Benjamin B. Hampton
Benjamin Bowles Hampton is one of the figures in early film history who is under-studied by professional historians. This post will give readers some idea of why he is under-studied by looking at his work between 1907-1922.
Goetz aficionados will know Hampton as the 1908 employer of Monroe, WI-native William Wesley Young. When Hampton entered the theater industry through his purchase of Broadway Magazine, he head-hunted Young from a Hearst paper out of Chicago and relocated Young back to NYC, where nearly a decade before Young had established a reputation as an editor at Pulitzer’s New York World. By the early 1910s, both Hampton and Young were heavily involved in the film industry, which lead to Young’s WWI work for the British Government’s film propaganda efforts in the (then neutral) United States. It’s likely that Hampton was Young’s gateway into NYC “active measures” work for the British. But what about Benjamin B. Hampton pre-1908?
Hampton was a political operator well before his his interest in film. He came to prominence in the tobacco industry: he was vice president of the American Tobacco Company by 1916, but was active at the executive level there by 1907. The history of this company, colloquially known as the “Tobacco Trust”, is the fin de siècle leg of the North American tobacco industry's much longer history as a globally important political force.
From at least the late 1600s, the trade in tobacco was a particularly sought-after privilege. Wherever the trade operated in Europe, it did so as a state-sanctioned monopoly. “Enlightenment” rulers, otherwise called “Cameralist” rulers like the Hapsburgs in the case of Central Europe, bestowed these monopolistic tobacco trade licenses on individuals who had already done them special services— typically services which helped imperial families centralize power away from the native aristocracy and church. This centralization is termed “enlightened absolutism”. Therefore, the tobacco trade has always had the whiff religious-radical, anti-aristocrat agitation about it— and it has always had strong ties to London.
The prominence of London in international trade during the 1700s is at least in part thanks to Camerialist tobacco monopoly grants. It was the profits from the trade in North American colonial tobacco which helped interloping Baltic traders break up native British trading monopolies and establish London as the home-base for stateless 'international merchants'. These Baltic merchants where largely Hapsburg subjects who specialized in black market trade— and the privileged trade in American tobacco, which they were allowed to conduct in the open because of those “special services” rendered. This is the legacy inherited by the American Tobacco Company (ATC).
ATC, the “Tobacco Trust”, was created by James Buchanan Duke of North Carolina and Thomas Fortune Ryan of Virginia, both men from the heart of tobacco-growing country. Ryan was the son of Protestant settlers who had established themselves in Virginia in the 1600s and were comfortably middle class. However, Ryan married the daughter of a rich Catholic merchant in Baltimore and thereby became a leading spokesperson for the Vatican in the USA. On the basis of his father-in-law's Virginian contacts and fortune, Ryan established himself as a 'Tammany Hall' operator in New York City: many of the voters Tammany Hall claimed to represent (but more often sold out, see the 1863 'New York Draft Riots') were Catholics. As described in Richmond, Virginia's Style Weekly:
In New York, Ryan made a key strategic move by enmeshing himself in Democratic politics, particularly the Tammany Hall machine that held a grip on city operations. He made generous contributions, became a party committeeman and worked behind the scenes to establish contacts.
He found the source of his first great fortune in public transit. In 1883, when a major streetcar system was proposed for the city, he organized the New York Cable Railroad and bid on the proposed route from lower Manhattan to 14th Street.
Ryan, like his two competitors for the franchise — Jacob Sharp and William C. Whitney — offered bribes to the city councilors. But Sharp's $500,000 bribe won him the contract.
Undeterred, Ryan and Whitney joined forces and invited investor Peter A.B. Widener to join their syndicate as they hypocritically challenged the legality of Sharp's under-the-table dealings. When the state legislature investigated, Sharp sold his company to Ryan's group. Nonetheless, Sharp was convicted of bribery and sentenced to jail.
In 1911, McClure’s Magazine— which employed William Wesley Young from 1913— had nothing good to say about Ryan’s business tactics:
Excerpt from “McAdoo and the Subway” in McClure’s Magazine, March 1911.
Readers will note how Ryan, much like the Roosevelts, saw both the US Navy and NYC politics as their channel to power and riches. Ryan expanded his fortune by going into business with London-Rothschild representative August Belmont's son, as well as by founding the Union Tobacco Company (strangely named for a Southerner), which ultimately Ryan rolled together with Duke's firm, making him one of the richest men in America.
1880s advertising from James Buchanan Duke’s tobacco company, which would shortly become the heart of the American Tobacco Company. Note how in the 1880s tobacco firms were already reaching out to the theater industry for advertising. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
“Card Number 610, Lillian Baldwin, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-3) issued by Duke Sons & Co. to promote Cross Cut Cigarettes 1880s. … There are eight subsets of the N145 series. Various subsets sport different card designs and also promote different tobacco brands represented by W. Duke Sons & Company. This card is from the third subset, N145-3. Note that actors' names are spelled differently on cards throughout set and are not dependable for accuracy.”
I've spent so much time talking about Ryan because throughout the 1910s Benjamin Hampton appears wherever Ryan or Ryan's son, Glendenning J. Ryan, does. (“Glendenning” is the name of a Scottish area which sheltered the rebellious Protestant religious/political “Covenanter” movement-- not an obvious choice of name for a Catholic parent.) I think it’s reasonable to view Hampton as a creature of Ryan’s pseudo-catholic political dynasty which operated in competition with the equally duplicitous Roosevelt Clan.
But what skill set did Hampton bring to Ryan’s table? The Tobacco Trust was labelled a “bad trust” by Theodore Roosevelt’s political machine, which used anti-monopoly legislation as a tool against Teddy’s political enemies. Benjamin Hampton appears to have had the right connections to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration during American Tobacco Company’s anti-trust prosecution in 1907. Hampton’s contacts are elucidated by the following letters, which are part of the collection of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University:
Letter from William Loeb to Charles J. Bonaparte. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o57377. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University.
Officially, William Loeb was Teddy Roosevelt’s “secretary”, but in the old-fashioned sense ,which means something more like “gatekeeper to the president”. Charles J. Bonaparte was Roosevelt’s Attorney General, i.e. the lawyer bringing suit against ATC on behalf of the US government. The “other side” and the letter from Benjamin Hampton from 10/24/1907 are not part of Dickinson’s digitized collection.
Attorney Lindsay Denison represented Benjamin B. Hampton and the ATC in 1907 when the company was targeted under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. In delivering Hampton’s letter to the Attorney General, President Roosevelt violated what in modern jurisprudence is called “attorney-client privilege”— it may not have been illegal in Teddy’s time, but it was unethical. Hampton’s letter to Denison is not included in the Dickinson collection. However, a subsequent letter that Denison wrote to Loeb, Teddy Roosevelt’s “secretary”, sheds light on what that privileged letter contained:
Letter from Lindsay Denison to William Loeb. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o57596. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University. Page 1/3
Letter from Lindsay Denison to William Loeb. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o57596. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University. Page 2/3
Letter from Lindsay Denison to William Loeb. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o57596. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University. Page 3/3
How do we interpret these letters? The “brutal political meddling” friends of Hampton are almost certainly James Duke of North Carolina and Thomas Fortune Ryan of Virginia, as founders of the ATC. Since Ryan and Duke knew that the legal action against their monopoly was politically motivated by NYC rival Theodore Roosevelt, they knew that parleying with the president— “going over the head” of the Attorney General— was the most direct way of “sorting out” their Justice Department problems.
Far more interesting to me is Denison’s mention of “the Pritchard incident” and Senator Mark Hanna. Readers will remember that Hanna sponsored building WWI submarines for the British in the Great Lakes, despite the wishes of the American people to remain neutral. This “Thunder Bay” Ontario sub project was the most likely source for Leon Goetz’s mysterious submarine escape pod patent in 1910.
I was not able to find out what the “Pritchard Incident” was nor how Hanna was connected to it— but I can provide some clues. “Pritchard” probably refers to Roosevelt political crony Jeter Connelly Pritchard, a North Carolina senator and a D.C. Supreme Court associate justice who was appointed by Teddy Roosevelt.
As a partisan of Roosevelt, Senator Pritchard raised eyebrows when (prior to 1906) he requested an opinion from the Department of Justice on whether he, an elected representative, could serve as a lawyer for a defendant in a case being brought by the US Treasury. The DoJ, keen to support a favorite of President Roosevelt, gave its seal of approval to this illegal arrangement. In October 1906— a few weeks prior to Hampton’s letter regarding the ATC— Teddy destroyed his rival Sen. Joseph Ralph Burton of Kansas for doing precisely the same type of paid legal work that Pritchard had the DoJ “approve” for him.
Burton’s crime was that he represented Rialto Grain and Securities Company of St. Louis, which was accused by the post office of running a financial scam, during his time as a state senator. Burton ended up doing jail time, whereas Pritchard could prostitute his public office on behalf of corporate interests and enjoy a sparkling career— under Teddy’s patronage, of course.
Why did Teddy espouse such a double-standard? In the wake of Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War, Pritchard had supported Teddy’s Cuban sugar import scheme (a politically stabilizing measure for Cuba which hurt US producers) while Burton had worked against it. We can deduce from all this that Pritchard was in the business of selling his political office in service of big businesses which had run afoul of the presidency. Since ATC’s founder James Duke was a North Carolina native, it stands to reason he would be well versed in a “justice for sale” scandal involving his senator.
Another clue about the “Pritchard Incident” is that Sen Mark Hanna was involved— which means the “incident” had to happen before Hanna’s death in 1904. Historian R. Alton Lee, among others, notes Theodore Roosevelt’s feelings toward Hanna (from “Joseph Ralph Burton and the “Ill-Fated” Senate Seat of Kansas”, Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 32 (Winter 2009–2010): 246-65):
Roosevelt held, in the senator’s estimation, an almost paranoid fear of the influential Republican senator from Ohio, Mark Hanna. The president believed Senator Hanna, who had been McKinley’s number one champion but was never a fan of the “Rough Rider” in the White House, would try to steal the Republican presidential nomination from him in 1904. So, the president tried to manipulate party organizations in Republican states prior to the national convention to assure victory.
When Vice President Roosevelt assumed the presidency after McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt’s political rivals in NYC would have quickly seen that their interests were in jeopardy. It would have been smart for them to arrange some sort of deal whereby the Republican party would run Hanna on the 1904 ticket instead of Roosevelt. In fact, it seems that Pritchard himself was notified of just such a scheme in Tennessee, another major tobacco producing state, by one John Allison. Could hard-ball sponsorship of a Hanna presidency by Hampton’s business partners in North Carolina be the “brutal political meddling” that grabbed Teddy’s attention as “the Pritchard Incident”? This is the most informed guess I can make at this time.
Whatever the “Pritchard Incident” was, and whatever the “brutal political meddling” of Hampton’s colleagues, we can be sure that Hampton served as the ‘political fixer’ for ATC in Washington. Quite a position to hold— and quite a position from which to start his career in Hollywood!
William Wesley Young was still working in Chicago for Hearst’s Chicago Daily Journal when Hampton was negotiating with President Roosevelt, however in just a few months time Hampton would buy Broadway Magazine— a seedy New York City theater rag known for salacious pictures and stories— and rename the magazine after himself. Certainly embattled tobacco executives would welcome a way to move assets out of the “Tobacco Trust” and into another industry with profit potential— like the Early Film Industry.
Christmas 1908 cover of Benjamin Hampton’s theater magazine. Note how his ATC lawyer, Lindsay Denison, got a story published! (Surprised he had time given the anti-trust work.) Please note the condition of the dolls and their relation to the bear and the ball.
1907 was an exciting year for investors in early film: the major players in the industry were combining under Thomas Edison’s umbrella “Motion Picture Patents Company”— (MPPC) an organization designed to protect copyright holders from intellectual property theft and film piracy. The validity of movie-industry patents had been bolstered by a 1907 court ruling involving Biograph’s “Latham film loop” and the leaders of the industry were ready to expand. ATC capital sought refuge from the embattled tobacco industry at just the right time to buy into the “Edison Trust”, should it find a way. Naturally, that way would lead through London.
In 1911 Roosevelt’s verdict against ATC came through and a long negotiation process as to how the company should be broken up began. The result of all this was the formation of a tobacco oligopoly— hardly a great outcome for consumers, but a boon for advertising firms in NYC. One of the more valuable firms created by ATC’s reorganization was British American Tobacco, which was formed when Duke went into partnership with the British “Imperial Tobacco Company” lead by radical protestant and liberal politician William Henry Wills. This company thrived after the anti-trust legislation. Owners of the new post-ATC oligopoly companies were given their “in” to Early Film when the MPPC got labelled a “bad trust” too.
The Edison Trust (MPPC) was on the wrong side of Woodrow Wilson’s administration. President Wilson had been put into office by Theodore Roosevelt’s political machine. By 1915 the MPPC had been broken, and far more thoroughly broken than the ATC ever was. (Interestingly, subsequent administrations under Harding and Coolidge were less interested in breaking up the new film monopoly which followed Edison’s, first called “NAMPI” [National Association of the Motion Picture Industry] and then called the “MPPDA” [Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America], than they were using the Federal Trade Commission to coach the new monolith on how to avoid obvious transgressions of the Sherman Anti Trust Act. See Kia Afra, The Hollywood Trust.)
Once the dust around Edison’s MPPC had settled, we find Ryan interests running the remaining valuable MPPC assets. In June 1916 Hampton and Ryan Jr were named to the board of Vitagraph— one of the few MPPC companies to make it out of federal litigation alive. According to Afra, defunct-MPPC co-founder George Kleine and Siegmund Lubin’s son-in-law, Ira Morel Lowry, hatched to plan to invite Hampton to the MPPC’s distribution arm, the General Film Company, which Hampton lead from that December. Lubin’s company was heavily in debt at this time and unlikely to survive. General Film was closely associated with Vitagraph.
Motography, June 3rd, 1916.
According to Kia Afra, Hampton appeared at Vitagraph as the representative of investment bankers Goldman Sachs, the Guaranty Trust Company, Thomas F. Ryan, Percival S. Hill of the American Tobacco Company, and John Prentiss of Hornblower & Weeks. These investors were willing to extend Vitagraph a cocktail of capital and loans far in excess of what the company’s assets and earning power could justify. Hampton pushed forward a risky plan for creating a “supercombine” where Vitagraph would buy MPPC-litigation victims Lubin, Selig, and Essanay, and ultimately arch-competitor Paramount— all of which would be paid for when they signed Mary Pickford just as star-salaries were exploding. The grease to this proposed machine was, of course, Wall Street credit lines.
Hampton received help from Mutual’s John Freuler (our Monroe, WI film tycoon) by pumping-up Pickford’s salary negotiations. Prior to Hampton’s approaching Pickford on behalf of Vitagraph, Freuler had put out a very public inquiry into how much it would cost to hire Pickford away from Famous Players Lasky, which in the context of the rich contract Freuler had just made with gangster Charlie Chaplin, started a bidding war for the pretty young Canadian. Terry Ramsaye, a popular film chronicler with a reputation for half-truths, says this about Hampton and Freuler’s dealings with Pickford:
In February the exciting announcement that John R. Freuler of the Mutual Film Corporation had contracted to pay Charles Chaplin $670,000 for a year’s work came to upset the scheme.
Mary had been in the films five industrious years before Chaplin started. Now she was getting a mere $4,000 a week while this stranger helped himself to almost three times as much...It seems that Mary discussed her discontent with Cora Carrington Wilkenning. Mrs. Wilkenning had come into contact with Miss Pickford as a scenario agent.
Also she had been instrumental in the making of an agreement with the McClure Syndicate for the selling of newspaper articles signed by Miss Pickford and written by Frances Marion, beginning the autumn before....That syndicate series was but one of the ways in which Miss Pickford realized upon the values of her valued name. ... The McClure Syndicate series paid Pickford $24, 243.30 between October 31, 1915, and September, 1918, which was sixty per cent of the gross sales...
Naturally and immediately Mrs. Wilkenning went to see John R. Freuler of the Mutual, the man who had done so handsomely by Chaplin. It was an opportune call.
Freuler was exceedingly aware that Mutual’s old line producers were going to let the concern die the same death that was overtaking the General Film, and for the same uninspired reasons. If there were to be Mutual pictures, Freuler had to get them. He wanted Pickford.
Then Miss Mary went down to the Mutual offices with the green carpet and the red mahogany and sat right where Chaplin had sat before her. Inevitably that Chaplin deal came into the conversation.
“I think,” observed Freuler with typical deliberation, as he reached to his breast pocket, “that we might make Miss Pickford happy, yet. You might sign a contract with this pen—it is the one Mr. Chaplin used.”... “But before I offer any figures,” Freuler continued, “I must consult our exchanges and some of the exhibitors to see how much your pictures would be worth.”... “You see,” Freuler went on, ignoring the storm in Mary’s eyes, “my investigation may show that you are worth a great deal more than I would venture to offer, off hand.”
Freuler issued a “pink letter” to the Mutual’s branch managers, making inquiry about probable earnings on Pickford pictures in all parts of the country. The Mutual’s “pink letter” system derived its name from the color of the paper which denoted a confidential communication from the home office, to be kept under lock and key in a special binder.
Unfortunately this made it very convenient for the spies of competitive concerns to locate important correspondence. The offices of all the major film concerns were in this time sprinkled with espionage agents, planted as employees.
The fact that Mutual was investigating Pickford possibilities became known among the competing film chieftains immediately.
Mrs. Wilkenning, the agent, was still looking for a chance to stir up new bids for Pickford. The report came up Broadway by way of Wall street that 111 Fifth avenue, the office of the American Tobacco Company, was seething with millions and motion picture ambitions. It was reported that Benjamin B. Hampton, vice president in charge of advertising, was about to head a big money invasion of the film field.
Hampton was interested when Mrs. Wilkenning called. There were conferences in her offices. Pickford and Hampton met there.
Mary seems to have been a bit hesitant, now that she was face to face with a step that might break her long and profitable connection with Famous Players. Hampton wanted to talk certainties and insisted on something tangible upon which to base his contemplated promotional efforts.
On that brave day, the seventeenth of March, in 1916, he received a tiny note on a bit of blue paper, reading:
"I have positively made up my mind to leave Famous Players. MARY PICKFORD"
The next day Hampton achieved a real option, in a lengthy letter written by Mrs. Wilkenning and signed by Mary. Mary got a thousand dollars down on that option and gave Hampton thirty days in which to make his arrangements for a corporation which was to give her fifty per cent of the stock and a drawing account of $7,000 a week—not so big as the Chaplin deal but better than the Famous Players arrangement at $4,000.
With this option signed Hampton began looking about for capital and the creation of excitement generally in the inner and upper circles of the motion picture industry.
While it is wise to take Ramsaye’s writing with a grain of salt, he had some reason to know what he was talking about in this case, and his account broadly agrees with Hampton’s account of the 1916 Pickford negotiation. Ramsaye got his start as a producer working at Mutual Film in 1915, he knew everyone involved, and in 1921 he moved on to write for Photoplay Magazine, which was owned by Mutual Film investors the Shallenberger brothers. (Readers will remember this is just a few months after Edith May’s “National Salesgirl Beauty Contest” that Photoplay was a silent partner organizing.) Hampton had a close relationship with Photoplay: when Hampton came to write his history of the movie industry in 1931, he worked from research already conducted by Ramsaye for Photoplay in 1921.
The Shallenbergers owned far more than just Photoplay: they were joint owners of Mutual Film alongside Kuhn Loeb & Co., whose interests were represented by board members Otto Kahn and Crawford Livingston. According to historian Timothy James Lyon in The Silent Partner, Mutual was founded specifically to be an ‘independent’ competitor to the MPPC’s General Film, which Hampton now ran. By 1916 Kuhn, Loeb & Co. had also invested in Paramount, so Freuler’s backers stood to loose if Vitagraph remained viable competition to Paramount. With Hampton’s appointments in 1916, the fox was put in charge of the General Film/Vitagraph hen-house. Given the Shallenberger/Freuler/Kuhn Loeb connection, Hampton’s work to undermine Vitagraph with Freuler’s help makes perfect sense.
With the help of shoddy financial evaluations from Price, Waterhouse & Company, Hampton concluded huge loans for Vitagraph only to abandon negotiations with Pickford, leaving the company without the “star power” needed to pay back the loans. Afra suggests that Hampton’s ‘option’ on Pickford was never a serious one:
Hampton's option on Pickford provided no penalties in the case of Pickford’s void of contract. She simply had to return a one-thousand-dollar certified check. Such a low penalty raises doubts about her willingness to leave Famous Players and suggests that she was simply looking for a document that would give her leverage over Paramount in the ongoing negotiations.
In addition to dropping his work on Mary, the investment capital from Hampton’s banker friends never materialized— only the debts remained. The owners of lame-duck Lubin would have been the ultimate beneficiaries of the cash from Vitagraph’s debts when Lubin was bought by Vitagraph (along with Selig and Essanay).
In his memoirs, Vitagraph founder Albert E. Smith looked back on his dealings with Hampton with bitterness, believing Hampton was an agent working on behalf of Wall Street bankers seize Vitagraph assets. During Hampton’s time scheming at Vitagraph, he was in contact with Theodore Roosevelt’s first cousin once removed, Nicholas, describing the progress of his plans, plans which permanently hobbled Vitagraph with insurmountable debts. (Nicholas, two years out of college and already secretary to the American mission to Spain, owed his career to his older cousin.) These debts were not resolved until Warner Brothers bought Vitagraph in 1925— for 1/4 of the firm’s estimated value. Warner Brothers were financed by Goldman Sachs to do this— the same bankers who’d worked with Hampton to saddle Vitagraph with the debts in the first place. (The Four Warner Brothers were Imperial Russian/Polish immigrants to Canada who looked to the US film industry to make their fortune— another link in the Canadian Connection.) One could say that Teddy took care of the last of his political adversaries in the film world when Hampton engineered the over-leveraging of Vitagraph and General Film.
While all this was going on, readers will remember that William Wesley Young was busy writing The Story of the Cigarette (1916), which promoted the tobacco industry’s usefulness pacifying soldiers on both sides of the WWI conflict in Europe. At this time Josephus Daniels and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were desperate for ways to entertain servicemen without the services of the Galician network’s bordellos. Ryan and Roosevelt interests finally found something they could agree on through the advent of WWI— in fact, Virginia tobacco producers were able to shift public tastes away from their competitors (such as Turkish tobacco) during the fighting.
National Sportsman, February 1918.
Having done his dirty work at Vitagraph on behalf of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. et alia, Hampton turned his hand to a different type of creativity. Between 1919 and 1922 he produced and sometimes directed films, usually starring his wife-to-be Claire Adams, a Canadian actress. Intriguingly, Claire Adams starred in “The End of the Road”, a 1919 “health film” which was probably paid for by funds from the 1919 Chamberlain-Kahn Act and drew the particular ire of anti-pornography activists. (William Wesley Young had been directing since 1913 with “A Boy and the Law”.)
A 1921 photograph of Claire Adams, a.k.a. Mrs. Benjamin B. Hampton, who very shortly after Hampton’s untimely death in 1932 married Australian millionaire Donald John Scobie Mackinnon. If she had a husband “G. T. Brokaw” too, it wouldn’t be surprising, but this could also be the name of a character she portrayed at the time of the photograph.
Advertisement for “The End of the Road”, courtesy Wikipedia. Note how “leading Ministers and social workers” are said to endorse the film, which was originally made for the War Department (US).
The pre-sound period of film history is one that deserves more scholarly attention than it has received. No research into this era will prove satisfying unless it avoids two pitfalls that plague film scholarship more generally: 1) neglect of firms not located on the Coasts and 2) an underdeveloped understanding of those financial institutions and their leaders who became involved in early film. The lack of attention paid to Benjamin Hampton has its roots in both these pitfalls, the last of which is, in fairness, treacherous terrain for grant-dependent historians.
