PART III—
MOBILITY STORIES

Chapter Nine—
An Unlikely Story

John Gagnon

Naming the ways in which the events of an individual's life have influenced his or her works is necessarily a trickster's task. It requires a decision that, first, there is some work separate from the events of the life and, second, that the order of effect is from life to work. How much more interesting it might be if one asked how writing a certain article affected the way the author reared children or loved friends. Even as I submit to the usual autobiographical pretense that early life affects later life, that nonwork life affects the content of the work, I submit to the reader that we are conflating two temporary representations, the representation of a life and the representation of a body of works. Neither the events nor the works will be in this new representation what they were when experienced or produced.

This version will be full of denied absences and illusory presences, of voices strangled and ventriloquism practiced; it will add up to truths and fancies masquerading as each other. This creation of a plausible past must submit to at least two kinds of demands of the present, first to the contemporary selves that will recollect the past, and second to the present-day fashions of making autobiographical sense. When I think about my own past it seems to be a docudrama (perhaps a ficumentary, a doction, a faction) that I re-create, not quite on a daily basis but often enough, to produce a semblance of authorship for audiences of different weights and valences. There are, of course, certain epiphanies, episodes that when elaborated and condensed can be comfortably told to nearly everyone, including my self. But even these ritual professions provide

only a fragile link between my recollections and the listing of works in my curriculum vitae.

Even when I reread in a current c.v. the small number of works attributed solely to Gagnon, I have no certain memory of having been the author of those texts. How much more suspect are the majority of citations listed as " . . . and Gagnon," "Gagnon and . . . ," or " . . . , . . . , and Gagnon." Sometimes I recall the contexts in which I wrote or talked, and the colleagues who wrote or talked with me, but the ideas and the text into which they were made are strange to me. Although I am willing to take credit and salary for that portion of "it" or "them" that others believe I have done, the portion I believe I have done is somewhat different from the institutional estimates. Whatever my transient claims to auctoritas might have been, it is a sense of detachment that now dominates. I sometimes wish detachment would become indifference, but one must eat.

Lately I have, with some perverse comfort, begun to think of my life as an extended example of tourism. I no longer wish to be a successful native or even a virtuous traveler. I like better the figure with camera that has just stepped down from the bus to pause for a few moments in front of everyday façades crowded with tour guides, confectionery sellers, and postcard and souvenir hawkers, whose speeches and gestures and silences will only be fragmentarily understood.

My itinerary begins with conception. I traveled, while in the womb, from a Depression-gripped mining town in Arizona to be born in a dying mill town in Massachusetts. My mother was forty-three, but I was spared visible birth defects. She was a devout Roman Catholic for her entire life and came from hardworking and temperate Irish stock. She went to work in the braid shops when she was twelve. Mary Emma Murphy was married at age thirty to a French Canadian in a town where the Canucks were beginning to fall below the ambitious Portuguese in the ethnic morality play. My father had run away from home (and the cotton mills) when he was fifteen and had returned a decade later, an atheist and a Wobbly, after hoboing and hard-rock mining in Montana, Alaska, Colorado, and Arizona—or at least so the family legend went. I think I can attest to the mining, the atheism, and the anarchism, but not to the places.

In this divided house my mother forced a decision about my fate. I was to be her child, a child of the church, a child of Irish respectability, a printer or a post office worker—no atheism, no anarchism, no working in the mines. My father honored the bargain, though as I grew older he

offered me a book or two that cast doubt on the morality of the robber barons and the mining industry. Secretly he may have been relieved by not having to bear the responsibility for my fate, but he never let on.

By the time I was four we were moving again, first to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Vermont and then, at the bottom of the Depression, back across the country to Bisbee, Arizona, the place of my conception. Goodbye to respectable poverty; hello, raggedy-ass poor. My mother changed my birthday to get me into school ahead of my class; I thought I was born on Columbus Day for at least another five years. Comic books, Flash Gordon, Riders of the Purple Sage, the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, Life magazine, heat lightning in the sky, barren ochre hillsides, mining slag heaps, pulled teeth, car sickness, eyeglasses, first communion, stations of the cross, nightmares. My sister went away to nurse's training at Hotel Dieu in El Paso; we took a bus to visit her when she graduated, and I saw The Wizard of Oz . My mother and I went to church; I skipped catechism, was afraid of the nuns and God, lied at confession, and played alone. My father read books and made speeches, and they ran us out of town.

We looked like Okies, and at the Yuma crossing into California the state police treated us like Okies. They said they were looking for prohibited fruit and vegetables that might be hiding the precursors of the dreaded Mediterranean fruit fly. So my father took the mattress off the roof of the Model A and emptied out all of the boxes and pillowcases and suitcases onto the ground. The cops fingered the cotton dresses and the denim work clothes and the worn bedding, but did not find what they were looking for. Welcome to the Garden of Eden.

Long Beach during World War II was paradise. The three of us lived in a one-room, wood-sided, canvas-roofed, army-style tent for two years and shared a one-room apartment after that. My parents slept on a Murphy bed, and I slept on the couch. I do not remember a primal scene. There was an antiaircraft battery stationed in front of the apartment building, between the boardwalk and the beach, until 1943. The night sky during the blackout was disturbingly full of stars. I learned how distant they were, and I was disturbed in a different way. I started school wearing short pants and was regularly chased home by redheaded Jimmy O'Reilly, whose father had taught him how to box. My father said I had to fight my own battles, so I took to skulking home by back alleys. My mother bought me long pants, but that did not make me brave. I liked a girl in the fifth grade and traded her mayonnaise-on-white-bread sandwiches for raw fish, but she was sent to a concentration camp in 1942.

In the center of town was one of Andrew Carnegie's libraries. By the middle of the war I had read my way though the children's section and was promoted upstairs to the adult books. I read without direction or discrimination; I was voracious, a cannibal of other lives. Sea stories, adventures, historical novels—I read Beau Geste and Apartment in Athens and A Farewell to Arms without raising my eyes from the continuous text. I thought Moby Dick was a book about whales and did not understand what the scarlet letter stood for. James Michener, Edna Ferber, Kathleen Winsor, Thomas B. Costain, Frank Yerby, Joseph Conrad, and Knut Hamsun had scribbled just for me. The library was a daily stop; it was safer than the alleys, and on each bookshelf there were places to hide. Books, particularly books that were not true, became (and remain) the most important source of knowledge in my life. Everything that has happened to me since then first became known to me through the scrim of text. I learned about tongue kissing when reading Forever Amber (a book they nearly did not let me take out) and about the thrill of looking up a girl's skirt from Studs Lonigan, a thrill I acquired without knowing what I was supposed to be looking at.

I caught the disease of science fiction while skipping catechism lessons for confirmation. There was a used-magazine shop in a bungalow down the street from the private home in which the priest met with those of us who did not go to parochial school. I began reading World War One Air Aces but quickly switched to Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories . I spent lovely, guilty Saturday mornings leafing through the pulp pages, disappearing into the future while worrying whether my mother would find out that I did not know the justifications for the third commandment. The musty smell of decaying paper on shelves still evokes meditative quiet in me.

As my dependence on text grew, the grip of the church weakened. It was too demanding, too frightening, too singular. I was unable to treat religious praxis with the requisite balance of indifference and attachment, to view sinning and being forgiven as part of a cycle of casual pollution and easy purity. I took it all too seriously. The version of Catholic theology preached by the Irish primitives from the pulpit of Saint Anthony's offered no comfort, only terror. After a series of minor crises, visits to the Jesuits, and the like, my spirit left, but my body continued to go to mass with my mother until I left home. "There is no God," I said to Carlfred Broderick as we walked home from Benjamin Franklin Junior High School one sunny spring afternoon. I think I made some attempt at explaining why, and I think he was shocked. I was

fourteen. I went to church until I was seventeen; I worried a bit about taking the wafer in my mouth without going to confession, but that passed. When I got to the University of Chicago, I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and discovered a more courageous ancestor.

My father died in the spring of my apostasy. A man in a green mackintosh came to the door at about four-thirty in the afternoon and asked where my mother was. He was the designated messenger, probably having been given the nasty job because he lived nearby: They don't have a phone, Charley, so you'll have to do it. Anyway it's on your way home. I told him that my mother was at work. We stood at the open door. When would she be home? I was not sure. We shuffled about for a moment or two. Then he told me that my father had died that day at work. He said he was sorry to have to bring the message, especially sorry to have to deliver it to a kid, but he couldn't wait around because he had to get home to his family and, well, he was sorry. I called the shipyard on a pay phone, hoping there had been a mistake, but they told me no mistake had been made. My mother came back an hour later, and I told her just like that. She shrieked "Oh my God" and immediately ran away to be comforted by a neighbor woman. I have always wondered why she did not doubt, even for an instant, the truth of what I said, and why she did not pause to comfort me.

My father's death settled the covert struggle over my religious, occupational, and political fate—no atheism, no mines, no anarchy. Long after my father died, my mother said to me that she was glad that she had outlived him because he was already thinking of returning to the mines. Indeed, he had taken some of their tiny savings to buy part of a gold mine with an old comrade from the Industrial Workers of the World. She had rescued the savings, and she thought she had rescued me.

At the same time his death was the most distal cause of my attending the University of Chicago. My mother faced the choice of whether we should continue to live in California or return to Fall River, Massachusetts, where her remaining family still lived. We journeyed north via San Francisco and Spokane and then east through Chicago and New York to Fall River. These were the closing moments of the age of the train. The summer of 1946 was for me a great numinous time, a preserve of fragments only one of which is relevant to this tale. On our way back from New York to California we had an extended stay in Chicago when the Golden State Limited was delayed ten hours. The day was full of touristic possibilities ready to be seized. First we took a luxurious

shower in the white-tiled bathrooms of Union Station, sumptuous with soap, hot water, and fluffy towels, and then stepped outside to the Grey Line tour buses waiting in the August sun. Shall it be the north side of the city or the south side? The bus to the south side left first. We happily looked out the windows at train stations, black folks (who then lived in black belts), churches, and parks and then headed down the Midway Plaisance (oh World's Fair names!) toward Lake Michigan.

Our bus slowly rolled between Harper Library on the left ("The crowns on one tower and the bishops' hats on the other symbolize the separation of church and state," said the tour guide), Burton and Judson dormitories on the right. Again on the left we passed Rockefeller Chapel, Ida Noyes Hall, and the Laboratory School—fake late-Gothic stage sets. Though unlikely, it being the end of summer, perhaps William Ogburn and Ernest Burgess, and even Louis Wirth and Everett Hughes, may have been thinking sociological thoughts in their department offices at 1126 East Sixtieth Street at the very moment we rode past. But these were not names and thoughts that I would have conjured.

Perhaps it was the reverential tone of the tour guide, the hot shower, the freedom of being on the road again, going back to Eden, that made me say quite without premeditation—indeed, how could a poor fatherless child have meditated such a thing?—"I'm going to go to that university." My mother held her tongue but thought (as she told me later when I was testing my recollection of this story), Who the hakes [heck ] does he think he is? It is fortunate for our continuing affections over the next four decades that she never let on whether she had found out. I do not know, but perhaps if we had taken the north-side tour first rather than second, I might have responded with equal passion to DePaul, Loyola, or Northwestern or pledged myself to becoming a Baha'i.

My desire to go to the University of Chicago remained only a wish that I invoked to defend myself when I was confronted by those who knew they were going to Reed, Berkeley, Stanford, USC, UCLA, or even Harvard. I secretly thought that I would go to Long Beach City College. Actually, I did not plan to go to college at all because I did not know the mechanics of going. Of course I had read novels in which people went to college, but they never said anything about how to write for catalogues or how to compose a convincing why-I-want-to-go-to-your-college-more-than-anything-else-in-the-world essay. I had never known anyone who had gone to college. That statement is not literally true; I had known many schoolteachers, but it never occurred to me that they had been licensed to teach what they taught by attending college. Our impov-

erishment both in money and, more important, in middle-class craft made all colleges, including the University of Chicago, seem as far away as the moon.

I was, however, rescued by a kindly man named Oakes, later registrar of the University of Chicago, who came to Long Beach Polytechnic High School on a recruiting visit. He told me how to apply to the university and may even have arranged to send me the application. Without that visit I would have gone to Long Beach City College. It perplexes me in retrospect why such a man was wandering around the United States in 1949 to recruit interested youth to the university (that is how we learned to call it, not the University of Chicago, or Chicago, just the university). Had the university put him on a train and aimed him west? Was he already in California for other reasons? It all seemed natural to me at the time. Was this not what all universities did? Much later I was told (perhaps falsely) that these recruiting efforts were part of an attempt to increase the national representation in the College. This I assume to be a code phrase for not having all of the undergraduate students—except the disappearing ex-GIs—be young Jews from Chicago and New York. I wonder sometimes who was left out when I was let in.

I went to the College of the University of Chicago as an innocent. I had not understood the plan of the university's president, Robert Maynard Hutchins (who now remembers the Hutchins plan?), nor that I was to be subjected to a week of examinations to "place" me in the course of study that would make me a liberally educated man. I recall being given a short story by Henry James and a paper on the theory of braids, both of which I was to read and on which I was to be examined in a few days. I did not understand either one. From these examinations I learned that it would take me two years to get a slightly tainted B.A. (True degrees take four years; time on task is education.) I was proud of getting the B.A. in two years until I realized that I was exactly where I should have been; the first two years of the College were meant for those who entered it after two years of high school. So much for precocity.

There was a second set of required examinations—the first complete physical I had ever been given. From these examinations I learned that I was defined epidemiologically as a wanderer. As a consequence of having lived four years in Massachusetts, one year in Vermont, five years in Arizona, and seven years in California, with asides to New York, my diseases could not have local origins. I rather liked the new label; it seemed a bit more promising than saying we moved because we were

too poor to stay. I was also told my teeth were in bad shape, which was attributed to sweets but which I blamed on the welfare dentist whom I avoided because he did not use novocaine.

These were only the first of a long series of misunderstandings between the university and me, misunderstandings often of my making, to which the university remained generously indifferent until they became a bureaucratic irritant. Kindly deans then resolved them in my favor because they thought I had promise, but of such misunderstandings and forgivenesses are disorderly careers made.

My first term in the College was exquisite. I can still recall the syllabi and I still reread many of the assigned texts. I met up with culture and personality through Freud, Durkheim, Gunnar Myrdal, Allison Davis, and John Dollard. I cannot say that they made much sense to me on first reading, nor did a career in sociology suddenly seem a sensible option when I listened to David Riesman and Philip Rieff. More appealing to my tastes were works by Thucydides, Milton, Forster, Joyce, Austen, Dostoyevski, and Huxley—works of fancy that called for response more than analysis. From there on, it was mostly downhill; I was not in any way prepared to grasp and order the opportunity offered by the College and the university to make learning into a career. I did not know how, and so each idea came to me as sweetly and individually as a flower, and on occasion I would group a bunch of ideas into a bouquet. It was good to know, but knowing for what eluded me.

It took me five years to finish the two-year program of courses for the bachelor's degree, but not because I was idle. In retrospect I seemed to have been frightfully busy, but my life was evasive and tangential rather than centered in the academy. I cannot remember any deep intellectual experience with the faculty in that entire period—except with Edward Bastian, who remained kind even as I stumbled through a fine history preceptorial that he taught. He suggested I write about the Bloomsbury group and read Anatole France. He told me something I treasured as a compliment—that I had been born old in the soul.

During those five years I attended many classes, often at the introductory graduate level, but actually I was taking courses in Harper Library, middle-class practice, the city of Chicago, and Jewishness. My first job in Chicago was shelving books in the stacks of Harper Library. Shelve one, browse two. The quiet hours when I worked among the PN and PQ shelves were rather better than the doldrums of the Hs, though there were many pleasures in the DCs and GNs. The beginnings of middle-class craftiness and good manners I learned from young women, particu-

larly two, whose families behaved with an uncommon generosity toward a young man who desperately wanted to please, did not know how to please, and hated himself for trying to be pleasing.

But it was the membrane between the university and the city that offered the most vivid possibilities. It was a stage for the most romantic, bohemian pretenses: drinking at the High Hat or Jimmy's; listening to jazz at the Cadillac and Crown Propeller lounges on Sixty-third Street, at the Beehive on Fifty-fifth Street, or at the Sutherland Lounge on South Parkway; and listening to folk music on Folkways record label, the local Young People's Socialist League singers, or at Big Bill and Moore's. I went to the movies without letup. There seemed to be projectors running in every rectangular room of the university as well as triple features at the Ken and the Kim on Sixty-third Street. And there was work that I did for pay on assembly lines and in machine shops, ice plants, and packing houses. The work kept reminding me of what I did not want to be, but I still did not know what I wanted to be. And it was the work that paid the rent.

If the University of Chicago had refused some Jewish applicant to accept me, a goy, it had, in an indirect sense, failed. For I was far more vulnerable to what appeared to me to be the coherent cultural claims of secular, cosmopolitan forms of Jewishness than theories of ethnoreligious origins might have predicted. In early adolescence I was already (if invisibly) detached from the religious feelings that are the core of Americanized Irish Catholicism, except perhaps the terrors of damnation. By the time I was fifteen even those fears came in infrequent surges, and finally they were replaced by an appreciation of the brute indifference of the physical world (nature signifying emptiness rather than an occasion for awe) and the thoughtful cruelties of humankind. I was also detached from my working-class world of intermittent poverty and intellectual mindlessness. As a somewhat cowardly and physically inept youth, the conventional working-class hierarchies of strength and sexual exploitation were outside my abilities even when they were relevant. At the same time I had no interest at all in Judaism, only in what I took to be a common marginality and a common interest in the book.

Being bookish took me to the university, and it was there that I first met a large number of people who were bookish beyond my dreams. They were nearly all Jews, part of that postwar release of Jews into the mainstream of life in the United States as the intensity of anti-Semitism in academic life began to fall. It was not that these young people were all intellectuals, indeed most were climbers in the bureaucracies and the

professions or mere careerists of the book. However, they seemed to value, perhaps only for that moment and in that context, perhaps only for purposes of gossip and belonging, the only activities at which I had talent. Had there been a place for socially mobile infidels at the universities of Cairo or Baghdad in the great ages of Islamic life, I would have become a near-Arab.

I was unaware of Jews in any deep way before that time. I did not even know the universal Christian fact that the Jews had killed Jesus. I may have missed that point since I often daydreamed during mass. Even rumors of the whirlwind had passed me by in my provincial Eden, though the death march at Bataan and Wake Island were included in the attractions at the United Artists movie house. I may have fallen in love in the summer of 1949 with a girl about whom it was said that she, a Jew, had survived in German-occupied Poland by pretending to be a Christian. I am not sure anymore whether I was in love or even whether I should believe the story, but I like remembering that she looked like Ingrid Bergman.

I am carried back by this meditation further into my adolescence, to a time when I did not understand why Nathan Tucker could not play on Saturday. He would disappear above his father's tailor shop, where on every other day of the week sailors from the Navy would come to be fitted for their dress blues and buy their combat ribbons. It was the first stage of the ritual of "getting blued, screwed, and tattooed." After my father died, Nathan's father took us fishing in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I did not catch a fish in a whole week. It was the only extended time I ever spent with Nathan's father. I never learned his first name, but it was of course a different time, and I would not have called him by it in any case.

During the period I knew Nathan he must have been bar mitzvahed, but I was not aware of that event even as a ceremony, nor was I aware that hundreds of thousands of children our same age were being murdered in Europe. Nathan and I quarreled violently on the handball court when we were fifteen; he hit me with the ball three times, I thought deliberately. I threw the ball at him and hit him, the only Jew I ever physically attacked, but I did not know then that he was a Jew. That quarrel seemed to end our friendship. Still I do not think that we would have been friends much longer, for he was not very bookish. It is out of the university context of Jewishness that I married a Jewish woman (by parentage, not religious training) and had two Jewish children (so identified by Mosaic, Nuremburg, and Soviet laws). I worry

about them, as I do about my close friends, nearly all of whom are Jewish and nonreligious. I do not think the era of pogroms and holocaust is over. That worry, the circle of people I love, and bookishness comprise my Jewishness. In this peculiar union of Venn diagrams are represented the immediacy of terror and love and the distance found in the text and the library. What then to do or feel about Zionist colonization, land expropriation, orthodox theocracy, Menachem Begin and the Stern gang, the West Bank, Shatila and Sabra? Perhaps my Jewishness has nothing to do with those matters, but only perhaps. The world fashioned by history does not allow me to choose my connections. Zionist colonization came after pogroms, Israel after holocaust—one entwined in the other, as the Palestinian diaspora is another twist in the rope after the establishment of Israel. There is no place to stand at ease, happily convinced of the rightness of one's stand in the midst of competing injustice and misery.

I entered the graduate program in sociology at Chicago largely as the result of failure, drift, and misadventure. My vague occupational dreams in high school had been of the hard sciences, but an inept performance in calculus and a certain penchant for text deflected me from that path. Medicine was out early, a sort of nonchoice. It was my first encounter with the ungloved reality principle at the university:

Psychology was eliminated by two short interviews on a hot August day in 1952. I suspected that the first great love affair of my life was ending and hoped that if I could make an honest man of myself, she might think more positively of our sharing the future together. So I tried to get some vocational counseling as I slithered down the occupational aspiration scale. It is difficult to communicate the fusing of heat and smell of an August day in the Chicago of the 1950s. The sky was bleached milky white; the edges of real buildings quivered in the heat, whereas the edge between shadow and light was hard; the asphalt sucked at the soles of shoes. The wind blowing from the west was thick with mutant molecules. It carried the taint from the packing houses and

tanneries and the heavy metals and complex organic waste from the vents of factories. The enamel finishes baked off the cars as they spewed lead, carbon, and sulfur out of their exhausts. Future cancers were in every breath.

In back of the University of Chicago Press building were some leftover World War II barracks, one of which housed rats and rat psychologists. On the second floor I found one of the healthiest men I had even seen. He was sitting quite composed at his desk, his brow not even damp, his shirt neatly pressed, his nose unoffended by the extraordinary stench of the place. Stretching away from us down the length of the barracks were what seemed to be hundreds of Skinner boxes in which rats were squeaking, pushing levers, eating rewards, and shitting through the grills into trays. The thousands of little clicks of the lever were being recorded by inked needles on endless loops of graph paper. There were a couple of animal tenders in white coats who seemed to be constantly engaged in filling the token dispensers with tiny pellets of food and wheeling out garbage pails full of tiny pellets of shit. The man told me that the future of psychology was now to be found in the intersect of physiology and learning, and he proposed a curriculum that sounded suspiciously like the premed program except that you did not get the golden handshake when you were done.

He asked if I minded whether he ate lunch while we talked. When I voiced no objection—indeed I encouraged him—he took out a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on white bread thickly smeared with mayonnaise. Each time he bit into it, a little mayonnaise pulsed up each of the grooves between his white, perfect front teeth. I thanked him for his time and bolted into the sunlight.

My second appointment was in a quasi-Victorian building across Fifty-eighth Street from the barracks where they kept the clinical psychologists. I climbed up four creaky flights of stairs until I reached a belfry office. The office was distinctly cooler and dimmer than the outside, and a small, dark man looked up from what he was reading to ask me what I wanted. I said I thought I might want to become a psychologist. Did I understand that many people became psychologists only to solve their personal problems? I knew enough Freud to nod appreciatively at this insight. Did I not think that it might be best to seek therapy, to set the mental record straight, so to speak, before making an occupational choice of this kind? I said that his idea had merit and thanked him and left. My suspicion that my lover might be planning to leave me for someone with better chances in life seemed sadly reason-

able as I waited for the bus to take me to Continental Can for the afternoon shift.

I drifted around the university trying to avoid the fact that I had not passed the language course required for the B.A. It was also true that if I had passed the exam I would have had to give up a small scholarship that the university provided me and would have had to decide what to do when I grew up. So I sampled the graduate social sciences: a little anthropology, a disastrous sociology course from Everett Hughes, industrial relations, the history of trade unions, psychology, economic planning. Finally someone discovered that though I was still officially a student in the College, I had taken no courses in the College for a number of years and I was making no progress toward the degree. I was forbidden to register for further courses. I was still passing as a proletarian at the aircraft engine division of Ford Motor Company, and that job paid the rent. I was now also ready to marry, but we had agreed to do so only if I finally received a degree. Proletarians may be romantic, but only if they have the promise of becoming former proletarians. I passed the course, received a degree, and married—the alternative was the fantasy of learning to play flamenco guitar in a bar in Palma, Majorca. The meaning of the past does indeed come to meet one from the future.

I then began sliding down the academic funnel toward a graduate degree in sociology. I had already sampled the early-1950s Chicago department—Hughes, Anselm Strauss, Horton, Philip Hauser, and the young Otis Dudley Duncan—and then I took courses from the hybrid Columbia-Chicago department—Jim Coleman, Peter Blau, Peter Rossi, Elihu Katz, and (though they did not have the right ancestry, they did have the correct attitude) Goodman, Fred Strodbeck, and Jim Davis. These were busy years since by then I was working full-time at the Cook County Jail for the professor-sheriff Joseph Lohman. In a fit of sentimentality I even took courses from Clifford Shaw (does anyone remember The Jackroller? ). There is no way neatly to summarize these years. I learned a great deal of sociology since I faithfully went to classes and did assignments. But no particular idea and certainly no intellectual posture of these teachers became mine. As I reread this passage it seems arrogant, but it is not meant to be. These scholars were interested in training people in the profession (and good training it was), and whatever other mental passions they had were hidden behind their extraordinary craft. I never met any of them outside of the classroom, nor could I call any of them a friend. The fact that they spoke and I listened made them seem much older than I, though they were not. I did not know well any of my

contemporaries in graduate school, though I can trot out the names of the fairly large number who have become famous in the ways sociologists become famous. I knew Philips Cutright well for a time (our first marriages took place on consecutive days), and I knew Bill Simon better than most; we helped each other at exam time and in statistics but had no sense of a shared fate.

I do not know what I learned from working at the county jail. I was only twenty-three when I started and in time was third or fourth in administrative authority. When tear gas was fired to quell a disturbance, I was sometimes fifth or sixth, as Warden Johnson, Captain Makowski, and an Italian lieutenant took priority in those circumstances. I grasp for phrases that offer a glimpse of that place that was the center of my emotional life for three and a half years—sometimes it was biffo-bongo "Hill Street Blues" with real blood, sometimes a tragicomedy in the cloacal regions; it was always the heart of darkness. And it was also a job. The only remnants of those years are absurdist fables and the love I recollect having for a man named Hans Mattick. He was the assistant warden of the prison when I arrived, and what I learned from him are those banalities of spirit about which one is ashamed to speak in these modern times. My first wife thought I loved him more than I loved her. I protested against that view at the time partially because if it were true it seemed to be a betrayal of our marriage vows and partially because she insisted on labeling it latent homosexuality (psychiatric social work has its charms). I am now persuaded she was right on the love count, though I prefer, even now when such attachments are more generously regarded, the rhetoric of friendship. As a result of helping to manage this branch of the lower intestine of urban life, I had, by indecision, evolved into someone who was believed to know something about drugs, delinquency, crime, and prisons and who had passed the Ph.D. comprehensive examinations.

My career at the Institute for Sex Research began with a visit from Wardell Pomeroy, one of the coauthors of the original Kinsey reports. He was looking for someone trained in the social sciences who was knowledgeable about working-class and criminal populations (the lower social level, ISR people called them) and comfortable with the topic. Kinsey had been dead for two years, and the current team was completing the interviewing, data analysis, and writing for the publication of a major volume on sex offenders. I was more than a little ambivalent about the prospect of sex research (about which I had read only the selection on sexual behavior and social class in Class, Status and Power , edited by Reinhard

Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, 1953), and I was about as relaxed about the topic as any other upwardly mobile former Irish Catholic male. My own sexual life was as uninspired as it could be (I later discovered the hollowness of sexual inspiration), and whatever sexual history I had accumulated was largely from individual or joint follies. I was losing my job at the jail because of an Illinois law that forbade county sheriffs to succeed themselves in office, the justification of which was that if you could not enrich yourself in a single four-year term at the public trough, you did not deserve a second opportunity. No one else was offering me a job at the time, and to return to the university would have made me a degraded student again. My wife wanted to have a child, and there was always the rent.

I knew no more about the Kinsey reports than Time magazine was willing to tell. Actually, the first time I heard of them was in 1949 when I went out with the male troop who hung around on the boardwalk in front of our apartment building. We visited a homosexual man who lived in a flat in Seal Beach. He gave us beer and and told us about our mammalian homosexual heritage and that, according to Kinsey, one man in three had had sex with men. My compatriots had done some hustling, but I did not figure that out for nearly a decade. I had also heard Kinsey give a public lecture in Chicago just before his death, but I do not recall what he said; it must have been something about the conflict between culture, the law, and our mammalian heritage.

The first years of my career in sex research were pastoral. Bloomington, Indiana, where the institute was located, had peculiar powers of place, for it was a world without any distractions from the professional or the domestic. In those early years I learned a great deal about sex in various species, watched films of various species doing sexual things, wandered through the collections of erotica, even learned how to interview in the correct Kinsey fashion (for a description of this arcane skill see the section on interviewing in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ). It has occurred to me that if I outlive all of my colleagues of that period I may be the last person on earth to possess that knowledge in practice. I will be a living artifact waiting to be tapped for a marginal dissertation on the history of method. As I learned more about sex, I drifted away from sociology, though Alfred Lindesmith, Albert Cohen, and Sheldon Stryker served as my disciplinary anchors as well as my friends. Daily life was full of research and lawns and babies and faculty dinners and grant applications and cocktail parties and local gossip and mortgages and swing sets and journal articles and backyard barbecues and rumors of tiny infideli-

ties. The comforting rounds of young-faculty lives worked themselves out against the shaping purposes of university rhythms. We were allowed to be thoughtless because it had all been so well thought out before.

When I arrived at the Institute for Sex Research it was dying in the quiet way most institutions die, by reenacting its old routines. Indeed, the result of my first years there was a book that was the end of a tradition, the last of the great statistical life history studies of the varieties of sex offenders. Sex Offenders is of some use, even though it suffers from problems of sampling and analysis and, most devastatingly, from conceptual limitations. But for me it was a project with direction, a momentum that pulled me along. Whatever my doubts about the Kinsey tradition—the fictive nature of the sexual life history, its abstraction from individual experience, the transformation of pleasure into outlet, the fictions of the mammalian tradition—they were minor when weighted against the force of ongoing involvement. This is not a denial of my active participation in Kinsey work, only an attempt to place it at the intersection of three historical processes: the production of social-science texts, the production of a career, and, now, the production of a consideration of the same texts and career.

In the spring of 1964 William Simon drove through Bloomington as he traveled from Southern Illinois University, where he was teaching, to a COFO (Congress of Federated Organizations) meeting, a civil-rights movement training program at Miami University in Ohio. I was not in Bloomington then, but he stopped again when he returned west. We had seen each other a few times while he was still in Chicago, but only at the American Sociological Association meetings after he went to Southern Illinois. We had largely lost touch. For a variety of reasons he was on the job market, and for a variety of different reasons the institute was looking for a new staff member. It was a propitious pit stop, not least because a local restaurant offered us the curious delicacy "chocolate pie in season."

The institute was still winding down. Clyde Martin (one of the first of Kinsey's collaborators) had left in 1960; Wardell Pomeroy was thinking of leaving and finally left to go into private practice as a therapist in New York City in the mid-1960s. The full-time research staff would soon be down to two. Everyone was extraordinarily active, but most of the work was in the service of the collectivity and the past. The Kinsey ethos was to subordinate the individual to the goals of the collective (usually identified with Kinsey's). For example, until after William Simon and I left, no individual researcher received royalties for books or

honoraria for speeches; all those moneys were contributed to the institute's own funds. The volume on sex offenders was a collective project conceived in the Kinsey era; it rested on interviews collected before 1960, and the analysis and writing of that book dominated our efforts until 1963. Research support for the institution at that time was a grant to transfer all of the original case histories (some seventeen thousand interviews) to punch cards. This coding operation required eliminating even the slightest chance of identifying subjects from the interview schedules as well as deciphering the arcane manner in which the interviews were originally coded. Even with a crew of a dozen coders the process took some three years to complete. The activities of the institute's library and archive bulked large in everyone's lives; new materials were constantly being added to the collection, and older materials needed cataloguing and preservation.

At the same time there was a constant stream of notables visiting Indiana University who wished to see the collections of erotica and be taken for a tour. The tour usually began with the mysteries of the interview schedule ("all items are memorized by the interviewer") and the fact that the key to connecting the name file and the interviews themselves was known only by memory to senior members of the staff ("they never travel on the same plane lest the code be lost forever"). The tour guide then opened selected green cabinets containing erotic examples of Peruvian burial pots, Japanese netsuke, and Chinese prints. The tour ended with slightly demoralized tourists looking at the spines of erotic books in the library. This was the second time I had been a tour guide; the first was at the county jail, where we took citizens' groups and various notables (Henry Fonda when he appeared in Twelve Angry Men , Nelson Algren after he had written The Man with a Golden Arm , a tough-looking general in the shah of Iran's army) around the prison to educate them about the need for prison reform. "In this institution," we would tell them, "we have city, state, and federal prisoners, men and women, adults and juveniles; we have a daily count of about two thousand prisoners in a building designed for thirteen hundred; all of the cells are six feet by four feet by nine feet, designed small to hold only one person, though we now have two people in more than half the cells in the institution; we turn over twenty thousand prisoners a year; 60 percent of the prisoners here have been sentenced, and sentences range from one day to five years; we have thirteen men sentenced to die—note the electric chair on your left."

In addition to the collective effort during this period, I wrote a num-

ber of unexceptional articles on sex offenders, victims of sex offenses, and sex and aging, primarily from archival data. I was committed to making the archives and library accessible to outside scholars since these represented enormous investments of time and energy that were virtually unused. The problem was to breach the barriers to the archives for outsiders, barriers that were created when the institute was in its initial phase of development. Can anyone today experience directly what it must have been like for Kinsey to wander through a 1940s and 1950s sexual underworld collecting erotica? To believe, and then to write, that masturbation, homosexuality, and oral sex were no crime? It was a world in which the nudist magazine, the striptease, and the stag night were the outer limits of the erotic. It was J. Edgar Hoover's world of the sex moron and sex pervert and of the Boy Scout manual's theory of masturbation. It was a world in which sex research was an academic offense. I was an adolescent in that world.

Beginning with these tours and with a certain amount of recruiting among friends a number of outside scholars worked on problems presented by the archives—although I needed to persuade my colleagues to make the archives available. Out of these efforts came Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians as well as Morse Peckham's Art and Pornography (probably the best theoretical treatment of erotica to date). I helped some graduate students do dissertations in a variety of areas, especially in literature and folklore. These efforts pleased me since they continued my connection to literature and the arts, if only from an underground perspective. And they allowed me to continue to acquire a varied supply of unconnected facts. I view them as having generally been a good thing, producing some of the few texts that give evidence of the peculiarities of my intellectual practice.

Bill Simon's arrival in June 1965 turned the focus of activity at the institute from inward to outward, from the archives and the past to new research and the disciplines (sociology, anthropology, etc.). I do not think that this shift would have happened without his coming to Indiana, at least not as dramatically. He was less respectful of the past than I was, better oriented toward conceptualizing problems in ways that were of interest to sociology. From his experience at the National Opinion Research Center he knew how to do survey research. We shared an interest in the work of Kenneth Burke and the softer side of the symbolic interactionist tradition (emphasis on symbolic ) and a certain outsider status at Chicago, particularly as the sociology department grew more professional.

We collaborated daily from June 1965 to June 1968 and continued to work together, though with decreasing intensity, until August 1972. In the last months of 1965 we wrote three grant applications—one too many to have done them all well. I recollect some division of labor in the beginning: Bill supplied more of the disciplinary orientation, and I knew the substance of the research area. As we collaborated further, that difference grew less, and the balance and weight in contribution changed from project to project, paper to paper—indeed, from one period to another.

Each of the research projects was an attempt to bring the field of sexuality under the control of a sociological orientation. The novelty of what we did then was to lay a sociological claim to an aspect of social life that seemed determined by biology or psychology, but a claim that differed from Kingsley Davis's mechanical functionalism. The study of so-called normal psychosexual development in college students began with Erik Erikson and the crisis of the late 1960s among youth but finally turned into the ideas about the social elicitation and maintenance of sexual conduct that inform the opening chapter of Sexual Conduct . The research project on gay men (called homosexuals in those days) began with a distrust of etiological theories and a vision of sexual lives as determined by social factors. In the phrase homosexual banker our concern was with banker as much as with homosexual . Similarly, in our tiny study of lesbians we were interested in the effects of gender on sexuality. Ideas about scripting seem to be most visible in our early writing about pornography but grew slowly to have a more central place in our thinking, replacing Erving Goffman's dramaturgy with Burke's symbolic action.

In those three years the core of my and Bill Simon's joint work was effectively completed: two edited books, a large number of papers and presentations, and the volume Sexual Conduct, even though it was not published until 1973. It always strikes me as strange that all of this work was completed in a period that also contained so much political and personal chaos. The antiwar movement on campus was growing in intensity (I remember hearing students shouting "Napalm!" at Secretary of State Dean Rusk as he defended President Johnson's policy in Vietnam). At Indiana the tension over issues of racism (then called discrimination and prejudice) was chronic: in 1959 the barbers in the student union building would not cut the hair of black students; in 1968 black students threatened to block the running of the Little Five Hundred bicycle race, spring raison d'etre of the fraternities and sororities. Allen

Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came to campus and read poetry, to the pleasure of the students and the outrage of the governor, who declared, "No more cocksuckers on campus." The Fugs, a New York rock group composed of some serious intellectuals, stood outside the office building that housed the Institute for Sex Research and sang a hymn to the memory of Alfred Kinsey while attempting to levitate the structure itself.

I was not personally ready even for this modest success. I do not think that I had planned any speeches about how I had been done in by the mindless empiricists, thus explaining away my lack of productivity, but I surely was not ready to be a cheerful member of the profession. During this period my personal life became increasingly incoherent as the disordering opportunities presented by my life course were fulfilled and found unsatisfying. In a peculiar way as my desire for professional success had increased, and indeed such success had grown more likely, my contempt for the banality of my own desires flowered as well. As the Fugs's song went, "Love is not enough, fucking is not enough, nothing is enough."

By the spring of 1967 it was clear that the effort to pull the institute out of its inward-looking posture had split the organization. By the fall of that year it was also clear that Bill Simon and I would be on the job market and that the projects we had started would have to be reallocated. We took with us the college youth study, for which the field work had been completed, and left behind the study of the homosexual community that was nearly completed in Chicago. In June 1968 Bill left for the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, and I went to the State University of New York, Stony Brook, as a lecturer in sociology. Lecturer? I have forgotten to mention that during the nine years that elapsed between my leaving Chicago and my going to Stony Brook I had not finished my dissertation. Why not? As the years went by and mild successes accumulated, the student role became simply too punishing to reassume. I could not face dealing with the faculty at Chicago, even though they were unfailingly nice in my sporadic attempts at finding a dissertation topic. Just walking on campus I could feel my IQ falling. It was that most paralyzing of afflictions: I had avoided a hurdle because I was afraid to fail; I then became so contemptuous of the hurdle and the hurdle holders that it was impossible for me to jump. This twenty-year gap between entering the University of Chicago and getting the Ph.D. made me expert on why graduate students should hang around and finish their degrees at all costs, but it also made me uncritical of those

who do not. I am convinced as well that a disordered career such as mine was possible only in the era in which it occurred. There is now less forgiveness in the profession than there once was. Perhaps the question might be, Is a disordered career better than none at all?

I finished the dissertation after being at Stony Brook for one year. Kindly circumstances and Morris Janowitz allowed me to write a simple, but acceptable, five-variable, 180-page survey research document. Not quite Durkheim, but even at my advanced age the committee, composed of members of the third Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago I had attended, did not expect a classic. For the next four years Bill Simon and I continued to collaborate, but at a greater intellectual distance and less effectively. Each of us were caught in the daily circumstances of our lives, and our attention focused on the demands of the institutions in which we worked. We completed a number of papers from the study of college youth, wrote up our research on working-class young people, and finished a number of projects together, but the routine of collaboration was gone. Still, it had been a remarkable run. Its intellectual, professional, and emotional influence on my life I still feel directly and indirectly. We talk about collaborating again, now and then, and have even done so, in a set of four papers on scripting that are a substantial advance over the earlier work. It is not possible for me to separate what is mine from what is his. Even asking who authored what causes me pain that I want to avoid. I tend to look away, think of other things. Perhaps this experience is behind my deep distrust of the idea of auctoritas and authorship. Even writing about the time when we worked together seems invasive of his right to tell his version of the same events, in his own voice. Let me evade articulating my affection for him lest it require a false reciprocity from him.

Toward the end of this period I made a number of missteps. I became a dean and worked on projects in regional and environmental planning. Neither job came to much. The deaning gave me a higher salary. No publications resulted from the environmental work, but there were later benefits. In 1972–73 I was an overseas fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, supported by a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellowship. It was a good year for me, but not for my children, who went to English schools, or for my first wife, who left her job to come to Europe.

After we returned to the United States, I went back to the sociology department to teach. I worked with two psychologists at Stony Brook on psychophysiological correlates of sexual response. I learned some

psychology, but my sense was that they got more out of it than I did. I separated from my wife in 1975, and we got divorced in 1979. Also in 1975 I started to do some work in simulation and gaming, and that has now become a serious area of study for me. My kids grew up. I got older. I now live with my best friend, and I have two more Jewish children. I spent 1978 to 1980 at the School of Education at Harvard and the year 1983–84 teaching at the University of Essex. I reside in Princeton.

Why so cryptic about this recent period and so lush about the distant past? I think because the time since 1973 has been busy but indecisive. It has no recollective plausibility: the participants are still alive; the events are only events, not yet stories; even my texts of this time have no center. When I think about this period I have a strong sense of evasion and drift, but it is too soon for it to be adequately revised and protectively judged.

Will I do anything else interesting? It would be pretty to think so.

Chapter Ten—
Learning and Living

Donald R. Cressey

My forty years as a faculty member have been spiced with delightful hours of teaching and research in criminology, which is the study of the process of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws. Over the years dozens of people have asked how I got into the professorial world and, more specifically, into my sociological speciality. I have repeatedly asserted that everything happened by accident. Few have accepted my assertions, and some have advanced theories of their own.

Anthropologists, psychologists, and especially sociologists have speculated aloud about events in my childhood that must have determined my choice of careers. Some of the sociologists, believing that I am an offspring of one of the two Paul Cresseys, cousins who each made a mark in sociology during the 1930s, decided that I simply followed in the footsteps of my father, as Robert E. L. Faris did. Not so. While attending the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association some years ago, I listened quietly while Paul F. Cressey told me that all the Cresseys are descended from a single indentured servant who came to America in colonial times. When he finished, I told him that my paternal grandfather was a poor Minnesota farmer who had been a poor English farmer before he emigrated.

Friends and acquaintances with a psychoanalytic bent, knowing that I have broken new ground in a couple of areas of criminology, have drooled in delight on learning that when I was a boy my maternal grandfather, Durkee Prentiss, was my idol and that in the 1890s he and

my grandmother left Vermont to stake a claim for land in South Dakota. As teenaged newlyweds the pioneers lived for two years in a hut they built from virgin prairie sod. Then, close to starvation, they welcomed a letter from my grandfather's grandmother back in Milton, Vermont. She said she had a "fat pig and two sacks of flour" and that they were welcome to spend the winter with her. My mother was born the following summer, in 1898. She was soon bundled up and moved to a North Dakota farm where my grandfather was the hired man and my grandmother the hired "girl."

Those same Freudian friends, aware of my tough-guy demeanor, also have linked my interest in crime and criminals to the occupations my grandfather held. These include, in chronological order, saloon keeper, gun store owner, and small-town police chief. Similarly, deep Freudian significance has been attributed to the fact that I parted company with my father when I was about fourteen, shortly after he had been jailed in connection with a hit-and-run accident for driving while drunk. Because I have long been convinced that Freudian psychology is based on a misconception about the nature of personality, I have no more confidence in such explanations than I have in the analyses made by people who erroneously believed me to be the son (sometimes cousin or brother) of one of the famous Cresseys.

More fun, and thus more acceptable to me, have been diagnoses of what my real criminological objectives have been, coupled with armchair speculations about which of my childhood experiences set me on the path to such work. For example, undergraduates over the years have discerned that one of my criminological goals, subsidiary to the scientific one, has been to reduce the amount of pain and suffering in the world. Then, reasoning backward, some have guessed that my childhood must have been a painful one. There is a smattering of truth in these assertions. I doubt their significance, however, principally because I cannot convince myself that pain necessarily precedes humanitarianism. On the contrary, it seems to me that adults whose childhoods were painful are more likely than others to take pain and suffering as the natural lot of humankind.

The most thoughtful diagnosis and speculation of this type was made by Scott Greer when he was a graduate student and I was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1950s. Scott, a poet and philosopher as well as a sociologist, decided that all sociological work is autobiographical. In coffee sessions and at beer busts he told fascinated audiences of graduate students and junior fa-

culty members what each senior departmental faculty member was really doing professionally, and then he "revealed" how that work was just an unfolding of the person's life experiences. Some of his analyses were not flattering, so I will not recall them here. But more than once he also told me, and others, that I actually was dedicating my professional life to identifying the nature of honesty. Speculations about childhood moral and ethical conflicts followed as a matter of course.

There is an element of truth in these assertions too. Unlike Freudian speculations, they do not rest on hog-wild assumptions about mysterious, unconscious motivations. Still, I never have taken them to heart. It is true that my early sociological work, especially that on embezzlement, showed concern for the nature of honesty. I was convinced, and remain convinced, that most criminals perceive their dishonesty as something other than dishonesty, perhaps even as honor, duty, or an acceptable means of social control. But I never have been able to find any significant perceptions of this kind among my early childhood friends. Moreover, I have long known that I learned to distinguish sharply between honesty and dishonesty at a very early age.

From shortly after I was born, in 1919, until just after my thirteenth birthday my father manned the circuit panel switches at the Hoot Lake electric power plant, located about three miles from Fergus Falls, a small town in northwestern Minnesota. Our family was not rich, but we were not poor either. At Christmas I always asked for a toy, a new wagon or sled, a guitar, or a gun and usually got underwear, socks, and a new jacket or pair of overalls. I lived with my older brother, younger sister, and parents in a company house high on a cliff overlooking the generating plant. Except for the Dunlap family there were no neighbors within a mile. The seven Dunlap kids, all but one of them older than I, lived just down the hill. Their father was plant superintendent.

Some portion of this bunch of ten Cressey and Dunlap kids played together every day. We went to the same Presbyterian church on Sundays. When school was in session the five of us who were of grade-school age usually walked together down the narrow river valley leading to town and to the Jefferson School, about two miles away.

As we trudged along the dirt road on a crisp fall day near the beginning of my first year in school, I showed the gang a new pencil my mother had bought the previous day and which I was carrying like a jewel in the patent leather book bag slung over my shoulder. Someone asked about the price. My brother reported that the pencil had cost a penny and then bragged that my mother had bought five of them. Wells

Dunlap, who at age nine or ten was the oldest member of the group (I was the youngest), responded, "Shit, I can get them five for a steal." We giggled, snorted, and roared.

I tell the story to suggest that I knew the difference between honesty and dishonesty, or at least between stealing and not stealing, at the early age of six. Moreover, I never stole very much. So far as I know, neither did Wells or any other member of our bunch. I have never been arrested.

The honesty issue came up a few other times during my formative years. In every case I knew precisely what was honest and what was not. For example, when I was a second-grade student, our teacher staged a book-reading contest. At the end of the term, she said, a prize would be awarded to the pupil who had read the most books. The nature of the prize was a secret. Every Friday afternoon Miss Bratt would ask us to report the titles of the books we had read during the week. As we named our books, she made notes in a stenographer's memo pad. I won the prize handily. It was a book, and I still have it.

In the course of the contest I had to make a quick decision about the nature of honesty and dishonesty. I had no doubt about the difference. One Friday my list of books included The Adventures of Robin Red Breast and Billie Blue Jay . Miss Bratt queried me about the title, but I did not catch her intent. She made herself clear by asking, "That's two books, isn't it?" I knew it was only one book about two fine fellows, and I also knew that saying yes would be dishonest. I looked out the window. The teacher took my silence for assent and gave me credit for two books. I did not tell my mother or any of my friends I had cheated.

By the time I was in the sixth grade and about twelve years of age, my sense of what is honest and what is not had been honed to a sharp edge. As was customary in most of America at the time, no prayers were said in our school. On Tuesday afternoons, however, classes were dismissed so kids could go to the church of their choice for Tuesday school, which supplemented Sunday school. Further, school children were frequently warned about sin and especially about the sinful nature of intemperance—gluttony, smoking, and drinking—probably because Norwegian immigrants comprised most of the population of Fergus Falls.

At least once each year a Lutheran minister spoke to Jefferson School classes about the evils of drinking and smoking. We looked forward to his visits. He began by placing on the teacher's desk a small bowl of water in which two goldfish cruised back and forth. In the course of the preacher's talk, which I heard two or three times, he always moved from

the perils of alcohol to the perils of tobacco. At the end he lit a cigarette with a big wooden kitchen match, took a puff, gagged dramatically, then blew the smoke through a straw (a real straw, not a cheap soda-fountain replica) into the goldfish bowl. After a few seconds, sometimes given over to furious stirrings of the water with a pencil, the goldfish died. We called the clergyman the goldfish killer.

During my sixth year in school the minister went too far. After killing the goldfish, he distributed printed forms for each student to sign. I read mine. I was being asked to promise that I never would drink or smoke. There was a shuffling of feet and a fluttering of paper as students signed the pledges and passed them to the front of the room. Only one student, me, held out. I lifted the hinged top of my desk a couple of inches and inserted the unsigned pledge. Our teacher, Miss Betts, saw me; I think the preacher did too. Neither said a word. The heat, I found out, was to be applied in private. The next day Miss Betts cornered me during recess. She had a mustache, and she spit little droplets when she talked. She asked if I were going to turn in the paper I had in my desk. I replied that I would give it to her but that I did not think I would sign it. I was not old enough to know about those things, I said; maybe when I grew up I would want to smoke or drink. She seemed to accept my reasoning.

A few days later, also at recess, Miss Betts singled me out again. I was afraid of her because when I was in the fifth grade (there was only one teacher for the fifth and sixth grades and one for the third and fourth) she had taken me to the teachers' lounge and hit me on the bottom with a piece of rubber hose. When I had reported to my mother that I got a licking because I had not heeded the teacher's warning to stop talking in the classroom, she had said I deserved it. Now, standing at the foot of the schoolhouse steps, Miss Betts asked if I had changed my mind about signing and returning the form. I had not. I did not want to lie, I said. She sighed, and I took that to mean I was off the hook. But that afternoon a lady from the Women's Christian Temperance Union telephoned my mother just to report, as I understood it, that I had not yet returned the signed pledge. In the questioning that followed, I confessed to my mother that I was the only one who had not signed the pledge, and I told her why. I asked her what I should do. She said she wanted to sleep on it. As I was leaving for school the next morning, she gave me a fat hug and then, as though it were an afterthought, advised me to do whatever I thought was right on "that pledge thing." I suppose she also called Miss Betts and asked her to lay off. For whatever reason there was no more heat. I never signed the pledge. I made it.

The advice my mother gave on the pledge was characteristic of her. Typically she encouraged me to make my own decisions. For example, when I announced to her that I wanted to attend Sunday school, she explained that if I elected to do so I would have to go way into town every Sunday morning, rain or shine, and that on some Sundays I would have to walk. Sunday school would be fun, she said, but it had its costs; I should not enroll unless I was dedicated. I chose to enroll.

Similarly, I once asked my mother to give me piano lessons. She was a fair pianist; as a girl she had for a short time accompanied silent movies with rousing piano tunes, and she often entertained me by describing war scenes while she played The Stars and Stripes Forever . ("Now the soldiers are marching to battle"; "Now the cannons are roaring and men are falling"; "Now survivors are limping home in their tattered uniforms.") In response to my request for lessons she told me she would gladly instruct me but only if I took piano playing seriously; I would have to practice regularly, skipping other things I enjoyed. She gave me a few days to think it over. I decided not to take lessons. It was a dumb decision, but it was mine, and it was all right with her. I expect that this training in decision making had a great deal to do with my later intolerance of sociological whiners, procrastinators, and fuzzy thinkers.

As I said, I am not a Freudian. When I dream about sex or power struggles, I do not do it in symbols. The real stuff is there. I therefore am confident that neither my early ability to make distinctions between what is honest and what is not, nor my early adoration of my pioneering and law-enforcing grandfather, had much to do with my becoming a professor, a sociologist, and a criminologist. A better hypothesis is that injustices I experienced as a boy are reflected in my criminological writings, some of which amount to pleas for a better quality of justice in America. If that is the case, it is not because the injustices triggered some Freudian mechanism such as projection, transference, sublimation, or rebellion. Instead, in my view, I simply learned early on that some people are unfair and then learned how to cope with this fact of life.

Miss Olson instructed the pupils in my first-grade class to take their new crayons from their desks and draw brown kites. We obeyed, and she collected our pictures. The next morning she returned all but one of the drawings to their creators. The one withheld was mine. She raised it high above her head for all the kids to see. "I asked you to draw a brown kite," she said, "but here's a boy who drew a green one." She dropped the paper on my desk. She seemed mad. The kids snickered, and I squirmed. At the time I did not know I was color-blind. I knew

only that I was unjustly being ridiculed because I could not tell green from brown.

I learned two things from that experience. First, I sensed immediately that I had to make use of the reading skill my mother had developed in me before I started school. I noted that each crayon had its color printed on a wrapper. If I had only read the word brown on the brown crayon, I would have colored the kite correctly. My later kites (and grass, skies, trees, and animals) were properly colored because I carefully read the name of the color on each crayon's label before I got down to the job of doing art. When a crayon wore down so far that I could not read the name of its color, I gave it to my little sister. (Freudians should note that that incident may have been the source of my later resistance to so-called labeling theory.)

Second, I learned after considerable meditation that I was treated unjustly because Miss Olson had taken my unintentional deviance to be deliberate defiance. "I didn't do it on purpose," I told the Dunlap kids when they examined my green drawing as we walked home from school. I gave the picture to my mother but never told her it was the wrong color. In law school twenty years later I heard about strict liability laws. Jerome Hall, one of the giants I had as graduate-school mentors, demonstrated repeatedly that such laws are grossly unjust because under them people are punished for behavior they did not intend. One general rule of justice in our society, I subsequently noted, is that only deliberate deviance or negligence should have pain or suffering as its consequence. Conversely, deviance perceived as stemming from ignorance or some other condition beyond the control of the actor should not be punished; it should be corrected by education, including so-called therapy. Strict liability laws and procedures violate that rule, just as Miss Olson did.

A similar, but more severe, injustice was done to me in the second grade. Miss Bratt encouraged good grooming and hygiene. I thought I was in good shape because my father conditioned me to look after what he called the extremities—to keep my hair combed, my nails clean, and my shoes polished. But I had had teeth. I had inherited a genetic defect from my grandmother and mother. My teeth, like theirs, had no enamel and were only little brown stubs. Miss Bratt did not know anything about hereditary defects. During a hygiene session she told the second-graders to look at Donald and see what had happened because he did not brush his teeth. I sank. I put my hand over my mouth as I usually did when I smiled, and as my mother and grandmother also did. Nobody

laughed. Nobody questioned me. They just stared. Miss Bratt went on to give a lesson on brushing teeth. I did not tell my mother about the incident, but she heard about it from the mother of one of my classmates. She telephoned Miss Bratt and straightened her out, but the call did not undo the injustice done to me. I once again learned the hard way that unintentional deviance should be carefully separated from deviance due to badness or negligence.

Besides teaching me to read and to make my own decisions, my mother taught me not to hate people. Her position was that hate hurts the hater but has no affect on the hated. It was not until I was a sociologist that I discerned that she also taught me that attitudes of hate and forgiveness stem from assessments of intentionality. People who have experienced what they consider an injustice are likely to hate the person imposing the pain or suffering if they decide that the person acted deliberately. However, if the pain and suffering is perceived as having been imposed out of ignorance, the offended person is more likely to forgive than hate. The trick, according to my mother, is to recognize that most, if not all, injustices are unintentionally imposed. Miss Olson was forgiven by my mother and me because she did not know I was color-blind; Miss Bratt, because she did not have all the facts.

Hatred stemming from injustices leads to rebellion and even revolution. Forgiveness of injustices leads to tolerance and sometimes to attempts to effect personal and social change. I have usually opted for the latter, though a seemingly insignificant incident that occurred when I was about eight years old taught me both that people who are poor and ignorant are more likely than others to suffer injustices and that the recipients of injustices sometimes find it hard to differentiate deliberate from accidental oppression.

Through our cousin who lived in town my brother and I got a job peddling bills. The cousin worked for a Mr. Jacobson, who had contracted with the owners of the town's two moving-picture theaters to distribute notices of coming attractions. Each Saturday he hired three or four kids to do the work. They were paid fifty cents, a generous wage. Moreover, Mr. Jacobson was kind and considerate. He drove his Model T Ford out to our house and picked us up, then chauffeured us to various routes. When a carrier came to a sparsely settled locale, Mr. Jacobson was always there in his car to give him a lift between houses.

Before driving us home after one Saturday's work, Mr. Jacobson treated us. He took us to Nelson's Cafe (rhymes with safe ) on Washing-

ton Avenue. We took seats at the counter. I got the stool next to Mr. Jacobson, perhaps because I was the youngest of the four boys who had worked that day. He told us to order what we wanted, but I somehow sensed that his offer was not to be taken literally. None of us had ever been in a restaurant before. There was a good deal of fumbling, stammering, shuffling, and removing of caps and coats. Finally, my brother asked the waitress for a hamburger, which cost a nickel. The rest of us, of course, followed suit. Mr. Jacobson waited patiently until all the kids' orders were in. Then he asked for a hot roast-beef sandwich with potatoes and gravy, a piece of apple pie, and a cup of coffee. Forty cents! I smelled both trickery and grave injustice. I knew that if he had ordered first I would have aped him. I concluded that he had not ordered first because he knew what I knew. As I chewed my dry hamburger with my little brown teeth, I further concluded that Mr. Jacobson was a bad man who had taken advantage of me because I was a dumb little kid. Riding in the back seat of his car on the way home, I changed my mind. After all, it was his treat; maybe he was just being polite when he asked us to order first. I forgave him.

A later incident had a different outcome. I clearly attributed a gross injustice to deliberate, intentional exploitation. My father was an alcoholic. Following an arrest for drunken driving in 1932, he lost his job at the power plant. The company house went with the job. By coincidence we moved to the upstairs rooms of a run-down house two doors down the street from Nelson's Cafe. There I encountered a case of deliberately imposed injustice. My father didn't tell me about it. He modeled it.

The Great Depression was in full swing. My dad could not find a job. We were desperate for food and for rent money, which came to perhaps ten dollars a month. My grandfather once paid the landlord forty dollars for back rent, but my father soon got behind again. Like other desperate men at the time, he decided to become a door-to-door peddler of soap, cosmetics, razor blades, or whatever. He needed money to buy some stock. He knew I had saved up $2.50 from the money I made as a paper boy, and he asked if he could borrow it. I went to the little room I shared with my brother and slipped the money from a secret hiding place under a pile of library books. Back in the tiny kitchen I handed him the two bills and five dimes. He cried. Because it was not the time to talk, he put his arm around my shoulders. Then I cried too.

That evening I stalked the people on Lincoln Avenue as usual, trying to get someone to buy a newspaper. I walked by the town's pool hall. My dad was a good straight-pool player, and when we lived in the

country near the power plant, he often drove to town on Saturday afternoons to spend a few hours at this same pool parlor. Kids were not admitted, so I never saw him play. He told me, though, that he could not play for money; if there was as much as a nickel at stake, his game would go to pieces. When we moved to town, his former place of recreation became his hangout. That night I glanced through the plate-glass window with POOL painted on it in shaded letters and saw him sitting at the counter. He was a fine singer, and he was at it. A crowd of deadbeats was listening. Through the open door I head his nice voice slurring the words to "The Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor," which I had heard him sing a thousand times. Although Prohibition had not yet been repealed, it seemed obvious that he was boozing it up with my money. When I came home from school the next afternoon, he was sitting on a stool in the kitchen. I ignored him. I never told him what I had seen and heard at the pool room. I do not think he ever bought the gadgets he said he was going to sell door to door. He didn't repay the $2.50 and indeed never mentioned his debt. Neither did I. My reaction was to hate, not to forgive. It did not change when I later learned that alcoholics supposedly are sick, not evil.

Once we had moved to town, I had obviously become a poor kid—real poor. There was no welfare system in those days, and I went to work delivering the evening Minneapolis Journal . After completing my route, I sold papers on the street, mostly to traveling salesmen staying at the River Inn or the Kaddatz Hotel. On a good night I got rid of five or six, at a profit of two cents a paper. Before school I delivered the Daily Reminder, a mimeographed advertising sheet. Sunday mornings saw me carrying a ton of what we called the funny papers in a canvas bag slung over my shoulder. After I had delivered most of them I went door to door trying to sell the remainder at a profit of three cents a paper. I could not stand on a street corner and sell Sunday papers to people driving home from church because boys who were bigger and tougher than I "owned" the only two corners worth working. Besides doing all this newspaper work, I did odd jobs—shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing lawns, pulling weeds, washing windows.

When we were evicted from the apartment near Nelson's Cafe because we could not pay the rent, we moved upstairs above Hansen's Harness Shop. My parents got divorced, and my dad became a squatter, living out by the river in a hut made of packing crates. I visited him once. Later he moved to Duluth, where he remarried. I visited him once there too.

As soon as my father moved out, my mother got a job as a maid, then as a helper at Ethel's Cafe. Ethel was one of her childhood friends. At the cafe the two of them did all the cooking, serving, and washing up. It is obvious to me now that Ethel gave mother the job because she knew we were going hungry. Before long our food was mostly leftovers from Ethel's, but my brother and I supplemented it with a purchase now and then. Also, in 1933 or 1934 my mother was allotted a bag of flour, some salt pork, and some other groceries by one of the budding New Deal relief agencies. I went to the basement of the post office and loaded the food into an old coaster wagon. The men distributing the stuff seemed contemptuous. One guy refused my plea for help in getting the heavy flour sack into the wagon. I felt like a beggar.

Most Sundays, after I had sold my papers, I bought a quart of ice cream and shared it with my sister. Because there was no refrigerator, we had to eat it all. Once or twice a week I went to Peterson's Meat Market and asked the high-school kid behind the tall glass counter for the cheapest respectable thing a person could buy at a butcher shop in those days—ten cents' worth of hamburger. When I entered the store one winter afternoon, three women and a man were standing in front of the counter waiting for the butcher to cut roasts or chops for them. Lawrence Olson, the kid, stood haughtily behind the counter with nothing to do but show off his butcher's cap. As I stepped toward the counter, he called out, "Ten cents' worth of hamburger, I suppose." I froze. In Fergus Falls in the 1930s poor people were thought of as sinners, lazy ne'er-do-wells who would not pull their weight, as my experiences while picking up the government dole of surplus flour and pork had demonstrated. Divorced women and their kids were considered moral lepers. Clearly, Olson's question was designed to let the other customers know that I was one of those degenerate deadbeats. But none of them looked up and stared, as I expected the crowd to do. I shuffled my overshoes in the sawdust on the floor, got my hamburger, and left.

As I entered my sophomore year in high school I gave up journalism and got an evening job working at Lunky Lundquist's Phillips 66 service station. Looking back, it was by far the best job I ever had in Fergus Falls, but I cannot recall how I got it. My associations at the station had a profound impact on my life. The proprietor was a young man whose father, a banker, had set him up in business. Another young man, Jake Smith, worked full-time for him. I thought of the two as old guys. From the banker's son I learned that it was important to have class, meaning

that one should be a snappy dresser, speak well, smoke Chesterfields, be judicious, and know who is who in Fergus Falls. Jake Smith gave me a deep respect for knowledge.

I became convinced that Jake Smith knew everything. He gave me little lessons on physics, chemistry, and biology and helped me with algebra. He spoke German and knew a little Latin. He was forever telling me about prepositions and split infinitives. Equally important, he was screwing the seventh-grade English teacher, whom I considered wealthy because she owned a car.

I told my buddies about Jake, and the gas station soon became a hangout for my gang of high-school friends. On one cold winter afternoon four or five teenaged boys were lounging around the station with Jake, cracking jokes and showing off as usual. One complained, as high-school boys will, "There's nothing to do in this town." Jake listened quietly while the rest of us expressed our agreement, then responded by hurling an angry question at us: "What's the atomic weight of lead?" Nobody knew. He told me there was indeed something to do in Fergus Falls—go to the library and find the answer to his question. He kicked all the kids but me out of the station and said they could not return until they had the answer. I was exempt because I was going on duty in a half-hour, when Jake was due to be picked up by the English teacher. The boys, with others, returned after Jake had left. No one had learned the atomic weight of lead. The next afternoon we assembled in Jake's presence. Every boy had the answer, 207.19. Jake then wanted to know the weight of gold, silver, carbon, zinc, and even ruthenium. He did not care about gases.

I regret that neither Jake nor anyone else directed my reading. While I was still living in the country, the woman working in the children's reading room located in the basement of the Carnegie Library got special permission for me to borrow books from the regular library upstairs, where children under thirteen were forbidden. I became an exception, probably because the children's librarian grew weary of me. It was the same story every Saturday morning: after visiting my grandparents, who lived near the library, I lugged my heavy quota of twelve books to the desk, then asked for help in selecting a dozen books for the next week's reading. I was not asking for guidance; my problem was that I had trouble finding books in the children's section that I had not already read.

Moving up to the adult section was like moving into paradise. However, I now needed real guidance but was not wise enough to ask for it. I

read randomly. I read classics without knowing it—I selected whatever looked like a good story. My voracious appetite for books continued for two or three years after we moved to town, but I cannot recall that in all that time I read one nonfiction book, including biography and history. Had Jake Smith or someone else set me on a course of reading, I might have turned out to be an intellectual rather than a scientist. By the time I reached my senior year in high school I was mostly reading magazines such as Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, and Colliers' . Being a sophisticated young man, with class, I also read each issue of Esquire from cover to cover.

Shortly after I started pumping gas at Lunky's, my mother left Ethel's for a job as cook at the City Cafe and Bakery. The steady work at fourteen dollars for a seven-day week of ten-hour days enabled her to settle us in the upstairs rooms of a small, ramshackle house in a rather classy part of town. The cafe and bakery were jointly owned by a sister and brother, but the two operations were independent. One afternoon a few months after my mother began working for the sister in the kitchen of the restaurant, I answered the brother's ad for a baker's helper. I got the job and went to work at once. I spent two hours cleaning huge baking trays and pans before walking down the street to my regular job at the service station. My mother was surprised to see me out back in the bakery, or pretended to be. Just before we moved from Hansen's Harness Shop, my brother, also by coincidence, had found a part-time job at the Park Region Bakery, the competitor down the street. Once he learned the trade, he gave up high school for a series of full-time jobs as a baker.

In my own bakery work I gradually advanced from clean-up boy to baker. My hourly pay did not increase correspondingly, but I did not complain. I was grateful, considering myself lucky to have a job and to be learning a trade. When school was in session, I cleaned pans after classes, bused dishes in the restaurant for my noon meal, and worked as a baker's helper on weekends. There were only two men to help—Lloyd Greenwood, who was the owner, and Ira Brown. On Fridays I started helping them at midnight and continued straight through until late Saturday afternoon when I finished up by cleaning the trays and pans. In those days small-town bakers worked outrageous hours during the hot Minnesota summer months when housewives did not care to fire up their ovens. During my last two high-school summer vacations every night was much like the school-year Friday nights and Saturdays. The long hours and the terrible heat from the coke-fired ovens did not make

me hate my work. On the contrary, I loved it. In my eyes I was one of those picture-show heroes who meets adversity face to face and stares it down. Everyone who would listen heard me tell how hard I worked. Drudgery was honor. On top of that, I was learning to be a baker. Lloyd or Ira, sometimes both, taught me a new trick almost every night. Because there was little specialization in such a small shop, and because I was a fast learner, Lloyd was soon telling me, my mother, the cafe waitresses, and bakery visitors that I was a "good all-around man." For a seventeen-year-old adult, that was heady praise indeed. I had it made.

I am the first person on either side of my family to graduate from high school. So far as I know, not one of my four grandparents or their brothers and sisters went past the eighth grade. My parents' generation did a little better, but I believe that only two of them, my mother and her sister, got beyond common school, as the first eight grades were called. My cousins, like my sister and brother, dropped out after a year or two of high school.

Still I did not really believe in high school. The love of knowledge I acquired from Jake Smith had nothing to do with getting a high-school diploma. I attended, and graduated, because my friends did the same. I skipped school at two o'clock every afternoon of my senior year, as a matter of principle. I graduated near the bottom of my class, with less than a C average. I liked science and math, and I worked for C's in those two areas. The rest of the subjects did not have any relevance for me. By design I did not flunk any courses but settled for D's. My plan was to work in the bakery for the rest of my life, and I did work there full-time for two years after graduating.

There is contradiction here, for my attitudes were middle-class on most issues. Indeed, when I first read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, I thought Weber was describing me, my high-school friends, and their families. I desperately wanted to achieve and acquire, but I was going to fulfill that ambition by learning a trade, not by working for good high-school grades. Most of my friends had high aspirations too, but they saw academic achievement as the road to success. One close friend was valedictorian of his class, and two others were not far behind.

My poverty, though severe, was not like that experienced by present-day inner-city dwellers. Fergus Falls had what Oscar Lewis later named a culture of poverty, but I did not participate in it. As a teenager I associated primarily with middle-class kids I met at church, in Boy Scout and Sea Scout activities, and at meetings of the local chapter of

the De Molays. The last two sources of friends overlapped the first. There were twenty-six churches for the sixteen hundred families in Fergus Falls, and church membership largely determined social activities. Unless next-door neighbors went to the same church, they ignored each other. Men who worked together but attended different churches sometimes associated socially, but even that relationship was unusual. Similarly, high-school students had few friends from churches other than their own. In the clubs and lodges, such as the Kiwanis, Elks, and De Molays, church membership had little importance; but they were an exception.

Like almost every other church in town, my Presbyterian church sponsored its own Boy Scout troop. At the age of twelve, boys who had gone to Sunday school together joined routinely. When I was fifteen I helped some of the older boys in our troop form a Sea Scout "ship." All but me were middle-class kids whose fathers were steadily employed or were in business for themselves. The "skipper" was a young lawyer who was soon to become mayor. Church members rich enough to own sailboats took us to their lake cottages for weekends of sailing.

De Molays are more or less junior Masons. At age fifteen a boy is eligible for membership if his father or some close relative is a Mason. In my case the relative was my grandfather. Admission was not automatic, however. A single member could veto an applicant. I was only a little worried on the night the group voted in secret on me. I was smart. I had class. I had several good De Molay friends who were Presbyterians and one or two who were not. I made it.

In De Molay activities I met mostly other Wasps: besides Presbyterians, there were Episcopalians, Methodists, and a few Baptists. In fact, it was a Methodist, one of my best buddies, who had encouraged me to join; his father was county superintendent of schools and a hunting and fishing companion of my grandfather. The religious beliefs of the town's four or five Catholic boys and one Jewish boy prohibited them from becoming members. Lutheran churchmen also frowned on the organization, thus discouraging the great majority of the town's boys from joining.

Our De Molay chapter had an ice-hockey team, and we regularly beat the hell out of the poor kids who had teams in the league. More important, the chapter staged three or four formal balls each year. These were significant social events for teenagers in the town. (The school board prohibited high-school dances because dancing, like smoking and drinking, was considered obscene.) Each De Molay was allowed to

invite two or three nonmember male friends and their dates to each dance. At these affairs I met most of the sons and daughters of the town's elite, no matter what their religious affiliation. Even Catholic and Lutheran boys and girls attended. Some of these non-Presbyterians and non–De Molays became close friends. One became a Jake Smith guy, the name given by the high-school biology teacher to each of the boys who hung out at the Phillips 66 station.

One by one, most of my many friends went off to college. The two years I spent in the bakery after high school were lonely. I worked nights, when I supposed almost everyone I knew was having fun. I continued to play ice hockey, and I coached a peewee team. I became an assistant scoutmaster. I remained active in Christian Endeavor (a church group), and on Sundays I ushered in church. I took courses that enabled me to qualify as a Red Cross senior lifeguard and, later, a water safety instructor. I had swum, skated, hunted, fished, canoed, sailed, and iceboated as a boy, but now I became passionate about these sports. I kept my membership in the De Molays and, after progressing through some lower chairs, was elected master councillor, the top dog. Then I made the big time by being elected junior councillor of all the De Molays in Minnesota. This statewide election, combined with the influence of the girl I was to marry, set me on the path to college and eventually a Ph.D. in sociology.

I became good-looking. I was now old enough to be fitted with full dentures. I saved up enough money to make a down payment toward the cost of the extractions and other dental surgery. Every afternoon for about six months I walked from my work at the bakery to the offices of a young man just out of dental school. He spent day after day pulling out pieces of my brown teeth, which were now rotten. When that job was done, he devoted his afternoons to taking a hammer and chisel and knocking pieces of bone off my upper jaw, which was deformed. Then he wired my lower jaw, which also was deformed, to the upper one. After each session I walked home and collapsed. I never failed to get up and go to work at midnight, however. I pretended that only the dentist and I knew about the work, though I discussed it with the bakers and discerned that my other friends knew what was going on. To reveal the pain would have been to show weakness and lack of class. Moreover, I convinced myself that the whole thing was being done for medical science, not just for myself. The dentist charged me practically nothing, saying he was performing the work as an experiment. With my permission he took pictures, which he showed at a dental convention and, he said, were to be

published in a dental journal. Eventually I got the new teeth and adjusted to them. One of the girls I had dated in high school came home from college for spring vacation. I met her on a street corner. "Very becoming," she said. So far as I can recall, that was the only comment anyone ever made about what for me was a transformation.

Before long I met Elaine Smythe, the girl who was to become my wife. Her father was an agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad, and he was transferred to Fergus Falls when Elaine was a senior in high school. We met at an Easter sunrise service and soon fell madly in love. We dated steadily all summer, and when she went off to Macalester College in the fall, I gave her the agate ring my mother had given me when I graduated from high school. (My mother, as practical as she was wise, had convinced me that a "real" ring was a better investment than a class ring.) Elaine wrote to me two or three times a week, and almost every letter encouraged me to go to college too. When she came home for holidays, we spent most of our time with other friends home from college. Aside from my twelfth-grade senior English teacher, Rosalie Zien, Elaine was the first person to tell me I was too smart to spend my life in a bakery. I knew I was at least as clever as friends who were now attending college. The evidence was obvious: I had something none of them had—a steady job that paid good money.

The critical incident that sent me off to college was a tiff at the bakery. Lloyd, the boss and owner, had died, and his younger brother, Jimmy, had replaced him. Jimmy, like Lloyd, was a sportsman as well as a good and kindly person. Like Ira Brown, he took me hunting and fishing and let me borrow his car. Nevertheless, I did not have the respect for him that I had for Lloyd, perhaps because I believed that Lloyd was by far the classier of the two. The quarrel with Jimmy grew out of my earlier election as junior councillor for the Minnesota De Molays.

A meeting of state De Molay officers was to be held in St. Paul on a Saturday in February or March 1939. Although I knew very well that Friday nights and Saturdays were the busiest times in the bakery, I asked Jimmy for time off. He withheld his response until our work was done, when he told me he had carefully considered my request and that the answer was no. Any other day would be all right, he said, but there was just too much work to do on Friday nights and Saturdays. I blew up. "I'm going," I shouted. "And if I have to quit to go, I quit." I added, still yelling, that he had taken Friday nights off in the past, that Ira and I had made up for his absence by working harder, and that now he could do

that for me. He flushed with what I think was surprise and embarrassment rather than anger.

I acted on the spur of the moment, but I was serious. I had no idea how I would earn a living if I quit my job at the bakery. Still, I seemed to realize that not attending the meeting was tantamount to declaring that I would never leave the baking business. Elaine had made me wonder if that was what I really wanted. The next night Jimmy and I barely spoke to each other. He followed me into the basement dressing room after work. Again he seemed embarrassed. He told me he had reconsidered and that I could have the time off after all. He ended up with a response to my earlier tirade. The gist of it was that he, as boss, was entitled to take a night or day off whenever he wished but that I did not have that option.

I attended the meeting. Jimmy's comments about his prerogatives gnawed at me. Before returning to work on Sunday night I made secret plans to quit the job as soon as possible. I began to consider college as an option. Despite my middle-class associates, I had always thought in terms of a working-class cliché: Learn a trade; they can't take that away from you. "They" were the powerful, and I was one of the masses. Now I saw my future in a related cliché: Get a good education; they can't take that away from you.

I decided to go to a town that had a college or university as well as bakeries. That way I could work nights, get a college education in the daytime, and "they" would not be able to deprive me of it. To decide on a major, I wrote to the Minnesota State Library for copies of interest and aptitude tests. The examinations told me what I already knew, namely, that I was a smart kid who liked mathematics and science. I picked chemistry, partly because of the bakery connection. A flour salesman had once told me about cereal chemistry, the vocation of people who do quality-control studies for flour mills. I wrote to the Pillsbury Mills in Minneapolis, saying I wanted to be a cereal chemist and asking where I should go to college. (I have a hunch that the salutation of my letter was "Dear Mr. Pillsbury.") Soon I received a letter advising me to attend the University of Minnesota, Kansas State University, or Iowa State University. I did not want to go to Minnesota because I had friends there and it seemed too big-time for me. I wrote to Kansas State and Iowa State for catalogues and literature. By coincidence the Fergus Falls Daily Journal soon carried a story about how a Kansas State track star had just broken a world record. I decided that Kansas, like Minnesota, was out of my league. That left Iowa State, in Ames.

In March I started putting my wages in the bank. In June I quit the bakery and took a job teaching swimming, rowing, and canoeing at a Boy Scout camp. In August I returned to the bakery for a month before setting out for Ames with $256.60 in my pocket. Once there, I found a cheap attic room, stowed my worldly goods in it, and walked down the street looking for a job. I found one within an hour—candling eggs in a grocery store. A week later I also got a part-time job in a bakery and another as a waiter for my evening meal plus tips. At Iowa State I was not at first eligible for a work-study program financed by the the National Youth Administration (NYA) because my high-school grades were too low. But at the end of the first quarter my college grades made me eligible for an NYA job at twenty-five cents an hour. I quit all except the bakery job and went to work in the psychology department, doing correlation coefficients on a hand-operated calculating machine. Then I transferred to genetics, where I inoculated mice with typhoid and also kept tab on mutant, tipped-winged drosophila. At the end of the first academic year, 1939–40, I went home with my $256.60 still in my hip pocket.

I never doubted that I could finish college. I knew my high-school grades didn't mean anything. Under what is now called an open-admissions policy Iowa State officials admitted anyone who had graduated from high school. Unlike current open-admissions programs, however, the Iowa State curriculum was tough. Half the members of my freshman class did not return after the Christmas holidays. Two-thirds did not return for the sophomore year. The policy was cruel but nevertheless democratic. Everybody got a chance. I made it.

By the beginning of my junior year I thought I could write. I was on the staff of the college literary magazine and had published a couple of short stories in it. I took a job as ghost writer for Agricultural Extension, giving up my bakery job, my NYA job, and also the room-and-board job I held during my sophomore year as live-in baby-sitter and handyman for a geology professor and his wife. Agricultural Extension was made up of a number of divisions, all headquartered in one old building. I started out by helping Robert Clark, who was in charge of the Iowa Rural Youth Division and, I think, had a Ph.D. in rural sociology. My principal task was to edit a monthly newsletter. The gimmick was that I wrote practically every word of every issue, including columns with various fictitious bylines. Word of this enterprise got around the building, and other division heads were soon giving me little writing assignments. I recall such articles as "How Rural Youth Can Prevent

Inflation," "How to Prevent Fire on the Farm," and "How to Raise Honeybees." I made seventy-five cents an hour, which was three times what NYA was paying and five times what the bakery was paying.

Academically I soon lost interest in chemistry. I liked theory but could not stand the laboratory work. The mixing and measuring resembled baking, so I was pretty good at it. But I now perceived bakery work as lacking in class, and that perception might have carried over to laboratory chemistry. My academic adviser, a botanist, told me that if I did not like the laboratory, I should get out of chemistry. In retrospect that was bad advice, but at the time it was reasonable because, after all, my declared interest was in cereal chemistry, a laboratory discipline. Further, I had no plans for graduate work, so I was destined to be a laboratory worker even if my interests shifted to another branch of chemistry. I changed to a major in geology, but the same adviser then convinced me that geologists' work lacked class too. He asked me to look ahead and visualize myself at work ten years down the road. Did I see myself sitting in a shack on an Oklahoma prairie waiting for an oil well to come in? I did not. I saw myself in an office job, though I had never had one. I started looking around for still another major.

Near the beginning of my junior year, as well, I met Bryce Ryan, one of four sociologists attached to the Department of Economics. (That department, I learned later, was clearly first-rate; it was headed by Theodore Schultz, who was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on human capital.) I was introduced to Ryan by a mutual friend, a student, at a coffee session in the student union building. Much to my surprise he knew my name—he said he had read my stories in the literary magazine. I told him I was now trying to write the Great American Novel. He suggested that I might be able to improve my writing by taking a course in sociology and learning something about social relations. Until then I had scarcely heard of sociology.

I enrolled in Sociology 1A pretty much for laughs. Three times a week Ryan, who had just received his Ph.D. from Harvard, lectured an auditorium full of undergraduates on what I later learned was standard Harvard sociology: culture, social structure, and function came into my vocabulary. After lectures the students broke into small groups and met with a teaching assistant for discussion sessions. My TA was not very good, and the course was awful as a consequence. At mid-term all students took a common examination during one of the lecture periods. I made the best score. Better than that, Ryan came to my table at the student union and congratulated me. I told him that the key to my

success was the fact that his lectures were similar to chemistry lectures, emphasizing bonds, links, valences, structures, and interactions. He was both pleased and impressed, and told me so. There were two consequences of such positive reinforcement. First, I became a smart ass: in subsequent discussion sections I told the TA on every possible occasion that he did not know what he was talking about. Second, I became addicted to sociology.

I changed my major. It did not seem like a radical change because to me sociology was like very complex chemistry—but without a mathematical base. Like Bryce Ryan, C. Arnold Anderson, then also an assistant professor at Iowa State, encouraged me to keep thinking along those lines. I still do. Neal Gross, by far the best graduate student then in the sociology department, took me under his wing and also had considerable influence on me. Among other things, he encouraged me to take courses in probability in the mathematics department. My professor was George W. Snedecor, a leader in the development of statistical methods for use in agricultural and biological experiments. I learned chi-square by studying litters of pigs and rabbits, and analysis of variance and multiple regression by studying the yields of millet fields, apple orchards, and plots of corn. Only when I became an assistant professor did I begin to lose my interest (and skill) in statistics.

When I switched from hard science to sociology I found myself with a lot of free time because there were no laboratories. Further, my work at Agricultural Extension did not require the physical energy that bakery work did. For the first time in my college career I had time to read and learn and to have fun while doing so. As I ran upstairs to the third floor of the chemistry building one afternoon, I remembered that when I was a freshman I had many times wearily pulled myself up the same staircase and, moreover, been amazed to see other students more or less skipping up the stairs. Being tired had been the norm, but now I was both energetic and exuberant.

College was no longer just a place to learn how to make a living. It is a bit corny, but I am convinced that Bryce Ryan hooked me on learning, just as Jake Smith had earlier hooked me on knowledge. To top that off, I borrowed four hundred dollars from Iowa State and moved into an apartment with three other seniors, two of whom also liked to play with ideas. The third student, a journalism major, often said he was just interested in reporting the facts; he is now the millionaire owner of a string of magazines. The rest of us eventually got Ph.D.'s—one in chemistry, one in psychology, and one in sociology.

Soon the military draft was instituted, to be followed by the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II. I wanted to get my degree before I went to war, so I took every sociology course in sight, hoping to beat the draft by graduating in March rather than June 1943. I soon ran out of courses. To obtain the number of sociology units needed for graduation, I took an independent-study course on crime and delinquency. My recollection is that I chose that subject because the range of choices was limited by a rule prohibiting independent-study courses on subjects covered in regular courses listed in the college catalogue. My supervisor was George Von Tungelen, a rural sociologist. He did not know any more about the sociology of crime than I did. At the end of the term he told me that my paper lacked focus and assigned it a B. Because I was making straight A's in my sociology courses, I was not pleased. But Von Tungelen was right. I still have the paper; it is awful. More important, however, the independent-study course introduced me to the work of Edwin H. Sutherland, who had recently completed his term as president of the American Sociological Society (now Association). I read The Professional Thief and the 1939 edition of Principles of Criminology, which contained the first version of Sutherland's differential association principle.

I made it. I graduated in March 1943 and went to war six weeks later. I spent the waiting period as a full-time research assistant to Ray E. Wakeley, a well-known rural sociologist and demographer and Iowa State's most prominent faculty member. I interviewed farmers in connection with a study of noneconomic factors in agricultural production. Previous studies had determined that rich Iowa farmers were not producting as much wartime food as they were capable of producing. It also had been learned that contrary to standard economic assumptions, offering farmers more money did not motivate them to change their behavior. My job was to find out how to get them to produce more. Wakeley arranged interviews for me. I heard him telephone a feed store owner and tell him about me, "He's young, but he's got a good head on him." I liked that. Conducting this simple investigation and writing up the results convinced me that I was a research sociologist and that sociological research was both easy and fun.

Most of the farmers agreed that they were not producing up to capacity. They said the reason was that their machinery had broken down and replacement parts were not available. When I suggested to some that they form machinery cooperatives with their neighbors, they denounced me as a communist. In the report I wrote for Wakeley I

nevertheless advocated more cooperatives. Then I made two proposals. It pleases me to recall that one was for positive reinforcement, one for negative reinforcement, though I did not meet B. F. Skinner until I was a graduate student and did not become a behaviorist until I was well into my career as a sociologist. Positively, I proposed that a federal agency start giving farmers medals for producing. Executives of well-managed factories producing war goods were awarded E banners (for efficiency ) to fly from company flagpoles. My suggestion was that a similar symbol be awarded to efficient farmers. (The theme of one issue of my Agricultural Extension newsletter had been "Food Will Win the War and Write the Peace.") Negatively, I proposed that vigilantes splash yellow paint on the houses of farmers who had deliberately chosen to be slackers.

Two or three months after I gave Wakeley my report on the project I was sitting on my bunk in an Army Air Corps barracks at Buckley Field in Colorado. Mail call brought a copy of the Iowa Farm Economist . There was no accompanying letter. Puzzled, I flipped the pages. In the middle of the journal was a glorious version of my first sociology article. What was missing was my name: the report had been edited and then published under Wakeley's. I did not feel exploited, for it had been clear from the beginning that my report was the boss's property. I proudly showed the magazine to my fellow soldiers. They were so impressed that I joined the American Sociological Society and asked my mother to forward my copies of the American Sociological Review to my various military addresses. The first issue arrived when I was attending the Air Corps' Engineering and Operations School at Colorado State Teacher's College in Greeley; I carried it under my arm as I walked from class to class, and I made sure that all the instructors saw it on my desk. I doubt that the Iowa Farm Economist article had any influence in Washington. Nevertheless, by the end of the war the government was awarding agricultural E banners to patriotic farmers. I have been suspicious of neoclassical economic theory ever since.

After I had completed my first year of military service, most of it in India, Congress passed the GI bill. Bryce Ryan wrote to me almost immediately. The essence of his message was that the bill made it possible for me to do graduate work in sociology and that I ought to plan to do so as soon as the war was over. I deeply appreciated his interest, but the message seemed irrelevant at the time. I was busy helping B-29 aircrews bomb Japan from India and China.

After the marines and infantry captured the Marianas Islands, my outfit moved to Tinian and bombed Japan from there. Another year

went by. Then a B-29 squadron on our island dropped the atomic bomb. Suddenly the war was over. I was still alive. I had made it.

During the four months my squadron waited for a ship to take us home, I necessarily thought about what I was going to do as a civilian. Two past events became highly significant. First, I recalled Bryce Ryan's letter encouraging me to do graduate work in sociology under the GI bill. Second, I recalled the name of Edwin H. Sutherland from the independent-study criminology course. In a short V-mail letter to Sutherland I said little except that I would like to do graduate work with him at Indiana. I described my undergraduate record and then cheekily asked for a teaching assistantship, saying that I had married before going overseas and that the GI bill would not pay enough to support us. I enclosed no transcripts of grades, no letters of recommendation, no Graduate Record Examination scores. Sutherland fired a note back to Tinian. He said that he would be delighted to have me as a graduate student, that I had been admitted to Indiana University, that he had reserved a teaching assistantship for me, and that I could come to Bloomington and start work whenever I got out of the Army. It was that simple.

I was discharged in San Francisco, where my wife was working as a medical technologist, in December 1945. Three weeks later I enrolled in the second-semester courses at Bloomington and started working as Sutherland's teaching assistant. (Later I became his research assistant and in that capacity helped him wind up the research for his book White Collar Crime .) I was extremely insecure, which was unusual for me. I had done nothing but grunt for three years. Worse, I did not know any sociology. Sutherland, fortunately, was the gentlest man I had ever known. He was very supportive, as were August De B. Hollingshead, Alfred R. Lindesmith, John Mueller, Mary Bess Owen, and others on the faculty. Karl Schuessler, then an advanced graduate student who had returned from the war to write his dissertation, was the person most aware of my insecurity. Besides teaching me sociological methods during long coffee sessions at Tom's Grill, he kept telling me to relax, take it easy, and not try to learn everything in two weeks.

In April I found the confidence and security I was lacking. At the meetings of the Midwestern Sociological Association in Columbus, Ohio, I heard Paul Hatt read a paper on how difficult it was for a veteran to adjust, not to civilian life in general, but to the host of incompetent people passing themselves off as sociologists. Even though I did not know enough about sociology or sociologists to make an

intelligent decision about Hatt's attack, I endorsed it with enthusiasm. Then I heard a terrible paper on housing in Cleveland, whose punch line was "Why, in many houses the rats run in and out freely." The paper changed my life. If such crap was sociology, I concluded, then I was surely capable of becoming a competent sociologist. I thought I had it made. I was right. I made it.

Chapter Eleven—
Reflections on Academic Success and Failure:
Making It, Forsaking It, Reshaping It

Gary T. Marx

When I came West with the wagon, I was a young man with expectations of something, I don't know what, I tarpainted my name on a big rock by the Missouri trailside. But in time my expectations wore away with the weather, like my name had from that rock, and I learned it was enough to stay alive.
—E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times

My attitudes toward work and life were shaped by an unusual early career pattern—success beyond my wildest expectations, followed by unexpected failure. Given the formative power of that experience, I will restrict my attention to only one of the many topics that an article on work and life might treat: occupational success and failure.^[1]

Academic work is publicly and correctly viewed as having a sacred quality involving the pursuit and transmission of truth. But it also involves a job or career carried out in a competitive milieu where the usual human virtues and vices are never far from the surface.^[2] I will try to shed some light on this secular side of the profession and to offer some practical advice. I first describe my experiences, then discuss seven characteristics of success and some practical conclusions I have drawn. Although the themes are universal, I have written with two groups in mind: persons beginning their career, and those at mid-career sorting it all out—the former because I wish someone had told me these things when I was starting out, and the latter because they may believe them.

Life Could Be a Dream

In 1970 there could not have been many sociologists just three years beyond the Ph.D. who were as professionally satisfied and optimistic as I was. The promise of the popular 1950s rhythm-and-blues song "Shboom" that "life could be a dream" had come true. Immigrants, gold miners, and aspiring actors might head West, but as an ambitious academic born on a farm in central California I had headed east to where I thought the real action was—Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I had a job at Harvard with a higher salary and a longer contract (negotiated under threat of deserting to another Ivy League school) than the other assistant professors in the Department of Social Relations. I taught only one course and had a mammoth corner office, where I was protected from intruders by my own secretary in an outer office.

My book Protest and Prejudice had sold fifteen thousand copies and had been translated into Japanese. Various chapters had been reprinted in more than twenty books. The major newspapers, magazines, and radio and television media gave good coverage to research I had done on the civil-rights movement, civil disorders, and community police patrols. From my experience in presenting papers at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association I assumed that it was not unusual to receive more than 150 requests for preprints of a timely paper.^[3]

After receiving my Ph.D. from the University of California, I had barely settled into Cambridge and got over jet lag in September 1967 when I received an invitation to join the staff of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Barely a year before, in beard and sandals, I had been sitting in smoke-filled cafés on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, listening to folk music and talking about the machinations of the power elite, plotting coups and bemoaning the sad role of co-opted American intellectuals. At Harvard I became a regular on the Boston-Washington shuttle and dressed in a three-piece suit. I eagerly rejected Thoreau's advice, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." Ignoring the sarcasm, I chose instead to follow Bob Dylan's advice, "Get dressed, get blessed. Try to be a success."

A student-published course evaluation booklet (The Harvard Confi-Guide ), known for its biting critiques, praised my courses: "Marx ranks among the best lecturers in the University. . . . If you don't take the course, at least sit in on some of the lectures." I was fortunate to encounter an unusually bright, well-read, socially conscious group of

graduate and undergraduate students, some of whom are now major figures in American sociology. We were on the same side of the generation gap and shared intellectual interests, a desire to see research aid social change, and a quest for professional status. Training students and involving them in research was deeply fulfilling. (It also allowed me to get more work done.)

I received several prestigious fellowships that enabled me to take leaves of absence. My name was added to the list of those under consideration to be invited for a year in residence at several think tanks. Consultation and research money was falling into my lap. CBS-TV needed a consultant for a series on urban areas. ABC-TV wanted a commentator on the Kerner Commission report. Encyclopedia Britannica wanted an article on riots. The Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard offered summer salaries. Unsolicited, funding sources such as the Urban Institute and Law Enforcement Assistance Administration offered me money for research; all they required from me was a letter of a few pages, and I would receive a grant.

At a relatively young age I was fortunate to have the chance to serve on the editorial boards of several major journals and was elected to the Council of the American Sociological Association, enjoying the company of senior colleagues old enough to be my parents and even grandparents. The mail routinely brought inquiries about positions elsewhere, along with requests to write books, articles, and reviews for both academic and popular publications, serve on editorial and other boards, participate in symposia, and give lectures and deliver papers at an array of academic meetings both in the United States and abroad. The invitations removed from me the anxiety and risk many of my peers experienced as they sought professional attention. I was not conducting research with only a hope that someday, somehow, the results would be published. Instead, I could adopt the more cost-effective and safe technique of filling orders on hand. Since invitations were usually general, I had the freedom to write on whatever I wanted.

It seemed to be a seller's market. In one of those nasty social principles wherein the rich got richer, each invited article or presentation triggered new invitations in an almost geometric expansion. Each article was an investment that earned interest. My problem was not having the goods rejected but finding it impossible to keep enough in stock. The certainty of publication probably encouraged me to produce more than I otherwise might have and perhaps to let it go to press earlier. It also may have meant a freer, more interpretive writing and research style

because I did not have to conform to the expectations of an editorial board or reviewers committed to a narrow notion of sociological research.^[4] Since esteemed members of my profession were offering these invitations, my self-confidence increased and I came to believe that I had important things to say. Perhaps a positive labeling effect was at work.

I brushed up against a busy world of movers and shakers, elites, and academic gatekeepers. Editors, reporters, lawyers, and heads of social-research consulting firms asked me to dine at expensive restaurants and private clubs or tendered invitations to cocktail parties. Often they asked me for my opinion or help on topics I knew nothing about. I negotiated a contract to do a race-relations textbook with a colleague for what seemed in 1970 to be an unprecedented sum, far greater than my annual salary. I had lunch with Vice President Humphrey and dinner with several Cabinet secretaries. I attended briefing lunches and dinners with other real and aspiring political leaders. I was approached by a former (or so he claimed) CIA agent still working for the government but in some other capacity. He had read Protest and Prejudice and wanted to talk about the student movement. I eagerly responded to a request to join a group of academics helping Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and drafted a position paper.

This bountiful professional harvest spilled over into private life. We lived in a university-owned apartment in the heart of Cambridge in a former botanical garden. We were invited to large, somewhat formal dinner parties attended by celebrated American intellectuals in eighteenth-century homes. Our son was the only nonconnected four-year-old accepted into Shady Lane, a wonderful Cambridge school founded by William James and John Dewey. We bought an expensive foreign car and land on Martha's Vineyard. Plans for the summer home were drawn up. I developed a taste for sherry and even pretended to enjoy playing squash.

I had moved from being an unknown graduate student at a state university in the outback to what seemed to be the core of American academic and political life.^[5] George Homans, Alex Inkeles, Seymour Martin Lipset, Talcott Parsons, and David Riesman were all down the hallway from my office. It was the same hallway that not long before had been graced by Pitirim Sorokin, Gordon Allport, and Clyde Kluckhohn, located in a building named after still another illustrious predecessor, William James. The periphery of the Kennedy circle of advisers from Harvard beckoned. One of my mentors, Daniel P. Moynihan, had moved on to a job in the White House.

I would eagerly return to my office (after an afternoon or day away) in the hope of finding several neatly written pink phone messages requesting that I return a New York or Washington call. Those little pink notes were lifelines, unobtrusive symbolic indicators bearing evidence of a career in motion. The higher reaches of sociology and perhaps even American intellectual life, public service, the mass media, and a patrician life-style all seemed to be beckoning. This was heady stuff for a person whose highest aspiration a decade before had been to write a master's thesis that would receive one scholarly citation^[6] and who kept the following lines from jazz-blues singer Mose Allison in his top drawer:

I made my entrance on the Greyhound bus
I don't intend to cause a fuss
If you like my style, that's fine with me
But if you don't, just let me be
   I got some kids,
I got a wife
I'm just trying to swing my way through life

As a student of American society I knew all about blocked mobility aspirations. But my situation was the reverse (or so it seemed during those glorious years of ascent). I had not been denied anything I felt entitled to. Instead I sometimes felt I had received things I did not deserve. In three short years, from 1967 to 1970, I had already achieved far more than I ever intended or expected.

In the warm glow of solidarity offered by elites who validate each other's status through self-fulfilling effects, it was easy to believe that what I was doing was important and that my success was meaningful and appropriate and could only increase. True, I knew that the chances of someone who had not received at least one degree from Harvard getting tenure were very slim.^[7] But I was too busy to think much about tenure in those early years. Besides, there was always the exception, and wasn't I on the fast track (as the list of achievements I also kept tucked away in the top drawer of my desk indicated)? Clearly sociology offered a great career if you had the right stuff. Who knows where it might lead?—an endowed chair, a deanship, a presidential appointment, honorary degrees, plenary addresses, editorships, more foreign translations, directorship of a research center, perhaps a best-selling novel and even a movie career. Was life ever so sweet for a young academic? Could a surfer from California disguised in academic cloth-

ing find happiness in an eastern elite academic setting? Did the rising sun have to set?

My academic knowledge of stratification and fashion should have told me that the dream could not last. That realization was not as sudden as when my chance for all-city high-school track medals was dashed when I broke an ankle just before the big meet in the Los Angeles Coliseum. There was no single calamitous incident. But gradually the sweet smell of success turned slightly rancid. As traditional achievements became less satisfying and little failures accumulated, stalagmites of disillusionment, anger, and confusion built up over several years.^[8] What I had naively assumed to be the natural order of things turned out to be but a passing phase conditioned by historical factors and luck.

After the Fall

In 1972 someone even younger than me, and with (at the time) a less impressive teaching and publication record, was suddenly given tenure in sociology. I had to give up my big office as a result. My book went out of print. A race-relations reader I edited did not sell well enough to recoup the advance. The race-relations text was never written. A partially written introductory text done with several colleagues, and which was supposed to make us comfortable and even rich, was rejected by the publisher. A number of editors I knew lost or changed jobs. After more than a decade of receiving everything I applied for, a grant application was rejected, and then another. The Republicans had taken over Washington. Whites writing about minority groups and favoring integration came under increased attack from segments of the left and the right. Liberal approaches to social issues became less fashionable. Advertisements made up an increased proportion of my mail. The reporters stopped calling. The pink phone messages were mostly from the library about overdue books and reminders to bring home a quart of milk and some bananas.

When my two most supportive senior colleagues and mentors left Harvard for Stanford, I realized that it was time to look further afield for work. Yet by 1972 the job offers had become fewer. A long-promised job in the University of California system turned out not to be there when I finally wanted it. A promised year at the Russell Sage Foundation suddenly fell through. I had several years left on my Harvard contract in 1973, but in an anticipatory version of you-can't-fire-me-I-quit, I left Harvard for an associate professorship at MIT. Al-

though certainly a good move in a market that was starting to tighten up, it was not the move to full professor that I naturally assumed would be my right should I leave Harvard.

My son made some great ashtrays in his progressive private school, but my wife and I came to have doubts about its permissive learning environment. Leaving Harvard meant giving up our ideal Cambridge apartment in our ideal academic ghetto and moving to a faceless suburb with affordable housing and neighbors whose politics, life-styles, and landscaping were far from what we had become accustomed to. The engine block in our foreign car cracked. A forest fire burned our land on Martha's Vineyard and exposed its proximity to the Edgartown dump. We sold the land.

I now had to confront ghosts that had lain dormant during the past decade of continuous graduate school and professional success. My need for achievement had been well served in those early years. I was able to leverage the success I found against inner demons always ready to tell me that I was not worth much.

Of course the need to display occupational merit badges is part of the American achievement ethos. But I was also responding to childhood experiences with a father who, whatever his virtues, was difficult to please. His own needs were such that he made me feel very inferior.^[9] As a result I had a strong need to prove myself. Seeking the external symbols of success was a way to demonstrate to the world and myself that the inner doubts I harbored were mistaken. Like Max Weber's Puritans looking for a sign of redemption through their worldly striving, I looked for evidence of my competence through competitive efforts—in high school through athletics, speech contests, student government, and stylish conspicuous consumption,^[10] and later in graduate school and beyond by applying for grants and submitting papers for publication.^[11]

My experience in those early years had supported a simple, adolescent, Nietzschean (and probably male) view in which the world could be neatly divided into winners and losers, leaders and led, those in the inner circle and those outside it. Of course, depending on the arena, one might be in or out. But many of my youthful memories revolve around a desperate need to be in that circle. Good taste required not openly acknowledging the intensity of the drive or that sweet, smug feeling that success made possible. But the quiet, invidious feelings achievement permitted were terribly important. Through grit, determination, hard work, and luck I had done a good job of showing the world where I stood—at least up to the early 1970s.^[12]

Then things changed. The appropriate tragic model was not the Greek hero destroyed by his own virtues, but the Biblical hero Job brought down by random external forces. I was the same person doing what I had always done (and probably even doing it better), and yet things were not working as they had before. I had jumped through what I thought were the appropriate burning hoops, but the cheers were now muffled.^[13] I had worked very hard to reach the brass ring, but it was always just out of reach. I had constructed a positive self-image based on possessing a nice suit of clothes, but they now were in danger of becoming outmoded and even being repossessed. I was suddenly vulnerable in a way I had not been before. What is more, the achievements that had given me so much pleasure in the past seemed less fulfilling on repetition.

Not even old enough for a real mid-life crisis, I went through a period of reassessment and asked all the familiar questions: What did it all add up to? Was it worth it? Why keep playing the same old game if the connection between merit, hard work, and reward was not assured or if the reward was not all that great to begin with? What were my goals? Who was I, after losing some of the formal trappings of success? What was important? Was there life after Harvard and the bountiful harvest of my first decade in sociology? My answers were hardly original, but they worked for me.

I came to terms with both winning and losing and was better able, as Kipling advised, to "meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat these two imposters just the same." I developed a perspective that made both failure and success easier to understand and accept. A part of this perspective is awareness of a Woody Allen paradox wherein when we do not have what we want, we are unhappy, but should we get it, it turns out not to be enough.^[14]

Seven Characteristics of Success

While success is nice to have, it is not all it is cracked up to be:

1. It does not last. Mark Twain said, "One can live for two months on a good compliment." Depending on one's psyche two hours or two weeks might also apply. But as a character in a Neil Simon play observes, "Nothing recedes like success." With appalling regularity, there is always a later edition of a journal or newspaper telling someone else's story. Books go out of print and journal articles cease to be read. The

pages rapidly yellow and are forgotten. People ask what you are doing now . Colleagues who know what you have done retire, and they are replaced by younger persons unaware of your contributions. To make matters worse, unlike the natural sciences, sociology is not very cumulative. Whatever social wheel you discover may be rediscovered a few years later by someone at another school or in another discipline unaware of what you have done (or at least not acknowledging it in a footnote). The Romans were wise to have servants march next to victorious generals in parades and whisper in their ears, "Fame is a passing phenomenon."

2. You can never be successful enough (at least in your own eyes). No matter how good you are, there is always someone better. Whatever you did, you could always have done it better and done more, or done it earlier. You never were as important or well known as you thought you were. Even the truly famous are not exempt.^[15] What is worse, you never really get there. As Durkheim observed, in a rapidly transforming society you can never achieve enough success. When what is at stake is something as open-ended as reputation, productivity, impact, or accumulation, there is no clear limit. With each higher level of achievement the definition of success changes such that it is forever out of reach. By contrast, failure more often seems limited and finite: you know when you have hit the wall.

3. The more success you have, the harder it becomes to reach the next level of achievement. As one moves from getting accepted to graduate school, to getting a Ph.D., to getting a teaching job, to getting tenure and national awards and distinction, the competition gets stiffer, the number of slots declines, and the price of success increases. With each level of achievement the field is narrowed. Once a certain level is reached, there is little variation among participants. Everyone is qualified and hardworking, and there are fewer rewards.

4. There is a diminishing-returns effect. National Basketball Association star Larry Bird captured it in his comment on receiving the Most Valuable Player Award a second time: "It's funny because when you're a kid you can't wait to get those trophies. You get 'em home and shine 'em up. Now I forget all about 'em. I got one last year that I left in a friend's truck for a whole year before he reminded me of it."^[16] The satisfaction from external rewards is not as great the second or third time around, whether it be delivering or publishing a paper, writing a book, or getting a grant. Part of the reason may be just the diminution of passion that

comes with aging. But repetition does not have the same kick. The sense of curiosity and expectation that accompanies the initial pursuit of rewards weakens once they have been achieved. It has become clear to me that a meaningful life cannot be constructed out of repetitively doing things to please an impersonal public.

5. Success may have costly and unintended side effects (apart from the price initially paid to achieve it). There are the obvious dangers of hubris and taking yourself too seriously and the bottomless-pit (or perhaps ceilingless-roof) quality of success. Less obvious is the paradox that success brings less time to do the very thing for which you are now being recognized. In an academic setting increased achievement is associated with increased responsibility. Being well known brings good-citizenship requests to review articles and books, write letters of recommendation, and serve on committees. Although such invitations are symbolic of success and can be directly or indirectly marshaled to obtain still more success, they can seriously undermine productivity. A virtue of obscurity is greater control over your time and greater privacy.

Public visibility may bring requests for more information about your research, job offers, and speaking, consulting, and research invitations. But being quoted or reviewed in the print media or seen on television may also bring appeals from job seekers, salespersons, and charities and requests for free advice or help on topics you know little about. When your topic is controversial, as mine on race, civil disorders, secret police, and surveillance tended to be, you are also likely to get bizarre missives including hate mail and threats, incomprehensible letters from very crazy people, and be besieged by persons seeking to recruit you to propagate strange ideas and schemes.

6. The correlation between ability, or merit, and success is far from perfect. This is of course a central sociological message. Factors beyond merit that may bear on the distribution of rewards include the makeup of the selection committee, what it had done the previous year, timing, the characteristics of the applicant pool, and intellectual, ideological, or personal biases. Even when the selection process is fair, rejections are often more a comment on the scarcity of rewards than on the incompetence of applicants. The major factors here are surely organizational. But the structure and ambiguity of reward situations also make it possible to mask the role sometimes played by corruption.

With age and experience you come to feel comfortable judging, and even sometimes doubting the judges.^[17] There are enough questionable

cases involving tenure and promotion, the awarding of grants, and the acceptance of materials for publication to make clear the role of non-achievement criteria in social reward. Cynical awareness of this state of affairs need not make you throw in the towel or become corrupt, but it may mean slowing down, putting less emphasis on outcomes, and becoming more philosophical about failure and success. This awareness can take some of the sting out of defeat. It also ought to take some of the pride out of victory.^[18]

7. There is no reason to expect that what you do next will be better, by your own standards, than what you have done in the past or will necessarily bring equivalent or greater recognition and reward. In graduate school and the early professional years this may not be true. You start with little, so each achievement is a milestone and more rewarding than the last. Yet this training effect is short-lived. Career satisfaction in academia and the quality and quantity of productivity are not linear, in spite of the rhetoric of cultural optimism and metaphors of growth. Academics are not like professional athletes, many of whom gradually peak over a period of three to six years and then fall off. For the minority of Ph.D.'s who continue to do research after receiving their degrees, the average pattern for both the quality of their work and the recognition it receives is probably jagged.^[19] There may be periods of intense creativity and productivity, followed by periods of reading, pursuing unrelated interests, or laying the ground for the next period of activity. Fallow periods, if that be the right term, are nothing to worry about (at least if you have tenure). As in agriculture, they may even be functional.

Practical Lessons

Three broad practical lessons follow from these perspectives on success and failure: (1) value the process of creating as an end itself; (2) develop new professional goals; (3) do not make your career your life.

Turning to the first, it is necessary to value the process of creating. Work has to be fun and interesting in its own right, apart from any external rewards once it is finished. Harry Chapin caught this idea when he sang:

Getting off this dirty bus
one thing I understood.
It's got to be the going
not the getting there that's good.

In graduate school I was impressed by Erich Fromm's argument to live life such that you did everything as an end in itself and not as a means. At the time I saw this directive in terms of interpersonal relations. It never occurred to me that the argument had local occupational application. But I now see that once you have tenure, if you do not enjoy the research or writing (apart from whatever payoff the finished product might bring), then it is not worth doing. I came to realize that I got pleasure from finding partial answers to questions I wondered about, turning a clever phrase, ordering a set of ideas, and seeing connections between apparently unrelated phenomena. In a competitive world of uncertain and perhaps unsatisfying reward there is much to be said for valuing the process of production as an end in itself.^[20]

The focus on process and becoming can mean less concern over the quantity of work produced and fewer comparisons to colleagues. It can protect against judging yourself by some quantitative standard wherein whatever you do next has to be more and better than what you did earlier and bring greater rewards. If for personal satisfaction what matters is enjoying your work, then it does not much matter how many publications that work eventually leads to, or how quickly, or even in which places it gets published. I am not particularly troubled that some of my work may never be published, or may be published a decade after its completion, or may bounce down the prestige hierarchy of journals before finding a resting place. This attitude contrasts markedly with the rational cost-benefit calculation and the intensity and snobbishness about publication I felt as a young academic. What matters most is a sense of engagement with your work and of movement. I do not deny that the need for social recognition can be congruent with, and even conducive to, the advancement of knowledge or that there is pleasure in seeing an article or book in print—producers need markets for validation and feedback. But that is not enough to sustain research activity, particularly after a professional reputation is established.

A second conclusion involves the need to develop new professional goals because of the diminishing-returns effect and the increasing difficulty of climbing ever higher. I broadened my professional and personal goals (described in the next section). In the case of the former, I expanded my intellectual repertoire. You are likely to discover early in your career that you quickly master contemporary sociological research knowledge regarding your topic (or if not, at least get bored with it). Occasionally there will be some highly informative, useful, or fresh empirical findings, concepts, theoretical approaches, or methods, but

not often. Although by and large it is not true that sociology consists of "findings of the obvious by the devious" (as an Alison Lurie character suggests), there is not much new under the sun after you have been out in it for a while.^[21]

I sustained intellectual interest by developing new substantive areas of interest, turning to comparative research and to other disciplines, investigating new sources of data and methods, and taking up consulting. My initial interest was in race and ethnic relations, part of a more general interest in stratification. Partly as a result of being a white studying blacks in an age of black power, but more out of the fatigue I have described, I shifted from race-relations research to questions combining my interest in race and ethnic issues with an interest in collective behavior and, later, deviance and social control. I now see the latter giving way to an interest in questions concerning technology and society. Such moves are gradual and not very rational. You cannot predict your intellectual trajectory by what you are concerned with in graduate school. But I would venture that unless you change and expand, it is easy to get turned off to intellectual inquiry.

Variety can come from studying in some other country what you have studied here. It is fun, and there are solid intellectual grounds for doing it. I went to India to study race relations. I went to France and England to study police. I hope to go to Scandinavia to study computer systems. Beyond the new intellectual horizons travel presents, it offers a new set of colleagues and new bodies of literature and outlets for publication. Whatever knowledge may be gained, I get a strange pleasure from struggling to read the French journal I receive.

Variety can also come from learning what other disciplines have to say about your topic. One consequence of having spent more than a decade in a planning department that is problem-centered rather than discipline-centered is a continual reminder of the variety of perspectives, methods, and data sources needed to understand a phenomenon. In this sense discipline-based professional education, with its insular, self-aggrandizing, and often imperialistic tendencies, does an intellectual disservice.

Although I always start with sociological questions, they are no longer enough. Over the years they have been supplemented by a series of questions from psychology, political science, economics, history, law, and ethics. What is more, for the research that touches on public issues I have added a broad normative question: given what I have learned from my research, where do I stand on a policy issue, and what would I

recommend? In graduate school, still reeling from the conservatism of the 1950s and the thrust to make sociology a science, such issues were ignored or seen as disreputable.

I have also broadened my definition of data and of what I feel comfortable working with. For both my M.A. thesis on Father Coughlin and my Ph.D. dissertation on the civil-rights movement I used standard survey research data. I continued to conduct survey research for several years after getting the Ph.D., but now rarely do. Instead, I have made increased use of observational, historical, and literary materials. My book Undercover has a historical chapter. In my work on forms of interdependence between rule breakers and rule enforcers I am analyzing novels and film. In my work on social movements I am investigating the role of art and songs in mobilizing people. My work on electronic surveillance methods for discovering violations deals directly with ethics. This broadening I advocate may not endear you to those with highly specialized disciplinary concerns who have their hands on the reward levers of your profession. But it is likely to enhance the quality of the intellectual product. The sense of growth and development it offers feels good and helps keep one fresh.

What I have described represents diversification rather than displacement. I have expanded the questions I am concerned with, the kinds of evidence I see as data, the places I look for them, and the methods I use. The movement between questions, data, methods, and location has not been linear. Instead it has, to a degree, been cyclical. I think that characteristic is another key to staying motivated. It is easy and fun to come back to a topic after having been away for a while. New materials will have appeared, and the experiences you have had in the interim may cause you to see what was once familiar in a new way. There is some salvation in moving back and forth between qualitative and quantitative, domestic and international, contemporary and historical, basic and applied questions and the various social-science disciplines.

This diversity also makes it easier to have a few irons always in the fire. If nothing more, it gives one a modest reason to go to work: to check out the mail. Beyond statistically improving your chances of success, having submitted multiple articles, proposals, and grant applications can serve as a kind of safety net for the imagination. When a rejection comes, you have the hope that the other things still out will meet with a happier fate. Of course, there is the risk of a harder fall if they all end up being rejected. However, with enough nets and fishing lines out, that need never occur. The future has an open-ended quality

that can be wonderfully conducive to optimism. I also guard against demoralization from rejection by typing out two letters whenever I submit an article. The first is to the journal to which I am submitting the article, and the second (undated) is to the next place I will send the article if it is rejected. I would not deny, though, that there is also wisdom in knowing when to fold, as well as when to hold.

Another professional goal that I actively pursued for a while (but am now ambivalent about) involved earning extra income through consulting and textbook writing. Earning money did not become an obsession, but I stopped seeing it as necessarily an unworthy goal. It was what I did to earn it, I thought, that merited moral evaluation, not the goal per se.

If making all the right academic moves did not insure success or satisfaction, why not use the same skills and credentials to get rich? The payoff was likely to be more certain and immediate, and the standard required was less demanding. Given disillusionment and fatigue with academic amateurism, it was easy to rationalize spending more time playing for pay instead of for honor, footnotes, and the acclaim of adolescents.^[22] However, as will be noted, this emphasis is not without problems if you remain committed to academic values.

A reassessment of the bourgeois life began with my move from Berkeley to Cambridge. My senior colleagues were living well, and well beyond their academic salaries. Spacious, elegantly restored historic homes with cleaning services, travel to exotic places in the winter and vacation homes in the summer, camp and enriched education for children, gourmet foods and foreign sports cars were not available to persons who gave all their royalties to political causes (as I had originally planned to do) or who only did social research gratis on behalf of causes they believed in. This shift in emphasis began symbolically with my gradual acceptance of, and eventual belief in, the usefulness of an electric can opener. We received one as a wedding present in the 1960s, and it stayed in its unopened box for many years. For reasons I cannot clearly recall, at the time it seemed to epitomize all that was wrong with our society. Brick-and-board book shelves were replaced by real book shelves. A new sofa eliminated the need for a draped Mexican serape to disguise the sorry state of the sagging couch beneath it. We came to view paying someone to clean the house as salvation rather than exploitation.

While it was nice to have the extra income, earning outside money was not all that great either. It got boring, and I did not like the feeling of being a sociologist for sale: have ideas and methods, will travel. I was not comfortable with the salesmanship that pleasing and finding clients

seemed to require. After all, I had chosen an academic life rather than the commercial life of my ancestors precisely to avoid the need to pander to customers. The pressures to meet deadlines were much greater than in the university. I felt the consulting reports I wrote were generally unappreciated and unread, except for the oversimplified and watered-down "executive summaries" with which they had to begin.

There were also role conflicts. The norms of scholarship sometimes conflicted with the interests of my employer. The substitution of market and political criteria for those of truth and intellectual rigor troubled me. It was alienating to be told what research to do and to have business persons and bureaucrats place conditions on intellectual inquiry. I did not like the lack of editorial and distributional control over what was produced.

I encountered bad faith on the part of employers. Thus, in an evaluation of a community-oriented criminal-justice project I pointed out how innovative and important the program was, while also honestly documenting problems and ways of overcoming them. Imagine my surprise when the research document was not used to improve the program but to kill it. It became clear that the hiring agency viewed research as a tool to pursue a course of action that had been decided before the research was undertaken. In another example a well-established consulting firm hired me to write a proposal for a large grant and promised me a major role in it. The grant was funded, although all I received was an invitation to serve on the advisory panel of the study.

I felt uncomfortable with the pressures and temptations to dilute work, cut corners, treat issues superficially, and delegate tasks I was hired to do to much lower-paid graduate students. These could be rationalized since consulting standards were generally lower than those of academic peer review. The goal was to maximize income rather than obtain a high level of craftsmanship, which in most cases would not have been recognized or appreciated.

I emphasized earning extra income for about five years. I met with some modest financial success and learned some things about government programs, textbook writing, and social science as business. It was a nice break from my early years but clearly could not sustain me. I gradually moved back to a predominant focus on academic work and caught a second wind. I still appreciate the benefits of doing sociology in applied and remunerative settings, and I have not given up such activities entirely—they can keep you fresh, involved, and informed and be a source of research data and a way to influence policy and shape debate.

It is refreshing to meet people who actually do things rather than merely talk about what others do. Yet if you are fortunate enough to have a job in an academic setting, it seems foolish not to take advantage of the freedom for intellectual inquiry it offers.

The third practical conclusion I reached was that your career cannot (or should not) be your entire life. Not only did I question the payoff from occupational success beyond a certain point, but I also saw the price that excessive devotion to a career could extract from personal and family life. The prospect of being a narrow, one-dimensional person with a good chance of having family trouble and an early heart attack was unappealing, even if there had been greater certainty in the hard work-success-happiness connection.

In the initial years after moving from Harvard to MIT I left several projects undone for lack of funding and graduate students. A bit weary and cynical about the single-minded pursuit of academic achievement, I devoted more time to highly personal, noncompetitive activities over which I had more control. I spent more and better time with my family, rebuilt a dilapidated Victorian house, learned to play the guitar, read novels, kayaked wild rivers, and worked on a family history project. Watching "Sesame Street" with a young companion, plastering and painting walls, scrutinizing the 1840 Detroit census for information about a great-grandfather, struggling with an out-of-tune guitar, and catching up on a decade's worth of unread novels were far removed from the usual academic obsessions and compulsions.

The respite from an unrelenting focus on academic work gave me great pleasure. Concrete activities provided immediate rewards. Ascriptive rather than achievement criteria were present. There were no risks and no concern over whether distant judges would find me wanting. These activities belonged to me in some very basic sense. They could not be taken away or withheld by editorial or academic gatekeepers. My family history, for example, was simply waiting to be discovered. The work was intensely personal and involved no deadlines or evaluations.

Yet as with exclusively playing the monastic academic game or going commercial, focusing primarily on quality of life also has its limits. It is not much fun to paint the same room a second time. Small children quickly become adolescents who do not want to go on family outings with you. You can trace back family history only so far.

After five years of spending considerable time on other things, I returned to the conventional academic activities of applying for grants, writing journal articles, and presenting papers. I was fortunate to find

and help develop a broad topic involving social control, deception, and technology that has sustained me for more than a decade. I find issues of surveillance and society and the revelation and concealment of information endlessly fascinating. The topic has implications for social theory and social change. It is of interest to academic, practitioner, and general audiences, and I have not had trouble obtaining resources to investigate it. Through working with congressonal committees, federal agencies, public interest groups, and the media, the research has also had some modest impact on shaping national debate and on public policy.^[23] But I have not pursued this project with the same single-mindedness or desire for professional success of the early years. My life has become more balanced.

There are some issues that I have not resolved. One concerns feelings of being underutilized and underappreciated,^[24] which comes with being the only academic sociologist in an interdisciplinary department of urban studies and planning at a technology institute.^[25] To be sure, in other ways my department and MIT have offered a superb home. There are advantages to being left alone in an environment where no one is like yourself. But it leaves a vague sense of loss.^[26] The part of academic life that I have found most satisfying is mentoring and working with younger colleagues and students on research. I would have learned and published more and done less self-questioning had I had the steady flow of students and the day-to-day validation and chance to contribute that large graduate sociology programs offer. It does not feel right to offer a new class or hold office hours and have few or no students appear. What kind of a professor are you if no one seems interested in what you profess?

Another unresolved issue is what to do with the anger I still feel toward certain persons who have treated me unfairly or simply wounded my pride. These actions were in discretionary contexts where what I believe to be the ideological and personal motives could easily be masked. On any broad scale such events were minor and are now long gone. Intellectually I know that to dwell on the past is unproductive and I may even be wrong in attributing personal and political moves to some of the rejections, but the feelings remain. Life is too short to waste time on replaying the past, and the evidence indicating unfairness is rarely unequivocal.

But in general I have ceased being so self-reflective. The issues about work, life, and identity that had troubled me became less important. I realized I was caught in the paradoxes of achievement and its discontents. I became more accepting of dilemmas and tensions that had once

consumed enormous amounts of emotional energy. Instead of viewing these as problems to be solved and choices to be made, I was better able to accept personal and professional contradictions and multiple motives as the order of things and, in Robert Merton's words, to appreciate the "functional value of the tension between polarities."^[27] Sometimes I would be drawn to one end of a continuum and at the other times to its opposite. Sometimes I would try to combine them in my writing or bridge them in my political work.

I also realized that I wanted a number of things that could not be had to the fullest extent or necessarily all at the same time. I compromised and settled for less of any one in order to have some of each.^[28] Instead of worrying about what I "really" was and what I valued most, I saw that I was probably more marginal than most people. I came to value being something of an invisible person and social chameleon, able to fit into, and move in and out of, different worlds. This quality may be part of my intellectual interest in deception, passing, and infiltration.

I am both the intensely driven, hardworking, competitive, ambitious person (like those I encountered early in my career) and the laid-back bohemian surfer of my California days; the intellectual interested in ideas for their own sake and one of the progeny of Karl Marx and C. Wright Mills who wanted to see ideas linked to change (perhaps a committed spectator, as Raymond Aron termed it); the quantitative and systematic sociologist and the journalist seeking to describe in language that people could understand what Robert Park called the big story; the scholar and the handyman; the athletic, river-running, beer-drinking, former fraternity man who could admit to still having some neanderthal-like macho attitudes and feelings and the righteous carrier of a new gender morality; a Jew with German and Eastern European roots and a secular American at home on both coasts (and in northern as well as southern California); the pin-striped suiter who could easily pass among elites and yet announce when the emperor was scantily clad or naked—but always with civility and in the King's English. And, as Lévi-Strauss notes, sociological inquiry can be enhanced by the skill of distantiation.

A cynic might suggest that the cautionary wisdom I have offered about success be viewed skeptically, as sour grapes. Are my new goals just compromises made out of necessity or, with appropriate professional socialization, is it possible to start a career with them? If my career trajectory had continued upward at its original pace, and had there been no fall, would I still have reached the same conclusions?^[29] I certainly would not have thought as much about these issues, and the

emphasis might be somewhat different. But since the fall I described was temporary, I am confident that my advice is sound and represents more than the idiosyncracies of my personal situation. It is based on two decades of successes and failures, and not only those in the beginning.

Unlike the Doctorow character quoted in the epigraph to this essay, I came East rather than West as a young man, and my expectations did not really wear away. However, they did change, and I was able to put them in perspective. Human existence is dominated by vast contingent forces that we gamely try to channel and control. That we sometimes succeed should no more lull us into thinking we can continually pull it off than should failure lead us to stop trying.

It was once said of Willie Nelson that he wrote songs out of love but was not above accepting the money. Nor am I above accepting professional recognition should it come. Yet I have become more concerned with process and learned more about how to deal with outcomes, whatever they are. I have become less troubled by rejection and also less thrilled by success. I have sought a more balanced life.

The Greeks gave their Olympic champions laurel wreaths as an ironic reminder that victory could be hollow. In Greek mythology Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne. She flees, and he runs after her. Abhorring the thought of marriage she prays to her father to save her by changing the form that has so attracted Apollo. Just as Apollo is upon her she is changed into a laurel tree. Is it a sign of modernity and a cause of its malaise that we offer our Olympic heroes gold instead?

Chapter Twelve—
Becoming an Arty Sociologist

Barbara Rosenblum

Little did I know that the form my adolescent rebellion took in 1958 both crystallized and foreshadowed the themes that would dominate my sociology and my life. Teenagers do strange things in adolescence: some overconform, some become exaggerations of a superstar, some become football players or cheerleaders. I became arty. Every Friday afternoon I would take the forty-five-minute train ride from Brooklyn into Greenwich Village in Manhattan, go to the Cafe Rienzi, order that foul-tasting coffee called espresso with the intense hope that someday I would like it, and read translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. After all, wasn't I going to major in comparative literature when I eventually went to college? On my napkin I would practice spelling existentialism, a word I was just learning. I read novels that were deep and meaningful. At home I practiced the guitar and sang folk songs, memorizing lyrics about social justice and black blues. I wrote poetry in the style of Allen Ginsberg. And, of course, there was jazz, the most vibrant, robust, alive form of music I had ever heard. I saw movies that made me suffer. I used the word absurd about a hundred times a day. More absurd was that I wore black beatnik clothes and looked like a teenage jerk. But arty and cultured I did in fact become. Later on, my field became the sociology of art and culture, and I became arty and cultured with a vengeance.

Becoming cultured, for me, had two essential ingredients. First, it was not enough to learn about one field, such as music, read about it, study it, and become one of the cognoscenti; that would be too simple. Rather, to be cultured meant becoming a generalist, knowing all the

arts. I had to learn about music, theater, literature, film, poetry, photography, and painting. I was driven into a kind of hypervigilance in which I had to know what was going on where, who was performing what, and what the New York critics said about it. Reading newspapers, especially the critical reviews, became my daily devotional study. No day passed when I did not submit myself to the process of taste formation and aesthetic discrimination. I had to know everything. I had to take courses in everything as well—music theory, Elizabethan drama and poetry, American cinema. The cultural landscape was there for me to gobble up and for no other reason. The notion of a single major in college seemed ludicrous to me. Wasn't everything connected to everything else? The artificial intellectual boundaries of majors or disciplines, I knew, were merely organizational conveniences for the creation of subdivisions for financial allocation and control of personnel. I was an intellectual. I was a generalist. I was cultured.

I embraced everything that was new and radical. I became a neophile. The avant-garde became my avant-god. For example, it wasn't enough for me to like the standard string quartets, though most enthusiasts felt a smug, often secret aesthetic superiority that distinguished them from lovers of the symphony. They could take joy in their selection of the most elite form of composition as their favorite kind of music. But I was compelled to learn to like the jarring and dissonant sounds of Bartók's dark and disturbing quartets. And then Bartók became insufficient for my psychological need to embrace the new. I sought out Berg and Webern, Henze and Stockhausen, Berio and Babbitt, Subotnik and Rochberg. I studied their compositions in the same intense way that I was learning angst-ridden modern literature and the names and styles of all the New York painters.

My sociology is dominated by the same themes. I became a generalist devoted to the sociology of knowledge, art, and culture. What other category could be large enough or more sanguine for one's needs? It was perfect—sociology at its most general, encompassing the entire world. But the second theme, embracing the new, also filtered into my sociology. I felt a need to know what was going on at the edge of social thought. I studied the latest in French and British social analysis and became knowledgeable in the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. My sociology was on the edge, too, when in 1970 I chose to study the organizational determinants of photographic aesthetics, long before the sociology of art became the relatively legitimate field it now is.

One day, when I felt superior enough and sufficiently protected

against my own insecurity to relax a bit, I found myself crying over the heart-wrenching themes in those damned Russian symphonies my father played when I was a child. Was I running away from Tchaikovsky all the time, from my own sentimentality, my own class background, where I frequently heard the Russian symphonies, with their grand, sweeping-across-the-steppes-of-Russia themes?

My mother was one of seven children, only two of whom survived World War II. She got out of Europe in 1929, avoiding bodily harm and probable death. When she was very young, she lived in a small Jewish ghetto, a farming town in rural Poland. Later, when I read Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, I was not horrified by the brutal ignorance and religious superstitions of rural Polish peasants, which I had been told about by my mother. As a child she worked instead of going to school and hence never learned to read or write properly. My father, however, was a city boy, was literate, had a bicycle, and wore shoes. He too left Poland before the war, in the 1930s. They met in America, first spoke to each other in Polish, and went to night school to learn English and study the Constitution. The combination of Polish, Yiddish, and English was the first linguistic music I ever heard.

When he arrived in the United States, my father had a marketable skill: he could cut hair. In Warsaw he had worked as a barber since the age of eleven. He too had strange stories to tell, of bleeding customers with leeches and applying heated cups to the chest to relieve congestion. When I heard my parents speak of Europe, I never saw in my mind any version of the photographs I would see many years later—pictures of gentlemen in the street, walking in long black coats and beards, engaging in the routine work of peddling or selling while retaining a pious demeanor. Rather, my father's stories created visions of dark medieval towns with sickly flagellants running to escape the plague.

But when he came to the United States, he thought he might do something other than barbering, so he tried new jobs. It was the Depression, and work was not easy to get. For a while he worked in a shoe factory but lost his job when he participated in the unionization of the factory and a subsequent strike. Leftist sympathy with working people is something I grew up with; to this day it is in my bones, as it was in his. When American industries began to produce for the war in Europe, my father found work in the Brooklyn navy yard as a ship fitter, a job he kept until he was drafted in 1943.

During her first years in America my mother did not read or write well; consequently, she worked as a live-in housekeeper and later, when

her English improved, as a governess. When the family that employed her was hit by the Depression and had to fire her, she next found work in a small factory shop sewing buttons on dresses. After that, she worked as an alterations seamstress for a department store in Brooklyn.

My father's military salary was the last solid, steady, and predictable wages that our family would see for the next twenty years. When he returned from army service, the barber-shop partnership he had formed dissolved and he was without steady work for a year. He free-lanced as a barber while looking for regular work. On borrowed money he bought one-fifth of a partnership in a tiny New York—style luncheonette, where racing forms, newspapers, magazines, comics, cigarettes, chocolate egg creams, and cherry lime rickeys were sold and fresh sodas made from syrup and fizzing seltzer streaming from spigots. I worked in his store from the age of ten. My father's mastery of numbers always impressed me. He could add up a column of numbers written down the side of a brown paper bag in no time flat, faster than any other person I knew.

We were very poor. We lived in low-income city housing in predominantly white-ethnic and black neighborhoods. I wore hand-me-downs except for one skirt and white blouse I was required to wear every Thursday for school assembly. The menu in our house was different from that in my friends': I thought that the category meat consisted of cow organs—lungs, pancreas, heart—and chicken feet. I did not taste steak until I was ten years old.

Being a poor kid in a city housing project and having immigrant parents was no fun. When my parents fought, it was always about money. From an early age I knew I had to earn money as quickly as possible, to work as soon as I was able, and to help my family in any way I could. Any thought of college was remote—it was not even a word I heard while growing up.

Being poor meant waiting—waiting in long lines in health department clinics, waiting hours to hear a bureaucratic voice call one's number on a loudspeaker, waiting for a social worker or eyeglasses or somebody or something. Being poor meant having one's finances investigated constantly, sometimes for seemingly insignificant and arbitrary reasons. In those days social workers were not as sensitive to matters of privacy as they are (or are told to be) now. Then a civil servant's primary duty was the assiduous detection of cheaters. My father's tax forms were examined every year to see if we were still eligible for the privilege of living in low-income housing projects. When my parents wanted to move from one housing project to another in a better neighborhood

closer to where my father worked, they were endlessly interrogated about their finances, having to admit time and again in the inquisitional ritual that they were economic failures. When I was sent to summer camp, my family's financial records were scrutinized carefully. We were poor, yes, but were we poor enough to qualify me for summer camp at a cost of one dollar? Yes, we were poor enough.

Being the child of immigrant parents also meant I felt like an outsider, not only because we were poor but also because my parents and I were different. Our ways, habits, talk, and rhythms seemed strange and bizarre. I lived in an un-American house, which my young mind linked with the congressional committee on un-American activities when people began to associate Jews with stolen atomic secrets, spies, and dangerous foreigners. The first comparison and difference was linguistic: we were other. To my unschooled ears the language spoken by my parents' friends, despite their Brooklyn drawl, sounded like the King's English. My parents sounded like foreigners.

My father's luncheonette became the locus of my education. From the comic books, newspapers, and magazines he sold, I learned to read. There was a bar and grill next to my father's store, and the waitresses and neighborhood prostitutes congregated there and often came into the store. I learned about the race track, horses, violence, protection, personal threats, and kissing from the young hoods who hung around there.

In the 1950s my parents' cousins and distant relatives began coming in droves to the United States. I remember being introduced to vast numbers of new people to whom I was bonded by blood but little else. Some of my mother's relatives were Chasidic Jews. The men had long hair, and the women wore wigs over their short-cropped hair. They were animated, hummed to themselves, and laughed a lot, and when they smiled, they showed a mouthful of gold front teeth. They all had tattooed numbers on their forearms and some, I would later see, had scars on their bodies from having been experimented on by Nazi physicians. They seemed to come by the hundreds: ragpickers, junk men, diamond dealers, watch repairmen, salesmen. They passed through my life bringing the names of the dead and stories of the living to my parents. Relatives came and went: I would meet someone and next thing I heard, somebody had moved to Israel and another went to Montreal, probably to become a character in a Mordechai Richler novel—maybe even Duddy Kravitz.

When I entered high school, I was placed into an accelerated pro-

gram called the Honors Program, which was the first time I was formally separated from my neighborhood friends. I found myself among bright kids from middle-class neighborhoods that the school district also encompassed. Although my own neighborhood was largely working-class ethnic and black, the Honors Program had few students from these backgrounds. For the first time I met Protestants who were not black, working-class ethnics who were not Italian and whose fathers were not in the garbage business, and middle-class Jews whose fathers were physicians and accountants. No question about it: they were different, and I felt different from them. But being in the Honors Program was an opening and a separation. My friends took secretarial courses; they studied typing, stenography, and bookkeeping. I took college-preparatory courses and hated it. The work itself was not difficult but being differentiated and separated into formal programs drove a wedge between me and my friends.

I did not want to be a secretary; summer employment in an office during high school taught me that. And I knew I did not want to be a postal clerk, my father's ambition for me. He wanted me to work for steady wages, have job security, and be employed by the government. And I really did not want to go to college. I knew I wanted to be arty, and I knew that college would bring me closer to that goal than anything else; so I went.

As I began to grow accustomed to the idea of myself as a girl who would go to college, I began to practice talking about things I was learning in school. When I would do so or use a word I had recently learned, I would be accused by my neighborhood friends of being phony and putting on airs. After high-school graduation my friends went to work, and I began Brooklyn College. The women worked as secretaries or bookkeepers in Manhattan and began taking business courses in night school at the college. Within a year or so, some dropped out of night school, got better jobs, married, and moved to Queens. The men went to work for their uncles' construction companies and drove trucks filled with concrete and garbage.

I started college immediately after high school and was one of a group of seventy-five kids from the housing projects whose grades were good enough to be accepted into day college rather than on probationary status into evening classes. When I entered Brooklyn College, I parted company with my neighborhood friends; but at the same time I could not relate too well to my new fellow students. They looked like they came from another planet or tribe, wearing funny gold chains with

totemic representations called charms. The men wore penny loafers and ties and looked crisp. The women looked prim, proper, and pinned. I wore black beatnik clothes and already knew about Thelonious Monk, marijuana, the Mafia, illegitimate children, contract murders, bars in Greenwich Village, homosexuality, interracial couples, heroin, and French existentialist novels. Brooklyn College seemed like a monster movie starring live Barbie and Ken dolls. It was a world I did not fit into, a world I did not feel comfortable in. After a year I dropped out.

I was caught: I could not go to college and move up because I felt so terrified and uncomfortable with class differences, but it was impossible to move back down. My own solution was to embrace an arty life-style permanently, a move that in our society signifies class exemption and arrogates to itself privilege through difference, rebellion, and nonconformity in the service of higher values; through otherness.

For the next six years I lived in the Village. I studied classical guitar, took music theory, philosophy, and literature courses, and held a variety of jobs, which for the last four years were in the music business. My lovers were as unconventional as I was: musicians or artists, they were all soulful, misunderstood, brilliantly talented, and unspeakably poor.

The music business was the perfect solution for my dilemma. I loved the music, the people, the recording sessions, the free concerts, the payola lunches, and reading Cashbox, Variety, and Billboard . There was one problem: as a woman, I was doing the secretarial work I disliked, and there was little opportunity for me to do creative work. Women were not writers or producers and had none of the jobs I might have considered moving into. The work itself was becoming boring. At the same time New York became a center of civic energy. It was the time of John F. Kennedy, and I got caught up in what I could do for my country or my city and became involved in political action at the local level, organizing rent strikes and neighborhood improvement campaigns. After a six-year leave of absence I returned to school for a credential as a city planner. Now school was important because I had a vocational goal: to work in a municipal agency in New York specializing in problems of transportation. I had grown to hate subways and city housing projects: both had made me—and thousands of others—feel demoralized, hopeless, and poor. I wanted to do something about them.

When I returned to college in 1967, there was energy, there were causes, there was a war that people hated. The Barbie-and-Ken era was over. Students looked beautiful in their hippie clothes, and things mattered to them in a different way. I took sociology courses as part of my

city planning program. I did not expect to fall in love with sociology, but I did, and then graduate school seemed like the next place to go. So I went.

At Northwestern University near Chicago I met blond people, one of many types of people I had never met before. They looked, spoke, and acted very differently from New Yorkers. They hardly understood my New York put-on jokes. But I had to learn their behavioral code to make it in their world, so I did.

When it was time to choose a dissertation topic, I decided to study photographers and the organization of labor as a partial determinant of photographic aesthetics. That was an important decision for me and, again, crystallized the arty theme in my life. Up until that time I had studied suicide prevention centers, psychiatric intake procedures at a hospital, and an agency dealing with child abuse and neglect in Chicago. I had planned to expand one of these topics into a dissertation since they were in keeping with the ideology of service to others, a strong sense I retained from my activist days. But I did not want to study these areas any more: the pain was much too great, and I could see that my days of doing field work filled me with rage and despair. Moreover, my passion for social change and service to others was finding expression in the antiwar movement. I decided to study something that was interesting, fun, and would be just enough on the edge of my bohemianism to be psychologically comfortable for me.

My years doing field work with photographers were, without exaggeration, some of the happiest of my life. How terrific to have a fellowship and take photography courses at the Pratt Institute in New York and later at the San Francisco Art Institute while interviewing and observing some of the most interesting people I had ever met! I was, in a manner of speaking, a state-supported arty type. The field work ended, and reality intruded: it became time to write the dissertation and get a job.

Having an arty countenance may have been necessary for my psychological equilibrium at the time, but it did not prove useful as a basis for social skills in the academic world. There was much more to university life than doing interesting studies and being an intellectual. My first lesson came during my first week at Stanford University as an assistant professor. One of my colleagues took me aside and suggested, "You aren't working in the university to be an intellectual. You have to start immediately getting grants and supporting graduate students. That's your first priority."

One of the detrimental consequences of my bohemianism was my lack of experience in socially strategic behaviors, academic financial matters, and other ephemeral, but essential, qualities of academic life. Such practices as the one my colleague suggested came as an abrupt surprise to me. I had just spent several years as a graduate student during the heyday of sociology in America, the golden years when government money and support flowed from Washington. Who would have thought that my first priority as a young assistant professor would be to bring in money to the department? Such a notion, I ruefully admit now, stemmed from my naive attitude about the mixture of money and ideas, the sacred and the profane. But with this incident my initiation into the realities of university life began, and I gradually came to understand the altered priorities of professional life. With it too came the discovery that my devotion to being cultured was irrelevant in my new setting. I thought I had spent my life acquiring the culture that would unlock a world to me, and I was wrong. There was much more to the bureaucratic culture than I had ever realized. My accommodation to it came a few years later, after exposure to the culture of the university, and I did finally master the strategic behaviors and other skills requisite for bureaucratic survival.

I began to search into the nature of social class in a way that was eye-opening for me. Of course, like any good sociologist, I knew the basic issues and debates in social stratification. In general, from reading sociological studies of class I imagined the class system as stratigraphic, that is, consisting of fixed strata. It was a solid image with clear demarcations, allowing members of a society to locate themselves in a spatial framework. It was also a ladder-of-success image. But these everyday images and sociological conceptions of social class were remote and lifeless to me, inapplicable to my own experience. These models did not illuminate my personal confrontation with class-mobile situations. I was experiencing, on a social-psychological level, some invisible aspects of class that I had never read about. The keen observation that the personal is political, which became a slogan of the women's movement, became an insight that I could apply first to my own experience and then to the social world. The personal is social. I began to ponder my own history, and out of this personal examination came a richer and much deeper understanding of social class.

I thought that all I had to do was move up educationally and the rest would happen automatically. And didn't I have a head start, being super cultured? Education in and of itself was a guarantee that opportunities

would be open to me, but as I later found out, it was no guarantee that I would also acquire the other skills to fit in. What was missing from this picture was my deeper appreciation of the tight grip that social origins exert despite high educational attainment. Although my conceptual skills and my educational credentials bought me admission, I simply did not yet have the requisite social skills, political savvy, and interpersonal sophistication to move in this social world. And I am sure to this day that had my social background been more middle-class, the acquisition of such bureaucratic orientation would have been second nature.

Class works in psychological ways, keeping people in their appropriate substrata. Class works by making movement across strata psychologically uncomfortable, even painful and, for some, intolerable. Earlier I mentioned that when I began using big words in my circle of high-school friends, I was ostracized. That process operates all the time. Class works by making people feel marginal when approaching class or status boundaries. Social markers, like signs on the highway, are always telling people, Stop! You are going the wrong way. Social life is filled with such markers.

Sociologists now pay attention to class markers and look at things like etiquette, social manners, dress, demeanor, taste, self-assurance in personal comportment, understatement, and so on as key concerns in the understanding of social class. Norbert Elias's work on the social evolution of manners is now being read in America and is enlarging the scope of the study of social class by looking at aspects of class-based social sensibilities. In their study The Hidden Injuries of Class Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb grasped the fundamental idea that class operates on a psychological level, and they attempted to document it. Theirs was a first look at the phenomenon, and since that time sociological sensitivities to subtle determinative aspects of social class have increased only slightly. But with Pierre Bourdieu's work on the influence of social origins and educational level on taste formation, an important avenue to this problem may now open up.

What makes class fascinating to me is the subjective side of social mobility, which takes the form of stories people tell about their own upward social mobility.^[1] Everybody has a story, and most people will recall occasions and situations when they felt out of place and counterfeit. Most people have experienced interclass movement in a subjectively meaningful, painfully real way. Class is not merely some set of income and educational categories that sociologists fill with demographic figures and distributions. Class works by making people feel

fraudulent, like they are "passing." Despite knowing about the best cuisine and fine wine, many people still feel like lower-class frauds, as if they contained dual class identities; indeed, they often do. They speak of experiencing themselves as having a veneer and never can predict when and how they will inadvertently disclose their class origins. They tell stories about their awkwardness at dinner parties, the instant recognition that their clothes were inappropriate and that even as their words left their mouths, they knew they were saying the wrong thing for the occasion. Class works by reminding people that they do not belong and by making them feel ashamed of even trying to get in.

There are still many stories to be told. Nothing is as powerful as a personal history, especially contemporary histories. My friend Eleanor tells how she learned to say thank you at the late age of twenty-five. Now living in an exclusive part of Westchester County, New York, she grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During World War II and after, with tin can in hand, she begged for money to send to the children of Israel. After every coin was dropped in the can, Eleanor said thank you. She did not know that the phrase thank you was an ordinary part of good manners, not the automatic reflex to a coin being dropped. Like most people I have talked with, Eleanor remembers the moments of class awakening most vividly in connection with table manners. She never knew how to set a table properly because in her home, as in many other working-class homes, families did not eat together. Everyone was on a different schedule and just grabbed a knife and fork and dumped food on a plate from the big pot sitting on the stove. After she married and began to entertain other couples, she served the same way, expecting her guests to take a knife, fork, and spoon and help themselves.

Those poignant stories illustrate the inescapability of class considerations and indicate the vanity of my intense desire to deny the realities of my working-class background by striking a highly cultured, bohemian pose. As I look back, I see that I did not integrate my cultural tastes because my social background did not prepare me to do so. My cultural side, as serious as it was, was like a graft: some of it took, and some of it did not.

My own story is an example of the way in which I have come to include a richer understanding of social class in everything that I study. These concerns are reflected in work that I continue to do. I have just finished investigating the problem of the alienation of the artist, taking a close look at marketplace conditions that become structural sources of alienation for artists, a population usually thought to have enormous

control over the production process. Before that, I examined the effects of the art market on the strategic attempts of artists to gain fame and recognition through means that increase their social visibility. Another project I am working on concerns the social history of bathing practices, a theme not unrelated to stratification and cultural practices. An examination of the floor plans of bathhouses built in Britain during the height of the public bathing and hygiene movement shows that two and sometimes three sections were created, each for separate but equal bathing by the different social classes. I have a passionate personal interest in these intellectual problems and have found a way to integrate all the parts of myself—emotional, intellectual, cultural, and historical—in all the work I do.