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.