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SF: I want to go back in your academic career just a bit, and ask a little bit about your classic study, Social Solidarity, which became the, a classic and still is used today. How did, how did you come to that topic for your thesis? How did that develop?

FM: Steiner was instrumental in getting me into it. When I started sociology, I went into it because -- well, let me back off a bit, and make a short story long. [Laughs] From the time I was a kid, I became interested in literature and my father, who was a furniture dealer, would go to the second hand furniture sales and pick up furniture to sell at his shop. But among other things that would turn up at these auctions where he bought his second hand furniture, were library books and phonograph records, things like this. So he brought home records of Caruso and there was a famous singer named McCormick, John McCormick and the Beethoven symphonies and what not. So I got to learn a little bit about those things through the records he brought home. He brought -- he brought home a set of, of -- oh God, a short story, I just had it on my mind, but forget about that. And then he purchased for our family, a set of twenty volume Book of Knowledge. Now the Book of Knowledge was for me, in that time the source of all great knowledge and I became interested. I had a kind of an encyclopedic interest anyway. So I read these things night after night. My mother would find me reading under the bed covers. [Laughs] And she would tell me you're going to wreck your eyes doing that, and so on. But that's how, what I became interested in. And I became very much interested in literature, thereby. Poetry for example, Wordsworth and all the others who turned up in the Book of Knowledge fascinated me. And the Shakespeare and the writers all fascinated me. And so then, oh God, this book, set of short stories by the American short story writer. God, I can't think of his name. (Narr. note: Referring to O. Henry) My father brought home this set of fifteen beautifully bound books that he picked up at the auction. And by God, I read those things night after night because they fascinated me. They were beautiful English, American English style writing. And I learned about construction of short stories. I learned about the writing style and so on. And therefore, I became interested in the idea of becoming a literary person. And my father said no. For Japanese Americans, there is no possibility of your getting anywhere in that kind of field. You've got to have something more practical that you can sell. Whereas, literary skills is not the kind of thing that will get you anywhere in this world. I don't know whether he was right or wrong, but he, his notion was that you do have to have some kind of skill you can sell, whereas, you know, literary skill is not that kind of skill.

So I tried engineering the first two years I was in college and I was really not a very good engineering student. I do pretty well in certain kinds of areas of engineering. But in other kinds, in other areas, I'm not very good in physical sciences, or relatively not good. So by the end of the second year -- incidentally my father died when I was already in high school, before I got to college. By the end of my second year in college, I was in college in 1930, '31, '32. This is the beginning of the depth of the Depression. I have to drop out of school after two years of engineering. So I, when I go back to college after this period of earning a living for myself in order to continue college, by that time, I decide that engineering is really not for me. I've got to get back to something that is closer to my, the heart of my interest. And although I concluded that my father probably was right, that English literature for example, is not a salable product, nevertheless, sociology was a topic, or social sciences was a topic that interested me and I thought, I'm going to pursue what I'm interested in. And once having gotten into this department of sociology and taking a few courses, I became acquainted with Steiner and he encouraged me. But again, interestingly, Steiner says to me. And this is entirely independently of my father. He says, you'd better take some foreign business courses, foreign trade or something like this, as a back up. He didn't want me to count on sociology as a thing I could make a lifetime career. So in the early 1930s, why, even well, Steiner, who was an intelligent and wise man, felt that you know, a Nisei should not count on being able to make a name for himself, except in something like foreign trade where possibly my Japanese background would be an advantage, rather than a handicap.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.