Max Weber in America by Scaff Lawrence A.;

Author:Scaff, Lawrence A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

AMERICAN MODERNITY

The journey from Boston to New York City by train followed the route through Providence, Rhode Island and New Haven, Connecticut. Writing to Hugo Münsterberg from Philadelphia, Max Weber had expressed the intention of stopping at both Brown University and Yale University, still in search of library holdings related to Puritanism and the Protestant sects. Armed with a recommendation from Münsterberg, he managed only the brief excursion to Brown, with amusing and revealing results. Weber made a point of noting that he was in “the oldest homeland on earth of freedom of conscience (Roger Williams) and the separation of state and church” (November 6; MWP). In search of documentation on this topic, he located the campus librarian who informed him that the university, though founded by Baptists and a few Congregationalists, had decided to erase any connections to its religious and “sectarian” heritage. It had retained no holdings on the history of the Baptists and avoided collecting even modern literature on the founding denominations. This exercise in forgetting the past and becoming nonsectarian and “modern” impressed Weber sufficiently to footnote it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, mentioning that if one wanted to know about the American Baptists, then the best library was not at Brown, but at Colgate University, an institution also founded by Baptists.

While in New England the Webers had taken two days to visit another member of their Fallenstein relatives, Max’s half cousin Laura, her German immigrant husband Otto von Klock, and their eight children, residing in Wyoming, a community near suburban Medford, north of Boston. It was part of the effort to keep up with the fate of the family’s colonial children, as Guenther Roth has shown. Klock had set up a successful typewriter and translation business under Laura’s name (L. Fallenstein and Company), and had received commissions from the Astors and other established and wealthy families to conduct genealogical research. For the status conscious, recovering a personal past could sanction pedigree and anchor social prestige, a sign of “Europeanization,” Weber maintained. The brief stay turned out to be enjoyable and instructive. Max thought the native-born Klock children had become fully assimilated to American life, despite their father’s scorn for “Yankees” and his romanticized longing for a Germany that had disappeared. Secularization had set in, too, as the second generation drifted away from Protestantism, a trend Weber thought was typical in immigrant families.

Arriving for their second stay in New York City a few days before the presidential election, the Webers this time located farther uptown, past Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace to the Holland House at Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. The hotel was four blocks north of D. H. Burnham’s recently completed Flatiron Building. The next week in a cost-saving move they relocated to a boarding house at 167 Madison Avenue, closer to the Thirty-third Street Station on the subway that had opened just two weeks earlier. Operated by a Frau von Hilsen, the Madison Avenue residence housed two American couples and several young German businessmen employed in the city.

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