II

My arrival at the University of Chicago in January 1945 produced a new set of marginalities, which had little to do with class, ethnicity, or religion but were more traumatic. One was the normal undergraduate experience of discovering my naïveté. Although I had been a top student at a top Chicago high school, where I had hung out with a quasi-intellectual clique, I was an utter provincial. My new fellow students were smarter and more sophisticated; many were combat veterans, four to five years older than I and many more years wiser in the ways of the

world. I thought they were wiser in all respects, proper students with their own apartments, whereas I was socially immature, had to live at home and commute, and worked on the side to help pay the rent. Whatever inferiority feelings I had in high school were now magnified.

A second trauma was intellectual. In the 1940s the high-school curriculum did not include any social sciences or humanities, and even social studies had not yet been invented. There was only civics and American history, which was just more civics but about the past. All course materials at the university except in the natural sciences were brand new to me, and I had never even heard of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hume, or Karl Marx. Old assumptions and certainties were therefore shattered quickly and often.

A third and related trauma was political. Once the war veterans arrived, the campus was rife with political discussion and action, involving groups and ideas of which I had never heard. I was wooed by Socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, and others who stimulated my interest in politics but also overwhelmed me, so I joined nothing. By the 1948 presidential election I had begun to make up my mind, however, for I said no to the Progressive party and worked for Socialist party candidates Norman Thomas and Maynard Krueger.

The one early source of certainty at Chicago was my field of studies. Having spent the first college year in survey courses in the natural sciences, the humanities, philosophy, and the social sciences and having taken a graduate social-science course in my second year, I knew where I wanted to spend the three years of study toward the M.A. In my 1947 autobiographical term paper, written in the first semester of graduate school, I reported that I was majoring in social science "but confused by too many interests: writing, sociological research, teaching, educational administration, social work (youth groups) and . . . Jewish religion and community life."^[2]

Sociology was already my favorite subject because it seemed closest to some of what I had already been writing about America and to the kind of feature journalism that interested me. It was also sometimes less abstract than the other social sciences. Although I did my share of reading—and even tried to write—abstract theory, I was always more comfortable with what later became known as grounded and middle-range theory, one reason to gravitate toward fieldwork. However, I also read some John Dewey and believed in the unity of the social sciences. In addition, I did not like some of the required first courses in sociology

and therefore entered the divisional master's program in the social sciences, headed by Earl Johnson, a sociologist who advocated many of Dewey's values. Johnson's program gave me the chance to take graduate work in all the social sciences, which provided a fine background for my electives, almost all of which were in sociology.

Earl Johnson also taught that the social sciences existed to help improve society, and thus he supported and strengthened my predispositions toward what is today called social policy.^[3] Still, those feelings were not strong enough to get in the way of what I was learning elsewhere about the virtues of detached research and how to do it. In any case, the relative ease with which I settled on my fields of interest reduced my earlier intellectual flounderings. Another source of reduced uncertainty was my discovery of cultural relativism. Because all beginning students in the social sciences were required to take two survey courses (which covered sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and "human development"), I heard lectures from all the Chicago social anthropologists and read the other major American and British ones. More important, I discovered Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, and was very excited by his concept of relationism as well as his emphasis on the idea that all knowledge was a function of the knower's perspective. Most of my papers that year were Mannheimian in one or another way, and his relationism provided a criterion by which to compare diverse ideas—or cultures—without having to choose between them. Later, when I began to do fieldwork in Park Forest, Illinois, Mannheim's notion of perspective proved useful, although I was surprised by how many perspectives toward the same event were possible even in a small, fairly homogeneous community. However, I also learned that for some issues, including high culture and popular culture, it is not always necessary to elevate one perspective above all others.

Two other authors helped me to develop my relationist position. One was W. Lloyd Warner, also one of my teachers, whose lectures and Yankee City books made the notion of class more meaningful to me at the time than readings in Marx, Weber, and even the Lynds. Warner also started me thinking about class and the mass media, and then about class culture, because of his lectures on what he called symbol systems. Since he taught that different classes looked at society from different perspectives, a culturally relativist approach to class made sense to me, although Warner himself clearly preferred the higher classes. The other author was Robert K. Merton, whose essay "Manifest and Latent Func-

tions," which I first read in early 1950, made an enormous impression because, among other things, it enabled me to see that cultural patterns disliked by one group can be functional for another.^[4]

My preoccupation with cultural relativism and relationism also helped, I now suspect, to nurture what I earlier called my antiexpert position. Although I was trying to become an expert myself and was spending most of my time listening to or reading experts, I had always disliked those whose expertise manifested itself in the exercise of absolute and autocratic authority. My early rebelliousness against Orthodox Jewish teachers in the Cologne Gymnasium was followed by similar reactions in Chicago to a number of rabbis I met during my activities in the organized Jewish community. As the editor of the school newspaper at Hyde Park High School, I had bitter but unsuccessful struggles with the supervising teacher and the principal, who censored every criticism of the school and the school system. Later I waged a less vocal campaign against Aristotle and Plato, who were the much-assigned experts in every college course at Chicago while Robert Maynard Hutchins was chancellor.^[5]

In graduate courses at Chicago from 1947 to 1949 I studied other subjects as well. I learned to become a novice fieldworker in Everett Hughes's course, and took Louis Wirth's course on the sociology of knowledge only to discover that by then he was much less interested in teaching relationism than in improving race relations. I learned economic history—and I think a good deal of what is now called social history too—from Sylvia Thrupp, and was taught content analysis and communication theory by Barney Berelson and Douglas Waples. In fact I took as many communications courses as possible in the social sciences because, whenever possible, I was trying to connect sociology with communications and the mass media. In Avery Leiserson's course on public opinion and in other political-science courses I tried to figure out how the governed communicate with the governors, a subject that continues to fascinate me today but then helped lead to my M.A. thesis on political participation and to an interest in audience-feedback processes in mass-media organizations.^[6] For Sylvia Thrupp I wrote a paper on the merchant writers of early seventeenth-century England, part of a larger and convoluted attempt to determine the functions of writers and symbol systems in social change. At one point I even studied the invention of the typewriter, and one of my early topics for the master's thesis was acculturation in the Yiddish theater.^[7]

At that time I was not formally interested in popular culture—I am

not sure I even knew the term. I tried to keep up with movies, best-selling books, and "Hit Parade" songs, but my interest was not scholarly and, besides, my own tastes were changing. I had been persuaded somehow that a successful graduate student had to be able to play tennis, which I could never master, and to appreciate chamber music, especially the Beethoven quartets, which was far easier for me and much more enjoyable. I also shifted from Hollywood movies to foreign "art" films and went to some of the Broadway plays that toured in Chicago.

If my interest in popular culture was latent, it quickly turned manifest in 1949, for two reasons. One was the appearance of an article in the February 1949 issue of Harper's Magazine by Russell Lynes, entitled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," a light but comprehensive survey of four "brow levels" and their cultural preferences and peccadilloes. Lynes described these levels with an implicit class terminology, although he was concurrently arguing that stratification by taste was replacing that based on wealth and education.^[8] Lynes's analysis was often acute, but he was more interested in expressing his low opinion of all brow levels. However, the article crystallized a lot of disconnected thinking I had done about culture, class, and symbol systems, and I had no difficulty in jettisoning Lynes's tone and values and adapting the brow levels to Warnerian class culture.^[9]

The other reason for thinking about popular culture was David Riesman's return to campus from Yale University, where he had been working on The Lonely Crowd . I had already corresponded with him about my plans for studying political participation for my M.A. thesis, and in the process he sent draft chapters of the book to me for comment, chapters which were filled with observations about popular culture. Dave was then, as now, one of the few professors I have ever met who treats students with intellectual respect, and once he arrived in Chicago, we engaged in frequent discussions about popular culture. Partly because he lacked time and, I think, inclination to keep up systematically with the mass media himself, he often interviewed his students about popular novels, movies, radio programs, and popular culture in general, and I learned an immense amount by keeping Dave au courant . His other important contribution was his insistence that studying popular culture was not only a legitimate but also a highly desirable scholarly endeavor. In those days American sociology was still close to its Germanic and American-Protestant origins, even at the University of Chicago, and popular culture was simply not a fit topic for study before Riesman returned from Yale.

One of Riesman's first graduate courses at Chicago was his seminar on popular culture. I took it in the spring of 1950, writing a paper called "The Metaphysics of Popular Culture." Of metaphysics there was nary a word, but in it I began to translate Lynes's approach into a more sociological one, developing the notion of leisure cultures and discussing how to assign people to them. I was apparently a total relativist then, for I suggested that the several cultures were functional for the creators and audiences in each and proposed the "complete equality [of cultures] from the point of view of social science research."

I also commented critically and at length about the different value judgments of some seminar members, who used the study of popular culture as a way of scorning disliked or less prestigious cultures and people. Above all I came out against an anonymous member of an unspecified elite I called the literary critic, who represented past aristocracies and the present humanities in advocating high culture and attacking popular culture. Although I observed that high culture was equivalent to the German Kultur, the literary critics I had in mind were writers like José Ortega y Gasset, Russell Kirk, and socialist Dwight Macdonald. I was then already bothered that some socialists were culturally as elitist as the conservatives—and later I said so in the second paper I ever published on popular culture.^[10] My literary-critic figure was the autocratic expert who defended universal standards that fed particularist self-interests, resembling in some ways the high-school officials, rabbis, and student Stalinists I had encountered in earlier years.