Death of a Zelig Character

When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1980s, no professor enjoyed greater campus celebrity than John Morton Blum, who died on Monday at the age of 90. One of the finest American historians of his era, he was the last actively teaching member of Yaleâ??s fabled troikaâ??with C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Career of Jim Crow) and Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom) having just retiredâ??that had distinguished the history department in its heyday. His undergraduate course â??American Politics and Public Policy, 1945-1974,â? whose students filled the Yale Law School auditorium, was called by one word: â??Blum.â? When I arrived on campus, the genial professor was still basking in his fame from a cameo appearance in Woody Allenâ??s Zelig, appearing alongside Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag.