Thirty Years at the Indiana Magazine of History

A Conversation with Lorna Lutes Sylvester

Lorna Lutes Sylvester served the Indiana Magazine of History for thirty-four years, first as its assistant editor (1964–1967), later as the associate editor (1967–1999), and during several periods as the journal's acting editor.1 We spoke with Sylvester in the magazine's offices in Bloomington on August 29, 2005, about her career, the IMH, and the changing state of Indiana history. The transcription of that interview, which follows, has been edited for continuity.
Early Interest in History
Indiana Magazine of History: What brought you to Indiana University and the Indiana Magazine of History?
Lorna Sylvester: I enrolled at Indiana University as a freshman in 1952, and other than a few brief side trips I was with IU until I retired in 1998. I came because I was a Monroe County/Bloomington resident, and as such, I could live at home and attend IU. My parents couldn't afford to send me to college any place else. It was just my good fortune that IU had an excellent history department and I received an excellent education; as a result I have my three degrees from here.
Lorna Lutes Sylvester, 1989 Photograph by Ellen B. Berkowitz, IMH Collection
IMH: What did history mean to you as a young woman just starting her higher education?
LS: It's difficult to say. I knew from the time I was seven years old that I wanted to do something with history. Since I came from a long line of teachers, my initial thought was, "I'm going to teach history in high school." I'm not really sure what drew me to it so much. It's just something that has always intrigued me. The books I read as a child and later were primarily history. Perhaps it's because I come from what has been called an "arrested frontier" in Brown County in southern Indiana, where people frequently discussed their ancestors and where almost every conversation included, "He lives there, his grandmother was so and so, her parents came from thus and so." I grew up hearing that. To me that was history, and from there on I wanted to learn more about it.
IMH: Meaning, as well, that you had a particular interest in Indiana?
LS: I was interested in it always, but for many years my first love was the Civil War period. When I came to IU, that's the area that I wanted to specialize in. When I was ready to start graduate school, I initially enrolled at the University of North Carolina to study southern history. One of my professors, R. C. Buley, called me in and said, "Lorna, that's a big mistake." He said, "You are not a southerner. You will never think like a southerner. This is the wrong thing for you to do. You're a Hoosier; you're from Indiana. You know these people, you think like these people, you ought to stay here and go into state, local, regional history." At the time I thought his reasoning wasn't particularly logical, and I didn't follow his advice. Because of health reasons, however, I had to come back to IU. I took four-and-a-half years out to teach public school in order to pay for further study. Very shortly after I returned to Bloomington, I took Donald Carmony's Indiana history course. A couple of years later he offered me a position as the assistant editor of the Indiana Magazine of History, and, as I say, the rest is history.
The Indiana Magazine of History
IMH: Describe your first encounters with Donald Carmony.
LS: He had interviewed me for the position of assistant editor of the Indiana Magazine of History just after my senior year, but I was determined on graduate school at that time so I turned him down. When I came back to Indiana, I began to teach in secondary schools, but I took summer courses at Indiana University. His course was one of the first that I took. That was my first real acquaintance with or knowledge of him. Then later on, when the position of assistant editor again opened up at the Indiana Magazine of History, he called me in and asked me if I would like to have the position.
IMH: How would you describe Carmony's contribution to the field? Was he inheriting and building on what Buley, Logan Esarey, and John Barnhart had created before him?
LS: Yes, I think he was. Esarey, of course, was the first IU editor of the Indiana Magazine of History (1913–1926). He was one of Professor Carmony's mentors. Carmony admired him a great deal, often told stories about him, and I think wanted to continue what Esarey had started. Barnhart, who was the editor (1941–1955) just prior to Professor Carmony, was also a renowned Indiana and midwestern historian and continued to build the reputation of the magazine. So yes: Carmony was building on what was here, but I think he took it much farther. He, like Esarey, was closer to pioneer Indiana, to the people. He really was able to bridge the gap between professional historian and ordinary people who were interested in history.
IMH: Was that because of the kind of boyhood he had or because of the kind of professor he was?
LS: I think it was because of his boyhood. He was from Shelby County, and his background was the rural background that a great many people in Indiana at that time had lived. He was one of them, and they saw him in that way.
IMH: Was Don Carmony then practicing social history? That is, was he looking away from the big political events and the major movers and shakers, toward everyday life?
LS: That is a difficult question. I don't know that he would ever have described himself that way. This was just what he was; it was who he was. His interest was basically in political history—old-fashioned history, if you will—but in pursuing that interest he worked with and knew and got along with people who were not academics: the lay historians, ordinary people. In fact, if you had called him a social historian, I think he would possibly have denied it. Hewas, but I'm not sure he recognized it in himself. He was open to social history, other genres, and we published many articles in the magazine during his editorship that were not political history. Still, that was his major interest, and that's what he researched; it's what he wrote about and what he was interested in. But I learned very, very early that his name was a sort of "Open Sesame" in Indiana, regardless of what part of the state you were in. You would go to a library or a town or a museum, and you would be stonewalled about research or getting access to documents or touring historic homes; but if you said, "I work with Donald F. Carmony," it was a complete reversal of attitude. You got almost anything you wanted. He had that kind of rapport with people in the state.
IMH: Let's talk about his impact on the journal. When you put together the edited volume, "No Cheap Padding" (1980), in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the magazine, you had a chance to look over the whole run and to think about the impact of different editors and the stamp that they left on it. What kind of magazine did Don Carmony inherit, and where did he take it in the many years that he edited the IMH?
LS: The editor immediately preceding Carmony was John Barnhart. I hesitate to use words like "old school," but he was also someone primarily interested in political history. The magazine under Barnhart became much more scholarly. He was able to get articles from professional historians, as well as lay historians, that were very significant in the field. The IMH became in his hands far more a scholarly professional journal than it had been before. There were scholarly articles prior to that. There were footnotes prior to that. But I think Barnhart moved the IMH into a more professional realm than perhaps some of his predecessors. When he passed it to Carmony, there probably was less change between the two editors than there had been before. Carmony merely took what was there and began to build on it. I won't say that he didn't do anything new, he did; but he was continuing, I think, for the most part, what Barnhart had started. Carmony perhaps broadened his focus a little more. He used a few more articles from lay historians. He considered articles with a wider variety of subjects than Barnhart did, but primarily it was a very smooth transition between the two.
IMH: You came to work here in 1964. What could or would happen in a typical day of work? What kind of operation was it?
LS: I remember that my first reaction, other than being thrilled to death to get the position as assistant editor, was to wonder how in the world a journal as well-known and as prestigious as the Indiana Magazine of History could be edited and produced out of the facilities that we had at the time. We were in one room on the third floor of what was then the library, now Franklin Hall. To be perfectly honest, the room was not particularly clean. I don't think the janitorial staff ever made it that high up in the library. We had a couple of desks and an antique—and I use that word advisedly—manual typewriter. Everything was done out of that room: we edited there; we carried on the business there; after the magazines were bound, they were stuffed into huge mailbags there. Initially, Professor Carmony had three different positions on campus with three different offices. Sometimes it was great fun trying to track him down to get an answer to a question because you never knew exactly where he would be at any one time.
IMH: How did your own role in the journal evolve over time?
LS: I often heard Professor Carmony joke that he preferred two part-time assistant editors to one full-time because he thought he got more work out of them. He said it jokingly, but he may well have been correct. I started as an assistant editor, just as any other graduate student or faculty wife who worked as assistant editor. Professor Carmony very rarely had what most historians today would call a true sabbatical. He would be relieved of his teaching duties, but the magazine deadlines were always there. As I continued with the IMH—and I didn't intend to stay forever when I first came—I began to take over for him when he needed to get away for a summer or needed to take a true sabbatical and be away from campus. My graduate degrees were basically in midwestern and Indiana history, and I could provide some continuity for the magazine; so from assistant editor I became associate editor, and on a number of occasions acting editor when Carmony and, later on, Professor Madison (1976–1993), were not here. Beginning as just another assistant editor graduate student, I gradually came to be viewed as second in command, and it became part of my duties to train the other graduate student or assistant editors. I also took over a larger amount of the editing duties.
Five editors of the Indiana Magazine of History, Bloomington, 2004 Standing (l-r): Eric Sandweiss, Bernard W. Sheehan, James H. Madison Seated (l-r): Donald F. Carmony (with wife Mary), Richard J. Blackett Photograph by Chris Meyer. Courtesy IU Home Pages
IMH: It seems that you must have trained the editors at some point in your career.
LS: Well, I felt that way sometimes. Professor Madison, of course, had worked on editorial staffs before he came to the IMH. He was an excellent editor, but he was somewhat "new" to Indiana history and definitely to the Indiana Magazine of History. We learned and worked well together. I helped him, I think, and I will say that his years as editor of the magazine were among the easiest, and pleasantest, of any of the thirty-four years I was here.
IMH: After thirty-four years, is there any way that individual articles or particular authors stay in your mind or does it all blur together?
LS: I suppose you could say that much of it blurs together. I can't name all of the authors I worked with. I can't name all of the articles that I edited. I suppose, as I've often heard teachers say, you remember the good students and you remember the bad students. The ones in the middle sometimes escape you. Fortunately, I had very few bad experiences with authors, and I had some tremendously, amazingly good experiences with authors. Both I remember.
One occurred the very first issue that I edited. A very renowned historian from another state was writing an article on Indiana in the Civil War period—using much the same material that I was using for my dissertation at the time. Professor Carmony assigned that article to me to edit, and the professor became somewhat perturbed, justifiably probably, that his article was being turned over to a mere beginning graduate student who should not have the temerity to make any changes. I did make quite a number of changes and questioned a number of his conclusions, and he became rather irate. What he had not realized, I think, is that at that point in time I had little, if any, power of any kind. Everything I did was checked, rechecked, and double-checked by Professor Carmony as editor. Nothing went out to this author that did not have Professor Carmony's approval. But the author didn't know this, and he threatened to withdraw the article. Well, Professor Carmony was a master at dealing with situations like that, and eventually a compromise was reached: the author accepted what we did and was happy with it. He got his article published, and all was well. But at the time I was in tears for much of that first issue because I thought, "Oh, what have I done!" As I look back on thirty-four years, that was probably the roughest time that I ever had. That was my baptism, and it really didn't get any worse.
Then I've had, oh, so many good experiences that are harder to describe. Some of them came as I was editing documents that lay historians had submitted. Many of them were Civil War letters, and those people were marvelous to work with. The articles in many cases ended up being very popular articles for the Indiana Magazine of History. One I recall dealt with a series of letters in Owen County, our neighbor, and those people would give you anything, do anything to help. I often told them, "Don't accept what I say as gospel. Question my editing because that's the only way we'll really achieve something that's worthwhile. I'm not God; therefore, don't give in just because I say that this is what I think would be best."
IMH: What did the IMH do particularly well, and what did it fail to do, during your three decades here?
LS: I think one of the strengths of the Indiana Magazine of History, one of the things that explains its one-hundred-year history, is what Cottman, the founder of the IMH (1905–1907, 1911–1913), hoped to achieve, and what succeeding editors always said they wanted to do. They wanted to make this a scholarly journal with articles by professional historians that could be read and accepted in the history profession, but they also wanted to publish history by lay historians—people who loved history, who liked history, and sometimes did the most prodigious, unbelievable amounts of research. The editors sought articles that would be easily read, acceptable, still scholarly, but from a lay point of view as opposed to the professional point of view. It's that balance, which I think began with Cottman and which continues yet today, that makes the IMH what it is. The majority of the IMH readers and subscribers are not professional historians. They are lay historians. I think the magazine's ability to reach both groups is what has made it strong. Articles by professional historians don't have to be couched in historical jargon, uninteresting, dull, and boring; and by the same token those by nonprofessional historians can be scholarly and important. It's a difficult balance to achieve. One thing that I remember hearing and reading from the very beginning was that belief: we have to balance between the two. The journal must be scholarly, but it must also involve the lay historians and the readers who are not professionals.
The Future of Indiana History
IMH: Our region has just lost two giants of the profession, Don Carmony and Tom Clark. Any thoughts on the legacy of these men, or of their generation, for those of us who continue to write about history today?
LS: They were both exceptional historians. Tom Clark, as did Don Carmony, belonged to the people and was accepted by the people and could bridge the gap between the lay historian and the professional historian. I think these two men have set a standard which may well never be reached by anyone else. Historians today write, and publish, and edit excellent history. But these two, it seems to me, were closer to the roots of Indiana and Kentucky and the regions in which these states are located. They were closer to the roots, to the people of the area, and thus had a feel for history that is going to be hard for other historians to emulate. I always thought that Esarey was a pioneer Hoosier; therefore, he understood, from first-hand experience, a great deal of what he was writing about. I've often wondered how those who write about the Middle Ages ever achieve that rapport with their subjects. They do, but I think it's harder. I believe Tom Clark and Don Carmony are two who have set a standard that others may only strive for. But then, Don Carmony was my mentor, and I am admittedly prejudiced.
IMH: In terms of the content of Indiana history, do you feel that we are missing large portions of understanding what's special about this state and this region?
LS: There's certainly no dearth of material or subjects so far as Indiana is concerned. The IMH has often been praised or criticized—whichever way you want to look at it—for publishing so many articles on the Civil War, but there's still so much that could be done. I don't think we have any more than skimmed the surface of what we could write about—and that includes even the old political, military, and economic history that was the focus for so many years. Certainly there's much more to be learned about social history and history of the people. We haven't even begun to plumb the depths. One of my all-time top histories is R. C. Buley's The Old Northwest (1950). If you read that, you can see that he sometimes just threw masses of information at you. I think if you look at some of that information, and pull it out, and start from there, you would have interesting, pertinent material to research for generations.
IMH: Do you have other thoughts?
LS: When I first came to the IMH I was thrilled, I was ecstatic, I could not believe that I had gotten a position on a journal that was as widely known and as prestigious as the IMH. I intended to stay two or three years, and then to move on to something else. I found that the IMH is addictive. I think it was William Lynch, one of the former editors (1928–1941), who said that at a very busy point in his life he had taken on the Indiana Magazine of History and put a lot of effort and energy into it. I'm not quoting exactly, but as he looked back on it, he said that it was something he could never regret. I feel the same way. Cottman, I know, said at the end of the first year's publishing there were many arguments against even continuing the thing, but he had put so much effort into it that he stayed with it a year, and then another year, and then another. That is very much the way I felt and feel about the IMH. I loved—I'm sure Professor Bernard Sheehan, another editor (1996–2002) under whom I worked, would tell me I should not use "loved"—but I loved my job at the IMH and gave it up reluctantly. But again the word is "continuity." Cottman was really a very amazing person. The standards that he set for the magazine, what he said he wanted to do, every editor since has said the same things. Every time you stepped inside the IMH offices, whomever the editor, you very frequently heard those same tenets, those same expressions, over and over again. The four editors with whom I worked had very, very different personalities and very different interests. But more than their differences, I think, it was their belief in the Indiana Magazine of History, their belief in the standards set up in the very beginning, that has made the IMH what it is. The magazine has lasted for one hundred years not because of any changes that have occurred, but because of the continuity the editors have maintained.
Notes 1 For a list of the specific dates of her acting editorship, as well as of the terms of service of all IMH staff members, see pages 401–402 in this issue.

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