DAVlD RIESMAN
577
My point was that America was a very belligerent country - as the
Civil War suggested - and it wasn't a very good idea to get Americans
aroused in foreign combat because who knew what would happen then
within the country. And then I talked about the Civil War. I think what
drives me is, as this example illustrates, several things: one, a wide-angled
curiosity about this country. And two, a certain skepticism. Not cynicism
but skepticism.
When my wife Evey and I had a chance to go to Buffalo for my first
teaching job, my friends at Harvard Law School tried to discourage me.
They said, "Oh you'll be lost there. Maybe we can find something for
you here."
But we were just delighted with the thought of Buffalo. It was a
working-class city, unlike more middle-class Rochester. And we had
lived our lives primarily on the Atlantic seaboard, from Washington to
Mt. Desert Island in Maine. Buffalo was the "far west." So we tried there
to meet all sorts of people. Buffalo didn't have much of an upper class,
and we were immediately welcomed. It was in Buffalo that I met the fu–
ture co-author of
The Lonely Crowd,
Reuel Denney, who was a high
school teacher. But I can't emphasize enough that
The Lonely Crowd
was
not about all of America, just a segment of it, primarily what I have now
come to call "bi-coastal America," which is, by the way, the America that
is represented in the supposed diversity of the Clinton Administration.
Very few people from the Midwest and very few ethnic whites, other
than Jews.
DB:
In light of the fact that you were conducting your research for
The
Lonely Crowd
shortly after the Second World War, were you concerned at
all, perhaps in part because of the rise of European fascism and the Nazi
propaganda machine, that there was a growing trend toward "mass cul–
ture" which might threaten to glue people together into a mindless con–
formity?
DR:
I don't think so, but I think Fromm had that view, too strongly, too
snobbishly. I resisted looking down on Americans. The Europeans had a
view of the lower middle class which was entirely contemptuous. I was
put offby that. I didn't like it.
DB:
In
The Lonely Crowd
you wrote that the socialization process, or the
molding process, had shifted, in large part, from parents to peers and the
media, thereby creating the "other-directed" individual. What do you
consider the dominant socializers of people coming of age in the nineties?
Has it continued along that "other-directed" stream?
