Maxwell Alan Lerner

http://csx.sagepub.com/content/42/1/1.full

A Question of Scope According to an autobiographical fragment called “From Minsk to Manhood,” sometime in December 1902 in the shtetl of Iveniz near Minsk, Russia, Mikhail Lerner was born to Benyumin Lerner, age 32, and Basha Podberesky, then 28, the sixth pregnancy for this former barmaid (Lakoff 1998: 1-18). Just prior to his birth, Mikhail’s mother nearly drowned during mikva [mikveh], a Jewish purification bath, which perhaps accounted for his “lifelong terror of swimming” (ibid.: 1). Thus begins the archetypal tale of American immigrants, millions of whom arrived between 1880 and 1920: persecuted and scarcely surviving in Europe, suffocating, dirty, and hungry in steerage below deck (“the voyage took sixteen or eighteen days,” ibid.: 4), then for a tiny minority, undreamed of success in their new homeland. But not at first. The peasants in Iveniz spoke Polish because the land often changed hands between the two warring governments. As the twentieth century dawned, the local Jews were threatened with increasingly violent pogroms. Mikhail’s maternal grandfather was murdered, and his grandmother, after surviving anti-Semitic attacks, finally “died of fright” at 100 years old when German troops invaded her home during WWII. Mikhail’s father wisely substituted “Lerner” for “Ranes,” the true family name, to avoid being drafted into the Czar’s army, choosing for his new name the Yiddish word meaning “learned,” because he studied the Torah avidly and was welcomed into Jewish homes as a teacher. This gentle, bookish, soft-spoken father, fearing that the next pogrom would victimize his family, moved to the United States when Mikhail was in utero, sending for his wife and four living children in July 1907 so they could join him in the goldene medineh (golden land) (ibid.: 4). Meanwhile, his stalwart wife tended a small general store and raised the children alone. Benjamin Lerner arrived in the United States at the end of the Gilded Age, when plutocrats were described in the press as “a bag of slimy gold and gilded slime” (Phillips 1904: 316). By contrast, Mikhail’s mother kept the family’s entire fortune in a bag hung at all times around her neck, precious in its tiny contents. This was a socio-economic environment in which “the up-town creed or code” was never allowed “to interfere with down-town doings. . . unless it could be done without money loss. For up-town or down-town, to make money was always and in all circumstances the highest morality, to lose money the profoundest immorality” (ibid.: 324-25). In this hypocritical, Darwinian context, Benjamin’s salary as a New York City garment worker started at $6/week ($158 today), rising to $12/week ($293) during his four years of living without the family in a crowded boarding house with no privacy and little food. Miraculously, by 1907 he had saved $700 ($17,073) by sewing clothes and also teaching Hebrew, which was just enough to pay for his family’s passage to America. Though common at the time among first-generation immigrants, this kind of heroic self-denial, verging on monastic asceticism, is as foreign to our “sensate culture” as the internet would have been to his. When the family arrived, all the Russian names were Americanized, so Mikhail became Max (rather than the more accurate but Irish-sounding “Michael”). His father bought 20 cows and began to deliver milk from their home in Bayonne, New Jersey, despite being more fitted for the classroom than the barn. A crooked uncle then sold them a rock-strewn farm in the Poconos where they endured cold and privation, and Max’s adored older brother died from pneumonia at 12 because the house was poorly heated. Farming and dairy work failed, so the family subsisted on renting rooms to tourists and feeding them during part of each year. When his mother tried to enroll him in first grade, Max’s face was so disturbed by pimples and eczema that he was turned away, and for several years was tutored at home by all the family members. His first exposure to public school was therefore in fourth grade, it being determined that he should skip the first three. The family eventually removed to New Haven, where Max’s fortunes changed. Now the eldest son and therefore bearer of the family’s future success, Max delivered milk in the wee hours, prepared even earlier by his parents, became a precocious scholar through his family’s tutoring and endless reading, and won debating contests—in part, he later thought, to compensate for his short stature and lack of physical prowess or attractiveness. His American history teacher in his final year of public school asked him to leave the class because his too ably expressed knowledge humbled and silenced his classmates. Instead she asked him to read privately Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People (in five or ten volumes depending on the edition), then to write a paper—which he was glad to do. Although he suffered personally at not being able to find a girlfriend, he shone academically in the local feeder high school to Yale and won that year’s singular scholarship. After Yale he attended Washington University where he studied economics and wrote a thesis on Veblen, then took an unorthodox doctorate from the affiliated Robert Brookings Graduate School in Washington, DC (where nine of Lerner’s research papers stood in for a dissertation). It was there that he was exposed to scholars of a very high order including Charles Beard (whose monumental The Rise of American Civilization with Mary Beard in 1930 may have inspired Lerner 25 years later), Carl Becker, Morris Cohen, Franz Boas, J.A. Hobson, and others (Lakoff 1998: 47). Still at the tender age of 25, he became Managing Editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930-1933) under the tutelage of Alvin Johnson. While helping with this stupendous project, he was in essence transformed into a social scientist without portfolio. Through his official duties, he became personally acquainted with many important sociologists, political scientists, and economists, some of whom would later offer him teaching jobs at fine colleges in an era when Jews were still unwelcome in such places. From that point the Max Lerner who would write 7,000 newspaper columns and magazine articles, not to mention his dozen books, became unstoppable. His first book, It is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1938), made his name, followed by collections of his journalistic columns in Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (1939) and several others. He also edited and introduced Modern Library volumes containing the writings of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Adam Smith, plus brought Veblen back into vogue with The Portable Veblen (1948), in print for decades, and sporting a lengthy introduction which remained one of Lerner’s best works (Lakoff, 1998, p. 42n). He observed and admired Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, comparing them in print; oddly enough he became friends with Hugh Hefner and Elizabeth Taylor, and hob-nobbed with hundreds of other notables in the worlds of politics and the academy. If one looks at this man’s long life and mountain of writerly accomplishments, meanwhile recalling his beginnings in the shtetl, and applies contemporary “mobility models” to his personal data, the odds against achieving what he did seem comically huge. Nobody standing by his cradle in 1902 could have imagined how his life would unfurl by the time he died in 1992, a few months before his 90th birthday. In December 1957, Simon and Schuster published Lerner’s “big book,” America as a Civilization (reissued by Henry Holt with a new afterward in 1987), which he worked on for a dozen years, filling over 1,100 pages in its second edition. Even with a cover price of $10 ($81 today), the book sold 100,000 copies (Lakoff 1998: x), many of them adopted for classroom use. Later it appeared as two paperback volumes and sold still more. Unlike even the most highly regarded sociology books published today, America as a Civilization was reviewed by journals on the left, right, and center, sometimes at considerable length, almost always with verve, including the 22 essays I was able to find, as follows: American Historical Review (reviewed by Robert E. Burke), AJS (a review-essay by Dennis Wrong, plus a regular review by Robert Notestein), American Political Science Review (Robert G. McCloskey), ASR (a frontal attack by the arch-conservative, Ernest van den Haag), Books Abroad (John Paul Duncan), Commentary (“The Middlebrow in the Age of Sociology,” by Richard Chase), Encounter (another blast, unsigned, by Ernest van den Haag which borrows heavily from his ASR review), International Affairs (H. G. Nicholas), The Journal of Negro History (W. M. Brewer), The New Republic (“The Towerless Edifice” in two parts by Daniel Bell), The New York Times (Henry Steele Commager), The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Nelson Manfred Blake), Pennsylvania History (John J. Reed), The Phi Delta Kappan (Richard I. Miller), Political Research Quarterly (John A. Vieg), Political Science Quarterly (Marvin Meyers), The Review of Politics (Thomas T. McAvoy), Time Magazine (unsigned), The Times Literary Supplement (Denis Brogan), Virginia Quarterly Review (Irving Dilliard), and World Politics (Clyde Kluckhohn). There are surely other reviews, probably many in foreign languages, that I have not found. This book was regarded by scholars and the public as a major publishing event, and was treated accordingly, fitting well with other popular sociology books of the time like The Lonely American, White Collar, The Power Elite, and Organization Man—despite not being the product of a card-carrying sociologist. One rare reviewer who disliked the book even complained that it had been widely assigned as a textbook in American schools, which given its gravitas and lack of graphic illustrations says something significant about education in 1958. Lerner (not unlike Lewis Mumford [1895-1990]; The Culture of Cities, 1938; The City in History, 1961, et cetera), was a writer whom sociologists “naturally” read for decades, not only because his politics during the 1930s and 1940s jibed well with the left-liberal perspective common to sociology then, but because he wrote fluidly and covered a far broader landscape of learning and political life than did even ambitious academic sociologists. He was a fellow traveler, someone with the Big Picture from whom one could learn. There is no comparable writer today, even though several New York Times columnists enjoy a vaster electronic audience when addressing sociological topics. But they do not write books of Lerner’s quality, nor are their backgrounds as varied and polyvalent. There was indeed a time when sociologists, and not just C. Wright Mills or David Riesman or the Lynds, wrote books that conveyed their peculiar sense of what “America” meant in toto. Toward the end of a notable career, W. Lloyd Warner (1898-1970) produced American Life: Dream and Reality (1953; revised 1962), a brief treatment, in ways summarizing what he had learned through his five-volume study of “Yankee City” (Newburyport, Massachusetts). He became famous enough through such work that John P. Marquand, a Newburyport native and best-selling novelist, lampooned him cruelly in Point of No Return (1949). Don Martindale (1915-1985), best known for his theory textbook, published American Society in 1960, an advanced text that seemed, as did others of the time, to be capitalizing on the wave of American Studies programs just then springing up around the country. (Tom Wolfe’s 1957 doctorate at Yale about communism and writers in the 1930s was made possible by such a program, seeming to give him license to write broadly about U.S. society ever since.) Martindale’s book followed a growing convention in the 1950s which fastened on the concept of “mass society” as having supplanted Gemeinschaft in the United States and Europe: “Mass society does not result from a plot by a little group of conspirators: it is not a consequence of the moral decay of contemporary man; it is not an institution—it is a way of life that has become increasingly peculiar to modern man. As a way in which modern men orient themselves toward nature and toward other men, the mass society represents a transformation in the structure of all major institutions” (Martindale 1960: 2). The best known large-scale treatment was American Society: A Sociological Interpretation by Robin Murphy Williams Jr. (1914-2006), published by Knopf in 1951 (eight printings), enlarged in 1960 (five printings), and again in 1970. Williams served as 48th ASA president in 1958, and carried out at Cornell a canny mixture of teaching and research through many books and articles. But his wide-angle, comprehensive response to the U.S. scene over a twenty-year period became the favored work of his many readers. In his ASA presidential address he noted that “the most recent period has been characterized by a striving for methodological perfection, a tendency to concentrate upon specific testable problems . . . The predominant although far from unanimous professional opinion seems to be that the most pressing current need is to analyze the larger sociological ‘visions’ into more manageable problems that can be put to empirical test in the context of a systematic theoretical orientation” (Williams 1958: 621). Naturally, he took exception to this professionalized narrowness by his own example, yet in kindly “presidential style,” his address appreciatively considers every new angle of attack on sociological issues that was then available. Still, he had reservations: “One can discern in some quarters a tendency to restrict ‘sociological factors’ to such gross categories as social class, religious affiliation, and ethnic membership, while the study of such genuinely sociological factors as the norms of husband-wife interaction, or ‘mothering’ behavior with infants, or patterns of treatment of juvenile delinquents is held to be the province of psychiatry, clinical psychology, and social work. Simmel said that ‘Society does not consist merely of the objective social structures which have attained a certain independence of the individual bearers; it also consists of the thousand minor processes of socialization between individuals which contribute to the functional unity of the group’“ (ibid., p. 632). This catholic sociological vision propelled his large-scale narrative about the United States. It is interesting that Williams’ very short bibliographies to two chapters, one on “Values and Beliefs in American Society,” the other the concluding chapter, “The Integration of American Society,” both cite Lerner’s America as a Civilization as one of a dozen books worth reading to enlarge upon these areas of analysis. The bulk of Williams’ book consists in a non-statistically-based characterization of eight “major institutions” that were thought at the time to constitute U.S. society, each more or less separated from one another for analytic purposes. Were one interested in understanding sociologically what the 1950s were “really like” in a way not based on contemporary movies, novels, or plays, Williams’ portrait would likely serve as well as any, and better than most. Or so it must have seemed to the many instructors who made the book an academic best-seller. With Lerner’s magnum opus, however, we enter an entirely different arena of scholarly production, despite the two treatments being written coterminously and covering identical empirical ground. It is for this reason that without too much difficulty, one can find in English alone 22 reviews of Lerner’s book, many of which second Samuel Eliot Morison’s opinion (“It is at once informing, stimulating, and provocative. . . a great book”) or Ashley Montagu’s (“It may be predicted that when all the critical judgments are in, America as a Civilization will be acclaimed as worthy of a place beside De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Bryce’s The American Commonwealth. It is an exciting, elevating book to read”). Others, like van den Haag’s two reviews in ASR and Encounter, attack the book root and branch, seeing in it little more than the amateurish dabbling of a pretend-sociologist. Others took a more “balanced” view (a tendency for which Lerner himself was criticized by some reviewers), such as Richard Chase’s “The Middlebrow in the Age of Sociology” (Commentary) or Dennis Wrong’s slightly negative AJS assessment, worried most by Lerner’s ethnocentric lack of comparative insight. Clyde Kluckhohn, esteemed anthropologist, wrote in “Shifts in American Values” (World Politics) that Lerner “seems to have read almost everything about the United States. . . No work on American civilization has been as careful and as exhaustively comprehensive as this, and it seems unlikely that anything comparable will be attempted for some time to come.” In “The Towerless Edifice,” Daniel Bell was given two issues of The New Republic in which to deal with Lerner. Rather than compare Lerner with Tocqueville and Bryce, he believed Harold Laski’s The American Democracy (1948) to be the proper gauge. Lerner comes out better in Bell’s estimate, even though “Like all of us, Lerner is trapped by sheer inability to capture a definition which will not fall apart on close analysis.” The “definition” which eludes Lerner pertains to “each society’s own inner structure and ‘general spirit’“ (Bell quoting Lerner) to the effect that in the end there is no single talisman to the secret of American civilization. . . The study of American civilization becomes thus the study of the polar pattern itself, not a search for some single key that will unlock causation.” Bell concludes by recalling the term Coleridge coined for an American utopia of amiable scholars: “It is a measure of Lerner’s scholarship that he has sought to create, within the confines of one volume, a pantisocracy. If he has not succeeded, it is still to his credit—and how many can claim that—that he tried.” The most important review of America as a Civilization appeared on page one of the The New York Times book review section on December 8, 1957, where no less an intellectual historian than Henry Steele Commager (sometime visiting colleague of Lerner’s at Brandeis) wrote adoringly of the book. Commager’s own The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s—considered when it appeared in 1950 to be a successor to Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought—lent powerful legitimacy to his assessment of Lerner’s attempt to cover similar ground. After commenting on the vigorous nineteenth-century search for “national character” that had fallen into disrepute (particularly due to Hitler and his associates), Commager claims that “A synthesis of all this new [sociological] material with older findings of history and politics was desperately needed; it is that synthesis which Max Lerner has provided. . . What we have here is a triumphant merging of the new behavioral with the older historical, political, and legal sciences. It is comprehensive, for nothing of importance has escaped Lerner’s alert intelligence. It is judicious, for this author is not easily imposed upon. It is original…” Commager’s verdict, distinct from that of most other reviewers’, held that Lerner had joined the new work of “cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, economists—in short, the ‘behavioral scientists’“ with traditional accounts from historians, philosophers, and literary critics to forge a general, all-inclusive statement about what made the United States what it was and what it wished it were. It did not hurt that Lerner ended his own analysis with a 43-page categorized bibliography of supporting materials in small font and double columns. He was pointing to a world of learning and conjecture that Tocqueville and Bryce would have found inspiringly useful, and clearly had he. One could easily create a handy “chapbook” of Lerner quotations from his huge volume for use in courses interpreting current American society, but this is not the place for that. Instead, consider a single observation that comes late in the book: “The typical crisis of character in an American novel is likely to turn on the endurance of economic hardship (note Norris’s McTeaque, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), and the typical fall-from-grace situation is that of the well-to-do family which must endure a scaling down of its living standards” (p. 948). In 1957, this must have seemed like an unnecessarily dour view of U.S. cultural history, when The Economy was going swimmingly and no war-mongering spoiled a social world filled with immense automobiles sporting huge fins and covered in gleaming chrome. Publishers and readers had forsworn Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck for John O’Hara, John Cheever, and James Michener. Today, however, Lerner’s memorializing of past literary voices seems “spot on” as we enter the sixth consecutive year of The Great Recession. This is one of many lessons that can be taken from Big Books with Big Ideas: they reveal past worlds in ways that less grasping academic labors cannot, and remind societies of the paths which led them to their present condition. In short, they uniquely define our humanity. References

↵ Lakoff Sanford. 1998. Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar ↵ Phillips David Graham. 1904. The Cost. Indiana, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Google Scholar