Details of History

Clifford L. Lord is a handsome, pipe-smoking historian from Amherst with the restless energy of a traveling salesman. In the competitive shopping centers of scholarship, he peddles his wares with remarkable success.

Lord left the ranks of college teachers even before he got his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1943. After a brief stint with the New York State Historical Association and a tour of duty in the Navy, he moved west to Wisconsin, where he became director of the State Historical Society. There in six years he doubled the society's membership (to more than 3,000), tripled its budget (to more than $300,000), and built it into one of the finest organizations of its kind in the nation. Last week the society was reaching beyond its geographical boundaries. It is about to begin a grants-in-aid program for the writing of local histories anywhere in the U.S.

To Lord, local history is something of an obsession. The best way to understand America, he believes, is to understand the details that make it up. He has persuaded the Wisconsin legislature to make the society custodian of all official records, which allows it to sort and preserve documents that might otherwise be lost. (One document that has been missing since 1891: the original state constitution.) He has expanded a program of restoring historic landmarks. And he has organized more than 1,000 junior chapters from which aspiring young historians sally forth to interview reminiscing oldtimers, stir up the dust in long-neglected attics and pore over half-forgotten town records.

In his six years in Wisconsin, Clifford Lord has gone a long way toward his goal. But he knows he is still just beginning. Eventually, he hopes, his society will become a clearinghouse for local histories from all over the U.S. "When we are assuming leadership of half the world," says he, "we owe it to the world and to ourselves to know more about the detailed workings of the American experiment."

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