David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy 9781472443175, 9781409438632, 9781409443087, 9781472423122, 9781472428486, 2014042799, 9781315575889

Citation preview

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Also in the series Being Human in a Consumer Society Edited by Alejandro Néstor García Martínez ISBN 978-1-4724-4317-5 Arendt Contra Sociology Theory, Society and its Science Philip Walsh ISBN 978-1-4094-3863-2 Hegel’s Phenomenology and Foucault’s Genealogy Evangelia Sembou ISBN 978-1-4094-4308-7 The Making of a Postsecular Society: A Durkheimian Approach to Memory, Pluralism and Religion in Turkey Massimo Rosati ISBN 978-1-4724-2312-2

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Edited by Keith Kerr Quinnipiac University, USA B. Garrick Harden Lamar University, USA Marcus Aldredge Iona College, USA

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Keith Kerr, B. Garrick Harden and Marcus Aldredge and the Contributors 2015 Keith Kerr, B. Garrick Harden and Marcus Aldredge have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Riesman, David, 1909–2002. [Works. Selections] David Riesman’s unpublished writings and continuing legacy / by Keith Kerr, B. Garrick Harden and Marcus Aldredge. pages cm. – (Classical and contemporary social theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2848-6 (hardback) 1. National characteristics, American. 2. United States–Social conditions–20th century. 3. Social sciences–Research–United States. I. Kerr, Keith II. Harden, B. Garrick, 1981– III. Aldredge, Marcus. IV. Title. E169.1.R567 2015 306.097309’04–dc23 2014042799 ISBN: 9781472428486 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315575889 (ebk)

Dedicated to Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt and to the memory of Rupert Wilkinson

This page has been left blank intentionally

Contents List of Figures and Tables   Notes on the Editors and Contributors   Archival Source Information   Preface   Acknowledgements   1

Series Editor’s Introduction   Stjepan Mestrovic

ix xi xv xvii xix 1

PART I: Riesman's Unpublished Works 2

The American Character in our Changing Society   David Riesman

11

3

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power   David Riesman

29

4

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities   David Riesman

41

5

The Berlin Crisis   Erich Fromm and David Riesman

57

6

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations   David Riesman

7

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence   David Riesman (and likely contribution by Philip Rieff)

8

A Suggestion for Coding the Intensive White Collar Interviews  105 David Riesman

9

Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That   David Riesman

67 79

109

viii

10

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

The Structure of Party Conversation   Robert J. Potter, David Riesman, Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt

115

Part II: Riesman’s Life, Work and Legacy 11

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman   Rupert Wilkinson

12

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman   Stjepan Mestrovic

167

13

David Riesman’s Mission   Michael Maccoby

181

14

An Examination of Sociable Conversations and the Work of the Sociability Project   Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt

15

A Minority Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century   Jesus A. Garcia

16

David Riesman and Higher Education Revisited: The State of the American University Then and Now   Joe Galbo and Miriam Jones

247

Strange Cultural Bedfellows: David Riesman, Erving Goffman, and Structures of Alienation   Marcus Aldredge and B. Garrick Harden

269

17

Index  

153

191 231

289

List of Figures and Tables Figures 14.1a First Page of 1957 letter from David Riesman to Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt regarding their co-work on the Sociability Project   14.1b Second page of 1957 letter from David Riesman to Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt regarding their co-work on the Sociability Project  

193 194

Tables 8.1

Riesman’s suggested coding for White Collar interviews, based on Erich Fromm’s typology.1  

10.2 Ranking of the parties by the optimism index and by occupational career status (percentages based on the total coding judgments per party through episode analysis)   10.3 Occupational career status and moral or emotional conclusions about the world   10.4 Participation structure of parties: ranked by the optimism index and by percentage of episodes with active audience participation (percentage of episodes for each participation type per party)   14.1 14.2a 14.2b 14.2c 14.3a 14.3b 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8

The categories for coding acquaintance   Key for coding types of parties   Key for coding types of party continued (total listing of parties)   Key for coding types of party continued (sample party descriptions)   Incidence of stylistic indicators at 26 fully-coded parties   Incidence of stylistic indicators at 26 fully-coded parties (continued)   Interpersonal stance at parties and at camp   Axis tie at parties and at camp   Categories for coding qualitative treatment of the resource   Qualitative treatment of the resource and motive style (percentage of episodes of given type which showed these motive styles)   Modal party status and alignment (40 parties)  

106

122 130 139 200 202 203 204 206 208 210 215 217 222 223

x

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

14.9 Heterogeneity of status and motive style (percentage of episodes of given status that showed motive style)   14.10 Participation structure and motive style (percentage of episodes of given structure that showed motive style)   14.11 Some conditions related to choice of motive style  

224 225 226

Notes on the Editors and Contributors The Editors Keith Kerr is an associate professor of sociology at Quinnipiac University and is an affiliated professor of sociology at Ningxia University in Yinchuan, China where he lives and works in the summer months. For his work there, he was named a 2014 OYCF Fellow. His areas of research include social and cultural theory, as well as China Studies, with an emphasis on Hui Muslims. He is the author of Postmodern Cowboy: C Wright Mills and a New 21st Century Sociology (Paradigm 2009). His current research, in conjunction with researchers at Xiamen University in Xiamen, China, is investigating Chinese social character types. B. Garrick Harden is an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas with teaching and research interests in social and cultural theory. He co-edited Co-Opting Culture (Lexington 2009). Marcus Aldredge is an assistant professor of sociology and an associate researcher for the Center of Social Research at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. His areas of scholarly interest include the sociology of culture, interactionism, and youth and deviance. His research primarily focuses on expressive cultural and artistic practices including recent projects on graffiti in China and collegiate arts programming in higher educational settings. His book Singer-Songwriters and Musical Open Mics was published by Ashgate in 2013. The Contributors Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt obtained her BA from Antioch College, 1946, in Sociology and Education. She went on to get an MA from Columbia University (1948, Sociology) and a PhD from the University of Michigan (1953, Social Psychology). She worked at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan (Research Associate) and at the Family Study Center of the University of Chicago (Research Associate, Project Director, Assistant Director of the Family Study Center, Assistant Professor). She published many articles in journals over her career including the Journal of Social Psychology, Human Relations and co-authored The Dynamics of Planned Change published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. in 1958.

xii

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Joe Galbo received a PhD in Sociology from York University, Toronto, Canada. He teaches and researches the sociology of intellectuals as well as cultural studies at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John. He has written on David Riesman and Daniel Bell as well as other intellectuals, served for three years as a member of the University of New Brunswick Board of Governors, and has been involved in international student exchange with American, Canadian and Mexican universities. Jesus A. Garcia earned his doctoral degree from Texas A&M in 2011 in Sociology with specializations in the study of race/ethnic relations, sociological theory, and cultural studies. His research publications have investigated cross border crime and deviance along the South Texas/Mexico border, sociological theory, race/ ethnic relations, and modernity. Miriam Jones is an English professor at the University of New Brunswick whose areas of interest are eighteenth-century British literature, women’s writing, and street literature. She has degrees from the University of Toronto and York University, Toronto. Her presidency of the Association of University of New Brunswick Teachers coincided with UNB’s first strike and lockout in 225 years. As part of her union activism she frequently writes about issues in postsecondary education. Michael Maccoby has a PhD from Harvard in Social Relations. He worked closely with Riesman for 45 years, beginning in 1955 when they co-taught a course at Chicago. Maccoby was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at New College, Oxford, a graduate of the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis and has taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Cornell, University of California at Santa Cruz, Washington School of Psychiatry, and Sciences Po in Paris. He currently teaches leadership at the Said School at Oxford. He has authored 14 books on work and leadership and he has been consultant to leaders in corporations, unions, government and universities. For his consulting, research and writing in Sweden, King Carl XVI Gustav honored him in 2008, making him Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star. Stjepan G. Mestrovic is Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. He holds three degrees from Harvard University (a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Social Relations, a Master’s in Theological Studies and a Master’s in Clinical Psychology) as well as a PhD in Sociology from Syracuse University. He is the author of 20 books and numerous scholarly articles, including Postemotional Society, for which David Riesman wrote the preface. Rupert Wilkinson was Emeritus Professor of American Studies and History, University of Sussex, UK. When he published his first book, Gentlemanly Power: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition (1964, UK title The Prefects), the American sociologist Martin Trow said it was really about “social character.”

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

xiii

Wilkinson more directly engaged American character in American Tough (1984), The Pursuit of American Character (1988), and American Social Character: Modern Interpretations (1992). He was also the author of the “The Lonely Crowd at 60” (Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Sept 17, 2010). Wilkinson’s final book was Surviving a Japanese Internment Camp: Life and Liberation at Santo Tomas, Manila, in World War II (2014).

This page has been left blank intentionally

Archival Source Information Michael Riesman and the Harvard University Archives (HUA) granted permission to include the original Riesman pieces found in this volume. The original source documents can be found in David Riesman’s papers, filed at the HUA, at the following catalog numbers: “The American Character in our Changing Society” and “National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power” HUA Location: HUG(FP) 99.20, Box 5 of 5, Folder #30 “American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities” HUA Location: HUG(FP) 99.20, Box 5 of 5, Folder #30 “The Berlin Crisis” HUA Location: HUG 99.20, Box 1 of 5 “The Impact of Freudian Thought on American Education: Some Observations” HUA Location: HUG(FP) 99.20, Box 3 of 5, Folder #19 “Freud: A Study in Ambivalence” HUA Location: HUG(FP) 99.57, Box 1 of 3, Folder “Freud Notes and Draft” “A Suggestion for Coding the Intensive White Collar Interviews” HUA Location: (Unprocessed Accessions), 1912–1997Accession 14588 “Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That” HUA Location: HUG 99.57, Box 3 of 3 “The Structure of Party Conversation” HUA Location: HUG 99.55, Box 20 of 23

This page has been left blank intentionally

Preface Unbeknownst to me, this project began in 2010 with what amounted to a whimsical trip to the Harvard University Archives to read what I could of David Riesman’s papers. A longtime admirer of Riesman’s work, the first trip to the archives was more personal than it was work-related. I had no idea what I would find, nor any indication that I was taking the first steps toward what would eventually become a book. I was going simply for an indulgent vacation; I was an academic tourist of sorts. Amongst Riesman’s numerous cataloged papers, I spent many hours that first trip scanning for anything that caught my eye. Amongst the finds were manuscripts in various forms of completion, with titles I had not previously been aware of. These I tagged to be copied and delivered to me for later reading; souvenirs by which to remember the trip. These arrived several weeks later and several more weeks after that, I found extended time to delve into them. When I finally did, I could not contain my excitement. I had, in front of me, copies of what I suspected were unpublished writings. Amongst the documents I had were several speeches Riesman gave over the years, writings by Riesman (and Fromm) on the Berlin Crisis, a memo to C. Wright Mills, writings from the Sociability Project, and other gems that rivaled Riesman’s better-known publications. Subsequent checks of the documents turned-up no prior publication of their contents. I was fairly certain that these were unpublished. It was then that I determined I must find an outlet for them. Yet, this almost didn’t happen. Over the next year I located a couple of journals that were interested in publishing the pieces as a special edition. In both cases, the initial editors I was in communication with were as excited about these pieces as I was. But in both cases and despite the initial editors’ support, the editorial boards decided against moving forward. With other projects taking my time, the papers were shelved. Then, in the spring of 2012, I got an unexpected call from Garrick Harden. He wanted to revive the project. Some two years later, this book is the end result of that revival. I am listed as the lead editor, Harden as second, and Aldredge as third—though Aldredge’s work and contributions to this project deserve much more. Alas, events outside of my control prevented him from being placed into a more deserved spot. Editorial Process It is with speculative certainty that we claim Riesman’s “unpublished” pieces presented here have, in fact, never been published. We were as diligent as possible

xviii

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

in trying to compile a comprehensive listing of Riesman’s many publications to compare the chapters against. We are confident that these are in fact unpublished, but recognize the possibility that amongst Riesman’s half-century of publishing, we may have missed something. It should also be noted that there are sections from the following Riesman chapters where we feel that some of his arguments, examples, and ideas appear in some version of other publications he later writes. When pertinent, these are noted in an “Editors’ Note.” We chose to keep such chapters only when we felt that the chapter was sufficiently different, or interpreted differently, than what may have previously appeared in published form elsewhere. While we attempted to keep chapters as close as possible to their original structure and wording, there were chapters and sections that required editorial discretion. Most of the original documents did not include complete citations. Thus, we have added many of the citations provided in this volume. This involved guesswork when the original documents did not provide enough data points to determine with certainty the reference Riesman intended. Beyond citations, some of the documents were filed with multiple versions or handwritten comments regarding intended changes. In these cases, we made editorial decisions as to which competing sentence or paragraph to include in published form. We must also make a note on the language used. The language in these pieces is reflective of the time period that they were written. As such, we have chosen to keep the language as was originally used. Finally, in order to help readers distinguish between original footnotes and notes added by the current editors, all editorial notes not appearing in the original document are indicated by “Editors’ Note.” KEITH KERR August, 2014

Acknowledgements There were many individuals without whom this project would not have been possible. First and foremost, we would like to thank Michael Riesman for his gracious permission to publish his father’s papers. A large debt of gratitude is also owed to the librarians at the Harvard University Archives. They went above and beyond in their help at accommodating us. Thanks are also due to the Quinnipiac University CAS Research Grant Committee for providing partial funding for our research. Their 2010 Seed Research Grant-in-Aid provided the initial funding for travel to Cambridge, even before we knew what we would find there. In the spirit of David Riesman, who used to advise his students to “just go out and look,” the committee provided the funding to do just that. The seed money they provided grew into this book. A large debt of gratitude is also owed to Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt. Of the many research projects that Riesman was involved in, the Sociability Project is perhaps the least known about today. We were able to make contact with Eisenstadt, an original and key player on the project. The amount of time and energy she spent in filling-in the details of the Project and her work with Riesman, not to mention her work in helping us to edit and explain some of the unpublished Sociability Project material, went above and beyond what was expected. This book is all the more better because of her. We would also like to acknowledge the hard work of the undergrad and graduate research assistants and administrative assistants who contributed in one way or another to this project. We would like to thank Megan Brigance (Iona College); Matthew Blumenthal, Andrew Bonacci, Lovanda Brown, Shauncey Coleman, Jonathan Hammer, Rebecca Ivester, Alexander Kriz, Dan Nguyen, Anna Rohman, Matthew Schultz, and Shantel Williams, all of Quinnipiac University; and Rita Trottman (administrative assistant), Paydon Babino, Sarah Harden (graduate clinician), Lionel Mitchel, Skylar Murphy, and Martha Anfoso Valdez, all of Lamar University. Thanks are also due to Quinnipiac University Associate Dean Allan Smits for funding some of the undergrad students’ travel to the archives. In the process, not only did these students discover for the first time the rich ideas of David Riesman, these students of the twenty-first century entered into a relationship of sorts with Riesman. In small ways such as this, Riesman and his ideas live on.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

Series Editor’s Introduction Stjepan Mestrovic

This volume is a remarkable collection of chapters by and about David Riesman that may be divided into three parts: previously unpublished pieces by Riesman from his archived papers; articles about Riesman by former students and friends, and chapters about the ongoing impact of Riesman’s work on social theory, military sociology, ethnicity, and education. The volume intentionally focuses on themes, ideas, and concepts other than Riesman’s famous Lonely Crowd. Indeed, Riesman published extensively on a broad range of topics. In broadening the context for apprehending Riesman’s legacy in this way, the editors have simultaneously shed new light on the importance of The Lonely Crowd for understanding phenomena ranging from education to the military. Riesman’s Lonely Crowd has sold over 1.5 million copies since its publication in 1950. It is the best-selling book in sociology of all time. More importantly, it continues to be read by persons outside the field of sociology, including laypersons seeking to make sense of contemporary society. Riesman was the first sociologist to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. He has influenced thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff, Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Bell, and C. Wright Mills, among others. Despite these enormous achievements and stature, he has been forgotten in sociology and is hardly mentioned in textbooks. This remarkable fact says more about the decline of sociology than it does about the significance of Riesman’s work. In Orlando Patterson’s New York Times obituary for Riesman, Orlando bemoans the fact that sociology today “mimics the methodologies and logic of natural sciences,” and therefore is less able to appreciate Riesman’s significance or build upon his ability to reach the layperson (often referred to as public sociology). I agree with Patterson. Positivistic methodologies have steadily taken over sociology and related fields—most notably economics and psychology—so that scholars talk to each other with numbers instead of ideas and concepts suitable for understanding human behavior. Anyone who has had Riesman for a teacher or mentor typically describes him along the lines that “he was a prince among men.” Riesman was approachable and humble, especially given his fame and high stature at Harvard. In fact, he was friendly and generous with his time. He corresponded and stayed in touch with former students. Unlike many professors today, he was truly available for office hours, and eager to speak with students. As was typical of his era, he always wore a suit and displayed aristocratic manners characteristic of his upperclass upbringing—but he was an aristocrat with the common touch, a man who

2

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

felt at home with and part of “the salt of the earth,” the common person. These personal qualities shine through his books and lectures: his books are readable and understandable, and loaded with examples from films, novels, and comics. I still use his Lonely Crowd in all the courses that I teach, and inevitably, students still relate to what Riesman wrote in 1950. It is remarkable that Riesman predicted the media and social media revolution that few others saw coming in the 1950s, and placed it in the context of “grand social theory” that makes sense. He divided human history into the eras of oral tradition, written word, and the screen image. Each era is characterized by character-types that he named tradition-directed, inner-directed, and otherdirected, respectively. We are living in the age of the screen, which has caught the attention of postmodernists and other theorists since Riesman. We are undergoing the character struggles that Riesman predicted: children are most definitely socialized more by the realm of the image (television, film, social media) than by the parents and authority figures who guarded the aura of the written word and the oral tradition. Riesman viewed the elderly as the most disenfranchised segment of society because they cannot keep up with the social consequences of screen image culture. The consequences of this seismic shift in socialization are enormous, but cannot be appreciated fully by either positivistic pseudo-science or the postmodern claims that social life is nothing but a mess of rootless, circulating fictions on a screen. The thinkers who influenced Riesman are as thought-provoking and largely ignored as he was, and is: Sigmund Freud, Alexis de Tocqueville, Everett Hughes, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. Riesman pointed out to me that in the William James Hall, the building that housed his office and social science classrooms, not a single course on James was offered. It continues to be popular to dismiss Freud as being obsessed with sex even as Western societies are obsessed with sex and pornography. Nobody reads Tocqueville anymore, even though Tocqueville claimed correctly that America’s Puritan beginnings and legacy of slavery would influence its course into the distant future—he was obviously correct. Hughes championed the Chicago School methodology of “thick description,” which has been drowned out by quantitative, positivistic methodologies. Veblen’s insights into the barbarism, bullying, and cruelty of modern life remain relevant, but hardly anybody reads Veblen anymore. But there is a deeper connection to the thinkers that influenced Riesman. Riesman often remarked that he did not hold a PhD in sociology or any other academic field. Riesman held a Harvard law degree and for a short period, practiced law. He was a lawyer at Harvard who worked as a professor in a sociology department that voted him down, and was appointed over their objections by the university president. Similarly, Freud was a medical doctor who was referred to as “the professor” by his disciples even though he was not a professor. Tocqueville was not credentialed, and became the world’s first ethnographer—before ethnography existed. James was also a medical doctor who never practiced medicine, and is known as the father of American psychology, even though he held no credentials in psychology.

Series Editor’s Introduction

3

Veblen was an economist, rejected by the field of economics, who became known as a sociologist without any credentials in sociology. I could expand this list of noncredentialed pioneers in the social sciences, but the overall point for Riesman was that the era preceding ours was one of individualism and charisma which allowed and even appreciated idiosyncratic innovations made by “amateurs.” Riesman was one such idiosyncratic “amateur,” and he is out of place in our McDonaldized, credential-conscious, conformist-era dominated by the screen image. As noted previously, Patterson calls Riesman the last sociologist. But his entire era of sociologists has faded, intellectuals who made laypersons as well as academics think about society. Today’s postemotional1 sociology lives vicariously off of the charisma, emotional energy, and intellectual legacy of the authentic sociology that died along with Riesman. New PhD’s in sociology are advised to publish in highly-ranked journals that publish mostly quantitative studies so that they can get jobs in highly-ranked departments. The problem is that laypersons do not read these highly-ranked and highly-mathematical journals, and neither do social scientists in neighboring fields, or even sociologists working in narrow specialty areas. This volume’s editors show courage and what Riesman called “the nerve of failure” in publishing this window into authentic sociology at a time when most credentialed sociologists do not know how to appreciate Riesman. Chapters by Riesman Perhaps the most powerful chapter in this collection is the one co-authored with Philip Rieff, entitled “Freud: A Study in Ambivalence.” Rieff went on to write the classic, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. The co-authored piece presented here, apparently never completed, gives us an outline for a very different perspective on Freud. Some of the subheadings in the outline immediately orient us in new directions: “As Vienna is not as it seems, so nothing is what it seems.” “Freud’s own self-denial as an artist.” “The attack on narcissism (last refuge of individualism).” “The warrior’s outlook: war and sex.” “Honest listening by participant-observer rather than manipulative or directive counseling.” “Freudian social engineering in war, industry.” One of the more interesting aspects of Freud’s life which catches the attention of the co-authors, and subsequently the reader, is that Freud was referred to as “the professor” by his disciples even though he was not a professor. Freud was dissuaded from a career in academia early on by his professors, presumably because of anti-Semitism. Yet Freud the medical researcher became an unofficial professor through his “academic” and simultaneously “artistic” writing—there is something profoundly Freudian about this aspect of Freud’s life and work; it also illustrates Riesman’s, as well as Veblen’s point, that sociology’s greatest innovators come from “vulgar” circles because the 1 I developed the concept of postemotional society based upon a post-other-directed reading of Riesman. See Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Postemotional Society (London: Sage, 1997).

4

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

respectable elite is too conservative in promoting its vested interests to be open to innovation. Interestingly, Riesman and Rieff link Freud’s work to the grimly pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. This means that every individual is at all times the potential enemy of civilization, and that civilization is but a thin membrane covering the all-powerful id. What is interesting and important about this new perspective is that Schopenhauer is as neglected today in philosophy as Freud is in psychology, even though both are referred to as towering Western intellectuals. This chapter, just a fragment for a project that was never completed, is profound in its implications. The chapter entitled “National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power” reproduces a 1966 speech Riesman gave to the National War College. He argues that as Americans become more educated, they become simultaneously less parochial and more nationalistic. In plain terms, they become less attached to immediate communities and more attached to perceived American, national values, which are ultimately the values of the upper middle class that controls the media. One of his arresting lines is that one such American value is the preference “to be at home, in the same kind of house and with the same mass media anywhere in America.” The thought-provoking aspect of his argument is that nationalism is increasing, despite the scores of social theorists who assume that with increased education, nationalism should decrease or disappear completely. In “The Impact on Freudian Thought on American Education: Some Observations,” Riesman takes up Freud “But what matters for us is not what he [Freud] ‘really’ thought, but how he was assimilated.” And how was he assimilated? Riesman argues that Freud, emphasizing the lustful id, was rejected by respectable Protestant Americans. But for the same reasons that Freud was rejected by the respectable, American intellectual elite, he was assimilated by various “vulgar” American immigrant groups. Riesman gives the example of the impact of “immigrant movie-makers on the whole society,” and “how movies brought a kind of vicarious mobility to those who stayed home.” It is still true today that Hollywood allows America to act out their id-like, sexual, “natural,” counter-civilizational fantasies vicariously. It is also still true that “respectable” American academics dismiss Freud or banish him from the classroom altogether. Riesman’s approach to verifying Freud’s importance is fascinating: he does not “test” Freud’s theories in a laboratory, but observes the truth of Freud’s insights in the structure of society. In this sense he was echoing Veblen on respectability versus the vulgar innovators. Specifically, America’s Puritan elite acts out the role of the repressive superego, while America’s various immigrant as well as ethnic groups, act out the role of the id in cinema, music, theater, and popular culture. Riesman’s “The Berlin Crisis,” co-authored with his friend and mentor, Erich Fromm, is a memorandum addressed to Arthur J. Schlesinger, advisor to President Kennedy. The crisis that Riesman and Fromm discussed was what to do about Khrushchev, who wanted to take Berlin along with the rest of East Germany. At the time, the Americans and the Soviets were escalating the Cold War rhetoric and risking a hot war. Riesman and Fromm urged negotiating with Khrushchev such

Series Editor’s Introduction

5

that he would “guarantee the continued freedom of West Berlin in exchange for the stabilization of the East German situation by peace treaty and by our de facto recognition of the existence of East Germany.” In “American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities,” Riesman introduces the concept of “conspicuous production” as a counter to Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption.” “Conspicuous production” never took off as a concept, although Riesman’s argument is compelling; particularly with regard to the American government’s spending for weapons—which is greater today than that of any of our enemies, or former enemies, combined—“it is clear that the line between consumption and production is hard to draw.” Clearly, weapons are not “consumer goods” on the order of televisions or laptops. Theorists frequently refer to America as the consumer society, but Riesman has a point: it is a consumer and production society. It would be interesting to develop this line of thought into exploring non-military social spheres of conspicuous production. “The American Character in our Changing Society” is another speech that Riesman gave at the National War College. In this chapter, Riesman rephrases his overall argument in The Lonely Crowd. For example, one of his lines in this chapter is that “the peer group in which we compete for approval as children is the tyrant which we obey.” In our grandparents’ generation, it was the parent, teacher, and other authority figure who was the tyrant whom children obeyed. What is fascinating is that in the shift to other-directedness—by which he means that children take their cues from the media peer group more than from parents—the tyrant has not disappeared, but has been transformed. We are not used to thinking about the peer group in Riesman’s way. The peer group is typically depicted as friendly, tolerant, and above all fun. Again, Riesman seems to be correct when we consider that the “fun” peer group also drives children to suicide through bullying, tears down anyone who thinks “they’re all that,” and in general, is able to traumatize children every bit as much as parents and authority figures did several generations ago. Personal Accounts of Riesman There are three chapters by Riesman’s former students or friends who knew him well (Maccoby, Wilkinson, Mestrovic). All three chapters agree that Riesman was a model professor who engaged his students and cared about them; that he was passionately involved in anti-Communist activities and in promoting peace; that Fromm turned Riesman’s life around through psychoanalysis as well as mentoring and friendship; and that Riesman was continually interested in a changing America—its social character, institutions, education, and ethnic minorities. I would venture the analogy that Riesman was the contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville to America. He often mentions Tocqueville in his writings and had us read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as part of his course.

6

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

True, Tocqueville was a genuine foreigner who appraised America through the eyes of an aristocratic stranger. But upon deeper reflections, as the interviews with Riesman by Mestrovic and Wilkinson show, one could make the case that due to his childhood traumas and ethnicity, Riesman also felt like an outsider to America in some ways. This status of feeling like he was in and out of American society at the same time enhanced his incredible powers of perception. What all three personal accounts of Riesman demonstrate is that he always painstakingly avoided any vested intellectual interests in whatever he was studying, and always sought to appraise a phenomenon from numerous perspectives. Maccoby observes that in Fromm’s opinion, Riesman was not a theorist as much as he offered thick descriptions of social phenomena; perhaps this is true, and if it is, I do not view it as a criticism. Like William James, Riesman felt that any “tight” conceptual scheme, such as a theory, is an exercise in “vicious abstractionism.” Concepts close off the nuances, shades of grey, and additions to a conception that would make a theory less than elegant or useful. Riesman consistently sought to open-up fields of inquiry to new and additional perspectives; he was always mindful of shades of grey; and he was always friendly and receptive to criticism. And Riesman was loyal: he was keenly aware of criticisms of his mentor, Fromm, but never criticized Fromm publicly or privately. Assessments of Riesman Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt offers a sole-authored as well as co-authored (with Riesman as one of the co-authors) chapter on the Sociability Project. Basically, the authors sought to explore the empirical dimensions of what it means to be “sociable” in different settings and by various actors. It is interesting that sociologists rarely study sociability, which is the most social and sociological topic of all. Sociability is taken for granted. It is to Eisenstadt’s credit that she examines sociability, and in true Riesman fashion, finds that it holds numerous meanings and dimensions. Joe Galbo and Miriam Jones take up Riesman’s notable contribution to the sociology of education in their chapter “David Riesman and Higher Education Revisited: The State of the American University Then and Now.” In this thoughtful piece, the authors trace the development of student consumer power in the university and the concomitant decline of faculty power. Increasingly, universities and colleges have adopted the neoliberal business model such that higher education is run more as a business than an oasis for liberal thought. The authors present the shocking statistic that less than 25 percent of faculty are tenured or tenure-track— and women constitute the majority of the remaining 75 percent of adjunct and part-time faculty. As women outnumber men as students in higher education, and as they gain graduate degrees in increasing numbers—their power relative to men has not increased. Jesse Garcia applies Riesman’s concept of “the nerve of failure” to contemporary ethnic studies. This is a creative leap in that Riesman used this term to account for

Series Editor’s Introduction

7

attempts at being an individual in a conformist society, or other attempts at being autonomous. Riesman did not use it to describe the efforts of ethnic minorities to preserve their ethnic individuality and autonomy in the face of assimilatory social forces. But this is the connection that Garcia makes, and it does help to explain the most salient development in ethnic relations in the last few decades. The “melting pot” model has failed and has been largely abandoned as a theoretical explanation. It has been replaced by the “salad bowl” model in which ethnic groups preserve their individuality while remaining part of the larger “salad.” Garcia is right to claim that for the individual member of an ethnic group, this entails courage and the nerve to risk failure in relation to the advantages of the majority ethnic group. In their chapter, Marcus Aldredge and B. Garrick Harden make important connections between Erving Goffman and Riesman. Like Riesman, Goffman is difficult to classify in relation to any existing major social theory. For example, Goffman denied being a Symbolic Interactionist or Structural-Functionalist. Like Goffman, Riesman writes about the dynamics of managing one’s “face” in relation to the peer group, without ever using this or any of Goffman’s vocabulary. In fact, Goffman and Riesman, who wrote in roughly the same time period, seemed to be blissfully unaware of each other. Nevertheless, Goffman and Riesman are both concerned with how individuals manage and cope with “adjustment” versus “maladjustment” vis-à-vis society and “autonomy” or some sort of genuine self that might lie beneath the masks that we are forced to wear to protect ourselves. References Patterson, Orlando. 2002. “The Last Sociologist.” The New York Times. May 19, 2002.

This page has been left blank intentionally

PART I Riesman's Unpublished Works

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2

The American Character in our Changing Society David Riesman

Editors’ Note: The following is a 1965 transcript of a two-day talk Riesman gave to the National War College (NWC). The September 8th portion of the talk was expanded in a presentation to the NWC the following year, and hence, these sections are not presented here. These sections are included in Riesman’s 1966 talk printed in this volume’s “National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power.” The topic of national character fell into disrepute about 30 years ago because it had been so over-generalized—people talking about the French or the Spanish or the Negro—and it became contaminated by racism. Indeed, if one reads as many of you will have done, Edward Chester’s (1962) chapter on “The American Character” that was part of your reading; one will see the triviality of many European comments about the United States. They are standard—you will have heard most of them even without going to Europe. National character also became discredited as a concept or a way of thinking about society by mistaken assumptions of its fixity. Geoffrey Gorer, in his brilliant book, Exploring English Character (1955), points out that the British, now so well-known for stability, inhibition, and law-abidingness, were, in the eighteenth century, an extraordinarily disorderly people and only with the invention of the bobbies and the admission of a larger group to the franchise in the last century became the sort of people we know now. The Swedes whom we now think of as passive and furnishing people like [Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl] Hammarskjöld1 to the UN, were, in the eighteenth century, an extremely warlike people and the terror of Europe. So that national character can shift and indeed in large-scale societies, which are stratified and differentiated, it is difficult to speak of national character at all. The concept of “national character,” in its recent revival, reflects anthropological interests in primitive societies usually undifferentiated. It is possible to speak of the national character of an Indian tribe or a Melanesian society because in these societies everything is related to everything

1 Editors’ Note: Hammarskjöld was Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 until 1961.

12

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

else including different cultural forms of dissidence which can represent the approved role of the court jester. In industrial societies such as our own—and I will have more to say about this later—one can speak of the character of doctors, of lawyers, of engineers, perhaps of military men, who share more across a national boundary than they do within a national boundary, although in my judgment national character still may color the different professional cadres. Yet anyone who has been overseas, knows that there is a difference, that there is something American about America. In the Foreign Service Institute, as it was set up in the State Department after the Second World War, a number of anthropologists (among them Edward T. Hall) tried to give people who were going to Iran some sense not only of the area to which they were going and its culture, but of our own culture, of the cultural load that we carry, usually unaware, as Americans. In Edward T. Hall’s book, The Silent Language (1959), he speaks, for instance, of different experiments he would make at the FSI. He would ask someone, for example: How long is “just a minute” when your girlfriend calls down to you from upstairs; or your wife: Honey, I’ll be down in “just a minute.” How many minutes is it before you get cross—is it five minutes? In Lebanon it might an hour, in Ecuador a day. Hall also describes in The Silent Language gestural patterns as these operate within and across cultural boundaries. In other cultures, as again you must have observed, people stand nearer to each other than Americans do, shake each other by the shoulders, embrace each other in the way that American men do not or seldom do. When Italians or Greeks come to the United States, one can watch in the acculturation of their children a narrowing of the physical orbit of the radius of gestures, as they become more pulled into themselves, although Americans are still more expansive and take up more room than English or Japanese. Or, if we take another area less physical, if we ask around the world a question such as this: “Do you think on the whole it is wise to trust people?” one finds that people in the educated strata of America will answer the question, “Yes” in the overwhelming number of cases. Yet, in a country otherwise so similar to our own such as West Germany, people will answer, “No,” and they will answer, “No,” in most of the peasant societies in the world. You have read a section of Tocqueville who, I guess, is the ablest European, perhaps the ablest person of any sort, to have analyzed the American. When he came here he too saw immense differences from Europe. His book, Democracy in America ([1835]1984), can be seen as a description of America as seen by a European aristocrat who was neither offended nor seduced by America and his account I regard as still the most penetrating. Someone must ask a fundamental question before one pursues the study of national character which could be put this way: why do we need one? Or to put it otherwise: why must human beings be shaped in a national mold or a social mold? Why isn’t it enough for us to grow up able to respond intelligently to what is demanded of us in a particular situation? I think the answer to this is that for the work of society to be done—and this is not only physical but psychological and

The American Character in our Changing Society

13

moral work—men must want to do what they have to do and what they have to do is defined by the particular society. Energy must be harnessed in childhood before the age of consent, for the later tasks of adulthood. We must learn to speak the language at an appropriate age and most of us, certainly myself, regret that we did not learn to speak more languages when it was easy to learn languages. When I was in Japan I was struck by the fact that these little children could speak a difficult language that I, an adult, could not possibly learn. In certain kinds of societies the national character is formed by the severity and precariousness of the social situation. The University of Washington Sinologist, Karl A. Wittfogel, has written a book called Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1959) in which he describes a whole series of societies where water is scarce, rainfall is scarce, where life depends on irrigation, and irrigation, in turn, depends on a very cohesive and orderly society which will maintain the dams, which will maintain the complex divisions of the scarce water. He suggests that in these societies despotism is almost inevitable because the management of water resources is such that life couldn’t go on even for a day without water. And he compares, in this respect, traditional Egyptian society, Chinese society, and Pueblo Indian society in all of which rather harsh child training instills a severe obedience because this is necessary to get the water where it is needed. Where what is needed is less—how should I say—perishable than water, where what is needed is more complicated (as in our own society), the demands are less; and in feudal societies as against oriental despotism, water was more plentiful—in England and in Japan, for example—and the whole span of society did not have to be embraced within a single collective irrigation pattern. But apart from these social and hydraulic imperatives there is another reason why a national character or social character occurs as we look around the world. Not only must people attend to the desperate problem of the sharing of water supply or food supply or supply of other essential goods, but being human, governed by symbols, governed by words, governed by communication, the world must make sense to us in the way that it makes sense to our fellows. We are torn always as men and women by a tug between the outer reality, the physical universe around us, and the inner reality that interprets the outer reality; and the inner reality in that interpretation is given by language and culture. If we cannot share the frame of reference by which other people interpret the world, we are crazy or we are geniuses. The world, in other words, is not simply given to man by sense experience; it must be mediated by symbols and, indeed, language helps shape our interpretation of what we see. What happens in a rapidly changing society such as our own is that the social necessities of one generation pass out of existence, new social necessities arise, but the people shaped in their character in the earlier generation, of course, survive. We can think of our own society as full of psychological DPs (psychologically displaced persons) who grew up in an era which made different demands—take, for example, the traditional American value placed on saving. Denis Brogan

14

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

(1944) says that Americans are free spenders and in a way perhaps this has always been true in comparison with the stingy peasant or bourgeois, let us say, of France. But in comparison with the past, with the era of the Puritan, with the era in which it was more valuable to save than to spend, this is no longer true. We live in a society today in which if people save too much, we will have a depression and in which we need to consume and are encouraged to consume by all the mass media and in this way we keep the economy rolling and keep money coming in so that we can consume again. People who grew up in the era of saving, of prohibition, of restraint, of inhibition, find themselves in a society where such behavior is square, where this behavior is looked on as old-fashioned, and in which some of them turn to political sects which want to turn the world back to a position where their characterological values, implanted in childhood, will again, make sense. In a way this has been a traditional development in America because as urbanization has proceeded, children have been exposed in this country to non-parental influence; and parents who regarded themselves as brought up by their parents find their children brought up by their peers and by the mass media and [to these parents] this does not seem right and proper. Consequently, our country is filled with frustrated older people whose social character was shaped in an earlier day and with frustrated younger people who are being brought up by those older people in an unhappy way. Authority figures who are not parents (school teachers, policemen, civil servants), are put in the middle here, asked by the parents to convey a discipline that the parents do not dare enforce themselves because then their children would simply, in Huck Finn fashion, “light out for the territory” (Twain [1885]2013). At the same time these surrogates are unwilling to act as parent-substitutes in any satisfactory way, and are the victims of the resentment, especially resentment of the boys, against any exercise of restraint. Indeed, one of the features of American character different from the British character, for example, is the strong anti-authority feelings of many American boys. These feelings reflect the fact that boys have to escape two female dominations in growing-up in America: not only their mothers but also the fact that our primary school teachers and many of our secondary school teachers are women, so that the schoolmarm joins the mom as a victim of the boys’ desire to establish their independence and manhood. Of course, the parents in America and the school teachers as quasi-parents, have never had the authority that they have had in many European countries or in Japan because they are always by definition less hip, less “American” than the young. In that sense Margaret Mead is right when she wrote in her own hook on American character: “We are all third generation Americans” (Mead 1942:74). At the same time this encounter between the national character shared by an age-group and the present social requirements are a source of political change and even of turmoil. Political prospectors going over the subsoil of national character to find oil, can mobilize resentments against what is happening, resentments against change, in many different ways. In many communities, for example, especially in the northeast, the fluoridation of water has been successfully attacked by

The American Character in our Changing Society

15

groups organizing to prevent this “invasion” which is attributed to the Aluminum Company and the Communist Party working together to poison the water and make money out of it. Now, the old American traditions provide a legacy of frontier traditions, or John Wayne ideals so to speak, to which today we cannot possibly live up to; and we find ourselves constantly confronted by an image, largely nostalgic, of what Americans were like, against which we test ourselves. In a brilliant short essay, Henry S. Commager has argued that Americans are ready to change.2 And that is true in some respects and very untrue in other respects because there is this characterological lag, so to speak, in which we constantly look back to the image of our parents or our grandparents as more self-reliant than we and, therefore, better. Studies of the prisoners of war in Korea and studies done in experimental small group laboratories have turned-up a group of Americans who could be called negative changers, resistant to indoctrination by the Communists, resistant to change and yet paradoxically affected by outer influences because their answer to them was always no. In other words if one finds Americans who dogmatically resist any influence from outside, they are obviously dependent on that influence because that influence can make them do the opposite while believing themselves individualistic. I want to turn from these general considerations of the problem of national character and the problem of lag and disparity between generations due to the character implanted in them and the change in society, to differentiations within American national character. I suggested earlier, our society, not being primitive, not being homogeneous, trains people in different settings under different home conditions to assume very different possibilities and assignments. The most obvious is sex difference. American men and American women could be said to have different national characters. All studies of American women show that they are more receptive, somewhat more compliant. Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst, studying play constructions made by boys and girls of the age 10 or so discovered very different patterns when they were asked to play with the same blocks. Boys would build castles that would then fall down; girls would build houses which would not fall down. One can even see sexual overtones to this difference. I also, as a teacher in coeducational settings, am very well aware of different attitudes between young men and young women as students. The young women tend to be more diligent, they tend to be more obedient, they tend to do the reading; boys are better at bluffing, boys are better at making do whether they have done the reading or not— whether this operates in the NWC, I don’t know. All such differences between men and women, Americans and Englishmen, old and young, rich and poor, are overlapping differences; that is, one can find, 2 Editors’ Note: The original transcripts did not provide a citation or title to the specific essay referenced here; nor, was there enough contextual information for the editors to identify the correct essay.

16

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

of course, women who behave in these respects more assertively like men and men who behave more compliantly like women. This is rather a modal distinction between groups rather than a distinction that says something about individuals. If this were not so, we could not communicate to people of a different social character. And while men and women do not always communicate admirably they manage to get along. It is more common today for women to have jobs and proportionately less common for women to have careers. President Johnson is having trouble finding enough women to promote to high positions. Perhaps this reflects, at least I would venture this hypothesis, a somewhat greater insecurity of men who do not want to be threatened by ambitious and demanding women. This reflects, in turn, something of the softening of the boundaries between the sexes both at work and in the home. Henry S. Commager, to return again to his essay, says that Americans are not introspective. But this appears to me to be changing, not in every stratum but certainly among the educated. The issues that I am talking about with you here are the common coin of discussion and self-scrutiny among young men and women in our better colleges. What about differences of social class? Here we find in effect that people being trained for different eventual positions in American society have different childhood experiences. In the upper and upper-middle class in America, young people of both sexes are trained for independence and self-reliance to a larger degree than is true in the lower-class. In the upper-classes children are given what is said to be “conditional love” depending on their performance. Children are loved not, so to speak, wholeheartedly and unconditionally, just for being there, but especially by their fathers for what they can accomplish. Now, there are again great differences here within the upper class, but on the whole, children in the upper-class, contrary to what is often thought, are trained earlier for self-reliance, earlier for bowel training, earlier to move around on their own than children in the lower class. In the upper classes, children are often sent away to boarding school, they are sent out of the family and headed beyond the parent of the same sex, headed to an indeterminate future, and are made to feel guilty if they do not live up to these parentally instilled ideals. In the lower strata children are loved unsystematically, so to speak, contradictorily but not in relation to their effort. They may he loved one day and thrashed or ignored the next. Their problem is contradictory and unreliable responses from adults. No consistent goals are held out, no models are presented. One day they may be given an ice cream cone and the next beaten. Guilt is not instilled in them for not living up to parental ideals—no parental ideals in this sense are held out to them. They learn to manage by simple expediency rather than by long-term goals. In contrast, there are of course, in the lower strata also what might be called “the poor but honest” who are training their children to move into the upper strata, anticipating middle class values. One of the interesting differences between the upper and lower strata in all Western societies is the greater subtlety of the linguistic cues to which children in the upper strata must attend. A mother might say in the upper strata to a noisy

The American Character in our Changing Society

17

boy, “I’d rather you were quieter;” whereas, in the lower strata a boy might be hit by someone or be told simply “shut up”—indifference alternating with abuse or indulgence. Hence in the lower strata, as we see in our poverty program, as in the Head Start Program, children come to school with very limited vocabularies and very limited sensibilities about the reaction of others. One has to ask at this point: are these childhood trainings designed to prepare people for their roles in the labor force and in the society? Of course not, not in any direct way. The home is managed ordinarily without any specific relation to the occupational role of the children. In the upper-middle class, for example, on the whole and with some exceptions, the home is not preparing the son to assume exactly the same occupation as the father. There are exceptions. The military is one exception where it happens that Army brats sometimes do carry on the tradition of their parents. Medicine is another not directly inheritable preoccupation, but there are many sons of doctors in medical school. By and large the upper middle class person has to train his son not to assume his own role, but to assume some professional role depending on his interest and talent. The result is that what might be thought of as the “factory” of the home does not turn out the products that are going to be wanted two decades later in the labor force. Yet, it does turn out some of the qualities that are wanted and we must ask: how does this occur—how does the family, in other words, act as a transmission belt for social imperatives? I am inclined to think, although we know not too much about this, that it does so through conveying a mood, conveying an atmosphere, conveying the climate of an era in the way the child is held, in the way that authority is exercised in the home. The parents may be anxious, and this may be contagious to the children; the parents may be demanding and this is contagious. The parents may be aware that their children will require schooling in order to survive in the new society. At the same time the parents, as we all know, can often fail. In a very interesting study done a few years ago, one of my colleagues at Harvard studied a group of high school senior boys who were able enough to go on to college but who were not going on to college, though who could have afforded college even though they were from the working class. These boys could have gotten scholarships or loans and managed, but decided not to go. This was in spite of the fact that their parents urged them to go. And as one went into the homes of these young people, one came to realize that what was happening was a double-message being conveyed by fathers to their sons. The boy’s father was saying to the son; “Don’t you be like me, held in my blue-collar job by the fact that I haven’t had enough education. You do better than me.” That is what he was saying verbally. But what the father was saying emotionally was: “Do you reject me, do you think I am a jerk, do you want to desert me, don’t you think I am a good guy just as I am?” And it was this that the son was hearing in deciding to follow his father’s emotional message and not his verbal message. In the study of national character, psychoanalytic theory as well as anthropological theory, has had a great part. In the Freudian, tradition as in the

18

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Jesuit tradition, it is often believed that everything is over by the age of six. Many of the studies done of national character in the period of the Second World War suggested that childhood training was decisive. For example, some studies done of the Russians argued that they were obedient and docile because they were swaddled in infancy and couldn’t move around. Yet we know other societies where swaddling is practiced like the Navaho Indians which are hardly noted for docility. The fact is that what was conveyed by the swaddling was not the swaddling itself but the mood of the parents—the mood of the mother, the spirit of the society, just as in our own society it has sometimes been said that bottle feeding trains people for a mechanical age. But this is absurd. A mother can convey warmth by a bottle and frigidity by a breast. I do not believe that character is fixed in childhood. The ability to adapt to change in adulthood suggests that we are continually being socialized for the world we are now living in and re-socialized as time goes on. Almost certainly, for example, the character structure of medical men is altered by medical school and the severity of internships and residencies and I will leave it to you to inquire of yourselves whether your character was altered by experience at Annapolis or the Point or Colorado or wherever else it was that you were inducted into what you are doing now. Moreover adult education and in-service training, of which this NWC is an example, seems to have possibilities of continuously recreating people. A few years ago I took part in a program of liberal education for middle level Bell Telephone executives at the University of Pennsylvania which gave, in one year, a better college education than almost any American college gives in four years. Here I was immensely impressed by the fact that these men in mid-career, in their thirties or early forties, were profoundly altered by this year’s experience. We learn in this country to play a fantastic variety of roles as we are exposed to these in our contacts with others or in our imaginations; and we can call out the appropriate roles when this is required of us by a new experience. Certainly this has been the experience of Americans in wartime where people discovered undisclosed aspects of themselves (incidentally, it is quite tragic that it had to wait for wartime to be discovered). At the same time, as all of you know, the way we fight a war or the way we conduct our business reflects something specifically American. In other words, not all war making societies are alike, not all industrial societies are alike, but rather they adapt to some extent to the demands of war or industry, and then readapt to the national style. Thus, for example, Americans in fighting a war have a larger “tail,” a larger service of supply than most other countries. The same is true of industry where “overhead people” now exceed blue-collar people. Commager speaks of this in his essay as self-indulgent and many people think of Americans as self-indulgent; and if we can, so to speak, organize our self-indulgence, we can manage to adapt it even to war. Another way of looking at this is to say that any society as large as our own, any large scale society, is likely to have actors in the wings who, by virtue of accident, of childhood experience, of personal temperament, can play roles very different from those at any moment in demand. I did not believe the studies during

The American Character in our Changing Society

19

the Second World War when national character studies of the Germans pictured them as authoritarian and sadistic—I believed these studies were propaganda. I also believed that any society as big as Germany would contain notably cruel and sadistic people who could come to the top and who could organize the society of docile, obedient, and non-sadistic people to do their bidding. Perhaps in a similar setting in our own society, though certainly one could find as many sadists, one might find a more disobedient and refractory population. Any society has enough people around to move that society in a variety of directions. Our society, as I have just said, has an ample supply of mean and brutal types. It also has, in my judgment, more selfless and dedicated people than one is apt to find anywhere else in the world. Another way of putting this is to say that the social or national character which we share, at least share in a sex group and an occupational group or social class group, is not all of us. Indeed, the very fact of having a national character is a way of providing us a certain leeway for the rest of our character—our private character; our private selves. We could think of national character as a kind of national income tax which demands of us a certain standard of performance in socially acceptable positions, but which allows us a private life in fact and in fantasy beyond this income demand. I think, too, we can say that societies differ in the degree to which national character absorbs all of character or seeks to do so. I can recommend to you a book by a former colleague, Dr [Robert Jay] Lifton, a psychiatrist, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), which deals with Chinese, so called, “brainwashing.” If one studies this rather scary and troubling book, one realizes that the Chinese Communists, as we all have come to recognize, have made a much greater demand on the Chinese character than even the Soviets made on the Russian character during Stalin’s era. The Soviets on the whole were satisfied with overt obedience and passive acquiescence. Except for cadres of Communist Party stalwarts who were a bit like the Boy Scouts or Puritan fanatics of the regime, they were satisfied if the rest of the population went along, with whatever private reservations. The Chinese are not satisfied with that. The Chinese want to drive into the whole society a missionary esprit that asks for a more total dedication, a more total surrender of the self than the Soviets ever asked. In the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, it has been possible for there to be what came to be called the inner emigration, for people to reserve their private reactions: going through the motions without the emotions. This, of course, is not unknown with us. There is a form of sabotage known as that of the Good Solider Schweik (Hasek 1924) who sabotages orders by obeying them literally, and you must all be familiar with this pattern. I want to turn to another way of looking at national character which was developed by my collaborators and I in The Lonely Crowd ([1950]1961). What we tried to do was to organize and grapple with changes in America in the last generation or so as reflected in national character. In speaking as we did in that book of inner-direction and other-direction as the two types of American national

20

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

character, we were not speaking of the whole society. We were speaking of segments of the metropolitan influential upper middle class educated strata; and even then of a shift in emphasis in which all of us are inner-directed in some measure and other-directed in some measure, and the balance shifts. The way we describe the shift is to say that America has been moving from a society organized around the frontiers of consumption; and even on the production frontier moving away from the harsh discipline of nineteenth century industrialism, to the morale-conscious, personnel attitudes of contemporary corporate industrialism. In a newly industrializing society, as in fact we can see in the Soviet Union or elsewhere in the world, it is necessary to build into character, into individuals, the necessary desires to save, the compulsion to be orderly, to show up on Monday morning at nine o’clock—all the qualities necessary for a highly industrial society, which do not exist in peasant societies. In our own societies we have sufficiently put production, so to speak, on the assembly line so that we can become more hedonistic, casual, relaxed, selfindulgent if you like, and still manage to turnout enormous amounts of goods. It may be that we have relaxed too soon and many people would so argue. But at any rate we have put on the production line of society, of institutions, what used to have to be built into character. The qualities which we now build into character are the qualities necessary for what I think of as post-industrial man; that is, sensitivity to other people, interest in consumption rather than in production, and a decline of saving, of compulsive and perfectionist work, or vaulting ambition. Young people today—not universally, for nothing changes all at once—are less ambitious to make a great fortune, or to become President or General than was true in an earlier day. Moreover young people today are focused more on each other than on physical objects or on the cosmos. It is an overstatement often made (and made in the Chester (1962) essay on how Europeans view America) to speak of Americans as materialistic. I think any of you who have served in Latin America know what it is like to be really materialistic. What Americans want are the objects appropriate to our station in life that we are supposed to have, that we regard as owing to us, and the right reactions to the object, which is a casual reaction, not the tight fisted one, let us say, of the French bourgeois. Our houses, and this is true even if one is not in the Army, are not castles surrounded by hedges; they are not a way of keeping other people out but they are back-yard barbecues inviting other people in and the picture windows that go two ways. Those who are materialistic in America, in my observation, who have a great hunger for objects, tend to be those who have not made it yet, the immigrants to metropolitan America whether from abroad or from the Deep South. For most of us our childhood experiences give us, not so much a hunger for objects or a hunger for fame, as sensitivity to other people. The peer group in which we compete for approval as children is the tyrant which we obey. In Great Britain hardly anyone who can afford it goes to summer camp. Children and their parents go away for the summer or camp out in trailers. The children are not sent off to a camp to be socialized by other children. Even in public schools—that is, British public schools, which we

The American Character in our Changing Society

21

would call private schools—children are not subject to the peer group of the same age-grade but to an elaborate hierarchy of prefects more like the situation of the plebe at the Point than like the typical American school. In that situation, children grow up more sensitive to total range of ages and less defining themselves as “us teenagers” against the adults (there is, of course, some of that in England today). In the United States, more than in other countries, parents worry if children are not popular—again I am talking about the middle class. And class in terms of social position does not protect children from the need to be popular or from the need to placate others. In Digby Baltzell’s book, Philadelphia Gentlemen (1958), he describes the way in which people living on the Philadelphia Main Line, leading figures in banks, and in corporate and professional life, cannot locate their children in the same position by inheritance but must send them to school to take their turn in competitive life in order to reach anything like the same position. And in the process of that schooling, the children of the upper class in our country tend to become democratized. Indeed, what characterizes Americans as against other people in the world, as Tocqueville noticed, is the ethics of tolerance and equality. And Peace Corps workers going abroad, Army people going abroad, all find that one of the great problems Americans have, perhaps less so in the Army but still there, is how to deal with hierarchical societies when we come, more than we often realize, from an egalitarian society.3 Tocqueville ([1835]1984) saw Americans, as he put it, subject to the tyranny of the majority; unduly concerned with the opinions of others; and he saw Americans, as compared to his image of feudal Europe, as antagonistic to all hierarchical relations. [This is why it would be difficult] for example, for Peace Corps volunteers, serving in Latin America, to find themselves in a hierarchical society in which they themselves were an elite when that is the last thing they wanted. The volunteer likely only wanted to be a good guy and “one of the boys.” It seems to me that what has happened in the United States is that the others to whom we have become sensitive have grown in ever widening circles beyond the family, beyond the kinfolk, beyond one’s ethnic, religious, or even social class group, embracing wider and wider orbits of other people. This is partly because we live in a complex urban society in which we come up against a great variety of people, but also because built into the value system of Americans is the belief that other people, no matter of what degree, are human and should be taken seriously. Of course, there are limitations on “the others” to whom we are sensitive. These [“others”] seem to be less in this country than in other countries where the lower orders tend to be more disregarded. If one does an experiment with high school students in this country and says to them, “A king is coming to visit and he wants to meet an outstanding high school student of your group, whom would you choose?” Then you give these high school students a group of vignettes of 3 Editors’ Note: Part I of Riesman’s presentation to the NWC ended here. What follows is taken from the Part II transcripts.

22

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

individuals, some of whom are very interesting and off beat and would interest the king, and [you give vignettes of] others of whom have all the “good human qualities” [such as] everybody likes them; they do not set themselves up above anybody else; they are not arrogant; and by and large the high school students will choose the latter sort. One can even make experiments of this same sort and ask about passing around roles on the basketball team so it is fair as against selecting the outstanding basketball player who is an unpleasant and conceited fellow. Students will choose the former, although I would say that sports is one of the major areas in American life where competition is relatively unrestrained, in part because an outstanding basketball star in the high school reflects glory on the high school as well as on the individual; whereas, if one is an outstanding student this is against the others rather than for them, or at least this has been so. What we have to do, I think, in asking how in these respects America has changed since Tocqueville’s day—and I believe it has—is to see the difference between depending on others’ opinion because the others are required for one’s own achievement and depending on others’ opinion because one wants to share their feelings and to have an emotional response to them. An unscrupulous and cynical politician may be “other- directed” because the others are the material, the stuff with which he works; as a steel company works with steel, he works with people’s psyches. But what has happened in America increasingly is that this concern for others is not merely a way to exploit them, but in a way to exploit one’s self, to share their emotional reactions, or, as the high school student could say, “to be sent by the same music with, which the others are sent.” In recent years since The Lonely Crowd was written, particularly in the last seven or eight years, there has been some change away from this preoccupation with others. Many nonconformists in America believe themselves independent because they have contempt for other people. And at the same time I think there is a very great tendency to exaggerate the degree of independence in an earlier America where independence in terms of superficial behavior was not common. People were extremely aware of the neighbors and how they should conduct themselves. Indeed, in Senator [James William] Fulbright’s4 excellent essay of “The American Character,” he makes a reference to the zealotry and fanaticism of the Puritans, who required a degree of communal behavior, of obedience, far beyond that which is required today. But my point is that the earlier conformity was external, whereas today’s conformity is more internal. Among social scientists, there is a great argument about whether America really has changed or not. In criticism of my own work, people have gone back to Tocqueville and said: “Well, America in 1830 and the United States in 1965 really aren’t so different.” And I suggested in the discussion yesterday with the small group that what had changed was this degree of resonance with other people. 4 Editors’ Note: Fulbright was a United States Senator from 1945 to 1975.

The American Character in our Changing Society

23

Americans have always been egalitarian, but now we are more egalitarian. Americans have always been concerned with opinions of others in a nonhierarchical situation, but now we are concerned with opinions of the powerless more than before, with opinions of women and children, with opinions increasingly of the underprivileged. But I must tell you that this is a matter of controversy, that many able people argue that the American character is the same as it was 150 years ago in all fundamental respects; I want to suggest one reason why I think it is not. The reason is the change in the nature of consumption of goods and the meaning of consumption for a large part of our population. It used to be the case that Americans went for a great deal for external show. The landscape is littered with the Baronial castles of nineteenth century magnates, which now, it seems to me, have three or four destinies: they become funeral homes, Catholic colleges for women, conference centers, or are torn down. And this is quite apart from the difficulty of finding servants or keeping up the taxes. It represents the difficulty of making that much of a show. People live among objects in America without any feeling of tremendous dedication to them, as would have been true in the last century. We think of possessions as owing to our station in life rather than as something about which we are greedy. I think Americans are among the least greedy of people. This was beginning even in an earlier day. I used to go with my family as a boy to Northeast Harbor, Maine, where well-to-do Philadelphians and Bostonians lived a “rustic” life. This conspicuous ascetic of underconsumption has spread in the population to the many people whose families have already made it. Where one now finds gaudy display is among the people who have not made it. The Negro from Georgia in Chicago driving a secondhand Cadillac would be an example. What concerns us now in consumership is less the glory of objects than the cult of experience, the relations with others; the meaning of what we do, rather than the sheer physical fact of what we have. The energy that once went into private consumption now, it seems to me, goes into corporate and public consumption. Our companies spend for us; our agencies spend for us, in ways which we would feel guilty if we spent for ourselves. Incidentally, in many companies this leads to a double standard—not the old double standard of the sexual sort, but the double standard in which a man has steak on his expense account while his wife is at home eating hash on her non-account. It is perfectly all right for the company to spend for us because that is good for public relations, and I think this extends even to the nation at large, which is our largest corporation, as in the race for the moon that has many values, but one of them is conspicuous national consumption. This, it seems to me, is the order of change that we see, but by no means is universal: all “geological” social characters survive in America. One can find all earlier forms, but in very largely widening strata one sees that consumption no longer has its old magic. Certainly one can see it in college students. It is always both amusing and poignant to me at Harvard to watch the freshmen come in. The poorer and more provincial their background, the better clothes they bring, and then when they go home again it is in blue jeans.

24

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Does it follow that we are becoming more alike as we become more attentive to others? Does it follow that industrial societies across the globe are becoming more alike? I think what we are finding is that people are becoming more differentiated according to occupation and less differentiated according to birth. Across the globe, physicians have a good deal of resemblance. Across the globe, chemists and physicists are different from each other: physicists play more chamber music, for example. Across the globe, music lovers share a good deal. There is a kind of international youth culture, often starting in America, sending the Negro folk music abroad and buying it back with the Beatles. These new categories that stretch across national boundaries are yet locally colored within national boundaries. There is, for example, the fact that Americans are much more curious about other people and how they feel about us or how they are than many other people are. Frenchmen are much less interested in what somebody else thinks about France than Americans or Japanese are about what people think of their respective countries. And this makes a bridge for me to my next topic of America’s changing society in which I want to begin by saying that the image of America held both at home and abroad is, as the psychologists would say, projective—that is, our image of something else is also a statement about ourselves. If one talks to Americans about who runs the country, one finds generally the feeling: “they” run things. One finds this not only among relatively powerless and uneducated people but, somewhat surprisingly, often among quite influential people, whose expectations of their influence outrun their actual accomplishment. One finds, for example, in many right-wing people, a feeling that they are being dominated by the Federal Government, in spite of the fact that their deterrent power, at least in local affairs, is very great. On the other hand, powerless people in America may be persuaded, for example, by having the appropriate consumer goods or a college education, that they are a part of the establishment. It follows from this that for us to talk about America makes objectivity difficult. Simplification is easy and attractive.[ … ] Setting aside these misgivings, which always make me hesitant to talk about America to Americans, I want to suggest in very rough and broad terms what seem to me as some of the fundamental changes which have occurred in our society in the last generation. First of all, what Frederick Lewis Allen (1952) in his book of that name calls The Big Change, which is the change to the world where production matters less than consumption, in which there is an economic surplus for millions of people, in which the plants, the organizations, the infrastructure, of an economy exist either in fact or in our ability to build them. The Michigan economist, Kenneth Boulding, has said that the greatest invention of modern times is the invention of the fulltime organizer. And I think he is right. In our society we know how to organize. This impressed Tocqueville also. The ability to form a committee is singularly American. I am not suggesting that there are not many problems of the efficiency and distribution of our labor force, that there are not many gaps in the American productive system; there are. But as compared with other countries we have the

The American Character in our Changing Society

25

organizational know-how and we have been able to shift our focus to consumption and services rather than production—so much so that white-collar workers and blue-collar workers are going the way of the farmers, increasingly being put out of work by automatic equipment, so that more and more of the population is engaged in labor-intensive service occupations. As I have already indicated, along with this big change goes emancipation from patriarchal and hierarchical oppression. As Tocqueville ([1835]1984) saw, America was born free without a feudal past and, except for colonial remnants, no established church. Women and children in America early became persons in their own right and indeed, as I suggested earlier, the rise of teenage culture has meant that youth are not needed in the labor force, that youth have their own institutions, their own mass media, and a kind of general hegemony based on the fact that in America we have what I like to call a “physiological” democracy. I asked the Admissions Director at Harvard not long ago how many really obese Harvard freshmen there were and he said three out of 1500. That is a lot smaller than their proportion in the population. No prejudice of a conscious sort entered, no discrimination against fat boys; yet, somehow the fat boy in America is not with it. In general, we are a society which looks at looks because we are sufficiently mobile, and our dating culture is sufficiently unchaperoned so that we have to make very quick judgments about other people on the basis of how they look (and much of what is regarded as racism in America seems to me to be based on our preoccupation with how people look rather than who their grandparents were). Furthermore, old people do not look right. All of us try to look younger then we are, except at a certain period in adolescence. And youth has a kind of sway that leads older people to defer to it in musical tastes and in many other ways. In sum, one big change in America is this development of a privileged majority for the first time—privileged in the sense of being above mere subsistence. [ … ] [Another big change is that] some people who attend colleges go beyond the national boundaries. Increasingly in our better secondary schools and almost overwhelmingly in our better colleges, people are taking courses in non-western cultures; they are spending junior years abroad; they are going abroad on the American Field Service or similar adventures. There are people whom college confirms their old prejudices, but they have to acquire new reasons in order to defend the old prejudices. I want to illustrate this by saying something about one particular cadre of college students—the Young Americans for Freedom—and I do so on the basis of a dissertation done at Harvard several years ago, where a graduate student studied chapters of YAF at Harvard, Boston College, Yale, and Ohio State. It used to be so that one could attend college and drift through, so to speak, untouched by human thought in a fun and games collegiate world made famous the world over by Hollywood. This is decreasingly the case. More and more, college puts pressure on people; it becomes more competitive; it becomes more demanding intellectually, more awakening ideologically. So that the person who comes from a provincial and conservative background can no longer return to that background untouched. If he wants to remain in touch with his family tradition he

26

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

starts to read the National Review; he starts to read right-wing literature; he starts to build an ideological defense against the emancipating environment of his fellow students who, I think, have more weight with him than his faculty. So one finds a paradox because the Young Americans for Freedom, for example, regard themselves as conservative but are not conservative at all. They are much more ideological than conservatives are; they are much more fanatical. When one watches these very spruce young men carrying picket signs, doing something as unseemly as that, which in the past they would think only Beatniks did, one sees what I mean. They go home again but they are as much out of touch with their parents’ unthought out values as they are with the values of those whom they have rejected in college. I think the existence of this group testifies to the kind of emancipating pressure that college education puts on people to accept the national upper middle class style. In fact, in their way of organizing, in their way of talking and their literacy, the Young Americans for Freedom partake of that style even when they reject it. [ … ] Tocqueville ([1835]1984) is the author of the great theory of the “revolution of rising expectations.” He interpreted the French Revolution as coming about not because things were getting worse but because they were getting better, but not better fast enough. I think this is what has happened with the Negro. Perhaps this is what has happened too with the South itself as a whole—which has moved ahead faster certainly than New England and yet feels itself constantly under pressure. I said last time, and I want to repeat now, that another residual cadre against the tide of the modern world and the speed of change are most elderly people. There are a great many elderly people who, unlike yourselves, have not had the opportunities for adult education and who, like myself, have not tried to keep young by teaching. Elderly people in America have less money. They have less education because there was less to go around when they were young. And even if they had the same number of years in school, these schoolings were less adequate. The world of the metropolis, the world of Hollywood, the vogue of youth are continuing statements to them that they are not with it. But quite apart from regions like the South or age grades like the elderly, historical differences persist in America. The Irish in Boston still suffer a feeling of aggrievement because of their disagreeable treatment by the Yankees a hundred years ago. And if one visits a Jesuit institution, like Boston College, one can feel this bitterness, as one cannot feel it at the Jesuit St. Louis University, where the German Catholics have encountered much less such antagonism. And if one goes to the West Coast, then one finds that the Irish American got there as soon as anybody else, if not sooner, and he did not come from County Cork, he came, like everybody else, from Brooklyn or Chicago. Throughout the country the ethnic patterns are changing, depending on regional differences. In Buffalo today, where I lived for four years 25 years ago, when a Polish boy marries an Italian girl his mother tries to defend the boy, but the grandmother thinks that the family has absolutely disintegrated, even though both are Catholics. The Poles are beginning to come out of their ethnic resistance to the

The American Character in our Changing Society

27

Irish or the Italians; they were beginning to attend colleges previously dominated by Irish Catholics and even secular institutions. In Detroit many go to Wayne, which is a State university. The immigrant voters were shepherded to the polls by the politicians who wanted their votes—largely Irish politicians because the Irish in America were the first immigrant group who spoke English and hated the English. They mobilized the descendants of immigrants in an anti-Mayflower coalition—which is now disintegrating—so that ethnic differences are being moderated, although by no means have they disappeared. What about class differences? Harold H. Hodges (1964) in his very learned book on stratification, [ … ] has much to say about this. On the whole there is more class consciousness at the top of our society than at the bottom. [ … ] There is much more pressure on Main Street to vote Republican than in the plant or the slum to vote at all or to vote Democratic. There are a great many workers who, like the Tory working class of Britain, will vote Republican, at least in local elections and sometimes in national ones, as when so many workers and especially their wives voted for President Eisenhower. Thus, contrary to what is often thought, there is less pressure in the lower strata for class allegiance in voting than at the top; but at the top, too, I think we are beginning to see the breakdown of Republican hegemony. I used to wonder why big businessmen and little businessmen thought that they were both businessmen, because they have very different experiences of life. The big businessman is a salaried manager, a civil servant, a corporate civil servant. He may have stock options, he may get a good salary, he may have a big expense account and all the appurtenances of rank, but he is an employee and he is in a complicated network of relationships dealing with fellow managers, with workers, with the public, with the government, with subcontractors, constantly having to take account of many others at home and often abroad as well. The little businessman is in an entirely different situation. He may be the owner. He can be extremely rich in terms of capital. If one is a real estate man or owns a few oil wells, one needs only one employee, a tax lawyer. One is outside the complicated network of relationships. One can belong to the John Birch Society and believe one did it all oneself. These two cadres, as I say, have little in common. And I have sometimes thought that it was rather the modesty of the big businessman that led him to talk as if he also believed in free enterprise along with the little businessman who found it hard to make and keep a dollar. [ … ] Now, in closing, does it follow from what I have said about the national upper middle class style and its increasing reach that we are becoming a more uniform and more homogenous society? We are becoming a society more in contact with itself; wherein it is easier to move about the country and to find like-minded people of similar education and taste, where in the supermarket there is an increasingly variegated display of all sorts of gourmet foods, even in the smaller communities, and where national media purvey standard attitudes throughout the country. Many people worry that we are becoming homogenized. As I have said, I think that one can still find in America Old World traits transplanted and a tension between

28

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

ethnic and religious backgrounds and national experience. But I do not think nationalization does mean homogenization. [ … ] In closing, what is American about America remains arguable. In [Denis Williams] Brogan’s (1944) essays, he is saying America is part of the western world; we tend to exaggerate our uniqueness; and to some degree, as industrialism spreads, the managerial society, the expert society spreads with it. References Allen, Frederick Lewis. 1952. The Big Change—America’s Transformation 1900– 1950. New York: Harper and Row. Baltzell, E. Digby. 1958. Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class. New York: The Free Press. Brogan, Denis Williams. 1944. The American Character. New York: Vintage Books. Chester, Edward. 1962. Europe Views America: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press. Gorer, Geoffrey. 1955. Exploring English Character. London: Cresset Press. Hall, Edward T. 1959. The Silent Language. New York: Anchor Books. Hasek, Jaroslav. 1923. Osudy dobrého vojâja Švejka za světové války. Czechoslovakia: A. Synek Publishers. Hodges, Harold H. 1964. Social Stratification: Class in America. Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co. Lifton, Robert Jay. 1961. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China. New York: Norton. Mead, Margaret. 1942. And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: William Morrow and Co. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. [1950]1961. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tocqueville, Alex de.[1835]1984. Democracy in America. Edited by Richard Heffner. New York: Mentor Book. Twain, Mark. [1885]1984. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mineola, NY: Dover. Wittfogel, Karl E. 1959. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Chapter 3

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power David Riesman

Editors’ Note: The following is a transcript of a 1966 speech delivered by Riesman to the National War College. On this occasion I feel a great deal of hesitation in trying in a very few minutes to say something about what is going on in our society, summarizing now your second course, when I realize how hard it is, even for those who devote themselves to the enterprise, to understand what is happening in this country and how easy it is to misinterpret and to oversimplify. Indeed, one of the things that is interesting about the image of America that many of you have encountered overseas, or will encounter, is how much it reflects the nature of domestic politics in other countries. For example, several years ago when I was on sabbatical at the University of Sussex in England, I was struck that even in this sophisticated institution, where there were many Americanists, people who specialized in the United States, it was extremely difficult to get across what I regard as the diversity, decentralization, and even chaos of this country to a highly centralized nation headquartered in London, where within a thirtymile radius everything goes on, as compared with a society like our own, where the political capital is Washington DC, the intellectual and cultural capitals are scattered from New York to Los Angles, the financial, legal, industrial capitals in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, and where there is no central educational pattern comparable to that of the United Kingdom or France or Japan. But even within America, interpretations reflect where people are, as much as what we are. If one reads Political Ideology (1962), a book by Professor Lane, a political scientist at Yale, which is a fascinating study of attitudes of working class people in New Haven toward American society, one sees how these people assume that “they” run things in America, not little old me. But even influential Americans often feel that they, including you, run things and you, I am sure, feel, “who, little me?” On the other hand, powerless people in America may be persuaded, for

1

1 Editors’ Note: This speech was introduced by Dr Thumm and was addressed to Admiral Lee, Colonel Trahan, and the National War College.

30

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

instance, by possession of luxurious consumer goods or by college education, that they too are part of the establishment. Furthermore, much of social science literature about America, not excepting my own, has made oversimplification attractive. When William H. Whyte of Fortune magazine was writing his famous book, The Organization Man (1956), he came to look at the American suburbs, and he chose as his model suburb, Park Forest outside Chicago, which no doubt some of you know. Park Forest is hardly typical, built all at once after the Second World War, and whose patterns, like that of the Levittowns and other such communities, do not reflect suburbs of more ancient growth. When he talked about management he talked about Dupont in its barony of Delaware and IBM in its barony of Binghamton. That was industry and hardly typical either. Furthermore, the terms we use to describe our society are very deceptive indeed. If you have had a chance to look at Alexis de Tocqueville you will see that this term comes from him and that he did not regard it as a praiseworthy term but as a synonym for selfishness. We talk in terms which necessarily categorize and oversimplify. So, with those caveats and warnings, I nevertheless want to plunge ahead and suggest to you some of the big changes that seem to be underway in our society as a prelude to discussion following our break where I hope what I have had to say can be further clarified. The big change is that the United States is perhaps the first postindustrial society, the first society in which there is an economic surplus not for a small minority at the top but for a majority, in which the industrial plants, the organizations, and the infrastructure, either have been built or we know how to build them. We have invented the organizational techniques, such as the corporation, to do it; and while there are still enormous problems of efficiency in terms of total national needs and distribution of the labor force that you have studied this year, nonetheless in principle, we have the knowhow. Tocqueville, when he was writing about America in 1835, made the observation, which I think is still true, that Americans know how to form a committee. We take this for granted. But in Libya, or even in southern Italy, and in many parts of the world, this is new. Tocqueville pointed out that somebody will put a notice in the newspaper that there will be a meeting, let us say, of the temperance society or the abolition society at such-and-such a place and people come together on a voluntary basis to do something. That is characteristically American. This is a kind of organizational literacy, as I like to speak of it, widely shared among Americans, learned often on the playing field, and very uncommon in many parts of the world. It is an aspect of our becoming postindustrial. Another aspect is that we have moved from an emphasis on production to one on consumption and services. And to some degree in those families which have had relative affluence for a generation or so, there is less concern whether with subsistence at the floor or show and display at the ceiling than there was in an earlier America, say, after the Civil War. People are more concerned with expressing themselves, serving society, doing interesting work, than they are with

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power

31

what they have learned—-not that that is negligible, but it is only a question of a certain minimum of appropriate consumer goods for decent Americans. To be sure, we have in the last years rediscovered the poor, those people who are out of this consumption nexus, at least by American standards, if not by world standards. I will come back to them in a minute. A further aspect of this development and one that Tocqueville already noticed 130 years ago, is the fact that Americans have been emancipated from patriarchal or hierarchical repression. This is a society without a feudal past, without accepting fragments in the colonies, an established church, and, as I said earlier, without a central capital in which everything goes on of any relevance. It is a society in which, as I am sure Max Raffarty complained bitterly, women and children become persons in their own right, in which we have the phenomenon now spreading to the rest of the world of teenage culture, of youth not needed or wanted in the labor force, with its own media, its own institutions (often called colleges), and its own hegemony—a society in which the most importantly disenfranchised class is the elderly, and a society, as I suggested already, in which the shape of the society is not the traditional pyramid of a few wealthy people at the top and a large mass of deprived people at the bottom, but, rather, a society shaped like an egg with a numerically small top and a numerically large but proportionately small bottom. Stimson Bullitt (1959), in an interesting little book called To be a Politician, describes the fact that America has developed in this shape as providing the first society in which a politician cannot use the poor as a majority in order to defeat the rich. There are more well-to-do by world standards and even by American standards, than there are poor; and one has to make a campaign such as our last two Presidents have waged on behalf of the poor, because they are a minority. There are exceptions to this condition of relative privilege. There are, as I have said before, the old people; there are the Negroes. This privilege, however, is not based on birth as such. I sometimes think of America as a physiological democracy in which the way people appear is more important than who their grandparents were, what their birth and breeding is. If we think of America as a physiological democracy we can understand better the prejudice against fat people (which I see in college admissions policies—though it is an unconscious policy), the prejudice against Negroes and other people of color, and a concern with looks in a society in which young people circulate and marry freely and in which they have to size each other up in terms of how they appear without asking for a pedigree. When I make the comment that America is not centralized in the way that many societies are centralized around a major capital, I am also saying that there is no single self-sealing elite that runs America. This position, expressed in The Lonely Crowd is bitterly opposed by many commentators on America who believe that there is a single power elite consisting of people like you, the big industrialists, and a few people who went to the same schools and know each other—and they are in charge. It is perfectly true that in many localities there are local elites, but they are not a result, I think, of a coagulation of elites who run things nationally. There is great

32

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

competition. This is not to say that everybody is equal. Rather, as has often been said, some are more equal than others; but it is, rather, to say that the country has not been centralized in terms of having one group of interlocking people, all of whom know each other and are alumni of the same few institutions and who make all the decisions. I think what is a relatively new development in American life is that we are proceeding towards nationalization faster than we are towards centralization. What I mean by “nationalization” is that we are developing a national upper middle class style which is to be found in all parts of the country. Public opinion data suggest that there is a general, but by no means universal, agreement amongst younger educated Americans, with values that are cosmopolitan: national rather than local, moderate rather than extreme, conservative economically, less conservative politically and culturally, religious in the sense of believing, as the advertisements put it, in, going to the church of your choice, any church, and being able to be at home, in the same kind of house and with the same mass media anywhere in America. One way of describing this national upper middle class style is to say what is not a part of it: the upper and the bottom parts of our society. There is a very small aristocratic stratum at the top, and I can describe how small it is by talking about the profession of three quarters of you, namely, the military. If one thinks of the attitude of the graduate of Sandhurst or of St. Cyr or of the prewar Prussian military academies and compares it with the position of American military officers described in Janowitz’a book, The Professional Soldier (1960) one sees very striking differences in outlook. Elsewhere, the upper military tend to be aristocratic in their values and that means contempt for the bourgeois, for the middle class. The French officers who fought in Algeria despised the colonists, the French overseas entrepreneurs, and farmers of middle class outlook, even though they defended them. Their values were anti-commercial, values of hauteur, and social arrogance. What is striking is how rare such attitudes have been in the American military. During the Second World War, I worked at Sperry Gyroscope Company and I had a good deal to do with the military, who were our clients. The military, in dealing with American businessmen, were extremely subdued. They did not at all take the position that business was an inferior activity to soldiering. So much is this the case that General Eisenhower felt he was honored if he could play golf with Chevrolet dealers and Coca Cola barons. There are exceptions—like General MacArthur, perhaps General Patton—men of aristocratic outlook and demeanor; but the democratic values and the civilian mindedness of the civilian military, while perhaps salutary for the country, are quite a striking difference from the attitude of contempt for trade and commerce and money making of military men elsewhere. In the same way, if one reads a book like E. Digby Baltzell’s The Philadelphia Gentleman (1958), one sees that it is no longer possible for the old aristocratic elite of this seaboard city and others like it, to transmit their positions to their sons directly. They cannot pass on high business position or high institutional positions in a nepotistic way. Their sons only can have a chance on their own through education. Now, to be sure, their families

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power

33

helped them here by sending them to good grammar schools which will get them into good prep schools, which on occasion will get them into good colleges. But our system of education, again Max Rafferty to the contrary, is increasingly meritocratic and demanding and requires of the young, no matter what their birth, that they act democratically and make their way on their own merits. Now, if one looks hard one can find in the United States, aristocratic counterparts to the Tory patricians of Great Britain who are antibusiness and in favor of the poor and deprived. In Great Britain ever since the days of [Benjamin] Disraeli there has been a kind of alliance between the landed gentry and the upper class generally, and the working class against the middle class. The only parallel I can think of in our country is the kind of attitude of political leaders of great wealth and family background, such as Governor Rockefeller and his family, or the Kennedys, or Adlai Stevenson, or Averell Harriman. These are men of wealth and background and good educations, who identify themselves usually, but not always, in the Democratic Party with the deprived and against the middle class and the business class. But this is all the aristocracy we have. It is not nationwide. It is only to be found in certain locales and it certainly, as it is going on to the young, becomes increasingly less arrogant and less differentiated. At the bottom, the group of excluded people is, of course, much larger numerically. It includes the Negroes of the deep south and the city slums, the poor whites of Appalachia and elsewhere, the Mexican Americans, and other deprived groups. But to come back now to what I regard as the central tendency of the development of the upper middle class national style, let us ask ourselves: What are the sources of change toward creating this style out of the once regionally differentiated and religiously and ethnically differentiated society? I think the mass media are one of the vital elements here that exposes all of America to NBC and CBS, to Life and Look, Time and Newsweek, and Hollywood movies. One illustration I would like to present to show how this works is to remind ourselves of what occurred in the debates in 1960 held over national television between Kennedy and Nixon. In all previous presidential campaigns it was the case that each politically partisan voter (and this is the great majority) tended to expose himself only to the propaganda and personalities of his team. He read a newspaper or listened to the radio by his side, which told him that the opposite side was the enemy. But in these debates, for the first time in our history, it was not possible to do this anymore than it would be easily possible to look at only one side in a tennis match. Kennedy supporters were exposed to Nixon, and vice versa. Consequently, it was much more difficult, once Kennedy was elected, for Republican partisans to believe that they should light out for Brazil. The enemy could no longer appear quite so devilish and malign. Many studies indicated that the result of the debates meant that when Kennedy was elected by the narrowest of numerical margins, he at once became President of a larger fraction than that, in part because people had seen him on television.

34

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Another aspect of the mass media is less substantive and more procedural, namely, that a kind of national rhetoric is implicit in what the messages say. This is a message of moderation, of pep, of youthfulness, of cheerfulness, of hedonism, enjoy yourself—which tells certain well-to-do Americans that they are living the right kind of life and the others—let us say the poor, the proud, and the elderly— that they are not “with it.” Another factor spreading the national upper middle class style is the enormous and continuing occupational and social mobility of Americans. The average American moves once every five years and in California once every four years. But no less important is the fact that those who do not move are influenced by those who do. I can think, for example, of the Vermont community where I have run a dairy farm now for over 30 years and where, when people go to college, they do so to get out of this rather deprived area so that the people who do the laundering and the doctoring and the preaching, and are the county agents in this community are college educated people from elsewhere. So are the managers of the local industries, which have come in since the war. The managers and other educated people who come in from elsewhere are different from the Vermonters. They drink more at the Country Club, go to bed later, want to spend more on schools, and have the national upper middle class style, to the annoyance of the local people who believe that the school that was good enough for granddad is good enough for me, and of course, he wouldn’t be there if that were true. In 1900, nine out of ten Negroes lived in the South. Now less than half do; and the Negroes in the South are more urban than the rest of the population, yet they were once rural. Farming has declined enormously, of course; so have unskilled and semiskilled work, with the result that people have had to relocate themselves in the new large employment of large corporations, including the Army and the National Government. The way they relocate themselves is through education, especially higher education. As many people attend college today as attended high school in the 1920s. In California, at present, two-thirds of those in the twelfth grade will show up in postsecondary education. In Utah the percentage is even slightly higher. There is enormous regional variation in the South and in backward states like Massachusetts only about 30 percent or 40 percent of the people go on to higher education. But the Western pattern is spreading eastward with the building of more State institutions and commuter colleges. These institutions serve, even when they are not very enlightened, to cut people off from their local parochial roots. For instance, what one finds is that even in a junior college people have come to it by car, by commuting from a high school which was often fairly homogeneous in terms of class and ethnic group. But the college draws on a wider territory and exposes students to a larger orbit of other kinds of people. One result is that it makes them less parochial and more national—indeed, often more nationalistic. Instead of being attached to a country or to the Lutherans, they become attached to America. They are educated by the state, increasingly so;

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power

35

about 80 percent of the people who are in higher education are in state supported institutions, but that does not mean that they have a special love for a state. When I hear young right-wing students talking about states’ rights and try to hear what they say it is not so much that they love the state; they are talking about Federal wrongs rather than states’ rights. The orbits are widened by going to college, often beyond this country, by junior years abroad, by non-Western area studies, programs, and so on. To be sure, not all students engage in this widening of orbits. Some freeze against the relative cosmopolitanism of college and stay rooted in their traditional parishes. Nevertheless, people who go to college do get delocalized and to some degree nationalized; they get introduced to what I have been calling the national upper middle class style. This is the case even for those colleges that were set up by small religious sects to keep young people in the fold. Virtually all religious sects, except the Amish, have figured that the only way to beat higher education was to join it; so that the Seventh Day Adventists and many other groups have organized their own colleges for their own young people. Yet, by virtue of going to college— that is, often going away from home—these young people are exposed to wider currents of thought and to people from elsewhere. Nevertheless, change occurs against a background of stability and resistance to change. I want now to turn to what might be thought of as the powerful residual localistic pressures in the United States. Probably no region of the country has changed more quickly than the South and, therefore, has more resistance to change. If we compare the South of the past with the South today, we see that the South was the most pro-British part of the United States. It was the most interventionist in the First and Second World Wars; it was free trade oriented because it was rural and an important agricultural society; and in politics in 1954 it was violently opposed to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now with Federal highways, Federal bases, and industry eagerly sought by southern communities, there has been a resentment developing of the same northern “colonialism” which the South has so eagerly sought to benefit from. Furthermore, as I already suggested, fewer people go to college in the South. And there is a sharp gap in the South, greater than elsewhere, between those who have attended college and those who have attended high school or less. The latter tending to fall back, with the assistance of some college-bred leaders, on a rhetoric of the southern way of life and kin connected values opposed to industrialization and urbanization in a kind of fundamentalist mixture of other worldly and materialistic orientations. This mixture has traditionally been fundamentalist Protestant. Though in 1960, thanks to the presidential campaign, a union occurred between Protestant and Catholic fundamentalism, so that one found that in the John Birch Society (named by a southern leader in honor of a man who had attended Mercer College in Georgia, and as an undergraduate, had indicted his professors for heresy), many violently anti-Catholic, Catholics. I remember a few years ago attending the Catholic education meetings and talking to a number of Jesuit educators who were

36

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

very perplexed by this. What they said to me was this: “We can understand that some of our students were in favor of Joe McCarthy; he was, after all, our son-ofa-bitch, who was one of our boys. But John Birch, a Protestant missionary from Georgia—what are our people doing there?” The answer, I think, in part lay in the fact that President Kennedy did not appear to these Catholics as a good Catholic. After all, he had gone to Harvard and he was too wealthy and too sophisticated. There is a kind of Catholic backlash against the tremendous changes in the Church which have come about through the Vatican Council and through many American developments, comparable to the reaction in the South among many Protestants, against the speed of change there. This speed of change can be illustrated by a personal experience I had when in pursuit of a study of higher education I visited the Agricultural and Technical Negro College at Greensboro, North Carolina in 1955. It seemed to me at that time that I had never been in a sleepier, more apathetic, and acquiescent community than this college; and, indeed, as I was saying to Admiral Lee this morning while we were having coffee, the Negro colleges in general are still seats of conservatism. So I talked to people in the evening when I could get them alone. I talked to ministers, labor leaders, and others. And I came to the conclusion that I was not being put on, that the conservatism, the traditionalism, the religious piety of this institution was indeed the way things were. Yet, as some of you no doubt know, this is the very place where in 1960 the first sit-ins occurred. And I have had the same experience elsewhere. This is upsetting, as all change is upsetting. And especially for the elderly who feel in an American society today that they are the DPs (displaced persons). The world of the modern mass media, the world of the metropolists is not their world and many of them react to the contemporary world with a kind of negativism which strikes out on symbolic issues to say “No.” Though this “no” is more a mood than a vote against a specific program. In many New England communities in the last 10 years, for example, there have been the bitterest fights about the fluoridation of water. It is hard to understand the violence of these fights if one realizes that the water, already polluted, is full of fluorine and other chemicals and why the addition of another chemical should create such a protest is not easy to see; and many scientists and dentists don’t understand it at all. But fluoridation turns out to be a useful issue for these DPs to say, “Stop. We don’t want our water interfered with; it is God’s water.” Although, as I say, it is hardly that. They can also vote “No” on bond issues for schools, and in a sense they are voting “No” against the contemporary and those who seem to be in touch with it. Another source of resistance to change comes from the persistence of historical, ethnic, and religious differences, in spite of ecumenical developments. If one studies Jesuit colleges, as I have been doing—and there are 28 of them in America—one sees extraordinary differences in this apparently similar world-wide order. Boston College has a different moral climate than St. Louis

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power

37

University or Marquette in Milwaukee. One of the differences is that the Irish in Boston found the going rough at the hands of the Anglo-Saxons in 1840, and thereafter, in a way that in St. Louis the German and French Catholics did not. Consequently, Catholics in the Middle West have tended to be less defensive than those in New England, who carry on an ancient feud with some occasional help from the Protestants and Jews. Indeed, my colleague, William Alfred, the great playwright in the English Department at Harvard, says that the Brooklyn Irish are so different from the Boston Irish that they don’t even speak the same language or the same dialect. Thus, Old World traits transplanted to American settings are different. Furthermore, if one then goes to the west coast, one does not find people who have come from Ireland or from Germany or from Poland; one finds people who have come from Brooklyn, and Boston and St. Louis and Chicago; and the ethnic differences there are still further moderated. One of the aspects of this, so evident in the American political scene, is that the old ethnic alliances are becoming unstuck. Right down, I would say, to the Second World War the Irish were the politically sophisticated immigrant group who spoke English and despised the English and shepherded to the polls Italians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, and Jews who came more recently from Europe and who were organized by the Irish in political machines. But today what we find is that the Italians, long resentful of the dominance of Irish priests in their parishes, have gone into the Republican Party, often to beat the Irish at their own game. The Negroes are now trying to move in the same direction, but in a society which has, in a sense, risen above the old ethnic disputes and has made things very difficult for the Negro newcomer. Of course, the Negroes are very old in our society, but they are newcomers to the urban political machines. Europeans find this so difficult to grasp because they interpret everything in terms of class, which in America has to be seen in terms of religion and ethnicity. Class consciousness does exist in America but in much moderated form, often more powerful at the top than at the bottom. It used to be said, for example, that in many small northern communities, Main Street was all Republican. In fact, not everybody in Eugene, Oregon, or Elmira, New York, where studies have been done, turned out to be Republicans on Main Street; maybe 25 percent were Democrats, but each of them thought he was the only one. In 1964 the really unhappy alliance between big sophisticated metropolitan businessmen and small town businessmen, farmers, and physicians tended to break down. The former big business group, who were managerial, and educated, and belonged to the national upper middle class, tended to vote for President Johnson— and many supported him openly. The small businessmen (who can be very rich, of course, but small in terms of their orbits) voted for Goldwater. Everywhere the well-to-do have to emphasize noneconomic issues, such as nationalism, in order to win a majority. But in this country this is less true than elsewhere because the majority are reasonably well-off. At the bottom of society, class consciousness is less. We do not have an articulate proletarian working class outlook, even though we have labor unions

38

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

which try to organize such an outlook. Labor unions organize only a minority of the workers and blue collar workers are today in America smaller in number than white collar workers. Race and ethnicity then are more powerful cements for political solidarity than social class. We could take this analysis into institutional as well as political life and describe what is happening within the main religious denominations. What we are discovering today is that we have a general belief in America, which is part of the national upper middle class outlook, that people should go to church—and more Americans go to church today and support churches than ever in history. But there is less concern with denominational identity. This is evident among Protestants where one so often finds, let us say, a Lutheran marrying a Methodist and joining the Disciples of Christ, or whatever church is handy, and has a good program for the children. But this is also true among the Catholics where sectarianism is less visible, at least to non-Catholics like myself. In the Catholic Church one has an intra-Catholic ecumenism in which Italians now outnumber Irish at Fordham, although they are still taught by Irish priests and laity, and in which there is a great variety of outlooks among people, all of whom call themselves Roman Catholic. Among the Jews this is equally evident. The old divisions in this country between the colonial Portuguese and Spanish Jews, the early nineteenth-century German Jews and the great bulk of Eastern European Jews, have been destroyed. One finds what might be thought of as mixed marriage among Jews, just as one does among Catholics where Poles now marry Italians in Buffalo, and the grandparents cry but the parents do not. What I have been suggesting in these last remarks is that America, like any other institution, does not change all at once, that Old World traits transplanted survive in altered form, that if we analyze occupational differences by ethnic group one would find interesting differences even now. One might ask: Is the Navy still aristocratic? I am inclined to doubt it. Is the Air Force still the place for the upwardly mobile Irish? There are Jews in engineering. There are Negroes coming into corporate life. Yet, these developments in the direction of nationalization do not mean, I believe, as some people would argue, homogenization. Rather, what I would say is that the differences, increasingly important in America, are not based on birth, on lineage, on ethnic group, or religious affiliation, but at least outside the area of color they are based on choice, aptitude, and education. There are many mysteries in this and what is American about America still remains arguable, and maybe we can talk about it a little in the discussion. References Baltzell, E. Digby. 1958. Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class. New York: The Free Press. Bullitt, Stimson. 1959. To Be a Politician. New York: Double Day Press.

National Character and Morale as Factors of National Power

39

Janowitz, Morris. 1960. The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. New York: The Free Press. Lane, Richard. 1962. Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does. New York: The Free Press. Whyte, William H. 1956. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 4

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities David Riesman

Editors’ Note: The following is the text of a 1952 lecture given at MIT while Riesman was researching and writing Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (1953). A small segment of this speech eventually made it into his Veblen book, primarily in Chapter 8 “Leisure and Urban Pastoral” (pp. 170–93). The original text of the following speech contained alternative paragraphs. In such cases editors selected the most developed paragraphs for inclusion. Likewise, the original manuscript ended with undeveloped paragraphs that did not seem to make it into the body of the final speech. These, we do not include. If one compares [Death of Salesman’s] Biff Loman with his father and then Edmond Gosse with his,1 as you have by implication done, one is reminded in the strongest terms of how rapidly the whole setting of family life has altered in the last century, and how the sons were in each case caught by the growing irrelevance of their fathers’ hopes and fears for them. It is illustrative of the changed position of the father that, while Edmond Gosse was afraid his father would catch him out in some frivolity, it is Willy Loman, the father in Death of a Salesman, who is caught out by his son in a hotel room. Not that Biff or even Happy escape defensiveness towards the father, but the initiative is certainly changed. A few days ago, Angelo Patri ran a column telling adults how to greet children, explaining that it was not tactful to ask them their names—or indeed any personal questions—and that in fact adults were best off if they allowed the children to take the conversational initiative. Can you imagine a hundred or even 50 years ago, that adults would be advised on their etiquette in dealing with children? No, children would be taught how to be polite with adults. Even The Late George Apley (Marquand 1937), of whose doings and undoings some of you have read, was instructed by his father— even while he was a Harvard undergraduate. And yet, I need not tell you, these three books can scarcely be fitted into a simple chronology of parent-child relations. Too many other factors are involved. There is the difference between England and America, although we must not 1 Editor’s Note: See Edmund Gosse’s 1937 memoir Father and Son, as well as his 1890 biography of his father, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse.

42

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

exaggerate this, for old Mr. Gosse was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a Puritan sect presumably more at home in New than in old England. There are very great differences in social class. It has been said that the upper class is oriented to the past, the lower class to the present, and the middle class to the future. The upper class therefore tends to be strongly family centered—the social memories of the Apleys are strong, cemented by estates, portraits, memoirs, and other impedimenta. Willy Loman, by contrast, seems to live always in the future, even though he spends much time listening to voices out of the past which point him to a future he didn’t take or that didn’t take him. Willy, in fact, appears to have no past, which is part of his pathos. And this leads me to the suspicion, which one or two other people have also voiced, that Willy may be the son of a Brooklyn Jewish immigrant, though he is not represented as such. For the particular way he is cut off from his past, and yet tied closely to his family, has a certain quality often found in Eastern European immigrant children. And his being a salesman, yet continuously looking for some transcendent, non-given meaning in his work—victimized more than I think most Americans are by the success ideology—this could again be interpreted as the outlook of a Jewish immigrant’s child, cut off from European culture and hence inclined to take American culture too much at face, too literally. And Happy’s cynical reaction to all this resembles themes in some fine novels concerning such uneager beavers among New York Jewish boys—I think of Budd Schulberg’s (1941) What Makes Sammy Run, or Daniel Fuchs Homage to Blenholt (1936), or the books of Eidman. I wouldn’t insist on this ethnic interpretation of the play; rather, I suggest it to illustrate the complexity that any discussion of American values has to take, in view of how quickly they change, and how various they are in different regions, classes, ethnic groups, and occupational groups. Indeed, on this latter score Willy Loman faces the problem that he is not really identified with salesmen but—as happens among some particularly outstanding salesmen—with the customers. He is very different from some salesmen recently interviewed by a student of mine in Chicago; these men took the position that “selling is fine if it wasn’t for the customers”—very much as many teachers will say teaching is fine if it wasn’t for the students; in fact, this is the characteristic ambivalence of an occupational group towards its clients. In lacking this distance from his client, Willy must have been something of a rate-buster among other salesmen, just as a doctor or nurse who gets too friendly with the sick is a rate-buster. And the result is to leave him vulnerable, without the occupation’s long built-up defenses against the customer, and against the work as a whole. In this ignorance of the ropes, Willy again strikes me as unusually deracinated—something Arthur Miller mislocates, I suggest, in the intangible nature of the occupation. To be sure, I have so far proceeded in terms of my own sometime occupation, as if Death of a Salesman were a documentary, a sociological tract, rather than an elegant and eloquent piece of stagecraft. But I fear that this is only moderately unfair to Arthur Miller, for as I shall try to show later on, his views of salesmanship in particular, and America in general, scarcely transcend certain intellectual

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

43

conventions of an earlier day. I would be greatly interested to know, if you could talk and I could listen, how many of you found these views of Death of a Salesman in any way shocking or surprising? I do know that when my own students in the College at Chicago read Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class ([1899]1953), they do not experience any novelty in its unmasking of bourgeois styles of life. On the contrary, they act as if they had always known that. One discussion group insisted with vocal unanimity that nobody bought a Cadillac for any reason save show—the idea that a Cadillac might be comfortable or pleasant to drive, they hooted down as a rationalization. So widespread has this attitude become that the Cadillac Company is worried about it from the sales viewpoint and is trying in current advertising to play down the note of conspicuousness. The hot rod car, as I discovered from my students, is really a protest for many of its devotees against the high speed parlor sofa made in Detroit. It is an aggressively conspicuous form of non-invidious motor power. Something of the same sort can, I think, be said about the blue jeans garb of many young people today—a garb worn not only to classes but to evening folk dancing dates. Among these young people, though sexuality is freer than it was among the Plymouth brethren of Edmond Gosse’s youth, consumption is almost as ascetic, as bound by sumptuary rules. Biff and Happy Loman show their lowly origin in being blissfully unaware of all this— Happy particularly chasing the gorgeous gals and the no less gorgeous dollar as if Diamond Jim Brady and Fiske and Jay Gould were still alive and kicking. In sum, I would suggest that millions of well-educated Americans today have become afraid of the very consumer displays, the very gaudiness, for which they once yearned. The one fear of being envied has, for many, replaced the fear that one will have cause to envy others. Many people now tend to examine all their purchases from a consumer engineering point of view, seeking not only to eliminate waste and the influence of advertising, but also to eliminate all peacock-like motives in their own behavior. Veblen, Freud, Marx, and Consumers’ Research Magazine all provide an arsenal of self-criticism which is pretty relentless. There are certain circles in America where one cannot buy a TV set without being regarded as vulgar—circles sometimes unaware of the commercial value of their anti-commercial stance. And of course there are other circles where the TV set, or some hard goods equivalent, serves as a compensation for substandard housing, job inadequacy, or other under privilege—taking the place of drink among depressed workers in an earlier day. Of course, I am not contending that consumption has lost the symbolic meanings it has for the men of the Loman family; these still exist, differentially distributed in the population, and in competition with other, newer meanings. One of these latter day meanings is the increasing need or desire of people in the upper strata to put on display not so much their purchased possessions as their more subtle qualities of personality and taste. I mean here not what Willy Loman would mean by personality—more, perhaps, what Edmond Gosse might mean. I mean an effort to show that one is different, an individual, above mere material things. Sometimes when I walk into a modern apartment, sparely furnished, glass enclosed, I feel how psychologically unprotected the inhabitants

44

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

are. Their consumption is as intangible as Willy Loman felt his production role to be. I can almost look back on the nineteenth-century type of fetishism of commodities as something of an idyllic time. As one mansion after another built, by our Captains of Industry, is torn down or converted into a Catholic college, one may even come to admire the social energies that the Captains and their wives exhibited. These tangibles were, it seems to me, some protection against the need to put their personalities on display, much as the religion of Edmond Gosse’s father protected him from the ambiguities, as well as the potentialities, of human contact. Now I want to turn to a somewhat more systematic account of why some of these developments have come about, why our values have changed so considerably with respect to both consumption and production. Naturally, such an account must be both speculative and abbreviated; I will have to confine myself to institutional changes and to such intellectual currents as Middletown2 or Death of a Salesman represent, and leave aside the interesting possibility that American character may have changed in important respects, as cause and consequence of the other changes. Let me emphasize, first of all, that such changes are never wholesale. The attitude towards the middleman in Death of a Salesman is nothing new. The idea that the middleman doesn’t produce anything can be found in medieval thought and in the Reformation; the idea was very strong in nineteenth-century American populism, and receives its clearest industrial exposition in Veblen’s distinction between productive and pecuniary employments—I might add that those of you who are planning to become engineers were Veblen’s undoubted heroes, for he regarded engineering as undoubtedly productive whereas businessmen, lawyers, bankers, and merchants were either idle parasites upon production or saboteurs of it. Nostalgia for a rural past has much to do with these attitudes—and such nostalgia is strong in Death of a Salesman. Veblen and Arthur Miller are middlemen of ideas. I suspect there is a good deal of self-contempt in their view of the middleman in trade. I think you have probably learned in this course that attitudes and valuations of what is good and proper work for a man to do are largely influenced by the culture, and by the work group as a subculture, and I suggest to you that it is intellectuals, such men as Veblen and Miller, who set one or another valuation on selling—rather than anything intrinsic in the nature of the work itself, or in man’s biological need to work or avoid work, as the case may be. At any rate, the combination of Puritan high valuation of work with a devaluation of the middleman’s role, goes back a long way. Along with the general pressure on business values has come a special pressure on selling, showing up in the evidence recently published by Fortune magazine that companies are finding it exceedingly difficult to recruit salesmen today, particularly if they are to work on a commission basis. This leads to all kinds of semantic niceties, such as redefining sales jobs as sales engineering, but it also leads to replacement of 2 Editor’s Note: See Robert and Helen Lynd (1929 and 1937).

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

45

direct selling by advertising, and by using the retail store as the point-of-sale as in the Supermarket—which is possibly why Willy lost his job and couldn’t get another, through a kind of technological unemployment. College graduates today want jobs in personnel work or other “service’’ occupations, rather than in the exposed and isolated position of the salesman. In the old days, Biff might have become a salesman without afterthought, but he is confusedly caught by some of the newer currents. One reason for this is that young people seem to be increasingly choosing the role of an employee in a large organization, with pensions and perquisites, rather than the chance to make a quick killing by a commission selling or other risky and entrepreneurial job. One company reported to Fortune that they now look for salesmen among Greeks—an ethnic group not yet acculturated to the newer American values; another, that they do their recruiting for sales in Texas and Oklahoma—states where old-fashioned crazy millionaires can still be found. Sometimes people refer to high income taxes as a determining factor, but I think taxes, though certainly an element, are frequently used as rationalizations by men who don’t want to take risks. Taxes are simply part of the managerial climate in which enterprise is now carried on, in which innovation is entrusted to a research and development staff trained at MIT and the Harvard Business School—men who take courses like this which deal with human relations in order that they will be able to get along with their colleagues in the office, or at least to discuss problems of human relations at American Management Association meetings. And this leads me to a further reflection in Death of a Salesman. You will remember the terrible scene in which Howard Wagner fires Willy, while listening to an idiotic recording. My colleagues and I at Chicago have recently been studying retirement practices and we find that one reason many companies have a firm rule compelling retirement at say, 65, is that people today are too softhearted to fire older people. At Inland Steel, a number of older men have “make-work” jobs because no one can bring himself to discharge them. A retirement rule locates the responsibility elsewhere, makes it impersonal. Some of you are probably aware that this is also true of the retirement regulations in universities. Indeed, wherever I have observed—in business, in government, in academic life—I have seen the lengths to which people will go before firing somebody. Howard Wagners are hard to come by. Now again you will notice that I am criticizing the play on the basis of a sociological estimate, but I must say that the play invites such criticism by its own effort at realism. So far, I have spoken as if fear of risk was the chief factor in the actual dearth of salesmen in the American economy at present. But there is also a growing desire to be serviceable to others—this is one reason for the current high prestige of the medical profession. The attraction of personnel work for many college graduates, rests on their urge to work with people (the fact is, they more often work with files—but that is in a way, beside the point) rather than, as they interpret selling, against people. People want to be part of a team, part of a group. It is this security which is often more important than pension plans.

46

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

But there is something else involved in the decline of selling, which I can illustrate in the following way. When I discussed the Fortune series with William Whyte, Jr., the writer, I suggested that people might increasingly be afraid of the human encounter of the salesman, even apart from the low estimate put on the middleman, and apart also from the guilt feelings some people have about quick commission profits when they, as they would say, make nothing, produce nothing. So I thought one ought to look at the big polling agencies to see whether they have difficulty recruiting and keeping interviewers. For interviewers are people who have to do an intangible selling job with a stranger each time they ask for an interview, although the relation is not considered exploitative or termed selling. And we discovered that the pollsters had a great deal of trouble holding onto people—that many interviewers would sit an hour in their cars getting the courage to go in and ask for an interview. There was a very high turnover so that the agencies had to depend on impecunious students and part-time housewives. Today, we are so sensitive to others that we don’t ordinarily act as Howard Wagner does in the play; when we meet strangers, we want to do so in an ordered, prepared, and sheltered way. We don’t want to rebuff others or be rebuffed. Now, as you know, it is not in America considered manly to be soft or sentimental; one is supposed to be tough. So we tend to conceal from others and from ourselves our conciliatory attitudes, our moods, our sensitivities. We continue to talk about free enterprise, about getting ahead—about all the values that the Loman family, in its several ways, has taken so literally, so out of context. But often I think the talk is big talk, or whistling to keep up our courage. And I suggest it is because we half credit and half discredit the kind of talk that an audience of businessmen can attend the play of Death of a Salesman and be genuinely moved by it while the play struck me as archaic, as dated. It did not strike them so, insofar as I could sense their reactions. If I am right in this, moreover, it raises the question whether we should not re-examine our picture of the nineteenth century to see whether, underneath all the Horatio Alger talk, other values and attitudes were not latent. Certainly Alexis de Tocqueville’s picture of the American is startlingly like that given by some mid-twentieth-century observers. The Christian values which are so strong in Mr. Gosse’s group of Plymouth Brethren not only helped, the ways you have been examining, to spur the rise of a competitive, individualistic capitalism, but also moderated that capitalism by feelings of social responsibility, of concern for the other—after all, they were called “Brethren.” Christianity always contains the latent dynamic of a potential return to the values of the early Christian era, before the Church became a great concern. In other words, there is always the available material for a reformation—within Catholicism as well as within Protestantism. Christianity may have become something of a shell in the nineteenth century, for many pious frauds, but it was always more than that and was not for long successfully allied with the more ferocious forms of competitiveness. Bruce Barton’s notion of a generation ago, that Jesus was really a big advertising man, would hardly go over today.

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

47

It follows that there have been changes, very profound ones, even if their origins can be traced back to an earlier day. What has happened is that values once confined to a small elite group, or to an elite place within the hearts of many people—a kind of Sunday rather than weekday place—have now spread more widely. We can see this in the case of attitudes towards conspicuous consumption on which we have dwelt earlier. Veblen noticed in his book on the leisure class, published in 1899, that some small groups among the very rich had become offended by conspicuous display, and were going in for “natural looking” estates, “natural looking” contrivances, and presumably “natural looking” faces, too. The return to nature—that is, to some intellectual image as to what is natural—is always available, much as the return to primitive Christianity is. Veblen observed that this return was often a fake one, as in the case of expensive fences made to look rustic, or expensively bred cows trying to give an air of usefulness to a luxuriously extravagant Berkshire pasture. But he did not stop with such debunking. He realized that when a leisure class gets large enough, and sufficiently in touch with itself, it can depart from grossly vulgar display—it can whisper rather than shout. He put it as follows: Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The portion of the leisure class that has been consistently exempt from work and from pecuniary cares for a generation or more is now large enough to form and sustain an opinion in matters of taste. Increased mobility of the members has also added to the facility with which a social confirmation can be attained within the class. (Veblen [1899]1924:100)

I might add that it is not only size and mobility which permit this confirmation, but also that the magazines and other opinion leaders in this group can make judgments of status and taste more sensitive, more subtle among the initiates. I would guess, for example, that the New Yorker magazine has played a very considerable role in recent years, among its readers, in exciting an interest in commodities in its advertising pages while dictating in its editorial matter, a style of non-conspicuousness. Veblen continues: Within this select class (that is, the upper reaches of the rich) the exemption from thrift is a matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility as a basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter day upper class canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting demonstration of expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the appearance of thrift. So, a predilection for the rustic and ‘natural’ in parks and grounds makes its appearance on these higher social and intellectual levels. (Veblen [1899]1924:100)

We need not stop with Veblen’s further explanation of this development in terms of instincts—he thought it represented an outcropping of what he termed “the Instinct of Workmanship” as against what one might call “wastemanship.”

48

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

What matters for us now is that Veblen saw how such an attitude, begun at the top of the social pyramid, could spread downwards as more people gained leisure, and as more came in contact with leisure-class values. Yet even he, perhaps because of his farm origin and Midwest experience, did not see fully the extent to which non-conspicuous non-consumption was already a powerful American pattern. Most of the people who walk through his pages are engaged in an endless chase for pecuniary reputability through invidious display, absorbing one ugly fashion after another. To read him, one would think no Americans ever saved any money. He seems to have escaped contact with Boston Unitarians or Philadelphia Quakers whose display was much more veiled. When we read Henry James’ fine novel, The Bostonians, which appeared in 1886, we are confronted with wealthy girls who were plain of dress and horrified at display. For them, good causes took the place of good commodities. I should add, in fairness to Veblen, that he saw some of this. But what he entirely missed was the influence on attitudes of intellectual, as opposed to merely technological, currents. It would not have occurred to him that his own books would influence people’s attitudes towards consumption, that he would be the godfather of the consumers’ movement—that, indeed, a whole series of books, including his own, and coming right down to Marquand’s novels, or Death of a Salesman, have helped kill certain American values with irony and sarcasm. For him, as for Marx, men conform always to economic necessity, not to cultural or ideological necessity. Nevertheless, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class fitted, not too badly, the American scene from the gay 1890s to the not quite so gay 1920s. The mother in the Lynds’ “Middletown” who tells the interviewer that she cannot send her daughter to high school because she cannot give her silk stockings; the hero in the novel Jefferson Selleck (Jonas 1951) who suffers agonies on his wedding night because he is of lower social origin than his bride; the drama of The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald 1925) and the miseries of Charlie Gray in Point of No Return (Marquand 1949) are so many testimonies to the Veblenian cruelties of the American status system, with its unmerry emulative chase. Yet the last novel I mentioned is testimony also to a newer note in American literature, that of the failure of success, rather than, as in Death of a Salesman, the failure of failure. If success is called into question, whether from a Christian basis or some other, than the American social pyramid itself is called into question—it is no longer a pyramid but a sphinx, an asker of questions rather than an answer to these, a touchstone of new values rather than a memorial to old and accepted ones. I am reminded of the rapidity of these shifts in the emphasis on consumer values by this very trip to Harvard and MIT. When I was in Harvard College in the late 20s, President Lowell announced the famous Harkness House Plan and put the tradition minded firm of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott to designing large new buildings that would harmonize with Harvard Georgian— difficult as it is to make large buildings look Georgian. My friends and I on the Crimson violently attacked these plans from the standpoint of a functionalist

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

49

architecture—we knew a little about Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan and we had heard rumors of the Bauhaus. We observed for instance, how chimneys were put up which contained no flues and how windows were spaced to meet pseudo-Georgian canons rather than student needs. Veblen’s text on this issue, though based more on Yale or Chicago Gothic than Harvard Georgian or MIT Athenian, is well worth quoting: The diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in such cases is not uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a smile. An appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction of an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance, to go no further into detail, are placed with a view to impress their pecuniary excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather than with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the detail of interior arrangement is required to conform itself as best it may to this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary beauty. (Veblen [1899]1924:213)

President Lowell won a pretty easy victory over the young functionalists of the Harvard Crimson. But in the course of it he revealed to me a strategy far more self-conscious than the picture I have quoted from Veblen. He wanted to surround young Harvardmen with luxurious buildings and appointments in order to make them discontented with less luxurious surroundings later on. They would then, to recapture at their own expense their undergraduate publicly subsidized extravagances, proceed to make a lot of money and to get themselves into positions of influence; some of that money and some of that influence would then redound to the further glory of Harvard. However, so far as I know, this was about the last victory of such blatant motives frozen into architecture. Harvard has since, as you know, gone functional, and it is hard to imagine either Conant or your own socially sensitive and responsible President Killian indulging in Lowell’s sort of strategy, worthy of a J.B. Morgan or other late lamented tycoons. But what my young Crimson colleagues and I failed to appreciate was that buildings do not design themselves from the inside out, as many people have thought society and architecture alike could be designed—like Willy Loman’s dream of working with his hands—from the inside out. Functionalism hides a complex set of aesthetic and social values—often no less contemptuous than Lowell’s of the comforts of the beneficiaries within, as anyone knows who has observed the ascetic dictatorship such modern architects as Frank Lloyd Wright exercise over their clients. When people like Buckminster Fuller regard a house as a “machine for living,” they are not only condemning

50

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

conspicuous residential consumption but are making living itself often more mechanical than it needs to be. Today, of course, many good architects have come to realize this, so that “modern design” is no longer synonymous with an artful and expensive lack of art or with the inevitably artificial effort to be “natural.” These considerations could lead us into a discussion of functionalism in anthropology and sociology, which is also frequently an ascetic discipline for the researcher—it could lead us to discuss the ways in which some systems of social science try to cut men and their motives down to the size of the system, forgetting that the very concept of a system is an abstraction, and that our love for the systematic is itself a cultural trait, by no means to be found everywhere. Ruth Benedict, in Patterns of Culture (1934) makes more sense, for she looks for configurations but does not expect everywhere to find them. (I might add that her view of America, as it appears more or less implicitly, is not so different from Arthur Miller’s—she sees it as exuberantly competitive and salesman-like. But of course she was writing in 1934.) Functionalism in architecture could also serve to remind us that the new builders of Harvard and MIT were trained in Germany and that their style is sometimes called the “international style.” And this takes us back to our discussion of “Father and Son” and the question concerning how American our American values really are. For in a way, what we are discussing today is a series of stances towards capitalism, towards the bourgeois, towards commodities—stances developed throughout the Western industrial culture. Anti-bourgeois tendencies have originated in aristocratic disdain and working class resentment. But I think they have stemmed even more largely from within the middle class itself, which breeds its critics in the ways that the late economist Joseph Schumpeter described in his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). But by the same token, in America values have changed without revolution from above or below, and middle class complacency, such as it was in the nineteenth century, has pretty much given way to middle class questing for new values and new standards of consumption. So today, if we want to find old splendiferous joy in extravagance, we indeed have to follow Willy Loman’s imagination to Alaska—or to South America or Spain, or to some other spot on the globe where only workers wear blue jeans and only millionaires’ mistresses wear fur coats. For, indeed, it has been the bounteousness of modern industry, especially in America, which has done more than almost anything else to make conspicuous consumption obsolete among millions in the better educated strata. It would go much too far to say that consumption bores us, but it no longer has the old selfevident quality; it no longer furnishes our lives with a kind of simple structure or chronology of motives. Some of you may remember the movie, Citizen Kane, presumably based on the life and hard times of William Randolph Hearst—an epic about a man who made acquisition of goods, more and more goods, an axis of existence, until finally you might say he drowned in goods. (Another treatment, incidentally, of the failure-of-success theme.) To collect objects, as Hearst did, requires a certain confidence, even arrogance, a certain imperviousness to ridicule, and criticism. Today, men of like wealth are much more apt to give over these

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

51

responsibilities to a foundation, which then on their behalf can collect research projects or artistic works, protected by bureaucratic devices and corporate responsibility from individual criticism, extravagance, and whim. Hearst’s “whim of iron” appears to be a thing of the past. And yet, as I have implied by reference to the foundations, the economy is still productive, more so by far than in Hearst’s or Veblen’s day. So the question becomes: who is to spend the surplus, and for what, when the millionaires no longer care to? For one thing, I suggest it is spent on children as it never was before—part of the same development that has taken us from Gosse’s Father and Son to Maggie and her daughter bringing up a father named Jiggs. I saw not long ago on the financial pages that the Lionel Corp., makers of toy trains, had had sales of more than 12 million in the first six months of 1951, up six fold in 10 years. And recently in the New Yorker there was a story about the A.C. Gilbert Co., which has been equally bursting its seam. Veblen might argue that the growing extravagance of child toys was an effort to make up for the fact that women today with servants quite scarce, have to do their own housework and so serve less well as jewel trays and clothes horses than in an earlier day—the trains would then be a sign of the displaced emulative zeal of the parents to overtake and surpass one another. On the other hand, bearing in mind, the passage I read you, Veblen might perhaps be pleased that children were not playing with toy castles and knights in armor, but with electrical and mechanical realities—preparing no doubt to compete for MIT and for the cold impersonality of the modern machine process. Indeed, Veblen, like most nineteenth-century observers, had a hard time dealing with play at all, since a work minded age regarded play as mere preparation for life or as re-creation for another round of work. (Today, I might add, in an adjustment minded age, play is often regarded as a kind of therapy—and as training for integration in the group.) The trouble with children, of course, is that they grow up—unlimited amounts cannot be spent on them. Before too long, in the same strata that Veblen and Arthur Miller have influenced, they are denouncing advertising and disdainful of waste and extravagance. The parents can then have more children, and as you may have learned, this is what has happened to the country in the last decade, much to the bewilderment of the demographers, the experts on population, who thought that the American urban middle classes would continue to have fewer and fewer children. They do not know, and I do not know, why the shift has occurred; doubtless the causes are complex and ramified—the same thing has happened in France and elsewhere. But I do suspect that the changes in value patterns we have been discussing have been among the factors. I started several years ago reading college class books with curiosity for the light they might shed on subtle shifts in attitude. I was struck by the emphasis on the family that began to appear in my own college class and its neighbors, a few years back. People who wrote about themselves no longer started off by saying they were Vice President of Ozark Air Lines and a director of the Tulsa National Bank, and so forth; they began by telling about the wife and five kids and how they had a home in the suburbs where they all enjoyed barbecues in the backyard. The occupational achievement was played

52

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

down; the family scene, with its pastoral virtues, played up. Since then I have found similar tendencies in other groups. This would seem to hang together with the devaluation of individual success we have been discussing; children are a kind of unequivocal good in a world of changing values, and we can lavish on children the care and emotions we would now feel egotistical to lavish on ourselves. The younger age at which people are marrying today is a further factor; having started to go steady at 14, they want to make it legal at 20, with the yearning to settle down, that Biff so painfully manifests in the play. Whereas a generation ago a career man and a career girl would have considered marriage an obstacle to their work aims, today marriage and children are in a way part of the consumption sphere, the side of life currently emphasized. Thus, as I have said, children absorb some of the surplus and foundations; especially the biggest foundation of all—the federal government. Conspicuous consumption has been socialized, and appears largely in the form of weapons, with something left over for national parks and such items. When in fact we see what governments can do with a surplus, we can look back with mixed feelings to Citizen Kane—the days when individuals were more powerful and governments less so, when rich men rather than wise but responsible statesmen, disposed of the national product. (The very concept of a national product, a national income, is a rather new thing, as those of you know who have been studying economics— though to be sure Adam Smith wrote about it in the Wealth of Nations (1776).) When we speak of government spending for armaments, it is clear that the line between consumption and production is hard to draw, and the much more general point I want to make is that with the decline in conspicuous consumption—a relative rather than an absolute decline perhaps—has come a great rise in what we might call conspicuous production. As I have implied earlier, the company for which Willy Loman worked did not engage in conspicuous production—else they would have kept him on, finding a place for him in overhead. The companies that do so engage, vie with each other to have natty modern factories, equipped with all manner of personnel services from masseurs to music by Muzak, and their advertisements increasingly sell, less the product than the company’s up-to-dateness in the arts of conspicuous production. I recall when I worked for Sperry Gyroscope Corporation hearing many officials sing the praises of our rival, the Jack & Heinz Company, and going with some of them to hear Mr. Jack talk to a meeting of the American Management Association. Jack showed a movie of all the elaborate personnel services his company provided, and talked eagerly of the junior welfare state he had inaugurated. My associates were duly impressed, and wished to duplicate what he had done. To be sure, he undersold us, but that was less important than the glamour of his methods. One way of interpreting all this is to say that the very men who would shrink from being themselves salesmen, sublimate in the corporation their wish for response, for esteem, and imperceptibly, and item by item, push the company towards extravagances which are then rationalized as necessary for good will.

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

53

This responsibility for conspicuous production falls on the corporation executive in his capacity as an official for one thing because saved corporate income is no longer rapidly distributed to stockholders as dividends, but is retained in depreciation funds or other concealment or reserve accounts. The tax laws have played a part in this. And I think you might find it interesting, as you proceed on your path through MIT, to observe the extent to which the tech schools and business management schools play a part in deciding what it is that the corporation should now spend money for—whether it is training directors, or market research, or philanthropic activity, much as support for “pure’’ research both at my university and yours—all the multifarious forms of conspicuous consumption. Many of these forms, it should go without saying, will not readily meet the eye. As I remarked earlier in a general way, people, including businessmen, don’t want to be thought soft-headed, nor do they want to be thought extravagant. I cannot stress too much the way expansion itself can become a form of conspicuous production. The redesign of plants or tooling is often influenced by these subtle pressures for corporate prestige rather than because some operator, some Uncle Ben, hopes to make a market killing. Many of you are aware that passenger service, for many railroads, is now a form of conspicuous production, and I suspect that the purchase of diesels often is just that, no matter what the figures show as to the savings involved. Or, one might ask, what use are accountants if they cannot justify as sound business practice what has become standard practice among well indoctrinated executives? In general, I think it can be said that many of the motives which were built into the character structure of individuals are now built into the institutional structure of corporate life. Speaking of accountants reminds me of how unnecessary old fashioned integrity has become in a large organization where, unless one is a genius like the Musica brothers who operated inside of McKesson & Robbins, one cannot possibly cheat because too many people, too many planned checking steps, would be involved. The system of accountancy, backed by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, takes the place of the individual conscience. We take for granted today the honesty of our larger corporations—until we go and try to do business in some other part of the world, or of our own economy, where different standards prevail. What is true of honesty, as I have indicated, may also be true of rivalry. A science fiction serial in Galaxy magazine last summer, entitled “Gravy Planet,” (Pohl and Kornbluth 1952) was a serious spoof on the way individuals, personally mild enough, fought commercial battles on behalf of rival advertising firms that wanted to exploit the dubious possibilities of the planet Venus. And the pressure is great upon our corporations to take upon themselves still other responsibilities, which will mean acquiring still other patterns of action once delegated to individuals. Because corporations have money, they are an obvious target—they are vulnerable to social decisions as to how they should spend the wealth they didn’t distribute to stockholders. I am myself old fashioned enough somewhat to prefer the older egotisms of private conspicuous consumption, which is idiosyncratic

54

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

and not always compulsory, to conspicuous production, in which individuals have a share only as members of a corporate group and are in fact bound to the group by what it does for them. I would rather use our surplus to allow individuals a still greater amount of leisure—so that each of us would work, say, a four hour day—than keep us at work eight hours so that our large organizations can spend the difference, partly in the very processes of production, and partly in socialized display on our behalf. But here again I would like to remind you that, once we see such tendencies clearly in the light of our own day, we are motivated to go back in history and try to see earlier exemplars of the same tendencies. When we do that, we can see that even in the nineteenth century, factories and machine tools were almost invariably influenced by current aesthetic attitudes, so that they were far more ornate and less functional than purists would have liked. At the World’s Fair at Philadelphia in 1876, for instance, machines of simple, vernacular design were (as Professor John Kouwenhoven (1948) has pointed out in his book, Made in America) disregarded in favor of those with the proper curlicues and scroll work. Conspicuous production is as old as production. What has changed is the emphasis, the Gestalt, the configuration. And by the same token, our own value judgments concerning American values must always be contextual, must take account of the concrete historical situation. Thus, it makes little sense to bewail the fact that financial integrity is no longer as important for the conduct of the economy as it was in Ben Franklin’s day, but it does make sense to ask what new kinds of integrity can now be stressed since we have successfully institutionalized the older kinds. Likewise, with the loss of older forms of personal ambition such as tormented Willy Loman displayed, we can ask what new sorts of ambition, perhaps for family life as a whole, now have room to flourish. I myself would not criticize the benevolences and extravagances of conspicuous production if I thought that we were smitten with the values of Happy Loman—for I would not argue that Brothers is a worse channel for the American surplus than he. I hope we can use the question period to begin to understand such matters, for I know that in these minutes I have skirted lightly over the complexities and ambiguities that make American life and American values one of the most fascinating topics for us as Americans to discuss and to explore. References Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston MA: Houghton Mufflin Co. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1925. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner and Sons. Fuchs, Daniel. 1936. Homage to Blenholt. New York: Vanguard Press. James, Henry. 1886. The Bostonians. v 1–3. London: Macmillan and Co. Jonas, Carl. 1951. Jefferson Selleck. New York: Dell Publisher Co.

American Values: Shifts in the Valuation of Commodities

55

Lynd, Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd. 1929. Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Lynd, Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd. 1937. Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Kouwenhoven, John. 1948. Made in America. Garden City, NY: The Country Life Press. Marquand, John Phillips. 1937. The Late George Apley. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Marquand, John Phillips. 1949. Point of No Return. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Pohl, Frederik and C.M. Kornbluth. 1952. “Gravy Planet.” GALAXY Science Fiction Magazine, June–August (3 Part Serial). Riesman, David. 1953. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Schulberg, Budd. 1941. What Makes Sammy Run? New York: Random House. Smith, Adam. 1776. The Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahen and T. Cadell Publishers. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers. Veblen, Thorstein. [1899]1924. The Theory of the Leisure Class, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 5

The Berlin Crisis Erich Fromm and David Riesman

Editors’ Note: The following is an undated memo from Erich Fromm and David Riesman, and addressed to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., then Special Assistant to President Kennedy. The memo was written sometime between July 8, 1961 and August 14, 1961 as the Berlin Crisis escalated and drew the US and Soviets closer to war. Over Berlin, the United States and the Soviet Union are painting themselves into corners from which they hope to emerge triumphant, or at least undefeated, by stepping up the tempo of the Cold War. The danger is that both sides will lose flexibility, each one being afraid of surrendering positions instead of trying to arrive at constructive negotiated solutions which would constitute a gain for both. We believe that a mutually satisfactory compromise, or de facto arrangements, can be worked out so that the immediate crisis will pass and possibilities for long-term settlements are opened. Our belief is based on the hardly novel premise that it is necessary, not only to take account of what the Russians say, but to analyze the substance of their demands in terms of their own reality, and thus, to be able to recognize which of their offers can be trusted because they are based on their self-interest. In the whole Berlin question there is one given which is not negotiable; that West Berlin must remain part of the Free World, not only economically, but politically, and that means specifically that it retains the democratic way of life in the Western sense; this means that no substantive change whatsoever, in the life of West Berlin, must occur. The freedom of West Berlin obviously includes free communications between West Berlin and the German Federal Republic. The question is: is the Soviet position compatible with this, or does it endanger the freedom of West Berlin? If we consider what Khrushchev says, the answer is that the Soviet Union does, “... not want to intervene in the domestic affairs of the City’s population or affect the prestige of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.” Khrushchev raises the question whether it is “possible to find such a solution as would satisfy all countries that fought against Germany and would not disturb the established way of life in West Berlin.” He proposes such a solution either by the Four Great Powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union), or

58

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

by mutual countries or by the UN organization. He adds, “If the Western powers have a better version of guarantees, let them propose it.”1 These assurances seem a not unreasonable basis for beginning quiet explorations with the Soviet leader, provided we ourselves take seriously three possibilities: one, that Khrushchev, given the dilemmas he faces and the experiences he has had with the previous Administration, has genuine interests in the Berlin situation, other than the desire eventually to swallow up the city or to push us further in it or from it; two, that he can control his East German puppets sufficiently so that their quite different stake in West Berlin does not lead to an inch by inch effort to strangle and eventually absorb it; three, that there are good reasons on our side to renegotiate the status of West Berlin (and, tacitly, eastern Germany), rather than standing on the legal and moral case that can undoubtedly be made for our right to continue the present situation unchanged. However, if Khrushchev goes ahead and signs a peace treaty unilaterally with East Germany, and other nations recognize that treaty, the Soviets will have clouded the legal and moral issue sufficiently making our case a shaky one. Khruschev’s Dilemma If one takes for granted, as many do—especially perhaps with Vienna freshly in mind—that Khrushchev wants mainly to humiliate the West in preparation for its total defeat, and if we also assume that we are so weak as to make this dream seem a likely one, then one will try to humble Khrushchev, relying on his fear of war, and if necessary, either reducing the fear of war or increasing the hysteria of the American people (e.g., by civil defense) so as to make our threats seem credible. Such a view, in our judgment, lacks historical perspective as to why Khrushchev may behave as he does, and as to how total and totally disastrous wars occur. We believe other interpretations for Russian demands on Berlin are not only more hopeful, that these demands are not merely the first step in a chain reaction, but are also truer to the facts of Khrushchev’s experience, both with the previous Administration and in [Khrushchev’s] present situation. Furthermore, we believe that American interests are not served either by not unseating Khrushchev or by forcing him to adopt the policies of his still more anti-American opponents; this is simply too risky for the long run, whatever the well-known, often almost overwhelming difficulties are of any negotiations of serious issues, with the Russians, including Khrushchev. One of Khrushchev’s main political problems is his need to stabilize his western flank. Quite aside from the fact of the immorality of Stalin’s postwar conquests, and even aside from the question whether the Soviet Union still needs or thinks she needs the satellites for security or economic reasons, Khrushchev could not retain political power if he gave away any of Russia’s postwar gains. While it can be argued that [on one hand] the United States has not indicated any 1 Editors’ Note: Quoted from a July 8, 1961 New York Times article.

The Berlin Crisis

59

active desire for upsetting the status quo, it is also true on the other hand, that our ally, West Germany (both the Adenauer government and the opposition), refuses to recognize the status quo and only promises not to use force to bring about a change. Khrushchev is clearly afraid that a rearmed West Germany, with a wish to regain her lost territories, is a threat to the stability of his western flank; hence he wants to do everything to stabilize the East German situation. Khrushchev’s Berlin proposal, in substance, means that he is willing to guarantee the continued freedom of West Berlin in exchange for the stabilization of the East German situation by peace treaty and by our de facto recognition of the existence of East Germany.2 On the one hand, Khrushchev’s popularity in the Soviet Union rests upon his role in fulfilling the Russian population’s deep seated wish for peace, but on the other hand he must defend himself against his own Stalinist opposition and the Chinese opposition which accuse him of being “soft on capitalism” and permitting Russia’s postwar gains to be nibbled away. The stabilization of his western flank by a peace treaty, plus a Soviet Union-United States understanding on the basis of new guarantees for West Berlin’s freedom, seems to be an answer for Khrushchev’s dilemma. There are other reasons which make it likely that Khrushchev’s proposal is meant seriously. First of all, he knows that the West would never permit West Berlin to fall into Communist hands, short of war. Secondly, it is likely that he recognizes that the incorporation of over a million anti-communist, Social Democratic, West Berlin workers, would lead to much greater troubles that the ones the Communists faced in East Germany, Poland, and the Hungarian Workers’ Rebellion. Hence, West Berlin’s incorporation into East Germany would be a very doubtful blessing from Khrushchev’s standpoint. He is not a Stalin who can simply kill or transport populations; he did not enjoy crushing the Hungarian rebellion, and knows that this cost him much abroad, and even at home. The Problem of the Puppet Regime in Eastern Germany After a peace treaty between the Soviet Union and eastern Germany, it is feared that the [Walter] Ulbricht regime can do what it likes—in fact, that regime makes aggressive rumbles to that very effect. How then can we protect ourselves against 2 Khrushchev’s dilemma goes even further on a global scale. While he is afraid of a powerful Germany, for the reasons just mentioned, he is also afraid of a powerful, atomically armed China. He cannot give up the alliance with China because then China would become the undisputed leader of the revolutionary movement in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the Soviet Union would be in a weak position vis-á-vis the Western block. But if he could arrive at a modus vivendi with the United States he could be much less dependent on China. There are good reasons to assume that his political strategy aims at reducing the threat from both an atomically armed China and West Germany, by an accommodation with the United States.

60

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

East German sabotage of any guarantees Khrushchev might make concerning the quality of life to be lived there and concerning the access to West Berlin? We must differentiate between the two aspects of the Berlin problem: the freedom of West Berlin and the guarantee of free access to West Berlin. As to the freedom of West Berlin, Khrushchev offers a Four Power guarantee (plus Four Power occupation), or neutral or UN occupation, or any other form of guarantee we might suggest. Are these guarantees sufficient to protect us against an attempt of the East German regime to absorb West Berlin? It would seem that the East German regime could hardly dare to defy the Four Powers or the UN [...] by attacking their troops in West Berlin. But beyond this, Khrushchev has sufficient power over East Germany to prevent them from violating the new agreements. By virtue of its location and its unpopularity—perhaps greater than that of any other satellite—the Ulbricht regime rules against the will of almost the entire population and hence is completely dependent on Russian backing. Khrushchev can force Ulbricht to respect West Berlin’s independence even though he must declare that that regime is itself independent. If we are correct in our view that Khrushchev has no covert agents in West Berlin, then it seems to us conceivable that Khrushchev would be willing to guarantee the freedom of West Berlin, not only in a Four Power or UN-backed arrangement such as he has already proposed, but directly in the treaty he proposes to sign with East Germany. The problem of free military and civilian access to West Berlin is more complicated than that of freedom within Berlin. According to the political fiction of East Germany’s sovereignty, the control over the routes to West Berlin lies in the hands of the East German Government. East Germany could conclude a pact with the Western powers in which it guarantees free access, but such a pact would amount to a degree of recognition we are not willing to grant. There is, however, a possible solution providing we make constructive use of the Russian— East German peace treaty. We can demand from the Soviet Union that they write in the peace treaty a clause by which East Germany accepts the obligation to give free access to West Berlin. In this case, we do not need to conclude any direct pact with East Germany, yet the free access to Berlin would be guaranteed by the Soviet-East German pact. All this would have to be negotiated secretly, because Khrushchev cannot officially admit that East Germany is controlled by him, yet he can act accordingly provided we do not force him to spell it out. What about West Berlin as an escape hatch for East Germany into West Germany? Will not the East German government, once it has total control over the roads to and from Berlin, make such escape impossible? As things are now, the East Germans can, if they want, seal off entrance into East Berlin from the East German territory and hence entry into West Berlin, leaving the escape route open only to those East Berliners who have not already opted to take it. We can try to negotiate that at least East Berliners have access to West Berlin as before; it seems unlikely that the East Germans would accept an obligation not to seal off their borders, since they would give up a right which they have now, although they have not made full use of it (at any rate they do not need a change in the Berlin status

The Berlin Crisis

61

to make use of this right). Still, we might try to bargain for as much possibility of escape as can be secured. Nevertheless, we must squarely face the likelihood that a new peace treaty may not be attainable that preserves the possibility of escape for East Berliners, much less for East Germans, as a whole. Unfortunately, we cannot base American policy on the idea that it is our obligation to guarantee escape from terror to all men living under inhuman regimes. And we say this with few illusions about the Ulbricht regime in particular which, outside Bulgarians and the Chinese, is probably the most cruel in the Communist bloc (the Russian army in East Germany has given asylum for over a year to at least one East German oppositionist—no doubt, a Khrushchevist and not a Stalinist). Our approach here must be based on a larger sphere of concerns how, while avoiding the risk of war, can we maximally improve the lot of the captive nations and peoples of the Soviet bloc? Eastern Zone stabilization will give the Poles and possibly the Czechs greater room for maneuver, since they will no longer be driven to dependence on the Soviet Union for protection against West German irredentist claims and against the danger to them of an immediate and violent uprising in East Germany. Even in that latter territory, the interests of freedom are not unequivocally served by the right to maintain the flow of refugees. Provided he can keep his hold on technical personnel, Ulbricht has something to gain from the flight of potential freedom loving opposition elements, who might provide Khrushchev (once East German territorial integrity is more assured than it is now) with a Gomulka-like alternative to a dictator who is almost universally hated, and who in addition is incompetent and seeks to aggravate the Cold War in order to bind Khrushchev more tightly to him. (The East German Protestant Church has forbidden its pastors to leave East Germany—even two ministers who left claiming fear of arrest have been discharged.) Let us repeat: we are not arguing that it is a fine idea to condemn these East Germans, as individuals, to remaining in East Germany were there any way to rescue them while also safeguarding other interests, including our aim for the liberalization of all the satellite regimes. Such choices are inevitably tragic; there is no comparable tragedy in acceding to a Soviet or East German demand for restrictions on anti-Communist propaganda beamed from West Berlin. While Khrushchev has not raised this point now, the Soviet negotiators at the Foreign Minister’s Conference in Geneva in 1959 did demand the cassation of anti-Communist propaganda aimed at creating unrest in East Germany. At that time, we expressed readiness in principle to accept this point. To the extent that the demand is genuinely based on Khrushchev’s need for stabilization, it is in our interest also. It is also in our interest in view of our dilemma that we cannot help a rebellion in any of the satellites which might break out, in some part, as a result of our propaganda. In such a case we would, as in Hungary, be denounced for having betrayed the rebels and the result would only be a further blow to their spirits. The real problem is how to assure a politically and culturally free atmosphere in West Berlin. Here both positive and negative steps can be taken. On the negative side, we can explore in detail—again, in secret—the nearly intractable problems

62

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

of distinguishing between freedom of speech and press in West Berlin, which must of course be maintained, and incitement to flight or rebellion in the satellite. Such distinctions are not impossible to make; we ourselves, after Hungary, toned down the RIAS3 broadcasts in fear of being again faced with revolt where we could not help the rebellion and could only lead to the exposure, and hence, destruction of opposition elements. There are various ways in which one might forward a solution, spelling out in detail what is meant by “the established way of life in West Berlin.” There are furthermore other means to increase and strengthen the morale of a free and independent Berlin. One possibly worth exploring would be to move the International Court of Justice from the Hague to West Berlin, and have perhaps a sub-tribunal standing in readiness to hear complaints and develop in effect a common law of distinctions, between the anti-Communist talk and writing natural to the West, and the incitement aimed not at strengthening the West, but at weakening the East. (In turn, of course, the Communists must be assured freedom of their propaganda in West Berlin—precious little good it will do them.) The moving of the International Court is here suggested also as a positive measure to build up to the fullest possible extent the judicial, cultural, and educational institutions of West Berlin so that, even more than at present, it becomes a reminder of the quality of a free society. This is all the more necessary since any change in West Berlin’s status, even to the city’s long-run advantage, will be interpreted by some political leaders in West Germany as defeat for that city’s hopes and prospects. And undoubtedly the hope that it will soon become the capital of a reunited Germany must be regarded as messianic at the present time and not encouraged. (As things are, West Berlin is not legally part of the West German Republic and hence is not represented by elected deputies in the Bundestag.) Hence, all ingenuity and resourcefulness on our side must be marshaled to ensure West Berliners not only that they are there to stay, but that their city, if not a nationalistic capital, can be, even more than now, a vibrant political and cultural one. The idea, for instance, of having the UN meet there in alternate years is a good one, and subordinate UN agencies might be moved there from Paris and Geneva. The city’s prosperity and industrial development can be further enhanced, if need be by Allied as well as West German subventions. The Free University might be expanded and become a sort of European University, even more cosmopolitan and influential than at present. Such accomplishments, inevitably visible both on our side and behind the Iron Curtain, could be worth a lot more than the broadcasts of RIAS. It is immediately important to shift the focus so cultural responsibility of the West, not only may moderate the dangers of war, but can give West Berliners assurance that, whatever the nature of the armed forces nominally patrolling the city (Four Power as in Vienna; neutrals; UN; or

3 Editors’ Note: RIAS was a Cold War-era American television and radio station located in the American sector of West Berlin.

The Berlin Crisis

63

some combination), they are far from defenseless, and that their energies have as many channels in which to flow as Western imagination can think up. In many quarters in the West, fear that we might give Khrushchev a victory, which would (in what lawyers call “the parade of the horribles”) be simply a prelude to further demands, paralyzes our thinking about constructive possibilities in which our initiative is not merely a grudging or threatening response to the inevitable. [On one hand] if a settlement of the East German borders is made by Khrushchev alone, war may perhaps be avoided, but jingoism combined with defeatism will remain. On the other hand, if a negotiated settlement with Khrushchev is made—which will of course arouse Adenauer’s and American opposition also—the problem is not only to make sure that the negotiation preserves what is indispensable for the free life of West Berlin itself. Over that horizon lies the possibility—perhaps a dream, perhaps not—of a late, fuller negotiation with the Russians, of Central European issues at large, out of which closer ties between Western and East Germany, and some Rapacki-like demilitarization, could occur. By negotiating with the Russians, we see the possibility that both sides could emerge with a positive achievement; we with new and clear guarantees for West Berlin’s freedom and access to the city, Khrushchev with a peace treaty with East Germany, and improved relations with the West, thus reducing the chance of war. A Historical Flashback We must still try to offer an interpretation as to why Khrushchev appears to so many Americans as frighteningly “tough” and aggressive over Berlin, while in his own eyes—and not simply to throw dust in ours—he appears to have been patient and flexible for too long. To support our view fully, would require a book length review of Soviet policy towards the West since the outset, and particularly since 1953. A brief survey must begin with the Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference of 1959. The substance of that conference was the Russian demand for cessation of aggressive propaganda and troop reduction. [Christian] Herter4 agreed in principle on both points, while there was no agreement on the details. [Andrei] Gromyko5 refused, in spite of these concessions, to guarantee the West access to West Berlin. The Geneva Conference, which was meant to prepare for the Summit meeting, was adjourned and was followed by Khrushchev’s visit to Washington. We do not know the private conversation between President Eisenhower and Khrushchev. The official joint communiqué (Sept 27, 1959) stated: “With respect to the specific Berlin question, an understanding was reached, subject to the approval of the other parties directly concerned, that negotiations would be reopened with a view of achieving a solution which would be in accordance with the interests of all 4 Editors’ Note: Herter was US Secretary of State from 1959–1961. 5 Editors’ Note: Gromyko was a Soviet Statesmen and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1957–1985.

64

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

concerned and in the interest of the maintenance of peace.” Khrushchev, after his return, had his trip described in the Soviet Press as a great success, and Eisenhower spoke of the Berlin situation as being “abnormal.” It is to be assumed that the Camp David spirit implied some concessions on both sides in line with the foreign ministers’ discussion in Geneva. Then, the Eisenhower Administration made what appeared to us the central blunder on the whole Berlin affair; his administration suddenly changed the atmosphere through [C. Douglas] Dillon’s6 April 20, 1960 speech. While the Russians and even Ulbricht talked hopefully about an interim solution on Berlin which was in sight, Dillon, although not refuting the possibility of interim solutions, accused the Russians of poisonous propaganda, attacking their imperialist ambitions, emphasized the need for strong arms and allies, and declared that we would not accept the Russian “distorted picture of the German problem as a factual promise upon which to negotiate.” Khrushchev had to interpret this speech, as did [our Allies] also, as indicating an about-face on the provisional agreement that seemed implicit at Camp David. This was a slap at Khrushchev’s political prestige to which he reacted with an aggressive speech in Baku, yet without resorting to aggressive action. The slap was all the greater because we had insisted all the time that we do not negotiate under the pressure of deadlines. Khrushchev had yielded by not mentioning any time limits; and then we reacted by renewing the Cold War spirit. Khrushchev’s political embarrassment was increased by the maladroit handling of the U-2 incident and, in spite of his violent language in Paris, his speech two days later in Berlin did not contain the new time limit about Berlin. Eisenhower’s breach of the informal compromise made it imperative for Khrushchev (aside from all other political reasons) to demand that the Berlin situation be settled at some time. Without Eisenhower’s blunders, President Kennedy would not have inherited the Berlin situation that, together with Laos and Cuba, signals to us still another move on Khrushchev’s part to push us around, when from Khrushchev’s standpoint, he must defend himself against the accusation from his opponents that he has been pushed around by us. This is all the more the case when we consider that we have made no concessions whatever to Khrushchev’s repeated protests against the West German rearmament. From his standpoint, the balance sheet of negotiation over Germany has been: no American concessions on West German rearmament, and the retraction of the concessions that had been proposed with respect to West Berlin. Such a posture on Khrushchev’s part, defensive yet injured, does not encourage ready communication in a one shot encounter with President Kennedy in Vienna. Eager as he is for a solution that would enhance, not damage, his political prestige, exploration of the limits of what he would accept and what he would and could practically guarantee to us, must be lengthy, utterly secret, relaxed, and tactful. Only in this way can we hope to learn whether we are right or whether, as many feel, Khrushchev sees West Berlin as a step in a Hitler-like covert agenda of destruction of or domination over the West. We [...] think that despite Khrushchev’s 6 Editors’ Note: Dillon was Undersecretary of State at the time.

The Berlin Crisis

65

global boasts and ideological cant, he frequently proceeds on an ad hoc basis in response to immediate pressures—in this case, the dilemmas we have outlined above. The view opposed to ours—that of Soviet total irredentism and undeviating faithlessness to arrangements that appear to serve both party’s interests—rests in part on the familiar American feeling that those wily foreigners are cleverer, more tenacious, more indomitable than we [sic]; this is the sheerest flattery, and is not borne out even by analysis of what occurred during the Eisenhower years, let alone what may be hoped for from a vigorous new Administration, provided it does not trap itself in a temporary fit of despair, a crisis prone view of history. The Administration faces a double task: it must repair the Eisenhower sins of commission and omission at home and abroad; but at the very same moment it must negotiate with a man who, out of his own disappointment with Eisenhower, was led to expect too much, too soon, from his more liberal successor. But suppose we are mistaken about Khrushchev’s intentions; does it follow that we should not negotiate with him over the status of Berlin? We think not. A clear delineation in a new treaty of access rights to West Berlin, and political freedom in that city, leaves us no worse off than we are now, when the legal, moral, and political status of West Berlin is ambiguous—providing us with a terrain hardly better than that of Laos for “standing up to” Communist advance. If this new treaty should then be violated, in the nibbling process feared by many in the West, we have a better case to back our protests and a more resolute solidarity on our own side. A treaty between Khrushchev and the East Germans, in which the latter have guaranteed our access to West Berlin, gives Khrushchev somewhat greater persuasive power if he wants to restrain Ulbricht from poisoning relations by sly sabotage—if, as we believe, he would find such power useful. If we are wrong, and Khrushchev and Ulbricht are up to the same game, one from which Khrushchev cannot be diverted by further negotiations and further strengthening of the moral and political resourcefulness of the West, things are indeed bleak, but no more than at present. If the proponents of our view are themselves wrong, and refuse to make any negotiated concessions to Khrushchev’s overt agenda on Berlin, they take the grave risk of justifying, each in turn, a whole series of steps toward a more military as well as more militant position, enhanced by inevitable ripostes from the Communist bloc, until people come to feel that there is no way—none save war, which is the way out for us all. Soviet leaders may not trust the ability of the Administration to channel and use effectively in the world arena, the heightened American spirit of bellicosity and suspicion, both of Soviet motives and America’s ultimate strength.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 6

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations David Riesman

Editors’ Note: The following is taken from a transcript from a talk given at the Summer Institute on College Admissions sometime around July 1963. I have taken from my topic a very large theme in what might be called contemporary intellectual history. Naturally, it will be a theme with variations: while I shall be concerning myself with Freud’s influence upon the growth of permissiveness in the treatment of culture in America, I shall also be talking in a very general and impressionistic way concerning other currents of thought among young educated people and the adults with whom they come into not always conciliatory contact. In this formal setting I shall not refrain from asides and digression which may have some bearing on the tasks that college admission’s staff have more immediately in hand. In the eyes of European visitors, the American has been almost from the beginning a child centered country. When Tocqueville was here in 1831, he wrote home about the poor luck he and his fellow French traveler, Beaumont, were having with apparently forward American girls: while to French standards they appeared so very free and unchaperoned, it turned out that they had internalized their chastity belts, and trying to seduce them was a waste of time (Tocqueville [1835]1984)! While foreign visitors would be unlikely to make a similar comment at present, they still tend to be struck by the freedom and ease of our young women in comparison with more protective situations elsewhere. But this freedom of young women was only an aspect of the difficulty of keeping people, adults, and children alike, inbounds in a big, unsettled country. One reason for the rapid development of slavery in the colonies lay in the fact that white bondsmen and indentured servants could take off for the woods on their own, and indeed the colonial chartered companies had the greatest difficulty in keeping control over the settlements in the New World. Consider in this connection the famous image of Huckleberry Finn lighting out for the territory, to escape the civilizing clutches of Aunt Polly and various schoolmarms (Twain 1885). Correspondingly, if one reads histories of eighteenth and nineteenth century education, one is always coming across the riots and personal combat between the proctors and faculties of academies and colleges, and the students supposedly

68

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

in their charge. I have the impression most of these institutions wasted whatever educational opportunity they had in custodial arguments. In most of these arguments, very much like those that continue down to our own day, the students were the adventurer victors. Thus, when Ellen Key published her book The Century of The Child in 1909, she was looking toward a future that had already partly arrived. John Dewey was part of the same impetus for the emancipation of childhood impulse and spontaneity, although he was at the same time concerned to keep this impulse channeled into the work of social reconstruction. And it was G. Stanley Hall, pioneer of student adolescence, who first brought Sigmund Freud to the United States, to give a series of lectures at Clark University in 1909. Freud’s serious interest in previously hidden aspects of childhood, and his critique of the dangers of sexual piety and pretense lent support in the American setting for further extensions of permissiveness. There is irony here, because Freud himself was, in my judgment, quite authoritarian, and non-permissive as I’ve argued in a series of essays reprinted in Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Riesman 1954), and indeed disliked America in part because it seemed an unbuttoned country to him. But what matters for us is not what he “really” thought, but how he was assimilated—a matter to which I shall return. Freud’s effort to discover the buried unconscious in us all, which he saw as the buried child, overlapped the interest many Americans from privileged backgrounds were beginning to take in “the other half,” the immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, who were crowding into our large cities. At an earlier time, and of course still in this very day, these immigrants have been seen as a threat to traditional American values, and we might think of the plight over the Prohibition Amendment in the terms used by Joseph Gusfield, namely, as a “symbolic crusade” in which white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were telling German Catholics in Milwaukee or St. Louis that they should behave as Yankees were supposed to. Immigrant Catholics and Jews were supposed to shape up and act like Yankees, and Americanization was taken to mean assimilation of the values of the charter members. In one important respect, this assimilation led to an increase of permissiveness, because the patriarchal, often peasant families brought from Europe tended to break down on the American scene, where the children, attending the common schools became rapidly more American than the old folks. In their book The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, Thomas and Znaniecki (1920) illustrated the tragedies this brought about in terms of generational conflict in the Polish Catholic community of a generation or two ago. Irish families had faced the issue of patriarchal control somewhat earlier, and it was met in different ways by Italians, Slavic groups, Greeks, and French Canadians. However, assimilation soon turned out not to be only a one-way process. Theodore Roosevelt’s journalist friend, Jacob Riis, wrote his famous book, How the Other Half Lives (1890), shortly before the turn of century, in which the immigrant and poverty stricken half was treated as colorful and interesting,

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations

69

rather than simply as human wastage to be salvaged and redeemed. In the minds of some explorers from the gent strata, the immigrants began to be seen as exotic and colorful, in sharp contrast to the anemic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—an outlook that today tends to take the poor Negro as a model of how to live. The revolt against the gent was taking many different forms simultaneously. We can trace it in Veblen’s sarcastic treatment of stilted and pretentious leisure, or we can notice in John Dewey and William James a defense of the natural and spontaneous. It is hard today to recapture the philosophy of some of the battles fought for the First World War over modern art. When the late Albert C. Barnes returned from Europe with what was then the most modern French Impressionistic painting, he brought it to his Philadelphia home and invited people to look at Renoir and Matisse and Cezanne; they responded by denouncing him in the Philadelphia newspapers as the most violent man, perverted, crazy, and subversive of all proper standards— so much so that he locked his paintings up into his personal museum and kept them from public view. A similar reaction of frenzy greeted the famous Armory exhibition in 1909. The First World War brought a certain loosening in cultural respects, even while it involved a tightening in political ones. It exposed several million young Americans in Europe, uprooting traditional complacencies and provinciality. The automobile, an industrial and commercial upheaval, facilitated geographical and social mobility, and marked the shift away from rural and small town culture. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) comes out of this period, with its vivid picture for the small town as utterly philosophical. Young people who started in this period in the 1920’s to go to college in greater numbers saw themselves as liberated from the village, while the visible permissiveness of the flappers era— more visible, I often think, than real—found support in popular Freudianism or in the supposed sophistication of London or Paris. Meanwhile, the new values of emancipation and hedonism were being spread by a new medium: the movies. These represented in very large measure another form of impact of the immigrant, no longer through personal contact with immigrants in the big cities, but through the influence of immigrant moviemakers on the whole society. The movies brought a kind of vicarious mobility to those who stayed home, teaching them other ways of looking, behaving, dressing, carried in each case by the young or supposedly young who were the heroes and heroines. Herbert Gans of Teachers College, a sociologist, has made an interesting comparison of British and American movies and television, raising the question as to why the American products have had such an impact with Great Britain as well as in the United States. He argues that it is because the immigrants and near immigrant American moviemakers in Hollywood did not learn to upgrade their own tastes by contamination with an elite, and could thus readily identify their aspirations with those of poor people released from poverty everywhere. In contrast, British moviemakers, though often of similar ethnic origin, tended to live in London, to send their sons to Eton or Winchester, and tried to win the esteem of literary men or members of parliament. We might add that when the British upper class complains about “Americanization,” what they really are protesting against

70

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

is the values of their own lower classes when these get money enough to exhibit their tastes and are no longer repressed by hierarchy and poverty (Gans 1962). As my references to the British upper class implies, the triumphs of permissiveness have not proceeded without opposition, even after the First World War. Consider what even the best American colleges were like in the 1930’s. In that period, a conference like this would have been highly unlikely, if not inconceivable, for student “traffic” came to colleges from already given orbits: regional, ethnic, denominational, and traditional. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1920’s, Freud and the writers who were carrying similar messages were hardly read, nor had psychoanalysis penetrated the medical schools in any way. Contemporary American literature was not taught, and indeed American literature was hardly recognized as respectable. English literature was, of course, respectable at least down through the great Victorians, and it was taught by AngloSaxons. History also, whether English or American, was generally taught by white Protestant Americans—Negro Protestant Americans had, of course, been here long enough, but hardly counted. The cult of the gentlemen prevailed in the Ivy League, and in the great Land Grant Universities the cult of the collegiate took its place. One symbol of the counter-revolution was the passage of instructing entry of people outside of Northwestern Europe; another symbol as the Scopes trial; Herbert Hoover’s high scholars were still another. In the college, there was a good deal of talk about “building character.” Sometimes this valuable aim was to be achieved by competitive sports, sometimes by quasi-custodial restraint reminiscent of the colonial era. Intellect was not exactly at a discount, but the English phrase, “too clever by half,” was not unknown. Seaboard intellectuals still tended to look to Europe as the source of all that was sinful and sophisticated. It should be clear from what I have said that the strands of resistance to permissiveness that I have mentioned have not vanished. Denominational and other colleges still talk about building character—and I don’t mean to be entirely cynical about the concept. Custodial functions also remain in our colleges, and in fact, as Dean Whitla knows very well, make a first ditch offense in the grading system, which serves to infect the relations of students and teachers by a sanction which interferes both with education and with understanding. Competitive sports, however much faculty members may dislike them, have done a great deal to remove the arena of combat from the classroom to the field house. As we all know, the Great Depression and the coming of the Second World War shifted hegemonies, and in a variety of complex and often indirect ways. For one thing, a wave of refugees from Central Europe brought various versions of Freudianism to the American academic, medical, and intellectual scene. The European scholars could not necessarily bring a benign view of man—Freud himself was deeply pessimistic—but again, the interpretation of their views is what counts. We can see what occurred by examining the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, perhaps the most talented and original of American psychoanalysts, who created a kind of synthesis of Freud with American social psychology. Sullivan threw out

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations

71

a lot of Freud’s metaphysics, or what the latter termed his metapsychology, while linking psychoanalytic theory with American social psychology in the tradition of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. The latter sees the self, not so much as the creation of a conflict between instinctual urges and parental suppression, as a set of selves reflected from one’s peers who helps learn their roles, much in the way a baseball player must learn the roles of all the players for his own performance. The role of the “other” in Sullivan’s version of psychoanalysis is far greater than in Freud’s; as I have sometimes put it, Freud is the philosopher of inner-direction, and George Herbert Mead of other-direction. In other words, Freud did not look at the child from the standpoint of the peer group. If Sullivan’s outlook reduced the importance of adult authority and increased that of the chum or peer, a somewhat similar shift occurred in the growing emphasis on group therapy, especially in the effort to reach social strata not touched by orthodox psychoanalysts. In social work, in the guidance movement, and to a lesser degree in secondary education, elements of psychoanalytic thought took hold. To be sure, Alfred Adler had sought to reach similar strata in Europe, but his impact there was fragmentary in comparison with the situation in America. Indeed, there is no country in the world where psychoanalysis has had anything like the impact it has had here. In a movie such as “Rebel Without a Cause,” it could be taken for granted that the young audience (the average movie goer is 19 years old) would understand that the young hero would of course be lost, because his father did not want this, or was not a real man; in ever so many films made for popular consumption, the inadequacies of the parents readily explain their children’s bad behavior. In the educated strata, and perhaps beyond these, we probably have guiltier parents than are to be found elsewhere. Parental guilt, of course, does not imply that children who have been raised more or less permissively are made thereby free of guilt. In what has been a standard American interpretation of Freudian permissiveness, people are made to feel guilty for not being as happy as all human beings are supposed to be, so that our miseries have a kind of secondary sting, hitting us the first time in their own right, and the second time because we somehow lack the euphoria and easy freedom that we feel would be ours if we were psychologically healthy. Advertisements and the mass media beam at us people who are sunny, smiling, youthful, and energetic. If we are then deprived, it is not fate but our own doing or what was done to us at an earlier time. It is evident that the American belief that things and people can be fixed up if one has the know-how has many roots other than in interpretations of Freud. The Brazilian writer Vianna Moog (1954), in Bandeirantes e Pioneiros, seeks to explain why it is that the United States and Brazil developed so very differently. Americans in the pioneer tradition did believe that man could make the world a better place. And if the world does become better, children will be closer to the source of betterment, to the future, the young people should be permitted to live in it now, and now have to wait for the old folks to get out of the way.

72

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Such buoyant optimism and future orientation has not been a monolithic dogma in the US. There have always been Calvinists and Catholics as a more fatalistic persuasion. Moreover, since the Second World War, there has been an effort on the part of leading thinkers to restore Freud’s own tragic and fatalistic vision in the face of its Americanization. Thus, Lionel Trilling, in Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955), has contended that Freud’s own doctrine was about our right to be unhappy, hence our right not to suffer because we are more miserable than we ought to be. Likewise, the impact of neo-orthodox theology and particularly of Reinhold Niebuhr, have emphasized the limits of distance and ridiculed what they regarded as shallow American optimism. So, too, some of the versions of Existentialism are influential for certain young people, for whom Freud no longer carries a personal message of emancipation and hope. One can find in our colleges world weary young people who have already resigned the struggle, convinced that life has no meaning, and who harbor no further emancipation. Certainly, no one needs to go to college today to learn how to drink, make love, and savor wine, or other mannerly attributes, now the province of the consolidated high school. Nor do people feel that they need to read Freud, that is, not personally, when versions of his doctrines are to be found on every side. Hence, for many college students, a tragic view of life is not the fruit of long experience, but a short cut to avoid experience and the danger of disappointment. At that point, permissiveness turns back on itself. I recall a conversation with a psychiatrist in the health service of an Ivy League college, whom I asked, “What is the presenting problem which students principally come to you?” He replied that they come in with a “problem” that they are not unique. They are preoccupied lest they be like other people, lacking idiosyncratic qualities and experiences. For such students, academic prowess is insufficient, because this simply plays the academic game within the given rules, and postpones the confrontation with what is “real.” Focusing on the cult of experience, no postponement is acceptable to these young people, and since sex and alcohol are pretty square, LSD or other drugs may be sought in an effort to transcend the dreary self and the dreary present. Other young people from similar backgrounds, facing analogous problems in confronting the limits of permissiveness, have responded in less solipsistic ways: they have, for example, entered the civil rights movement or managed teach-ins or worked with patients in mental hospitals, in an effort to discover challenge and to make contact with something they consider real. Most of them would be vehement in denying that there was anything in the least idealistic in their conduct. I have, in fact, argued that we are confronted today by a post-Freudian hypocrisy that has stood on its head the hypocrisy of the Victorian era. The people were often painted to conceal their guilty and lascivious, or aggressive, impulses. They pretended to the highest motives. Today, sophisticated young people conceal from themselves their idealism, their inhibitions, even an occasional venture in tactfulness, which might be regarded as insincere and lacking in candor. If they are wanting in aggressiveness or assertiveness, they will lay down this cowardice

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations

73

and timidity, rather than recognize that they might not want to be aggressive all the time. They would rather be do-bidders and be considered do-badders than dogooders. When I spoke the other day to the Peace Corps group meeting I was once again struck with the vigor with which these students denied that idealism played any part in their decision to spend two years in a tropical new African nation beset with immense difficulties. In this respect, at least, Freud has won the day. He has persuaded many people of the correctness of the view that everything man possesses is a cover for something else or sublimation of something else—I regard this as a reductionist view of man which conceals our actual complexity and ambivalence: an ironical concealment to be charged to the founder of the very concept of ambivalence. In what I have already covered, I hope I have suggested some of the complexities in the American reception of psychoanalytic theory. I have not had opportunity to mention some of the contemporary writers who stand, so to speak, to the left of Freud, such as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, or to discuss the still different and influential view of Erich Fromm. But what I want to turn to now is a series of suggestions as to the uneven impact of psychoanalytic theory on the different fields of academic learning. For example, while there were a good many literary men such as Lionel Trilling or Leslie Fielder, who are Freudian in orientation, the humanities also provide a kind of enclave for people who want to defend themselves against all they feel is vulgar and debasing in the contemporary scene. Such people find it difficult or impossible to resist the obvious importance of the natural sciences. But they can take out their hostilities on the less established and prestigious “soft” sciences, whose pretenses to omniscience often sound foolish enough. All of us must know academic colleagues in history or classics or law or literature who have a bitter hostility to social research and to psychoanalytic psychiatry—at least until their own children fall ill. (It is extremely common to find faculty members who are political liberals and academic and pedagogic reactionaries.) Similarly, among natural scientists, one finds great differences. At MIT, for example, there is in many quarters a ready acceptance of Freudian doctrine: although one could hardly characterize the institution as permissive, many on the faculty are at least eager to have psychiatrists around to pick up the casualties. But this sympathy might be greater among physicists than among engineers; and at Case Institute or RPI or Georgia Tech, one would find still other variations. Certainly there are many engineers who feel that if you are a real man you will take it, and no fooling around with the psyche. But the differences within a field might be quite as great as the differences among fields. Thus, old style and new style biologists would be very different from each other in their musical tastes and in their sympathy for psychoanalytic thought. The same thing, of course is true in the social sciences. Economists, as a whole, have been extremely resistant to systematic psychological thought, as relevant to their own work. It is principally when they come to the so called underdeveloped countries that economists have had to begin to worry about motivation. A recent book by Professor Everett Hagan (1963), an economist at MIT, attempts to interpret

74

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

the development of economy in terms of childhood training; Hagan is a wholehearted convert to psychoanalytic theory as well as to the clinical doctrines of David McClelland. Presently, he is a sport among economists. Historians also have operated on the basis of implicit psychology and have been, on the whole resistant to more formal psychoanalytic work. But here also recent writers like Professor H. Stuart Hughes, have insisted on the importance of what psychoanalysis can contribute to the understanding of historical processes. Within the ranks of political scientists, guerilla warfare goes on between the more traditionally historical and philosophical work and the more contemporary work influenced by modern social science and psychoanalysis. For some academicians, psychoanalysis may serve as a symbol for all that they detest in the modern world, while for others it may serve as a shortcut to easy interpretation of the modern world. What is true at the level of the disciplines is also true if one looks at the different academic institutions across the American scene. In the great state universities, all varieties of belief and unbelief can be found. Some students expose themselves to this diversity, while others protect themselves from it by enrolling, not at Michigan or Berkeley, but at Kappa Epsilon Sigma Chi. The student paper, and assuredly, the student literary magazine, are apt to be in the hands of the guard. The religious foundations on the campus play a very diverse part in all of this. There are a good many places where the YMCA is the center of enlightenment, where more ideas are discussed than in most of the classrooms; the same thing could be said for a few Newman Clubs, but not many. Almost everywhere in the large universities there are fundamentalist groups that feel threatened by the permissiveness of behavior and talk among their fellow students and the faculty. A fundamentalist is often a person who doubts his ability to absorb the new by incorporating part of it in his own outlook so as not to have to incorporate all of it. In spite of all the movements of emancipation in the United States in the last two generations, there still remain fundamentalist colleges that have worked to keep out disturbing new ideas. There are Catholic colleges where the students have never heard of Father Kung or Father Rahner, and who barely know that a liturgical movement is underway. There are Protestant fundamentalist colleges that link Biblical literalism to white supremacy and to anti-communists. In spite of the centralization of ideas and imagery and of intellectual currents in New York primarily, with outposts in Washington and Hollywood, these institutions manage to maintain an osmotic pressure against the tide of permissiveness. At some of these places, students lean on the views of thinkers such as Freud only by hearing them derided. In talking this way, I do not mean to suggest a “wave of the future” approach, in which ideas that have the stamp of newness are therefore better. What I am saying is that it is more difficult to be provincial in America today than it was in Sinclair Lewis’s day: one has to set up stronger defenses and do more harm to the play of ideas and to the possibility of discovery. To resist the new completely is to be as much the victim of it as to accept it uncritically. In what I have said, I have been quite critical of Freud, and indeed, I am also critical of some of the uses of his work. But I do not regard his impact as primarily

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations

75

a negative one; on the whole, I believe it has been productive. Freud helped us recognize previously invisible aspects of ourselves, and has made it possible for what one might call underprivileged data to become less underprivileged. Although as I have said, he was patriarchal, he listened even to small children and to the smallest of details about them, and gave them the credit of not viewing them as the little darlings of the nursery. The child as a separate sort of person in its own right, is a relatively recent discovery; the story is told by the Frenchman Philip Aries (1962) in Centuries of Childhood, where he describes the way in which children in earlier periods were regarded as little adults—as indeed we often see in the paintings of the Renaissance. As I said at the outset, American society from the beginning has been characterized by a relatively greater freedom given to children. Young people were scarce; they were valuable and they were valued; parents would come from Europe to America or from the East to the frontier, and wanted to bring their children up to their own cultural level as best they could. Freud, as I have said, provided additional ways of being attentive to children and of making adults conscious of their less visible imperatives. I regard this emancipation, this discovery, as an advance, whatever the ancillary problems it has created for all of us who work with young people. And indeed, I could say in general that all “solutions” to historical problems give us the opportunity to deal with new problems and to say this, does not mean that I am a fatalist, but indeed that my view of life has been [sic] … Audience Question/Answer Session Audience Question: “To go back to your notion of guilt, could you possibly relate that to other problems of communication with faculty members? If we were trying to bring in superior students, to communicate their problems to the faculty, would the guilt of the latter be part of the obstacle? Perhaps in a more general way, you could help us understand what it is that is making the faculty tick.” Riesman: I do have one thought which I would like to venture. Faculties in general do not yet know that they have won. They still feel they are surrounded by hostility and anti-intellectualism. One reason for this may be that, when they were in high school, the football player got the pretty girl; they cannot forgive him, and later on, as adults, they are still vindictive toward him. It is still true that in some ethnic groups, in some parts of this country, to be a priest is to be not quite a man; to be a teacher is to be not quite a man. If one has already faced these attitudes in high school and had to defend oneself, one may build up a picture of oneself as victimized by athletic glamor and athletic over-emphasis. The person, who, in high school, was clumsy and awkward, will carry this over into his life as a faculty member, and this may complicate his relations to some of the graceful young people in front of him. This is so in spite of what I considered to be the true state of affairs, namely, that it is even more terrible as a youngster to be dumb than it

76

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

is clumsy. Feelings of inferiority because one is clumsy will pass with adulthood, when this whole issue of being stupid will last one’s life. A second factor springs from the need to picture one’s own qualities in terms of the reflective discipleship of students. Many faculty members never get enough satisfaction of this sort. Indeed, one of the trouble is of having a faculty which is teaching-oriented—and I realize that many of you would prefer a faculty to be oriented towards students rather than toward research—is that such a faculty may depend for its satisfaction on the reflection of their own qualities in the bright eyes of their students. They cannot justify themselves in other ways outside the classroom. Thus, they hunger for converts even though converts are a bother when one gets them! A third factor is the feeling of faculty members that springs from their problems vis-à-vis their own children. Many faculty members see themselves as waging a valiant battle against mass culture and on behalf of purer and more absolute value, or in defense of avant-garde culture. All around then they see a dismal slothfulness in American society—an outlook that may reflect the views of Admiral Rickover or the more highbrow views of someone like Jacques Barzun. Many Americans, and often with good reason, look with envy on the French lycee, or the German gymnasium, or the British public or grammar schools doing a more serious and intensive job than even the better American high schools. What happens then when a faculty member with this outlook finds in his own children the very slackness, sloppiness, and amiable indolence against which he has been fighting? Rather than relenting in his attitude toward students, he may be all the more severe because of his domestic battle. Actually, in my own observation and in all the work that you yourselves must be doing, it seems evident that students all over the country, although unevenly so, are becoming more serious. We must ask then why the faculty members are slow to catch on to this. One element here is their allergy toward any systematic study that might tell them what their students now are really like. You must find on Admissions Committees faculty members whose stock in trade is a set of anecdotes. They will talk about Susie, who had scores of 400 but managed to do brilliantly, and in defense of their integrity as human persons, they will refuse to give to a machine or to statistical summaries what can properly be given to these devises, while preserving the more complex and intractable problems for themselves; they prefer to substitute anecdotes for data. Even scientists and social scientist on an admissions committee can behave like this. Something of the same sort holds true in their judgments about the students who actually sit in front of them in a class or a seminar. Perhaps they are sort of the quasi-alumni of their own institution, with as many illusions about the undergraduate of today as an alumnus father will have about his own children in college. He will think back, often nostalgically, to his own undergraduate days, and project these on students of today. One bit of evidence here is the tendency I have observed among faculty members to believe that there exists in the universe an inherent number of grades A, B, C, D, which are to be attached to any particular undergraduate group, even

The Impact of Freudian Thought in American Education: Some Observations

77

if those actually being dealt with are twice as intelligent and far more hardworking than when the curve was first set up. In this connection, I have sometimes been tempted to describe the relation between faculty members and students by an analogy to Hannah Arendt’s picture of the role of front organizations in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). A front organization, for example, surrounding a hard-core Communist group, is usually seen as a way to deceive the outer world as to the nature of the hard core; what is less often realized is that the front organization also deceives the inner core about the nature of the world outside. Many faculty members tend to surround themselves with a group of “front” students who are “the students” taken as a whole from them. I have sometimes had the experience in a staff taught course of arguing the reading list is too long for any serious students: nobody should be asked to read Freud one week and Plato the next and Durkheim the week after that. But there will almost invariably be some faculty member to pop up and say that he had four students come into his office hours last week to ask for additional reading! This quartet will stand for the entire student body for such a faculty member, and prevent him from seeing who the students actually are in all their diversity. References Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Publishing. Aries, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Random House. Gans, Herbert J. 1962. “Hollywood Films on British Screens: An Analysis of the Functions of American Popular Culture Abroad.” Social Problems 9(4): 324–8. Hagan, Everett. E. 1963. On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, Inc. Key, Ellen. [1900]1909. The Century of the Child, translated to Engl. New York. Lewis, Sinclair. 1920. Main Street. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. Moog, Viana. 1954. Bandeirantes e Pioneiros. Brazil: Grupo Editorial Record. Riesman, David.1954. Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Riis, Jacob. 1890. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Scribner Books. Thomas, William I. and Florian Znaniecki. 1920. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. vols 1–5. Boston, MA: The Gorham Press. Tocqueville, Alex de. [1835]1984. Democracy in America. Edited by Richard Heffner. New York: Mentor Book. Trilling, Lionel. 1955. Freud and the Crisis of our Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Twain, Mark. 1885. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster and Co.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 7

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence David Riesman (and likely contribution by Philip Rieff)

Editors’ Note: The following are parts from a never completed book on Freud. In at least one section (not reproduced below) there was clear indication that Riesman had a co-author working on the book with him. The section in question had a “thank you” to David Riesman inside the text. We cannot say with absolute certainty who the second author was, though there are some hints. The never completed manuscript, at least in parts, was written while Riesman was teaching at Chicago. In at least two notes typed into the original text, the second author identifies him or herself as “PR.” In attempting to learn the identity of PR, letters were found in Riesman’s archives indicating that Philip Rieff, who would later go on to author Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, served as a TA for Riesman at Chicago. Finally, while the text presented here appears to be wholly original, some of the themes and arguments can also be found in Rieff’s 1954 dissertation. Hence, there is every indication that Rieff was the second author on this piece. Below, we begin with the working outline of the planned book; notes toward what had, at some point, been intended to be the structure of the proposed book; and the remainder is a combination of several different working chapters in varying stages of completion—all appearing to have been intended for the book section titled “Authoritarian Elements” (see outline of proposed book below). For this reason, we have chosen to include these various documents together in a single chapter. The originals were in rough draft form with incomplete references and citations; the editors have attempted to recreate these, but in some cases, it was not possible. This is especially true of quoted material. The original documents generally contained only a page number with quotations and no other information. Hence, we have been able to track down the likely title from where the quoted material came from, but not necessarily the same edition as was being originally used. For this reason, many quotations below are cited with no page number. As this chapter is a collection of notes and working drafts, there are repeated paragraphs and quotes in parts; the editors decided to leave these in since the best context for these had not yet been decided, but that Riesman and his co-author seemed to have wanted the text “said.” This chapter offers readers insight into Riesman’s thought processes in writing a book as close to in vivo as possible.

80

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Freud [Book Outline]1 I.

Introduction: the Janus-face of Freud Selective reception: progressive and reactionary consequences of ambivalent thought Freud as a political philosopher: direct legacies (e.g. Group Psychology and the Ego) and indirect consequences (e.g. the politics of “adjustment”) II. Summaries of the basic theories of individual psychology The unconscious; the libido economy; genesis of character; transference-therapy III. Dogmatism and greatness A. The hardness of the environment and Freud’s sensitivity Sex and morals: copy-book beliefs and rude awakening: a Jew in Vienna: the silken barriers of Victorian gentility B. Consequences for Freud Need for disciples, yet confidence in self No play: everything put to psychoanalytic use Hostility towards outside world—and gratefulness for small favors Secretiveness (under guise of openness) Sadism (under guise of listening to the material) C. The topsy-turvy world Insistence on rational explanations: no secrets from Freud As Vienna is not what it seems, so nothing is what is seems D. The nerve of failure: ability to take extreme positions alone: to insist on single-factor causation rather than conciliatory multiple-factor causation IV. The style of thought A. Dreams 1. The writing style: the novelist fleeing from softness and grace 2. Examples of dream interpretation: handling of symbols, the detective crushing “resistance” 3. Emphasis on the wish (implied Stirnerism: wish equals will, yet laughing at man’s futile dreaming) 4. Search for the “basic” a. Methodology and concepts b. Interpretation as a one-way street: bottoms-up c. Disbelief in play, spontaneity, or “peculiarity” B. Art 1. Theory of sublimation: no “waste”: Freud’s own self-denial as an artist 2. True sense for spectator-role in Max Reinhardt’s era (Helpless modern man as voyeur) C. Love and grief 1. The economic interpretation: portrait of an age 1 Editor’s Note: The brackets indicate a handwritten insertion into the text.

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

81

2. The negative picture of the normal man 3. The manipulation of love: social cement, illusion, and source of leadership ties V. Authoritarian elements A. The attack on narcissism (last refuge of individualism) 1. Cf. attitude towards “over-gratification” of children 2. Cf. attitude towards unsocial sin of homosexuality (“tolerated” but dominant values and norms assumed) B. “Neurotic” as epithet: the weak sisters 1. The attack on reformers 2. The goal of therapy: “adjustment” C. The romantic conservative 1. The warrior’s outlook: war and sex 2. Equating civilization and over-refinement (cf. Nietzsche, Sorel, Nordau, etc.) 3. Emotional ties to the leader: the construction of a social group (cf. Comte, Durkheim, Mayo, Lasswell) D. The social limitations to therapy 1. Manipulation of patients: breaking resistance; “guidance” in daily affairs betrayal; attitude towards “free-living” of children and adults 2. Belief in the super-ego: the patriarchal “governor” 3. The norm of activity: draining the id and draining the marshes VI. Revolutionary elements A. Insight into the role of authority 1. In creating values 2. In producing neuroses 3. In inhibiting new insights, e.g. Freud’s own B. The treatment of minorities: again, ambivalence 1. Children v. adults 2. Women v. men 3. Individual v. culture (thinkers v. masses) C. Faith in truth, cost what it may 1. Truth as liberating for the individual 2. Truth as the self-justifying method of science 3. Faith in “free” association: the world of man makes sense 4. The attack on the apparent, “privileged” reality, on the part of underdog conceptions drawn from the underground of dreams, myths, sex life—and the slips and errors of privileged “normal” everyday life, i.e. the underground railway D. The nature of psychoanalytic therapy and research 1. Small-scale, not Maine to California 2. Concern for handful of individuals and their idiosyncrasy 3. “Private” rather than bureaucratic: no “official” connections; nonutilitarian approach to knowledge; lack of interest in statistics,

82

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

projects, teams, etc.; broad, humanistic view as against narrow specialization and vested medical interests 4. Honest listening by participant-observer rather than manipulative or directive counseling E. Breaking the stranglehold of guilt: the fair side of tolerance 1. Others also hate, have evil wishes, perversions 2. The union of the weak and the sinners—Freud is with them up to a point 3. The debunking of ideology VII. Conclusion: the uses and abuses of Freudian methods A. Political psychiatry: the necessary irrationality of politics: the increase in manipulative skills: Freudian social engineering in war, industry, etc. B. The Neo-Freudians and the Enlightenment in Freud Freud—Introduction “It has gradually become clear to me,” wrote Nietzsche, “what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography … ” (1917). Moreover, to continue the Nietzschean entrance, the political purpose in every philosophy has constituted the core around which the entire secondary elaboration of the philosophy has grown.2 This is not to say that greater knowledge of the psychic structure of a philosophic personality will provide us with a complete gloss of his thoughts. But the more limited and obvious advantage—if Nietzsche is correct—is that the by-products of the psychic problems peculiar to certain individuals will be viewed in a more encompassing and so more penetrating light. We may help ourselves understand the philosophy by understanding the philosopher, but most of all we may understand the philosophy by the combined labor of an approach which views both author and authored in terms of their relevance for the problems facing us in our time. That part of the philosopher and the philosophy, which live, is that part which is timely for us, and perhaps one measure of man’s greatness is the portion of his work that is still in our time, so to speak. A philosophy is still relevant to the extent that it makes our past to some extent present. This problem in thought and biography we may call the experience of identity through change, as when an old man gazes at photographs of his childhood. We assume, here, the primacy of development; the child is father to the man. This historicist (Popper 1962)3 hypothesis characterizes the writings of those men who have attempted 2 The term “secondary elaboration” is derived from its use in psychoanalytical writings, meaning a rationalization (logical structuring of ideas in terms of the accepted moral patterns of the culture) of originally irrational (primary and unconscious) and now repressed meanings. 3 Elaborate in footnote.

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

83

to set forth the history of political theory. Professor McIlwain’s [The Growth of Political Thought in the West] (1959) is an attempt “to set forth … the development of our ideas4 about the state and about government, beginning with the fifth century B.C. … .” McIlwain is concerned with the growth of thought and a well-ordered “rendering of all essentials.” Now the terms development and essential bespeak the method of modern political science; indeed, of all social science. The first is the basic evolutionary hypothesis upon which social science has rested since Comte and until Freud. The second is the basic psychological premise of more recent exploration that interest holds together with certain present values. Thus the definition of what is essential in any system of thought is constantly shifting as the view of the past in terms of present values shifts. We shall take up hypothesis and premise in turn.5 We have said that interest holds together with certain present values. Indeed, science does not begin until interest inaugurates a problem. “Science, we may say, is confronted with problems at any moment of its development. It cannot start with observations, or with the ‘collection of data,’ as some students of method believe. Before we can collect data, our interest in data of a certain kind must be aroused: the problem always comes first. The problem in its turn may be suggested by practical needs, or by scientific or pre-scientific beliefs which, for some reason or other, appear to be in need of revision” (Popper 1957). If revision, for some reason or other, suggests itself regularly (and the number of volumes examining and reexamining the political philosophies of practically everyone who ever wrote) then we may assume, with Freud, that the past is always latent.6 This simply means that the past is a living past. There is a constant reconstruction and reorientation of the past in terms of the present projections (claims and expectations) of the future. At 60, I assume a man may have a changed perspective on his youth, as compared to his perspective at 24, in light of what he has become, as well as in the light of what further he expects to happen to him (or his posterity). One may say then, that the past and the present constantly intersect; and this is what we mean when we say that each generation will rewrite the history of its past. The question of what is essential is answered by the reconstruction of time back from the present. It is possible to define two concepts of time, and any introductory comment on the method of the history of political theory must at least indicate both. The first is the concept of chronological time, in which each unit is identical with the next unit. Here, as with a clock, the flux of experience is divided into equal time spans. Time, in this quantitative sense, is irreversible and unilateral. Regression, that is, the intersection in operation of the past and the present, is impossible within this 4 Italics mine.—P.R. 5 (Discussion of evolutionary hypothesis on attached page 3a.) [Editors’ Note: Pg 3a missing.] 6 The term latent, in Freudian terminology, refers to the repressed primary meaning of the content of an experience, as opposed to the manifest or conscious explanation of that experience or fantasy.

84

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

quantitatively articulated concept of time. But the Greeks had a word, missing in our language, for another kind of time: Kairos. For the Greeks,7 time was experienced in terms of cyclical political fate—e.g., from Democracy to Tyranny. One can revert to something that has existed before. In the Republic, Plato applies this doctrine of revisable time to the evolution and devolution of the Greek citystates. A state may move from an aristocratic rule to one that is oligarchic, but the flow of time is not regular. The crucial factor is how, subjectively, the event impresses one.8 One moment may seem like an eternity. In memory, routinized time span tends to undergo a process of shrinkage. Thus, in the concept of time as Kairos, a time experience is equated with a critical period and only certain elements of the experience seem to undergo some sort of selective process and become “essentials.” This phenomenon of the shrinkage of time is what is practiced by historians of political theory. Political historians are concerned with the task of quantitatively articulating time.9 Thus, to sum up at this point, Freud finds war therapeutically necessary. War readjusts the disparity between reality and our superego structure. War makes life more interesting because when death can no longer be denied life must be regarded as having a fuller significance. But is this not strangely close, not only to Schopenhauer in Will and Idea, but also to the fascist theory of permanent barbarization—the return to the bare primal man? If it is true that “we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers, with who the lust for killing was in the blood, as possibly it is to this day with ourselves,” then we may console ourselves that modern institutionalizations of barbarism— e.g., the compulsory labor camp—have “the merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs” (Freud 1918). Freud (Notes on Biographical Materials) Memory eliminates the realities as surely as it adds certain actualities. With memory, the mysteries which clogged and hindered our understanding take on the gross aspects of “qualifications” to the hitherto unattained biography of a man. The obscurities of motivation and action so difficult to communicate to others—let alone ourselves—disappear before the personification of our ordered imagination. In biography, a man too often becomes a monument, but that biography may teach us what his contemporaries never knew. This does not mean that biography must hopelessly vacillate between richness and reality. No man is so real that he can be disposed of by one biography, or an endless chain of biographies. On the other hand, we must manage; and to 7 For a critical commentary on the Platonic doctrine of life cycles, c.f. K. Popper, The Open Society & Its Enemies. p.— 8 Quote Carr biography of Dostoyevsky in front of firing squad. 9 c.f. Tilich, p.—?

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

85

manage we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the mysteries. If we are to communicate about Freud, we take on the responsibility of leading the reader somewhere. But that “somewhere” cannot be the last station on the road. Perhaps the best way to indicate our approach to Freud is to say, with Joseph Conrad, that a man is very seldom fixed to one exclusive meaning. Freud faced two ways. The nearer biography approaches art, the more it must string together words which cut both ways. “Symbols,” writes D.H. Lawrence (1932), “are organic units of consciousness with a life of their own, and you can never explain them away, because their value is dynamic, emotional. An allegorical image has a meaning. Mr. Facing-both-ways has a meaning. But I defy you to lay your finger on the full meaning of Janus, who is a symbol.” Then we must lay our finger on part of the meaning of Janus. For biography must try to find the connection between what a man was and what he did; between personality and action. The attempt to build the connection between what Freud was and what he did must begin with “the story” of his life. Bergstrasse 19 Sigmund Freud was born at Freiberg, in Moravia, on May 6, 1856. To his children, he was der Papa. To his wife and sister-in-law, Minna Dernays, who spent her life with the family, he was “Sigi.” To his “circle of friends and disciples, he was ‘the Professor’ without need of being more explicit” (Sachs 1944). But there is need for more explicitness, “because ‘Professor’ is just what Freud never was and never could become” (Sachs 1944). To know why Freud never was entitled to be called “Professor” is to know a great deal about the man. Freud entered the University of Vienna in 1876 and graduated from the medical school in 1881. At the same time, he made a brilliant record in the university’s physiological laboratory, working under the then famous Prof. Brucke. Before and after he got his medical degree, he worked in the Institute for Cerebral Anatomy, under Meynert. Ernest Jones reports that “financial considerations” compelled him to renounce his academic work. But Freud does not mention finance in his autobiography. He simply writes, in his usual laconic manner, that the “great man” came up to him in the laboratory one day and advised him to leave the University, since he had no future there. No future for a brilliant young medical researcher? Freud was a Jew. The passage on his leaving the University for private practice is sandwiched between two passages on the difficulty of being Jewish. Freud discovered at University that it was a disadvantage to be Jewish. He also discovered that he could take it. Freud was still taking it years later. In recognition of his neurological research, the University made him a Privatdozent, which gave him the right to lecture at the University if he wanted to, but did not make him a member of the faculty. Years later, long after this Jew with such strange ideas had become a world renowned figure, the Austrian Minister of Education raised Privatdozent Freud to the rank of Professor Extraordinarius when a wealthy and influential patient of Freud’s made

86

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

a bargain with the Minister. She promised to send him a painting he wanted for one of the public galleries under his care in exchange for a promise to raise Freud to the new title. The bargain was kept, but Freud still was not a member of the faculty. It was only in the last period of his life, when he was nearly 70 that the University of Vienna suddenly bestowed on him, in voluntary absentia, the title of Professor Ordinarius. But they somehow contrived to keep from giving the dangerous man a seat on the Faculty. But Freud showed no inclination to take advantage of any of the honors bestowed on him by his alma mater. “The Professor” never taught a class (Sachs 1944). Yet it is evident that his disciples dared not call him anything but “Professor.” Freud was the father of six children, three boys and three girls. His wife and her unmarried sister made up the remainder of the number of people who lived in the two-story house at his Bergstrasse neighborhood. The neighborhood was too close to the Tandelmarkt, Vienna’s great junk mart, to be called distinguished. Before the Freud’s had moved into the house, Bergstrasse 19 had been the home of Dr. Victor Adler, an old classmate who went into journalism and politics. Freud’s study had been the nursery of Adler’s son, Friedrich. The family lived in the apartment downstairs. Upstairs, serviced by a separate entrance, Freud could find complete privacy. No member of the household entered the four second-floor rooms except at Freud’s special invitation. There, Freud had his office—“a dark little anteroom and three chambers, waiting room, the room for seeing patients, and the study-library behind that. Each room had but one window opening onto a courtyard in the middle of which stood a tall and beautiful tree. None of the rooms got much light or sunshine; they were comfortably furnished in the taste and style of middle-class homes in the eighties ....” The study had “full bookshelves that covered the walls almost to the ceiling” and “glass cases which contained Freud’s collection of antiques” (Sachs 1944). Aside from patients and a few relatives and five or six disciples, nobody ever rang the bell at Bergstrasse 19. Vienna ignored him, and he ignored Vienna. But this was during his manhood. It is still important to know that he came of a Jewish middle class family, which had just migrated to Vienna. But the province of Moravia was in clean contrast to the provinces of Poland, from which the traffic to Vienna was heavy. The family in which Freud grew up surrendered a good part of its piety and orthodox beliefs, but frowned on apostasy. Freud took his Jewishness with increasing public dignity, as the tide of anti-Semitism rose. It is a long step from his realization of the importance of his being Jewish in his early manhood to the note to the Zionist Organization, Keren Hajazoth: “It is a sign of our invincible will to live which for the two thousand years had survived the worst persecutions. Our youth will carry on the fight” (Reik 1940). Freud could be patriotic. While he was working on his last book, Moses, as Hitler marked time at the Austrian frontier, the old man quietly insisted to Reik that the Jewish will to live would not be broken. “Our enemies wish to destroy us. But they will only succeed in

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

87

dispersing us through the world” (Reik 1940). Freud did not foresee the latest techniques in extermination.10 Freud took life as a task that had been set. Life, and the demands of the superego, must be met. In this sense Freud is in the Jewish tradition, for the duty to meet the demands of the super-ego is another way of saying that we are all children of the Covenant. The deal on Mount Sinai holds for all mankind. Freud’s answer to the problem of life might well be summed up in one of the kind of double edged Jewish jokes Freud delighted in. Sachs tells the story of the Jewish coachman who whips his horse mercilessly. “Cruelty to animals is not a Jewish trait and the Jews who stand by entreat him to spare the poor beast; but he answers coolly: ‘Since he has undertaken to be a horse, he must run.’”11 Vienna, during Freud’s time, was a place of transition and extremes. It sought to mitigate the strain of the crumbling Empire and embattled middle class value systems by forms of self-indulgence which tried to avoid sharp conflicts and harsh convictions. “The political and social background favored the tendency to look the other way when uncomfortable facts had to be faced.” Austria was a corrupt and hypocritical aristocracy of 80 families. The aristocracy was so “deeply imbued with (its) right to govern that (it) never thought about it as something for which they might have to fight and struggle.” The ruling elite was refined, irresponsible and treated ruling as they treated the problem of handling the servants on a country estate. To get anywhere in Freud’s Austria, it was absolutely necessary to know the right man; to have “backing” from above. The style of life was patterned after the people in the “above.” “The thing was to dress and act in such a way as to be taken for a member of the aristocracy or at least to be able to believe in the possibility of being mistaken for one. The best way to procure this sweet illusion was to give big tips. All Vienna was constantly giving and receiving tips. Every door which you had to pass was opened for you by someone who demanded a tip … If you took a meal in a better class restaurant you were expected to give four different tips—one for the head waiter, one for the waiter who brought your food, one for the waiter who brought your drink and one for the waiter who helped you with your coat.” The forms of address were equally stylized and graduated. Each one was called by a title one rank above his real station in life. Students were addressed by the lower classes as “Herr Doctor.” Upon graduation, the student became “Herr Von—.” If a given tip was really large, one was called “Herr Baron.” A joke of Freud’s time was that the first thing a Viennese would see on Resurrection Day would be the outstretched hand of the man who opened the door of his coffin. Freud was an unmusical man. The city of Mozart and Beethoven still had a great orchestra and opera company, but Freud was out of touch with both all 10 “Le bruit est pour le fat, la plainte pour le sot; L’honn`ete homme trompé es’éloigne et ne dit mot.” 11 Editors’ Note: Text from the bottom of the page was missing due to the age of the original document. The text picks up with the original German quote that follows: As es sich hat ünternümmen ze sejn a Ferd, müss es lejfen.

88

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

his life. Freud was a little more interested in the theatre, as was all Vienna. The theatre was what Hollywood, Broadway, and sports, all rolled up into one, is for America. And ordinary Viennese acted out the roles they saw at the theatre at every opportunity. The shopkeepers, no less than the salon hounds, constantly struck poses and loved to play the scenes to the hilt if only with a customer. Between the tips, the false titles, and acting, Freud detested the insincerity, the superficial amiability, the glossing over of reality. This overall deception galled him. “As far as the surroundings influenced his character at all … they produced what in analytical lingo is called a reaction-formation.” If the Viennese were colorful, Freud was colorless; if the Viennese were dramatic, he was singularly undramatic; if the Viennese perfected the polite fiction, Freud insisted on the truth. There is no doubt that Freud, the Jew, the intellectual, the unbending Viennese, the unrecognized and despised scientist, felt himself a stranger in Vienna. Yet, “he was not insensitive to neglect or slights. Once a Vienna collector challenged his income tax statement and pointed out that Freud’s fame was spread far beyond the borders of Austria. Freud wrote in reply, ‘but it does not begin until the border,’” (Reik 1940).12 Freud had a habit of expressing his deepest emotions in rather obvious and wry humor. The Jewish joke was, for him, a great source of insight into the psychic structure of human beings (Reik 1940).13 Freud’s exclusion from academic functions and the Vienna social scene fitted his own program. “He eliminated almost everything that did not fit in with his planned life. Visits, social calls, and parties did not exist for him. Yet he always found time to receive friends when they wanted help and advice, and even on the busiest day he never appeared hurried or preoccupied in listening to them. He never forgot to visit them when they were ill, but, with rare exceptions, he never spent a quarter of an hour on social functions” (Sachs 1944). Freud’s Daily Routine 1. 9a-1p: With patients 2. Midday meal with family 3. 2–3p: Hour walk (Also used to stop in bookshops, antique stores, barber shops, and his favorite cigar store. Freud was a chain smoker of cigars!) 4. 3p-4p: Consultations (appointments made in advance) 5. 4p to 7p or 7:30p work with patients 6. 7:30p: Evening meal 7. Back to his study, except on Wednesdays which belonged to the meeting of the Psychoanalytical Society. Another invariable exception to this schedule is that on Saturday afternoon he prepared his lecture for the informal 12 e.g. also Sachs (1944), p. 20, for a slightly different version of the same story. 13 Added materials on Freud’s “alienation” in Vienna: he married a girl from Hamburg, who spoke only the ‘purest’ German. “The household gave an impression of extraterritoriality like an island that is easily accessible from the mainland, but still an island” (Sachs 1944).

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

89

groups of students (Rank, Sachs, Jung, etc.) that gathered at his house every Saturday night. After the discussion, the group played poker. Occasionally, someone was invited to dine. On all other evenings, Freud worked alone, reading and writing well into the next morning. Freud hated to wait around for anything. “The most unnecessary expenditure I know of,” he once said to Sachs, “is for all the coal that’s needed for hellfire. It would be much better to go through the usual procedure, have the sinner condemned to so many hundred thousand years of roasting, then lead him into the next room and just let him sit there. To have to wait would soon become a worse punishment than being actually burned.” Yet Freud always waited for trains. “The only occasion when Freud squandered away his time ... was when he had to make a train. He was always a good deal ahead of schedule and had to wait around at the station for an hour or so,” (Sachs 1944). Throughout the day and night, Freud smoked. His average was 20 cigars a day. His study reeked of cigar smoke. The first thing he did upon greeting a visitor (usually a disciple) to his study was offer him a cigar. Once Hanns Sachs refused, saying he had just finished one. “He laughed at this—and that was the last time I heard him laugh” (Sachs 1944).14 Freud disliked short rests and holidays. He usually worked steadily until the end of June and then left Vienna until the end of September. The first part of this three month vacation was spent with his family at some quiet Alpine spa. The last part was spent travelling, usually in Italy or Athens. Freud liked his travels in Italy and his walks in the mountains. Most of all, he loved to pick up relics of early Etruscan life. His desktop was lined with idols and images from all the primitive peoples, and when he became famous, collectors sent him pieces from Asia, the near East, and Polynesia. When age and illness made travel impossible, Freud found a house outside the city and spent his summers in almost complete isolation there. Of all Freud’s travels, only his trip to America was a failure. He did not like the country. “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success” (Sachs 1944). Freud’s writing discipline was phenomenal. His manuscripts indicate that rarely, if ever, did he ever blot out a line of his characteristic big lettered, narrowly spaced, carefully punctuated words. He was not in the habit of writing anything down until he had thought out the exact form and content, even to the formulation of complete sentences. When he sat down to write it was practically a matter of dictation. If he was not satisfied, he would begin all over again. Freud was much concerned with the problem of style, and treated a work as an artistic whole. It would not do to patch things up, or put pieces together. He would have a piece of work on his terms or not at all.

14 “And the first?” [handwritten at end of sentence].

90

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Chapter 1—Biographical and Style of Thought Section II Freud: The German Ideology. In terms of Freud’s location and the direction of his thinking, it is important to examine the thinkers closest to him in time, space, and theory; both those before and those after. This job demands an investigation of contemporary German thought which might well begin with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. An insight into Schopenhauer might give us the nucleus of Freud’s metaphysics, or in his own terms—his meta-psychology. The World as WILL and IDEA … War Thus war functions as a therapeutic device, as a channel of regression to a lower and more natural level where he may discharge of the tensions of over-sublimation which equate with civilization. Immediately, one might ask: is the super-ego of modern man quite as lofty and sublime as Freud makes it? And is it the same for all society, as he says? If the Christian super-ego structure—the super-ego we find stated in the Sermon on the Mount—is not operative for us and the state, which exacts good conduct without troubling itself about the impulses underlying it, this has won over to civil obedience people who are not thereby following the dictates of their own natures. “Encouraged by this success, society has suffered itself to be led into straining the moral standard to the highest possible point, and thus it has forced its members into a yet greater estrangement from their instinctual dispositions. They are consequently subjected to an unceasing suppression of instinct, the resulting strain of which betrays itself … in neurotic disorders … and in the perpetual readiness of the inhibited instincts to break through to gratification at any suitable opportunity” (Freud 1953). War is a quite suitable opportunity, but in peace people live, psychologically, beyond their means. But man is a labile animal, and it is easier to go backward than forward. No amount of change eliminates the past in the mind. In this case, Freud writes, “every earlier stage of development persists alongside the later stage which had developed from it; the successive stages condition a co-existence” (Freud 1953). In a given situation, “[t]he earlier mental state may not have manifested itself for years, but none the less it is so far present that it may again at any time become the mode of expression of the forces of the mind, and that exclusively, as though all later developments have been annulled, undone” (Freud 1953). This extraordinary plasticity in the mind is also reflected in the always tentative evolution of political organization. Both might be described as containing an

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

91

essential “special capacity for retroversion—for regression … ” (Freud 1953) to an earlier and lower stage if evolution in our political institutions can always be reestablished. In fact, “all instincts have as their aim the reinstatement of (just such) an earlier condition” (Freud 1953). The primitive mind is, in the fullest sense of the word, he concludes, imperishable. “Everything past is preserved” (Freud 1953). The past is never dead. History is neither a straight line nor a circle, but a burial ground for live and pushing things. Behind Jesus there lurk the old gods of wrath and rape and slaughter. Indeed, “the slaughter of a foe gratifies an instinctive craving” (Freud 1953). War can bring about a permanent or temporary regression of this order. The irrationality of intellectuals during wartime is much easier to understand than the ferocities we have been discussing, for we know how much intelligence is a function of the emotional life. Reason produces few victories in that conflict with interest. The shrewdest persons, writes Freud, “will all of a sudden behave like imbeciles as soon as the needful insight is confronted by an emotional resistance” (Freud 1953). But intellectuals drop their logical infatuations and prostituted insights when the emotional excitement of conflict is ended. Freud did not go on to add that we are today in a constant state of conflict. What this means for our estimate of the intelligentsia is not for this writer to say. [But man’s alienation from “this once lovely and congenial world” (Freud 1953) is also the consequence of a changing attitude towards death. Society—overrefined and fearful—here again displays its preference for fantasy over reality. We tend to “‘shelve’ death, to eliminate it from life," (Freud 1953) The state,].15 If men behave in the manner indicated above, what more can we expect from nations? Having in this way come to understand … our fellow-citizens .... we shall the more easily endure the disillusionment which the nations, those greater units of the human race, have caused us, for we shall perceive that the demands we make upon them ought to be far more modest. Perhaps they are reproducing the course of human evolution, and still today represent very primitive phases in the organization and formation of higher unities. (Freud 1953)

In nations, as yet, there is no system of external compulsion, as there is in the individual. And the fond hope that a world wide commerce would provide it has left us. “It would seem that nations still obey their … passions more readily than their interests. Their interests serve them, at most, as rationalizations for their passions” (Freud 1953). War performs another important function in Freud’s view. It sweeps away society’s conventional treatment of death. Until war, we behave as if we did not have to pay our debt to death, to Nature. Our own death is unimaginable. We can think about it, if at all, only as spectators. Unconsciously, we are all convinced of our own immortality. Nor can we bear to think of the death of others. If there is the 15 Editors’ Note: Bracketed text marked out in original text.

92

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

slightest chance that we will profit by another’s death, or if it is someone whom we love, collapse and melancholia are the conventional reactions. But “life is impoverished; it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked” (Freud 1953). We become paralyzed creatures, seeking the thrill of life in the safe world of fiction. Section VI. Freud as Authoritarian (A, B, D) Draft 1 Freud16 was an aristocratic intellectual. Perhaps that is why he strikes one as being so metallic, yet so sensitive and humane. He despised the world as a whole, as every gentleman should,17 yet he was profoundly aware of the tragic dignity of every man. In his writings, in his autobiography, even in the laudatory biographies of Hanns Sachs (1944), and Fritz Wittels (1924), and Stefan Zweig (2013[1932]),18 the master emerges as a rarely attractive man, secretive, and domineering. It is hard to put him together—this high minded Viennese professor who found so much of the nature of man located in those parts which lie between the naval and the knee. Yet it is evident that he lived as intensely and as painfully and as profoundly as his creations live today.19 It is easy to resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque in Freud. His genius blankets his pettiness, his brilliance flashes us past the dark spots and the personal recriminations [and the ruthless insistence on obedience from his followers].20 His great wisdom will stand all such pointing up of his faults. But if we are to truly understand Freud, we must examine his general approach to human nature and locate him in a scale of values, as culture does with all the great philosophers. What did Freud think about people in general, and about each man in particular, and about the society in which each man lives? These kinds of questions should lead us further along the way and give us a closer touch with Freud’s philosophy. Does Freud believe man is good, and if left alone will honor his father and march upward and onward to bigger and better things? On the contrary, Freud believed every man is evil by nature, and society is but a structure of hypocrisies designed to hold the evil creature in check. If man is evil by nature, Freud asks, “How do we imagine the process by which an individual attains to a higher plane of morality?” He answers: by “eradicating 16 To be collected in the Janus theme. 17 C.f. his remarks in Group Psych. on the Masses 18 Sachs, ‘Freud, Master and Friend’/ Wittele, ‘Sigmund Freud’/ Zweig, ‘Mental Healers’/ (articles by his sister?) 19 How so? Must relate a thematic episode) 20 Editors’ Note: Bracketed sentence marked-out out in original text.

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

93

from him the evil human tendencies and, under the influence of education and a civilized environment, replacing them by good ones” (Freud 1947b). This is what Freud means by the process of sublimation.21 But, “in reality there is no such thing as ‘eradicating’ evil tendencies.” The past is never dead. And in the past man was a killer. “The primitive mind is, in the fullest sense of the word, imperishable.” The elemental instincts, which are “the inmost essence of human nature” and “are common to all men and aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs,” such as gratification and self-esteem,22 remain. The old pessimist would first say, of course, “these instincts in themselves are neither good nor evil. We but classify them and their manifestations in that fashion, according as they meet the needs and demands of the human community” (Freud 1947b). But then he must give away his pessimism. “It is admitted that all those instincts which society condemns as evil—let us take as representatives of the selfish and the cruel—are of this primitive type” (Freud 1947b). But it is society’s fault if we are disappointed in ourselves because we expect too much. We live with the delusion that we are better than we are. Indeed, as we shall see later, we try to live like saints when we are sinners. And the attempt causes trouble. But, for the present, we must realize that there is nothing holding us back except each other’s illusion about the conscience of the next man. “Our conscience is not the inflexible judge that ethical teachers are wont to declare it, but in its origin is ‘dread of community’ and nothing else. When the community has no rebuke to make, there is an end of all suppression of the baser passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery, and barbarity so incompatible with their civilization that one would have held them to be impossible” (Freud 1947b). But only Jewish professors and sublimated humanists such as Freud and Durkheim could be so surprised at the behavior of civilized people.23 His astonishment and disenchantment led Freud to posit an elaboration of a theory of human nature which he had constructed earlier. The personality of man consisted in those central parts which are given in every man at birth—and these are narcissistic, egoist, anti-social, and base—and those parts which are imposed upon him by the society in which he lived; and these parts are social, responsible, and high-minded. Thus the baser passions are also the basic passions, and are always incompatible with civilization. The word “civilization,” for Freud, almost means anything that is not ourselves and yet not simply somebody else but a relationship between the two. Thus, roughly, civilization may be equated with society or with our culture. What is Civilization? Freud defines it as sublimated behavior; that is behavior oriented to satisfy the central part of our personality only obliquely. “Civilization is the fruit of renunciation of instinctual satisfaction and from each newcomer in turn it exacts the same (painful) renunciation” (Freud 1947a).24 21 Riesman’s note: (added def.). 22 Riesman’s note: Food & sex? 23 Not the place for this—later, in the critique. 24 (addition).

94

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Unfortunately, “in this way we are led to regard human nature as better than it actually is” (Freud 1947a). All that glitters certainly is not gold. It may just be varnish. And this is the case with the behavior of a “civilized man.” We are content to take man’s actions at face value and call the vicious little egoist good if he is on his good behavior, seduced by love and cautioned by a system of rewards and punishments. But the only manner in which to judge a man is as God judges him: by knowing his secret motives. The wisdom of the ages tells us that a scoundrel may have beautiful manners but he is nevertheless a scoundrel. But civilized society is content to exact good conduct, if not by the premium of love than by the economics of reward and punishment, without troubling itself “about the impulses underlying it … ” (Freud 1947a). Here again is an illustration of Freud’s style of thought, in which whatever is secret and hidden is real and true and whatever is open and above board is only a fake reality and quite untrue except as a misleading symptom. Our dreams, which we think unreal, are the most real things about us. And our dreams show us to be, one and all, Viennese scientists and American ladies, all are consummate egoists. In imposing renunciation (civilized behavior) on us egoists, society enforces a collar and new tricks on reluctant animals, “who are not thereby following the dictates of their own natures” (Freud 1947a). But, always, as civilization progresses it contains the seeds of its own destruction. If we get too refined we explode all the more violently. Freud’s attack on refinement is an attack at its unreality and at its consequences. “Society has suffered itself to be led into straining the moral standard to the highest possible point, and thus it has forced its members into a yet greater estrangement from their instinctual dispositions” (Freud 1947a). The more refined we get, the less ourselves we are; a point that provided D.H. Lawrence with the theme of his major writings. The tragedy is that “anyone thus compelled to act continually in the sense of precepts which are not the expression of instinctual inclinations is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his means …” (Freud 1947). Society forces man to over reach himself and every so often he falls flat on his face. But man finds his fall such a relief from the strain of civilized living that he stays down on all fours for a time. In wars, “the greater units of humanity, the peoples and the states, have mutually abrogated their moral restraints,” permitting themselves “relief for a while from the heavy pressure of civilization …” War grants “a passing satisfaction to the instincts (society) holds in check” (Freud 1947a). Violence is the first truth, as children and primitive men attest. Aggression is the first law of man’s attitude towards other men. Violence is necessary to balance the pathological effects of the system of refinements we call civilization (Freud 1947a). Man is over refined and too nervous. War is a natural protest against this system of polite hypocrisy and softness and intellect. As Georges Sorel saw it, violence (which would give the proletariat purposiveness and re-toughen the middle classes) “seems … to be the only means by which European nations—at present stupefied by humanitarianism—can recover their former energy” (1950:90).

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

95

Sorel, like Freud, is interested in the problem of the genesis of morality. And, like Freud, he believes man is unnatural when he is refined. Sorel, however, saw moral recovery—a righting of the balance between instinct and civilization— brought about by a new fierceness. Freud was not so naïve. For him the problem was not one of moral recovery. Morals were not to be recovered but grafted. Sorel believed that when aggression of any direct sort is frowned upon, the society is dying. Freud believed, in such a case, that the society was very much alive and doing its police work well. But both believed in the importance of fatalism. Man would conduct himself more nobly and more vitally if he walked always in the shadow of death. “A society,” wrote Sorel (1950), “is vital precisely to the extent it believes there are many things more important than the preservation of life.” Si vis vitam, para mortem.25 If Freud resembles Sorel in his belief in the necessity of violence, so long as the disparity between man’s instinctual drives and his super-ego structure exists, he is closer to Nietzsche in his belief that the process of artistic creation is irrational. “Now the writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of phantasy” (Freud [1908]1927:174) which is all his own and which he cherishes as he cherishes their source: his will, his most powerful wishes. Nietzsche agreed. The creative mind, he said, is like a primitive dancer— euphoric, in love with himself, intoxicated self-forgotten.26 Nietzsche believed the true culture creation was an unconscious, unsophisticated devotion to the Act, which for Freud is a symptom of the wish. From both men, then, the creative act is out of a narcissistic trance, and non-deliberate. It is interesting to note what this connotes for all those elements in a culture which are deliberate, conscious, refined, intellectualized, etc. Freud dismisses such creativeness as not within the area of his discussion and less important to insight into man’s nature; a typical Freudian habit of finding methodological reasons for making value judgments. For Nietzsche, who is less pedantic, such a travesty of true creativeness is pernicious and he would banish it from his society. For both writers, man is crushed under by his history. Inevitably, he must react against it.27 The folk elements in the psychologies of both Freud and Nietzsche are quite apparent. For both men, the innocent (i.e. ignorant) man is the good fellow.28 The intelligent man is the devil. Knowledge, for Nietzsche, is the deadly enemy of decision making, and one cannot work hard nor take heroic stands without making decisions. For both, there is the overtone of knowledge as weakness, except, of course29 in so far as it is an awareness of only those insights and values that are 25 Editors’ Note: “If you wish peace, prepare for war.” 26 Note characteristics of Negro jazz … Ernst Bornemann. 27 C.f. N. on the dangers of reading history. Room for more elaborate statement here, leading into the problem of the use both men made of proverbs and the aphorisms of folk wisdom. 28 C.f. Freud’s ideal, mature genital character. 29 C.f. analysis.

96

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

fruitful for each personality’s particular task, for each psyche’s own stand. Nietzsche would not have argued with that. And isn’t this what analysis does for a person? In our literature there is an antinomy between the poor fool—the sucker who finally must resort to violence to serve truth and nation—and the Devil, who is an intellectual and a deviant. Sometimes the devil is the Jew scientist (Freud himself). Sometimes he is the brilliant … strategist, with the monocle, telescopic eye; sometimes simply an urbane sophisticate. Or sometimes he is, as in Nietzsche, a university professor who does nothing but knows everything. The poor fool is closer to his instinctual origins. He never left home. Thus he is a healthier man, having no heights of sublimation from which to fall. This element in Freud’s thinking—the sentimentalization of the unimaginative solid, fertile citizen is in the great tradition of romantic conservative ideology. It is interesting that the great romancers of blood and iron as the two basic constituents of the chemistry of personality have been aristocratic intellectuals or city slickers. From Edmund Burke to Schlegal, from Sir Walter Scott to Steinbeck, and including Hitler, the sentimentalizers of the soil have not been on it. If highly mobile urban intellectuals can sentimentalize the stability of the soil, there is no reason why a highly conscientious and cultured Jewish professor in Vienna should not indulge his day dreams on the ineffable sensuality of uninhibited, barbarous people. But we are all barbarous, underneath our suits of clothes. And it is this pessimism which puts Freud in the line of great authoritarian philosophers. All authoritarian philosophy is pessimistic and all pessimistic philosophy authoritarian. “This is one of the strains of nature; it affects boundless liberty … . Whatever power he hath received, he hath a corrupt nature that will improve it in one thing or other … what desperate deceits and wickedness there is in the hearts of men.”30 This is the essence of all pessimist theory; and Freud might echo “what desperate deceits and wickedness there is in the hearts of men.” But there is this consolation: our mortification and disillusionment is no more for we see the truth and are disenchanted. “In reality our fellow citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they have never risen so high as we believed” (Freud [1947]1962). What is the structure of this primitive mind, to which Freud refers back [to] so much of what is basic and everlasting in modern man’s personality?31 First, it must be said that Freud locates the primitive mind, analytically and historically, by a study of neurotics and perverts, and children and savages. In each case he finds that the primitive mind is narcissistic. With extrapolations of this kind of evidence, Freud concludes that narcissism is the basic factor in man’s nature. Almost all states of being can be referred back to narcissism: schizophrenia and parental love, melancholia and babyhood. Even genital love has a narcissistic base. For love rests on the factor of over estimation, which in turn is narcissistic. Love, as the projection of a part of the ego into another

30 John Cotton, Limitation of Government. 31 “Style of thoughts and Basic Personality.”

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

97

object, “originates in the capacity of the ego to satisfy some of its instincts autoerotically …” (Freud [1963]1991). In our origins (childhood, primitive race history, etc.) is our meaning. If in our origins hides the truth then it is thematic to write that in the beginning there is “a narcissistic organization of the ego” (Freud [1963]1991). Not only is there the narcissism of the abnormal to guide us towards the realities of normalcy, but there is also “the primary narcissism of the child” (Freud [1963]1991) and even “the attitude of fond parents towards their children, we cannot but perceive … as a revival and reproduction of their own, long since abandoned narcissism. Their feeling is characterized by over estimation, that sure indication of a narcissistic feature in object choice” (Freud [1947]1962). War is the great regression, just as civilization is the great sublimation. War “strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us.” The Hero becomes, once again, the killer—he who regresses most, with the sanction and connivance of civilization. Heroism is the most archaic form of finiteness, for Freud. It is a personal denial of death and a belief in personal immortality. As with maniacs, the Hero shouts “Nothing can Happen to me” (Freud [1947]1962)! In Austria and Germany, in the war of 1914–1918, inmates of insane asylums were thrown into the front lines and gained notoriety as much decorated heroes. In World War II, advancing psychology had competently institutionalized the social premium of neurotics in certain social roles. The concentration camp leader and the brass hat were picked with fine scientific hands. For Freud, war is therapeutically necessary. It realigns psychic structure and institutions. It readjusts the disparity between reality and our superego structure. It makes life “interesting again.” “When death can no longer be denied, life has regained its full significance.” Such language wanders dangerously close to the fascist theory of permanent barbarization—the return to the primal man. If it is true that “we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers, with whom the lust for killing was in the blood,” and if it is true that the past is never dead, then we may console ourselves that modern institutionalizations of barbarism—the compulsory labor camp, etc.— have the “merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs” (Freud 1918). The only real end of life is to face up to it. “To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all human beings” (Freud [1947]1962). When we admit the inevitability of war and the hard reality of death, life becomes “interesting again” and fully significant … “Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes flat, as superficial, as one of those American flirtations in which it is from the first understood that nothing is to happen, contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear in mind the serious consequences” (Freud [1947]1962). The most serious consequence is death, and if one would take life and make something of it, the thing to do is to assign Death its great place at the end of the line. The last thing to say, perhaps, is “live dangerously.”

98

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

But how are we to approach the problem of death, whose reality is so necessary to us if we are to stand up under the burden of living? Here, again, in his profound analysis of our attitudes toward death, Freud illustrates his thesis that man’s surname is Narcissus. Man’s basic narcissism displays itself in two ways: (1) by the denial of death for ourselves (2) by the ready admission of death for strangers and for enemies. It would be better to say that this is an illustration of Freud’s basic insight and style of thought, which is a model [we call ambivalence.]32 The Politics of Sigmund Freud: Chapter on War Draft 1 Given war, Freud asks what are its psychological functions and political significances. [Never has any event been destructive of so much that is valuable in humanity or so debasing to the highest that we know.33 Never is the alienation34 or the anxiety of “being out of it” felt more keenly.]35 “The individual who is not himself a combatant—and so a wheel in the gigantic machinery of war— feels conscious of disorientation and of an inhibition in his powers and activities” (Freud [1947]1962). This implies that to be above the battle is as psychologically difficult as to be in it. The non-combatant—and this insight has become a truism only since Freud’s time—is “disoriented” and paralyzed. Freud just lived to see the beginnings of total war, and some of the techniques developed, by government and voluntary associations, to bring every man, woman, and child into some sense of combat. War governments have learned since his time to use most effectively the techniques of involving everybody as a combatant by staging regressive fantasies in the press, over the radio, and on the screen; at the same time heightening guilt feelings by measuring the non-combatant against ideal images of the citizenpatriot, thus “enabling (the non-combatant) to find out what is wrong with himself” (Freud [1947]1962). Freud proposes to tell men what is wrong with themselves during war by distinguishing “two among the most potent factors in the mental distress felt by non-combatants” (Freud 1918): the disillusionment which war evokes and the changed attitude towards death which war imposes.

32 Editors’ Note: Bracketed portion was a handwritten completion of the sentence in original text. 33 C.f. p288. 34 The term ‘alienation’ is used to denote a psychological disorientation, in which there is an estrangement from the dominant patterns of behavior in the community. 35 Editors’ Note: Bracketed sentence marked out by hand in original document.

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

99

What does Freud mean by disillusion? [He means the psychological resultant of the vectors of aiming too high and falling too low.]36 Disillusion may be defined, in his terms, as the gap created by the disparity between the demands of the state, our own expectations, and our own basic human natures. This is the key to Freud’s unarticulated but operative hypothesis of the therapeutic effect of war on individuals and a state, as we shall develop it here. The sources of our disillusion are that we permit ourselves hopes. “One need not be a sentimentalist,” Freud begins, in his discussion of the mechanics of disillusion, to perceive “the biological and psychological necessity of suffering in the economics of human life,” (Freud 1918) yet one can be disappointed in the brutality and degradation of European war. “We were prepared to find that wars between the primitive and civilized peoples, between those races whom a color line divides, nay, wars with and among the undeveloped nationalities of Europe” (Freud 1947) would for a considerable period continue to occupy mankind. But we did expect that among the “white nations upon whom the leadership of the human species had fallen, who were known to have cultivated world wide interests,” (Freud 1918) there would be a resolution of conflicts in a more peaceful and efficacious manner. Western nations had achieved high—even too high—standards of individual behavior; force and fraud were forbidden to private usage by the state. The individual was especially forbidden to make use of the immense advantages to be gained by the practice of lying and deception in the competition with his fellow men. The ... state regarded these accepted standards as the basis of its existence; stern were its proceedings when an impious hand was laid upon them; frequent the pronouncements that to subject them even to examination by a critical intelligence was entirely impracticable. (Freud [1947]1962)

Though to be sure, “mingled remnants of certain other races that were universally unpopular”37 (Freud 1918) were partially excluded from participation in the life of the state, the great nations seem to have transcended xenophobia. Yet war still comes and even the most civilized man (Freud was in Vienna, of course, in 1915) is caught up by it. If war must be, how have these civilized men imagined it? As a chivalrous crusade, fought between gentlemen, and limited to the establishment of the superiority of one side or another in combat; after which peace and international accord would reign … But the war in which naïve men of good will “refused to believe” has not only broken out, but, more important, has brought with it utter cruelty, embitterment and implacable hatred and loathing where once some measure of mutual comprehension existed.

36 Editors’ Note: Bracketed sentence marked out by hand in original document. 37 Veiled ref. to A.S. Posits higher level of general repress. Editors’ note: Footnote marked out by hand in original document.

100

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy The individual in any given nation has in … war a terrible opportunity to convince himself of what would occasionally strike him in peacetime—that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong doing, not because it desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. The state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. (Freud [1947]1962)

Freud denies the objection, which, in his usual style, he raises himself, that every state in effect is a Rechtsstaat which can substitute expediency for morality whenever it suits its purpose. It the state is bound to seek its own advantage, “it is no less disadvantageous … for the individual man to conform to the customs of morality and refrain from brutal and arbitrary conduct” (Freud [1947]1962). The theory that there is a duality between state standards and individual ethics in political behavior is, for Freud, false. The “relaxation of ... moral ties” between states must have a “seducing influence on the morality of individuals,” (Freud [1947]1962) for conscience, as we have seen before, is not an independent force capable of preserving its own integrity. “Our conscience is not the inflexible judge that ethical teachers are wont to declare it, but in its origin is ‘dread of the community’ and nothing else” (Freud [1947]1962).38 When the state no longer rebukes man for his transgressions, but rather puts a positive sanction on them, then there is an end of all suppression of the baser passions. “Men perpetuate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their civilization that one would have held them to be impossible” (Freud [1947]1962). If the state, the very guardian of morals, becomes the instrument and teacher of cruelty, fraud, treachery, and barbarity, what then can the spectator—one of those few who are repelled by war—be except disillusioned? Yet his disillusion merely robs him of an illusion. Men such as Einstein and Freud,39 who suffer not merely an intellectual and emotional repulsion towards war, “but a constitutional intolerance,” indulge in a gratifying fantasy which spares them the pain of reality when they assure themselves that men and nations live solidly on a plane of morality. Psychoanalytical findings here come to the rescue of political bewilderment; they indicate that the poverty of ethical behavior between nations, like the poverty of kindness among men, is a regressive condition which most truly indicates the true nature of men and politics. Without a shred of cynicism, Freud asks: “How do we determine the process by which an individual attains to a higher plane of morality?” On the basis of his method of basing generalizations about society upon a basis of clinically observable tendencies in individual cases, Freud attempts to answer his own question.

38 Italics mine.—P.R. 39 C.f. quote p.96 Why War?

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

101

The first answer is sure to be: he is good and noble from his very birth, his very earliest beginnings. We need not consider this any further. A second answer will suggest that we are concerned with a developmental process, and will probably assume that this development consists in eradicating from him the evil human tendencies, and, under the influence of education and a civilized environment, replacing them by good ones. (Freud [1947]1962)

What is worth remarking on is that evil nature should manifest such staying power, in the face of all-powerful nurture. But the thesis that the polity eliminates anti-political tendencies in man is precisely the one from which Freud proposes to dissent. Man is no more apolitical than he is an unpolitical animal. In fact his “inmost essence ... consists of elemental instincts which are common to all men and aim at the gratification of certain primal needs” (Freud [1947]1962). These essential instincts are in themselves neither political nor unpolitical, neither good nor evil. Our value classifications of them in one camp or the other is a tentative business, resting on the needs of society at that time. If anything, it might be admitted that all those primary and involuntary drives in man, which arise out of the unconscious and called instincts by Freud, which society usually labels as antisocial and unpolitical are of this elemental type. In Freud’s view, man is never one thing or the other; he is always both. His is the dialectic unity of twin opposites. Man can never be defined as anything except ambivalence.40 Freud plunges us into an explanation of the ambivalence of love and hate, of good and bad, of the sources of political behavior. The passage is swift and brilliant: Primitive instincts undergo a lengthy process of development before they are allowed to become active in the adult being. They are inhibited, directed towards other aims and departments, become commingled, alter their objects and are to some extent turned back upon their possessor. Reaction formations against certain instincts take the deceptive form of a change in content, as though egoism had changed into altruism, or cruelty into pity. (Freud [1947]1962)

Thus a “bad” child, in a characteristic instance of the developmental significance of the concept of ambivalence, often becomes a “good” adult; the egoist becomes a helpful and self-sacrificing member of the community, and the little sadists and animal tormentors become humanitarians. This occurs in part because of the influence on egoistic instincts of socializing needs: for example, the need for love. “We learn to value being loved as an advantage for which we are willing to give up other advantages” (Freud [1947]1962). Such an influence may be called an internal one. The external factor enabling an individual to live in a community is the community itself. Society is the consequence of the renunciation of instinctual 40 I have disc. the relation between methodology and Freudian methodology. Suffice it here to repeat that the dynamic theories of dial. and Amb. are closely analogous.

102

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

gratifications. But this renunciation has become a part of man’s personality;41 it becomes internalized. Societal pressure is converted into “conscience.”42 But we are always liable to overestimate our ability to rise to the levels of our culture, and so are constantly inclined to think man better than he really is. Even when an action is “good” from an ethical point of view it can just as likely as not be born of “bad” motives. A society cannot rely simply on the obvious and interesting pressures of love. Renunciation is also a function of another system of premiums, namely reward and punishment. More generally man behaves well only because it is expedient and not out of any inner change. There are some men who act well without the stimulus of expediency, but their numbers, Freud remarks, are grossly exaggerated. Nevertheless, we tend to focus on these model few as images of what all men ought to be. [Thus encouraged, society strains its political morality higher and higher, leading to even greater gaps between man’s morality and man’s nature.]43 [But the reader may wonder at Freud’s unwritten hypothesis that one of the causes of the tragedy of war is the disparity between the Christian super-ego structure dominant in Western nations and the basic nature of man. His theory seems to be that the higher we try to climb on the road of civilization the more stringent is the repression and the more violent the inevitable regression. We must examine].44 References Brinton, Crane. 1949. English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Boston: Harvard University Press. Einstein, Albert, and Sigmund Freud. 1933. Why War? The Correspondance Between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Freud, Sigmund. [1908]1927. “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming.” In Freud: Collected Papers. Vol. 4. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1918. Reflections on War and Death. Translated by Dr. A.A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company. Freud, Sigmund. 1947. Freud: On War, Sex and Neurosis. Edited by Sander Katz. Translated by Joan Riviere. New York: Arts & Science Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1947b. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 41 def. of Personality. 42 Freud insists, however, that there is no original internal compulsion to obedience in society. “In the last resort it may be said that every internal compulsion was originally nothing but an external one” (Freud [1947]1962). 43 Editors’ Note: Bracketed sentence marked out by hand in original document. 44 Editors’ Note: Bracketed sentence marked out by hand in original document.

Freud: A Study in Ambivalence

103

1–5, translated by James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Freud, Sigmund. [1963]1991. General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. New York: Touchstone. Lawrence, D.H. 1932. Apocalypse. New York: Viking. McIlwain, Charles Howard. 1959. The Growth of Political Thought in the West, From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages. New York: The Macmillan Company. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1917. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Helen Zimmern. New York: Modern Library. Popper, Karl. 1945. “The Poverty of Historicism, III.” Economica 12(46): 69–89. Popper, Karl. 1962. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1 and II. New York: Harper & Row. Reik, Theodor. 1940. From Thirty Years with Freud. New York: Farrer & Rinehart, Inc. Sachs, Hanns. 1944. Freud: Master and Friend. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sorel, Georges. 1950. Reflections on Violence. New York: Collier Books. Wittels, Fritz. 1924. Sigmund Freud: His Personality, His Teaching & His School. Stratford, NH: Ayer Co. Publishers. Zweig, Stefan. [1932]2013. Mental Healers: Mesmer, Eddy and Freud. London: Pushkin Press.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 8

A Suggestion for Coding the Intensive White Collar Interviews David Riesman

Editor’s Note: The following is a 1948 memo from Riesman to C. Wright Mills regarding a typology for coding the White Collar interviews. The original memo, located by Rupert Wilkinson in Mills’s collected papers at The University of Texas, was copied and returned to David Riesman around 1989. It was subsequently filed with his papers at the Harvard University Archives. This is based on Fromm’s typology. The idea is to rate the subject according to how they use their moral problem, or their moral outlook in terms of three possible outlooks: what we may call the Protestant ethic, the marketing ethic, and the rational ethic. For our purposes, we are roughly distinguishing them as follows: Protestant Ethic—the goal of life is achievement through work; the idea of selfimprovement, and the traditional values of honesty, unselfishness, trustworthiness are strong and valuable for themselves, as well as for proved effectiveness in advancement; the traditional values may well have been considerably weakened and a great deal of cynicism developed as to their efficiency, but they still seem part of a framework towards which one reacts positively or negatively. The two permanent things in this ethic are advancement and self-improvement. Marketing Ethic—here the goal of life is acceptability; being the kind of person that everyone can like. The goals of the Protestant ethic only exist here as means to being liked, fitting in, etc. Rational Ethic—this is very hard to distinguish from the Protestant ethic; it is “being a real person,” “oneself,” and the aim becomes self-development and happiness. Criteria for distinction—the question “what is your best trait … ”/“your worst” gives us an excellent indication. The person who says—as so many do—that his worst trait is his inability to get along with everybody, his temper, his stubbornness, his failure to like all kinds of peoples, indicates a person in whom the market ethic is strong. Certainly, in a sample of white collar workers, we would expect the marketing ethic to be prominent, and by this criterion, it is. A person in whom the

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

106

Protestant ethic is strong may give as his worst trait “selfishness,” for example, as does case 57. Attitude toward work is another good indicator: the person who likes to meet people, and likes his work (in view of what the work is in this sample) and particularly who likes the meeting of people involved in work but not the work itself—seems to indicate the marketing personality. The person who dislikes the work because one doesn’t meet people, who would like to travel and meet people, who wants to get a lot of fun out of life, who likes the movies because one learns so much—again, the marketing ethic. On the other hand, a person who doesn’t like his work because it’s so dull, it doesn’t seem to be important or do anything, it isn’t educational (not in the sense of “teaching you about people,” but in the more traditional sense of educational), that person falls in the Protestant ethic. Is this worthwhile?—It depends on two things: whether we get sharply defined types from the material, using this system of coding, types that correlate with other features that have not been used for placing the individual; and whether we get a different distribution of types if this questionnaire—or a part of it—is used on other social groups, particularly workers. On rating—we propose as a rating system the following: Each subject is likely to show a blend of all three ethics. On a scale of 0 to 7, one rates each subject for presence or absence of the ethic in question. We then get a number of distinctive profiles: eventually we may decide to code by type of profile rather than by this first rating. We suggest the following rating for a number of the interviews: 1 Table 8.1

58

Riesman’s suggested coding for White Collar interviews, based on Erich Fromm’s typology.1 PE

ME

RE

4+

3+

2+

57

6

0

3

56

0

5+

0

Further notes to the typology: 1. The scheme assumes that each person confronts a moral problem—how to live. Some are more aware of this than others. Prevailing ethical systems function as ideologies to instruct people in the solution of this problem: 1 Editors’ Note: Table number and caption not in the original.

A Suggestion for Coding the Intensive White Collar Interviews

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

107

in some cases, to make the effort at the solution itself is an agenda (with resistant guilt feelings for inevitable failure). The white collar class in present day America is making the transition from the Protestant ethic to the marketing ethic, and its members are in various stages of that transition; there are very few signs of recognition of genuine moral problems, i.e. non-ideological ones imposed by external authority, which, for want of a better term, we relate to the rational ethic. The PE is dominant in nineteenth century America (until 1914, let’s say); the ME is dominant today. But there are geographical and class differences in distribution, and perhaps also sex differences; i.e., it may be that men, with the discontinuities in their training, are more propelled to the ME than even working women. The PE hangs on in New England, Plainville USA, etc. But because it is a hanger-on, it is tighter (in the sense of constricted, lacking in confidence) than in the nineteenth century; it brings frustrations only, not rewards. Thus, people trained in it, who because of temperament or conscience cannot make the transfer to ME, tend to be withdrawn—hoarding types in Fromm’s term; they do not have the courage and resourcefulness needed for aggressive exploitive behavior, or if they do, they won’t be found in the lower middle class. Thus goals are trimmed down to size; passive receptive attitudes taken towards life (but life and people are felt as threats); perhaps these people tend to be those labeled unattractive by their interviewers, often unmarried spinsters with “ideals.” The person with the ME is “on the make” in a very different sense; in a sense, this is Weber’s secularized, success oriented PE in an extreme fullemployment-economy form. But the urge to have fun, which seems so hedonistic, is actually a carryover from the PE in two ways: it is external, felt as a compulsion; and it is really fun as a means to something else, namely a feeling of belonging, of having the experiences which the culture labels as valuable. Fun is a means to salvation, as it were, in morbid idiosyncratic experience in one’s final rating. (See my article on “The Cash Customer”). Since the ME is dominant in high status groups, adjustment to it is felt as a solution of moral problems, especially easily since “adjustment” is itself the principle value in this ethic. It is much more passive than the PE was in its heyday in one direction: there is an absence of bold and daring exploitation, of overt sadism, etc.; there is also less struggling with the self-traditional moral terms: one may pummel one’s body or pluck one’s eyebrows into shape, but not one’s “soul.” But it is just as active as the PE (despite the cult of effortlessness which accompanies it)—a point easily established by looking at leisure time activity, and seeing how little the ME person listens to himself and how much he needs to live with background noises such as the radio. Since the PE and the ME are compatible with different periods of capitalism—periods of course which overlap—it may be possible to trace in the interviews the extent to which people with PE find themselves in

108

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

situations demanding the ME. There is, for instance, the case of the Gentile girl who is being trained in selling (“It doesn’t hurt to show a bit of leg, girlie”) in an aggressive Jewish enterprise which sells want-ads, who resents deeply her new role, yet feels she is learning by it. This enterprise, being highly competitive and marginal rather than staid and monopolistic and service-minded, is nevertheless closer in spirit to PE than to ME; it represents in its way a kind of transition. Strictly ME behavior is required in such outfits as insurance companies, hospital service corp. (One may perhaps observe this process in accelerated form in Russia in the period since the Revolution: first, a campaign to put over the PE, then, among the higher ups, a weakening of the Puritan pattern and an increase in the “get along” adjustment of the ME?) A typical ME reaction is that of the girl who works at Stern’s selling handkerchiefs: her aim is to sell scarves since that means more $s total—even though she is not on commission, it is she who is rung up on the cash register. (Cf. the man selling insurance who feels “tired” when he has a bad day, i.e. a day without sales.) 7. The foregoing considerations would lead us to expect that the ME person would be: young, attractive, better educated, ethnically medium (i.e., not, e.g., a Finn from Seattle, but 2d or 3d generation urban “natives”), urban or urban bound, and working in an economic situation which demands little initiative or self-starting ability and much “adjustment” to customers, fellow workers, and superiors who have a personalized relation to them. The PE person would be more on her own, older, unattractive, not so well educated, not so ethnically medium (either old American or recent immigrant), and with rural ties. Neither category will cover certain working class types who are not “Americanized,” e.g. the aggressive lower-class working-stiff, the fighting Negro, the Wobbly, etc.; there is an interview with a Spanish person (S. Am?) which cannot be coded in our system since her ethic antedates both PE and ME, though she strives as most do, to adapt to one or the other or both in the USA. 8. It is obvious that the RE is best defined negatively, since it is so rare. It occurs when there is insight; when there is awareness of unused gifts, of being dissatisfied with the unchallenging nature of one’s work or associates (in intrinsic, not status terms). It is less tolerant of evil than the ME, but less given to moral indignation against lower classes or races than the PE. There is something original about it, in the sense that it pays attention to the person’s idiosyncratic needs; nor is it the “get ahead” of the PE, which is status and career bound; the stress is towards more personalized achievement. That even glimmers of it are seldom found in our cases is not surprising though perhaps, in principle, something of it is always present; Tolstoy, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, describes how a person whose life had always been lived in strict ME terms, came on his deathbed to be aware of what his problem in life—finding a purpose—really was.

Chapter 9

Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That David Riesman

Editors’ Note: The following is a 1957 memo addressed to Riesman’s coresearchers at the Leisure Center, Sociability and Interview Project. The memo is noteworthy because of its “typicalness” as a common and regular sort of memo that Riesman would distribute to the group, and because it demonstrates both his ever present analysis of the people and environment around him, his eye for observational detail, and the ability to see connections from seemingly divergent and unconnected events and people. See the chapters in this volume “The Structure of Party Conversation”and “An Examination of Sociable Conversations and the Work of the Sociability Project” for more information on the project and the place of Riesman’s memos and “notes on this and that.” On the plane from Hartford to Washington I was joined at New York by an elderly man who was very friendly. I was reading [William] Holly Whyte’s (1958) story of “Urban Sprawl” in the current issue of Fortune but the elderly man interrupted to introduce himself—I never did get his name—and to make clear that he wanted to chat. (Mostly in my experience people in planes, if they do recognize the existence of the person in the next seat, do not introduce themselves but just chat.) He also soon informed me that he was the President of the National Labor Relations Board. In some ways this made it harder to talk for I would have liked to ask him about the Reuther proposal to the auto companies but felt this would be tactless, since I couldn’t remember what his politics were supposed to be if any. Instead I asked him where he was from and he turned out to be from South Dakota, adding he had been a Justice of the Supreme Court there. He asked me at once where in Washington I was going and I told him the Shoreham, and he said he would be glad to give me a lift out there—a quite astonishing courtesy more characteristic of the still unacculturated Dakotan than of the metropolitan man. I asked him whether he had been to a hearing in New York, and he said no, he had been there to install the new chief of the New York Regional Office. He said he was sorry he hadn’t been able to bring his daughter with him since she had never been in New York City, and that she felt “entitled” to go there. This led to much talk about the daughter who had been a freshman at Earlham College last year but was transferring to the University of South Dakota out of homesickness (his son

110

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

was a lawyer with one of the government agencies in Washington, and he hoped the son would leave government agency work and go on his own, although he feared he would not, being too retiring for the competitive struggle). I said that I knew Paul Herzog, the New Deal Chairman of the NLRB, in order to make clear my own political colors and then asked him whether the agency was running out of business with the growing sophistication of businessmen in dealing with unions. He said they had very few of the older types of complaints since managements were now reconciled to unions but that they were in effect making new business through new kinds of regulations and new opportunities for controversy; for instance, the free speech provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. I asked him if there were many holdovers from his predecessor and he was proud to tell me there were a great many even on his own personal staff (yet I thought to myself what a fall off in the intellectual caliber of the agency with a head who had no real mission in life except to see Washington, D.C. before he died). Having pretty much exhausted the obvious topics, I gave him my Fortune to read and read something else resuming the conversation on the ride to the hotel—a ride which meant some delay on his part in getting home. I asked him about social life in Washington, and he said it was difficult for him since he and his wife were teetotalers, and Washington entertainment was all by cocktail parties so they could not reciprocate, but would occasionally give a small dinner party. But mostly we talked about automobiles. He had a brand new Plymouth—it had all the fixings— and was pleased to show me its various gadgets, including a very noisy air conditioner type of defroster. He said he was a great trader of cars and had traded in a Packard for this Plymouth because he thought Packards were declining in value even though the Packard had not gone many miles, and could easily have gone many more. It occurred to me he might also feel that the new Plymouth was in line both with the modesty and the rank he wanted to present in Washington for it was very flossy and technicolored and yet was one of the so-called low-price cars. That is, he was at once presenting himself as from South Dakota and up-to-date. He had practiced law apparently for a number of years in Rapid City, and had moved three years ago to Pierre, the capital, as a Justice. Rapid City is in the hills and is pleasant but Pierre is miserable, and he was glad to get out of it for Washington, as was his wife. The beauty of Washington and the social life was still a novelty, and his wife belonged to a group of women who were the wives of the heads of executive agencies—a rather strange tie, I thought, of quite disparate people, and one of those voluntary associations which are invented to escape from loneliness. He said what a hard time his daughter had had in transferring from the high school in South Dakota to the one in the Virginia suburb where they lived—the latter being a very big high school with a high powered population where the daughter was quite lost. She had gotten interested in the Quakers, although she and her family were Methodists, and had gone to Earlham in part out of that interest, had liked it there, but still wanted to go “home” to South Dakota. The father was worried that she would find it a bit provincial after her experiences, and this led me to ask him whether he himself had plans for returning to South Dakota when

Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That

111

his term was up. He said he preferred not to look ahead, and thought that was the best way to live. Sociability and Drama I recently had a chance to talk about the Sociability Project with Professor C.L. Barber of the English Department at Amherst. Barber had written a book on the village ceremonies which form the basis for Shakespeare’s comedies and is an authority on ritual and etiquette in Elizabethan society. (Barber [1959]2011) He feels that these plays of Shakespeare’s grew naturally out of the dramatizations of self in village festivities, as in those in which people would dress up as the Lord of Misrule and would reverse the hierarchical pattern of the feudal system while retaining the fact of hierarchy in their play—just as today he suggested play becomes as egalitarian as work now tends to be or, as he put it, we no longer have friends: we only have colleagues (at least in an academic or professional community). He said that he thought the sociability of graduate students—having been one himself 20 years ago—was lived in a limbo and would necessarily have a certain discontinuity and bear the strains of the graduate students’ uncertain situation. At the same time, it would be free of the rivalry he had observed in the sociability among people in Westchester and in other well-to-do suburban groups where parties tended to be a reaffirmation of status rather than a search for intimacy or meaning—with formal festivity sometimes expressing the status Barber had been greatly influenced in his thinking by Kenneth Burke’s theories of the self, and the act. He felt that in sociability we both dramatized and discovered who we were and he wondered to what extent the spread of the group dynamics ethos and of non-directive interviewing and counseling had led to a loss of hierarchical or other organizational patterns in sociability. He had asked students in his entering freshman’s English class to describe a party they had been to (he will send us these) and he said that most of them described parties that they had managed, e.g., school dances, or described the decorations they had arranged but only rarely referred to actual interpersonal experiences. Many would report parties they had given for this or that school group at which they had made a profit—it was this that was memorable. At Amherst he said there was a tendency for faculty men and women to separate while the former talked what I have termed office gossip, e. g., who has gotten a raise and who is coming or going—seldom discussing ideas. Almost never was flirtation countenanced: he said that the imagined possibility of having an affair which would make a crosssex tie intriguing was ruled out entirely (this is true also in my perhaps unduly limited experience in Chicago). The impression that I got from him was that with few exceptions the parties at Amherst, and like institutions were of familiars rather than of friends (there appeared to be a good deal of culinary effort simulated in part by the wife of a French professor who writes cookbooks). Barber feels that the forms of sociability in our country are extremely important as the basis on which

112

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

the drama rests. He called our attention to the magnificent description of a dinner party in Virginia Woolf’s book To the Lighthouse (1927) and I was struck with the fact that he had independently arrived at some of the same insights that Nelson Foote and Bob Potter have expressed. “Managerial” Interviewing on Campus Booz, Allen, and Hamilton, the management consultants, recently made a survey of Amherst in order to spot certain problems of administration in the College. Barber is a member of the Governing Faculty Committee, and had been interviewed. He was greatly interested in the technique of his interviewer. When Barber was talking of something which was of interest to the survey group, the interviewer would say, “Really, that’s extremely interesting,” or “That’s very interesting.” He would never say, “Could you tell me more about that,” let alone challenge or probe directly. Barber was interested to find that he was led by this technique to talking quite freely even though he would have preferred, he thought, a more challenging or dialectical encounter. It also made the person who was talking to him appear to understand more than he actually did by giving Barber the feeling that what he, Barber, was saying was of tremendous importance—Barber knew better but still was caught. Actually, he pointed out that the consultants were after problems of which the College itself was fully aware (e.g., that the treasurer was a terrible busy body and should be curbed) but did not have the nerve to undertake without outside advice. Thus, there was nothing particularly subtle that they needed to discover. Barber felt that the non-directive technique with its minimization of drama was spreading into many spheres of life and that group dynamics had an important influence on the culture in this way (he did not bring up the possibility of a reverse influence). Several Further Comments by Barber Barber said he thought that the study of parties given to sell goods, e.g., the Stanley Home Products parties would be very interesting. A friend of his had given such a party and he thought the women enjoyed very much going on a buying spree combined with sociability—the number of different types of objects they can buy on this sort of occasion seems to increase—and they enjoy the male salesman who comes along and who is young and attractive. He also thought that the problem of “decompression” in sociability was “solved” by strong slugs of whiskey or other cocktails at the outset. People came to a party after commuting but without changing their clothes or in any other way preparing themselves as people did in Elizabethan times for a dramatic event. Alcohol then served to speed the change of pace. (In my own, of course, limited observation there is more drinking in the Eastern communities than in comparable

Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That

113

communities in the Midwest.) And this reminded me of Washington, D.C. where cocktail parties are a way of melding people from a great variety of backgrounds who have almost nothing in common except the same employer (or, in the case of lobbyists, etc., a wish for something from that employer). References Barber, C.L. 1959. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and it’s Relation to Social Custom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whyte, William H. 1958. “Urban Sprawl.” pp. 103–6, 194, 198, 200 in Fortune. New York. Woolf, Virginia. 1927. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 10

The Structure of Party Conversation Robert J. Potter, David Riesman, Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt

Editors’ Note: The following is an unpublished report from the Sociability Project. The tables reported here were not filed with the original paper in Riesman’s archives, and have been furnished by Eisenstadt. Riesman, Watson, and Potter all worked on the collection, preparation, and interpretation of data for the Sociability Project. When the period of funding was over, they scattered. Riesman went to Harvard, Potter to SUNY-Rochester, and Watson to Michigan. Each had a claim on the data, which they had prepared together. Each worked in his or her own way to create a report, but without being closely in touch with one another about those reports. This paper was slightly different. It was initiated by Potter, and Riesman added to it. I made no direct contribution to the paper, and would disagree with parts of it. However, I consider it a valid reflection of the Project.—Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt, 2014.1

In experimental research on small groups, it is possible to reliably score interaction and to control variables—including the status and even the personality of subjects in a way that seems idyllic, even if taxing, in comparison with the problems of “live” participant-observation of parties, where one begins with neither agreedupon measures of interaction nor adequate knowledge of background variables. In contrast, moreover, to the tradition of field research on small work groups in an office or factory or even a street corner, parties in the strata to which we had access involved ever shifting dramatis personae, and kaleidoscopic groupings and regroupings that even the trained observer, recollecting excitement in tranquility, could recall only to a moderate degree. The combination of transient populations and hardly less transient research grants made it impossible to follow individuals through even a short spell of their sociable “careers,” let alone attempting systematically to relate the style of their sociability at one occasion to the other interactional aspects of their lives.

1 Editors’ Note: This paragraph was not included on the original document. As the only surviving author, Watson Eisenstadt asked that it be included here. Also, when the article was originally penned, she was named as Watson, as Jeanne Watson subsequently changed her last name to Eisenstadt after marriage.

116

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Furthermore, in our effort to reduce a party to microscopically manageable form, we divided the reports of our participant-observers into episodes which were then coded in terms of an elaborate quantitative code and punched onto IBM cards. As in Bales’ system2 or Chapple’s, this kind of punctuation of the flow of time and events limited our ability to study the sequential development of theme and style at a party. Techniques for handling sequential data statistically are not yet adequate to this task and phase development is irregular. However, we have attempted to array quantitative evidence so as to reveal in a summary way the keynote that is repeated in the course of a particular party. Despite these handicaps, our effort in this paper and throughout the research on which it draws, has been to grasp the functions and malfunctions of sociability for individual participants, for the group they create, maintain, or disrupt, and for the larger society—and to see in turn the ways in which the values and ethos of that society and its subcultures are refracted in sociable interaction. Clues to subculture in our data are inevitably somewhat fragmentary: we can know the sex, occupation, ethnicity, and educational background of guests with some surety. We know the residential locale (though we disguise it, herein). But we surmise the age and social status of participants and less obvious personal characteristics out of technical limitations of our research. In this report, we attempt to link three variables: the status of participants (a code based primarily on occupation); the structure of participation at the party, that is, how people grouped themselves, whether as dyads or triads or larger clusters, whether as performers, equals—or saboteurs; and the outlook on the world manifested by the conversation (the latter based on a whole series of complex qualitative codes concerning the judgments on the environment explicit or implicit in what is being said). Noticing that soldiers and graduate students spent much of their sociable energy in griping, in asserting with an imperative redundancy that the world is unredeemable by effort and only exploited by the big shots, we sought to grasp some of the correlates of this “obvious” fact, and to see whether, in addition to the status of participants, their grouping influenced the tone of their talk (conversely, with the sociable themes, “big shots” themselves were more euphoric and their clusterings tended also to take different form). Then in turn we asked ourselves whether groupings were related to status: obviously, those with the longer purses can afford the longer living rooms and, other things being equal, the longer guest lists. We report here our findings and speculations concerning these relationships. The Data Our data for episodic analysis consists of field reports from participant-observers covering 26 parties; in addition, we are able to draw upon 47 party reports done 2 Editors’ Note: This is likely a reference to Robert Freed Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups published in 1950.

The Structure of Party Conversation

117

too impressionistically or scantily to be suitable for detailed qualitative analysis. Six different observers assisted in collecting the 26 reports subjected to intensive analysis. All these parties were small enough for one or two observers to gather the main drifts of discussion (typically 8 to 16 persons), and at all of them conversation was the mainstay, as contrasted with parties where card games, charades, or dancing were salient. Folk singing occurred as an interlude at some of our parties—and this already indicates something of the milieu: two-thirds of the parties involved persons from the academic world (sometimes graduate students, sometimes young faculty members, sometimes well-established professors, and administrators; and mixtures of all of these). Ten different academic institutions are represented, from three or four states; the fields of specialization range from medicine to geology, from social work to classics, from physiology to sociology. From outside the academic world, we have reports of suburban parties of professional and semiprofessional people, such as architects, lawyers, advertising men, and their respective wives; also parties of artists, writers, and a few society women; and of bankers, industrialists, and political figures. We have reports, not sufficiently detailed for coding, of a seasonal round of parties in a small Southern town; we have a long series of coded observations, also not made use of herein, of sociable interaction among the student help at a summer camp for adult church workers. In general, the material drawn upon for this paper reflects the professionally oriented urban middle class, although it would be very rash to suppose, that this variegated set of subcultures has been “covered” in any systematic fashion. We experimented with the tape recording of parties, but found it unsatisfactory, save as a very rough check on the findings of participant-observation. For one thing, some guests became self-conscious, at least at the outset; and we ourselves felt hesitant at invading, even with permission, a “free” and private area. For another thing, the tape picked up the loudest conversation (often scrambled with others) but could not locate it. Thus, we fell back on participant-observation. And of course selecting what to see and recall, our participant-observers were biased; and we were naturally concerned to minimize the extent to which differences between parties reflected the observers rather than the occasions. Some observers thought a “good” party was an intellectually stimulating one; others that it was a humorous or joshing one; still another that it was low pressure and relaxed. These were among the qualities we were attempting to code. For 11 of our 26 fully coded parties, we have the reports of two observers; two more of them were tape recorded. Moreover, there is a range of style and outlook in the parties reported by a single observer—some comfort against the misgivings that he was merely “projecting”; on the whole, our observers learned as they worked, being able to recall more and “forget” less. Even so, although episodes taken from tape recordings generally last about one minute (we defined an episode as a unit of interaction homogeneous with respect to speakers, topic, and point of view), the condensed reports based on recall would run from 40 to 150 episodes, while the parties themselves lasted from two to five or six hours and would have produced from one to 500 episodes if tape recorded

118

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

All reported episodes were coded. This meant that equal weight was given to the trivial and to the momentous, to the fleeting and to the sustained passages of interaction. Such a procedure is arbitrary; but since our objective was to analyze microscopically what people do when they are doing nothing, and what they talk about when there is no imposed external task, it seemed best to include in our analysis all conversations and comments, regardless of their quality or their marginality. Much of the intellectual work of our research went into the elaboration of a code designed to capture, at different levels of abstraction, what the speakers are talking about, what implicit judgments they are passing on each other and the world, what presentations of self or non-self are occurring, and what relationships are aimed at or taken for granted. Findings Some Implications of Nihilism for Sociability The section of the code relevant for us here is our effort to capture the verdict passed on the environment, the world “outside” the party, by each episode. In many cases, obviously, the coders felt that the episode—for instance, “Please pass the potato chips,”—pointed to no conclusion, moral, emotional, or otherwise; or to one so obscure it could not be fathomed. But a factual statement, such as “It’s raining again,” might be coded both for its literal content and for its “emotional conclusion” as this might be gleaned from the context, for example, in this case that the world is defeating us once more and our picnic is ruined. We sought to deal with ambivalent or multiple conclusions by multiple coding of the same episode; for instance, the comment, “The world is a mess, but it won’t matter when I’m pushing up daisies,” might be coded nihilistic, but also as existential—the latter being a more buoyant expression of the human condition, less a wet blanket than a hotfoot. Of the 2244 instances where a coding judgment was made, including episodes with one or more emotional conclusions and episodes with no emotional conclusions, 44 percent fell in the latter class, “no codable” conclusion. Among the 26 parties, the proportion of codable episodes ranged from 36 percent to 76 percent, reflecting the more affective and judgmental nature of some parties as against others, but also the detail and style of the report. In what follows, we shall place some, but far from complete confidence in these percentages. Parties differ of course not only in whether or not emotional conclusions are made, but in the range and monotony of these; some strike a theme: literally a burden, early and carry it late, while others alternate between joyous or effusive talk and recrimination or complaint. In 8 percent of all coding judgments, the conclusion about the world was termed “nihilistic” by the coders. Our first effort was to see in what size and style groupings nihilism appeared most often. Since a nihilistic comment derogates the worth of human beings or human effort, we also looked at the verdicts we called “achieving” conclusions, representing the belief that men can influence their own

The Structure of Party Conversation

119

destiny and achieve something they desire; such comments appeared 7 percent of the time. Some parties could be relatively high or low on both of these qualities, but our original clue to linkages of party form and content came when we found that grouping episodes not by party but by what we termed participation-structure, the surplus of nihilism over achievement (in percentage terms for each group size) rose with an increase in the number and activity of participants, as indicated in Table 10.1.3 In preliminary form, our hypothesis was simply that: the larger the group with whom one had to compete for the floor in a setting where such competition appeared to be the norm, the greater the likelihood that one’s relative powerlessness in the immediate situation made nihilistic judgments on the larger environment seem right and proper. Thus, looking at Table 10.1, we see that the edge of nihilism over achievement is greatest in groups of four or more where all participants are active; declines somewhat when a star performer entertains—and copes with—an active, interfering audience; is still less when a performer speaks to a listening, more passive audience and declines sharply when two or three strangers are talking quietly on the edges of a party. While we do not agree with those psychoanalysts who believe that all conversations are “naturally” dyadic, it is clear, as Simmel noted, that members of a dyad at a party have great control over the conversation; to be sure, there may be a captive audience of one, supporting by his presence the egocentric freedom of the other, but at most parties there are junction points which permit polite escape or at least some enlargement of circle and topic. (At all size levels, understandably, strangers are slightly more cautious or diffident in expressing nihilistic sentiments than those who already know each other, although among strangers the discovery of mutual detestations may create a faster if more superficial bond than the discovery of mutual enthusiasms.) Increase of the size of a group does not, of course, automatically invite nihilism or other negatively toned conclusions; remember that we are dealing here with a small minority of episodes; and with relatively small differences within that minority. There is safety and security to be found in numbers, as well as denigration. Enthusiasm, jollity, and festivity may be ignited as more active participants join in; and nihilism itself can vary from a redundant pathetic plaint to an abrasive, spirited, and hence exciting quality. This very fact, however, creates a problem for our hypothesis, for many will feel that what we refer to throughout this paper as nihilism is simply truth and honesty, subdued in smaller groupings and among the elite due to hypocrisy, while in a larger grouping chance would help turn up one or two individuals ready to cut through lies and say how things and people really are. Certainly, this can happen. But to assume it explains our data requires believing that friends, talking quietly together, are more apt to be false and dishonest than people in a larger, but still not anonymous, gathering. We think this also happens, but in general we have concluded that, given a certain 3 Editors’ Note: Table 10.1 has been lost in the decades since the report was written.

120

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

ambivalence of people concerning their power to shape their environment, they will express their more humane, melioristic facets in a sociable setting which itself is malleable and beneficent, and their more negativistic facets when the structure of the group itself reduces the relative influence they can wield. We could not, however, establish this empirically, since we did not follow the same people through different settings to see how their sociable behavior responded to those settings. In any case, we have thought it too literal minded to suppose that participation structure can be a microcosm of the larger world, responsible only to this mirroring and not to the prior experiences and personalities of participants. And of course we realized that participation-structure itself reflected the preferred forms of association among party goers, and that these forms as well as the often nihilistic content, must be responsive to wider currents of American life. For example, the studies at the University of Chicago Law School indicate that jurymen, brought by the dozen into the jury room, do not group themselves randomly, but that men are more likely than women, and high status men more likely than low, to take the foreman position at the head of the table. So, too, in our data men were slightly more likely to assume the sociable initiative in the larger groupings, and slightly more likely to tilt them in the direction of nihilism. However, at a party in the equalitarian minded circles of our observation, high status did not necessarily give its possessor a monopoly over tone and topic; for one thing, as the number of guests increases, the hosts and other dominant persons have less minute control over individual guests who may have a choice whether to participate in large or small groupings. Indeed, at one very striking occasion, which our coders dubbed “At Lady Haversham’s,” a domineering high status old lady, the hostess, imposed a euphoric or optimistic tone on all within reach, while periodic dyads or triads of disaffected younger people gathered at the margins to make catty or nihilistic remarks. There is evidence in our material (not presented here) that some individuals participate easily only in dyads (reflecting, inter alia, such factors as being a first born or only child); these, when forced into a larger group, may seize the performer’s role and use it to relate to but one of those present, or to suffer in silence, a drag on festivity, inert or restless. At a number of parties of between eight and 14 people, hosts and guests alike sought to maintain a single conversation; those only comfortable in a dyad lacked the legitimation only the host could give for pairing, and might then tend to sabotage what they could neither guide nor enjoy. Conversely—one reason there are parties—there are people who are uncomfortable in a dyad (cross-sex or same-sex) or in any situation threatening them with intimacy or, perhaps, with carrying any responsibility for the encounter. Preferring the casual brush of the numerous to the trials of marriage or friendship, they can maneuver themselves into larger groupings, and there contribute to a sociable tone that reflects their own mode of distant relatedness and escapism, a mode that often finds the route to nihilism short and easy.

The Structure of Party Conversation

121

That route, of course, tends to be taken by a mob in the larger society, including many audiences at so called sporting events, when people behave towards a performer as they would seldom do in closer and less public contact with him. A democratic society, curbed by its equalitarian values and permissiveness from enforcing tight controls, can put a family, a private party, or a political party at the mercy of a ruthless monopolist. Still, talk of the mob—Freud and LeBon to the contrary—does not really explain why nihilism or destructiveness often come to the fore in large gatherings. Among the college girl volunteers, (mainly recruited from the church related colleges of the Midwest), whom we observed at a summer camp, negativism was seldom present, and it did not increase with size of gathering.4 Similarly, in the seasonal round of Christmas parties we observed in a small Southern town, in parties largely confined to kinfolk and neighbors, “Southern hospitality” prevailed and nihilism did not appear even in the corners of the larger formal teas. These affairs were largely managed by the older women, and were used by them to maintain reciprocities. Probably, the men and boys, left to themselves and supplied with liquor, would be less genteel; still, coming to these command occasions, participants brought minimal expectations for personal efficacy, and hence were unlikely to feel socially powerless and prey to nihilistic themes. A somewhat similar ban on nihilism is reported by Vidich and Bensman (1958) in their study of a small New York upstate community, where sociable occasions were times of mutual boosting and genially optimistic comment, with any harsh or negative gossip reserved for very private dyads. Such examples led us to return to our data to see whether other factors, in addition to participation-structure, were related to the balance of nihilism and achievement. As in all such contemporary studies, we had no longitudinal historical data, although our Southern parties might bespeak an earlier time, and our more elderly participants likewise. While we did not have parties broken down by average age, we had ranked them by average status, and we knew that age and occupational status tended in our academic and professional groups to run pari passu. Building a New Index Meantime, we had concluded that the nihilism-achievement axis culled our data too narrowly and we decided to combine a variety of “positive” affects with their “negative” counterparts to produce a crude “optimism index” representing the surplus of the former over the latter, that is, the quotient of the surplus of positivelytoned over negatively toned conclusions to the total number of conclusions expressed in the episodes of a given party. While this more elaborate index ranked

4 There was, of course, a complaint about irksome basics or wearisome adult guests at the Camp, but little actively nihilistic comment, nor did dyads seem to be a place where this publicly tabooed sentiment could be expressed.

8

10

+.38

+.36

+.31

+.20

+.20

19

9

6

Columbia 7 100% Diners 12 “

9

8

13

17

+.43

11

18

+.45

5

100% Machines “ Haversham “ Intimacy “ Famine “

Sabrina

13

15

11

11

18

13

14

15

12

17

17

29

43

47

20

23

20

24

40

34

36

34 24

53 20

16

12

10

15

5

32

21

23

12

21

7

25

24

26

14

32

15

13

36

21

47

32

25

36

34

25

42

14

30

8

5

47

40

57

44

35

28

26

30

27

26

34

77

53

83

72

72

128

131

83

155

54

88

62

33

% 15

N 7 53

No codable Conclusions Total Judgments N % N 25 53 47

Other Conclusions

Conclusions about the environment expressed in the episode

Ranking of the parties by the optimism index and by occupational career status (percentages based on the total coding judgments per party through episode analysis)

Status Optimism Negative Conclusions Positive Conclusions Rank* Index** % N % N % Playwrights 1 +.73 2 4 13 28 100% New Year 14 +.67 4 6 20 32 “ Luncheon 10 +.64 8 9 37 42 “ Fluid Drive 4 +.62 5 9 21 39 “ Barbecue 3 +.53 14 9 46 30 “ Public 2 +.53 9 11 29 35 “

Party Coding

Table 10.2

“

“

“

-.12

-.24

-.30

18

25

13

-.04

21

-.08

.00

16

24

.00

8

-.05

+.02

17

22

+.04

+.10

+.13

+.20

15

26

20

23

381 17%

15

13

14

34

22

29

11

4

27

54

14

13

6

594

21

25

19

30

20

24

24

15

27

26

21

14

10

26%

8

8

11

29

20

27

11

4

28

59

17

17

9

452

11

15

15

25

18

22

24

15

28

28

25

18

16

20%

8

4

22

19

34

18

4

10

20

46

16

11

6

817

11

8

30

17

31

15

9

37

20

22

24

12

10

37%

40

28

27

32

33

46

19

9

25

49

20

52

37

2244

56

53

36

28

30

38

42

33

25

24

30

56

64

100%

71

53

74

114

109

120

45

27

100

208

67

93

58

*Each party is given a status rank by a scaling procedure which gives the whole party the same rank as that of the dominant participants in the conversation of the party. For example, a party with four young adults whose conversation was dominated in percentage terms by episodes whose participants were older well established adults would be ranked as a party of older persons. The highest occupational career status was assigned rank number 1, the lowest, number 26. The rank order correlation of status with optimism is +.68. **The Optimism Index is computed as follows: Optimism Index = Positive Conclusions minus Negative Conclusions Positive Conclusions plus Negative Conclusions

All Parties +.22 100%

100% Post-Dept “ Bring Food “ Beer Bust “ Neighbors “

Ponchy

Unanimous 100% Conversation “ Exurbia “ Mister E.G. “ Internes “

Going Away

Easter

Semi-pro

124

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

our parties in much the same way as the nihilism-achievement polarity, it seemed to us a more differentiated instrument, and the tables that follow are based upon it. We included among the “optimistic” conclusions those scored as “joyous” (“it’s a gay and happy world, full of wondrous things”); “humane” (statements that imply the moral worth of individuals or the importance and value of individual feelings); “achieving” (as already indicated, the conclusion that man can influence his destiny and that effort will be rewarded); and “protective” (the term for conclusions that society or some milieu within it provides protection, love, or aid for individuals). In all these instances, it should be remembered, we are coding the judgment passed on the environment, not the sanguinity, choler, or despair of individual participants. Thus, a person may be deeply pessimistic about himself, or temporarily depressed, yet take part in an episode that expresses a humane or joyous view of the environment; his gaiety might be frenetic, but still give tone to an episode—although on leaving the party he might relapse into a quite different mood. Conversely, as our previous discussion has already suggested, basically eupeptic individuals may in a group, depending on the subculture and the catalyzing cues, scarcely depart from a monotone of negativism. The negativistic component of our index was based on simply adding the instances of three items in our code: “nihilistic” conclusions (as stated earlier, a flat derogation or ridicule of aspects of the environment, destructive in tone and content, and implying that established institutions, persons, or values are fake and worthless); “fatalistic” ones (“effort makes no difference; success depends entirely on luck”); and “amoral” ones (“the world’s a jungle, you have to watch out for number one”; or, alternatively, less conventional and more explicitly immoral judgments à la De Sade or Celine).5 Naturally, in such a quantified approach, episodes of different intensities and weights had to count equally; what we did was to sum up the “positive” and “negative” items for the party or the group in question, giving us Table 10.2. Examining Table 10.2, we see that our 26 parties differ from each other both in the extent of codable conclusions from the seven categories making up our index and in their position on that index itself. Thus, the percentage of negativistic conclusions starts at a low of four percent, representing only two episodes at a dinner party honoring three playwrights prior to an evening of performances of one act dramas by each of them, and rises to 30 percent representing 34 episodes or judgments at a party of a group of graduate students who gathered at the home of one of them for a midnight snack and drink, following a departmental “official” party. In general, it is the negativistic conclusions which contribute the larger part 5 Our selection of moral emotional conclusions omitted a number of other themes which, though related, appeared to us not to amplify greatly our optimism index: “mechanistic” conclusions (“it’s a world of machines and behaviorism”); “existential” ones (“man is alone in an absurd world”); “power ridden” ones (elites or social engineers control the world); and “superior” ones (claims on behalf of the superiority in a moral sense of present company, particularly when regarded as members of a deviant, minority).

The Structure of Party Conversation

125

of the variance to our “optimism index”; in general also, the higher the occupational status of participants, the higher the index. As we turn to examine several of these parties in detail, we may be able to grasp some of the ways in which factors of social status which in Simmel’s view of “pure sociability” (1957:544) should be parked at the door, have an impact on the intrinsic qualities generated at the party. Two Parties Compared What our coders referred to as the “playwrights’” party consisted entirely of established people in middle life: in addition to the three playwrights and their (professional or artistic) spouses, there were several other literary figures, a sculptress, a designer, and a painter and several academicians. The gathering had been carefully planned by an experienced hostess, who wanted her various friends to meet each other. Drinks before dinner were served in a living room so planned as to forbid a single large gathering of the 16 guests. As guests arrived, they could make a choice as to which circle to join—a less than fateful option since dinner would soon rearrange them. At dinner, the hostess announced that the place cards would require people at dessert and coffee to relocate themselves as stated thereon; seating was in tables of four to six, and the shift allowed new people to meet, as well as making a wider distribution of the honor of sitting at the tables of the host and hostess. After dinner, people were reminded by the host that they had to leave quickly to go to the theatre where the reading was to be held. Obviously, high status, the manageable (and managed) size of the groups, and a lack of long captivities do not guarantee a low negativism or high positivism score; one could imagine highly rivalrous and nervous playwrights resentfully cutting at the world and each other. However, neither the party nor its temporal subdivisions consisted exclusively of playwrights, or even those within a certain genre. Nor was it dominated by its menfolk; a number of the women were of high social and professional status. The non-playwrights were protective of those about to be presented; the latter, in that company sought to be amiable, tame lions, and their later engagement insured a determinate end to sociability after two hours. Enough of the guests knew each other well enough to want to know each other better, but hardly any so well as to feel it wearisome to encounter the same faces. It was an occasion, therefore, with relatively high entropy as well as high status, by which we mean that status was here translated from an objective background characteristic to a concrete, immediately present fact by means of the value placed upon each other by the persons present. This translation is evident in the high proportion of episodes (68 percent) wherein a central performer or dyad was listened to quietly by a small, supportive audience. Such a listening attitude on the part of non-performing participants is a demonstration of respect.6 6 Despite two observers (of the three tables, one was always uncovered by observers), our report of this occasion includes but 47 episodes, many of them dyads with a very small

126

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

The party we came to call the “Post-Departmental” differs in almost every respect from the foregoing. Many of these graduate students in the social sciences are married men with families, veterans, men who have taught and fought and held other jobs. Yet they are in a setting of relative deprivation where (as Jacques Barzun recently described matters for Columbia) the winning of the PhD is a long and uncertain road, with many falling by the wayside and those who do gain it, taking an average of eight or more years beyond graduation. They have just attended a party given by their mentors, whose criticism they fear and whose patronage they need. They have little peer solidarity: they are not proceeding as an age-grade through a regulation rite of passage, but meeting casually in the course of careers that drew them from afar and will locate them far from each other. Not only do they feel as powerless as GIs, they talk and act like GIs, joining in standard griping against the “officer” faculty, the “campaign” field, their “conscription” matrimony. The unvoiced difference is that they have chosen this career. In barebones externals, there are certain similarities with the playwrights’ party just mentioned: there were 11 guests, and it lasted from shortly after 11 pm to 1:30 am (thanks to tape recordings we have many more episodes from the same timespan). But there the similarities end. The Post-Departmental party was unplanned. The de facto host, who invited the students up and asked them to rustle drinks for themselves, began after an hour or so to wish they would go home. The hostess had an early rising job and three children besides. The ethics of taperecording led to a characteristic assault on various kinds of social research and on the faculty members of recent memory who represented—or denigrated—those kinds. But in a group of 11, including wives and men of very different background (nationally and ethnically) and sub-field, there was no serious conversation generated by these differences. As one participant commented afterwards, it was more like children who shout, “my old man can lick your old man!” One of the wives was forced by others to tell a long and involved story (seven minutes on the tape: the longest in our data) about a dreadful experience she’d had on a train, when several soldiers got her mixed up with a woman they were pursuing and then came to blows over this. The story was amusing, though scary, but was told in a way to imply that the world is a terrible place where one is caught among unanticipated and undeserved evils. Later, other women groaned—not for the first time—about children, poverty, and (seldom in America) death. The two sexes split, as they often do, in an unplanned way in low status groups, allowing the men to gripe even more loudly while the women discussed buying bicycles too large for their children in their eagerness to have them grow. There was no fixed time when people had to leave. People, as they later reported, felt bored—but as we have repeatedly noted, boredom does not drive people home but rather draws them to stay in hope of some justification for having already stayed too long. Later events indicate that for a few who stayed longest, a desire for more friendly and supportive conversation audience of listeners, before and during dinner. Similar problems of reportage beset other parties also.

The Structure of Party Conversation

127

with the hosts was an excuse for waiting on the departure of others. The very passivity of these hopes reflects the fatalism and anti-achievement ethos of the party. There was no one in charge and anyone who attempted to take charge or to avert the negativism was either ignored or met, no less in his own mind than in the jeers of others, by the refrain, “who do you think you are?” In this particular party there were two such attempts, both failing. Arguably, the craven position of the graduate students vis-a-vis their work and their teachers is compensated for by an anti-authoritarianism and non-conformism off the job. There were indeed at the party some attacks on a research director feared and also admired for his brilliant and cutting criticisms of students. As at other parties, there were efforts to use standard unconventionalities, sexual or sarcastic, as a source of wit, exoticism, or vitality. It was necessary for the coders to distinguish, not only between “negativism” and “existentialism,” but also between it and criticism of authority or attack on the establishment; that is, we sought to sort out revolutionary criticism founded on hope from rebellious or anomic attacks premised on vindictiveness and defeatism and inertia. (Elsewhere we coded the episode for autonomous, adjusted, or anomic perspectives7—which are analogous distinctions—not always reliably, of course.) The “Post-Departmental” party was one of several where, at the tag end when people seemed drained of life, the conversation turned toward death and gruesome incidents. Even there, however, there were a number of comments coded as “positive” (l6 percent)—a percentage which, as can be seen from Table 10.2, is in the same range as other parties of students and apprentice-professional people Nevertheless, it is striking how, when one guest at this party twice made efforts to introduce new, less destructive or despondent topics, he was immediately squelched. Both from Table 10.2 and from sequential reading of party reports, we conclude that, in the younger and less established groups in metropolitan centers, the rhetoric and the slogans of negation possess—at least among the men, a power far greater than that of more “affirmative” statements. The latter must seem to many dopey, preacherish, boy scout-like, and generally square. To be sure, they might not verbalize such attitudes explicitly, if interviewed concerning their values; on the contrary, few appear to be unambivalently nihilistic, especially since, in dyadic encounters, they are willing to express buried hopes and ideals. Quite possibly, it is this very ambivalence that makes them jump so hard on someone who, in some students patois, is called a “poso” (as contrasted with a “nego”)—while perhaps half hoping that the “poso” will prove strong and convincing enough to stand up to their expressed attitudes and provide them with a reliable basis, for commitment. The “nego” position, symbolized by a boo or catcall, takes less time to state; it is familiar to all and hence can be assumed as a uniform, as recruits can easily pick up

7 We defined these terms according to the usage in The Lonely Crowd (Doubleday Anchor ed.), c. 12.

128

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

GI swearwords they could never have invented.8 That is, anyone has the debit card entitling him to join in a chorus of “negos,” while expression of a “poso” point of view may invite active razzing forcing the isolated “poso” to defend and develop his conclusions, and to take full responsibility for them. Were he exceptionally strong and skillful, he might be able to isolate a few “negos” instead, keeping his audience passive, its negativism unexpressed (as a teacher may do, by exercising his authority in a classroom). But precisely such exposed, even semi-pedagogic, positions appear not only unnerving but unduly egocentric to the younger urban groups whose sociability we observed. At a number of parties, a guest would be asked to bring his guitar, and groups might join in the folk singing; but here it is the guitar, so to speak, which performs at the service of the group, all of whom are free to take part. And the songs, of course, do not bespeak individual commitment; the only commitment is the tenuous and collective one to the folk style itself—a style which includes among its attractions the fact that imperfection and awkwardness in performance may actually seem more folk-like, hence more authentic. Consider also what the implications would be if a graduate student or other low status person was to express euphoric or optimistic conclusions about the world: he would be denying his solidarity with his “oppressed” fellows and claiming a status (or a lack of concern with status) denied them. It is ill mannered, even aggressive, to be joyous among the sullen and downcast, while it is warmly responsive to employ that very mood, heightened by sarcasm and exaggeration, to create a nihilistic verbal jam session, with sad lyrics set to mournful tunes.9 Certainly, as we have elsewhere argued at length, the host is in no position to set the tone of a party among his deprived peers (Riesman et al., 1960a and 1960b). It would seem that the adolescents of the later 1930s and early 1940s, who were graduate students or apprentice professionals at the time of our observations, had overlearned the dangers of megalomania, of “gung ho” commitment to distant symbols and causes, and of losing themselves in the excitement of organized mass action. A critical, negativistic, or apathetic position had seemed safer to them, with its advantages of avoiding the possibility of disillusionment by beating the tragic events of life to the punch. To be sure, these hardworking graduate students and their wives were not Beat, but their resigned and querulous tone had something in common with the more defiant or more withdrawn vicariousness of the Beat. Nevertheless, we cannot speak too glibly of a generational shift here, in spite 8 Intellectuals in America are of course not immune from the cult of toughness and “realism”; quite apart from basic training in the high schools and the army, they—like intellectuals elsewhere—are among the ideological founding fathers of this style. 9 Studying the preferences of teenage girls for “happy” and “sad” songs, Johnstone and Katz (1957) found that older girls who were dating and had had “romances” preferred sad lyrics, having discovered the limits of romance, while younger girls and those without dates solaced themselves with hopeful lyrics. One would expect group situations to be dominated by the higher status, older girls, and by the “sad” songs.

The Structure of Party Conversation

129

of the evidence for it in our data. Just as a group of sorority girls may take the position that “we’re all lovely girls—and the other girls are all lovely, too,” so in the summer camp where we observed sociability among the young volunteer workers, there was a ban on nihilistic and destructive comment. Even so, however, there was little optimism, little euphoria; the girls were too unsophisticated to be cool, too “collegiate” to be enthusiastic. Yet the existence of pockets of more traditional values does not forbid the conclusion that there has in fact been a shift between the generations, though one unevenly complete: a shift recently described by Time as that between Will Rogers and Mart Sahl.10 The parties discussed here are in no sense peculiar, but are exemplar of the extremes in a rather strong association of optimism with high status and of pessimism with low professional status. A more direct test of this relationship can be made using status ranks as the basis for the calculation of optimism scores, rather than parties. The following table, based on our classification of episodes for the status of participants, shows an even stronger association of status with optimism. Although the data exhibit a strong tendency within a party toward homogeneous status, the inclusion of episodes whose participants are of mixed status levels in our computation by parties tends to weaken the clarity of the relation. And even within an episode, status is often not homogeneous, a fact which we have attempted to account for by constructing mixed status categories. The increase of optimism is regular as status rises; the only aberrations appear to be produced by the relatively lower optimism scores of all the episodes including mixed status classes. To put it another way, the conversations of peers of all status levels is slightly more optimistic; and that of non-peers slightly less, than the orderly progression of optimism with status would indicate. Perhaps the strain of differentiated status in sociability is translated into conclusions about the environment. For people on the same occupational ladder, the sense of relative deprivation could, as indicated here, be more salient in the presence of immediate superiors, even when the deprivation is only slight as in the case of apprentices in the company of established adults. Still, we find it hard to believe that the relation of status to conclusions about the state of the world expressed at parties is a direct one. Some intervening mechanism of behavioral expectations, of style or experience in party participation, must be sought that will provide an intelligent link between these social and sociable variables. 10 Since we did not have an opportunity to interview participants, we do not know to what extent they are conscious of the moralities and ideologies they casually toss about in their sociability. Quite possibly, the conscious values, as these might be preferred in answers to a questionnaire, are of less relevance than the life situations and the sociable settings by which they are at the moment bounded. Compare in this connection the study done by Melvin H. Tumin (1958) in a North Carolina county, where he discovered that the more deprived clung inarticulately to traditional values and that their “hard core” resistance to desegregation could be predicted from their position in the social structure better than from what they themselves might verbalize.

57 44 38

36 55 84 100 61 40

Intimacy Machines Diners

Columbia Diners Luncheon Neighbors New Years Unanimous

D D D D D D

C C C

B B B B B B B

D. Mixed: Established and apprentice adults +.29

C. Established adults +.44

14

12

13

+.39

47 50 100 89 90 70 60

Public Barbecue Fluid Drive Sabrina Famine Exurbia Columbia

B. Mixed: Well established and established adults

8

+.59

A. Well established adults

A A A

88 53 44

Playwrights Public Barbecue

Neg. Conclusions %

Optimism Index

Occupational Career Status

26

32

29

31

Pos. Conclusions %

21

21

23

29

Other Conclusions %

Occupational career status and moral or emotional conclusions about the world

Parties with high percent of episodes in each status class % N

Table 10.3

39

35

35

32

No Codable Conclusions %

100

100

100

100

422

208

358

177

Total coded judgments Conclusions %

55 44 60 73 100

Semi-Pro Punchy Post-Dept Beer-Bust Going Away

All Parties

33 42 42 40

Easter Internes Punchy Post-Dept

H H H H H

G G G G

H. Students

G. Mixed: Aprrentice adults and students

F. Mixed: Established and apprentice adults and students

70 57 35 35 37

Haversham Bring food Easter Internes Semi-pro

F F F F F

E. Apprentice adults

Mr. E.G. 100 E Conversation 70 E

+.22

+.02

17

20

30

19

+.08

-.11

18

+.24

26

21

24

23

30

20

18

16

19

14

36

40

30

39

38

100

100

100

100

100

2244

320

243

308

208

132

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Some Additional Examples Before continuing our speculations, however, let us again dip into our data to look microscopically at several other parties, this time at two which are highest in percentage of positive conclusions. The highest one is especially interesting because it is one of three parties where low status is not congruent with its relatively high position on the optimism index; and, like the other parties where greater optimism is expressed than is usual for persons of this status level, it is a party of celebrants, in this case, a Christmas party which our coders called, “At Lady Haversham’s.” “Lady Haversham” is an elderly upper class widow of a classics professor who for a great many years has invited faculty and graduate students in the humanities to a candlelight tea just before the Christmas holidays. She is very much the grande dame of this occasion, ceremonious, imperious, and sufficiently eccentric and “out of this world” to be a conversation piece, especially for students who have never seen her like, save in the movies. The mulled wine, the reception line, the cutting of the cake, the objets d’art with which the house is filled, the mixture of generations—all created a stagey setting demanding, no matter how insincerely, appreciative response. Indeed, as our preceding remarks have indicated, students who would not accept a “poso” of their own age might still hesitate to take the lead in public skepticism towards an old lady—no threat to their own values—who had gone to such trouble on their behalf. Thus, the episodes reported of larger groupings are responsible for the optimism quota of 40 percent. But there was nothing to prevent sotto voce exchanges of a derisive sort when acquaintances met in hallways and corners; many of the younger people were eager to show that they were not taken in by all this fol-de-rol, or were even irritated by the pretentious and domineering hostess; hence, the negativism quota of 18 percent is much the highest of any party in the first 15 in Table 10.2—reducing the overall optimism index to .38 (to be compared to the .73 of the Playwrights’ party). It is as if we recorded simultaneously an officers’ mess and a GI chow line, and averaged the results. The other party of almost equivalent optimism (39 percent) is far more homogeneous (negativism: 9 percent). It was given by the ebullient and energetic president of a large university on the West Coast for a visiting professor and his wife who was being enticed to consider a post at the institution. His other guests were four academicians from three universities and their wives; the men, including the president himself, combined high and secure academic status with (save in one case) high social status, including appropriately spirited, well-born, and wellgroomed wives; all the men, moreover, were worldly, including several scientists of wide government experience, a physician from a nearby medical school previously connected with UNESCO, and a political scientist who had served with the OSS during the War. None of the wives presently worked, although several had done so in the early years of marriage or before marriage; all the wives were active in voluntary associations of one sort or another, including political activity in both major parties as well as the usual charities.

The Structure of Party Conversation

133

The host and hostess had the experience in sociability such positions both invite and provide, but in addition the host actively enjoys animated give and take among peers eminent or prideful enough not to be awed by him, and expansive enough to respond to his own animation; moreover, the fact that the guests were drawn from different fields and different institutions minimized anxiety while not reducing a British common room type of competitive gamesmanship. Indeed, especially when the men and women separated for a spell after dinner, reducing each sex group to the point where a single conversation could be maintained (whereas before and during dinner there had been at least two), the men held forth as experienced raconteurs until forced to give ground. But here the need to fight for the floor in an active group did not give individual participants an iterative feeling of helplessness but rather a kind of parity resting on mutual geniality undismayed by kidding, and perhaps a renewed sense of one’s own importance reflected in the public and political quality of many of the topics discussed. Beyond that, the unobtrusive skill of the host was always available in the background to respond to guests of more muted temper, and to guard against any tendencies among inveterate performers to monopolize discussion. In fact, when the men and women rejoined, he was able, like a roving fullback, to circulate among conversations, rescuing the anemic, puncturing the pontifical, and using his own not inconsiderable presence as a countervailing power when required.11 In such a group, bearing such gifts and responsibilities, neither men nor women wait to see how the wind is blowing before venturing a “poso” opinion, nor are they diffident about viewing the world as a moral arena in which activism can make a difference—as it continuously has in their own experience. At this party, 65 percent of the episodes could be coded for a moral conclusion or implication (as against an average, for all our data, of 56 percent). Quite similar is the statistical profile of another, almost entirely non-academic but equally ebullient dinner party, referred to, by the coders, as the “Public” party. This, too, was held for a [visitor], sprightly British government official just returned from an assignment in Tokyo. It was both a larger and a wealthier company, meeting in a spacious country house, and including some old and close friends and several acquaintances whom some hoped to know better. There were several industrialists and bankers—again, of both political persuasions; a lawyer, a publisher; all highly civic-minded and well-traveled. As at Lady Haversham’s, the age-range was considerable, from under 40 (not including the host’s teenage daughter, who curtsied in to greet the guests) to over 70. The wives, with one eminent exception, would be classified by the census as “housewives”; all were better trained at eliciting than at initiating dialogue, and tended to take an affirmative but subdued part. At dinner, as at the Playwrights’ party, people were divided up at small tables, permitting a choice of dyadic or somewhat larger groupings; after dinner, as at 11 It would take the finesse of a Henry James to describe the subtlety of these operations, whose very value would have been lost had they become too obvious; the student of sociability can merely note what the novelist of manners would dramatize.

134

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

the president’s party, men and women separated (as occurred “officially” at none other of our parties); on resuming, sitting in a huge living room with an enormous fire, the guests made a large circle for a single conversation among 16 people. Naturally, the topics were “public,” but our observer had the sense that intimate talk in this group would be rare, at any rate among the men. In catching up with each other, people were catching up with what was happening in the Far East and in deepest Washington, in London, and at the state capitol. A friendly, self-confident elite, the division between Republicans and Democrats—internationalists all—led to amiable joshing among gentlemen, with no hard feelings; in any event, events mattered more than personalities, performance more than popularity. Here again the host played an important role: a banker skilled in negotiation, with government experience and a trustee of three major universities, he could move easily among the worlds represented on many different occasions in his home, while his gracious, self-effacing but observant wife played a supporting role. Here, as in the preceding party, people even in a large conversational circle did not feel powerless, either in the immediate or the vicarious present; masterful men, they had long since passed any point of no return in which their mode of life gave them qualms, or in which they may have felt inadequate—or, indeed, been very much aware of or concerned with how they felt. The quantified outcome: positive comments 35 percent; negative 11 percent; while 70 percent of all codable items could be rated for moral conclusions on the world. Deviant Cases Following what we regard as the sound practice of close examination of deviant cases, that is, parties whose social status is incongruent with position on the optimism index, the so called “New Year’s” party is in second place, with an index of .67 (with 47 percent of the items codable), although its participants were graduate students and apprentices (the latter category including an assistant professor or two, a young engineer, and a young market researcher). It is a group which, in composition, might give rise to a negativism quota of the order of 20 percent, but which to fact was only 6 percent. Why wasn’t it larger? First, of course, we notice that it was a New Year’s Eve party, an occasion where one would have to be an extreme “nego” to resist the cultural definitions of gaiety. Second, the hostess, though a young graduate student in linguistics, was of Greek origin, vivacious, intense, and generous; quite uninfluenced by the cool canon of her age mates or by any other “American” restraint on the exercise of her powers as hostess, culinary expert, and mistress of ceremonies. Greek familism, in effect, cast her in the role of Lady Haversham pro tem; indeed, at none of our parties dominated by women was negativism higher than the 18 percent at Lady Haversham’s (and had we coded the Christmas season parties in a small Southern town, already mentioned, we undoubtedly would have found that in these formal, female-dominated rituals negativism was virtually taboo).

The Structure of Party Conversation

135

Moreover, the hostess involved her guests in helping make the punch, and in responding to the Greek delicacies she had prepared. All the guests were related to each other in a series of interlocking cliques, geared into each other primarily through the hostess, whose hope that her friends would get to know and like each other better was a kind of tacit command performance. One of the guests had been invited to bring his guitar; when he faltered at being cast in the role of performer, another guest, new to the city and eager to make himself agreeable, picked up the guitar as in a relay race, and inexhaustibly led the singing. Even a topic guaranteed on other occasions to provoke derision, namely the presence of participantobservers from the “sociability project,” was here a source of sympathetic interest (not for general conversation, which was non-professional and seasonal, but for some dyadic interchange).12 The second deviant case, “Lady Haversham’s” party, is unique in so many ways that we chose to discuss it earlier. Domination of the party by Lady Haversham resulted in both excessive optimism for the status level of the participants and a high frequency of episodes in which a single performer held sway over an audience of relatively passive listeners. Analysis of other deviant cases indicates that where many of the episodes in a party are composed of persons of widely different status, the relation of status and the expression of optimism is not predictable unless information on how participation is organized is included. In this case, Lady Haversham’s ability to silence competitors for the floor permitted the expression of her own optimistic viewpoints. In other parties where episodes among persons of widely mixed status occur frequently, the day is carried by those of lesser stature and less optimistic perspectives prevail. The party which deviates most from the relation of professional status to optimism was a party of four graduate students in economics and their wives given for one who was departing from their Midwestern campus. It was called “Going Away,” by the coders, and concerns us because the status of the participants was the lowest in our data, yet the percentage of positive conclusions (25 percent) slightly overbalances the amount of negativism (21 percent). In only one other student party did optimism surpass pessimism, and that party had a mixture of higher status persons. Like other parties where low status persons express an optimistic view of the world, this too has a celebrant purpose; it signified the close of two years of association on a friendly, graduate student basis of both the men and their wives. Moreover, it was the last of a series of reciprocal invitations these young couples (aged 25 to 35) had shared; sharing that included the cost and preparation of food and drink. The small group of eight and the informal division of the party into a male corner and a female corner of the living room for a time helped to encourage the 12 Another party, labelled by the coders as “Greek Easter,” was given by the same hostess, this time exclusively for fellow graduate students; and this fiesta, too, is “out of line” in the rank order, although negativism rises to a modest 14 percent, as against the mere trace of 6 percent at the New Year’s party.

136

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

optimistic qualities we have found associated with dyadic and triadic groupings. But the party was still well within the genre of graduate student norms. Negativism was high (at 21 percent, this party’s negativism is exceeded by only six others). For the first hour or so, the men and women discussed recent jobs, study, and household experiences, respectively, but in an emotional tone that allowed room for differences that would seem competitive in larger group settings. This period, and the immediately following one, during which folk songs and, later, union songs, were sung to the accompaniment of a guitar, was marked by expressions of friendly concern and respect that are rare in our observations of graduate student parties. But optimism was not blocked by the force of majority pressure in this small group and the occasion of the departure of a fellow student for a new job encouraged some aspirations and optimism. After the singing, one of the men described his exciting experiences as a union organizer. This led to some antimanagement talk that shaded off into the standard criticism of professors and of the competitiveness of graduate school—a return to the norm. On this low note, the party ended. There are two among the five deviant parties in which the index shows a more pessimistic tone than would be predicted from the status level of the guests. One is exceedingly negativistic, with twice as many negative conclusions as optimistic ones—a very low key gathering of a few neighbors on a Sunday evening. Although the general status level of the guests at this party, “Neighbors,” was a mixture of apprentices and established adults, the emotional conclusions reached were much more frequently negative than is usual for either status level. The other depressed party, called “Exurbia,” by the coders, was a weekday gathering, so the hostess said, “of all the Democrats she knew,” in her Connecticut suburb. The occasion for both of these parties had little festivity or calendric separation from the round of life. Fatigue and illness had a hand in both of them, but the illness of one guest does not explain the relative pessimism exhibited by all. Let us look more closely at the latter of the depressed occasions, “Exurbia,” where the optimism index is exactly zero, 40 points lower than the average for parties of a similar status level, indicating an exact balance of optimistic and pessimistic conclusions. For the 10 participants of established and well-established professional status (architect, professor, editor in a publishing house, etc.,), this optimism score is quite like that of the less advantaged graduate students. What explanation can be offered for this? In their suburban milieu, to be a Democrat is to be a “stand pat” guy, even a deviant, for most of their neighbors either had always been Republicans or had shed their Democratic Party leanings with the dirt, noise, and conflict of the city. Thus, the hostess’ declaration that “Everyone here is a Democrat,” identified them to each other as members of a minority group hostile to many of the ideas of the community in which they reside, and encouraged ridicule and critical conclusions about the environment not unlike the deprivation themes so prevalent in the parties of graduate students. The guest list, coupled with the hostess’ attempt to make it the center of a festive theme, set off a round of disclosures regarding other people in the

The Structure of Party Conversation

137

suburb who were also Democrats. Often these disclosures were met with surprise, indicating that these people considered themselves more a minority than they were. These contributions were accompanied by both optimistic and negativistic conclusions about the people mentioned, but the theme soon led to ridicule of the Republican majority and the congressman who represented them. Moreover, this blanket designation of everyone as a Democrat resulted in the organization of the party into a single large group of ten. Such a structure encouraged each to try to entertain all the others with criticism of the local, Republican dominated League of Women Voters, of Dulles, and to search for stories, jokes and anecdotes that would hold the interest of everyone. A structure of participation such as this seems to encourage people to contribute only that over which they have excellent control, and thus, to lead to the retelling of tried and true stories. The single conversation among the group of 10 continued successfully until dinner with single performers entertaining the rest with talk of the paradoxes of ghost writing, the mess in the Near East, and the attempts of others to match this with reports of their own travel experiences. Nevertheless, the limited resource of being Democrats in a nonelection year and the mild intensity of interest in world affairs or foreign policy in so large a group tended to use up resources faster than they were discovered. During, and after dinner, various couples engaged in trying to get acquainted by pairing off for more intimate questioning of each other. To do this they had to break away from the valiant and increasingly excited efforts of the hosts to entertain everyone. The conversation of those interested in laying a more personal basis for a relationship than being Democrats must have seemed relatively routine and domestic, falling, as it did, on the heels of a display of political hostility. Thus, such attempts to break away from the large group were repeatedly over ridden by the louder and otherwise more demanding voices of the entertainers. From dinnertime onward the dramatization of old anecdotes became increasingly less adequate as the guests returned to sit in a circular fashion in the living room. The host rescued the group from moments of silence and self-consciousness more frequently. Finally, the hostess began to ask friendly questions of individuals. That was the signal for the departure of one couple, and their departure, in turn, the signal for an instantaneous realization by all that the party was over. The observer remarked, with great perception, that hosts seldom realize the disservice they may do to incipient friendship when they allow a group to bore or depress one another through mismanagement of a party. This party was less optimistic than it might have been for three reasons: the choice of a weekday depressed the resources for festivity and relaxation; the guest list, bringing people together on the basis of an abstract, categorical identification as Democrats, presumed a limited commonality and discouraged the differentiation which could have enhanced the element of choice within the party; finally, these background data served to define the occasion in such a way that total group participation was relevant, whereas, at the point of acquaintance at which these people found themselves, smaller and more fluid groupings, encouraging individualized discovery, were necessary even though they had been denied. The party did not make them eager to see each other again.

138

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Discussion of the five deviant cases can be summarized as follows. Where optimism is excessive as compared with other parties at the same status level, two common features are found: the parties are celebrant occasions and the participation of those who are the audience to most episodes is less competitive than is usual for a group of similar status. Where pessimistic conclusions are expressed with much greater frequency than is usual for a given status level, the parties are not given to celebrate any calendric or other event and there is a tendency for participants to compete more than is usual for the floor. In this sort of post hoc analysis, it is impossible to be certain which of a number of associated factors is paramount, yet the observation that many other non-celebrant parties exhibit greater proportions of optimism at the same status levels as do these two excessively negativistic ones leads to the possibility that the structure of participation, the way people at these parties organized themselves for the pursuit of sociable interaction may be the factor explaining deviations from the regular relation of social status to optimism. The higher is the proportion of episodes at a party in which one or two high status persons control the conversation and others listen or participate quietly in a supportive way, the higher is the optimism index for that party. Similarly, in parties where many episodes are characterized by very active participation on the part of a large number of persons—with a resultant competitiveness for attention—the level of optimism is reduced as compared with parties of similarly situated persons. Non-competitive participation structures may occur in two ways. Either the structure of the party fissions into many dyads and triads, or a single performer or dyad attracts and holds the attention of an audience of relatively passive listeners. Parties such as “Semi-Pro,” “Haversham,” and “Going Away,” have high frequencies of participation patterns in which one or two higher status persons control the conversation. In two of these, the control is exercised through dyadic participation, while in the third, “Haversham,” the powerful hostess cowed everyone into passive appreciation of her party and her optimistic view of the world. As we have earlier noted, control over the pattern of participation is associated with a sense of control over the external environment—as this attitude is expressed in conversation. But it is difficult to guess the direction of this relationship. Rather, participation structure appears to serve as a plastic medium through which attitudes can be handily expressed. Humane and individualistic attitudes find easier expression in dyads. Aggressively joyous and nihilistic attitudes find easier expression in an active group of jointly participating persons. Given the strong association of status and optimistic conclusions, one must be led to conclude that persons possessed of the attitude tend to seek an appropriate setting for voicing it, though it may still come out when the order of participation is inappropriate to it. By studying separately those parties whose participants were often status peers, we were able to see that the association of high social status with optimism is much closer. A rank order correlation of status with optimism index scores for the 13 parties with the most homogeneous status yields +.85, contrasted with a similarly computed correlation of +.68 for all parties. From this result we infer that the status

The Structure of Party Conversation

139

Table 10.4

Participation structure of parties: Ranked by the optimism index and by percentage of episodes with active audience participation (percentage of episodes for each participation type per party)

Party

Optimism index

Rank by percent active audience*

Performer or dyad in a group with with active listening audience audience

Isolated Number dyad or of episodes triad per party

Playwrights New Year Luncheon Fluid Drive Barbeque

+.73 +.67 +.64 +.62 +.53

22 8 17.5 25 20.5

23 42 32 17 24

68 39 67 46 52

9 20 — 38 24

43 56 74 40 129

Public Sabrina Machines Haversham Intimacy

+.53 +.45 +.43 +.38 +.36

14.5 13 19 26 23

34 36 26 9 21

29 58 54 62 35

37 5 20 30 44

62 96 106 63 63

Famine Columbia Diners Semi-Pro Easter Going Away

+.31 +.20 +.20 +.20 +.13 +.10

17.5 9 20.5 10.5 12 16

32 41 24 40 38 33

61 45 46 31 52 50

7 14 30 30 10 17

81 42 66 56 84 58

Unanimous +.04 Conversation +.02 Exubria .00 Mr. E.G. .00 Internes -.04

24 5 6.5 10.5 6.5

20 48 45 40 45

49 46 35 56 44

30 6 20 5 10

149 83 20 41 106

Punchy Post-Dept. Bring Food Beer Bust Neighbors

-.05 -.08 -.12 -.24 -.30

14.5 4 3 2 1

34 50 55 58 70

35 43 42 23 25

32 7 2 19 4

78 95 65 48 69

All parties

+.22

35

47

18

1873

* A rank order correlation of the Optimism Index with percent active audience yields -.67. Both Isolated dyads or triads and Performer or dyad with listening audience distributions are inversely related to the percentage Performer or dyad with active audience.

140

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

factor dominates the expression of optimistic or pessimistic conclusions where status is homogeneous within the episodes of a party. But in those parties composed of persons from widely mixed status levels, the usefulness of status as a predictor of the optimism score of the party declines markedly to a rank under a correlation of +.42. Concurrently, the association of optimism score with differences in participation structure remains the same, as indicated by rank order correlations of -.68 and -.63 for parties of status peers and of mixed status levels, respectively. Careful study of the accompanying table will show that the six parties whose status rank is higher than their optimism index rank have participation structures (as indicated by rank order in percentage of episodes with active audience participation) of a more competitive sort than is observed among their status equals. Likewise, the six parties whose status rank is lower than their optimism index rank have lower percentages of episodes with active audiences, and thus less competitive participation than other parties among persons of similar status. The 12 include four of the five “deviant” parties for which status is not related to optimism, as well as other, less deviant cases. The remaining exceptional case, the “New Year’s” party, is unexplained by either status or participation structure. Only this can be said of the “New Year’s” party: the active audience episodes of that party describe a lengthy bout of group singing. In such episodes, the competition for participation time is eliminated by a structure that permits everyone to perform while at the same time he is also a member of the audience. In another party at which group singing occupied the guests for an hour or so, “Going Away,” optimism exceeds the level associated with similar status and participation characteristics, though the deviation is not so great. Perhaps the attractiveness of folk and other types of group singing for young adults is a consequence of the solution it offers to the participation problems we have observed to have such depressing effects in their parties. Parties in the Middle Range As with most indices, the conclusions based on our “optimism index” are clearest at the extremes. We turn now to describe a party termed, by the coders, “Conversation,” which is in the middle on status and is evenly balanced on our index, with 27 percent negative and 28 percent positive episodes (and 75 percent of all codable items expressing some moral judgment on the world). There were four suburban couples, all in their early thirties except one pair, who were in their late twenties. They gathered for dinner at a lawyer’s whose house had been designed for him by another guest, an architect, both of whom were neighbors of a third guest, an advertising man, whose wife had attended college with the wife of the fourth guest, a political scientist. All were graduates of elite colleges, including the alert, underemployed, cosmopolitan wives. A prosaic note on which the party began may not be irrelevant, namely, that when the guests arrived, the hostess, having just put her small children (not for the last time) to bed, was finishing dressing, while her spouse, delayed at the office,

The Structure of Party Conversation

141

was not to arrive for nearly an hour; excellent drinks did not perhaps fully fill the hiatus. On a less alimentary level, it is clear from the report of the party that the participants cared very much to display themselves to themselves and each other as superior to the snobbish suburbia in which they were living; perhaps especially in the presence of the (Jewish) academician, they were at pains to show that, unlike their neighbors, they were not conventional anti-Semitic, and Republican; the advertising man, like so many in his field, was concerned to show that he was not taken in by the symbols of his trade. Furthermore, as already implied, the wives, well-educated and capable of pursuing independent careers, felt (unlike the older women at the more elite affairs) that they were not living up to the education they had received: this was not said in so many words, but was implied in the references to books read, earlier jobs held, and so on—these women, in a way like the advertising man, were disidentifying themselves with their current occupations as housewives. The Organization Man (Whyte 1956) had recently been published, and helped focus the anti-conformity feelings of these professional men and their wives, as well as the sense of members of the group that they were more creative than their environment. But the resentments against the latter did not only serve to weld the group—a periodic phenomenon in all our more deprived groups—but also spilled over in barbed, often witty and teasing comments inter se. At one point, the group discussed and toyed with a new psychological game, sparked by the advertising man, which invited kidding about sexual symbols and “projective” matters generally. Although the pacing of a party is hard to capture in retrospective write-ups, it seems clear that this party moved much more quickly, more spiritedly, than the majority of occasions reported in our material. Almost all the talk was general, and eight verbal people would well carry this—indeed, people and themes were being continuously interrupted in rapid fire exchanges: a pattern that gave individuals, we would assume, the sense that they could enter the fray, that one could monopolize it and exclude them. Only on the steps in parting did several of the wives have an opportunity for more personal exchange. This last observation can serve to remind us that the indices we have been discussing are far from an overall index of party quality or of the affective components of sociability—any more than Bales (1950) could score his groups on but a few dimensions. The optimism index reflects, on the one hand, the artifact of a party: the collective ephemeral “product” to be judged as one would judge a ballet or tableaux vivante: and on the other hand, to a greater or lesser degree, it represents the individual inputs of affect and outlook, on this one dimension alone. It says nothing whatever about the ability of people to deepen their ties with one another, or to scan the sociable environment to see whom they might want as potential friends, and it says very little about the festive qualities genuinely felt by individuals, either in the direction of shared enthusiasms or of shared detestations. For example, we have already pointed to elements of strain and disaffection at “Lady Haversham’s” Christmas ceremonial, despite or even because of the high score of this party on positivism.

142

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

An even more striking illustration comes from the party our coders nicknamed the “Famine” party, a dinner given by the elderly chairman of the geology department of a major state university for senior members of his department and for a former member now teaching at a nearby institution. Such dinners, being felt as somewhat obligatory, are calendric, but they do not celebrate anything. The hostess has made it an inflexible rule that no one shall talk shop on these occasions, but the effect of this taboo—as Freud thought was the case with all taboos—served merely to make people wary; several times, guests would begin to forget themselves and bring in some geological topic, only to restrain themselves or be warned by the vigilant hostess; this served to hinder rather than to free associations. The chairman, fond of European travel, talked about cheeses and guests fell in with this, telling one food story after another—hence, the label “Famine”; in general, people clung to wisps of topic, wringing each dry for fear of silence and embarrassment. The one tie that bound them—their work— they could not discuss; on other issues, they could only grind out small change. Someone told a rather gruesome story about starving on a mountain (following an earlier discussion of skiing), and this led to an even more gruesome account of someone’s death. Whereas at other parties we have mentioned political differences added zest to discourse, here the fact, that the chairman was Republican—and somewhat patriarchal—made it difficult for his Democratic colleagues to sound off: the ties were at once too fragile and too close to afford such a risk. (In general, however, the supposed American taboo on talking politics or religion did not hold in the groups we observed.) This party’s score of .31 on the optimism index (20 percent “poso”; 11 percent “nego”) reflects no real euphoria, only a collective front to cover strain. One almost had the feeling, reading the report that the guests felt that this was simply a waiting time, among individuals who would still remain basically strange to one another, and who threw in their anecdote or matched each other’s stories of food or travel to keep the conversational flame alight. A larger touch of nihilism might have fragmented the group or brought it closer. As a script the “Famine” party does not sound badly: the participants are intelligent; they can dramatize experience and serve it up retail. The pace is much slower—though not on that account more relaxed—than at the party of the suburban professional people; but the reader does not suffer the momentary pangs brought by the silences, while participants waited for the next free association to roll in; only slowly does the sense of monotony grow on him—monotony based on a sense of what these people might be capable of under more voluntary relations. There was lacking the resourcefulness for an evening-length single conversation among a dozen people—a span of control that would tax the most skillful. This becomes clearer when we turn to our companion index, that of participation-structure, and compare the “Famine” party with another where there was also a single group, members of which alternately took turns at embroidering a scene. This latter was a women’s luncheon, given by a middle aged faculty wife for a few friends whom she wanted to have meet each other, and particularly for

The Structure of Party Conversation

143

a visiting English woman, wife of a professor of education at another university. With one exception—a sportswoman married to a respected judge—all the women actively followed careers, in some instances on a part-time basis, including a sculptress, a ceramicist, an art teacher, and an editor. It was a cold, snowy day; there was a warm fire; and the group itself developed warmth. Of all our reports, it stands highest by a wide margin for a participation-structure we termed “listening group”—an occasion on which individuals take turns in performing before a rapt or at least obedient audience. Thus, the sportswoman spoke of skiing in Chile the preceding summer, and this led to another guest telling of a summer spent in a lonely cabin on Hudson’s Bay, followed by some discussion of the dialectic of aloneness in exotic places as against the pleasures of metropolitan life. Now, the flow here, from performer to performer before a listening group, is identical with that of the “Famine” party, where people as we have seen strung anecdotes together as one theme got drained dry and another produced. (The percentage of “listening group” episodes there was 61 percent, still very high, even though less so than the 67 percent at the luncheon.) But at the women’s luncheon it is plain from the report that the listening was of an active, vivacious sort, responsive to the inner meaning of a raconteur’s account rather than merely to its topic; the spirit was of a feast, of endless waiting resource, not of a famine. (The fact that it was a luncheon made it easy to leave early without rudeness; in fact, the guests suddenly realized it was after 4 pm when they began to break up.) Neither at the luncheon nor at the “Famine” dinner was there competition for the floor, despite the fact that, in a certain sense, people were prisoners of the listening group style, with dyadic alternatives unavailable in a small dining group. But the non- competitiveness sprang in the two cases from different constellations of motive: at the dinner, the heavy and “official” hand of host and hostess muted any tendencies to compete (not that geologists are notably aggressive anyway), and as we have seen people were passive, taking their turns to be sure in the relay race of the evening, but not eager to assume responsibility for one more lap. In contrast, at the luncheon, the women seemed really to be drawing each other out, sharing in what each had to tell. All were married, all had reasonably secure positions in life, even though several were quite young artists with little reputation; none needed to denigrate their sex and the occasion by regarding it as a “hen party,” for most had not met hitherto. A concern for artistry and décor—though not for decorousness— gave style to what was recounted; no strident monopolist presented problems of interruption or disruption that the group might well have been unable to cope with. Sex and Negativism Considering this report, one naturally asks (as our code was set up to do) whether there are substantial differences in the sociable styles of the two sexes. There is certainly a world of difference between this luncheon, with its delicacy, and the raucous quality of the student “beer bust” (at the bottom of the optimism index) or the “Post-Departmental” party of graduate students discussed earlier. At these

144

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

latter occasions, and others high in negativism, nobody but nobody is given a chance to perform before a listening group—even to perform in a nihilistic way. The conversation (as borne out by tape recordings) is choppy, in a Hemmingwaylike vein (though without his concealed artistry). Those who do manage to hold the floor under such conditions tend to be somewhat autistic and to harangue, but this in turn provokes competitive response: baiting, teasing, challenging, or simply interrupting. Leads are thrown out but not picked up; people act as if to listen to one another would be a kind of passivity. To the anthropologically minded, our account may sound as if one social class—or age-grade—is criticizing the “bad manners” of another class or generation. However, to some extent, our criteria spring from the experience of the participants we observed: the parties where the participation-structure of performers competing for the floor joined a negativistic tone appeared to give people neither relief nor the feeling of having touched others or social reality. For these individuals—virtually all college-educated—were not lower class people who had not learned middle class manners; rather, they were middle class people who felt they would be freer without formal standards for sociable conduct. The fear of passivity is, of course, more characteristic of men, and the baiting and teasing would seem to reflect a machismo-like male vanity. Yet our overall totals do not show substantial differences in sociable style between men and women. This may reflect the crudity of our coding; it surely in part reflects the nature of our population, in which equal position for women is taken for granted, and in which many of the women were professionals in their own right. In the overlapping circles of social science, Jewish groups, and metropolitan locale, strong polarizations in sex-style tend to be at a minimum. No effort is made to formalize the difference by a postprandial single-sex coffee break; this occurs only in the older and more established groups—groups where, on the whole, women did tend to contribute less and to take a somewhat more muted part. In the middle class groups of middle or apprentice occupational level, there is often a de facto separation of the men and women, the former talking not really shop but office gossip, while the latter discuss children and domestic affairs (their “shop”), but tone differs less than topic. And many topics in our sample were equally accessible to both sexes: politics, for example, both local and national, which was not at all a monopoly of the men, and psychological questions which were not a monopoly of the women. The near equality of women has in this instance brought them the liabilities of the men without the leverage to dominate sociability as a “female” area. The Christmas-tide parties in a small Southern town already referred to are here a distinct contrast, for their slow paced affairs of kin and neighbors (with people invited in shifts, depending on age and status, for 4, 5, and 6) were stage managed by the women and were used by them to maintain reciprocities and to keep up with the doings of kin. No liquor was served, no rough “men’s talk” allowed. In this setting, the optimism index would tend to be high. Furthermore, the nearly ascriptive nature of participation tended to minimize personal feelings

The Structure of Party Conversation

145

of frustration: people did not bring exalted expectations for themselves or the occasion, and hence did not feel sociably powerless. Size and Control In our data, we have already seen that negativism tends to increase as status decreases, and we have sought to depict the “typical” party of graduate students or apprentices, too large for intimacy, too small for selectivity, in which a group of perhaps 10 people sit around matching denigrating comments. But we have also suggested that there is a tendency for the size of parties also to decline with declining status. This is partly a financial matter because, even though guests may bring their own food and drink, there are babysitters to find or financial increments to be foregone; and the working wife especially may feel that a party is a pretty expensive luxury; moreover, there are no capacious living rooms for such affairs— even though at some student parties the number crowded into a small apartment is reminiscent of the effort to wedge a whole fraternity into a telephone booth. Size of overall party, however, has no inevitable connection with the preferred patterns by which guests group themselves; even at parties of 10 or 12—the most awkward number for general talk save among the highly capable—there may be either a single circle or a variety of splinter groupings. A very striking illustration is the party the coders termed “Intimacy,” which outdistances all others in Table 10.4 in the frequency with which pairs seeking person to person contact break away from such larger patterns of participation as exists. Here there were a dozen guests, including two pediatricians from a medical school (one of them with a psychologist wife), a social worker, a housing official, and an economist. The host, a medical researcher, is distinctly low pressure, with a subdued voice, an exceptionally gentle manner, and a decided preference for dyadic intimacy over any larger constellations. He did not impose his preferred pattern on his guests; indeed, imposing anything on anybody would violate his laissez-faire, casual style; however, the very lack of structure provided by the host, and familiar to his colleagues and friends, seemed, paradoxically, to dominate the party. At the host’s, as one guest put it afterward, he felt free to doze, to leaf through a magazine, or to go off in a corner to chat with a friend; elements of the Beat or Bohemian style, in its quiet variants, are present here. Forty-four percent of the episodes were coded as isolated dyads or triads. At such a party, as at a much larger cocktail party or reception, guests can of course get lost, frozen out of a set of small, intimate clusters. Indeed, the social worker at this party, a woman and a stranger to some of the group, did apparently feel periodically isolated; the host, in accordance with his temperament, would of course not look after her, but acted as a relaxed guest at “his own” affair. Several times she listened in on conversations others were having, but no effort was made to clue her in on what was being said. On one such occasion, two of the wives were discussing a part-time Negro maid who worked for both, with that special combination of condescension and fascination with which such women often

146

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

regard in their maids; but the social worker was forced to discover as best she could who was being gossiped about, and much of the talk, for example, as to how much the maid was paid, was of no presumable interest to her who had no maid. (She was temporarily rescued from this predicament by the presence of food in the dining room, which allowed a regrouping.) At a ceremonious party such as “Lady Haversham” or at a large ceremonious dinner party, pairing, like flirtation, can be a kind of tacit defiance of the imposed structure, with much the same consequence for morale (as “measured” by our optimism index) as the nucleation of informal groups in industry. But at the “Intimacy” party there was no such central focus to provide an escape from or, save spasmodically, an alternative, to dyadic or triadic groupings. By adherence to this participation-structure, the party avoided frustration for most of the guests, but also did not have much of a “party-like” or festive quality. It may have been a style especially suited to those who, like pediatricians or clinical psychologists, work a good deal with people, usually in dyads or other small groupings, and who have adopted a low-pressure manner in work as well as in play. The dinner parties termed “Public” and “Fluid Drive,” already discussed, are also among the highest on pairing. Sitting around a table does not necessarily have this consequence, as the women’s luncheon indicates, or the “Playwrights’” party. But a dinner group of ten or a dozen can be like Fred Strodtbeck’s juries in preferring dyadic intermissions to the larger sessions—something one can observe also at conferences, where friends sitting beside each other may whisper or exchange notes. The other parties notably high in the frequency of dyads include another large dinner party where pairing was possible at cocktails before and drinks after dinner, as well as at moments in the dinner itself, which was largely dominated by highly fluent monopolists (“Barbecue”), as well as three occasions where young and awkward guests, who felt exposed in any larger setting, could not sustain large scale conversations. It will be seen from Table 10.4 that parties with minimum dyadic interaction are clustered also near the bottom of the optimism index, but the converse does not follow, and parties high on optimism are not necessarily high on dyadic interaction. This is consistent with what we have said above: dyadic interaction allows, perhaps encourages, people not to repress such “poso” feelings as they have. By the nature of the case, dyadic interaction is not exclusive at any of our observed parties, and the negativism at parties where such interaction occurred was likely to occur in the sequences of larger participation-structures—notably so at the parties nicknamed “Unanimous” or “Punchy.” Lessons for Sociability Sociability in our purview, especially among the younger groups, proceeded, like much else in modern life, somewhat blindly yet anxiously; people shared no traditions on which to rely, or by which to be inhibited, but yet believed in laissez-

The Structure of Party Conversation

147

faire, and would have regarded any effort seriously to plan a sociable occasion as an interference with spontaneity, hence with the very spirit of party. However, again as in other such situations, lack of a minimum of information tended to lead individuals to interpret failure, not as the product of ecological regularities, but as due to personal inadequacy of a more deep seated sort. Just as it would help people afflicted with the Horatio Alger myth to learn how few people rise from the bottom to the top of American society, and just as it would help New England spinsters to realize that the sex ratio is more favorable in Alaska, so it might not hurt all hosts to know what some have learned—the fact, for instance, that a dinner or evening party of nine to 13 people will labor under serious handicaps of span of control. Of course, this is not an invariant rule—there are few such in human affairs: some of the best occasions were of this size. But when, as in the party labeled “Exurbia,” an advertising man’s wife invited several neighbor couples, a close friend of her husband’s and his wife, and a business associate of the husband, she produced a “product mix” that an evening’s work could not untangle: the neighbors one category, the business associate another, the friend still another. The prevailing mode was competitive; one big circle tried to bring topics to life, or to organize a sequence of discourse in the face of competing expectations. If the hostess had realized this setting in advance, but had still been stuck with her initial choice of the company, she might have sought to avoid forcing a group of incompatible people to discover their lowest common denominator; it might have helped, as at the Playwrights’ party, to use card tables and group people in smaller clusters, clusters however to which they would not be bound for the entire evening. The optimum size of a cluster, like that of a class or seminar, varies of course within a range, depending on the sociable energy and other qualities of individuals: in some circles, four might be too few to provide sufficient conversational resources, while in others eight might already furnish too competitive an arena. The traditional elite practice of dividing the men and women up for a time after dinner can be regarded, inter alia, as a rough and ready effort to shift the props of size and spacing by a division which, because customary, requires no independent choices on the host’s part, choices that might be felt as invidious. Certainly, today in the groups we studied, it requires a magisterial sangfroid for a host to separate his guests during the course of a party on some basis other than sex—to ask A, B, C, and D to come into another room and make a go of it by themselves, while other guests remain in place. The host, like a commander in battle, must believe in his own authority, but the slightest resistance to such an effort at manipulation will destroy it, leaving everyone embarrassed and perplexed (just as at the “Famine” party the hostess’ injunction against talking shop, while obeyed, left guests constrained and resentful). Furthermore, as reflection on one’s own experience will make evident, hosts have very little room, physical or temporal, in which to maneuver. Among the young adults we observed, there often was no other room to which some guests could repair (the bedrooms all being in use by presumptively sleeping small children). And the rented or inherited furniture often seemed an obstacle course for sociability

148

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

to run, not making clear by its placing where entering guests might be expected to group themselves. Beyond that, the speed with which two or three (not always pregnant) women made for the sofa and plunked themselves down, thus ensuring the stickiness of the party and the probable but unintended separation of the sexes, could only be countered by a host with qualities of quick and firm diplomacy, or anticipated by removal of the sofa for the duration. The place cards still in use among the elite at formal dinner parties had the advantage of obviating the need for instantaneous vigilance, giving the host ample time to consider the balances of status, entropy, and resourcefulness among his guests (and himself); and in these same groups, when the men rejoined the women after coffee, the latter rearranged themselves to make sure that the sex division would not be continued and, often, that new groupings, different from those prevailing at dinner, might be formed.13 The choice between maintaining one (or several) large conversations as against fragmenting into dyads and triads seems not to have been consciously made at the 15 parties in our sample involving a large proportion of low status persons—none of these were cocktail parties where fragmentation would of course be the rule. As Table 10.4 reveals, five party groups chose the dyadic alternative, seven the large competitive group. The former choice, although empirically associated with lesser degrees of negativism, is by no means an optimal solution: when the pair or trio is already friendly, entropy may be low and the occasion may lack sparkle even as it approaches intimacy: it may pay for uncompetitiveness and lack of risk with anemia. But the latter choice, of the large competitive group, already contains in these gatherings an implicit sub-choice, namely of competition versus listening, and it is to this we now turn. We know that in only three of these 15 cases did groups choose the noncompetitive form of a large group listening by turns to one or two performers, rather than competing with any pro tem performers for the floor. We must then ask why there is in this cadre so little eagerness, or even willingness, to listen to what people have to say, supporting and encouraging them as they develop their themes, and then shifting the spotlight to another person. In the struggle for that scarce resource, “air” time, young adults brought up in the ethos of equalitarianism seem reluctant to allow one of their fellows that span of attention which would enable him to make a complex idea or emotion understood. Given the fact that at these parties less than 20 people have from two and one half to four or five hours to “kill” or divvy up, it is striking as we have already seen how short the time allowed a speaker before he is interrupted or tackled. It may well be that even among these college educated young people (frequently, as everywhere in this country, they are the first in their families to attend college) there has been little experience in sustained conversational flights: at home and in class they have 13 At a number of dinner parties, sometimes by design, and sometimes not, introduction of a new couple after dinner helped break up patterns that had lost their resiliency, introducing new and refreshing resources. But where complete laissez-faire prevailed, the newcomers might feel lost—all dressed up with no place to sit down.

The Structure of Party Conversation

149

been largely confined to short answers to categorical questions. Thus, they cannot develop a topic in an exciting way that will interest the group—or at least cannot do so without falling into the only other model they have observed: the teacher or minister holding forth. Undoubtedly, the audience reacts unsociably to the incapacity of fellow participants to be entertaining. They are far more intolerant of poor performance, where it is clear an effort at performance is being made, than of poor exposition where it is clear that no efforts towards performance are involved. This is very clear in the conversation of the Beats, where a few iterative phrases appropriately voiced (man, like, dig, etc.,) are a passport to anything or nothing; there is here no more performance on the instruments of sociability than banging a bongo drum is performance on the instruments of music. All this, however, does not seem to us fully to explain the frequent harshness with which people are cut down who attempt anything more, even when the group might be entertained by them. Involved is not only a resentment of the reminder that there are standards. There is also the fear of one’s own solipsistic and monopolistic tendencies as these are revealed in others. Academic administrators have frequently observed that students in an honor system are much more severe with each other than their elders would be with them: having barely subdued their own anti-social impulses, they cannot afford to give them free rein in others. But this works two ways in sociability: it cuts down the other to size, but it also works no change in one’s own incapacity to respond to others (in contrast to being tolerant of them in a general way) and to evoke from them what they might have to give. This constellation, however, leaves the field clear for those of the lung power, aggressiveness, and toughness to become the hare for a pack of hounds that continually bay and snap at the performer’s heels. It would be wrong to leave the impression that the form of participationstructure we have labeled as performer(s) with competing audience is always harsh, rivalrous, or awaiting threatened attack. The “competition” involved may be muted and friendly; it may have a joyous game-like quality, directed not against the other but, so to speak, against the material of sociability, against the world outside, against fate: what we have referred to earlier as existential nihilism which can be bracing, as against mere negativism which is usually redundant to the third degree. Moreover, an interlude of fierce competition among participants, if it is conducted in the British or French or German styles, in which outspokenness is not taken as personal derogation, can be entertaining and enlivening—far more so than the Beat style of grunted vocalbes—or the hipster-Negro style of “playing the dozens,” that is, active razzing of the other. In other areas of culture, do-it-yourself has upgraded taste with astonishing rapidity, but in sociability people are afraid to seem to be consciously learning the ropes, at least in the strata of our investigation. They fear on the one hand that any effort in this direction would be an indication of a demeaning desire for social acceptance and propriety, and on the other, that it would destroy the ingenuous and, therefore, wholesome nature of personal relations. But, as we have argued elsewhere, manners and authority, thrown out the front door, leak in the back,

150

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

and as the host or the group as a whole relinquishes control, a solipsistic guest or a negativistic mood takes over and a new subordination ensues. Despite the cult of sincerity, people cannot really bring themselves to admit their sociable inexperience and awkwardness, any more than young men can traditionally admit this in the field of sex, but unlike the case of sex, which is taken in our culture now with an almost frightening seriousness, sociability is still thought of as peripheral, not important enough really to bother to notice how others do it or to read novels with an eye to conversational styles. As things are, these younger adults are caught in a vicious circle. They are exposed only to the limited alternatives we have seen, and do not witness, let alone create, the enhancing sort of euphoria that spirited conversation can bring. They therefore do not organize their groupings so as to make this possibility, rare at best, more likely. Their failures do not lead them to withdraw from sociability, any more than divorced Americans withdraw from the marriage market; they continue at once to require it and to doubt it—and themselves. The “Famine” party demonstrates what we already know, that no mechanical form can guarantee a sociable product. But it is only one of the 10 party groups that rank highest on the optimism index and in which a seriatim listening was one of the alternative styles; the majority of the others were, so far as our material implies, enjoyable for the participants. It seems paradoxical that in an age when people are extraordinarily tolerant of others they do not hear them out; perhaps one reason is that, lacking the firmness of convictions on which to feel secure, they fear to discover genuine differences. References Bales, Robert Freed. 1950. Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Johnstone, John and Elihu Katz. 1957. “Youth and Popular Music: A Study in the Sociology of Taste.” American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 563–8. Riesman, David, Robert J. Potter, and Jeanne Watson. 1960a. “Sociability, Permissiveness, and Equality: A Preliminary Formulation,” Psychiatry 23: 323–40. Riesman, David, Robert J. Potter, and Jeanne Watson. 1960b. “The Vanishing Host.” Human Organization 19: 17–27. Simmel, Georg. 1957. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 541–58. Tumin, Melvin H. 1958. “Readiness and Resistance to Desegregation: A Social Portrait of the Hard Core.” Social Forces 36: 256–63. Vidich, Arthur J and Joseph Bensman. 1958. Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power and Religion in a Rural Community. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press. Whyte, William H. 1956. The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Part II Riesman’s Life, Work and Legacy

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 11

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman Rupert Wilkinson

New Preface by R. Wilkinson This interview report is a strange creature but it suited its maverick subject. It is based on notes—no tape recording—and it reflects subsequent correspondence with Riesman when I sent him a first draft of the report. Had this approach been used on politicians and many others, it would not have been a good idea: it would have given them too much opportunity to “clean up their act” and retreat from bold positions. In Riesman’s case, though, giving him a chance to revise what he said paid off because of his honesty, his lack of desire to look good, and his genuine wish to have second thoughts. It also helped to have a day’s interlude between the two days of interviewing. It enabled me to think back on what he said and, if need be, challenge him—sometimes in his favor. In the second interview, I queried if he really had anti-Semitic feelings as a college student against his own Jewish background. He insisted that he had, as if analyzing another person. The interviews and subsequent comments by Riesman fed my own commentary on The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al. 1950) in an anthology, American Social Character: Modern Interpretations (1992). It explored the currents that fed into The Lonely Crowd, as well as the critiques that followed it. More recently, in a Chronicle of Higher Education Review (Wilkinson 2010) article marking 60 years since the book was published, I drew on the interviews to suggest that The Lonely Crowd had an autobiographical element. His own life played out the main psychological stages the book attributed to Americans: from inner-direction to other-direction and then aspirations for autonomy. I tried this idea on Riesman in the interview and he thought I might well be right. The interviews also suggested that Riesman’s passion not to be boxed in, to keep his ideas and his politics free of conventional categories, started with strong, intellectual parents who he felt “over defined” him. My Chronicle piece remarked on a quality in The Lonely Crowd shared by other theories of American character. Along the way to its claims about character change, the book makes observations about changes in the whole society that are as important as its character types, and more generally accepted as valid. Whether or not twentieth-century Americans became more other-directed and less innerdirected, middle class culture changed in all sorts of ways from one of production

154

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

to one of sales and services. The Lonely Crowd was the first book to observe this, long before the decline of heavy industry in the US. Riesman’s effort to pin down a new character type was the locomotive of a train whose lights illuminated many aspects of society. The full interview report is in the Harvard University Archives where Keith Kerr found it in an obscure folder. With my approval, the editors made some deletions, insertions and re-arrangements for clarity.—Rupert Wilkinson 2013 Preface This account is constructed from interview notes taken when I talked with David and Evelyn Riesman at their home in Cambridge, MA Sept 19 and 22, 1988—the second date being David’s 79th birthday. The interview totaled between 5 and 6 hours (not counting other talk) and continued during two lunches and a car ride errand to Dave’s office. Evelyn (“Evey”) was a contributing presence for almost all of the interviews. During these two days, I also interviewed Nathan Glazer for over an hour on his own route to The Lonely Crowd and about the way he collaborated on that book with Riesman. Revisions and excerpts have been made from Riesman’s ensuing letter and “Notes” to me of Dec. 20, 1988, and letters of Feb. 6, 1989, and Mar. 22, 1989 (especially about his father). The final copy, lodged with Riesman, was marked “Not to be quoted without permission of David Riesman.” The sequence of the interview was more or less chronological, with forays forward to The Lonely Crowd, but in some places this report puts together what was said at different times, or re-arranges it more chronologically—Rupert Wilkinson 1989 Abbreviations: DR = David Riesman. ER = Evelyn Riesman LC=Lonely Crowd Square brackets denote insertion by RW. Interview Report The interview started by showing DR a photo of his father, David Riesman, Sr., published in his father’s 1940 obit in the Current Biography. DR remarked it was a formidable face. I asked ER her first impressions of the Riesman parents. She said she liked them very much, felt very easy and comfortable with them. (Evelyn’s father was an MIT professor and she had grown up in Brookline; had been to Winsor School in Boston and had a musical family background like the Riesmans). DR knew the photo of his father but not the obituary. DR said he had

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman

155

helped his father with some of the writing for Medicine in Modern Society (1938). I noted that his father, unbeknownst to DR, had agreed to be listed in Who’s Who in American Jewry, despite DR’s stress elsewhere that he had not at all had a Jewish upbringing. DR, continuing to speak of his parents, said his father’s circle was “enormous,” including much of upper class Philadelphia—it included for instance America’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt, who co-authored with Sigmund Freud, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (1966). Regarding his mother, both DR and ER did think that his mother’s world reflected a German Jewish “gender gap” in which the men (often lawyers, bankers, and businessmen) tended to leave it to women to be active in public as well as cultural affairs. Female relatives included an aide to Hopkins in the New Deal; another became a landscape architect; his mother’s sister a book reviewer. DR agreed much of this division of labor was not tied to Jewish ethnicity, but ER suggested that Jewish wives of business elite were more “enterprising,” in a way assertive, in intellectual activities and social issues than, e.g., her [mainly WASP] school friends and their mothers. DR stressed again that he had been raised in ignorance of Jewish festivals. I asked if it wasn’t particularly Jewish at that time to do psychoanalysis, as DR’s mother did. They believed not. An upper class friend of ER’s sister had done analysis with Fromm though that was not how DR came to Fromm for analysis (see below). DR said his parents had “over defined” him, wanting him to be both cultivated and skilled. As a boy he had felt neither. His father was far more widely cultivated than he; indeed he had some interests and knowledge that DR wished he had now but had rejected then. His father was also skilled in a practical sense whereas DR was “clumsy.” DR indicated feeling a lot of pressure from his father, who also applied this pressure to DR’s “more obedient” brother too, whom his father would make stay up late at night to do astronomy. DR himself felt he was “not measuring up” to his father’s standards. At the same time his mother had defined him as analytical like her, but believed that both DR and his father were not creative. [The uncreative, “unoriginal” label by his mother is something DR mentioned several times in the interviews as he has elsewhere.] I suggested that LC was autobiographical: not simply a projection onto history but a telescoping and intensification of it, from inner-directed, relatively Puritan and “over defining” parents through the sensitivities of other-direction in his own life, seeking and realizing an autonomy made possible by the privacies and hard edges of his parents’ world as well as his own, more modern self-awareness. Hence his enormous concern with the imposition of opinions and self-definitions on the individual by others. DR said he had not thought of this before and it might well be right. His parents were not necessarily “stricter” than others of their generation but they were more “frugal.” Although they were well-to-do, DR as a boy believed he was the poorest of his [private school] classmates: they “had more electric trains than I had.” His parents were also “very critical.” DR had a “ravenous” appetite,

156

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

and would be scolded for “reaching for the bread.” It was considered impolite to ask for “seconds or thirds”—he was told he had a tapeworm. On vacation the family regularly went to Northeast Harbor, Maine, which was “elegant, not luxurious”—there were at first no cars on the island, and a lot of animus against the elder Rockefeller for building developments enabling the “hoi-polloi” to come in.1 His father loved to fish and DR hated it, found it boring—a “key to life” became the wish not to be bored. DR would “climb a mountain” not to be bored; he loved rowing and canoeing, and was good. He was afraid of the physical dangers of baseball but played it, “played the game,” and memorized a large number of baseball players’ batting averages. In group athletics DR was “hopeless with my peers”: he finished last in riding at his Tucson prep school. His father was no support in athletics, not even the learning of all the baseball statistics. In not being athletic at all, his father was indeed in this regard “the immigrant Jewish intellectual.” His father was “always busy,” making notes even in his car, which was chauffeur driven. In a later follow up letter, DR expanded, writing of not feeling “one of the boys.” DR boarded at Evans School, in Tucson, run by a British headmaster, between going to William Penn Charter in Philadelphia and entering Harvard. Although DR’s Philadelphia school, Penn Charter, was Quaker, he did not voluntarily go to Quaker meetings, i.e. he went very little outside of school. During school, “Fourth Day,” Friends Meetings, were standard. DR shared Quaker values of pacifism from quite an early age, and was “at home with” the lack of ceremony, though he now liked ceremony more. His Unitarianism came from ER, but he felt similar—they went to a Unitarian church in Buffalo when they moved there the year after their marriage. I asked if his later readiness to generalize and speculate about social character— never a wholly legitimate subject in the academic world—reflected a combination of marginality with upper class confidence and connections, a protective milieu. He indicated he did feel marginal, very much, but not an upper class confidence. Without Nathan Glazer’s support, he could never have had the confidence to do The Lonely Crowd. With his Penn academic connections, Glazer had a “breeziness,” and editorial gifts that made it possible; he seemed to know so much more. At the same time the LC work did not seem to be “rule breaking” academically: when he got into it DR was too new to regular academia to see it as such.2 At Harvard DR had gone to Boston debutante parties but felt neither upper class nor middle class. An “odd concatenation of people” were his friends at Harvard, though he probably knew by name a third of his class. He had a “looking, questing” quality at college: “went out for everything,” though music was a strong interest. 1 DR to RW, 6 February 1989, pp. 2–3, quotes and elaborates on Northeast Harbor’s portrayal in Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines. 1900–1950 (Lukacs 1981). 2 DR to RW, 20 December 1988, on DR’s innovating confidence as an editor at The Crimson, DR writes he was “not intimidated by professors and deans, despite feelings of marginality” too.

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman

157

There was also a repressed Jewishness. He was “cool toward” the Jewish, commuter, pre-med grinds. He didn’t realize his feeling contained an anti-Semitism until Carl Friedrich [then a young instructor and good friend of DR’s] “called my attention to this.” Friedrich said, “you are rejecting these people: why?” Some of this was an anti-scholasticism common in the dominant, gentlemanly culture of the College at that time: you were not supposed to be a grade hunter. Academically DR wanted to do well but not appear to do well. So he concealed his high grades; lied to a friend who asked him what grade he got for an ambitious paper from Irving Babbitt—he got an A but pretended it was lower. Babbitt’s comment on the paper was that DR was “clever like Georg Brandeis,” a prominent Jewish critic, but DR didn’t realize at the time the anti-Semitic undertone in Babbitt’s remark. Later, when DR was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he tried unsuccessfully to get The Crimson not to publish the news. Nevertheless, DR found Friedrich’s challenge “sharp and helpful.” He had not wanted to be identified with Jews, especially a new, arriving generation of them and didn’t want to be tagged, to have an identity ascribed to him. On majoring in biochem at Harvard, DR indicated it was more demanding than the liberal arts in that you had to go to class, which put him at a disadvantage working for The Crimson. But it was also “undemanding” in that you could get “the right answer.” He did it in obedience to his parents’ views that you should do in college what you couldn’t do elsewhere. He certainly didn’t do biochem as a pre-med requirement. He despised the lab work, describing it as simple minded Bunsen burner experiments where, again, his physical clumsiness broke things and got in the way. I asked whether a college background in science connected with the explicitly hypothetical nature of LC’s categories, whether it made DR more comfortable with working in hypotheses. DR said he did not learn this in college, but was intrigued by Lawrence Henderson (prominent in George Homans’s autobiography (1984) and in James Conant’s building of the Society of Fellows). Henderson, a pathologist who lectured on physiology of the blood, wrote The Fitness of the Environment (1913), in which he speculated as to why one couldn’t have life the next stage up the periodic table—why it simply wouldn’t work. This kind of speculation had fascinated DR. So did Henderson’s “clear delineation of the structure of hemoglobin.” I asked whether my hypothesis about Daniel Bell (formed on just meeting and hearing him once) applied to DR. That is, I wondered if a feverishly inquisitive mind, fascinated with all kinds of practical detail, sometimes needed giant conceptual categories and typologies, to give a sense of order and control. DR thought this did apply to Bell but not to him. Compared with Bell and Glazer and their precocious New York upbringing, he developed late; had felt “so much slower in every way.” He was curious but not “omnivorous” like Bell. He had dropped Philosophy I at Harvard: found it too abstract, and later found Glazer’s empirical sophistication more congenial. Both of them tried to make sense of data, to go inside it. When I asked why LC was more typological, more dominated by

158

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

categories than most of his fluid writing, DR said this was partly due to Glazer’s influence: Glazer was essential to the formulation of inner-direction (originally called conscience-direction) v. other-direction. But he thought he did show the categorizing/typologizing tendency in his work on higher education and in Constraint and Variety in American Education (1956). Noting DR had written that Friedrich introduced him to European social science, I asked whether Friedrich had contributed to his intellectual development as an “enabler” or in specific ideas. DR thought the former very much: Friedrich gave him confidence and suggested “avenues” to read in. Yes, they had shared an interest in totalitarianism but Friedrich’s view of it was more “ironclad” than DR’s; from quite early on, DR was more apt to believe that totalitarianism was a matter of “degree”: more impressed by the amount of “guerrilla warfare” that went on in and against totalitarian societies, readier to see differences between Nazis and Stalinists. His introduction to European ideas of alienation came from talking with Fromm during psychoanalysis, which was not a strict Freudian process: no couch. His interest in opinion and propaganda had not started with his 1931 visit to the Soviet Union, though it had been affected by the ability of the Soviets to sell itself to his intellectual fellows on the trip, despite the evident survival of old fashioned Russian brutality (at one point they had to make their bus driver go back to pick up a man whose cart the bus had hit, sending him sprawling—the driver had wanted to leave him, a mere “peasant”). Generally DR was not as impressed at Russian society as his friends were. Instead, his interest in propaganda and opinion control went back to World War I when Germans were called Huns and frankfurters renamed hot dogs. He was conscious as a young boy of the German element in the family; they had a German cook, and a German governess “right off the boat.” He knew German music, ate German springerle (Christmas cookies). He remembered not looking on the sinking of the Lusitania as an “outrage,” more as an act of war—it was a British ship. On what ER called his Depression “experiment,” DR tried seeking a job in Detroit and Chicago. He said of this decision, it was “quixotic”—“as I still am now”—and an “exploratory impulse.” DR said no one in his circle had been affected by the Depression, and he was offended by their attitudes on top of their own continued affluence, that anyone could get a job whom really wanted to. He had never really met “workers” until the Depression. It affected his attitudes toward poverty in two opposite ways. On the one hand, it exposed a sentimental exaggeration of poverty by radical acquaintances, for the workers he met usually had more “resources” for getting a job than he had: they had cars which meant that they could go to several employers in one day whereas often he could only get to one, relying on buses or other time consuming means. On the other hand, he proved to his rich friends that the unemployed were often good family members and really trying to get jobs. Why did he go into law? He indicated it was less about choosing the legal profession, that it was a choice to attend Harvard Law School. He shared the

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman

159

general Harvard undergraduate disdain of academic graduate school. In attending, however, DR indicated that he didn’t realize he was going into a “non-Harvard world … an icy combination of the mid-west and New York city.” On clerking for [Justice] Brandeis: I noted that several times he had written of not liking Brandeis: “Why?” In addition to his coldness, DR gave examples of three kinds of Brandeis behaviors that he disliked; that he indeed found quite shocking. First, he was dogmatic, making his mind up and not allowing it to be altered by clear, contrary case material that DR produced. Secondly, he was unethical when he used knowledge gained as counsel to corporations against these corporations before becoming a judge, while the “Public’s Lawyer.” Thirdly, DR heard him say (to Harold Laski in 1936) that he hoped the British and Germans would kill each other off, thus simultaneously defeating the Nazis and opening up Palestine to faster Jewish settlement.3 Clerking for Brandeis, though, did give DR a lot of prestige, he said, and this helped shortly afterwards when he was executive secretary of the committee that helped German Jewish professionals find jobs in the US. Friedrich was an instigator of this operation. DR did not see any deep psychological significance in his involvement in this. Going back to 1936 and his marriage to ER, I asked what she had brought to his writing, and particularly LC. A writer of fiction and art criticism, she had taken a Bryn Mawr course in “rhetoric” which was really one in editing. She said she often read what he had written, “a pencil in my hand.” DR said her judgments of people were often better than his. She would visit college classes where he went, have conversations with people where he was interviewing or surveying—would correct his assessments. This applied especially to the work that went into Faces in the Crowd (Riesman and Glazer 1952), where she did some editing and cutting. On starting psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm in 1939: why? His mother had suggested it, wanting someone to discuss psychoanalysis with. Her own analyst, Karen Horney, had remarked to her that DR was a very “resigned young man,” and recommended Fromm (DR didn’t know at the time that Fromm was Horney’s lover). ER said the “resigned” description seemed strange to her: he didn’t seem at all resigned; indeed he “took me by storm” and seemed that way socially with others. DR said he was not particularly shy at the time, but had a “crushing” feeling with Friedrich as well as Brandeis, and that he had been much affected by his mother’s statement that he lacked originality. He remembered acutely being chided by Friedrich for being unable to criticize his book on constitutional development, and he had not been able to develop Brandeis’s drafts as had his illustrious predecessors in the Brandeis clerkships. Fromm “liberated me” from this sense of failure that arose, as Fromm put it, because “you are playing on their turf.” I suggested, and DR agreed, that in accepting Homey’s comment about being resigned and going to psychoanalysis to deal with it, he was in part responding to very high personal standards of self-development and self-expression. In a December 1988 letter expanding on this subject, DR wrote more on the truth in 3 DR to RW, 20 December 1988, Notes p. 2.

160

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Homey’s comment: notes despair about being unable “to imagine a future for myself,” certainly not as a “practicing lawyer.” I asked DR what LC said that was not already said by Fromm (in Escape from Freedom (1941) and Man for Himself (1947)). DR thought for some time, and then answered, “the details”; though the fundamental “building blocks” of his book were Fromm’s. [See below for second thoughts by DR.] He then added that his further typology distinguishing between anomie, adjustment and autonomy was not really Fromm’s, and Fromm’s concept of the marketing personality “did not quite capture” the idea of the peer group. DR said he had never liked the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass society, though he acknowledged that he had read and interacted with Adorno’s writing on popular radio music. [cf. DR’s article on “Listening to Popular Music” (1950)].4 5 6 DR also said that he added the population-curve idea; he loved demography and was not familiar at the time with the ideas of Karl Mannheim on generations. On the evolution of LC’s main character types, DR and Glazer developed “political ideas” about types of opinion and Americans’ surprising “opinion proneness” as they read interviews done at NORC’s Eastern Office in NY. They tested their “nascent ideas” when reading interviews done for C. Wright Mills by Glazer and others. “Conscience-direction” (as they originally called “innerdirection”) and “other-direction” appeared to be a way of distinguishing the interviewees and recognizing the salience of the peer-group. DR believed Mills’ White Collar (1951) “misrepresented the interview material.”7

4 The question of originality in LC warrants this interviewer’s note. In my interview of the same time with Nathan Glazer, the latter expressed more of a sense of influence by the Frankfurt School, though in LC both authors continued Fromm’s line of departure from the Frankfurt notion that capitalism was fascistic. However, Fromm does not really anticipate LC’s connection between the other-directed consumer type and a concept of political pluralism, and LC makes much more of leisure and consumption. On the other hand, DR’s autonomous type is very like Fromm’s spontaneous and self-aware “productive orientation.” 5 DR to RW, 20 December 1988, Notes p. 2, enlarges on the difference between LC and the Frankfurt School. Along with LC’s own typology of political types and its attack on “notions of a power elite,” LC rejected the School’s “class analysis” as well as its “critique of ‘the masses.’” Fromm and Lowenthal were “enormously talented observers” of contemporary America, “but did not have much sense for American history.” 6 DR to RW, 6 February 1989, pp. 3–4: “On reflection I do not think it is correct to say that ‘the fundamental building blocks [of LC] were Fromm’s.’ The concept of autonomy owes most to Fromm. However, Fromm’s concept of the ‘marketing orientation’ is more denigrating than we intended ‘other-direction’ to be: the latter has qualities of empathy, not self-salesmanship, certainly not for any ‘capitalistic’ purpose. Also it is unfair to Fromm to [be] put in the same class in terms of influence [by] Leo Lowenthal’s one brilliant essay on heroes of popular culture. The latter was a helpful spur and illustration of our ideas.” 7 cf. DR to RW, 6 February 1989, p. 4

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman

161

While living in New York, DR had audited Ernst Schachtel’s lectures at the New School discussing the use of Rorschach tests, that is, “projective” tests— work which fascinated both ER and DR—“the test seemed to give some ‘magical’ insights, offering the hope that interviews could be interpreted in terms of what the interviewee was really like or really meant.” Schachtel’s material included findings about fascist dispositions of German workers, but DR valued the Rorschach tests not for what they themselves revealed but as a means for “a gifted analyst who put every answer together with everything else.” DR implied that later he and others tried to interpret ordinary interviews in a similar way. I asked whether the concepts of inner and other-direction and autonomy roughly corresponded to, and were influenced by Freud’s anal, oral and genital categories. On reflection, DR thought not. He had been quite scornful of the types, though he could understand their application as metaphors to “studies of group or national character (e.g. as having ‘anal’ personality) or to FDR having an ‘oral personality’).” However, “much more to the point were the common distinctions of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, feudal and industrial, historical rather than biographical.” On the culture and personality anthropologists: DR did not think he met Ruth Benedict before 1941. Margaret Mead’s main influence on him was as an “extraordinary connector.” A “networker” before that term was invented, she was very generous in helping and putting together other people. I asked if it wasn’t also true that she was irritatingly voluble. Yes, DR said, she could be an “unfair listener.” He told of her meeting with a group of his students, asking them what they had read, and then scolding them for not reading enough. Driving her home afterwards, he told her, “you were cruel to those students,” and she burst into tears with mortification: she had not realized what she had done. Lloyd Warner would not have her at Chicago, as he considered her a “gabby woman.” ER remembered being “thrilled” at a New York Times book review of Mead in the mid or late 30s: a “woman” writing such things. I asked if Mead’s distinction between external and internalized sanctions (Cooperation and Competition (1937)) had influenced him and he said no. I also asked if the culture and personality anthropologists had made social character work such as LC’s less deviant in the late 40s. DR thought yes but in a qualified way. Despite people like Kardiner, the extent and influence of culture and personality anthropology were quite small, but “the batteries hadn’t been mounted against us [social character people] in full force.” On the Lynds, DR said he had liked most Helen Lynd’s England in the 1880s: Towards a Social Basis for Freedom (1945). DR said Robert Lynd was “virtuous” but DR felt his own “spirit was more playful” than R. Lynd’s ideas in Knowledge for What? (1939). He had, however, “dreamed of working with the Lynds [on] a community study.” About his job [1942–43] as deputy D.A. for NY county, DR said he loved reading the cases, including wiretap material. As a result he dismayed his liberal friends by favoring capital punishment for murder by professional criminals.

162

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Again and again he heard criminals on the taps cautioning each other not to bring guns to a planned burglary. He was sure it was fear of the death sentence that made them do this. I said I sensed, though not very tangibly, an ideological shift in his writing from a left-wing, even quasi-Marxist picture of big business power in his writing on America and modern society cl942 to the pluralist model in LC. DR agreed with this: his “sensibility had changed.” Before writing LC, he had read C. Wright Mills’ New Men of Power (1948) on labor leaders and had disliked his exaggeration, as he saw it, of leaders’ power. Why then, I asked, did LC apply the term “monopolistic competition” (and the idea of “marginal product differentiation”) to other-directed behavior in the contemporary US? DR answered that “monopolistic competition is still competition,” though he had underestimated the amount of global economic competition that would develop. DR wrote me in February of 1989 in a follow up: What is striking about LC is the degree to which it is insular to the United States. The book reflects in that respect the American situation right after the end of World War II. Moreover, terms like “monopolistic competition” or “marginal product differentiation” were used in an ironic way, not as solemn condemnation of capitalism. What is so extraordinary in retrospect is to realize how ready we were to assume that the problems of production had been solved and that the problems of distribution were in principle soluble, not intransigent. In addition, although there is the Left Wing touch in some of the earlier writings, I did not have an animosity [in them] toward “robber barons” or a dour view of capitalist exploitation. While I was critical of Justice Brandeis in many respects, which you note, I shared with him, not the passion of his anti-monopoly outlook, but his decentralist suspicion of the New Dealers, even while I respected some of the young men, like my housemate Thomas Hopkinson Eliot, who helped pilot the Social Security legislation through the Congress. The National Recovery Administration, which I think a unanimous Supreme Court threw out, was a vehicle for price-fixing and hence for what LC dubs “fair trade,” in contrast to “free trade.”

On his war work with Sperry Corporation, DR said he always expected to go into the military eventually but wanted very much to avoid “basic training”—he would have been “hopeless” at it. I asked if the Sperry Corporation exemplified the pluralistic power that he stressed in LC; answer yes, very much. Sperry’s operating managers were engineers, people of “rectitude,”—“scrupulous, not greedy”—who had no idea how to run the big company that Sperry had become. Greater respecters of General Motors and other corporations that seemed efficient at every level, they tended to be anti-government and seemed to fear the unions, but not always. Sperry plants had differing “atmospheres—‘cultures’ we would say today.” Top management had no idea about the government they were negotiating with; did not, for example, understand service rivalries. Aided by a “brilliant, young lawyer,” Elizabeth Klintrup, DR was in charge of negotiating with the armed services how

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman

163

much the company should recover for work done which could not be quickly stopped or shifted after the military had ordered it decommissioned. DR told his military counterparts frankly, that the company that had suddenly expanded from a thousand to over 30,000 employees, was in “disorganized ‘shambles,’ for which military procurement policies bore some responsibility.” From this experience he realized that neither government, nor a company, had complete power over each other but each could make the other miserable, and so could the unions. In addition to these insights, DR’s Sperry years gave him the “gyroscope” metaphor for innerdirection but not the substantive idea. I asked if DR’s early postwar years at Chicago—interdisciplinary teaching, interesting scholars read and brought in, and the exposure to anthropologists— encouraged his social character work. Yes, he said, Chicago was “enabling” but it was “bracing rather than embracing.” His analysis with Fromm helped him not to feel intimidated by the young scholars from City College of New York who seemed to have read everything—“so bright so young” as ER put it. People like Ed Shils. High-powered talk.8 At Chicago, Milton Singer was a particularly “important person” for DR, a Texas trained philosopher whose teaching spanned public policy, psychology, and culture. DR said that Singer, as a philosopher, developed his intellectual confidence, for, as he had said earlier, he had dropped a first year philosophy course at Harvard; it had bored him but he also “couldn’t follow it … couldn’t do it”; it was too abstract. He felt this a failure; he knew the course was important, and his father would have loved it. Friends at Harvard had talked about logical positivism and Whitehead’s lectures on Plato etc. … DR had felt “stupid, bewildered” by them, yet also felt they were not imaginative. Singer helped DR move into anthropology and culture and personality. Redfield, too, was teaching in the College at the time: gave big lectures. At Yale the key people on the Committee on National Policy, which sponsored the LC research, were Harold Lasswell and Eugene Rostow. Their sponsoring policies did not reflect a Cold War interdisciplinarity (my question), and indeed the Committee, with the “notable exception of Lasswell,” was unsympathetic to the LC result—not because LC lacked policy orientation but because it was too soft nosed. What, I asked, about the Yale of John Dollard and a law school interested in behavioral science? This, said DR, was not the Yale represented by the Committee. DR and Glazer actually delayed presenting their research to the Committee as they knew it would not be well received. They got much more supportiveness from Brewster Smith et al. at Harvard, where they were working on what became Opinions and Personality (Brewster 1956): long interviews on such things as anti-Soviet attitudes. I asked about Veblen as a possible influence on LC. DR said he had been impressed by the acuteness of Veblen’s description of the “underconsumption” and 8 Between the Wars, CCNY—tuition-free and largely Jewish—may have been the most academically selective college in the country.

164

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

“spareness” of the old upper classes. He was not so much influenced, though, by the content of Veblen’s observations as by the “way he was able to interpret styles in consumption.” However, as DR’s book, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (1953) suggested, Veblen had a certain Philistinism that DR did not like. I wondered whether an early seed of LC’s consumption focus had been laid in the defense spending boom of the early 40s. DR said he didn’t know, but he did believe then that the “invention of defense” would continue the war boom into peacetime: that due to a combination of Keynes and defense spending, there would be no post-war depression. I noted to DR that he was an early identifier of what would later be called “military Keynesianism.” This led to a question about prevalence. LC, I said, implied a cultural class leadership, hinting that other-direction would spread downwards from the young, metropolitan upper middle classes. Writing later, DR appeared to pull back from this in saying that he was only writing about a specific class character, not a national character. DR said they meant in LC to imply that other-direction might spread; they didn’t know if it would, but they did assume erroneously that “everything goes”: that is, affluence and leisure would continue to grow and spread, and that families would become more and more “the prisoners of the peer group.” Later he had more doubts about extrapolating future trends from the present, which was why he resigned from the Commission on the Year 2000. What, I asked, about working class resistance to other-directed trends? LC described this phenomenon—or at least a working class resistance to false personalization—but did LC’s authors expect this to evaporate? DR said they just didn’t know enough to generalize. “I had no sense of the working class.” Why then did LC have the subtitle, “A Study of the Changing American Character” [emphasis added by RW]? “Hyperbole,” DR said; I asked, to sell the book or to highlight the implication that other-direction might spread? The latter, said DR, and he then told how the Yale Press editor had shown him the first cover of the book. The jacket copy called it “the greatest book on America since Veblen.” DR said he told the editor, “I’m sorry you showed it to me—you can’t say that.” When the editor said it would cost $500 to change it, DR wrote him a check for that amount. DR added that for several years after publication, the authors got no royalties on the book: they all went to the Yale committee. When they did get royalties, DR received 40 percent, Glazer and Denney 30 percent each, though Glazer got a higher figure for the paperback edition that he had abridged. In a follow up letter from December 1989 DR tells of Karl Meyer’s invention of The Lonely Crowd title, after DR told him its contents. One of DR’s “unsatisfactory notions” for the original title was The Continental Pueblo! At the time of the LC work, DR said he did not think of the book as a huge and risky statement. It was “an essay,” drawing on history, sociology, psychology, and psychoanalysis but only aiming to pick out a part of general, social trends. “Looking back, it looked larger than it looked to us” at the time. The notion that

Toward the Lonely Crowd: A Report on an Interview with David Riesman

165

“Rupert Wilkinson would be sitting here interviewing me” about the book would have been inconceivable then.”9 I asked whether LC didn’t contain a contradiction between what it called “false personalization” toward the end of the book, and the initial assumption that other-direction was not simply imposed from on top but was a genuine character tendency produced by a changing culture. In a way, it seemed to me, the book’s later sections seemed to be moving back towards Fromm’s idea of a “pseudo-self.” DR said that “false personalization,” referred to having to behave in a certain way—smile, glad-hand—over and above what other-direction made easy. But he criticized C. Wright Mills’ picture of saleswomen having to smile and be nice. A study by Chicago students [undergrads] of saleswomen in the department store, Carson Pirie—probably in the early 50s, he said—found “they really loved their work. They probably did smile a lot, but because they enjoyed the work and the people rather than feeling coerced to smile while they would have preferred to scowl.” Mills’ interpretation of his own interview data was politically loaded: for example, he declared that an insurance salesman’s apparent enthusiasm was contrived. DR thought Fromm’s distinction between a “pseudo-self” and a real, natural self was “Rousseauistic, romantic” about the latter. At the same time he suggested that women might tend biologically to behave more naturally—men were more egotistical. DR implied here that male egotism generated more affectations. On William (‘Holly’) Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), DR said he went back with him to the Park Forest suburb, and the women there told him persuasively that they were less conformist than Whyte had said. I asked about Whyte, his Marine background, etc., and DR said his manner was not at all toughguy. DR noted he had moved into environmentalism after The Organization Man. Contrary to what Current Biography (Candee 1955) had said about DR’s politics, DR had not voted Republican in the 1950s, though he had found Adlai Stevenson “vain” and “weak,” and some of his aides had “tunnel vision” on the Cold War. I asked about his tendency cl950 to write off Henry Wallace as the prisoner of Stalinists. DR said a lot of people around Wallace were indeed Stalinists, not just soft nosed liberals. But it was now time, he thought, to reconsider the Korean War—it was not necessarily just a defensive war, a “good” war. In a later follow up correspondence, DR added that his beliefs of the time were that “as a general who had decided to become a Republican, Eisenhower had a better chance of moderating the Cold War than most Democrats.” Of himself, DR again said he was and long had been “quixotic.” That is, he was a “utopian” in “unlikely” directions, going against the general culture and its “realists.”

9 DR to RW. 6 February 1989, p. 5 qualifies the above by saying they were aware at the time that LC made “a number of specific statements for which we lacked sufficient evidence, and which were risky.”

166

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

References Bullitt, William C. and Sigmund Freud. 1966. Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Candee, Marjorie Dent. 1955. Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H.W. Wilson. Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Fromm, Erich. 1947 Man for Himself. New York: Rinehart. Henderson, Lawrence Joseph. 1913. The Fitness of the Environment. New York: Macmillan. Homans, George Caspar. 1984. Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Lukacs, John. 1981. Philadelphia, Patricians and Philistines, 1900–1950. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Lynd, Helen Merrell. 1945. England in the Eighteen-eighties: Towards a Social Basis for Freedom. London: Cass. Lynd, Robert Staughton. 1939. Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mead, Margaret. 1937. Cooperation and Competition among Primitive People. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. Wright, and Helen Schneider. 1948. The New Men of Power, America’s Labor Leaders. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Riesman, David. 1950. “Listening to Popular Music.” American Quarterly 2:4. Riesman, David. 1953. Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation. New York: Scribner. Riesman, David. 1956. Constraint and Variety in American Education. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Riesman, David and Leon Banov. 1938. Medicine in Modern Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Riesman, David and Nathan Glazer. 1952. Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics. NY: Arno Press. Riesman, David et al. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Smith, M. Brewster. 1956. Opinions and Personality. New York: Wiley. Whyte, William Hollingsworth. 1956. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wilkinson, Rupert. 1992. American Social Character: Modern Interpretations: From the ‘40s to the Present. New York, NY: IconEditions, Wilkinson, Rupert. 2010. “The ‘Lonely Crowd’ at 60, Is Still Timely.” Chronicle of Higher Education. September 12, 2010.

Chapter 12

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman Stjepan Mestrovic

I took David Riesman’s course, “Character and Social Structure in America” as an undergraduate at Harvard. It—and he—affected me more than any professors. He would frequently tell us, during lecture, to “go out and look.” Other professors taught us the usual research procedures which involved hypothesis testing, and of course, trying to prove that our hypotheses were false. But he wanted his students to become curious, and to try to find what is personally as well as socially true. As a result of taking him seriously, I became curious about him as well as his generation, and wondered: was the author of The Lonely Crowd lonely? How can one be lonely in a crowd? Was my generation lonely, and if so, was it a different kind of loneliness from Riesman’s generation? Riesman wrote about and spoke so much about childhoods, it seemed natural to me to wonder about his childhood. Eventually, I interviewed 40 Harvard professors for my undergraduate honors thesis, and Riesman was one of my interviewed “subjects.” I went through the usual research procedure, of course—including getting Riesman’s written permission to eventually publish portions of his interview. I majored in something called Psychology and Social Relations, an interesting blend of psychology and sociology, which no longer exists. I doubt that any thesis committee would allow a student today to “go out and look.” Riesman was an unconventional scholar and person. He was a famous professor at Harvard—but he did not hold a PhD in any field. This would be unthinkable today. He was appointed as the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences over the objections of the sociology department. He did not lecture as much as he held discussions in large lecture halls—and he was mesmerizing to students. He engaged his students so deeply that one could hear a pin drop in the classroom. Even in my interview with him, he disclosed things that one would not expect anyone to disclose to an undergraduate researcher. My intent here is to reflect briefly upon Riesman as a scholar—and person—in relation to his overall argument in The Lonely Crowd and to continuities as well as changes in American society since its publication and since my interview with him. The reader should not expect anything like the positivistic baggage that is forced on researchers and students today, wherein the researcher approaches the subject matter loaded with so many pre-conceptions that he or she can scarcely “see” the subject (this is the “vicious abstractionism” that William James warned

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

168

against). Rather, I follow Riesman’s emphasis on curiosity in this chapter, as I did at the time I interviewed him. And 40 years after conducting this interview, I realize that Riesman was following in the footsteps of Thorstein Veblen, who advocated “idle curiosity” in education. Riesman wrote a book on Veblen, and obviously took this idea seriously. To explore the social and private world of Riesman, and his immediate intellectual predecessors (William James, Thorstein Veblen, Sigmund Freud) is to glimpse a legacy that has been all but destroyed by the McDonaldization of education. I am referring to George Ritzer’s concept of the McDonaldization of society as an over emphasis on efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Riesman’s unconventional life and theories are a refreshing antidote to the Iron Cage of McDonaldization that is crushing the spirits of contemporary students. Childhood I began the interview in the usual way, by asking him about his childhood: I’m the oldest, which is typical of Harvard students. I have a younger brother who passed away and a sister. Basically we were not Rockefellers but in fact we were very wealthy. My father was a professor of medicine and had a good practice. So we were upper or upper middle class.

I asked him whether he thought that he had a happy childhood, and if he felt he had been loved by his parents. I was not prepared for his reply: I would say my childhood was quite unhappy. My mother lived in a world in which the only thing that mattered was being first-rate. And it had to be a creative artist, not a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that. Anyone who was not a creative artist was in her eyes second-rate. She viewed my father as second-rate. She viewed me as second-rate. I was viewed by her that way. . . I identified with her. She was an early feminist. She had won a fellowship to Europe which would have secured her an academic career; instead, she gave way to the social pressures of the milieu, didn’t accept the fellowship and felt frustrated all her life. She admired very few people, many of them artists. I was unhappy because I did not satisfy her definitions of worthiness. And she, in identifying me with herself, drew around me a circle of mere adequacy, which was failure. I was a failure in the domestic sense. Secondly, I was at a school which valued athletics above anything else and although I’m probably one of my few surviving classmates who still plays tennis everyday and used to until recently play squash regularly, I was by school definitions near the bottom in athletics: helpless, I loved baseball but I was clumsy. And while I was a bright boy I always had the feeling I was marginal socially. I was inferior to these graceful, athletic young men, and while at the same time not satisfying my mother’s criteria. And I should add that my

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman

169

father had the same name as myself—I am a “jr.” And this hung over me. There was no place I could go that his name wasn’t known. And teachers would say, “You are Riesman’s son” and that put a burden on me I couldn’t live up to. And while I could identify with my mother I can see clearly now that my father also was a formidable figure. And he was immensely busy. He placed other kinds of demands on me. To give you an example, he would bring home on Christmas or a birthday Twenty Years of Congress in two volumes and if I wasn’t interested then I failed in his eyes too. I saw him very little. I would say I was not really loved.

In his Lonely Crowd, Riesman would later argue that everyone in every era wants to be liked, but that the contemporary other-directed type wants to be liked more than anything else. It occurred to me during the interview that Riesman might have figured out as an adult that he had been unhappy as a child. I asked him to clarify whether he had realized, while he was a child, that he was unhappy. He replied: Yes, I felt this as a child. Except for one very important exception. I had a German governess who was just off the boat who was absolutely devoted. She was a devout Catholic. I learned German from her as a child. Later forgot it. But I had a great deal of love from her. And in a fashion I remained very inhibited and this in spite of the fact that in my mother’s world of thought—Joyce, Freud—all the now avant-garde artists were an early presence so that her thinking, but not her conduct, were very advanced. She had a very small, very select circle of friends. On the other hand my father was gregarious and knew everybody. I felt I couldn’t get out from under that shadow. I had a year of boarding school in Arizona and it was still, “Oh, you’re Riesman’s son.”

My immediate response to Riesman’s self-analysis was surprise that a well-off child could feel unhappy and unloved. The American ethos seems to assume that unhappy childhoods are generally the result of poverty. Upon further reflection, I realized that Riesman was talking about emotional connectedness—or the lack of it—and that this pertains to any social class. Because his mother admired only artists, and wanted him to become an artist, I disclosed to Riesman that I came from a family of artists—and they were no happier than his family. At this point Riesman interviewed me for a little bit, and surprised me with the fact that he knew of and had seen my grandfather, Ivan Mestrovic’s art. Finally, I suspect that, using terms from The Lonely Crowd, his mother was more inner-directed and his father more other-directed (sociable and gregarious), even though both parents lived in a predominantly inner-directed era that valued any sort of achievement more highly than any form of affection. It is important to keep in mind that children in Riesman’s generation were “raised” but not “loved up,” as they are today—in many ways, Riesman’s unhappy childhood was typical.

170

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Adolescence I asked Riesman to describe his adolescence. In addition, I asked the author of The Lonely Crowd whether he had felt lonely. It is worth noting that most of the other faculty that I interviewed denied feeling lonely. He answered: I had the same friends. The school I attended was decayed classical. Seven years of Latin and three of Greek but never any introduction to classical culture. I did extremely well academically. Socially, I had a few friends and I felt socially as I did athletically: awkward and graceless. The masters in the school were mostly also coaches. I felt very little support from them either. I was lonely. There were few . . . for instance, across the street lived the son of a colleague of my father’s. I used to try to get to know him. I played with his brother who was two years younger. As I look back on those early years I spent an incredible amount of time going to baseball games alone. I was a very sheltered child by today’s standards, being raised by a governess. I liked school better than I liked home.

Of course, I asked him how he “adjusted” socially, given these feelings of loneliness and not fitting in anywhere. The word, “adjustment” was in vogue in psychology at the time, along with its opposite, “maladjustment.” Riesman explained: How did I adjust? I would say . . . (long pause), if you asked my classmates they would have a different picture than mine. They would think I adjusted well. By my own internalization of parental standards, I did not. Because on my mother’s side I had fiercely intransigent standards I could never live up to and on my father’s side I had a man whom everyone loved, was extremely popular, extremely gregarious and I had to go forward in order to go backward. When I would bring college friends home they would say what extraordinary parents I had because they didn’t have mothers who read authors that they had just discovered. And I would feel very embarrassed because I couldn’t say, “These are very attractive people to meet but not to live with.” (emphasis added)

Again, there is the connection between the way that he characterizes his parents—the inner-directed mother and the other-directed father—and his famous explication of these concepts in The Lonely Crowd. But the decisive line in Riesman’s description is his reference to the “internalization of parental standards.” In all of his writings that touched upon socialization, he would later argue that the inner-directed “internalize” the standards of their parents while the other-directed open themselves up to “the jury of their peers.” Parents have been dethroned and de-privileged in the contemporary era, with children taking most of their cues from peer groups and media. Riesman was inner-directed, and dealt with

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman

171

the tensions of his childhood in the typical ways of that era, namely, sublimation and achievement. He elaborated that some semblance of other-directed sociability entered his life at age 16: Only in my last year, when I was sixteen, did social things enter. Parties and crossing sex lines, and so forth. And in a way, when I look at young people today, that is not necessarily a bad thing. I can illustrate my feelings by saying that all but half a dozen of my classmates went to Princeton. And my parents felt I was too socially immature, which was not entirely false, and they said to me when I graduated from high school—they wanted me to go to Exeter for a year. I wanted to go around the world. We compromised by my going to Arizona to boarding school for a year. It seemed adventurous. They had horses there. But it turned out to be not a good place at all but a place for upper class dead end kids from St. Paul whose parents didn’t know what to do with them. It was not an asset to be bright, to do well in school. It was a negative asset. I was never one of the boys. By that time I had a small number of close friends. There was one history teacher whom I adored and who worked with me privately. I was too young to take the college boards but he worked with me to prepare me for them. I took them anyway and did very well. But he lasted only two years at the school. Students complained about him. The school lost whatever good it had—that’s what I mean by “decayed classical.” The masters were unbelievably shallow pedants.

As an interviewer, I conformed too much to the vocabulary of psychology extant at that time, and asked him whether he “conformed” to the values of school—after all, he was a high achiever. His reply again took me by surprise, because he distinguished between inner versus external conformity. He was a rebel “inside” but a conformist outside—a trait that he attributed to the inner-directed types in his famous book. It is worth connecting this point to another argument in The Lonely Crowd, that the other-directed have no “inner” refuge in which they can hide from their “enemies.” The other-directed are socialized from kindergarten on up to share everything with their peer groups in order to “conform”—a social tendency that is currently found in the collective obsession with Facebook and other social media. Riesman said: Well, I conformed outwardly. I shared the values of my enemies to some part. Well, enemies is too strong a word. I shared some of the cultural values of the school. And since in my mother’s eyes merely doing good in school and doing well on the examinations was a sign of lack of creativity—taken for granted. So, the only way out was to be not engaged in school subjects with two exceptions. One was history and the other was poetry. But again, in my mother’s eyes, since I couldn’t write with any distinction uh . . . (long pause) I can illustrate my point by saying I became a serious admirer of Mark Twain. Not the Mark Twain

172

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy everyone knows, but the bitter, sardonic Mark Twain. I read everything by him. And I read what my parents called trash – detective stories. But then that came to a sudden stop along with baseball, when I came to college.

I do not mean to imply that Riesman’s sophisticated social theory should be reduced to the psychology of his childhood. But it is striking that the connection between his unhappy childhood and his later achievements bears some resemblance to similar connections between the lives and works of Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber. Veblen and Weber also had unhappy childhoods—Weber’s mother turned out to be the inner-directed, Puritanical parent and his father the relatively more other-directed, gregarious one. Weber sublimated and worked out his inner conflicts in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. We remember Weber for his dark and icy concept of the Iron Cage, and Veblen for his equally dark vision of modern barbarism. Similarly, Riesman’s Lonely Crowd is not a happy book, even if it is very convincing and thought provoking. Perhaps it is true that unhappy people write unhappy books, although I do not intend to pose this as a hypothesis, and repeat that I do not intend to reduce Riesman’s genius to some armchair psychological assessment. I do mean to open up the possibility that in trying to understand a thinker, we should do more than examine other thinkers who influenced him or her—and start with thinking about how they coped with their childhoods, and how they sublimated their traumas. College Years Riesman began talking about his undergraduate years at Harvard as follows: The one course I ever dropped at Harvard was my first year philosophy course. I felt I should like it. I kept returning to Whitehead’s lectures and tried three times to study his thoughts and each time was turned off. It was too abstract. I couldn’t get interested in these games philosophers play. And I felt that was another defeat because I found the people around me playing the game so well. But I decided I would not become an academic long ago because my father was a professor and into the academic field. I didn’t begin to get released from my parents until my last year in college when I met a professor who was then a young instructor and my tutor who was the first exchange student coming from Germany, a friend of Heidelberg, who introduced me to exciting topics and only someone of his cosmopolitan background could have acted as a counterweight to my parents. And he was the only person who could have given me a sense, an initial sense of self-confidence.

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman

173

Because I was an undergraduate at the time of this interview, I was struck by Riesman’s admission that he had lacked self-confidence. I asked him about this, and he elaborated: Oh, yes, my parents made me feel inferior. Uh, [my reaction] was suppressed rage and anger. I would say it was coupled with ambivalence. Because in other respects she [my mother] identified me with herself and lived a frustrated life —she was an unhappy woman. She had Parkinson’s Disease by the time I was about eleven. And was bedridden by the time I was through college. And this, of course, made it more difficult to express any of the antagonism that I had built up against her. At the same time she drew me to her by identifying me with her. Let me illustrate. She belonged to a German Jewish family that had been well off. Her attitude was that any German Jews were not interesting. The really interesting people were the Russian Jews. Even though she was a social snob, she was a creative—“creative” in quotes—snob. And nothing else mattered. And German Jews weren’t creative. She took toward German Jews the same attitude as the Nazis: that of sterility, analytical power but not creative power, so that my very skills were held against me. I could pass exams—trivial, game-playing skill.

This last admission seemed too much for the young undergraduate who was interviewing him, so that I exclaimed, “That’s horrible.” He replied: It was horrible. One of the things was an effort to get away from her constraints which led me to perform foolhardy acts of physical extravagance. One of the things I failed to mention is that I was the only son of a physician, one who took no interest in his family. He had an interest in research but not in helping cure people. So that I grew up with rickets—which is shocking. I had pneumonia as a child and nearly died, was constantly bronchitic. I was a sickly child. He took no interest. But I took that as the order of nature. Children do. I could see the incongruity through the eyes of my friends whose parents were businessmen or homemakers with no intellectual powers and here my parents were both learning Italian at age 50 so they could read Dante. I could never be a professor by their standards— that’s the last thing I would be. That’s why I went to law school. Academic life never occurred to me.

Riesman went to Harvard, where he majored in biochemistry. At first, he sought to follow his father’s footsteps and become a physician. However, he changed direction abruptly after graduating, and went to Harvard Law School. As a quick aside, it is interesting to note that he refers to the peer group as “the jury of one’s peers”—he uses this and other metaphors from the legal profession in The Lonely Crowd. Apparently, he found Harvard to be a mixed blessing for him: he

174

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

felt more at home in college than he did at home, but he also found it to be lonely and alienating: Harvard was a delight. It was a new world, very different from the decayed prep school I came from. Here I felt at home. The Crimson [student newspaper] became my club. I was very ambitious. My Harvard years were uneven. The first year I was quite happy knowing perhaps 500 of my classmates, which is inconceivable today. And unlike many of my classmates, many of my friends were at Radcliffe, who were my speed at tennis as against the Harvard players. But again, I was awkward. I was given piano lessons but never played well, and one of my friends had season tickets to the Boston symphony. We went every week. Yes, I felt lonely and alienated. In my first year I was in the social register. I was invited to deb parties and dances, which ended promptly at midnight. Very chaste. I loved dancing. My friends were mainly socialites. In my second year I moved to Claverly [dormitory] and my friends did not follow. This was a great blow. I spent my second year with a social revolutionary who ended up getting killed in the Spanish Civil War. But he hated Harvard, and after two years ended up transferring to MIT. I admired him. We did foolish things. I would follow him on the tops of bridges, and being clumsy, I was terrified. My mother was also very cautious and always worried about me and this led me to do rash things. This was flight away from my urban, well-bred world. My parents had a town-house in New York: very proper, a kitchen, a basement, a house in which people are physically very separated from one another—the kids are upstairs. Unimaginable to today’s generation. So I sought to escape this governess-like world. I’ll give you another example. I went to the Soviet Union on adventure and not ideological grounds. I went to a collective farm and started to pitch hay and stepped into a hole, twisted my knee and landed in a Russian hospital. And I was always doing things like that. I was having physical catastrophes as my result of escaping or trying to escape parental definitions of what I was capable of.

Links to Sociology Riesman’s descriptions of his youth are in line with his and other assessments of the inner-directed social world in which he grew up: parents were remote authority figures who did not generally hug their children or express affection openly and verbally. The influence of the primitive “media” (radio and rudimentary television and cinema) was negligible to the overwhelmingly strong influence of parents and authority figures. Children suffered in silence and channeled their emotions into work—or they were broken. All this changed dramatically in the other-directed social world, in which being liked by peers—whether actual or virtual, as on Facebook and other social media—became more important than

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman

175

being respected for one’s achievements. I asked Riesman to assess the 1970s generation of college students: I think there is a great deal of unhappiness in this generation of students. A lot of sullenness. And one reason for this is that the mandate of many HarvardRadcliffe students, who are themselves children of very successful people, is not to be successful but to be happy. This philosophy—do your own thing— gives people a heightened sense that they must find work that is really theirs, that it is personally meaningful, meaningful lives, meaningful relations—and that’s a tremendous burden on young people. This affects this group of students more than any other in America. They are highly self-conscious and for which they feel themselves inadequate. They feel they are not capable of love, they are not capable of warmth: “Am I capable of medical decency?”—or “Am I materialistic and greedy in seeking law and medicine as career choice?” “Is it rationalization if I say I want to be a lawyer or a community health physician?” They’re cynical about society, about each other and about themselves.

It is not a matter of wanting to be liked or wanting to be successful. My students are particularly confused by this aspect of Riesman’s argument in The Lonely Crowd. They generally agree with Riesman that they are obsessed with being liked but disagree with him on not wanting to stand out for achievements. Riesman’s stand on this issue is complicated. He said in his interview: Well, I think of a physics concentrator who does absolutely brilliant work— his professors already have him teaching physics and math. But, he thinks he doesn’t want to go on with physics because he doubts he will be a Nobel Prize winner and he’s lost. Alienated is too strong a word. But he has staked his life up to now on being a top-flight physicist and while he knows he can be a great physicist he knows he cannot be the greatest—and nothing else is worth while. This zero sum nature of Harvard is peculiarly strong in this institution: “He’s a good man, he is not, he’s top rate,” and so on. What I’m saying is that instead of being part of a workshop in which people are excited because they are working together this young man sees himself in competition with the world of physics. So do his professors. I feel this is an appalling way to live. I look constantly for ways to create enclaves of a workshop sort where there is more collegiality.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to try to resolve Riesman’s apparent logical contradiction regarding the issue of being happy versus successful. What remains true and still resonates today is his description: nowadays, we all compete with the entire world—which is more interconnected than ever before because of the internet and communication revolutions—instead of having local competitors, who used to be more manageable. It is true that Riesman tried to create “workshop” sorts of enclaves, and it is also true that nowadays, we live in a social world of fake workshops and communities; Riesman elaborated: “In this case the student had

176

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

the support of his professors but the professors never feel secure enough to rest on their laurels. They still feel insecure; ‘Can I do it again?’ The senior faculty, with exceptions, are as unfriendly and ungenerous as many of the students are.” Riesman: The Teacher and Person I asked Riesman about his goals in teaching. He replied: I would say that my principal goal is to incite curiosity. Get students to look for themselves. This is a tremendously difficult goal because of the heterogeneity of the students. There are the go-getters and the sleepers and so on. The shy or frustrated students don’t believe he—or she, it’s often a woman—that he or she can discover anything. I try to show this is not so. I emphasize in my lectures that happily sociology is so backward a field that anyone can contribute—go out and look. I published three volumes of student papers simply to show I take student work seriously and learn from it. I used to read all my students’ papers—they taught me something. I still respond to many student papers but I’ve gotten to the point that I give them back two years later and I get very little feedback from the students. It’s gotten to the point that a student no longer believes that a faculty member can take him seriously and if one does, as I try to do, that so contradicts their [mind]set that they don’t respond. And I feel hurt by this. Paranoia is a useful reflex for the oppressed. It prevents disappointment and it also prevents discovery.

In later conversations, Riesman used this analogy: he said that sociology was like the Wild West as opposed to the paved highways in psychology and economics. The Wild West allows one to explore, discover, and wander in the wilderness, whereas most of the other social sciences force students into carefully structured “highways” of thought, complete with “must exit” and “do not enter” warnings. His assessment inspired me to pursue a PhD in sociology. Alas, sociology today is increasingly less backward, and more of a controlled highway. I ventured the observation to Riesman that most of my professors did not encourage curiosity, and on the contrary, tried to stifle it. They did not want students to ask questions. This observation set off an unexpected disclosure by Riesman: I am controlled when things are going well. But if I’m at a committee meeting dominated by one of these arrogant types, I’m apt to explode, because I can’t stand sadism. I just can’t stand sadism. If I had been in the same room with one of those arrogant professors—well, toward me I would be at best amused. You’re right in a sense, I feel sufficiently, well, I’m not defensive about my work. Everything that has been said in criticism of my work I’ve said only much more severely. I don’t identify with my work. It’s out there.

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman

177

This was surprising to me because Riesman had one of the most mild mannered and professional personas. One would not expect him to ever go into a rage. I asked him to explain this: In the first place, I identify with the person under attack. I see the snobbery and arrogance and the attacker may be someone who admires me—which makes the situation stranger when I then explode. Cruelty I have never been able to buy. Let me give you an example. I was coming back from New York on a plane when a group of students were teasing the hostess by pushing the call button and shouting, “The plane is crashing, the plane is crashing,” so I went up to them and said, “Cut it out. She isn’t your plaything.” My wife is trying to control me because one of these days someone is going to take a poke at me and I wouldn’t be very good in that situation—but I can’t restrain myself.

At this point I asked him whether his identification with the underdog stems from his childhood, and added that perhaps this question was too personal. He said: It’s not too personal. It’s a question that puzzles me also. I surmise it had something to do with what I felt as a child but … Let me tell you another story which will illustrate. I was not political in college. I was all my life antiCommunist. I’ve had no sympathy for anti-democratic systems at all. During the Depression people said anyone could go out and get a job. I wanted to see so I took a knapsack and set out for Detroit and lived with the unemployed and characteristically got sick. I recuperated, went to Chicago and tried again. It was foolish of me. No one would hire me but I proved to my satisfaction that not everyone could get a job. This was without any of this strong political feeling of injustice or ideology or anything of the sort. So although I led in some ways a controlled, reserved life—I didn’t in all ways. When I did things like this, that were hazardous—it was to fight against fate. I don’t think I regarded my parents—I eventually came to regard my mother with anger. I’ve wrote her fierce, angry letters which I’ve learned to regret because she was herself a tortured woman, a frustrated woman. I think, only if she had married Picasso would she had been satisfied. So I felt I was living out my fate, therefore I didn’t feel rage against injustice or strong passion in general. So I do not know the answer to the question as to what are the mechanisms that touch off this rage. All I know is to watch for it. I think you may have touched an important element, which is that in my writing I’ve found ways to channel my sardonic views about the world. (emphasis added)

Not surprisingly, I responded that according to psychological theories, he should have become neurotic as the result of such trauma. He replied: I became neurotic. I guess in some ways I still am neurotic. I think I was saved by several things. In the first place, I found Harvard College very different from

178

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy all that had gone before. I found the Crimson a kind of home here. I did well, which was not especially reassuring but it would have been disastrous not to do well. And I was very active in college. I was anxious, resigned, inhibited, putting on a mask. What saved me was meeting Erich Fromm and being psychoanalyzed by him. I was living in Buffalo and Karen Horney thought I was awfully resigned for a young man, which I think is true. I was fatalistic about myself and so I started commuting weekends to New York and seeing Erich Fromm for two hour stretches. Well, it changed my life. We became very close friends. Enormous friends. We became in a way colleagues even though in a way, you know, his manner of being an analyst was unorthodox. He met my parents. He wanted to know what he thought of them as against what I thought of them. We would have long discussions about Marxism and ideas as well as psychoanalytic sessions. And he was just a tremendous help in dealing with problems both contemporary and from the past. For example, why was I so impressed with the other boys whom I wanted to like me and be liked when I was in school? Why did I not see how destructive my mother had been? And how tearing down of me she was? And since he liked me and since I had and still have a tremendous admiration for him—we’re still in touch—we’re very close still and correspond all the time, I feel this made all the difference in my life. I feel it saved me, it saved my marriage. I was just 30. I don’t think I could have worked with any other psychoanalyst. Fromm touched me emotionally. And then my wife made a tremendous difference.

Riesman and others have already written about Fromm’s influence upon him. I will only add that it appears that Fromm was as unconventional as Riesman. And from a sociological perspective, one should note that most therapists today would prescribe medications as opposed to becoming friends with or mentors to their patients. Riesman added that there were other people and things who and that “saved” him: As I said I had the love of the governess, terribly important. A simple German woman who cared very much about me and to whom I was devoted. Now the question which I suppose needs an answer is, “Why didn’t I give up?” Well, I think youth and vitality. There were many things that I loved. I was a baseball fan. Although I was not good at sports I was very active and I loved the outdoors. I went camping, I adored canoeing. There was much that I did that was rewarding. I read a great deal although that was a mixed thing. I was a mad reader of detective stories but I also read all of Mark Twain who was a very bitter man. I think I felt kinship with his bitter, sardonic, cynical feeling. Bitter isn’t perhaps the right word. Resigned is the word Karen Horney used and I think it’s

Reflections upon my Interview with David Riesman

179

correct. I think cynicism is often a cover for idealism. I think the chances are that I think I was and repressed my idealism.

I asked him if his fame, following the publication of The Lonely Crowd, eased some of the issues stemming from his childhood. His answer was long and complicated. He was clearly aware of the Freudian concept of the “compulsion to repeat” childhood feelings and neuroses. What is interesting sociologically is that Freud is no longer taken seriously today, and neither is his concept that one must fight this compulsion, this conservative force that makes all of us tend to repeat the mistakes from our pasts. Yet, contemporary social life is replete with examples of such compulsions, private as well as social. Riesman said: I don’t know. The “who little me” feeling is extremely common. The easily crushed feelings seem awfully common so I don’t think it’s so unique. I wasn’t tough. I would say these are very American reactions of people who put the best face on everything. This was the case in my family. My mother always put the worst face on everything. It would be very hard to grow up. On the one hand she was as cynical about herself as she was about me. She drew me into a circle of self-criticism and self-analysis which denied all possibilities of forming a coat for defense. If I had a coat, she would say, “Who are you mad at?” because she was an early student of psychoanalysis. It would make me angry and irritated but it wasn’t an atmosphere where one could grow up with a coat. The coat was always being punctured, if there had been one. I also think these things are partly temperamental. I have outburst of anger in situations in which I am pushed to the end of my resilience. I lose humor and gaiety and explode. I never feel good about that. It’s always an over reaction to the specific situation. It shocks anyone observing me who expects me to be kind and conciliatory and suddenly, for what seems like a minor offense, I get angry. That’s one. The other is I simply get exhausted. I have too many stimuli pouring in and I have difficulty keeping my life under control and in bounds. I would feel embarrassed by evidence of my inconsiderateness, of not noticing, me not noticing someone else, their situation. I feel to my children I often seemed inquisitorial when I was only curious. I had a hard time dealing with my children’s feelings of being crowded by being my son. I often felt I was repeating my parent’s constellations in spite of myself. I think I’ve become a better father but I think at the outset I was not a good father. One of the things that haunts me is that I often have more time for my students than my family. That’s two repeats of parental constellations. I’m sure I engage in a lot of repression of childhood. So the experiences of injustice are not that vivid. I think children take what comes, to some degree for granted as their fault, in my case, or that’s the way the world is, as a more cynical older person might react. I suppose my way of fighting was to keep going, but not to

180

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy fight. If you read someone like Kafka, you will see a person who was not a selfactualizer who was nevertheless able to capture in writing his own neurosis and his own defeat. In many ways I’ve been lucky: tremendously good luck to meet my wife and Fromm. All kinds of, I mean I’ve had incredible experiences of luck in addition to misery. Fame has complicated my life, my fatherhood. I wouldn’t want to be obscure but I was totally taken by surprise.

Conclusions Perhaps I am safe enough as a scholar with my history of conventional peerreviewed publications to have ventured into this unconventional disclosure about the very unconventional, innovative, complicated, and compassionate David Riesman as scholar, teacher, and person. Academia has become much more conventional, regimented, and rationalized—in a word, McDonaldized—since Riesman’s time. In today’s social climate, Riesman—without a doctorate—most likely would not have been a professor at Harvard or anywhere else. It is important to remember that scholars are not just bundles of ideas who were influenced only by other ideas, but that they are persons with emotions, traumas, and families. Riesman’s Lonely Crowd spoke and continues to speak to so many people because it addresses emotions, childhoods, and common human interests at both sociological and personal levels of analysis. The last unconventional aspect of Riesman that is worth mentioning is that this interview was the beginning of my friendship with him that lasted up to his death.

Chapter 13

David Riesman’s Mission Michael Maccoby

David Riesman’s mission was not only to understand how and why Americans behave as they do, but also to make the case for the importance of civility in social relations. A major theme in his writings and political activism is the threat to civilization from all forms of extremism, from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Riesman believed that without civility there would be no progress. Riesman’s instincts were politically progressive and socially liberal. He supported civil rights and women’s liberation long before they were mainstream. But he had witnessed the devastation caused by the extreme ideologies of fascism and communism. He viewed civilization as fragile, a thin crust covering destructive human passions that could be enflamed by ideologies. He argued that it was urgent to support movements for arms control and détente with the Soviet Union to avoid nuclear war. He opposed the Viet Nam war as a mistake that provoked aggressive impulses in America from both sides of the political spectrum. When the anti-war movement turned violent, he spoke out against it, alienating those on the left who had viewed him as an ally. They did not understand that Riesman feared their extremism would provoke a right-wing backlash that would undermine civility and threaten civil liberties. With Riesman at the University of Chicago For 48 years, I enjoyed a warm friendship with Riesman. During those years, I worked with him as a student and colleague on both academic and national policy initiatives. In this chapter, I focus on those of Riesman’s activities and writings where I was directly involved. We met in the summer after my graduation from Harvard College where he was celebrating his 25th reunion and I was working at the Russian Research Center. Both of us had been editors of The Crimson and had written about innovations in education. We had a similar interest in understanding American culture, and both of us had been active in opposing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on universities. That fall, with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, I went off to Oxford to read philosophy, and we continued our relationship by mail. Halfway through the year, Riesman sent a letter inviting me to be an instructor in his course on character and society at the University of Chicago. I wrote back that I was not qualified, and in any case, planned to continue to work toward a doctorate. He responded that

182

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

he was sure I could prepare myself in time, and I could combine teaching with graduate study at Chicago. This was typical of Riesman, supporting and boosting the confidence of young associates. Age 22, I arrived at Chicago to teach a section of the course based on the classics of social science that Riesman had created, and to assist him in research on the responses of social scientists to McCarthy and attacks on academic freedom.1 Riesman had been recruited to analyze and evaluate the interviewing process of a study directed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens (1958). His hundred-page report at the end of The Academic Mind (Riesman 1958) shows his characteristic approach to social science. Riesman interviewed the interviewers and surveyed the interviewees about their experience with the interviewers. He asked questions like the following examples: did the interviewers experience resistance? Did the interviewees feel understood? In his report, he brings to life the results of a large survey research project. He disaggregates the universities and colleges studied, classifying them as avant-garde, upper middle, lower middle, and rear guard (Riesman 1957). He explains that social scientists in these different types of institutions had different experiences with attacks on academic freedom, and he presents brief cases to illustrate these differences. He points out that social scientists in elite institutions were more protected and therefore less fearful and wary of opening up to the interviewers. In contrast, some academics in less favored institutions were afraid to criticize an administration that strictly controlled what they were allowed to teach. In one college, the interviewer reported that the president listened in on interviews, even though they were supposed to be completely confidential. Riesman also described different types of interviewers in terms of social class, education, political views, and attitudes toward the professors they were interviewing. The interviews took from one to three hours, and the length could depend on the relationship as well as the context of institutional type. For example, liberal professors might close up because they sensed that the interviewer was conservative and disapproving of their statements. In effect the greater the civility based on mutual understanding, the more open would be the interviews. Riesman’s report is written in the first person. It is rich in detail with many footnotes. Characteristically, he is excruciatingly fair, reporting both sides of disagreements and alternative interpretations of statements made by respondents. It is not easy reading, but it succeeds in expanding understanding of the study and its results. A reader would never view the findings of survey research in the same way.

1 In the year I was at the University of Chicago, besides teaching in Social Sciences I enrolled in stimulating courses taught by Robert Redfield and Sol Tax in anthropology, Bruno Bettelheim in psychoanalysis, and Leo Strauss on Machiavelli.

David Riesman’s Mission

183

Riesman as Teacher and Mentor Riesman was a uniquely supportive teacher with both students and teaching assistants. His course at Chicago was taught in sections with weekly lectures to the combined sections. I attended Riesman’s section to prepare to teach my own section. It was a time for me of intense, mind expanding learning. Teaching and fielding questions from students is a great way of learning. Furthermore, Riesman led weekly discussions with all the section heads on the readings, which presented a sampling of some of the key works of the social sciences. In the fall of 1956, I returned to Harvard to complete my doctoral training. I was also hired by McGeorge Bundy, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as his assistant on educational policy, and Jerome S. Bruner had arranged a research fellowship that would support my doctoral work. Henry Ford II had just endowed a professorship to teach the social sciences to undergraduates, and I lobbied Bundy for Riesman to be appointed. Riesman asked me to help recruit teaching assistants, and we were able to hire a stellar group, most of whom went on to distinguished academic careers.2 Riesman organized a course on American Character and Society, based on his own studies of Tocqueville, Veblen, and the changing American character. As at Chicago, he viewed his role as teaching his assistants as well as the undergraduates who registered for the course that became extremely popular. Riesman presided over Monday dinners at his house where the week’s readings were discussed and assistants shared student responses to the readings and lecture of the week before. When Harvard established a new freshman seminar program for senior faculty to select a group of freshman applicants and engage them in research, Riesman was one of the first professors to volunteer.3 The freshmen in his seminar were stimulated to produce reports that Riesman collected and published. Riesman’s approach to teaching undergraduates and mentoring teaching assistants is an excellent model for professors. It is a stark contrast to the practice of many professors at elite universities who spend little time with students. They consider teaching a tax they are forced to pay in order to concentrate on the research and consulting that brings them recognition and renown. Riesman’s dedication to his students did not keep him from continued research on higher education and engagement in the national debate on defense policy and the Cold War (Riesman 1980; Jencks and Riesman 1968).

2 They included Robert J. Lifton, Kenneth Keniston, Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph, and John Atherton. All became professors. 3 The program was endowed by Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, who like Bill Gates years later, dropped out of Harvard, bored by the lecture courses. Land believed that many gifted freshmen entering Harvard should have the opportunity to participate in research with senior faculty. The program proved successful and continues to the present day.

184

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

The Correspondent and the Debate on Defense Policy Riesman’s engagement in the debate on defense policy began in March 1960 after Stewart Meacham, Peace Education Secretary of the national American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Robert Gilmore AFSC Peace-Secretary in New York City, called a meeting of a few dozen prominent academics and writers at Bear Mountain Lodge above the Hudson River near West Point. Alarmed by the possibility of nuclear war, the participants discussed ways of influencing policy makers to decrease the danger by engaging the Soviet Union in mutual arms control and disarmament. Some participants argued that unilateral disarmament in steps could provoke a reciprocal response from our Cold War enemy. Others, like Riesman, believed this was unrealistic, but that we should be willing to take risks with trusting the Russians to honor an agreement. Riesman brought me with him to the meeting that resulted in the decision to publish The Correspondent, with opinions on foreign and defense policy and a board of editors headed by Riesman.4 Marcus Raskin, another participant in the meeting, was legislative assistant to Congressman Robert Kastenmeier (D, Wisconsin) and organizer of the Democratic Study Group of members of Congress who met regularly to discuss policy. Riesman and I continued to correspond with Raskin, and he invited us to speak to the group on an essay we were publishing in Commentary, “The American Crisis, Political Idealism and the Cold War” (Riesman and Maccoby 1960). The essay and presentation focused on two issues. One was that the defense agencies engaged a number of experts and academics to support a nuclear strategy, based on an abstract game theory. Those of us who were not privy to classified information still could and should criticize the logic, often based on unproven assumptions such as the view that the country could bounce back to a working order after a nuclear attack (Maccoby 1961; Maccoby 1962). Our message was that we should not let the defense intellectuals silence contradictory views by claiming their expertise trumped reasonable criticism. The other issue had to do with the impact of the Cold War on American society. The attacks on communists, former communists, and so called fellow travelers had caused many Americans to fear expressing idealistic views that might turn out to be in some party line. Americans were turning away from progressive visions to conformity and consumerism. In politics, it was dangerous to be soft on communism, to refuse to see that the Soviets were out to conquer the world. Talk of disarmament was naïve and played into the Communist strategy to soften us up by pretending to want peace.5 4 The board included Erich Fromm, A.J. Muste, David Cavers, Kenneth Boulding, David Inglis, Seymour Martin Lipset, and H. Stuart Hughes. The publication was named after the Committees of Correspondence that prepared Americans for the Revolutionary War. It was published from 1961 to 1965. 5 In 1962, when I visited Bundy in the White House, he sent me to meet Walt Rostow, former MIT professor and defense intellectual who was head of policy planning in the State

David Riesman’s Mission

185

Riesman and I argued that Americans needed a meaningful vision beyond selfindulgent consumerism or Puritanical conservatism. We suggested a focus on work that engages the worker’s creative potential and industry that designs work so that it has a positive impact on workers’ families, communities and political life. In “The American Crisis,” Riesman and I were skeptical of those who saw the race for outer space as a safety valve for the arms race, “furnishing an outlet at once for imperialistic energies and cowboy imaginations.” We wrote, “While it goes without saying that this latter ‘solution’ is preferable to the arms race, it seems to us a fictional frontier, reflecting a nostalgia for a long past day when the West had to be settled, the industries developed, the cities built, the immigrants ‘Americanized’”(Riesman and Maccoby 1962:461–72). We concluded: … our imagination must focus on other frontiers, work at bringing more people into participation by forming many small groups, by decentralizing industry, by creating better means for continued education not merely for children but for adults throughout life. To be sure, none of the problems of scarcity has been dealt with in a wholly satisfactory way: not all Americans are affluent, many are destitute, and many of the traditional issues of welfare and social justice— markedly, of course, the race issue—remain exigent. But a movement of renewal dedicated only to these issues is not conceivable. We shall move faster on these older fronts if they do not usurp our attention and if we can invent an American future which is exciting, active, and responsible, but neither murderous nor imperialistic. It is for this that political programs are needed which transcend the details of the present. (Riesman and Maccoby 1962:461–72)

The Commentary article provoked harsh criticism from some of the cold warriors we implicitly criticized. In a letter to Norman Podhoretz, the Commentary’s editor, Diana Trilling wrote that it was “a hodge-podge of non-thinking, a soft sentimentality, an intellectual insult” (Podhoretz 1999:79). In retrospect, some of the criticism was justified. We caricatured the relationship between the US and Soviet Union, viewing the Russians as younger brothers who wanted to catch up to the richer American society. We implied that a friendlier approach would be reciprocated. This was indeed sentimental, ignoring the aggressive and totalitarian attributes of the Soviet state. W.R. Smyser in Kennedy and the Berlin Wall (2009) writes that Kennedy’s friendly approach to Khrushchev at Vienna was met with contempt and the view of the President was soft. Subsequently, Khrushchev allowed the East Germans to erect the Berlin Wall and gave Castro nuclear weapons. However, Kennedy learned that by combining toughness with negotiation, it was possible to engage Khrushchev in steps toward arms control and disarmament: Department. Rostow, familiar with my writings said, “We will protect naïve liberals like you.”

186

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

The Cuban missile crisis was ended by a combination of naval blockade and agreement to take out our nuclear missiles, aimed at Russia, from Turkey. Kennedy also learned that he could not trust the military and the defense intellectuals with their overly optimistic and aggressive proposals. This was a lesson never learned by Lyndon Johnson, who allowed the war hawks and generals to expand a disastrous war in Viet Nam. Nor was it learned by George W. Bush who let the same kinds of theorists persuade him to invade Iraq. Riesman and Erich Fromm In 1960, after the presentation to the Democratic Study Group, I drove to Mexico with my wife to start a stay of eight years, training with Erich Fromm in psychoanalysis and joining him in a study of Mexican peasant society (Fromm and Maccoby 1970; Maccoby 1996). Riesman introduced me to Fromm who had been his analyst and mentor in psychoanalytic theory. Riesman’s inner and other-directed dichotomy in The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al. 1950) was suggested by Fromm’s theory of social character. Fromm viewed social character as a conceptual bridge between Freud’s theory of character development and Karl Marx’s theory that values and attitudes adapt to a changing mode of production. Fromm argued that character or personality does not develop immediately with such a change. Fromm went further than Freud in proposing that social institutions, schools, workplaces, religious, and political institutions as well as the family, shape personality so that people want to do what they have to do to succeed in that culture. And during a time of change, some people raised in the old mode of production suffer a “character lag” so that, frustrated by the lack of fit, resist change. While Fromm viewed the evolving service market as shaping a “marketing character,” able to adapt its personality to whatever sold (Fromm 1947), Riesman’s theory of the change from inner to other direction was based on changing demographics, and he later dropped it when it was refuted. Unlike Fromm’s anchoring of social character types in psychodynamics, Riesman described the inner-directed person as controlled from within, with a gyroscope to regulate behavior, while the other-directed person conformed to a peer group. Riesman characteristically exchanged theory for thick description. I joined Fromm when he was testing his social character theory in a Mexican peasant village. He needed help with statistics and projective testing, and with Riesman’s encouragement, I offered this help in return for psychoanalytic training. Riesman and Fromm supported my successful application for a research and training grant for three years from the National Institute for Mental Health. My family, wife, and three daughters born in Mexico, stayed for eight years as we completed the study. After the grant ran out, I earned an income in Mexico as a psychoanalyst and training analyst.

David Riesman’s Mission

187

Riesman and The Correspondent I maintained contact with Riesman via frequent letters, and I sent him articles that he published in The Correspondent. In 1962, I traveled to Washington to visit Bundy in the White House, and with his support, lobby members of Congress to give speeches supporting the President in cooling down the conflict over Berlin that threatened to escalate, egged on by hardliners on both sides. I managed to get 13 speeches in the Congressional Record that were essentially drafted by Riesman, Fromm, and George Kennan, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and author of the famous containment policy.6 Riesman wrote a number of wide-ranging articles for The Correspondent during its short life. In them, he demonstrated his characteristic approach of trying to be fair to different views. He and other writers for The Correspondent were encouraged by President Kennedy’s American University speech in 1963. It appeared to be the first post-Cold War speech by the president. However, by 1965, when The Correspondent ceased publication, the Viet Nam war was growing, and although he opposed the war, Riesman was beginning to express concern about the radical reaction by Students for a Democratic Society and other groups on the student left who were showing “a general hostility toward ‘politics,’ ‘bureaucracy,’ ‘organization’—all of these symbols being seen as aspects of corruption of our society” (Riesman 1965). In one of the final issues, he wrote “Some Americans, without becoming anti-American, see the national interest in the present world as part of a wider international interest. But this interest will not come into being without politics, without organization, without bureaucracy—or without compromise and temporizing. The long run tactical and moral aim of establishing such an interest must work within what is given in American politics, as well as in the politics of America’s adversaries and allies. It is easy to grow weary of lobbying for that interest when so much of the country is hostile and so much is indifferent, but I can see no other course.” Reunion In 1967, Riesman called me in Mexico with an offer from Harvard to be appointed to a named professorship with all the perks, but only a five year appointment that could lead to tenure. I would be in charge of the clinical psychology program within the Social Relations Department, which at the time still included Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. I told him I’d consider it. Fromm cautioned me that if I accepted the appointment, I would be inevitably drawn into all of Riesman’s projects and I would have to be very tough in protecting myself from him. Fromm 6 Editors’ Note: See the included chapter in this volume “The Berlin Crisis” by Fromm and Riesman.

188

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

was ambivalent about Riesman. He was fond of him and respected the fact that he leveraged his position as a well-known Harvard professor to take courageous stands on controversial issues. However, Fromm criticized Riesman as lacking theory and essentially describing phenomena. Furthermore, Fromm saw Riesman’s passion to weigh all sides as a way of avoiding going to the roots. Riesman was an empathic liberal democrat and Fromm was a radical socialist humanist. While Riesman valued civility and was skeptical of radicals, Fromm admired revolutionary fervor. During the student movements of 1968, Fromm supported the radicals at Columbia University, while Riesman was critical of their extremism. I turned down the Harvard offer, deciding that if I accepted it, I would spend five years trying to do research and writing to publish in academic journals, and to impress a tenure committee rather than doing creative work that might not fit into an academic paradigm. It was a very tempting offer, but the right decision. Riesman then offered to get me invited to spend the next year with him at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for the academic year 1968–69. I accepted gratefully. It was a chance to finish writing the Mexican study and begin to develop my own ideas.7 Riesman also helped me get a grant from the Harvard Program on Technology and Society to study the personalities and values of managers and engineers creating new technology in companies like IBM, HP, Texas Instruments, and Intel (Maccoby 1976). I had studied some of the most powerless people in the world, and now I wanted to learn what motivated the people I believed were changing the world. Riesman encouraged my research and later, projects to improve the quality of working life, projects that grew out of the vision we had shared and wrote about in “The American Crisis” (Riesman and Maccoby 1960). When I became director of the Program on Technology, Public Policy and Human Development at the Kennedy School from 1978–90, Riesman was an active member of the advisory board. I commuted from Washington to Cambridge periodically, and often stayed at the Riesman house. In the late 1970s and 1980, the focus of social scientists shifted to viewing people in terms of racial and sexual identity rather than personality. I found interest in personality and social character among managers in business and government who had to deal with engaging and motivating employees. They saw identity groups as interest groups with members who did not necessarily share motivating values or even cultural traditions. For example, a group of “Latinos” might include a farmer from El Salvador, a Mexican bricklayer, a professional from Cuba, and a third generation American named Sanchez who did not even speak Spanish (Appiah 2005). I became a consultant to leaders in companies, the State Department, and World Bank, and began to write about leadership. Riesman commented on my findings and in return shared his research on leadership in higher education. Our friendship and mutual support continued, undiminished until the end of his life. 7 Before going to the Center, I joined Riesman and Fromm in Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign for president.

David Riesman’s Mission

189

The Vanishing Host Riesman’s contributions to understanding the changing behavior of Americans and higher education can be found in his many books and articles. His contribution to public policy is recorded in The Correspondent. His contribution to civility is implicit in his writings, expressing his concern for understanding and empathizing with different kinds of people in their social contexts. It was also expressed in his relationship with students and colleagues, and also his approach to hosting. Riesman encouraged students and young colleagues and gave us opportunities that we might otherwise not have had. James Billington, Librarian of Congress, once said to me that a letter of recommendation from Riesman for a less than stellar candidate had more impact than someone else’s recommendation for a seemingly more qualified candidate, because it was so detailed and described the candidate’s full potential. Riesman also believed that a host had an obligation to make a party or dinner convivial. He would introduce guests that he thought might enjoy meeting each other, describing to each qualities the other might find interesting. He studied hosting, and in an article, “The Vanishing Host,” with Robert J. Potter and Jeanne Watson, writes (1960) “we cannot help but feel that generally, in the population to which we had access, the role of host is a neglected one—a role taken much for granted, and often underplayed to such an extent that the party remains diffuse without the élan and sense of excitement which mark a truly festive occasion” (p. 17). David Riesman was a rare and exceptional academic who not only worked to understand the behavior of Americans, but also dedicated himself to improve the culture, by his writings, teachings, and his example of courageous engagement in the major issues of his time. References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fromm, Erich. 1947. Man for Himself. New York: Rinehart. Fromm, Erich and Michael Maccoby. 1970. Social Character in a Mexican Village. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Jencks, Christopher and David Riesman. 1968. The Academic Revolution. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. Lazarsfeld, Paul and W. Thieleus Jr. 1958. The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Maccoby, Michael. 1961 “Social Psychology of Deterrence.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist 17(7). Maccoby, Michael. January 1962. “The Question of Civil Defense—A Debate.” Commentary pp. 1–23. Maccoby, Michael. 1976. The Gamesman. New York: Simon & Schuster.

190

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Maccoby, Michael. 1980. The Leader. New York: Simon & Schuster. Maccoby, Michael. 1996. “Introduction” in Social Character in a Mexican Village by Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby. NY: Transaction Press. Podhoretz, Norman. 1999. Ex-Friends. New York: The Free Press. Riesman, David et al. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riesman, David. 1957. Constraint and Variety in American Education. Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Riesman, David. 1958. “Field Report” in The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis, by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Riesman, David. Autumn 1965. The Correspondent No 25. Riesman, David. 1980. On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Riesman, David and Michael Maccoby. 1960. “The American Crisis: Political Idealism and the Cold War.” Commentary pp. 461–72. Riesman, David and Michael Maccoby. 1962. “The American Crisis.” pp. 13–49 in The Liberal Papers, edited by James Roosevelt. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books. Riesman, David, Robert J. Potter, and Jeanne Watson. 1960. “The Vanishing Host.” Human Organization 19(1). Smyser, W.R. 2009. Kennedy and the Berlin Wall: A Hell of a Lot Better than a War. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Chapter 14

An Examination of Sociable Conversations and the Work of the Sociability Project Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt Editors’Note: This contemporary article by Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt, the former Research Director of the Sociability Project, explains the overall breadth and depth of the project, covers Riesman’s role and contributions, and presents the central findings of the Project that were never fully published. The Project was housed at the University of Chicago’s Family Study Center during the mid and late 1950s. The following article provides additional analysis and insight complimenting “The Structure of Party Conversation” and “Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That”—both previously unpublished writings included in this volume. The Sociability Project was funded by a research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service and had at least 10 total researchers over its half a decade life. The project resulted in multiple articles published in the 1960s in American Behavioral Scientist, Sociometry (later Social Psychology Quarterly), and Psychiatry. Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt would go on to have a very fruitful career researching and publishing many academic articles in the field of social psychology. In addition to the Sociability Project, Watson Eisenstadt worked for over 40 years at multiple organizations including the Institute for Social Research; Merrill Palmer Institute; Wayne State College of Nursing; and the East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), mostly as a volunteer. The Sociability Project was the outgrowth of a seminar on Leisure and Play, taught jointly by Nelson Foote and David Riesman. The seminar was influenced by Georg Simmel’s seminal work on sociability. The two men, Riesman and Foote, obtained a grant to do research, hired staff, and worked with the staff to shape a research project.1—Foote and Riesman were not clear on exactly what they wanted to study, or how to go about it. They thought vaguely that they would like to bring Simmel’s work on sociability up to date. They had not determined what kind of research would achieve this.

1 The study was funded by Research Grant M­891 from the National Institute of Mental Health, Public Health Service.

192

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Foote wanted a way of observation that would utilize episodes as a means of analysis.2 His interests were primarily in sociability as a medium for the definition of the self. He thought sociability might be particularly relevant for young adults, offering a fluid situation in which they could experiment with new aspects of identity. Riesman wanted to extend his knowledge of party sociability beyond what was possible for him as an individual. They hired as Project Director a young PhD from the University of Michigan, Jeanne Watson. She found herself in sympathy with Foote’s wish for a quantifiable unit of analysis, while accepting Riesman’s statement that they were looking for a simple description of what they could find, not for any particular cause and effect within the realm of sociability. As additional staff, they hired four research assistants, including Robert J. Potter. He was at the time a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. He stayed with the project as long as it lasted, moved up to the status of colleague, and worked simultaneously on the development of the Sociability Project, and on development of materials and ideas for a thesis. With a thesis committee in mind, he was particularly looking for reliable quantitative results. The other research assistants stayed only for the first year, and afterward were replaced each year.3 Foote left the Project at the end of the first year, leaving Riesman as the Investigator in charge of the project. Riesman’s approach was to listen, encourage, and not to criticize or impose any direction on the project except by example. He became an active participant in the collection and analysis of party data, and he continued for the life of the Sociability Project to submit his “Notes on this and That.”4 In these Notes, he reflected on many experiences and ideas that came to him and were relevant to sociability. As an illustration of his role on the project, consider a letter he wrote to Watson in 1957 (See Figure 14.1). She had delivered a paper on “Why be Sociable?” to a University class. The letter opens by saying “I liked enormously your Soc 2 lecture” and continues by suggesting the paper be dittoed, passed around the department, and possibly published. Then he indicated the parts he particularly liked. One was a section commenting on populations that had a deficiency in sociability: prisoners in solitary confinement. Others referred more directly to her role in formulating and implementing coding concepts. Thus, his role combined support, encouragement, and praise with cautious indication of directions in which he would like to go. 2 As an example of episode coding, Foote was following the published example from Barker and Wright (1951). 3 Research assistants during the first year included Ariadne Plumis Beck, Albert Axelrod, and Joanne Holden. During the second year, research assistants included Lucinda Sangree and Kenneth Feigenbaum, and for the third year, we had the help of Lucille Kohlberg, John Hotchkiss, and Philip Kotler. 4 Editors’ Note: See in this volume, “Conversation on a Plane: Notes on This and That.”

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

193

Figure 14.1a First Page of 1957 letter from David Riesman to Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt regarding their co-work on the Sociability Project

194

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Figure 14.1b Second page of 1957 letter from David Riesman to Jeanne Watson Eisenstadt regarding their co-work on the Sociability Project During the months that we were together, members of the Sociability Project talked together, argued together, and worked together. There is very little of what we learned that could be appropriately credited to a single individual. Differences appeared between us after the end of the project, as we moved away from each other, and from Chicago. We each continued to reflect on the data we had collected to determine what he or she wanted to say about them. Potter and Watson continued separately to do new analyses. The articles Riesman published after the project was over showed an interest in changing behaviors in sociability, as these were reflected to changing mores in the larger society (Riesman, Potter and Watson 1960a and 1960b).

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

195

Potter wanted to see connections made between the concepts guiding the analysis within the project, and concepts more familiar to the profession of sociology. Watson wanted to use the data from the study to describe sociability as nearly as possible in its own terms. Riesman responded to Philip Hammond’s interest in providing a book about sociologists at work by agreeing to provide a chronicle of the Sociability Project. He and Watson worked on this chronicle of “Frustration and Achievement” with additions from Potter and others who had worked on the Project (Riesman and Watson 1964). Foote was impatient with this kind of introspective analysis, and thought that instead we should have been working on a report of findings. Data The Camp The emphasis on episodes desired by Foote led us to the conclusion that we should study conversation. However, we did not know how to define what data we wanted in order to get examples of conversation. Therefore, we chose the most inclusive possible definition; we would study the conversation that occurs between persons when they are being sociable. Taking this as our starting point, we experimented with various examples of everyday conversation. In the most elaborate of these, during the first summer two observers joined the staff of a nearby camp resort, working halftime as part of the staff (e.g. waiting tables, making beds), and otherwise working to listen and record episodes of conversation among their fellow employees. The camp-resort provided resort-like accommodations for individuals and groups that wanted to camp. We shall refer to it as “the camp.” The camp staff included 143 college students, 107 women and 36 men. Overall, the staff was composed of undergraduates; they were likely to have come from unpretentious middle-western colleges, judged by our raters to be average or below average in academic quality. Housing and job assignments both served to separate men from women. The men were all housed together in a single large dormitory, while women were housed in half a dozen locations. Many jobs employed one sex only—men on the work crew, for example, and women as chambermaids or waitresses. The men on the average were younger than the women and they reported poorer grades; yet at the camp, the men often were given supervisory responsibility over the women. The conversations accessible to the researchers reflected a predominately feminine society. We made records of all conversations heard within the 24-hour period, regardless of whether or not any specific “sociable” objectives were involved. The total number of episodes observed over a three-month period (1637) was slightly less than the number (1873) observed at 26 parties. On the average, we recorded as many episodes for each 2–1/4 days (2 observers: 2(2–1/4 days) was (4–1/2) observer-days) at camp as we did for one party.

196

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

We divided the data according to the place where the conversation occurred. We identified four contexts for observed interaction: (1) at home, in the cabin where the speakers lived, (2) associate settings, sometimes when people were at work, sometimes mealtimes, where campers were required to fill each 12-person table in order of arrival, (3) interstitial settings with conversation noted as campers passed from one place or activity to another, (4) fun settings, where a group came together to go out for fun. There were two fun settings on campus, a Coffee Shop and a more informal Shack. If one had a car, as one observer did, there was also the possibility of going off campus to a pizza place, a movie, or other place of recreation. Parties We soon decided that observing everyday interaction was not giving us what we wanted. We needed to study parties. But how could we do that? Parties are private behavior. Even if one of us could manage to get an invitation, the presence of this stranger observing the party would destroy the data we wished to obtain. Further, if we tried to create a party for some chosen set of people, we would be marginal participants. We might create the wrong sort of occasion, or at the wrong time. And from a marginal position, it was impossible to fully participate in or understand the covert side of a conversation. It became clear that the only parties about which we could get good information were those where we ourselves were natural participants. We all learned to be participant-observers. We each tried to maximize the range and number of parties to which we had access. We solicited additional reports from friends and colleagues. Where possible, we made use of ambiguities in our positions within the academic world. Riesman was a full professor who had achieved national prominence and “entrée” to professional and intellectual circles throughput the nation, yet within his own department he remained a controversial figure of uncertain status. Watson and Potter exhibited complementary ambiguities in status. Watson was a PhD, Project Director, and Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago; but as an unmarried woman, she did not always draw full value from these achievements. Potter was a graduate student who looked like a professor: a war veteran with a wife and, at the time, two children, he had an air of established maturity. We decided to select parties that were small enough so that one observer could have access to a reasonably large portion of the total activity of the party. This excluded many parties that were larger, more festive, and sometimes more alcoholic. We chose to focus upon conversation at the party, taking this as a representative record of the sociable encounter. There were several reasons for this: one, conversation was public behavior, and therefore accessible to an outside observer. There was much about the private experience of sociability that would have been of interest—the expectations brought to the party, the fantasies and pleasures generated there, and the ultimate outcomes and memories that remained with a person after a party was over. These were not accessible to an observer. We did explore the possibility of interviewing a set of people and then observing their

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

197

behavior at a party, but this proved to be not feasible. Two, a person’s conversation reflected much of his individual quality, while still being separate from the person and more or less under his own control. Finally, some of us felt that it was important to have a way of standardizing and quantifying our observations, so that we would gain information that was both objective and reliable. By breaking up the flow of conversation into comparable units (episodes), it was possible to create a basis for this kind of generalization. Reports were given from memory. We tried tape recording parties, but found it unsatisfactory. A tape recording was incomplete, because it missed many nonverbal cues. Also, it missed conversations held at a distance from the microphone. It was diffuse, giving too much time to trivial detail. Transcription was difficult and time consuming. A more satisfactory use for the tape recorder was in transcribing the interaction among persons reassembled after a party in the place where it had taken place, for the purpose of reconstructing the party. This technique was used twice. It gave a good picture of the party, but was judged inappropriate for the study of episodes. In most cases, a party report consisted of a written record prepared by a participant-observer in the days following the party. We found that it was useful to make notes immediately following the party, before sleeping, but that it took several days or a week before all the different conversations sifted back into memory. A full party report averaged about 12 pages. In the end, we had a collection of 60 party reports. Parties came from 10 cities and eight states. Most of them were from an academic milieu, but others were not. We had reports reflecting professional, residential, community and elitist orbits, and college based friendship groups. At parties with an academic orientation the dominant interests were in the social sciences, and such related disciplines as education, law, and clinical practice. As might be expected in a set of parties from urban academia, there was a disproportionately large number of persons from Jewish or foreign born backgrounds. Students and graduate students were overrepresented, while there was a relative scarcity of non-professional persons in the middle and older years of adulthood. The parties were alike in that they were ones to which one of the staff persons, or someone he or she knew, could get access. Of the 60 parties, 26 were reported in sufficient detail to permit episode coding. Fourteen were summarized more briefly, and could be divided into sequences. These reports were coded and used to expand the sample for limited purposes. Twenty were suitable only for holistic analysis. This set of parties could not be considered in any sense as a representative sample. Rather, it was an enlarged and objectified representation of the slice of life visible to a particular set of people, at a particular time and place (we were working in the late 1950s). Other people in other times and other places would see other parties. Our objective was not to provide definitive statements about parties in general, but to use this small set of parties as a first step toward bringing into view the extensive and relatively unexplored phenomena of sociable interaction. We did not believe our data justified more than simple statistical procedures.

198

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Coding the Episode Our unit of analysis for both the camp data and the party reports was the episode. This was defined as two or more axis partners, sometimes with an audience, joining together (axis tie) to engage in conversation drawing upon some conversational resource (topic of conversation). A change in any of these parameters signaled the start of a new episode. Consider this hypothetical report. It is similar to many of the party reports we received, although the example here is briefer than many actual reports: (1) Sally (a middle school teacher) and I talked about the difficulties she had faced recently when one of her students was bullying another, (2) Peter came over to listen, (3) the discussion became more general, with everyone involved in a discussion of bullying, (4) Steve told of what had been done in his school to minimize bullying. This report would be divided into four episodes, as shown. In the sequence sample, it would be treated as a single sequence, as if reported, “Then we had a discussion about bullying.” The first step in our coding process was for the project director to go through the report of party or other conversation, marking the divisions between episodes. In the interests of standardization, she was the only one to do this. Then the coders could take the unit as marked, and ask of themselves, what was really going on here, say, in the episode where Peter came over to listen? This was an exploratory study. We did not know what would be important to code about the episode, so we proposed many different ways to describe the episodes, particularly the episodes of party conversation. Many of these ways of coding were overlapping. Many required judgments going beyond the written word. Each party was coded twice, once by a man and once by a woman. Disagreements were noted. When both had finished, we had a discussion including the project director and, if possible, the person who had given us the report. These discussions scrutinized the party and its participants very carefully, as we decided which code would be the best fit for whatever was going on. These discussions were often painful for the party observer, as his or her actions and those of friends were laid out for all to see. It was essential for the observer to feel safe. Riesman and Watson tried to maintain an atmosphere that was uncritical, continuing to show liking and respect for each individual. In some ways, it was like a clinical therapeutic session. In the party reports, pseudonyms were usually used for each participant, including the observer. These helped to make clear that the discussion was about the character as observed and reported, not about the individual whom we knew. A special difficulty was present for graduate students reporting a party in which there was criticism of Riesman and/or his faculty colleagues, and then the report was given to Riesman to study. Similar procedures were observed for the camp data. The project director marked off the report of conversation into episodes, episodes were coded twice, once by a man and once by a woman, and disagreements were discussed and resolved. For the camp data, only the parameters of the episode were coded.

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

199

The Contexts for Party Conversation Parties do not take place in a vacuum. We looked briefly at the qualities that participants brought with them to parties. Before the episode coding began, one person (i.e. Robert Potter) created two charts, showing for each person how his status and his acquaintance should be coded when paired with each other person at the party. Coders referred to these charts as they recorded information for each episode. Party observers, who usually knew quite a bit about the other people at a party, gave us invaluable help while we were preparing the charts. Status In coding career status, we maintained a major distinction between apprentices and adults. Adults were classified according to whether they were in the early, middle, or late stages of their occupational careers, giving altogether four categories. There were many episodes in which axis partners did not all have the same status. In such cases, it was necessary to assess the impact of the difference. A judgment was made as to whether axis partners recognized and discounted a small status difference—equalized status; or whether interaction was conducted in recognition of a real difference in status—unequal or heterogeneous status. Ultimately, the code of unequal status was used only for episodes where apprentices appeared together with adults. Within the range of adult years, persons together at a party appeared to be able to equalize their status differences. Sex We found that at most parties, and even at the camp, there were seldom enough differences between men and women in the qualities we were coding to be worthy of comment. In the party data, the frequency of male comments was slightly higher than for women, but we could not tell whether the difference was real or artificial; perhaps male observers did not notice the women as often as female observers noticed the men. Acquaintance An evaluation was made of the acquaintance of the axis partners, prior to the party. The previous acquaintance of each pair was judged to be either voluntary or compulsory. Acquaintance was judged compulsory if persons were brought together by work, residence, or other common membership. In voluntary relationships, persons had to make deliberate arrangements if they wanted to get together. The second factor was frequency of meetings between partners. Persons who saw each other several times a week or more were judged to have frequent contact; others, infrequent contact. In applying these two criteria to episodes having more than two participants, we found that usually more than one type of

200

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

acquaintance was represented. We decided that in any given episode, we would code the more distant among the relationships present. Our thought was that conversation would be adjusted by the better acquainted persons to be appropriate for the less-acquainted persons. The result of this rule was that the majority of party episodes were coded as casual. The casual category became very much a mixed bag. It included both episodes in which unacquainted persons were talking with one another, and episodes in which a relative stranger was talking with others who were better acquainted with each other. The other acquaintance categories were more homogenous (See Table 14.1). Table 14.1

The categories for coding acquaintance

Acquaintance Codes

Code Description

Friends

Pairs with a history of mutual choice, covering a range of activities and involving frequent contact.

Familiars

Pairs who saw each other frequently as members of the same face to face task group or clique having recognizable symbols. Included among familiars were married or dating couples who held this status for two years or more.

Institutional Colleagues

Pairs who were members of the same formal organization or group of colleagues; who had infrequent, usually formal, institutional contact; and whose sociable contact was like that of Casuals.

Casual

Pairs with little or no history of prior contact that was more than superficial. Also, groups of three or more who differed in acquaintance with one another.

Expanding Acquaintance

Pairs who were in the process of developing an acquaintance or friendship; who were moving from casual, institutional or familiar acquaintance toward friendship; or who were renewing former friendly or familiar ties after a period of separation.

Disequilibrium Examination of these categories as reflected in the data indicated that only two, familiar and expanding acquaintance, were related to conversation at the party. We came to the concept of equilibrium. Acquaintance relationships that were in a stage of equilibrium, having gone as far as individuals wanted them to go, did not show any influence on the conversation. Others in a state of disequilibrium had more visible effects. The disequilibrium in the case of expanding acquaintance was that the individuals were not as well acquainted as they wanted to be. In the case of familiars, it was

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

201

more often the opposite: a state of satiation, in which individuals had seen each other so much that they wished for a reduction in exposure to one another. Disequilibrium could also be generated by change in the composition of a group of acquaintances. It would exist in a group preparing to separate, or to take note of the departure of one of their members. Similarly, it would exist in a group coming back together after they had been away, or welcoming back an individual after an absence during the party. Participation Structure For each episode we applied a four way classification of participation structure, as follows: (1) isolated dyad (i.e. two people, same sex or both sexes), (2) dyad with a passive audience (i.e. two people talked with each other in the presence of one or more others who listened quietly), (3) performer responding to an audience (single performer is dominant, audience mostly listens quietly), and (4) active group, three or more persons actively talking together, distributed participation. In our analysis, we combined categories three and four to create a comparison between a dyad and a larger group; category two occupied a middle position. Party Type Our efforts provided a set of 26 party reports (See Tables 14.3a and 14.3b) that were sufficiently detailed for episode analysis, plus 14 more in which interaction could be divided into less detailed sequences, and analyzed with the same code. We also had multiple codes, often overlapping, aimed at providing complete information about each episode, with no single perspective. We wanted a way to classify party type that would help us distinguish among different kinds of parties. We worked with the sample of 26 parties to use each body of information to organize the other. Chi-square was used to identify points of high and low frequency. This analysis yielded eight identifiers that would organize all the parties. In turn, the choice of these identifiers told us something about how to view the codes. We required that the identifiers be independently coded, so that from a code classification offering several alternatives, only one could be used in the search for party type. Most striking in our data was the contrast between what we labeled festive parties, and others we called parties of good conversation. In many ways they were opposites. Conversation parties were realistic, focused on the outside world, showing artistic quality of a kind rated moderate or better. Festive parties were unrealistic, focused on the immediate world of the party, and the conversation reflected the quality of making fun, but without artistry. On the other hand, the parties of festivity and good conversation were alike in contrasting with a third group of parties. In the third group, people came together at a party just to have a chance to see each other, and pursue with one another the matters that occupied them outside the party. We called these parties of identity maintenance. These three categories served not only to place all the parties in the set of 26, but also

202

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

provided a satisfactory classification for the 14 parties in the supplemental sample. For some purposes, the two samples could be combined.5 Potter later did an independent analysis of the 26 parties using Goodman and Kruskal’s gamma, pooling all code categories to see what clusters would emerge. He came up with four: festivity, conversation, individual identity-maintenance, and collective identity maintenance. Although for our sample of 26 parties it seemed desirable to combine all kinds of identity maintenance, in contrast to the alternative categories of festivity and good conversation, we had the ability to maintain comparability by separating individual from collective identity- maintenance. Table 14.2a Key for coding types of parties Column 1: Type of party (The numerical values selected for each of these four columns combine to form the Party ID number listed in Table 14.2b) 1. Conversation, dyadically organized. 2. Conversation, centrally organized. 3. Conversation, abortive. 4. Successful identity-maintenance. 5. Abortive identity-maintenance. 6. Festive identity-maintenance. 7. Festivity; small-medium in size, unitary focus. 8. Festivity; large, multiple focus. 9. Abortive festivity. Column 2: Type of coding given to the party 1. Fully coded; in the sample of 26 parties. 2. Party included in the auxiliary sample of the 14 parties, in which the party was divided into a few sequences (n varied from 5 to 14) and each sequence was coded according to the episode code. 3. Party was not coded. Column 3: Population represented at the party 1. Students. 2. Young people. 3. Established adults. 4. Heterogeneous population, ritualistic occasion. 5. Established adults, women only. Column 4: Individual party number Parties are numbered sequentially within party type, separately for the three major samples: 26 fully coded parties, 14 briefly coded parties, and 20 uncoded parties. 5 A summary of each party is available online at Appendix I: Summary Descriptions of 60 Parties: http://www.jeannewatsoneisenstadt.com/text/appendix-I-summary-descriptions.pdf

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

203

Table 14.2b Key for coding types of party continued (total listing of parties)6 6 parties) Party

Party

1131.

Fluid Drive

6325.

Furlough Party

1132.

Public Personalities

6336.

Sociable Strangers

1133.

Almost Unanimous

7326.

Painting, Phonograph, and Glogg

1134. Barbecue

7327.

Characters

2121.

Sabrina Fair

7328.

Characters on New Year’s Eve

21X2.

Ladies’ Luncheon

7329.

Characters Enjoy a Good Get-Together

2123.

Urban Neighbors

8211.

The Press

2124.

Bring Your Own Food

8222.

Pursuit

2125.

Spirited Conversation

8353. Gingerbread

2231.

Dinner for Eight

9121. Festival

2332.

Small, Sedate Dinner

9122.

Foursome

2213.

Memorial Day

9143.

Lady Havisham

3131. Famine

9311.

Surprise Party

3132.

Exurban

9212.

Party in Folk Style

3123.

Hail, Alma Mater

4111. Ingathering 4132.

Artists

4221.

Good Home Cooking

4232.

Institution Lawn Party

4133.

Young Professionals

4114.

Going Away

4135.

Sunday Evening

4336.

Psychiatry

5111.

Get Acquainted

5321.

Pauses That Don’t Refresh

5112.

Beer Bust

5232.

End of School Year

6162.

Dine and Wine

6311.

Residential New Year’s

6232.

Bridge & Conversation

6313.

Goodbye Party

6314.

Off To The Army

6 Select descriptions for some types of parties can be found in Table 14.2c.

204

David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

Table 14.2c Key for coding types of party continued (sample party descriptions) 1131. Fluid Drive. This was a dinner party with nine persons, three of whom were visiting the university, all well-established professionals. The conversations were mostly in groups of two and three. 1133. Almost Unanimous. Seasonal evening party of 16 young people comprised of apprentices and young adults who were university-connected; shifting pairs and sub-groups. 2123. Bring Your Own Food. Potluck dinner of four couples. The women were friends from college days and the men were young professionals. All were thirtysomething’s. 2124. Urban Neighbors. This was composed of three couples who were the only occupants of a single apartment building; apprentices; host couple relative newcomers. There was a lot of mutual interviewing. 3131. Famine. This was in another state. The dinner party was for 9 persons of whom all the men were in the same academic field, some at the City and some at State University. They were older, established adults with a few young adults. The hosts were European and of lower status than established adults from state; they also exhibited a degree of anxiousness. The youngest couple had not been told of a change from evening to dinner party, so they arrived late, having already eaten. Others waited for dinner until the last couple arrived; neither snacks nor drinks were served during the wait. The hostess insisted there be no shop talk. 4111. Ingathering. This get-together of 15 established friends and students was at the start of new academic quarter. 4232. Institution Lawn Party. This was in another state. It was an evening lawn party of 50 or so attendees with work connections to the Institute; it was young adults to established adults and on July 5th; it was a welcoming back one of their members who had been gone for a year. 5112. Beer Bust. This was five couples and one single person; all were male apprentices and graduate students in same department; they gathered for a gripe session the day after taking prelim exams. They were not in a party mood. 6162. Dine and Wine. This was four young people who were slightly acquainted; they met to go to dinner first and then on to a fairly large gathering of young people designed to make it possible for guests to meet new people. Most participants were with university connections; graduate students and young professionals.

An Examination of Sociable Conversations

205

6238. Academic Ritual. This was in another state. It was a large party held regularly for all university personnel; it was on Friday and Saturday nights and was a combination of a period of quiet visiting along with period of entertainment. 7111. New Year’s Eve Songfest. This had apprentices, eight at first, then three more and then one more. It started with quiet conversation. The last participant to arrive brought a guitar, and his arrival was followed by a change to a period of noisier, musical festivity celebrating the arrival of the New Year. 7326. Painting, Phonograph, and Glogg. This had two male hosts and there were 25 or so at the party, including students and young professionals. It was an evening party where guests wore casual clothes and then sat on floor to paint pictures. 8353. Gingerbread. “Ginger” gave a large party to celebrate moving to a new apartment; apprentices, young professionals and many university related participants were in attendance. There was food and dance with little conversation except among those who arrived together. 9121. Festival. The hostess gave a party to celebrate an ethnic holiday; many ethnic artifacts were offered with snacking food all evening. Thirteen people, with apprentices and young professionals; all knew the hostess but few knew each other. The neighbor brought a dog and guests tended to focus on the dog.

25 31 34* 40*

49* 26 38* 40* 27

Centrally organized 2121 21X2 2123 2124 2125

23%

Secondary Realms

Dyadic 1131 1132 1113 1134

Conversation

Average, all parties

Party

79* 56# 33 42 52

85* 60 51 43

42%

Artistic Quality

14* 15* 17# 18 26

33 29 28 26

28%

Routine Relating

4# 3# 0# 2* 16

3 0# 13 5#

10%

Membership Tie

8* 24 23 25 18

5# 15 13 9*

20%

Fun, Fantasy

Indicator

Table 14.3a Incidence of stylistic indicators at 26 fully-coded parties7

19 12# 24 22 7*

10 21 19 26

23%

No Solidarity

52* 34 30 19* 29

65* 58* 49* 31

38%

5* 0* 4* 2* 4*

33* 37* 29* 24*

17%

Empathy Isolated Dyad

96 74 69 65 80

40 62 149 129

1873

Number of Episodes (N)

party7

7 Numbers in the body of the table indicate the percent of episodes at the party which showed the given characteristics.

11# 40*

Abortive 5111 5112 34 42

50 53 48 55 40

32 35 38

52* 33

39# 51* 25 38 39#

30 30 5*

4 46*

10 12 18* 19# 21*

15 30* 5

11 23

17 9 11* 13 21

11# 0* 10

29 21

19 21 15 7* 24

46* 30 36

18* 29

46 40 44 50 56*

17* 25 29

28* 19

31* 9 15 17 40*

7 20 12

56 48

78 43 105 58 65

81 20 42

7 Numbers in the body of the table indicate the percent of episodes at the party which showed the given characteristics.

* X2 Value for this cell alone is 3.84 or greater; p < .05. # X2 Value for this cell alone is 2.71 or greater but less than 3.84; p