<Begin Segment 8>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

I wanted to go back to graduate school. I'd already applied at the University of Wisconsin, which was then a hot graduate history program, leftists largely, whether William Appleman Williams, who came by way of going to the naval academy at Annapolis and from a little town on the coast of Oregon, or the Jewish intellectuals from New York who came out to Wisconsin, Herbert Gutman and all these progressive historians that were there at that particular time. Well, Wisconsin history was a byword. So I wanted to go to Wisconsin. Or the other place I applied to was the University of California, Berkeley. I got accepted at both of them, but I got no money to go to either one of them. I went up to Berkeley, and the only affordable housing that I could find in Berkeley was essentially in a black ghetto. So the choice was pretty easy for me, as I wasn't going to leave my wife home alone in a ghetto during the day while I went off to graduate school seminars. And these were the days when wives weren't automatically thought to have to go out to work. I mean, she did go out to work after that, but not in Berkeley. So I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara. And I didn't have any money there, but I had contacts, and I knew I could get some financial assistance there, and I did.

I got a teaching assistantship right away, and I finished two years there at UC Santa Barbara, took my doctoral exams, and then I was off to England. My field of specialization was Anglo-American intellectual history. My mentor, Robert Kelley, had written a wonderful book called The Transatlantic Persuasion, which had to do with liberalism in the English-speaking world, and it covered Canada, Australia, the United States, and Great Britain. Kelley wanted me to write a dissertation on an important Fabian socialist named Graham Wallas, who wrote a book called The Great Society, and he was the mentor at Harvard for an American student who became a leading liberal thinker, Walter Lippmann. And right then, when I was in graduate school, President John Kennedy was shot and killed, and then Lyndon Johnson became president and brought in the so-called "Great Society," and he took that name from Graham Wallas's book. That would have been a great choice for a dissertation, but I didn't do that. My mentor was way more into political things, I was way more into literary things, cultural things like that, and so I didn't really want to do a strictly political dissertation. But I probably should have. In any event, I decided I was going to go teach in England, and then I would find a dissertation topic. I was originally going to assess the impact of the American public school on Britain. Because while the American public school was introduced in 1830, it wasn't until 1870 that Britain introduced free, mandatory public education. The British really did borrow directly from what Horace Mann had developed in the United States. There was a guy named W. E. Forster who spearheaded the Forster Bill of Education in 1870. So I was going to study that topic. But once I got to England, I wasn't really that interested in that topic either.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.