Fifth interview with Archibald Haller (July 2, 1997): Tapes 9-10

Archibald Haller (#507) Transcript BT: This is Barry Teicher of the Oral History Project. Today is July 2nd, 1997. I'm with Archie Haller. We're in the WARF building today. They're doing some construction at Goodnight Hall. So we've moved our location. We're going to start talking today, It turns out that Dr. Haller has spent 12 years in this -- in this building, excuse me, as sociology or rural sociology had been moved over here. Let's start out telling a little bit about the whole background, and you had some incidents regarding the student unrest that you wanted to relate as well. AH: Uh-huh. Well, that had, uh, well, things, I guess, are connected with each other in strange ways sometimes. But going to our move, directly to our move out here, when the bombing took place at Sterling Hall, there was a lack of space everywhere. We had research, our department rural sociology, was squeezed into a small amount of space for faculty in Ag Hall, and we had an overflow area over in King Hall, which was close by. And we had research operations there, and we just had, as of July 1st, we had just brought in two new professors, one of them from the University of Illinois, another one from Princeton. And they both had very large research operations with them, all kinds of equipment and so forth that they brought in because they brought 00:01:00 projects with them at the time, and, uh, then I was chair at the, of the department, had been since July 1st at that time. Excuse me. But and we were told that, uh, that we were going to have to give up our King Hall space because somebody else needed it as a consequence of these, uh, these rolling consequences of the bombing. So we were offered space out here in the WARF Building, but only after, what, January 15th of 1971 as I remember. It must have been then. Um, and what we did was split the department. We brought those two new professors out here. I would have had to split my research, or if I'd kept an office for research over in, in Ag Hall, in the first place, it would have been pretty tight there, and other people would have suffered if I had done that. Second place, I would have been split off from my research people, and I didn't want that. And, uh, so I, I came out here with David Featherman and Gene [Sommers?] who 00:02:00 were the faculty members then. Gene is still here. And, um, oh, when we brought our research people and whatnot out here, we had about half a floor here on the sixth floor. Well, and so we stayed here for a long time until, finally, the college had some more moves of departments here and there, and in particular, agricultural economics moved out of Ag Hall, and that gave us some space there, and the department moved back and came back together. But the other thing that I wanted to mention that doesn't appear anywhere in the, and I don't know that, well, a few people, obviously, know it, but I don't know any of the living people at any rate, who are aware of what I'm about to say. And that is that, um, a year before the bombing of Sterling Hall took place, I was in a conversation with one of our faculty members whose name was Gene Havens, and he told me something at that time that I found shocking. Now remember, this is a year before the bombing. One other thing about Gene, he had been a, um, lieutenant colonel in the ROTC at Iowa State or something like that as I remember. And, uh, and he had an obligation to be in the military during the Vietnam War. He didn't like that, but he finally went into it. And but when he came back, he seemed to be a changed 00:03:00 person completely. I had some other stories about Gene Havens and things that he told me, but I don't know whether I believe them or not. But this one, I believe because it was the, this would now, this particular event was a year before, as I recall, before the bombing took place, and Gene kind of breathlessly told me that, uh, he had been at a meeting of the crazies at that time. And the crazies were talking about bombing and burning the Land Tenure Center. Indeed, that had been tried once before. Somebody did throw -- and the Land Tenure Center at the time these things took place was in King Hall. They, somebody earlier had thrown firebombs inside of it, and, of course, it didn't happen that, uh, that, no serious damage happened at that time. So the idea of burning or, or bombing the Land Tenure Center was not a new one at the time that this conversation, uh, of Gene Havens took place. Well, now he was associated with the Land 00:04:00 Tenure Center, and, uh, and at any rate, in the crime that, what he said was, that in the meeting of, with these crazies, and I have no idea how many people were there. Maurice Sidlyn apparently was there and must have given a speech. Gene Havens was there, gave a speech. There must have been, my vague recollection is Gene said there were 100 or more crazies at the meeting. And that's, the term crazies is the term he used. I, now -- he told me that, uh, that they had, had to move to bomb the Land Tenure Center, but he decided to give up, get up and give a speech telling them not to bomb the Land Tenure Center, but rather to bomb Army Math. And, uh, I'm, I mentioned this to a couple of people within the last three or four years. I have never, I had not wanted to talk about it, uh, because, well, at the time, it could've been taken as something moderately idle, when it took only, it took a year before the, uh, Army Math was actually bombed. And it may be that, that his speech had nothing to do with it, even though he did say that he had told the crazies to do that. But, at any rate, this doesn't appear in any of the literature anywhere. I didn't do anything about 00:05:00 it because I couldn't see that it would have any legal consequences at all. And I only remembered it retrospect when the bombing actually took place a year later. BT: I bet you just -- AH: Oh, sure. But the bombing itself, add just a quick word, I awoke at what, something like 3:15, and we live about five miles or so from Sterling Hall. And, uh, I heard a boom, and woke up, and I thought, isn't that strange? It didn't look like it was going to storm tonight. And I went back to sleep, and about 6:00 in the morning, I got a frantic call from a wife of a, of a police officer, who was a neighbor, uh, saying, screaming over the telephone that they bombed Sterling Hall. And, of course, then, well, then things took off from there. And then we had our issues about reorganizing space and all kinds of things at that time. BT: Yeah, I think people 00:06:00 aren't quite aware, or they forget about the ramifications, like you said, almost the rolling effect that this had on just space alone within the University. AH: Uh-huh. BT: And we're talking damage control, we're talking about it at about 25 different levels, you know, from a PR level to trying to figure out where people are going to, you know, have their offices to -- AH: Right. BT: Tremendous consequences. AH: Yeah, I want to say one more thing about consequences, and that is that up until the bombing, the bulk of the students really didn't know who to believe. They tended to believe the, to believe the, um, the few radicals, who were pretty good orators among other things and probably pretty courageous people too, although, I'm sure some of them had their own games that they wanted to play. But and, and the country as a whole 00:07:00 was so unused to this kind of divisive situation, that a lot of official responses to, to, to rallies and things like that, were really overdone, or and we had events in -- such as in 1967, when the Dow Chemical riots took place. And we had other riots at about that time. But in other words, up until the bombing, the bulk of the students thought that these radical leaders, who were really relatively few, compared to all of them, all of the students, were Robin Hoods, uh, with no weapons and so forth, facing a brutal and, and very well armed establishment. Well, then when the bombing took place, immediately after that, a woman whose name I don't remember now if I ever knew, who was editor, as I recall, of The Cardinal, got on the radio, and she said, and, well, by the time she was on the radio, it was already known that this one fellow had been killed in the, in the bombing. And she got on the radio, and she said in the most callous way, this is war. Of course, people get killed in war, too bad. The students were appalled. 00:08:00 All over the nation, not just here in Madison, but all over the nation, the students who had taken the, the leadership among other young, the young leadership of the revolutionary movement as Robin Hoods suddenly saw them as the face of evil as well, so that they didn't, that didn't change their opinion of the establishment. It changed their opinion of the former Robin Hoods. And it killed the student movement, the student revolutionary movement all over the country. BT: Yeah, that was really the, the nail in the coffin, wasn't it? AH: Yeah. BT: The Sterling Hall thing. AH: Yes, it was for the nation as a whole. I don't, I suppose people have written this up, but I really haven't seen. It must be in magazines of various sorts. Well, at any rate, that's about what I wanted to say on that. Okay. Then you asked me -- BT: Well, one, one question, one question I wanted to ask, you said that the crazies were talking at that meeting about bombing the Land Tenure Center. Why did they choose that? Why did they say that? AH: Well, as I recall, the argument that was being made at that time, and I heard this in a meeting of the, of some of the people who were questioning the Land Tenure Center along with Land Tenure Center personnel, as I believe the director of the LTC was there at the time and other professors who were associated with it. And what they were saying was that the Land Tenure Center, for example, had more objective information on Bolivia than you could find in Bolivia itself. And, uh, and they were saying that they resented this, this inequality of information, and the fact that Bolivia, all of this information should have been in Bolivia instead of here in the United States in the Land Tenure Center. That was the reason that was given at the time. 00:09:00 It was probably more than that, and this goes back to something else. The Land Tenure Center was, I don't remember the exact funding of it, but it was authorized by Congress, as I recall. I was not here when that authorization took place. But at any rate, at, I think the funding was probably through the State Department at that time, and there was a lot of criticism of the State Department. May I switch to another one of the touchy period things of that period? BT: Sure can. AH: As you know, because we've talked about him before, one of the most brilliant students that, uh, that we ever had the pleasure of working with is Alejandro Portes. He was born in Cuba, came to the United States when he was 15, went through college, and then came here at age 20 as a beginning graduate student, and he wound up being, coming on as my research assistant, 00:10:00 um, and when he came here. Was a very bright fellow, he told me when he came here what he wanted to do for his Ph.D. thesis thinking four or five years ahead. He was the most knowledgeable young person I think I ever met about almost anything. At any rate, Alex said that when he was ready to do a Ph.D. thesis, he wanted to go to Chile, and he wanted to study the political and social attitudes and behaviors of people in what was called the [qiompas?], which were the, the slums of, that were growing up all over Latin America in major cities. And the qiompas was the name for those slums, shantytowns, in Santiago, Chile. And the reason he wanted to study, to do the studies in Chile was because Chile was the only place in the Americas where the, all parties were legal, so that it was, you could get what their statements or their voting behavior was and so forth, and you had the full spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left. Well, 00:11:00 when, as he went through his coursework and his research, he did absolutely brilliant work. The article that he and I and Bill Sewell published in 1969, which is based on an analysis that Alex and I had done on Bill's data and, uh, and done in, well, it was really done in 1966 or so and [word unclear], but published in journals a little bit later on. Well, anyway, that had a big impact on the literature. But Alex did things by himself. He entered in a theoretical debate with a British, a leading British psychometrician a the time and in the journals. And he did a project over in, uh, on his own, over in Milwaukee, which was, uh, made a big splash in the literature, all these while he was still a graduate student. Well, come time for his -- but and one of the things that happened was that amongst all of the a number of the Spanish American people from Columbia and Peru in particular, but mostly Columbia, who were, they weren't so sure they were really interested in sociology. They were much more interested in reading Marx in Spanish. And they also occupied the, the King Hall at that time. Well, they obviously got very jealous of him. And because he was doing well, and if you were Latin American, you were, and this, and you were supposed to hate statistics and hate, uh, serious research and so forth because you were going to change the world, and you don't change it by research. Well, he got a grant from MUCEA with Land Tenure, or support in the Land Tenure Center had an office in Santiago, Chile. So he went to Santiago for his Ph.D. thesis, and he did just that on it. While he was there, he, uh, somebody who was here in Madison in the King, in King Hall, was writing letters to the Maoist newspaper, and to the Soviet-aligning newspaper in Santiago attacking Alex's 00:12:00 work, and the, I have, somewhere I have copies of these, of the things that appeared in the newspapers there because he sent them to me. But the argument was that Alex was working for the Land Tenure Center. The Land Tenure Center and with the MUCEA grant, and the Land Center and MUCEA were funded by the State Department. The State Department was under the control of the CIA, and therefore, he was a CIA agent. And, well, if you break down the argument, that's exactly what it was. Well, he slept with a pistol under his, under his pillow for a while, and I never knew exactly why, but in general, it was because the students in Santiago were being, uh, incited by people in Madison to attack his work. The decision they finally made was to do all the interviewing for him, accept his money, and then burn the interviews. And but he got wind of it, and, uh, photoed all of the pages of his, of his interviews. BT: Oh, my goodness. AH: This was the first empirical study that was done by any foreigner in Chile after the Camelot Affair, and which caused a, well, some groups in the United States had, were looking at 00:13:00 revolutionary potential in Latin America, and they were funded by, I guess, federal money some way or other. I don't know how. But, uh, it caused a huge, the Camelot Affair, the studies of revolutionary potential, caused a big scandal in the country at that time, and then his study was one of, was the first one, I think after that and to be conducted by a foreigner. At any rate, uh, I have to tell a related story. There was one Donilo Salcedo, who had been a graduate student here, and he professed to be leftist. I guess he was. I don't know. I really don't pay too much attention to people's politics in the academic situation because that's not our business. Our business is to understand the politics but not to interfere in them. And but anyway, Donilo and I, Donilo was, if he was a leftist, was one of the few left of those periods. And now we're going back in the early '50s, who was one of the few who was a quantitatively sophisticated. He knew what numbers were all about. Well, he left here, and he and I were friends. He used to criticize everything around him, but he and I were friends, and I, I felt he was a good, honest, decent person. Well, after a 00:14:00 long set of things that took place one after the other, Donilo was back in Chile, at [Chilano?], and I think he, at the time that Alex was down there, he was dean of the social sciences in University of Chile, at any rate, a high administrative position. Donilo then wrote me a letter. And he said, what about this fellow Alejandro Portes? You tell me what you know about him. If he's on the level, if you say he's on the level, I'll back him. If you say he's not, well, we're going to let things happen. And, uh, and so I wrote him a long letter back, and I told him that what I know about Alex, about what I've just mentioned here to you, about his, what I knew about his history, and, of course, I'd never really probed his history. The only things he ever told me, in conversations, things come up, so you learn a little 00:15:00 bit. But I knew that his father had been superintendent of schools in Havana before Castro came in, and that that was the reason why his family had to leave. But more than that, I don't really know very much. Well, Donilo, uh, then did exactly what he said he would do. He backed Alex. And, uh, and without that backing, Donilo then was respected by the leftists because he was viewed as a leftist himself. He probably was one. Um, and he was also dean, or this relatively similar position. So when, when Donilo then backed Alex Portes's work, and then Alex took his own precautions too, uh, it went why. Now that research is still reverberating in the literature because what he, the things he discovered from those analyses, he just had a huge impact on thinking about, on, on the thinking of the theoreticians and the practical people about what life is like in the slums and what it is that slum people want out of life, how they got 00:16:00 there, what they hope to do, so they can break their ways through it. And, and before his research, the, the, uh, sociological, political science, and anthropological literature was essentially a bunch of mythology and impositions made by scholars who, who thought they knew what these people thought and behaved like, but in fact, didn't really know very much about them at all. Well, at any rate, as I said, Alex's work then and his work continues to be, to be just splendid. He's, uh, well, he's changing from, now, from chair of the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins over to Princeton at the moment. BT: Oh, my. AH: Well, those are the two little stories I wanted to tell you. BT: Now did he do, you said his research down there had such ramifications on the practical and the theoretical side. Did he do more or less the anthropological type of research that we talked about in previous interviews when he goes down there and observes as well as anthropological? AH: Oh, sure, oh, yeah. BT: So 00:17:00 and was that part of the unique, the fact that he was actually down there recording his observations, or what made it so unique -- AH: Well, his -- BT: -- his findings or his methodology or both? AH: Well, our group, myself, Alex, and some others, we really don't spend very much time talking about the informal interviews that we do, or we don't even write about those. What we write about are the formal things, like the sampling techniques, the questions that are asked on interview schedules, the way they are coded, and it just is very straightforward technical material. His work was very well informed by the kinds of, of informal observations and interviews that he had taken at all kinds of people. But you don't really know that in any direct way unless you really stop to think about it, and you wonder how it is that he could come up with the right questions. Well, I guess I would add one other thing. Before he conducted this 00:18:00 study, remember this fellow by 1970, when he, well, 1969, I guess, when he was doing his, uh, field research in Santiago, he was only 24 years old. Uh, and he went to the political leadership of every party in Santiago, um, there's a right, a middle, and a left, and told them what he was doing and got their okay to go ahead with the project. And, uh, and clearly, he, he did his, his homework in the qiompas and with other kinds of people, the elites and the, and the poor, and so forth. That's what we try to do, but we don't write it up at any ex -- we just don't write it up. BT: Well, that's the background. That's the subtext I guess is one way writers talk about that, yeah. AH: Right. BT: That's what they -- now you mentioned one thing, I just have to know how it ended up. You said that he heard it had been, someone had informed him that they were going to burn his, the interviews, the notes on the interviews, afterwards, did -- and then he made copies. Did they indeed burn the notes? AH: I don't remember. BT: Hmm. AH: I don't recall. I think not. I think he got 00:19:00 them out of, uh, no, I don't know. That doesn't, don't, I just don't know. BT: I was just, just a little [word unclear] I wanted to quote. AH: If he ever comes back here, ask him. BT: Okay. I will. We're back on tape. We were off tape and we got onto somehow Jorge Amado's book Shepherds of the Night. AH: Oh, well, and I wanted to mention that I, that book is, I think it ought to have some, they ought to be recognized by the social scientist. When he wrote that, the beliefs about how shantytowns were being established, coming into being and just appearing suddenly sometimes over fairly large tracts of land, in Lima, in Salvador, in Rio, in Santiago, Chile, and in other great cities, Bogotá, the beliefs about how, how those happened were a mystery to the social scientists. Oh, and a number of them were speculating about them, both Latin American social scientists [word unclear]. Well, Jorge Amado scooped all of them because he wrote a first-rate description in Shepherds of the Night about the -- the establishment, occupation, and later destruction of, of, uh, of one of these 00:20:00 shantytowns. And this was before any of the -- BT: Interesting, yeah. AH: -- the formal scientific literature came out on it. They eventually discovered that, uh, the process but it was exactly what he had described. BT: Interesting. Well, I always knew there was a reason I liked that book so much. AH: Oh, Jorge Amado is a wonderful writer. He, he's not, in my judgment, he's not the greatest writer of Brazil. The greatest writer of Brazil in my judgment is João Guimarães Rosa who wrote a book called Grande Sertão: Veredas, which is, Brazilians all say it's unreadable, but it's not unreadable. And it was translated with an awful title in English it's as good a translation as you can get, but the title is The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. But it's [word unclear] publishers. That's, that's a great book in the sense it's got these deep, deep western and mid-eastern themes that go through it. But it's, but it takes place in the Brazilian backcountry, and the people are all 00:21:00 illiterate. And, and it is a Faust story. The fellow who's the key figure in it believes he has a pact with the devil, which you never know. BT: Oh. AH: But at any rate, it's a good book. I, I think that he's the, uh, the greatest of their writers. I would have to say that, you may remember that, uh, I'd said that, in one of our meetings, that, that my friend Jose Israel Vargas who's now the minister of Science and Technology, he and I got to be friends because we were discussing a book. BT: Oh, really? AH: It was that book. BT: The one, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Oh, interesting. AH: Yeah, Grande Sertão: Veredas, yes. And then I had said that I thought that was a wonderful book, and then I made the comment I made two or three times to other people, that I have my little mental list about those that deserve A's, those that deserve B's, and so forth. And I thought, well, there are only a handful 00:22:00 of books among the ones I've read that I would call A's, and they include Tolstoy's War and Peace and The Brothers Dostoyevsky and one or two of Thomas Munn's thing. And I said, and I would include [words unclear] as an A too. And Vargas then started talking about, we were driving through the countryside, and at the time, and Vargas then started talking about, uh, about João Guimarães Rosa and he said [word unclear], but see, he'd read all the things. He'd read a lot that I hadn't read too because Vargas is not only a nuclear physicist and stateman, statesman, but also one of the few genuinely educated men I've ever met in my life. And but then he eventually said, oh, you know -- BT: We're going to turn now to your fellowships and consultancies. Um, you noted in the biographical sketch that you 00:23:00 gave me a couple months ago now, that you had been awarded Fulbright professorships in Brazil in '74, '79, '83, '87, '88, and '90. Let's talk for a few minutes about these, these Fulbrights, how you went about obtaining them, the value of them to your research, and anything else AH: Well, yeah, let me give the context again. I think I've given part of this. But when I arrived here, a Professor Kohl, but already been involved in Brazil research and what came to be a real Brazil program of the Department of Rural Sociology had actually been begun when Juan [word unclear] de Sosa came to Madison to study with Kohl back in 1944. And Juan rose to be a minister of state and some other things as time went on. But I had mentioned that we were working on what came later to be called status allocation or status attainment processes about working on American data. And we, Kohl had his graduate students here. Well, he, I was doing some talking with one of his graduate students because Kohl had asked me to advise the student because Kohl was too busy to do it, and, and when I listened to him, I became convinced that there were fast evolutionary changes going on in stratification in Brazil, that we didn't, our literature didn't make any allowance for. And the, I thought that well, the same things must be happening in the United States, but for some reason, we don't see them. And if they are indeed happening in the United States, that means that the status allocation processes that we are studying or were still unnamed at that time, are, are taking place with respect to a rapidly changing structure, and we don't even know how to think about it. We don't even know how to look at it. So I thought, well, one of the things I ought to do is to, is to go to Brazil sometime if I could do it, and, and observe changes in 00:24:00 stratification with, by talking to people and listening to people and by doing empirical research. And so after that, I left here, I would work with Sewell instead of going to Brazil, as you know. But then, then when time for sabbatical came on, I had two choices. One of them was, I was considering, and they would have led to very different kinds of careers, both of which I was really interested in. But I, but only one of which was feasible because they were just too, each one was too much to handle, was enough to handle by itself. One of them was to go to University of Michigan and work with Anatole Rappaport if he would permit it, and see if I could learn some things from his, uh, his line of mathematical analysis that could be applied to sociology. The other one was to, in my sabbatical, would be to go to Brazil and work on the stratification problem as changes in the, evolutionary changes in stratification. As it happened, I decided to, to 00:25:00 go for the Brazil possibility, and got in contact with Jean Gonzales and with Kohl. Kohl at that time was no longer a professor here. He was retired. And we, I was advised by them to apply for a Fulbright, and to go to the same university where Jean was technically a professor, although, he had never taught there because he was working for the Brazilian government in the Organization of American States in Washington instead. But also, it was the same place that Kohl had done his field research. And I proposed repeating parts of, of Kohl's research on exactly the same areas for the same sampling procedures and so forth that he had used, at least those parts of it that pertained to stratification so that we could measure some changes that had taken place between 1953, when he had gathered those, he and his students had gathered those data initially, and the time that I'd be there, which was 1962. Well, the Fulbright grant was granted, and, and so I did go there in 1962 and did the stratification research and worked with some very bright students and, and had lots of curious adventures. I'm going to recount one of them. BT: Yes, you're sitting there 00:26:00 smiling, so I was going to say, you've got to tell me why you're smiling. AH: This is, one of these days, I'm going to write this up. But I call this one bombing a Russian helicopter. The rural university where I was, was about 50 kilometers outside of Rio de Janeiro. At the time we were there, the relationships between Brazil and the Soviet Union were fairly hot, and Americans were pretty generally hated at the time. They're not now, and they haven't been for a long time. But, but this was a touchy, touchy period in Brazilian history, food riots and all kinds of things going on. The Russians then decided to have a, to hold a, a huge fair in Rio de Janeiro. And so the brought their fair over to Rio, to the city of Rio, which I never attended. My wife and the girls actually went to it, but I didn't, uh, get to it. I was working or something. But they, uh, they brought their military contingents with them and I don't know what all. In fact, they did fly out, one of their planes out to the rural university to brag about how they could, they could put pesticides, use planes to deposit pesticides on, on, on their crops and so forth. The Brazilians laughed at them. They said, well, ours are more advanced than theirs anyway. But, but while I was there, while the Russians were there, it turns out that my students in Michigan State, where I was professor at the time had decided to have a beer party. Now I didn't know anything about what was going on there. And they got a little bit drunk, and the university that I was in, the Rural University of Brazil as it was called then, was having strike after strike after strike. But my classes went on because they didn't count for credit for anybody. So, so I went ahead and taught. Well, these people back in East Lansing got together, and they decided to send a telegram to us and make a joke 00:27:00 with us. Oh, I didn't know anything about that, of course, but here one day, now how the telegrams at that time get to, to a place like the Rural University, in the first place, they were telegraphed to Rio, the city of Rio. Then they were telephoned to an operator about 30 miles out of Rio. And then they were telephoned to the Rural University. And then they came to, by the time they, this thing got to me, everybody in the university already knew about it. Now what it said, this was a telegram, not identified, it said, only address and so forth, and it said, s-c-a-p, the gang. I had no idea what, and addressed to me. I had no, the slightest idea what this was. But at the same time that this happened, the Russians, within a day or so, the Russians had sent a helicopter from Rio de Janeiro up to escarpment to the city of Petropolis. And on the way up there, it was bombed. BT: Oh, my. AH: And with this unintelligible telegram, from no site that we could identify, that any could, everybody thought that this was a CIA signal. BT: [words unclear]. AH: To, and it was somehow connected with bombing the Russian helicopter. Eventually, we found out that what had happened is that they said, these were graduate students. They didn't have any money except to spend on beer I guess. And, and they got together and when my wife had been writing to some of them or 00:28:00 also our friends, and, uh, and so they had tried to send a telegram calling me sacab, s-a-c-a-b. But, of course, we wouldn't have understood that either. But it didn't come out that way. It came out s-c-a-p, which is absolutely unintelligible. And later on, we found out what had happened, but -- BT: A little alcohol makes people do strange things sometimes. AH: Yeah, and you do see some, I'm always suspicious of coincidences myself, but this was a real one [Laughs.]. Anyway, one of these days, I have a bunch of stories I want to write up about adventures and trying to do research in Brazil. My wife says I should write, you know, she's Brazilian. She says I ought to write a book on, uh, those stories because there are so many of them. But that, that's the one that's most fun of all. BT: That's great. So we're going to talk about the other, that was the '62 fellowship. AH: Right. BT: Which I 00:29:00 didn't mention when I gave my little intro question. We still have '74, '79, '83, '87, '88, and '90. AH: Right. BT: And -- AH: Well, then, the, then a number of very, very bright Brazilians started coming up to Madison. I sent a couple of them to Madison because I thought they should work with Wilkening and Sewell because I thought they could, they were supposed to be trained in rural sociology. Now I thought, that's the best training they could possibly get anywhere. So I sent a couple of them up, but I, the university in the city of São Paulo also sent one or two up and another university in the state of Minas Gerais wanted to, so that a group of them were here. Then, as I mentioned earlier, in the summer of 1964, I was invited back here to teach and do research for the summer, and came to the conclusion that in all respects, Wisconsin was, had become much more powerful for the kinds of things I was interested in than there was anyplace else in the world. And in terms of the, the computer support, the theoretical understandings, the understandings of careful empirical analysis, the contacts with Brazil, the teaching of Portuguese, and not the least of that was very, very bright students and, from Brazil. Well, so I was major professor to some of these, and Wilkening was major professor of others. But we always worked on each other's committees after I came back here a year later, that is. Uh, and during, in 1966, when we were having meetings of the Rural Sociological Society in the American Sociological Association in Miami, Jose Pastori and Fernando Hosha and Elsio Serraiba and I got together, and we decided that we were, the four of us were going to do whatever we could do to support the development of a strong empirical 00:30:00 and effective, conceptually effective sociology in Brazil. And we made a real agreement with each other to do that. Then time went on, and 1964 was a, and '65 were really rough years in Brazil. And there was a changeover to a military government. The government was, that preceded it was a disaster too even though it was technically a democratic government. But then the military government came in, and they were really quite repressive and so forth. But by, and I had mentioned that in the late '60s, I had become concerned that these very people and also David Hanson, who was an American, had gone there, had gone to Rio Grande de Sul, were, were so occupied with just making a living that they couldn't use the knowledge that they had gained, and they couldn't possibly keep up with the changes in the field that were going on and going on very rapidly at the time. And so I had written a letter to somebody in the Ford Foundation, and the Ford Foundation indeed put up some competitive research money in their office in Rio de Janeiro, and these people, Jose Pastori, Elsio Serraiba, David 00:31:00 Hanson, all got research support. In 1970, Jose came up to Madison, and he said that he wanted, would like to have me join him on a research project on the occupational positions and income the managerial and managerial support personnel in São Paulo's factories. And by that time, I had become concerned that we didn't, those of us who were working on the stratification issues empirically didn't understand enough about money and power, and that was, I thought that was an opportunity to begin to think a little more systematically about such things and maybe learn how to feed that back into our regular research [word unclear]. So I said, sure. And so we did. And then in, what, I guess it was '74, we were finishing off the analyses, which were finally published, some of them, in 1975. And we were beginning new work. By that time, the Brazilian National Statistical Service had a system for sampling a whole nation, and 00:32:00 with probability samples and so forth. Well, Pastori, by that time, was on the faculty, not of sociology, because the, our sociologists are not accepted by Brazilian sociologists. But they're welcomed by departments of economics. BT: Yeah, well [words unclear] crazy. AH: Jose was in, professor of sociology in the Department of Economics and Administration, faculty of Economics and Administration by that time, and the arranged to have me come, they asked me if I would apply for a Fulbright. I did, and they supported it, and it happens that when, an in, a credible in-country research and teaching agency wants to support a particular candidate, the Fulbright Commission pays a lot of attention to it. Now that means, I think, the, well, I sat on the evaluation committees later on too, so I see how, I saw how they operated. I think what that means really is if you get several very able people who are competing for, thought they don't know it, are competing for the same Fulbright, that the stronger the support is from some local agent, agency, academic group, the more likely it is that that's the person who's going to get the Fulbright. So that, that really was with the, I 00:33:00 applied for it, and it was granted. And these same sorts of things happened later on too. And they were usually, the University of São Paulo was always involved in them after that, even, as I remember, one of them involved a lot of other places. But São Paulo was key to them, and Jose Pastori's position there was key to it too. And, of course, he and I, we worked on a number of things as years have gone by, and we still are working together. BT: Well, I don't, I don't know much about, that much about Fulbrights, and I was kind of surprised when I got your biographical sketch to see that you had been awarded, what, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Fulbrights. Is that a large number? I've never met anyone who's gotten more than like one or, two or three maybe. AH: Yeah, well, I think it's a large number, yeah. Sol Levine has had a large number too. I haven't counted them, but, but Sol is one of the 00:34:00 world's experts on Japanese industrial relations and industrial relations generally. And I know that he's had a group of them, both, I think to Japan, but the Australians like him very much too because they're finally discovering that they're not, they're in Asia and not in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But, but, and also, it's a little bit about how, how these are counted. This last three were really one application with three annual visits possible. BT: Oh, I see. AH: In fact, I postponed one of them so that there were three visits over one year. And it's kind of hard to explain that in -- BT: Right, the biographical. AH: Yeah, in a three-inch sentence. BT: Were you, um, is this a comment, the number you received as, does this reflect the Fulbright committee's interest in Latin America? Were there a fair amount going to Latin America? AH: Oh, not very, there were -- BT: Or South America? AH: There were some, but they, it's every place in the world, every 00:35:00 country in the world where the United States has an agreement to, to have Fulbright professors, and the, the countries that are most sought after are no surprise. They're Britain, France, Italy, Austria, Germany. And at least when I was on that committee later on, those are the ones that came up most in sociology. And Japan would come up a little bit, Russia a little bit, but not much. And, and there are usually over Latin America as a whole maybe nine of ten professorships that are open either for research or for teaching or both. So there's not, each year, there will be a few, a handful. BT: Have professorships, Fulbright professorships been cut back recently too? I know that there was talk of cutting back the student Fulbright awards. AH: Well, I haven't seen the legislation on it, but the, within the last three, four weeks, there was a vote taken in Congress, I think the last couple of weeks. And Senator Feingold apparently strongly supported the, the international activities including the, the Fulbright awards. The, the one of the people who, who is an official with the organization that does the evaluation of the Fulbright awards in Washington, the committee on international exchange of scholars, I guess it's called now, had sent e-mail to a number of people around the country asking that, that we write to the, to 00:36:00 our senators. And I wrote one to Russell Feingold, and then I got an e-mail back. The only thing I know about that, about the result was that, in the e-mail that I got back saying that they, that the committee had supported it handsomely. So but I don't know what that means in details. So I wrote a letter back to, to Feingold, which was sent out last week by fax, one of probably a lot of letters that he's getting, I hope, thanking him for his support and point out that these Fulbright grants have been absolutely essential for the Brazil program to the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. And so, and I, well, I hope they keep it going in the future when I'm not around, but we'll see about that. BT: Yeah, that sounds like [word unclear]. AH: I, I think that probably the funding is going to come out all right, but I don't know. BT: Yeah, for the little amount of money that goes into that 00:37:00 thing, talk about bang for your bucks. AH: Oh, yeah. BT: It's one of the greatest, uh, foreign ambassador programs, goodwill ambassadors that you could [word unclear], but we shall see. Let's turn for, now to you were a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in 1902. Let's just talk a little bit about how that came about. AH: [Laughs.]. BT: I mean, here you are in Brazil, Brazil, Brazil, Brazil, and now all of a sudden you're stuck in the middle of, uh, down-under land. AH: Well, Pastori and I decided we wanted to hold a meeting on social mobility research in São Paulo, and it was going to be a very small research meeting. We were thinking about people that, that we wanted to include in it, and then Brazilians, and we were going to include one American. And we didn't know who it would be. I'd had some correspondence with Jonathan Kelly, uh, at that time. And this, we're back in 1972-1973 now. And, uh, but I didn't know, I didn't know that I knew him personally. I had met him, in fact, but I wasn't aware of this. And Jonathan Kelly 00:38:00 is the one who was in Australia later on. But at any rate, our, one of our professors, David Featherman, who has really come to be quite an important figure in the field, had written an article in the ASR, and he did a kind of causal analysis, and he published it, but it didn't make much sense. It was, he did, everything he did was correct, but it still didn't make much sense to us when we looked at it. And then this fellow, Jonathan Kelly published a criticism of it, in which he did a correction on the numbers, which was an innovative idea for correcting the numbers. And lo and behold, the pattern was just beautiful. So both Pastori and I paid attention to this, and we thought, and we thought we'd better, we'd better keep our eyes on this -- we weren't talking with each other about Kelly. Independently, we were keeping our eyes on him. So when this idea of the meeting came up, over how to do social mobility 00:39:00 research in the future, we, we asked Kelly if he'd like to join us. By that time, he had, he, well, he finished his Ph.D. at Berkeley, and he did his undergraduate work at Cambridge University in England, and then he had worked at Columbia as a research assistant for one of the leading people, and then, and stratification research, and had found himself and us in the Department of Sociology, the Institute of Advanced Studies of Australian National University. Well, by this time he was, by the time we had the meeting in São Paulo, he was not there. He was just finished with his Ph.D. and was, I think, probably at Columbia at the time. But anyway, we asked Kelly if he would join our meeting, about half-dozen people or so, and for several days, we beat the area of social mobility research pretty heavily and did some research planning, which resulted in a whole flock of things later on. And Kelly made really fine contributions to that meeting and, and we decided we'd collaborate after that. So Kelly became part of our network in effect. The, then he and, would, and some of our research here in Madison, while he was still in the United States, he'd come up to Madison and write with us or analyze data and so forth. And so we did, much of our research, our empirical research on Brazil, collaborative with basically Pastori and me was either done in 00:40:00 Madison or done in the University of São Paulo. Where it really got complicated, we'd do at Madison because we had better equipment than São Paulo had. But a lot of it, they had pretty good equipment too, and a lot of it was done there. But, so, but that would bring, once in awhile, we would bring, uh, Kelly up here, or we'd bring Pastori up here, or I'd go down to Brazil, and so he became really pat of our network. And we're still working together. But then we were, this, by the late '70s, we were working on some research that was published later on, on, on the same kinds of stratification problems that we'd been digging away on for years and still dig on. But, uh, and they had, that university had what was called a visiting fellow, I think it was called, available, and -- BT: Yeah, visiting fellow, yeah. AH: And they asked me if I would apply for it, and I had, to go there and do research on Brazil. So I did. And I had a sabbatical coming up at that time, and so I took a six-month sabbatical from here in Madison and went out there, and we got some good work accomplished at that time. And so we're going to come back to that in a little bit, I know, but that's how I got out there. BT: Did Pastori go at all? Did he visit during your six months there? AH: That brings us to the next point. No, but I tried. Well, Kelly and I both, uh, tried to get things in motion to get Pastori out to the institute to, the Australian National University to work with us. And that connection, I became, and some other connections, I became acquainted with, uh, with the officialdom from Brazil. Canberra is a very small place. It's a capital city of a country. Its population is about the [word unclear] of the capital territory, is about the same as Dane County. And the population of the city is about the same as Madison. So and they have all these diplomats there, and this is this great university there. So that's about all there is there are diplomats and great university. So, so, uh, it's [word unclear] these 00:41:00 people then have all kinds of contact with each other because they don't have any chance of having contact with anybody else. And it's a couple hundred miles from, uh, from each of the main cities. So at any rate, so I made attempts to get Pastori, uh, out to Canberra. And so we were in contact with him, and now we move to another subject, which you were going to ask about, and that is decorations for the Brazilian government. Well, the during this same time, after I had become acquainted with, with the Brazilian ambassador, he was a really nice fellow, very, very bright too, and some other people connected with, either formally or informally, with the Brazilian embassy there, then I began seeing signs of being investigated by a government. Now I knew what those signs were because remember in the Navy, I'd been involved in, in very secret things, which were how radar -- BT: Radar, right [words unclear]. AH: -- worked, and radar was 00:42:00 terribly secret at the time. And I had been, even as a 17- and 18-year-old, I had been investigated twice by the FBI. And the reason I knew is because my mother would write letters to me telling me these people were out interviewing and they were interviewing these people, and that people, and these people, and the others. And so I began to see these funny signs of being interviewed, or being investigated by a government. I go, why in the world would anyone be investigating me? But the only possibilities are the United States, Brazil, the Australians, but what in the world is there about me that they would want to investigate? I can't imagine. And I went to the leading political scientist, who was there at the time. He's now in the Department of Sociology at 00:43:00 University of Texas, but I went to him because I wanted somebody to know about this. And I said, I told him, he thought it was ridiculous. He thought I was just out of my, paranoid or something like that. But, but he didn't know that I had some experience with such things. BT: Right. AH: And, uh, so anyway, then we're still in contact with Pastori trying to get Pastori over here, and, and then I went up to another