Chapter Nine, Vanderbilt: 1948-1949

On September 10, 1948, Ruth and I caught the Greyhound Bus and departed Salt Lake City for Nashville, Tennessee.  The trip, a long, tiring one, lasted two and one-half days.  We should have broken the trip and stayed at a hotel in some interesting town but, uncertain of our cash reserves, traveled non-stop.  Ruth was an excellent traveling companion.  We talked, laughed, commented on the changing scenery, dashed across streets on rest stops to purchase paperback books and snacks, and slept leaning against each other.  For us the trip was in a way a substitute for the honeymoon we could not afford.

From Salt Lake City we traveled to Denver by way of Cheyenne and then across the Great Plains to Omaha, Nebraska.  From there we slanted down through the more scenic lands of southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, arriving in Nashville in the morning.  We checked into a rather seedy hotel, the Clarkston, where Ruth rested while I went up to Vanderbilt University by bus.  Unable to find Dr. T. Lynn Smith, I went up to the office of Dean Davidson, Dean of the Graduate School, a very kindly man who formally welcomed me to the University, told me that Dr. Smith would not be on campus until just before school began, and suggested that I transfer over to the Fleetwood Motel, which offered better accommodations at a more modest price.  Encouraged, I returned to the Clarkston, picked up Ruth and our scanty belongings, and moved to the Fleetwood.

For three days we looked for an adequate apartment near the University without success.  The quality of housing in Nashville was very poor.  Finally, in desperation, we rented for $36.00 a month a combination kitchen, bedroom and living room with shared bathroom privileges in an old wooden house at 2126 Capers Street.  As cooking facilities were quite primitive, we purchased a portable oven from Sears Roebuck.  The house was inhabited not only by many young couples, but also by cockroaches, water bugs, mice, and other components of the urban fauna of Nashville.

Ruth and I explored Nashville thoroughly in the few days of leisure before the semester began.  It seemed to us to be a very shabby, down-at-the-heels city.  Downtown streets were dirty and narrow.  The architecture was begrimed and unprepossessing.  On almost every street corner in the business district, beggars whined without the dignity of beggars in Latin America.  Large numbers of poorly dressed blacks and whites walked the streets chewing tobacco and sniffing snuff.  They spit tobacco juice that stained floors in public buildings and the sidewalks without much concern for the public.  The air was so polluted as to be unbeatable.  Sharp social class differences in behavior, dress, and housing were quite obvious.  But, on the other hand, we were impressed by the large number of colleges and universities in the city and the almost universal friendliness and courtesy of the people.

I later came to the conclusion that Nashville, diminished by defeat in the Civil War and poverty, had shrunk within itself.  In spite of the urban ugliness, I was impressed by the local intellectual tradition in which the Vanderbilt faculty had played such an important part.  I admired the sturdy independence from the North.  In some respects, Nashville resembled a small independent republic of letters.  Although I never tried to penetrate local intellectual circles, I did read almost every book, novel, poem, and essay written by Vanderbilt and Nashville scholars and intellectuals.  In spite of its poverty, the city had a far more intensive intellectual life than did Salt Lake City.

Before school opened we visited Fort Nashborough, the replica of the original settlement.  I rather wish that the Cherokees had been more successful in repelling white intruders.  We also visited the local Parthenon, a copy of the Greek Parthenon, several times pondering its classical significance in the culture of Nashville.  I went to the National Cemetery many times alone to look at the large number of graves of young men killed in the Civil War.  For me Nashville became a city haunted by the bloody struggles that had taken place in its environs.

By our first Sunday in Nashville, we located the local Church branch that met in a run-down Woodman's Hall.  From talking to the branch president, President Billings, an F.B.I. agent, we learned that there were about sixty members of record, the majority married out of the Church and only partially active.  We were, however, pleasantly surprised to encounter Ana Hart, her daughter and mother, and Georgia Maeser, granddaughter of Karl Maeser, first president of the Brigham Young University.  They were attending a special educational institute at Peabody College.  Ana Hart taught in the B.Y.U. elementary school and Georgia in the University's College of Education.  They became special friends of ours during our stay in Nashville.

Shortly before the fall semester began, Ruth and I were forced into apartment hunting.  One morning while shaving in our shared bathroom, I happened to put my hand on the wash basin and watched with horrified fascination as the basin gently fell away from the wall, snapping the lead water pipes as it fell.  Water poured out of the broken pipes onto the floor, down the hall, and into the numerous rooms along the hall.  Their inhabitants in all stages of undress poured out of their rooms.  We frantically hunted for the turn-off valve.  After an hour with water cascading down the steps into the street, we found it beneath the building.  Upon turning it off, we were faced by another indignant group of half-dressed residents from the second story whose preparations for the day had been disturbed.  We decided then and there to find another apartment.

After several days of hunting we rented a commodious, furnished three room apartment at 212 S. 11th Street on the other side of the Cumberland River within two blocks of the Church, but almost an hour's bus ride from the University.  The rent did strain our budget, but we enjoyed the apartment.  The landlord was an Irishman who, with wife and daughter, lived on the other side of the house.  He worked as a typesetter at the reactionary afternoon newspaper, the Nashville Banner.  Learning that Ruth played the piano, he moved his piano into our apartment with the understanding that Ruth would give his daughter piano lessons.  We became quite good friends.

The landlord's family fascinated us.  His young daughter played the record, "Everybody Calls You Darling," over and over in the late afternoons.  His wife rebelled against being a mother and wife while we were there.  Having married quite young, she claimed that marriage had robbed her of her youth.  Wanting to earn her own money and be independent, her husband trained her as a typesetter  and found her a job on the Nashville Banner.  Once assured of her own income, she abandoned husband and family.  When we asked about her, her husband replied, "Oh, she is honky-tonking around.  She just never grew up."

Financially we lived marginally above poverty.  We had my war bonds that I had purchased during my military service.  We also received a monthly check, seldom arriving on time, from the Veterans Administration, as well as a monthly stipend from Vanderbilt University.  Ruth worked for a few months as department secretary.  But even then, financial difficulties overtook us.  In such moments I wrote to my father requesting an occasional fifty dollars which he always sent to us without even a question.  Many of our financial problems arose from book buying and from providing constant room and board to numerous missionaries in and around Nashville.

Like many Mormons living away from the Rocky Mountains, the Church became an important center of our lives.  Ruth served as branch pianist, directed the branch choir, and taught in the Relief Society and Sunday school.  I taught in the Sunday school and Mutual as well as serving as first counselor to President Wallwork in the branch presidency.  I also filled in a missionary companion when needed.  The majority of the branch members such as the Brunsons, the Morrows, the Sudekoms, and the other families were humble, working class people whom we came to love.  The branch leaders, such as Billings and Wallwork, were professional men born in the West.  Visitors from Utah such as ourselves helped to teach classes, keep records, and train local people in the art of holding church positions.  During our stay in Nashville, we developed few friends outside of the Church and the Department of Sociology at Vanderbilt.

The missionaries were important in our Nashville period.  As young people from Utah, we constantly entertained the missionaries, most of whom were a little younger than we were.  Upon our arrival the resident missionaries in Nashville were Elders Wagstaff and Birdno.  Unfortunately, shortly after our arrival Elder Birdno entered Vanderbilt Hospital and was later sent home with an illness.  Among the missionaries whom we came to know and to appreciate were Elders Ted Stamfill from Tremonton, Utah; Seth Colburn from Oxford, Idaho; Ralph Shafter from California, an old friend from the military and B.Y.U. days; and Elders Belnap, Stringfellow and Warner.  Perhaps the missionary who was closest to us was Elder Gene Viehweg from Clifton, Idaho--an outstanding young man and a superb missionary.  I had the pleasure of being called as his junior companion for four or five weeks during the summer when missionaries were in short supply in the mission.  We were heartsick to hear later that he had been killed in an industrial accident.

The elders rode motor bikes like cowboys on wild horses.  They were constantly zooming in and out of traffic at all hours.  During the colder months, they labored in urban areas.  But when warm weather came, the elders loaded up their saddle bags with vitamins, canned fruit, extra clothing, and tools to travel on their bikes without purse or script in the rural regions.  They returned in the fall lean, gaunt, ragged, and hungry.  We fed them just to hear their fascinating experiences.

The weather in Nashville was uncomfortably hot and humid during the summer and uncomfortably humid and cold during the winter.  We were invited by the Sudekoms to spend many comfortable nights with them in their home in a semi-rural suburb near Nashville.  Ruth and I traveled frequently with Sister Sudekom on weekends as she sold Stanley products through the region.  Through her we came to know the living conditions of urban working people and small farmers in central Tennessee.

One Saturday morning, Sister Edna Sudekom invited us to accompany her on a selling trip through Lewis County where two Mormon missionaries had been killed by a Protestant mob in 1884.  She suggested that we try to find the site of the killing and photograph the monument erected by the Church on the site.  Finding Kane Creek, the site of the massacre, was quite difficult.  The people were most uncommunicative.  When we asked where the site of the killings was, they asked us if we were kin.  We simply replied that we were friends of the families.  Then they misdirected us.  Finally, after traveling most of the morning, we stopped in desperation in front of a large mountain cabin.  I got out of the car and approached the yard gate.  A large pack of dogs began to bark and a thin woman boiling clothes in a large black kettle towards the back of the front yard called to someone in the house.  In response an elderly, bearded man walked out to the gate to inquire what we wanted.  When I told him our mission, he said that the site was not far away.  He would be happy to take us there, providing we ate dinner with him.

We enjoyed a fine dinner, the ingredients came from the small farm, except the white bread served as desert.  The man, a Mr. Talley, told us that as a small boy he had heard the shots that killed Elders William S. Berry and John H. Gibbs as they, along with Elders Henry Thompson and William H. Jones, were preparing for service at the Condon home, a family of members.  Two boys in the Condon family were killed along with the leader of the Protestant mob, a Dave Hinson.  The mother of the family was also wounded and crippled.  Mr. Talley told us that his father defied the mob and rescued the missionary bodies that were laid out in the room in which we were eating.  Apparently the missionaries had established a small branch at Kane Creek converting people, including the son of a Baptist minister, from established Protestant congregations, arousing the wrath of local ministers.  President Brigham H. Roberts, the mission president of the Southern States Mission, dressed as a traveling salesman, came in with a wagon to pick up the bodies.  He got them to Hohenwald, the county seat, and on to a train just as another mob approached the small community.  Mr. Talley told us that the mob members were ne'rer-do-wells, most of whom came to a bad end.  The church members migrated west.  He went on to say that the county had been cursed ever since.

After dinner Mr. Talley accompanied us to the site—a hillside covered with shrubs and grass, marked by a large monument retelling the events of the massacre.  We photographed the site, walked around, and talked about the sad event, its causes, and its impact upon the county.  We dropped Mr. Talley off at his cabin.  Just before he left, he asked for the address of the nearest branch, which we gave him.  We heard later that he had walked out of the mountains and requested that he be baptized.

On a later trip to the same general region, Elder Viehweg and I encountered a mountain woman who had been baptized some fifty years earlier and had had no contact with the Church since.  Upon learning that we were missionaries, she embraced us, cried, and hurried to her back yard to dig up coffee cans filled with currency—her tithing.  She went with us to the nearest branch to meet the branch president.  She paid her tithing in a moment of excitement.  We hopefully arranged for her to receive regular visits from local church leaders.  I was amazed at the persistence and bravery of the missionaries in the 1880s and 1890s, who seemed to have walked through every cove and settlement in the mountains, defying the mobs.

While at Vanderbilt, I majored in sociology and minored in Brazilian studies.  My course work included two classes in Brazilian history taught by Dr. Alexander Marchant and one course in Brazilian economics by Dr. Carlson.  A Dr. Thomas taught me two courses in intensive Portuguese and Professor Lauchner, one course in intensive German.  From Dr. T. Lynn Smith I took seminars in Rural Sociology, Latin American Institutions, and Population Analysis.  I also enrolled in a fine course on the Rural South, taught by Dr. Brearly at Peabody College.  And finally, I took courses in Races of Latin America, taught by Dr. Emilio Willems, a man whom I came to admire and to respect, Rural Social Organization from Dr. Olen Leonard, and Advanced General Sociology from Professor Gifford.  I worked harder in these courses than I ever did at Brigham Young University.  I spent hours preparing for my courses, reading through the library holdings on the subjects of my classes, and writing long research papers, each almost the equivalent of my master's thesis.  Ruth was of vital assistance to me.  She helped me clarify my thinking, edited and typed my papers, and helped me with library research.  Because of her, I managed to secure an "A" in all my classes, except one "B", in Brazilian history.

Dr. Marchant, a large, massive man, fascinated me.  Born in Brazil of southern stock that fled to Brazil after the Civil War, he drove a large, antiquated Rolls Royce through the streets of Nashville at a slow rate of speed with a long convoy behind him of impatient drivers.  A charismatic, eccentric teacher, he required all his students in Brazilian history to read the accounts of early travelers to Brazil, plus the works of modern Brazilian, American, English, and German scholars on Brazil.  Through him I developed a permanent love of Brazilian history, culture, literature, and essays.  Going to visit him just before the end of a quarter to discuss my prospective term paper, I found from his secretary that he had left Vanderbilt and turned in his grades without correcting our final exams or reading our term papers.  He assigned me the grade of "B", the only "B" I made at Vanderbilt.  I was quite angry at first, but later laughed at it.

My Portuguese teacher, Dr. Thomas, was a young American married to a Brazilian girl who later divorced him.  He had the ability to teach foreign languages.  Knowing Spanish, I found Portuguese an easy language to study, although hard to separate from Spanish.  The final Ph.D. exam in Portuguese was quite easy.  My experience with the German language, however, was interesting.  I studied very hard under Professor Lauchner.  While I was taking the course, Dr. T. Lynn Smith gave me Thucycides' History of the Peloponnesian War in German.  I read it diligently, memorizing vocabulary and analyzing grammar.  Upon finishing the book, I decided to take the German exam for my Ph.D. midway through my German course, with little expectancy of passing it.  I went into the office of the head of the German language section.  Much to my surprise I was given Thucycides History of the Peloponnesian War  in German to translate.  I did beautifully and was congratulated upon my command of German.  Little did he know that that book was the only book in German I could have translated.

Dr. Carlson, a young faculty member, was one of the few people I ever met who had mastered the intricacies of the Brazilian economic system with its incredibly high inflation rate.  He taught me not to analyze the Brazilian economic system with the concepts of American economic theory.  Dr. Olen Leonard, deeply interested in Latin America, came to Vanderbilt too late for me to take more than one course from him.  Later I came to know and to appreciate him much better.  Of all these teachers, Dr. Emilio Willems influenced me the most.  A German immigrant to Brazil after World War I, he had gradually made a name for himself in anthropology in Brazil.  Invited to Vanderbilt by Dr. T. Lynn Smith, he came to the University to remain.  I was fortunate in that he took considerable interest in my work and was of great assistance to me as chairman of my Ph.D. committee.

I have never pretended to understand Dr. T. Lynn Smith, an enigmatic person.  Emotionally troubled, a very talented scholar, he made important contributions to demography, rural sociology, and other areas in sociology.  He virtually founded the sociological study of Brazilian institutions.  He trained a generation of native Latin American sociologists, provided them with scholarships, encouraged their research, and nurtured their careers.  He treated them much better than he did American students.  Demanding, harshly critical, hectoring, he was insensitive towards our feelings, although generous with grants and other forms of student aid.  I worked harder and not always successfully to gain his approval than I ever did for any person before or since.

The darker side of his personality came out in his treatment of members of the Department of Sociology.  He brought to the department many talented young faculty members such as Vandiver, Leonard, and Ferris, but on the other hand, he brutally treated the older faculty, such as Dr. Wayland Hayes, an authority on the Tennessee Valley Authority and on the rural South.  He never permitted me to take a course from Hayes or from his colleagues.  When Ruth was employed as secretary of the Sociology Department, he never permitted her to do any typing for Hayes and others of his group.  She, therefore, did their work early in the morning, at noon, or after working hours.  They were very grateful to her, which helped me later.

My relationship with Smith was complicated by the fact that I was an active Mormon.  Smith was born into an orthodox Mormon home in either northwestern New  Mexico or southern Colorado and even served a mission in the Great Lakes region.  He lost his faith in Mormonism during his graduate studies at Harvard.  He criticized me harshly for devoting so much time to the Mormon branch in Nashville.  However, his wife became friendly to Ruth and even took piano lessons from her.  After Smith's death she became a Christian Science practitioner. Smith pulled her away from Mormonism, but could not pull her into agnosticism.  Having observed closely the behavior and personalities of T. Lynn Smith, Lowry Nelson, Kimball Young, and other Mormon sociologists of that generation that abandoned the Church I decided that I did not want to pay the price that they paid in insecurity and instability by cutting themselves off from their own cultural roots.  I decided that, come what may, I would remain active in the Church.

Smith brought to Vanderbilt several of his former faculty at Harvard, such as Zimmerman and Sorokin, who gave seminars and interacted with the graduate students at receptions in their honor.  Both impressed me greatly.  The activities of the Brazilian Institute, headed by Smith brought a number of Brazilian scholars, graduate students, and even the Brazilian president, General Dultra to Vanderbilt.

Smith announced that he had accepted a position at the University of Florida in July, 1948, stunning his graduate students.  After he left  the Brazilian Institute withered away.  Most of the faculty and graduate students brought to Vanderbilt by Smith left shortly afterwards.  I survived through my close friendship with Dr. Emilio Willems and because so many of the faculty were grateful to Ruth for doing their work.

My health was chronically poor during my stay in Nashville.  Because of the heavy air pollution and perhaps because of my chronic anxieties and worries over my relationships with Dr. T. Lynn Smith, I suffered form persistent bronchial asthma.  There were few nights that I did not lay awake, unable to sleep for many hours.  Four of five times, Ruth had to call the doctor to give me injections of adrenaline.

Ruth became pregnant in the spring of 1949.  Her pregnancy proceeded normally with few problems.  As fall approached, it was decided in the family that she should go home to have the baby.  Her father and brother, John, drove out in a pickup truck to pick up Ruth and our belongings.  I reluctantly moved into a college dorm to finish up my course work and take my preliminary examinations.  I often had with me one or two of the district elders.  I also got to know my fellow graduate students, MacBroom, Martin, Parrish, and Gordon much better.  Unfortunately, I never saw them again once I left Nashville.  Many of them suffered from being Smith's graduate students.  I also found out that there was a certain amount of gentile anti-Semitism in the department.

As I began to take my written examinations for my Ph.D. degree, I was informed by long distance that Ruth had started labor and was on her way to the hospital.  Then, as I finished my writtens and had started my orals, I learned that the baby had died within a few hours after birth.  Fortunately it lived long enough for Ruth's father to give it a name and a blessing.  I was not in a good frame of mind to respond to questioning, but passed the orals without a problem.  Finishing my exams, I packed my belongings, said goodbye to my fellow graduate students, the faculty, and the members of the Nashville branch and boarded the bus to return home.

As I rode across the United States deeply concerned about my wife, I thought about my experiences at Vanderbilt.  The quality of its library, faculty, and administration had impressed me deeply.  Many of the men I had studied under became role models for my own professional life.  I felt that I had measured myself successfully against its high academic standards.  I had learned really how to work, how to push myself, how to do research, and how to teach.  But, above all, I admired the proud position of Vanderbilt as one of the intellectual leaders of the South.

Baptist founded, Vanderbilt, a private university, had unashamedly become a regional university deeply rooted in the very fabric of Southern life.  Its scholars studied, criticized, anguished over, and defined Southern values.  I could not help but compare it with Western universities, many of whose faculty members rejected the region in which they lived, ashamed of its provincialism, contemptuous of its students and intellectual potentiality, little concerned about its economic, social, and cultural values; aping the intellectual fashions of the Northeast and dreaming of the time when they could leave.  I thought of the Brigham Young University stifled by the dead hand of authoritarian reactionism, exemplified by Wilkinson.  Vanderbilt molded me into a regionalist, deeply concerned about regional values, resistant to national standardization and homogeneity.  The regional values I came to appreciate at Vanderbilt helped me to understand the Southwest.