Robert Kelley was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1925, the son of a corner grocer and his wife. He attended public schools and, after service in the Air Force at the end of World War II, graduated in 1948 from the small local college that would one day become a campus of the University of California (UCSB). He completed his Ph.D. studies in history at Stanford, concentrating on the west with a focus on California water politics. His dissertation was published as Gold Versus Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Sacramento Valley (1959). Hired in 1955 to join the UCSB History Department to teach and write on California history, Kelley’s scholarly interests took a sharp turn toward the comparative study of nineteenth-century American, British, and Canadian politics, leading to The Transatlantic Persuasion (1969), a bold and original synthesis.

What, then, was my senior colleague Bob Kelley’s “field” when I joined the UCSB History Department in 1966? He taught California and western history, and with considerable enthusiasm. He showed no further interest in comparative Atlantic politics, but began a book project leading to the influential synthesis, The Cultural Pattern of American Politics: The First Century (1979). Bob Kelley, I would have said in the 1970s, had “changed fields” from California and the West, was now a prominent political historian interested in the entire sweep of our national politics.

Yet even as Cultural Pattern went to the publisher, his colleagues became aware that Kelley was not just “changing fields,” but planning to plant on our university campus a new graduate training and research effort to give visibility and new energy to a scattered and heretofore unnamed part of the history profession almost entirely ignored by academic historians and their institutions. He called it “Public History.”

Looking back, I realize that I was given a hint of his direction one evening when he invited my wife and I to dinner shortly after I arrived at UCSB in 1966. That evening we heard his account of what had been a career-bending experience for him—a series of eleven consultation contracts with the California Attorney General’s Office in which Bob was hired to provide reports and expert testimony in connection with flood and condemnation suits in the Sacramento Valley.Footnote ¹ In the 1970s, he thought deeply about the implications of his off-campus consultant role.

The 1970s brought a relentlessly shrinking job market for history professors, and my department’s tenured history colleagues helplessly bemoaned the lack of jobs for their graduate students. Bob Kelley, however, took action. Remembering his well-paid professional work in the court system in Sacramento, and the accompanying gratification that came to an ivory tower academic when asked to bring his research and presentation skills to bear upon important public problems, Bob in 1975–76 established in our department the nation’s first graduate history program (or perhaps there was a tie for first, as Peter Stearns and Joel Tarr at Carnegie Mellon were at about the same time taking similar if less visible steps) in Public History. It is not important who “was first” in establishing a graduate program. Bob Kelley did not stop there, but (with the participation of colleague Wesley Johnson) established The Public Historian, and then published in that journal in 1978 a powerful essay defining public history and offering an expansive and optimistic vision of its possibilities.Footnote ²

Terminology would be a contentious issue, as Public History programs and professional activities expanded across the country. Bob firmly opposed the term Applied History, and no better substitute was to come forward. He persuaded me to teach in this program when the first class of graduate students arrived in 1976, the faculty (me included) still trying to figure out how to teach this topic that Bob had planted in a very conventional history department. He then took the lead in securing a Rockefeller Foundation grant funding a national conference in Montecito in April 1979. The meeting attracted more than fifty historians (95 percent of those invited to the three-day gathering), a mixture of those practicing their trade outside and inside the academy. “I have not encountered a session of historians that was so upbeat as this one,” commented Eric Boehm, a publisher of historical materials who captured the spirit of the occasion. The meeting led to the formation of the National Council on Public History, which began to hold annual meetings and assumed sponsorship of The Public Historian.Footnote ³

The history of public history is reasonably well known, meaning by that term not only university-based graduate training for off-campus careers for historians but also the much older practice of applied history in government agencies, corporations, and elsewhere. Bob Kelley’s restless mind, however, was not finished with the challenge of applying historical insights and historians’ skills throughout society. While growing numbers of public historians were finding careers working with and for constituents off campus, writing corporate and other institutional histories and working in museums, archives, and historic sites, Kelley, a political historian, was especially drawn to historians’ actual and potential roles within or consulting for governments. He yearned to pursue ways for historians to influence public policy, and I remember his enthusiasm upon recommending to me Harvard historian Ernest May’s Lessons of the Past (1972), which analyzed the misuses of history in presidential decision making from the 1930s to the Vietnam War, where May found a long series of foreign policy miscalculations rooted in faulty analogies. It turned out that there was a vigorous if small literature on the misuses of history by public policymakers, and Bob and I shared in the discovery of this work, which included, among others, George Mowry on presidents, Charles Fairman, Charles Miller, Paul Murphy, Alfred Kelly, and Wilcomb Washburn on judges, John Demos on child-welfare policy, and Francis Lowenheim on foreign policy.Footnote ⁴

Kelley was an affirmative personality, and while he had a keen interest in encouraging historians to study and offer useful lessons for avoiding history’s misuses by governments, he functioned best on the side of making history informative, enlightening, positively useful to policymakers. He sensed opportunity in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected president, and convinced the American Historical Association to send a letter to President-elect Carter, drafted by Kelley and signed by twenty-one distinguished American historians, stating that “it is time, we believe, that the national government to begin thinking historically about the problems it must solve.” Just as presidents since Harry Truman had the advice and commentary of professional economists in the Council of Economic Advisers, was it not time for “a Panel of Historical Consultants to conduct studies for you” as “an aid to decision-making?”Footnote ⁵ Carter never received the letter, his Domestic Counsel Stuart Eizenstat told Bob some years later, and some historians were relieved, preferring to remain independent critics of power.Footnote ⁶ Bob regretted a lost opportunity for institutionalizing historical knowledge of public policy at the highest reaches of our national government.

Predictably, Kelley was an immediate ally of the emerging subfield, the history of public policy. Julian Zelizer’s 2000 essay, “Clio’s Lost Tribe: Public Policy History Since 1978,” ably traces the emergence and increasing sense of common purpose animating historians drawn to the new “interdisciplinary arena” (Zelizer preferred that term to “subfield”) of policy history seen in the work of influential social scientists such as Theda Skocpol (Bringing the State Back In (1985) and Stephen Skowronek (Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982).Footnote ⁷ Their topics were past federal policies and represented what came to be called a “new historical institutionalism” among social scientists. Their work found a substantial professional audience in a new journal, Studies in American Political Development (1986–).

The social scientists engaged in the work of the New Institutionalism assiduously read historical work on past governmental policies. I offer a personal example. In the early 1980s, Theda Skocpol, the prominent sociologist whose writing focused on the historical development of the American state in the modern era, insisted on a working lunch with University of North Carolina political historians when she visited the UNC campus to consider an offer to join the Sociology Department. She and the other “New Institutionalists” looked to historians for facts and narrative, but they shared with most political historians the assumption that the stories historians told had no policy application until social scientists arrived to ask and answer the right questions. Public history assumed otherwise, but was only in the early stages of its intellectual development. Skocpol, at our luncheon in the early 1980s, had never heard of it.

A major step in the direction of applied policy history came in the 1980s from the oldest site of historical scholarship, Harvard University. Historian Ernest May and political scientist Richard Neustadt began teaching a course titled “The Lessons of History” at the Kennedy School of Government, leading to the publication in 1986 of Thinking in Time: The Uses and Misuses of History in Policymaking.

Kelley’s enthusiasm for the book was unbounded. Earlier, he responded positively when invited to a November 1978 conference on the History of Public Policy in the United States, hosted by Morton Keller of Brandeis and Thomas McCraw of the Harvard Business School, where the meeting was held. “Public policy as a distinct and self-conscious area of inquiry has made relatively little progress in American historical writing,” Keller and McCraw wrote in their invitational letter. Political scientists and economists, they observed, were giving the study of public policy an important place, but historians, while producing important work in policy areas such as social welfare, foreign policy, and economics, tended to subsume the chosen policy theme “within the framework of the substantive area of inquiry. There tends to be relatively little concern with the history of the public policy process per se.”Footnote ⁸

Some thirty historians (myself among them) gathered in Cambridge for an invigorating and informative two days of conversation about our common scholarly interests.Footnote ⁹There was some talk, toward the end, of a need for a next step, such as the founding of a policy history association that might sponsor annual meetings and/or a newsletter or journal. That step would be taken in the Midwest, when Notre Dame historian Donald Critchlow, energized by conversations with some of those who attended the Harvard conference, organized a follow-up meeting to consider taking organizational steps toward a more self-conscious history of government policies. It took place at Notre Dame in October 1986, and Critchlow invited Bob Kelley to be the keynote speaker.

It was curious, Kelley began, that historians, deeply interested since Thucydides in the stories of political events and policies, have only recently awakened to the shortcomings of their work, which “remains formless. . . . The work of policy historians runs along on many separate railroads, rarely meeting.” What is needed is “constituency-building . . . that is, acquainting our colleagues in some attention-arresting way with the fact that they are policy historians, that they are in something that links them to scholars working in different and separate policy streams.” Only then will “a wide and complex dialogue on policy history be possible.” We must “go beyond the pure empiricism of histories of particular policies, running this way and that . . . and turn our attention . . . to the policy process, its nature and history . . . so as to be able to give advice to policy decision-makers.” We must go beyond “simply the sequence of events” to fashion “a systematic way of thinking” about events as a process and build a constituency to nourish it.Footnote ¹⁰

Whether the “wide and public dialogue” about policy history that Kelley and the conference organizers called for at the Notre Dame meeting made satisfactory intellectual and institutional progress across the 1980s and 1990s became a matter of dispute. On airplanes and commuter buses one saw copies of May and Neustadt’s Thinking in Time (1986) in the hands of field-grade military officers assigned the book, and reviews of it were positive. May received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to develop “Uses and Misuses of History” courses in four major university medical, law, and business schools. Donald Critchlow announced the founding in 1987 of a new journal, Journal of Policy History, and soon afterward Critchlow, from his new base at Washington University, St. Louis, established an annual meeting of scholars interested in a more rigorous and policy-influential policy history.

Despite these steps, progress in professionalising and extending the influence of policy history was, to some historians, slow and discouraging. Vanderbilt historian Hugh Graham wrote an appraisal in 1993, concluding that “policy history has not found its identity.” The emergence of public history should have siphoned energy into applied research, but Graham found disappointing results. Few major universities had established programs in either the history of public policy or public history itself. Acknowledging the impressive careers of governmental public historians such as Richard Hewlett in the AEC, David Trask in the State Department, and Richard Baker and Donald Ritchie in the Senate Historical Office, Graham judged historians’ efforts to influence public policy “marginal.” He found the “lessons” derived from May and Neustadt’s policy episodes “entertaining” and “a delight to use in class,” yet the policy advice amounted to a loose collection of simplistic “rules of thumb.”

And there was a larger pattern to be reckoned with. Historians who offered policy lessons were by nature reluctant to predict and “seem more comfortable with negative advice.” Beyond this, they were seriously handicapped in deriving policy guidelines and lessons by the fundamental transformation of the American state in and after the 1960s into an overextended and fragmented apparatus that historians no longer understood as they did the American state built from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. Add to this the turn away from political history in the profession at large toward social and cultural issues, and the new policy history disappointed some of its sponsors.Footnote ¹¹

Several historians responded to Graham’s assessment in a subsequent issue of The Public Historian, some finding his “disappointment” verdict too negative or at the least premature, while Zelizer, writing an assessment at the end of the century, conceded that “policy history still lurks in the disciplinary shadows.”Footnote ¹²

Bob Kelley lined up with the optimists, and indeed presented the opportunity as an obligation: “I think what lies before us in policy history is not simply an interesting challenge, it is a duty and an obligation . . . a scholarly task which will never run out.”Footnote ¹³

As always, he had ideas about what more needed to be done, and he acted upon them. In the Notre Dame address—later published in two versions—he affirmed the vital importance of teaching. Policy history, like public history, make us “realize a venerable scholarly truth: it needs students to grow and flourish. It must be a topic which is taught to young people, which . . . acquires a collegiality and an identity in the institution, a vitality and a sense of self-worth.” He had already acted upon these convictions, drawing in 1983 upon the respect he had accumulated with colleagues and campus administrators at UCSB to gain approval for the establishment of a new undergraduate major—a bachelor’s degree in the History of Public Policy. “A historian’s approach to the study of public policy differs from that of political scientists,” economists, and other disciplines, he was quoted in the UCSB Campus newsletter in October 1983: “Through history, students acquire the deep dimension of time.” The campus newsletter reported Kelley as saying that the new undergraduate major “will prepare students who want to prepare for careers in public life—law, government, politics, journalism.” “The goal of the new major in the History of Public Policy,” a History Department brochure declared, “is to send people out into public life who have a clear sense of what they are going to do, how it works, and what they can expect.”Footnote ¹⁴ In 1988, Kelley led discussions on campus resulting in the creation of a new History of Public Policy field in the department’s doctoral program. The first student arrived in 1989. In 1988, Bob joined a small group of planners at UCSB who hoped to convince UC administrators to establish an Earl Warren Public Policy graduate school at UCSB, one with a strong historical component. They were unsuccessful in this, as in a later effort to establish on campus a Public Policy Research and Exchange Center.

A remarkably innovative educator, Bob Kelley was always a writer of history, and his sustained promotion of policy history surely put pressure on him to produce a model of the sort of policy history he so tirelessly urged on the profession—if his pedagogical innovations and graduate-student obligations would allow time. He decided that the completion of the second volume of Cultural Patterns, bringing the story from 1876 to 1976, seemed out of reach given his other commitments. Fortunately the editors of the American Historical Review invited him to write one of their “Bicentennial Essays,” allowing him to place before a large audience of historians an article-length version (“Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” American Historical Review [June 1977]) of what the second volume of Cultural Patterns would presumably have argued. He placed at the center of his condensed synthesis his conviction that “political culture” was the key to understanding American politics. Readers of Kelley’s article four years later would be justified in concluding that whatever illumination historical perspectives provide on public policy outcomes, the direction of electoral politics remained inscrutable. Kelley in 1977 foresaw that “the Republicans are dying” and “the Democratic majority” forged in the New Deal seemed from the perspective of history “touched with eternity.” Even as he wrote, California governor Ronald Reagan was girding for his startling move toward leadership of a conservative counter-wave that would capture the White House.Footnote ¹⁵

Kelley was the busiest man I knew in those days, completing a book (Battling the Inland Sea, 1989) and an article (“The Interplay of American Political Culture and Public Policy: The Sacramento River as a Case Study”) based on his earlier research on Sacramento River water wars and meant to illustrate how to do this new thing, policy history.Footnote ¹⁶ He also taught the core courses in the history of public policy to undergraduates and graduates, as well as his courses on California and the West. He shared with several of us the reading lists and syllabi for these new Policy History courses, and I was astonished to realize that he and other faculty he drew into policy history were not focusing only on America but on governments everywhere through time. He brought in guest lecturers to lead discussions of governing in ancient Greece, Rome, modern Europe, Africa. His course syllabi, contained in several boxes of his papers, are thoroughly globalized, and he gave structure to the courses by developing a lengthy set of “Questions to Ask” and “The Stages of the Process.”

Time overtook him, as it always does. Approaching retirement age and diagnosed with prostate cancer, Bob convinced the department to search for a replacement who could teach all of his courses and keep the Public History and Policy History enterprises moving ahead. Our search could not find such a person, even when California history was sacrificed.

His colleagues seem to find enduring value in Bob Kelley’s pedagogic innovations. The UCSB History Department website in 2010 still holds pages describing not only the Public History program, now thirty-four years old, but the undergraduate major in the History of Public Policy and the graduate program in the History of Public Policy, formed at the end of the 1980s and now listing eight faculty teaching and guiding dissertations. Bob Kelley would take heart at these roots.

“On August 28, 1993, Robert Kelley lost his battle with cancer,” the editors of The Public Historian wrote in the Fall 1993 issue, and closed with words from a memorial poem written by friend Marni McGee:

Though it was early in the day,

the loving words had all been said,

and so he set out,

walking from the foothills

into the shining sunrise of his Lord.Footnote ¹⁷