Chapter Four—
My Life and Soft Times
Joseph Gusfield
There is a touch of chutzpah in autobiography, an arrogance that my life is a matter of such significance as to merit the reader's attention. My name may be known in seminars but it is hardly known in households. The self-analysis implied requires me to find some justification in a more universal rationale. I find it in Gerth and Mills's view of social psychology as the confluence of history and biography. An even more useful salve to my sensibilities has been supplied by Alvin Gouldner, who wrote that the perception of sociologists comes from two sources. One is empirical studies and theorizing—the role realities that the sociologist presents to the reader and freely acknowledges. The other, and often the more determinative, is the "personal realities" that the sociologist derives from his or her experiences. These are seldom acknowledged and are often half hidden from the writer as well.
My autobiography is a form of stock taking. It is also an exercise in finding the sources of the personal assumptions that have formed the temperament, the feelings, and the mythic and experienced bases from which theory, research, and conviction often spring. No life exists apart from history, from a time and a place. So too an autobiography that did not reflect the person "of this time, of that place" would mislead and misdirect. It is in this amalgam of person, place, and idea that I find my direction.
Kenneth Burke, whose work has had a great influence on me, writes of human beings as being "rotten with perfection." I understand him to mean the proclivity of people to invent typologies and then push
them to their extremes—for example, for a sociologist to over-sociologize human action, for a Marxist to find capitalism everywhere, or for a Parsonian to see only system. Writing an autobiography induces that kind of perfection. It must lend a narrative quality to the events of a life, as if they had direction, purpose, and goal rather than being the result of accident, impulse, and drift. I have to be aware of who I am now when writing about who I was then. Let me make that discount at the beginning and set it aside, otherwise I might stop writing at this moment.
I write from a gazebo of time, looking backward at my life and discovering the present as future seen from the past. At sixty-five I am an aging sociologist living at the edge of America. Mexico is a half hour away, and the Pacific Ocean is down the street. It seems a fit location from which to write this musing account of a life that is probably duplicated in the accounts of many sociologists of my age.
Growing up in the 1930s
Like many others of my generation, I came into academic life in a period of an expanding system of higher education in a prosperous economy. Growing up in Chicago in the 1930s I would not have expected that kind of future. In retrospect three facts of my childhood seem formative: Chicago, the Great Depression, and being Jewish in the 1930s.
The city of Chicago had, in the Prohibition and Al Capone years, gained an international reputation as a center of the underworld, the place Sandburg had called the "city of the big shoulders." And so it seemed to me—a place of continuing danger, where walking the streets was a daily adventure, and every stranger posed a threat. It was also a city of sharp ethnic lines, both territorial and social. The first question about anyone, of any age, was, What is he?—meaning, What is his nationality? This perception of the city was repeated in the University of Chicago's urban studies. Only later did I learn that Chicago's rigid ethnic boundaries probably represented an extreme among American cities. They extended to aspects of education as well. During my undergraduate days I became friendly with a fellow student, George De Vos (now professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley). We were astonished to learn that we had been living for several years on opposite sides of a narrow street. He had gone to a Catholic
parochial school, and I to public school, and we had not even been aware of each other.
The Depression was more than a bend in the business cycle. It was a cataclysmic destruction of belief in the special providence of America and a long period of deep anxiety and frustration. Many of us who went through it continue to feel that the structure of solid institutions is a facade, always liable to sudden and unexpected tremors that undermine the foundation.
Above all, growing up Jewish in the 1930s was more than a matter of what you were; it was the definitive statement of your place in history. The local ethnic conflicts kept anti-Semitism alive but they were always discounted, the disappearing reenactment of old-country relationships in a new environment. In my neighborhood on the Day of Atonement, Polish-American youth would throw stones at the windows of the synagogue and shout anti-Semitic slogans; Jewish youth would do the same but omit the slogans. (I have said often that I was beaten up by Polish hoods because I was Jewish and by Jewish hoods just for the fun of it.) The deeply serious happenings were overseas, in Germany. They colored our politics, our daily talk, and our sense of the security of being American.
The beginnings of what later became the Holocaust pushed me and many other Jews rapidly into both the Zionist movement and the left in politics in the late 1930s. Here too I learned the vagaries of trust in the stability of movements and organizations. I had been active in an effort to develop a branch of the American Student Union in my high school. The union was then an organization attempting to gain economic benefits for youth and college students. It was also committed to developing an anti-Hitler foreign policy and a consciousness of what was happening under fascism. I had invited the national secretary to a formational meeting. Between his acceptance and the meeting the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany, and the union line changed to an attack on the war-mongering capitalist countries. I learned early that ideologies and political organizations are fickle lovers.
I suppose that in looking back and perfecting my narrative I could say that all those experiences create the aura of a world in which violence and discontinuity were palpable possibilities. They suggest a world in which rules are broken as much, if not more, than followed. I do not think that was my personal feeling about my own life, but it may well have shaped my sense of history as unpredictable and unmeasurable.
The War Years
The attack on Pearl Harbor was one of those moments when you realize that history and biography meet. Like most men in my generation, I was a soldier in World War II. In one way the war was not a turning point for me. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago when I entered the Army in April 1943. I was discharged on January 14, 1946 (a day of liberation I still celebrate), and returned three days later to the University of Chicago. But the experience of war and soldiering had a profound impact on how I viewed life. After almost forty years I still see the present historical period as the postwar world.
Perhaps my second day in the Army was a symbol of what was to come. A sergeant lined up the raw recruits and asked all those with some college education to fall out and walk across the yard picking up cigarette butts. "Now," he said to all the others, "I want the rest of you ignoramuses to watch these college kids and see how it's done." I did learn respect for raw intelligence that cuts across class and education. For a bookish and timid Jew from lower middle-class Chicago to live with Cajuns from rural Louisiana was an introduction to the similarities among Americans and among human beings that are not often as evident as the diversities.
I also learned the difference between front and back that distinguishes the sophisticate from the naive. I learned that the pious assistant to the chaplain, who spoke so fervently about the sweetness of his boss and about how much he missed his wife, was a busy whorehound who hated the woman he was forced to marry after he got her pregnant. I learned that he saw the chaplain as a naive man who could be played for gain by feigning a religious commitment. But I also learned that men who affect cowardice can act heroically, that people from whom you expect hostility can be helpful, and that though people can be worse than they seem, they are also sometimes better. What I was discovering, I think, was the appearance of a human quality outside the history and sociology that seem so often to be the constraining and shaping matter of our existence. Only later, in reflection, can it come to our consciousness in forms such as Dennis Wrong's "The Oversocialized Conception of Man."
The war helped create a certain indifference in me to ideologies and political programs that, except for the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, has remained a part of my political quiescence. Two events stick
in my memory. One is like a classic movie scene: the first time I had to go through the pockets and wallet of a dead German soldier to identify him, I found a picture of his wife and child. It made me recognize that wars are fought against human beings, not against abstractions that can be hated.
A second event made me vividly realize the strange mix of good and evil that affects history. In the closing days of the European war the Germans had thrown old men and young boys into the front. After the surrender some members of the Schutzstaffel, or SS (the elite military unit of the Nazi party) continued to fight; some disguised themselves as members of the Wehrmacht (the regular German army). Wounded German prisoners were sent to our company, a medical unit attached to an infantry division, one level closer to the front than a MASH (mobile army surgical hospital). Because of my one year of college French, my smattering of Yiddish, and my sliver of German, I had, mirabile dictu, become the company interpreter. A German soldier was brought in who claimed to be in the Wehrmacht. Because he was in his late twenties I was skeptical and suspected he was an SS man in disguise. He spoke good English and said that he had sat out the war as a theology student but in the final days had been drafted (a story he later substantiated). I asked him if he had been in the SS (Schutzstaffel), for me and most Americans the embodiment of evil. "No," he replied, in an answer still with me. "I was not so idealistic."
The war was the supreme instance of William James's description of experience as "a big, buzzing, blooming confusion." For a soldier it was the experience of being a pawn in a chess game whose strategy and direction he could never make out. It began to seem to us, however, that the chess players were in the same fix; they could no more control the game than could we. Events were, as so often they are in politics and life, in command. The tragedy was the absence of true ideological or political content in the average soldier's commitment to the war—on both sides, as Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz's work on the Wehrmacht later displayed. Though Seymour Martin Lipset is probably correct that World War II was the only popular war the United States ever fought, the soldiers I knew understood little about Nazism and had no more than a vague devotion to patriotism and duty. I, of course, was different. As a Jew I had a strong feeling about the war, though it too was almost lost in the mix of human beings, death, destruction, and anarchy I encountered. That sense of fate, of the unknown, uncontrollable forces surrounding us, has never really left me. The root belief of the
scientific endeavor, that the world is both knowable and malleable, has continued to seem to me a supreme delusion.
The University of Chicago
My decision to enter the University of Chicago on graduating from high school in 1941 was one of those turning points in my life when there was a fork in the road, and I took the right road. That I did so still seems mysterious to me. During my senior year in a Chicago high school I thought a great deal about going to college. It meant that I would be the first in my entire extended family to go to a full-time, four-year college. Neither of my two older brothers could afford that. Scholarships were rare in American higher education, although the University of Chicago was unique in granting scholarships to high-school graduates through competitive examinations. (I tried, but failed, to get one.) I lacked the money for anything but a free education where I could live at home and commute. I had a scholarship to a small college in Iowa and to a four-year "working-class" college in Chicago.
But I had set my heart on the University of Chicago, which I had visited as a high-school debater the year before. Both my uncles, whom I depended on for advice, cautioned prudence. Go to a junior college for two years, they said, or to Roosevelt College (later University), and transfer to the university later; save some money now. It was sound advice, and I knew it. In my senior year I read a collection of addresses by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago and a major figure in higher education. I was impressed by the boldness and philosophical turn those papers displayed. Throwing caution and my uncles' advice in the ashcan, I decided to enter the University of Chicago. I had been working about thirty hours a week during the school year and more than full-time in summers and had saved one hundred dollars, enough to cover one-third of my annual tuition. I continued to work fifteen to twenty hours a week at the same supermarket as clerk and stock handler while going to college. With that income, as well as loans and scholarships, I was able to complete my first two years.
My sense that this was a formative decision well made must be tempered, however, by awareness of the common predilection to read history backward and find the oak tree in the acorn. O. Henry has a story, or stories, in which the hero finds himself at a crossroad and takes one of the four possible directions. The narrator follows him through
each of the four choices and by each, through different experiences, he arrives at the same place. My fellow graduate student and later colleague Bernard Farber (now professor of sociology at Arizona State University and a leading figure in family studies) took another road: he did his undergraduate work at the Chicago college I rejected and has since had a career very similar to my own. But my undergraduate years nonetheless proved to be highly significant.
I entered the College of the University of Chicago in September 1941. Three months later the United States was at war. I lived at home and commuted about three hours a day to and from campus. Though I had friends at the university, I continued to find my social life among high-school friends in my neighborhood, and my work as a supermarket cashier took me to still another part of the city. Despite this fragmentation and the clear recognition that I would be a soldier in the near future, that period was perhaps among the richest intellectual times I have known. The university was the focal point of my existence, and although I was very much aware of the war, it was possible to lead a cloistered life in which Kant and Marx and John Dewey and Shakespeare were as much companions as they have been to others at other times and places. In several courses, I read all the assigned as well as the optional readings listed in the syllabi. As a commuter not engulfed by student norms, I learned only from a study group for the final examinations that such dedication was neither expected nor accepted. I had become a GDCR—goddamn curve raiser.
I regret not being able to convey the excitement of my freshman year and the intensity and exuberance of intellectual discovery. The University of Chicago seemed charged with an electric current that made every question a matter of analysis and argument, in which the intellectual exchange seemed to me to be as keen as possible. We all felt ourselves to be among the smartest and the brightest. Later many colleagues of mine would speak disappointedly of their undergraduate days, and I have felt very privileged to feel otherwise. I recall the intellectual rapture most vividly in an argument with a friend (now professor of mathematics at Purdue) after the final examination in the freshman social-science course. Returning home on the Chicago elevated train, we quarreled about the correct answer to an economics question. We were so carried away by our debate that we pulled down the window shade and drew supply-and-demand curves. Those years were definitive in establishing in me a love for disinterested intellectual play, still the best source, I think, of what we used to call scholarship and today call research.
I learned some other valuable lessons. One was that you don't have to be Jewish. Deep in my view of life was the unstated premise of supreme confidence in the capacity of poor Jews to overcome intellectual obstacles. Being lean and hungry as well as one of the people that had produced the Old Testament, the Talmud, and thinkers such as Einstein, Freud, and Marx, what couldn't I do? I soon became friendly with a group of fellow students who were Greek-Americans, and I learned that poor Greeks were also smart. I then learned that there were rich Jews who were smart and, again, that there were poor Gentiles and, to my amazement, even rich Gentiles who were smart. Many, if not most, of those students were smarter than I. I discovered the painful truths that leisure is more valuable to scholarship than hunger and that poverty does not breed either character or intellect.
Graduate Education and Intellectual Tension
Three days after leaving the Army I returned to student life, completing my college education in the first three-month quarter, almost as if the war had been only an intermission. I was twenty-two and felt that time was running out. My aim, developed in my sophomore year, was to take a master's degree in economics and a law degree and then to become what was known as a New Deal lawyer, working in government. By 1946 the years of study the plan involved seemed too long to wait before beginning "life," and I decided to enter the University of Chicago Law School.
In 1946 the law school students were largely veterans of the war. We were mostly anxious to find a life outside of history, to concentrate on career, marriage, and family—the private aspects of our lives. We felt that we had to make up for years lost in the war and had no time for the play of the mind. The mood of the campus, compared to that of my freshman year, was similarly privatized, though it retained the intellectual intensity I had known. The atmosphere was distinctly apolitical. Although there were great debates and intraorganizational struggles over the role of Communists in veterans organizations, the merits of T. S. Eliot or Thomas Aquinas could arouse more interest than could the coming elections.
After three years in the Army, the study of law was a replenishing change. The daily preparation and possible recitation (much like Professor Kingsfield's classes in the movie The Paper Chase ) meant a rigid routine of disciplined study. Yet despite that routine and the standard
curriculum, the law also possessed an intellectual, philosophical side that the faculty helped emerge from the pages of appellate court opinions. In discovering this side I was fortunate to have two excellent teachers—Edward Hirsch Levi (later chancellor of the university and still later attorney general of the United States under Gerald Ford), who taught jurisprudence, and Malcolm Sharp, whose course on contracts was one of the supreme educational experiences of my life. Sharp made his students see law as a meeting place of psychology, economics, sociology, ethics, and history, but that it was still Law. It had its own character as well.
But my undergraduate education was only completed formally. On my return to campus, my former college instructor in social science, Milton Singer (now professor emeritus of anthropology but then a recent Ph.D. in philosophy), had asked me to teach the sophomore social-science course for adults in the university extension division. College instruction after the war was a seller's market, and I was fortunate for an opportunity that today would go to an advanced graduate student. Teaching that course began to awaken in me the intellectual concerns that could be indulged only on the periphery of legal curricula, smuggled in by some scholarly teachers.
Whitman wrote that he was simmering and simmering until Emerson brought him to a boil. Teaching in the College did that for me. At the beginning of the following academic year I was asked to become a teaching assistant in the Social Sciences 2 course in the College. It has become a historic course, and the years I was associated with it have become legend. (Its fortieth anniversary was celebrated in 1984 with a symposium at the University of Chicago.) The teaching staff, about seventeen people, met each week to discuss the materials for lecture and discussion sessions. These meetings were less conferences about pedagogy than seminars about many scholarly matters, seminars marked by intense debate and rancor, pyrotechnical displays of ego and erudition, and great flashes of insight, wit, and critical analysis. The members of that staff have since found their merited niches in the academic pantheon—Daniel Bell, Lewis Coser, Rose Coser, Morton Grodzins, Abram Harris, Rosalie Hankey (Wax), Martin Meyerson, C. Wright Mills, Benjamin Nelson, Phillip Rieff, David Riesman, Milton Singer, Sylvia Thrupp, and Murray Wax.
Though the intensity of staff meetings was awesome to a timid and unsure assistant, they were nevertheless intellectual adventures that made law school seem confining. In the first quarter of the course we
read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents , Durkheim's Division of Labor , and Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , as well as works by Marx and Veblen. It was my first meeting with Durkheim or Weber. Weber's cultural analysis of the rise of capitalism was the most captivating book in social science that I had ever encountered, and it changed the way I viewed history and society. That year I also took a seminar on the sociology of law, which was taught in the law school by Max Rheinstein. We used as basic material Weber's Law in Economy and Society , which Rheinstein and Edward Shils had just translated. These experiences made me restless with a legal education that was becoming routine and constraining. (Ego compels me to say that I was a good law student; I even made the law review.) I decided to continue my education in some other area.
There is an image in my mind of a discussion about my future that took place under a tree on a quadrangle outside the law school with Milton Singer and Benjamin Nelson. Nelson felt that the Committee on Social Thought, one of several innovative interdisciplinary committees formed under Hutchins, was the logical place for me, but Singer felt that it was an unwise choice—a degree without a market. At one point I felt as if God and the devil were debating the disposition of my eternal soul. Whatever the merits of the debate, this time I chose prudence and entered the Department of Sociology.
I led a somewhat schizoid existence, between teaching in the College and being a graduate student in sociology. I have written at length elsewhere about the value of the tension produced by those two contrasting models (broad intellectual exploration and narrow disciplined research) of what doing social science should be. They were diverging paymasters, but I am convinced that the push and pull of each against the other has contributed to my thinking in later years.
The College and the graduate departments had completely separate faculties. The College faculty was junior in age and rank, with fewer Ph.D.'s and contemptuous of the specialization and narrowness of the departments. Its models of social science were those major works that had come to be regarded as classics—those of Marx, Freud, Mannheim, Weber, Schumpeter. These works gave readers a way of placing themselves in the historical stream of their times. They were "big" with significance and wide in scope. They provided the badge of the cultured, educated person; they formed a base for what the classicist James Redfield calls the objective of a liberal-arts education—the capacity for "good talk."
To me the Department of Sociology seemed a dull, narrow place in contrast to the intellectual excitement of the College. Its model of achievement was found in the famous Chicago series of observational studies, such as Harvey Zorbaugh's Gold Coast and the Slum , Walter Reckless's Taxi Dance Hall , and the then recently published Street-Corner Society by W. F. Whyte. Achievement meant completing a Ph.D. dissertation in imitation of the model. It meant becoming a craftsman, a sociologist. It seemed narrow and insignificant, a sop to the necessity of an academic degree for entry into academic life. Only later, in working on my thesis, did I come to appreciate the value of the craft and the necessity and joy of narrowness. Only later did I come to recognize the value to scholarship of the tension between these two different conceptions of social science.
Graduate Years
I entered the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1947 and received my degree in 1954, at the age of thirty-one. Though I left in 1950 to take a faculty position at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, I returned to Chicago every summer to teach in the College. I look on those years as important intellectually but even more important as the source of friendships that have continued throughout my life and have been of great significance to my scholarship as well.
As had been the case in law school, the sociology students were mostly veterans of the war, older than had been typical of graduate students and beginning to marry and have children. Unlike law school, however, in the sociology department there was a greater sense of intellectual and social play. We lived in the Hyde Park area near the university. Graduate-student life was a round of parties, study, and endlessly flamboyant talk. The faculty and classes were its accompaniment as well as its catalyst, but the talk was where the action was. Now, forty years later, it becomes romanticized in nostalgia, but it has long appeared to me as a period in life that I wished could have gone on longer and that I have often wished could return.
Strangely, it was a period without much concern for the future. We did not yet sense the expansion that was coming in higher education and in the economy. Like devout sectarians we felt that somehow God or the economy or the universities would provide. Living on the GI bill of rights and an instructor's salary, we scrimped but felt far from drowning. Since we were all in the same boat, the genteel poverty of graduate-
student existence was no deficiency, and the GI bill kept us afloat. For myself, whatever the future held, it would not be the world of my father. A meat cutter, he had been buffeted by business cycles and the indignities of living on the edge of a statusless poverty.
I was especially drawn to the lectures of Herbert Blumer. He was perhaps the most theoretical and critical member of the faculty. His criticism of most sociological methods, however, made it difficult to think of a thesis that could meet his exacting standards. From Blumer and the reading in G. H. Mead I developed an interest in social psychology and chose self-conceptions as the subject of my master's thesis. As was the case with Ph.D. dissertations, the expectation was that the student would complete an empirical research project and not an exercise in theory or even history. After a course on the life history with Ernest Burgess I decided to study the self-conceptions of the aged among three generations of the same families. My reasoning was that if people develop new self-conceptions from the views of those around them, then the elderly would have a self-concept more like that of the young than would the middle-aged. Burgess served as chairman of my thesis committee; Albert Reiss, then an instructor, was also a member. The project was not exactly a fiasco, but I learned from it the subtleties of self-concept and the difficulties and limits of interview questionnaires. My original intention of developing the topic for a Ph.D. dissertation was discarded.
Despite my exposure to Blumer and my announced view of myself as a symbolic interactionist, my own early politics and my work in the College and the courses with Hughes and Warner had kept my vaguely structural and Marxian assumptions alive. When I left the University of Chicago in 1950, I had not yet found a dissertation topic. Blumer's work on collective behavior and social movements had interested me, and I had been struck by an account of the Women's Winter Crusades of 1873–74 in Park and Burgess's introductory sociology text. Social-movement theory was dominated by the model of the natural history. Weber's writing on the routinization of charisma and Michels's on the iron law of oligarchy had only recently been translated. The transformation of theories about collective behavior and social movements was in the air.
But there is more to the choice of a topic than the logic of theory. I was already interested in the temperance movement, and when I began to read more, I discovered things I had not known and that were hard to explain. This sense of anomaly seems to me the seed of good research.
Answering a question or solving a puzzle is still the model of what I am about in my work—that is, when I most like what I am doing. As I read about the temperance movement in America, I encountered agrarian radicalism for the first time and was astounded. I had always thought of political radicalism as something associated with an urban working class, and its ideology as brought to the United States by European immigrants. I thought that native and rural America was conservative and that the temperance movement and Prohibition were the programs of that conservatism. The discrepancy was a source of wonder. In the language of the 1960s, it "blew my mind," and I wanted to know how the movement had changed from its beginnings to what I assumed was its present conservatism. The effects of organization seemed to me to be a clue.
The final title of my dissertation was "The Woman's Christian Temperance Union: Change and Continuity in an Organized Interest Group." How did I get from there to Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement? I completed the dissertation in 1954; the book was first published in 1963. I could recount the theoretical and practical explanations for the transformation, but one element would be missing. I had fallen in love with the subject. Interviewing the members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, gathering and analyzing WCTU journals and convention reports over seventy-five years of its history, and doing background reading in secondary sources, I had become fascinated by the history of the movement. There were good theoretical and practical justifications for studying it, but they would mask the joy and excitement of knowing a great deal about a subject, of trying to make sense out of what I knew, and of becoming an expert on something that interested me and, through my work, would come to interest others. In recent years historians have gone well beyond me in the study of temperance. I get much satisfaction seeing how my work has become both a stimulant to those studies and the foil against which most must measure their work and their arguments. In writing Symbolic Crusade , I was beginning to be wary of theory as a source of scholarship, to search for anomalies, and, above all, to see what Veblen called idle curiosity as a vital and prized part of being a scholar.
The Establishing Years
From 1950 to 1955 I taught sociology and social sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. During that period I was
the only sociologist in a college of about eight hundred students. (Pierre Bessaignet, now at the University of Nice, was the sole anthropologist in a two-person department.) Hobart and William Smith was an old Episcopalian college. After the war it had expanded from four hundred students and was widening its appeal from its original denominational base. It provided a good intellectual climate with a commitment to integrated social-sciences and humanities courses, modeled somewhat after the College courses at the University of Chicago. The faculty included a number of excellent scholars, many of whom later distinguished themselves elsewhere.
I had gone to Hobart and William Smith with some dread. Chinese entry into the Korean War had caused panic among young instructors in the College at Chicago. The reinstitution of an expanded draft seemed imminent. Instructors were warned they might not be rehired for the next year. Ithiel Pool visited friends at Chicago and told them he was also recruiting for Hobart and William Smith, where he had taught before going to MIT, where he spent the rest of his life. I applied, made a visit, and was hired largely on the strength of my experience in the College.
Hobart and William Smith proved to be a needed, pleasant, and fulfilling experience. For one thing, I learned about sociology. Being the only sociologist on the campus, I taught the gamut of courses from quantitative methods to marriage and family to public opinion. Through that experience I was up on the corpus of sociology for many years to come.
I grew up at Hobart and William Smith. It was my first encounter with a world of manners and tradition and a sense of established and secure authority. With the exception of my Army experience, it was the first time that I had lived in a gentile environment. At twenty-seven I had lived my civilian life mostly in one or another urban Jewish enclave. Neither the law school nor the sociology department at the University of Chicago had afforded a change. Some wit has perceptively described the University of Chicago in those days, and perhaps now as well, as a place where Protestant professors taught Jewish students Catholic philosophy.
Hobart and William Smith maintained, and perhaps still maintains, that mix of education and character training that colleges have provided in many societies. It was this educational approach that the University of Chicago (in Hutchins's speeches as well as in campus lore) so openly despised as anti-intellectual. As a young assistant professor, I, along with my wife, was pressed to chaperon fraternity parties, as the college guidelines demanded. The rules, manners, and poise of the students and
the formality of dress contrasted starkly with the free and easy openness of the University of Chicago. There we had experienced a policy of treating all students as adults and eschewing the parental concerns of other campuses in the late 1940s.
My wife still talks about her surprise at the controls exercised by Hobart and William Smith and their continuity with the family life of many students. Chaperoning a dance one evening, she expressed amazement at the rule requiring women to be in the dormitory by 11 P.M., and midnight on Saturday. "Surely," she said to one young woman, "you don't have to be home by midnight in your own family?" The student replied that indeed she had; at home the curfew was 11 P.M. even on Saturday. For my wife, who was the only child of Russian-Jewish socialists and had grown up in the Socialist Workman's Circle and had gone to college at the University of Chicago, this was a strange world indeed.
Like many American colleges and universities, Hobart and William Smith had not only expanded considerably after World War II but was also in the process of absorbing new students into what was an old and traditional institution. The few Jews on the faculty were tokens in a new era, evidence of the tolerance and goodwill of an old Protestant institution. We were also exotic and thus sought after in a somewhat analogous fashion to the way blacks are today or to the way Hannah Arendt has described Disraeli's use of his Jewish origin as an admission ticket to British high society. But I came to admire a genuine tolerance and attraction that resonated with a New England tradition of fair play and civil liberties, cutting across political divisions of conservative, liberal, and radical.
Writing this sketch of my life, I came also to appreciate another facet of my experience in upstate New York that is bound up in its past. An image of Frankie Merson remains with me. She was professor of political science at Keuka College, a small women's college on Keuka Lake in upstate New York. Keuka College had a work-study curriculum long before Antioch College and was a Methodist school with a strong feminist mission. It was a vestige of the nineteenth century still existing in the twentieth-century world of postwar America. Professor Merson was the leading member of the Keuka WCTU, and she was one of my interview respondents. She had been a suffragette before 1920 and had been active in opposing the presidential candidacy of the Catholic and "wet" Al Smith. She had first come to my attention through a letter in the Geneva, New York, newspaper protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs. Such a strange mixture but not so strange in this piece of
America that had been the scene of many social movements and that one historian had called the burnt-over district.
The Illinois Years
Hobart was a part of the history of American colleges in its movement out from the circle of denomination into a wider world of American diversity. The faculty mirrored that polarity between cosmopolitan and local with which Alvin Gouldner, using Robert K. Merton's terms, described the loyalties and sources of aspiration of American college teachers. I had made use of my Hobart and William Smith years to write my doctoral dissertation. I had begun to feel comfortable in the small-college atmosphere, and that comfort made me uncomfortable. A colleague in another department explained why he left Hobart and William Smith. Only a few years older than I, he was introduced at an alumni meeting as "kindly old Professor Bartlett." I too began to sense the ivy growing around me and felt that if I stayed two or three more years I would lose the drive and stimulus that had come from a university environment. I would begin to feel comfortably at home and start absenting myself from national meetings for fear of meeting those who had been my fellow graduate students and who had lived up to their early promise of scholarship.
I wrote to Herbert Blumer, and he recommended me to the University of Illinois. I remained there from 1955 to 1969. Those were years of immense expansion in American higher education. The evolution of my own career paralleled the evolution of higher education in general, from institutions catering to a small minority of the American elite to mass institutions that absorbed the American middle class. In that process education became perceived as the sine qua non to mobility and the decent maintenance of already established family positions. In this respect the University of Illinois was caught on the same escalator as Hobart and William Smith, though at a different level. It had been a state university whose networks, both socially and occupationally, prepared students to return home to become the professionals of their local communities. As such it did not, except in football, compete with other universities, even the University of Chicago. They were in different intellectual and educational leagues. In the 1950s it was changing and had an eye on greater prestige in academia.
In the postwar world the large and comparatively wealthy state universities were intent on moving up. They became national universi-
ties as America was itself becoming a more national society. It was necessary for students to leave the local community, and even the Midwest, in search of jobs and family. The aspirations of administration and faculty were making even fraternity-sorority life and athletics subservient to the academic aspirations of the faculty. What David Riesman and Christopher Jencks later called the academic revolution was in full swing.
It was a period of expansion and security. For the junior faculty member in sociology it was a seller's market. Not much in the way of publication was needed to gain tenure. Sociology was still a new field, and with new universities springing up and old ones growing, new departments were being formed and old ones expanded. If a sociologist missed tenure at one school, there was another good job on the horizon. The welfare state was coming of age, and people were needed in what I call the troubled person's industries, such as criminology, social work, and clinical psychology. All this meant that college education was in; students were plentiful, and education was trusted to provide the necessary training. The expansion of higher education was also sold as a way of competing with Russian science and engineering. Scholars could ride in on the tails of the post-Sputnik rockets.
The Illinois years were ones of scholarship, teaching, and growth in family and friendships. The years at Hobart and William Smith had been the years of the cold war's beginnings, the McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg and the Hiss cases, and the first Eisenhower-Stevenson election. The Illinois years were the years of the civil-rights movement. Provocative, disturbing, and flamboyant as they were, it was not until 1968 that the student movements of the 1960s became central to life on most American campuses. Even the Vietnam War does not, in my memory, override the importance and the emotional surge of the civil-rights movement. It set a tone and provided a model that opened the 1960s and gave it its motif.
In the early 1960s I felt that I was in a rut. I had been in school, in one form or another, since 1946. The world was changing in profound ways as new nations came into being, sometimes each week. I was not even sure that I wanted to continue in academic life. With a sabbatical due me, I thought of travel and decided to get out of Western civilization and see life in a developing and new nation. I chose India because I could teach and observe without learning a new language. I meant my year on a Fulbright fellowship to be an interlude. In some respects it was, but only in some.
India, 1962–81
I am writing this section the day following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and India is unexpectedly and unusually prominent in the attention of the American public. In 1962, when I first visited India, it was a land almost invisible to Americans; it still is. I have been there four times now, for visits ranging from six weeks to nine months. I have taught for at least one term at three Indian universities and have lectured at many others. I have lived for periods from two weeks to five months in several major cities—Delhi, Patna, Bangalore, Calcutta. Though I have done some research and writing in connection with India, it has been peripheral to most of my work. And though some of my scholarship has been concerned with problems of national development, that too has been a minor theme. Most of my studies have been located in the United States.
Yet my experience in India has had a major personal and intellectual impact on me. I first came to India armed with the concepts of American social science. These, following a line from Durkheim through Parsons, were couched in the discourse of modernization with its clear movement from community to society, tradition to modernity, caste to class. India defied the efforts to be seen through such prisms. An aphorism I learned later, when living in Japan, puts the matter well. In India no one trusts the institutions to work because they know that socially organized life is fragile and will disintegrate. One acts to protect oneself and one's interests because social institutions cannot be trusted to sustain themselves. In Japan, there is the same sense of the fragility of social life but there is also the belief that if everyone works at it and helps sustain one another's roles, the social organization can be upheld. Americans are not worried about social organization being destroyed because they know that it will be replaced by a better one.
The culture shock that came from living in a provincial city in India was more than the usual experience of people going from one country to another. What accentuated it was the sense of illusion, that whatever was true today, or true at the level of public rules, or true of one region, was not necessarily a good guide to what might happen in the immediate setting. The intellectual shock was the realization that the concepts I had learned bore little relation to the observations I made. Community and society, tradition and modernity, caste and class, and democracy and autocracy were so far from ideal types that it was illusory to use them as contrasts in anymore than a literary, allusive sense. India was so
big, so diverse, and had been a civilization so long that it humbled the casual visitor who expected a transformation to the American ideal within a decade.
But India did something else. It made me skeptical of much that I had learned in sociology and hence restored some freshness to my thinking. I found that economic man was not dead, that paradox was everywhere (the caste system adapted well to the egalitarianism of political democracy), and that tolerance of diversity was not a mark of Western modernity, nor were Westernization and traditional India as incompatible as I had believed. India was exotic—startlingly different and even frighteningly its own culture. It could not be understood or explained with the concepts in my bag. But if that was so for India, I realized how much it was also the case for America whenever I stopped to look without the blinders of theory. That skepticism toward conceptualization has not left me. Later periods of living in India, Japan, and England have substantiated it.
Pitirim Sorokin once wrote that probably the last thing a fish realizes is the fact that it lives in water. Only when taken out, gasping on the beach, does it recognize water. Like much of what I am writing about, the sense of one's culture as a tangible context forming the necessary basis for understanding is less a series of provable, logical ideas than a series of felt, believed, and acted-on assumptions. Our tacit knowledge sits on that bedrock. It is less ideology than myth.
California
Sometimes, half-facetiously, I say that I have lived in six cultures—general American, Jewish-American lower middle-class, Indian, Japanese, British, and southern Californian. Between 1965 and 1968 I was three times offered positions in southern California at campuses of the University of California, including my present one at UC San Diego. Each time I was tempted, and each time I drew back, in part out of a natural timidity about disturbing a comfortable life in Champaign-Urbana. But I also felt guilt and fear. The guilt came from having been a midwesterner most of my life. The Midwest is a section of American society that has a strong view of itself as having been passed over in American culture. Neither in climate nor in glamour can it compete against the claims of the East to cultural superiority or the attractions of the West and South in weather. In the 1960s it was clearly in decline economically as well. Any move to a place of such flamboyant hedonis-
tic charms as sunshine and year-round bikinis carried a stigma of desertion.
There was also the fear that such charms would remove the press to work. This fear seems to me to have been compounded by a belief that academic work was like other occupations—not play but work, a means to an end, and that it required a whip rather than a steering wheel to keep us scholars at our "tasks." People in Champaign-Urbana would often praise the town by saying that since there was nothing much else to distract you, academics got a lot of work done, and created close friendships because sociability was so necessary.
When the University of California at San Diego again offered me the chance to start a sociology department in 1967, I accepted. I felt drawn by the climate and scenic beauty, as well as the opportunity to create a new department after my own vision. It would be a department that broke with the conventional quantitative bent of modern sociology and emphasized the central importance of observation and data collection. But the offer also held out the opportunity to begin a new intellectual life. I was growing aware of the great revisionist streams of philosophical and linguistic thought in Europe and the United States that were turning the academic world upside down. Noam Chomsky had lectured at Illinois in the late 1960s, and it made me aware of the revolution in thought coming from linguistics. While in Japan I had read Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind . On my return to the United States in January 1968 I first heard of ethnomethodology and read Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology and Jack D. Douglas's The Social Meaning of Suicide . These works displayed originality and yet also continuity with the "messages" of symbolic interactionists and social anthropologists that I had absorbed at Chicago with Blumer, Hughes, and Warner. They were all skeptical of the direction of mainstream sociology toward a scientific model that substituted instruments for a close relationship to subject matter. I had years of reading dissertations at Illinois in which sophisticated instruments and statistical analyses were applied to poor data, of coping with abstract concepts that came between the investigator and the matter being investigated—to say nothing of the poor reader.
Another, quite subsidiary push was that I hoped by moving to diminish the heavy load of what I called "paperwork." It was not only the committee meetings of department and university that caused me anguish but also the recurring mound of correspondence, including manuscripts to read, colleagues' work to evaluate, and journal articles to
referee. Always my desk seemed overlayed by reminders of letters to answer, these to read, and conferences to prepare for. They were continuing goads to my sense of responsibility and collegial duty. At UC San Diego I hoped—in vain, it proved—to manage these responsibilities better and to keep clear the center of my sociological life—teaching, observing, and writing.
On and Off the Wagon
The guilt and fear that troubled me in deciding to move to California were dissolved in the task of building a new department and a new campus. They were multiplied by the stress and storm of the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s at UC San Diego. Any idea that I had traded the hurly-burly of Illinois for the laid-back life of the West Coast was washed away quickly. These past fifteen years have been busy ones in all respects, professionally and otherwise.
Symbolic Crusade was published in 1963, and I turned away from alcohol and alcohol control as a subject. I wrote about India and development. With David Riesman and Zelda Gamson, I did an observational study of higher education. I conducted research in Japan and the United States with Ken'ichi Tominaga of Tokyo University. I wrote on social movements and produced a small book on the concept of community. But in 1971 San Diego County asked me to study sentencing and plea bargaining in the case of drinking-driving offenders, and I was back in the field of alcohol studies.
For the past twelve years, while I have continued to do other work, my focus has been the study of alcohol—alcohol and law, alcohol and knowledge, alcoholism and social movements, alcohol and the welfare state, alcohol control and class conflicts. Out of it has come the work of which I am proudest, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order . But I have been involved in a variety of other activities, including conferences and papers, review of research and the development of policy at the federal and county levels, and studies and observations at the local level. These activities have led me to audiences and arenas other than academic or sociological.
I like to say that alcohol has kept me honest. I mean by this statement that studying alcohol control has kept me in continuous touch with the nonacademic world. I also mean that study of a restricted body of materials acts as a brake to my disposition toward speculative isolation that lacks substantive existence. I see myself as a person who likes to develop
ideas and explanations, essentially a spinner of tales. I need the bite of depth and complexity that a policy-oriented field of paradoxical and popularly accepted matters can provide. Alcohol has been a field through which I have been able to think through a variety of intellectual issues, to uncover alternative and diverse ways of looking at what others take for granted, as I have tried to do for drinking-driving. It has also given me an arena for bringing a diversity of perspectives and fields to bear. I would describe The Culture of Public Problems as a study in the sociologies of science, knowledge, and law. It draws on historical, literary, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives as well as field observations.
It is this quality of developing ideas on the grounds of a deep understanding of a narrow swath that I find particularly appealing and fun. It comes close to resolving the tension between the analytical generality and the empirical particularity that is, for me, the most useful and also the most difficult form of sociological scholarship. Over the years my distaste for abstract theory, for the gloss on gloss on gloss that fills so many sociological shelves, has increased. I have great respect for scholarship that has resulted from immersion into the detailed observation and study of substantive matter. If one thinks of sociology as a generalizing and scientific discipline, and history as more particularistic and humanistic, I have become drawn toward the historical pole among sociologists.
As part of this transformation, my felt assumptions about the fragility of social organization and the illusory character of much public presentation has deepened. My earlier title for The Culture of Public Problems was The Illusions of Authority . I wanted by that title to emphasize both the limited character of authority in modern society and the illusory quality of much that passes for knowledge and conventional wisdom in the topic of drinking-driving and in the general public and professional understandings of "the alcohol problem." I find the stuff of most public discussion, through the media or the political arenas, to be the maintenance of a facade, a theater of events rather than a reference point for understanding actions. I am writing this section on an election day. I will vote, but I have no great conviction about the importance of the choices. Not only am I skeptical about the assumed relation between political rhetoric and political acts, but I am also equally skeptical about the extent of governmental ability to affect social institutions, international relationships, or the day-to-day behavior of citizens in more than a peripheral manner. I feel a little like the woman I heard about who, when informed that Ronald Reagan slept through Cabinet meetings, said, "Despite that fact, I still won't vote for him."
The Now and Future Years
Writing this autobiography comes at a time of turning points for me. I am now well into my sixties and thinking seriously of retiring. For the next few years I will be engaged in a new intellectual turn—toward literary criticism, the history of ideas, and visual imagery—though in the study of social movements. But for some time I have been upset, frustrated, and angered by the busyness of my life. The mound of "paperwork" that disturbed me when I left the University of Illinois has grown into a mountain of matters that cannot be ignored without grave detriment to others and to my view of myself as a responsible person. I work part of most evenings and weekends. I have less time now for my painting than five years ago, although it has come to mean more to me. I have less time to read the mystery stories, novels, and biographies that I love. Even my teaching and writing suffer from things half done.
I have always been attracted by the Hindu view of life as ideally a series of ashramas , or transformations over the life cycle, from the material to the spiritual, from family to self, from the profane to the holy, and from sexuality to celibacy (that one I never found attractive). The thought of being outside the swirl of institutional life is appealing to me. The idea of a life without a schedule of places to be at set times, without guilt for responsibilities not fulfilled or deadlines not met, and without the need to manufacture opinions seems an attractive utopia. I hear my wife's doubting refrain that I will be grossly unhappy when the phone calls stop, the letters and requests no longer appear, and nobody knows my name. Perhaps.
We live in a time when to be young is the aspiration of the aged. We must do what we can to keep ourselves young; to continue to be what we have been. So says popular wisdom, but I do not feel it. Let me proclaim my right, even my desire, to be old. I wish for the hedonism of the aged, the chance to shun responsibility and prudence. Let me live with only one deadline in front of me.
Afterword
I might have ended this sketch at this point, but in the act of writing, my image of myself and my times has undergone a transformation. I might have let stand the picture of a self-satisfied scholar, proud in his achievements, comfortable in his life, eager to expand his enjoyments. But this
exercise in internal reflection has unexpectedly sharpened a lingering disquiet.
My generation of academics has been a privileged one. Perhaps that sense of having been privileged has caused my restiveness. I am struck by the self-indulgent tone of my account. My generation of scholars has had the luxury of absorbing work and public respect. At the same time academic life has provided us with much discretionary time and supported plentiful travel all over the world. For some time now it has given me more than a comfortable income. Teaching has been easy and enjoyable for me, though less so in recent years.
I watched the television reports of the last presidential election with an Olympian coolness toward the whole process. Skeptic that I am, I could not share the significance that others gave to it. The differences between parties and candidates were to me a dramatization, a symbolic action without much relation to events before or after. The supposed changes made by this or that administration appear to me overstated by friends and foes alike. The area in which government can act seems to me quite limited. The rhetorical bombast of the participants, even for tactical purposes, is more insulting to my intelligence than I can stand. Nor can I share the radical condemnation of the process: it too is grossly simplified and unbearably doctrinal.
Where does that leave me? I can identify with no one. After the elections I am neither happy nor sad. My only connection to them is that of the voyeur. I am not a part of my community, of the people around me—disconnected but not angered, not even alienated. Have I become Camus's Stranger?
The election is a microcosm, a metaphor that serves to locate a feeling. I have been aware of it, at the public level, as a part of the intellectual and scholarly culture of our time. But the other level, the level of personal restlessness, has been submerged. That feeling of being unconnected comes to my awareness more pointedly and poignantly as I write this autobiography.
It has seemed to me for some time that the intellectual and scholarly world of analysis and critical posture has moved us further and further from the communities of our time and place. It makes it difficult for us to lend ourselves to the missions, zeal, and emotional sensibilities with which others engage their worlds. When people outside my scholarly circles heatedly discuss public problems, I find I become the nay sayer. I am the skeptic who destroys the assumptions on which both sides of the argument base their conflict. Like a trained debater, I can always find
something to be said for and against each side and can end up, as I recently titled a paper about the scholar of social problems, "Being on the Side."
The description is as applicable to others as to myself. My work in alcohol studies is a piece of that which characterizes the inner circle of serious scholars in the field. It is perhaps caught again by a title of a lecture I gave in New Mexico a year ago—"The Case for the Drinking Driver." We scholars are the critics of the lay people and professionals who work thinking they are making the world a better place. We undercut them with our skepticism and our knowledge.
That academic pride in, and love of, rational criticism to which I am clearly and fully committed is at the same time a disdain toward those who do not, or cannot, share it. In his history of American universities, The Emergence of the American University , Laurence Veysey writes of the nineteenth-century university as having offered the professor a haven somewhere between a business career and exile—neither monastery nor counting house. That very ambiguity of loyalties, Veysey argues, made an academic posture toward the society possible. We have in my generation tried to retain that quality of monastic retreat while reaping the rewards of the counting house.
My sense about the disconnectedness of academic life would not be so disquieting were it not for the other plane, the more personal one of emotion and feeling toward other people. There is a lack of selflessness in this account of my life, a lack that I find in most of my colleagues. I am amazed at people who perform acts of generosity and kindness that overwhelm me with their self-sacrifice. These are people who devote days of a busy life to help in hospitals, who adopt handicapped children, who give away sizable sums of money to aid a needy family, who leave their societies to work among the people in poor countries, and who minister to the sick. They give of themselves—their time, their income, their love—not for causes but for specific persons and in specific situations.
Selflessness is also a way of giving emotionally, of being attached to persons. We academics use our intellectuality to hide ourselves from each other. It cuts off the emotions of sympathetic feeling that might generate ties and commitments between persons rather than between colleagues. It gives our life and even our work a vision of a world of roles but not of persons. To be sure, I can display a record of public service on this board or that and charity to various causes. But I do not give time, and I do not give of my emotional self.
I have come to admire those whose work moves them to do some-
thing for others rather than to or about others. My wife is a social worker (a profession most sociologists look at with amusement and ambiguity) in a children's hospital. Watching her, the doctors, the nurses, and the volunteers work with cancer patients and their families makes me sense an accomplishment that I envy.
The universities are themselves a party to this pervading intellectual coolness. Still among the more decent institutions in this society, they have come to prize toughness in the struggle to raise the productivity (a word now common in academic circles) of the organization in the quest for prestige. The Nielsen-like ratings that infest present-day campus administration come to be the symbols of successful stewardship. We become ever more suspicious of decent motives of kindness and personal attachment lest human warmth interfere with organizational glory.
It is life lived at this microlevel, at the level called communities, that I miss in my account. Rereading it, I found myself appalled at its self-indulgence. In the very choice of how I would organize this autobiography I could not aim to touch the reader, to give of myself. Here too I had to hide behind the mask of role—the role of sociological analyst. Yet everywhere in the world I have been, in every class, culture, and country, I have learned that the elements that move and absorb our lives are those basic elements of human contact—our children, our parents, our families, our friendships, our communities, and our work. Birth, death, love, hate, lust, greed—they are the places in ourselves where we connect with others.
Such retrospection does not lead me to retract the sense of satisfaction I have with my life and my work. Only I wonder, like the character in that O. Henry story, what would it have meant to have chosen another road, to be writing another autobiography?