Pauline Maier passed away Monday.
Her academic title was William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a distinguished position,
but hardly does justice to the person who filled it.
I didn’t know Professor Maier was ill. Frankly,
it’s hard to imagine her in a non-effervescent condition. Every other
observation I’ve encountered since Monday affirms the testimony of my own experience: Maier was irrepressibly charming,
ceaselessly brilliant, and blessed with a thunderous, seminar-shaking laugh.
Professor Maier published important books at a stately pace. There were four major monographs, one per decade. The
first two changed our understanding of
pre-Revolutionary politics; the third
upended standard interpretations of the Declaration of Independence; the fourth provided the first full account of how the
U.S. Constitution was ratified. Each was definitive, the sort of
book that every early American historian needs to read at some point.
Each was also a marvel of original documentary research and nonfiction
storytelling.
Pauline Maier, the world-renowned scholar and
teacher, also happened to be kind. She didn’t dispense saccharine praise
to the minor figures who clamored for her attention. Instead, she
offered genuine respect for their ideas and lots of
tough, useful criticism. As a graduate student with no prior
acquaintance, I invited her to comment on a conference panel. She agreed
and, when the time came, cheerily directed me to think about many
rudimentary things about which I should have already been
thinking. A few years later, when I asked her to read part of my book
manuscript—a punishingly dry and tedious tome—she agreed again, and then
administered the thorough, friendly thrashing it needed.
These were the kind of things she did for people
and partly explains why she published four landmark books instead of
eight. Maier treated her fellow historians with the same honest
consideration that she tendered her historical subjects,
remaining ever open to the possibility that the lowly might possess
more insight than their better appointed counterparts (as well as the
possibility that they might be out of their senses).
Ratification’s acknowledgements leave no doubt how much she
appreciated the assistance that others offered in turn. She thanked them
not merely in lists of names, or even sentences, but whole paragraphs.
Word count be damned.
Maier was more irreverent in her work than big-name
professors typically are. She had little use for unsubstantiated
assumptions or pious orthodoxies. She had a keen eye for the workings of
power and a still keener appreciation for the anxieties
of those who confronted it. But Maier never succumbed to the vain
illusion that doing history is the same thing as doing politics.
Professor Maier loved good argument but always
approached the past with the kind of wonder and excitement that those
burdened by mountains of historiography often find difficult to muster.
Of course she knew the relevant scholarship inside
and out. Maier just didn’t have much use for the things that we
habitually say about those who lived before us. She wanted to know what
they said themselves.
Scholars as celebrated as Pauline Maier are
vulnerable to severe cases of self-absorption. That was not a malady
from which she suffered. In addition to the innumerable kindnesses she
extended to other historians, she was perpetually delighted
by her children, grandchildren, and Rhode Island garden. And she loved
her husband Charlie.
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