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An appreciation of a challenging professor

by Jack Neely

I will miss my friend Milton Klein. I knew him for 25 years or so, but I never once called him “Milton.” I can’t even imagine it. To me he was always Dr. Klein. His specialty—colonial history, especially New York colonial history, and the origins of the U.S. Constitution—was never mine, but when I was at UT, I signed up for his classes whenever I had the opportunity. The best part of one of his classes was the first few days, when I had the opportunity to watch another new, unsuspecting group respond to the man and his methods.

He was a tall, formal, businesslike professor with a long stride, and when he walked into the room we’d sit up straight. His teaching style was, for me, as bracing as a jump in a cold river.

In the late ‘70s, professors tried hard to be our friends, learn our hipster lingo, dress like us. They grew sideburns, long hair, open-necked shirts, graded on a curve. Dr. Klein never bent to any fashion. I never saw him when he wasn’t wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a suit and tie. I think he saw a barber every week. He dressed like an ambitious New York banker in 1945, and his confidence would convince you that he never had any reason to change.

Though he was one of my older professors even back then, he was perhaps the most vigorous in the classroom. He certainly got more of a physical workout than any faculty member I recall; in the course of a one-hour class, he’d walk at least two miles around the room. Maybe that’s why he stayed active for so long. Teaching was, for him, an aerobic workout.

As he walked, he fired questions at us. He employed an especially aggressive form of the Socratic method. We’d done the reading—he shoveled homework at us daily, sometimes reading of scholarly articles he’d written himself—and we were supposed to know the answers. His lectures were not lectures at all, but energetic dialogues.

When he barked, “What claim did the English have on the land between the Hudson and the Delaware, Mister....” well, I’d better be listening, and thinking hard, because there was a good chance the next word would be “Neely!” And the class would not proceed unless I had either given Dr. Klein a satisfactory answer, or admitted that I was a soggy-brained hick.

In most college classes, daydreaming is inadvisable. In Dr. Klein’s classes, it was impossible. Even hippies sat up straight and watched him carefully, like you’d watch a loose cheetah.

After a while I came to realize that what we were learning wasn’t necessarily facts about colonial Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. Dr. Klein was an exemplar of the idea that the study of history is much more than a catalogue of long-past events. History is our best laboratory for studying cause and effect, the interplay of diverse motives, the potential of conflict and compromise, the strengths and weaknesses of our institutions. The study of history can be a boot camp for aspiring thinkers. Dr. Klein was the drill sergeant.

I don’t remember ever getting an A in one of his classes. But a conspiratorial smile from Dr. Klein, a quiet acknowledgment that meant, you finally get it, was the currency equivalent of an A from some other professors.

Though he was tough, he enjoyed a joke and sometimes appreciated a surprising perspective. So when he complained about my handwriting, which he found hard to read, I thought I had him. I explained to him that as a small child I had consciously tried to imitate the writing of Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence, and that some other professors had remarked that my handwriting reminded them of Jefferson’s. That was, in fact, true, and I was kind of proud of it. I was for some reason expecting Dr. Klein to be impressed with that allusion to his beloved 18th century, and see my handwriting in a different light. And I was pretty sure he’d never heard that excuse before.

He did not pause, or smile, or remark on the allusion. He offered only his trademark blink. “Your handwriting is worse than Jefferson’s,” he said.

So, for Dr. Klein, I worked on it.

Most of the students I knew were in history because they were headed for law or grad-school academia. Other professions didn’t always get much respect. But Dr. Klein called the press the Fourth Estate with some reverence, as if it were something special, or should be. When I mentioned I was thinking about journalism, he encouraged me and told me to be sure to use what I’d learned. Most reporters, he said, failed at their jobs because they didn’t understand their subjects; they hadn’t studied their subjects’ history.

I didn’t see Dr. Klein for more than a dozen years after graduation. The next time I saw him, he had not changed in any respect, which didn’t surprise me much. But he had a different and surprising role, that of “university historian.” It didn’t fit him as well as his suits. Even though UT was one of America’s older universities, it was, after all, something that didn’t even start until years after the end of the era he spent his life studying.

There’s a paradox about history. It’s old to begin with, but somehow it stays fresher than most other disciplines. Dr. Klein was near what is, for most mortals, retirement age when I first met him in the 1970s, and he seemed more old-fashioned than most folks his age. But he never, to my knowledge, ran out of energy.

For most folks who survive to the age of 86, a career is a distant memory, something they left far behind, 20 or 30 years earlier. Or something that left them behind. That wasn’t the case with Dr. Klein.

Earlier this spring, Klein published a book about the English abolitionist group known as The Clapham Sect, and in the last few years he has worked on several texts considered authorities on the subject of colonial America. In 2002 he edited the book Empire State, what some consider to be a definitive academic history of New York. Every once in a while he was associated with a best seller. Gotham, the mammoth history of early New York by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, is on the shelves of thousands of trendy Manhattan lofts. I had owned the book for three or four years before I discovered that one of the tome’s much-cited sources is Milton Klein.

My last conversation with him, characteristically, was a spirited argument. I didn’t always agree with him, and when he had a strong opinion he wasn’t easily persuaded otherwise, but he and his provocative points could never be put away easily.

Though his commanding classroom manner sometimes reminded me of Gen. Patton, I never knew until Dr. Klein showed up at a talk I gave to a banquet for retired officers, that he was a World War II veteran, who had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. He never mentioned it in class. He was buried Monday at the Tennessee Veterans Cemetery.

June 17, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 25 © 2004 Metro Pulse