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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907301476 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECPR Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Series: | Ecpr Essays |
| Pages: | 212 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.45(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Learning About Politics in Time and Space
By Richard Rose
ECPR Press
Copyright © 2014 Richard RoseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907301-47-6
CHAPTER 1
The Roots of a Political Scientist
If someone asks — Where are you from? — almost everyone has more than one answer. You can name the city where you were born or where you live now; Londoners can give the name of their borough and a Viennese the number of their district. If travelling in the United States, saying you are from Europe can be sufficient to explain your ignorance of what the World Series of baseball is about. Saying you are from America can invite Europeans to ask if you know their friend who lives 2,000 miles from your home. History and politics have dealt older peoples of Central and Eastern Europe a more complicated choice: they can either give the name of the city or country in which they were born, for example, Breslau, then in Germany, or Wroclaw, the name it now bears as one of the largest cities in Poland. Naming your birthplace explains the soil in which you are rooted and nurtured, whereas your current residence shows where you have got to through choice or the vicissitudes of work and politics.
When asked where I am from, the answer I give depends on who asks, where, and why. The simplest answer, because of its multiple overtones, is to say that I come from a border state. If a precise answer is appropriate, then I say that I come from the States. This can then be elaborated by adding that I am from St. Louis like T. S. Eliot, and that Miles Davis came from across the river in East St. Louis. My explanation for not living in America now is that, since I couldn't get spit out of a trumpet, I went to Oxford. If asked in America where I am from, then I reply Missouri or St. Louis. If asked by a St. Louisan where I come from, then I reply, Clayton, the suburb of 15,000 in which I grew up.
If a cab driver in a European country asks me where I am from, the answer is usually Scotland. It is where I have lived for almost half a century and though not a state, it is an internationally recognised place. If a Scot asks me where I am from, the answer is Helensburgh, where the Highlands come down to the sea west of Glasgow. In pursuit of clearer international recognition, my academic base, the University of Strathclyde, has modified its name. Since few people know the meaning of 'strath'(a broad valley in Gaelic) and not many more know that the Clyde is the river that Glasgow straddles, it now calls itself the University of Strathclyde Glasgow.
The epigram — the past is another country — becomes more relevant the older one gets. Since I was born in St. Louis, the population of the United States has grown by more than 150 million people, while the British Empire, which once had upwards of a billion people nominally subject to its King and Emperor, has disappeared. Of the 28 countries that are now EU member states, most have experienced one or more changes of political regime, France has had four regimes, and Germany has become a paradigm example of a good European democracy.
The past is not so much gone as it is under foot. In the evocative German phrase it is one's Grund das Wesen, that is, the ground of one's being. It is the starting point for learning about politics. Socialization involves learning how to fit into your place of origins and what to make of the opportunities it offers. This is not only a question of what will grow best in the soil, but also what individuals make of their surroundings. Marcel Proust turned a small child's bedroom in his grandmother's house in a small French village into the first pages of his multi-volume search for time past. Aaron Wildavsky (1971) celebrated the fact that nobody ever told him he was wrong to go to a low-prestige local school, Brooklyn College, because it gave him the educational foundation to become a world famous academic. Only afterwards does one branch out.
Everyone, including people who become professors, learns about life in many ways besides reading a set list of books and crunching numbers in a computer. One learns from family and friends before going to school, and from books discovered in libraries as well as from textbooks. If you have eyes and ears and intelligence, there is a lot that can be learned by getting out of the familiar setting established by family, friends and school to see what else is happening in your native city. If all these resources are drawn upon, by the time one starts the academic study of social science, there is a fund of experiences against which the concepts and insights in books can be tested. To supplement the limited education offered in my school, I went to the library and explored the streets of a big metropolitan area.
Growing Up in a Border City
St. Louis is on the west bank of the Mississippi River at its convergence with the Missouri River. Together, the two rivers have a length more than twice that of the Danube and five times that of the Rhine. They drain the great mass of land between the mountains that separate the American Middle West from the once colonial cities of America's East Coast and what was in my boyhood the lightly populated Pacific Coast. St. Louis was founded by the French in 1763 and briefly under the Spanish flag. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of local difficulties in Europe, that is, the Napoleonic wars, to buy from France the whole of the Louisiana territory, which included the great bulk of the lands west of the Mississippi. St. Louis was never under a British flag nor were there large waves of immigrants from England.
St. Louis boomed in the 1840s, making it a magnet for two groups wanting to leave Europe, Irish fleeing the famine and liberal Germans frustrated by the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament to unify Germans peacefully (Rippley 1984). My father's family were South St. Louis Dutch (that is, Deutsch). His grandparents were born in Alsace, whatever country it was then in. The family had arrived in St. Louis by 1860, for one of my great-great uncles served with Union troops in the American Civil War. When I was growing up, the bakeries, the beer advertisements, the turns of phrase and the surnames of many people were German in origin. Thus, the phone book entries under Sch- were as numerous as those for Mac in Scotland. When I visited Mannheim for the first time in 1965 I was struck by the faces of the older women I saw on the street; they reminded me of people I had seen at my grandmother's funeral. When I shut my eyes listening to an operetta on a hot summer night in a Budapest park in 1989 I was almost back at the summer opera in St. Louis a half century earlier.
America's entry into the First World War in 1917 on the British side led to a massive repression of German connections. Street names such as Berlin Avenue, Kaiser Street and Bismarck Street were replaced with American names. Helen Traubel, later to become famous as the first American to sing Brünnhilde, was growing up in St. Louis in a family in which even the dog was a German-speaker (Traubel 1959). After America entered the First World War on the British side, German became verboten as it were, and Traubel learned that her grandmother could speak English. On the Illinois side of the river, a young German-born baker was lynched by a mob stirred up by antiGerman sentiment. Nonetheless, the late nineteenth-century statue of a great German liberal, Friedrich Schiller, remained in place by the City Hall.
My father, Charles Imse Rose, was born in 1901, too young for the First World War and too old for the Second. He went to the University of Illinois to study ceramic engineering, which was then developing innovative uses that were later superseded by plastics. He took a first class degree in chemical engineering and then a postgraduate degree (Rose 1923). Initially he worked as a research chemist for Union Carbide Corporation in Buffalo before deciding that the family coffee business suited him better than being the employee of a large bureaucracy. My father remained an applied scientist all his life. If you spilled something on your clothes, he would give you a lecture about what chemicals would remove the spot as well as spot remover. Later in life I realized that his engineer's interest in how things work is reflected in my curiosity as a social scientist (www.profrose.eu/about.php).
My mother, Mary C. Rose, was born on a farm in Macon County, Illinois in 1901. Abraham Lincoln had lived in the county (Kyle 1957) and was buried in the next county a year after my grandfather was born. Her parents' families had come from England to New England before and after the Napoleonic wars and had migrated to settle on farms in Michigan and Illinois when there was free land there. My grandfather was a farmer and when he died in 1941 he owned five 80-acre sections, the historic unit in which free soil was platted. My mother's mother was born just after the Civil War in a part of Kansas where Indians were still around. Her mother died on the prairie and her father came back to Central Illinois, where she trained as a schoolteacher. To go to secondary school my mother had to board in Decatur during the week. A high school classmate was Harold Lasswell, who went on to the University of Chicago to become one of the founders of the behavioural revolution in political science. My mother went to the University of Illinois to take a degree as a domestic science teacher, where she met my father. Neither of my parents showed any interest in Europe nor had they seen the Atlantic Ocean until they drove me 900 miles east to start university in Baltimore.
I had the good fortune to be brought up in a home that was very secure. My father had not only kept a family business going through the depression but also built a house. He showed his businessman's disdain for politics by not registering to vote, so he would have no responsibility for any government nor would he be liable for jury duty. My mother voted but she never mentioned her party preference. When Decatur, Illinois, built two new high schools in the 1950s they named one after General Dwight Eisenhower and, for political balance, the other after General Douglas MacArthur. I infer she voted Republican. The absence of any political cues from my parents was balanced by the absence of any pressure to go into the family business or to pursue any particular professional career. Their policy of non-interference kept us close together until my father died at the age of 102.
Borders in many dimensions
The schema that Marty Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967) devised to map political cleavages in Europe fit St. Louis with one fundamental addition. Race was the first dividing line. Missouri was a slave state that had been held in the Union in the Civil War, thanks to the Northern orientation of St. Louis and the federal desire to control the strategic waterway of the Mississippi. The 125,000 blacks were about 15 per cent of the city's population; the surrounding suburbs were virtually 100 per cent white. Schools were segregated by law and housing was segregated by real estate operators, but black St. Louisans could register to vote and had their own patronage machine. The rhetoric of politics was not that of the race-baiting South, but for blacks there were clear lines that could not be crossed and ceilings on aspirations.
There was also an East/West divide reflecting America's geography and the ethnic divisions of immigrants from different parts of Europe. To the west was the cowboy and Indian country of the Great Plains while to the east was the culture of New England. In politics St. Louis was Democratic and the Democratic Party was run by Irish Catholics. In my day, all the police captains were Irish, even though the Irish were less than half the party's vote. When I was growing up the Midwest twang of Harry Truman was familiar to me and so were Southern accents like that of Lyndon Johnson. New York and Brooklyn accents came from what was then almost a different world. When I first heard Jack Kennedy's voice on the radio, it sounded to me like that of a Boston cabdriver.
The city's religious divisions reflected the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, with some distinctive American twists. The gender division between the leisure centres of the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations were less significant than the fact there were parallel Ys or their equivalents for white Protestants, black Protestants, Catholics (who were almost exclusively white) and Jews. The Catholic Church financed a separate school system and class differences were evident in the co-existence of separate parochial schools and high-prestige schools run by Catholic orders. Protestants were divided first of all by race. As one black clergyman explained to me, while Billy Graham was respected, 'He's a bit tame for our people'. German Lutherans had their own school system as well as a belief in their faith alone. The Southern influence produced many Presbyterians and lots of Baptists; there were a limited number of adherents of the Church of England. The churches were not in competition with each other. Religion was an ascriptive social characteristic that could be modified by abandoning it but not by converting to another religion. St. Louis reflected its 1848 German origins in being a stronghold of liberal Judaism. The chief division in a substantial Jewish community was not on matters of doctrine but ethnicity and class: there were even two Jewish country clubs, one for Germans and one for post-1905 fugitives from the Russian Tsar.
St. Louis was an urban island in a largely rural state. The difference of rural and urban outlooks was brought home to me through visits to my mother's family in central Illinois. Although my grandfather had retired to the city of Decatur, he had a chicken house in the back garden and would kill a chicken fresh for Sunday dinner. My father started buying Missouri farm land in the depression as a hedge against war and his investments turned unproductive land without electricity into good farmland. As a consequence, I now own some 165 acres of farmland and 60 cattle. It keeps me up with a different way of talking and thinking than found in academic seminars. It also encourages a respect for the uncertainties of nature and of markets, for an investment in farming cannot confidently be reduced to a mathematical formula.
Insofar as I grew up with an ethnic identity, it was that of an unhyphenated American. More relevant was my local identity. Within a multi-dimensional matrix of suburbs, the one in which I grew up, Clayton, was distinctive. It bordered Washington University and was prosperous. Most families had two cars and many had bought new homes there during the Depression. I never heard anyone talk about what the Depression had done to them. Although Clayton was named for a Virginia farmer who settled there before the Civil War, its distinctive feature was being the suburb of choice for the city's liberal Jewish community. This set its 15,000 residents apart from other suburbs and neighbourhoods. I had never been on the Hill, the nearby Italian neighbourhood that was home to Yogi Berra and good Italian restaurants, until after I had been to Italy.
Learning in Spite of School
The Clayton schools were a problem for me and I was a problem for my teachers. The schools were comprehensive in the sense that classes integrated pupils of all levels of ability. The school system's philosophy was life adjustment, which meant adjusting advanced pupils to fit middle-mass standards. This was meant to be progressive; for me it was regressive. Whereas Arend Lijphart's (1997: 243) small town Dutch gymnasium required him to study five foreign languages for a total of 26 class years whilst specializing in mathematics and natural science, the Clayton schools offered only three languages for two or three years each. To have something to do, I would take a book to school; my worst day in elementary school was the day I left my book at home.
Without knowing it, the school system was involved in a Kulturkampf and I was a leading Kampfer. Teachers were often raised on a farm and becoming a teacher was a way to escape the dreariness and drudgery of that life. They could teach us how to read and do arithmetic, but with few exceptions the teachers could not instil a love of learning for they did not know what the world of learning was about. A job teaching in Clayton was a big prize in terms of social mobility, for it meant a good salary and escaping the boredom of a small town. However, it opened up a big gap with students, who could look down on teachers as hicks from the sticks who could not relate to the pupils who, bright or not, were urban and mostly Jewish.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Learning About Politics in Time and Space by Richard Rose. Copyright © 2014 Richard Rose. Excerpted by permission of ECPR Press.
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