When the Board of Regents unanimously accepted William M. Swinton's resignation in 1874, the University of California didn't just lose its first-ever English professor. It also lost its first history professor, rhetoric professor, logic professor, and University Librarian.
Still, if Swinton had had his way, he might have lost his jobs anyway. The man who originated the humanities at Cal, it seems, also set out to destroy them.
The University of California held classes at the College of California in downtown Oakland from the time the university was chartered in 1868 until it moved to Berkeley in 1873. William Swinton taught here for most of his tempestuous tenure.
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
The Board of Regents appointed Swinton in 1869 to teach Cal's first class of 167 men and 222 women. Despite Swinton's abundant titles, the early curriculum focused on English composition-reportedly not the favorite class of those first future miners, farmers, and timber magnates.
Swinton likely gained his position through his notoriety as a journalist. He covered the Civil War for The New York Times, during which he became the personal gadfly of no less than Ulysses S. Grant. In the days before embedded reporters, Grant reports in his memoirs that he discovered Swinton crouched behind a tree stump eavesdropping on a conversation between the general and a confidant. Later, Union General Ambrose Burnside arrested Swinton and ordered him shot for reporting too freely on Union movements (or lack of movement: one of Swinton's Times pieces told how Burnside had gotten an entire Union regiment stuck in the mud). Grant countermanded Burnside and had Swinton released, but only on the condition he be expelled from Union lines.
Emerging unscathed, Swinton went on to author four books on his Civil War experiences, including one illustrated by famed Harper's caricaturist Thomas Nast. Another cultural luminary Swinton counted among his collaborators was Walt Whitman, who contributed two chapters to Swinton's foray into etymology, Rambles Among Words: Their Poetry, History, and Wisdom (1859).
But Swinton seems most likely to be remembered in the annals of UC Berkeley as the university's first faculty radical.
A tempestuous personality by many accounts, Swinton in 1872 befriended Henry George, the editor of San Francisco's Daily Evening Post, and took him on as a protégé. George, a staunch populist, seems to have had it in for the University of California from its inception. Appalled by the largess of the land grants that established the University, George in an 1872 editorial said the Regents had perverted Cal from its original design as a "college of industry" into "a college of the classics and polite learning." George later accused the Regents of fraud and corruption in the construction of the College of Letters, which prompted an investigation by the state legislature in Sacramento, and called for the elimination of all colleges at the University except the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts.
Though it would seem to go against his own interests as a humanities professor, an early history of the scandal describes Swinton as a major instigator of George's attacks, which outraged the Bay Area ruling class. According to a letter to a colleague written by the University of California's first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, Swinton appeared in Sacramento after his 1874 resignation as an outspoken opponent of the University and an advocate of the Granges, one of the populist groups pushing to strip the University of any liberal arts trappings.
Though Swinton's motives for undermining his own position aren't entirely clear, anti-establishment politics ran in the Swinton family. His brother, John Swinton, managing editor of The New York Times during the Civil War, had afterward become an activist in the burgeoning labor movement.
The anecdotal evidence also indicates teaching was not exactly Swinton's first love. He often missed class. When he did show up, students had often already cut and run. Perhaps for good reason. Before his resignation, Swinton had become engrossed in writing school textbooks. According to an early Gilman biographer, a history course Swinton taught in the fall of 1873 "was conducted by his reading, while correcting, the proof-sheets" of one of his books.
After leaving the university, Swinton moved to Brooklyn, New York. He became a prolific and award-winning author of 16 textbooks in all, from which he derived a healthy income until his death in 1892.
From these less than auspicious beginnings, the arts and humanities faculty at UC Berkeley has grown from one man to hundreds of scholars comprising 30 departments, groups, and programs. At the end of Swinton's tenure, and perhaps despite it, the University Library held some 11,800 volumes. Today the school's library system boasts over 9 million books.
– Marcus Wohlsen