My Academic Journey: Part 2

​As graduation from Illinois neared I applied to grad school, but here my naivete caught up with me once again. I applied to some of the best PhD programs in the country. But I didn’t have the background for it. My army experience was no advantage in such programs, which were tailored to high achievers and rewarded not practical experience but conventional, recognizable academic success. My army experience hurt me in another, unexpected way. I had satisfied nearly two years’ worth of credits in night school during my enlistment, an achievement of which at the time I was proud. But that meant I was at the university for only two years. I did good work in my history classes, but I was not around long enough to build relationships, stack extra-curricular accomplishments, and develop my reputation. The army experience did not translate, and so I am sure my record did not look nearly as strong to the gatekeepers at Princeton and Berkely as my younger competitors. That round of applications went unrewarded.

I was still determined to pursue an academic career, however, and an advisor, who has since become a dear friend and regular reader of this blog, suggested an alternate path. He had gone on to high-level study (a PhD at Illinois, a very fine program) from modest beginnings. He was from Laramie, Wyoming, and was also a military guy, having done a stint in the navy. He suggested that a terminal MA program at a respectable place such as the University of Wyoming might be a way to build out my academic record. So I enrolled in Wyoming’s American Studies program. Two years there would burnish my credentials and make me more competitive to the kinds of PhD programs for which I was currently, apparently, unappealing. I packed a derelict old van with everything I owned and steered myself to the high plains for the first time.

The historic Cooper House on the campus of the University of Wyoming, home of the American Studies program.

Laramie was cold, small, isolated, and beautiful. It was less “windswept” than “wind-cleared,” perhaps "wind-vacated." I was a full-time graduate student, ensconced with a cohort of other like-minded individuals. I lived the life of the mind for the first time in my life. We read ideas, discussed ideas, and debated ideas. Many of those debates were a bit thin, even superficial. But we were earnest, and I was certainly devoted to the project. Wyoming is where I began to catch my first glimpse of what an academic career, and intellectual life, might look like.

In the meantime, I was fed a steady diet of the American West, of frontier history, of the clash of ethnic and commercial interests in the region, of core and periphery, of folklore and tall tales, and what the ever-present force of the landscape meant for and to historical actors. I wasn’t quite drawn to Western history as a field for myself, but it did make an impression.

​I was at the time becoming increasingly drawn to the film career of Charlie Chaplin (whom I had not encountered before). Chaplin led me to the politics of Hollywood, which led me to left-wing screenwriters, which eventually took me to John Howard Lawson. Lawson was the doyen of Hollywood Stalinists, and the ringleader of the group that would be interrogated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947, memorialized in history as the “Hollywood Ten.” So at 7200 feet amidst the sagebrush and pronghorn antelopes, I wrote a Master’s thesis on a radical Jewish New York playwright and notorious Hollywood communist. I had found my métier, or so I thought.

--David J. Snyder