During old friend Terry Boswell’s time as chair of the Department of Sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, he came up with the notion that Annette and I might be invited to be Visiting Professors of Sociology for a semester, putting on hold their replacements for two permanent posts. Knowing Terry as we did, we suspected that this was a very personal initiative that might – or might not – have gained the wider approval of members of the department. But it was an opportunity not to be missed and we readily acquiesced. The semester was to be the first one in 1998. Paul Higgs willingly shouldered the extra burden of our M.Sc teaching while I was away, and in acknowledgement of his generosity we paid for him to come out to Atlanta for a brief sojourn. This was possible because I retained my position and remuneration at UCL while at the same time attracting an income from Emory (which was of course taxed appropriately). It was to be a learning experience in multiple ways. While Terry had made the trip possible, Dick Levinson had gone out of his way to find us somewhere to live adjacent to Emory’s splendid campus. Two lessons were absorbed from the outset. The first involved a complex procedure to settle our status as ‘resident aliens’ entitled to undertake temporary paid work in the US. I vividly recall reading a sign in the local office proscribing the shooting of people on the premises. Of more moment was an early meeting to clarify the extent of our medical coverage on Emory’s nominally excellent insurance. Another visiting academic asked: ‘What if I was to attend a conference in New York and was involved in a road accident, would I be covered?’ There was a hesitation before the spokesperson replied: ‘Well, you would be advised to ring the insurers in that eventuality.’ Best be cautious, Annette and I looked at each other and reminded outselves: there is no NHS here.
Doris Lessing and others have remarked that the British should see the USA through the eyes of an anthropologist and not fall for the presumption that because Americans speak the same language their society more or less mirrors ours. Stand back, open your eyes wide, take it all in and learn became our motto. I was delegated two courses on the main Emory campus and one on Emory’s outlying ‘junior’ campus at Oxford (where students whom it was thought would benefit from a phased and sheltered introduction to university life were admitted). My undergraduate course on the sociology of health and health care on the main campus was normally taught by Dick Levinson; and I was also invited to teach a Masters course on social and sociological theory. The undergraduate course at Oxford was also on the sociology of health and health care and I was to stand in for Mike McQuaide. Dick and Mike were both dauntingly good and well-evaluated teachers. Annette meanwhile was to teach a course on sociology and modern Britain on the main campus.
Unlike UK students at this time, most American students had long paid heavy fees to study and were accustomed to being ‘clients’ in pursuit of credentials. Moreover, Emory was a high-status, if not Ivy League, private university, and one attracting considerable financial support from locally based Coca Cola (whose historic factory we were to visit). I was told that when a bottle of Pepsi Cola was found in the fridge of one member of the Emory faculty, he was instantly sent home to reflect on his wrongdoing and to undertake a period of penance. I often pondered on Terry Boswell’s accommodation of all this as a Marxist sociologist. Another aspect of the teaching was the seriousness with which students’ evaluations of faculty were taken (and you didn’t want to have a teaching slot at 9am on Monday mornings). We were also each allocated a Teaching Assistant. Mine was the excellent Leslie Martin, who was to sit my graduate theory class, is now herself a university teacher, and with whom I’m still in contact. The prescribed tasks of TAs were to help with class preparations and to assist with marking assignments. I never quite got my head round this and suspect I asked too little of Leslie, but I have no regrets.
This was an opportunity to sample a different society, which is another way of reflecting on one’s own. I became very fond of the students I taught, undergraduates and postgraduates alike. One or two incidents stand out, however. The first involved an undergraduate who submitted several drafts of an assessed essay to me before eventually achieving a creditable ‘B+’. ‘Why didn’t I get an ‘A’’, she expostulated, ‘I followed all your advice.’ Rightly or wrongly, one couldn’t say: ‘Well, there is the matter of ability and aptitude.’ Another by chance also female, rang me up on the eve of our departure for the UK: ‘You’ve given me a ‘B+’ and if I don’t get an ‘A’ I will lose my funding for next year!’ ‘Sorry’, I was able to reply, ‘there’s nothing I can do. I’ve submitted the marks.’ What these two incidents did was send a message: in the absence of resolution and a degree of obstinate determination, grades awarded are sometimes only the opening salvo in a protracted process of bargaining. ‘I’ve paid good money for this course, and I expect/am entitled to an ‘A’’. American academics struggle to meet their students less than half-way. In later sketches we shall meet British academics beginning to be confronted with these same negotiations.
‘Political correctness’ was another feature of the Emory scenario, and another that was later to characterise British teaching in higher education. Annette was informed by one of her intake that she was ‘not comfortable’ discussing the ins and outs of racism in either British or American society. Annette’s response was along the lines of ‘tough, make an adjustment’, which I approved of then and do so now. We were to learn of one Emory faculty who had in an unguarded moment, and admittedly with extreme foolishness, let slip a phrase her parents had deployed, namely, ‘nigger in the woodpile’. She apologised and withdrew it immediately. Her retraction and apology proved insufficient. A black student lodged a formal complaint, and the upshot was that she was dismissed from her post. I found it difficult to understand how such a racially loaded phrase could have been uttered inside or outside of the classroom but wondered if the sacking was proportionate to this one-off offence for which a fulsome apology had been proffered. This, as with so much in the US, seemed to anticipate cultural mechanisms that were to come to characterise the UK in the twenty-first century, not least in the guise of debates around trans rights. On the other side of this issue of political correctness were two mildly disconcerting experiences. The first came when one female student wrote on her form evaluating my course: ‘nice buns’. Aged 49, I wasn’t sure whether to be chuffed, bemused or just plain surprised; settling on the latter, it struck me that no British student I had ever taught would have dreamt of submitting a written comment like that (and not merely because they held to different/better aesthetic criteria). The second episode was in similar vein but more alarming. The last one to leave the classroom, a female student who had previously invited me to eat with her at her parents’ restaurant in downtown Atlanta – an invitation I had politely and diplomatically declined – waited until her classmates had departed at the end of the seminar and, while maintaining eye contact, proceeded to lower her jeans to adjust her underwear; I clutched my papers and left at speed. Again, an episode almost inconceivable in the UK.
Mention should also be made to the phenomenon of the American café. Already committed to ‘café society’ and its bounty, of which more later, I found the innovative US versions a real eye-opener. They were plentiful in and around urban centres, as well as liberally scattered alongside interstate highways, but most appealingly they were often open late into evenings. Moreover, around university campuses like Emory, they were replete with people much like me, reading and writing by their bottomless coffees. In bookshops, cafés were relaxed loci, allowing student to take unpurchased books to consult while consuming food and drink. On numerous occasions, Annette and I drove our hired Buick – a choice of auto that amused Dick since it’s apparently associated with middle-aged conservatism – to the likes of Barnes & Noble to while away a couple of hours.
It was this same car that was to transport us across the USA and back, a round trip that ate up 5,500 miles and an eyebrow when we eventually returned the ‘unlimited mileage’ hire prior to departing for the UK. It was a journey that further educated us about the USA and warrants a few paragraphs here. The plan was to utilise the mid-term break to visit the Grand Canyon. We left after our classes at 2pm on Friday 4 March and set off on the I20 to Birmingham, though it rained in torrents and we saw little of Alabama. Four hundred or so miles out of Atlanta and we arrived at Memphis and rested in a cheap Day’s Inn motel ($35-40 per night in 1998). Known for its music, Memphis also hosts Elvis’ Gracelands, and we duly paid homage (excepting the awful ‘jungle room’, replete with remarkably hairy furniture, it was all quite elegant). Aiming for Oklahoma City, we set off again in a continuous downpour, finally stopping for the night 550 miles later in another Day’s Inn on the other side of Oklahoma City and well on the way to Amarillo.
We awoke to find ourselves in deep snow and a freezing wind; Amarillo was apparently cut off. Deciding to drive on regardless we saw only the occasional truck before, skirting Amarillo, we were held up by a truck blown onto its side by high winds. Texas proved as flat as expected and it was almost a relief to enter New Mexico. At Tucumcari I somehow managed to leave the car keys in a locked car while the engine was running; and it was now Sunday (8 March). Thanks to a phone call by a local hotel proprietor, we were rescued by a friendly blacksmith and extricated for $40. A second bout of foolishness overcame us when hours later we turned off for Santa Fe and our ‘gas’ needle went from empty to a red warning light. I pulled over by a restaurant to ask where the nearest gas station might be and, fortuitously, was informed it was 100 metres down the road behind a hedgerow and thus hidden from the road. Settled in Sante Fe for the night, we slept well before exploring this unique Spanish enclave, its environs inhabited by the Pueblo Indians from 600 AD until, for reasons unfathomed, they abandoned the area around 1400. The Spanish arrived in 1609-10 and developed it, bequeathing much of its surviving charm. Later in the day – Monday 9 March – we drove on into Arizona and on to our destination of Flagstaff, 80 miles south of the Grand Canyon, where we booked into a Best Western for two nights to explore. It was already in the backs of our minds to carry on driving west but no decision had been reached. The Grand Canyon, a huge, tiered set of rock faces unevenly carved by the Colorado River over a period of ten million years, didn’t disappoint. A first glimpse of the South Rim took our breath away, as indeed did the day’s excursions to a series of different vantage points; we gazed on until fatigue eventually overtook us. I’d driven 250 miles on my day off.
It was now Wednesday 11 March and we’d opted to drive on, traversing Arizona in burning sunshine and surrounded by giant cacti, some of them 15-20 feet high. Arizona eventually gave way to California and the cacti to brightly coloured exotic flowers and palm trees. For reasons that escape me now, we decided to drive through rather than to skirt Los Angeles. We hastened through Beverley Hills and Hollywood and joined the Santa Monica Highway, aiming at Santa Monica Pier, where we stopped at a Starbucks for coffee. The Pacific was lost in the early evening haze. Unsure how long it would take us to return to Atlanta, we opted to drive on another 100 miles to San Diego, risking running out of gas again when we hit a snarl-up exiting LA. Refuelling, we passed several miles of building sites, massive floodlit cranes transmuting an archetypically urban environment into a fairyland. We saw nothing, however, of the famous Long Beach as we sped through the darkness, reaching San Diego at 12.30am,
690 miles from Flagstaff. When we awoke, on Thursday 12 March, we found the Pacific as grey and uninviting at the Atlantic. But our stereotype of Californians was reinforced when a couple in their early 20s cycled past, male and female alike with flowing blond hair, and I overheard him saying to his companion: ‘Gee, your hair looks great blowing in the wind honey’; and she replied, gleefully but earnestly (and through perfect teeth): ‘Why thank you!’ We explored the cosmopolitan city briefly and I ate the best sandwich I’d ever tasted, but it was time to move on. California, in my imagination much like a desert in the Middle East, all sand dunes, gave way to Arizona and we were heading for Tucson.
If Tucson was not endearing, the prospect of stopping by Tombstone was irresistible. We entered this historic town close by the cemetery, the ‘Boothill Graveyard’, each incumbent with a story to relate: only two had died natural deaths, the remainder having been shot, killed by local apache indians, taken their own lives or, in one case, ‘hanged in error’. We lunched in the Grand Hotel in the main street, a venue frequented by the Earp brothers, visited the Old Bird Cage Theatre, the most notorious bordello in the country between 1881 and 1889 (the ‘bird cages’ being used by prostitutes servicing their punters and overlooking the gambling tables below). Recently reopened, this venue is much as it was when ‘Doc’ Holliday placed his bets and Wyatt Earp met his third wife in one of the cages). We avoided a staged re-run of the gunfight at Ok corral, although we scanned the site. Interestingly I was to read later that Wyatt Earp refereed a world boxing bout between Fitsimmons and Sharkey when in his late 40s, though he had to be disarmed of his Colt’s Navy revolver prior to the bout and, after disqualifying Fitsimmons for a low blow was accused to fixing the fight. Earp died in 1929.
Back on the road we were encumbered by an electric storm. The sky, alarmingly black ahead, was split by sheets of lightening that seemed to touch the ground. Tired after a mere 380 miles we came to a halt at El Paso. Anette’s research informed us that we could easily walk across the border into Mexico’s Juarez, and we decided on the spot to do so the next morning, even if it meant being a day late back to Emory. So on the morning of Saturday 14 March we crossed the Santa Fe bridge into Juarez, which we only later discovered is one of the world’s most dangerous cities. It was more than poor: its roads and pavements were pitted with jagged craters and its buildings in desperate ill-repair. Men hung around its central square. We haggled over an Aztec broach for Annette, sipped beers in the shade of a café and retreated across the border to our El Paso base, where we spent an evening listening to an appalling Mexican band playing at a wedding in an adjacent room but managed to book a hotel in San Antonio for the following night. Next morning, we left around 10am for San Antonio and drove in what seemed like a straight line across Texas on the I10, arriving early evening at our hotel, another Holiday Inn, named ‘Crocket Hotel. We strolled to the Riverfront, found a restaurant, and celebrated the day’s 570 miles with a good meal.
The next day we rang Dick Levinson and asked him to alert Emory about our delayed return. We walked over to the nearby Alamo, where the Texan ‘martyrs’ (and others, including a dozen Englishmen), died at the hands of Santa Anna’a Mexican army in 1836. Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie were thought to be among those who fell, though I have since read that Crockett may well have escaped and been put ignominiously to death on his recapture). Only the church and part of the barracks have survived, but the reconstructive work has been well done and a few artifacts, like Crockett’s rifle, are on show. We sat down to a Mexican brunch. Returning to the Riverfront in the evening we found a jazz club (we often do) and the set was excellent, a sextet led by local club-owner Jim McCallum.
Time was of the essence when we regained consciousness on Tuesday 17 March. Six hundred miles and we were in New Orleans, a favourite city of ours that we’d visited several times before. In American chronology it’s an old city, but it’s younger than the seventeenth century house in Epsom we owned at this time. We drove into the French Quarter more in hope than expectation of finding accommodation, eventually retreating to a motel just out of the centre. But we couldn’t resist returning for an evening meal – at Pierre Anthonie – just off Bourbon Street, and in doing so we discovered just why accommodation in the French Quarter was in short supply and expensive: it was St Patrick’s Day and New Orleans was partying! Cars, floats and well-lubricated music and singing surrounded us; and, a local tradition this, necklaces of green and yellow beads were hurled down from balconies to women passing by beneath: to our delight Annette retrieved three. Bourbon Street was its usual mad, packed and exhilaratingly sleazy self. We sauntered down by the less frantic Jackson Square to Cafe du Monde, where we complimented our cafes with beignets. It was a late night.
It was the morning of Wednesday 18 March when we set off back to Atlanta, a fortnight after our departure on our semi-planned trip, improvised beyond the Grand Canyon to the West Coast. This abbreviated travelogue is included here because it rewarded us with insights into the American way of life unavailable from books or the classroom. So how to summarise the ways in which our trip extended the experiential knowledge of America and Americans gleaned from the classroom? My answers cluster between the utopian and dystopian. Referring to Habermas lifeworld/system dichotomy once more, I found Americans friendly and helpful in my large if non-probability sample of lifeworld encounters. This applied to multiple personal interactions, including those in what Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place called ‘third places’ (ie those routine informal meeting places like bookshops, restaurants, cafes and bars), but seemed to extend also to dealings with goods and service providers. The dystopian elements might reasonably be cast as products of system rationalisation and colonisation. At the interactional level, normal good relations were often conducted against a background of latent threat. Most dealings with US bureaucracies for example, ranging from border controls to registering and being accepted as resident aliens to everyday matter-of-fact policing, seemed contaminated by needlessly officious bureaucrats or officers. On a more mundane level, the natural friendliness of the average citizen driving along an Interstate must surely be called into question by the fact that he or she is likely carrying a gun in the car’s glove pocket. We were told not to get into disputes with drivers when we set off for the Grand Canyon ‘because 60% of American drivers have guns in their cars.’ Such is the current power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the US (the NRA was formed in 1871 to advance rifle marksmanship, but since mutated into a prominent ‘gun rights’ lobbying organisation).
If the NRA is an eccentric example of system intrusion into the American lifeworld, more telling illustrations are to be found at the macro-level. The US remains a deeply divided and unequal society, the more so since the advent of financialised or rentier capitalism, symbolised by Reagan in the USA as it was by Thatcher in the UK, under cover of a near-ubiquitous ‘There-Is-No-Alternative’ (TINA) neoliberal ideology. This was readily apparent by 1998 but has since been dramatically amplified by Trumpism and the continuing threat of a resurgent right-wing populism; Johnson was in some respects the UK’s Trump. Already by 1998 there was a sense that events in America would inevitably find an echo in the UK. This has been amply born out, as we shall see later. Without anticipating the contents of sketches to come, it is sufficient for now to mention the growing potential for capital to buy power to make policy in its own interests; the personal infiltration of national governance by leading capitalists; and the rapid increases in wealth and income inequality and the generalised contraction in welfare provision. Within higher education, students in the UK have come to pay fees to study and to accumulate significant debt, in the process becoming more client-like and questioning and with a growing recourse to court action against their universities; universities themselves have become more bureaucratic and competitive, forced into targets and metric competition, and with the elite Russell Group institutions putting clear water between themselves and their ‘rivals’; and faculty have lost security and autonomy. This is of course just to scratch the surface and it should be emphasised that there are important differences as well as similarities between the USA and the UK. Moreover, underlying the social institutions found in each, in 1998 and in the present, are distinctive social structures, cultural recipes and agents with potential to both reproduce and transform the status quo.