Publication Date

January 13, 2025

Perspectives Section

In Memoriam

Geographic

  • United States

Thematic

Political

Richard S. Kirkendall, a political and agricultural historian, died August 26, 2024, at the age of 96.

Richard S. Kirkendall

Born in Spokane, Washington, to Roland Peter and Marjorie Delia (Montfort) Kirkendall, Kirkendall discovered his passion for history after enrolling at Gonzaga University. He was surrounded by veterans attending on the GI Bill. Having never been particularly studious in high school, Kirkendall found that he needed to take his studies more seriously. After graduating with his BA in 1950, he served for two years in the US Navy during the Korean War, much of it spent on a destroyer off the coast of North Korea. He then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he wrote a dissertation under the guidance of renowned intellectual historian Merle Curti. The book based on that dissertation, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1966), is still cited.

Indicative of the opportunities then available during the golden age of academia, Kirkendall taught for three years at Wesleyan University while he was still ABD. Upon completion of his PhD in 1958, he joined the faculty of the University of Missouri in Columbia. When he reluctantly agreed to take his turn as chair of the department, he handled it well. He excelled at administration, even in the tumultuous times that followed the invasion of Cambodia in 1970. One of his graduate students from those days called him “a great, steadying influence on our history department.” Many of his undergraduate students were studying journalism and quoted him so regularly in the daily newspaper that “and Kirkendall says” became a running joke in his family.

During his time in Missouri, Kirkendall developed a fascination with the career of President Harry Truman. By the 1960s, Truman’s legacies were recognized as representing both promise (such as his executive order banning discrimination in the armed forces) and peril (including his application of the “containment policy”). Kirkendall developed a lifelong association with the Truman Library, including serving on the Truman Library Institute’s board of directors for many years, and he directed many doctoral dissertations on the president and his era. Kirkendall published state-of-the-field books, including two editions of The Truman Period as a Research Field (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1967, 1972); a Truman encyclopedia (G. K. Hall, 1990); and A History of Missouri, volume 5, 1919–1953 (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1986). He edited Harry’s Farewell: Interpreting and Teaching the Truman Presidency (Univ. of Missouri Press, 2004) and The Civil Liberties Legacy of Harry S. Truman (Truman State Univ. Press, 2013). In his years in a Seattle retirement community, Kirkendall gave more than 40 lectures about Truman. He also wrote two books for classroom use, The Global Power: The United States Since 1941 (Allyn & Bacon, 1973) and The United States, 1929–1945: Years of Crisis and Change (McGraw-Hill, 1974).

In 1973, Kirkendall left Missouri to serve as executive secretary of the Organization of American Historians in Bloomington, Indiana. His dedication to the organization is demonstrated by one of his later edited volumes, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).

After eight years as executive secretary, he took on a new challenge, helping establish an agricultural history program as Henry Wallace Professor of History at Iowa State University. Wallace had been a developer and promoter of hybrid corn, served as Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture and vice president and Truman’s secretary of commerce, before challenging Truman in the presidential campaign of 1948. During this period of his career, Kirkendall edited Uncle Henry: A Documentary Profile of the First Henry Wallace (Iowa State Univ. Press, 1993), a collection of writings by Wallace’s “Uncle Henry,” a prominent agricultural journalist, as well as an agricultural history book series. His last job brought him back to his home state as the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Endowed Chair of American History at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Kirkendall retired in 1998. During his retirement, he traveled widely, and he remained a loyal fan of Seattle Mariners baseball and Gonzaga men’s basketball.

Despite his success, he often expressed a wish in his last years that he had written one more book. About Harry Truman, of course.

Andrew J. Kirkendall
Texas A&M University

Glennys Young
University of Washington

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