Manuscripts Collection
Clarke A. Chambers was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota on June 3, 1921, the son of physician Winslow Clarke Chambers and Anna Anderson Chambers. He received his B.A. from Carleton College in January 1943 and enlisted that same month in the U.S. Army Air Forces, 29th Bomber Command. He was trained as a weather observer and was stationed in the Western Pacific in the spring of 1944, having married his college sweetheart Florence earlier that year.
Over the next sixteen months he was successively stationed in Hawaii, Saipan, the Marianas, Guam, Okinawa, and Japan, as the war was fought to a conclusion. Chambers was a sergeant in the First Weather Squadron and was primarily assigned as a weather observer and cryptographer in all of those Western Pacific locations.
Following the war, Chambers received his M.A. (1947) and Ph.D. (1950) from the University of California-Berkeley, where he taught American history 1950-1951, and served again as guest professor in 1961-1962. He was appointed professor of American History at the University of Minnesota in 1951, where he remained the rest of his career, serving as department chair, 1971-1976, and retiring from his reular appointment in 1990. He currently holds the title of Professor Emeritus. Chambers is a leading scholar in the field of American social welfare history, and he founded (1963) and directed the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota throughout his active career.
Correspondence is primarily with his wife Florence and his parents, and to a lesser extent with other relatives and friends. Those to his wife are primarily love letters. All the letters contain thoughtful and articulate musings on army life, the war, warfare in general, politics and current events, the several Western Pacific islands where he was stationed, and his daily activities and routines.
Related materials: Papers of the families of Alexander Chambers and Harvey Stiefel are also in the Minnesota Historical Society manuscript collections.
Publications of Clarke A. Chambers are in the Minnesota Historical Society book collection.
A print version of this finding aid is available in the repository; filed in ALPHA notebooks under the heading: Chambers, Clarke A.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should
Accession number: 13,530; 16,051
Processed by: Dennis Meissner, May 2005
Catalog ID number: 003685688
Chambers' letters to his wife are daily, and it appears that she reciprocated, though her letters are not in the collection. Letters are almost always articulate, thoughtful (self-consciously philosophical or didactic at times), expressive and descriptive, and perceptive, regardless of topic. They are often fairly long, usually 3-4 handwritten pages. The predominating topic is his love for Florence, his loneliness away from her, and other facets of their relationship. Other frequent topics are routine military camp and post life and the activities that comprise it; prosecution of the war; politics and social and cultural observations; the indigenous peoples among whom he is living, and various of his fellow soldiers (he does a lot of brief character sketches); his readings and his observations about them. They each apparently numbered their letters so that the other would be aware of gaps in delivery and non-sequential delivery.
His letters contain almost no information about his actual duties and activities as a sergeant in the AAF Weather Service, perhaps for security reasons. Comments in his letters suggest that he is involved primarily in cryptographic work. He is also often quite vague about his exact location.
Letters before May 1943 concern his life at his boyhood home in Blue Earth, while he awaits military induction. The following year focuses on his Weather Service training, and his stateside camp and training assignments in the California desert and in Utah. Letters from the first part of 1944 also concern their marriage and their attempts to establish a household of sorts during their wartime separation, with Florence living and working in San Francisco.
After shipping out to Hickam Field, Oahu in June 1944, the letters bring in the themes of camp life in the tropics (including miserable living conditions), exotic flora and fauna, shipboard life during redeployments from one island to another, and caustic comments about army waste and mismanagement and the lifestyle of the senior officers. After August 7, 1945 there are many musings about the terrible destructive power of atomic warfare, and about where the exploitation of atomic energy may lead the country in future.
Beginning September 5, with the end of Army mail censorship, he becomes freer with criticisms of the Army and the U.S. government, and more voluble on political matters in general. Chambers also discusses his sympathies for American communists and other leftist groups. He receives his orders home in October, and his correspondence starts to wind down after that.
These letters, 2-3 per week, are generally shorter than those to Florence and somewhat different in content. Apart from lacking the romantic content, they also focus more on information about family and friends, as well as less about his own feelings and philosophy and more about events and activities around him. He also complains less frequently about the miserable conditions of camp and the tropical heat than he does in letters to Florence.
An apparent smattering of his parents' letters, stretching across the full period of his military service. The letters are generally brief and relate his parents' activities, and news about friends and family, and other local servicemen, as well as their love and concern for their son. Many of them relate how hard his father--a local physician--had to work during the war years, how hard it was to get basic supplies like paper and food, and the high wartime consumer prices. His mother's letters are often critical of some aspects of his life: his plans to marry Florence during wartime, his radical politics, his headstrong nature, and his neglect of opportunities the army affords him.
A small set of letters from his brother Winston and sister Jean, as well as Jean's husband Sheldon B. Vance (later an important officer in U.S. State Dept.).
A folder of poems and other short writings by Chambers while in service, probably intended for Florence. The second folder contains published poems and other writings by others that Chambers saved for reference.
Miscellaneous U.S. Army documents including immunization forms, orders, certificates, and travel documents.
Three issues of an unofficial newsletter of the Weather Service enlisted personnel stationed in the Western Pacific. They contain brief news items about activities on various islands, as well as humorous pieces, drawings, and gossip.
Chambers' percentile rankings on comprehensive standardized academic tests.