XIII

The law school was in an old town house in downtown Buffalo, and the main campus was some distance away. The principal interest of my Harvard-trained colleagues was in the great subjects made central by the New Deal, constitutional law and the newly expanded fields of labor law and administrative law. The recruiting orbit of the school did

not change with the replacement of most of the practitioner faculty by new full-time faculty. The students came from nearby and were mostly the first generation in their families to attend college. Some were disoriented by the high aspirations of the new faculty, which could not be matched by our influence in getting jobs in the New Deal agencies for even our ablest students in competition with the graduates of the major law schools. I was assigned two of the five first-year courses, criminal law (which I had not taken in law school) and property, and was glad to teach the staple subjects to the entering students. I would have preferred a chance to teach torts, for I had begun to develop an interest in the study of libel and slander, in the bearing of litigation over defamation on issues of public opinion and civil liberties. However, torts was in the hands of Philip Halpern, later a judge, a capable Buffalo practitioner who fitted in well with the newly recruited faculty. Teaching the property course, I used in addition to a standard casebook the advance sheets of the most recent New York State court opinions. When I had taught what I believed to be the law in New York State, I could briefly speculate concerning people's attachments to possessions—to what extent attachments to certain sorts of objects could be thought of as "natural" and other sorts as customary and particular.

This interest led indirectly to my first bit of empirical research, "Possession and the Law of Finders."^[8] Traditionally the law is finders, keepers, unless the owner is known. I surveyed the policies of public-transit systems and department stores, as well as the practices of people themselves when they find something in a public place; many do turn it in to the lost-and-found department of a transit depot or store. They might, of course, believe they have a right to reclaim it if the owner does not, but few seem to act with this motive in mind. I did not conduct a survey of the general population but made sufficient inquiries to indicate that most people assumed that if they found something that had plainly been lost in, say, a store or a subway, they should turn it in to the lost-and-found department. The traditional case law did not support what was, in fact, common and desirable practice.

I realized that I greatly enjoyed teaching, always seeking to discover what my students might be learning, in contrast with what I thought I was presenting. I also took the more difficult and chancy road of eliciting discussion rather than calling on certain students to state a case and then on other students to say what was wrong with the exposition until I had elicited the "correct" response. Since a class based on discussion cannot be in the lecturer's control but depends on the students' motiva-

tion, preparation, and willingness (though not bombastic eagerness) to volunteer, I found then, as in all my teaching, that the discussion method often miscarried, leaving both students and instructor disappointed. I had to prepare questions that I hoped might provoke discussion, an effort that for me has never been free of anxiety. Focused as I was on what seemed requisite for the students, there could be only the most peripheral connection, if any, between my research and my teaching. The prospect that I might some day teach in a setting where there was less separation between my agenda for research, growing out of my intellectual interests, and what I was teaching did not occur to me.^[9]

I was twenty-seven when we went to Buffalo, which did prove to be an interesting city. I soon became a member of the board of the Foreign Policy Association, gave a lecture to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and began my first teaching of social science at evening classes of the YWCA. I found friends at the university, notably Fritz Machlup, an evocative refugee economist; Walter Curt Behrendt, the city planner; and others in sociology, political science, history, and English. Evelyn and I met musicians, painters, and a poet, Reuel Denney, whom I was later to recruit as a colleague at the University of Chicago. Our efforts to explore the city did not extend to the Polish neighborhoods, which seemed to be isolated even from the other traditional Roman Catholic groups. At about this time I began an unorthodox psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm. I did so not because I thought I needed it—I did—but to please my mother, who wanted to be able to talk with me during the time she was an analysand of Karen Horney, who had recommended Fromm to her for me. Karen Horney had said of me that I was a rather resigned person, and this struck me as perceptive. On alternate weekends and when feasible, I would take the train or fly to New York and have two two-hour weekend sessions with Fromm before returning by train to be sure not to miss my Monday class.

When I went to see Fromm for the first time at his apartment on New York's West Side, I noticed a large shelf of the collected works of Marx and Engels. I assumed that a Marxist or Leninist would seek to propagandize me. When I had gone to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1931 with an Intourist group, some of whom were then in law school or graduate school or starting careers in journalism, there were fellow travelers among them who idealized whatever we were shown in the Soviet Union and derogated the United States. I had little use for either side of that seesaw.^[10] Although several people I had known in college, for example Paul Sweezy, had later become Marxists, and several of the

New Deal lawyers I had met in Washington, notably Alger Hiss, had turned out to be Communists or close to the Communist party, none of my friends was even so much as a fellow traveler, and many of my law school friends, including Chafee and Howe, were vigilant civil libertarians. I had gotten this far in life with virtually no exposure to scholarly Marxists.

Fromm amusedly reassured me that he had no intention of converting me to Marxism. However, we often talked as if he were my teacher rather than my analyst. We discussed the study of society and the work on social character that he had done with Ernst Schachtel, whom I also met and admired, when Fromm was part of the Frankfurt group. Later, I was to attend seminars in New York for analysts in training, given by both Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan at the William Alanson White Institute, and lectures by Schachtel and Fromm at the New School. While I resisted the efforts of my mother, with whom I stayed at her New York apartment, to draw me into intrapsychic inquiries, I was happy to talk with her concerning the larger social-psychological issues raised by both Horney and Fromm.

Fromm, who had, like Friedrich, a Ph.D. from Heidelberg, was widely read in history and biography. Like Friedrich also, he greatly assisted me in gaining confidence as well as enlarging the scope of my interest in the social sciences. Although he did not accept my criticism that his view of the United States and especially its middle classes was too monolithically and stereotypically negative, he did accept my criticism of his English prose and once encouraged me to redraft a chapter of Man for Himself; he thought my version perhaps improved, more nuanced, but characteristically decided to write "for himself."

If one recalls that my parents were Francophile and Italophile in culture and Anglophile in manner, then my interest in contemporary German—that is, Weimar—culture was a way of finding my own direction as distinct from theirs—a direction facilitated not only by Friedrich and Fromm but also by the many refugees I met through both those men and through my own concerns.^[11]