Optional Sociolocial Autobiography guidelines and example: If you choose to do this assignment, it will be due by Friday, May 6, and will be worth up to 100 points. In other words, it will have about the same weight as one of the exams.

Analyze your own world view using theories discussed in class. This should be a personal essay which places yourself, your politics, your beliefs and values, and your view of the social world in relation to these theories. What were the experiences, both in your growing up years and in your college experiences, that brought you to the study of sociology, and how does sociology relate to your life experience? Pay particular attention to issues of stratification, ethnicity, race, religion, and gender in your family, school, and neighborhood. You may also treat the influence of the mass media and mass culture. Also pay attention to the social psychological dimensions of changes that you experience. Finally, include a section at the end, in which you specify a few central intellectual projects (areas of sociology that particularly interest and/or puzzle you) and which of the theories we've studied seem most helpful in pursuing those intellectual projects. If you are a criminology major, by the way, you may also talk about which of the theories from Soc 2311 seem most helpful to you and why. I've linked this heading to an example of my own, which is by no means the last word in sociological autobiographies, but may give you a few ideas. You'll notice that it is more autobiography than sociology, but that's okay in your own stories as well.

Sociological Autobiography: Bruce Mork, November 29, 2000

My Parents Grow Up in Norwegian-Lutheran Farm Families

My parents, born in the early 1920's, both grew up in large Norwegian-Lutheran farm families in Minnesota and Iowa. My mother's was the kind of gemeinschaft community analyzed (and perhaps romanticized) by the German sociologist, Ferdinand Tonnies. Life was lived in a circle of extended family and church. Ethnicity and religion were closely related. Mom's parents were the children of Norwegian immigrants; the church, and its cemetery, was on land donated by one of her grandparents; services were in Norwegian; Norwegian was spoken in the home to such an extent that her older brothers (the second generation born in the United States) spoke only Norwegian when they started school. Social life was among relatives on neighboring farms, and her closest friends were her siblings and her many cousins. All her life my mother yearned to recreate the kind of community in which she'd grown up.

At the same time, she resists labeling that period as "the good old days." Her family, and most families they knew, were poor. People in towns did a little better, but for farmers, times were already tough in the 1920s. In the 1930's, drought and Depression made them even worse. Mom remembers walking out with her father into a corn field that was mostly dust, with the plants all withered. She can't imagine how her parents coped with all the worry. They lost their farm to a mortgage foreclosure in the early 1930's, and her parents worked rented farms the rest of their lives, until they retired to town. Both of her brothers left school in their early teens to work on neighboring farms. Mom and her sisters were able to finish high school, but no one was able to attend college, which was a great sorrow to their mother, who had taught school briefly before marrying. From my perspective, one of the striking features of this Norwegian-Lutheran subculture was the limited range of emotional expression. Humor was an important factor in Mom's family, but grief and sadness were best kept to yourself; it was no use complaining. There was a great deal that was never talked about, and that carried down to subsequent generations. Mom says that she and my dad never talked about my brother's suicide, for example.

On my father's side, my grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant; my grandmother the daughter of a Norwegian immigrant. When my father was born, his family lived on a farm in Iowa, close to the farm of my great-grandparents and somewhat more prosperous than my mother's people. But with the coming of the Great Depression, they too were unable to meet mortgage payments and they lost their farm, with the added bitterness of feeling that my great grandfather could probably have helped but chose not to do so. The family left Iowa for Minnesota, bringing with them nothing but a few clothes and household items. In Minnesota they lived on a series of rented farms, largely cut off from extended kin. My grandfather's people were still in Norway, and my grandmother was bitter against her parents and siblings and would have nothing to do with them for more than a decade. I see the experience of my father's family as the anti-gemeinschaft commentary on the more idyllic view of rural community. Largely on their own, by dint of sheer hard work from the parents and all eight children, my grandfather eventually purchased another farm, and managed to send three of his daughters to state teachers colleges. In this family, I also see the limited range of emotional expression, but in addition, an enormous emphasis on self-sufficiency and hard work.

In both families there were issues of ethnic and religious intolerance, the downside perhaps of a close-knit religious ethnic community. There were also splits within the Norwegian-Lutheran community over religious doctrines. In both my parents' families, there was a strain of pietism(the notion that the saints of God don't drink, dance, or even play cards), although both families eventually compromised on allowing a few card games like hearts or pinochle and in my mother's family, a little polka dancing. My dad's mother was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance League, which Joseph Gusfield has analyzed in terms of anti-Catholic and anti-urban values, and certainly my grandmother would have been horrified to have any of her eight children marry a Catholic.

World War II, Corporate Employment, and the Baby Boom Generation

As my parents came of age, their lives were transformed, first by World War II and then by the economic opportunities opened up by the continued expansion of the large corporations. In 1942, after the United States declared war on Germany and Japan, my father enlisted in the navy, where high test scores moved him into officer training and some college coursework. Eventually he served in the Pacific as a second lieutenant, an experience about which he never talked and we children never asked. My mother, who had taken a couple of months of secretarial training in Minneapolis before the war, returned home to the farm, as her older brothers enlisted in the army and her older sister took work in a war plant on the west coast. Later, as it became clear that she wasn't all that much help on the farm, she took a secretarial job at an insurance company in Owatonna.

By the time the war was over and my parents met and married, the possibility that they would lead a similar life to that of my grandparents was shrinking fast. Dad was still in the Navy, and their courtship was brief, squeezed into a couple of leaves. . Mom says they didn't know each other very well. Not only was the time short, but they had little experience with talk that was emotionally revealing. But they came from similar backgrounds, had similar values, and their marriage lasted. Dad might have liked to stay in the Navy, but Mom was very committed to living within reach of her large, extended family. Dad might also have liked to continue college on the GI Bill, but Mom was soon pregnant with me and Dad took a job in Minneapolis, with a large and growing corporation, Allis Chalmers. His first job was warehouse work, but he was soon asked to go on the road as a sales representative in the farm equipment division. This meant more money, as well as new car (they were scarce after the war), and though Mom wasn't very happy about all the out-of-town travel, Dad took the job.

He would work for the farm equipment division of Allis Chalmers all his life, rising to higher positions in sales and management. Working for a big corporation meant good benefits and sufficient salary and bonuses to support a family without Mom's ever having to work outside the home. Dad was always grateful to the company for those opportunities, especially in view of his limited formal education. He liked the continued connection to the farm economy; he liked the eventual management responsibilities. On the other hand, working for a big corporation meant long hours of work, much of it "on the road," and frequent geographic moves, which invariably accompanied any promotion. Mom had to give up her close extended family connection, which was soon reduced to letters, telephone calls at birthdays and Christmas, and an annual two-week visit during the summer. She also had to start over in a new community time and again.

People married and had children in large numbers in that period following World War II, producing the generation that became known as the Baby Boom. Ours was probably an exaggerated version of the wage-earner/homemaker family that was the American cultural ideal during the 1950s. With dad often out of town, the lion's share of the home-building effort clearly fell on my mother's shoulders. She was well-suited to the role, although in retrospect she feels that it would have been better if my father had worked considerably less hours and if she had also worked, at least part-time.

In terms of neighborhood and income, by the time I reached grade school we were clearly middle class. In terms of less tangible items of life-style, we were probably between middle class and a kind of amalgamated farm/working class life style. There were few adult books in our home. The only magazines were of the Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest variety. My parents were active members of a Lutheran church wherever they lived, and their four children were all confirmed in the Lutheran Church. Our home was child-centered to an extreme, with the kids' interests dominating dinner conversation, with relatively few adult guests in the home (except when relatives came to visit), and with little or no discussion of issues and events in the larger world. We lived in what seemed to be an entirely white world--no racial diversity in church, neighborhood, or school.

My growing up years

Organized activities played a much lesser role in the lives of most kids during my growing up years than they do today. I was involved in Scouts and Little League and a few trombone lessons during the summer, but most of my time outside school was spent in sandlot sports, informal neighborhood play, and reading. Wherever we lived, the most important nonschool organization in my life was the local library. I read voraciously and indiscriminately--sports books, dog and horse books, mysteries, science fiction, and some serious literature as well. Then in high school I set out to read all the books written by American winners of the Nobel prize for literature and some of the foreign winners as well.

I was a willing participant in Sunday School and church activities through confirmation--in fact, rather a goody-goody. Then in my sophomore year of high school, I stopped attending church and in the next few years begain to define myself as an agnostic. Certainly there were some books and ideas that influenced me, but I now suspect that another factor was our move from Indiana to Michigan the previous summer. I resented the move, and dropping out of church was probably part of the general package of resentments I felt toward my parents at that time. There was also the fact that the Lutheran churches in which I had grown up were not intellectual in their approach to spirituality. I remember reading many years later about a Lutheran pastor in Germany who, when asked whether he believed in the afterlife, replied that he was willing to be surpised. There didn't seem to be any room for those kinds of uncertainties in the churches my family attended, and I was beginning to feel more uncertainties. I still remember a few lines from a book that seemed to me very avant garde and powerful:

I heard a man cry out, from on his dry dung heap:
If God is God, he is not good,
If God is good, he is not God,
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not stay here if I could. (Archibald MacLiesh, J.B.)

(It isn't clear to me any more how I could see earth as a dry dung heap, but that's another story.) By the time I was a senior in high school, I also began to read the French existentialists, particularly Camus and Sartre, but I really think the disbelief came initially as much as an act of rebellion as an intellectual decision. (All these years later, by the way, I am an active member of Peace United Church of Christ, and of course, I'm married to a chaplain; I still have religious doubts at times but I choose to nurture my faith.)

I was a good student and experienced school as a rewarding place. I loved the competition and the status that went with being a good student, particularly in grade school. In junior high things were a little more mixed in terms of what kind of people got respect, but I had a big football-playing friend from the neighborhood to see that I wasn't troubled by bullies. In at least one of the high schools I attended, the good students were once more at the top of the status hierarchy. Some of my teachers were excellent, although I didn't see myself as a future teacher. In fact, I think my aspirations were never clear. I loved books, but I was also good in math and science. In those days, not so long after the Russians had surprised the world with their Sputnik satellite, there was an assumption that bright boys should become scientists and contribute to our side of the Cold War. I graduated from high school in Sioux City, Iowa (we'd moved again, from Michigan to Iowa, after my junior year), with a "most likely to succeed in science" award and a national merit scholarship to Stanford University.

Stanford, Self-doubt, and Rumors of War

I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1965. I'd hated moving again before my senior year of high school and I think I'd over-romanticized how perfect everything would be once I got to college. Stanford turned out to be a mixed experience. Parts of it I enjoyed immensely; parts of it intimidated me. I enjoyed being part of the somewhat kooky Stanford marching band, and I mostly liked dorm life, although I was a little too "virtuous" to entirely fit with some trends that developed over the course of freshman year.

I arrived expecting to major in physics, so my freshman year involved three quarters of calculus, two quarters of physics, and year-long courses in English and History of Western Civilization. I also took a religion course called Belief and Unbelief, from a Catholic theologian, that confirmed me in the belief that I was an existentialist unbeliever. Stanford represented my first exposure to racial and ethnic diversity, but it wasn't a dramatic experience (despite the fact that the first major urban riot/rebellion of the 1960s in the Watts area of Los Angeles happened just about the time I headed off to school). Incoming freshmen read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which I liked a lot, but I'd already been reading minority authors (Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Piri Thomas). The Western Civilization sequence would be challenged years later, for mostly perpetuating the thoughts of dead white guys, but the minority students in my dorm were more into blending with the rest of us than into any kind of cultural militance.

In one way, I loved the academics; coursework was demanding but interesting, and my work habits were such that by the time Dead Week arrived (a week of study before final exams), I was the only one on my dorm floor who could just sit in the California sun and take it easy. At the same time, I'd soon seen that there were many students (from prep schools and higher quality public schools) whose academic preparation was superior to mine, and I'd met students whose passion for math and physics (and probably ability too) exceeded my own. I was doing well in academics, but beginning to doubt whether I wanted to major in math or physics.

At the same time I was beginning to wonder whether this highly academic life was really the right path, and I was probably quite homesick, although I didn't recognize it at the time. I'd never traveled, I'd never been away from home for more than a few days, and many of the kids I was meeting seemed more cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and socially adept. I was far too intimidated to date, and I'd begun to feel that I wasn't very good at establishing deep relationships with other people. Here's where that Norwegian-American emotional reticence and self-sufficiency came back to haunt me. I didn't talk to anyone about my worries--not my parents, not my classmates. Thanksgiving brought a kind of crisis. I was one of the few kids who remained in the dorms. (My parents would probably have paid for a ticket home, but it didn't even occur to me to ask. Norwegian-Americans are a thrifty lot.) I became increasingly depressed, and made up my mind to do two things: 1. Apply to some schools that were closer to home as options for the following year; 2. Stop being such a hard-working student and put more time into friendships and other informal activities.

At about the same time, I applied to and was accepted for Stanford in France the following year, so I really hadn't made up my mind about transferring. What I did do immediately was to begin to cut a lot of classes and spend more time hanging out.
By the end of the year, my grades had dropped, though not precipitously; I was still doing a lot of studying, although only in bursts when paper were due or tests pending. This became my college pattern, and of course, then as now, it was probably more the norm than not. As the end of the year approached, I was much happier with my informal social life (though still not dating), but I hadn't made any housing arrangements for the following year, and the upcoming year in France began to seem like too big a step(foolish, foolish boy!). I made up my mind to follow through with a transfer to Carleton College which was both smaller and much closer to home (ha! My parents were soon transferred to Dallas,Texas).

At Stanford I'd begun to hear about the Vietnam War, to which the United States was just beginning to send major numbers of troops. The senior advisor in the dorm next to mine was a senior named David Harris (who would later marry folksinger Joan Baez and spend years in prison for draft reistance). Harris was a somewhat charismatic and highly controversial figure at Standford, and I was at least partially convinced by his arguments. I'd gone away to college a conservative Republican. My parents had voted for Eisenhower in the 1950s and probably for Nixon in 1960; I don't know if they'd supported Barry Goldwater in 1964, but I spoke on his behalf in a high school debate (and was impressed with his pro-cold war book Why Not Victory?). I'd also been at least temporarily enthusiastic about the ultra-individualist, pro-capitalist ideas of Ayn Rand. By the end of freshman year, these old political enthusiasms had dropped away, but my political ideas were still in flux.

Carleton College and a Protest Identity

Over the summer I paid more attention to news about the war and did a little reading about it, and by the time I entered Carleton College as a sophomore, I was beginning to define myself as a war protestor. As with my earlier disillusionment with organized religion, this decision probably had a subtext. Looking back with the eyes of a social psychologist, I can see that I was searching for an identity, other than my old identity as a top student. I had picked up an old army jacket at a surplus store (ironically, often the garb of the war protestor in those days) and some workshirts and heavy boots from my summer job with the Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company, and I'd begun to grow my hair. I'd also begun to listen to records by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The music and the new identity probably did more to make me a war protestor than anything I was reading. . That doesn't mean I was wrong in my opposition to the war. It just means that my initial commitment to protest grew out of factors I would label as more sociological than rational.

Arriving at Carleton, I continued to make a whole series of identity choices. I dropped band and became a writer for the campus newspaper, with a focus on what needed to be changed at the college and in the world. My new roommate and his friends soon became my close friends. Based on my Stanford experience, I was prepared to put a lot of time into informal college life. My new friends smoked and drank; I smoked and drank. (Drinking and drugs were core elements in the student subculture at Carleton in the late 1960's). I also was chosen, I don't remember why or how, to participate in a transpersonal communication training process that was becoming popular at about that time. Called a t-group (for "training group," I think), it involved coming together for a weekend with a group of peers and a trainer and participating in a series of exercises designed to remove the barriers to intense interpersonal communication. For a while thereafter, I would hang out with other t-groupers who were revelling in our new level of interpersonal honesty. But the t-group experience soon faded, and "deep" communication increasingly seemed to involve getting high together.

At Carleton I took my first sociology course. I liked one of the texts, Invitation to Sociology, which helped me to see the way in which dramatic identity changes such as those I'd been experiencing are interwoven with changing social affiliations and supports. This is one of the basic lessons of social psychology, and I recognized it as a big piece of learning. But I was not impressed with the rest of the course. I was more excited by a two-quarter sequence in ethics, and philosophy became my new major. The philosophy faculty was bright and caring, and I thought philophy would deal with current social and political issues that were increasingly important to me. In truth, my philosophy coursework did have at least tangential relevance to the issues of the day, but over the next year, I came to see these philosophers as all talk and no action (I wasn't necessarily right; that's just the way I saw it then) . What were they really doing about the Vietnam War or the major inequalities I was beginning to recognize in American life?

During my junior year of college, my identity became more political and more radical. In November 1967, I travelled with a busload of other students from Minnesota to an anti-Vietnam War protest at the Pentagon. The intensity of the experience was magnified by a thousand miles of protest songs and conversation; as a student of social movements (whether political or religious), I see music as one of the central elements in the creation of new subcultures. By the time we reached Washington, D.C., everyone was exhausted, which I think also adds to the emotionality of an experience. The protests were dramatic. Thousands of protestors, many of them college students, faced lines of police and soldiers. As night fell, we were tear-gassed repeatedly, and the crowd was swept by rumors that protestors were breaking through police lines or that the army was about to mount a major attack or that protestors had been severely beaten. The bus-ride back was anti-climactic, although I remember being angered by newspaper reports in which officials first denied any use of tear gas and later blamed the protestors themselves for introducing tear gas in order to discredit the police.

Back at Carleton, I enrolled in my second Sociology course, Modern American Society, and it changed my life. Among the half dozen texts for the course was C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. Mills provided me with an intellectual framework for understanding American involvement in the Vietnam War. I began to see American foreign policy as centering around the interests of our large corporations, in an effort to create a world that was safe and profitable for American business interests. This course also emphasized social stratification and race relations, at a time when America was exploding with racial rebellion and ethnic militance. This was the year that black power reached Carleton. The assassination of Martin Luther King brought an outpouring of grief and anger. A visit from El Teatro Campesino (a political theatre that was an offshoot of the effort to organize a farmworkers union in California) brought increased publicity to the Chicano movement. I became convinced that these were the things I really wanted to study, and I changed my major to sociology, even though it meant a mad scramble to meet the requirements of the major in little more than one academic year. I was definitely a conflict theorist, with a growing interest in Marx (I still am a conflict theorist, although ultimately more impressed with Weber than with Marx).

The interests that came to the fore in 1967 and 1968--politics, social movements, inequality--remain my major intellectual interests in sociology. My senior year of college I applied to the Sioux City, Iowa, draft board for conscientious objector status, which was denied. I then took a job teaching social studies and mathematics in a junior high near Flint, Michigan, which brought a draft deferment. The next year I entered graduate school at the University of Washington, where I became particularly fascinated with the history of the labor movement in the United States. I'd grown up in an anti-union family. I still remember my father crossing a picket line to enter an Allis Chalmers facility in La Porte, Indiana. I did my master's thesis on the response by Boeing engineers and their "union" to massive layoffs in the early 1970s. My Ph.D. dissertation (never completed) was an analysis of competing theories about the origins the Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935. During my graduate school years, I married my college sweetheart and became a feminist. The last year of graduate school, my son Nicolai was born, and I took a 1-year job at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. After that year, I went to work in the cooperative natural foods movement, where I spent nearly 15 years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to mold an alternative to the private business system--"food for people, not for profits." In the early 1990's, I returned to full-time teaching at UMD. My kids are grown; my son is a business consultant with Bain and Company in Sweden; my daughter a sophomore at Pomona College near Los Angeles. My wife is the Protestant Chaplain at the Benedictine Health Center. I could of course treat those last 30+ years more extensively and more sociologically, but I've already exceeded the length of the sociological autobiographies that I'm expecting from you in my Sociology 2111 course.

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