1. I have sketched my mother's outlook in some detail for a conference sponsored by Daedalus on woman in America. See "Two Generations," Daedalus 93 (1964):72-97; reprinted in The Woman in America, ed. Robert J. Lifton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).

2. Daniel Aaron, reviewing a biography of Babbitt, wrote, "Out of unchecked impulse came nationalism, imperialism, and tyranny. Babbitt thought that American democracy, given its dubious ideological antecedents and evangelical politics, was all too susceptible to cant." "The Hero of Humanism," review of Irving Babbitt: An Intellectual Study, by Thomas E. Nevin, New Republic 192, no. 24 (June 17, 1985): 36, 38. Harvard's aesthetes largely continue

ignored, or were repelled by, Babbit, and he himself was half proud to be an anachronism.

3. I have described the mise-en-scène in an essay, "Educational Reform at Harvard College: Meritocracy and Its Adversaries," in Education and Politics at Harvard, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman, prepared for the Carnegie Commission (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), pp. 281-392.

4. See Richard C. S. Trahair, The Humanist Temper: The Life and Work of Elton Mayo (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984).

5. The chain of mission stations established by Sir Wilfred Grenfell on the Labrador coast was designed to provide primarily medical services to the descendants of early British settlers who scraped meager livings from fishing. At inland Northwest River, where I was stationed, the "natives" booed and hissed Sir Wilfred when he came and lectured them on their failure to plant gardens to vary their diet, too much of which, in his view and in mine, was alcohol. I was not disillusioned by the indigenous population of Labrador (I saw hardly anything of the Indians, but I knew that they treated their dogs miserably and seemed immune to missionizing) because I had no expectations concerning them. But I was somewhat disillusioned by the medical missionaries. Our little group of "wops" lived all summer long on a diet of salmon fourteen times a week because the other stations, which had got provisions intended for us, refused to share, and it seemed to me that the generally Anglican station heads who were married sacrificed themselves and their families more than they could emotionally manage without engendering rancor. From these leaders I had expected too much.

6. One of Friedrich's students whom I already knew was Lewis Dexter. A student of public opinion and of the interview, Dexter had passed enough examinations to graduate from the University of Chicago in the record time of five quarters. After war began in Europe in 1939 Dexter became a member of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, monitoring broadcasts--a group that later formed the Office of War Information, and some of whose members entered the Office of Strategic Services. Almost immediately after Pearl Harbor, as perhaps my first serious political act, I went to Washington to work with others to try to prevent the deportation of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. I worked closely with Dexter, and after 1945 we were periodic allies in the effort to control nuclear arsenals and to prevent their testing.

7. Unlike a number of my fellow sociologists who have written essays for this volume, I was not an early critic of the American social order. I did not know any Democrats, let alone Socialists or Communists, until I got to college. When in college, I worked briefly with boys' groups in several settlement houses. I did not identify with the youngsters I found very difficult to control.

When I met fellow travelers on my visit in the summer of 1931 to the Soviet Union, I regarded them as even more ignorant than I concerning the United States and gullible in the extreme concerning the Soviet Union. However, I was a pacifist. For fuller discussion, see "A Personal Memoir: My Political Journey," in Conflict and Consensus: A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis A. Coser, ed. Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins (New York: Free Press, 1984) pp. continue

329-35. For a bibliography of my publications through 1978, see On the Making of Americans: Essays in Honor of David Riesman, ed. Herbert J. Gans, Nathan Glazer, Joseph R. Gusfield, and Christopher Jencks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 319-46.

8. Harvard Law Review 52 (1939): 1105-34.

9. For additional reflections on dilemmas of teaching and research, see David Riesman, "On Discovering and Teaching Sociology: A Memoir," prefatory chapter to Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1988): 1-24; and "Balancing Teaching and Writing," Journal of the Harvard-Danforth Center on Teaching and Learning 2 (January 1987): 10-16.

10. I had not harbored illusions about the Soviet Union before going there, but my experiences in the course of the summer (briefly described in the political memoir referred to above) led me to see that in a large, incipiently industrial society no amount of terror could create complete internalized belief and that at the margin there could even be disobedience. In the same year in which I sympathetically reviewed Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism in Commentary (11 [1951]: 392-98), I also delivered a speech to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, "Some Observations on the Limits of Totalitarian Power," in which I contended that totalitarian control was an unreachable ideal--a judgment that exposed me to attacks then and thereafter from often newly zealous anticommunists. The latter did not see the differences I saw between inefficient Stalinism and less efficient Nazism: both were evil; but it did not follow, as my adversaries contended, that both would forever remain unchangeable from inside. My address, first printed in Antioch Review 12 (1952): 155-68, also appears in my collections Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954) and Abundance for What? and Other Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964).

11. In David Riesman, "A Personal Memoir: My Political Journey," in Conflict and Consensus: A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis A. Coser, ed. Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1984), pp. 327-64, I indicate ways in which I worked earlier with Friedrich in helping German refugees from Hitler's Germany and in opposing fascist sympathizers in the United States, and later with Fromm and others in what seem now like quixotic efforts to establish a binational Palestinian-Jewish entity in Palestine, as well as my own civic concern about the dangers of a nuclear arms race and on behalf of a test ban.

12. I have described in an essay some considerable differences in culture between a law school and a school of arts and sciences. "Law and Sociology: Recruitment, Training, and Colleagueship," Stanford Law Review 9 (1957): 643-73. See also "Toward an Anthropological Science of Law and the Legal Profession," University of Chicago Law Review 19 (1951): 30-44; reprinted in American Journal of Sociology 57, no. 2 (1957): 121-35.

13. University of Chicago Law Review 7 (1940): 655-75.

14. "Legislative Restrictions on Foreign Enlistment and Travel," Columbia Law Review (1940) 40: 793-835.

15. "Democracy and Defamation: Control of Group Libel," Columbia Law continue

Review 42 (1942): 727-80; "Democracy and Defamation: Fair Game and Fair Comment I," ibid., pp. 1085-112; "Democracy and Defamation: Fair Game and Fair Comment II," ibid., pp. 1282-318.

16. I have returned to somewhat related problems recently in studying the impact of open-meeting or sunshine laws on searches for college and university presidents. Here it is the press that intimidates judges and institutions by forcing, as public-interest advocates also do, the opening of such searches to contemporaneous observation. For a case illustrating the way such insistence destroys academic autonomy while leading to subterfuge or what appears as subterfuge, see Judith Block McLaughlin and David Riesman, "The Shady Side of Sunshine," Teachers College Record 87, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 471-94.

17. A splendid sense of the capacity of Margaret Mead for mentorship and for connecting people with one another is presented in her daughter's biography of her parents: Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye (New York: William Morrow, 1985). Years later Everett Hughes and I were to try to bring Margaret Mead, who never held a secure academic position, to the University of Chicago but could not overcome the professional disesteem in which she was held.

18. My pacifism had never been a matter of absolute principle but rather of skepticism concerning the justification for most wars in history, including all prior American ones. But the rise to power of Hitler changed my outlook as it did that of many others. I became a reluctant interventionist. See Riesman, "What's Wrong with the Interventionists?" Common Sense 10 (1941): 327-30. I regarded Hitler and his not insignificant ally Mussolini as an even greater threat to civilization, including the United States, than a war to defeat them. In recent years I have been an admirer of the work of Gene Sharp on the history and strategic uses of nonviolent sanctions. See my introduction to Gene Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970).

Moreover, I became so caught up in the widespread hope for postwar internationalism that I was happy to accept an invitation from the American Law Institute to join a group of international lawyers, American and overseas, seeking to draw up a bill of human rights. See "An International Bill of Rights," Proceedings of the American Law Institute 20 (1943): 198-204. I had been skeptical about Woodrow Wilson's ideal of making the world "safe for democracy." In recent decades I have regarded the crusade for human rights for dissidents, especially Jewish refuseniks, in the Soviet Union as one of the chief weapons by which the American right has destroyed détente and as one of the chief factors preventing the achievement of a ban, or even a moratorium, on underground testing of nuclear weapons and enough of a rapprochement with the USSR as joint guardian of the planet to cooperate in limiting and policing the proliferation of nuclear arsenals to more, and more unstable, countries. See "Human Rights and Human Prospects," commencement address at Williams College, 1977; revised and reprinted as "The Danger of the Human Rights Campaign," in Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Relations, ed. Carl Marcy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 49-55.

19. The national law schools, as Harvard had been for decades and Buffalo was becoming, and their law reviews--indeed in a sense all law reviews-- hard

worked toward the "nationalization" of American case law developed from British common-law traditions, seeking, often unsuccessfully, uniformity across state boundaries. This breadth of reference enlivens American legal research, dividing the bar between the great private and governmental establishments and the solo practitioners attentive to local law and to the idiosyncracies of local judges.

20. In his marvelously vivacious autobiography George Homans describes his experience as a neophyte ensign commanding a small vessel in the Navy in World War II and an encounter with his chief boatswain's mate, who had picked up an unguarded coil of hawser and appropriated it, not as personal, but as ship's property. Homans forced him to return it, although the boatswain's mate could not comprehend why it was not "his positive duty to the ship to snap up, when he could, any such unconsidered trifles as spare gear that might at some time come in handy." Similarly, some Sperry employees might hoard scarce aluminum on behalf of the Navy even though it theoretically belonged to the Army Air Corps. See George Caspar Homans, Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 230.

Although I admired the probity of Sperry's engineering leadership, I was appalled by the arrogance of young officials who would insult a colonel just back from the European theater with ribbons for valor who wanted to know why Sperry could not shift production more readily; instead of being uncomfortable because they were not in uniform, these accountants and other semiprofessional Sperry officials would run up the flag of private enterprise in a company totally funded by the military. The self-abnegation of often modest officers may have been politically prudent in dealing with Sperry as a prime contractor, but it also conveyed to me how thoroughly they were indoctrinated in the subordination of the military to civilian control, a judgment later confirmed by my occasional visits to the National War College and the Air War College. Even the contravention of congressional authority in the 1980s by Admiral John Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North was in the service of higher civilian authority. I met no one remotely like General Douglas MacArthur.

21. The treasurer of the holding company, with offices in Rockefeller Center, would have had me fired instantly had he learned of the frankness with which I discussed Sperry's difficulties with the Army Air Corps officials who were our principal contracting officers. I had to explain why we could not shift production with the speed of Westinghouse or General Motors. Moreover, when he learned of pressures the services were putting on the plants, pressures for which I was a conduit, the treasurer's impulse, from which several times I had to restrain him, was to get on the phone with his friend, the secretary of the Navy, to chew him out for giving Sperry trouble. Such bypassing by Sperry's treasurer of the proper channels might, I contended, land Sperry in far deeper trouble--for example (as I occasionally emphasized in the plants), investigation by the Truman Committee, which at the very least could take away our cherished "E" for excellence. The treasurer may have thought that I was soft on the government, whereas in fact I was so firm that my immediate boss, an amiable Sperry vice president, upbraided me for refusing to bargain (as the law required) continue

with the Corps of Engineers, which had a minuscule portion of our contracts. I knew I could not give better terms to the Corps of Engineers than those I had negotiated with the Army Air Corps, for example, adjust the amount of our advertising expense included in overhead.

22. Vis-à-vis Nazi Germany, unconditional surrender was in part a concession to Stalin's fears of a separate anti-Soviet peace. But it also seemed to me to echo admiration for Ulysses S. Grant and his insistence on unconditional surrender in the Civil War, as well as reflect anti-German, apart from anti-Nazi, attitudes among key Roosevelt advisers. As Allen Dulles complained, this demand impeded the efforts of the German opposition to Hitler.

23. See, for example, my essays "Predicaments in the Career of the College President," The State of the University: Authority and Change, ed. Carlos E. Kruytbosch and Sheldon L. Messinger (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1970), pp. 73-85; and "The College Presidency," Educational Studies 13, no. 3-4 (1982): 309-35. See also my introduction to Richard Berendzen, Is My Armor Straight? The Life of a University President (Bethesda, Md.: Adler and Adler, 1985).

24. I discuss some of my rather quixotic notions concerning the conduct of academics in "Some Personal Thoughts on the Academic Ethic," Minerva 21, nos. 2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1983): 265-84; revised in "Academic Colleagueship and Teaching," Antioch Review (1985): 401-22.

25. Ed. Carl J. Friedrich and Edward Mason, Public Policy 3:33-96 (published by John Wiley, New York, for Harvard Graduate School of Public Policy) 1942. See also "Equality and Social Structure," Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1942): 72-95. Marcus Cunliffe has written an essay, "Watersheds," American Quarterly 3 (1961), criticizing the self-importance of believing that one is living at a time of transition, or watershed, thus giving a spurious significance to one's own historical moment; it is a useful caution.

26. All sorts of makeshift housing, such as barracks, were in use at that time, and the returning veterans were scattered in digs all around the area. When in the first year I presided at a lecture by Milton Friedman in which he opposed rent control, the massed group of veterans booed him; I urged them to listen, reminding them that rent control would diminish the stock of housing.

27. Reinhard Bendix has also written about this era at Chicago; see his and Joseph Gusfield's contributions to this volume.

28. These lectures were later published in Psychiatry 13, no. 1 (1950): 1-16; ibid., no. 2 (1950): 167-87, 301-15, and are reprinted in Individualism Reconsidered . Although the published versions are of course more detailed and appropriately annotated, they give an indication of the expectations we held for our undergraduates, as well as the fact, which we jokingly recognized, that we lectured in part for one another. A critique of these lectures and of my approach to psychoanalysis and society appears in Steven Weiland, "Psychoanalysis, Rhetoric, and Social Science: David Riesman's Freud," presented at the biannual meeting of the American Studies Association, Philadelphia, Pa., November 5, 1983.

29. The infectious enthusiasm of the faculty, the fact that the students shared the identical program and did not question its legitimacy, and a college continue

culture that encouraged sharing ideas outside the classroom led to animated class discussions that could also be intimidating to the shy. In time I worked out ways to evoke response from the diffident without stifling the assertive students. See "My Education in Soc 2 and My Efforts to Adapt It in the Harvard Setting," in a forthcoming book about the course edited by John MacAloon on behalf of the University of Chicago.

30. On Hughes, see also Joseph Gusfield's essay in this volume, as well as my memorial address, "The Legacy of Everett Hughes," Contemporary Sociology 12, no. 5 (September 1983): 477-81.

31. When I took a leave of absence after the end of the fall term in 1947 to work on what became The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd, I began, along with Nathan Glazer, to read interviews, irrespective of topic, available at the eastern office of the National Opinion Research Center in New York City. Paul Sheatsley and Herbert Hyman helped us understand the interview and survey work. See David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, "Social Structure, Character Structure, and Opinion," International Journal of Opinion and Attitude Research 2 (1949): 512-27; and "The Meaning of Opinion," Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1949): 633-48. See also the cogent discussion of The Lonely Crowd in historical perspective in Rupert Wilkinson, The Pursuit of American Character (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 16-19.

32. Some of those I met early were scientists, of whom the late Leo Szilard was one of the most notable; his Council for a Livable World, created in 1962 when he was dying of cancer, has had my admiration and support. One of the interests Edward Shils and I shared was in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the people who wrote for and edited it.

33. While the St. John's College program has included Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Capital and Freud and Keynes, resembling in this respect Soc 3, these works were not read in any historical context, but as parts of what the St. John's College tutors termed the great conversation. Soc 3 took for granted the importance of the historical context of the works read.

34. See Baird Whitlock, Don't Hold Them Back: A Critique and Guide to New School-College Articulation Models (Princeton: College Board, 1978), on how such a program worked at Simon's Rock College, now Simon's Rock Early College, administered by Bard College.

35. I do not share the contempt Hutchins had for students' interest in postbaccalaureate careers. However, believing as I do in the advantages of diversity among American colleges, I can be grateful both for the existence of the College of the University of Chicago and for institutions such as Carnegie-Mellon University, which are frankly and seriously professional. See David Riesman, "Professional Education and Liberal Education: A False Dichotomy," in Preparation for Life? The Paradox of Education in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Joan Burstyn (London: Falmer Press, 1986).

36. The ever-expanding pool of students and the corresponding shortage of faculty, which had helped me receive my offer in the first place, made room for expansion of the Social Sciences staff of the College. That expansion of nontenured faculty was done with a facility that in retrospect is astonishing, in the light continue

of all the steps, including clearances for affirmative action, that one has to go through today to appoint an assistant professor. Whereas it may not be surprising that I had no difficulty in securing the appointment of my former law school roommate, Donald Meiklejohn, with his brilliant undergraduate record at Wisconsin and his Harvard Ph.D. in philosophy (he was then teaching at the University of Virginia), it is less easy today to grasp how I could persuade not only my colleagues but also the dean to invite Reuel Denney, a Dartmouth graduate and at the time a public high-school teacher, who had published a well-regarded book of poetry but had no Ph.D. and no scholarly record. Daniel Bell and, several years later, Lewis Coser joined the staff of Soc 2 and only thereafter went off to earn their doctorates at Columbia. Denney stayed on and became professor of the humanities in the College. See Michael Schuson, "The Intellectual History of Soc 2," in John MacAloon's forthcoming book. I would like to add here that I owe much of my knowledge of, and interest in, American popular culture to Denney's stimulation, some of it reflected also in The Lonely Crowd .

37. At one point Donald Meiklejohn, accepting his father's belief that lecturing was an antiquated idea and that only discussion with students in the Socratic mode was worthwhile, sought to reduce or eliminate the lectures and have three or four section meetings a week. I thought, as I have already indicated, that the idea was unwise pedagogically since the rhythm of lectures and sections had in my judgment worked well. Such a change would have meant an increase in the responsibility of each instructor, who would have to prepare three or four rather than two section meetings. I regarded many of the section meetings, conducted along Socratic lines ("What did Max Weber mean by this particular sentence?"), as a kind of Ping-Pong between a few bright students and the section leader. I thought it important that students be exposed to the full range of lecturers that the university offered rather than having their experience confined to the particular person in whose section they landed or to whose section they might shift. Happily for many of us on the Soc 2 staff, Meiklejohn's motion did not carry.

38. As part of the revision of Soc 2, we recruited another cultural anthropologist (Rosalie Hankey, later Rosalie Hankey Wax, who had done her fieldwork in the Japanese relocation camps) and added another sociologist with a historical slant (Helen Mims). Later we found a survey researcher (Mark Benney, who had done public-opinion surveys for the British government during World War II), a sociologist with an interest in leisure (Sebastian DeGrazia), and others; we already had a political scientist (Morton Grodzins).

I looked without success for an economist willing to join the staff. In methodological and perhaps conceptual terms, economics appears to have been the most advanced and, in student recruitment, the most attractive among the social sciences; the highly professionalized narrowness of some of even its most able practitioners may reflect this. (We found no one within our orbit who used the modes of thought of economics as do such Harvard colleagues and former colleagues as Thomas Schelling or Albert Hirschman.) Herbert Simon, in his Nobel Prize speech for the award in economics, emphasized the importance of studies of disaggregated economic phenomena in minute detail. Indeed Simon, with his wit and continuing interest in undergraduate education and his polymath probing and subtle curiosity, may be regarded as continue

the ideal product of the University of Chicago in the 1940s. In my early years at Chicago I occasionally suggested to graduate students in economics that they take a leave of absence to do something akin to fieldwork by accepting a position, for example, as assistant comptroller in a small business; they would thus learn something about microeconomics in a direct way. Invariably their reaction was that aggregate statistics were more than adequate for the understanding of economic phenomena--and in any case, while they were in a company that would necessarily be dismissed as idiosyncratic, some disciple of Paul Samuelson would have published four articles in refereed economics journals! It was not a hazard that a bright, aspiring economist wished to take.

39. In her biography of Harry Stack Sullivan, Helen Swick Perry provides a subtle, unflattering portrait of Lasswell as gifted and vain--and something of a con man. See her Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982).

40. On my second leave of absence from the Soc 2 staff I arranged for Mills to take my place; he and his wife lived in our home, sharing it for that period with the Lewis and Rose Coser family. When I came back to the College, students told me how contemptuous Mills had been of some of the readings. He had begun his first class by planting his paratrooper boots on the seminar table and throwing Patterns of Culture across the room, saying in effect that he would be damned if he was going to waste time on some little tribes. No "New Men of Power," they!

41. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New York: Scribner, 1953). See also "The Social and Psychological Setting of Veblen's Economic Theory," Journal of Economic History 13 (1953): 449-61; and "Veblen's System of Social Science," Explorations 2 (1954): 84-97. I came to regret my commitment to write about Veblen, for I judged that I had to read everything he had ever written and, less arduous since there was not an enormous amount of it, everything written about him in English. Veblen was in some respects an American provincial, having to deal with Marx but not with the great European thinkers who were his contemporaries. In his best works he coupled telling insights into the nature of work (for example, the "instinct" of craftsmanship), leisure, and the anthropology of war with brilliant and sardonic wit. They also display crankiness and great redundancy and include some interesting puzzles, such as the sudden desire of this reclusive scholar to engage in the crusade against Germany in the First World War by working for the United States government. A later book on Veblen, more sympathetic than mine and linking him to his European contemporaries, does not appear to me to solve these contradictions either; see John P. Diggins, The Bard of Savagery (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).

42. The study of aging was a particular interest of Neugarten and Henry, and I was peripherally involved in it. See David Riesman, "Some Clinical and Cultural Aspects of Aging," American Journal of Sociology 59 (1954): 379-83; and "A Career Drama in a Middle-Aged Farmer," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 19 (1955): 1-8.

43. In this exploratory period (1950-51) I came upon a phenomenon that still perplexes me. The local elites who were linked by their interest in commu- soft

nity development and improvement included the then editor of the Kansas City Star, a long established and influential newspaper. If there was a meeting to consider some exigent problem, be it the reconstruction of downtown or conditions in the public schools, the people who with near unanimity came to some conclusion did not believe the decision had actually occurred until it was legitimated by publication in the Star, though the Star editor had been among the consulting group. To put it in slightly comical terms, they did not know that they were the power elite until they read about themselves and the outcome of their consultation in the daily paper.

44. See David Riesman, "The Study of Kansas City: An Informal Overture," University of Kansas City Review 20 (1953): 15-22.

45. I later collected some of the notes bearing on religion, removed identifying details, and published them as "Some Informal Notes on American Churches and Sects," Confluence 4 (1955): 127-59.

46. For fuller discussion see David Riesman, "Ethical  and Practical Dilemmas of Fieldwork in Academic Settings: A Personal Memoir," in Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarfeld, ed. Robert K. Merton, James Coleman, and Peter Rossi (New York: Free Press, 1978). The Kansas City connection had as one outcome the study of the University of Kansas Medical School, initiated by Everett Hughes, and later of campus cultures at the University of Kansas, in which I participated vicariously by reading the interviews and field notes. See Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm Strauss, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, and Everett C. Hughes, Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life (New York: Wiley, 1968).

47. Michael Maccoby, then a graduate student in the Department of Social Relations and secretary of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, greatly helped in the staffing of the course. For a fuller account of the course and teaching at Harvard, see my "On Discovering and Teaching Sociology: A Memoir." break

I am grateful to my wife, Phyllis Rakita Marx, who has patiently and lovingly helped me sort out these issues, and for further critical comments and suggestions I wish to thank Jerry Aumente, Judith Auerbach, Murray Davis, Rosabeth Kanter, John McCarthy, Nancy Reichman, Zick Rubin, Susan Silbey, Barry Stein, Mike Useem, John Van Maanen, Chuck Wexler, and Jim Wood.

1. Among other themes I would like to pursue at some point are the experience of being at Berkeley in the 1960s; the move from the West Coast to the East Coast; family life, parenting, and professional ambitions; teaching; the selection of research topics; the uses of sociology and the role of moral commitment in sustaining research; the method (and challenge) of writing critical yet scientifically grounded essays. I have dealt a bit with the first theme in "Role Models and Role Distance: A Remembrance of Erving Goffman," Theory and Society 13 (1984), and the last two in the introduction to Muckraking Sociology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1972). break

2. This seems to be particularly true for a discipline such as sociology that specializes in the study of stratification and in which there is only limited consensus about what constitutes good work. One observer even suggests that academic fauna can be ordered according to the degree of concern shown toward the outward presentation of self. Variation is inversely related to a discipline's certainty of results: "Thus at one end of the spectrum occupied by sociologists and professors of literature, where there is uncertainty as to how to discover the facts, the nature of the facts to be discovered, and whether indeed there are any facts at all, all attention is focused on one's peers, whose regard is the sole criterion for professional success. Great pains are taken in the development of the impressive persona. . . . At the other end, where, as the mathematicians themselves are fond of pointing out, 'a proof is a proof,' no concern need be given to making oneself acceptable to others; and as a rule none whatsoever is given." Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (New York: Norton, 1983), p. 202.

3. Only later, when I gave what I thought was an equally timely paper and received only a handful of requests, did I realize that on average 150 might be more appropriate as a lifetime total.

4. This more interpretive, discursive, sensitizing style inspired by authors such as David Riesman, Erving Goffman, Herbert Gans, and Howard Becker was later to get me into trouble when I had to take greater initiative in submitting articles and applying for grants. Ground rules different from the ones pertaining to the invited contribution were in force. In assessing my mounting collection of failures in the early 1970s, I learned that as a humble petitioner, rather than an invited guest, one had to conform more rigidly to the conventional academic rules. Moreover, at that time quantitative methods as ends in themselves were ascendant.

5. I am reporting the elitist views encountered at Harvard. The University of California, though not an Ivy League school, was certainly an institution of enormous distinction.

The consequences of being around highly successful people who work very hard and see themselves as among the chosen are mixed. On the one hand, they become role models and you mimic them. You get more done than most people, and their sponsorship and advice help your career. On the other hand, you have doubts about whether you could ever do anything as impressive as they have done and (even if you could) whether you wish to pay the price that such success may require.

6. With success came ever greater aspirations. My modest goals as a young professional were closely linked to what I thought I could accomplish. This was no doubt a self-protective device. I had not yet learned to shoot for the moon with the hope that if you miss, you might still grab a few stars. I think the willingness to take risks and face failure are as (or more) important a determinant of academic success as native ability.

7. Even with a degree from Harvard, the odds were still against tenure, as the cases of prize-winning sociologists Theda Skocpol and Paul Starr indicate.

8. In retrospect I now see that this pattern was more a leveling off than a fall, but that was not how it felt at the time. What had been unusual (and more continue

worthy of explanation) was the degree and consistency of the early success, not the far more common pattern of intermingled success and failure that followed.

There are of course variants of falls. Some are easier to deal with than others. However poignantly felt, mine was gradual and partial. I had lots of time for hedging bets, putting out safety nets, and devising alternatives. That kind of fall is easier to respond to than one that is swift, total, and unexpected. The latter is the case with the assistant professor who had planned a large celebration and whose oh-so-sure department head had sent him a case of champagne the night before the faculty voted to deny him tenure.

9. Two examples will suffice. An account I heard too many times was that when my mother would push me in the baby carriage accompanied by our handsome collie, people would stop her and say, What a beautiful dog. A corresponding family tale stressed my father's resemblance to Rudolph Valentino.

10. To wit a "real sharp," chopped and lowered 1949 Pontiac convertible with duo carburetors, chrome pipes, and dice hanging from the rearview mirror and what used to be called "real cool threads"—a powder-blue one-button-roll zoot suit with enormous shoulder pads. The car did get attention, but to my chagrin it was never chosen by the school newspaper as "heap of the week.''

11. The first three years of my undergraduate career were an exception to the pattern of success in high school and my first decade in sociology: I looked but did not find much. This lack of success partly was due to a demanding outside job, but also to the confusion and dissipation of youth in southern California (in the surfing film Big Wednesday a girl from Chicago, recently moved to California, observes, "Back home, being young is something you do until you grow up. Here, well, it's everything.") I was surprised when after a series of aptitude and vocational tests at UCLA in my senior year I was told by the psychologist that I could be a professor if I wanted to. An expert had passed on my qualifications and given me permission to go on and become a professor.

12. In high school I had an experience that should have taught me something about the pitfalls of narcissism and hubris. There is a Fats Domino song with the lines "I'm gonna be a wheel someday, I'm gonna be somebody." I can still recall the excitement I felt working as a box boy in the King Cole Market on Los Feliz Boulevard in Glendale, California, when I saw a vegetable box with the label "Big Wheel Produce" on it. It was the perfect thing for a self-fancied big wheel to hang on his bedroom wall. I deserted my assigned duties and proceeded to cut out the label. When the knife slipped and cut deep into my index finger, I knew there was a God and that he or she had caught me. Not only was I guilty of hubris, but on company time. The scar is still there. As in Pinocchio, mutatis mutandis , it sometimes itches when I get too carried away by achievement fantasies.

13. Of course there is always ambiguity about, and a gap between, theory and practice with respect to the rules that govern the awarding of tenure, receipt of awards, or acceptance of an article for publication. See, for example, John Van Maanen's consideration of types of rules surrounding career games, "Career Games: Organizational Rules of Play," in Work, Family, Career , ed. C. Brooklyn Derr (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 111-143.

14. George Bernard Shaw observed in Man and Superman , "There are two continue

tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." In some ways our culture does a better job of preparing us to cope with failure than with success.

15. Paul Newman received the following letter complimenting him on his spaghetti sauce: "My girlfriend mentioned that you were a movie star, and I would be interested to know what you've made. If you act as well as you cook, your movies would be worth watching. Are any of your movies in VCR?" New York Times Magazine , Sept. 31, 1986.

An academic career is strewn with humbling little reminders that bring you back down to earth. For example, several times I have eagerly turned from a book's index to the pages where G. Marx was referenced only to find that the reference was to Groucho or discover that as a result of typographical errors I was given credit for Karl Marx's ideas. I well recall the smug feeling I had when I received a call from the president of a midwestern school telling me I had been the unanimous choice of their faculty to deliver a prestigious lecture. Since a recent publication was receiving considerable attention, it seemed only fitting. Yet it soon became apparent that the invitation was for my esteemed MIT colleague Leo Marx.

16. Boston Globe , June 4, 1985.

17. Beyond an occasional case of corruption the questioning of judges' decisions is aided by the lack of consensus among sociologists about what quality is (beyond the extremes) and how quality in different areas (qualitative-quantitative, comparative-domestic, contemporary-historical, theoretical-empirical) ought to be weighed. Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. Among my collection of diametrically opposed responses for the same research proposals and articles I have submitted are the following: "This is the best article I have ever reviewed for this journal--an absolutely outstanding contribution" versus "This tiresome review of things everyone knows does not merit publication here"; "An extraordinarily important project . . . absolutely indispensable. I urge strongly and without reservation that this request for support be approved" versus "This study offers little that would improve the infrastructure of science. Do not fund it.''

18. It is comforting to think that when we fail the causes are structural and the system is unfair and when we succeed the causes are personal effort and the system fair. My naïveté and ego needs in the early period of my career probably led me to overemphasize the latter. That some of my success had little to do with merit per se was something to which I gave little thought. To be sure, I had worked hard and done respectable work. But there were a lot of things going for me that I had no control over. As research in the last decade has made clear, there is a sense in which demography (and timing) is destiny. In the case of my first job at Harvard one of my Berkeley mentors was then teaching there, and another held in very high regard had left not long before my arrival. I thus had a strong push from the outside and pull from the inside. What is more, the year I went on the job market Harvard had three openings at the assistant-professor level. Berkeley as an institution for training sociologists was at its height, and its graduate students were then very competitive on the job market. I had done my thesis on the civil-rights movement and specialized in race relations, topics continue

much in demand. The macro factors that aided my success in the 1960s ceased doing so in the politically more conservative period that followed.

19. As paragraph 6 suggests, these patterns can be independent. For quantity, a major pattern is flat. Some people hit their stride early and stay with it, producing about the same amount of work each year of their career.

20. As a graduate student one of the most important things I learned from Erving Goffman was that you had to click with your topic and really care about it or else you were in the wrong business. He implied it would happen early--it either grabbed you, or it did not. Since that was a time of many job offers for each applicant, rather than the reverse, this advice needs to be qualified.

21. This partly explains the exhaustion with reading journals as one ages (though an additional factor is an expansion in the number of journals). Although I would not go as far as a colleague who said he could not think of a worse way to spend an afternoon than to read the American Sociological Review , the moral imperative I felt as a graduate student to read it from cover to cover is long gone. The imperative has been diluted to reading the table of contents and occasionally marking an article to read later. I took this step with some of the same trepidation my grandmother reported when she made the decision to ignore kosher restrictions regarding the mixing of meat and dairy dishes and waited for God to strike her down. In neither case did harm befall us.

22. To be sure, in my early years there had been extra income, but I had not actively sought it out. I also felt a little uncomfortable being paid for work I would have gladly done for free.

Although I did not neglect my students, I must admit to an increased curiosity about those teachers whose moral (or immoral) code permitted them to devote an absolute minimum of time to teaching. Examples include the professor who required students who wanted to see him to make an appointment by calling a phone number that was rarely answered; the professor who did not have his name on his office door; the professor whose lectures consisted of reading from someone else's book; the professor who always came late to the first class meeting, did not have a syllabus, and was vague about just what the course would comprise (other than a heavy load of exams and term papers); and the professor who offered political (antielitist) and pedagogic (students should learn from each other) justifications for never preparing for class and never lecturing.

23. The research is reported in Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (forthcoming).

24. More broadly, such feelings seem to characterize American social scientists and humanists relative to scientists and engineers in academic settings, and academics relative to persons in applied settings.

25. It appears that sociology is increasingly being practiced outside traditional departments, whether in various interdisciplinary-studies programs or in applied contexts in professional schools. This goes beyond seeking new audiences; it is a matter of economic survival. In most of these settings one sociologist is fine but two is too many.

26. Though to a degree this sense of loss is also my fault. I did not try to continue

construct a more satisfying campus life or sell sociology. Instead I kept a low profile to maximize the time available for research.

27. Robert K. Merton, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 63.

28. William Butler Yeats ignored an alternative when he wrote, "The intellect of man is forced to choose. Perfection of the life, or of the work." One can opt for doing each as well as possible, but coming short of what might be accomplished by pursuing only one.

29. A related question is whether I could have reached these conclusions without experiencing the success with which I became disillusioned. break

1. The strongest documentation of the subjective side of upward social mobility and its impact can be found in autobiography. Norman Podhoretz's Making It is a well-known example and details his rise from poverty to become editor of Commentary . Richard Rodriguez, a Chicano who went to Harvard, has told his story in an interesting autobiography entitled Hunger of Memory . After his transformation from a migrant farmer's son whose first language was Spanish into an Ivy League literature scholar, Rodriguez found himself turning down a variety of offers from prestigious universities because he refused to be somebody's token Chicano. Now he works alone, writing books with occasionally painful passages about his ethnic and class background and trying to make sense out of what has happened to him. For him, as for me, educational attainment alone, though it is the life-rope that lifted us out of the ghetto, can never deliver on its promise to feel comfortable about fitting into the dominant, legitimate American culture.

Another moving and powerful autobiography is about two black brothers, John and Robert Wideman. Both grew up in Pittsburgh, and John's story, Brothers and Keepers (1984), is almost archetypal in its content and structure, reminiscent of the movies about two Irish brothers, one of whom becomes a priest or a cop and the other a criminal. The autobiography documents the thoughts of a man whose privilege in the white world was granted on the basis of his gifts as a novelist, writer of short stories, and professor. His brother was caught in the criminal traffic of the brutal dope-dealing street world of the ghetto and did not escape it. As a consequence of a series of errors, he murdered someone and is now serving a life sentence in prison. John describes the repercussions of these events on his own life, reflecting on the circumstances that created the differences between their worlds. He brings to his story what W. E. B. DuBois called double consciousness, the ability to discover profound truths about both worlds, by viewing those worlds from within the hazy space between them. break

American literature, especially novels written in the early part of this century, is filled with stories of upward mobility and its effects. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth , Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth , and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are all strong examples. The master of this genre is Theodore Dreiser, whose Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy tell powerful parables about the insidious and often pernicious subtle effects of upward social mobility. break

1. Several years ago I wrote to ask if the pictures were still hanging on the walls of Horace Mann School. The building had been demolished some years earlier. I tried to trace the stories in the Sunday editions of the Minneapolis Journal between 1910 and 1915 but became impatient and gave up. Sic transit gloria. Those were the first accolades I ever received. The more recent ones are far less exciting. In fact, it seems to me that increasingly they tend to be tributes to my longevity rather than to anything I write.

2. Mine was the only novel the professor had ever seen completed by a member of that seminar as long as he had been teaching it. A psychologist friend of mine once commented that I had enormous "consummatory" drive. That I cannot deny. I have to finish it, whatever it happens to be. Perhaps the consequence of having been taught as a child always to clear my plate? Even a plate of professional chores?

3. And not even a modern typewriter. I don't know how many manual typewriters I have worn out. My friends have implored me for years to get at least an electric typewriter. No way. That would be too easy. Typing is more than transferring thought to paper. It is, for me, an act of aggression. I pound the keys to get rid of my aggressions. I owe my reputation for nonaggression to the keys I batter mercilessly instead of the people who make me mad. George Lundberg once called me "Christlike," which was not a compliment in his vocabulary. Now I am fighting all my friends who insist I must have at least a word processor. Again, no way. Writing is not for me a matter of processing words. Words are very real entities for me, not, of course, human, but certainly having personalities. I enjoy browsing through my Historical Oxford Dictionary when I have time. Sometimes I strike a gem which starts me off on a train of thought that sooner or later may find a home in something I write.

4. A cousin of my father, M. E. Ravage, was a popular writer on immigrant topics in the second decade of the century. Among his books were An American in the Making and A Sentimental Journey .

5. Many years later the nature of the ambience of my childhood became clear to me. In the early 1930s I was invited to spend a summer as the guest of E. A. Ross in order to do research for a biography of him I was to write. I interviewed him daily, went through a lot of his files, learned how he organized his data, became fascinated by him, but never wrote the book. He wrote it-- Seventy Years of It --himself. I couldn't have written it, in any event, but preparing to was an illuminating learning experience for me, however equivocal. He gave me insight about the ambience of my own childhood. He was a Midwesterner and so was I. I could recognize the common background we shared. I continue

could see the mentality of the Progressive Era that he so archetypically represented, even embodied. I could understand it was the prevailing mentality of my own childhood. But there was also his Waspism, his anti-immigrant attitude, his view of immigrants as an invading horde. I had been taught by teachers of a different stripe. One of them was Professor Jenks, who, I learned many years later, was important in the Americanization movement of the second decade of the century. He was appointed by the president in 1907 to serve on a Federal Immigration Commission set up by Congress "to make full inquiry, examination and investigation . . . into the subject of immigration." In 1919, the Minnesota legislature passed an Americanization Aid Law and appropriated $25,000 to maintain active cooperation with the University of Minnesota for an Americanization training program "under the capable guidance of Professor A. E. Jenks." My sister invited him to our home from time to time and for all I know we may have appeared somewhere or other in his memoranda or reports to congressional committees. I never realized that I had been part--however remote--of a movement that "takes its place, alongside those other great crusades of the past, abolitionism, woman's suffrage, civil service reform, and universal education" (Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant [New York: Columbia University Press, 1948], 273).

My family had come to the United States a little too early to be part of the "Americanization" movement, as had the families of my Norwegian friends. But neither they nor I knew of the general harassment of immigrants said to be common in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and North and South Dakota before World War I. Norwegian-Americans had long debated the virtues of assimilation versus retaining the ways of the old country. When war broke out in Europe, Norwegian-Americans, like most immigrants, leaned toward assimilation and Americanization, but between the wars many tried to revive interest in traditional life. Nevertheless, ethnicity faded in the immigrants' children and grandchildren, who grew up as Americans. I later learned what a common pattern this was among ethnic groups, and I noted a point in curricula development when courses on the problems of immigration became courses on ethnic groups.

6. The emotion triggered by that intellectual vandalism has remained with me ever since. I finally did learn enough German to pass the required doctoral examination, but it has always remained difficult, and I have been blocked from reading German sociology in the original. I once had to resort to a Spanish translation of something by Simmel that had not yet appeared in English.

7. An "immigrant chain" was literally a succession of family members who came to the United States either one by one or as family members. Usually it was the oldest member who came first to earn enough--and learn enough--to pay for the expected family members next in line. The concept of an immigration chain may have been a contribution to the language by my own professor--A. E. Jenks q.v.--at the University of Minnesota and a high official in the Immigration Commission of 1907. It strikes me now that the concept was completely lost from the sociological vocabulary when the phenomenon itself no longer existed.

8. Many years later, as authors of The Origins of American Sociology, we were called "stooges of capitalism" in a Soviet review of the book. break

9. This is how William Kephart described this period in 1961: "As women achieved legal and economic equality with men there was a tendency to do other things that men did. . . . After World War I the dam burst with a vengeance. . . . Much to the dismay of the older generation, young ladies began to smoke, drink, use a male vocabulary, listen to risqué jokes. . . . It was almost unavoidable that women's fashions would change. . . . Necklines became lower, sleeves and hemlines shortened. . . . Make-up became a self-styled art, with lipstick, powder, rouge, eye shadow and mascara, perfume, face creams, and nail polish the outward symbols of the new femininity. Hair-styling and hair-coloring became national fetishes, and local female headquarters often came to be centered in the Beauty Shop."

10. A "blind pig" was a secret or police-protected night club or bar where your phony credentials were examined as safe from the "blind" police--themselves well paid for their blindness--before you were allowed to enter.

11. In his teaching he ran, in effect, a school for subversion, almost by design. He did not call it that, but he felt it to be part of his role to challenge the status quo, to get students to see it as a human creation. He called the Jewish ban on intermarriage an "ethnocentric taboo." Young Jewish students brought their praying shawls to the department museum as gifts. Some seminary students came asking how they could incorporate what they were learning in their sermons. Others protested, charging him with attacking religion.

12. I was aware even then of my lack of flair in clothes, and in time I gave up the effort to be anything more than inconspicuously dressed. Many years later when a newspaper reporter described me in a story as "dowdy," however, I was hurt until she called to apologize, explaining that she had written "doughty," not "dowdy." Since "doughty" means formidable as well as capable, virtuous, and valiant, I wasn't altogether appeased.

13. It was a very creative and complex relationship. He insisted I get a doctorate and that I work and achieve, and I worked on his research with him for many years. He was a very unusual man--a poet, and a very charming person. He cooked better than I and he sewed on the sewing machine better too.

14. The real test of my faith was to come later, when I learned of the violation of the ethos of science, described later.

15. A number of current preoccupations appear in that book, including an analysis of housework that deals with such items as homemakers' fatigue (494-99), now called overload, for example; isolation (534-35); housework as an occupation and the asynchrony of its time schedule (535-36); as well as marriage trauma (470-71). After the book was already in galleys I removed a discussion of female orgasm, the nature of which was just then becoming an issue among (mainly male) researchers. The reason for not including it was not theoretical but wholly practical. Most of the women students had never even heard the word orgasm, and I did not want to take the time from this course to teach that time-consuming material. I suggested that the physical education courses take that chore on. I am not at all pleased with that cop-out. Later came books on American family behavior, on the future of marriage, on remarriage, and on marriage and family among black Americans, together with a host of continue

family- and marriage-related articles and papers for encyclopedias, anthologies, and the like.

16. There were already enormous publishers' catalogs listing the dozens of instruments becoming available, and if there wasn't one yet available for what you wanted to measure there was a standard procedure for creating one.

17. I had revealed this propensity for measurement in my master's thesis on a theme I got from E. A. Ross, namely, that customs tend to change more readily than traditions, in which I devised a laughably simplistic and unsophisticated method for measuring change. But by the early 1930s I was going full force, measuring the distribution of success in marriage, some factors in success in marriages, remarriage, neighborhood behavior--of adolescent boys, of women--anything. In American Family Behavior I measured the success of families in carrying out their several functions (reproduction, socialization, protective, affectional, institutionalization, and even--love). (I resist using an exclamation point here.)

18. At Penn State I took a course with Sidney Siegel on nonparametric measurement and managed to struggle through. But I knew I was way beyond my depth when in a faculty seminar in the mathematics department one of the men put an equation on the board that traversed two walls of the classroom. Everyone followed him admiringly. Then, after several minutes, one member of the class raised his hand and pointed to one particular point in the long equation. The others studied it a moment, and then, without a word being said by any one, they all nodded their heads in agreement. There was a defect in the argument. Not a word was needed. This was clearly a kind of communication I could never master. However much the Comtean love affair with the queen of the sciences might intrigue me, I knew she was forever beyond my reach.

19. "Pathetic" may have referred to my being "childlike." I did not look the part.

20. Linda Thompson, a biographer, tells me, for what it is worth, that citations of my work are among the most numerous. I discount this somewhat because with so many decades of publication, it is sometimes difficult to avoid citing me.

21. Passing was not a reward of talent or ability but a matter of luck. During a sabbatical in Europe in 1953 I had seen the IBM THINK signs everywhere, even in the back ways, and at home I watched Pennstac--one of the first computers, in the days when they all had names of their own and covered what looked like acres of space--pioneering the wave of the future. I bought IBM stock. I sold it too soon but not until it had made it possible for me to leave academia to do my own work unfettered by academic restrictions, psychological as well as bureaucratic.

22. I was offered every office my profession could offer. All kinds of honors and awards were bestowed on me. I even declined nomination for the office of president of two prestigious professional organizations--not, I must admit, without a feeling of guilt for not being willing to assume responsibility for the performance of important professional functions. I was also twice nominated, I am amused to report, for one nonprofessional honor, which, however, I was not continue

awarded either time. It was the Ladies' Home Journal "Woman-of-the-Year" award in my area. I don't remember what area it was. Or who won it.

23. It was not coincidental that this was also the decade of the first atomic bomb and of the Holocaust. My second child was born a few weeks before the first atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

24. I found it amusing to note the difficulties the USSR was having in finding an ideological rationale for their change vis-à-vis statistics. "In the 1930s they [Soviet ideologues] believed that since statistics dealt with chance it would of necessity die out in a socialist society where chance would not be allowed to operate. By the 1950s they concluded that they had been wrong. They needed statistics. But they were still stumped, for ideological reasons . . . as to how to conceptualize this science. A high-level conference was called to solve this problem. It concluded that statistics was an independent social science which studied social productive relations and therefore 'the use of the best mathematical methods . . . is neither shameful nor un-Marxist'" (Jessie Bernard, "Citizenship Bias in Scholarly and Scientific Work," Alpha Kappa Deltan, paper presented to Alpha Kappa Delta, University of Pittsburgh, February 18, 1959, 8-9; the Soviet scholar quoted was Ostrovitimov, 1955). At the Amsterdam meetings of the International Sociological Association--the first in which Soviet scholars participated--I watched the implacable and undeviating reply the Soviet participants made to Samuel Stouffer's questions about the methods they were using in their surveys of time-use in the Soviet Union: "The best." A few years later at Evian I watched the young Soviet men rushing madly from one mathematical session to another as though they just couldn't get enough of all the exciting new mathematically based research techniques.

25. The refugee scholars were notably reticent about discussing their experiences. I once attended a modest little party at the New York apartment of one of the stars, Paul Lazarsfeld. He was jovial, exciting; he made jokes about how hot Americans kept their apartments--but not a word about his experiences in Austria. Other refugee scholars I met later were equally silent. So, although we were beginning to learn something about Hitler and his followers, much of it from newsreels of marching storm troopers, most of the academic picture was blank.

26. Marianne Weber was allegedly one of those who chose "inner emigration."

27. Nor, unfortunately, did our fellow sociologists. "The absolute majority of early German sociologists were either helpless or susceptible towards Nazi ideology and its representatives. And this helplessness or susceptibility not only showed in their biographical fate but also on the level of their scholarly work." Even Jewish sociologists: Karl Mannheim, for example, who had, as a Jew, been obliged to leave Germany, when asked what he thought of Hitler, replied: "I like him." Not because of his policies, of course, which were wrong, but "because . . . he is an earnest, sincere man who is seeking nothing for himself, but who is wholeheartedly trying to build up a new Government. He is deeply sincere, all of one piece, and we admire his honesty and devotion." Alfred Vierkandt was also positive in his attitude toward Hitler. Tönnies was confused; Sombart pessimistic. Only the aging Franz Oppenheimer, though re- soft

signed, remained obstinately opposed to Hitler and his Nazis. ''They cannot kill the spirit!" he cried defiantly. These remarks were made in interviews with an American sociologist, Earle Eubank, and reported by Dirk Käsler at the 1983 meetings of the American Sociological Association (109-13).

28. "It was not at all clear at first that the design of the Nazi government in 1933 was to force the emigration of Germany's Jews. The Civil Service Law of April 7 was couched in confusing terms, with qualifiers such as the cutoff date of September 30, when procedures were supposed to return to normal. This, coupled with the staggered manner in which the dismissals and forced leaves were announced, made effective protest nearly impossible. As was demonstrated in the case of the Göttingen physics and mathematics faculty, no clear focus for action could be decided upon. The academicians were also severely hampered by the superficial legality of the Nazi measures" (Beyerchen, 1981, 199).

29. Lest we feel complacent and assume a holier-than-thou attitude, it might be useful to remember that only thirty years ago a congressman was asking "how it happened that National Science Foundation money was being used to study integration [and] . . . was mollified only when he learned that the study he objected to . . . of integration in an oak forest community was a study in ecology" (Jessie Bernard, "Citizenship Bias in Scholarly and Scientific Work," 12). Or that the Reece Congressional Committee of the House forbade any federal funds from ever being used for the study of surrender (Tax-Exempt Foundations, Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, 83d Cong., 2d sess., 1954).

30. In April 1945 the Times of London reported from Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz scenes "beyond the imagination of mankind." The news of what had happened in those camps trickled into the West slowly after that. In June 1942 the gassing of Jews had been reported in the London Daily Telegraph, but because people remembered having been tricked by propaganda in World War I, they did not believe it. Not until the summer of 1945 were there fuller accounts of what had happened, now documented beyond the possibility of rejection.

31. I once offered the Library of Congress the cache of materials I had accumulated from this underground press, invaluable as documentary material for all the research that sooner or later would undoubtedly be done on the subject. There was no interest in these "ephemera."

32. I was much older than that baby-boom cohort of mothers. I was thirty-eight years old when my first child was born, forty-two when the second was born, and forty-seven when the last one was (by immaculate conception, I always add when I make this statement about the last child).

33. For example, when I was talking to a former president of the American Sociological Association about my book-in-progress on the female world, he had said, "You're all wrong," and proceeded to tell me about the female world. And when I laughingly asked wasn't it amusing that he was telling me about the female world, his reply was that he knew lots of women. In extenuation, I should add that he may have had one too many cocktails. Still, we are told, there is truth in wine.

34. I sometimes feel like the judge my father used to tell us about. In reply to continue

1. See Siegfried Kracauer, Ginster, von ihm selbst geschrieben (1928; reprint, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963). The atmosphere of World War I in my immediate region is well captured in another famous antiwar novel, Ernst Glaeser's Jahrgang 1902; it too was published in 1928. Carl Zuckmayer, another local member of my parents' generation, wrote an autobiography that my mother declares accurately and vividly portrays the world of her own early memories: A Part of Myself: Portrait of an Epoch (New York: Helen and Kurt Wolff, 1970), trans. R. and C. Winston.

2. This seems to have been the last group deportation. On February 10, 1943, fifty-three persons were sent to Theresienstadt. They had been forced to continue

assemble in the former Rosenthal Clinic, which by then was called an old-age home. Afterwards persons from so-called mixed marriages were individually arrested under various pretexts and deported. Almost all perished. See Erckhardt Franz and Heinrich Pingel-Rollmann, "Hakenkreuz und Judenstern," in Juden also Darmstädter Bürger, ed. E. Franz (Darmstadt: Roether, 1984), pp. 185f.

3. In the summer of 1942, when the Nazi fortunes seemed to stand highest, a group of gold pheasants, as uniformed Nazi leaders were popularly called, inspected us and explained that the Führer had decided to turn us into military peasants ( Wehrbauern ) along the Urals so that we could defend Western civilization against the Asiatic hordes. Expecting the right answer, one functionary went down the line asking each of us for what we would volunteer. None of my peers, who were only two or three years away from finishing their eight-year schooling and beginning their apprenticeship, budged. They all insisted that they would become metal workers, mechanics, electricians, and so forth. I knew that I would spend many more years in school. I wanted to become an opera stage designer--I had rebuilt many stage designs I had seen in the theater--but I was more cowardly than my peers. So I answered that I did not know. After being harangued for being "dirty pigs," we were given two hours of penalty drill until our clothes were covered with dirt and soaked and we looked like the animals we were alleged to be.

4. Late in 1943 the Nazis decided to evacuate my school from Darmstadt and move us deep into Czechoslovakia, into the forests of the Beskids. The evacuation plan made us suspect that they were concerned less about nighttime attacks and direct hits on school buildings during the daytime than about isolating our school from our families and exposing us to more indoctrination. This threat led to the only semiorganized resistance during the war--families trying to protect their own. Although teachers warned my father that he was risking arrest, he called the Nazis' bluff by proving that contrary to their assertions the school could be moved to a nearby small town and the pupils boarded in private homes in the surrounding villages. His many connections from the pre-Nazi period with the rural hinterland served him well. After unsuccessfully sending youth leaders to our school and after an unprecedented parents' meeting with the highest Nazi official in town, the authorities yielded. This victory over the Nazis, whose curious legalism my father manipulated time and again, probably saved our school from being captured by the Russian army.

5. See "A Quiet Trip All Round: Darmstadt," chap. 13 in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Dial Press, 1979), pp. 303-26; "A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Darmstadt, Germany," The United States Strategic Bombing Survey 37 (January 1947); Klaus Schmidt, Die Brandnacht (Darmstadt: Reba, 1964); David J. Irving, Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht (Zurich: Schweizer Druck- und Verlaghaus, 1964), pp. 266-78.

6. To this day I am studying the pros and cons of what many military experts still believe to have been an unimaginative and overly cautious strategy. See Russel F. Weighley, Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). break

7. On the enormous reconstruction problems of Darmstadt, see the August 1946 report by an American journalist, "Ein Amerikaner in Darmstadt," Heute 3 (1945): 36-43. ( Heute, modelled after Life, was the first magazine in the American occupation zone; it was published by the Information Control Division of the United States Army.) I described a night walk through the ruins of Darmstadt in an unpublished composition dated November 13, 1946, "After Sundown: A Walk Through the City."

8. The first German author to make a powerful impression on me was Heinrich Heine, for whom I had apparently been too young during the war. My father had kept his works in a closed bookcase, which he had made to order during the Nazi regime to hide his library from curious eyes. As early as 1946 (or 1947) I heard the first of the formerly outlawed modern music when the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music were organized to train musicians and composers; the courses soon became an international institution, for decades attracting many American musicians. The first abstract paintings I beheld were done by an American officer and shown in a half-ruined building. In 1947 I saw my first large art exhibition: riches from the Berlin Kaiser Friedrich Museum, which the American army had recovered from Thuringian salt mines and taken along with it after abandoning the area to Soviet control. The first American novel I read, still in translation, was Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which the Nazis had banned after 1933 (together with the works of Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair). It was printed on newsprint and looked like a newspaper. My first American movie was Thirty Seconds over Tokyo . In one sitting I devoured my first American play: my father brought home overnight a typewritten translated script of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which was being rehearsed for the reopening of the theater in Darmstadt.

9. Together with my father's Greek and Latin dictionaries, these history books were the only volumes of our family library that survived the war since I had taken them into the countryside. I still consult the dictionaries and find the textbooks remarkably balanced. See Friedreich Neubauer and Ferdinand Rösiger, Lehrbuch der Geschichte für die höheren Lehranstalten in Südwestdeutschland, vols. 4 and 5 (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1908).

10. In 1981, when we met for our thirtieth anniversary, the school opened its files. Ours were the only records saved because we were considered the most promising and successful group of the postwar period, together with the class just below us, to which my future Weber coeditor Claus Wittich belonged. It must have had to do with being at just the right impressionable age to draw maximum benefit from a bad war experience and the difficult postwar years, which nonetheless provided a liberating contrast. Eight of us ended up as professors, in archaeology, architecture, Catholic theology, electrical engineering, German literature, law, Romance literature, and sociology. The others are today corporate executives, judges, other high-ranking civil servants, journalists, physicians, engineers, and classics teachers. One became a Catholic priest--after the theologian our other convert in class--and one a member of Helmut Schmidt's federal cabinet in the 1970s. My closest friend, the one poet among us, dropped out. When the school files were opened for us, we discovered the predictions our teachers had made, including their evaluation of our "character," a category continue

later dropped in the course of the "democratization" that undermined our school in the 1960s. By and large our teachers had been accurate.

11. Out of a mountain of disparate materials and reports Friedrich Pollock finally pulled together the study under the title Gruppenexperiment (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955).

12. See the autobiographical statement "Wie ich zur Soziologie kam und wo ich bin: Ein Gespräch mit Kurt H. Wolff, aufgezeichnet von Nico Stehr," in Soziologie in Deutschland und Österreich, 1918-1945 , ed. M. Rainer Lepsius (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), pp. 324-46.

13. Shortly after my arrival in the United States I wrote in a research paper (still in German): "For young people like me the American turnabout in 1950 to rearm Germany was a bitter disappointment. The United States seemed to abandon the moral foundation on which it had fought the war and which had given it the moral justification for reconstructing Germany. My newly developed realism is not cynicism but has helped me to see matters in a less unrealistic, 'idealist' light" (my translation).

14. See Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (New York: Free Press, 1954); it includes the well-known methodological demolition by Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley, and Edward Shils's vigorous political critique.

15. Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1963; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1979), p. 325. Bendix agreed with Paul Lazarsfeld on the desirability of autobiographical statements for both author and profession. If the old German custom of appending a brief biography to the dissertation could be expanded to include some information about formative experiences and major changes of outlook, the cumulative evidence might be of service to sociologists of knowledge. Authors too might benefit from facing the question of the consistency and continuity of their own lives and work.

16. See Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Doubleday, 1960; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977); Guenther Roth and Reinhard Bendix, "Max Weber's Einfluss auf die amerikanische Soziologie, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie 11 (1959): 38-53.

17. To be sure, I had learned enough from saturation bombing to understand that dropping more tonnage on the Vietnamese countryside than was delivered during all of World War II made no sense. I had also grown wary of American moralism, but I still did not dispute the right of the United States to try to stop communist expansion in the world--I had not only been liberated from Nazism but also saved from Soviet domination. break

1. Sears Roebuck had been built up by Julius Rosenwald, himself a German-Jewish immigrant in the nineteenth century, and the store was then still run mostly by Jews. Many years later we discovered that one of my mother's ancestors was a cousin of Rosenwald's.

2. The paper was written for an education course that some of my fellow sociology students and I took because it would make us eligible for high-school teaching later. I suspect that my interest in educational administration may have been included to impress the instructor, but I did not go back for the other required education courses. I suppose I would have liked to be a sociology professor even then, but such jobs were scarce, and I was not even in the department. I still do not understand my failure to make any practical occupational plans while in graduate school, but I do not recall any major anxiety about how I would earn a living after the M.A. However, the late 1940s were the start of the affluent society, even if it did not arrive for sociologists until much later.

3. Earl S. Johnson, The Humanistic Teachings of Earl S. Johnson , ed. John D. Hass (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983). In addition, I was enrolled in an introductory graduate survey course entitled ''The Scope and Methods of Social Sciences," which focused on "how the problem of a united, free, peaceful, prosperous world may be attacked by social science" ("Syllabus, The Scope and Methods of the Social Sciences," Division of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago, 1st ed. [October 1946], p. 11). My section of the course was led by Bert Hoselitz, but many other social scientists at the university lectured in the course.

4. I still remember virtually sneaking into the campus bookstore for my copy of Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure because the rivalry between the Columbia and Chicago sociology departments discouraged undue interest in Columbia authors.

5. During my undergraduate days I was on the staff of the college humor magazine and wrote a number of satirical pieces in which Plato and Aristotle were the villains. The only one I published reported the desertion of the university by its students after the chancellor banned bridge playing (of which I seem also to have disapproved) until researchers discovered that the game had been invented by a close friend of Aristotle; then the chancellor reversed his decision. "Hearts Were Trump When Aristotle Smiled," Pulse Magazine , April 1947, p. 17.

6. My interest in audience feedback mechanisms resulted in one of my first published papers, "The Creator-Audience Relationship in the Mass Media: An Analysis of Movie-Making," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America , ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), pp. 315-24.

7. I had to drop this topic because I did not read or speak Yiddish and thus could not content-analyze the plays, but I later made and published studies of acculturation in the work of two popular American-Jewish comedians, Mickey Katz and Allan Sherman. My interest in sociological research in the Jewish continue

community was stimulated by a brilliant course that Erich Rosenthal, who later taught for three decades at Queens College in New York, gave at the College of Jewish Studies in 1947, using mainly novels because of the lack of sociological studies. In those days sociology was close to heresy at the college, and Rosenthal was able to give the course only once.

8. Lynes later reprinted the article as chapter 13 of The Tastemakers (New York: Harper, 1955).

9. In fact I did so virtually at once, in a term paper comparing the concepts of culture and Kultur , which I wrote in the spring of 1949 for Kurt Riezler, a visiting professor from the New School for Social Research.

10. Moreover, that paper was published in a socialist magazine and consisted largely of a critique of Harold Rosenberg, the art critic who was one of its major contributors. "Popular Culture and Its High Culture Critics," Dissent 5(1958): 185-87.

11. I also had an invitation from Robert K. Merton to study for my Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University and a job offer from the Bureau of Applied Social Research, but it involved assisting Fred Ikle in a study of the evacuation of American cities in World War III. Partly because I had lived through the London blitz in 1940, it was not a subject I wanted to study.

12. I wrote a book-length monograph, which also dealt with the topics I had covered in my 1950 seminar paper, and later published an article, "Hollywood Films on British Screens: An Analysis of the Functions of Popular Culture Abroad," Social Problems 9 (1962): 324-28.

13. Herbert J. Gans, "The Social Structure of Popular Culture," unpublished paper, February 1959, p. 29. Later versions of the paper were "Pluralist Esthetics and Subcultural Programming: A Proposal for Cultural Democracy in the Mass Media," Studies in Public Communication , no. 3 (Summer 1961): 27-35; and "Popular Culture in America: Social Problem or Social Asset in a Pluralist Society," in Social Problems: A Modern Approach , ed. Howard S. Becker (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 549-620. A revised version, written for an abortive second edition of Howard Becker's text, is in Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication , ed. W. Phillips Davison, Rolf Meyersohn and Edward Shils (Teaneck, N.J.: Somerset House, 1972). An updated version of my book Popular Culture and High Culture , entitled "American Popular Culture and High Culture in a Changing Class Structure," appears in Art, Ideology and Politics , ed. Judith H. Balfe and Margaret Wyszomirski (New York: Praeger, 1985).

14. Gans, "Social Structure of Popular Culture," p. 29.

15. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture , p. 130.

16. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers , updated and expanded ed. (New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 283-88.

17. Here my conclusions agreed with those of the editor of this anthology. See Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960).

18. This argument appears in my essay "The Audience for Television--and in Television Research," in Television and Social Behavior , ed. Stephen B. Withey and Ronald P. Abeles (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980), pp. 55-81. break

19. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time, chap. 7 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).

20. The book is Middle American Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1988). By the 1980s, populism had become a conservative term and for this reason and others, I went back to a concept I had learned from Martin Meyerson in the 1950s. It looks at people as users--of goods, services, ideas, policies, and the like, and I spent some pages of the book on the possibility of more user-oriented sociology.

21. One of those writers is Christopher Lasch, whose analysis I discuss in "Culture, Community, and Equality," democracy 2 (April 1982): 81-87.

22. Many of those immigrants were hostile to American popular culture, however, partly for class reasons but also because they felt that German popular culture had helped bring the Nazis to power and feared that the United States could become a fascist dictatorship.

23. That study also owed a considerable debt to W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New York: Yale University Press, 1945). It is reported most fully in my "The Origin and Growth of a Jewish Community in the Suburbs: A Study of the Jews of Park Forest," in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Ethnic Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), pp. 205-48.

24. My search for a rational religion ended more than thirty years ago, but occasionally the urge to do more empirical research in the Jewish community and to see whether the experts are still offering the same solutions has to be suppressed. For some observations of American Jewry not based on systematic research, see my "Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures," in On the Making of Americans: Essays in Honor of David Riesman, ed. Herbert J. Gans, Nathan Glazer, Joseph R. Gusfield, and Christopher Jencks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 193-220.

25. In 1987, my wife was elected to a judgeship in New York's Civil Court. During the latter half of the 1950s, I was married to Iris Lezak, an artist who had taken a vow of poverty.

26. Some other sociologists at the University of Chicago to whom I am indebted are two then junior professors: Reinhard Bendix, the first of my sociology teachers when I was an undergraduate, and Morris Janowitz, for whom I conducted some initial research as he was beginning his community newspaper study. I also benefited from teaching assistants and researchers associated with the Department of Sociology--;and the names I now remember are Margaret Fallers, S. C. Gilfillan, Robert Johnson, and Harvey L. Smith--as well as from many professors in sociology and in other departments who are too numerous to mention. break