Mendel Letters 94 — Graduate School at Rutgers
September 10, 2022
Dear Mendel,
When I became a serious political activist in my sophomore year of college I also became a serious student, really for the first time. It helped that I had completed the required classes at CCNY that reminded me of being in high school — super boring. Now I could concentrate on what I loved — history. I was convinced that study of working-class history would help New Left activists like me to build a social movement for a more just country and a better world. I was a good enough student in the end of my career at CCNY that I received one of the History Department awards at graduation.
Although I completed the teacher certification program, I was going to need a job while I worked to change the world, I applied for PHD programs in history at the University of Minnesota, Columbia, CUNY Graduate Center, and Rutgers. Minnesota turned me down, Columbia and CUNY accepted me without money, and Rutgers offered a position as a teaching assistant that came with tuition remission and a stipend. It wasn’t hard to pick Rutgers.
Rutgers had other advantages as well. It was only an hour from the city in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with regular bus and train service so I could continue doing community organizing in Brooklyn; it had dormitories so I could move out of my 5th floor walk-up Bronx apartment; I loved its open-stack library where I could walk through canyon walls of books and browse whenever I wanted to; and Gerald Grob, who researched and wrote about labor unions, was a teacher there. A funny side story, Grob’s mother lived in Co-Op City and knew you.
Graduate school had its plusses and minuses. The teaching assistantship required top grades, which meant a lot of stress because I could never relax and blow-off a class I didn’t like or take an incomplete. It also exposed me to some of the peculiarities of the profession. One semester I attended a professor’s lectures and then ran a seminar for a breakout group. I liked leading the seminars but soon realized that the professor, up on stage in a large auditorium, was just reading to the audience from books that he hadn’t assigned to the class.
At Rutgers, the social studies student teachers were supervised by history professors. Since I was the only certified secondary school teacher in the department including the professors and the graduate students, I was assigned to supervise the student teachers even though I still had never had an actual teaching job.
Socially, I didn’t really fit in. I was younger than the other students and came from a less sophisticated working-class family. When one professor invited us to his house for wine and cheese, he asked how I liked the “paté” which I thought tasted like pretty good chopped liver. Even vocabulary was a little strange. In class discussion, people used words I had only read but never heard spoken aloud. I never knew “epitome” (e-pit-o-me) and “epitome” (epi-tome) were the same word. Financial aid was also not fairly distributed. If you showed income like I did because I had to work, you got less money. People with “Daddy Scholarships” whose families were supporting them so they didn’t have to work, got larger amounts.
I did make two long-term friends who I am still in touch with. Norman was a new young professor in the History Department who like me was from the Bronx and CCNY. Norman was also a lefty and he worked hard to help me learn how to write professional-level papers and complete my doctoral dissertation on radical coal miners in the 1920s. Andor was a graduate student in my cohort who I appreciated for his careful analysis in classroom discussions and friendliness. Like me, Andor took forever writing his dissertation because he was involved in political organizing.
The best part of the doctoral program was going out into the field. Gerald Grob was no longer studying labor history, but he knew the United Mine Workers Union archives located in Washington DC and he helped me navigate them for my doctoral research. While Grob was my doctoral chair, Norman, whose field was leftwing politics in the 1940s and 1950s worked with me more closely. A major part of my research involved interviewing retired coal miners from Central Pennsylvania who were active in strikes in the 1920s. I will write more about them in another letter.
After my first two years at Rutgers I began to lose focus on doctoral work which is why it took me eleven years to finish the program. I was spending more time at the community center than on campus so I moved out of the dormitory and rented an apartment in Brooklyn with two friends. I was also working as a substitute teacher and eventually decided I liked being a teacher more than being a historian and graduate student. I was able to discipline myself to complete my doctoral written and oral exams, but after starting my dissertation research I put it aside for almost three years. I didn’t really go back to it until I got a full-time high school teaching job and had summers available to read, research, and write.
For three summers, 1979–1980–1981, when Heidi and Rachel went off to the community center’s summer camp, I turned their bedroom into my office. I covered their beds with plywood and laid all of my research notes and photocopies on the beds. I dropped Solomon off at childcare at 9 AM and picked him up at 5 PM and spent the rest of the summer days hacking away on my old IBM electric typewriter writing “stream-of-consciousness” rough drafts. Days before the girls returned, I packed everything away and moved the typewriter and chapter drafts into Judi and my bedroom. During the school year I would edit and retype the summer’s work. I finally finished and defended the dissertation in April 1982.
The May graduation ceremony was enthralling. You and mother came with Heidi, Rachel, Solomon, and Judi. After the ceremony we all went out to eat with Judi’s parents, Ed and Mae. Before dinner I made you and Ed understand that the dinner was my treat so we wouldn’t have any fight over the bill. The dinner was my thank you to everyone for their support in helping me complete the doctorate. Thanks again Dad.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
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