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At a Meeting of the
Faculty of Vassar College
held
October fifth, nineteen hundred
and eighty-three, the following
Memorial ,
was unanimously adopted:
Jonathan Charles Clark was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on
June l8, l94l. He grew up in Vermont and in southern California where
he came to love the Pacific coast as he had the New England mountains.
As a boy in Vermont, he recalled catching perch with his hands by the
dam in the Pussumpsic River; and as a boy bodysurfing on the California
beaches, he recalled yelling to a friend as they caught a wave together
and rode to shore where Jon discovered that his fellow surfer was a
California sea lion. In a small apartment on Pacific beach, Jon's mother
slept on the living room couch while Jon shared a bed with his step-brother
At night he washed out the good pair of pants he had to wear to school. He
never had very much money. His father had left his mother just before Jon
was born, and his step-father was killed in the Second world war when Jon
was still a child. when he was sixteen, his mother was committed to a
mental institution. After a brief stay with an uncle on a chicken farm
in the San Joaquin Valley-an event that left him with a distaste for
chicken the rest of his life-Jon returned to southern California where
he was on his own. He had his own apartment and went to La Jolla High
School where he was a brilliant student, especially in mathematics and
the sciences, and he was allowed to take a college chemistry course with
Linus Pauling. He walked to San Diego to get a bicycle so he could pedal
to Scripps Instiunfion Oceanography where he worked after school. He
played quarterback for La Jolla High,and when you looked at Jon’s nose you
saw the result of his clash with the bruisers of San Diego High who went
on to become the bruisers of USC.
He received college scholarships to Harvard and Dartmouth» but
because Dartmouth offered more money, he said, "I couldn’t afford not
to go to Dartmouth," So he was back in New England where he loved the
mountains and was on the college ski patrol. He liked to hitchike to
Boston, but in other ways he felt out of place at Dartmouth. In his sophomore year he walked off the campus without bothering to withdraw, leaving behind four F's on his transcript. He joined the Army with the expectation of being sent to the Monterey School of Languages, but instead, he traveled as a member of the Chemical Corps. After his discharge, he was glad to be rid of the Army, and he claimed to have celebrated the fact by throwing his boots, fatigues, and everything else associated with the Army into the East River. In New York he worked in advertising layout for Life magazine, then as a cataloguer for the American Institute of Aeronautics, then as a clert for Morgan Guarantee Trust. With his wife
-2-
Judy he moved back to the west coast. While working as head of the sample
department for the paper distributors of Blake, Moffat, and Towne, he began taking night courses at San Francisco State. Transferring to the
University of California at Berkeley, he discovered his love of colonial
American history and knew that he wanted to continue his studles at Yale
with the historians he admired, Edmund S. Morgan and J. H. Hexter.
Jon was graduated with honors from Berkeley and awarded a Danforth
Graduate Fellowship. At Yale he won the Tew Prize as the best first—year
graduate student in history and later the George Washington Egleston Prize
for the best dissertation in American history. After a year as a Junior
Fellow in History at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he began his teaching
career at McGill University in Montreal. The following year, l973, he
arrived at Vassar with his wife Judy and his young daughter Hilary.
From the moment of his appointment Jon was a popular and influential
teacher of history at Vassar. Students flocked to courses in his special
area of expertise-colonial America and the period of the ratification of
the Constitution of the United States. But he soon displayed a firm
control and versatility in other areas, including American legal history,
Atlantic civilization in the early modern period, and historiography.
Characteristically, in being a good teacher, Jon broke all the usual mfles
of good teaching; he laboriously wrote his lectures for each class downim
the an's and the‘s and read these lectures aloud to the students. But
what would almost always have been a deadening approach became, in Jon's
hands, an exciting and lively presentation. Generations of students
confirmed that he was not just one of the best lecturers, but one of the
best teachers in the department.
To say that Jon "took an active part in Department affairs" hardly
begins to describe how indispensable he was to his colleagues in History.
He was one of the prime movers in the reform of the history curriculum in
l97l-78, he played a crucial role in the design and teaching of an
ambitious course in comparative cultures, and he took the lead in preparing a year-long course that satisfies the freshman reading and writing require-
ment. dudy and he were popular housefellows in Cushing for three years;
his chairmanship of the Committee on the Quality of Residential Life
brought Perspective and imagination to a vexed area of campus life. His
participation in the American Culture Program as advisor, teacher, and
planner was much sought and appreciated.
These are only the obvious examples drawn from one area of Jon's
concerns. In a larger sense, Jon was a living Resource Center for so
many people both on and off the campus. When students or faculty or an
administrative officer called for some statement of policy from the
History Department, more often than not Jon would volunteer to produce
the difficult first draft. Just as students gravitated towards Jon, so,
too, did his fellow historians find him always willing to lay down a book
or a pencil and talk about anything from baseball to Puritanisms. It was
natural to ask Jon what the Puritans meant by “preparations” or how to
explain Puritanism to non-Bible-reading students. But it was equally
natural to discuss with him what to do about an undeserved traffic ticket, the Giant-Dodger playoff series in 1951, or the comparative merits of ale and beer. Jon never gave information; he shared it. Nor did he offer advice- he was far too unpretentious to do that. One always came
-3-
away from a conversation with Jon feeling that one had learned a fact, picked up an idea to think about, collected a joke never to be forgotten. His desk piled high with papers, Jon was never too busy to undertake more work, or in a larger sense, to make Swift a sane and habitable place. One member of the Department says: “I remember that when I thanked Jon for anything, he would turn out the palm of his hand and reject the idea that he had done anything at all. But he helped all of us to be better teachers, scholars, and human beings.”
As his mentor, Edmund Morgan has said so well, “Jon Clark was a good historian for the same reason that he was so good a friend: he took other people seriously and took their striving seriously.” He was attracted to the New England Puritans by their insistence that the world be made better than they ever expected it would be. The dominant concern in Jon’s own scholarship was understanding the varied ways by which people try to reconcile their political ideals and ethical standards with the conflictin
interests and demands of everyday life. He began by asking whether the
framers of the United States Constitution may have meant what they said
despite all the debunking of their motives in twentieth century historiography
Entitled in its most recent version, That More Perfect Union, Jon's l
dissertation foreshadowed all of his subsequent scholarship in the skill
with which he revised received opinion without maligning his predecessors,
His first published essay demolished the myth of the consolidating ”
federalists with wit, impeccable research, lucid presentation, and respect
for the honest attempts at interpretation by others.
Jon saw his coming to Dutchess County as an ideal opportunity for
testing in a more exact way a central conclusion of his dissertation--that
political allegiances during the ratification controversy could not be
explained by class or interest group. In shifting his attention from the
macrocosm of political debate at the federal and state levels to the
microcosm of political behavior in its full context in one locality, Jon
had to use much more varied kinds of evidence, acquire new skills to deal
with them, and acquaint himself with the rapidly developing literature
on social history. A major contribution by itself was Jon's reconstruction
of the complicated networks of personal relationships in Poughkeepsie
based on family, shared religion, economic standing, and occupation.
But Jon's aim in the essays which resulted from his research always was
to illuminate the choices people faced and what we can learn from their "
responses. No wonder bis scholarship contributed so_constantly and
powerfully to his teaching. The best illustration is the recently-
published booklet, A Government to form, where Jon uses local events and
figures to make intelligible a sophisticated analysis of political
behavior during our Revolution.
In the summer of l982 Jon embarked on a new, ambitious project,
less than the explanation of the rise of the two-party Syitem lg ggggeed
and America. He had just received a leave in the spring term of 1983 for that research, when on Sunday, January 30, he entered the hospital complaining of high fever and headache. His illness was diagnosed as endocarditis caused by staphylococcus aureus, and he quickly lost consciousness. A week later, on the morning of Monday, February 7, 1983, Jonathan Clark died at the age of forty-one.
Jon Clark was a scholar and teacher of several parts, but through his character ran two dominant traits: a sense of integrity and fierce
-4-
independence on the one hand and a capacity for compassion and
friendship on the other. That Jon was able to keep two traits unified
in a single personality accounts for the apparent contradictions in
his life and work: his tough-minded secular outlook balanced by an
abiding interest in Puritan theology, his gruff, sardonic, sometimes
earthy, wit, combined with caring for students and colleagues and deep
love for wife and daughter, his contempt for unjust authority matched by
unstinting service to the Department of History and to Vassar. Jonathan
Clark will be remembered as an intensely private man who gave generously
of himself to students and community, profession and College.
Respectfully submitted,
Frank Bergon
Clyde Griffen
Rhoda Rappaport
Benjamin G. Kohl, Chairman
Faculty of Vassar College
held
October fifth, nineteen hundred
and eighty-three, the following
Memorial ,
was unanimously adopted:
Jonathan Charles Clark was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on
June l8, l94l. He grew up in Vermont and in southern California where
he came to love the Pacific coast as he had the New England mountains.
As a boy in Vermont, he recalled catching perch with his hands by the
dam in the Pussumpsic River; and as a boy bodysurfing on the California
beaches, he recalled yelling to a friend as they caught a wave together
and rode to shore where Jon discovered that his fellow surfer was a
California sea lion. In a small apartment on Pacific beach, Jon's mother
slept on the living room couch while Jon shared a bed with his step-brother
At night he washed out the good pair of pants he had to wear to school. He
never had very much money. His father had left his mother just before Jon
was born, and his step-father was killed in the Second world war when Jon
was still a child. when he was sixteen, his mother was committed to a
mental institution. After a brief stay with an uncle on a chicken farm
in the San Joaquin Valley-an event that left him with a distaste for
chicken the rest of his life-Jon returned to southern California where
he was on his own. He had his own apartment and went to La Jolla High
School where he was a brilliant student, especially in mathematics and
the sciences, and he was allowed to take a college chemistry course with
Linus Pauling. He walked to San Diego to get a bicycle so he could pedal
to Scripps Instiunfion Oceanography where he worked after school. He
played quarterback for La Jolla High,and when you looked at Jon’s nose you
saw the result of his clash with the bruisers of San Diego High who went
on to become the bruisers of USC.
He received college scholarships to Harvard and Dartmouth» but
because Dartmouth offered more money, he said, "I couldn’t afford not
to go to Dartmouth," So he was back in New England where he loved the
mountains and was on the college ski patrol. He liked to hitchike to
Boston, but in other ways he felt out of place at Dartmouth. In his sophomore year he walked off the campus without bothering to withdraw, leaving behind four F's on his transcript. He joined the Army with the expectation of being sent to the Monterey School of Languages, but instead, he traveled as a member of the Chemical Corps. After his discharge, he was glad to be rid of the Army, and he claimed to have celebrated the fact by throwing his boots, fatigues, and everything else associated with the Army into the East River. In New York he worked in advertising layout for Life magazine, then as a cataloguer for the American Institute of Aeronautics, then as a clert for Morgan Guarantee Trust. With his wife
-2-
Judy he moved back to the west coast. While working as head of the sample
department for the paper distributors of Blake, Moffat, and Towne, he began taking night courses at San Francisco State. Transferring to the
University of California at Berkeley, he discovered his love of colonial
American history and knew that he wanted to continue his studles at Yale
with the historians he admired, Edmund S. Morgan and J. H. Hexter.
Jon was graduated with honors from Berkeley and awarded a Danforth
Graduate Fellowship. At Yale he won the Tew Prize as the best first—year
graduate student in history and later the George Washington Egleston Prize
for the best dissertation in American history. After a year as a Junior
Fellow in History at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he began his teaching
career at McGill University in Montreal. The following year, l973, he
arrived at Vassar with his wife Judy and his young daughter Hilary.
From the moment of his appointment Jon was a popular and influential
teacher of history at Vassar. Students flocked to courses in his special
area of expertise-colonial America and the period of the ratification of
the Constitution of the United States. But he soon displayed a firm
control and versatility in other areas, including American legal history,
Atlantic civilization in the early modern period, and historiography.
Characteristically, in being a good teacher, Jon broke all the usual mfles
of good teaching; he laboriously wrote his lectures for each class downim
the an's and the‘s and read these lectures aloud to the students. But
what would almost always have been a deadening approach became, in Jon's
hands, an exciting and lively presentation. Generations of students
confirmed that he was not just one of the best lecturers, but one of the
best teachers in the department.
To say that Jon "took an active part in Department affairs" hardly
begins to describe how indispensable he was to his colleagues in History.
He was one of the prime movers in the reform of the history curriculum in
l97l-78, he played a crucial role in the design and teaching of an
ambitious course in comparative cultures, and he took the lead in preparing a year-long course that satisfies the freshman reading and writing require-
ment. dudy and he were popular housefellows in Cushing for three years;
his chairmanship of the Committee on the Quality of Residential Life
brought Perspective and imagination to a vexed area of campus life. His
participation in the American Culture Program as advisor, teacher, and
planner was much sought and appreciated.
These are only the obvious examples drawn from one area of Jon's
concerns. In a larger sense, Jon was a living Resource Center for so
many people both on and off the campus. When students or faculty or an
administrative officer called for some statement of policy from the
History Department, more often than not Jon would volunteer to produce
the difficult first draft. Just as students gravitated towards Jon, so,
too, did his fellow historians find him always willing to lay down a book
or a pencil and talk about anything from baseball to Puritanisms. It was
natural to ask Jon what the Puritans meant by “preparations” or how to
explain Puritanism to non-Bible-reading students. But it was equally
natural to discuss with him what to do about an undeserved traffic ticket, the Giant-Dodger playoff series in 1951, or the comparative merits of ale and beer. Jon never gave information; he shared it. Nor did he offer advice- he was far too unpretentious to do that. One always came
-3-
away from a conversation with Jon feeling that one had learned a fact, picked up an idea to think about, collected a joke never to be forgotten. His desk piled high with papers, Jon was never too busy to undertake more work, or in a larger sense, to make Swift a sane and habitable place. One member of the Department says: “I remember that when I thanked Jon for anything, he would turn out the palm of his hand and reject the idea that he had done anything at all. But he helped all of us to be better teachers, scholars, and human beings.”
As his mentor, Edmund Morgan has said so well, “Jon Clark was a good historian for the same reason that he was so good a friend: he took other people seriously and took their striving seriously.” He was attracted to the New England Puritans by their insistence that the world be made better than they ever expected it would be. The dominant concern in Jon’s own scholarship was understanding the varied ways by which people try to reconcile their political ideals and ethical standards with the conflictin
interests and demands of everyday life. He began by asking whether the
framers of the United States Constitution may have meant what they said
despite all the debunking of their motives in twentieth century historiography
Entitled in its most recent version, That More Perfect Union, Jon's l
dissertation foreshadowed all of his subsequent scholarship in the skill
with which he revised received opinion without maligning his predecessors,
His first published essay demolished the myth of the consolidating ”
federalists with wit, impeccable research, lucid presentation, and respect
for the honest attempts at interpretation by others.
Jon saw his coming to Dutchess County as an ideal opportunity for
testing in a more exact way a central conclusion of his dissertation--that
political allegiances during the ratification controversy could not be
explained by class or interest group. In shifting his attention from the
macrocosm of political debate at the federal and state levels to the
microcosm of political behavior in its full context in one locality, Jon
had to use much more varied kinds of evidence, acquire new skills to deal
with them, and acquaint himself with the rapidly developing literature
on social history. A major contribution by itself was Jon's reconstruction
of the complicated networks of personal relationships in Poughkeepsie
based on family, shared religion, economic standing, and occupation.
But Jon's aim in the essays which resulted from his research always was
to illuminate the choices people faced and what we can learn from their "
responses. No wonder bis scholarship contributed so_constantly and
powerfully to his teaching. The best illustration is the recently-
published booklet, A Government to form, where Jon uses local events and
figures to make intelligible a sophisticated analysis of political
behavior during our Revolution.
In the summer of l982 Jon embarked on a new, ambitious project,
less than the explanation of the rise of the two-party Syitem lg ggggeed
and America. He had just received a leave in the spring term of 1983 for that research, when on Sunday, January 30, he entered the hospital complaining of high fever and headache. His illness was diagnosed as endocarditis caused by staphylococcus aureus, and he quickly lost consciousness. A week later, on the morning of Monday, February 7, 1983, Jonathan Clark died at the age of forty-one.
Jon Clark was a scholar and teacher of several parts, but through his character ran two dominant traits: a sense of integrity and fierce
-4-
independence on the one hand and a capacity for compassion and
friendship on the other. That Jon was able to keep two traits unified
in a single personality accounts for the apparent contradictions in
his life and work: his tough-minded secular outlook balanced by an
abiding interest in Puritan theology, his gruff, sardonic, sometimes
earthy, wit, combined with caring for students and colleagues and deep
love for wife and daughter, his contempt for unjust authority matched by
unstinting service to the Department of History and to Vassar. Jonathan
Clark will be remembered as an intensely private man who gave generously
of himself to students and community, profession and College.
Respectfully submitted,
Frank Bergon
Clyde Griffen
Rhoda Rappaport
Benjamin G. Kohl, Chairman
