Harry Lesesne's A History of the University of South Carolina, 1940-2000 covers the six fascinating decades of history in which USC was transformed into a modern research university. How he organized and wrote the book is a story in itself.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to Remembering the Days, the podcast about the history of the University of South Carolina. I'm Chris Horn, your host for the podcast. Actually I should stop myself and say I'm your co-host for the podcast. Evan Faulkenberry, the university's new university historian is joining me this season.
We started this podcast five years ago just as the Covid pandemic was locking everyone down, and since then, we've told nearly 90 stories about the history of the university.
Teaming up with Evan, we're taking a little different direction this season. We're going to be talking to someone who is digging up artifacts on the Horseshoe. We'll be talking with someone who is considered the grand old historian of the history department. And today we will be talking with someone who has written the most recent history about the university. But first, let me introduce Evan Faulkenberry.
Evan Faulkenberry: Well thanks Chris. I am glad to join the podcast. Back when I started this position in August 2024, we met during my first week on the job. I just wanted to reach out because I had been listening. I had been kind of cramming, I guess you could say, for this position by listening to the podcast over the summer before I moved here. So one of the first I wanted to do when I moved here was to reach out to you and get to know you. And I think we just kind of clicked and you wanted to continue the podcast and I wanted to continue listening to it. We thought why don't we kind of work on it together. So one thing led to the next and we've joined forces, I should say, you graciously allowed me to join up and together I think we found some great people to talk to for this season — people that have been studying and documenting different parts of the history of the University of South Carolina as well as people who have shaped it in various ways as well. I think people who listen to this podcast will enjoy hearing these different stories and hearing these new voices. And like you said, the first one is going to be Harry Lesesne who wrote this big ol' brick of a book of USC history from 1940 to 2000. He really did some great work, figuring out all the details, diving into the records and the documents to figure out how USC just exploded in the 20th century.
Chris Horn: Sounds great. Well let's get started with that conversation. Harry, thanks so much for joining us today. And I have used this book I don't know how many times over the last few years for story ideas and also just for background, but tell me how this book came about. You were a graduate student. You were earning your Ph.D. Did you intend for this to be your dissertation?
Harry Lesesne: Well, first of all, thank you, Chris and Evan, for inviting me back. It's good to be back on campus. It's good to be back here when students are around. And searching for parking made me remember my graduate school days. So to the question about my dissertation that became the book. No, the short answer is no. This was not something that I long intended to do. I came into the graduate program in 1993, finished my master's degree in '95 and was headed straight into the Ph.D. program. And at that point, the university was kind of gearing up for the bicentennial and so I think reasonably wanted to update Hollis's history and bring it up more into the present, essentially, a third volume. So Walter Edgar, the well-known historian of South Carolina, was my dissertation director and mentor and good friend and colleague, and I owe him so much for everything that happened while I was here at Carolina.
At that point, I knew I wanted to write about modern South Carolina and so this was suggested as a possible topic, and for a struggling, starving graduate student it came with a little bit of stipend, which was hard to say no to.
The other thing that was great about it was all the information was right here in Columbia. I wouldn't have to travel. I had the amazing South Caroliniana Library. I had the university archives, which were really finishing being organized at that point. It was like an easy transition for me to just take this up. Anyway, it just kind of it kind of fell into place. So I finished that in late '98, I worked on it solidly for about a year and a half and that was both the research and the writing.
Evan Faulkenbury: At the time when you picked up this research, what was the sense around campus, around the university or Columbia itself, of USC's history? Was there a strong sense of that kind of identity?
Harry Lesesne: You know, it was somewhat of a blank slate. In the late '90s the civil rights era was sort of fading into history. It was 30, 35 years ago at that point and many of the principals were either nearing retirement or retiring and so that that era that was so formative in the late '50s and '60s, they had kind of, were kind of aging out of being in the heart of the university's day-to-day activities, although they were still around in Columbia and in South Carolina. So to some degree, there was not a lot of cognizance at all about the university's more recent history anyway. And I look at Chris because he was around then, too, and writing on these things at the same time. I know that that there was a sense that the university's history was profound and it was important. And my view, is the way the way I approached this book was that the university, to use a hackneyed term, was a faithful index of the state. That in a lot of ways, the development and growth of the university in the post-war era really reflected the changes in the economy and the population and the demographics and the education level and so on and so forth of the state. And so that's kind of how I I approached the book.
Chris Horn: As you mentioned, you had access to an enormous archive of data and meeting minutes and all that sort of thing. But when you're putting that into a narrative as an historian, you're trying to be objective, but you have to put a voice to it. So, so obviously everyone who writes a history book is editorializing to a certain extent. How did you try to temper that? I mean, did you run passages past people to say, hey, does this sound about right? How does that work?
Harry Lesesne: Honestly, that's a great question. No, I didn't. I had one of the earliest laptop computers in the late '90s. The Institute for Southern Studies let me use it for a year. And I sat in the fifth subbasement of this library, where we're doing this in the Thomas Cooper Library, in one of those carrels in the back with my little key. And it was, I don't know, 12 square feet. I mean, it was a tiny little carrel, and I just pounded away at it, and I tried to write eight hours a day. I wanted to get the thing finished because there was the pressure of the bicentennial coming. But also I was ready to get out of school and, you know, get on with it.
So I tried to be very disciplined. And so I just wrote, Chris. I mean I had spent a year buried in the data in the research and I had a story in my head and it was just getting it out on paper, typing it out and I don't type. So that was another challenge. It was hunting, pecking. And then once it was down, once I had something down, then we kind of had folks who lived through this read it and comment and editorialize. And that's why the book, the dissertation was finished in 1998, and it's on the shelves somewhere in this library. If you compare that to the published book, there are some fairly significant differences in that. And actually, I'll be frank, there was some arm-wrestling matches about what happened in the book, about what ended up on the printed page. I had to stand firm on I'm the author, and this is the way I see what shook out.
For somebody who spent a good, solid two and a half years of my life dedicated to that project, my intent was that we would be sitting here 25 years later talking about it, and that people would use it as a resource. Because one of the things that I felt like I did in a lot of ways, was plow a lot of new ground. I mean, there was the first draft of history, the news, the news stories and those kind of immediate takes that were in databases. But in a large extent, for example, the integration, desegregation and integration of the university, I was the first person to write about that from an academic standpoint. Now, because it was in a book about a lot of other things, I couldn't go into as much depth as I probably would have liked to. But I think that for folks who came after me for, you know, future historians, it was at least a guide as to the basic narrative and some of the, some of the sources that were out there that folks who wanted to go in more depth could do that. I hope that was the case for a lot of these topics that I dealt with.
If you read the preface of the book, what I tried to do was explain the narrative structure, which was chronological by decade. And then I dealt with, I dealt with similar themes in each decade as, as, you know, as the decades unfolded.
Chris Horn: Was there a particular decade that that you found most interesting? I know the decade for me that I think that I find the most interesting — 1960 to 1970.
Harry Lesesne: I think I would agree with that. I think the '60s were the most transformative decade. The '40s and '50s are fascinating because of the changes that were happening throughout South Carolina and the Southeast that laid the groundwork for what happened in the '60s. And really, in the 1960s, South Carolina rejoined the rest of the Union. I mean, we became the University of South Carolina, became this mega institution like state universities around the South that served the needs of our growing industrialized economy. That's kind of what we were doing at that point.
In the '50s, the university was emerging from an era when it was basically a liberal arts college. It was a small institution and changes in the '50s — the development of faculty and programs — set the stage for the 1960s, which were so transformative in so many different ways. So I think the '60s, if I'm going to look at one decade that really kind of set the stage for and was the fulcrum of history in that period from 1940 to 2000, I would say it was 1960 to early '70s.
Evan Faulkenbury: So you talked about your preface and organizing these themes. One that I was most interested in that you kind of formed all this information out of, is how there was always a sense of or a question in the minds, maybe not articulated in leadership here, but who does the university serve? You know, what's the, what's the point? And so I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit and why that was one of your themes and how you organized that story?
Harry Lesesne: I think I think that's a really great question because it played on every aspect of how the institution developed, say, from, you know, from 19, let's just say 1944. I think 1944 is when the leadership of the state realizes, 'OK, we're going to have all these veterans are coming home from the war, we're going to have to do something. We can't just — status quo is not going to be OK.' So these institutions, Clemson, USC — they're going to have to get ready for these veterans. Well, who are these veterans? You know, what do they want? What are they going to be looking for? And that story, whether it's the growth and development of various departments and schools within the within the university or, of course, the question of desegregation and do these institutions, are they are here to serve all South Carolinians or only a part of them?
That's a question that will always have to be dealt with and being dealt with perpetually in South Carolina, in every state, in every country. Who are these institutions to serve and what's the priority of service? And that's, you know, that's the tug of war. I think, again, I come back to the idea that the university was, in order to stay relevant, had to respond to the changes in South Carolina's economy. Whether it's the development of a of a first-rate business school and the programs there or the engineering and sciences and all those programs that serve the industrial, post-industrial economy here.
Chris Horn: You interviewed a bunch of people for this book. You probably listened to a bunch of oral histories, read transcripts from those, etc. Is there one person you could think of from this vast history, that you would just be curious to be able to sit down and kind of pick their brain and understand why did you make this decision or what were you trying to accomplish?
Harry Lesesne: If I had to interview one person that I wasn't able to interview, it would have been Tom Jones, because he was there for so much of this, kind of this fulcrum. And for those who don't know, Tom Jones was the president of the university from I believe, 1962 until 1974. He was there for so much of the development of this big institution that is now the University of South Carolina. And he dealt with so many of these problems, and frankly, he got kind of a bad rap. I think he was very successful and he left under not the greatest circumstances, I think. He has one of the great quotes that I still repeat this today. His quote when he left office was: 'Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.' I think that’s an interesting way to look at what happened to him.
He came in with a stellar resume. He essentially came from Silicon Valley and brought with him, the gravitas of having been at some of the best institutions in the country and also involved in the cutting-edge business, tech businesses in the early '60s. And, boy, did he have some challenges. I mean, from student challenges, which were probably the most evident publicly, and political challenges that came along with the student challenges, but also developing this institution and growing it in a way that served the state but also maintained a high quality of faculty and programs. He was the one person that I wish I could have interviewed because he was such a key person in this narrative. And still today I would rate him as one of the best presidents that the university had, even though, again he at the time left under less than ideal circumstances because of the politics of the state, essentially.
Evan Faulkenbury: You trace so many years of history, this happened, this happened, this happened. But I wanted to make sure that listeners knew that it's primarily a book about people, you know, it's stories about people doing things. I just wanted to highlight that because it's not, when you're looking through all these records, it's easy to maybe get in the pattern of, well, this happened and then this happened and this happened as if it's these larger forces determining fate and history, but it's people who are making mistakes, who have huge ideas, from presidents to professors to students. And you kind of just bring it all together in a way that sort of makes sense. So how did you do that?
Harry Lesesne: You have to remember that. That's one of the things you learn as a student, grad student in this program, or at least it was taught to us, is that this is a story about people and to make this something that people want to read, you have to make it about people. But the truth is to tell the story. It is about leadership. It's about the students that were here who had agency and had — were shaping the world that they lived in. I wanted to tell a story. And I had researched these stories, and there were some that I had followed, you know, for 50 years of this history because I wanted to see how they connected with the life I had experienced here as a student. How did how did this place come to be the way that it is? In some ways frustrating and other in other ways exhilarating and joyful. This is a great university. And how does a great university develop in a state that sometimes can be anti-intellectual, can sometimes be anti-government, can sometimes achieve amazing and world-changing things. How do these things all how do how do they happen in the same place at the same time?
I wrote this book in my early 30s. I had the good fortune of my father was a college president. My grandfather was a college president. So I'd been around colleges my whole life, and I kind of understood a little bit about higher education and how it worked. But I was very young and, and I had only experienced the university as a student. I had never been a faculty member here, an administrator. So I kind of was able to just be fairly objective, I guess, I didn't have axes to grind. I didn't have internal battles to fight. I just kind of called it like I saw it. And I think in a lot of ways I told the story that was in the documents. The sources told me a story and I didn't try to massage that or fit it into a preconceived narrative because I didn't have one.
Chris Horn: Well, Harry, thanks so much for joining us today. This has been a lot of fun.
Harry Lesesne: Yeah it is, and again, I'm very grateful. And I hope we can do more of this because while we've talked about this book and how I approached it, the real interesting stuff for those who've gotten this far in this podcast, the real interesting stuff are the stories in the book, not the story of the book. The stories in the book are fascinating, and the people are interesting, and the place they built is extraordinary.
Evan Faulkenberry: Well that was great to listen to Harry talk about his book and his process for writing it and how it all came together. I know he said something there about the most interesting parts to him are the stories in there and not the actual writing of the book. I like listening to how he came up with it.
Chris Horn: I thought the history of the history book was kind of cool. We'll have to have him back on for some other episodes because he knows that whole 60-year period — plenty of interesting stories in it.
On the next episode of Remembering the Days, we're going to be talking to Jill Found, who is the chief historian of the university Center for Civil Rights History and Research, wrote what I think is an interesting dissertation about enslaved people at South Carolina College, the precursor of the University of South Carolina. Really looking forward to that conversation.
Evan Faulkenberry: Jill's done some amazing research to uncover a hard-to-track-down topic and a hard-to-discuss
topic as well.
Chris Horn: That's next on Remembering the Days.