Chapter Two—
Becoming an Academic Man

David Riesman

I

My shift from law to an academic career in the social sciences, and sociology in particular, is perplexing to some people; it is a puzzle especially to my law colleagues, who regard their occupation as vastly superior to being a professor in a supposedly "soft" field teaching mere undergraduates. Some also have been bewildered by my ending up in a sociology department without passage through the ordinarily requisite Ph.D. program. That I became an academic, though, is not so surprising to those who know that my father, an exceptionally learned man, had been clinical professor of medicine and, later, of the history of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; and that my mother had led her class at Bryn Mawr College and had won a European Fellowship at a time when it was still rare for women to go to college. Unlike many children of academic and intellectual parents, I was not openly rebellious, either at home or at school. Nevertheless, the picture of a young man following a parental bent would be a mistaken one. In fact, my father's example and the internalized verdict I accepted from my mother were perhaps the principal obstacles I overcame in becoming an academic man. And as my story will show, I followed a rather fortuitous, zigzagging path.

My father was born in Germany. His widowed mother brought him as a boy to Portsmouth, Ohio, where he worked in an uncle's store through his high-school years and then went to the University of Pennsyl-

vania to study medicine, graduating in 1892. He had almost no money and lived with extreme frugality, as he continued to do out of dislike for ostentation when he won recognition as a diagnostician in internal medicine. In 1908, at age forty-two, he married Eleanor Fleisher, an elegant bluestocking, like himself of German Jewish background, of a family established in Philadelphia for three generations. He had a gift for clinical observation and immense conscientiousness. In medical education he became an admired teacher of interns and residents; he supported the more clinical focus of Pennsylvania as against the research preoccupations of Johns Hopkins and Harvard. He was sympathetic to the education of women as physicians and took an early interest in new forms of psychiatry. His concern with the societal aspects of medical care was evident in his last book, Medicine in Modern Society (1939), written at a time when I was old enough to help with editing and commentary. My father worked tirelessly. He would come for the summer to our cottage in Northeast Harbor, Maine, but to my mother's dismay would at times interrupt his vacation to look after an ill patient in the city.

He did not bring his medical problems home with him, even during the many years when his consulting office was on the ground floor of our four-story brownstone on Spruce Street (at the time known as Physicians' Row), near Rittenhouse Square. When being driven in his car, he would scribble notes on the yellow pad he had always with him, sometimes for a clinical paper or conference, sometimes for an essay such as "Irish Clinicians of the Eighteenth Century." My father was a bibliophile, and he had an amateur interest in astronomy. Cultivated Philadelphians enjoyed his company at the Franklin Inn Society. Occasionally he would entertain medical men from here or abroad at our house; I remember our Scottish maid saying to my mother during one such dinner that she should put on a waitress's uniform so she could listen to the splendid conversation!

But at the family dinner table, save on rare expansive occasions, my father's presence was more forbidding than inviting. Fastidious in manners, he was critical of mine. Moreover, if something came up in conversation, I would be sent for the encyclopedia to look up precise meanings or references, which I felt as a chore rather than an opportunity. When he and my mother were learning Italian to be able to read Dante in the original (already at home in Latin, Greek, French, and his native German), or studying the theory of relativity, I was avidly watching Philadelphia's two last-place baseball teams, the Phillies and the A's, and read-

ing detective stories. But I also read some authors who were outside the Europe-centered orbit of my parents—almost everything by Mark Twain, sharing his deeply sardonic pessimistic side and not then put off by the brutality of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . I read Jack London and admired Rudyard Kipling.

Not surprisingly, my parents loved the opera and the Russian ballet, as did my younger brother (who followed my father into medicine and then disappointed him by becoming a surgeon) and also my musical younger sister, but I did not. However, I did regularly attend the Friday afternoon Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra concerts. At one of those concerts a dramatic event occurred, of the sort no longer likely when the patrons lack self-confidence and are afraid of appearing shocked. Leopold Stokowski played a symphony by a composer of whom I had not heard, Edgard Varèse; members of the audience started to shout in opposition, and a great many walked out. I found it thrilling. It was the first modern music I had heard, and I went on to look for more—a rare aesthetic area where my mother had not anticipated me.

One summer my brother, John Penrose Riesman, who was attending Bedales School in England, joined me in Grenoble for a bicycle trip down the Rhône valley to Marseilles and then west to Carcassonne. John knew the ground plans of the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, whereas only the Roman ruins had at that time much interest for me; indeed, for a time I actively disliked Gothic architecture. Often I would talk with museum guards or sextons in the cathedrals.

That I lacked the aesthetic tastes considered important in my family was probably less salient for me than my incompetence at the competitive sports valued at school. Only when I came to college could I find people as avid as I and yet of about my mediocre speed; I discovered squash and went on playing tennis, occasionally with Radcliffe "girls" (whom most of my classmates affected to scorn).

My father did things easily and deftly, whether mastering subjects or dealing with people; he was critical of me for my awkwardness, while he took for granted the fact that I did well at school academically. In contrast to my father's distance, my mother saw her older son as someone who shared her own style of intellectuality and what she also saw as its limitations. For her, intellectuality without creativity was sterile. Only the creative were "first-rate"; she was not, and by direct implication I too was not; hence I came to share the harsh judgment she passed on herself.^[1]

There were some women in my mother's day who hoped to pursue

both marriage and a career. More common was the acceptance of the verdict of M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, that "our failures only marry." Despite the encouragement of her teachers, my mother resigned herself after college to wait for callers from the small covey of eligible men, one of whom, a Philadelphia physician fifteen years her elder, had made a shy but persistent presence felt. My mother and her friends had discovered the excitement of books and ideas in college, and a few of these women did go on to pursue careers. But my mother's family had been very traditional, fearing that when she was awarded the European Fellowship to study in Europe, it would lead to spinsterhood, and did not encourage her. She herself was too self-mistrustful to embark on such an independent course.

She was indisputably an intellectual and later astonished my roommates and other friends, who envied me for having a mother with whom they could talk about Freud and Proust, D. H. Lawrence and Faulkner. For her, the only people who really counted in the world were the first-rate, the creative artists whom she early recognized and a few innovative scientists of such originality that they could be included in her pantheon. Correspondingly, in her romantic view the rest of worthwhile human activity served art as a kind of infrastructure or, as she would have put it, was merely second-rate.

Stricken in the 1920s with Parkinson's disease and later confined to a wheelchair, she could still lose herself in enthusiasm for Bach's B-minor Mass and Beethoven's late quartets, and she could enjoy the seascapes of Northeast Harbor and admire Florentine and French Impressionist painting—the latter in the extraordinary art collection of her and my father's friend, the acerbic collector and critic Albert C. Barnes. Most of the time her attitude toward life was relentlessly unillusioned. She hardly needed Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, of which she was an early reader, to believe in his prognosis; she had already absorbed the views of Henry and Brooks Adams. But she added to those a particular curse, one which, pondering it in retrospect, may have served as a partial rationalization for the failure she felt at not pursuing the academic career toward which the award of the European Fellowship had pointed her. Descended from German Jews on both sides, whose businesses (silk, yarn, and banking) were now in the hands of those she called Russian Jews, she concluded that German Jews were a particularly doomed lot, too inhibited and univentive to compete with the rambunctious, if crude, new immigration.

My parents were agnostic rationalists without religion. Being Jewish

was not a theme discussed at home or elsewhere. It was certainly no asset to be Jewish, but neither did it make itself felt as a liability. For me a sense of Jews as in some respects different entered my consciousness most strongly when I went to Harvard Law School. For seven years at William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia I attended Friends Meeting every Fourth Day (Wednesday). I had a devout German Catholic governess to whom I was close. My mother arranged for a novelist friend of hers, Shirley Watkins, to read the Bible with the three Riesman children and the four children of my mother's Wellesley-educated sister. Although a few of my parents' acquaintances were observant Sephardic Jews, proud of their colonial American heritage—founders later, in opposition to Zionism, of the American Council for Judaism—my siblings and I had no familiarity with Judaism at all. My mother's brother had married a White Russian of the lesser nobility, an Orthodox Catholic. I married a Unitarian and became one; my brother married a nurse he met while serving as a doctor for the Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and joined the Congregational church to which she belongs; my sister, still agnostic, married a Spanish Catholic.

II

My mother thought I was too young to attend Harvard College immediately after William Penn Charter School and suggested Exeter—perhaps to be followed by Antioch College; she admired Arthur Morgan, who had revived Antioch. I wanted to go on an educational cruise around the world. We compromised, and my mother found a school near Tucson, the now defunct Evans School. It was a dismal year. My principal pleasure and escape came from horseback trips in the mountains every weekend. A few of the students were semidelinquents who had been thrown out of schools like Saint Paul's, although I found in John Heinz II a good friend; he and I edited the humor magazine, where we used our sardonic energies against the lackluster masters and the largely indolent students. The English headmaster, Dr. Evans, taught Latin, but without the slightest interest in it.

At Harvard College I soon found myself for the first time in a place where I wanted to be. I actively went out for activities; I competed twice for acceptance onto the staff of the student newspaper, the Crimson, and, succeeding on the second try, made it my "club" for the next years. The Crimson not only legitimated my roaming curiosities concerning Harvard University but also focused my energies, and the severe criticisms we made of one another as writers and editors in the

"Comment Book" engendered a kind of competitive camaraderie and, at best, craftsmanship.

Mistakenly I thought my parents sensible when they encouraged me to study subjects at Harvard that could only be pursued in an academic setting, and that meant the natural sciences, for one could always read books. Thus I majored in biochemical sciences, making clear to curious friends on the Crimson, most of whom majored in English or another discipline of the humanities and had no heavy laboratory work, that the last thing I would ever be was a premed. Neither did the idea occur to me that I would ever become a professor. The science teaching I experienced, including that of James B. Conant, was routine until in my senior year I encountered Lawrence J. Henderson's magnificent course, focused on the physiology of blood.

But I did enjoy reading history, and as a sophomore I petitioned Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., for permission to take his course on American social history, open to juniors and seniors. It was a disappointment, for although Schlesinger was a fine person and an admired mentor of graduate students, he was a poor lecturer and did not seem to me to be a penetrating scholar. The following year I had a piece of good fortune in the visit of Charles Kingsley Webster from the University of Aberystwyth in Wales who gave a course in British diplomatic history in the era of Castlereagh and Canning. Webster had burrowed with ingenuity and thoroughness in the archival materials, and it was engrossing to be able to learn something in such fine-grained detail, including the British origins of the Monroe Doctrine—a relevant concern for me in the light of my already established misgivings concerning Manifest Destiny. I enjoyed a few conversations with Webster in his rooms in the Continental Hotel. I had "discovered" Webster, and I wandered about in the humanities, sometimes briefly auditing courses in literature favored by my friends. I shared their admiration for John Livingston Lowes but not their enthusiasm for George Lyman Kittredge's course on Shakespeare, which in my view was philosophical pedantry not made more palatable by his carefully cultivated eccentricities.

In my senior year, however, I had better luck and perhaps better judgment. Since I was writing an honors thesis (on a theoretical topic in biochemistry I have forgotten), I was permitted to reduce my course load to two rather than the standard four courses. In addition to Henderson's course, which entranced me (as did his book, The Fitness of the Environment ), I opted for Irving Babbitt's course on romanticism. Babbitt's personality was not appealing to me, but I found his outlook bracing and attractive.^[2] (Most students were uninvolved with Babbitt's

judgments. He displayed his erudition, and there was a students' betting pool on the number of names he would drop each day; I sympathized with Babbitt in the face of the philistines!) I wrote a long essay on an extravagantly ambitious topic, "The Educational Theories of Goethe and Rousseau." I did not read much secondary literature, and I pondered Émile and other apposite writings of Rousseau as well as Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann .

I appreciated Rousseau's originality, but not his vision. Well before I encountered Irving Babbitt, I had gained a keen sense for the fragility of civilization. Eight years old when the United States entered World War I, which led to the internment of my governess's fiancé, a German merchant seaman, I was aware of the storm of hatred for "the Huns"; frankfurters became hot dogs; schools stopped teaching German. In the 1920s I read about the propaganda campaigns that helped bring the United States into the war on the side of the Entente, whereas I concluded that had the United States sought to impose a peace in 1917, the Germans would certainly have been willing, and the French might have been forced, to accept a settlement. My sense of the volatility of public opinion in a democracy and my misgivings concerning nationalism, in the United States and among other potential combatants, have been fairly constant in my outlook to this day.

III

I cannot recall how it was that I became a member of the Liberal Club, but it was not out of an interest in politics. My involvement with the club had to do with education, which was one of the interests I did share with my parents, especially my mother, whose interest in Bryn Mawr College was lifelong and who had an admiration for, and some acquaintance with, John Dewey. As chairman of the Liberal Club speakers committee during my sophomore year, I invited some venturesome college presidents to speak to our little group. The most memorable was Alexander Meiklejohn, whose ouster as president of Amherst College had caused a sensation and who had then founded the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin. Clarence Cook Little, the reform-minded president of the University of Michigan, came to speak; so did Hamilton Holt, who had put Rollins College on the map. (Holt is admirably sketched by John Andrew Rice, who left Rollins to found Black Mountain College, in I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century, as well as in Martin Duberman's fine book, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community .)

Through my own interest and the default of other reporters and editors, I was able to make education at Harvard my beat on the Crimson (my fellow editors, notably Paul M. Sweezy, who easily beat me out for the presidency, prided themselves on their lively sports coverage). I "discovered" Henry A. Murray and his Psychological Clinic, devoting a full page to a story about his work—an unexpected visibility he regarded with a mixture of pleasure and unease. I gained a scoop on the iron lung that Dr. Philip Drinker, a friend of my father, developed at the Harvard Medical School. I prowled the law school, encountering, not for the last time, its pugnacious, spirited dean, Roscoe Pound. I ventured to the business school, then as later terra incognita to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I wrote an occasional column, "The Student Vagabond," about courses that seemed particularly interesting.

As a Crimson assistant managing editor the most difficult times came during reading period, when (unlike in the present lush days) there were hardly any advertisements and I had the responsibility for filling what seemed like acres of print, including writing editorials (a few of them attacking the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and the anti-German militarism of the war memorial murals in the Widener Library). I was an anxious perfectionist, and in slack news times I would wonder whether I would be the first editor in fifty years to end the night without a Crimson in press. I preferred to work on stories with a long lead time. My greatest excitement came in collaboration with Benjamin West Frazier III, who had been a Penn Charter classmate until sophomore year, when he had gone to St. Paul's School and from there to Harvard. He had come onto the Crimson as a photographer. Both of us were architecture buffs, and Ben, a concentrator in architectural sciences, was to go on to spend his life restoring old Hudson River valley houses. We discovered the incipient Harvard House Plan of President Lowell. Where Eliot House now stands was a gas station. We asked the manager when his lease was up, and made similar inquiries elsewhere in the area along the Charles River. Then we went to the offices of Coolidge, Shepley, Bullfinch, and Abbott, the Harvard architects, whose permanent hold on the university had not yet been moderated, and there saw mock-ups of the actual buildings. We learned from President A. Lawrence Lowell himself that land assembly was not yet complete, and withheld the story, exercising journalistic restraint in the interest of Harvard.

When it was permissible to break the story, I had developed an entire issue of the Crimson for a fall Saturday (for which the favorite journalistic assignment was the Yale game). I not only described the House Plan

in detail, with its background in a Harvard Student Council report of 1926 as well as the Harkness gift, but also wholeheartedly supported the Plan. Among my friends I was alone in this judgment. Members of Final Clubs (Harvard's exclusive clubs for upperclassmen), whose mode of life Lowell intended to disturb, were of course opposed. So were others who had anticipated spending their senior year in the Yard—on such matters of tradition students then, as now, were conservative.

Even so, the two Houses that opened in the fall of my senior year were oversubscribed. My roommate, Alexander Langmuir (later one of the first persons to go directly from medical school into public health), and I were delighted to be selected for Dunster House and to find ourselves in a corner room overlooking the Charles. For us, living in Dunster House well illustrated Lowell's hope of close contact between tutors and undergraduates.^[3]

IV

Living in a House dramatically changed the quality of life for me. Before my senior year, other than the historians I have mentioned, I had met no faculty members in the social sciences. Crane Brinton, the historian (later to write The Anatomy of Revolution, a book I admired), and Seymour Harris, the economist (with whom I was later to work, along with McGeorge Bundy, on a plan for a national self-liquidating student loan bank), were tutors in the House, as was Carl Joachim Friedrich of the Government Department. (I met Pitirim Sorokin only once, when I invited him to address a House colloquium; I still recall his opening comment that he was educating his son to shoot straight even before he taught him to think straight!) Entertained by tutors, Langmuir and I would in turn give tea parties for them, for fellow students, and for young women from Boston and occasionally Radcliffe.

What was truly decisive for me was meeting Friedrich, a nonresident tutor who had come to Harvard as part of a small group of German exchange students in the mid-1920s; he had not intended to stay, but at some point Professor Arthur Holcombe invited him into the Department of Government as an instructor. Friedrich was primarily responsible for my becoming an academic man. He had taken his doctorate at Heidelberg with Alfred Weber. At Dunster House he quickly had around him a circle of some of the most intelligent students. He was energetic and ambitious, of sanguine disposition, though capable of anger and contempt; he was a vigorous cello player. He was at home in French as well as

general European art history (he later published The Age of the Baroque ). He went on to a distinguished career in scholarship and public affairs in the United States and in post–World War II Germany. In due course I became one of his closest disciples. When I had become a student at Harvard Law School, we bought a rundown farm together near Brattleboro, Vermont. He introduced me to the European social sciences and to some American writers such as Thorstein Veblen. What was decisive for me, as I realize in retrospect, was that Friedrich was a magnetic and cultivated person, who not only was fond of me but also respected me as a potential intellectual colleague.

Had I lived in the Yard with most of my class, I would not have had this opportunity for easy intellectual commerce with faculty members and would have been less likely to encounter James Agee, then a junior, a haunted and engaging person, who was also in Dunster House. My interest in the Houses provided a few opportunities for conversation with President Lowell. (I quixotically sought to interest him in having Walter Gropius design one or another of the new Houses.) I was startled and found it clarifying to have Lowell dismiss my admiration for Henry Adams by saying that he was a whiner, full of self-pity. Lowell wanted Harvard, and particularly its law school, to turn out tough-minded leaders, potential statesmen, and also leaders of the bar—not aesthetes.

V

But my reasons for going to Harvard Law School had nothing to do with such ambitions. Like many people, particularly during my last two years, I had found a home in Cambridge and Boston more agreeable than my own home had been in Philadelphia.

Even if I had thought I had the capacity for the life of a scholar, I resembled my friends in not regarding our professors as leading lives we would want to follow. Since Harvard of that time had no rules for tenure, some of my teachers had been frustrated failed scholars, instructors in mid-life teaching affluent, uninvolved youngsters. When in Dunster House and elsewhere I met more interesting and sophisticated faculty members, I did not envisage them as models for myself. I had several classmates who were planning to enter Ph.D. programs, but they were not people with whose interests I could identify. One had an interest in forestry, worked for the Harvard Forest, and eventually got a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Another, my school and college friend and classmate William Aydelotte, got a Ph.D. in history and was one of

the pioneers in cliometrics. (He is the son of Frank Aydelotte, who had as president developed the honors program at Swarthmore College and who had impressed me as an almost ideal-typical Rhodes Scholar in his strength of purpose, his athletic prowess—when I knew him, at tennis—and his personal heartiness.)

I sought and did not get a Rhodes Scholarship myself (something I have not regretted since I dislike Oxford common room–style gamesmanship). However, a lot of my friends, and indeed about a hundred of my classmates, were going on to Harvard Law School. I recognized that intellectually I would probably find Yale Law School a more engaging locale. Yale already had a reputation for innovation and an effort to introduce the social sciences, chiefly economics. But since my primary purpose was to stay put, Harvard Law School was the obvious choice. Staying put, moreover, had the great advantage of allowing me to continue my association with the magnetic Friedrich.

By my choice of roommates I took care to minimize what many of us who went from the amiable amateurism of the college to the fierce competitiveness of the law school experienced as culture shock. Having met Alexander Meiklejohn's son Donald, who was coming to Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, I arranged to room with him. Another roommate was to be James Henry Rowe, Jr., a charming and ostentatiously indolent literary man, whose father was a judge in Butte, Montana; before coming to Harvard College he had spent a year at the Jesuit University of Santa Clara and astonished his classmates by arriving from Butte with all the aplomb of one to the manor born. Rowe went on to become Oliver Wendell Holmes's last law clerk, an early energizer of the New Deal, and one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "anonymous assistants."

We lived at the Brattle Inn, along with several other lively would-be philosophers. I tried again what I had already done, which was to make something of Alfred North Whitehead's lectures. I could not get interested in his discussion of Plato's Timaeus and Plato's imagery of the planets; the pleasure I had in the occasional Whitehead teas I attended could not be matched in the lecture room. In fact, my philosopher friends made me feel stupid; they seemed to play intellectual Ping-Pong, trading arguments back and forth, and this experience was one of the reinforcements I had of my parents' judgment on me. Philosophy seemed central to intellectual life. Only later did I discover philosophers—several of them European-born women (Suzanne Langer and Hannah Arendt)—whose work I could appreciate.

More interesting for me than the philosophers was Elton Mayo, who also lived in the Brattle Inn, where he and I, when we were having dinner together, were occasionally joined by Lawrence J. Henderson. I was fascinated by Mayo's work in the Fatigue Laboratory of the Harvard Business School, and it was through him, as I recall, that I learned about Lloyd Warner's research then under way in what became the Yankee City series of anthropological studies of Newburyport. Mayo took an interest in what he regarded as my naïveté about the world and what he saw as my obsessiveness. He told me about Pierre Janet's psychology both to interest me and to help me. Mayo's combination of physiological and social-psychological concerns was as remote from law school as I could have wished. Moreover, I felt that there was something mysterious about Mayo.^[4]

VI

The atmosphere at the law school was rapacious, in contrast with the gentlemanly—and, in the eyes of Lowell and others, too leisurely—spirit I had experienced in the college. Fearful of failing on the one hand, and desperately eager to make the law review on the other, students formed into study groups, underlined their notes, and read and reread their cases. Virtually all casebooks at that time were prepared by the professors themselves and were unannotated selections of appellate opinions, from whose obiter dicta we were supposed to extract the holding—a figure-and-ground exercise many of us quickly learned. I enjoyed the cases for their details, though these were of course filtered through what the judges regarded as important.

But what the law school was about was teaching one, as the phrase went, to think like a lawyer. This adage primarily meant giving up sentimentality and naive notions of justice. I could appreciate, against the claims of distributive justice, the need for precedents and stability. It was periodically my common sense that was offended, as for example by some interpretations of the intricate rules of evidence, especially the hearsay rule, which frequently excluded evidence that was clearly relevant because the source could not be cross-examined in court. Also my common sense (but not that of anyone else I came across then or have come across since) was offended by the Fifth Amendment, for I did not think the democracies that had no such prohibition against self-incrimination were more oppressive or unjust than the United States, and I thought the amendment an overreaction to the fervent propa-

ganda of the American Revolution that sought to portray the relatively mild British rule as archaically tyrannical. When legal rules led to what were clearly untoward outcomes, the legal system was upheld by most of my professors and ultimately by fellow students on the ground that allowing each side its day in court and its opportunities for argument would in the main lead to the discovery of the relevant facts, with the debate among opposing counsel eventuating in their correct interpretation. I found this debaters' outlook inadequate. But I was even less attracted to iconoclastic Thomas Reed Powell, who taught constitutional law in what was already known as the Yale realist style—an easy cynicism that saw judges manipulating precedents to arrive at decisions satisfying to their egos, their interests, or their whims; for Powell and his followers, it was enough to debunk the law.

I admired and came to know two of my first-year professors who were dramatically different from one another. Calvert Magruder, Jr., was an almost universally popular, cultivated, noncombative Marylander who taught torts and later became an eminent federal appeals court judge. The other, James Angell McLaughlin, taught property law; related to presidents of both the University of Michigan and Yale, he flouted courtesy and convention. He sometimes frightened students, like Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase; more often he offended them. Mischievous as well as sharing the then prevalent Bostonian snobbery toward Irish Catholics, he wore an orange tie on St. Patrick's Day and later changed his name from McLaughlin to MacLachlan.

As the academic year drew to a close, Rowe was convinced that he would flunk out, as allegedly a third of the students did. He had read French novels, spent much time at Smith College, slept late, and far more than I refused to adjust his Harvard College style to Harvard Law School routine. I decided that I would work hard in my second year in the hope of making the law review, and the way to do that was to have a roommate who was deeply involved in his legal studies. I found such a person in Donald Field, who had been on the Crimson and came from a legal family. We moved into the law school dormitory. I joined Lincoln's Inn, a semirefuge for the more socially acceptable law students, where some faculty were also members and where conversation at lunch was generally shop talk.

My sheltered youth gave me a desire to see how people lived under different conditions, an interest that had led me the previous summer to the Soviet Union; it was one motive for bits of settlement house work I did as an undergraduate under the auspices of Phillips Brooks House,

Harvard College's social-service center. It was through that center that I was taken on as an unpaid "wop" for a summer with a Grenfell Mission station at Northwest River in Labrador.^[5] There I received a cable telling me that I must return at once to Cambridge to take up my duties on the law review, duties that began several weeks before the start of the fall term. I was incredulous. After an all too long and hazardous sailing cruise down the coast to Halifax, I left my three fellow sailors to bring the boat to Boston while I took the train so as not to be further delayed. I discovered that I not only was on the law review but also had led my class.

VII

Jim Rowe returned, having done a little better than just scrape by, his ingenuity and literary gifts coming to his aid. I regretted my decision to leave our Brattle Inn residence, and after a year with Donald Field returned there both for my third year of law school and for the fourth, postgraduate year to which those who had been anointed as Louis Brandeis's prospective law clerks were entitled.

I enjoyed the work of the law review. Even more than the Crimson, the law review was a diurnal affair. Few of the editors worried about their law school classes. It was heady to be able to edit one's own professors, or professors from elsewhere—I remember editing an article by the man I most admired in the law, Columbia's Karl Llewellyn. I should add concerning editing that it has helped me as a writer to have edited the work of others as well as to have been edited by the stringent standards of the law review. Sometimes these seemed silly standards, as when even a biblical proverb was said to require a citation. I was elected legislation editor, a position that took me out of the area of case law and into legislative draftsmanship and public policy. I took part, with fellow editors, in an assessment of the constitutionality of the early New Deal legislation, my assignment being Section 7a of the Wagner Act, whose constitutionality I defended and whose vague language was seized on by John L. Lewis and his cadres of organizers to encourage workers to join unions; the act was ultimately sustained by the Supreme Court.

A few of us debated the merits of Legal Realism, then in vogue at Yale Law School, which seemed to me to be simpleminded reductionism. But the mode of analysis of many of the Harvard Law faculty was not vastly superior, though it was more attractive because it did not seek to shock. It assumed that the task of judges, within the limits of

precedent, was to balance interests. Decisions were admired that appeared appropriately to have balanced interests of contending parties and the larger groups they might be thought to represent. For example, decisions, even by the most strained reasoning, that found large corporations liable in suits for negligence and ignored the negligence of the presumably impecunious plaintiff were generally justified because they spread the risk of accidents, even though they did so in haphazard, nonactuarial ways that were of enormous benefit to the litigating bar and sometimes produced a windfall for the plaintiff. Law professors made no accompanying investigation into the real interests; assumptions were made of a generally liberal sort as to what was in whose interest, and the question was happily left at that. In fairness I should add that many of the law professors were men of exceptional integrity, fair-mindedness, and dedication as teachers and as the scholarly house-keepers of the law. Half a dozen became good friends during my law school years. Felix Frankfurter, to my surprise a pedantic teacher, was a frequent, lively host, quick to explode in outrage at local or national injustice, corruption, or stupidity, happy to introduce the young men he sponsored to each other and, where appropriate, to people in power.

VIII

Antitrust law as MacLachlan taught it was an exception, involving some understanding of economics and of industrial organization and combination. In my third year I had a one-term course with Ralph Baker, an older man who had come from the Harvard Business School. He devoted the entire course to a single utility rate case involving the utility's financial structure. I enjoyed that course more than any. (I realize, writing these reflections, that what I seem to have enjoyed was getting thoroughly into something reasonably complicated, whether British diplomatic history or the intricacies of utility rate regulation in a particular instance.) Most materials read in law school were appellate court opinions.

Though making the law review spared me from having to care a great deal about my courses and, beyond the necessary minimum to remain on the law review, my grades, I never became reconciled to the general atmosphere of the place. We were taught to the point of redundancy how to deal with case law, how to make and, presumably, win an argument. Some of my friends and teachers were remarkably intelligent; hardly any were reflective or had an interest in ideas beyond gamesmanship. I con-

cluded that two years of law study was sufficient (with much to be said for a clinically oriented program whose time-consuming work with clients could occupy a full year or more). I showed my boredom with much of the program, more than perhaps I intended by writing one of my third-year examinations in rhymed verse.

IX

More important than law school was my growing closeness to Friedrich, who was a reflective person with interesting ideas and serious interests. He had originally looked forward to a career that would bridge Heidelberg and Harvard, much as Harold Laski had linked England and the United States in his transatlantic forays. But when Hitler came to power, Friedrich, who had feared that prospect, decided to become an American citizen. And what better way to become American than to buy a farm? In the depths of the Depression, Vermont farms were cheap. Many had been purchased with Federal Land Bank mortgages at very low interest. I had inherited some money from my grandmother and I put it into a farm Friedrich and I bought jointly. In my last law school years we would go up weekends, staying at a tourist home and spending our time clearing brush and working on the farmhouse itself, a sizable place that had been turned into a granary. And of course we would talk endlessly. Through him I met Gaetano Salvemini, a refugee from Mussolini's Italy, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a fascinating German refugee, and many others. (Friedrich and I were to work later on a project he founded and I directed for retraining refugee lawyers and jurists.) Friedrich encouraged the Busch family and Rudolf Serkin, also refugees from Germany, to relocate in Marlboro, near Brattleboro. We both enjoyed meeting Vermonters, whether gentlemen farmers or herdsmen, county agents or bankers. In The New Belief in the Common Man (1942) Friedrich expressed a faith in the capacity of ordinary Americans for self-government. That faith grew in part out of our experience with the Agricultural Extension Service and with self-reliant, competent dairy farmers in New England; it left out of account the slovenly farmers whose barns we visited, looking for cows to purchase. We were in agreement in our opposition to plebiscites and to proportional representation, were admirers of representative constitutional government, and were aware of virtues in the federal systems of both Australia and the United States.

Friedrich had wide academic interests, having written a book on

Althusius and having immersed himself in Roman law, early European history, and political philosophy. The study of public opinion was something of a side interest for him, but it was already close to my interests in contemporary events and history. I learned from him to do what I still do today, which is to look at the letter columns of a newspaper or journal as a way of getting a sense of opposing views. Later he was to bring Charles Siepmann over from the British Broadcasting Corporation, where he had been director of research, to introduce the study of mass communications for the first time at Harvard.^[6]

Before me, every person who had preceded the Brandeis clerkship by a postgraduate year at Harvard Law School had received a doctorate in law. However, I had offended Dean Roscoe Pound by arranging for Karl Llewellyn to come up from Columbia for a talk billed as "What's Wrong with the Harvard Law School?" and by asking my faculty friend Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (who still suffered, despite his national distinction as a civil libertarian, from not having made law review), to talk in rebuttal. Pound first forbade us the use of a law school classroom but then relented. But he was also feuding with Frankfurter, and the combination of animosities led him to change the rules, so that the doctorate in law could no longer be given to anyone who came to the requisite year immediately after law school. To me it did not matter at all; the doctorate was useful to those planning to teach, especially in the nonelite law schools, or to any hoping for an academic career outside a law school. But since I had at the time no such aspirations, I did not contest the dean's ruling.

I did something else, however, which my friends considered reckless. Frankfurter had formed a strong dislike of Friedrich. He suspected this blond Teuton of being a secret sympathizer of the Nazis, and in addition I think he was jealous of Friedrich's influence over me. The person designated as the Brandeis clerk usually worked with Frankfurter on a thesis. But I intended to work with Friedrich; I held my ground, and Frankfurter, to his credit, said that though he distrusted Friedrich, I could work with him if that was my preference during this post-law school year.

X

My year with Brandeis at the Supreme Court did little to turn me toward an academic career and did even less for my self-esteem. I did not think I served the justice well. I worked only to try to improve,

which I could rarely do, the opinions he had drafted; he had already arrived at his judgments. The "Brandeis brief" had been developed by him as an advocate, introducing evidence from the social sciences to sustain the reasonableness and hence the constitutionality of legislation. The very first case I worked on dispelled any illusion that Brandeis himself would be influenced by empirical data when in pursuit of the larger goal of creating precedents for federal judicial restraint. It was the "Oregon berry box" case (Pacific States Box and Basket Company v. White ), in which Brandeis upheld for a unanimous court an Oregon statute concerning the shape and size of berry boxes. Assigned to write the opinion, Brandeis wanted to establish that the law fell under the state's power to protect the public interest and welfare. He sent me out to discover the actual reasons for the law. I soon found at the Department of Agriculture and the Interstate Commerce Commission that the law was designed to keep out berry boxes manufactured from redwoods in California (redwoods do not grow in Oregon); the law resulted in boxes less equipped for stacking in freight cars. To me, the law was an interference with interstate commerce. Brandeis thought in terms of a long-term strategy in which he wished to reduce centralized power, including the power of the federal courts to declare state legislation unconstitutional. In his building block of precedents he ignored the real story in order to uphold the state's authority, even though in principle he favored free trade and opposed monopolies. Other cases I worked on, such as the famous case upholding the Tennessee Valley Authority indirectly by denying the plaintiffs standing to sue (Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority ), involved only library work and not what was for me more exhilarating detective work and fieldwork.

I shared a house in Georgetown with a group of New Deal lawyers, including Rowe. One of my housemates was Thomas H. Eliot, several years my senior at college and law school, who helped draft and pilot the Social Security legislation through the Congress. Other young men from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard were exercising similar responsibilities. The brisk self-assurance of many of the young New Deal lawyers struck me as awesome in some cases but as disagreeable in others. I had already concluded that Harvard Law School and other national law schools cultivated a belief that outside of a patent, admiralty, or antitrust case, there was nothing one could not get up in a pretrial two weeks. If I lacked the self-confidence of others around me, I was growing in confidence that I might be able to understand events. For example, my early judgment that even unemployed Americans in the years of

the Depression were basically conservative and would not become converts to socialism, let alone communism, was being borne out day by day. I sympathized with the strong Southern Agrarian streak in Brandeis, his distrust of centralized power, and his hope to use the states for small-scale, incremental experiments. However, I lacked the crusading spirit of Brandeis and many of his devotees.^[7]

When I told Brandeis that I wanted to return to Boston, he sought to dissuade me, saying I had enough privilege and enough education; he advised instead that I go to Tupelo, Mississippi, and work there for the TVA and help develop Appalachia. I rejected his advice (as I had also rejected his harsh judgments against the English, based on the restriction of immigration to Palestine, and against the Germans, rather than simply the Nazis). Many notable lawyers and law professors had preceded me as Brandeis's clerk, and I compared myself unfavorably to them in terms of how I had served the justice; but as several Brandeis biographers have suggested, I also did not share the exalted view of Brandeis most of them held.

I was offered a position with the Securities and Exchange Commission but instead said to the lawyer who had hoped to recruit me that I wanted his help to get a job with a small Boston law firm, where I could learn my way in the law. He found me such a job with Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts, a firm that defended Metropolitan Life and John Hancock in insurance cases and handled corporate reorganizations.

XI

Brandeis's law clerks were forbidden to marry. I had become engaged the previous summer to Evelyn Hastings Thompson. Evelyn's father was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; her mother of an old Bostonian family. Evelyn followed her mother to Winsor School, a girls' school of high academic as well as social selectivity, and on graduation won the Nora Saltonstall Scholarship given by the Winsor School to study for a year in Paris. On her return she went to Bryn Mawr, where she majored in English, edited the Lantern, the college's literary magazine, and directed and acted in plays. When through a Boston classmate of hers I met her at a dance at Bryn Mawr in the spring of my last year at law school, I asked her what she planned to do on graduation; she replied that she wanted to put on Greek plays and act in them. That summer I looked her up in the course of a sailing cruise my brother had organized when we stopped off at our parents'

home in Northeast Harbor. She was acting in a summer theater company in Bar Harbor. That fall I persuaded Evelyn to come to Washington, where she found a position as an editor of the consumer affairs magazine published by the Department of Agriculture. She had given up her dream of working in Greek drama and instead decided to turn to writing criticism and short stories. (Having done a great deal of editing in college, her gifts as a critic and editor have been of the greatest benefit to my own thought and writing.) We were married in Boston the next summer, in July 1936. I borrowed a car from a former law professor, Ralph Baker, and we took a trip out west to Seattle (this was before interstate highways), traversing some drought-ravaged and depressed areas in the farm states, as well as some magnificent country.

In the fall I began to work with Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts. What I was looking for was an apprenticeship. I have already indicated that I regarded my legal education as too bookish and insufficiently clinical. Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts handled more litigation than most corporate firms. Had I worked in Washington—or, indeed, for the TVA—I would have had as a young lawyer large responsibilities and a decent starting salary; in a private law firm I was only an adjunct at one hundred dollars a month, helping prepare trial briefs. But with a small private income I could afford to do it.

The few appellate cases I handled, involving relatively small amounts, did not give me a high opinion of the judges. In one case a man was receiving disability benefits under an insurance policy for "total and permanent disability." The insurance company had photographs of him actively playing tennis and golf in Florida, and on the basis of his recovery we appealed from a judgment against the company. The judge asked me, "How permanent is a permanent wave?" and went on to support the plaintiff's cause.

I found much of the work of a trial lawyer at once frustrating and strenuous. It was frustrating because I spent so much time waiting for a case to be called. It was exhausting during a trial to be always on the qui vive, at a time before discovery proceedings limited the surprises one might encounter; and when the courtroom day was done, I was busy preparing for the next day as well as trying to keep up with the regular flow of office work. Yet there was much novelty and hence interest in the actual trials, often in outlying towns like Salem or Quincy, in courtrooms far removed from the elevated discourse and the solemn and ceremonial quality of the United States Supreme Court.

The firm's trial lawyers, particularly a Mr. Murphy, for whom I largely

worked and whom I liked, possessed a kind of combative idealism, a quixotic belief in justice, leading them to prefer fighting to settling cases of fraudulent claims against John Hancock or Metropolitan Life. By contrast, most of the large Boston firms settled such cases since the cost of defending them was more than the policy was worth and the defense seldom won. In a typical case a man would be told by his doctor that he had pericarditis; he would then with a zealous or perhaps corrupt insurance agent take out a policy with Metropolitan Life or John Hancock for his wife's benefit; shortly thereafter he would die of heart disease. Since he had said he was in good health in his application and the autopsy showed otherwise, the insurance company would refuse to pay and suit would be brought. In his summation to the jury, counsel for the plaintiff would read the Metropolitan Life's billion-dollar balance sheet and ask why the company was unwilling to help out the widow. It was a rare triumph for honest policyholders when suits based on egregious fraud were not successful. Fraud often was abetted at the trial by medical experts, such as a Harvard Medical School specialist who testified that myocarditis was no worse than a bad cold. At that time, and later when I worked in the New York County district attorney's office, I could observe the power of demagogic oratory on the part of solo lawyers virtually unrestrained by the rules of evidence I had learned in law school or anticipated in trial briefs. Conscientious but easily swayed juries had not yet been "educated" to award multimillion-dollar damages in accident, malpractice, and, quite recently, libel cases, but they were moving in that direction under the tutelage of a bar that Tocqueville had seen as a possible source of aristocratic restraint in a democracy.

I glimpsed high tragedy and low comedy in some of the trials. My superiors impressed me with the astuteness of their trial tactics, and I learned from them that the rules of evidence I had studied in law school were of little help in predicting the tactics of the plaintiffs' lawyers or the capriciousness of the judges. The office work generally was of greater intellectual interest, for example, grasping the details involved in the reorganization of the International Paper and Power Company.

Most of my evenings were free. I had time to attend sessions of a seminar Friedrich was giving and to keep in touch with the bright graduate students he was gathering around him, as well as with friends on the law school faculty. Evelyn and I also had time to make new friends in Boston, and we became particularly close to Mark DeWolfe Howe, Jr., a former law clerk for Oliver Wendell Holmes then also practicing in Boston, and to his actress wife Molly Howe, from the

Abbey Theatre in Dublin, who lived near us on Beacon Hill. This friendship turned out to make easier my decision on the next step in my career.

XII

By the luck that seems to have come my way at crucial times, the year in which I started work in Boston, 1936, marked the beginning of a new administration at the law school of the then private University of Buffalo. It had been a locally oriented school run by practitioners. Samuel Capen, president of the university, wanted to create a full-time, scholarly, national school. He turned to Francis Shea, a Harvard Law School graduate and former New Deal administrator in Puerto Rico. Dean Shea, a Frankfurter protégé, had recruited Louis Jaffe, who had preceded me as Brandeis's law clerk, and Ernest Brown, who had clerked for a federal appeals court judge; through Frankfurter's recommendation Howe and I were invited to join the group the following year. We encouraged one another to accept. When I told my friends on the Harvard Law faculty that I was planning to go to Buffalo, several of them warned me that I would ruin my career and added that if I wanted to teach law, they would try to find something for me at Harvard Law School. (They were wrong about the careers of all four of us; the other three—Jaffe, Brown, and Howe—became professors at Harvard Law School after World War II.) The fact that Buffalo was in no fashion a major law school made it more attractive to me because I would not be beginning my teaching in the highly competitive atmosphere of a national law school.

Moreover, for Evelyn and me the city of Buffalo had its own appeal. We were aware of our having been bounded by the northeastern "province" of the country, interrupted by transatlantic experience. Buffalo's primarily industrial character, with its large, not yet mobile Polish population, the whole city heavily Catholic, invited our restless curiosity.

XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV

Becoming a professor in a law school is not the same thing as becoming a professor in an academic discipline.^[12] Competing directly with the profession, law schools pay higher salaries and give instant or virtual tenure to attract and retain young recruits. The law professors under

whom I studied at Harvard Law School were categorizers of the law, organizing decisions for the purposes of teaching and, sometimes in proposed uniform codes, for the benefit of the profession and the country. Of course the major law schools housed researchers (as Harvard did Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck to study juvenile crime) and a handful of scholars who taught legal history, jurisprudence, and sometimes Roman law or contemporary foreign law. At Buffalo, in contrast with such recondite work, I taught a third-year seminar on the ordinances of the city of Buffalo. And I did what law professors do, which is to "keep up" with developments in the law by reading the advance sheets, that is, skimming through recent decisions in the areas of my teaching or research. But this harvest was not nourishing to me unless I was on the trail of a specific topic, such as the studies of defamation in comparative perspective to which I will come in a moment. Nonlawyers often have read the opinions of some of the virtuosos of literature and the law, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, or Louis Brandeis. But most judges are journeymen who crib from the briefs of counsel, do not employ an annual crop of Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, or Yale clerks, and provide the case materials by which the professors in the major national law schools, who are brighter and better educated, can develop their not always endearing classroom sharpness. In comparison with the excitement I found in reading Democracy in America or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the regular gruel of the law appeared thin. I could teach it in a sufficiently evocative way to relatively unsophisticated students who had to face the bar examination and the practice of law.

I shared many interests with my Buffalo Law School colleagues. But I differed from them and from the other law professors I came to know in several significant respects. I have mentioned my belief that the Fifth Amendment was a harmful archaism. (I had a similar view of several others.) I was opposed to the use of the First Amendment in what I thought to be a vigilante way to oppose aid to parochial and other church-related schools. Although I cared about intellectual freedom (as my later writings attest), that did not make me an automatic supporter of the agenda of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mark Howe was offended by my skepticism and, as a stoic, disapproved of my psychoanalysis. My colleagues and many other law professors found their involvement in New Deal reforms and the corresponding legal questions rejuvenating, but neither for pedagogic nor research purposes did I see superiority in the new subjects. I published an article, "Government

Service and the American Constitution," that developed some of the work I had done with Friedrich.^[13] I wrote another article on a topic still germane—the question of legislative restriction on the freedom of Americans to travel abroad and fight in foreign armies, as some Americans were doing at that time in support of the Loyalists in Spain.^[14] I wrote essay reviews of books such as Otto Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure and Edwin Mims's offbeat Majority of the People .

After the intense work of learning to teach three courses, I cast about for a research topic that might relate my interests in public opinion to the law. Defamation, though in all countries a tort or civil wrong and in some still considered a crime, was not a major interest of professors of torts. What I wanted to understand in comparative perspective was themes in the scattered American case law concerning defamation, that is, libel (written) and slander (oral). The cases and comments on them indicated that in the United States not only politicians but also ordinary folk were supposed to be able to take it and, if need be, dish it out. Successful libel suits were uncommon. By contrast, in England, Austria, Argentina, and elsewhere slander and libel were deemed extremely serious in both criminal and civil proceedings. What did all this imply concerning American public opinion and attitudes toward individual privacy, publicity, and the press? In an earlier day in our history did different attitudes prevail, when someone might issue a challenge to a duel—at least against a social equal, perhaps especially in the South—in response to regarding himself as having been defamed? Along with Friedrich I had done some work for the Council for Democracy, a group combating fascist tendencies in the United States and Hitler and Mussolini abroad. I wondered whether the Jews, as a defamed group, might bring suits for libel, and I observed the use of libel suits by fascists to intimidate their critics in the press—much as Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli defense minister, recently attempted to do vis-à-vis Time magazine, and General William Westmoreland, no fascist but supported by the radical right, vis-à-vis CBS.

I recruited one of the refugee lawyers I had met, Lucie Krassa, as a research assistant and embarked on a comparative study eventually published in 1942 as "Democracy and Defamation."^[15] In that work, and in a long essay, "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition," I made use of cases as a social historian would, as clues to the temper of a country, region, or epoch. On the basis of such partially empirical grounding, I was prepared to speculate concerning the public policy that might permit freedom of opinion while exploring how the intimidation

of opinion through defamation, as well as suits for defamation, might be prevented. I did not then, and do not now, believe that I found a "solution" to these again vexing problems, but at least I did not approach them on the basis of flat American contemporaneity.^[16]

Among the law professors I knew, there was intense focus on the Supreme Court as it began to uphold, rather than interdict, New Deal legislation. The social-psychological and cross-cultural themes that interested me rarely had immediate focus in public policy through law. A handful of law professors, such as Willard Hurst, who taught legal history at the University of Wisconsin, and a cluster of the lively men at Columbia Law School could respond to my interest in the significance of defamation in an amiably tolerant way more characteristic of colleagueship among law professors than of that among comparably ambitious faculty members in arts and sciences. The people from whom I was learning, however, were primarily not in the law but in the social sciences. Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown had attracted me during my student days, and I was delighted to meet them in New York and to begin to exchange ideas with them. I think it was through them that I met Paul Lazarsfeld and then Marie Jahoda. I also met Franz Neumann, a refugee political scientist and analyst of Nazism.

In 1940 I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to devote full time to this research; but I chose instead to accept a visiting fellowship for 1941–42 at Columbia Law School, which provided an office and potential universitywide colleagueship. New York also had the advantage of allowing more frequent analytic work and intellectual companionship with Erich Fromm.

Of the people Evelyn and I met in New York, Lionel and Diana Trilling were particularly important. Many of their interests overlapped with ours. They introduced us to their circles at Columbia and to editors and writers for Partisan Review . We met other writers, artists, and intellectuals through Dorothy Norman, founder and coeditor of Twice a Year, a journal devoted to the arts and civil liberties where an article of Evelyn's had been published. We met Selden Rodman, with whom I played tennis, mostly unsuccessfully; he edited the irreverent journal Common Sense, which supported the isolationists (as did my cousin Fred Rodell, one of the Legal Realists at Yale), fearing that America's involvement in the war might irretrievably destroy the country's liberties. Some of my colleagues at Columbia Law School (Karl Llewellyn, Herbert Wechsler, Paul Hays, and Walter Gellhorn) had broad intellectual and cultural interests in and beyond the law. I met Ruth Benedict

and joined the ever-expanding circles around Margaret Mead.^[17] Fromm and Helen Lynd were teaching at Sarah Lawrence, where a number of "New York intellectuals" taught part-time.

Friedrich had counseled me to pursue a Ph.D. in government. The financial constraints of a wife and three children aside, I never came to the point of seriously considering the idea. Moreover, as I got more deeply immersed in sociological questions and preferred to start with empirical data, the concerns with political theory of Friedrich and his disciples began to seem a bit abstract to me. In other words, I was in search of a mode of work more empirical—ethnographic, even—than government as it was then being taught could provide. If Robert and Helen Lynd had given me an opportunity to take part in a community study, I think I would have welcomed the chance. Innovative law deans at the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University, and the University of Oregon offered me joint positions in law and political science. However, since my primary base would still have been in a law school while coping with a new intellectual challenge, I hesitated to commit myself and was inclined to return to Buffalo.

Soon, with American entry into the war, the Buffalo Law School prepared to close, and the question of returning there was rendered moot. I thought it likely that despite having three children, I would have to enter military service. (I also had some inclination to do so, and unsuccessfully sought commissions, knowing enough from others to fear the ordeals of basic training.)^[18] Then by chance a Harvard Law School friend and classmate, Whitman Knapp, offered me a position as deputy assistant district attorney of New York County, working in the Appeals Bureau under Stanley Fuld, legendary for his erudition and his scrupulousness. It seemed like an interesting temporary job at that unsettling time, and wishing to remain in New York, I took it.

XV

My work was to read the records and write the briefs on appeal. Thomas Dewey had been the district attorney and had prosecuted a number of racketeers on evidence gained from wiretapping. A few were convicted, and I was one of a group writing the appellate briefs in an effort to sustain the convictions. The trial lawyers for the defense in criminal cases were mostly histrionic, objecting to practically everything presented by the prosecutor and then seeking to find flaws for appeal. The extravagantly permissive state lower-court judges allowed the de-

fense to try to browbeat often reluctant prosecution witnesses and behave in ways that would be considered unprofessional in federal court. By a tacit agreement between party bosses and the bar associations, the elected judges, including those holding lucrative probate judgeships, were slotted in the lower courts on the basis of patronage, whereas the Court of Appeal, the court of last resort in New York State, though also elected, was allowed to become respectable and even distinguished; it had been Benjamin Cardozo's base and later was Fuld's. The latter was a perfectionist and insisted that we overprepare our briefs, no doubt boring the judges' clerks who had to read them since if a case from New Zealand was in any way apposite, we would be sure to cite it!^[19] The experience gave me a sense of the appeal of Wall Street and other metropolitan law firms whose predominantly corporate clients can afford (and are sometimes constrained by) the most carefully researched advice that hourly billing can buy.

XVI

I could have stayed in the Appeals Bureau, but after a few months I had pretty well exhausted the variety of cases and had many times rehearsed work not terribly different from that of the law review or clerkship in doing meticulous research and then writing a brief. When the United States entered the war, Friedrich undertook to direct the Civil Affairs School at Harvard to train administrators for a future occupation of Germany; no one doubted that the Nazis would in due course be defeated. Friedrich asked me to take part, but I declined. My knowledge of Germany was slim, and I questioned my competence to be of help in such a school.

As an alternative, I had the idea of seeking a commission in some branch of the armed forces where I might learn something about business. The services turned down my application since I lacked business experience, and plenty of lawyers were already available. Casting about for opportunities, I was introduced by a friend to James Webb, treasurer of the Sperry Gryoscope Company (later head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), who asked me to become his assistant. He wanted to assign me to labor relations, but I pointed out that as a professor I would be regarded as friendly to labor and would hence possibly be given undue trust by the United Auto Workers local. I preferred to work on problems not directly involving personnel. My expectation was that with some experience at Sperry, if I then were drafted, I

could secure a commission where I would hope to be useful and also to learn something about organizational and business problems. Since I was not drafted but ended up as contract termination director after Webb left (to become a combat flier), I actually found myself dealing directly with the military for two and a half intense years.

Sperry was a small engineering firm of one thousand employees that had exploded to thirty-three thousand as a war contractor. The senior officers of the operating company were primarily engineers, patriotic and of high integrity. But with the enormous expansion much was out of their control. Sloppiness and waste occurred in the manufacturing process. Extramurally I confronted the familiar story of interservice rivalry. Intramurally some of my own effort was spent making clear to junior managers and workers on the shop floor (who thought that they were protecting Sperry against its naive and idealistic top officials) that the company could only lose, in reputation as well as through negotiation of profits later if materials were sequestered (this was not done for private gain) or contracts terminated with more than the considerable delays I had already explained to the military.^[20] I found several capable people (chief among them Elizabeth Klintrup, a brilliant lawyer trained at the University of Wisconsin) to help me make the quick judgments on the basis of limited information that the tasks required. The deficit of competent people, and changes in procurement as emphasis shifted from the European to the Pacific theater, added to my responsibilities.^[21]

I had to learn my way simultaneously among the military services (where I ran into the most difficulty with the shore Navy) and among the production control people and accountants in the company's Brooklyn and Long Island plants; I had no direct dealings with the hundreds of subcontractors whose contracts had to be canceled when Sperry's prime contracts were terminated. I worked hard under great pressure, with a kind of stubborn rationality. Negotiating a modus vivendi for settling Sperry's claims to recover for canceled contracts raised strategic and practical questions but not ones of intellectual substance; hence it surprised me that I was so intensely involved. It was, as I would remind myself, primarily only money (and occasionally matériel) that was involved, not people's fates—and the money itself, as already mentioned, was not Sperry's to keep but was subject to renegotiation. Sometimes anxious, sometimes exhilarated, and often both at once, I persevered in a way that I regarded as responsible both to the company and, in a microcosm, to the rational conduct of the war.

I had come to view the war as necessary, though after many hesita-

tions and without believing (like the interventionists) that the end of the war would be wholly benign or (like my friends among the isolationists) that America would become fascist. In terms of the way the war was fought, my sympathies were with positions Dwight Macdonald took in Politics: I opposed the mass air raids on German and Japanese cities, which Sperry's products were helping make less inaccurate. At the time and since, I regarded the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, far more, on Nagasaki as the use of means wholly disproportionate, certainly vis-à-vis Japan, which could not directly threaten the United States. Moreover, I believed that the demand for Unconditional Surrender was wrong in principle and pragmatically, making it difficult for the emperor (always threatened by military fanatics) to negotiate a surrender that would keep him in place.^[22]

XVII

With the war clearly ending, I had to consider what I would do next. In 1945 Helen Lynd and Esther Rauschenbush, two prominent leaders of Sarah Lawrence College, asked me if I would consider becoming its president. Shortly thereafter, the then president of Reed College approached me with a similar proposal. My interest in women's colleges, beginning, of course, with Bryn Mawr, had combined with an interest in educational innovation and led me to visit Bennington College while I was at Harvard; hence the attraction of the offer from Sarah Lawrence. I had great respect for a few coeducational colleges, notably for Reed. I have noted my admiration for presidents whose approach was experimental—for Frank Aydelotte of Swarthmore College, and for what President Lowell was seeking with the House Plan and other reforms at Harvard College. Academic administration is, however, still administration, and I had learned at Sperry that it did not fully engage me. More important, I recognized that I lacked some of the qualities I knew to be essential in a college president.^[23] Academic administration would demand of me tireless energy almost certainly without the summer respites in Vermont working on our dairy farm. Moreover, I lack the equable, sanguine temper that an administrator, and especially a college president, needs. I can rarely assuage irritation and impatience with wit and good humor.^[24] I could not imagine assuming the responsibility of leadership in the semiparticipatory milieu of an experimental college, so I declined these possibilities.

There was some talk that I might be invited to join the Yale Law

School faculty. But by this time I was thoroughly converted away from an engagement with the law that was never wholehearted. What I most wanted was colleagueship—colleagueship in teaching in a setting where I could educate myself more fully in the social sciences and, if possible, colleagueship in research—something the individualism of law school professors, comparable to that of professors in the humanities, did not provide.

At this point I had remarkably good fortune. I had gathered some of my work on public opinion and civil liberties together in a monograph, "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition," which I had contributed to an annual series edited by Friedrich and Edward Mason and which was also available independently.^[25] In the third-year social-science course in the College of the University of Chicago Edward Shils had gotten the staff to assign my essay. When he discovered that the author was still alive, unlike those of the social-science classics read in the course, he went to the administration of the College and proposed that I be recruited to the staff. Reuben Frodin, assistant dean of the College, had been editor in chief of the University of Chicago Law Review and had edited an article of mine in that capacity; he lent his support to Shils. I went out to the university to meet Shils and the other members of the staff of the course. I eagerly accepted the invitation to come as visiting assistant professor, confident that this opportunity was right and, had I thought it possible, the one I would have looked for.

I arrived in January 1946, alone, since no housing for my family was available (our farm in Vermont came in handy as a base during times of relocation). In my first several months emergency regulations forced hotel tenants to find a different location every five days or so; this anxiety of where I would spend the night added to all my pedagogical ones.^[26] Although I had spent the previous summer immersed in my own crash course in sociology, beginning, as I recall with Comte and then some Durkheim, I had inadequate preparation for the course in which I would be teaching. I had two different reading lists to master simultaneously, one for the course that had begun regularly in the fall term, and another for an accelerated course for veterans who arrived on campus when I did, in the winter. Shils was welcoming as a sponsor and learned as a mentor. So in a different way was Milton Singer, who had a Ph.D. in philosophy and was beginning to reeducate himself as an anthropologist. Our staff and our coverage included political science and history. One member, Gerhard Meyer, a German refugee, was steeped in Weber and German philosophical thought. Familiar with psychoanalysis, Singer shared an

interest in "culture and personality."^[27] Economics was represented on the staff by Abram Harris, with some reading and lectures from Frank Knight; economic history was the province of Sylvia Thrupp. We met regularly for discussion of readings and assignments of the two lectures a week, which we took turns delivering, and were responsible for the separate sections, ranging from ten to thirty-five students with whom we discussed readings twice weekly.

The three-course social-science sequence at Chicago seemed to me extravagantly ambitious then, and even more so in retrospect. While experimental psychology lay at the boundary with the natural sciences, Piaget and psychoanalysis, and especially its cultural foundations and impact, were on the social science side; I gave four successive lectures on Freud in his cultural context.^[28] I learned a great deal from lectures given in turn by my colleagues. I found pleasure in teaching undergraduates in the college's required curriculum, for every student was reading the same books, attending the same lectures, and becoming engaged, if erratically and sometimes even overzealously, with a curriculum that invited efforts at coherence.^[29] I soon began to audit the graduate courses of Everett C. Hughes, who personally as well as professionally became my closest colleague.^[30] I profited particularly from Hughes's course on field methods. Lloyd Warner, whose work I had known and admired earlier, was a member of the Sociology Department also, and we were soon involved in discussions concerning new directions in community studies. Having come with an interest in public opinion, I was grateful for the presence of the National Opinion Research Center and its director, Clyde Hart.^[31] At Chicago, more than anywhere else, there was great overlap of intellectual and academic interests, nourished by the fact that the university is relatively small, not only in comparison with the major state university campuses, but also with its eminent private East Coast competitors or Stanford. Moreover, at that time virtually everyone on the faculty lived in the Hyde Park and Woodlawn areas, within easy walking and bicycling distance from the university. Stymied from influencing the academic departments in the graduate school, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the university's maverick president, encouraged the creation of interdisciplinary committees in social thought, human development, communications, and planning—the latter two short-lived; and the milieu allowed for relatively fluid grouping and regrouping among sanguine, energetic scholars.^[32]

Much of the social-science program in the College consisted of what

had been defined as Great Books and hence was compatible with Hutchins's distaste for what he regarded as merely empirical and transient. Yet the third-year social-science course, dubbed for short Soc 3, as well as the first- and second-year courses (Soc 1 and Soc 2), differed from a similar integrated program at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, in including contemporary social, political, and juridical problems—otherwise, something as contemporary as my essay "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition" could not have been made a required reading.^[33]

My own attitude toward Hutchins was one of admiration tinctured with ambivalence. I believed then, and still believe, that he added greatly to the diversity and potential intensity of American higher education. Chicago's willingness to recruit students after the tenth and eleventh grades of high school still seems to me worth pursuing, while recognizing its hazards.^[34] I admired the effort of the College under Hutchins to group disciplines into more comprehensive divisions and the refusal to allow student consumerism to dictate the curriculum.^[35] Consequently, I supported Hutchins against his academic enemies in the graduate divisions and his political enemies elsewhere. His characteristic arrogance of the bright lawyer, coupled with wit and charm, made him an effective debater. One argument where he carried the day was a case of overreaching—his insistence that the College program be self-sufficient and sealed off from electives in the graduate divisions. When I came to the College, students had the option of taking two courses in one or another of the graduate divisions, which therefore retained the hope that they might acquire Ph.D. candidates who had become attached to a particular specialty as undergraduates. In his grand manner Hutchins despised specialists. When he, along with those I came to refer to as the "College patriots," added courses in history and philosophy to the College curriculum, thus closing off apertures for electives, I opposed the decision as a mistake—as indeed it turned out to be since the limited capital of goodwill the College had among the graduate divisions pretty much evaporated at this point. I also believed that students should be exposed to specialists as well as generalists as part of their general education—a judgment that Hutchins and his devotees easily dismissed. Another issue where we differed concerned my wish to increase the proportion of empirical work in the sequence in the social sciences. Hutchins considered such work trivial and ephemeral. Soc 2, though also drawing on the classics (Freud, Durkheim, Veblen, Marx, and Tocqueville), included materials with some empirical substance, for ex-

ample, Piaget's Moral Judgment of the Child and Gunnar Myrdal's then recent American Dilemma. I decided to shift from Soc 3 to Soc 2 and persuaded Milton Singer and Gerhart Meyer to make the move along with me. Milton Singer was crucial in accepting the leadership of the expanded staff of Soc 2 and in retaining the breadth of intellectual horizons that informed the development of the course.

Milton Singer became the chairman of Soc 2 in 1946–47 and assigned to me the task of revising the course in cooperation with the other people teaching in it.^[36] Among them, one of the most important, who left his mark on Soc 2, was Daniel Bell. Versed in the work of the great European theorists—Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim—he also supported my effort to include unprocessed data that students and their mentors could interpret (for example, unprocessed field notes from community studies, or life histories, or the interviews gathered in a public-opinion survey). Robert Redfield, thoroughly interdisciplinary in spirit, became a part-time lecturer in the course.

Both Soc 2 and Soc 3 differed from Soc 1 and other College courses in the balance between discussion sections and formal lectures in Mandel Hall to the entire class. Some courses had three section meetings and one lecture a week. I found the section meetings so intense that two a week seemed just about right. And the number of lectures we had made it possible for specialists on the staff to exhibit their erudition to their colleagues as well as to students; if they sometimes spoke over the heads of many students, then the section leaders could help interpret what was said in later section meetings.^[37]

The Chicago quarter system had advantages for faculty members. There was always a certain student attrition by the winter quarter, so that it was possible to teach (and do one's stint of lectures) during the fall quarter and take the winter and spring quarters off without imposing an excessive burden on the staff. Correspondingly, after teaching in the fall quarter in 1946, I was granted the next two quarters off to work on developing Soc 2 into what already existed of a course that would be termed "Culture and Personality," although still under the rubric "Soc 2."^[38] The reading, consultation, and discussion involved in launching the revised Soc 2 gave me a splendid opportunity for learning as a teacher some of the things I would have learned had I been a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago at a time when the line between sociology and anthropology (united at the graduate level until the 1940s) was not sharply drawn.

XVIII

The intense demands of learning and teaching, of curriculum development and negotiation, of staff recruitment, and of service on the interdisciplinary committees all prevented me from embarking on research of my own. By the nature of the interdisciplinary curriculum in the College, only a part of my research interests and disciplinary ties could be embraced except by accident or at the periphery. For example, my interest in survey research and in the survey interview could only be brought vicariously into the classroom. In my few spare moments I wrote several articles that were extended essay reviews or drawn from addresses I was invited to make. Only in occasional work with doctoral students who had research interests congruent with mine was I able to combine research interests with my commitment to teaching.

I do not recall when I met Harold D. Lasswell, but I know I read his work with excitement long before going to Chicago; he was the principal American-born political scientist who in the 1920s was using a psychoanalytic approach to politics. I went to hear him lecture in downtown Chicago some months after my arrival, and when the lecture was over, he suggested that we go across Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute. There he proceeded to delight me by his detailed and discriminating knowledge of painting. In person, more than in print, he was fascinating.^[39] Lasswell was then a professor at Yale Law School. In 1947 the interdisciplinary Committee on National Policy at Yale, composed among others of Lasswell and his law school colleague Eugene V. Rostow (whom I had met when I was a law professor as well as at their summer place not far from us in Vermont) invited me to come to Yale to do research on some aspect of national policy. There was no definite assignment of what I was to investigate, but previous work had been in economics, and there was some talk that I would focus on public opinion and mass communications. But I was to be free to proceed as I liked—an awesome prospect, but one I saw as an opportunity. However, more immediately troubling was whether I could seize this occasion when I could give Chicago little advance notice. I did not have tenure and was warned that a request for leave would make me seem flighty, even disloyal to Hutchins's aims. But when I made clear that I would teach the fall quarter, and do so for two successive years, the arrangement went through with the support of Milton Singer and Dean F. Champion Ward.

In his essay in this volume Nathan Glazer gives at once an acute and

generous account of our collaboration on what became The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd . I had not met Glazer but had been reading his "Study of Man" columns in Commentary, with their cogent analysis of sociological work. I knew he had a connection of some sort with the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research, and having admired its director, Paul Lazarsfeld, since his days running the Office of Radio Research in Newark and then Princeton, that was a connection from which I thought I could learn. When I asked Glazer to join me in this research project, at first he was in doubt, but in the end he agreed to come part-time; Glazer's part-time, however, is worth more than time-and-a-half for most people! We began by examining interviews concerning political issues at the eastern office of the National Opinion Research Center. We were struck by the opinion-proneness of the respondents: that there were so few responses of "don't know" and that so many people had opinions on matters quite remote from them and often outside the orbit of even vicarious experience. Americans appeared to feel entitled to have opinions and almost embarrassed not to have any. My own continuing sense of the fragility of a democratic society helped lead Glazer and me to look at political apathy, including nonvoting, as not necessarily a bad thing; on the contrary, a wholly civic, mobilized population, expressing itself by referenda and similar direct measures, can be a risky departure from representative government.

Glazer had been working on the interviews done for C. Wright Mills that later went into White Collar, and we studied those interviews and made rough efforts to code them according to a dichotomy we first termed conscience directed and other directed .^[40] Then we started to do interviews ourselves, borrowing what we thought might be projective questions here and there, adding our own, and then working painstakingly to interpret the answers as a gestalt in the mode illustrated in Faces in the Crowd . Reuel Denney contributed materials on popular culture. The effort to understand social character drew especially on the Fromm-Schachtel study of German workers. Glazer and I both profited from a seminar the Yale anthropologists were conducting to see whether or not culture and personality theorists, such as Ralph Linton, who chaired the seminar, and Erich Fromm, who came up from New York to participate, could interpret a culture on the basis of ethnographic accounts of the Truk Islands presented primarily by George Murdock and Ward Goodenough.

Rostow and Lasswell arranged for me to have a pleasant office on the

top floor of the Yale Law School building, but I had virtually no contact with the school. The Yale committee that sponsored the work kept pressing me to make a report on it to Yale's social scientists, but knowing the tentativeness of our ideas, I was reluctant to do so. I recall that my audience, when I finally had to present material, was generally critical, with the economist Max Millikan being rather harsh—he had been, and remained afterward, personally friendly. Economists understandably dismissed our ideas as lacking in scientific rigor and probative value; some sociologists said we were simply translating into new terminology familiar concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. More derisively and imposingly, Joseph Schumpeter, whom I greatly admired, ridiculed my notions when I spoke at Harvard, declaring that I was trying to pull a heavy historical load with an oxcart. In the Department of Social Relations, M. Brewster Smith, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Talcott Parsons were interested and supportive. My rather limited Yale colleagueship came from John Dollard and other psychologists with anthropological connections and interests, from political scientists, and from historians—Yale at that time had no sociologists to speak of.

In the second preface to The Lonely Crowd, written in 1968–69 for the Yale paperback edition, I make clear how speculative and tentative an essay the work was intended to be. Friedrich had read it in manuscript and said that it was a difficult book, which he would use with graduate students, but it was too subtle to assign to undergraduates. We never anticipated the kinds of adolescent sophistication that would lead many to read the book while in high school. Moreover, since the themes of the book were confined to certain sectors of American life, we did not anticipate the following it continues to have. Although attacks on me by reviewers and essayists have never been particularly agreeable, attacks on the theses of the book itself, even when astringent, discovered few lacunae that Glazer and I had not already sensed. We saw the book as a contribution to an ongoing discussion shifting away from national character to the character of particular strata at a particular period—a less ambitious, but also perhaps more fugitive, focus than the nation as a whole.

XIX

In the fall of 1949 I returned to my position in the College at the University of Chicago, supplemented by membership on three graduate committees. One, which lasted only a short time, was the Committee on

Communications, which Bernard Berelson directed. I had already been a participant in the American Association for Public Opinion Research and a contributor to its journal, Public Opinion Quarterly; what I especially enjoyed in AAPOR was the inclusion of nonacademics—members of the professional survey organizations, on whose work I drew for understanding and for secondary analysis, and market researchers, who in my perhaps too vivid imagination generally know more about Americans in our "market segmentation" than do sociologists. I had informal ties with the Committee on Planning, from which I had recruited Martin Meyerson to teach in the College and then, with his wife Margy Meyerson, one of Everett Hughes's students, to work on a small community study in Vermont, which is briefly reported in Faces in the Crowd . From that committee I also recruited Staughton Lynd, who helped me analyze the sources of Thorstein Veblen's economic concepts for a small book I had agreed to write on Veblen.^[41]

During my apprenticeship my most important graduate involvement was my membership in the Committee on Human Development, which included Lloyd Warner, Everett Hughes, Robert Havighurst, Allison Davis, Bernice Neugarten, and William Henry.^[42] Plans were adumbrated to find a new locale for a community study, and I proposed that we look for a much larger community than the small and provincial Illinois town variously known as Jonesville and Elmtown—a community I defined as manageable in that one could gather forty influentials in a room and they could pretty much decide what was to be done. I recognized that no community was typical, not Granville Hicks's "small town" nor Lloyd Warner's Newburyport (Yankee City, later restudied by Stephan Thernstrom), nor the Lynds' Middletown (later restudied by Theodore Caplow and associates). Nevertheless, after I had briefly visited Springfield, Illinois, we concluded that with its one main "industry" of state government, it would not be a good locale, and Racine, Wisconsin, also with a single major industry, did not appear inviting either. At that time Homer Wadsworth, then director of the Kansas City, Missouri, Association of Trusts and Foundations, one of many organizations of pooled local charities, had set up Community Studies, Inc., to do social research in Kansas City. Havighurst, Hughes, Warner, and I considered Kansas City and connection with Community Studies as a practicable possibility. With the aid of the energetic Homer Wadsworth (formerly a Pittsburgh social worker and executive and now for many years doing similar work in Cleveland) it was possible to meet interested local elites who appeared to be the moving forces of the city.^[43]

After I taught the fall term in Chicago in 1951, Evelyn and I moved to Kansas City, where I was hoping to learn how to conduct a community study with Martin Loeb and four graduate students in sociology (one of them, Warren Peterson, was working on a dissertation of great interest to me about Kansas City school teachers). I was a resident researcher from the supervising Committee on Human Development quartet, and Loeb was the director. The community study was framed around gerontological questions, but I wanted to go beyond those and also beyond the questions of social class that preoccupied Loeb and Richard Coleman, one of Lloyd Warner's students and his later collaborator.^[44] For example, I was interested in the religious life of this predominantly Protestant community (so different from overwhelmingly Catholic Buffalo) but was unsuccessful in persuading Loeb and the others to spend their Sunday mornings visiting churches (discreetly of course) to understand, for example, the difference in liturgical practices, Sunday school, and sermons among the three Churches of Christ, one of which in an upper middle-class neighborhood had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the hope of stimulating the group of colleagues, I made field notes of observations and interviews and circulated what I loosely termed "notes on this and that"; but neither Martin Loeb nor the graduate students reciprocated my efforts, and I found that I could neither lead nor follow a project that for a time floundered.^[45] I had been made a pro tem member of the Department of Sociology, chaired by the genial and reflective Ernst Mannheim, at the University of Kansas City, then a private institution, and gave a course of evening lectures on sociology.

I also continued a mode of ad hoc inquiry into the varieties of higher education that was to develop into my own specialty in community studies, namely, the community of colleges and universities. I accepted invitations to speak at those types of academic institutions with which I was unfamiliar, and if the Midwest Sociological Society was holding its annual meeting at Indiana University, I would try to go a day ahead or stay a day after its conclusion to meet people at that splendid institution and learn more about its ecological niche in the state (for example, its relationship with Purdue), in the region, and in the country. I accepted invitations to visit sociologists at the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and the University of Missouri at Columbia (where I briefly explored the limited legacies Veblen had left during his time there); in Kansas City I met Jesuits teaching at Rockhurst College, and educators experimenting with a modular program at Park College; I had earlier been interested in Stephens College, also in Columbia, Missouri, as an

aspect of a continuing concern for women's education and the role of women's colleges in that education. These visits were exploratory, not systematic, but forerunners of later dedication to a kind of academic ethnography pursued in brief bouts of fieldwork of the sort Ray Rist once characterized as blitzkrieg ethnography.^[46]

In 1954 Everett Hughes, as chairman of the Department of Sociology and with support from Morton Grodzins, then dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, persuaded the department to allow me to join it on a split appointment with the College. However, there was dissent from the demographers, notably from Philip Hauser. He insisted that I not be given the title professor of sociology but retain the one I already had as professor of the social sciences, and in the end that arrangement was agreed on.

But the enmity was a problem for graduate students who worked with Hughes and with me, as well as for nontenured colleagues, particularly Nelson Foote and Anselm Strauss, with whom I shared research projects and to whom I was personally and professionally close. Unrealistically, if understandably, translating acidulous comments by faculty members into actual proscriptions of what would pass muster, some able graduate students feared to write a dissertation without tables in it. Fears increased when Hauser, after a rough political campaign, was elected to the chairmanship in place of Hughes. I sometimes had the dismal experience of having as a doctoral candidate someone who had been a spirited undergraduate and watching that person become more timid and less original as time went by. Meanwhile, I had been engaged in cooperation with Hughes in recruiting members of a group who called themselves the Young Turks at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, of whom a modest and percipient account appears in James Coleman's contribution to this volume. Coleman himself came; we had adjoining offices in the Social Science Research Building, which is so constructed that secretaries do not act as buffers. Everett Hughes was on the other side of me, and communication was frequent among us. I recall my excitement in looking through high-school yearbooks with Coleman and pondering the reasons why in some schools an overlapping group of students not only occupied the elected offices but also edited the yearbook, played in the band, served as cheerleaders, and so on, whereas in other schools there was more of a division of labor. Elihu Katz came, and I brought in Rolf Meyersohn to be research director of the Center for the Study of Leisure, which I established with Ford Foundation support in 1955. Katz, Meyersohn, and I offered seminars

on mass communication, among other things comparing academic with journalistic ethics in interviewing. Hughes and I traveled to Cambridge and were successful in persuading Peter and Alice Rossi to come to Chicago; they had formerly worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

None of these people had tenure, and if the liveliness facilitated by their arrival was to be maintained, and the combativeness of the department contained, Hughes and I agreed that there needed to be a new, hence not previously involved, chairman. We went to New York to see if we could persuade Leonard Cottrell, Jr., then at the Russell Sage Foundation, to accept a position, if one could be worked out, at Chicago, where we had the strong support of the dean of the Social Science Division. He declined. We made other overtures, which of course had to be to persons of such distinction that there would be no question as to their academic legitimacy. None worked out. Concurrently, in the wake of Hutchins's departure, less autonomy was being granted to the College.

In the summer of 1954, I taught sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard's Summer School. That fall McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, whom I had met and admired, asked me whether he could stop over to see me in Chicago as he would be on his way to Wisconsin; I responded that if he were coming with any thought of persuading me to leave Chicago for Harvard, he should not stop by, and he did not. The intellectual excitement of the University of Chicago outweighed the price it seemed to exact in terms of combative personal and professional relations.

Several years later, however, the balance began to tilt against Chicago, and I quietly began thinking about finding a more equable place. The California Institute of Technology was one place I considered. Cal Tech possessed able faculty in economics, history, anthropology, and psychology. I would have been happy to teach bright undergraduates who might be willing from time to time to relax narrow definitions of what is scientific and examine social life with disciplined subjectivity. Stanford was another possibility. However, when in 1957 Bundy again approached me, he persuaded me to come to a newly created chair where my principal responsibility would be to undergraduates. It was an additional attraction that I would be affiliated with the Department of Social Relations. Even so, I found it very hard to leave the University of Chicago, toward which I had developed intense institutional loyalty, almost a kind of patriotism. It was a wrench to leave colleagues with whom I had worked in teaching and in research, and the many friends

Evelyn and I had made and who urged me to stay. At Harvard I quickly managed to develop an interdisciplinary cadre to join me in teaching a large course, "American Character and Social Structure," in the General Education program.^[47] Rather than returning to Dunster House, I took part in shaping Quincy House, which opened in 1959, a year after my arrival at Harvard, and which, with Henry Kissinger, H. Stuart Hughes, and others as associates, became the most politically engaged of the Houses.

One of the ironies of my shift of locale has been to observe that the University of Chicago survived the student-faculty protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also more recent controversies over issues of race and gender, with its undergraduate curriculum unimpaired, its academic seriousness unquestioned. By moving to Harvard I did not escape departmental controversy! However, the small number of graduate students with whom I have worked and with whom, happily, I continue to work, though emeritus, have not been at risk. In 1976, I became in addition a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Education. Some of the most mature and interesting graduate students with whom I have worked have come from that school.