from  The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge
-Part 1

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science and has edited several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Jodi Bruhn is the editor of Vol 13 and also translator of Vols 8, 13, and 32 of The Collected Works.

 

The Voegelins in the United States

 

LISSY VOEGELIN: After we arrived from Europe, we were in New York for two days.

 

PAUL CARINGELLA: They arrived in New York, and just as they got to their hotel, the great hurricane of 1938 came up the coast.

 

L. VOEGELIN: And the windows were all falling out onto the streets. Oh, it was terrible. The wind–oh, it howled. And we were on the twenty-second floor. But Eric just said, "That's the way it is in the United States.”

 

CARINGELLA:  Eric said: "You have to get used to it! It's a new country.” The next day, I think, Eric went somewhere for a meeting, or to a library. He made sure you knew that, if you went out, you should stay close to the building. You were to go around the block and not wander off. So, you went out for a walk, and you turned around the corner . . .

 

L. VOEGELIN: And the first thing I saw was two rough girls in brown uniforms singing songs about refugees. Then I started crying. I turned around, and cried and cried.

 

 

 

CARINGELLA:  And you told Eric, "They're here.”

 

These were American Nazis?

 

L. VOEGELIN:   Eric told me it was very stupid of me.

 

CARINGELLA: So that was a great introduction to America. Then they got on the boat.

 

You had to take a boat up to Boston?

 

L. VOEGELIN: Oh yes, because of the hurricane. The trees were falling over the tracks, so we had to take the boat. And we couldn't afford a cabin to sleep in, but there were great big chairs on the deck outside. We got two of them, and I had my fur coat with me, so I put it over me and felt very comfortable. And Eric left for a while to buy some cigars or I don't know what.

 

Then a man came up to me and said, "You don't have to stay here on this deck. Come with me to my cabin. I have a very nice room there. You can sleep all night.” I said, "No, thank you very much. My husband is coming.” I couldn't stand talking to this person. Then he said, "Oh, your husband's coming," and he disappeared.

 

When we went to Boston, Eric put me in a hotel. And he said, "Stay here.” Then he emptied his pockets, and there were fifty dollars in them.” Now I'm going on to Harvard," he said.  “I have the permit until the tenth of October, and I'll try to get fifty dollars from them.” When he came back, he said that they wouldn't do it. He had asked for a senior secretary to come and had told her that we were refugees really, that it wasn't our fault. Eric said, "Oh, I am doing lots of things for Harvard, and I'll be getting lots of payment.” But she said, "No, we cannot do it. We can't do it, it's absolutely impossible.”

 

You then spent the winter in Cambridge?

 

L. VOEGELIN: Yes, yes. In January, we went to Bennington. Eric had to return to Harvard every Wednesday afternoon, I think. He went to Cambridge every Wednesday because he had two boys to tutor. He was also looking for a job, of course. Then on Thursdays and Fridays, Eric came back to Bennington.

 

CARINGELLA: A group of the Bennington girls upset you and Eric once. They were very much against Germans, and you happened to speak German. And what did they do?

 

L. VOEGELIN: Well, they had a group of girls who sang about refugees in Bennington. Because the quarters where we had to live had big windows, they had seen me. They knew that I could see them, of course. When Eric came home, I told him, and he knew exactly who they were and that they had seen me. Eric went to the director and told him about it, and the girls got a lecture.

 

They did it just because they didn't like Germans?

 

L. VOEGELIN: I don't know why. I had never done anything to them; I had never seen them before. They probably didn't like Germans. But Eric and I, when we were together, talked German together because I didn't know English well yet. But we only whispered; we did not make much noise.

 

CARINGELLA: On the train once–I think you were coming back to Baton Rouge from Cambridge–this couple behind you heard you talking to one another in German. And they called the conductor and told the conductor something. So that when you got to the train station in Baton Rouge . . .

 

L. VOEGELIN: When we got off the train and Eric tried to hail a taxi, the police came and said, "Wait a minute, who are you?" And so forth and so on. Eric showed them that he had an appointment at the university, that he was a pro­fessor of government, and so on. He asked, "What's going on here?" And the policeman said, "Well, somebody sitting behind you in the train heard you talking German, and thought you were spies.” But what spies would talk in German?

 

Did you enjoy your time in Bennington?

 

L. VOEGELIN: Oh, yes. It was in Vermont. At that time, it was girls only. The girls liked Eric very much. They were asking the president to ask Eric to stay for five years. But Eric didn't want to.

 

CARINGELLA: They offered Eric five thousand dollars, which was a lot in 1939.

 

L. VOEGELIN: Then we went to Alabama for two thousand. Eric said, "I'm not going to stay up in Bennington, in the mountains in the snow and ice where I see only fifty people and they hate each other. I don't like it there.” So, we went to Alabama.

 

CARINGELLA: By way of Evanston–by way of Northwestern.

 

L. VOEGELIN: That was for summer school, yes.

 

CARINGELLA: It was in Evanston–or Chicago–that Eric and Lissy bought a car. And Eric drove first to Wisconsin, then straight down from Wisconsin to Alabama.

 

I thought he couldn't drive. I thought you would drive.

 

L. VOEGELIN: Oh, he could drive. But he was a very thoughtless driver. One day I heard him after he had left in the morning for the university: I heard a big bang, and I thought, "Oh, it was somebody else.” But then came Eric with a really white face. He said he had lit his cigar and his hands had left the wheel. And then I thought, "Ah, I want us to live a little longer.”  So, I took over. And Eric was delighted. He never drove again.

 

CARINGELLA: When they got the car, I think they both said to the salesman, "We can't drive.”

 

L. VOEGELIN: The salesman said, "Oh, anybody can drive. Sit in there, and I'll show you how.” And we went right into the car.

 

CARINGELLA: Those were the days!

 

JAMES BOLNAR SR.: When I taught at Alabama in the early '6os, I heard a story about Voegelin. This had to do with his absentmindedness.

 

One day, the Voegelins let it be known that their car was not functioning properly–or not functioning at all. They then discovered that there was absolutely no oil in the motor block; there was just no oil. It had never occurred to them to get the oil checked or changed or whatever. This is an Alabama story, and although it might not be true at all, that level of absentmindedness corroborated other stories you would hear in Baton Rouge.

 

So, you came to Tuscaloosa.

 

L. VOEGELIN: Tuscaloosa, yes. They were very nice to us. Eric had gone down there on a Rockefeller fellowship, and when the Rockefeller expired, some­body said, "No, you're out.” I remember the head of the department went to the president and did all kinds of things to try and keep Eric, but they could not keep him. So, Eric had to go to Baton Rouge one weekend to give a lec­ture there . . .

 

CARINGELLA: At the meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.

 

L. VOEGELIN: And Eric was immediately hired. So, he went to Louisiana.

Louisiana in the 1930s

 

ROBERT B. HEILMAN: Huey Long was killed in 1935. There's no reason why you should remember it; I wrote an essay on it because I was present. [My wife Ruth] and I, on what was practically our honeymoon, arrived at Baton Rouge on Labor Day in 1935. [The city of Baton Rouge is the State Capital of Louisiana and the home of Louisiana State Univesity. -ed] The next Sunday, we went to a meeting of the legislature because the United States Senator Huey Long was going to be there.

 

And we were sitting in the balcony, which is at the rear of the lesser chamber, and we saw Huey Long in action on the floor. United States Senator Huey Long was sitting in one of the head chairs of the Lower House of the Louisiana legislature. After about forty-five minutes, he left; he was walking down the aisle underneath us with henchmen going after him in droves.

Senator Huey Long

 

And then we heard something that sounded like firecrackers. People started running back in and ducking behind desks. What we were doing was attending the death of Huey Long–well, he died two and a half days later. That was quite an introduction for a couple of Northerners to Louisiana! We thought, "So that's how they settle problems here!"

 

The head of the department at that time came to my apartment several days later. He said, "Heilman, I don't know if the university is going to open next week.” I thought he meant that a formal period of mourning might con­tinue. But no–what he meant was that the whole state might fall apart. I thought, "Good God!" But the university did open.

 

LEWIS P. SIMPSON: Huey, he had actually got control of everything, even of the university. He had the National Guard here in Baton Rouge and so on. He had made the National Guard into his own groom, so to speak, as he already had the state police and the state legislature. He left the governorship to become a United States Senator, but in fact he kept both jobs and solidified his power in Louisiana even though he had gone to Washington.

 

He had aspi­rations to become president, and there were reports that Franklin Roosevelt was rather afraid of Huey Long. But I don't know how true that was, consid­ering Roosevelt had some cognizance of the fact that he [Long] would have some problems trying to establish himself as a national force as well as a hav­ing a stake in the South.

 

That was the context when Voegelin arrived. By the time he got here, what is referred to as "the Scandals" had already broken open. By 1939, a number of members of the Long regime were in prison, including the president of Louisiana State University. He had been engaged in various fraudulent activ­ities.

 

He was sentenced to the state penitentiary at Angola, which is still bad enough, but in those days was probably one of the worst penitentiaries in the country! They still wore prison stripes, traditional prison garb. There is a picture in Life magazine, oh, from about 1943: "Ronald Smith, former president of LSU, standing in a cane field with a machete cutting cane.” Anyway, he died there not long afterward. It was a strange time in Louisiana. A great deal of it was used in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men.

Colleagues in Baton Rouge

 

SIMPSON: Robert Penn Warren was already at LSU when Voegelin came. So were such scholars as Cleanth Brooks, T. Harry Williams, Robert Heilman. Voegelin stepped into a situation where there was a marvelous group of peo­ple–most of them younger–at LSU. It was a pretty exciting time in a way, a Southern university acquiring a broad reputation almost overnight. It became internationally known even. The intellectual aspect of the university in the '30s and '40s was more impressive than it ever had been.

Robert Penn Warren

 

The intellectual liveliness of LSU in the early 1940s is not something I expected. How did this configuration of minds come together? Did they recruit one another? Was it purely good luck for the undergraduates?

 

ROBERT PASCAL: It was not good luck. This campus is the result of the efforts of Huey Long. Huey Long's idea was that this university was going to be one of the best universities, if not the best. Money was not an object for Huey Long; whatever the university needed, it got. Salaries for good people were high for the time.

 

The law school, for example: Huey wanted a law school that would teach the law of the world. He wanted a law school that would be able to teach European law, Latin American law, certainly Anglo-American law. He got a professor, then at Tulane, Frederick Butell, to head the LSU Law School. Butell was simply told by Huey Long that he should get the best peo­ple and pay them well. He did. To give you an idea, back in the '30s and early '40s, before World War II, salaries for some full professors at the law school were ten thousand dollars. That was a lot then. Butell managed to attract a great number of people to the LSU Law School.

 

Now, that's only the law school–I can't tell you very much about the other faculties, but I have no doubt that the law school was part and parcel of the same thing. While Huey was still alive, he told Butell that he was to build a building for a proper law school and a library building that would permit a collection of books that would exceed Harvard's collection in number and quality.

 

Cleanth Brooks

It was only after Huey died that the plans were toned down. But still: Heilman and people like that were brought here, the Southern poets were brought here, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and other people. The Southern Review was founded then. It is still a very respectable review.

 

Did he ever talk to you about how he came to LSU and why he left Germany?

 

ERNEST J. WALTERS: Oh, no, although we knew he left Europe because of the Anschluss. He had friends where he was able to get into Switzerland, and then from Switzerland came to the United States. He taught at Harvard and at the University of Alabama, then he came to LSU. Then, when he gained such notoriety, they gave him one of these chairs.

 

There were three people who got those chairs: Voegelin was one of them, Harry Williams was one of them, and I don't remember the third person. But I do remember that Voegelin got a salary of eight thousand dollars a year and all of us thought, "Good heavens, how could anyone earn that much money?" So you see, this was a long time ago!

 

DONALD STANDFORD: I did not arrive on the scene for any length of time until 1953. At that time, I received my long-awaited doctorate degree from Stanford University, and with my new wife, I traveled out to Baton Rouge and we lived in Baton Rouge from 1953 on. I believe that that was the year Voegelin was made Boyd professor here. I heard about it soon after my arrival. He was a great scholar and a very erudite man.

 

SIMPSON: A Boyd professor is supposed to be, academically, the most presti­gious rank. They have established in recent years a number of professorships named for alumni, so it's not quite what it was. But when Voegelin was appointed, it was still supposed to be the highest academic ranking. Not a great many were appointed to that.

T. Harry Williams

 

But I think Voegelin was appointed first, then T. Harry Williams was probably the second. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for a long book called Lincoln and His Generals–that was the book that made Harry prominent. After he wrote Lincoln and His Generals, he wrote a biography of General Beauregard. He then spent many years working on Huey Long. And he won, I think, two Pulitzer Prizes.

 

PASCAL: Voegelin found some people on the faculty of interest to him, such as Heilman and Brooks. That's perfectly true. But I think what he liked about LSU was the fact that he was allowed to work as he pleased. He didn't lack anything by way of library resources or other such things. He would go off at times, in the summer, to other places and do some research–that's true. But he found it very comfortable here. Able to work peacefully.

Everday Life at LSU

 

PASCAL: You know what his schedule was? He'd get to the university about nine o'clock in the morning. And you might see him strolling around the campus, smoking a big black cigar, until it was time for his ten o'clock class. Then he would come in and teach it. If he had another class, he would go out and smoke another cigar and think. That's about the way he carried on here.

 

He did his work at home. Generally, he would go home for his main meal, around noon, and take a siesta. Then, at three o'clock, he would begin his work. And except for a very light supper–almost every day, he had a very light supper, prepared by Lissy–he worked through until three, three-thirty in the morning. She was an academic widow, for the most part. Although he did try out many things on her, would test things on her. So, she was not someone who was entirely out of the picture.

 

L. VOEGELIN: He very seldom went to bed before two o'clock in the morning. And he had to have breakfast at seven-thirty. Then he read the newspapers and the journals. And then he went and worked, and then we had lunch. After lunch he'd always have a nap of at least two hours–that's where he caught up on his lost sleep. And then he read. At night he started really to work.

 

And you made him breakfast and lunch.

L. VOEGELIN: Yes.

 

Did he ever cook?

L. VOEGELIN: No, never. He always was very happy to cook omelettes, but that was all he could cook.

 

Did you make him Viennese coffee or American coffee for breakfast?

 

L. VOEGELIN: For breakfast? Oh, I had American coffee made in a coffee machine. But we never had coffee for breakfast. We had tea. Eric didn't like coffee for breakfast, and I couldn't stand it. Both of us had tea.

 

And he did most of his work in his study at home rather than in his office?

 

L. VOEGELIN: Yes. In Louisiana, he had to teach in the morning, of course. From nine to ten, and from eleven to twelve he always had to. And on Saturdays, of course. They always put him in a Saturday class, especially from eleven to twelve, because he was the only one who could make the students come. Otherwise they would leave.

 

JO SCURRIA: I remember he always wanted his classes at the time of eleven o'clock–from eleven to twelve on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Those were his class times.

 

Why did he want those times?

 

SCURRIA: I don't know exactly. You didn't make up a schedule–classes were given by Dr. Voegelin at the eleven to twelve hour. He never did drive, and Mrs. Voegelin would come and pick him up. She'd come into my office and talk to me and wait for him to get out of class. I guess they just went home after that and did whatever a brilliant man like that does at home.

 

He would go home with her, and you never found him around the hallways in the after­noon. I think at the time he was also teaching a course in jurisprudence in the law school. At that time, they did give you a class load, and then you also had time for research. So, he probably taught about six hours and used the others for research.

 

If he did most of his work at home, his office wasn't filled with books?

 

SCURRIA: He had books in his office, but he had evidently a lot more at home, because, other than at eleven o'clock, you'd never find him in his office. He was always at home. But he was not unreachable: if I had questions about a manuscript or something, I felt comfortable calling him.

 

So you had the task of typing Voegelin's manuscripts? Did you do all his typing?

SCURRIA: I must have typed something like 5500 pages of manuscripts. Remember, we didn't have any electric typewriters; we had all elite typewrit­ers, that was what we typed with. But Dr. Voegelin wanted his done with a pica type. I had an old, old Underwood typewriter, and I can't think now how I ever typed on that typewriter. But I typed on that old typewriter all those pages of manuscript for Dr. Voegelin.

 

The man never failed to compliment me, saying, "Where did you learn to type that good?" It was just typing; it wasn't any big deal, especially for a typ­ist. It all just came naturally to me. But he never failed to compliment me on anything I did for him.

 

Elite type is the smaller?

SCURRIA: The smaller, and he wanted the pica type. I think that's what his publishers wanted. And all his own typing was done on a manual typewriter.

 

So, he typed what he wrote himself?

 

SCURRIA: He typed himself. Dr. Harris was the chairman of the department at that time, and I said, "Dr. Harris, this stuff is all Greek to me anyway.” But when Dr. Voegelin was typing, he would want to type over something like an e with an o or an o with an e, and I never could tell if it was supposed to be an o or an e. I always had to ask him about it, because I guess he thought that I knew what the Greek words meant, but I didn't. But he typed it, and he'd have all these little things in the margins, you know–these thoughts that he had had afterward.

 

But he was quite a chore, and I used to think, "Is this stuff ever going to stop coming?" I guess it didn't, though, because as long as he lived he was always producing stuff! I found that, when he left, I truly missed all the typing that I had done. I was sorry he had left, because he was truly a great, great man.

 

You could read his writing, too?

SCURRIA: Yeah, I could read his writing. In fact, I still have to read it to peo­ple. It sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, but I am reading what he put down because nobody else can read it!

 

You didn't just work for Dr. Voegelin, did you?

 

SCURRIA: No, I worked for the whole department. There were five of us in the department at that time. I was the only secretary; they just had the one sec­retary. And no matter what else I had to do, Voegelin's work came first. I was not exempt from anything else, but his work was put right alongside every­thing else in the department.

Not One to Complain

 

He had good support from LSU. Was he comfortable in other senses? Did he ever mention the weather, for example?

 

MARIANNE STEINTRAGER: I don't remember him complaining about anything.

 

SCURRIA: No, he never did, he never complained. Of course, he always got his schedule arranged like he wanted to, his eleven o'clock class. It was like: what­ever Voegelin wants, Voegelin gets. I think some people probably resented that on campus, because a lot of people didn't feel about Dr. Voegelin the way we did.

 

It's not really a matter of reputation, but of an internal awareness of his own abilities. With someone of his stature, it must have been a source of considerable resentment?

 

SCURRIA: It may have been across campus. I say across campus because we were on one side of the campus, and they were on the other. And maybe some of the others in the history or philosophy departments may have resented him. But within the department, they always felt it was complimentary to the department for LSU to be recognized through such a scholar.

 

Do you think there was any resentment?

 

STEINTRAGER: I never remember any resentment. And then we also had Dr. Heberle in sociology. His wife was Arnold Toynbee's daughter, so we had two of those fairly distinguished people. I think that people were just very pleased that LSU had them.

 

The English department was also quite prominent then.

 

STEINTRAGER: And we had T. Harry Williams in history, too. It was a good time to be at LSU, actually. We had a lot of famous people.

 

LUCILLE  McDOWELL:  I got this little student job–well, I didn't get it, jobs were foisted on me. I didn't mean to work, they would just happen. So, I was grad­ing papers for the philosophy department, and I was in this English library, and that's where Cleanth Brooks was. He was my undergraduate adviser, and he really helped me schedule things. He was absolutely remarkable in the classroom. He drew people: we would study a poem and think there was nothing to it, and two days later you would know that that poem was the equivalent of any novel that had ever been written. They were his insights and he was leading you to them; it was fabulous.

 

Well, Dr. Brooks and T. Harry Williams and Eric Voegelin and a man named Robert Heilman–all of them were marvelous lecturers. They were friends. And Peter Carmichael, who was the head of the philosophy depart­ment, their offices were all on that floor. They would sometimes forget, I think, that I was there. I suppose I learned as much from the conversations as from the lectures!

 

And sometimes Dr. Voegelin would come over. Now, he wasn't in the gang because he wasn't on that floor, but he would sometimes come in. Of course, they would also tease one another, and he would enter into that too when he was there. He could give as good as he got. And he got and gave! I heard a lot of that, and it was marvelous: he was absolutely charming and a different person with that group of people. But then, being with Cleanth Brooks and T. Harry Williams would swing anybody. There would have to be something happening, because T. Harry Williams was kind of crazy.

 

One day, for example, T. Harry Williams was walking down the hallway. And he said, "Hey, Lucille!"–he used to call me Lucille, the Miss Klausen went long ago because he would tease me, he liked to tease everybody. And he was coming down the hall toward me, yelling all the way down the hall, "Hey, Lucille, guess what? I just learned there are three sexes on the campus." And I said, "Oh really, Dr. Williams?" "Yeah, three it is."

 

And he's coming closer the whole time, and I'm wondering what this is going to be. And he gets to me and says, "Guess what they are." "I don't know, Dr. Williams, what are they?" "Well, there's the male sex, and there's the female sex, and then there's the English major."

 

And he just falls all over himself. Everybody was looking because he was yelling and he had a booming voice: this little bitty man and this booming voice, and he was yelling this joke. And every time he used to tease me about being an English major and how ridiculous it was. He teased anybody about whatever it was that was their thing. He teased Eric Voegelin too, and Dr. Voegelin, I think, enjoyed it a great deal.

 

In fact, I think they were a kind of club, and Dr. Voegelin was admitted. He wasn't a prominent fixture because he wasn't there every day. But that little group met, and there was the wonderful quality of T. Harry Williams and of his mind and of his spirit. He was absolutely the life of the place. And Cleanth Brooks was simply a fabulous human being. And Dr. Heilman was a marvelous person, and Peter Carmichael was very interesting, and they enjoyed each other very much.

 

When Dr. Voegelin would come in, you could tell that he enjoyed it too. But what person of any intellect whatsoever wouldn't enjoy Cleanth Brooks? Or T. Harry Williams or Dr. Heilman? And Peter Carmichael: I think the other three sort of accepted Peter Carmichael on sufferance, but they didn't accept Eric Voegelin on sufferance. He was welcomed.

 

I felt that I was really privileged to be able to listen, to be able to hear a lot of the conversations, because they would have them in this huge room with a lot of books in it. Of course, there was a sign that said "Quiet," but they didn't care about that. It was their clubroom.       

 

This is part one of three parts. Part 2 will appear next week.

 

These recollections appear in Chapter 5 of Voegelin Recollected–Conversations on a Life, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2008. This is published with permission and appears in two sections.  We begin this week the first section which is presented in three parts. 

Contributors

(Information given is as of publication of Voegelin Recollected in 2008)