Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 42, number 2, winter, 1958-1959

              Clifford L Lord: An Appreciation
by Wiliiam   B. Hesseltine
iinPHE OBJECT of the Society shall be," -*- said the Charter as Lyman Draper and Charles Larrabee drafted it one January eve¬ rting in 1853, "to collect, embody, arrange, and preserve in authentic form a library of books, pamphlets, maps, charts, manuscripts, papers, paintings, statuary, and other mate¬ rials illustrative of the History of the State." Moreover, the Historical Society should "ex¬ hibit faithfully the antiquities of the past and present condition and resources of Wisconsin. It should promote the study of history by lec¬ tures, and diffuse and publish information re¬ lating to the description and history of the state." So authorized and instituted, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin has gone on througli its first century in the path that Ly¬ man Draper pointed out to it. After three dec¬ ades, Draper turned over the institution to Reuben Gold Thwaites, who was followed in due time by Milo M. Quaife, Joseph Schafer, and Edward P. Alexander. Then, ninety-three years after Lyman Draper got his society es¬ tablished, Clifford L. Lord became its director, and proceeded, with imagination and zeal, to give new meaning to the forward-looking ideals that Draper originally set forth.
Clifford Lord was thirty-four years old when he arrived in Madison in 1916 to become the sixth superintendent of the State Historical Society. A native of New York, a graduate of Amherst, and a Doctor of Philosophy in His¬ tory of Columbia University, he had already served a stint in the Navy's historical section and been director of the New York State His¬ torical Society's museum at Cooperstown. He was a genial zealot, bringing with him an en¬ thusiastic welcome for new ideas and a drive for putting them into operation. He was tire¬ less, traveling the state and the nation in serv¬ ice of the Society, or gathering material for its growing collections. "Fireball," one member of the Board of Curators tagged him, and Cliff Lord lived up to the nickname by being always a ball of fire himself and continually igniting others—staff, curators, legislators, or donors— with some of his own burning enthusiasms.
The degree to which Lord achieved the Draper ideal for the Society—sometimes even better than Draper himself had achieved it— is evidenced by his accomplishments. Draper was proud of his collections and he made tre¬ mendous strides in building a library from fifty volumes to over 100,000 books in thirty years. Lord's book and pamphlet collections fell far short of Draper's, but he built a manu¬ script collection to levels far exceeding any previous dream. The "fieldmen" of the_greatly expanded field service searched the state and brought in hundreds of manuscript collections, books, and revealing artifacts. Lord personally gathered materials. He reinvigorated the labor collection, and persuaded national officers of leading AF of L and CIO unions to turn their records over to the Society. He worked dili¬ gently to bring the great McCormick Histori¬ cal Association Library in agricultural history to Madison. He capped a career of collecting by inaugurating, and making a substantial be¬ ginning of, the Mass Communications History Center.
Lyman Draper began a "cabinet" of curios which would illustrate the tools and handiwork of past ages. A hundred years later Draper's modest cabinet of artifacts had grown, largely under the supervision of Dr. Lord, into such historic houses as Villa Louis, Wade House, and the Stonefield Farm and Craft Museum. Lord was, moreover, devoting time to stimu¬ lating local groups to establish a Circus World Museum and a Museum of American Rail¬ roads. He had stimulated the restoration of the first state capitol at Belmont and the pre-histo- ric Indian village of Aztalan.
Through it all. Lord worked toward the Draper ideal of carrying iiistory to the peo¬ ple. He brought a belief in local—in grass¬ roots—history, and contended convincingly that the base of American democracy lay in the localities and that the strength of the demo¬ cratic ideals was to be found in the local com¬ munities. In this spirit he instituted a Junior History program which grew until the Badger History magazine had more than 30,000 juve-
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