Body Parts

Not Income Inequality But Slowing Lifetime Mobility Was Behind The Housing Crisis

Some economists and observers have argued that the Great Recession was caused by income inequality, that is, by the great earnings gap between high and middle-low earners. Interesting, but that does not accurately address how homeowners calculate their homeowning capability. Homeowning capability is relevant to the explanation of the crisis, of course, because it was Americans' collective economic inability to sustain the increase in home prices that led to the collapse. Households evaluate their homeowning prospects, not in terms of the income of the moment they would buy, but in terms of long-term (i.e., decades) increase of their income (e.g., lifetime earnings, lifetime savings). First, prospective homeowners plan savings for down payments; then they plan their budgets to accomodate their new home. They assume, given fixed rate mortgages, when they buy the home, that the percentage of income demanded by P&I&taxes will be at the highest. The percentage will decline over the years, as their income rises. They also plan future savings in terms of the difference between increasing income and increasing home equity. In other words, behind home ownership is the social-economic escalator. Economists should, empirically, look first to a slowing of the social-economic escalator as the precipitant cause of the housing crisis (halt in rising demand and housing prices, then increasing foreclosures). What happened in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s that broke the expectation of prospective homeowners and new homeowners that they could calculate home ownership in traditional terms of lifetime income and savings on the escalator of social-economic mobility? Did mobility slow down? I think it did, in the sense that some sectors in American society benefitted from globalization of the economy and the prosperity of specific industries, such as computing, while many other sectors declined, such as manufacturing and garment-fabrication and the small businesses that served them. The number of persons employed in these declining sectors declined, and fewer persons could enter them, thereby removing whole sectors of the economy from social-ecnomic mobility these industries had traditionally offered.

Update. September 3, 2010. Joel Kotkin argues that in the last generation, upward mobility has diminished in the world's largest cities--LA, New York, London, and so on. (H/T Instapundit)

September 7, 1983

[Peace and Reconciliation]

I recall clearly the occasion when I made my peace with California. While we [my wife, daughter, and I] were [living] at the Josephine Street house [in Berkeley], sometime in the summer of 1971, I was sitting one evening on the front porch, which looked to the West, toward San Francisco (although the view across the Bay could be glimpsed only from an upper storey window in the house).

I could feel a feeling of well-being rise within me, as I enjoyed the peace of the end of the day. I listened to unseen doves cooing their liquid call. Rather suddenly, my hatred of California shed off me, like cold water evaporating. I never again really regretted that I was in California, and I look forward to returning to Riverside.

As I articulated to myself, the reasons for this transformation were two.

The first was a realization that my dislike of California was less of a reaction to California than the perpetuation of a pattern. With the exception of my year in Pittsburgh, since I obtained self-consciousness, I had always wanted to be somewhere else, and assumed that the next place I would live, or the next school, or next job, would bring me happiness. In Plymouth, I had to get out. Durham and UNH I soon outgrew; Ithaca and Cornell were an awful experience; now (skipping over the wonderful year in Pittsburgh), I was unhappy in California.

Surely, I realized, most of this unhappiness came from a source within me, from a dysfunctional source. At one time, the unhappiness may have properly sprung from a realization of the inadequacy of where I lived and from my situation, but how--objectively--could that be true any longer?

Riverside gave me a good job, physical comfort, security, an opportunity to following my own interests, and a pleasant place to raise a family. Whatever else was wanted, I had to supply on my own.

I realized it was time [to] accept where I was and make my fulfillment there [here].

A second reason for my realization must have been due to my daughter. A_ was born in California, and I realized--though this too I had resisted--that California would seem as natural and "right" to her, as New England was to me, simply because of growing up in the place. An infant learns about the world as a series of "givens", and California would be as "given" to my daughter as New England was to me.

What better evidence did I need that the trouble with my reaction to California was in me, not in California?

I think I was also struck by a "moral" discontinuity. How could I hate a place, when I would be unable to point to the reasons for that hatred to my daughter, when she would undoubtedly, at least as an infant, like California? I did not want to be separated from my daughter by hating a place that she might love. What would I teach her but hate? I did not want to teach her this; I wanted to teach her to see and feel positive qualities, and to be positively motivated, not negatively.

If I was to raise a child to have a positive, healthy outlook, I needed to have one myself. The rest was easy. Once I had these realizations, I swam deeply into life in California.

Was this an instance of self-transcendence due to self-realization? Probably not. The body and soul, in the natural interests of health, accommodated to California, and my mind followed.

I wrote a poem about this evening of healing. A haiku? I'm not sure I remember, but a brief poem, anyway.

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

December 24, 1983

I cannot recall many details of the day that A_ [my daughter] was born [in 1970]. I can't recall how many trips we [S_, my wife, and I] made to the hospital; if we made more than the trip immediately prior. But it does seem to me that S_ was finally admitted about noon or early afternoon, about 2 cm. dilated. We were placed in a private labor room, from which we could see other women pass to the delivery room.

S_ was excited, but time and the labor were slow for her. We used LaMaze [Lamaze] technique--I coached her breathing as contractions came and went. As the contractions intensified, S_'s ability to tolerate the pain decreased and several times she requested from the nurses a shot to relieve the pain, which she was denied, of course, since any medication would have affected the baby.

As the afternoon stretched out (and as S_ didn't stretch out!), I passed the quiet intervals by reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather, a gynecological novel for a gynecological occasion. I can't recall my emotions. I think I was detached from S_'s efforts and pain, and I didn't have much fear about the proceeding.*

In late afternoon, the obstetrician on duty decided to move S_ to the delivery room. I requested the privilege of accompanying her, explaining that we had done the LaMaze training together. But I was denied.

I believe that I remained in the delivery room [labor room?]--although I may have gone to some sort of waiting room. S_ was in delivery for four hours. A nurse told me at some point, that her contractions had stopped, and that she was given a shot (of what?) to induce and strengthen them. She was also given an intravenous dosage of (glucose?).

Eventually, A_ was born. It was late in the evening, but before midnight, so my daughter was born on my birthday anniversary!

I was told later, by S_ (or by a nurse?) that A_ had to be delivered by forceps, and after she was born, the delivering ob. had difficulty getting her to breath. He spanked her bottom, but she wouldn't cry and take in a gasp her first breath. Finally, by slapping her feet with an instrument, she was stimulated to breath. But it required nearly a minute. I wondered if she might have suffered any brain damage from oxygen starvation, though I don't think this thought ever occurred to me again after that day.

S_ was wheeled out of delivery on a delivery cart. She was lying prone and looked exhausted. A_ was lying across her chest. The nurse pushing the cart told me I had a daughter. She said, as S_ quietly lay and rested, "Isn't she beautiful!"

Actually, I didn't think so. A_ was still covered with blood, and her eyes were filmed with the antibiotic put on them to prevent infection. My daughter appeared to me to be a small, hairy, red, little baby of no distinctive beauty.

As I stood by the cart, outside the delivery room, I was suddenly overcome by all the anxiety and fears I had apparently repressed in the preceding hours.

Blood rapidly drained from my head and I began to faint. As I started to sink beside the cart, the nurse told me to sit down and put my head down. This I did, and after 30 seconds or so, blood returned and the faint passed.

After a minute or two more, the nurse indicated that S_ and the baby should be moved to their room. The cart with mother and child was wheeled down the (gray green?) hallway.

I took S_'s labor kit and left the hospital. I remember the drive home, late at night; I was hungry, tired, and strangely detached from the events. I was excited and I was not excited. I was satisfied, but not relieved.

I recall lying awake, briefly on the bed in our bedroom in the apartment. I don't recall what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all.

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[* The recollection of detachment strikes me now as curious. I hypothesize that my state of detachment much have been the result of Kaiser Permanente's policies regarding participation of husbands in the births of their children.  We were compelled to be observers, rather than participants, which would have produced the sense of being detached from my wife and her ordeal.]

September 5, 1983

[Screwed Up Resistance]

So: resist Southern California I did, that first year in Riverside. Were Riverside's hills bare of deciduous forests? Yes--so I thought they were ugly and mean. Were the hills brown soil, rather than gray with exposed granite? Yes, so I thought brown was ugly. Did the hillsides have trails wandering up and down them?--Yes, so I wrote a poem comparing the trails to lacing on motorcycle boots.

So: resist I did. Was Riverside, and all of Southern California, irrigated, and did impulse "rainbird" sprinklers turn the desert into a carpet of green? Of course--so I thought irrigation sprinklers were "mechanical" and ugly, and consequently the very lifeblood of Southern California was dead.

I tirelessly devoted emotional effort to this conscious resistance; I argued constantly with myself, silently and privately in my head, that Southern California could not be beautiful, that somehow the experience of New Hampshire with which I grew up exhausted all that could be known about scenic beauty.

Lest I waiver momentarily in my determination to see Riverside and Southern California as the epitome of ugliness, I kept momentos of New Hampshire: S_ and I subscribed to the Plymouth Record and Yankee magazine, and I hung a photograph of the Presidential Range in New Hampshire on my office wall. I carried in my pocket billfold a plastic-covered snapshot of the same Presidentials, a snapshot I had taken in 1956 or 1957 from the Christmas Cottage in Jefferson and carried in my wallet ever since. On the back of the color snapshot I had written, words to the effect, "Mt Washington from the Christmas Cottage, where I belong." I carried this photo until my second or third year in California.

I mounted a screwed-up logical campaign against Southern California, which consisted of the following strategies:

1. I conveniently forgot everything unfortunate and gray about New England--including the reasons why I had worked so ferociously to get out; I ignored and pushed away everything lovely, colorful, and vital about Riverside and Southern California.

2. I continually compared the worst features of Southern California with the best features of New England.

3. I carefully maintained my ignorance about Southern California, while simultaneously learning more about New England.

4. I carefully avoided making friends in the community of Riverside, where I would have met persons happy with their lives here; and cultivated friendships among new academics at UCR, who, like me, were transplanted from the East and would not argue against my anti-Southern California campaign.

Thereby did I manage--in my first year in Riverside--to become a mean-spirited, resentful, ungrateful, and nay-saying opponent of the life I had chosen and the region I had chosen to live in.

This campaign of vicious hatred of Southern California and self-torture reached a peak--and at the same time suddenly ended--in Berkeley in the summer of 1971, not in Riverside, ironically.

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

August 27, 1983

[A New World]

To continue this recitation of changes:

3. Opportunity: California provides opportunity to do and be most anything. The act merely of moving to Southern California breaks enough ties and interrupts enough habits to permit new opportunity to be seen and seized. And Southern California offers the diverse opportunities offered by any large and growing metropolis any time in history: a lot of mobility of persons and institutions, great movement of money, continued circulation of news, of rumors, of gossip. To these traditional virtues of a city, Southern California adds its relaxed and tolerant life-style, a life-style encouraged, if not entirely sustained, by a pleasant climate that permits comfortable and cheap living, and a diversified topography that permits anyone to escape the constraints of one kind of community or setting and select one more to taste. In a word, opportunity in a setting of wealth and freedom.

The structural freedom and wealth of Southern California is so great that it enables the sprawling metropolis to contain within it something that would seem paradoxically contradictory to this freedom and opportunity: a vital and vigorous middle class culture centered around family values. Perhaps not so paradoxical, since this stalwart middle class provides an engine of striving that drives the economy of the region, and a sturdy foil of morality that permits diversity to be defined by difference.

This was a setting of opportunity greatly unlike any I had ever lived in. Plymouth--Ithaca--Pittsburgh were all different, but similar in the [their] tight limitations.  Opportunity came primarily through escape and leaving. Even Pittsburgh, which I loved, was a city in decline in a region that was stagnant.

The true opportunity, different in scale and quality, provided by this region, threw into different perspective whatever opportunities had been offered by other areas I had lived in.

In particular, it became quite clear to me that one of the outstanding characteristics of New England was a state of mind that: (1) makes a virtue of necessity. This characteristic occurs not so much because the region is moralistic, but because it wishes to disguise necessity. For instance: poverty. New England is one of the poorest areas of the nation. But this poverty is treated as a superior moral virtue by those who suffer it. So much so, that a few years ago a group in Providence, Rhode Island started a "voluntary poverty" movement, asserting ideologically that poverty was better, permitted better human relationships, and so on. These were not persons who gave up wealth they owned, and assumed the monastic vows of poverty; they were persons who had no wealth to begin with.

This "voluntary poverty" amounted to no more than refusing to look a fact in the face.

And this aversion from the fact is precisely the sort of attitude not characteristic of Southern California.

Southern California's willingness, indeed eagerness, to "look a fact in the face," is not due to some superior morality in the region. It is due to the presence of widespread opportunity to change the fact. Indeed, there is an empiricism, a quest for the hard fact (here in tinsel town) precisely because true change is change of the factual situation. So one needs to "know the facts" in order to take advantage of opportunity and transform a situation.

2. What's good for you is bad for me. This maxim derives from an economy and culture that is so limited in true opportunity that when any one actually does obtain something good in life, it removes that possibility for everyone else. When there is room for only one corner drugstore, that opportunity taken, no one else has it.

This condition leads to resentment of other's achievement.

In contrast, achievement in the L.A. region is in a "supply-side" situation, to use the capitalism analogy. One person's achievement and seizing of opportunity creates more opportunities for achievement for everyone else. This leads to the attitude, "If they can do it, so can I," and to admiration and encouragement of the achievement of other persons.

In turn, this attitude leads to generosity, or at least to a generous view of change and the achievement of others. And certainly the people of Southern California are generous in this way. New England, by opposites, has evolved to a crabbed and ungenerous, even resentful, morality.

Southern California's respect and generous attitude toward achievement and opportunity has been reinforced by the poverty of its natural resources and its marginal geographical location (at least until WWII). Without any natural resources--no minerals, not even water--whatever "opportunity" has been built here by imagination out of nothing. Opportunity has not been created by exploitation of natural resources, as in most of the U.S., or by exploitation of human resources, as in the slave South.

(The exception to this, sadly, is the exploitation of migrant labor in agriculture, which stands as an exception to how Californians have "done it," as well as a regional shame.)

Southern Californians have invented industries that didn't previously exist in order to keep their region alive--movies and airplanes are the two great examples.

This points to one of the great differences between Northern and Southern California in that Northern California was built on the exploitation of two great natural resources--gold and lumber.

Southern California's peculiar economic and cultural situation led therefore to utilization and respect for--ironically--imaginativeness.

"Ironically" because Southern California is so empirical. But opportunity and self-generative achievement are the conditions that unite apparently antithetical qualities, empiricism and imagination.

(Is this musing really derived from Carey McWilliams Island Upon the Land?)

As it turns out, these qualities of achievement and opportunity-making reinforce a middle-class bourgeois morality and culture, thus the growth and wealth of the region reinforced a bourgeois culture, whereas in many urban societies, the long-term growth of the city seemed to undo and unravel this stalwart culture.

In turn this middle-class culture provides the institutional basis for an achieving society, by fostering discipline, thrift, etc., in raising of children.

Thus a fortunate cycle has been created in Southern California that has enlarged opportunity, fostered a respectful and generous morality, and reinforced the institutions that foster individuals of the type needed to create opportunity.

In the end, therefore, Southern California opportunity was symptomatic of a state of society, economy, and culture unlike any I had ever lived in before. And one whose qualitative difference I found absolutely congenial.

As a consequence, I did things and grew in ways I could not have expected before I came out here.

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

August 26, 1983

[All That Is Gray Is Not]

It is interesting to me, now, to reflect upon the ways in which California changed me, or otherwise influenced me. These changes were both painful and--sometimes--wonderful. In general, these changes came from the vast explosion of unexpected experience brought upon me that California brought.

These changes may be, albeit inadequately, pointed to by several epigrams:

1. Life is always larger than words,

2. experience always surpasses judgment.

Or, somewhat differently,

3. Life is larger than morality.

These lessons came as a surprise to me. I think the first time I articulated them came in 1975 or 1976, when I wrote a poem about the Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Of course, it is entirely possible that I would have come to the realizations simply as part of the process of gaining maturity, no matter where I was.

But I think that if I had stayed in the East, my experience would have followed a sufficiently familiar enough pattern that I would have come more slowly to the recognition of the point of these epigrams.

The reason that I may well have come to these epigrammatic lessons regardless of the locale of my life, is that their opposite lesson strikes me as particularly adolescent.

The opposite lesson is the expectation that morality is larger than life, or that words can express--indeed, structure--life and experience.

I think of this expectation as adolescent, because it is derived from the adolescent experience of having many words--obtained from years of education--and not enough experience to fill them. I would imagine that the lives of most persons involve a growing, in which experience out-runs the verbal conceptualizations of adolescence, so that the experience of adolescence is succeeded by the experience of maturity. So I think that they would come to my epigrammatic lessons of maturity.

Whatever--California brought me to these lessons, not any other locale. And the re-shaping of experience, the veritable flooding of experience California provided, began the day I arrived in Riverside, the moment S_ and I peaked Cajun Pass and gazed upon the smog-blanketed Los Angeles basin.

And that was the day I resisted the lessons.

What features of California brought this experience to me:

1. dreams: all the dreams and fantasies I had, prior to coming to California, were set in New England. California was an unimaginable setting. Everyone, and me too, has dreams--we have no choice. And California imposed a new topography and setting upon my dreams--whether of success, love, children, horses, or whatever. Without my entirely consciously realizing it, not only the topography, but also the wish behind the dreams also changed.

My dreams shifted from wishes for static fulfillment at some future time to wishes for continuation of growth, openness, and opportunity.

California gave new dreams for old.

2. asethetics [aesthetics]: all my asethetic experience, and hence expectation about beauty generally, had been fashioned by growing up in New England and the east. The qualities of this asethetic may be summarized in the expectation that beauty, when found:

a. Would be "small" in scale

b. Would be "dense" in detail

c. Would be visually keyed to "green" colors

d. Would be "manageable"

California--which I found incredibly ugly when I arrived, because it violated these trivial asethetic canons--was just the opposite. California

a. is so immense in scale, compared to New England, or Europe, as to be a qualitatively difference topography;

b. is "empty" in detail,

c. is visually keyed to earth colors--"brown" and "reds",

d. cannot be "managed."

The asethetic experience of California can be summarized in another lesson: beauty must be taken on its own terms. California must be taken on its own terms.

I am truly appreciative to California for opening me to new modes of asethetic experience. I learned not to prejudge, to be open, to asethetic experience.

Or differently:

"All that is gray is not smog; it may just be an 'opaque marine layer'."

"Go with the flow." (referring to freeway traffic)

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

August 23, 1983

[Outside]

After we arrived in Riverside, we began to settle in. Unlike Pittsburgh, where we knew the L_s, who welcomed us to the city, in Riverside we knew no one, and no one stepped forward to welcome us. I was surprised that my arrival at athe University could make so little difference. I was not--that is, S_ and I were not welcomed by invitation to a dinner, or in any way a special welcome provided by members of my department. I was rather taken back by so being ignored. But it rapidly became clear that there was an "old boys" network at UCR, and that they had special persons whom they welcomed and incorporated into their circle, and ignored all others. I guess I must have immediately struck everyone as not being good material to become a good ole' boy, and hence I was at first left outside the department's old boy circle, then actively kept outside. It was clear to me within a few months, by what was said to me by "old boys" like E_ and G_ that I was not in the expected mold.

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

August 15, 1983

[Bumps After the Road]

I had never moved to any place so far away from where I lived that I was unable to visit, prior to the transfer of my residence and belongings, to scout out the new setting and find an apartment. So I approached the move to California with great methodicalness and thoroughness. I had never heard of Riverside before the AHA interview, so I wrote to the Chamber of Commerce for information, specifically requesting a city street map and list of apartments.

Other than the Chamber of Commerce brochure, I had only three other sources of information about Riverside. One: on Johnny Carson's late-night television show--which I almost never watched--in June 1970, he had Little Richard as a guest. Little Richard mentioned in conversation that he had visited his mother (grandmother?) in Riverside. So I knew that Riverside was associated with Little Richard.*

Two: A newspaper story about college graduation had a photostory about UCR, where a graduating woman wore a bikini to commencement and another student released a pig during the award ceremony (was this UCR, or Santa Cruz that had the pig episode?).

Three: A Time magazine article on the UC system referred to UCR as the dope-smoking, wife-swapping campus of the system. This is hilarious to contemplate. What kind of place were we moving to, I wondered; it seems a little kinky.

Of course, the greatest source of information about Riverside was my vivid imagination. I pored over the city map, trying to imagine what the place looked like, reading carefully all the symbols for parks, schools, shopping centers, and so on. The only images I could fit into these schematic blanks were those of places I had known--so naturally my image of Riverside, thus invented, was a replica of the Northeast. Without realizing it, prior to moving to California, I had carefully constructed a universe and predicted experience for Riverside. Of course, reality would be different--in fact, it turned out--greatly different.

Half out of intent, half out of inadvertence, I had built barriers to California, carrying a head filled with New England and the Northeast. Too full to allow new experiences in. These preconceptions and defenses were to prove the fundamental source of difficulty in adjusting to California. Though, I did not know this, either, until after a year of living there [here!].

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[* Oddly, in 2005, thirty-five years after I heard of Little Richard's connection to Riverside, a man who had been one of Little Richard's bodyguards and gofers moved into a house in our neighborhood. I got to know him in a casual way.]

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Oh California!

• Epiphany (August 19, 1982)
• Temptation (July 18, 1983)
• No Heating Blanket Needed (August 13, 1983)
• Bumps After the Road (August 15, 1983)
• Outside (August 23, 1983)
• All That Is Gray Is Not (August 26, 1983)
• A New World (August 27, 1983)
• Screwed-Up Resistance (September 5, 1983)
• Peace and Reconciliation (September 7, 1983)

August 2, 1983

[Culture As Politics]

I have never thought of myself as particularly political, and during my year at Pittsburgh my political consciousness neither increased nor decreased from previous years. I participated in a day long march from the University area to the Golden Triangle, along with many of the history department's faculty members and thousands of other persons. But the major political change for me was a change in the nature of my political consciousness. I had always thought of politics almost exclusively as political party activities, and--under the intellectual impact of the liberal Pitt faculty--I came to realize politics as a culture, of which party politics was a small component. I would not say that my understanding of this was complete; it was, at best, begun. I did not have the life-experience and contact with different cultures to realize what fully politics was. Nonetheless, S_ H_ and D_ M_ in particular, considerably widened my sense of how power was distributed in society. I recall many conversations about subcultures. D_ was interested in the cultures of laborers, and speculated analytically about creation of culture among miners at the mine face. These work-generated cultures would then manifest themselves in social activities and practice, as reference values, organization of the miners attitudes generally. Eventually, such cultures showed themselves in political partisan and voting behaviors.

I suppose that the best label for my own cluster of political values would be "democratic socialist;" more or less as defined by Michael Harrington, whose writings articulated pretty precisely my political sense in the late 1960s. I think I recall M_'s views accurately in his seeing socialism as growing organically out of work and ethnicity. I suppose that was a modified Marxism; at all events, I was powerfully impressed by this sort of political analysis. My own political values were reinforced, and my understand of history greatly deepened.

Later, much later, as I have begun to lecture about political history, I would come to understand that my concern about the basic importance of values in society and an individual's life was an internalization of the conservative reaction against liberalism [communism?] after WWII. I did not understand this in the 1960s, even though I realized that concern about values was a major part of left-liberal reaction against the war [against communism and fascism?] and in extending economic democracy to underprivileged groups. Kenneth Kenniston's two books on committed and uncommitted youth and the protests of the 1960s were avidly read by me when they came out and the concern about values was central to them.

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Politics Is A Window

• Earliest Political Memories (November 5, 1980)
• Distant Rumors of War (July 15, 1981)
• Left (August 2, 1982)
• Reject (August 5, 1982)
• Hesitant Activist (August 31, 1982)
• Student Rebellion (July 9, 1983)
• Culture As Politics (August 2, 1983)

July 30, 1983

Certain memories of Pittsburgh remain vivid in my memory. The most vivid is of my walk to work across Schenley Park. Frequently this walk of a half-hour was accompanied by a friend--often A_ L_, or V_ B_ H_, [or] R_ L_; and often it was by myself. I can recall clearly A_ waiting for me at the corner of the street on which she and J_ lived. In the winter, [she] bundled in layers of heavy clothes and sporting ear muffs against the cold. Pittsburgh did not have a lot of snow that winter, but I can recall our making tracks across a shallow fresh snow fall. I thought A_ was just adorable in her ear muffs.

Our walk took us along residential streets for several blocks. Some of the  homes--but not many--were single family detached houses. I recall one that set back on its lot about 70 feet, with a flawless and always green, manicured lawn. I was intrigued to know what variety of grass could be green all year long, and guessed the owners must have had a great deal of money to keep the lawn so conspicuously manicured. Than we cut across Schlenley Park, first crossing a portion of a country club and golf course, then walking a paved, pedestrian path through the park. The park was a lovely, heavily wooded hillside park, cut with deep ravines and crossed by carriage roads, and as I walked the route I took to the campus, I was above some of these ravines. I would explore them leisurely with my eyes and wonder about the persons whom I saw. I recall a jogger, whom I saw perhaps a dozen occasions. He wore a huge Afro-type hairstyle, though he did not appear black. The hair flared out around his head in a bright brown corona, so he looked formidable and fierce, like the M-G-M lion. Frequently, he jogged with a large dog, who also had--naturally, I presume--a similar spray of hair around its thick muzzled face. Once on warm summer afternoon, I glimpsed a couple, off in the woods, animatedly having intercourse, with half their clothes off. Seldom was the park heavily used. At the conclusion of the route, I entered the "Oakland" section of the city, with its cultural institutions--Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Library and Museum, the University of Pittsburgh, private membership clubs, the baseball stadium, the philharmonic hall, and so on. Then I passed by the Schleney Conservatory, crossed a bridge that spanned a deep ravine, and entered the vehicular bustle of the city near the Carnegie Library. After crossing several streets, I walked by the soldiers memorial with its large, sweeping lawn. My office was in an academic building diagonally across (on my route) the soldiers' memorial, so sometimes I would walk across the grass to shorten my route, despite the "No trespassing on the grass" signs. I could never understand why the city prohibited walking on this lovely expanse of grass, but it did, and twice I was requested to ease walking on it by caretakers. I was more curious than annoyed by this policy. I seldom failed to recall, as I passed this large plot of green, an advertisement I read in a national news magazine that stated that 100 sq/ft of green lawn provided enough oxygen to supply a family each day. So I would mentally calculate how many families were breathing off the lawn of the soldiers' memorial building.

The building in which the History Department was located was of no particular distinction, being only an office building, built of an unattractive yellowish stone, now gray with city soot. It was between two other fortress like buildings, and my office--on the 3rd (?) 4th (?) floor--looked across a delivery alley to a private club. I could look into the bar, and in late afternoon frequently watched the bar tender set up the bar, and watched deliveries be made through the alley to the kitchen. I was greatly impressed at daily delivery of fresh mushrooms by a special mushroom delivery truck.

Someone in the department told me that these large clubs, dating back to the 19th century, with their private dining rooms, had forestalled the establishment of good restaurants in the city.

I had the feeling--which must have been shared by millions of other persons over the past century in Pittsburgh--that I was on the outside, merely looking into the "real" city through alley windows.