Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction

One: Autobiographical Recollections

one Autobiographical Recollections From the Lincoln School to Harvard College Toward a world of peace eternal And a people strong and free, Toward a land of radiant beauty, Forward, sons of liberty. Never more shall earth be shaken By the tramp of marching men, Tools of war shall be forsaken, Wheels of peace shall turn, and then . . . [repeat first stanza] Thus, if memory serves, ran the opening of the “Victory Cantata” (composed by two of my classmates) in which our voices joined at the graduation ceremony of the Horace Mann–Lincoln School in May of 1945. Victory in Europe had just been won, and the United Nations was in the process of formation in San Francisco. Although the sorrow over Franklin Roosevelt’s death lingered, the hopes of Yalta were still bright, and the future had not yet been clouded by the atom bomb. Buoyed by the momentary prospect of a world at peace, our class stayed up all night celebrating the end of our high school days, and at the dawn of our new day we took the early morning ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island, returning to breakfast at a classmate’s Park Avenue duplex—or so we might well have, since such posh venues had been the site of several class parties in the preceding year. In contrast to my classmates, a number of whom had enjoyed Lincoln’s Deweyite progressivism from the elementary grades, I had 23 24 Autobiographical Recollections only been there for that one year, having arrived by a somewhat migratory route. Born in December 1928 in Berlin, Germany, where my father, a professor of economics at the University of Texas, had a leave of absence to study the German potash industry, I was my mother’s much loved first-surviving child—my elder brother Hobart having died a week after his birth in November 1927. In the spirit of German child rearing, they placed me for several hours each cold winter day in a basket on a porch outside their apartment, and in the baby book she was keeping, my mother noted that my bowels were “‘trained’ at 5 wks.” After a month in Paris for comparative study of potash issues, we sailed from Cherbourg to New York, where we spent a month with my mother’s parents, and then set off by train to Austin, Texas, which I thought of as my “hometown” until 1944. I went to elementary school in Austin until 1941, when my father went to work for the government, and although we lived in Arlington, Virginia, I graduated from Gordon Junior High School in Georgetown. After our return to Austin in the fall of 1942, I spent another term in junior high due to overcrowding at Austin High, which I assumed was the only high school in Austin, much later to realize that there must have been another, segregated one. When I entered Austin High early in 1943, a member of the football team who lived down the street— prodded, I suspect, by his academic parents—got me an invitation to join the Woodrow Wilsons, one of the four high school fraternities. Although I accepted, I have little recollection of its activities, other than the somewhat traumatic and degrading late-night initiation. I do remember having an unrequited crush on a fellow member of the school debating team who was later Miss Rheingold of 1949. But in general I recall feeling myself a social and physical misfit, a year or more younger and smaller than my classmates. In the summer of 1944, our family moved to New York City, where my father was conducting research on monopolies and cartels, and I spent my last high school year at the Horace Mann–Lincoln School. My forty or so classmates were from privileged families—business, professional , academic—most of them liberal, many of them Jewish, several of them international, and a couple of them African American.4 Although 4. From my 1960 doctoral dissertation on “American Social Scientists and Race Theory, 1890 to 1915” (1960a) to the publication of the “Black Box,” my historiography 25 From the Lincoln School to Harvard College I was not able to match the “all A” record I had maintained in Austin, the intellectual environment was much more stimulating; I especially recall Miss Daringer, who carefully and critically read the two-hundredword essays she assigned each week. While I was not a talented...