MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER SIX SECOND INSTALLMENT

Intersecting with the onset of the war, and considerably complicating and compromising the socialist response, was the second great event, the Russian Revolution. We are, of course, talking about two revolutions, not one, for what we now think of as the Russian Revolution began as a social democratic displacement of the Czar in March, 1917, and culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power on November 6, 1918 [or October 24, according to the Old Style Gregorian calendar then used by the Russian Orthodox Church - hence “October Revolution.”] The overlap of the events in Russia and the entry of the United States into the war placed socialists in a double opposition to the mainstream sentiment in America, for if there was any bogeyman more feared and hated than the German, it was the Bolshevik. With the overthrow of the Czarist regime and the installation of an openly Communist government in Petrograd, the American socialists became, in the eyes of their countrymen, double traitors, and it was not long before the Government began indicting them for their public expressions of support for Lenin and Trotsky.
The downfall of the Czarist regime was greeted ecstatically in New York socialist circles. This was, after all, the hated regime that many of them had fled, fearing either pogroms or impressed service in the Czar’s army. In addition, as the revolution developed in Russia and moved steadily leftward, it held out the hope of redeeming Marx’s vision of an international workingmen’s revolt against capital. The workers and peasants were refusing to support Russia’s failing war effort, and it was not hard for loyal socialists to hope that this great refusal would spread to Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, and even America, triggering both an end to the war and an end to capitalism.

Two weeks after the fall of the Czar’s government, a mass meeting was organized in Brownsville to celebrate. Here is the Call story of March 28, 1917 in its entirety.
"Brownsville will celebrate the Russian revolution tonight at a mass meeting in Congress hall, Vermont street and Atlantic avenue. It is the first mass meeting in the district since the news of the revolution, and it is expected that the Russian Jewish exiles living in the district will turn out in full force to celebrate the czar’s downfall and the dawn of democracy in their native land. B. Vladek, William Karlin, William Morris Feigenbaum, Abraham Aleinicoff, and Barnett Wolff will be the speakers. The Socialist Musical society will play Russian songs and recitations. Admission to the hall will be 10 cents. The meeting is arranged by Branch 2, 23rd Assembly district, Socialist Party."

As events developed in Russia, the Call expressed excited support for the revolutionary forces. In April, the Germans sent Lenin and his colleagues back to Russia, in the hope, quite realistic as it turned out, that they would foment sufficient unrest to cause Russia’s withdrawal from the war. [This is the now famous journey in a sealed train carriage, ending at the Finland Station in Petrograd.] With the benefit of hindsight, we are able to tell what is happening and choose up sides, but at the time, the events seemed rather chaotic. The Bolsheviks and the Kerensky government, which we now perceive as irreconcilably opposed to one another, looked to contemporary observers simply as competing wings of the same anti-czarist movement. As late as November 13th, a week after the fall of the Kerensky government, the Call was still temporizing.

Eight days later, the great communist journalist John Reed, who was in Petrograd reporting for The Call, filed a dramatic account of the Bolshevik uprising which the Call printed on page one with a banner headline. Reed unequivocally declared the Bolsheviks to be the wave of the future, and consigned Kerensky to the trash heap of history. He filed a twenty-five page cablegram, which the Call edited very lightly and published virtually verbatim. Here is the text of the original cable. In order to make it comprehensible, I have added full stops from time to time, and I have not reproduced it all in capital letters, as in the original, but otherwise it is exactly as it came into the offices of the Call, with the cable page breaks indicated by "//"

"New York Call, New York//Petrograd October 31 Reed - Petrograd garrison Kronstadt sailors and red guard altogether Bolshevik army last night defeated Kerensky’ army seven thousand Cossacks Junkers and Artillary//attacking capital. Attempted Junker insurrection Sunday by Committee of Salvation comprising Mensheviks cadets put down by heroism//Cronstadt sailors who took armored car and telephone station by assault also Vladimir Junker School. Hundreds delegates arrived Smolny Institute Headquarters government and Soviets to report to Bolshevik Solidarity army front. This the real revolution real class struggle proletariat workmen soldiers peasants against bourgeoisie. //Last February only preliminary at present moment proletariat triumphant rank and file workmen soldiers peasants soviets control. Lenin Trotzky at head. Land given to peasants natural resources industry armistice and democratic peace conference. Extraordinary immense power Bolshejiki lies in fact Kerensky government absolutely ignored desires of masses expressed in Bolschevik program peace land workers control //industry. Entire insurrection magnificent spectacle proletarian mass organization and action bravery generosity. Was at dispersal soviet republic morning with Junkers defending Winter Palace. Afternoon opening all Russian Assembly //Soviets evening at assault Winter Palace. Midnight entered with first Bolschevik troops saw Duma members going unarmed to die with provisional government. Witnessed arrest ministers was at city Duma morning. //26 When Mensheviks Cadets etcetera declared against Bolsheviks formed committee salvation night witnessed stormy meeting city regiments deciding which side to support. Then Soviets meeting Smolny declaration peace land decree aboilition [sic] capital punishment taking over government //by Soviets and appointment new cabinet. Then 27 watched bourgeois counter revolutionary movement growing. City Duma visited Peter Paul fort midnight to see prisoners 28 rumors Kerensky //coming with troops battles went to Tsarskoe Selo saw falling back Bolshevik troops. Smolny midnight war preparation 29 factories rifles shovels soldiers sailors to defend city telephone station and //Hotel Astoria taken by junkers retaken Bilshevik [sic] sailors. 30 Battles against Kerensky troops Ulkowa Krasnoie Selo Colpinno Tharskoe Selo Gatchina all victorious. //I went front with Red Guard. Movement to give all power Soviets growing long time. Attempt by masses to force Soviet take power in July resulted so called Bolshevik insurrection blocked //by center socialists parties led by Lieber Dan Theretelli Gotz etcetera who held power. Then impotence provisional government created discontent disgust led to astounding growth Bolsheviks accelerated by Lieber Dan bunch forcing coalition //with Cadets against evident will democratic assembly September. Meanwhile with Lieber Dan Bunch heading central all Russian Soviets separate soviets one by one went Bolshevik demanded calling new all Russian assembly soviets which was opposed by old crowd all central army. //Fleet peasant and labor unions committees elected early in revolution just as reactionary but masses or another mind insisted on calling all //Russian soviets insisted on power to soviets and downfall provisional government eve of all Russian meeting which sabotaged by Lieber Dan bunch Cadets etcetera. Provisional government made quiet preparations to suppress any //demonstration for all power soviets. tried to send revolutionary Petrograd garrison to front replace with loyal troops. Garrison refused demanded representative in staff was refused. Garrison then refused to take orders from anybody //except Petrograd soviet formed military revolutionary committee. Staff planned to take action but overheard night 24 25 by members Pavlovsk regiment who at once began arrest staff and government. The insurrection was off could not stop. Military revolutionary committee took charge //put into execution perfect comprehensive plan captured whole city and patrolled first three nights while insurrection going on. No disorders no crimes committee Bolsheviek [sic] patrols kept town //absolutely quiet. Many stories being sent out Bolsheviek looting murdering without foundation. In fact after being captured and released on word of honor many Junkers again took part treacherous fighting some murdered by outraged opponents but very few while Bolshevik //losses five times as great. All newspaper except Bolshevik retailed lies to excite population and yet many of the[m] not suppressed. City Duma center of absolute hostility to//Bolsheviks. no workingmen present but center and right socialist parties cadets all sorts of representatives of bourgeoisie breathing threats and mobbing guards caught alone. Not arrested however. Now other socialist parties are //forming new government and debating whether or not to allow Bolsheviks to take part. no one with the Bolsheviks except proletariat but that solid. All bourgeoisie and appanages relentlessly viciously hostile. Employees all //government departments bank telephone etcetera on strike paralyzing business of government. refuse to work with Bolshevik ministers. New Bolshevik plan government to run by series of collegiums instead of ministry headed by chairman//called peoples commissars who meet in soviet of peoples commissars with Lenin chairman. News from front and all over country shows that though some fighting going on in cities masses pretty solid Bolshevik except Don region where general //Kaledine and Cossacks have proclaimed military dictatorship. Good to be alive. Trotsky and Lenin through CALL send to American revolutionary international socialists greeting from first proletarian republic of the world and call to arms for international social revolution. Send me money."

How is it that I have the precise wording of this historic document? Therein lies a lovely story. My great-aunt Fanny, Ella's sister, was working as a secretary in the editorial offices of The Call when Reed's cable came in. After she had finished transcribing it, she asked the editor whether she could keep the original stack of cable pages, and he agreed. The cable, yellowed with age but still intact, was passed from her to my grandfather and grandmother, from them to my father, and from him to me as part of the mass of papers in my parents' attic. For many years, it simply sat on my shelf, but eventually, I decided to donate it to the John Reed Archives in Houghton Library at Harvard [Reed, of course, had been a Harvard graduate], in memory of my grandfather and grandmother. This is the same library in which I had sat, as a graduate student, reading the microfilm of the German translation of James Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of the Truth, and thereby establishing an essential link in Immanuel Kant's knowledge of the sceptical arguments of David Hume. It seemed appropriate that I repay them in some way for their assistance during the writing of my doctoral dissertation.
There is an amusing coda to the story. When I came to write the book about my grandparents, I asked Houghton Library for a copy of the cable, so that I could quote it in my book. They charged me a fee, even though it was I who had donated it to the library. I wrote a restrainedly ironic letter to Harvard’s President, Neil Rudenstine, and received a very contrite apology. I urged him not to send the money back, as that would, I suggested, not be a classy thing to do, and he had the grace to accede to my suggestion. I gather that in future the donors of documents will be able to get copies of them gratis.

Two years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks ["majority" and "minority", or "greater" and "lesser"] split, triggering fratricidal warfare in socialist parties all over the world. My grandfather sided with Menshevik faction in the American party, led by Norman Thomas. Thus it was, two generations later, that I grew up in a socialist but violently anti-communist home. It was many years before I discovered the roots of my father's hatred for Lenin and Stalin.
Writing a book about my grandparents did indeed give me a usable past. I found in Barnet Wolff a man I could admire and celebrate and perhaps manage in some small measure to emulate. But I also found in my grandparents a young, exuberant, romantic pair of lovers who charmed me as I read their letters to one another. My grandfather especially was a playful, witty correspondent who endlessly teased and wooed my grandmother. Mind you, I have pictures of them from their earliest days, and Elka Nislow was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a looker! But my grandfather saw himself as the luckiest man in New York, as having made a great catch.

Why so many letters between a husband and wife? The reason is that to escape the heat and dirt and very real danger of serious infections during the New York summers, Barney would send Ella and the children to the Catskills and remain in town to work. These were no holiday outings to fancy resort hotels. The family would board with a farmer in Big Indian or Westshokan, and Ella, from the testimony of her letters, would worry endlessly about whether her four little children were getting enough milk. The postal service was much better then than it is now, and Barney and Ella could count on a letter arriving the day after it was mailed. Indeed, the very same anxiety my parents expressed if my sister went aq few days without writing home from college is merely an echo, I came to realize, of the eagerness with which Barney and Ella awaited the post.

Late in series of letters, in August of 1918, when the Flapper Era was about to start in America, Barney got it into his head that it would be a most fashionable thing for him and Ella to get a divorce [or “devorce” as he puts it, mimicking the pronunciation.] We don’t have the beginning of this bit of fancy, nor do we have Ella’s replies, but here is the first of the two letters in which Barney sets out his very modern proposal:

"Aug 12, 1918
Now as to that Devorce; I see no reason why we cant remain the best of friends afterwards. I would be a single man and as such I would be worth going after. You would be a "poor" woman who had suffered from a "bad" husband and as such would be interesting and would of course deserve a great deal of sympathy. I would of course do my best to understand you. A thing which your husband "never did" and altogether it would be very jolly and up to date. So if you think you want it why, I'll do my best to be a gallant Frenchman. For I surly would not want to disapoint a lady. By the way as I am very poor now and may not be able to come out to see you, you can sue on the ground of desertion and non support. But before doing it wont you be at least once more my dearest Elka and let me be as ever lovingly your Barney! "
When it came time to choose a title for my book on my grandparents, I recalled a lovely letter that Ella had sent to Barney after they had been married a while. Even though she wrote "I would have loved you even if you were no socialist," I decided to call it Barney and Ella: A Socialist Romance.

HOW TO WRITE A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IN PHILOSOPHY

You were admitted to graduate school, you have completed all of the preliminary requirements for the Ph. D., you are now what Americans call ABD ["all but the dissertation"], and the time has come to write your dissertation. What do you do? How do you do it? Will you ever manage to finish it? Do not panic. Doctor Bob is here to answer your questions.

First of all, What is a doctoral dissertation? In theory, a doctoral dissertation is a masterwork, which is to say a work by an apprentice in a Guild that is presented to a committee of the Masters of that Guild as evidence that the apprentice is ready to be included in their company. It is a finely wrought silver bowl, if you are an apprentice Silversmith, or an elegant pair of lady's slippers, if you are an apprentice Shoemaker. The Academy is the last medieval Guild, so a doctoral dissertation is a piece of scholarship judged good enough by a committee of Master academics to admit you to their company. Or that is the story we tell each other on cold nights. The truth is somewhat less exalted.

In Microbiology or Anthropology or History, a doctoral dissertation is a research report, which is to say a report, in stylized form, of research that the candidate has been carrying out under the guidance of a Director. In Philosophy, a dissertation is The Defense of a Thesis. [That is why a dissertation is referred to familiarly as a thesis.]

What is a thesis? It is a proposition, expressed in a declarative sentence. Here are some examples of theses:

Contrary to popular opinion, David Hume and Immanuel Kant have almost identical views on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge. [This is the thesis of my doctoral dissertation]

God is dead.

God is not dead; he has just been on vacation.

In all situations, I am morally obliged to choose the act that will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Here are some examples of things that are not theses:

Kant and Hume on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge

Nietzsche's view of religion

Act utilitarianism

Each of these is a topic, not a thesis. You cannot write a dissertation defending a topic.

Some theses in Philosophy are historical. For example, here is an historical thesis about American academic philosophy:

With the notable exception of Pragmatism, every school of philosophy that has held sway for a while in American academic circles has been an import from Europe, arriving just about when the practitioners of the previous school are getting tenure, with the result that American academic philosophy resembles an alluvial river bed in which now extinct species are preserved as fossils in layers of sedimentary rock.

In order to write a dissertation, you must be prepared to defend a thesis. If you cannot state the thesis of your dissertation in a single declarative sentence, you are not ready to write. Do not make the mistake of thinking that if you begin writing, your thesis will become clear eventually That way lies disaster. You ought to be able to begin your dissertation with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." You should then be able to conclude your dissertation with this sentence: "Thus we see that p."

What should you do if, midway through the writing of your dissertation, you conclude that you are wrong? In Microbiology or Anthropology or History, that can require a great deal of re-writing, or even the selection of a new thesis. In Philosophy, this problem can be handled by inserting six words into the statement of your thesis in the first sentence of the dissertation. Instead of "In this dissertation I shall defend the thesis that p," you write "In this dissertation I shall defend the thesis that it is not the case that p." No one will care. What do you do if someone publishes first? Give her a footnote.

Now you are ready to start writing. A doctoral dissertation in philosophy is a story. It is the story of an argument. Like all stories, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and like all good stories, it only includes what is essential to the story. Since this is actually the most important thing I am going to say, let me start a new paragraph and expand on it a bit.

Suppose you are called on to tell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk to a little group of very smart children. [If you do not know this folk tale, substitute one from your own culture. The point is universal.] You would not begin by saying, "And so Jack climbed the beanstalk." The kids would yell, "Who is Jack? Where did the beanstalk come from?" And you would not put in little bits of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, even if you knew that story really, really well. All of us know how to tell a story -- we know that we should tell our listeners, at each stage of the story, just what they need to know at that stage to follow the story line. Never mind about foreshadowing and the non-omniscient narrator and all that stuff. When you are telling a seven year old the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, you do not drop in an obscure allusion to singing harps or speak darkly of Oedipal rages. You just tell the story. As a story teller, you know four crucial things: First, where the story begins. Second, where it ends. Third, what has to be included so that the story makes sense to the listener. And Fourth, what is not needed, and therefore should be left out.

As the writer of a dissertation defending a thesis, you need to know the same four things. In preparation for writing your dissertation, you may have done a great deal of reading, and you may even have written various fragments in which you sketched out an argument. Now, you are writing your dissertation, and since you have your reading notes and those fragments on your computer [or your telephone, or your class ring, or whatever], you figure, Waste not, Want not, I will incorporate them into the dissertation. Wrong! If they are not a part of the story, they have no business being there. Set them aside and publish an article some time, but do not cram them into your dissertation.

If you are like me, and work in your head, then you should be telling the story to yourself over and over again until you know every step of it and have filled in all the blanks and worked out all the kinks. If you do not work in your head, then buy a friend a beer, sit her down, and tell her the story of your dissertation. Ask her to stop you whenever she gets lost or cannot see how you got Jack up that beanstalk.

The very first thing you must tell your friend [or yourself] is the thesis of your dissertation. Don't tell her the topic and then wave your hands and, as they say these days, gesture at the thesis [God, I hate that locution.] State the thesis in a declarative sentence. If you cannot do that, then no matter how charming you are, and how much beer you ply your friend with, you are not ready to write your dissertation.

So, you have your thesis, you have your story line, you can tell yourself or a friend the whole argument from start to finish, and the time has come to actually write the damned thing. Herewith some important and valuable pieces of advice:
1. It does not matter a very great deal whether your dissertation is brilliant, and it matters not at all whether it is true. What matters is that it is. In fifty years, I have seen many students fail to get the doctorate because they did not complete their dissertations. I have never seen a student complete a dissertation and fail to get the Ph. D. If you write it, the Ph. D. will come.

2. An American dissertation in Philosophy should be about 200 to 250 pages long, and have five or six chapters. That is a very big pile of chopped chicken liver. But you have been writing seminar papers and term papers all your adult life, and you are good at it. Otherwise you would not be an advanced doctoral student. You can do this. Trust me.

3. A dissertation is quite unlike a book. When you write a book, you do not know whom the audience will be. You just put it out there and hope it finds readers. But when you write a dissertation [in America -- it may be different elsewhere], you know who the members of your committee are before you start to write. So you are writing for a small and pre-determined audience. Now, the members of your committee are also philosophers, which means they are compulsive arguers, so if you say the sun rises in the east, at least one of them will take issue with you. But unless they are total pigs [which happens, alas -- try to make sure that your dissertation director keeps the total pigs in the department off your committee, and for God's sake, do not choose a total pig as a director], they would like to approve the dissertation. This means that you have to give them something they can sign off on even if they think your thesis is false. What to do? After stating and explaining your thesis in Chapter One, you devote Chapter Two to a survey and critique of the literature. This contributes nothing at all to the story. It is like interpolating a discourse on beanstalks and giants into Jack and the beanstalk after you have introduced Jack and his mother. This just slows down the story, but it gives your readers something to nod their heads at approvingly. Needless to say, if a member of your committee has written something on the topic of your dissertation, be sure to mention it.

4. The same thing goes for footnotes. I rarely put footnotes in what I write. In the first place, if something is part of the story I am telling, it should be in the body of the text, and if it is not, it has no business being there. Besides, I can never figure out how to use the footnote function in my word processing program. But dissertation committees love footnotes, so put them in. Nobody will read them, but everyone will look at the bottom of the page to see whether they are there. Also, number them consecutively so they can see how many you have.

5. Before you write a paragraph of the dissertation, write a chapter by chapter outline of the entire dissertation, with headings and subheadings, all in the precise order of your story. If you cannot do that, then tell the story to yourself or your friend a few more times until you can. Learn to think of the entire dissertation as one connected story.

6. Oh yes, a good piece of advice that my dissertation director, Roderick Firth, gave to me in the early Fall of 1955. If you manage to say something original, be sure to call attention to that fact in a footnote, so that your committee can give you credit for it. Otherwise, they probably won't know, sine you undoubtedly know more about your topic than they do.

And now, at long last, you are ready to write. Here is what I very strongly suggest: Start on Page 1, with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." [Substitute your thesis for "p" of course.] Then start telling your story. On the first day, write one page and stop. The next day, write another page, and stop. if you do that every day, including Sundays and holidays, in eight months you will have a dissertation. If you are able to, write two pages a day. In that case, you will have a dissertation in four months.

Be patient. You are telling a long story. In your head are really nifty bits of argument that you are eager to get to, but do not rush. Tell the story as fully and clearly as you can, confident that your readers will still be there when you get to page 50, page 100, and page 200. [They have to be -- they are sitting on your dissertation committee. They are a captive audience.]

Do not, I repeat do not, rewrite. If you wrote a bad page yesterday, write a better page today. Remember, your goal is to finish the damned thing. You can polish after you get tenure. Also, do not write four or five pages on a really good day and then figure you can take a few days off. Those few days will stretch into eternity. You are a tortoise, not a hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

If you do not have the discipline to write a page a day all by yourself, cut a deal with a fellow dissertation writer. You will send her a page a day by email, and she will send you a page of her dissertation every day by email. You will read her page [it only takes a minute] and send back an encouraging word, and she will do the same for you.

And that is it. No doubt, your director will require revisions. Make them. Perhaps your committee will require revisions. Make them. Don't anguish. Just make them. if you write a complete draft of a dissertation, you will get the Ph. D. If for some reason you don't, tell me and I will terrorize your committee
by threatening to splash their names all over my blog. :)

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER SIX FIRST INSTALLMENT

The failure of Moneybags Must Be So Lucky to attract either reviews or readers had at least for a while killed in me any desire to go on publishing books, but it did not quell my desire to write. For years, I had been carrying around the horde of Wolff family papers as I moved from Belmont to Watertown to Pelham, and at last I decided the time had come to pay them some attention. My first task was to transform them into a usable archive. I carefully sorted the papers and letters, arranged them chronologically according to author and recipient, and set up an elaborate filing system in a large file cabinet. I began with the several hundred letters that my grandparents, Barnet and Ella, had written to one another, along with a small number of letters one or another of them had written to third parties [including a charming letter written by my grandfather to the little girl who would eventually marry his oldest son and become my mother.] My grandfather had been elected to the New York Board of Alderman on the Socialist ticket in 1917, and among the papers I found a large cardboard file folder holding his Aldermanic correspondence. Although almost all the papers from that generation derived from the Wolff family, rather than from my mother's family, the Ornsteins, I did find several very early letters from her father to her mother, written before they married.

With the letters and papers were hundreds of photos, some faded and discolored with age. I could identify some of the people in the photos, but alas, many were unknown to me, and even my mother, ordinarily so careful and systematic in such matters, had failed to write their names on the back. Still and all, I sifted and sorted them as best I could and filled a number of manila envelopes with pictures of this or that branch of the family.

When I turned to the materials from my parents' generation, things were a bit easier, although even in those piles there were pictures to which I could not put names. In addition to many hundreds of letters between my father and my mother, starting in the late teens of the twentieth century and coming forward until after my sister was born in 1930, I found a sizeable collection of letters that my father had written to his boyhood friends [he kept copies], and somewhat fewer letters written by them to him. There was also a substantial pile of written and printed materials relating to my father's career, especially from the years when he served as Principal first of William Cullen Bryant High School and then of John Baum High School, both in Queens, New York.

And then there were the materials from my own generation: all the letters [and there were many of them] that my sister or I had written home from summer camp; every letter that first she and then I wrote home from college and graduate school [in 1948-49, my sister's first year at Swarthmore, Barbara wrote eighty long, multi-page letters to our parents, describing in detail what she was doing and learning.]; the hundreds of pages of letters that I wrote home during my post-college wanderjahr in Europe; and large numbers of related documents from our lives.

I spent a very long time laboriously typing my sister's letters onto my computer, arranging them by year and month and day, deducing from internal evidence the location in that series of the small number that were not dated. By the time I was done creating the entire archive, I had read every single letter and document, beginning with a brief note from my grandfather to my grandmother dated March 26, 1900. It opens "My dear friend Elka." His next letter, dated July 31, 1900, was addressed to "Dearest most beloved Elka." He was a fast worker.

I was morally certain that no one save the members of my immediate family would take the slightest interest in this massive accumulation of documents, but I felt an irresistible urge to transform them into two books -- one devoted to my grandparents, the other to my parents. Over a period of more than a year, I sat in my lovely second floor study and worked away. My plan, which I eventually brought to completion, was to write what were in effect two epistolary novels, created from the letters, the first devoted to the love affair between Barnet and Ella [as she came to be called], the second to the love story of my parents. I hoped by this literary device to bring all four of them to life through their own words. What on earth had moved me to so large an undertaking?

If I may borrow the lovely phrase first coined in 1915 by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, I was in search of a usable past -- an understanding of the family from which I had come that could serve as a frame for my own political and personal commitments. In the case of my grandparents, I wanted to understand more fully my grandfather's lifelong commitment to the socialist ideals that I had, somewhat mysteriously, inherited from him. I wanted as well to know my grandparents as the young, romantic couple that the letters revealed, not merely as the ancient figures from an incomprehensible past that they had been for me when I was a boy.

My need with regard to my parents was more immediate and urgent. I knew that my father had been a vigorous, energetic, hard-driving, ambitious man when young, and I even had personal memories of him like that, dating from my early and middle childhood. But something had happened to my father, not too many years after his own father died. He had started to drink heavily, to gain weight, and to retreat into himself, just at the moment in his career when he was offered an opportunity for an exciting professional advancement. I wanted to understand the causes and nature of his transformation, in part to reassure myself that I was not reenacting a dismaying pattern.

When I began crafting the book about my grandparents, I very quickly realize that it would not be enough simply to tell the story of their personal relationship through the medium of their letters. Although Barney, as he was called, earned his living as a cigar salesman for Monday & Sons, it was the Socialist Party that was his life. From the evidence of the papers and letters in the archive, it appeared that he had thrown his life and energies into socialism from a very early age. I needed to know a good deal more about the activities of the Socialist Party in New York City in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Though I have several times observed in these memoirs that I am no sort of a scholar, I did, for once in my life, engage in something very like genuine archival research.

My principal resource was a newspaper called The New York Call, usually referred to simply as The Call, which was published daily from 1908 through 1923. The Call was written in English, unlike The Forward [Vorwarts], which appeared in Yiddish. The UMass library did not have The Call on microfilm, but through interlibrary loans, they managed in the end to obtain the entire run from one source or another. By the time I was done, I had read my way rapidly through the entire fifteen years of the newspaper, scanning both for references to my grandfather, which were many indeed, and also for a more general sense of the evolution of the party in New York.

Both the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where my grandparents grew up, and Brooklyn, to which they moved after they were married, were very much assemblages of immigrant communities in those days, with enclaves in which Yiddish or German or Italian was the lingua franca. The roots of the Socialist Party of America, formally organized in 1901, lay in nineteenth century labor activism enhanced and in some cases led by European immigrants fleeing the reactionary repressions of revolutionary uprisings in 1848 and 1870. The Party fought for the rights of working men and women, grounding itself in Marx's critique of capitalism.
I found that the best way to get some organized sense of the Party's political orientation was to take a close look at the Party Platform, published in The Call on Monday, November 9, 1908. After a rafter rattling preamble full of the sort of Marxist rhetoric that gets my juices flowing, the platform enunciated a series of General Demands, Industrial Demands, and Political Demands. Taking account of a few cases in which multiple demands were listed under a single heading, I counted twenty-seven demands in all. No fewer than eighteen of these demands have been met in the one hundred two years since the promulgation of the Platform - most of them during the New Deal administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, if one sets aside the demands for alterations in the political system, such as abolition of the Senate [this was five years before the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, remember], amendment of the constitution by majority vote, and abolition of the power of the Supreme Court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, the only significant remaining demand that has not been met is the collective ownership of the means of production.

It is not difficult to see why reactionaries in American today cry “socialism” whenever they contemplate the social welfare programs of the New Deal and its successors. As has often been noted, FDR and the New Deal Democrats successfully separated off the social welfare component of the Socialist Party program from the call for collective ownership, and managed by using the power of the state to salvage capitalism from its inherently self-destructive tendencies. By so doing, they were able to maintain for capital the stability and viability of the system of private ownership of the means of production and production for profit rather than for use. Almost a century later, we see a society still capitalist in its fundamental structure, vastly wealthier, but actually more unequal in the distribution of the social product than was the America at which Barney and his comrades were looking. [This is, I realize, a surprising claim, but the statistics bear it out. The share of the total social product going to the poorest one tenth of the population is roughly one-half of what it was at the beginning of the century, though of course the absolute quantity of goods and services allocated per capita to the poorest Americans is much larger. In recent decades, the gap between the top and the middle has also widened.]

Local politics in those days was conducted on street corners and in meeting halls. When an election was on, the Socialist Party would send out speakers each day to prominent intersections, where they would put up some signs and an overturned box, and start speaking. There were no microphones or amplifiers. One needed a good crowd presence, a pair of leather lungs, and a ready tongue to gather a crowd. My grandfather and his close friend and ally, Abe Shiplacoff, would speak three, four, or even five nights a week in the month before election day. For stellar occasions, a flatbed truck would be rented, and the speakers would travel from location to location, repeating their speeches. My Uncle Bob, when he was in his eighties, recalled that the children and their mother would not see Barney very much in the evenings, what with Party meetings, public speaking, and the meetings of the unions in which he served as an officer.

The Call was an essential part of the campaign planning. Each day, there would be a long list of the street corners meetings with the names of the speakers, and sometimes an indication that the speeches would be in Italian or Yiddish. The notices were as much for the speakers as for the audiences. There was really no other way for the Party to get the word out as to where Barney and the others were needed. As part of my research, I bought a street map of Brooklyn and had a copy shop blow it up repeatedly until I had a huge detailed map of the section of Flatbush where Barney spoke. I mounted the map on a large piece of plaster board, and as I gathered detailed listings from the pages of The Call, I put red pins in the map at all the intersections and speech sites. The area Barney covered really wasn't very big, looked at that way. It was maybe fifteen or twenty blocks square. I was doing this in 1998, ninety years or so after the event, but save for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and few other innovations, the streets were unchanged.
Although Barney ran for office half a dozen times, his great moment came in 1917, when he and six other Socialists were elected to the New York Board of Aldermen. "The Seven Honest Men," they were called. He apparently had a truly impressive voice, and there are some wonderful descriptions in pages of The Call from 1917-18 of Barney holding forth at Aldermanic meetings. I found a great deal to be proud of as I looked deeper and deeper into Barney's political career. In 1910, he went with a delegation to a national meeting of the Party held in Chicago. The hot button issue that year was the admission of "Asiatics" to the United States. This meant Chinese workers, whose predecessors had been brought to America to work on the Trans-Continental Railroad. Some of the Socialists wanted to bar them from the country in order to limit the supply of labor, but Barney, to his eternal credit, was one of a handful of delegates who voted against the discriminatory policy.

In 1914, a series of events was unleashed that permanently changed the course of history, and with it the fate of the socialist cause throughout the world. We can trace the effects of these events, albeit from a somewhat parochial perspective, in the pages of the Call, but oddly, there are few if any references to the events in Barney’s letters to Ella.

On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists. One month later, on July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia [or “Servia,” as it was always referred to in the Call.] In quick succession, Germany declared war on Russia and France, England declared war on Germany, and Austria declared war on Russia. The Great War had begun. No event, save the French Revolution, has had a more profound transformative effect on modern world politics [with the possible exception of the Chinese Communist Revolution.] The complicated structure of European alliances was shattered, America’s isolation from world affairs was permanently ended, Africa underwent yet another colonial subjection, and the hopes of socialists everywhere for an international alliance of working people against exploitative capitalism were dealt a death blow.

The initial reaction of the Call and its readers to the war was complicated in several different ways. One of the central tenets of the Marxist analysis of capitalism was that the internationalizing, centralizing tendencies of capital would have the unintentional consequence of progressively unifying wage laborers, transforming them into a genuinely self-conscious working class. As described by Marx in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, this process begins in individual factories, where previously isolated workers, operating in a “putting-out’ system, are brought together for reasons of capitalist efficiency of production and first come to realize their common interest in opposing the exploitation of the owners. As capital revolutionizes the process of production and distribution, workers in one factory, then in one industry, then in several regions of the same nation, and eventually workers throughout the world discover their common interest and join forces in ever larger and better organized combinations. The relentless transformation of the social relations of production drives the development of greater ideological understanding.

As a result of this analysis, which seemed to have been confirmed by the half century of economic developments following the publication of Capital in 1867, socialists confidently expected that the working classes of the world’s most ideologically advanced nations, Germany and France, would refuse to fight one another at the behest of their capitalist bosses. There seemed to be every reason to believe that socialist solidarity would trump appeals to nationalist loyalty. So, for example, in the July 27, 1914 issue of the Call, just a day before the first declaration of war, there appeared the bold headline:

“SOCIALISTS OF AUSTRIA AND GERMANY WILL HOLD DEMONSTRATIONS TO HALT WAR PREPARATIONS.”

The failure of working-class solidarity, and the willingness of millions of European and American workingmen to fight one another for four bloody years, fatally undermined the hopes for international solidarity. Patriotism, it seemed, was stronger than class consciousness.

During this time, the New York socialists were for the most part immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe with strong ties to their countries of origin. As the pages of the Call make clear, there was as much interest in events in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, or Petrograd as there was in the doings in Washington.
Ironically, the contradictory factors of ideology and nationality combined to produce a strong pacifist or anti-war sentiment in the socialist ranks. Large segments of American society responded similarly, although for different reasons, but over time, and in response to the increasingly destructive submarine attacks on trans-Atlantic shipping, American sentiment in general began to shift very strongly in favor of support for the British and French. As war fever rose, the socialist opposition came more and more to be seen at a treasonous betrayal of the nation by foreigners who couldn’t be trusted.

At first, the American debate focused on preparedness for war, with the socialists trying unsuccessfully to persuade their fellow workers that the war in Europe was nothing more than a struggle for markets between the bosses. Individual socialist leaders took varying positions. Meyer London, one of the Socialist leaders who was by now a member of Congress, offered tempered support for war preparedness, a fact that infuriated some of his comrades in the movement.

By late 1916 and early 1917, the sinking of American ships by German submarines had generated considerable support for a war effort, and on April 6, 1917, the United States formally declared war on Germany. Now the opposition of the socialists was seen as straight-out treason, and a frenzy of red-baiting and government repression began that extended throughout the country. On June 15, 1917, shortly after America’s entry into the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act, a far-reaching act of repression that contributed to the hysterical sentiment arising in the nation. All things German became anathema to good Americans. German classical music disappeared from concert programs, even the study of the German language was suspect. My uncle Bob told the story of a Professor of German at City College in New York who walked into his departmental office at the beginning of the Fall semester in 1918 to discover that all of his courses had been canceled. “Very well,” Bob claims he replied, ‘I shall be at home if you want me,” and he walked out, content to be paid for not working. According to Bob, the College relented and rescheduled his courses. Similar things were happening elsewhere. At The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the entire German Department was fired!

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER FIVE FOURTH INSTALLMENT

That first year was a hoot. The seven students showed up, ready to begin their doctoral studies in our brand new program. At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, September 4th, I met with them, greeted them in my new role as Graduate Program Director, and explained that in the first year, all of them would take a double seminar on Major Works of Afro-American Studies, meeting for two and a half hours each Monday and Wednesday. In addition, I said, during the second semester, they would be expected to take a third course or seminar, either in our department or elsewhere in the University. That same afternoon, at 2:30 p.m., they were to gather in the seminar room at the end of the hallway for their first class.

All of us on the faculty were a little bit over the top with excitement, and in a moment of sheer folly, we decided that all us would attend every session of the Major Works seminar. Seven young, rather nervous students gathered around a table with Esther Terry, John Bracey, Mike Thelwell, Ernie Allen, Bill Strickland, and me. There wasn't enough oxygen in the room to draw a deep breath! I had instructed the students that they were to read three books over the summer in preparation for their studies -- the Franklin, the slave narratives, and the Meier and Rudwick -- and were to bring to the first class a paper on one of them. To each class they were to bring enough copies so that each member of the class and each professor could have one -- thirteen copies in all. I advised them to keep a file of these papers. In future years, I explained, when they were professors somewhere and were called on to teach one or another of those fifty books, they could pull out the file and see what their colleagues -- now also professors - had had to say about it,. I assured them that it would make class preparation much easier.

And away we went. Each time we met, the students were responsible for another book and another paper. Seven students, fifty papers each, three hundred and fifty papers in all. That first year, I read every single paper and returned it the next day with marginal hand-written comments and a brief typed comment clipped to the front. We were insane, of course. My five colleagues had been arguing among themselves about the substance of Afro-American Studies for almost thirty years. Gathered together in one room, they could scarcely restrain themselves from rehearsing those arguments, and they made very little effort to do so. The students would plaster themselves up against the walls, struck dumb by the sight and sound of an entire department of professors in full bellow.

There were moments whose truly extraordinary character was, I think, lost on our students, who simply assumed that all graduate programs were like ours. The assignment one day was Margaret Walker's novel, Jubilee, which chronicles the life of a young woman born into slavery, liberated at the end of the Civil War, and then struggling to make a life for herself during Reconstruction and in the terrible aftermath of Jim Crow. One of the students asked whether the novel could be read as a work of feminist literature. Mike Thelwell said that it certainly could not be so read. John Bracey, who knew a great deal about feminism, then launched into a lengthy and extremely interesting rebuttal to Mike, distinguishing a number of different schools of feminist thought, and suggesting that the novel might be read as feminist by one or another of those schools, but not by yet a third or fourth. Mike Thelwell, who disliked feminist literary theory as much as he disliked every other school of literary theory, stood fast, insisting that there was no way that the novel could be construed as feminist.

The next class period, the students came in, having read a new book and having prepared a new paper. As soon as we were convened, Mike began to speak in his characteristically courteous and somewhat orotund fashion.; "You will recall," he said, "that my esteemed colleague, Professor Bracey, and I had a disagreement when last we met about whether Margaret Walker's novel, Jubilee, could be construed as a feminist work. I said that it could not, and Professor Bracey mistakenly argued that it could. I was quite persuaded that I was correct, but I did not wish to leave my judgment thus unsubstantiated, so after the class ended, I went home and I called Miss Walker. We had a very pleasant conversation, during which I asked her whether her novel could be construed as feminist, and she assured me that it could not."

John exploded at this, saying that every literary critic knew the author was the last person you wanted to ask about the proper interpretation of a piece of fiction, and pointing out that a collection of Mitchell's short stories had been published by a feminist press [a fact of which everyone in the room save John was, of course, ignorant.] At that point, the rest of us intervened and suggested that we start discussing the book assigned for that day. But I am very much afraid that the students came away from the experience thinking that in graduate school, when one had a disagreement about the meaning of a text, the normal thing to do was to call up the author, with whom one was, of course, good friends.

Later on, we read Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, and Esther remarked casually that some while back, when Anne was a bit on her uppers, she had stayed with Esther and Gene in their Amherst home. When we got to Zora Neale Hurston's great novel, their Eyes Were Watching God, John told stories about Zora, who was, it seems, a good friend of his grandmother. Zora was visiting John's grandparents in Florida when she got the $200 advance for the novel, and she and John's grandmother went out shopping, whereupon Zora blew the whole advance on a splendid new coat. I was in a state of perpetual intellectual arousal. I had been around the Academy for forty years, at that point, and I had never seen anything like it.
One moment in the seminar remains in my memory as emblematic of an important fact about the ideological convictions of my colleagues. One of the books we read was Herbert Gutman's important work, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. Michael Forbes, who had come to us from Eastern Michigan University, where he had majored in Black Studies, observed that when he took a course on the Black Family as an undergraduate, they had not read Gutman's book "because he is White." John Bracey delivered a long speech about the large number of White scholars who had made invaluable contributions to Afro-American Studies. Some while later, when we were talking about my difficulties in raising money for the graduate program, John remarked that the department was "nationalist but not separatist." That fact went a long way to explaining why they were able to welcome me into the department, as they had another White scholar earlier, and as they welcomed two more White scholars subsequently.

There was no way we could continue with the mad scheme of having the entire department attend every class. After the first year, we calmed down, and started handing round the responsibility for leading the discussion on this book or that. Because we were so short handed in those first years, I actually got to teach some of the books on the list, even though I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert on any one of them. For several years, I led the discussion on Cane, on Their Eyes, and on two books I had personally championed on our list, Skip Gates's The Signifying Monkey and Thomas Morris's five hundred page monograph, Southern Slavery and the Law 1619 -1860. My colleagues hated Gates [for pandering to the moneyed white liberals and having no roots in the Black community], and everyone in the department but me hated the Morris book, which I found utterly fascinating, so after a couple of years both books were voted off the list.

Each year, near the end of the Spring semester, we would meet as a department to discuss possible changes in the Major Works list. At first, people argued for adding titles, but could not agree on dropping any, so the list crept up from fifty to fifty-six. Finally, in one of my few acts of administrative rank-pulling, I laid down the law that henceforward, anyone wanting to add a title would have to couple the proposal with the name of the book he or she was proposing to drop. Over the twelve years during which I presided as GPD, the list did undergo changes, but it held remarkably constant. The practical consequence was that in any of the advanced courses or seminars in the department, one could confidently assume that every student had read the same fifty foundational works, to which one could therefore refer without further explanation. Pedagogically speaking, that is an invaluable foundation for a truly productive graduate teaching.

We learned a great deal during those early years. The first thing we discovered was that the Graduate Record Examination was totally useless as a measure of an applicant's ability to do well in our program. The GRE scores of our applicants were dismal -- three hundreds and four hundreds, which, as the philosophers reading these memoirs will immediately respond, means that a student is utterly incapable of graduate work. But there they were, reading books by the score and writing solid, intelligent papers. Our response, at my suggestion, was simply to stop requiring GRE scores as a part of the application file. Instead, we introduced the requirement that each applicant submit a substantial piece of written work -- a term paper or seminar paper. Since "The Graduate Admissions Committee" was simply the entire department, this meant that each year, all of us read every paper submitted by every applicant. As the number of applicants crept up from twenty-nine to forty or fifty, this became a serious demand on everyone's time, but we did it, because we knew that those papers were a better indication of real promise than anything else a student might present.

I knew very little about Afro-American Studies, but by this time in my career I knew a great deal about graduate programs, and I worked very hard to make ours a success. I began by laying down an absolute inviolable rule: No matter how much or how little I could raise to support our students, the money would be divided equally among all of the students. There would be no A-list and B-list of students, no favored inner circle considered the favorites of the faculty, with everyone else forced to pick up such scraps as they could. Contrary to every other doctoral program I had ever seen or been a part of, this was going to be a collective effort of students and faculty.

This rule went hand in hand with a departmental ideal whose strongest proponent was Esther herself: If we admitted a student, then we would do whatever we could to make sure that that student completed the program and earned a doctorate. I was myself very deeply committed to this conception of education, as my comments about the Army and South Africa have already made clear. The structure of the program embodied this conception of our mission. Each class of students was expected to work as a team in the first year Major Works seminar, studying together, helping one another, looking out for one another, and that is indeed what happened. No student fell through the cracks, no student was allowed simply to slip from view. If a student missed a class, everyone in the department knew about it. If a student was having trouble grappling with the flood of texts, we would know that immediately because we were reading the papers that were turned in twice a week. The National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, adopted as its motto "Lifting As We Climb," and the spirit of that commitment was built into the structure and the ethos of our doctoral program.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what became of the students who entered the program. In the first two years, twelve students were admitted [after the first class, we settled on five per year as the appropriate size for each class]. Of the four students remaining in the first year class and the five students who were admitted the second year, every single one earned a doctorate, and eight of the nine now hold tenured or tenure track teaching jobs in American colleges and universities. By way of comparison, according to a recent study by the Council of Graduate Studies, the national ten-year doctoral completion rates for African-Americans is 47%.

In that first year group, Michael Forbes, the man who questioned the appropriateness of reading scholarly works by White authors, went on to write a fascinating comparative study of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway as expatriates. He is currently Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at DePauw University. Njubi Nesbitt, who came to us after earning a Master's Degree in Communications Studies, wrote a study, since published, on the role of African-Americans in the anti-apartheid struggle. Njubi is now a tenured Associate Professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State, and the author of several books. Tanya Mears, a tall young Black women with a mordant sense of humor, wrote a ground-breaking study of Colonial American execution texts about people of African descent, a genre of literature that preceded the much better known Slave Narratives. Tanya has just accepted an Assistant Professorship of History at Worcester State College, after spending several years of back-breaking work at Norfolk State, an historically Black college in Virginia. Brandon Anderson Hutchinson, while starting a family, has earned tenure at Southern Connecticut State University. Her dissertation was a study of three Black female playwrights.

The second year class has been equally successful. Chris Lehman, a serious, deeply religious man, married to a minister who had studied at Harvard Divinity School, astonished us all by choosing as his topic "derogatory images of African-Americans in animated cartoons," or, somewhat more colloquially, coonery. He studied old animated cartoons, interviewed as many of the writers and animators as he could find who were still alive, and produced a completely original study that was subsequently published as a book. Chris lives with his wife and children in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where he is a tenured Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at St. Cloud State U. Rita Reynolds, who had already studied both African-American Studies and Photography before she came to us, wrote a fine archival study of a group of wealthy free Black women of Charleston, South Carolina. Rita, who is one of my very favorite all time students, is now a tenure track Assistant Professor at the Wagner College on Staten Island. One of her closest friends in the second year cadre was Andrew Rosa, the first Latino to join our doctoral program. Andrew is a cheerful man with a penchant for the theoretical as well as the archival. He fixed for his doctoral dissertation on St. Clair Drake [yes, the same man whose name I misspelled as Sinclair Drake while we were crafting the first year Major Works Seminar.] Despite being the most important African-American scholar after W. E. B. Du Bois, Drake had been virtually unstudied when Andrew began his research. Indeed, Andrew was the first person to make a systematic study of the one hundred boxes of Drake's papers and other materials stored at the Schomburg Library in New York. Because Drake had been John Bracey's teacher at Roosevelt University in Chicago, John was able to arrange personal interviews for Andrew with several of Drake's contemporaries who were still alive. Andrew is now bringing his intellectual biography to completion and readying it for publication. When it appears, it will be an indispensable contribution to the political as well as the intellectual development of twentieth century African-American thought. Andrew is an Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University.

Let me tell one brief story about Andrew, to give some idea of the sort of commitment we all had to the success of our students. For several years, Andrew carried out his doctoral research, traveling repeatedly to New York, to Chicago, and elsewhere in pursuit of original materials. When to came time for him to start writing, however, he got stuck. I think he simply had so much material that he was unable to subdue it to a satisfactory and manageable narrative line. I knew that he was having difficulty, but since I was not directing his dissertation, I really had no role to play. [Readers of this Memoir who are not themselves academics may be puzzled by this remasrk, inasmuch as I was the Graduate Program Director, but at UMass, and more generally in graduate programs of any sort, it is the dissertation director, and no one else, who is in charge of a student's progress, once he or she reaches the dissertation stage.]

Finally, I decided to step in informally. I asked Andrew to meet me in my office with everything he had written thus far. He showed up with about one hundred pages or so of material. I took a quick look and found that it was really alternative versions of the same material, or fragments from different stages in Drake's life and career. so I set it aside and started to talk Andrew through the structure and organization of his project. Since he had undertaken an intellectual and political biography of Drake, the narrative structure was obviously going to be chronological. Andrew had a very clearly defined and quite precise conception of the successive stages of Drake's education and career, so it was not difficult to see how the dissertation should be broken into chapters. However, since Drake lived to be seventy-nine and played a major role not only in African-American affairs but also in the Pan-African Movement following the end of World War II, it was obvious that Andrew could not possibly cover the entirety of Drake's life and career in a doctoral dissertation. Following Andrew's lead [I knew nothing about Drake -- I mean, nothing], I proposed a cut-off point for the dissertation, essentially at the end of the research project that led to Drake's most important scholarly work, Black Metropolis, written with Horace Cayton and published in 1943.

Once we had defined the limits of the dissertation, I talked Andrew through an outline of the successive chapters, each of which he really already had conceptualized in his mind. Finally, after more than a hour, we reached a point at which Andrew had a clearly defined game plan for the writing of the dissertation. At this point, I said to him, "Andrew, I want you to go home and today write the first page of the first chapter. When you are done, I want you to email it to me as an attachment. I will read it, make any corrections I think it needs [of an editorial nature -- I was certainly not qualified to make any substantive corrections!], and I will email it back to you. Tomorrow, I want you to send me page two. I will do the same thing. Every day, including Sundays and holidays, you are to send me an additional page. I may go to Europe with Susie for a vacation, but you are to continue sending me a page a day, regardless. You will do that for eight months. At that point, you will have a draft of your dissertation. If I see you wandering from the outline, or getting ahead of yourself, I will warn you and get you back on track. If you are patient, you will get your degree at the end of this year. Once you have a complete draft, submit it to your dissertation director [John Bracey], for his comments, corrections, and required revisions.

For the next eight months, Andrew sent me a page a day, which I read and sent back to him that same day. Andrew completed his dissertation, which was fully as impressive as I knew it would be, and off he went to Oklahoma State. I have done the same thing with two other students in the doctoral program, always, of course, without having more than the most rudimentary knowledge of the subject matter of the dissertation.

The fourth student from that second year group was Carolyn Powell, an older independent scholar who came to us after a career in the secondary schools of New York City. [John Bracey became very excited when he read her application file, because it seemed that he routinely assigned an essay she had published in one of his undergraduate courses.] Carolyn wrote a very controversial dissertation about consensual sexual relations between slave masters and female slaves in the Old South, and as luck would have it, was writing about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings just at the time the DNA evidence confirmed the oral tradition in the Black Community, steadfastly denied by Jefferson's White descendants, that the Founding Father had fathered a child with his slave, Hemings.

This is perhaps the appropriate time to say something about an aspect of our program of which I am most proud. Over the years, we attracted and admitted a number of older Black students like Carolyn who had been away from the Academy for as much as twenty years or more, and now wanted to return to do earn a doctorate with us. These were in every way non-traditional students, and each, in his or her own way, found the transition back to student life difficult. W. S. Tkweme, a very tall, elegant graduate of Harvard, had had a bad experience in the Ivy League, and had withdrawn to Atlanta, where he ran a radio program devoted to Black culture and started a John Coltrane Society. Tkweme [as he styled himself -- it was not his birth name] was obviously made somewhat uncomfortable by once again being a student after making a life for himself as an accomplished and mature man. With exquisite tact, he took to calling me "Dr. Bob," which nicely triangulated our relationship. He chose to write on the politics and economics of the jazz world in the 60s, and took advantage of the fact that one of our colleagues in the department was the great jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. After earning his doctorate, Tkweme accepted an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville.

Lloren Foster had dropped out of college and pursued a career as a computer expert, before returning to complete his undergraduate degree while in his forties. He then applied to take a doctorate with us. Lloren wrote a comparison of liberation fiction in America and South Africa, and on one of my periodic trips abroad, I was actually able to track down for him a number of South African novels in a Cape Town bookstore. When Lloren was still a long way from completing his dissertation, he was offered a job at Hampton University teaching Freshman English. The teaching load was crushing, and I knew from Cynthia's experience that the task of grading student papers could be mind-killing. I urged Lloren not to take the a job until he as finished with the dissertation, but he had a family to support, and decided to accept. "The Lord will provide," he assured me, and so He did. Lloren is now Dr. Foster, and is a regular member of the Hampton English Department.

My favorite student among the older contingent was Marieta Joyner, who came out of a sharecropping background in rural Alabama. Marieta had been serving for a number of years as a staff assistant in the Clinical Psychology Department of the Boston campus of UMass. I worked long and successfully with her to help her to reacquire the ability to handle the heavy load of reading and writing that we demanded of all our students. Marieta, who was in her early fifties when she started our program, had a grown son who had gone deaf as the consequence of an illness, and this got her interested in a subject that no one at all had done any research on -- the education of deaf African-Americans. Marieta learned American Sign Language, and presented it in satisfaction of the language requirement that was a standard part of our Preliminary requirements for the doctorate. She visited Gallaudet, conducted a number of interviews with old-timers there, and produced the first scholarly study ever done of the subject. Marieta is now Associate Lecturer in History and Politics at Curry College in Milton, MA.

The last of the students in that second year class was Jennifer Jensen-Wallach, the first White student we admitted [there would be a number of others.] Jennifer came from an evangelical Christian family in Arkansas [her mother, who eventually left the Church, wrote an autobiography about her experiences that is about to become a movie in which she is played by Vera Vermiga, the co-star of the George Clooney movie Up in the Air. Talk about seven degrees of separation!] Jennifer had done graduate study in Southern History at Ole Miss, and had also worked on the Martin Luther King papers. She conceived the idea of writing a genuinely interdisciplinary dissertation in which she would do a literary analysis of a number of memoirs of the Jim Crow south, written by famous and accomplished authors, in an attempt discover whether there were insights into an historical era that can best be accessed through a literary rather than a historiographical approach. I ended up directing the dissertation, to my absolute delight. Although Jennifer needed no help at all from me, or indeed from anyone else, in the writing of the dissertation, I was able to make some philosophical suggestions about the epistemological questions raised by her approach that I would like to think strengthened her argument. The dissertation was published as a book to great critical acclaim. Jennifer is now a tenure track Assistant Professor in the History Department of the University of North Texas, and has just signed a contract for her fourth book.

All of us in the department were especially close to those first classes of graduate students. At the beginning of each year, Esther would throw a party at her big home for the entire department. Somehow, the extended Black community of UMass would get wind of the party, and they would all show up, considering the Afro-American Studies Department their home as well. In its way, this community was rather like that circle of people in New York who considered the Columbia Philosophy Department their second home.

There was a certain amount of hi-jinks that took place, inevitably. One day, I walked into my office to discover that it has been festooned with little cardboard cutouts of Bob the Builder, a children's play figure after my time as a father [or as a kid.] But I think my favorite joke arose out of a conversation I had one day with Jennifer Jensen-Wallach. My time in the Afro-American Studies Department was, after all, rather cognitively disorienting. To the students, I was good old Bob, the Department shabbes goy, who seemed to do everything administrative that no one else wanted to do. Most of the them had no idea that I actually had a certain reputation as a philosopher. That was all right with me, but sometimes I wanted to let them know that I wasn't just a pile of chopped chicken liver. So in the midst of a conversation, prompted by I know not what, I suddenly blurted out to Jennifer, "You know, this may be hard to believe, but I am actually a World Famous Philosopher."

Well, from then on, to this day, she took to calling me The WFP. Her first book is dedicated to The WFP, and when her husband, a writer for The Nation, came back from a Nation sponsored cruise, he brought with him, for me, a picture of Rachel Maddow, inscribed "To WFP." I am sure Maddow has no idea what that actually meant.
During the twelve years that I served as Graduate Program Director of the doctoral program in Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, we achieved an astonishing record with our students. Almost all of them finished their degrees and went on to good teaching jobs and a growing record of distinguished scholarly publications. During that same period, the flashy "Dream Team" at Harvard got all the press, but we were doing the Lord's work at UMass, and we were phenomenally successful.

WADE'S LIST

Wade asked what the thirty or so works are that one should read to have a basic education in philosophy. Here is my list -- nothing surprising here at all. With this should go a firm command of mathematical logic.

Plato: Euthyphro, Crito, Apology, Phaedo, Gorgias, Republic, Philebus, Symposium, Sophist, Parmenides
Aristotle: Nichomchaean Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, de Anima
St. Augustine; City of God
St. Thomas: Summa Theologica
Locke: Essay on the Human Understanding, Second Treatise of Civil Government
Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
Hume: Treatise of Human Nature, Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Descartes: Meditations [with the Objections and Replies], Discourse on Method
Leibniz: Monadology
Spinoza: Ethics [extra credit: Short Treratise]
Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Judgment
Hobbes: Leviathan
Rousseau: Of the Social Contract [extra credit: Emile]

That is thirty one, I think, and takes you up to 1800. At that point, all bets are off, and you are on your own.

This is a lot of stuff, but think about it. If you are a graduate student in philosophy, could you read six of these books a year? Of course you could. Some are a breeze, some will take a humongous amount of effort. But when you are done, you will have a grounding in philosophy that will last a lifetime. You can take the rest of your life to fill in all the gaps, of which there are lots.

MEMOIR VOLUME THREE CHAPTER FIVE THIRD INSTALLMENT

There were lighter moments, during which I enjoyed some of the sheer fun of being a member of the Afro-American Studies Department. In October, 1993, I drove to New York City with Bill, John, Ernie, and Nelson to attend an enormous celebration at Carnegie Hall of the one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of our patron saint, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. [Du Bois was actually born on February 23, 1868, but the celebration was being held in October.] The event was intended as a fund-raiser organized by our colleague, Du Bois’ step son David Graham Du Bois, son of Shirley Graham. The idea was to raise a ton of money for the Du Bois Foundation, which David heads. We had dinner before the celebration at a small restaurant, and then we all walked up Seventh Avenue to Carnegie Hall. Nelson got it into his head that it was time to teach the white boy how to walk Black, so as Ernie, Bill, and John collapsed in laughter, Nelson strutted up the avenue and I followed, imitating him as best I could [Nelson’s walk is a wonder to behold, and I am not sure my highly amused colleagues would have done much better.]
When we got to Carnegie Hall, we ran into Esther, who had come down from Amherst in another car. Everyone was there. I have never seen so many well-dressed Negroes and superannuated Jews in my life. I held onto Esther’s coat and tailed along as she greeted one luminary after another. One tall woman rushed up, threw her arms around Esther, and gave her a big kiss before going off. “Who was that?” I asked. “Betty Shabazz,” Esther said, searching the crowd for more friends. “You mean the widow of Malcolm X?” I sputtered, astonished. “Yes,” she said, “Betty did a degree in the Ed School at UMass. We are old friends.” As the evening wore on, I began to realize that my colleagues knew, and were known by, just about every Black man or woman who had become famous in the struggles over the past thirty years.
In the end, despite the fact that Carnegie Hall was sold out, the event lost money. The last straw was Bill Cosby, who went on so long on stage talking about his friend Herbert Aptheker that the union stage hands had to be paid overtime, which ate up the slender profits. I took that as a cautionary lesson for my own nascent fund raising efforts.

My friends from pre-Afro Am days always had two questions about my new academic home. Why had I transferred from Philosophy to Afro-American Studies? And What did I do in my new department? Each question had a subtext, of course. The simple answer to the first question was that I joined the department because they asked me to. But the unexpressed assumption behind the question was that I was on some sort of good works or social welfare mission, bringing the wisdom of the ages to the benighted savages of New Africa House. The truth was a good deal simpler. As a philosopher, I have always prized intelligence, which is, after all, a philosopher’s sole stock in trade. My former colleagues in Philosophy were, by and large, very smart, though in a narrow and uninteresting way. But with the noteworthy and happy exception of my old comrade-in-arms, Robert J. Ackermann, few of them were capable of carrying on a genuinely interest¬ing conversation. Indeed, during my twenty-one years in that department, again with the exception of Bob Ackermann and Ann Ferguson, I cannot recall ever learning a thing from any one of them, or hearing any of them say something that struck me as genuinely fascinating.

By contrast, my new colleagues in Afro-American Studies were smart, knowledgeable, politically engaged, and interesting. Talking to them, I never had the distressing feeling that I was speaking a foreign language to someone intellectually challenged. It is not merely that I learned from them – vastly more, I suspect, than they ever learned from me. It is something much more fundamental: there were levels of irony and nuances of moral and political judgment in their conversation that keep me perpetually on my toes. When Mike Thelwell saw my son, Patrick (by then a grandmaster) on television, playing and beating the first Black International Master (now Grandmaster) Maurice Ashley, he called me up and in perfectly deadpan Jamaican English, asked me why I had not instructed my son not to humiliate a brother. I had to do a good deal of verbal tap-dancing to conceal my failure to realize that he was teasing me. In later years, when I worried endlessly about how few applicants we had to our doctoral program as the deadline approached, John Bracey would say, in avuncular fashion, “Bob, stop worrying, they are out there, but they are operating on C.P.T.” [Colored People’s Time.] John was right, of course.

The second question also concealed a suppressed premise. Since I knew considerably less about Afro-American Studies than one of our undergraduate majors, what could I possibly teach in my new department? Well, I had a go at it. I taught an undergraduate course on the political economy of race and class, drawing on my knowledge of radical economics. I cobbled together a course on Black Philosophy, using collections of writings by such Black philosophers as Bernard Boxhill and Lucius Outlaw, and writings by African philosophers debating the existence of an authenti¬cally African philosophy. I taught in Afro-Am a seminar on Ideological Critique that I had first offered in the Philosophy department. But I knew, and my colleagues knew as well, that Black Studies was not my field of scholarly expertise.
The course on the political economy of race and class had some delicious moments, to be sure. At the very beginning of the semester, a young Black student from Springfield showed up. Al Lizana was something of a celebrity on campus, a bigwig in the student government, eventually serving a term as the student representative to the University's Board of Trustees. I was flattered that he had signed up for the course. The next class period, Al was joined in the front row by about seven other students who had not been there the first day. These, it turned out, where all his cousins. As their guide and protector, he had come along first to check me out. When he decided that I was o.k., the rest of his extended family enrolled.
A rather tense moment arose one day while we were discussing Fanon's Black Faces, White Masks [a very powerful book, which I recommend if you have not looked at it.] One of the traditional rationalizations of slavery, of course, is that it is the legacy of the curse that Noah laid on his son, Ham, and Ham's son, Canaan [Genesis, Chapter 9, for those of you who are not intimately familiar with the Good Book.] African-Americans, it was said, were the descendants of Canaan, and hence condemned by Noah to be the servants [i.e., slaves] of the descendants of Shem and Japheth. I asked whether any students knew the story of Noah and Ham. A number of hands went up, including Edes McCrae's. This was one of the things I really loved about teaching Black students. In an age when undergraduates seemed less and less literate, they could be counted on to know the Bible.

I called on Edes, who gave a very creditable account of the Bible story. I then remarked what a really kooky rationale for slavery it was, because of course Ham wasn't Black. "Oh yes he was," said Edes. "Now Edes," I replied as gently as I could, "Noah and Shem and Japheth weren't Black, so how could Ham and his son be Black?" "But it says in the Bible that Ham was Black," she said with great confidence. "No it doesn't," I said, getting a trifle rattled. "But it does. My grandmother told me so."

Now, I was new to the Afro-American Studies Department, and I had a great deal to learn. But I was not stupid, and I knew that one of the things you didn't do is tell a young women that her grandmother was full of it. So I dropped the subject and moved on to more profitable topics.

Still and all, I really was not competent to pull a full load of courses in Afro-American Studies, so I undertook to handle all of those departmental chores that absorb the time and try the patience of senior professors. I took on the Chairmanship of the Personnel Committee, a time-consuming administrative task. Eventually, I became Graduate Program Director of the new doctoral program. I ran the admissions process for that program. I also became the sole fund-raiser for the department, endlessly seeking money to support our new graduate students.
An ethnic allusion will perhaps make clear just how my role in the department evolved. In the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, the orthodox Jews faced a problem imposed upon them by the rigor of the Talmudic laws to which they submitted themselves. Religious law forbade them to work on the Sabbath, and “work” was interpreted so broadly that even such simple tasks as lighting Sabbath candles were forbidden. The practice arose of hiring a little Gentile boy from a nearby town to come in on Friday evening and perform these proscribed chores. This lad was called the “Shabbes goy.” I became the Shabbes goy of the Afro-American Studies department.

Meanwhile, our doctoral program proposal was slowly ascending the administrative ladder, though not nearly fast enough to satisfy me. There were hitches along the way. No sooner had we drafted a full-scale proposal, with multiple attachments, in conformity with the official documents sent to us by our campus administration than the Higher Education Coordinating Council promulgated an entirely new set of guidelines, designed to make the process nigh on impossible to complete satisfactorily. We dutifully recast our proposal to meet the new guidelines, and sent it on its way again. At the very first stage of campus approval, we ran aground, thanks to the racial anxieties of a professor on a Faculty Senate Standing Committee who had been handed the job of recruiting a three-person review sub-committee from the faculty as a whole. After nine months of stalling, she allowed as how she couldn’t find anyone to serve because they were all afraid of saying anything negative about a proposal put forward by a group of Black people. In twenty-four hours, we rounded up three very senior unimpeachable scholars to perform the review, and the proposal resumed its journey.

In the first flush of excitement, at the end of the summer of 1992, with a completed proposal in hand, I had rashly predicted that we would surely complete the approval process in time to launch the program in the Fall of 1995. This was not merely misplaced optimism. I was at that point fifty-eight years old, and I was beginning to worry that I would not be around to see the first class of students get their degrees. But nothing can be done that quickly on a university campus. Even getting appro¬val to offer a new course usually takes an entire year. So 1992-93 passed, and 1993-94, and 1994-95 began. Finally, the proposal made its way to the office of the President, then to the Trustees, and on a triumphant day in October, was approved by the Higher Education Coordinating Council. We would have our doctoral program, after all. I mailed out a host of the eighteen thousand new brochures I had designed and ordered, and we were officially launched. The next Spring, we selected seven promising applicants from the twenty-nine who applied, and sat back to await their arrival.

Once I had recovered from the elation of having our doctoral program approved, it occurred to me that I had a small problem. In the Fall, seven eager young people would show up to begin their doctoral studies. Inasmuch as I would be the Graduate Program Director, they would look to me for advice. And I did not know anything about Afro-American Studies! There and then, I decided to read all fifty-three books on the first year reading list during the summer, before the students arrived. I bought them all, and sat down to begin.

The books piled up on the coffee table until they threatened to block the view of my living room. Fifty-three books, twenty thousand pages of African-American history, politics, fiction, essays, and poetry. It was the first day of June 1996, and I had to read them all by September 3rd. There I sat, knowing next to nothing about the history, the trials, the triumphs, the artistic creations, the experiences of Black folk in America. To be sure, I had managed an anti-apartheid organization of Harvard graduates for two years, and for the past five years, I had run a little one-man scholarship organization raising money for poor Black university students in South Africa. I had picketed Woolworth’s in the sixties, supporting the young Black students who started the modern Civil Rights Movement with their sit-in in Greensboro. But I knew virtually nothing about slavery, Reconstruction, share-cropping, Black Codes, Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the World War I riots, or the Black Arts Movement.

I am a slow, methodical reader, incapable of skimming lightly through a book. This is fine if you are going to be a philosopher. Close reading of a small number of famous texts is what philosophers do. I often pointed out to my students during my days as a Professor of Philosophy that you could get a pretty fair education as a student of philosophy by mastering perhaps twenty-five or thirty texts from the Western tradition. Indeed, if you were willing to treat all of Plato’s Dialogues as one enormous book, you could probably bring the list down to twenty titles. So the mountain of volumes awaiting me was daunting indeed. It was going to be a long summer.

I sighed, and reached for the first book on the pile. It was the seventh edition of John Hope Franklin’s classic work, From Slavery to Freedom. I didn’t take notes. I just read carefully one book after another, in the order prescribed by our syllabus, making marginal comments, as I have always done. My goal was to immerse myself in them, so that I would have a grasp of the over-arching shape of the story of Black Americans.

As the title suggests, Franklin’s work is an up-beat history of African-Americans, beginning with the torment of the Middle Passage and slavery, and taking the reader out of that darkness and into the sunlight of freedom. First published in 1947, the text has been revised again and again to incorporate the tribulations of post-war Jim Crow, the triumph of Brown vs. Board of Education, the drama of the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggles over affirmative action. Every page is filled with names, dates, and events about which I knew next to nothing.

John Hope Franklin was the Dean of African-American historians, held in the highest esteem by younger Black historians, many of whom he trained at Chicago and Duke. In a profession that for generations did not even acknowledge the Black presence in America, save in the most dismissive and abusive of terms, John Hope had to struggle to gain any sort of professional recognition. Eventually, his White colleagues were forced to admit the weight of his scholarly contributions, and elected him the first Black President of the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association. I knew none of this on that day in June. To me, the book was just the first in a large pile waiting to be read.

After plowing through Franklin, I read a collection of four famous slave narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and followed that with Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980, by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick. This last work struck me as an odd pairing with the Franklin and Gates, but my colleague John Henry Bracey, Jr. was the protegé of Augie Meier, and later his collaborator on a number of scholarly essays and editorial collections, so it seemed that we were engaging in the time-honored academic practice of introducing our students to those who had been our own mentors.

I read on. Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery is a classic thesis book about the role of Caribbean slavery in the growth of British capitalism. Originally his doctoral dissertation, it argues the striking and controversial thesis that the growth of British industry was funded by the profits from the slave trade and the sale of slave-produced Caribbean sugar. Black Majority by Peter Wood, another classic work, focuses on the early period of slavery in South Carolina. This is a natural successor to the Williams, because of the important link between Barbados and South Carolina during the eighteenth century. Reading the book, I learned for the first time of the hideous practice of “seasoning” newly captured Africans in Barbados – which is to say beating them into submission – before selling them to South Carolinean plantation owners. Peter was an old friend of mine from my struggles against apartheid at Harvard, and I was delighted to encounter him in the pile.

Early in the Summer, I read The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, written by Herbert Gutman as a response to Patrick Moynihan’s notorious “benign neglect” memorandum on the African-American family. Through the sort of painstaking archival scholarship that Moynihan did not trouble himself with, Gutman demonstrated that against all the odds, in the face of the brutality and disruptions of slavery, Africans and their descendants had created and maintained strong family units. Often, they were forced to counter the destructive effects of slave sales by substituting extended kin relations for those of the nuclear family. If a father or mother was sold down the river, an “aunt” or “uncle” would step in to take over the burdens of child-rearing. This practice of kin caring for children continues down to the present day, putting the lie to Moynihan’s claim that the economic troubles of Negroes are due to an absence of what are today called “family values.”
As the weeks passed, I became more and more absorbed by my reading. Some of the historical works were fascinating and beautifully written. Judge A. Leon Higgenbotham’s In the Matter of Color deals with the law of slavery in six of the American colonies prior to the Revolutionary war. For the first time, I learned something of the extraordinary complexity of the early attempts by judges and lawyers to find in the English Common Law some justification for the racial oppression of chattel slavery.

I was ravished by the outpouring of vivid contemporary detail in Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long, an astonishing book about the ways in which the slaves experienced and reacted to liberation at the end of the Civil War. In Litwack’s pages, the slaves and freed people began to come alive to me as individuals, with passions, skills, and a fully developed ironic understanding of their own situation. More perhaps than any other single work in the pile, this book weaned me away from my tendency to look at Black men and women rather than to look at the world through their eyes.

Some of the books were solid, workmanlike monographs, useful for fleshing out the story of the African-American experience: Gary Nash’s Forging Freedom, a portrait of free Blacks in Philadelphia; They Who Would Be Free, by Jane and William Pease, telling the story of Black abolitionists. Another old friend from anti-apartheid days, Nell Painter, turned up with Exodusters, her account of the migration of freedmen and women from the South to Kansas in the years just after the Civil War.
Later in the summer, I worked my way into the twentieth century, reading Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, a massive work, more than eight hundred pages long. This is a classic sociological study of the Black community in Chicago, one of the first major works of urban sociology. Only years later would I learn that Drake had been one of John Bracey’s teachers, and a major figure in Pan-African and American Negro political movements. For the moment, I was content to learn something about the Black community in the South Side of Chicago, which I had lived next to but had never explored during my two years at the University of Chicago.

The literary half of the list started slowly, with Clotel, Iola Leroy, The Conjure Woman, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin representing pre-Civil War fictions. Clotel, a novel by an escaped slave, William Wells Brown, is based on the belief widely held in the Black community that Thomas Jefferson had fathered mulatto children by one of his slaves. It took the miracles of modern science to demonstrate to the White community that the oral traditions of Blacks are frequently more reliable than the written assurances of established scholars.

Near the end of the summer, I read Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston, Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes, and Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin. Our students were in for a treat!
I was so absorbed in the enterprise of reading this huge stack of books – checking off titles, shifting volumes one by one from the to-read to the already-read pile – that for much of the summer, I did not take the time to reflect on the experience I was undergoing, but slowly, little by little, as I drew closer to the end of the list, I began to realize that something quite remarkable was happening to me, something I had not anticipated when I began my labors.

This was actually the third time in my life that I had attempted a concentrated bout of reading of this magnitude. The first time had been in the Spring of 1958, when I read the major works of Western political theory, and then went on to read twenty thousand pages of European history in preparation for teaching Freshman history at Harvard. The second time had been just twenty years later, when I immersed myself for a sabbatical semester in theoretical economics so that I could master the modern mathematical reinterpretation of the economic theories of Karl Marx. Each of these efforts had greatly broadened the scope of my knowledge and insight, but neither had in any fundamental way changed me. I was the same radical philosopher after the political theory, history, and economics that I had been before.

But as the story of the African-American experience washed over me in all its horrible and glorious detail, the very structure of my perception and conception of America underwent an irrever¬sible alteration. I saw everything differently – I saw the Puritans differently, and I saw Rodney King differently; I saw the Civil War differently, and I saw O. J. Simpson differently. I saw my colleagues differently; I even saw myself differently. By the time the summer was over and nothing remained in the pile of books to be read save The Negro Caravan [which I never did manage to plow through], I found myself living in a world I had never before inhabited, seeing the world through entirely new eyes.

How exactly had my perceptions, my conceptions, and I myself changed? It is not so easy to put the changes into words. The change was not merely a matter of accumulated information. I now knew about the Stono Rebel¬lion, and I understood the structure of the triangular trade that circulated slaves, raw materials, and finished goods among Europe, West Africa, and North America. I had for the first time some feel for the complex detail of the laws governing slavery in the Colonies and then in the United States prior to the Civil War. Perhaps most important of all, I understood that the long, painful saga of Black men and women in America was not a story of slow, steady improvement, but rather an endless repetition of hopes raised and then dashed, of advances followed by brutal reversals. But facts were not the substance of what had happened to me, though they played a role, to be sure. Rather, I was for the first time beginning to see America from the standpoint of African-Americans. Let us be clear. I was still, as I had been and am now, a New York Jewish intellectual from a non-religious middle-class family. I was under no illusions about being Black or thinking Black. But because I had made the life choice to change my departmental affiliation, with everything that meant, I found myself beginning to be able to see how the world might look to my colleagues. And it was starting to look the same way to me.

I think more than anything else my perceptions were altered by the sheer repetition of detail in the books I had read – the fictions as well as the historical accounts. Reading about one whipping or one lynching is upsetting. Reading statistics of the numbers of whippings or lynchings is an education. But reading description after description, in book after book, of maimings, killings, whippings, and lynchings in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century ¬made me finally understand why so many of my colleagues seemed deeply, irreversibly pessimistic about the prospects for anything resembling racial justice. To them – and, by the end of the summer, to me as well – the beating of Rodney King was neither remark¬able nor unexpected. It was an episode that was continuous with almost four centuries of oppression.
The images of the fictions blended in my imagination with the factual accounts dredged from archives by historians. The Battle Royal in Invisible Man, the lynching in Uncle Tom’s Children, the bitter unfairness of the ending of If He Hollers Let Him Go were no more terrible, no more implausible, indeed no more powerfully realized in their literary settings, than the purely factual accounts of the Negro who was lynched on the stage of a theater before Whites who had paid to see the show.

Stories have a power to shape our experience, to impose interpretations on what we think we know – both true stories and fictional ones. The story of America organizes our collective social memory, high-lighting turning points, bringing some facts into sharp focus, concealing others. If our national story is told wrongly, we shall forget our real past, and then – because stories have this power – we shall misunderstand our present and lose the ability to shape our future. Freud says somewhere that if there is any one subject that it is not permitted to discuss in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that one subject. Race is the dirty little secret of the American story – not greed, not sex, not power. Until the American story is rewritten with the fact of slavery and its aftermath given its true place, none of us in the White community will be able to understand the story of America aright.