Voegelin at Baton Rouge (Part III)

Q. In the letters between Voegelin and Strauss, there are many statements about how they’re going to meet in Chicago, or going to meet in New York. Did they ever?

lissy voegelin: Oh yes. I don’t remember how many times, but I suppose it wasn’t very often.

Q. And they got along quite well? 

l. voegelin: Oh yes.

ernest j. walters: I had talked with Voegelin about graduate work, and Voegelin rec­ommended that I study with Strauss. He simply said, “If you want to study political philosophy, there’s only one person to study with, and that’s Leo Strauss.”

Now, this would have been late ’49, early ’50. Some years later, Voegelin came to Chicago. I think it was under the aus­pices of the Catholic group, the Newman Club. I went to hear that lecture, and afterward, they had a reception. I chatted briefly with Voegelin and with Mrs. Voegelin, but I don’t think Voegelin recognized me at first.

(As a matter of fact, after I’d been doing graduate work with him for a year and had stud­ied with him for two years as an undergraduate, I saw him after one summer, and he said: “Well, Mr. Walters, what are you, a junior or a senior?” So, he was not all that great on practical matters.)

But I told him this time who I was, and he chatted with me and said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m study­ing political philosophy with Mr. Strauss.” He then said, “That is very won­derful! You know, you are extremely fortunate.” This would have been well after their correspondence had dropped off–it was somewhere around the time of the Walgreen Lectures. So, this was several years later. But even at that time, he had a high opinion of Strauss.

I’m not sure that it went both ways, though. I know this through a friend of mine who came to LSU and began to take Voegelin’s courses, and he was so fascinated by it that he then went up and worked with Strauss.

And accord­ing to him, Strauss taught a course in which he made a frontal attack on Voegelin. This completely turned that friend off; he was convinced that Voegelin was right and Strauss was wrong. So, he went back to his previous class, finished medical school, and became a psychiatrist.

Q. Did Strauss ever mention Voegelin to you?

walters: Strauss never talked with me about Voegelin except on one occa­sion. Part of the reason was because I simply did not go in to see him. There were students I disliked because they would just go in and stay for hours with Strauss, and I thought they were depriving people of books that he should be writing.

But I was talking with Strauss one time in his office just after Voegelin left LSU. And Strauss asked me, “Why did Voegelin go to Germany?” The way in which he said it was like, “How could he go to a place where the Holocaust occurred?” And of course, the Jews looked favorably on Voegelin because he had written these books on race and religion.

So, I just said to Strauss, “I don’t have contact with Voegelin, and I don’t know why he did that, but I do know that he spoke of the beauty of Europe.” Strauss said, “Yes, it is very beautiful. In fact, it’s more beautiful than . . . ” Then he paused and said, “Now, you understand, I’ve never been to the South.” He knew I was from the South, you see. “But except for that, it’s more beautiful than what I’ve seen in the United States.”

I started to say, “After all, he’s getting Max Weber’s chair,” but I didn’t really know whether that was a reason or not, so I just kept my mouth shut. Strauss then said, “I thought he was doing very well in the United States and was about at the point where he would move up in his academic position.”

This was many years after my friend Duncan had taken the course in which Strauss attacked Voegelin. By that time, I think that Strauss learned that if you make a frontal attack, you may lose. So, by the time I got to Chicago, Strauss referred only indirectly to Voegelin. On a few occasions he’d mention his name, but most of the time he would merely say, “The best writer on the historicist position is Collingwood.”

It was clear in certain parts of the work on Collingwood that he really thought it was a defense of Voegelin. And I think that comes out in the correspondence–I don’t mean necessarily about Collingwood, but about what he thought was the profi­ciency of Voegelin.

Difficulties and Prejudice

Q. Did Strauss’s other students say anything to you about Voegelin?

walters: Yes, they did in this sense. When I arrived at Chicago, Strauss was over in Jerusalem. He had had a year’s sabbatical or something. It worked out well for me, because I was then able to take some of the more practical courses without getting into Strauss. And when I arrived at Chicago, I was a bit of a know-it-all. There wasn’t really anything else Strauss could teach me, because I’d learned it all from Voegelin.

Well, the students there who had tried to read Voegelin let me know that they simply couldn’t understand his language. I said, “Well, it’s very interesting because I’m sure it’s difficult if you haven’t worked with Voegelin to know what he’s talking about.” Because he does use this strange language for which he himself only said, “This is just basic philosophical language, and you have to know it.” But his language was not characteristic of anyone else, and surely not of Strauss.

So, they just said that they couldn’t understand it. I then came back and said, “I don’t want to tell you this, but I can’t understand Strauss.” This was before I’d had a course with him. I was trying to read Natural Right and History, and the problem I had with Strauss was that I couldn’t tell whether Strauss was saying the thing or whether he was just developing the argument as John Locke or whoever was doing. So, I didn’t know whether this was their argument or whether it was his argument, and I had great difficulty figuring that out.

Q. Do you think your having been trained by Voegelin and having learned his language affected your own scholarship or career?

walters: Well, when I was looking for a job after I finished graduate school, I was told by a faculty member in Chicago, “Don’t go around telling people that you studied with Strauss; it may hurt you more than it helps.”

But the same thing was true in regard to Voegelin: I went for an interview to a col­lege, and they were having a little luncheon where people of different depart­ments could meet, and one guy came up and chatted with me for about ten or fifteen minutes.

After a couple of minutes he said, “I hear you were a stu­dent of Eric Voegelin.” I said, “Yes I was; I learned a great deal from him.” Then he said, “You know, I have the impression that he has a direct phone line to God, and God calls him up and gives him instructions on a daily basis.”

Well, what could I do? How could I start arguing with this guy when I’m try­ing to get a job? So, I’m not sure that was even an important factor, but they just didn’t like me at that school and they never offered me a job. But it’s an instance of how people become very much enamored of Voegelin or Strauss and other people detest them. So, you have all kinds of problems one way or the other.

But still, how fortunate can you be? They both were . . . Gosh, can you imagine anyone being as fortunate as I was? To have studied with Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss? That’s just like the guy falling into the privy and coming up with a ham sandwich!

Comparing Teaching Styles

Q. Did Voegelin give you any advice on what you should do after LSU?

marianne steintrager: He did; he and Walter Berns both did. At their advice, I went off to the University of Chicago and studied with Leo Strauss. So, I had the pleas­ure of studying with both Strauss and Voegelin.

Q. Can you recollect what Voegelin might have said to you?

steintrager: He didn’t say, “You must go and study with Strauss.” He was actually quite cautious. He thought it was a good idea: if I was going to go to graduate school, this was a logical place to go.

Q. Why was he cautious?

steintrager: Well, I think he probably thought that, if I were going to go to graduate school anywhere, Chicago was as good a place as any. But I’m not sure how much encouragement he gave to any women students.

Q. Strauss also had very few women students. Why do you think that would have been?

steintrager: As I look back on it, I think that women students probably didn’t expect to be there in the first place. I mean, it was unusual. I know nothing about the German system. Were there very many women students in Germany? Okay, that’s probably it. If they needed an assistant, they would choose a male assistant.

I never felt left out in the sense that I never felt like I was being discriminated against, but I really feel that the expectation was that the male students were the ones that were probably going to be the profes­sors. The female students were there simply to get an education.

Strauss had a lot of graduate students who did things for him–go out and get him breakfast and things like that. Now, whether it was because he asked them to or because that was the way they were toadying up to him, I don’t know. But all of the people in the inner circle were males.

Q. Did you notice any difference in the attitudes of either man toward women?

steintrager: I really didn’t, no. I did not notice any difference in the way I was called on in class or graded or whatever. They certainly took me seriously in terms of grading me in the same sort of way. There must have been some­thing there, but it was not overt enough to make me get my back up and make me feel they were treating me differently from the way they were treat­ing the other people.

I brought this–I thought you might find this interesting. I found this in the National Review. It’s a letter between Voegelin and Strauss.

Q. Oh, the thing on Popper. I edited this correspondence.

steintrager: Oh, did you? I just found that, having known both men, I found that I could see their personalities in the letters.

Q. Well, let me ask you an obvious question. You certainly get a different under­standing of the personalities of the two men from reading the things that Strauss would say in reply to some fairly demanding questions [from] Voegelin. Voegelin would answer in a very open way, “This is what I’ve done. ” But Strauss’s responses were always very guarded.

steintrager: That’s his secret teaching, don’t you know? You have to read between the lines.

Q. How would you compare the two men as teachers, in their style as well as the substance?

steintrager: In terms of style, I think that Strauss was a clearer teacher than Voegelin. He asked more of his students than Voegelin did in terms of responses in class. But I was a graduate student at that point, whereas I had been an undergraduate with Voegelin, so that might have been a difference. Voegelin teaching graduate students might have taught differently, too.

Again, both men–although they were very important people–never talked down to students. They always made you feel comfortable. Strauss used much more of the Socratic way of asking questions and trying to get the class to respond; but at the same time, he didn’t expect the class to teach the class. You had a lot of direction. Voegelin was much more the straight lecturer intro­ducing a lot of historical material. With Strauss, you’d be looking at the text of what you were doing–that would be a difference.

As far as personality goes, they did not have the same personalities at all. You hear about the arrogance of German professors, but neither of them came across as being arrogant with students. I am sure they could be arrogant with one another and with their colleagues, but both were very kind teachers.

A Shared Radicalism

Q. In terms of substance, I suppose Strauss’s focus was always on the text. For Voegelin, part of his original way of looking at the history of political philosophy was to insist on the historical contextualization or the relation of the real life of the authors to these texts. I don’t know Strauss nearly as well–I just know what’s published, and I’ve read some of those transcripts of his seminars–but you don’t get the feeling that the individual that wrote them mattered. What matters is the argument that is found in the text. That’s why, for what it’s worth, I consider Voegelin’s approach to the topics to be more comprehensive. And, for me, it is more interesting. This is not a criticism of Strauss: I think he’s quite an amazing man as well.

steintrager: I did learn something–maybe different things–from both of them. But they were enough in the same “conservative tradition” that I came out, not as a disciple of each, but being able to take something very impor­tant away that was similar: a way of looking at philosophy and the world that was similar.

Q. He and Strauss both are often categorized, usually by journalists or by liberal academics, as being conservative. Would you have any reason to agree with that kind of terminology–not necessarily that terminology in terms of political sci­ence, but as a kind of a general disposition?

steintrager: Yes, I would. They wanted to conserve a tradition. They were cautious people, and they were also certainly ones to point out the problems with a theory of progress. In the name of “immanentizing the eschaton,” you could do a great deal of harm. And that could be considered a conservative viewpoint.

So, yes, I would say they were conservative from that standpoint. The idea that human nature is flawed–that is probably a conservative notion. That might have been why Voegelin would have fit into a very Catholic com­munity even though he was not a Catholic.

jo scurria: I always thought he was a Catholic until I saw his biographical info. In his thinking, and everything, I just assumed that he was Catholic.

steintrager: The label “conservative” has gotten skewed. Actually, I subscribe to the National Review, and have for years and years. But I am also into “lib­eral causes,” and I think people like Strauss and Voegelin have allowed me to be involved in those causes, too. Because I know the limitations of what can be done, I don’t expect too much when I get involved in these causes.

Q. So there is a kind of radicalism to both Voegelin and Strauss?

steintrager: Yes, I think there’s also a radicalness there, which probably appeals to my nature. Also, I really feel like there’s something special about southern Louisiana that allows people to be radical and in some ways even encourages it. I don’t know whether it is the French influence or what. But think of [death-penalty abolitionist] Sister Helen Prejean, for instance–peo­ple like that. There is something here, I think, that allows you to do that with­out being considered a kook.

A Shared Taste for Murder Mysteries

walters: One final thing. Did you know that both of them had identical ways of relaxing? Both of them read murder mysteries. Strauss said, “I cheat. When I open the book up, I read the last chapter to see whodunit, and then I go back and read from the beginning.”

And Strauss would come out with these expressions in class. Voegelin may have done it from time to time, too, but I don’t have much recollection of that. But Strauss would come out with these quips that, once you knew he read these mysteries, you know that’s where they came from.

For example, one day Strauss came up a couple of flights of stairs and before he went into his office, he looked at the secretary and said, “I think I have a bum ticker.” It was true: a couple of years later he had that heart attack right in the middle of a course on campus. But I thought it was interesting that they both relaxed by reading murder mysteries and they learned a lot of their colloquial English from them.

How Voegelin Saw America

Q. I’d like to know how he and Strauss saw America. They both were very comfort­able in the United States as a place to live. But so many of Strauss’s students have mentioned that it was no accident that he became a defender of the American founding, and that this was important.

lewis p.simpson: The sense that Voegelin had of European order and lack of order, of the construction of order and so on, he somehow had from the very begin­ning, from the very early years when he came here. He had been influenced by something like the idea of America. He picked up on it pretty early, and it made a difference in his understanding of Europe.

Q. In his early book on America, I think you can see pretty clearly there that he gained a perspective on European affairs that survived beyond his early writing.

simpson: Yes, I think it must have. He got certain ideas from what he’d call American pragmatism.

Q. Well, one thing about Voegelin is that he was obviously very adaptable, if he adapted to the American South the way he did! But the ambiance of LSU, I think, was somehow . . . Well, he was also teaching at Bennington, but he didn’t like the teachers there; he said they were leftists and Marxists.

Simpson: Oh, I see. So, he wanted to come to the more conservative atmo­sphere here. But it’s remarkable that he could be uprooted the way he was. He took on an enormous project, although he seemed to have been at home almost wherever he was. His ideas were at home; at any rate, he could make his ideas at home. But from what I heard, his wife liked Viennese life.

Q. Did he talk to you about his adjustments, I guess, to life in Baton Rouge?

scurria: No, he never did. And I was always amazed that he seemed so com­fortable in Baton Rouge, because when he was here . . . . Of course not that Baton Rouge hasn’t grown in some respects, but he seemed very comfortable here. And he lived on a street near downtown, and he would walk to wher­ever he wanted to go to buy his papers.

Q. When I had breakfast this morning, I had Eggs Louisiana at a diner just off cam­pus. It was pretty hot, like Eggs Benedict with crawfish and a bunch of other stuff on it. Louisiana food is pretty much unique. Did he ever mention things along those lines about cultural differences?

scurria: I don’t think I ever heard him mention anything one way or the other. He was just not the type to talk to you about something like food. I assumed that he was happy here, because he stayed here for so many years. But I never heard him mention anything about any of the activities here.  

Q. Would you say Voegelin was in his own world and it wasn’t tied to anywhere? That he was in the same world when he was in Munich as he was when he was here?

scurria: He just seemed to be the type that just made himself comfortable and was happy whatever he was doing and he didn’t have to have a lot of peo­ple around him. He always just looked like he was very satisfied, to me. I admired both of them. They were childless but they seemed to not miss out on anything. They were enjoying life. They just had each other, and that was all that they needed.

Q. And he had his work?

scurria: Yes, he had his work. And she let him have his work. I think that some women are jealous because somebody is working too much, but I don’t think that that was ever a problem with her. She knew he had to have his work, and she let him have it.

Life in America in the 1940s and 1950s

Q. And what about what he didn’t have here that he had had in Germany or Austria? Did he ever speak of European academic life?

jo scurria: I never heard him mention anything. In fact, it was the longest time before I found out that he was Austrian, because it just never came up. I always just assumed that he was German. I never knew anything about his life previous to LSU. He never talked about it with students, either.

Q. Certainly in some of the correspondence there is a great sense of gratitude to the United States for giving him a place to live and supporting him, and so on. And he was happy to teach American Government for the same reason.

scurria: Well, everybody [in the department] had to teach American Government. But he said that he enjoyed it, because he obviously wanted to learn about America.

Walking Home from School

lucille mcdowell: I went to university during the war, so there was gas rationing. And I lived three miles from the campus, down Dalrymple Drive, which is by the lakes. And then you had to go all through Roseland Terrace, which at that time was a very nice, rather new, subdivision of Baton Rouge. Then my house was right on the far edge of Roseland Terrace.

So, everybody who was going to school at the time, if they were town students, had to really consider how far the gas rationing would take them. Well, it wouldn’t take you more than half of going to school back and forth every day during a month. So occasionally, you would catch a ride, arrange a ride, and so forth. And for a time, I did that with a friend.

But then I just decided that, with my classes and the times they were, I would just have to walk home half the month: go by shank’s mare, in other words. So, I started doing that. This must have been toward the end of my first class with Voegelin, toward the springtime of my sophomore year.

As I was walking along one day by the lake, this person behind me was call­ing me. He always pronounced my name in a European way. My father was from Norway and my name was Klausen, but Dr. Voegelin said it “Klassen. ” And he was calling, “Miss Klassen!” I suppose he was thirty or forty feet behind me.

I was striding along, walking home, and he was striding along. Of course I didn’t know that he lived in Roseland Terrace. And he said, “Wait, wait!” Of course I waited. I was a little overwhelmed, though; I was eighteen or nineteen and I suppose I thought he was fifty or more. I don’t think he was now: he probably was in his thirties, or possibly in his early forties.

And so, of course, I thought of him as practically a grandfather. But he was a handsome man, and particularly then. He had a beautiful complexion, a very blond and very smooth complexion. He had a very imposing build, too. He was sort of formidable looking and even a little bit cold looking, I think, to an eighteen-year-old girl. I didn’t quite know what this older gentleman was going to say. And really, I had been struck by how terribly brilliant he was.  I thought I had followed everything he said, but I really had to focus.

So, he caught up with me and we started walking. It’s not a good place to walk; there’s no real trail. But we made it. We walked all the way to his house, which was about three-fourths of the way. And I knew right where he lived, because I had known the people whose house it was, so we chatted about that for a few minutes. But then it seemed to me that he was very interested in asking me some questions. And of course, he was tremendously polite in the way he did it: would I mind telling him certain things?

I don’t remem­ber all the details of the questions in that first walk together, but we had sev­eral. The questions were: “Do you date?” “This dating, what is this dating like?” “Where do you go?” Well, I told him. I answered every question, and it seemed to me he was tremendously interested in getting a fix on “What do you young people do?” “What are your views?” So, we just chatted along and it was very friendly.

He asked me why I took his class, and I told him I was minoring in his­tory and that I just loved it and I’d always been interested. So, we talked about that. It was just really friendly, a very nice talk. But he obviously was interested in my responses, my point of view. He was interested in learning, I guess, about this culture he was in, which of course had to be quite differ­ent from the one he had come from.

He was also interested when he learned that my father was from Norway. That intrigued him. I told Dr. Voegelin his reason for being here, and then I told him that he had been appalled because there was no Lutheran church here when he came. Then Dr. Voegelin made a few comments on where he came from, so we were gradually sort of exchang­ing, comparing cultures, as it were. Not in any depth, but a little bit. It was a very pleasant walk, and I told him goodbye when he went to his house and I went home.

Q. Did you walk with him home from school often after that?

mcdowell: It must have been a dozen or so times. Most of our walking together was at lunch. Occasionally, though, I would stay at school until four or five. And once in a while, at four or five he would happen to be leaving the law school, where I think he spent most of his time. I think he was doing a great deal of research in the law school library, which at that time I think was a bigger library than it is now. So, occasionally, we might have seen each other in the early evening or late afternoon. But most of the time it was around lunchtime.

It wasn’t a bad walk: once you got past the lakes, it was sidewalks and very pleasant. Around the lakes it was gravel, and we were walking on the verge of the water and looking at the cattails. I would say it was a total of ten or twelve times–no more than that. But we always chatted just like two friends, and he was a perfectly charming person.

He asked me: Did my family ever go out to eat? If, so where? And he asked me about food: What did I like? What did my mother cook? Things like that. Now, my father had died when I was about thirteen, so my father was dead. And I lived with my mother and my grandmother, who lived with us. And he was interested in that: how old was my grandmother? Well, my grandmother was in her nineties, and she was a formidable old lady. I told him this one time, and he laughed at this:

“You know, Dr. Voegelin, I don’t dare bring some of my boyfriends around because she flirts with them.”

And he said, “Flirts with them? What do you mean ‘flirts’?”

I said, “Well, she plays up to them. She takes them over, if you want to know the truth.”

He asked me about my boyfriends, too. He said, “Who are you dating?  You date?”

“Yes, yes I date.”

“Well, who are you dating?”

“Well, Dr. Voegelin, there are not too many to date these days.”

There was a company–ASTRP, if I remember the name. It was an engineer corps or something, and they had work to do from eight in the morning until eight at night. But at eight to nine or to ten sometimes you had a date with an ASTRP person.

And of course, Harding Field was here, and it was terrible for me: the fighter pilots were at Harding Field, and most of them were smaller than I. I told Dr. Voegelin that, too:

I said, “Well, I don’t have too many choices, Dr. Voegelin, because those fighter pilots are practically all the boys in town.” “And,” I said, “they’re all smaller than I am. When we dance together I don’t particularly care for it.”

And he would laugh. He said, “You dance?”

I said, “Oh, yes.” “Do you like to dance?”

“Well, yes, I like to dance.”

Well, he was really into what did I do.

Q. When you were together, did he ever tell you about how he liked life in America or about his life in Germany?

mcdowell: Yes, he did. Not a great deal, but he talked for instance about lik­ing his house in Baton Rouge. I never understood if he had bought it, or was renting it; I am going to assume now that he was renting it.

When you are sev­enteen or eighteen or nineteen you don’t really think of things like, “Hey, are you renting?” I just assumed that it was his house, and I figured it was rented because I had known the people who left it. And there were a lot of people in Baton Rouge who were renting houses and a lot of rented houses in that area.

It was a pleasant house, an ordinary house, but–let me see, how would I characterize this house? It was just a one-story bungalow, very attractive–one of the more attractive of the bungalows. And he seemed to like his area. That’s an impression of mine. He never said, “I like my area,” or “I like my house,” but he seemed very, very pleased. It was certainly a very comfortable place and wasn’t all that far from the university.

Religion and Race Relations

Q. The South generally, and, so far as I know, Louisiana still, is concerned with reli­gious questions. And religion has more of a major presence in the lives of indi­viduals here, in this part of the country, certainly, than in Chicago.

marianne steintrager: That’s probably why, when I was taking classes with Voegelin, it didn’t seem strange at all that people might be talking about visions. I grew up in southern Louisiana in the Catholic tradition, where religion is taken seriously–but not too seriously, as they say! There was that element there, but I don’t remember it being emphasized unduly. It was just there.

Q. Was Christianity another topic to be discussed, rather than something that was major in his life?

steintrager: I didn’t get an impression that it was major in his life in terms of his being a practicing whatever. Although he was a Lutheran, I never got any impression that he went to church. I knew he wasn’t Catholic, because I was and if he had been a practicing Catholic, I think I would have been aware of it. But I knew that it was a Christian tradition he was coming from and that he thought that Christianity, visions, and things like that were a very impor­tant part of this whole history of political philosophy. 

Q. What about race relations in the South at that time? Did Voegelin ever mention any views on segregation?

steintrager: He was there when LSU was integrated, wasn’t he? Or did he leave the year they integrated? Anyway, I can’t remember any comments about the whole segregation issue.

scurria: If there was anything that he was dissatisfied about with Louisiana or the way things were, he never mentioned it.

steintrager: Integration might have happened the year Voegelin left. He left in ’58, so that might have been the year. I remember: when the “White Only” signs went up over all the restrooms in the buildings, there were about five of us in the government department that took all those “White Only” signs down and put them on the trash cans. Some of us Voegelinites did that: White Trash Only. It was horrifying to me that they would have put “White Only” signs up.

And I remember that somebody I liked very much–a professor who will remain unnamed–cautioned us about doing this: we might get into trouble doing this. He was a Yankee, very much ACLU, but he was telling us to be very careful. I still remember that: liberal in your thinking, but what do you do with your actions? But I don’t remember any real upheavals surrounding integration when it finally happened.

Q. What was the general attitude of faculty at LSU toward race relations in the South? How did Voegelin respond to that?

robert b. heilman: Race relations? I don’t think the subject ever came up. I left in ’48, when the old conventions were still holding. Harold Stoke, who was president of LSU from ’47 to ’51 and later dean of graduate studies here, told me that he could have integrated the university if it had depended on the students alone.

The Supreme Court decision was in ’54, and this was four or five years before that. But he said that the old-timers, the alumni and the board, were terrible. To me, it was very interesting that he thought the youngsters wouldn’t have cared. If you go to the LSU campus now, it’s full of black students.

But I can remember that even by the time I left in ’48, there was beginning to be some feeling in the South like, “Should we really let all these black boys go up North to play football, instead of keeping them down here?” And that alone might have produced some sort of educational integration in due time!

But to answer your second question, I don’t know that Eric was interested in that problem. I don’t know, it may have seemed to him a contemporary sit­uation that would solve itself in the evolution of time. And it didn’t particu­larly shed any light on the theoretical issues with which he was concerned.

manfred henningsen: I think he did not buy into the acceptance of the practiced racism in the South. He never did that. But there was no analysis either; there was simply a silence. It was not only a silence about the corruption, but a silence about this dimension of it. And that certainly has always troubled me.

I remember the first time I came with them to the United States: for me, it was really a shock experience. You got off the plane at Idlewild Airport and went into the customs area, and there you had lines of white customs officers and behind them was a line of black porters. I will never forget that moment. For me it was a shock: it confirmed everything the radical left in Germany had said about the United States. This was a racist society.

For me, it was one of the most shocking experiences because it violated my understanding of the United States and confirmed that the left’s critique was right. I had reviewed books and attacked them for their anti-American tenor, but there it was! But the Voegelins didn’t say anything, because, for them, it was normal. It was part of the life they had accepted. And for the next two months, I tried to con­firm for myself that this was an exceptional experience. I wanted to suppress what I had seen there, but I didn’t get any help from the Voegelins on this.

But it’s interesting: here you have a young German coming to America as a guest of refugees, seeing something and finding it very offensive, whereas the refugees had accepted it as part of American reality. That is an interesting contrast.

Q. They weren’t refugees so much as returning Americans, perhaps.

henningsen: Oh, I mean original refugees. But no, now they were Americans. And they were very proud of that, and Voegelin, whenever he gave an American politics class in Munich, certainly had to cope with this question. It was always painful to see him not fully addressing it. He was somehow uncomfortable with that question. He was too honest to not recognize it as a deep flaw in American society.

Through his own studies on race and the events of the twentieth century, he was aware that he simply could not use any kind of intellectual justification for racist attitudes and institutions. It was very clear to him. But habitually, I think, his whole style was not free. And my wife, who is black, felt it–the only time she met both of them, she real­ized it. The discomfort was stronger with Lissy than with Eric; I actually think [my wife] over-interpreted Voegelin’s behavior, because Voegelin very often was uncomfortable and a little bit gauche when he dealt with women.

I don’t know whether it was the impact of his stay in the South, which became somewhat golden because of the black working-class in the South. I think he didn’t know how to handle it. Eric sometimes talked about blacks in his lectures in Germany when he was teaching American politics; sometimes you had this slip of European racism coming through, this kind of normal dismissal. A lot of German immigrants of that generation carried it around with them, by the way: Thomas Mann wrote about his black servants as if they were an indentured class.

Becoming an American Citizen

Q. There was a German book called Conservative European Intellectuals I just read today. And Voegelin had written back and said that he wasn’t a European; he was an American.

lissy voegelin: Yes.

Q. And was he very proud of being an American?

l. voegelin: Yes. I remember a dinner party when someone asked Eric, “Mr. Voegelin, may I ask you one very personal question? What do you consider yourself? Are you a European or an American?” And I thought, “Oh, now I’ll be hearing one of his speeches.” But he said, “An American, of course! I’ve been an American for such a long time and I’ve learned so much about America that I am an American.” But he was European-born–that was one aspect of him.

Q. But he did not feel alienated.

l. voegelin: No.

paul caringella: Or just like a poor émigré, a refugee, an exile.

l. voegelin: No. They wanted to make him that way, but he wouldn’t let them. That’s one of the reasons why we went down South. In New York, everybody stays in exile for twenty years, but Eric didn’t want that. He said he wanted to be an American. He had moved to America, and he wanted to teach American Government. And in the Eastern intellectual climate, we were even not American citizens, because it takes five years to become one. So, that’s why we went South.

The Naturalization Board

heilman: Did I tell you about my problem with the naturalization board? Apparently, the person being naturalized has to present some native as his official witness. And Eric nominated me as his official witness, so I went with him to the naturalization proceedings.

I was then interviewed indepen­dently, secretly–oh, secretly is the wrong word, but I was asked very severely if he was a communist, a trouble maker, all that sort of thing. Needless to say, the answer to all the questions was easy. But on one problem, we ran into difficulties.

The naturalization officer wanted to know when I had got to know Eric. This was in 1944, so I had known him for just about two years. I couldn’t remember exactly when, so I said, “He came here in the second semester of the academic year 1941-1942.

So, obviously, this was some time early in 1942. Shortly after he came, we became friends.” Then he said, “That won’t do. You have to be more precise.” And I said, “Well, he came for the second semester of the 1941/42 year, which means he would have been here about February 1st. And I met him sometime between then and the spring.” Again he said, “That won’t do.” So, I said, “Well, I met him perhaps about the middle of February.”  “Won’t do.” I said, “All right, February 16th.”

Then I was hoping I wouldn’t be caught out. Later, Eric told me that they’d told him that I was a very good witness, that I was very precise on my facts. Most professors wandered all around and weren’t sure what the hell was what, but I knew!

Q. Did his naturalization process or hearing take place in Baton Rouge?

heilman: In Baton Rouge, in 1944.

Q. Did he ever speak to you about any, I don’t know what you’d call it–any preju­dice against his being Austrian, or German? Particularly during the war?

heilman: No. If he felt any, I don’t remember his mentioning it.

Q. I remember reading some letters that people my age would write to him asking about his views, because they were writing a book on European conservatism. And he would say, “I’m not a European and I’m not a conservative. I’m an American and I’m a political scientist.” And that struck me as a very strong statement.

heilman: I know. But that was definitely an idea of his. When he came to this country, he said, we resolved to be Americans. That was one reason why the South interested him: it was away from the Eastern centers, which were loaded with European refugees. They all hung together and sort of main­tained a Europe out of residence, you know. In the Deep South there weren’t any–or, at least, there weren’t large numbers of them. That was important to him. He said, “We decided to be Americans.”

The Move to Munich

Q. Was there any signal or any anticipation that he might be leaving?

scurria: No, it came as a complete shock to me. I was really surprised.

Q. When Voegelin left Germany to go back to the States, his students felt abandoned, annoyed, disappointed. I was wondering how the people here felt when he left.

scurria: I think they hated to see him go. He was a man who was renowned all over the world, and having been at LSU, we thought that we were fortunate to have him. And then to have him leave, it just left a big void, as far as I was concerned. I don’t know how people on campus felt about it, but I know that the department hated to see him go. I hated to see him leave, I truly liked him.

Q. Why do you think Voegelin went to Munich?

ellis sandoz: Well, he had been headed off in the past by every single job offer he might have been able to get in the United States–including kind of a disas­trous one apparently at Johns Hopkins, which may have involved a bit of skullduggery on the part of Leo Strauss himself.

There may be documentary evidence for it; it’s pretty authoritative because it came as a reaction to what I wrote about Voegelin. Lissy read it and corrected me as to when the split between Strauss and Voegelin came, and why it was as profound as it was. But there was a direct statement that Voegelin was characterized as being “too controversial” to be appointed at Johns Hopkins.

The point is: He had been at LSU for sixteen years. He had been in America since 1939, and in twenty years had gone from Bennington to Alabama to LSU. He had some ambition, and Alois Dempf and Romano Guardini were at Munich. There was this opportunity to develop political science in a country that had no liberal dem­ocratic tradition and needed an infusion of ideas on how to govern on the basis of a liberal democratic regime such as the American one. And I’m sure the pay was pretty good, too. So, for a variety of reasons, he accepted.

robert pascal: When Voegelin indicated that he would be leaving, there was an attempt to keep him here–a very real attempt. Cecil Taylor, who was then chancellor of the university, did everything he could to raise a sufficient amount of money to keep Voegelin here.

Now, neither Voegelin himself nor his wife were interested in money as such, I must say that. Voegelin, I think, would have been delighted to stay here as a professor; to be able to travel (as he was always able to travel and go to other libraries and consult other schol­ars) but to operate from here. The one thing that convinced him he had to make a change was that LSU, at that time, did not have a good retirement sys­tem. First of all, the maximum retirement for an LSU professor at that time was only one-third of the average of his highest-paid three years. And absolutely no provision was made for a widow.

He told me himself at the time–don’t forget we were talking in another era, in 1957, ’58–”Well, I would have to have at least three hundred thousand dollars to make sure that Lissy would have enough income when I die, and it looks like that is not possible.” Then he said, “In Germany, once I take the oath of office, I will have my salary for life, and if I die, she will have seventy-five or eighty percent of the professor’s salary.”

So, here was a retirement ben­efit adequate for Lissy. That, I think, was the principal reason for his going. I don’t think he had a desire to return to Germany at that time. But he did tell me about the retirement situation, his own fear that his illness might return, and that sort of thing.

I certainly can believe that the opportunity to open this institute was itself complimentary to him, to say the least. But I still don’t think he would have gone to Germany.

Contributors

paul caringella (interviewed May 23,1995, in Mountain View, California) became Voegelin’s assistant in 1978 and provided Voegelin both scholarly and personal support until his death in 1985. Now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Caringella is director of the Eric Voegelin Archive there. He lives in San Francisco.

robert b. heilman (interviewed July 27,1995, in Seattle) was Voegelin’s colleague and friend during his tenure at Louisiana State University. As a member of LSU’s English department, Heilman not only sponsored Voegelin’s naturalization as an American citizen but also frequently assisted Voegelin with his English. In 1948, Heilman accepted a position at the University of Washington, where he taught and wrote until his retirement in 1984. A prolific literary scholar, he remained active in his profession until his death in 2004.

manfred henningsen (interviewed September 1, 1995, in Chicago) knew Voegelin first as his research assistant in Munich, then as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution in California. In 1970, Henningsen accepted a position at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he has written on and taught contemporary political theory since that time.

lucille mcdowell (interviewed May 4,1996, in Baton Rouge) was one of Voegelin’s first students at Louisiana State University. Formerly a producer for Louisiana Public Broadcasting and the coordinator of Louisiana’s “Literacy and Learning” program, she is retired and lives in Baton Rouge.

robert pascal (interviewed May 6, 1996, in Baton Rouge) was Voegelin’s colleague at Louisiana State University, where he taught Civil and Anglo-American Legal Science and Voegelin taught the Philosophy of Law to first-year students. Now an emeritus professor of law, Pascal lives in Baton Rouge.

ellis sandoz (interviewed October i and 2,1995, in Calgary and November 4,1995, in Indianapolis) met Voegelin as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, completed his M.A. there with him, then wrote his doctorate under him at the University of Munich. A prominent Voegelin scholar and promoter of Voegelin studies in America, Sandoz teaches political science at Louisiana State University, where he also leads the Eric Voegelin Institute. He lives in Baton Rouge.

jo scurria (interviewed May 4,1996, in Baton Rouge) was the administrative assistant at the department of government throughout Voegelin’s time at Louisiana State University. One of the few expert interpreters of Voegelin’s handwriting, she estimates that she typed more than five thousand pages of his manuscripts. Scurria is retired and lives in Baton Rouge.

lewis p. simpson (interviewed May 5,1996, in Baton Rouge) was a professor of English literature when he met Voegelin at Louisiana State University. Also a Boyd professor, Simpson co-edited the Southern Review from 1964 to his retirement in 1987. He died in April 2005.

marianne steintrager (interviewed May 4,1996, in Baton Rouge) studied under Voegelin as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, then did graduate work under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. She lives in Baton Rouge

lissy voegelin (interviewed May 28 and 29, 1995, in Palo Alto) was Eric Voegelin’s wife from 1932 until his death in 1985. His lifelong companion, constant support, and frequent adviser, Lissy joined him in exile after the Anschluss and accompanied him in all relocations up to their final move to Palo Alto in 1969. Lissy Voegelin remained in Palo Alto until her death in 1996.

ernest J. walters (interviewed November 4, 1995, in Indianapolis) knew Voegelin as an undergraduate and M.A. student at Louisiana State University. After completing his doctorate under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Walters joined the political science department at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He taught there until his death in January 1997.

This excerpt is from Voegelin Recollected: Conversations of a Life (University of Missouri Press, 2007). It is the third of three parts, with parts one and two available; also see “Voegelin at Notre Dame,” “Voegelin in Munich,” “Voegelin and his Contemporaries,” and “Voegelin Recollected.”

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