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作者

Philip Kasinitz

来源

CITY & COMMUNITY,Vol.18,Issue2,P.433-438

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

City University of New York, Graduate Center

摘要

Nathan Glazer, who died on January 19, 2019, at the age of 95, was for several decades arguably the most influential American Sociologist outside of academic sociology. This is striking because, despite appointments at Berkeley and Harvard, he was somewhat marginal within academic sociology. He was co‐author of two of the bestselling works is the history of American Sociology, The Lonely Crowd with David Riesman and Reuel Denny in 1950 and Beyond the Melting Pot with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963, and for decades thereafter he was a highly visible contributor to public debates on a host of issues including race, immigration, American cities, public education, political protest, U.S. foreign policy, American culture, and even architecture. Yet, he never had many graduate students. He rarely wrote for sociology journals and he never seemed much concerned with having himself enshrined in the academic canon. Despite spending most of his life in the academy he always seemed to be an almost accidental professor. He was, however, an intellectual. A very public intellectual of a sort that, for all of the talk in recent years about “public sociology,” we hardly ever see anymore. He was one of the last members the “New York intellectuals”—a group so clearly defined that, according to an old witticism, one is tempted to capitalize the “I” in intellectual as one would the “Y” in New York Yankees. The loosely affiliated group began as student activists of the anti‐Stalinist left in the years just before World War II. Most, like Glazer and his City College classmates Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, and Gertrude Himmelfarb (actually a Brooklyn College grad; City was still all male in those days), were Jewish and the children of immigrants, although over time their ranks came include refugees from Europe, including Lewis Coser, Rose Coser, and Herbert Gans; slightly younger Jews, such as Joseph Epstein and Norman Podhoritz; working class Catholics, including Moynihan and Michael Harrington; a handful of African Americans, including Bayard Rustin and the secretly Black Anatole Broyard; and even the occasional upper class WASP, such as the Canadian American sociologist Dennis Wrong, who died a few weeks before Glazer. Beginning as activists on the left, they soon spread out across the political spectrum, in Glazer's case from Trotskyism to Social Democracy to Cold War Liberalism to neoconservatism, then back to something more of less like liberal progressivism. His politics were often said to be “between the Irvings”—that is, to the left of Kristol's unabashed embrace of conservatism and to the right of Howe, who despite misgivings about the new left remained a committed socialist. What united this group over the decades was a love of argument; a deep commitment to understanding the nature of American society—a nation they celebrated as perhaps only partial outsiders can—an unfortunate tendency toward factionalism, a remnant of their Trotskyist youth which even the most conservative among them seemed to bring with them on their journeys across the political spectrum; and a passion for the written word. They wrote incessantly, founded journals, published commentaries on everything including each other, and rarely if ever asked if a publication would “count” as “peer reviewed.” Even those who, like Glazer, became academics had little interest in academic careers. The point was to be read, to be heard, and perhaps to have some influence on the world. Even in this stellar company, Glazer stood out for his intellectual breadth. And despite his willingness to take often unpopular positions on controversial topics, Glazer was perhaps the least dogmatic of the group. He was, even in his radical days, often said to have been a moderate by disposition. He had a broad streak of intellectual skepticism, a dislike of orthodoxy, and a propensity for rethinking his own views, including those for which he was best known. In a world of full of position taking and intellectual combat he had a pragmatic—some would say frustrating—capacity for reassessing his beliefs in light of changing circumstances. Writing in the New York Times in 1998, James Traub noted that “Nathan Glazer has had more second thoughts than most people have thoughts” (Traub 1998). Perhaps the clearest example of this is seen in the contrast between the two editions of Beyond the Melting Pot, published in 1963 and 1970. As Richard Alba and Aldon Morris have written excellent accompanying essays specifically on this work, I would not discuss it in detail. Yet, it is worth reflecting on its complexity and its influence. Published by a small academic press, and unapologetically dealing with only one city, New York, which many Americans see as inherently atypical, the book would seem ill positioned to have the huge influence it did. It makes a subtle argument about the nature of race and ethnicity in American life. On the one hand, as the title implies, the book argues against the notion of assimilation into a “melting pot.” To be sure, three generations past Ellis Island most of the grandchildren of immigrants had assimilated into American cultural life. They spoke English almost uniformly. In their values, beliefs, daily life practices, and cultural activities they resembled each other and other Americans far more than they did their immigrant forebears. Yet at least in New York, there was little sense that they were melting into an indistinguishable American mainstream. Ethnic groups, Glazer and Moynihan argued, had become interest groups. As such ethnicity still played a huge role in the life of the city. It influenced where people lived, where they worked, who was in their networks, and how they voted. And yet, this pluralism was not a threat to the unity of the whole. New York worked, they argued, in large part because people could be both very ethnic and very much Americans—or at least New Yorkers. Most striking to a contemporary reader, however, is that in the 1963 version, African Americans and Puerto Ricans are seen as likely to follow this pattern. Of course, Glazer and Moynihan were well aware that African Americans were not immigrants. They had been present in the City from its 17th century founding and faced a long history of slavery and social exclusion unlike that of even the most downtrodden European immigrant groups. Yet, they argued, these facts could be overcome. Most of the Black population of early 1960s New York were relatively recent migrants from the south—in that sense not that unlike other immigrants from rural underdeveloped regions of Europe. And if the “southern” model of race relations promoted a strict caste system of two legally and socially separated groups, the northern system in play in New York was based on multiple groups contending for power, with no one group dominant. To be sure African Americans faced a higher wall of discrimination than other groups had. Yet, in the 1963 edition, the authors are cautiously optimistic that they would follow in the path of other upwardly mobile ethnics. In so arguing, it is clear that Glazer and Moynihan, like most White liberals and most White sociologists of the era, did not grasp the centrality of race and racism in American life. They were, of course, strong supporters of the civil rights movement, then at its zenith. Like most of the New York intellectuals, they had long been opposed to segregation and were appalled by anti‐Black violence in the south. In their youth, they had applauded the desegregation of the armed forces and cheered for Jackie Robinson. Yet, in what may have been a bit of residual Marxism left over from their radical youth, they tended to see race as epiphenomenal to deeper underlying social cleavages. Segregation they saw as largely a southern problem, leftover business from the civil war and part of the pathology of a backward region, which was, by the 1960s, finally being dragged into modernity (another New Yorker of the time, Malcolm X, wryly commented that this notion of race as a “southern problem” only made sense if by “southern” one meant south of the Canadian border). In the north, Glazer and Moynihan felt, poverty, not racism, was rapidly becoming the most important problem faced by African Americans. This was something with which both had some personal experience, having spent their own Depression era childhoods in some of the same poor neighborhoods where Black and Brown newcomers were, by the early 1960s, increasingly concentrated. Yet their experience of overcoming poverty was framed by a narrative of immigrant upward mobility in the context of the New Deal and postwar prosperity. In their more optimistic moments, they hoped Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers would follow similar paths. Yet, they remained concerned that African Americans and particularly Puerto Ricans might remain mired in multigenerational poverty, due to changes in the labor force, changes in social policy, and in some cases to their own behavior. Ongoing racism was, at most, a secondary concern. By the time of the book's second edition in 1970, the notion that most African Americans could, at least in the north, follow the “immigrant path” into the middle class was increasingly untenable, as was the idea that racial conflict would decrease with the decline of southern Jim Crow. In Glazer's long essay preceding the 1970 edition, he reviews all the reasons the first conclusion was proven wrong in light of the racial politics of northern cities during the late 1960s and surveys why and how race was different than immigrant ethnicity. It is a stunning turnaround, and if today its pessimism seems a bit too extreme—the overwrought product of an overwrought political moment—it is also clear that its author was more than willing to rethink his basic understandings in light of a new situation. Over the next few years, Glazer seems to have made his sharpest turn to the right. He was always uneasy with the new left and the anti‐war movement. He became more so as elements of that movement became more committed to Marxism—which he saw as repeating many of the mistakes he had seen on the left during his own Marxist youth. Even so, he refused to join a number of his former socialist colleagues in an endorsement of Richard Nixon in 1972 (he voted for McGovern). He also grew increasingly disenchanted with the Civil Rights movement's northern “black power” phase and with subsequent movements for African American liberation. He was critical of school busing to achieve racial integration and was particularly skeptical about some affirmative action efforts, particularly those that relied on numerical quotas. Increasingly, he was identified with the “neo‐Conservatives,” a group of formers leftists and liberals whose world view was largely shaped by disillusionment with the politics of the 1960s. Yet if Glazer was not a very dogmatic radical, his fair mindedness did not make him a particularly reliable conservative culture warrior either. His clearest break with the neoconservatives came with the publication of We are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997. The book was the product of the heated debates over the “canon” in American education during the preceding decade. In 1990, Glazer had agreed to serve on a commission reviewing the Social Studies curriculum in New York State Public Schools. Along with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he had been added to the commission in part to “balance” the work of an earlier commission, which included the Afrocentric political scientist Leonard Jeffries and which had been largely seen as an attack on the Eurocentric assumptions underlying the mainstream curriculum. Glazer and Schlesinger were both on record as defenders of a traditional American faith in assimilation and American values. Their inclusion seemed sure to set up a racially charged confrontation. Yet, while Schlesinger remained an embittered critic of the multicultural agenda—his reactions are captured in his 1991 book The Disuniting of America—Glazer actually engaged with the multiculturalists, and eventually signed on to the report that was issued. He was, it is clear, never fully convinced by the canon smashing arguments. Yet neither was he willing to dismiss them out of hand. The result of his reflections on this experience, We are all Multiculturalists Now, is hardly a full‐throated endorsement of the multicultural agenda. Indeed, parts of the work read more like a sigh of resignation (“rueful” is the word most often used by reviewers). He remained uncomfortable with the idea of “Ethnic Studies” and made clear that determining the curriculum based in part on the demography of the students was not the outcome he would have preferred. At the same time, he argued that a more multicultural approach to education was hardly the disaster that some of the Chicken Littles of the cultural right feared. Basing decisions about what history gets taught in part on the ethnicity of the students is hardly new, he reminded us. The incorporation of diverse European immigrants and their children into the American mainstream had led to the downplaying of the details of British history and the invention of things called “western civilization” and “Judeo‐Christian” values that would have seemed bizarre to the nation's 19th century elites. Nor were the introduction of salutary myths aimed at raising students’ self‐esteem an invention of the Afrocentrists: think of George Washington and the cherry tree! The main point of the book, however, was that, for good or ill, multiculturalism was now simply a fact of life in an increasingly diverse America. Fighting a culture war to oppose it was simply churlish and, in any event, a losing proposition. It was time to figure out how to make it work. The other central point in We are all Multiculturalists Now, one that is increasingly lost sight of, is the exceptionalism of the African American experience. In sharp contrast to the first edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer now insisted that while the ideas about immigrant assimilation and incorporation that had worked for his own working‐class immigrant parents might still work for most of the post‐1965 immigrants (including immigrants “of color”) they clearly did not address the experience of African Americans, who were the descendants of enslaved people denied basic citizenship rights and social participation for centuries. Multiculturalism, he argued, was often expressed in the language of ethnicity and diversity—respect for the autonomy of distinct traditions, values, and ways of life. In fact, however, it was primarily about race. Those who argued for the institutional and cultural autonomy of the Black experience were doing so in the face of historic and contemporary exclusion. For Glazer, the embrace of separatism and the rejection of what was seen as “White” history was unfortunate—“I feel warmly attached to the old America that was proclaimed in school text books,” he notes. But it was also understandable given the depth of racial exclusion African Americans continued to face and the alienation from “White” cultural tradition that so many African Americans clearly felt. For children of immigrants like Glazer, who grew up in a Yiddish speaking working‐class home, the purpose of education was not to see their own experiences reflected in the curriculum. This he insisted was not because he and his contemporaries had been deracinated and forced to conform to the norms of the dominant culture, as some later critics would maintain (Gorelick 1981). Quite the opposite, Glazer and his City College cohorts were quite confident about their relationships with their roots (for some there would eventually be a certain nostalgia for those roots; see Irving Howe's The World of Our Fathers [1989]. Yet in their undergraduate days that was still decades away). They mounted the hill of City College precisely to escape the ethnic ghetto, not because they hated it, or were ashamed of it, but rather because they were seeking a wider world. They would have seen any attempt to provide them with works they “could relate to” as supremely condescending. It was a model of assimilation Glazer was deeply attached to. Yet, he also recognized that it did not work for everyone and it particularly did not work for African Americans. Having had their own experience systematically written out of the American narrative, African American activists sought to see themselves reflected in the curriculum their children studied. “There's a tremendous alienation,” Glazer writes, “from the notion of Whites telling them things. They do not want to hear about things different from them that they cannot connect to; they want to hear about their lives.” The fact that other minorities were taking up the African American model was also problematic for Glazer but perhaps it was the price America had to pay for never extending the promise of full membership to its Black citizens. We are all Multiculturalists Now is an ambivalent work. Traub described it as a book length shrug. Its reluctant conclusions were far too ambivalent to win its author many friends on the left. Yet its embrace of ethnic diversity, however reluctant, was enough to see Glazer branded as a traitor or a defeatist by many on the right. Dinesh D'Souza, for example, accused him of “cowardice” (D'Souza 1997) while others saw him as making excuses for those who would turn the teaching of history into therapy. Yet in retrospect, I think the book which marks Glazer's break with the neoconservatives reflects something else—his own distaste for orthodoxy and position—taking as intellectual combat. I suspect that the very things that once alienated him from the sectarian politics of his left‐wing youth and led him to react so badly to the new left of the 1960s were now leaving him feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the party line orthodoxies of the think tank right. He had never felt particularly fond of the “neo‐conservative” label and in any event by the early 2000s the label had become fairly meaningless as less and less separated Kristol and his ilk from any other kind of conservative. As Wrong once put it, the “neo” had come to signify nothing, but had been left hanging in space “like the smile of the Cheshire cat.” For Glazer this would not do. It was not his style to announce political breaks with former comrades and he still maintained many of his former criticisms of much of the cultural left. But he backed away from the neoconservative fold. His name quietly disappeared from the masthead of the City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's journal of urban affairs. There are three more things I would like to say about Nathan Glazer. The first is to strongly recommend his final major book, From a Cause to a Style. The book is an outstanding history of modern architecture and its effect on the American cities, particularly on New York. Readable and fascinating, it is remarkable in part because it mixes social and intellectual history, a deep concern with public policy and the shape of cities with a real sense of aesthetics I fear one seldom sees from sociologists. The second is a personal note. I would like to commend his continued support for his alma mater, the City University of New York. For years, it has been all too common for Conservative commentators to disparage what has become of CUNY—once the “Harvard of the Proletariat”—now that most of the students are Black or Brown. Glazer never did. Even at the other Harvard, he not only took pride in being a City College graduate, he reached out with real joy to recent CUNY alums on the rare occasions when he met them among the Harvard graduate students. More than once, when someone remarked that many CUNY students now work full‐time while going to school, I heard him publicly express his awe at how hard and how admirable that was: “I could not have done that.” He was never one to pull up the ladder behind him. Even when he disagreed with them politically, he felt a bond of comradery with CUNY's diverse working‐class students struggling to get an education and to pull themselves into a wider world. And though this was not the fashion among his many of his conservative associates, he remained a firm supporter of CUNY, an institution, however troubled, that was making this possible. Finally, even after decades based in Cambridge, Glazer always thought of himself and presented himself as a New Yorker. I suspect the identity was meaningful to him. It signified urbanity, cosmopolitanism, and erudition, but also, like his City University pride, a sense of being up from the bottom, and celebration of opportunity that at its best the City promises its new comers. He was not usually a romantic—indeed often he was close to the opposite. But when talking and writing about New York and what it could be, there was a romantic streak that I, for one, will miss. And in a time when sociology, including urban sociology, is so often dominated by narrow academic discussion on the one hand, and essentialist pronouncements on the other, there is a lot in Glazer's commitment to being, first and foremost, an engaged intellectual, that I think we will all miss.