[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 138 (Thursday, September 7, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1722-E1724]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                    TRIBUTE TO PAGE AND ELOISE SMITH

                                 ______


                         HON. NORMAN Y. MINETA

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, September 6, 1995
  Mr. MINETA. Mr. Speaker, a week and a half ago, Page Smith, noted 
historian and educator, and his wife Eloise, noted artist and educator, 
passed away in Santa Cruz, CA. They leave behind monuments few will 
ever equal--monuments in their creative works, in generations of 
students they inspired, institutions they shaped and reformed, and in 
the lives they touched and the affections with which they are 
remembered.
  Page as a young man was tempted by various professions: novelist, 
actor, miner, journalist, and historian among them. He graduated from 
Darmouth College--selected for its proximity to good trout fishing--in 
history in 1940. Like many men of his generation, his choice of career 
was interrupted by military service. He served for 5 years in the Army, 
including ski combat duty, following graduation from Darmouth. In 1945, 
as commander of a rifle company of the Tenth Mountain Division
 
[[Page E 1723]]

on Mr. Belvedere in northern Italy, he was severely wounded in both 
legs, wounds which he felt the effects of for the rest of his life.
  Following the war he entered Harvard under the GI bill and received 
his doctorate in American history in 1951. From 1953 to 1964, he served 
on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. Of his 
move to Los Angeles he later observed that, ``I was an extremely 
provincial Easterner who had never been west of western Maryland and 
the notion of going to a place as remote and bizarre rather alarmed me 
* * * and dismayed my mother.'' Once at UCLA Page both practiced and 
critized his chosen profession of historian.
  His two volume biography of John Adams, published in 1962, played to 
both scholarly and popular acclaim, winning Columbia University's 
Bancroft Award and becoming a popular Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
  In his subsequent book, ``History and the Historian''--1964, Page 
both stated his philosophy of history and earned the iconoclast label 
so often attached to him that it might be thought by some to be one of 
his middle names. He declared that ``great history * * * has always 
been narrative history, history with a story to tell that illuminates 
the truth of the human situation, that lifts spirits and projects new 
potentialities.'' He chided his colleagues for being too wed to narrow 
subjects, to various forms of determinism, to the primacy of impersonal 
forces, to the pretense of pseudo-scientific objectivity, to the 
actions and beliefs of the few
 leaders rather than the people who make up the whole of society.

  He later said that the American Revolution took place first and 
foremost ``in the hearts and minds of the American people,'' and that 
``the best history of the American Revolution was written by the people 
who were in it.'' His work was always a magical weaving of first-hand 
accounts of those who participated in the events, and his histories 
were always first and foremost captivating stories about real people.
  And that was the narrative history that Page both practiced and 
preached. When Page published in 1976 ``A New Age Now Begins''--which 
was the beginning of his eight volume work, ``A People's History of the 
United States'', the great American historian Samuel Eliot Morrison not 
only called it ``a great, magnificent work,'' but also spoke of it in 
terms we might more commonly reserve for a captivating novel or movie: 
``His story of Bunker Hill is a real thriller. * * * His chapter on 
Washington resigning his commission, and the disbanding of the army, is 
a masterpiece.''
  Page always believed that good history is a good story, that it is 
about people, and that it must be made from their thoughts and 
observations, which he found in bits of letters, diaries, and the like. 
He argued that historians should not look down on the past from their 
lofty perch of historical distance. ``I say the situation is more like 
an archaeological dig * * * (you) reconstruct what happened out of the 
remnants and shards.''
  The Adams biography was the first of his works to take up the curious 
story, which he revisited in both his ``People's History'' and in his 
biography of Thomas Jefferson (1976), of Adams and Jefferson. These two 
men were in many ways the polar opposites of their era, political 
adversaries, and symbols of opposite tendencies in American life. 
Jefferson embodied much of the radical idealism of the Declaration of 
Independence, Adams the carefully structured, balanced and controlled 
pragmatism of the Constitution. Each was a leader of powerful and 
opposing factions in early American political life. Yet these two ex-
Presidents, late in their years, became regular correspondents, each 
coming to appreciate and admire the other despite their differences, 
each becoming in many ways the most respected of Americans in the eyes 
of each other. Early in their correspondence, Adams wrote to Jefferson, 
``You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each 
other.'' Many years and a great many letters later, they died within a 
few hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the 
Declaration of Independence. Adams' last words were about Jefferson.
  In the early 1960's, two of California's leading educators, Clark 
Kerr and Dean McHenry, launched a great experiment in higher education. 
They wanted to see if a university with the size and prestige of the 
University of California could change its stripes and could create a 
new campus built around small and intimate colleges along the lines of 
Swarthmore or Oxford. They needed a first leader of the first college 
to bring that vision to life. Thus in 1964 page became the first 
provost of Cowell College at the University of California.
  It is now 30 years after the campus welcomed its first few students 
in 1965, and the place has grown to a major university with many 
colleges. Yet much of the tone of the campus, its intellectual life, 
its style, was the inspiration of Page and Eloise. They probably had 
more influence in the shaping of that great institution than anyone 
else. In the emphasis on classroom teaching, on shared intellectual 
pursuits within the college, on the college as a social framework in an 
otherwise impersonal institutional setting, on personalized education 
and evaluation, Cowell College and ultimately UCSC were in many ways 
the offspring of Page and Eloise.
  He summed up what a university might be, and in particular what his 
university should be, as ``the pursuit of truth in the company of 
friends.'' What is so remarkable that it is so often forgotten is that 
Page was only provost of Cowell for half a dozen years, and left the 
university entirely in 1973. His enduring effect on the institution 
would have been astounding if he had worked there for a lifetime.
  Characteristically, he left over one of the principles which had 
brought him to Santa Cruz: that the primary purpose of the university 
should be to teach students. He left in protest over the publish-or-
perish requirements the university imposed on his younger colleagues to 
the detriment of their teaching responsibilities. Having so changed the 
nature of the university, he was still dissatisfied that it had not 
changed more.
  Page was 56 years old when he left the university. He was the award-
winning author of five major works in American history, and he had been 
instrumental in the founding of a major new institution of higher 
learning. Some would have rested on those considerable laurels, but 
Page had an irrepressible curiosity and a relentless work ethic. What 
some thought of as his retirement instead blossomed into his most 
productive years, years in which he would author and publish another 14 
major volumes, including his 8 volume ``A People's History of the 
United States''.
  The ``People's History'' alone took a decade to write, but it was 
Page putting into practice what he had admonished others to do in their 
histories. It was what he called old-fashioned narrative history, with 
the spiritual and moral dimension included, and without claims of 
distant objectivity or easy explanations. One reviewer concluded, ``No 
American since Charles Beard has produced anything comparable in 
length, scope, or readability.''
  In his 1990 book, ``Killing the Spirit,'' Page the iconoclast took on 
higher education even more forcefully than he had taken on historians a 
quarter of a century earlier. He criticized universities for their 
obsession with size, for failing to put teaching first, for excessively 
narrow specialization ``at the cost of * * * any awareness of the unity 
of life,'' for failure to build a sense of community, for elevating 
``knowledge for its own sake, rather than knowledge that ripens into 
wisdom or that serves larger ends,'' and for promoting ``relativism, 
which denies any moral structure in the world.''
  Those strong views excepted, Page was in many ways hard to categorize 
and hard to predict. He was an accomplished scholar and historian who 
rejected many of the ways of scholars and historians around him. He 
built up a major university, yet criticized the structure of 
universities and organized a ``Penny University'' in Santa Cruz to show 
that friends could pursue the truth without faculty, without tuition, 
without books, without grades, without special buildings--they met for 
years in a cafe, more recently in a church, and, perhaps most 
importantly, without faculty meetings and administrators. He was to 
many the founder of Santa Cruz's casual and irreverent style, but he 
also stood for structure, reverence, and students wearing ties to 
dinner once a week, and once raised a flap when he complained that 
students had become too unbuttoned. He was a leading advocate of 
women's rights and women's role in the university and in the Nation--as 
in his 1970 book, ``Daughters in the Promised Land'', but raised 
another flap by criticizing the proliferation of women's studies 
classes at UCSC as too often sexual politics rather than serious 
academic courses. He was an Eastern traditionalist who also became a 
Western innovator.
  He was an author of prodigious output, who nevertheless opposed the 
premium universities put on publishing at the expense of teaching. His 
critics sometimes took him to be at the forefront of the counterculture 
of the 1960's, but in fact he had a traditionalist's work ethic 
sufficient to stagger most men. Even in his pseudoretirement, he 
strictly set aside a good part of nearly every day for research and 
writing, which he did with great discipline. From age 59 to 69, he 
wrote his eight-volume, 6,000-page ``People's History.'' The month he 
died at age 77, he published two new works: ``Democracy in Trial: The 
Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II,'' and 
``Old Age is Another Country--A Traveller's Guide.''
  He was both of the establishment and quick to challenge it. He was 
above all else a probing mind, always subjecting ideas and beliefs, 
including his own, to re-evaluation and scrutiny. Nothing was safe from 
reappraisal and fresh judgment, and there was nothing he loved to 
challenge anew so much as his own views. He was always looking for a 
new perspective on any issue, a new piece that would reveal something 
about the puzzle, a new clue to the mystery.

[[Page E 1724]]

  Eloise grew up in North Carolina. There was nothing about her 
background which would have suggested a great artist was in the making. 
Yet beginning with the inspiration of a high school arts teacher, she 
took to the arts with a vigor that characterized her throughout her 
life. Her talent was enormous. By the time she was 21, she had won five 
national scholarships to the Art Students League in New York City.
  Once married, her career as an artist was often interrupted, and she 
clearly determined to make her artistic career secondary. Nevertheless, 
she continued her work as best she could. She once recalled in a Santa 
Cruz Sentinel interview that on the rare occasions when she got away to 
paint, she would think of her children and worry that ``they're all out 
running around in the middle of the street and Page is typing.''
  Eloise was always a force; a force at home, a force in the community, 
a force at Cowell College, a force in the world of art, and a force in 
the life of her husband. But she was always a force with grace and 
charm. She was coauthor with Page of the style of Cowell College in 
particular and UCSC in general. On campus, she promoted both greater 
participation in and understanding of art.
  She not only did art, she advocated art and its role in the 
community. Most notably, she was named by the Governor of California in 
1975 to head the California Arts Council, and rather than use that 
position for more traditional purposes, she determined to start an arts 
program in the California State prison system as a way to help inmates 
break patterns that would otherwise bring them back to prison. Despite 
its modest size and resources, the program enjoyed notable success.
  Though she never promoted her own art the way she promoted the role 
of art in the community, she was widely recognized as an award-winning 
artist, and particularly in recent years, her art and her reputation as 
an artist blossomed.
  The story of Page and Eloise is not ultimately the story of a 
historian, an artist, and two educators. The story of Page and Eloise 
is above all else a love story, and one of the most profound love 
stories ever lived.
  Page as a young soldier in training in North Carolina was walking 
down the street in town and saw a painting on display in a shop window. 
He was so taken with it he bought it on the spot and asked to meet the 
artist. On meeting Eloise, he fell in love at first sight and 
determined to marry her. They were man and wife for 54 years, had four 
children, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
  Of their marriage their daughter, Ann Easeley, recently said, ``She 
allowed him to be the kind of person he was. She made a life and an 
environment and world for him that enabled him to do the amazing things 
he did. She was devoted to him and he was dependent on her.''
  Eloise was in many ways Page Smith's Page Smith, the iconoclast's 
iconoclast. He would hold forth at a dinner gathering in full 
professorial bloom, and she would manage to deflate his balloon with an 
affectionate but effective pin prick. He would rush to his own defense 
and enjoy the opportunity for intellectual thrust and parry, but take 
great delight at the same time in this university big name getting his 
comeuppance. He loved her wit, her challenge, as well as her charm.
  Page in his later years wrote a very popular newspaper column on old 
age, entitled ``Coming of Age.'' Eloise was often the foil for his 
good-natured satires and complaints about old age. Finally she took 
over one installment of the column to give her rebuttal, entitled, 
``Page Smith's Wife Tells All.'' She noted that she had once, ``in a 
thoughtless moment,'' said that
 Page was ``almost perfect to live with,'' and that Page had promptly 
written it down and had it signed by witnesses and notarized.
  She then proceeded to set out her reasons for emphasizing that he was 
less than perfect. A brief sample: ``It pains me to have to say that 
Page is inherently lazy. For years he has done his best to persuade me 
that, as `writer' and `thinker', he is hard at work as soon as his eyes 
are open in the morning. Although he has written on the importance of a 
husband's participating in housework, and prides himself on having been 
a forerunner of the emancipated modern male, here again he is longer on 
theory than practice. As he gazes distractedly around our rural abode, 
he manages to screen out dirt on the floor, crumbs (his) on the rug, 
spiderwebs trailing from the ceiling, windows crusted with dust stirred 
up by his barnyard fowls whose droppings are everywhere and who rouse 
me from my sleep with their crowing and honking. He performs the most 
modest domestic chores as though they were the labors of Hercules. His 
so-called study would make a pig blush.''
  She concluded the article however, by saying simply, ``I did say 
`almost' perfect. But I still adore him.''
  Page loved the article, just as he loved its author.
  This past May Eloise was diagnosed as having kidney cancer, and her 
health declined rapidly. Soon after, Page was diagnosed as having 
leukemia. He determined to live as long as she did.
  ``As mother failed, he failed,'' said their daughter. ``Four days ago 
they told him they could keep him alive until she died. It's exactly 
what Daddy wanted. He said he didn't want to live without her and that 
he considered it a blessing.''
  When Eloise died Saturday morning, August 26, Page refused further 
medication. In a few hours, he slipped into a coma. He died a day and a 
half after she did.
  The Smith's longtime friend, Mary Holmes, a professor of art history 
who came with them from UCLA to launch UCSC, said, ``We couldn't even 
imagine the shape of a life he would have without her. Apparently, he 
couldn't either.''
  She added, ``Their relationship was such a rarity and an 
extraordinary thing. It was a gift, and they became a gift for everyone 
that knew them. It was a love story; what a love story.''
  By their own wish, they were cremated and their ashes mixed together.
  Death is not newsworthy; it is too common. What is rare is to have 
truly lived to the fullest, to have left a legacy of creative works, of 
many lives touched, of community improved, of understanding increased, 
of fond remembrance. There are no two people who have had more of all 
that than Page and Eloise Smith. Their lives stand as a celebration of 
what human lives can be.


                          ____________________