Baker, Van R. 1925-

PERSONAL: Born March 24, 1925, in Atlanta, GA; son of Roy (a bank clerk) and Virginia (a secretary; maiden name, Frix) Baker; married Mary Light, April 16, 1955 (died October 24, 1982); married Louise Hicks (a librarian), February 24, 1984; children: Eric Clark, Mary Virginia Baker Blankenstein. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Attended Gordon Military College, 1942-43; U.S. Military Academy, B.S., 1946; Columbia University, M.A., 1958, Ph.D., 1968. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Unitarian-Universalist.

ADDRESSES: Home—434 West Market St., York, PA 17404-3804. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: U.S. Army, career artillery officer, 1946-67, including service in Germany and Thailand and as instructor in English at U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, retiring as lieutenant colonel; York College of Pennsylvania, York, professor of English, 1967-89; writer and historian, 1989-.

MEMBER: American Society of Eighteeneth-Century Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Military: Legion of Merit. Other: Distinguished Book Award, Army Historical Foundation, 2000, for The Websters: Letters of an American Army Family in Peace and War, 1836-1853.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The Websters: Letters of an American Army Family in Peace and War, 1836-1853, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 2000.

Contributor to periodicals, including Eighteenth-Century Life, Notes and Queries, Comparative Literature Studies, and Restoration.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on the military paintings of Thomas Sully.

SIDELIGHTS: Van R. Baker told CA: "Since age nineteen I have written about relationships between military activities and civilian pursuits. The first such instance concerned war and medicine: in my freshman thesis at West Point, an institution for which I had just abandoned medical ambitions, I wrote on World War II advances in military medicine. Some years later, when I was a graduate student, my master's essay was about the military characters in Henry Fielding's novels, and my doctoral dissertation treated the military imagery in John Dryden's poetry and drama. A later concentration on Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy led to papers on the military actions, military imagery, and military characters in that novel.

"Commissioned in the Artillery of the United States Army in 1946, I had a military career for twenty-one years, with assignments at stations all over the world, from Germany to Thailand. My satisfaction with this career derived not only from the interesting travel and gratifying duties, but above all from the strong and enduring friendships a military life offers. Yet I realized early on, while serving as an English instructor at West Point for three years, that some day I would want to have a second career as well, in the academic world.

"After retirement from my military service in 1967, and upon receiving a Ph.D. from Columbia University, I did indeed become an English professor, at York College of Pennsylvania. There I sometimes suggested to desperate students that they could find research topics by combining long-held passions with newly discovered interests. A baseball enthusiast, for example, could find out how computer studies have affected the role and techniques of the catcher.

"The Websters: Letters of an American Army Family in Peace and War, 1836-1853 derives from that same kind of combination of interests. The letters were simply there (after I tracked them all down and got them together), but my interest in people and relationships—cultivated through years of reading novels, as well as studying and teaching them—made me read the collection of letters for its novelistic elements of plot, character, setting, and suspense, rather than for the military and political events they recount. My notes and narration, however, explain those events and tie the letters together.

"An interest in religion and ethics also affects the light I direct onto the main characters, Lucien and Frances Webster. Lucien, a deeply religious West Point graduate of 1823, found himself an officer in a war that he did not wholeheartedly support, the American war against Mexico. When Captain Webster's artillery weapons killed enemy soldiers, Lucien both exulted at the military success and agonized over what he had wrought. Moreover, both husband and wife found their New England abolitionist sympathies somewhat challenged as they tried to resolve the problems involving an exasperating black slave inherited from Frances's father.

"The letters show the concern Lucien felt for his soldiers, as well as the completely democratic attitudes of the officers toward each other. Such democracy did not necessarily apply among their wives, and the wellborn and well-educated Frances was not tolerant of behavior she considered uncouth on the part of the officers or their wives. The enlisted men's wives, however, she cared for when they were sick, and she saw that they were fairly treated when their husbands were off at war. Frances herself was on her own for the two years Lucien was in Mexico; she eventually made her way by water from Florida to the north, via the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, accompanied only by a servant and three small children, one of whom died en route. If anything, Frances was braver than Lucien, and her letters are livelier than his.

"The letters were found in the Historical Society of York County and other depositories. Although the writers and recipients of the letters were in no way related to me, after living with this family for many years I now think of it as my own."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Civil War History, September, 2001, Kenneth G. Anthony, review of The Websters: Letters of an American Army Family in Peace and War, 1836-1853, p. 266.

Journal of Southern History, February, 2003, Virginia J. Laas, review of The Websters, p. 166.