How I Entered the Field and the Forest

April 24th, 2008 Posted in Biography

TIME IN
Sequences of Recollection: A measure of time at work beyond hours and days is the variety of the work itself. I think of my formal efforts into my chosen part of the universal as projects. I start with limited and unfocused knowledge and strive, through research, reading, discussion with others and through my own cogitation, to reach as formal and unified an understanding of the field I have tapped as I can. So looking back I do not have a sense of clock time used but I do have an idea of the process I have experienced. I think of all my projects together as my time in.

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THE WEST SIDE OF UNION SQUARE
What called to me first was the song of explanation. I was unhappy and stymied in my personal life. I felt shut off from effective action for myself, shut off from love and companions. I needed to know why and how. I was concerned with the psychic order within but I had no access to it. So I projected it outward onto the apparent social order around me. Both questions are valid, but I could see only one, really the two, but one projected onto and hidden within the other.

Walking along the west side of Union Square in New York City on a dark, winter night in 1951 the startling thought jolted me of the obvious disparities in wealth and life style that surrounded me and that was maintained in seemingly placid order.

In my native city of Philadelphia differences in wealth and power were not directly transparent. We lived in large economically homogeneous neighborhoods and presumed that, with some cultural enriching differences in taste and life-style, the round of life was the same for all. The rich and well-connected living along the main line of the commuter railroad in the city’s southern suburbs were beyond our experience and attention, minor features on the daily newspapers’ society pages. But in New York City the rich and poor were very close, a ten-minute walk from the tenements under the Third Avenue elevated to the fabulous apartments and town houses on Park and Fifth Avenues.

I was on my way to a college on the edge of Greenwich Village whose catalog was much more entertaining than the courses it announced. One economics professor was so boring that even he slept through the first five weeks. Then he awoke with a start and announced that he finally understood what the course was about. Came to him in a dream he was having at that instant. I can identify.

But Max N was the exception. His lectures were the ideal combination of information and entertainment. He talked about the economic and the social order. The class met in a room in the school’s basement that actually was a small theater with a small stage projected out and elevated by two feet over the audience seated on three sides. N was always the last one in. Onto the platform, removing his coat and hat and scarf and setting them neatly on a spare chair. Then seated at a small table, stage center and forward, overlooking the class but never actually seeing us, commencing his lecture slowly, at a whisper. About a country, each session a new one, and its political economy. The different parties and factions, the social classes and interest groups. The dynamics, the struggles. And the change. And the remaining the same.

He was cautiously pessimistic, things might get marginally better at most. Old, his revolutionary salad days back ten years before World War One. Hair growing out of his bulbous nose, out of his ears, his eyebrows luxurious bushes, a wild fringe around his bald pate. As the lecture advanced the sound of his voice and the call of his topic sent him into a light trance. The timber became more youthful, louder and firmer, pace up-tempo. Like a masculine clairvoyant transmitting a message from the spheres. Fascinating. And repeated weekly. He was a classical democratic socialist and he showed the strength of a Marxist analysis. But where did it lead? More specifically what was I to do?

One night after class I asked N. out for a bite and a talk. Out to a local cafeteria, a tuna-fish sandwich for him, coffee for me.

“What to do?”

The trade unions were into organizing expeditions into the South then, especially targeting the run-away textile mills from New England, which in the years since have scattered even further and are now distributed throughout the Pacific. I had dropped into a union office at a Philadelphia steel-mill to volunteer. I was told I wasn’t tough enough. This was heavy lifting

N denounced me for a bourgeois attitude and made it clear to me that there was no way forward for me from his course to a career. I packed the technique of class analysis into my old kit bag, smiled sourly, and moved on.

UPTOWN
A woman with big tits I knew, a distracting co-worker at the New York Times, accompanied me to registration at an uptown college. And there I was, listening to the lectures of Bern S, William G, Clarence S.

Clarence S. was a socialist, Bern S. an accused communist under investigation by the United States Congress, but the subject set before me was unexpectedly different. No Marxism here. Positive science it was. A tradition prior to Marx. A rejection of the religious explanation of social events in terms of good and evil though this part of it was never emphasized to we innocents. Things-as-they-are is what we want. Material fact recorded under the rule of an objective scientific method and accompanied by an associated theory. This positive sociology had its own pantheon of international pioneers showing us the way. We were to be unbiased, universal and above all scientific.

Then I came under the influence of Harold Z. A Scandinavian sociologist and novelist: Youthful, I believe that I was the older, tall, sandy hair cut in a European style, always formally dressed but slightly rumpled, slow moving, lectures always prepared and precise. He was relaxed and accessible but behind this was the formality and aloofness of the landed class who we in the U.S. imagine is represented by a monocle nonchalantly screwed into an eye-socket. It was an impressive combination.

Z was pushing, at that moment, for a rigid definition of theory and research for sociology that would guarantee the scientific status we all thought our subject deserved. Prior to Z there was no sensible transition from theory to research. There was no assurance that the two sets of events, theoretical statements, called propositions, and research facts, were isomorphic. The two events might not match. A critical question for all scientific experiment: How do you know you are measuring what you purport to measure?

Z had the answer. The concept. It has two meanings: One within the context of the proposition and theory in which it is embedded, and the other an operational definition which describes exactly how it has been observed and measured during the research work. To assure congruence these two meanings have to fit one into the other like an air-lock into its housing. Once this linkage takes the classical form of mathematics, a logical derivation of a proposition from a theory can be described that can then be verified or rejected by a research operation. Conversely any research finding under known and precise operations can be cranked back up into a theoretical proposition. So simple. Let’s do it.

The problem Max N left me, the what to do question, was answered. Positivist sociology was an expanding enterprise. The scientific method had finally found its footing in the social studies. It was only a matter of time, energy and investment for a pay-off in knowledge. And the investment was pouring in from government, industry, and foundations in the form of scholarships, fellowships, grants, subsidized meetings and publications. The social science departments at universities and colleges were expanding. There was a high level of achievement among professors and practitioners and a uniformly high level of intelligence and character. And the work was based on a generation of conceptual preparation by American academics built over the intellectual ups and downs of 5,000 years of western civilization augmented for us in the United States by the European scholars, another brilliant lot, who had been forced to migrate west by the political insanity in their home countries.

William G, the departmental chairman at General Studies, and Z were encouraging and supportive. This was the way to go. So I went.

DOWN SOUTH
Off to graduate study at a college in a southern state with a first year scholarship from a famous foundation and an appointment as research assistant to Professor Rick H.

Middle south: Iced tea in winter and barbecued pork. Low population density except at football games when thousands dressed up and congregated. Where did they hide when they weren’t watching football? One didn’t have to go too far out from the two or three block business district in our town to find log cabins. I watched a weird ritual for an hour before discovering they were boiling down fat to soap in an iron cauldron. I made a positive remark about Abe Lincoln in a diner and was rewarded by a general hush. Abe’s name was still taboo. We touched the larger national popular experience. The University’s basketball and football teams were competitively successful on the larger scene. And we even had a local character, a bookstore proprietor, famous for his long affair with a beautiful Hollywood actress. Except for an occasional hurricane it was pleasant enough. But I paid very little attention to place. My life was lived within the Sociology Department. It contained all meaning.

Over three years I was fortunate enough to work with four men of high intelligence and accomplishment, each of whom gave me warmth, encouragement and a share of his wisdom. I am more appreciative now then ever.

Rick.H. had been instrumental in my acceptance at the school. He was a physically solid but soft-spoken man Very serious but capable of an on-target joke. He had all the qualities of a dynamic CEO, smart and energetic with an ability to lead, but he consciously dampened his drive down in the service of a strongly held ethical commitment. He was a Mormon but in his work he was strictly secular, an example of the unbiased man for the rest of us. I also caught a sensitive and alert interpersonal side. He had a good fix on the personalities of all his students. He never intervened in our private lives but one could be sure of his empathy. If Freud had gotten him before sociology he would have made a fine psychoanalyst.

His specialty was marriage and the family, an interest fueled, he once admitted, by the polygamy within his family background that set his vision of life slightly askew from the rest of us. He was active in research, juggling several projects at a time, some of which were large scale and required organizing and coordinating associates and assistants. Most astonishing for me was his memory. He had the past and present literature cold. His annual reviews of research progress in the field were admirable and complete, and he was convinced that these works were valid and significant. At the moment I joined him he was starting a propositional inventory. This flowed naturally from his own work and seemed to benefit from Z’s paradigm. The time seemed right, the aim was encyclopedic. Data in droves from articles, monographs, research reports, textbooks had been accumulating in what seemed like massive middens. Now was the time to take the measure of the mountain. And this is where Rick H. put me to work.

Hank.S. who specialized in medical sociology became my second mentor. Of medium height, a starkly handsome man whose eyes had a slightly oriental cast within a ruddy face around a very long, delicate nose. Physically he was a non-foppish Disraeli. He looked slim but his arms were muscular, his chest deep. He might have lifted weights, he certainly looked athletic. He hated the formal lecture and all of his classes became informal seminars no matter how they started. He had a suite of offices at the medical school that was well away from the physical sociology department. We met there sitting in a circle, Hank, in a lightweight jacket that served as his lab coat, and we discussed our projects and subjected them to the group’s critique.

Hank was not only loved by his students but by the psychiatrists, medical doctors and dentists with whom he worked. He was charming, accessible, responsive, non-judgmental. Everyone felt close to him. Like Professor H he was empathetic. The only war story (Was it true or a riddle?) he told me shows this: In tents in New Guinea, heavy rainstorm accompanied by an incoming mortar barrage. Hank in one tent and a deeply fearful friend of his in another moaning his name: “Hankee. Hankeeee”. The man who later committed suicide. “What could I do?” asked Hank, implying that love is not the answer for adult dependency. Perhaps I was the second dependent, alone under the barrage beyond Hank’s help. Looking back and considering, perhaps Hank made the whole bowl of noodles up to convey his perception of my psychic state to me. He was trying to say something.

Hank S was a product of the University of Chicago tradition of hands-on research. The social field was their lab. Their method: a combination of accurate journalism, participant observation, anthropological awareness and acceptance of things as they are. Concepts were sensitizing and reporting tools, no more precise than required. Hank was conscious of interconnectedness, the notion of system. He understood that the dynamic of any setting was in the consequences, including contradictions, for established structures. He wanted to understand the events before him and wasn’t particularly concerned with theory. If he could describe the observed and could argue how it worked he was satisfied.

Hank was brilliant in an ad lib setting. Present him with a jumble of data and stand back. For me it was like the call of the wild to the Jack London dog, Buck. It resonated with a tendency I already had. It felt natural and right. But Hank hesitated before a blank page though I recall a paper of his that shimmered with the vibrato of the events described. Perhaps it was the difficulty of communicating this quality, the danger of being misunderstood that held him back and limited his fame and influence.

Ruby.V was the most eminent member of the department. He had been a part of a southern intellectual renaissance led by a world famous southern scholar who had retired shortly before I arrived. V was known as a demographer but his interests were quite wide, his most famous study was of the cotton industry. His energy was pretty much gone by the time I knew him.. He lectured from old notes but he was so bright that there was much to learn from him even on a bad day.

He was paraplegic, the result of infantile paralysis in his early youth in Arkansas, with a bird shaped protruding chest. Braces on his legs and arm-bracing canes, he like President Roosevelt could hardly walk. He had been hit so early that his full height was under five feet. He had a modified automobile that he used to drive himself around town. He had a wife and children. And he had established a conventional life for himself. But his high-pitched voice projected a, for me, barely understood alien cracker dialect. His office, table piled high with tumble down, oddly shuffled and dealt papers and manuscripts. Books shelved to the ceiling all round, the excess stacked into swaying towers, and V seemingly buried within the disorderly mess, only a nose or forehead visible. One felt like a Dickens’ character visiting his solicitor. Outwardly one had to get through the facade to reach the real V. Not a strenuous action for V was always there, metaphorically out in the open, accessible, reaching out. He gave me what I consider the two fundamental ideas of sociology, namely culture and social ecology. They hold the insights that, if not grasped and firmly held and applied, can lead one into the repetition of the old errors which we really want to correct.

Anthropology was my minor and I was lucky to have Jimmy Jack H, the cultural anthropologist as my fourth mentor. He had bad teeth, poor eyesight, was very skinny, hated to speak publicly and wasn’t well prepared at lectures. But he loved to write and came to class with pages of notes for his students. And if at an unexpected moment some word of wisdom or nod of approval was exactly appropriate, he delivered on target. When under Ruby V’s hints I had a staggering moment of insight into the meaning of culture while walking down a flight of stairs—it was a near conversion experience and I almost fell down from shock—Jimmy Jack approached, walking up and with a nod welcomed me to the club. He also with a few words, during a chance meeting on a campus walk, alerted me to the nature of the enterprise I was entering. “The dissertation isn’t critical,” if I may paraphrase him, “It only proves that you have promise for delivering on future projects.”

There was a fifth man, Norman D, with whom I had hoped to work. He had graduated from Harvard and was rumored to have some understanding of Parsons who was the most famous American sociologist in that era, but who was not easily accessible through his own writings. Norman was also the local expert on social class. He was a tall man, tending toward extra weight, very patrician, slow moving, slow speaking, avoiding emotion. He was the first of my professors to have his class over to his house, combining our academic work with sociability. An important act in giving a youthful group a sense of gravitas, and, for those of us who hadn’t achieved it, a realistic view of personal value. But something was wrong. It might have been departmental politics—he later decamped for Wisconsin—but our relationship never warmed enough for me to pose my question about the Positivism-Marxism disconnect which was my true, at that time, personal and professional interest, my way to a sensible dissertation which, alas, I did not know I was on.