By Rolf Dumke
When I applied to Yale for admission in 1960, I was one of the top boys in a big graduating class at Shaw High in East Cleveland, Ohio, where I had been learning about middle-class life in America. Yale would enlarge my scope of persons, values, and life styles to encompass the upper end of the social scale in America. During the first ten years following my immigration from Bavaria, beginning with my initial half-decade (1953-57) living in the Hough District in Cleveland, a notorious black ghetto, I would have zipped through three class environments in America: really lower, middle, and upper-middle to upper class.
Given my youthful optimism, each environment presented interesting challenges that I presumed to handle well. In retrospect, I now appreciate my emotional resilience in facing these American challenges. Everything was new to this young immigrant from Bavaria – the ghetto, suburban middle-class life, and Yale – and posed an interesting puzzle about my new life in America. As part of a postwar Lutheran migrant family from Berlin, I had learned to withstand unkind hazing in a rural village in Catholic Bavaria. In contrast, America was friendly and welcoming, even in parts of the ghetto.
My German Lutheran background and schooling in Cleveland’s St. Paul’s Lutheran elementary school and high school had prepared me for life and education in a ghetto. Friendship, social support, and guidance for immigrants were provided by the large German-American clubs in Cleveland, which were a sort of halfway house in my growing up in America. My parents stayed in this environment for the rest of their lives. But I wanted to become a full American, and I sought out the guides I needed among the teachers and students in the schools I attended. I didn’t realize until later that I lacked the useful role model provided by parents who have attended a university and lived successful professional lives in America.
One great help for me was spending time with Mr. Green, a Lt. Colonel of the Army Reserve, our neighbor on Allendale Avenue in East Cleveland. He drove to his office in downtown Cleveland in the Cadillac of an older friend with vision problems, a conservative owner of a small company. Another neighbor, a Democratic civil servant and union member with strong views on urban reform and social spending, usually came on board. In 1958, this trio gave me a ride to school every day of the second semester of my sophomore year at Lutheran High School in downtown Cleveland, and each ride delivered a spirited, hour-long civics lesson, an advanced “Cadillac” seminar on city administration and finance, beautifully preceding the civics course I would take at Shaw High.
But understanding Yale was more complex than understanding what I had experienced in the seven years leading up to it. I will try to convey the understanding that emerged by describing some first impressions of attending many memorable courses in Yale College, whose catalog was an intellectual smorgasbord whose richness fairly overwhelmed me:
Mr. Marriott’s English class
At Yale I first had to learn to write a decent paper in English and was appropriately drilled by our instructor in English 100, Mr. Marriott, an Oxford MA, who gave back my papers full of red-lined errors, striking out needless adjectives and esoteric words, simplifying sentences and arguments. It was a hard job to clean up my own bad style.
Mr. Marriott had me tag along to the Elizabethan Club house facing New Haven Green, the town’s public square. Oxford English was chattered by thin young Englishmen to impressed young women in flowery summer dresses, all drinking tea in the garden and eating cucumber sandwiches, a tranquil show of English gentility in rough America. It was surreal! It seemed that the Oxfordians played out their gentility trump against the brawn and wealth of Americans at Yale.
The wonderful Vincent Scully’s History of Architecture
I later took a seminar from an architect who designed one of New Haven’s new fire stations in the early 1960s. In the 1960s New Haven was blessed with the most beautiful fire stations in America, each designed by a different architect! Much seminar time was spent discussing the political machinations required to get this small public contract. This turned me off architecture, even though I was fascinated by Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink (for hockey and skating), a beautiful building resembling a whale or giant fish.
My brother, Rainer, actually had the skills to become an architect, in New York City, after getting a scholarship and a degree from Cornell. He was bothered by the severe fluctuations of demand for architectural services over the business cycle. Therefore, he specialized by designing medical and laboratory buildings for colleges and the Veterans Administration, where there is a steadier demand. He has also designed a spectacular beach house on the Hampton shores of Long Island for a wealthy family, but such one-off contracts for innovative houses demand much time and don’t earn sufficient income to be worth repeating.
An aside will amuse. Our mother worked as a hairdresser in a shop next to Cleveland’s celebrated West Side Market – a building in the tradition of European great market halls in Barcelona and Budapest – where she bought German sourdough rye bread and unsalted fresh butter, as well as German sausages for the family. She liked to impress her customers with stories of her sons who went to Cornell College and to “Jail” – her pronunciation of Yale. She got much sympathy for how different her sons were, which she didn’t understand, and got great laughter at home, when we heard it.
US history in the 1930s was a disturbing story of nativists, with Father Charles Coughlin’s poisoning political intercourse in his radio broadcasts. Similarly, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist investigations and the House Un-American Activities Committee besmirched government officials and persons in the media in the late 1940s and 1950s with unsubstantiated charges of treason. These were ugly modern witch-hunts that are re-appearing again against Muslims and immigrants today under President Trump.
Weiss argued that beauty and truth are wed. Later, I realized that this was basic to John Keats’ 1819 poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which concludes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Acquired in my youthful, romantic period, I believed this truism for a long time.
Theme-a-Day, Creative Writing, by Robert Penn Warren and individual English instructors
Unfortunately, I failed Penn Warren’s course because I ran out of topics that I believed were “interesting.” I had strangely ignored the fact that as an immigrant I found much of everyday life at Yale unusual and many things I experienced would have been a good topic for a theme-a-day. It seemed to me that other Yale students were set on automatic course control, with various expectations having been wired in by their own, largely unquestioned family backgrounds. I then engaged in a vast reading of American popular novels to try to understand this country, but I failed.
I found JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the acclaimed teenage rebel, silly and strange.
Ditto much of Ernest Hemingway’s macho stuff, although I learned a useful lesson about lean writing from reading in Mr. Marriott’s English class Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”
I shrugged at John Galt, Ayn Rand’s heroic market economy man in Atlas Shrugged. Unfortunately, this is the Bible of today’s Republican hard core. How silly! And destructive of American democracy today.
My Yale scholarship work requirement
My task of working 20 hours per week for Yale, a requirement for my scholarship, resulted in memorable incidents. I cleaned tables and the dining room each evening at Branford College in my first year. Interestingly, the Yale drama department rehearsed two notable plays in the dining hall after we bus-boys cleaned the hall. The first was Samuel Beckett’s puzzling Waiting for Godot, about life as a senseless waiting for death. (Our retirement plot?) It was the antipode of Horace’s famous saying, Carpe Diem! Seize the Day.
The second play was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Ur-Faust. His story of how Faust sold his soul to the devil, Mephisto, for knowledge was more relevant to a student. The question arose, am I in such a pact unknowingly? In one sense, yes. Elite college scholarships to bright underclass students eliminates future possibly problematic revolutionaries. It buys off their revolutionary fervor. Ur-Faust or, the original Faust, was a zippy, shorthand version of the ponderous, published long poem. It was wonderful to see plot and acting meld together to become alive over the weeks.
I stayed for almost all of these rehearsals, astounded at the magical transformation taking place on stage, handling a cold, stale mug of coffee at the end of day. The experience woke a strong interest in seeing stage productions of Shakespeare’s great dramas in Stratford, Ontario, and Stratford-upon-Avon, England, as well as in Germany. The number of yearly performances of Shakespeare’s plays in Germany is huge, possibly over twice as many as in Britain. They are also very good, because the excellent translation of Shakespeare into modern German is well-understood by the actors, often in contrast to British productions where actors have difficulty in understanding Shakespeare’s English.
More interesting work than cleaning dining halls was done for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. At the time, the Exhibition Hall was mounting a new dinosaur exhibition with a huge skeleton of a Brontosaurus in the Great Hall. One exhibitor was an anthropologist who was mounting smaller exhibitions in cases next to the walls. Among others, her task was to determine the color layout of the exhibition with subdued blue-green hues. Every day she met me with a slip of paper with a particular color she wanted to use in her cases, cut out from different magazines. I was required to make pint-sized amounts of color copies. I had two sets each of color, one with a metallic sheen, the other pure color, with about two dozen different colors for each set. She showed me how to do this at the first meeting and gave me a tryout with another color to copy and paint on a slip of paper, dried with a fan. Dried colors look different from wet colors! I quickly learned how to analyze the color composition of everything I looked at, just as I later learned to analyze the taste of wine as a combination of fruit, berry, vegetables, herbs, minerals, and other tastes like leather. Strangely, not everybody has this facility.
I was then given the skeletons of tiny dinosaurs to draw them looking alive with skins, standing upright. This didn’t seem too complicated. As a result, one of my own pictures of tiny dinosaurs may still be in the museum’s exhibition today. The lady liked my drawing ability and took me to the museum director to find out whether I could join her on an ongoing dig in the Aegean Sea near Turkey next summer. He said yes, if I majored in archaeology.
The requirement was to learn old Greek and Sumerian. Not all that difficult for you with your German background, the director meant, apparently thinking that I had attended an elite altsprachliches Gymnasium. The old language, traditional preparatory schools in Germany graduated excellent students at that time and older Yale professors knew it. But I hadn’t done so; my knowledge of Greek and Latin was nil. I thought the price to spend the summer surrounded by pretty, lightly dressed female anthropology students was too high, given the uncertain job opportunities in the field. Thus, an opportunity closed.
In retrospect, I’m sorry not to have taken Professor Joseph Albers’ course at Yale, The Composition of Color, which a roommate did during my senior year, to my puzzlement. Albers’ finely nuanced compositions of geometric forms of juxtaposed colors were initially painted in oil. He later produced serigraphs of color compositions which became icons of OP-Art in the 1960s and 1970s, available to small collectors. Interestingly, colors look different in the neighborhood of other colors, effects which Albers knew intimately and employed his work, which my wife, Susan, an art major at Lake Erie College and MA at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and I collected while in Germany in the late 1960s. Our daughter, Sibylla grew up in homes whose walls were covered by our art collection of serigraphs and lithographs of what was then modern art. She became so enamored of it that she studied at the Art Academy in Munich, and become a painter herself.
My mixing colors at Yale became a vortex into which I dived.
Professor Krieckhouse’s Psychology Laboratory
My last student employment was for Prof. Krieckhouse in the Psychology Department, running a new learning experiment on a rabbit in his lab. Usually, K was testing if rats learned to avoid electric shocks in a maze under the influence of different doses of the stimulus Dexedrine, or Dextroamphetamine, which was thought to improve cognitive ability and keep pilots alert on long flights. I had to recalculate his analysis of variance calculations for his experiments on learning by rats, double checking his numbers before his paper was submitted for publication. This was all done by hand, using mechanical counting machines, and took a long time. In a previous summer job at Price-Waterhouse in Cleveland a precision with numbers and double checking was the Alpha and Omega of accounting. The managing director wrote the annual report of the US Steel Corporation’s big Cleveland plant. Hundreds of pages of this document had to be read by him and me, alternating page by page and switching the original typed document with a first printed copy. This took days! I was impressed that the boss of the big office re-read the text and re-checked all the numbers himself, with me.
After the Krieckhouse and Price-Waterhouse experience, I took numbers and data analysis in my own research very seriously, double-checking the numbers and the data I used in research. The extra work was worth it, giving me and my readers more confidence in my work.
Krieckhouse found that with an appropriate dose, the treated rats learned more quickly and reliably. Krieckhouse was also to test if the autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions, can learn, an important question. However, the machine that had been built to test a rabbit was badly constructed. It was loud and it failed. A subsequent better machine and tests by other researchers at Yale actually did find that the autonomic nervous system could learn!
I began to understand how the ANS learns much later, having problems to stop smoking. I found out that nicotine addiction was easily overcome with use of a few pieces of chewing gum with nicotine. More complicated was relearning social interactions without the prop of a pipe, stuffing and lighting it, before I ventured a reply. Without my pipe, my hands were strangely useless and I had less time to respond, an awkwardness that passed after a few weeks. But the main difficulty was getting tired after lunch. Without smoking, the afternoons were a fight to stay alert and my research suffered. Finally, I realized that smoking had changed my diurnal rhythm and that I needed to restart my ANS by experiencing big swings of intense light over daytime to nighttime, out in the open. Accordingly, I waited until our summer vacation, camping on the Atlantic coast of Bordeaux. There it took about a half month to return to a normal diurnal rhythm again. What a relief. Finally, to stop smoking had taken half a year. But this story of giving up smoking was not as convincing and simple as my alternative story, how easy it is to stop smoking while drinking wines in Bordeaux for a few weeks.
My year off: growing up, meeting my future wife, setting priorities for my senior year at Yale
In my gorging on the rich intellectual smorgasbord of Yale College courses during my first three years, I switched majors many times, and my lack of focus and declining grades, which at times seemed irrelevant, resulted in my request to take a half-year’s leave of absence from Yale. The Dean of Yale College smiled, nodded his head, and said, “Take a full year.” He was right. I needed time to consider and adopt a new approach, no longer as a consumer of general education but in order to build up a stock of useful knowledge for a future profession.
It was only during my sobering year off, working on my own as the foreign-exchange teller at National City Bank of Cleveland, on Euclid Avenue, in order to experience the everyday job market and real working life, with the many social dimensions that are involved, that I began to understand America and its society better than by simply being a student. This year grounded me in American reality. Reading novels, attending school and college were just inadequate small parts.
During the year I also got to know a wonderful girl at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, and I wanted to improve my professional status and get a college degree before I might marry Miss Susan Noble. My alternative offer at that date was from the assistant head of the international department of NCB, who had just gotten the job as head of a Portland bank’s international department. He wanted to take me with him to the west coast. Instead, I followed the advice of a senior banker who gave an evening course in accounting to the bank employees: Go back to college and finish it with a degree. The Cleveland Yale Alumni said that they would continue my scholarship. With many thanks, I did go back and, for a change, became a Ranking Scholar in Calhoun College.
My more grounded, final year at Yale
In my senior year at Yale, in my economics major, I focused on international trade under Richard Cooper, later Harvard, and on economic development under the stimulating Werner Baer, later Vanderbilt, and learned much trade and growth theory. It had become clear that I had to set priorities. Professional development required professional learning.
The example of a teacher who looked young enough to be one of us
Assistant Professor Richard Cooper taught a large class of enthused students, who all worked hard to show that they followed his clear lectures and do well for his exams. Cooper looked his students’ age, as if he had just arisen from amongst us to deliver his well-organized lectures. His example somehow motivated us more than an old professor could have done. Student enthusiasm was also fanned by Cooper’s contact with important federal government departments. As assistant professor, he had already been a senior staff economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He later became the Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, 1977-81, in the Carter administration.
I received my highest grade at Yale in this course, writing two scathing book reports on other anthropologists’ inadequate field studies and a seven-book final exam. Pospisil surprised me when he said I could become a good cultural anthropologist and offered to support my application for graduate training in a major university! Initially I took the course because it was said that one got good grades from LP. As well, his course was known as an early-morning waker when Pospisil discussed physical anthropology – how the shape of head, body, and breasts differed between Papua New Guinea’s native populations in the high mountain valleys and Australian natives vs. those in other islands. His pictures of coniform vs. hanging breast forms got much student attention, information that was later used for amusing cocktail conversations. However, in response to a dramatically rising class size, he warned in the first class that grading that year would be stringent, to weed out basically uninterested students. The next class showed that he was heard; it was one-half of its former size.
As the course developed, I became more enamored with his topic, how anthropology could determine the historical timing, origin, and method of the settlement of the Pacific Ocean’s many widely spaced islands. For the final exam, I asked myself, what is the overarching question that the course attempted to answer, copying the useful approach to exams that my roommate, Steve, had asked himself since freshman times. It was clear to me: using physical and cultural anthropology, Pospisil refuted Thor Heyerdahl’s theory of settlement from South America. Indeed, that was the question Pospisil asked in the final and it looked like he had never gotten such a good response before. I aced it.
Peter Demetz, History of German Literature
I became literate in German literature with Demetz’s book and lectures. It is incredibly useful to know the big themes in literary history because analogies are often made to today’s activities. Analogy and metaphor are important stylistic elements of language and thinking. In the 1990s, Demetz was a guest of Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s immensely popular TV program, Das Literarisches Quartett. MRR was Germany’s literary pope, and I was proud that my former teacher Demetz was his cardinal!
Baer was a very stimulating lecturer on this modern topic of how poor countries become rich and of theoretical economic growth theories. Baer’s book on Industrialization and Economic Development in Brazil, 1965, led to his professorship at Vanderbilt. Baer suggested I should apply to Vanderbilt for graduate studies –which I did, receiving a full scholarship.
Andreas Papandreou, graduate seminar in Economic Development
This was a very popular course, which was attended by many emotional Greek, Indian, and Latin American doctoral students who believed that more US aid to their own developing countries was the solution. AP was a Greek economist and later prime minister, who in the 1980s ended a half-century of conservative rule, modernized the country’s economy and politics, and established liberal labor laws and national health and retirement programs. They have, ironically, evolved into today’s big problems of an overspending state, which has been taken over by left-wing labor unions.
My summer following graduation from Yale
In the summer of my graduating year I worked as an intern in the Department of State’s Agency for International Development, Office for Latin American Policy and Planning.
There I began to understand the big question of how Latin America was attempting to develop with the financial and planning help of the US government. It was a wonderful j0b, for which Werner Baer had prepared me. I participated in the discussion of how much the Dominican Republic should devaluate its currency to become more competitive, without unleashing inflationary pressures that would destroy the new competitiveness. Devaluation is a complex balancing act.
Our Latin American Policy and Planning department heads decided that a mid-decade review of the Alliance for Progress program would be useful for President Johnson, who had invited participating country leaders to a celebration in Washington. The department worked full force for a half-month to write the report, for which I prepared the tables and calculations. Unfortunately, we found that the program had been failing! Its goals of planned major reforms of Latin American countries – in agriculture, education, and government administration – had not happened. Neither had economic growth sped up, or taken off, even though substantial aid had been given by the US. However, at least, the receiving countries had not turned Communist. Hundreds of copies of our report were then stamped Secret, to avoid ensuing embarrassing press reports and making President Johnson look foolish before his Latin American guests. Curiously, now I was not allowed to read my own study, as I had only gotten an initial Confidential security classification from the FBI. The charm of working for USAID diminished.
In later decades, economic historians of different countries found that industrialization and economic development did not occur in spurts or take-offs, with the possible exception of Germany in its railway age. Rostow had stuck to an old interpretation of the British industrial revolution that was wrong, as my former colleague, Nick Harley, at the University of British Columbia, and later at Oxford, and Nick Crafts, at the London School of Economics, would show: “Output growth and the British industrial revolution: a restatement of the Crafts-Harley view,” Economic History Review, 1992.
I learned that economic development was intricately affected by political constraints, and I would not specialize in this field of economic studies in graduate school, but would switch towards theory and analysis of international trade, and, thereafter, into the field of economic history. And, almost 40 years after that summer following Yale, when I felt the need for an analysis of how institutions for economic development grow, I would be gratified to see such an analysis by Daron Acemoglu, MIT, and James Robinson, Chicago. By examining many historical cases, they developed a theory of how and why necessary institutions – like the rule of law, ownership rights and democratic pluralism – come about. See their great book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, 2012, with over 6,900 Google scholar citations. See the book’s Wikipedia article.
To USAID’s credit, in recent decades it has accepted this wider view of political and institutional requirements for economic development, as well as accepting how democratic pluralism guides sustained development.
Marriage
Immediately after graduation, I had written a letter to Dr. Noble, Susan’s father, asking him for the hand of his daughter in marriage. He sent me his OK. I liked the guy and loved his daughter. My former roommates at Yale attended our wedding in Washington, Pennsylvania, in September 1965. Susan and I were driven home from the church in a horse-drawn buggy, surrounded by a cheering bunch of black kids. The buggy drove down a street lined with porches full of waving black women and families in a neighborhood where Dr. Ellenetta, Susan’s mother, was treating many patients. It was a beautiful afternoon, sharing so much spontaneous joy.
And a new, post-Yale chapter of growing up in America began.
| Copyright © 2019 by Rolf Dumke |
Enjoyable read.
ReplyDeleteWhat a remarkably varied college career! Although I had not planned for it to be so, mine as it turned out focused strongly on literature, even though my degree was in psychology. You studied with Robert Penn Warren! The man was a god to us in high school and college, although I clinched an 'A' in English Lit by pointing out that the ending to "All The King's Men" was a terrible anticlimax. I felt like clapping when you said Catcher in the Rye was disappointing. I found it disjointed and nearly incomprehensible; Holden's introspective voice seemed so self-centered, and the order of the day in the 1970's was to be concerned with the world outside of ourselves. Finally, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is in my opinion not only Hemingway's best work but the best example of his passion for brevity. "The most valuable of all talents is not using two words when one will do..." Thanks for a delightful tour.
ReplyDelete