Interview with Dr. Daniel Bell

Bell, Daniel, 1919-2011 ; McKiernan, Stephen

Daniel Bell (1919 - 2011) was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and academic, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He received his B.S. at City College of New York and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. Bell became a professor of sociology at Harvard University, where he remained until 1990.

ND

In Copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

90:13

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Daniel Bell
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 12 June 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:01):
All right. I will continue to look at it too, to make sure it is not... Yeah. As a former journalist, some of these I am going to read and then I am just going to prompt you to. As a former journalist and great professor at several prestigious universities, what would you say about the students of the boomer generation? Actually, the students you had in the classroom for many years, those were the students that were born, and propped, and going to college between 1964 until 1981 because the boomer generation is defined as those that were born between 1946 and (19)64. Do you feel positive about that generation as a sociologist and as a person who experienced them in the classroom? Do you feel negative qualities starting? Did they stand out in comparison to your students post boomer, those that were in college in the mid to late (19)80s and beyond? And maybe those before? Any thoughts you have on students from that generation?

DB (00:01:11):
I think the question is too broad. There is a range of students in every generation. And there is a difference to those who come to me as a teacher and those who simply stay away. So, it is difficult for me to talk about a generation.

SM (00:01:42):
How about instead of talking about the generation as a whole, how about the students that you experienced? The ones that came to you, the ones that sought your advice, counsel, or you were kind of a mentor to, and they were your mentees? Did you find them very inquisitive? Were they fairly well-read?

DB (00:02:21):
Excuse me. When you think about particular students rather than generation or range of students... And when I think of a particular set of students, they were all extremely bright, very inquisitive, and somebody eager to challenge me, which I like very much. There is no fun or excitement in simply teaching students when there is an attitude to them, but I like students with whom I can argue with and who can argue with me. And sometimes they argue from the left, sometimes from the right. It varies with the class. And the other thing is that I have always liked teaching with a colleague. At Columbia, I taught several seminars with Lionel Trilling on literature and society. At Harvard, I have taught several seminars with Hilary Putnam, who was a philosopher.

SM (00:03:48):
Yes-yes.

DB (00:03:53):
And in one sense, we argued well with one another, as well as with the students. So that there was not any sense that we're setting forth knowledge on high. We were interested in what sort of problems when raising. What we have always started to do is to make distinctions, which override some of the clichés. For example, when I was teaching with Hilary Putnam, we would say that some issues are constitutive and some are intrinsic. People often confuse it too. Sex, for example, is intrinsic because it is based on hormones. Whereas, gender is constructed. It is based on cultural norms and such. And when people talk about sex and gender without making those distinctions, they are confusing people. So, our effort has always been to try to cut through many of the clichés of any of the arbitrary statements, to try to really sort out the actual differences. Sometimes, for example, issues are reductive, meaning that they go from psychology, to biology, to chemistry. Sometimes they are what we call emergent. Maybe they are expanding what they tried to cover. We used to say, for example, what is the most important prefix in the English language? And the answer would be, most important prefix is re. Which you sometimes rearrange. So that you are always reorganizing what you are doing. And therefore, you are making distinctions, which allow people to sort out what is it you are trying to do.

SM (00:06:09):
What is interesting, just looking at your background and you talk about how important Sydney Hook was. You did not actually have him as a teacher, but he was like, you saw him and what kind of teacher he was with his students, and when he taught in college. And one of the things about the boomers, oftentimes they will say is that the teachers were available to them. We could talk to our teachers, we could talk to our professors. Our professors really encouraged us to go out and listen to people, and different points of view, and had different experience in colleges. And if we were not pushed, maybe we would not have gone and had them. So, there was a closeness. There seemed to be a closeness during the time that the boomers were in college. Closer ties with their faculty members. And again, you liked the students had challenged that. Again, you cannot talk about an entire generation. But the experiences from that period, from say (19)64 to the beginning of when Ronald Reagan became president, that was the time when boomers were in college. And there seems to be not that closeness anymore on college campuses like there was in the past.

DB (00:07:27):
Depends upon the school. A student from Berkeley, I would say, "Who was your teaching in college?" He said, "Oh, I do not know?" He took all elective courses. So, there would be several hundred students in a course. So, I said, "What is the point of taking such a course?" "Well, we had to."

SM (00:07:49):
Yes.

DB (00:07:49):
I think these large elective courses are nonsense because you might as well simply have a recording. And so we play it. It is where there is a possibility of being able to interact with students in seminars and such. And one thing about Sydney Hook as a teacher, as one learned, he was always willing to take opposite points of view just to be able to challenge a student. Was not necessarily his point of view per se, but seemingly he would take an opposite point of view. One of my best students, for example, always acknowledged that fact. Was a man, David Ignatius. I do not know if you know the name?

SM (00:08:45):
That name does ring a bell. Yes.

DB (00:08:46):
Well, David Ignatius is a columnist in the Washington Post.

SM (00:08:49):
Okay.

DB (00:08:50):
And he was the editor for a while in Paris of the Tribune, owned by the Times. And he would always say, "What I appreciate most about you at seminars, is you made me change my mind. Not that you want to per se, but I was interested in the problem and you began challenging me on this to define it, to organize it. Why are you interested, etc." And he says, "Finally, I changed my mind." He has written about that. He has written several columns about that.

SM (00:09:27):
He was a student here. He is a boomer probably too, probably during that timeframe. Again, a teacher is very important in the development of student. We always say at orientation and for years, it is very important to find that teacher or a few teachers that will be there for you, you can talk to for advice and counsel. And not only on courses you take, but certainly if any issues come up. Sydney Hook seems to be that the type of person. I remember, I have some quotes in there, I put them in the email that I sent you. I have a question on Sydney Hook toward the end of my... But that is a very interesting point of view that students need to hear the other side, and try to wonder and understand the other side. Do you see that was happening back then in colleges, that a lot of teachers wanted people to hear both sides? Some people today say that it is not the same on college campuses.

DB (00:10:39):
Again, I cannot generalize on that. I find any generalization rather awkward because the thing I constantly deal with students is to say, you have to make relevant distinctions. What distinctions are you making? So you know what belongs there and what belongs there. And therefore, if you know what distinctions you are making or why you are making them, then you can begin to decide what is relevant, what is not relevant. And so that...

SM (00:11:24):
You are the author of so many classic books, including the End of Ideology. In just a few words, and it is a broad question again, but what was the main theme of the book? It did look at the (19)50s, when boomers were in elementary school. So, when you are talking about that, the book came out in (19)61, I believe. (19)60, (19)61 and boomers were just going into junior high school at the time. So, you are basically writing about the (19)50s and the late forties. And the change that is happening in our society to the service economy. And could you in your own words, say why you wrote the book, why you felt it was important to write it, and the basic theme?

DB (00:12:18):
Well, I think the title sums it up. Namely, that ideologies have been fabricated or fixed, instead of usages of concepts. And therefore, the subtopic of the book, if I am not mistaken, is on the exhaustion of ideas in the 1950s.

SM (00:12:40):
Yes. Yep.

DB (00:12:43):
So that in one sense, the main target was Marxism used as an ideology. Not the law of Marxism was that, and we were wrong. But those who use Marxism as an ideology, in a sense, would be the target of the book.

SM (00:13:03):
It's interesting because during the 1960s, as you remember, many of the... Particularly after 1965, (19)66, (19)67 and it was very evident on Columbia's campus in (19)68 with Mark Rudd, that a lot of the students were reading that kind of book. They were reading Miles. Somebody told me people only carried Miles's book just to impress people. They had not really read it. But in terms of, I interviewed Mark Rudd, and Mark Rudd said, "Well, Marx was very important. Many members of the new left were reading that." That way of [inaudible] was very important. Revolutionaries were very important. So, the ending of what you were saying was going on the (19)50s, some of the people in the new left, student leaders of the anti-war movement, were bringing those ideas back. Any thoughts on that?

DB (00:14:00):
Well, in (19)68, add along and count with Mark Rudd because we have been supporting David Truman with the stipulation that they should not call on the police. Because the police would simply go in and break heads. And I was saying to Mark Rudd, what you are doing is trying to play Truman's game. It came out later, as Mark Rudd himself said, one of the issues was the question of the gymnasium on the Harlem side. And he had never been there. He did not know anything about it. He was using these things simply as tools, props. And that was the main thing I disliked about him. That you were not really arguing a problem. You were not really saying, I believe this. I believe that. But you were using them as a tool. And he was using ideology as a tool because he had a language to impress people, but he never understood what the language itself was. And I would say to him at one point, "Who's Bruno Bauer?" He said, "I do not know." I said, "But you're talking about Marx and not know Bruno Bauer? That Bruno Bauer is one of the people that Marx talks about in the Communist manifesto and one of the chief people between Feuerbach and himself. Do you know who Feuerbach was?" "No, who was it?" And so, there was a complete ignorance there of actualities of ideas.

SM (00:16:02):
Did you change your opinion of him at all over the years as he's...

DB (00:16:07):
I have no sense of what he was or what he became. The person who I thought most had been in the new left for a while was Paul Berman.

SM (00:16:17):
Oh, Paul Berman. Yeah. He wrote a book on Vietnam, I remember.

DB (00:16:20):
Yeah. He has written several books. He has written one book now recently on Islam and on in the Ideology of Islam. But Paul Berman was a young man who had got to think through, he was a good friend one time of Rudd. But after (19)68, he began moving towards the amicus because they were opposing ideas with which he was unfamiliar and he had to encounter. So I think that Paul Berman was the best person to come out of that movement. And Rudd, probably the worst.

SM (00:16:55):
Are there any people within that movement, because Mark was just one person, but when you think of the anti-war movement, several people come to mind that were... Tom Hayden or Rennie Davis, David Harris. Of course, Dave Dellinger, William Kunstler, the lawyer. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin. A lot of different... In fact, Rubin was over at Berkeley for a while and Abbie Hoffman seems to be everywhere. Is there anything in any of those people that you admire? Because they are at the cap, the top of the cap, the top of the pyramid in terms of the names of that era.

DB (00:17:50):
Well, Hayden had been in the University of Michigan and he came to see me. And clearly in his own mind he was saying, have to choose between C. Wright Mills and Daniel Bell. And he chose C. Wright Mills. Recently, there is a book which has come out by Ki Ochs and Arthur Filleg on Gerth and Mills, which is a devastating book. Reputation and Scholarship, how Mills manipulated Gerth and tried to get credit for the work on Max Weber. But they never knew that. And I have in my book collection of essays are the, which I think one of my favorite books is the... It is a book of essays dealing with technology, and religion, and such. And there is an essay there called From Vulgar Marxism to Vulgar Sociology. And mostly about Mills. And there he was thrashing away with these large scale generalizations and you never knew... Well, how things are going right now. There is a power elite. So, there is no change in the power elite from the beginning of the republic to the end. And he said, but you're talking about power, not about politics, which is the distinctions between people and such. No, I had no respect for Rudd because he wanted to go out and swing at people and have them swing at him. Because he thought, "I am going to be a tough guy and we will get into a fight." Well, you want to get into a fight, get into a fight. But that is not a way of making distinctions or understanding issues.

SM (00:19:50):
I sense that when you are saying these things and you make very relevant points, and that is knowledge is power. And we say this to students all the time, that if you are going to understand your opponent, you need to read about what the opponent stands for. Do not just attack them based on emotion, but have knowledge with power. Do you think that when you look at the movements that came about after the anti-war movement... The civil rights movement was already taking place, obviously, and it was a role model for the other movements that followed. But the anti-war movement itself... Point I was trying to make here. I am trying to get it right. I lost my train of thought here. The anti-war. Yeah. What were your thoughts on the anti-war movement itself and the people that participated in it? Do you think they were genuine? I know you cannot, again, because you cannot generalize, but when you look at the anti-war movement, you see different segments. You see the religious segment, which was the Catholic. Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the anti-nuclear group. Then you had the students. And then you had people like Benjamin Spock, the doctor. And you had these people coming from all different angles and all different walks of life, and violence was something they all opposed until the Weatherman, the Black Panthers, groups like that came around. Did you admire at least some segments of the anti-war movement, these other movements before they were-

DB (00:21:41):
I admired most of them because I thought it was genuine. I started out in some sense supporting the government and then turning against it. A group of us wrote a long letter to Lyndon Johnson, as we had contact with a lawyer who worked for Johnson. And he encouraged us the write to Johnson, and he would get Johnson to write a reply, which he did. But we were saying that it is the wrong war, so to speak. Sorry, I am being carried out in the wrong way quite often. So that the man, for example, who had been the senator and now became the head of the new school, had-

SM (00:22:39):
Kerry. Yeah.

DB (00:22:43):
... Sent me to kill people. I knew a bit about the Vietnam War, in a personal sense. My son-in-law was in a Coast Guard in Ensign, and he was patrolling the boats. He was patrolling the rivers. And he would write letters to me or he would come home and talk.

DB (00:23:03):
... and he would write letters to me or he would come home and talk. He would say, "We are doing it all wrong." So, I had great respect for many of the people there because their feelings were quite sincere. But no respect for people like Mark Rudd who are manipulative, who are using this as a manipulative issue. There is a man who is been a very good friend of mine, Max Lerner, and he wrote a book with a dreadful title called Ideas Are Weapons. Well, ideas are not weapons, ideas are ideas and you debate ideas. But to say, "Ideas are weapons," is to denigrate ideas and to devalue them. I told Max... he is a wonderful writer, very good columnist for New York Post-

SM (00:24:01):
Is he?

DB (00:24:02):
... taught at Brandeis. I said, "Ideas are not weapons. It is the wrong way to think about it. If they are weapons, you should be using it to smash people, rather than to debate with people." But he thought, and maybe he was right in one sense, if you have a good title, you keep it.

SM (00:24:29):
That is what book publishers like sometimes titles that would get you to sell your book. Obviously, going beyond Mark Rudd, there was certainly Bernadine Dohrn, another person from the Weathermen, and Bill Ayers who was in the news a lot because he was in front of Bill Clinton. Just your thoughts, when you think about... and even as a historian or as a sociologist teaching classes, my golly, you look at the Civil Rights Movement, you look at the anti-war movement, you look at non-violent protests, you look at the Gandhi philosophy of non-violence. Then all of a sudden in the late (19)60s, because the anti-war movement is getting frustrated, you see a segment trying to turn to violence through the Weathermen. There is always the question, people do not understand whether the Black Panthers were violent or not. But there is the scene of Stokely Carmichael challenging Dr. King, basically telling him, "Your time has passed. Non-violent protest does not work." We had the experience of the students at Cornell walking around with guns, although I do not think they had any intention of using them, they just wanted to use them as a symbol. Then in the American Indian movement, you had Wounded Knee where you went from Attica in 1969 to Wounded Knee in 1973, which was about violence. Seems like violence never wins, does it? As a sociologist, I think you have even said some things about violence is just totally bad. I mean, it only brings enemies rather than supporters.

DB (00:26:09):
Nonviolence can work only in a society which respects people's ideas. Obviously, nonviolence cannot work in Nazi Germany. They can just go in and smash you. But nonviolence works when people respect ideas and say, "Well, if you're willing to take the stand and be nonviolent, well, then I will respect that." I think that in this country, nonviolent worked. Nazi Germany, it would not. In the Soviet Union, it would not.

SM (00:26:50):
They would be dead if they did that.

DB (00:27:10):
The thing which I just dislike most the is that the New Left was taking to the university as the focus of their attacks. Any great university and for a while, Columbia was a great university, respects different points of view. And you cannot destroy a university. But someone like Mark Rudd was ready to destroy the university. Not everyone in that Weatherman group, some of have been students of mine and I knew them very well. They would say to me later on, "You know, you made as read a book, which really shook us up and we would argue about it." I would say, "Yes, I know." This was Dostoyevsky's book, The Demons. Had different titles, but the real title was The Possessed. Well, then The Demons, because it is about his group, followers of Akunin, who created violence. I do not know if you know the book?

SM (00:28:29):
No, I do not. I-

DB (00:28:32):
Well, it is one of the great books of its kind. New translation, it is called The Demons. It's one of Dostoyevsky's great books along with Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov. Because it is about a revolutionary group and what happens in the revolutionary group. And they identify very strongly with this and it shook them up.

SM (00:29:06):
You talk about Marco, what did you think of Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker, and I think Goldberg led that group that were the student leaders of... Ian Rossman... the student leaders of the student protest movement at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement. Because they said it was all about ideas, the university should be about ideas, not about corporate takeover of the university. In the very same time, Clark Kerr, then the president, talked about the knowledge factory. Of course, that upsets students because many of the students of that era did not want to be their mom and dad who just never questioned authority, they just put a hat on, like an IBM mentality hat.

DB (00:29:55):
I came out to Berkeley, I met with [inaudible], (19)64, (19)65 because Clark Kerr wanted me to come the head of the Institute on Labor Relations. So he invited me to come out to Berkeley, talk with him about it, I did. Of course now I was crossing the campus with Marty Lipset. [inaudible].

SM (00:30:18):
Oh, yes-yes.

DB (00:30:20):
A man came running across the campus, said, "Hey, Lipset. We are off of the July Days, we're going on to October." I said, "Who is that?" He said, "Oh, it is that crazy nut, Mario Savio." They had an image of the Russian Revolution. The July Days were the ones when after all, they tried to turn against Kerensky.

SM (00:30:40):
So, the Free Speech Movement was a-


DB (00:30:57):
I do not know if you have seen the film Arguing the World?

SM (00:30:59):
No. Well, maybe I have. But was that a documentary?

DB (00:31:05):
Well, in a way, yes. I strongly urge you to see the film. It's about four of us from City College and our past live [inaudible]. It is about Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and myself-

SM (00:31:27):
Kristol?

DB (00:31:27):
... coming out of City College and moving out into the larger society.

SM (00:31:31):
And that was Seymour Lipset too, right?

DB (00:31:35):
Lipset was not in this one.

SM (00:31:35):
So, it was Howe...

DB (00:31:37):
Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and myself.

SM (00:31:39):
Okay.

DB (00:31:40):
There is a text of that that had been put up by the University of Chicago Press, edited by Joseph Dorman who did the film. So you may want to get a copy of the book called Arguing the World. This gives you the debate between the four of us and our friends from City College starting out in (19)38, (19)39 and moving up to the 1970s. Well, it is published by University of Chicago Press, the text of it, and the film itself is very strong in many ways. You can probably call PBS.

SM (00:32:30):
I can get. You can get anything on the computer if you need access to something. I-

DB (00:32:40):
The film called Arguing the World and directed by Joseph Dorman, D-O-R-M-A-N. I said, then there's a text of it elaborated, probably find the University of Chicago Press. I would say it would be a rather crucial book for you.

SM (00:32:57):
I may have... I have so many books. I am amazed that... In fact, I have just been here and I have bought a few books up at Harvard Square. I mean, they have great used bookstores around here. But obviously the Mario Savio and the group at Berkeley in (19)64, (19)65 were not the same as the SDSers and the ones we were talking about at Columbia. But they were the precursors, they were the forerunners for all the movements that followed. They just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement out there just recently, too. Do you have any high regard for them in terms of the... Because there is quite a few names, the names, because there is like 20 of them that were student leaders. They have gone on in all different directions, some very successful in life. Mario Savio did not live very long. He's passed on. He was not very well for many, many years. There is a new book out on him, too, by Dr. Cohen, I think it is out of NYU.

DB (00:34:07):
I do not already know the Berkeley people at all. However, there is a long section on Berkeley in this film because of the fact that Glazer was teaching there. There is a woman who comes out attacking Glazer, and it turns out Sam become a member of the city council.

SM (00:34:30):
Oh my gosh.

DB (00:34:34):
Excuse me.

SM (00:34:34):
Yep. I have a couple quotes here that I want you to respond to from your book, The End of Ideology. Here is one quote... Oh, there's three of them and you can respond as a group. Quote number one: "We have seen the exhaustion of the 19th century ideologies of Marxism as intellectual movements that explain the truth." Well, you have already even referenced to that a little bit. Number two: "Many intellectuals have begun to fear the masses or any form of social action." I find that because when you look at the masses and social action, that is a lot of what the (19)60s was about. Then the third one, and I love this one and I hope I can somehow remember this forever. It was a quote, I think it came either you or [inaudible], "The difference between capitalism and communism: capitalism is system where man exploits a man and communism is vice versa." Now I hope I can remember that because that is a classic. When I read that, I said, "That is something, Steve, you ought to remember." But I wanted your thoughts here because when you look about the masses, whether the elite phrase of the masses or whatever, when you think of the Vietnam War and you think of the movements, they were about masses of people. The Montgomery Boycott with was about a mass of African Americans who said that, "We're not going to ride the buses." The 1963 March on Washington was a mass gathering where Dr. King gave his famous speech. You had the Black Panthers, you had these other groups, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, the National Organization for Women, the anti-war movement, the Earth Day group, the gay lesbian groups from Stonewall, and of course, the Black Panthers. These were all masses. These are masses of people. So, if what you are saying here is that many intellectuals have begun to fear the masses or any form of social action. How do you respond to that? Because that is what the (19)60s are really all about, and early (19)70s.

DB (00:36:52):
Well, different periods of time having the keyword. Nobody, today uses the word masses. At one time you had a magazine called The New Masses, which was the communist magazine, edited by Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. Ortega y Gasset had a book about the masses, the famous Spanish [inaudible]. It is a word which has now gone out of relevance, partly because it never had a defined meaning, who were the masses. In some ways, Ortega's book, and he was after one of the most important philosophers of the (19)20s and such, were the scientists, which was is strange. But the word masses has gone out of fashion. Today you have race, gender, and equality. If you look through a period of the (19)50s and (19)60s, I do not think you will ever find the word gender. It was not a term that was used then. But now, gender became an important word to define the women's movement. You did not have a woman's movement then. Most of the movements in the (19)50s and (19)60s were led by men and you had very few women. In fact, the women were complaining they had to do the dirty work, cleaning up and such. Today, gender became a key word. The question is always when and where are keywords used and why. As I say, gender becomes important because it symbolizes the nature of the women's movement and women's rights. Nobody in that period of time, let us say of Mark Rudd, would ever think of gender. It was not within the framework they are thinking. So, masses disappears. And one of my books has a long essay on nature of masses, maybe in The End of Ideology or some other books.

SM (00:39:12):
This is another very important quote that... I have a lot of your quotes here, but... "A society is most vigorous..." This is very important, and I wish people would read this today. We maybe could get along better. "A society is most vigorous and appealing when both partisans and critics are legitimate voices in the permanent dialogue that is the testing of ideas and experiences. One can be a critic of one's country without being the enemy of its promises." That is prophetic. In my view, if the people that were either leading the country during the Vietnam War, the divisions over civil rights, if they sat down and discussed these two quotes and just the importance of opposing points of view... They are important in your eyes, are not they?

DB (00:40:05):
I would say this, that certain statements are derivative of their time and relevant to their time and certain statements transcend that. The one you have given me now, I would say transcends the nature of time. It is a permanent situation in any society where there are differences of opinion. I cannot think of any society, unless it is a totalitarian society, where you do not have differences of opinion. So, if you have differences of opinion, you have to respect the differences. I think one of the important things about this society is that it goes back in the very beginning of society, one of the things I used to say, I am not sure I could pinpoint where I said it exactly, is that until World War II, we never had a state in this country, we had government. You had states in Europe. Because these were unitary elements, were pulled alongside together. We only began to have a state where we got involved in war where you had to pull a pieces of society together. You had a government, and a government is different between a government and the state. Hegel used the word state, but not government, you see? I do not think if you ever go back and look at the writings of John Quincy Adams or Thomas Jefferson, they ever used the word state. They never thought of the United States as a state, even though the various states, the 13 states that made up a union. But it was not a state in Hegelian sense of unitary focus. We had a government, not a state. We began to have a state during World War II when we had to pull the society together and organize an army. We never had much of a standing army. A state has a large standing army. We never had a large standing army until World War II. Even afterwards, we still never had a large standing army.

SM (00:42:30):
Then, of course, we fought the Civil War and constantly, it was all about the union. It was the union, South and North. But we preserved the union.

DB (00:42:40):
It was a war between states.

SM (00:42:47):
Yes.

DB (00:42:48):
There was not gestalt, you see?

SM (00:42:55):
Yeah. Again, you had mentioned Mr. Berman, but are there any other people that you truly respected. We are talking about here, about, one can be a critic of one's country without being the enemy, I think there were many people did not understand that in the (19)60s and early (19)70s. Because you had even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, two different Presidents, but very distrustful, opposing points of view of their policies.

DB (00:43:24):
But people forget that are not domestic issues, they are both fairly alike. Then Johnson built The Great Society, which was Medicare and extensive social security. Nixon tried to do that with Pat Moynihan as his advisor. But both got trapped by foreign policy. Therefore, the domestic agenda was pretty much eclipsed or simply laid low. But we forget that there is a domestic agenda in both cases, even with Nixon. Of course, with Pat Moynihan there as Nixon's advisor, there was an emphasis on the family and strengthening the family. I mean, the whole point of Pat Moynihan advice of Nixon is, one of the problems is that the Blacks in this country never had much of a family. They had been slaves or they dispersed. Therefore... I was on six to eight government commissions. The most important one was on technology and automation. Robert Robert Stovall and I directed most of the reports, one called Technology and American Economy. People do not know, do not remember or do not think about it, that one most important situation in increasing productivity in this country, particularly in late 1930s, 1940s, which was chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizer increased the productivity on the land. Before World War II, one of the bad, major social issues in this country was sharecroppers. People did not even know the word sharecropper, but these were people like the Blacks who lived on the land and with the chemical fertilizers, they were not needed. So they moved up North, they went to Watts in Los Angeles or to Harlem or Chicago. People say, "Look at all those Blacks that are unemployed." Well, they were never employed. There were sharecroppers on the land. Chemical fertilizers increased productivity enormously and pushed the Blacks off the land and moved them up... and pushed the Blacks off to land and moved them up north. Black became an issue in the north because of this. Great people understand, I know this, you see, because the Blacks had never been there, except in Harlem, had never been there in large numbers before. But the chemical fertilizers pushed them off the land. And what also happened is that the chemical fertilizers polluted many of the lakes and rivers.

SM (00:46:28):
That is right.

DB (00:46:29):
And created a social cost, which regular people had understood, because it was not there before, but the pollution in the lakes and rivers came from the chemical fertilizers, which increased [inaudible] society. So, you have the double edge of it.

SM (00:46:47):
It is amazing. Of course, the Hudson River is one of those rivers that was... Now, it is getting back to normal. I think they have been trying to work on it for years. Let make sure I switch the side here. I cannot even see how far we have got to go here. Yeah, I am going to... Make sure it's working okay. All right. In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end?

DB (00:47:26):
I have never liked the idea of dating particular periods of time as if there were unitary elements. They were not. It is part of our nature of a journalistic society where you have to have a label or something. So, you talk about the (19)60s, the (19)70s, the (19)80s. So many things were happening in each of them. There were so many cross currents. So, to talk about the (19)60s, as if there is something unitary about it, it is never made much sense. So, I cannot respond to the question, because I do not understand it as a question.

SM (00:48:03):
That applies to all the decades. Even people when they say that the (19)80s was Reagan. There is more than Reagan then.

DB (00:48:13):
Well, any period of time has many cross currents, so that, it seems to me, it makes no sense we have to talk about these (19)60s, and these (19)70s, and the (19)80s. What happened between 1975 and 1980. Do you know?

SM (00:48:29):
Between (19)75 and (19)80? Yeah, that was the year of the disco.

DB (00:48:35):
I am trying to show you that, what if you were breaking the thing down? What happened between 1975 and 1980, suddenly you find yourself a little wobbly.

SM (00:48:43):
Yeah, I know that the Iran hostage crisis was in (19)79 and that ruined Carter. Carter had problems with gasoline and all that other stuff. I could write them down, but you got to think a little bit.

DB (00:49:01):
I was an advisor to Carter. There's a book which came out recently about the Carter administration and the famous malaise speech of his. And Chris [inaudible], and we were both in the White House with dinner with Mr. Carter, and I respected Carter. People forget that Carter originally was an engineer. He claims a graduate of the Naval Academy, meaning he was a peanut farmer, but he was an engineer, and he had a very good rational mind, but he was caught by the circumstances, particularly by the Iran hostage situation.

SM (00:49:41):
Yeah. When you think of, again, the presidents that were in charge, supposedly, when the Boomers have been in line, that includes anybody from Harry Truman to Obama, do you pin any of them as greater than the others in terms of what they have done for [inaudible]?

DB (00:50:03):
Depends upon what issue you are thinking about. There are many different issues and many different circumstances. After all, Lyndon Johnson is defined very largely by the Vietnam War, which is true in the sense of, this was a major concern. But at the same time, they were building the Great Society Program, which people then tend to diminish or forget, and forget the people who served him. My friend Charles Haar at Harvard Law School, was very much in charge of the Cities Program and the Metropolitan Program. And they were very important people and who were very-very good, but they were diminished by the attention to the Vietnam War.

SM (00:51:06):
You wrote in your book... What is the basic theme of your book, the coming of the post-industrial society? And as an added note, are you the person that really came up with that term? It was Professor Bell. We never thought of that term until Professor Bell wrote about it in his book.

DB (00:51:31):
Well, no term ever comes cleanly out. David Riesman used the term at one point, much earlier, but it was never picked up, never done. There was a man in France who did a book on post-industrial society. But I was talking about two different things. One was the move away from manufacturing to services. The services were not simply the McDonald's hamburger kind of thing, but research services, there is other forms of service to the economy, and the word post-industrial was simply to indicate we are going beyond that. But the more important dimension of it was the development of the theoretical knowledge and the reliance on theoretical knowledge, and that many of the things we think about, we derive with theoretical knowledge. Let me give you an example. You know what a laser is?

SM (00:52:36):
Mm-hmm.

DB (00:52:37):
What is a laser?

SM (00:52:39):
Well, a laser a sends a beam. It is a beam of light.

DB (00:52:45):
Well, how is it different from other beams of light?

SM (00:52:48):
How is it different from other... I would think there would be intensity that you could control.

DB (00:52:54):
No.

SM (00:52:55):
No?

DB (00:52:57):
The laser goes back to a paper by Einstein in 1904, 1905, that light is not just a wave, but light is a quanta, a pulse. Laser is an acronym. Do you know what the laser means?

SM (00:53:10):
Mm-mm.

DB (00:53:12):
Light amplified by simulation of the emission of radiation, L-A-S-E-R. [inaudible] Charles Townes at Columbia in 1939. It's a different way of focusing light through the emission of radiation. So, it changes the plutonium view of light as a wave. And you have to know the theoretical foundations. That is Einstein to Charles Townes. And the word laser is an acronym. Light amplified by the simulation of the emission of radiation, L-A-S E-R.

SM (00:53:51):
When Clark Kerr gave that famous speech about the knowledge factory, you're talking about the post-industrial society, that is an important part of it, isn't it? The university is a knowledge factory and that is what-

DB (00:54:02):
Well, I do not like the word factory.

SM (00:54:05):
He wrote that in the uses of the university.

DB (00:54:07):
I know, but it's not a factory. A factory is organized about particular things. The thing about knowledge is, it is very diffused. You never know where it is going to come from, where it's going to go. So, I say the paper by Einstein in 1904 is a foundation of the laser along with many other things. But it went from Einstein to Charles Townes who was then a physics professor at Columbia who created the laser. And with a laser, you can send a beam to the moon. You can also do an operation on the eye. It is the use of light in a different way by the simulation of the emission of radiation, L-A-S-E-R.

SM (00:54:51):
That is what you mean by the codification of theoretical knowledge.

DB (00:54:55):
Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

SM (00:54:58):
You also said something very profound too in this book. And again, I have only read a couple chapters, that the growing tension between equality and meritocracy is something a social and ethical issue of the century. Now, that is pretty prophetic as well, because there's obviously been that... The whole, Dr. King, the (19)50s and the (19)60s short equality, not only African-Americans, people of color, women's, gay and lesbian in a double thing-

DB (00:55:32):
Well, people do not know who it was who invented the word meritocracy and what it meant. Actually, it was a word invented by a man named Michael Young, who was an Englishman who had been, at a one point, the head of the Labor Party research department. And he used the word meritocracy. In one sense, Jefferson used the same term without calling it meritocracy, namely, opportunities of men of talent to arise rather than birth. Before that, your status in society was based upon birth. And you inherited a piece of land, you inherited if a factory, you inherited a practice as a dentist. But Jefferson said, we want to have this open to men of talent, not just birth. Michael Young, when he did the book on the meritocracy, and he used the term... first one to use the term meritocracy, however, pointed out that there was a negative sense of meritocracy. And to some extent, I have understood that. His notice of the negative sense was, you longer had excuses to be where you were. You had no meritocracy. If you were in a low position in society, you were there because you had no merit. And therefore, meritocracy kept people down as well as moving people up. So, the idea of... When I was [inaudible] phrase a just meritocracy. I have always used the phrase, a just meritocracy, never meritocracy by myself. Because meritocracy also pushes people down. You have no excuses to be where you are, because you have no merit. But Michael Young was a very stimulating person, extraordinary man.

SM (00:57:38):
When was he alive? Or when was his heyday, so to speak?

DB (00:57:43):
Well, his main contribution came after World War-War II when he wrote most of the Labor Party documents. I spent the year with Michael Young in the Center for Advanced Studies.

SM (00:58:00):
Oh, in Princeton?

DB (00:58:01):
No, in Palo Alto in 1958, (19)59. And I wrote an... a collection of Michael Young's essays published by [inaudible]. And I wrote the introduction to that. And people right now no longer know Michael Young. He became Lord Young of Darlington and there's a Young Foundation in England.

SM (00:58:38):
There were two books that came out in the late (19)60s that were very popular with the young people. And they kind of explained the Counter Culture, and the different kinds of consciousness that was going on, the changes that were happening. As a sociology, I do not know if you ever assigned them to your students, but what were your thoughts of the Greening of America by Charles Reich? And the second one was The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak. Those were very major books. I will add though, that Erick Erickson also wrote several books on protests and descent around that time, and so did Kenneth Keniston. So, when you think of that period, say from (19)67 to (19)73, (19)74, those are major, major writers?

DB (00:59:27):
Well, the two books you mentioned are forgotten, and rightly so. They are very slim books and very thin books. They were coining phrases, not really making an argument, particularly the Reich book. Whereas Erickson and Keniston, they were more serious people, particularly Erickson, of course. There's also a man in Harvard named Murray who invented The Thematic Apperception Test. But the Greening of America, it is a phrase, it is a title. It is not a theme or an argument. And The Making of a Counter Culture, well, where is the Counter Culture now?

SM (01:00:16):
I know in graduate school it was required reading. We had to read it. It had different levels of consciousness. And Dr. Roszak, I guess has just retired from University of California, Hayward. And he just wrote an update to it, as people are becoming senior citizens, The Making of a Counter Culture, where are they now kind of a book. But to you, they are not major at all?

DB (01:00:45):
No.

SM (01:00:48):
As a group of 75 million Boomers, how do Boomers fit into your definition of the post-industrial society?

DB (01:00:58):
Well, I find that too loose a generalization. Among 75 million, there must be about 70 million different opinions. So, I cannot respond to a question so loose as that.

SM (01:01:14):
Do you think that, this is a question I have asked everybody though, that because there were so many divisions in America and during that timeframe because of the Vietnam War, those who supported the troops, those who were against the troops, supported the war, against the war, divisions between Black and white. I was on college campus when those divisions were intense, certainly that the other divisions that were happening in America at that time. Do you think that this has permanently affected the generation, the Civil War generation, that they will go to their graves with not coming to terms with some of the divisions that they experienced in their lives? And I preface this by saying that we asked this question to Senator Edmund Muskie when we took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995, because the students who were not alive in the (19)60s wanted to find out if he had his thoughts on what they had read in their classes, that the nation was on the verge of the second civil war, that all the things that they had seen in 1968 at the Democratic Convention, and the assassinations, and the president resigning, and riots and burnings and everything, wanted to know if that would have had a permanent effect on the generation which was their parents.

DB (01:02:40):
Well, again, I think of the whole statement, two set of loose terms, the verge or the verge [inaudible] the case and civil war between whom and whom? Again, these are phrases, not ideas.

SM (01:02:59):
But the healing though, that is really with respect to those who served in the war, the Vietnam veterans and those who protested the war, some of them may have issues as they move on.

DB (01:03:15):
Well, there is one woman who changed so much of this. You know who that would be?

SM (01:03:22):
One woman who changed...

DB (01:03:24):
All these perceptions.

SM (01:03:28):
No.

DB (01:03:29):
Her name is Maya Lin.

SM (01:03:31):
Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. The wall.

DB (01:03:36):
Suddenly you have a very different feeling about the war when you see all those names on the wall. When she first proposed the wall, Bill Buckley said, "This is dreadful. We do not want this modernist stuff. Why do not we have a traditional thing?" So, most people do not realize, if you go look at the wall, that next to is a man on a horse, a traditional statue, which supposed to symbolize, you see, the Vietnam War, which nobody even looks at.

SM (01:04:05):
You are talking about the Three Man Statue?

DB (01:04:07):
Hmm?

SM (01:04:08):
The Three Man Statue, you are talking about?

DB (01:04:10):
I do not remember what it is.

SM (01:04:11):
Yeah.

DB (01:04:12):
But Maya Lin's wall suddenly became the symbol, and suddenly gave a sense of appreciation of the names of these people.

SM (01:04:28):
You find it interesting it took the Vietnam veterans to take the lead on the monument issue, because there had been no World War II Memorial, there had been no Korean War Memorial. There really had not been a World War I Memorial. And now, there is the World War II, there's the Korean... They have kind of taken a lead in that area.

DB (01:04:47):
And the Roosevelt Memorial.

SM (01:04:48):
Yes, the Roosevelt, and now the Martin Luther King.

DB (01:04:50):
Quite late.

SM (01:04:51):
Yes. And then the MLK Memorial, which is being built right now. Jan Scruggs wrote the book To Heal a Nation. That was his book.

DB (01:05:01):
Who?

SM (01:05:02):
Jan Scruggs, the founder of the Vietnam Memorial. And the goal of his effort to get the wall built was to heal the veterans and their families, and to pay respect to those, but in some sense, to also help the nation heal from the war. And I will respond that Edmund Muskie, he did not even mention 1968 in his response. His response was, we have not healed since the Civil War and in the area of race. And then he went on to talk about that for the next 15 minutes. And then he said, and by the way, we almost lost an entire generation of Americans when 430,000 men died. The effect that this had on future generations of America, it was devastating.

DB (01:06:01):
I am beginning to fade.

SM (01:06:03):
Okay, I got, all right, maybe three more questions?

DB (01:06:07):
Well, go ahead.

SM (01:06:11):
See if I can cut this down. I guess maybe what I will do, instead of asking these specific questions, I will just mention some of the personalities of the period and just give you... Because you had strong feelings toward Mark Rudd and others. And I to usually end my interviews by as listing about 20, 25 names, people just give a quick response to them, in terms of that period. For the following people, just your thoughts on the following people mean to you. Tom Hayden?

DB (01:06:55):
A crooked man. Look at the film Argue in the World. There's interviews with-with Hayden there, you will see what I mean.

SM (01:07:05):
How about Jane Fonda?

DB (01:07:08):
Rather forlorn personality.

SM (01:07:11):
Rennie Davis.

DB (01:07:14):
No one will ever know that name again.

SM (01:07:17):
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

DB (01:07:21):
Two clowns.

SM (01:07:23):
Timothy Leary.

DB (01:07:27):
Worse than that. A man who would destroy himself.

SM (01:07:36):
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

DB (01:07:39):
Decent man, was unfairly roughed up by the Nixon administration.

SM (01:07:49):
Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.

DB (01:07:53):
Decent men, particularly McCarthy. McGovern, I support McGovern when he ran, because my colleague, Irving Kristol, supported Nixon, but both decent men, but not major figures.

SM (01:08:11):
How about John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy?

DB (01:08:17):
John Kennedy was a personal force, but never had sufficient weight of ideas. But we never had a chance to find out. Robert Kennedy, such a mixture of things. He worked for Nixon. One time was pretty much on the right and on the left. You never knew, in a sense, what the man was about. And he died too soon.

SM (01:08:50):
How about Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

DB (01:08:54):
Well, Nixon was a very clever man, very shrewd man in his way. Spiro Agnew was a complete crook.... way, could describe as a complete crook.

SM (01:09:04):
LBJ and Hubert Humphrey.

DB (01:09:08):
LBJ was a very good man. Could have been a great man, but was trapped by the Vietnam War. Hubert Humphrey was a very nice man, but not an intellectual. He wanted to be an intellectual, but never was. And that was his problem.

SM (01:09:28):
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

DB (01:09:31):
Well, Gerald Ford was a decent man and he played a decent role when he was in the White House. I think Jimmy Carter was very much underrated. And his work after he left office, and going around the world and such, been very important work.

SM (01:09:51):
How about George Bush Number 1 and Ronald Reagan.

DB (01:09:57):
George Bush Number 1 was a fairly good politician, and as a political person, played out a good role. Ronald Reagan, I have never understood, really have never understood, because he is a man who responds to cue cards. But he does is very well. I have never understood the adulation for Reagan or what achievements were supposed to have been. I think what he did do, in a way, was to take the country, which felt very guilty by the Vietnam War, and got the country to put it all aside for a while.

SM (01:10:45):
Well, Bill Clinton and George Bush the Second.

DB (01:10:50):
Clinton was a very good politician, very shrewd, very smart, but never wholly consistent. George Bush the Second, to me, was a cipher, a little cipher, and in many ways a very unfortunate president. Particularly by letting Cheney do so much behind the scenes.

SM (01:11:22):
Of course, President Obama and Dwight Eisenhower.

DB (01:11:26):
Well, I think Obama has great potential. His books of wonderful books, great sense of feeling, but he has not had that much of a chance, now, to really bring it out. Eisenhower was a man who was underrated. He was very good, very shrewd, but he was shrewd enough to appear not to be shrewd.

SM (01:11:52):
How about Harry Truman, because he was the very first president for the movers.

DB (01:11:58):
I would say Truman was, again, underappreciated. He was a very good president, most importantly, because like Nixon, he knew how to choose good people around him.

SM (01:12:10):
Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, people who stood out for the Women's Movement.

DB (01:12:20):
Gloria Steinem was a great publicity hound, and very shrewd at that. Bella Abzug, again, she was defeated by Pat Moynihan, and eclipsed by him.

SM (01:12:38):
Mm-hmm.

DB (01:12:41):
And who was the third one you mentioned?

SM (01:12:44):
Oh. It was Betty Freidan, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem.

DB (01:12:49):
Well, Betty Friedan was important because she was able to re-focus attention on the nature of the Women's Movement, and the Women's Movement's role. But, essentially, it was the ability to put forth an issue rather than anything else. Gloria Steinem always took issues. People forget that one time she worked for the CIA.

SM (01:13:15):
I did not know that.

DB (01:13:16):
Yeah.

SM (01:13:16):
Oh, my God.

DB (01:13:17):
She and Clay Felker. When the CIA was setting up movements to oppose communist fronts, she worked for the CIA at one time. And then, she married Mort Zuckerman. We could go to any lengths to see how weird this woman is.

SM (01:13:37):
How about Malcolm X and Dr King.

DB (01:13:43):
Malcolm X became important because King was killed. And his rhetoric was, for a while, very strong. But after a while people realized it was rhetoric. King had a strength of personality, but people forget, he was also plagiarist.

SM (01:14:08):
That is come out recently from-

DB (01:14:10):
Came out sometime ago.

SM (01:14:12):
Clayborne Carson, or...

DB (01:14:13):
Sometime ago. But that famous speech of his, it was ad hoc. "I have a dream."

SM (01:14:23):
He did use that in some of his sermons before, too. It was an ad hoc, but he had used that phrasing in some of his sermons.

DB (01:14:31):
No. He was very shrewd in terms of knowing when to put forth certain ideas and certain rhetoric. And he was able to take advantage of it.

SM (01:14:40):
During that period, you had the Big Four. And I do not think you have seen anybody since. The Big Four, which was James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Dr King. That was a powerful portion of this.

DB (01:14:51):
Well, I knew Farmer quite well. He was a good man, but never had real strength behind him. Wilkins is a very, very good man. Wilkins is a real intellectual among them, in a way. Who was the fourth?

SM (01:15:05):
Whitney Young, and Dr King. You already mentioned [inaudible].

DB (01:15:11):
Whitney Young was a good leader of NAACP, for groups for that kind, but, except for the last one, never played a national role. But Roy Wilkins, particularly in terms of Washington politics, played a much more important role.

SM (01:15:28):
How about Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson, because they were monumental people-people.

DB (01:15:33):
Well, I have never been a fan of boxing, so I cannot talk about Muhammad Ali. Jackie Robinson was an extremely good baseball player and deserved, in that sense, his fame.

SM (01:15:52):
And then, the Black Panthers. And I have to admit, because there is [inaudible].

DB (01:15:54):
The Black Panthers were a dreadful movement, in which the one-time Horowitz, was-was right wing, wrote about the Black Panthers. They were dreadful people in terms of people they killed and the people they tried to support, and such.

SM (01:16:20):
There is-

DB (01:16:20):
I think the Black Panthers did more to destroy the Black movement then almost anything else.

SM (01:16:26):
Yeah. I will mention, though, that there are six big personalities that stand out here. And of course, it is Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Etta Brown, and Stokely Carmichael. And Nate Hilliard is another one. Elaine Brown. They are big names.

DB (01:16:46):
Well, they are all names. Cleaver, however, as you know, went overseas, and then turned the other way. Went over to the right.

SM (01:16:54):
Right.

DB (01:16:57):
Bobby Seal. Well, one has to distinguish those people built up by the press and by the need for certain individuals to build up people like that, from their actual accomplishments.

SM (01:17:12):
Forget Mark Rudd, here. What did you think of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, because they were the weatherman?

DB (01:17:18):
Well, Dorhrn was a dreadful person, the way she, at one point, approved of the Manson killing. They stuck a fork in a woman. Oh, yeah. I think she is a dreadful person.

SM (01:17:41):
How about George Wallace?

DB (01:17:44):
Who?

SM (01:17:44):
George Wallace.

DB (01:17:46):
You mean from the south?

SM (01:17:47):
Yes.

DB (01:17:47):
Well-

SM (01:17:49):
He was in the elections there, a couple times.

DB (01:17:50):
He was a southern politician, and a bad one. And he was very dangerous for the country.

SM (01:17:56):
How about Barry Goldwater and William Buckley, these real strong conservatives.

DB (01:18:00):
Well, Goldwater, for his time, was a fairly good man. But then, other than the phrases that he used when he ran for President, had no real substance. Buckley was an incredibly shrewd man, and incredibly good at publicity, debate, and very effective. Had respect for Buckley.

SM (01:18:35):
And then, the last thing is just these terms or these events. What did Woodstock and the Summer of Love mean to you?

DB (01:18:46):
Again, these are media terms built up by attention by the media. And Woodstock, somebody gave a phrase. The Summer of Love, people would not even understand what it means anymore. One has to distinguish between media-built sensations and actual movements. And I do not think either Woodstock or so-called Summer of Love, the hate Asbury kind of thing-

SM (01:19:13):
Mm-hmm.

DB (01:19:15):
... are real movements. These were media events.

SM (01:19:18):
How about Watergate?

DB (01:19:25):
Watergate was an actuality, and proved how duplicitous Nixon and his camp could be.

SM (01:19:39):
The other thing I mentioned was just the term, counterculture. What does counterculture mean to you, and communes?

DB (01:19:45):
Nothing anymore.

SM (01:19:46):
Communes.

DB (01:19:48):
Nothing anymore.

SM (01:19:49):
A couple who have gone on to be fairly successful. Woodward and Bernstein. They are thought to have changed the way journalism was.

DB (01:19:58):
Yes. I think it did change, in a way, but more so again, as a media event than actuality. And best illustration, the Times never became a Woodward and Bernstein kind of paper, became a sober-grade paper, as it should be.

SM (01:20:23):
How about the Vietnam Veterans against the War?

DB (01:20:28):
No understanding of that.

SM (01:20:31):
The American Indian Movement?

DB (01:20:33):
Again, no understanding of it. I do not even know what it is. I know what the term is supposed to say, but I do not know what it means.

SM (01:20:41):
The Young Lords were the Latino version of the Black Panthers. They were big in Philadelphia.

DB (01:20:49):
Again, I have no sense of what all that is anymore.

SM (01:20:53):
And the National Organization for Women, as a group?

DB (01:20:56):
A what?

SM (01:20:57):
Now.

DB (01:20:58):
Again, no feeling for what it means.

SM (01:21:03):
And the Equal Rights Amendment. That failed, but there was strong attempts for it.

DB (01:21:13):
What rights do you want? When you say equal rights, there is no specification of, what rights do you want? Again, one has to distinguish between a mood, a movement, and actuality, and as all these things roll together.

SM (01:21:33):
And the year 1968, which is a traumatic year, which included Tet.

DB (01:21:40):
Well, again, I do not like such terms. I do not think they are useful, at all. I think they obscure more than they help.

SM (01:21:53):
This might be a general question, too, but you are a scholar, you are a writer, and you have written about periods, you wrote, in the 1950s, The End of Ideology. Do you think that a person like you, 50, 60 years from now, when most of the Boomers have gone on to higher Up, let us not even talk about what they are going to say about the Boomers? What are they going to say about young people and the people that grew up after World War II? What would the legacy be of that period, that many believe is a period of disruption and change?

DB (01:22:30):
Well, what's interesting to me is how quickly so much of that gets obscured now by the Muslim problem. Suddenly, the Muslim problem's everywhere. Paul Burner writes a book attacking a Muslim thinker, and the papers are full of arguments about that. Suddenly, that obscures everything else before. Beginning of the year 2000, the Times Literary Supplement published a list of the most important books of the last 50 years, or more. And two of my books were listed, The End of Ideology and The Cultural Context of Capitalism. Two books by Isaiah Berlin were listed. Two books by Belinda Orange. David Reisman and Ken Cavalharad had only one book listed.

SM (01:23:28):
Wow.

DB (01:23:28):
So, if you look at the Times Literary of Supplement, which afterward, was one of the most important intellectual journals, they list the most important books. But who would know that, Isaiah Berlin, Cavalharad, and myself, the only ones who had two books listed.

SM (01:23:42):
What an honor, though. What an honor. This book is a classic book. I have actually encouraged people to read it, right now, The End of Ideology. I think it is great.

DB (01:23:54):
Well-

SM (01:23:56):
I think it is got so much context. And when I was reading it, and when I read it a long time ago, because it was linked to a class, but now I am reading it, I can enjoy it more, and I can take a chapter, and I can take a page, and I can take an idea, and just stop and try to understand it more, rather than rushing it for a class, which I had to do when I was much younger. But it was very good. My very last question is this. And I thank you very much for spending this time with me. And I truly appreciate I it. It is an honor to meet you. The (19)50s, you were a journalist in the very beginning of your career, and then, you became a professor. But I was curious of what you thought about television and the television media. Because the young people that grew up after World War II, TV was what replaced the radio. And, of course we knew about the Vietnam War through television more than any other war. The question is, do you think that describe the (19)50s television, particularly when this generation was younger in the (19)50s, (19)60s, and (19)70s, really is exemplary of the times they were living in? Can I just put mention these? When you look at the (19)50s, now, this is a little boy. I am remembering now, me as a little boy watching TV near Ithaca, New York. I can remember seeing Victory at Sea, Hopalong Cassidy, watching Walt Disney, Edward R Murrow, I loved him, Arthur Godfrey, I know my parents loved him, and Art Linkletter's House Party, those things kind of stand out, and all the westerns, of course. Then, you get into the (19)60s, and the things that stand out more was TV shows like Laugh-In. You see more and more Black artists. Vietnam War's on TV, the Smothers Brothers seemed to be highly unusual, and All in the Family was something that stood up for the (19)70s. I guess, the question I am asking is this, how has TV influenced the young people of that grew up after World War II? And do you believe that the television and journalism as a whole in the 1950s hid some of the realities of the bad things that were happening in America, right up to the time President Kennedy was elected?

DB (01:26:28):
Let me put it this way. I think what TV did was to make us aware of a visual culture. Now, it is interesting that there was something before that, which was very visual, but never had that effect. And that was photography. Photography was about a hundred years old by the time of TV. But photography never had that much of an effect. There are great photographers like Steichen, and others, very great photographers. But it never had a mass effect the way TV did. And what TV did was to move, radio did not disappear, radio, in fact, flourished to when people used their cars more. Because when you drove your car, you put on the radio. But it made us predominantly a visual culture, and gave us a sense of the impact of things. Because what it did is allow us to visualize things. So, yes, it has it changed the way the Gutenberg press changed the nature of culture of its own time. Do you know who the Cuopisei were?

SM (01:27:40):
The who?

DB (01:27:40):
Cuopisei?

SM (01:27:40):
How do you spell that?

DB (01:27:52):
C-U-O-P-I-S-E-I.

SM (01:27:52):
No.

DB (01:27:58):
The Cuopisei were all the people thrown out of work by the Gutenberg Press. They were the copyists. Before the Gutenberg, people had books, but they were done by copyists. And Thomas Carlisle wrote a wonderful book about this. But the first technological unemployment were really the copyists, because people had books, but they were copies written out by people who were paid to copy a book. For the Gutenberg Press, you had moveable type. And therefore, you can do away with the copyist. In some way, TV had an impact the way the Gutenberg people did. And the contrast, I would say, is with photography, as you had to the copyists before with the Gutenberg Press. You had photography before, but never had that kind of impact the way television did.

SM (01:28:58):
One last thing I forgot to mention. What were your thoughts of Kent State and Jackson State?

DB (01:29:02):
About what?

SM (01:29:04):
Kent State and Jackson State in 1970. That was such a tragic event.

DB (01:29:08):
Well, these were horrible events, and rightly so. But there you see the impact was due to photography, the image of the young woman-

SM (01:29:24):
Yes.

DB (01:29:24):
... and the man being shot. There, it was not television, but photography, which became important.

SM (01:29:31):
Are there any final thoughts you have in terms of, I am writing about Boomers, and we have hit a lot of different areas here. And you have hit different angles that other people have not hit, in terms of ideas and what you have written, and so forth. But is there any-

DB (01:29:50):
I would hope never to have final thoughts. I would be able to go on and on and on and on.

SM (01:29:55):
Is there any question I did not ask that you thought I might ask?

DB (01:29:58):
No.

SM (01:29:58):
No.

DB (01:30:00):
You have been very comprehensive.

SM (01:30:02):
Well, thank you very much, professor. It is an honor, an honor indeed. And I am going to take-

(End of Interview)

2010-06-12

Stephen McKiernan

Daniel Bell, 1919-2011

90:13

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Sociologists; Authors; Editors; College teachers; Bell, Daniel, 1919-2011--Interviews

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