstrate an open mind.
During his UW career, Larson supervised 80 Master’s students, and six Ph. D students. Of his 16,000 Wyoming history students, Larson said that he wished he had taught “only a quarter that many so that I could give each one more time.”
By Judy Knight
This article relies substantially on Deborah Hardy’s 1986 book Wyoming University; The First 100 years, and the transcript of T.A. Larson’s oral history on the website of the Wyoming State Archives, https://archive.org/details/OH1744TALarsonTranscript/page/n25/mode/2up.
Source: Laramie Plains Museum, Boomerang Collection
Caption: Dr. T.A. Larson, c. 1950s, in his UW office.