Life in America
From Harvard to LSU
When I came to America in 1938, I had a part-time instructorship at Harvard. It had been secured through the offices especially of W. Y. (Bill) Elliot, Gottfried von Haberler, and Joseph von Schumpeter, with Arthur Holcombe, who was then chairman of the department, consenting to my appointment. This appointment, however, was strictly limited, and I still remember my first conversation with Holcombe. When I presented myself to him at Harvard, he told me with dry precision that Harvard was pleased to give me this opportunity for a year and that with the end of the year the opportunity was ended. The importance of the appointment was, in the first place, that by its means I could get the previously mentioned nonquota visa. Otherwise, I would have had to wait an indeterminate time until my turn came for an ordinary immigration visa. Second, of course, the start at Harvard was of the greatest value as a good address from which to look for a job elsewhere. During my first semester at Harvard I immediately commenced looking for a job. To that purpose, I wrote more than forty extensive letters to various universities and personalities making my desire for a job known over the country. The first immediate result was an appointment as instructor at Bennington College in Vermont for the spring term of 1939 [which involved commuting back and forth from Cambridge].
Bennington presented an entirely new experience to me, which at the time I could absorb only partially because my background knowledge of American society was still rather defective. Still, I understood that I did not want to stay in spite of a very tempting offer of an assistant professorship with a salary of $5,000 for the next year. My reason for rejecting the offer and looking for something else was the environment on the East Coast. In Bennington specifically I noticed the very strong leftist element, with a few outspoken Communists among the faculty and still more among the students. This environment was no more to my taste than the National Socialist environment that I just had left. More generally, I noticed that the institutions on the East Coast were overrun by refugees from Central Europe, and if I stayed in the East inevitably my status would be that of a member of the refugee group. That was not exactly to my taste either, because I had firmly decided that once I had been thrown out of Austria by the National Socialists I wanted to make the break complete and from now on be an American. This aim, however, I could hardly achieve if I was stigmatized as a member of a refugee group. Moreover, I wanted to become a political scientist. For that purpose I had to familiarize myself with American government through teaching it; and it was impossible for a foreigner to find a teaching position in American government at any of the major Eastern institutions.
So I accepted an offer from the University of Alabama. There I would come into an environment definitely free of refugees, so that adjustment and introduction to American society would at least not be externally handicapped from the beginning. Besides, I got my chance there to teach American government, and the department under the chairmanship of Roscoe Martin was more than sufficient to keep me busy for some time to come acquiring new knowledge concerning American institutions. The situation was poorly paid: I believe $2,500 for the year, roughly half of what Bennington had offered. But the general effect of adjusting myself to the new environment was indeed achieved thanks to the truly gracious reception by southerners who somewhat condescendingly enjoyed protecting an innocent from Europe. I especially want to remember Mildred Martin, the wife of the chairman, who formed a perfect friendship with my wife and helped us considerably in giving us all sorts of advice that prevented us from hurting feelings through untoward remarks.
During my two and one-half years as an assistant professor at Alabama I worked myself into American government, the Constitution, and even a certain amount of public administration. At the same time, I had to give a course on the history of political ideas. Since by then I was a member of the Southern Political Science Association and attended their meetings, some of my new colleagues became aware of my activities, and Professor Robert J. Harris, who at that time was chairman of the department at Louisiana State University, brought me to Louisiana [in 1942] as associate professor. I accepted gladly, because it improved our financial situation ever so slightly and certainly was also an improvement in environment.
That was still the time of the group who had organized the first Southern Review. There were, when I arrived, Robert B. Heilman and Cleanth Brooks in the Department of English, and Robert Penn Warren was still there for a year before he went to Minnesota. I also remember at least one occasion when I met Katherine Anne Porter at a party. This environment outside the Department of Government was of inestimable value, because I now had access to the interesting movement of literary criticism and gained the friendship of men who were authorities in English literature and language. I especially want to mention the help extended by Robert B. Heilman, who introduced me to certain secrets of the American history of literature and who was kind enough to help me with my difficulties in acquiring an idiomatic English style. I still remember as most important one occasion when he went through a manuscript of mine, of about twenty pages, and marked off every single idiomatic mistake, so that I had a good list of the mistakes that I had to improve generally. Heilman’s analysis, I must say, was the turning point in my understanding of English and helped me gradually to acquire a moderate mastery of the language.1
The friendship with Brooks and Heilman, furthermore, helped me to acquire some knowledge of the stratification in American English by social groups. When you come as a foreigner to America, you are of course swamped by the language that all sorts of people speak around you, some of them speaking correct English, some of them local idioms, some of them a vulgarian vocabulary with all sorts of mistakes. If you do your best to adapt yourself to your environment without having any critical knowledge of what level that environment belongs to, you can easily end up at the bottom of the vulgarian scale. Heilman and Brooks were of course very much aware of such social stratification of language and helped me confirm my suspicions with regard to language I heard in the environment.
The nature of the problem can be gathered from a conversation with Cleanth Brooks. Once, when crossing the campus, I met him deep in sorrow and thought, and I asked him what worried him. He told me he had to prepare a chapter on typical mistakes for a textbook on English style that he was re-editing with Robert Penn Warren, and that it was quite a chore to find typical mistakes. I was a bit surprised and innocently told him, “Well, it is very simple to find typical mistakes. Just take any education textbook and you will find half a dozen on every page.” He then explained to me that he could not use this method because educationists were far below the level of average literacy, and their mistakes could not be considered typical for an average English-speaking person. Instead, he was using sociology textbooks and sometimes had to read twenty pages of that stuff before running into a really good example. But even so, he had to worry because social scientists could not be considered to write typical English either but were below the average, though not as far below as educationists.
This is the type of stratification of which I had gradually to become aware in order to achieve a moderately tolerable English, free of ideological jargon and free of the idiosyncracies of the vulgarian levels in the academic community.
The center of my activities was of course in the Department of Government. I had to teach two sections of American government, so I achieved my goal of teaching American government for sixteen and, including the Alabama years, for twenty years. Of considerable help in my development of the understanding of American institutions was Robert J. Harris, who became a close friend. He was a first-rate connoisseur of the Supreme Court decisions and could explain to me a good number of things that otherwise would have escaped me for a long time. To the conversations with him I owe especially an understanding of the enormous importance of procedural law in the decisions of the Supreme Court. Besides American government, I had to teach courses in comparative government, at one time, even diplomatic history, and generally, throughout the years, as my main course, the “History of Political Ideas.”
1. Cf. Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944– 1984, ed. Charles R. Embry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). For additional details of Voegelin’s escape from Austria and arrival in America see Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), chap. 1. For Voegelin’s sixteen years at LSU see Monika Puhl, Eric Voegelin in Baton Rouge, Periagoge series (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004).