UC Santa Cruz

Other Recent Work

Title
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power

Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s80c9v4

Author
Domhoff, G. William

Publication Date
2014-02-13

Supplemental Material
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s80c9v4#supplemental

eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library

University of California
 G. William Domhoff:

The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power

Interviewed by Sarah Rabkin

Edited by Irene Reti

Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

University Library

2014
This oral history is covered by a copyright agreement between G. William
Domhoff and the Regents of the University of California dated February 12, 2014.
Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview)
may be quoted without the University Library’s permission as long as the
materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require
the written permission of the University Librarian and a proper citation and may
also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be
granted a waiver of the fee. For permission contact: Irene Reti ihreti@ucsc.edu or
Regional Oral History Project, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High
Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064. Phone: 831-459-2847.
 Table of Contents

Interview  History   1  

Early  Life   3  
A  Passion  for  Sports   34  
Duke  University   52  
Majoring  in  Psychology   66  
Graduate  School  at  Kent  State  University   74  
Calvin  Hall   79  
The  Beginnings  of  Dream  Research   83  
A  European  Adventure  and  Marriage   85  
Moving  to  California   88  
California  State  University,  Los  Angeles,  and  Dissertation  Research   90  
The  Beginnings  of  Research  in  Sociology   99  
The  Genesis  of  Who  Rules  America?   104  

Coming  to  the  University  of  California,  Santa  Cruz   105  

Reflections  on  the  College  Core  Courses   116  
College  Courses   120  
Culture  Break   122  
A  UCSC  Baseball  Team   123  
More  on  the  UCSC  College  System   125  
Other  Early  UCSC  Activities   131  
What’s  Different  About  UC  Santa  Cruz   132  
The  Banana  Slug  Mascot   133  
Chairing  the  Committee  on  Academic  Personnel  (CAP)   137  
Chair  of  the  Statewide  Committee  on  Preparatory  Education   149  
Chairing  the  Academic  Senate   151  
Taking  VERIP   160  
Dean  of  Social  Sciences   162  
Committee  on  Emeriti  Relations   175  

The  Trajectory  of  Domhoff’s  Research   179  

More  on  Calvin  Hall   180  
Student  Researchers   183  
Who  Rules  America  and  The  Higher  Circles   184  
Fat  Cats  and  Democrats:  The  Role  of  Big  Rich  in  the  Party  of  the  Common  Man   190  
The  Bohemian  Grove  and  Other  Retreats:  A  Study  of  Ruling  Class  Cohesiveness   195  
A  Study  of  New  Haven   203  
Who  Rules  America  Now?   209  
The  Powers  That  Be   211  
A  Broader  Political  Context   213  
The  1980s   223  
Ralph  Nader  and  the  Green  Party   226  
Changing  the  Powers  That  Be:  How  the  Left  Can  Stop  Losing  and  Win   227  
Santa  Cruz  Harbor  Commission   228  
The  Politics  of  UCSC’s  Growth   230  
Looking  Back   233  
A  New  Generation  of  Sociologists   237  
The  Mystique  of  Dreams   248  
“My  Rehabilitation”   251  
Finding  Meaning  in  Dreams:  A  Quantitative  Approach   254  
State  Autonomy  or  Class  Dominance?   257  
Two  Key  Colleagues   258  
Jews  in  the  Protestant  Establishment   260  
Blacks  in  the  White  Establishment?:  A  Study  of  Race  and  Class  in  America   263  
Diversity  in  the  Power  Elite   265  
The  New  CEOs:  Women,  African  American,  Latino,  and  Asian  American  Leaders  of    
Fortune  500  Companies   266  
dreamresearch.net   268  
dreambank.net   269  
More  on  Who  Rules  America?   271  
The  Scientific  Study  of  Dreams:  Neural  Networks,  Cognitive  Development  and  
 Content  Analysis   276  
The  Leftmost  City:  Power  and  Progressive  Politics  in  Santa  Cruz   277  
Current  Research   281  
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 1

Interview History

G. William (Bill) Domhoff is a research professor of psychology and

sociology at UC Santa Cruz. He arrived at the campus in the fall of 1965 as an

assistant professor in the psychology department, affiliated with Cowell College,

and is one of UCSC’s founding faculty members. Domhoff was born in 1936 near

Cleveland, Ohio; he received his BA at Duke University, his MA at Kent State

University, and his PhD in psychology at the University of Miami. He taught at

California State University, Los Angeles for three years before arriving at UCSC.

Domhoff’s reputation as a scholar extends far beyond UCSC; four of his

books were among the top fifty best sellers in sociology for the years 1950 to

1995: Who Rules America? (1967, #12); The Higher Circles (1970, #39); The Powers

That Be (1979, #47); and Who Rules America Now? (1983, #43). While he began his

career as a psychologist; what is remarkable is that Domhoff has made significant

contributions to two fields: sociology (in power structure research), and

psychology (research on dreams). Domhoff’s dual career was perhaps more

possible at UC Santa Cruz, which, particularly in its early years, encouraged

faculty to engage in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research.

This oral history has two major foci. The first is Domhoff’s recollections of

UC Santa Cruz over the entire (nearly) fifty year history of the campus, including

his memories of the early years playing baseball with students at Cowell College;

his thoughts on the unique features of UC Santa Cruz such as the colleges, the

Narrative Evaluation System, and the Banana Slug Mascot, as well as his

administrative work on several key committees, as chair of the Academic Senate,

and as dean of social sciences. Domhoff took early retirement from UCSC in 1994
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 2

and continued to be an active scholar in both of his fields.

The second focus of this narrative is to explore the trajectory of a prolific,

eclectic, and accomplished scholar. As is evident in this oral history, Domhoff

has never truly retired; he continues to research, write, and publish. In 2007 he

received the University of California's Constantine Panunzio Distinguished

Emeriti Award, which honors the postretirement contributions of UC faculty.

Much of his work is now accessible on two web sites: www.whorulesamerica.net

and www.DreamResearch.net.

The interview was conducted over six sessions in April and May of 2013,

by Sarah Rabkin, for a total of about thirteen hours of interviewing time.

Domhoff reviewed the transcript of the audio recordings, making corrections

and clarifications, and engaging in editing with sharp eyes, dedication, and

tireless energy. I thank him for his generosity and good spirits. Thank you also to

Cameron Vanderscoff, who tenaciously dove into transcribing thirteen hours of

recording in the midst of his graduate studies, and to Sarah Rabkin, interviewer

extraordinaire.

Copies of this volume are on deposit in Special Collections and in the

circulating stacks at the UCSC Library, as well as on the library’s website. The

Regional History Project is supported administratively by Elisabeth Remak-

Honnef, Head of Special Collections and Archives, and Interim University

Librarian, Elizabeth Cowell.

—Irene Reti, Director, Regional History Project, University Library

University of California, Santa Cruz, February 14, 2014

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 3

Early Life

Rabkin: This is Sarah Rabkin. And I am with Bill Domhoff for our first interview

in my kitchen in Soquel, California, on April 8th, 2013. So Bill, let’s start with

when and where you were born, and tell me a bit about your family background.

Domhoff: I was born in Youngstown, Ohio on August 6th, 1936. I lived there the

first four or five years of my life, and basically never returned except to visit my

grandparents, because we moved on to live in a town called Steubenville, down

the river from Youngstown. Lived there, maybe from the first to the third grade,

and then moved to the east side of Cleveland, to a small town called Lyndhurst.

Lived there for a year or two. And then by the sixth grade I was at a school in

Rocky River, Ohio. And that became, what to me, was my hometown. A great

place. I really think I blossomed for kidhood, for childhood, there. But we would

just visit to Youngstown. So I was born in Youngstown. My parents are of

Youngstown. But I’m not in really quite, in any conscious sense, from

Youngstown.

Now, as far as my family—my father was born in 1905. He had a father

who was of German background, although born and raised in the United States,

and bilingual. And my Grandfather Domhoff worked in the steel mill. He was a

foreman in the steel mill by the time I knew of him. And from pictures you can

tell that he started working out in the steel mill, worked his way up. His mother,

my dad’s mother, was actually an English immigrant. So she came to this

country at age eleven or twelve. And her family had served in the military. I

think her parents came as well. So right away, it’s a mixed kind of family.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 4

And what I didn’t know about my father’s upbringing until I was an

adult—and it’s an interesting commentary, I realized much later, on mobility in

America—he had a huge cousinhood. I was stunned when I learned this in my

thirties or forties: He had twenty-six or so cousins.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: Because my Grandpa Domhoff had a brother that married a sister of

his wife. And then there were others. And she had other brothers and sisters.

They all lived within a few miles of each other, so you never knew who was

going to be at lunch. So you grew up in that huge kind of thing. He got

encouragement; he went to college. I think he was the first, probably, one in that

family, although others may have gone, out of that huge cousinhood. And he

went to Ohio State. He had to drop out, turn money a couple of times. But he

graduated from Ohio State in 1930, about when he was twenty-five years old.

And then basically that put him on a somewhat upward track. So I grew

up in a very nuclear family that moved around. So it was kind of stunning that

he came from that background—he never talked much about them, but they

would talk about Uncle Harry or Cousin-this—but I had no sense of how many

of them there were and what a huge collectivity it was.

My father—when he got out of college, he first worked in newspapers. He

worked as a journalist up in Cleveland. But he got what then was called a goiter.

There was not good iodine in the soil and he got this bad neck. He got sickly and

then they had to take it out. So when he recovered from that, it was now the

Depression. And he got into—he got a job, I think he was just mostly looking for

a job, essentially in what’s called generally the finance business. I think he

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 5

worked at one time for Dun & Bradstreet checking on credit of businesses. But he

got into being just a worker in a small loan [company]. Small loan companies

made loans of just, today we’d say ten to a thousand dollars.

He worked in that all of his life. He worked his way from being in this

office in one company; then he joined the City Loan and Savings Company, I

don’t know when, somewhere probably by ’36, ’37. And then in 1940 they made

him a manager in this town that I mentioned, of Steubenville. But it was World

War II by then and they were short of guys. He was just a little too old for the

Army, at thirty-five, thirty-six, so they also made him the manager of Martin’s

Ferry, which was another thirty, forty, fifty miles down the road. He managed

two offices then for them during the war.

Then they moved him to their large office in the downtown of Cleveland,

Ohio. And that’s where I remember him from, always going off to work and

running that office. [He] worked Monday nights—whatever the structure of

things were then. I remember that well because that’s when we had to eat all the

stuff that he didn’t like. So we had liver. Oh! Although I got to like it. And we

had broccoli and asparagus and all these things that now have very negative

connotations for me because of that. So we had to eat that good, healthful stuff

while he was working on Monday nights.

So he worked in that job from probably 1945 to 1965. And then, with my

sister and I both grown—I’ll come back to that—he was tired of being in

Cleveland. Cleveland was now headed downward. It was a very tense town. It

was no longer growing. In fact, it was declining. And he was successful within

this modest-sized company. It had a hundred offices around the state, but they’re

all small, mostly.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 6

They offered him the district supervisorship of eight or ten offices in

Northeastern Ohio, which is very rural, small-town, hunt and fish and so on. It

made it possible for my dad and mom to move back down near Youngstown,

where my mother’s sister still lived with her husband. And they then spent their

retirement years—he retired in 1970 and he lived to 2000—so they spent the next

thirty years retired in this particular town, which he picked carefully, partly

because it was located just near enough to Youngstown, but it was also right on

an artificial lake, a really nice lake that was well stocked with fish. His passion in

life was fishing.

We also always had a garden. Victory gardens during World War II. We

would grow vegetables and flowers, but in very modest-sized plots. So they

started out, my mother and father, once they moved to this little town called

Cortland, Ohio, they had most of the backyard in flowers and maybe some

vegetables. But gradually, and it was interesting to watch over the years, it

would get smaller and smaller. But they still would have a little flower garden in

his nineties and her nineties too, because she was just four years younger than he

was. So that was pretty much my dad’s story. I’ll come back to him as a father.

He was a very excellent and attentive father.

But my mother, on her side—her father was of longstanding American

stock. I think they were mostly English and whatever varieties they had

intermarried with. I have one cousin who traced out all of this family tree stuff.

They were middle class, modest circumstances. My maternal grandfather was

the most adventurous one. His three siblings stayed in this little town near

Philadelphia. But he went westward. He was an electrician in the steel mills. So I

don’t think he was highly educated, but he was a skilled worker in the steel
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 7

mills. So you can see that, in a way, I grew up, not necessarily knowing it, but in

this steel town of Youngstown, which was a booming steel town, the site of much

history that I read about only later, and had no conception of at the time.

So that was my maternal grandfather. And then my mother’s mother—the

way I get the story was that she grew up in an orphanage at a certain point. And

there was uncertainty about her full origins. However, she was a Catholic. What

that meant was that my mother and her sister—my mother was a younger sister

of two, by just a couple or three years—but they grew up and they went to the

Catholic church and to a Protestant church. And they could decide [which] when

they got older. So my mother had, in that sense, sort of an eclectic religious

upbringing.

I should say here that my father was probably brought up Lutheran. But I

don’t think it was very strong. He never openly protested going to church—my

mother would say, “It’s Easter,” or this or that, but it was clear that he was not

into it. She would take us to Sunday school, or as teenagers to church, my sister

and me (and I’ll get back to her). And then I remember saying, “Well, how come

Dad doesn’t go?” And pretty soon I’d say, “Well, how come he doesn’t have to

go?” And he would say, “I commune with nature,” was his phrase. We lived in a

town called Rocky River, Ohio, about twelve miles from the public square in

Cleveland. But it was right truly on a rocky river, not very deep and not very

wide, but rocky, and the water was moving. And it was in a fairly big gorge, so

he’d fish in there. He’d find a little fishing hole. His passion all his life was

fishing, and work, and his kids, and enjoyment of sports, and of us being athletic.

So that was my mother’s story. She had a high school education and one

year of some kind of business school and typing. She was working at the same
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 8

finance company my dad did. I’ve later seen pictures of them in the early 1930s.

It was obviously a company office picture.

So they started to go out—

Rabkin: What was her role at the company?

Domhoff: She was just in a clerical kind of role. You have people who are taking

payments, that are at windows. They’d say, “We hired a new girl today and

she’ll be taking payments and then she’ll be doing this.” So maybe there were

little variations on their jobs but they didn’t go outside and “chase” slow

accounts. I’m sure they didn’t move to managerial positions. I don’t remember

any women managers. My dad had a few friends among managers of other

company offices—I’d meet a few of the other managers in Cleveland that he

liked. So it was just an accepted separation.

When I was born, then my mother didn’t work anymore. And then when

my sister came along three and a half years later, which I’ll talk about, she

certainly didn’t work. So she took care of us with great care, carted us to our

games, and to cheerleading, and all of those kinds of things.

But when my sister was then out of high school and in college, my mother

took a job as a secretary-receptionist at the Catholic girls’ school in Rocky River,

called Magnificat. She was perfect because she had a comfort level and they

knew she had some Catholic background—I think she had revealed that to them.

So they liked having her. But she could also then be there when they went off to

their prayers or whatever. There were times when she was holding the fort down

at noonish. She also worked for a back doctor for a while, but again, just a

receptionist kind of thing, which I didn’t know much about because I was long
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 9

gone and far away. Once I left Ohio, I was either in Florida or California, and you

didn’t travel quite as much and as readily then. We’d write letters. And if I

talked too long on the phone then my mother would always say, “Well, do you

own stock in AT&T or something? Do you own stock in the telephone

company?”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: So it was clearly, you were out there; you were supposed to

accomplish something. And nothing like, “You never come see us,” Or, “Why do

you live so far away?” Or anything like that. Now, they may have missed us, like

parents do, but they did not so express. They were stoical. If there was any

sadness there—

Incidentally, along that line, a story I only learned later—that relates to my

parents driving me down to college. It was a long ride in those days from

Cleveland, Ohio, down to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. You’d go

across the Pennsylvania Turnpike and then these fairly modest highways, small

highways down through Virginia, and then into North Carolina and then several

hundred or so miles in North Carolina to arrive to Durham. I think it was seven

or eight hours, nine hours. At any rate, my parents drove me down there,

unpacked me and got me in my dorm and all that. I said goodbye and they left.

Just good luck and all. My dad later told me that my mother cried all the way

home.

Rabkin: Oh—
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 10

Domhoff: So, but I never knew that. They were not people who would show

emotion or express emotion, or yell, or be very demonstrative or exuberant in

any particular kind of direction.

Anyway, my parents met in this small loan company and they were

married in 1933. And there was, I didn’t know it at the time, but there was some

tension over that on the part of my aunt, my mother’s sister, and maybe her

family, because they somehow saw my dad—which is laughable today—as a

little wild. He hung around with a couple of guys that maybe went to

speakeasies. He was a person that did not drink. If he ever drank, it was not

when I was around. So my mother’s family was nervous about him at first.

And my uncle, it turns out, had said, “The family really doesn’t approve

of your relationship with Helen,” my mother. Which I didn’t hear much of. I

didn’t have a good sense of it. They all got along fine, all my life I watched them.

Anyway, my uncle, to give you a sense of what these people are like, my uncle

died—his wife had died first, and then he died some years later after remarrying.

He was pretty outrageous in his own way. For a low-key nothing he was just

pretty imperious. Anyway, he died at about ninety-two.

And after the funeral, my dad and I were sitting in the living room, maybe

waiting for my mom to be ready to go to somewhere. By that time my dad had

had a stroke and basically recovered. But he talked a little slower. At any rate, he

said to me, “You know, that guy, he had the nerve to come and tell me that I

shouldn’t marry your mother.” And then he said to me, “I never liked the son of

a bitch.” (laughs) I was tickled, but it was just so matter of fact. He didn’t yell or

scream or go on. “I never liked the son of a bitch.” And yet, you would never

know that in terms of watching them interact. It was just all small talk, but they
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 11

seemed to get along fine, from what unperceptive me could tell. But the point is,

they didn’t throw those things out on the table. It was all very low key. I’m sure

that both my dad and this guy, my Uncle Evan, didn’t fight, for the sake of these

two women who were very close, my mother and my aunt. They wrote to each

other once a week at least. And, of course, they must have destroyed all these

letters, but they wrote to each other very, very amazingly faithfully.

Rabkin: Your mother and your aunt.

Domhoff: Yeah, which I, at a certain point, figured out—but I didn’t understand

that when I was growing up. And it’s not like my mother was not a saver,

because if I ever write something more like a memoir of my life, it’s an amazing

thing. It was stunning. I must have been in my fifties, and for some reason she

showed me that she had saved every letter I had written to her and my father—

since I had left for Duke.

Rabkin: Do you still have them?

Domhoff: I still have them. I’ve never really looked through them. I expurgated

them slightly in case I were to suddenly die. I looked through them, but there

was nothing revealing in them. I know full well that they’re useful for, maybe for

dating things, or maybe some things that I said that expressed disappointment,

or whatever. But I know that I carefully censored myself. I did not write true

letters to my parents. That is, I didn’t write, “I’m scared of this,” or, “I’m

worried,” or, “Frankly, I’m—“ whatever. I never wrote heavy things; I just wrote

superficial things like, “Well, we’d play in this,” “We’re doing that,” and,

“School’s going well. And somebody was—“ It was all more, in that sense,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 12

superficial. And that was calculatedly so. I had that same kind of guardedness.

(laughs) I certainly didn’t want to upset them in any way. I didn’t want to say,

“Well, I was drunk last night,” or, “We did this. Yeah, I didn’t go to class for a

few days.” I wasn’t ever going to say anything like that to them.

But in any case, my parents did get married in 1933. And then I came

along in 1936. And, as I already said, my mother was then very much our

caretaker, and a very dutiful mother. Very organized, and she didn’t dominate or

anything like that. But she clearly had a sense of order and organization that I

picked up from her. I’m sure those habits of being conscientious and so on came

from her. I remember she would talk on the phone when I was a teenager, and

she would be very nice to these neighbors. And so my dad would say, “Get off

the phone. Come on—that’s enough.” And she would get off and say, “George, I

had to explain this to them,” or, “I feel sorry for them.” So she’d do this very

conscientious kind of thing. But as I say, she never—I don’t remember her

disciplining me, or in any way being harsh, or raising her voice. And at the same

time, I’m sure that she was trying to keep me in line, and mostly succeeded.

I think maybe at my uncle’s funeral many of their old friends were there,

the people that I never had met. And there was this very exuberant, extroverted

woman in the line who was just, I could tell, outgoing and fun, and clearly had

had good times with my mother and probably my father. And anyways, she met

me and we talked. “You were a handful,” she said. “You gave your mother just

all kinds of fits.” And basically it fits with an image, at least, that I’m given. And

fits—partly true, that I was probably pretty rambunctious and charging around,

eager, and so on and so forth.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 13

But my mother was a great mother. And when I once took a friend, a

woman friend, to visit, when she was probably around ninety—my father had

died. It was probably in 2001 or 2002. She died later in 2002. And we got there.

“Hey mom, this is so-and-so,” and so on. That night, when I went to the motel to

be with my friend, she said, “I cannot believe how natural and easy your

relationship is with your mother.” She said, “It’s just unbelievable how relaxed it

is.” And I know. It never felt uncomfortable. I didn’t tell her much, but then, she

didn’t tell me much. But it was always just a very easy relationship.

For my sister it was very different. She saw my mother as tense and this

and that. She got annoyed with my mother. When my mother was ninety-one-

and-a-half, she was annoyed with our mother. So my relationship with her was

so nice that I think it must have put a certain kind of patience under my

temperament.

Rabkin: How do you explain the difference between your sister’s reaction to

your mother’s parenting and your own?

Domhoff: I don’t know. I honestly don’t. It’s that kind of thing that always

brings me back to psychology. I’ve studied a lot of aspects of psychology that

relate to human motivation and relationships. I’ve taught social psych and

personality psych and child psych. I taught once a child psych course that was

focused on just the first five years—called The Psychosocial Development of

Preschool Children. So the answer’s very abstract or academic, that there’s this

temperament, interaction, there’s this or that.

But let’s just say a little bit about my dad, then turn to my sister, who does

fine and is alive and well today. My dad was very, very involved in our
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 14

upbringing. And maybe particularly in mine, although when I went off to college

I know from my mom and slightly from memory he was always on the bus with

my sister, who was a cheerleader. He went to all kinds of events. He tried very

hard to be supportive of her.

But with me—he pushed me. He always challenged me. He would pay for

good grades. And he would say, “Do better. You haven’t worked out. Did you

pitch today at your canvas?” When I was a pitcher, by about sixth, seventh

grade, he put up this canvas backstop. And I could go across the street and

throw for the strike zone—to work out today, in effect. And then he would want

to catch. And he’d catch me. I’d be pitching. I’d be annoyed. He’d say, “Keep the

ball down.” I was so annoyed sometimes I was trying to hit him in the shins. I

was trying to throw it so hard that it would have slipped past him and hit him in

the shins and we could quit and go in the house. And we’d play Ping-Pong in the

basement. And he’d probably just keep it close enough that I’d think I was going

to win. It was very competitive, and it was very frustrating for me always to lose.

I’d accuse him of cheating, or I’d say, “That didn’t nick the table.” I would go

upstairs and tell my Mom, “He was cheating. He was this or that.” So I had a

different relationship with him than my mom. He was enormously supportive,

and we never had any falling out or anything like that. But he did keep the

pressure on me, and I’m sure he pushed the high achievement kind of thing.

Now the interesting thing, though, when I look back on him, and I

remember specific events at the time; even though he was in this business world

and doing all right, he would never try to encourage me to be a businessperson,

to go to business school or to be the head of a even bigger office than he was, or

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 15

anything like that. He would say things about, “Teaching is pretty good. You get

summers off.”

Or, the owner of the Cleveland Indians baseball team at that time—in the

forties—was quite an interesting guy. He was atypical. He was more of a

showman, named Bill Veeck. And he didn’t wear ties. And [my father] said,

“You want a job like Bill Veeck, where you don’t have to wear a tie and do this

and that.” He certainly liked journalism from the fact that he been in it, and

really did have to leave it because of the goiter. I think there were a lot of things

that he had wished he had been able to do. But once he got working and the

offices were competing with each other to—you know, you get bonuses by

having the lowest percentages of slow accounts, or putting out the most loans, or

whatever it was. He was tremendously competitive about that kind of stuff.

So he did definitely involve himself. He was at all the games. He’d worry

about them. And when I get to talking about my high school football days, where

I was very, very successful and very much the center of the team as the running

back—and any moment I could get open, if I got a little hole—I’m going to talk

about that—my one lucky inheritance in this matter was I was the fastest runner

there was, without question. And certainly, accelerating and starting: for the first

five yards I could beat just about anybody. In any case, at any moment on a

football field I could be all of sudden scoring a touchdown. But my mom said my

dad would pace around; he’d be nervous; he’d get a headache. And the next day

he’d have a headache. So he was obviously very, very involved. And extricating

myself from that dynamic was very much part of my growing up, in my

twenties.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 16

I was a child and grew up, you could say, in the middle of the Great

Depression and World War II. But I really have no formative memories about

that. We moved to different houses, but I had no real exposure to poverty. I have

no memory of low-income people. I have no memory of the black-white

differences and tensions in town. Nor really of the tensions that there were

between the various ethnic groups. Although I remember, as a teenager, that

disparaging terms about people of Italian backgrounds, or Hungarian

backgrounds, and so on, were just part of everyday conversation where I lived.

So I have no real memories of those particular times. My parents, I don’t think,

talked about those things.

Basically—and this mostly I learned later—they were very mainstream,

and didn’t get in arguments. I always thought, when I was in my twenties, they

were apolitical. But when I talked to about that to them later, it turned out that

they had always voted. They voted. They discussed it. They voted

independently. But they both basically voted for the people that became

president. They were the median Ohio voter. So they voted for Roosevelt and

liked Roosevelt. I don’t know about Truman, what they thought, but I think they

were Eisenhower fans. One of them voted for Kennedy; one of them voted for

Nixon in ’60. I forget which, if they ever told me. And then my dad really didn’t

like Goldwater in ’64—and he might have been the one that voted for Nixon.

They actually liked Reagan, by then, to my surprise and disappointment. And

then in 2000, my dad really liked Gore, “Oh, that’s guy’s really good.” By then,

he watched a lot of TV. But my mother liked George Bush. My father died

shortly before the election, but I took my mother, in her wheelchair, to vote. And

she voted for Bush, George Bush. (laughs)

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 17

So there they were, these centrists, where one would go one way and one

would go the other. Well, I want to use that as a way of saying it wasn’t like it

was an idyllic childhood, but it was certainly not riven by racial, religious, class,

or even familial kinds of tensions.

But—and we’re still working up mentioning about my sister—but there

were some traumas for me that were scary. And they involve the deaths of my

grandparents. The first one was that my mother’s father, my maternal

grandfather, up and died just with a heart attack, when my mother was seven-

and-a-half months pregnant, in 1940. It was a total shock to her and to everybody

else. I don’t remember it at all, but what I know was then my sister was born

prematurely. Three or four days after this death my mother went in the hospital

and my sister was born. So she was born a little bit early, in a time of real tension.

My only memory of it is that my mother wasn’t there. And I remember—

this could be what psych has called a screen memory, where I’ve rearranged it,

but I just remember going down to the kitchen—it was a one-story house—going

in the kitchen and there’s my dad standing there with an apron on, which is just

anomalous, because he couldn’t cook. He was worthless on all those kinds of

things. I said, “Where’s my mother?” I don’t remember what he said. I think she

had to stay in the hospital for several days. Partly it was the custom in those

days, I think. But maybe there were complications. And I may have then gone by

and waved at the window.

But at any rate, that was the context in which my sister was born. And that

might have been a factor in her life. She had a more edgy temperament, in a way,

than I did. And she was three, almost four years younger—three-and-a-half, we

say—younger. I was very organized. I liked to line up my little soldiers, and

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 18

organize my other things. But when she’d come and play with them, then she

would knock them down and mess them up. That would upset me, my mother

said. So she had to be careful that she didn’t let my sister do those little kinds of

things. So I think that that was a tough start for her.

But she was totally a normal person, from all I knew, and didn’t have

grievances. We didn’t talk about our parents. But when she was in her twenties,

then she did. She had tensions and doubts. And we did then talk. She thought

that our dad didn’t like her, and our mother didn’t care about her, and so on and

so forth. Which was dumbfounding to me, but it also fit perfectly what I had by

then learned. There are studies now that show if you ask siblings about their

family and how it was, they have night and day perceptions a lot of the time

about the family—unless they have talked a lot about it and sort of rearranged

and shared memories in such way that they’ve got a common construction, as we

would say today. But a lot of times there’s a very different view of how a family

is.

In about, probably when I was in the fifth grade, probably when I was

nine or ten—I think it was fifth grade—another heavy trauma happened. I came

home from school, and I knew my Grandma Cornett was going to be there

because she was staying with us for a visit. I came in on my bike, and she wasn’t

in the house. I went in the backyard, and there was she was lying dead. Had

turned kind of purplish. Flies were on her. She had had a heart attack while she

was hanging up the clothes.

Rabkin: You found her.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 19

Domhoff: I found her. I was freaked out. I was just really scared. There was

nobody home, and I remember running, then, through the backyard, past the

garage and towards the house of a friend of mine named Geezy Cook. One of the

few names I remember, and I think it’s tied with this event. I remember zipping

across the street. I must have looked [for traffic], but sometimes I think, “There

was a car not too far away.” But I went to Geezy’s house and said, “My

grandma’s dead, she’s still, and flies all over her, in the backyard.” And so they

called to whatever, and kept me there until my mother came home. I don’t

remember what my mother was doing that day. I don’t think she worked. I’m

pretty sure she didn’t work. But in any case, then my parents came and got me.

And, of course, once again my mother’s in shell shock over that particular death.

That one was certainly scary to me, and still was in my mind. So sudden, and the

whole aspect of it was really frightening.

Somewhere in the same time, and I don’t know whether it was before or

after, my sister and I then experienced a similar, another trauma. My Grandma

Domhoff had hardening of the arteries, they called it those days. And there was

nothing they could for her. So we went to their house. We went down to

Youngstown, because apparently she was near death. The adults would take

turns going in the bedroom and sitting with her and holding her hand. But she

was really hurting, and you’d hear the “Ahh, oh,” and the moans and painful

outcries and so on. And there we are in the living room, wondering what’s going

on, scared to death ourselves.

Rabkin: How old were you?

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 20

Domhoff: I was under ten, I know that. I’d have to dig out exactly when she

died, and then of course I could figure it out. Those three deaths were far more

distinctive in my memory than anything about the society at large. I certainly

remember I had little toy airplanes, and I had a Lockheed something or another

that had these two wings in the back. And we’d dig in the dirt and make caves. I

had army trucks. But I also had cars and all that. It was just all part of a

childhood world. And there was nothing that really, from the outside, I would

say, that I had any consciousness of—as I said, of anything to do with the major

factors in the world of religious strife, or racial strife, or class conflict, or anything

like that. It was part of this sort of ‘middle American life,’ as I came to think of it,

using Nixon’s term. This middle American life in middle America, in Ohio.

I didn’t know, at the time, that I’d been living in this median state that

was a very working-class state. Both Youngstown and Cleveland had these

clearly separate, distinctive, neighborhoods of different people. I knew there was

a Little Italy. I knew that black people tended to live almost all on the east side of

Cleveland. I knew by my teen years most people of Jewish background lived on

the east side of Cleveland. But I didn’t know the full extent of the ethnic

separateness until a little later when I actually spent a summer walking through

all these neighborhoods doing a survey for a newspaper that had hired me. I’ll

come to that a little bit later. So I grew up, I think in that sense, in a pretty

sheltered kind of world.

Rabkin: Were your schoolmates fairly homogenous, in terms of class and

ethnicity?
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 21

Domhoff: As far as I know. I have no memories of any [pause] childhood

friends. I know I had childhood friends. I had lots of them. When we get to

[talking about] seventh grade, I can speak of those matters. My two best friends

were Catholics: one an Italian American, as we’d say today, and the other a Mc-

something. But they were both Catholic—which had no matter in our own

personal lives, or discussed or anything, but they weren’t allowed to do certain

things. And in particular, the best dances for young teens were at the MYF: the

Methodist Youth Fellowship. And they weren’t allowed to go. The church, the

Catholic Church, would not allow them to go. And then in high school, they both

had Protestant girlfriends that they really liked. In both cases, the parents of the

girls intervened and broke up the relationship, and just badgered about it in such

a way that—

So both my buddies had faced that kind of religious discrimination. I was

really conscious of it and really shocked by it and puzzled by it, and didn’t like it

at all, of course. It did really bother me. There was something about unfairness

that always bothered me. But that was the first time that I ever, that I have any

conscious experience of it, was in this suburban city of Rocky River, which is

homogenous in the sense of being all white and being all middle class. All white

collar and on up.

Cleveland was partly stratified in those days by who lived closest to Lake

Erie. Years later, it was a joke, because it was so polluted. But the big, classy

houses were along the lake. And the further inland you lived, which meant a

mile or two, the more it got [to be more] modest circumstances. I could certainly

list the status levels of my high school friends. One of the members of our

basketball team, which I’m going to speak about in a minute, he lived in a real
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 22

nice house on the lake. It was clearly twice, three times the size of ours, or

anybody else’s. But my friends, my two Catholic friends, Dick and Frank, they

lived in modest houses—more modest houses, like we did. And our house was

certainly modest. It was middle class for its day.

But other friends I don’t have memories of, because we’d leave for another

town. We’d move on. But I do remember a wonderful friend, I mentioned earlier,

Geezy Cook, who lived on the street behind us in Lyndhurst. They had a nice,

rambling kind of house. But it wasn’t elegant, or anything.

I had another really good friend named Dodie Harper in Steubenville. I

remember just the tiniest about Dodie, and only his name. But we were friends,

and I was always there at his house. One of the stories I was going to mention—

when I realized how fast a runner I was— I used to think maybe I can run so fast,

because I’d be at Dodie’s and it was time to go home, and it was getting dark or

already dark. Maybe I’d stay too long, and I start walking for home. And I’d get

scared and I’d start running. You know, just run. I’d feel like I was flying to get

home. You know, just had enough wariness about your surroundings and so on.

This was in Steubenville.

Steubenville was a little bit tougher town, certainly. There was a man—

poor guy, I don’t know anything about him. But he would walk on the street,

and he was very, very—I called him the purple man. He probably had

Raynaud’s Syndrome, which is something I happen to have now, so the end of

my fingers will be purplish. And people will notice. But they’re not cold. But

with my toes, I do notice, and they’re cold. So the poor guy probably had some

fuller version of that. But he was scary. And there’re alleys in the streets in

Steubenville. It was a little tougher, and a little more frank. Like the older guys
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 23

swore. They did this and that. And I’d watch them play basketball, but there was

a certain wariness of them, that they might jump you. So I remember Dodie

really well, and we once went with my Dad while he was fishing. We played

along the creek. So I had these friends, but they were not lasting friends.

I don’t have memories of any teacher, anything like that, until the seventh

grade. Now I have memories of my friends, Dick and Frank, from the sixth

grade. We were friends from the sixth grade through high school and when we’d

see each other in college, and if we were to see each other today it would be like

we’d seen each other yesterday. But we all went our separate ways into different

careers. And particularly me, going into the academic world and gradually

becoming more and more different from them, and being very liberal, radical,

left, very liberal, whatever. They’re very conventional and very conservative.

And they’re Republicans.

The one guy, Dick, married a Southern woman, and she’s very restrained.

And they’re retired in South Carolina. I would say they’re racists and extreme

right-wingers. You see these offensive joke kind of emails. When we’ve chatted a

few times, I’ve said, “Dick, you were raised on Keynes.“ Because he took

economics, went into the business world, was a manager and all. I said, “Dick,

what you took as conventional wisdom is now thrown out, but it’s right: we

should be priming the economy.” He won’t have any of it.

And the other guy’s father was a milkman—which was no big deal, or at

least wasn’t in my mind. But it was different than the other fathers. My friend

Dick’s father had some trucks. I don’t know how many, but he owned a little

trucking company. He was independent enough to move out of Little Italy. They

had a very nice house. My friend Dick’s older sister was very accomplished and
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 24

went to college. And was a very successful person. So they were upwardly

mobile. But Frank’s father was a milkman, which I mention because I learned

later it really bothered him. I partly learned it indirectly from his wife; her father

had a construction company.

But anyway, they both went to Miami of Ohio, and I went off, as I said, to

Duke. Then I went to grad schools and they went to work for Union Carbide, a

big company. And at one point then Dick went to work with his brother-in-law.

But the other guy stayed with Union Carbide and worked his way up. And when

Union Carbide spun off some parts of it, for stock options, whatever reasons—it

made Glad bags and a few things like that—he bought that. So he was probably a

millionaire several times over in his adulthood and sat on a hospital board. He’s

now very officious. But his wife told me once that he was really self-conscious

about his background. The kids always had to have their shoes totally shined,

and this and that. She was, I think, a little more relaxed about that.

And he was, I think, very patriarchal in this family setting, too. Which is

something that I was just not used to at all. First of all, my mother—it wasn’t like

they were totally egalitarian, but there was no domination of my mother by my

father. She was plenty independent and very competent—and not deferential,

but not fighting. They were just interactively much more equal.

So you grow apart. And I think by my mid-twenties, when I was at Cal

State LA in the early sixties (jumping ahead), I was already curious, “Why are

some people leftists and some people rightists?” I actually did a study with a

colleague in 1964 of leftists and rightists, which I will talk about later.

So, why some people are leftists and some rightists became a curiosity to

me, and I think it was because by then I was so involved in politics. I was also
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 25

wondering why I became so liberal, from such a conventional background. It

wasn’t like I was rebelling. It’s not like my parents were fanatical Republicans, or

something. But they weren’t rah-rah Democrats either, or anything.

And as I say, all my friends that I went to high school with, I don’t think

any of them—there was one other guy, who was actually from the year ahead of

us, who later became, for a brief time, a professor. But there were only one or two

others that I went to high school with who became an academic or liberal—with

probably 80 to 90 percent of the people I went to high school with went to

college. It was a very good suburban high school. But they all went into business

and law, and most of them stayed in the Ohio area, although I have one high

school friend who I just read an obit on, who left Ohio. He was a very nice, quiet,

low-key, nonathletic kid. I just knew him. We were friends and all, but we didn’t

hang out much. But turns out he had gotten a master’s degree and had a couple

of inventions, and had done some interesting things. He died in Connecticut just

recently. So he had moved a little bit outside the usual orbit. But most of them

not. I doubt that that there were any other leftists in there, and only one or two

professors. When I went to a reunion, now many years ago, I had come the

furthest distance as far as geography. I came from California and I was actually

visiting my parents when I went out. I maybe have one other classmate that I

know of that moved to California at some point.

So I grew up in a suburb. It was much more provincial, parochial than

some other Cleveland suburbs. Not cosmopolitan. The way I learned that was I

tried to explain to people I was from near Cleveland. Then I’d say Rocky River,

and they’d never heard of it. So I would just say, “Look, I’m from near

Cleveland. I’m from just outside Cleveland.” And just lots of people would say
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 26

to me, “Oh, you must be from Shaker Heights.” Which was a much more

cosmopolitan suburb on the other side of town. And it and University Heights

and a couple of others were really the elite suburbs of the wealthy. Then further

out were some towns that I knew about, and I knew they had horses and all of

this. They were rich people. But people wouldn’t have heard of those either

because they weren’t big-time famous things. But Shaker Heights, people have

heard of. People go around the world from Shaker Heights.

And a guy that I kind of knew a little bit as a young man, but not in high

school, a guy—I can’t think of his first name now, but his name is Wolfe—he’s

been running one of these Nader things on health for decades and decades. He

was from Shaker Heights. Which has often happened—which is also part of my

observation that makes me very wary of various theorists that’ll we’ll come to,

who are always talking about, “The working class, the working class is rising

up.” And yet again and again, these liberals are often from well-to-do kinds of

backgrounds, often people who have been in some way mistreated because of

their race, religion, or ethnicity, and have been “othered” in some way, as we’d

say today.

But there’s got to be something else to it, too. Because I have never been

othered. I was never anything but a standard issue white male in growing up. I

didn’t realize that, but obviously that was the invisible kind of thing where you

just are. You’re there. You take it for granted. I never felt excluded by anybody,

or mistreated. I certainly knew we weren’t rich and there were these rich people.

But they weren’t really part of my universe.

So anyway, that answers your question, in a long-winded way, but it gets

me thinking. I think the moving around made it so, when you’re that young,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 27

even though these were close friends and intimate friends, I just don’t have any

memories of them or any contact with them. But once we were settled—and

maybe this was about the time you become aware, have a self-consciousness—

that then I remember a lot of people from high school, a lot of events and so on.

But up until then it’s mostly things that I remember about my family. My

mother had one sister. My father also had a sister who was younger. That meant

I had two cousins on my mother’s side, my two cousins, a boy and a girl. Then I

had a male cousin on my father’s side, on my aunt’s side. They lived in

Pittsburgh, so we would see something of them. But I only had three cousins.

Then to learn later my Dad had twenty-six or twenty-seven cousins. It was kind

of funny, the contrast. So I lived in a very nuclear family—far from other

relatives. Time-wise, it would take a couple or two and a half hours to drive

through all these little towns, including these Amish towns where you had to be

careful—you know, buggies come out—driving from Cleveland down to

Youngstown. Pittsburgh was even further until all those turnpikes were built.

And by that time I was much older.

Rabkin: Do you have other memories from your time before college that you

want to talk about?

Domhoff: Yeah. Let me just turn, then, to school. I may have to go back and look

at my grades. I’ve got my report cards from elementary school and all that. My

mother saved them and then put them in a scrapbook. But from the time I was in

the sixth grade in Rocky River, I was an excellent student, conscientious. But

there was no way that I was an intellectual, or inquiring, or had, “an interest in

ideas.” It was something you did and did well. I’d always go home and do my
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 28

homework. And I wanted to do well. It was important to do well. So in that

sense, I had a great grounding in a great education on the basics. Not the classics.

We did take some Spanish. I don’t remember any of it. We couldn’t speak, but I

could read it a little bit. But in no way was it intellectual.

What I got into in junior high school that I liked a lot was journalism. I

think by the seventh grade I was writing for the newspaper. And I had a teacher,

I do remember her name, Miss Newell. She would be critical of my writing. I

realize now that she was pushing me to do even better. And she probably

thought it was all right. But I would be annoyed and try harder and do better. So

she probably molded me a lot on that. And so, I worked on it. From that day

forward, I worked in journalism. There were a lot of ways in which I probably

thought I was going to be a journalist. I liked writing term papers on the old-time

journalists, on [John] Peter Zenger and the freedom of the press. It just seemed

like a very honorable, exciting kind of profession.

Okay, I’m going to turn soon to the fact I was really only interested in

sports. But the point is that I did work on these papers in junior high, and then

the same way in high school. I was the sports editor of the high school paper,

and we’d have to go and set up a page, which meant there would be blocks of

type and ink things on little lead plates. I had to set it up and move stuff around.

And the same way when I was in college: I went right into writing for the school

newspaper, called The Duke Chronicle. I think my junior year I was the sports

editor. My senior year I was a columnist, a crusading columnist, all about things

on campus. (laughs) So the news things were there, but it wasn’t about bigger

politics, or the fact that there had been a Hungarian uprising. I go back and

think, wow, I didn’t even know about that, I don’t think. I have a whole set of the
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 29

newspapers from my junior year and I can look at it and say, “Wow, I don’t

remember any of that.” So all of that international and national news, most of it

was just going right by me, and I didn’t care. But I was very much then in

journalism.

Now, as part of that—this is something I want to come back and talk

about, which may be today or another time where it fits—after my freshman

year, I think, I had the opportunity to work as a copy boy, it was called, for The

Cleveland Press, which was one of the biggest newspapers in Ohio. It was an

afternoon paper. They called themselves a “the newspaper that serves its

readers.” A copy boy was somebody who went around to each reporter’s desk

and would pick up any copy, any piece of paper they’d thrown in a wire basket.

You’d take it and either take it downstairs, or put it in a tube and send it down.

Sometimes you’d run downstairs and get proofs. So I was kind of up and down

two or three floors in this building. And I had other little jobs. Sometimes I’d

have the four to twelve shift, where I’d have to pull stories off the machines and

answer the phone.

And at least one summer, for long weeks and maybe a month or two, I

worked the graveyard. I worked midnight to 7 a.m. sitting there. By 1 or 2 a.m.

you were all alone. And you’re sitting at the main copy desk, and somebody calls

and says, “What was the score of such and such a game two weeks ago?” And

we had all our books there—meaning me and others who had that job. And

you’d tell them these factoidals—they’d call them today—but we were the

newspaper that served its readers. And oh, at 2 a.m. I’d had to go pull something

off this wire, or something came in, or by 5 a.m. I had to crank up this or that. Six

a.m., you know, or whatever it was, people started to come in and do this. So, I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 30

had a whole, very specific job of just hanging around answering phones and

tending print machines. There were things you did at certain hours to prepare

for the day.

So I had a lot of ink in my blood from that. And during my senior year at

Duke, while I was writing these columns for the newspaper, I also had a job. I

was what I called a rewrite man for the afternoon newspaper downtown called

The Durham Sun. The Durham Morning Herald and The Durham Sun were owned

by the same company and basically what we would do at The Durham Sun is

rewrite The Durham Morning Herald.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: So I would come in. I was a sports guy, and I’d look at the stories and

look at the angles and what had happened. And then I’d say, “Okay, here’s

where we could do something.” Or, “God, we’ve got to find out more about this

superstar.” So I’d call the coach, call a couple other people, get some background.

Then I’d essentially rewrite the story, but I’d add, say, the coach’s reflection on

the game was such-and-such, or that people say this kid’s headed for glory, a

scholarship, or whatever. So I was working then very much as a newspaper guy.

But all the time doing really well in school.

Once I got to high school, I was really a good student. I can’t remember if I

was a super-good student before that. But basically I got all A’s in high school,

except for one B plus, and it might have been in mechanical drawing or

something. I was very competitive at that point, and I purposely did not take

typing because I thought I wouldn’t do well in it. I then had to teach myself to

type. And I did type the right way, but I had to teach myself. But I didn’t want to
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 31

risk a B in typing. So I took all the standard courses in physics and chemistry and

everything like that. And then history and geography—whatever it was. I took

‘em all and I got A’s.

I ended up as co-valedictorian of my class. There was me and there were

three young women. We were the valedictorians of this really good high school

class. And we had to take a test—I think it was an achievement kind of test. I

don’t think it was an IQ or that kind of stuff. But there was some test we took.

There was a statewide test, and to my delight and surprise—and I kept the

story—I was in the top 1 percent. My name appeared in the paper.

Rabkin: For the state?

Domhoff: Yeah, for the state. At that point I knew I was a pretty good student.

But I was still—I want to say that when I went off to college I was so scared. I

took nothing for granted. I just assumed I had done well because of hard work

and I had to, had to, had to keep working hard.

Rabkin: You didn’t think of yourself as especially intellectually gifted?

Domhoff: No. I thought it was all motivation and hard work. Which is what I

had really been taught, too. I never thought that I was in any way smart, or a

genius, or had insights, or anything like that. I was not even close to thinking

that kind of thing. Because I knew that I was working harder and more

disciplined than these other people, that I would study. Even in college, I out-

studied everybody. I mean, I would study so damn much for these exams. I’d go

to bed at 2:00 a.m., and there would be three or four things I hadn’t remembered
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 32

that I was sure I wasn’t sure of. And I got up in the morning and I’d review

them.

Then what I’d do is get ready to walk to the exam site, and I’d have this

piece of paper with those tough definitions, or the key four points about a certain

thing. I would have those with me. I would look at them just before I’d walked

into that classroom. Because it was small classes, we weren’t into cheating that I

know of. Anyhow, I was never going to cheat. But I’d look at those things and

then I’d walk into that classroom. They’d either give us a blue book or we’d

show them our blue book was empty. The first thing I’d do is what today we’d

call downloading; I’d download that information from my head that I was shaky

on, and I’d write down, “And X is Y. This formula is this. There’re three reasons

for this. This means that compared to this. The contrast is that—“ I’d write it

down before I even looked at the damn exam.

Rabkin: So you’d write yourself a little legal cheat sheet.

Domhoff: Yeah. So I was into it. And you know, it jumps ahead, but then I was

in this class of six hundred guys. I don’t know whether the women were

included in class standing—there were two or three hundred women on another

campus a mile and a half away at Duke. So I don’t remember whether they

counted in this. But at the end of the first year I was sixth in my class.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: So I was heavily into it.

Rabkin: How did you decide to go to Duke?

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 33

Domhoff: Okay, well I can go back to that. And the answer is two things: one is

sports, which I want to talk about if I’m going to be at all balanced. And the

second is I don’t like winter. I hated winter, and I knew I didn’t want to be in

winter. No way, no how. But also, if you were going to play baseball in those

days and get a chance to really play a lot, you had to go to the South. They didn’t

have these great big field houses where baseball players now play a lot indoors, I

think, in the North. Or have batting cages and all that stuff. No, there was

nothing like that. So I went to Duke basically because of baseball, is the answer.

But let me go back to my schooling and upbringing and memory of

myself. I’ve said to you I was just a really good student, but not an intellectual. I

was a journalist. I did like it. I did like writing. I did like the fun of organizing the

newspaper. I did like that a lot. And there was a fair chance, I think, that I could

have ended up in that. Although it wasn’t like I sat there anguished, “Should I or

shouldn’t I?” It didn’t happen that way. But it could have easily and naturally

happened.

I’m pretty sure The Cleveland Press would have hired me or one other

newspaper in Cleveland, if I had asked them, with the college record I had, the

journalistic experience, the fact I had worked for The Cleveland Press. There were

some people that worked for those newspapers that really liked me, including

one guy who just a little bit older that I worked for the summer I did the survey

for him, a guy named Seymour Raiz. Seymour ended up the managing editor of

a Columbus newspaper. So I know I could have gone into that world and I could

have liked it. I liked the excitement of it. I could have been either a sports

reporter or I could have been maybe an investigative journalist, something like

that.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 34

A Passion for Sports

But those weren’t my goals. The truth is that my goals were around

sports. I’ve already said to you how fast a runner I was. I was also well

coordinated. I was stocky. By the six or seventh grade, I was the best athlete there

was of all of them, on football, basketball, baseball. I was also the fastest runner.

You couldn’t play track and baseball, so I was never going to play track. But once

in the eighth grade we went to a summer Olympics down in Cleveland. There

was a wide range of kids there. I won the hundred-yard dash just like that, as an

eighth grader in a pretty mixed crowd. I don’t know what all parts of the city

were there or whatever. I don’t remember the number of other kids. But I had

those abilities and I had those desires.

I wanted to be a baseball player, is what I wanted to be. The thing was

that size-wise I was a normal size as a young teenager. In other words, I wasn’t

smaller until I was older, so to speak. So I never thought of myself as smaller

back then. And I was certainly as strong, and could push and shove and so on.

By about my junior year in high school everybody was outgrowing me.

But these sports were my desire and took up the most of my time. That’s

what I read about. When I read fiction, it was these sports books. There was a

writer at that time, and I read all his books, John R. Tunis. He wrote books that I

now see were just lightly fictionalized stories of some of the players that were

around. There was one by him I read called The Kid from Tomkinsville. It was

really a book about Ted Williams: string bean guy and all of this, being a famous

baseball player.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 35

So that’s what I was doing, and doing all the time, and being encouraged

to do—as well as to be a good student. I saw no contradiction, where I grew up,

between being what today would be called a jock, what would then be called an

athlete, and being a good student. There was just no tension or problem for me.

Maybe it’s because of the schools that I was going to.

The sport I loved best was basketball, and I’ll start with that first. I played

it all the time. I was really, really good. My freshman year on our team I had

twice as many points as any other player on the team. Sophomore year on JV I

scored more points than anybody. I was the best player. But by my junior year,

when I’m on the varsity, I’m not a starter. Not that there were any starters, really,

from our grade. But I thought I should have been. I’d go in the game off the

bench; I’d often get a fair amount of points. But it was clear at that point that

these guys were a lot bigger.

And in my senior year was one of those magic moments for me that then I

carried away, that were a source of pleasant memories for decades, and still now.

I often tell present-day teenagers that I know they will later cherish big moments.

I say, “Your season was great. It was magical. It was a great team, a great bunch

of guys. And you’ll love it forever.” We had that kind of team my senior year. It

had my two best buddies and me, and a big guy that lived on the lake whose

family was clearly well-to-do. They either owned a box company or a furniture

company. And he later—because of where they went to get away from unions, I

realized—they moved to North Carolina. His name was Chic Robinson. And he

was about 6’4. The nicest guy. You know, just a big, amiable—executive, is what

he turned out to be.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 36

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: But the other guy on the team was also 6’4. His father was a garage

mechanic, maybe he had his own garage. And he was also our summer baseball

coach in these amateur leagues. His son was sort of the opposite of Chic. But

they’re both big. And then my two buddies, Dick and Frank. We were the team.

And we didn’t have any substitutes that were that good. It was a big drop off,

although a couple of them were really annoyed they didn’t play more. But in any

case, people called us the Iron Five, because we just played basically the whole

game unless we were way ahead. And we started the season against a really

good team and they beat us—maybe the second game. Then we won the next

fifteen or sixteen games. Won our league and we were really looking good. We

played together so well. I guess we maybe won the first game in the playoff, but

we came up against the same team that had beaten us at the start of the season.

We couldn’t beat them. They had a couple of big guys, and one of our big guys

fouled out. And then one of my buddies fouled out. I had to guard a guy who

was a little bigger than me. And we lost.

Rabkin: Mm.

Domhoff: It ended up, I scored the most points in that game. I was the one that

lasted that long. I didn’t foul out. It was a wonderful time. But it was clear that

I’m not going to go to college and play basketball. But as I say, I loved it the most

and I played it into my fifties.

We had a great intramural team in college one year that was also a magic

time, where we ended up with this great team in a fraternity that was made up
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 37

mostly of student athletes and people who were in student government and so

on. And two of my buddies on the team ended up MDs. And the other guy got a

law degree. And me. And one of my buddies, one of my two best buddies from

college, who’s got an MBA, worked for big companies, he was our sub. So we

had this great team. We got up to the final game. We played the big jock

fraternity. Great big guys, all on football scholarships. Some of them went on—

one to be a Hall of Fame quarterback. So we had a great time.

And when I came to Santa Cruz, our first year—they wanted us to interact

with students. The first thing you know, we got a basketball team. We’re playing

down at that church that’s now called Vintage Faith Church, right at the corner

of Highland and Mission.

Rabkin: That’s The Abbey.

Domhoff: The Abbey, yeah. You know, we were playing in their gym. It’s me

and Marshall Sylvan, who stayed around, and Ron Ruby, who stayed around

until his retirement and death of cancer, and a guy named Dick Morris who was

on the team to have the exercise and ended up chair of statistics at Harvard. And

Bill Doyle in biology, our big guy at 6’4.” And we had a team ever after. I was

usually running it, and organizing the teams. You know, getting them out there.

We had a team into my early fifties. We played into the late eighties. Then my

back was finally too bad. I’d still have a basketball in my car and would shoot

around until a few years ago. So it meant a lot to me, which at my age seems

embarrassing to say.

So basketball was a big, big part of my life, but so was football. And from

the day I played football, which was originally just touch football—but from the
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 38

day I was on the freshman team I was the best player as far as running the ball. I

was so fast a runner and I could catch the football if they threw it to me—and so I

made three or four touchdowns one of the first games I played in. I was not big

by any means. In my sophomore year I played enough to get a letter and make

some big runs. My junior year I was the key ball carrier, but on a terrible team.

We were 0-9. But again, I carried the ball practically every other time, made a lot

of yards. They didn’t give us the records. They didn’t tell us. Only once the coach

said—the guy called me ‘son’—he said, “You did really well today, son. You

made over two hundred and something yards.” But it’s not in the newspaper like

it is today.

My senior year, we won four, lost four, and tied one, I think it was. But

they did put in the paper the people that were the leading touchdown scorers.

And from the start of the season in all of Cleveland County I was one of the top

touchdown guys. I was always in the top three or four. I was in the running for

the most touchdowns for that season, which seems so trivial now. But I was

really trying hard, and one game I opened the game by returning a kickoff for a

hundred yards, and I caught a pass from my buddy Dick in the end zone. I ran

for sixty yards on another one. So my fast start and my speed, just carried me. In

my senior year I was 5’6 and ¾ inch and 155 pounds. So I was this quick back,

and scored a lot of touchdowns. And I played on defense. I was the safety man. I

had to catch runners when they got away from our other players and I’d pull

them down. Or the other player got them stopped, so then I jump on and push.

Rabkin: (laughs)
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 39

Domhoff: But I thought, I’m not really tackling. These other guys are tackling

him. Well, here’s an example of just how bigger things in the society affect you: I

was ambivalent about football. I did like running for the football and catching it.

You could have players in college that would just come in and out of the game

for one or two plays, or just play on offense. Well, right at that time, the same old

stuff that we always hear, they decided football had become too specialized and

it had to go back to the day when men were really men and you could play both

offense and defense, with few substitutions allowed. So they instituted a set of

rules that lasted for, I think, four years. Just by coincidence that was my college

career. (laughs) And those rules were that you had to play offense and defense

basically. You couldn’t do much substitution from ‘54 to ‘58—I don’t know the

exact time.

What that meant was I wasn’t going to get asked to play football at a

really good school, not at my size. And furthermore, I didn’t want to play

defense against those big guys. I liked running away from them, and I didn’t

mind being tackled. But I wasn’t interested in playing defense too. So what

happened was that a whole lot of schools that were small schools in Ohio—Ohio-

Wesleyan and John Carroll, Kenyon—all these little schools asked me to come

and play football for them. If somebody had just come up to me and said, “We

think you could make it in the Big Ten as a running back,” then I might have

taken it real seriously. But it wasn’t going to happen that way.

Now, the other funny thing, getting to the fact I was a good student, the

guys from Princeton wanted to me come. They invited me to a banquet. I’d be a

student athlete and so on. I don’t think I took the invitation to go to the banquet

in Cleveland and go to this Princeton kind of thing. A guy from Colgate came to
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 40

see me. They were a pretty big deal. And it was a traumatic experience for me,

because he said, “If you’re going to be playing football. You’re going to have to

really work out. You’re going to have to put on twenty pounds. You’re going to

work out all of this time.” As he’s talking, I’m thinking, “I don’t have the

slightest interest in doing this.” And he’s got this bully-boy, macho style I didn’t

like anyhow. So it’s like he was testing me, right? “Are you up for this? Are you a

man enough to do this?” The kind of thing you’d mock today. I thought, “Oh

God, I’m not going to devote my life to trying to put on twenty pounds to play

football at Colgate.” That sounded like stupid to me.

Rabkin: Not to mention winter.

Domhoff: Yes. So it was out of the question. But see, winter, if you’re going to

play football—okay. That goes with the territory, so to speak. But it was just

interesting that a guy from that big a school would ask me. I was flattered, but

talking to him was just downright offensive. A similar kind of thing happened, I

might say, in terms of how I ended up at Duke.

I also got invited to go to a reception for students in the Cleveland area

that might want to go to Yale. And I don’t know why, or whether my dad

encouraged me, or wanted me to go to the dinner, or whatever, but I went to

that. Now, I didn’t know Yale from schmale, really. I had no idea of the status

ladder of these schools. And it didn’t interest me much. But what was so striking

to me, that I never forgot—when I talked to the guy, some snotty kind of guy

who was obviously an alumni. It wasn’t like some big deal from the school. They

weren’t heavily recruiting. They were just looking over really good students.

And that’s all they saw of me, in terms of they weren’t talking sports. So at any
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 41

rate, this guy says, “Well what would you like to do in college?” I said, “Well, I’d

like to be on the school paper. And I’d like to play on the baseball team.” And he

said—and he kind of almost huffed: “Hah!” he said, “Look, you’ve got to take

one or the other when you to college.” He said, (snotty voice) “The Yale Daily

News is every day.” He went on and on.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: I feel almost [like] I’m making it up, but just his whole haughtiness.

“You’ve got to take one or the other.” And I wasn’t really, as I say, because I

disliked winter and had this real desire to go to Duke, going to go to Yale. But it

was really off-putting to me, and I thought, “No,” to myself. I remember at the

time I thought, No, I’m going to do both. I’m going to do both of these things.

I’m going to go to a college where I can do both of those things.

Anyway, I only applied to Duke, which I’d read about in a magazine. And

they had a great tradition of baseball, and they had a famous coach, who wasn’t

there by the time I got there. (laughs) But we had another really nice coach. So I

applied to Duke. They didn’t give me a scholarship or anything, but they waived

my tuition, and it was understood that I might be a pretty good baseball player.

But it wasn’t like they recruited me for baseball or anything. I chose Duke, and

they chose me. Today people apply to lots of schools. But I sure didn’t.

But at any rate, the other thing I want to say in terms of sports is that, of

course, the sport I ended up playing was baseball. I was good at baseball. I did

want to be a baseball player. And I did want to be an outfielder. I’m left-handed,

and therefore I could not play shortstop, or second base, or any position where I

would have had a real chance. Because you’ve got to be a lot bigger, it turns out,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 42

to play baseball. That was already becoming apparent then. By that time, I was

looking through Who’s Who in Baseball, and I figured out the average size of these

players at various positions. I thought, “Oh boy.” There were still a few

outfielders roughly my size, but I knew it was going to be uphill. But on the

other hand, I was a good hitter. And I was a good outfielder.

I was also a good pitcher as a kid and teenager. I mentioned my dad—

From the sixth grade on, it was just hilarious. My mom would take me and five,

six guys in one car, and one other adult would take the rest of the team. And

we’d go over and play, over the bridge into Lakewood, the nearby suburb, and

play in these leagues that were the equivalent of Little League. But it was sort of

a sixth grade league. I was the best player. And the same in the seventh and

eighth. There was no stopping me as a pitcher—and left-handed. My dad had

taught me a change-up pitch. And I’m crooked armed, and so my fastball would

dart—it moved. So the batters would have a tough time. I’d throw them this

change-up curve. So through my sophomore year I was quite a good pitcher, as

well, and then I’d play in the outfield. I did end up, incidentally—the bragging

part—I did end up all-Cleveland in football my senior year, and also in baseball.

And then there was one newspaper that said I was all-Ohio in baseball. I hit—I

had a high average, .620, .630. And I did a little pitching. But by my senior year, I

was mostly an outfielder.

It was hard for me to make that adjustment. But by that point, there was

an adjustment that had to be made. And so my junior year I played a fair amount

in the outfield. I played all the time, but I didn’t pitch as much. And then my

senior year, there was a guy who was only a sophomore that did end up pitching

in the minor leagues. He was a big guy, a big left-hander, and he was our best
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 43

pitcher. The coach didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but when there was a key

game he’d pitch. But a couple times I had to come in from center field to pitch

the last two innings, or get him out of a jam to save the day. It was clearly—my

role was changing.

When I went to Duke, I was trying to be both pitcher and outfielder. And

they said, “You’re going to have to choose.” I looked at those other pitchers and

how hard they threw it, and I said, “I’m an outfielder.” So they put me out in left

field, which is the easiest field for throwing, because I didn’t have an arm that

could throw it a mile. But that’s where you put the little fast guy that’s going to

lead off, which was then what I did in college.

And I played left field in college and in summer leagues, and after college.

One year my wife and I went back to Cleveland so my parents could see more of

our children. I think it was the summer of ’63 or ’64. I’d been out of college since

’58. And I said, “I’m not going to try to take enough batting practice to be able to

hit a left-handed pitcher. They’re tough for a left-handed guy.” And I hadn’t

learned to be a switch-hitter, so I just played against right-handers. But I had a

couple of great games.

And then, I had actually forgotten about my summer in Cleveland in ’63

or ’64. Geoff Dunn—you know, the local writer. By the eighties he was our grad

student at UCSC in sociology. Geoff and I became pretty good buddies. And he’s

real close with one of my sons. So Geoff found this article from some newspaper

and sent it to me. I’d completely forgotten I’d won the ‘sandlot star of the week’

that summer. So I was still out there playing at that time. But that was the last

time I played hardball.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 44

And then when I came to UCSC we had a softball team. We played slow

pitch against the students. By then I could really hit a ball, compared to the other

faculty, let us say. (laughter) So the image was—maybe [Michael] Cowan said

this to you, I forget—“Well, he was really an athlete.”1 From their point of view, I

was a very good baseball player. But, in fact, by the time I was a senior in college,

I was a below average baseball player.

One of the reasons I could hit the ball a long way—in Rocky River, the

first house we lived in was at the end of the street. There was a slag pile there.

And I used to go out with the bat and hit and pretend I was hitting it to left field

and right field. I’d stand there. I wasn’t working out. I was just having fun and

thinking, and “Yeah, wow, you could be great.” You know, I’m in the sixth

grade, seventh grade. I didn’t realize it, but it was putting bigger forearms on

myself. It was like I was working out. Now, in those days, it was bad to go lift

weights and all. You’d be muscle-bound. You shouldn’t do that. So we didn’t do

that. Even in college we just stretched. We didn’t lift. Sports leaders changed

their mind about that later. But I had, in effect, done all these exercises, so I had

this good forearm strength. And if somebody throws a softball to a guy that’s

played against some really good players in college and he has big forearms—I

could hit it anywhere I wanted to and way over their heads.

In a way, though, that was bad because it became my image on the

campus: here’s this jock we have here that also teaches. It far overwhelmed any

image of me as any kind of scholar. It was amazing.

1
Michael Cowan provided some background research for this oral history. See Cowan’s oral
history, Irene Reti, Interviewer and Editor, “It Became My Case Study”: Professor Michael Cowan’s
Four Decades at UC Santa Cruz (Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2013). Available at
http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/it-became-my-case-study-professor-michael-cowans-four-
decades-at-uc-santa-cruz
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 45

Do you know Marshall Sylvan at all? You’ve heard of him—Marshall is a

very, very fine athlete. He’d actually, I think, played maybe freshman basketball

at his college. He has a different build than I do. He’s a little bigger than I am.

He’s a more wiry guy. But we essentially—he would pitch and I would play left

field. Then they’d try to hit as far as they could and I’d catch it. If it was a left-

handed batter we’d just switch and I’d go over to right field and Marshall would

carefully pitch it—because he was a really cagey athlete. They had no choice but

to hit it to right field. Then I’d catch it. So we had this team. But there were just

two or three of us that could play. Turning back to intramural basketball,

Marshall was a much better basketball player than I was. Then later came

another guy who had been on Duke’s basketball team. He didn’t get much

playing time at Duke, but he was an incredible player. So we had this really great

fun in that. That was part of our intramural stuff. So the sports carried on for a

long time.

I want to say one other thing about my growing up that carried on as an

image, and I never fully understood it or assimilated it, or really meant it. I

probably was a handful. I probably was rambunctious. But I was never a fighter.

I never hit anybody. I was never in a fistfight. I could lose my temper and yell

sometimes, especially at umpires and referees. I was very competitive. But in

about the fifth grade I was apparently interrupting in class or disrupting by—I

don’t know whether it was talking to others, or they’d say, “What’s the answer?”

and turn to Susie and I’d say, “The answer’s X!” Although I don’t remember that

subjectively, what I remember is I had to meet with the teacher and my parents

because I was disruptive. The plan they made was that at the end of the week the

teacher would send home a report on my behavior, and that determined whether
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 46

I got to go be taken to baseball games or whatever for that weekend. I didn’t

have that trouble before. I never was really disciplined. After that episode, I

never had any trouble.

But there was something about my behavior and image that suggested

that I was maybe more wild or volatile than I think I was. And one incident in

high school really brought this home, and I’ll never forget it. I was on the student

council. I don’t think I was ever president or anything, but I was always elected

to something. So I was on the student council, and we would meet in the

teacher’s lounge. It was no big deal. It wasn’t that big a room. It was probably as

big as your kitchen. But one day I got called in by the dean of students or

whatever—it wasn’t the principal—Ms. McKay. And then she—and it might

have been my buddy Dick that was with me—called us in and she asked us if we

had done anything mischievous the last time we were in the faculty lounge,

where they have coffee and stuff. And we said, “No.” And we hadn’t. We didn’t

know of anything. So she said, “Are you sure that you didn’t put the salt into the

sugar?” And we said no, no we hadn’t. The thing was I don’t think she believed

us. I think that was a little annoying to me.

But the interesting thing was, from my point of view—and I think it had

some effect on me in terms of my image and goody two-shoe types. There are a

couple guys that I knew, and they were these namby-pambies that ended up

bankers and accountants—you know, small-time bankers. They were wimpy.

And I was certainly a much better student, too. Anyway, lo and behold, they

confessed. They did it. Now, I didn’t even talk to them about it. But anyway, we

were absolved and they confessed. But it was interesting that Dick and I were the

ones who were accused. And we hadn’t even contemplated such a thing.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 47

It was a thing that happened—so I’d be known in college, ‘Wild Bill.’ I had

a classmate from Duke that later moved to Southern California. He was a very

stolid kind of physicist guy. And he was funny, because he was so stolid. He

came up to visit me once. Probably in the 1980s he was up this way. He always

liked to call me something like ‘Wild Bill’ and all. “Well,” he said, “I hear you’re

a great teacher. But you’re just wild as ever, aren’t you?” I said, “What are you

talking about?” And he said that this student that he had known—because he

had asked, the guy had said he was from Santa Cruz, and he said, “Do you know

Bill Domhoff?” And this guy said, “Yeah, I was in his class.” But anyway, he said

what this student had told him was that I had walked into the classroom—and it

was Nat Sci 2. That was the biggest classroom then and I taught a lot in there,

because I was teaching big classes. And I’d walked into the classroom—you

know how they at least used to have these tables. They’re probably about this

high, or maybe a tiny lower. [demonstrates]

Rabkin: Like hip high or so, down at the front of the room?

Domhoff: Yeah.

Rabkin: Yeah.

Domhoff: So anyway, he said that this student had told him that I’d walked in

the room, thrown my notes on the table, jumped up on the table and said, “This

is the way it’s going to be!”

Rabkin: (laughs)
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 48

Domhoff: I swear to God I never, never did anything like that ever, ever. Unless

I’ve like hallucinatory repressed it. What I do is very casual. I’d come in and say,

“How you doing? I’ll Bill Domhoff.” And then maybe just a little hip hop—

Rabkin: Perched on the table.

Domhoff: Yeah, so your full rear end’s on the table. I’d sit down and talk to

them. My legs are dangling, and I’m visiting with them, and I’m dressed about

like this. We didn’t wear coat and ties. We were all Bill, Frank, Sam, Joe, Mary, at

that time.

So this image, then, was that I was this wild man. I’ll hear other stories

like that, that I did this or did that. There was one recently, and I thought, “I just

can’t believe that I really did that.” It hasn’t really dogged me. If anything, it’s an

asset, in a strange way. But it does make me a little uncomfortable. It just doesn’t

fit with my sense of self, given what I told you about how my mother was, and

that I was, except for that disciplining in fifth grade or so, I was a well-behaved

student. I did not get in trouble. I was not in the principal’s office for doing this

or that, or anything like that. I certainly was exuberant in school and sports

settings. And in the class I’m sure I would answer, all that. But not doing

anything untoward or crazy. So that, to me, was something that was puzzling,

but it would visit me every once in a while.

The other thing that I want to say about my high school days is that the

third thing that was a great deal of my time and focus was a girlfriend. I was

fairly shy, but pretty interested in girls, and pretty focused, and just looking and

looking and looking and looking. And desiring and desiring. All the other people

were taking dance classes— My dad said, “That’s sissy stuff.” So I was an
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 49

awkward dancer at first. But at any rate, this one attractive girl invited me on a

hayride. And she was very nice. I thought, “Wow.” So I got involved with her.

And I was involved with her then—I think it was the last part of our sophomore

year into my junior and senior year. We also then were a couple in my freshman

and sophomore year. And during my junior year—

Rabkin: Of college?

Domhoff: Yeah. Then we broke up. She wanted to get married, and I wasn’t

prepared to do that. I didn’t really, for sure, think I wanted to marry her. She was

at a state college in Ohio. So we’d write and this and that. So if I really say,

“What was I doing during my high school years?” I was playing sports virtually

all the time. I was then doing my homework at night. And if I wasn’t doing one

of those two things, I was with her and we were making romance. So that was a

pretty full schedule.

Rabkin: You and your buddies?

Domhoff: Yeah. But back then we would never talk about that or assume

anything. It was all very private and focused. But we weren’t dating around, or

going to the other town, or going downtown, looking around, or anything like

that. So you had a girlfriend. She was very proper, very nice and all that. But you

were really spending a lot of time with her whenever you could. So that was an

enormous amount of time.

I used to say that my life originally had been one of sports and books, and

then it was sports, books, and a girlfriend. And then, by the time I was twenty-
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 50

five, twenty-six, it was sports, books, a wife, and children. And so, most of my

life was those relatively few things.

And then gradually, the children grow up. I’m divorced. And I’m too old

for sports. So back to one thing: just books. But a few years ago, I got married

again. So my life is not just books. But those have been the few themes of my life.

Not traveling, not looking at art, not learning about music, not reading the

classics. But always sort of straight ahead: to try to discover something new, to

write the story by the deadline, to have a good time Friday night at the dance

and afterwards, to do well in sports, to be there for your kids. It’s not been

discursive. It’s not been reading about the ancient past—although I now listen to

tapes about history and all. I had no interest in those kinds of things. No interest

in music, arts, humanities. I never, except for these kinds of sports books I grew

up on—maybe teenage boy fiction, whatever that would mean—I hardly read

any novels. Never have in decades. There are probably four or five I have read

outside of high school and college courses.

So I think I have to be understood, or understand myself in a certain way,

as not an intellectual. I’m a researcher. I’m a social scientist who does research on

specific questions like about power or about dreams. But I wasn’t this wide-

ranging intellectual, and never quite was. I think much of this was perceived by a

lot of my colleagues, and maybe made me somewhat different from many of

them. (laughs)
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 51

That also came out when we were urged by the chancellor [Dean

McHenry]2 and provost to, “Interact with these students as much as you can,” in

the first year or so. So at a certain point, three or four of us were coaches for

student teams in basketball and rugby. As for me, I coached the baseball team

one year. I think it was useful to me in that I’d get to know male students that

might otherwise by then be standoffish about being intellectual. But if they knew

me through basketball or baseball or softball, maybe they could take a seemingly

“sissy” course like Child Psychology. Or a sissy subject, like dreams. So I think it

broke some stereotypes of the kind they’d acquired (stupidly, sadly), for us to be

playing sports with them or coaching them.

I’m not so sure how it affected my image with the faculty. (laughs) But it

was fine. My colleagues were always good to me. I liked my role. I wasn’t

expected to have these grand insights, to be able to reach for these grand levels of

knowledge. I think they knew I just poked around and found stuff that was new

and brought it back and wrote it up in a real straightforward fashion that people

could understand. But I’m certainly not a learned person, just a well-educated

one that liked to do research and discover stuff. The point is that that’s the way I

was all through high school and into college, and for much of my career.

Rabkin: Bill, I wonder if that would be a good place to stop. We’re actually

almost at two hours.

Domhoff: Okay. Well it’s fine with me, or—

2
See the three volume oral history: Dean McHenry: Founding Chancellor of the University of
California, Santa Cruz (Regional History Project, UCSC Library) http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-
hist/mchenry
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 52

Rabkin: And next time we could pick up, talk a bit more about your time at

Duke before we move on to graduate school?

Domhoff: Okay, good. Then I want to talk a little then about my intellectual stuff

at Duke, how I finally got involved in some things that interested me, and a

couple of professors that did have an influence on me.

Rabkin: Great. Well let’s start with that next time. Thank you.

Domhoff: That’ll be good. And I’ll think more about Duke and then Kent State—

and Kent State I’ve thought about. It’s just a wonderful year, simple, straight

ahead, great teachers. Molded me, made me know I knew the stuff and that I

liked it.

Rabkin: This is Sarah Rabkin. It’s April 15th, 2013. I’m with Bill Domhoff in my

kitchen in Soquel, California for our second interview. Last time we finished up

talking some about your time at Duke, mostly about the athletic aspects. And

you wanted, I think, to pick up and talk some more about your experiences at

Duke.

Duke University

Domhoff: Yeah, let me give a more general picture now of my time at Duke. I’d

say, generally the first two years were just in many ways very great, even though

I was working very hard and very insecure that I would do well in my courses.

But looking back, and even during that time, it was organized. It felt good. The

last two years were more disorganized, felt more chaotic, although I think it was
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 53

during that time that I probably became more of an intellectual and more

academically oriented.

But let me begin at the beginning of Duke in one important way for my

life, and this is that people would ask, “Where are you from?” in kind of a mild

accent: “Where are y’all from?” I’d say, “I’m from Ohio.” And they’d say. “Oh,

y’all is a Yankee.” And down you’d go; the drawl would go up. It was really

striking. I thought they were just putting me on. But I came to understand, out of

that and other things, the depth of the tensions between the North and South in

the minds of these Southerners. I think I understood it later, intellectually, that

they are a conquered minority. They were conquered during the Civil War. They

were the richest people by far. Their capital was huge. There was more capital in

slaves than there was in railroads and everything else. And they had a fierce

resentment. They did use terrorism to restore their power. And then, lo and

behold, of course, later they were overtaken by the civil rights movement, which

was after my time there. But I think, out of that experience at Duke, I did come to

understand in a more emotional way what I learned intellectually, later, about

Southerners.

The other thing that was a background kind of thing going to Duke,

related to this Yankee stuff, was the black-white situation there. And it came to

me in a very forceful way because probably my sophomore year my job I was

assigned to be a player on the baseball team—a checker in the cafeteria. And that

means the workers that came in, you’d check off that they were having lunch. I

guess it would be deducted or whatever. All I knew is I checked if they were

there. And if they came in they’d say, “Smith,” or “Jones,” or whatever. I was
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 54

assigned to the black cafeteria. And that was kind of a shock, that there was a

black cafeteria. That was the first—

Rabkin: The cafeterias were racially segregated?

Domhoff: Totally racially divided. There were no black students at Duke. These

were black employees at the Duke Hospital, which was at the other end of the

campus. Duke is a Methodist school. It’s in the shape of a cross. You come in the

main entrance and you go straight down, and there’s a big chapel. As you get

close to the chapel, the two arms of the cross go off in either direction. To the left,

is the quad. That’s where all the dorms are. Some of the dorms are fraternities.

And off to the right were the academic buildings. And at the very end, was the

Duke Hospital. Now there’re all kinds of buildings around it on the outside of

that cross, and they grew gradually. I haven’t seen it in a long time, so who

knows now how big that is.

But in any case, I was a checker in the black cafeteria, in the basement of

hospital. And so, these young men and women would come in and say their

name—often difficult for me to understand. I think it was just probably the

general language of keeping a distance from whites, but maybe especially in this

situation where a white guy’s sitting in their cafeteria, or right at the edge of it.

There was one guy that I’ll never forget. When I first heard him talking, I thought

maybe he was a British guy. But he had really developed his elocution. He’d

been outside of the small world of Durham. I forget where. But in any case, he

sat with me a few times. That made me okay. We had a lot of conversation. But I

certainly then, out of that, got a sensitivity for what the situation was like, the
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 55

degree of subjugation, at least in those predominantly white power kinds of

settings.

After I worked in the cafeteria—I think I did that a year—the other thing

that then happened to me was, it was very interesting, and maybe was a step

along towards a career I didn’t see coming, was that by my sophomore, junior

year, the people that ran the Duke University Athletic Association, as it was

called, knew that I was on the baseball team and I was on the track team. They

also knew I was a good student. So they made me a tutor of the athletes that

weren’t doing so well. I was making double the minimum wage. The minimum

wage was a buck or buck-thirty. They were paying me two-twenty an hour. So I

thought, wow, this is great. And I tutored a range of guys. I tutored them in that

Bible class, of all things, because the university, as a Methodist school, required

two semesters on the Bible. I was taking Spanish and I couldn’t speak, but I

could read and write. So I tutored a guy or two in that. And several other

courses.

And I tutored a guy who went on to be a Hall of Fame football player

named Sonny Jurgensen, who was a very famous Washington Redskin and could

hurl a football a million miles. Sonny was a wise guy, flippant, didn’t try. Blew

everything off. Had some real nasty streaks about him. He had failed out at one

point—maybe his freshman or sophomore year. And they sent him immediately

to Indiana, maybe at the end of a fall semester. But anyway, they sent him to

Indiana because they were on a quarter system. He could get in these quarters.

And somehow he got himself eligible again. So he never sat out for ineligibility.

Of course, today we know it’s always that they fix it. I didn’t know that at the

time.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 56

But one of the things they’d fix it with then, was by having people like me

tutoring athletes like Sonny. So I got to know him a little bit, but not personally.

He was just visiting with some tutor like he would with a professor. So it wasn’t

like we developed a friendship. But I knew him a little bit. He had played a little

baseball and then quit, because he didn’t want to get into it. And I had played

intramural basketball against him. Some of the other guys were much better

guys. I got to know some of them. I think everybody I tutored was a football

player. But that was, of course, a great way to earn money: flexible hours and

more money than I could make in the cafeteria, or anywhere else.

I also, through the Southerners that I was with—and probably half the

people in the fraternity I joined were Southerners, some of them quite well-to-do.

And more generally, I would say, I gradually realized I was in a school for the

Southern elite; that there were a lot of big-deal Southerners, especially of North

and South Carolina, that went to Duke. The most famous from my class, it turns

out, was a woman I knew as Libby Hanford, but is known to the world as

Elizabeth Dole, who married Senator [Bob] Dole at some particular point. She

was a student government type and a debutante type, from one of these typical

North Carolina small towns, or relatively small towns, of that time. And there

were a couple of sons of senators. These people often went on to be wheeler-

dealers in business and politics. But their attitudes towards blacks, and their

statements, were just kind of breathtaking. And their willingness to say that a

person that got out of line would be killed was quite stunning to me.

Rabkin: Can you think of an example of the kinds of comments they would

make?
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 57

Domhoff: Well, they would always use the N-word. And they would certainly

talk about, “If this guy got out of line, you’d just kill him.” Or sometimes it was

“have him beaten up,” or whatever.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: I went to Duke in the fall of ’54, and it was as late as ’57 or ’58 that this

young person— I think it might have after I left Duke, but right about the time I

left Duke a young man, who’s name I’ve never forgotten, named Emmett Till,

who was twelve or thirteen or fourteen years old, was killed in Mississippi for

allegedly looking at or whistling at a white woman. So I definitely lived down

there at a time—even though there had been King’s efforts in Montgomery—I

didn’t really have a consciousness of that, and it really hadn’t generalized in any

way. And there wasn’t talk on the part of these whites that they were under siege

in any way. I think that I lived there when their way of life was pretty intact, at

least in the minds of these younger people. I think those were formative

influences on me in giving me a sensitivity and a real distance from that

mentality. Even though I’d certainly grown up in all-white environments, you

didn’t have that kind of a mentality towards things. And there were certainly lots

of places where you did interact with African Americans, in bigger settings of

baseball parks, and so on.

And here I should say something that I left out. When I was about thirteen

or fourteen I wrote an essay on why I wanted to be batboy for the Cleveland

Indians for the fourth or fifth time year in a row, to win this contest. And that

particular year I won. Ten of us were interviewed. Then we all sat out there, all

proper with suits and ties. Then they called me back in. And lo and behold, I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 58

thought it was the second round of interviews, but I had won. So I got a

thousand or two thousand dollars and I got to be the batboy for the visiting

teams at Cleveland for year. Then I was the Cleveland Indians’ batboy the next

year.

Through that, I knew the guys that ran the clubhouse, as the locker rooms

were called. And I was a water boy for the professional football teams on the

visiting side. So I was up close to a lot of big time sports. I was still a young,

small guy. But that certainly brought me into contact with African Americans in

various ways, including what I didn’t understand until later, that, in a word, the

more marginal guys on the teams were the ones that would be nice to me: a guy

named Bobby Avila, who was a Mexican guy, not a Mexican-American, a really

good player from Mexico; a Jewish guy, named Al Rosen—which was rare on a

baseball team in those days or any days since. He was always good to me; and

also, several of the black players.

I took one, what’s called a road trip, with the Indians. I went on the train,

which I hated, to Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis and then home. I thought, “Boy,

this is not the life for me.” That’s what they rode in those days. But in Detroit,

after maybe the first or second game one of the black guys said, “What are you

going to do with yourself tonight, Billy?” “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said, or

words to that effect. They said, “Want to come with us?” So they took me to

these black-and-tan clubs. And it was amazing. Get a taxi or limo, and into the

heart of the inner city of Detroit, into this music and dance hall, and sit and have

dinner and a show. Women would come over, “Oh you’re back,” or “You’re in

town!” and all this, and talk to them. And they’d introduce me. So here I was, the

only white person, this little white guy, in this club.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 59

So these guys were all good guys, and I knew them as people and decent.

One of them that had been the first African American in the American League, he

was a little more their leader. He had to just keep the vigilance. He had been

through it. So he was not aloof from me, but he was just a little more ready to

stand up. And these other guys—by then baseball had been four or five years

integrated in the American League. And they were a little loosy-goosy about it.

They were a lot of fun and good to me.

So I didn’t have this sense of separateness. I certainly knew about these

class distinctions, these neighborhood distinctions. I knew that, but I didn’t have

any real sense of these things in any intellectual way, or a historical way—at least

that I remember.

Rabkin: What an experience for a young boy.

Domhoff: Yeah, it was amazing. And it was interesting then to look back. I

understood at the time that some of these big deal white guys never gave me the

time of day. But it was only later that I had any, I think, conceptual sense of it—

that they just didn’t bother. So it was like meeting with the other out-groupers. I

was part of the marginal, as a batboy—and rightly so, of course. But in any case,

these were formative experiences for me on black-white kinds of issues.

Turning to why the first two years [at Duke] were good, I’ve already

mentioned I did real well in school in terms of grades. But I should say that I

really was introduced to a whole range of courses. I just mentioned Duke was a

Methodist school. One of the requirements was you had to take a year of Bible.

We had to first study the Old Testament and then the New Testament. I liked the

course; it was really a course in history and anthropology and sociology. And
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 60

you’re learning about the P writer and the J writer [of the Bible], and when

various parts of the Bible were written at different times. And it was really eye-

opening for me. It wasn’t the Bible as this seamless book. I really liked that

course, and did well in it.

I then took a third quarter in their religious series, where I learned about

Augustine, Aquinas, and then, I think, Luther. And we went up to Wesley,

which would be, of course, their man—the Methodists. So I took that course, too.

So I had a certain sense then, of things that had a historical context for religion. I

had been raised religiously, as I said. Indeed, had gone to this Methodist church

from about sixth grade on, which my mother, in particular, liked. But I had no

real sense of Methodism or where it stood. I didn’t go to Duke because of that

reason. I didn’t even know it was a Methodist school. But at any case, I did have

the Bible courses.

I took a course in Greek myth, a course in logic, that all turned out to be

very useful in broadening me. And I had a course in economics that was

interesting. Basically we were taught Keynesianism as second nature. But the

way it happened was interesting for me, because there was this guy who—I

cannot remember any names—but this obviously big-deal professor. And he

would come in and just sit on the desk and talk to us about the things of the day,

or big issues. And he was often not there, and there had to be a substitute. Well,

he was off consulting. So finally at a certain point—and as I say, he might have

been a big deal—he said, “Look, I’m going to be involved in all these things.”

And basically one of the grad students took over the course. But the grad student

then could teach us the basics, and he knew what we needed to know, so to
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 61

speak. He wasn’t off consulting yet and so on. And he was great. I felt like I

really learned the stuff. And I liked it.

Then I took another course in economics, which was pretty deadly. It was

a business course, and I can’t remember much about it. But I didn’t like it much

at all. I was sort of getting this widening at that particular point. It truly was a

liberal arts education.

Now, when I went down there I thought—going to back to sports—I

thought we’d be playing baseball right from the start in the fall. Well, it turns out

they didn’t play until the spring. So I thought, I’ve always wanted to know just

how fast a runner I am. And I want to get some exercise to get me in shape.

Somebody said something about the track team. I went down and became a

sprinter on the indoor track team. It was quite interesting because there were

three or four guys that could beat me. One turned out to be the world’s fastest

human being, a guy name Dave Sime. Within a year or so he held the world

records in the one hundred yard dash, as it was called then, and the 220 and 440-

yard dashes. He was truly going places. But then he hurt himself about his junior

year, somewhere around there. He got what was called a high groin pull. So it

was a tough one. But he did come back enough that he just lost by an inch,

literally less than maybe half an inch, in the 1960 Olympics to a German sprinter.

So that’s who I was running against in the 100 yard dash. He could beat me by

ten yards, even though I could run the 100 in 10 seconds flat, which was pretty

good back then, but not now. He ran it in 9.3 or 9.4, which was ridiculous. There

were two other guys on the team that were really fast. We were a relay team.

And gradually I got so I could beat the other two guys. So it was pretty much

fun.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 62

Then I had a little event that was fun that got me some visibility, and all

my friends were pleased. Probably my sophomore year, to publicize the indoor

track team, they had us run at halftime of this big Duke basketball game. Duke

was as nutty about basketball then and as competitive for the big time as it is

today, although it wasn’t winning strings of NCAA championships at the time.

But definitely the same rivalry with the University of North Carolina and so on.

So at half-time, the four of us ran. I beat one of the secondary guys again, and so I

ended up in the finals against this world’s fastest human. It was just a fifty-yard

dash. And I was the faster starter. So we started a little outside the gym, where

people couldn’t see us, and we ended up at the other end. And by the time we

busted into visibility I was ahead of him.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: I thought, “This could be the day I beat him.” I was just really rolling.

I’m thinking he was pretty shocked—and he said so afterwards. But at any rate,

he then turned on the jets and he beat me in the last twenty yards. But people

were surprised. And my friends were all happy for me as the underdog. I did

have a lot of fun running on that track team my freshman and sophomore years.

And this relay team was fun.

But an interesting thing happened then in terms of—I told you I played

baseball there. And that was that this world’s fastest human guy was also a great

baseball player. He was about 6’3, a much better thrower than I was. He was a

powerful hitter. But because he was such a great track man, they said, “Look,

you could go places, to the Olympics.” So he decided to take his sophomore year

off from baseball. Well, that was my good fortune; that meant I was no longer a
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 63

substitute. I was the starting left fielder. Because I was the fourth best in the

outfield. So suddenly I’m the lead off man and left fielder.

And so I say, “Well, well.” So I dropped track and really concentrated

then fully on the baseball. We turned out to have a great team. We came on

strong and we got into these playoffs. And we went to the playoffs that could

lead to the college world series. I probably played the best I ever played in my

life as a college student that sophomore year, which I’m going to say because of

how badly it went from there on. I made some great plays in the outfield. I got

one really good hit that might have brought us back in the game. Almost went

out of the park, and got a ground rule double on one bounce. And then nobody

could get me home to win the game, and they won with a run later.

But in the next series, after we won the first one, we then played a team

from Mississippi, and they had a great big left-handed pitcher. I was batting

against him and battling him and battling him. I was the only guy on the team

that wore a little insert in my helmet. And accidentally, but he hit me in the head.

Right square in the back of the head, the side to the back of the head. And I

might have been a little dizzy, and I didn’t quite go down, but I knew I’d been

hit. And for a minute the umpire said he thought it sounded like a foul tip. My

coaches were enraged. They took the helmet off and I already had a bump on my

head. So there I went, to first base.

But we couldn’t beat these guys. This pitcher was too good. He went on to

be a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. So he was a major league caliber

pitcher. But the bigger point of the incident was that I didn’t see that ball coming.

And I don’t think I could’ve gotten a hit off him in a million years. So it was the

kind of thing that told me, even in the midst of having this really good season,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 64

that there was no chance I was going to be among the better players. I was also a

sports writer for the paper during that year. So everything was really quite

exciting and good and new.

But things were less successful for me in my junior and senior years for a

couple reasons, at least subjectively. The first was that my long-time girlfriend

and I went our separate ways. She really did want to get married and I didn’t. I

was anguished. I was too young. It was too soon. I didn’t really know—and

honestly, in the heart of my heart of hearts—that I wanted to be married to her.

So I said, “I just don’t think this will work.” But then, of course, you regret it.

And I didn’t have a girlfriend then. And it had been a long time with her. So it

put me a low mood.

Within a few months, because of her eagerness, she had found another

guy. Everything worked fine for her. I never saw her again, but through mutual

friends I know that her marriage lasted. She had three kids. All went well. And I

see in the older alumni stuff, she and her husband travel around in their big RV.

They go these RV camps. The contrast was so great back then in what we had in

mind for our lives.

But it made it a tough time. I was trying to decide what to do, what to

major in. No longer did I have that focus or purpose. I had my Phi Beta Kappa

key. During that time I started to smoke a little bit—and I just mean cigarettes.

That’s what we smoked in those days. But that didn’t help any. And I was, in a

way—I think I’d call it addicted. It was hard not to smoke a pack or two a day.

And I finally stopped.

But that was my pattern all my life at different times. I would start

smoking for six or eight months in new situations, usually meeting someone
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 65

new, a woman, someone new. But other times too. This happened to me off and

on. I want to say five or six times, but maybe seven or eight. It would be very

disconcerting. I’d have to have a quiet time where I was going to be alone for

about a week or so, and I could finally break it. But it gave me a sympathy and

empathy for people who are addicted to something worse. It always bothered

me, then, when people would say, “Well, willpower and you can overcome it.”

All that kind of exhortations and all, because I knew they really didn’t work for

me. So I found that annoying in my fellow humans that I was around, and in all

the policies that we have in our country.

Well, anyhow, back to baseball as usual. Dave Sime, the fast runner, came

back to play baseball again in his junior year. That meant I sat on the bench. I

only batted eleven or twelve times the whole season in my junior year, which

wasn’t much. We weren’t much of a team. We’d lost some really good pitchers. I

played again in my senior year, because now I was a senior and I was better than

some of the sophomores. So I played in the outfield with Sime and one other guy

that I’ve forgotten. I played every game. We were a mediocre team. But again, I

didn’t really play that well. I was decent in the outfield. I was the lead off hitter

again. But my batting average at Duke over three years, I think my batting

average was .211, which is a terrible batting average. I’d get on base through

walks. They’d hit me in the arm. I’d bunt. So I was just called a scratch or banjo

kind of hitter. So baseball was clearly over for me and that’s why I laugh at

myself about being able to hit a slow-pitch softball a long way during my active

years at UCSC.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 66

Majoring in Psychology

But I was not sure what I wanted to do. I had gotten into psych, and that

was the one subject that interested me the most. A lot of it made sense. I’d had a

good course in personality and one or two other things. I can’t even remember

the courses. But my advisor—and I’ll say more about my advisor in a minute,

was a behaviorist. But I just didn’t like behaviorism. I didn’t like experimenting

with animals. And generally, I wasn’t much of what you call an experimentalist,

where you’re manipulating variables. And in social psych it means—did for a

long time—it meant deceiving people, setting up a situation to get at some aspect

of their behavior where they think one thing’s going on, but it’s really another. I

later had a colleague here at Santa Cruz who used to say, in terms of social

psychology, “Deception is our business.” That changed totally in the 1970s, by

the way.

Which led, then, to one of my friends—who was a grad student at the time

at Santa Cruz, to write a paper in the context of the Vietnam War on the fact that

psychology, in a way, was contributing to the whole atmosphere of deception.

True, it wasn’t the cause of it. But they’d just unthinkingly end up deceiving

people. He wrote a paper calling for a moratorium, which finally appeared in a

peace journal, but social psychologists wouldn’t even publish it.

Going back to my Duke junior and senior years, there was one particular

professor that had a big influence on me. His name was Weston La Barre. He had

written a book called The Human Animal. He was an anthropologist, and well

trained and fastidious, to hold onto his credentials. But he also was a Freudian.

And that meant he was, to me, then a psychological kind of anthropologist. I

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 67

took both semesters of his course. I often didn’t understand what he was talking

about. But he really struck me as having something interesting to say. And

indeed he later wrote a book, which he had talked about in class, called The Ghost

Dance, which was about the origins of religion. One of things he said was that all

religions had their origins in a vision, or a dream by a single individual, in a

situation of real social tension and collapse for the particular society. They were

under siege, like the Iroquois were under siege by the white settlers.

So the kinds of things he was talking about tied together psychology and

anthropology and history. And so I really resonated with his work. I read the

three-volume work on Freud by Ernest Jones. The way it’s put together, it is this

intellectual quest and self-discovery and discovery, whether it turns out to be a

true or not—and I think more of it was than some of the critics have said,

because Freud was trying hard to understand. Yeah, he wanted to be famous, but

he also wanted to try to help human beings. He originally wanted to be a

physician, and he ended up— Actually, take that back. He did want to be a

scientist. He became a physician, a neurologist, and he was involved in trying to

help human beings.

So La Barre had a big kind of impact upon me with his book. He also

talked to us about what later became a book of his on serpent handling within

the Southern religions, in communities where they would prove they weren’t

sinners by getting these rattlesnakes and other venomous snakes and handling

them in church services. And he explained how that could be possible. In the

heat of the thing snakes are kind of a little logy. But some people did get bit. And

if they lived, it proved God loved them. If they died it proved they were sinners.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 68

So this was all, as I say, really to me eye-opening and amazing. When I’d

go back to Duke through Virginia from Ohio, we’d see all these little churches

with little signs. But there was one sign that we loved. And it said, “Say no to

sin.” And the ‘S’ in sin was a serpent, and it had its tongue out. So one of the

things that was fun in those days, late at night, was to stop and steal the sign. I

said, “I want to steal that sign.” And so for years I had a “Say no to sin” sign with

the serpent. Which I think was very much related to his class, the course.

And I read all of Erich Fromm at that point, a Neo-Freudian. The laugh on

me here is that I thought it was a really good, social psych kind of Freudianism.

But later, I think in ’60 or ’62, he wrote a book that had the subtitle My Encounter

with Marx and Freud. And he said he thought Marx was by far the more profound

and important thinker. I didn’t realize that he was as much a Marxist as he was a

Freudian, although the Marxists didn’t think so. He wasn’t hardline enough,

because he brought in this namby-pamby psych stuff. But he had a big influence

in my thinking.

The other person that—I don’t know how I got into him—was Bertrand

Russell, the great philosopher. Somehow he resonated with me. I could

understand what he was saying in his essays. I read his book on Human

Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. He had a wonderful phrase that was very

liberating, where he said, “Knowing how we know is only a small part of what

we know.” In other words, we can learn about vision without understanding

epistemology. So he was very freeing for me in not making the world, as he said,

one big bowl of jelly like the Hegelians do. You can pull it apart.

And through Fromm and Bertrand Russell, and probably just being a

person that was willing to be critical, out of liking journalism and doing critical
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 69

sports writing, by my senior year I thought of myself as a socialist of their type. I

certainly wasn’t interested in heavy Marxists, or the Soviet Union, or anything

like that. But what Fromm and Russell were talking about made a lot of sense to

me.

Now, I did have a great advisor, the behaviorist I mentioned. Indeed, he

was from the hardcore schools. His research was on eye blinks, conditioning eye

blinks. And in the introductory class, which I took with him, one of the things we

had to do was participate in three experiments, allegedly to learn what they’re

doing, but of course, they needed to have subjects, as we were called then. Now

psych is more sensitive and they try to say “participants.” (laughs) But in any

case, I remember sitting there with my head in this harness-like thing, with a

chin-rest, like when you’re getting your eyes examined. Only they would flash a

light and then puff air at you. So I knew they were trying to condition me. And

so I tried to hold my eyes open, but when you see that light, you start pretty soon

to blink. I remember that, because I thought, this just doesn’t do it for me. I mean,

this is not want I want to know about. I want to know about motivation, and

what is going on in religion, and why do people do the crazy things they do,

basically—to each other and how they treat each other—were much greater

interests for me.

Now, this advisor thought I was all right. And he wanted me to go to grad

school. The heartland of many of these behaviorists at that time was the

University of Iowa. He said, “You have to go to Iowa.” I just remember thinking,

God, I don’t want to go to Iowa. And I certainly don’t want to study

behaviorism. So there I was, betwixt and between. I didn’t know what I was

going to do. I certainly wasn’t applying to grad school my senior year. I wasn’t
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 70

even sure that I’d go into psych. I probably was thinking I’d go into journalism

eventually.

But at any rate, what happened that changed a lot of things—during my

spring semester of my senior year when I was playing baseball and we were

going on these legitimate trips—and I had legitimate excuses—I had to miss a

number of the labs for the Experimental Psych course. It was the second semester

of Experimental Psych. I had purposely waited to take it because the guy I’d taken

the first semester from was so deadly. It was so awful, I hated it so much, that I

decided I’ve got to wait and hope for a better professor.

So I was taking this course with this new guy. And he was a pigeon-

conditioning guy. He studied the behavior of pigeons in cages. He was, in his

way, even more obnoxious than the first experimental psychology instructor. But

I liked the course all right, I think. But he had the view, which was kind of

amazing—and this is why I think he was such a jerk—that I was just another

typical jock that was trying to blow things off, as we say today. So for these labs

that I missed, he gave me zero. Now, when you have two exams, that are graded

one to a hundred, and I was only getting B’s by then: eighty, eighty-five, eighty-

nine that would not make up for low lab scores. Even the worst lab students

would get a sixty or a seventy. He gave me zeros. And so I ended up, in his book,

the second worst student in the class. He failed me. I still think that he was trying

to, “teach me a lesson.”

I was livid. I was really livid. And my father was upset that he wasn’t

going to get to see me graduate. Somehow that was a big deal in his mind. That

didn’t seem to be a big deal in mine. I’m just going to get this damn piece of
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 71

paper. I was not into ceremonies at all and never have been. If I was ever, I

certainly had outgrown it by then.

Rabkin: So the zero in this class was preventing you with graduating with your

classmates?

Domhoff: Right. I couldn’t go through the graduation. It’s not like today, where

they let you go through if you’re within hailing distance. So I had to call and tell

my parents that. And supposedly it was a required course. So supposedly I’d

have to maybe take the course the next year and all. It was really tense. I was

really, at one hand, chagrined, but also really, really angry. But my adviser

waived that requirement. I didn’t know how it easy it is to waive things. They’re

all such arbitrary rules.

I took summer school. I took a summer school course with a visitor from

UCLA, as I remember. I really liked him and I really liked the course. It was

basically on child development. It might have been called Exceptional Children,

but it really meant atypical. That meant we looked at a lot of disabilities and

mental problems, as well as maybe ‘very exceptional’ in the current sense of high

IQs or something like that.

So I liked that course, and I thought, well, this is the kind of psych that I

could do if I could ever find a place to do it. So at that point I left Duke. It turned

out, for different reasons, my two best friends, my roommates for the past three

years, had had to take summer school too. The one guy, who went on to be in the

business world, had not counted up what were called his quality points. And he

didn’t have enough to graduate.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 72

Rabkin: Oops.

Domhoff: And the other guy, he was just a very marginal student at one time.

He had some course to make up. He was a guy who wanted to be an MD, but he

was a flat C student. At one point, they were going to kick him out. He begged

his way back in. Anyhow the three of us lived together that summer and

graduated. Then off we went. We left Duke with some feelings of anger and

acrimony, which was good, because it helped get me some distance. So home I

went. I don’t even remember what I was thinking. But what I know was that

there was a draft notice waiting for me. They wanted to draft me into the U.S.

Army. This was in the summer of 1958. Nothing was happening.

Rabkin: But there was a draft on?

Domhoff: Yeah. If you weren’t in school you’d be drafted. Everybody was

drafted, unless you had a school exemption. If you’re eighteen and you’re not

going to college they drafted you. Later we learned that at least part of the

rationale was to goad good students into grad school. That’s in the documents of

the sixties, when they were defending the draft, and saying this makes sure we

get a good quality of grad student and all.

Now I think I probably would have wanted to be in the army even less if

they were going to fight. I’d never had a gun. My parents didn’t have a gun. I

had no interest in military culture. And I wasn’t a rah-rah nationalist, by any

means. In that sense, I can look back and say I know I was a liberal-to-leftist,

because the usual things the rightists like are hierarchy, and they’re very into

religion, and they’re nationalists, and all of that. None of those things appealed
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 73

to me at all. And some of them were quite repellent. Furthermore, my dad had

not been in the army. He had been too young for World War I and a little too old

for World War II. And I knew my grandfather had not been in the army. I doubt

if they were pacifists or anything, but they certainly weren’t crazy about fighting.

At any rate, I said, “I don’t want to do this.” The night before the physical,

I got to admit, I went out drinking and smoking and everything. And I stayed up

late. When I went to the routine physical, they said, “Is there any reason you

shouldn’t be in this line? Any problems?” I stepped forward. I said, “Yes sir. I

have a heart murmur.” I’d almost had the life scared out of me my sophomore

year or junior year in high school. They’d examined us for football, and they

said, “This guy’s got a heart murmur. We’ve got to go look at him.” Well, it was

some kind of not-bad heart murmur. But it was a scary week or two until I saw

the doc. And so far so good, obviously, on my heart. (laughs) But I stepped

forward on a heart murmur. So they said, “Okay, you’ve got to go to see this

special person, make an appointment.” I made an appointment.

So before, that night before that appointment, I just did everything to be a

wreck. And I arrived, and they sat me down. They were late, as usual. And I fell

asleep. Of course when I woke up I was just humming. I was running smooth as

glass. And they take me in there. And furthermore, the guy’s a gynecologist. So

here I’m going to be examined for a heart murmur by a non-specialist in hearts.

Rabkin: The guy who’s supposed to be examining you for a heart murmur?

Domhoff: Yeah, he’s an army doctor. But in other words, they can give you any

doctor. I didn’t get a heart specialist. I just couldn’t believe it. Now maybe he was

just in someone else’s office, but that’s what the diploma said. So he listened and
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 74

listened and listened, he said, “Your heart is fine.” And I thought, great, but what

am I going to do?

Graduate School at Kent State University

That’s when I went to Kent State, and why I went to Kent State. I looked around

and said, oh, I’ve got to go to grad school. This forced the decision. I went down

there and saw them. I think I might have looked at some catalogues for nearby

schools. It was an MA school. And the applications were taken until August 31st.

Now, at the time I didn’t understand that they were probably really glad to have

me, with my record, and from Duke and all the rest, that they weren’t ordinarily

getting students like that in their MA program.

The chair was a wonderful old gentleman. He taught us, I think, about

tests. But he also just gave me a real conception of psychology. All my professors

were great, and I was totally into it. It was a good bunch of fellow grad students.

And it was all guys. I can’t remember any of them except one, who was a little

older, had been in the military, named Pietro Badia, Pete Badia. Pete went on to

be a professor at Bowling Green State in Ohio, and then did some work on sleep,

which gave us a little overlap. Such a good guy. In a way, he was a kind of a

mentor to me.

But the two behaviorists, I really worked hard with them. They were both

good, especially the one guy. We got into the concept of “generalization” in

learning theory and all kinds of other stuff, and I became steeped in and

socialized in the field, even though it wasn’t, at that point, stuff I loved. But I

said, “Okay, it’s like drinking castor oil and eating spinach, you’re going to take

your medicine.” And I knew that I had to do this to get where I wanted to go.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 75

These behaviorists at Kent State were really good guys and useful to me,

and gave me methodological rigor and respect for doing it right. And they

taught me it wasn’t easy to get answers in any field, including the ones that I

wanted to study. But also there’s even more—a guy named Ben Mehlman that

had a big impact on me. He was a real nice guy. He was teaching, I think, a

course on the ethics of psychologists, which he cared about. He was a very

conscientious, caring kind of guy, a humanistic psychologist, more or less. He

later ended up at San Fernando Valley State, and I ran into him once or twice.

And just the way he talked, and the way his wife talked, I realized that they had

already decided that I was going to go on to fine things. But I didn’t have that

sense at the time.

I’ll never forget that I went up to him and said, “Now you mentioned

Erich Fromm today. You think that research could be done on the kind of stuff

that he talks about?” And he said, “Yeah, I think so.” I remember leaving there

elated, saying, wow, wow, this could work out. There are maybe these other

pathways within academic psychology.

I ended up doing my MA with Ben, where I developed a paper and pencil

test related to Erich Fromm’s character orientations. So I learned to do the

correlational studies, and how to make sure your test items are right; things that

I could not right now or with months of training, ever repeat or understand. But I

did it, gave this test to a lot of people, to students. It worked out all right. So I

wrote that MA thesis.

I lived in a boarding house at Kent State. They were, most of them, these

young guys. Two or three of them were gone within a semester or two. They

were out of these small towns. Everybody in Ohio that graduated with a high
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 76

school degree could go to one of the schools and get a chance. But they dropped

out and flunked out like flies. It was just amazing. So I was living with a set of

guys, then, that were going nowhere.

Rabkin: These were undergraduate students, mostly?

Domhoff: Yeah. And it was right across the street from the main buildings. And

my life was very organized. I’d go to classes. I’d go to this one particular little

café. But they had these particular liverwurst sandwiches, and a couple of songs

they’d play every time that I really liked. Oh, it was a guy named Little Willie

John. And Little Willie John would say, “Let’s rock while the rocking is good,

‘cause once you’re old and your blood runs cold, there’ll be no more rocking n’

rolling.”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: And at that point I had a consciousness of, “Yeah, you’re going to get

focused. You’re going to do this. You’re going to have that good time, but you

got to rock while the rocking’s good.” That became my mantra for a long time. I

had to remember the good times don’t last forever, as I learned the hard way at

Duke.

I’d go home on weekends, home to my room, my house. I can’t remember

what I did, or who I did it with, or anything. I never really had a girlfriend after I

broke up with my long-time girlfriend my junior year. I was shy—I was very

eager, but I was shy. And I didn’t particularly meet anybody. So I didn’t—

whatever we were doing, I just don’t remember. But it wasn’t much, and it

wasn’t memorable.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 77

But mostly then I was just studying and studying. At that point I knew I

was going to go on to more grad school. But now I’m understanding the

hierarchy more and where I’m likely to get into. Once I’d gone to Kent State, I

was downwardly mobile, I didn’t know how fully until I got into the academic

world. About five, ten years ago one of my friends in sociology did a study

called, “The Academic Caste System.” He showed that Harvard hires other Ivies

and so on, that there’s really a tremendous caste system that’s never spoken of,

that while everybody’s running around being egalitarians and going to change

the world, they live in this caste system.

But there was another factor for me in trying to pick a school, and that

was that I wanted a place where I was not going to be doing traditional stuff, in

the sense of these behaviorists, and these stupid tests, and these social

psychology manipulations. I really didn’t want to do that. I also didn’t want to

go to the snow. West of the Mississippi did not exist in my mind. That was never

anything I’d thought— “Go west, young person, go. California, here I come,”

never were thoughts of mine.

So I said, okay, if it’s going to be that way, I’m going to be in the sunshine.

I applied to the three Florida schools: Florida State, the University of Florida, and

Miami. And I think I applied to what was then called Western Reserve

University, as a backup in Cleveland. I think I got in all of them, or most of them.

The reason I went to Miami was that they gave me the best deal. Basically,

I was going to have a fellowship. I’m going to have work for two years, which I

thought would be as a TA or a research assistant, and then I had a dissertation

year fellowship. I just didn’t see how you could beat that. I was ready to go to
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 78

Miami for no particular reason other than the sun, and it had a good image. Of

course, this all very pre-Castro. This in the spring of ’59.

So at any rate, I then went to Miami. And that turned out to be

tremendously lucky in a lot of ways. I was in clinical, supposedly. I wasn’t even

thinking then of being a teacher. I’d be more of a clinician, and help people and

learn more through doing that by being like Freud and Fromm and

psychotherapists and so on.

But I had a number of what I just have to call lucky breaks—just the way

things tumbled. And one was they had a very new program. We may have been

the first class or the second class with a PhD. They had had an MA program and

they were building on it. At any rate, it was also a growing school—as all schools

were then, as I didn’t understand. There were a tremendous number of jobs in

the late fifties and early sixties as these schools burgeoned, unlike only ten,

fifteen years later. And it gets worse all the time. But in any case, they said, after I

accepted and went there—a few weeks after I accepted I got this letter from them

saying, “Your assignment the first year is: in the fall we want you to teach

Introductory Psychology. In the spring we want you to teach Introduction to

Statistics.” So here I was; in 1959 I was twenty-three years old, and I am going to

be teaching this class. So that was kind of daunting, but also thrilling and a

challenge.

Rabkin: This wasn’t just a TAship. You were the teacher.

Domhoff: I was the instructor. I had no TAs, but I was the instructor. And there

was nobody watching over me. So I prepared a course and I arrived there. And

yeah, I’m taking classes. But I’m also teaching Introduction to Psychology. And I’m
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 79

teaching it my way and slipping in some atypical or nontraditional stuff. I really

had a ball. It went well.

I think that started to tip me, then, towards being a professor. And then in

the spring I taught the stat course, which was hilarious because I didn’t know

that much stat. But I knew stats through analysis of variance and regression

analysis. But all I was teaching was the basics: mean, median, mode, and

standard deviations. I think we touched, maybe just mentioned, analysis of

variance. And certainly I taught them about basic correlation. So I did that in

what was my second year of graduate school.

Calvin Hall

Now, during the same time that’s when I met the person that turned out

to have the most influence on me intellectually in my life. And that was Calvin

Hall, who was there as a visitor. I didn’t know of Hall. I didn’t go there because

of Hall. But he had been a big-deal psychologist, which I hadn’t quite yet

fathomed. He had studied with Tolman of Tolman Hall at Berkeley, another

famous psychologist of that day, and had done the first work on inheritance of

emotionality in rats. He was a behavior geneticist originally. Did quite well. He

was then made chair of Western Reserve University in Cleveland as a twenty-

seven or twenty-eight year old, and stayed there then for a long time.

Rabkin: Chair of the psychology department?

Domhoff: Yeah. They brought him in to build the psych department. And then

World War II had come, I might add, and the government had said, “We need

clinical psychologists. Will you train them?” Most of the psychologists held up
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 80

their noses and said, “No, we’re scientists.” But a few said, “We’ll take your

money and train psychologists.” And one of those was Hall, who by the late

thirties and early forties had gotten into, it turns out, the neo-Freudians and then

into Freudian stuff. But the point was that in the fifties he and one of his former

students had written a book called Theories of Personality. So he was quite well

known. And he’d got into dream research out of his interest in Freud. He said,

“How can I do research?” And he started to collect dreams in the classroom.

Then he started to read them. And then he started to develop categories to put

elements of the dream in: characters, social interactions of various types: Are you

in a house? Are you outside? And he just kept putting those names on paper:

home, house, street, car. He started to clump them, and then to see how he could

reliably categorize them and develop more general categories. The system was

working pretty well. He had had a lot of graduate students in the fifties doing

various dream studies that prepared the way for our later work.

Rabkin: Bill, when you say he collected dreams, how did that work? Did he have

people write down their dreams?

Domhoff: Yes. Voluntarily what you could do is you’d write down your dreams

every morning. Sometimes he collected them in the classroom. But mostly he’d

have them write on a sheet he’d given them. They had other things they could

do, too. I forget what they were, but they had to do something that got them

thinking inside. They could write down diary stuff or whatever.

So, at first you don’t know what you have. But when you collect dreams

for a long enough time from students—and I know this from doing it later—you

notice how personal they are. They’re not about the events of the day. They’re
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 81

not about politics, economics. They’re about your relation with your friends,

your parents; you miss your dog, whatever it is. I mean, they’re very personal.

About, what I’d now say, 70, 75 percent of them are personal, but another 25, 30

percent are kind of adventure stories. They don’t have familiar characters or

settings, and you’re off on a hill, or slogging through a jungle or something like

this. And you say, “Where’d that come from?” We still don’t know. But lots of

dreams were about personal concerns: past regrets, present concerns, future

worries. Like, “Will my wedding be okay?” “If I’m pregnant or when I get

pregnant, what will it be like? And will the baby be okay?” Things that you

worry about.

I went into dreams because they were considered at the time the royal

road to the unconscious, which was Freud’s famous phrase. But the point is, you

were going to learn the mysteries of life. But they turn out to be, in a certain way,

more mundane. They’re these wonderful enactments of our concerns. So you’re

around the table and you’re fighting with your mother. Ten dreams later you’re

in the living room and you’re fighting with your mother. We start to figure out

this person had a lot of conflict about their mother. You ask them, “Who is the

person you’ve had the most conflict with?” They say, “My mother.” So it’s not

like we’ve suddenly tapped the unconscious. But we’ve shown that dreams have

meaning and they’re very personalized and so on.

And you can get a sense of it, if 80 percent of the interactions with your

mother are negative versus 50 percent for the average person, you can get a real

quantitative sense of the nature of the relationship—far more negative than

positive. Other people may have just the opposite.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 82

And to add some other simple examples about this: we learned the

frequency of dreaming about somebody tells you about the intensity of the

concern. If you dream most about your mother, you’re most concerned about

her. Now we then have to go on and look at the interactions to see whether they

are more negative or more positive; whether you see her as a helper, or whether

you see as a prohibiter, whether you see her as an impossible role model. You

can see that because dreamers dramatically enact their conceptions of their

relationships.

So I met Hall and took his course on psychoanalysis. And I took his course

on dreams. And I got into content analysis, which is what this categorization

methodology is called. Calvin and I hit it off really well. This was the kind of

psychology that I was interested in. I was a neo-Freudian. He was more of a

Freudian at that point—very much a Freudian. But he loved Jung, and I hadn’t

read Jung. But there was enough overlap. And the dream work, in a certain way,

was very separate from any theory. If I just go out and collect a hundred dreams

and then count up the number of animals in the dream, or the number of

aggressions, what’s that got to do with any theory? It’s very empirically driven,

bottom-up kind of research.

So that was a big turning point. It turned out that the fact he’d been at

Case Western—he had been there from the late thirties to ’54, ’55—meant that we

overlapped our Cleveland backgrounds as well. Still, there was considerable

difference, obviously, in age. He was born in 1910, I think it was. And I was born

in ’36. So twenty-six years difference in age.

At the time I still didn’t realize that I was potentially a very promising

student. I was a hard worker. But I didn’t have a direction. But I think he could
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 83

see that I was strongly motivated and focused and disciplined. I understood that

about myself at the time—that I could really stick to something. So he was a

supporter of mine. We did research together. It was a big turning point. He

became—we’ll get to my wife in a minute. When I got married, she came to

Miami with me. They got to be good friends, too.

Now, there was one other thing going on at this time that I think is very

important to say—one of those conjunctions, when something new comes along,

and you’re new, so there’s an intersection that happens. I’m interested in

motivation, and what makes us tick, and fantasy life, and myths and so on. I met

this guy Hall, who’s done this content analysis; who’s interested in Freud and

Fromm and generally what was called psychodynamic psychology.

Understanding human beings in terms of the conflicts of all our wishes and fears

is the basic point of it.

The Beginnings of Dream Research

But there was something else going on. And that was that it was really

right at that point that it was dawning on psychologists what by physiologists

had discovered in 1953. And that is that dreams seem to happen only during a

phase of sleep called REM sleep, which stands for rapid eye movements. And

what that did in a nutshell: it made dreams the first psychological phenomenon

that seemed to have a one-to-one to relationship with a physiological state,

because brain wave patterns change and heart rate and much else.

Rabkin: Interesting.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 84

Domhoff: So you go into a REM period, and you’re going to dream. And we

believed you dream every time. If you aren’t, it’s because you just aren’t a good

recaller. Non-REM, that is sleep without rapid eye movements, if you report

something from that type of sleep, it’s a memory from an earlier REM period, or

you’re just pleasing us by saying stuff. A Non-REM (NREM) report is kind of

vague and rambley and shorter and so on. No longer do I believe much of this,

but the point is what we believed at the time for research reasons. As I said, I

don’t believe it much anymore. But in any case, that’s what it looked like at that

time, with these two or three physiologists and MDs that had done this work.

So that made dream research pretty exciting. And furthermore, it looked

like the eye movements were tracking the dream. And in 1960 a guy did a study

in which he deprived people of REM sleep and they supposedly got all agitated.

And then they made up the lost REM sleep when allowed to sleep undisturbed.

So it looked like REM sleep very much fit in a certain way with Freud, that you

have to have it, or you can become agitated or start hallucinating.

When we look at it now, we say, “Wait, it doesn’t fit Freud at all. You

dream four or five times a night. It’s pretty regular. You dream outside REM.” In

1999 I wrote a review of a new translation of [Freud’s] The Interpretations of

Dreams, and went through the book again, and looked at every claim he made,

from the minor to more major, in the light of the research that then happened

between ’60 and ’99. And there wasn’t a single hypothesis that I felt had

withstood the test of time.

Rabkin: Wow.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 85

Domhoff: It meant further research was needed. We were confident too soon. I

guess it’s good I tell later developments now. Because at the time we were totally

immersed in it. It was totally exciting. And the people that were doing it, it

turned out, were all Freudians and closet Freudians. And I say “closet” because

some of them didn’t write until later, “Oh, I went to med school because I read

The Interpretation of Dreams three times. I wanted to be a psychoanalyst, but I got

into the sleep research. And then the dream stuff didn’t turn out to be all what

we expected. And I went on into sleep medicine.” In fact, that’s the really the

story of a truly great person, the greatest scientist I ever knew, William Dement.

Retired at Stanford. A great guy and great scientist, who empirically followed his

nose and was open-minded. So he just quietly dropped the Freudian aspect and

went on to even greater and important things for human beings in general. I

admire him enormously.

So that year or two, meeting up with Hall, teaching, and this new REM

stuff, got me really hooked on being intellectual and academic and a researcher,

but also being a professor.

A European Adventure and Marriage

In the summer of 1960 I earned enough money, after my first year of grad

school I had a little money left over. And also my buddy and I, who I’ll explain

in a minute, wanted to go to Europe. And Calvin Hall joined us. I’d learned at

Duke you could get free passage over there if you were the editor on the ship

newspaper on this student boat. It was a Dutch student government thing. And it

was called the SS Groote Beer. So I wrote and said, “Hey, I’m a journalist. I’ll run

your newspaper.” And they hired me, in effect.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 86

Rabkin: What a cool gig!

Domhoff: It was a great gig. So I floated over for free. And I had this money.

Now, the person I lived with at that time was one of my old college roommates.

He was from Fort Myers, Florida, on the other side of Florida from Miami. And

he was the one that was not a super student. He didn’t know what he was going

to do. He was very independent. He’s just really fine. But on school things he

was a little lost. And then I kind of instructed him. I said, “Jim, come over and

live with me and get a job at the medical school. And get into some research

through that, then see what happens.” So he did.

He got a job operating on dogs. He was very good with his hands. He

could fix anything. He wanted to be a surgeon. So he lived with me and he got

this job at the med school and worked with the doctors on some cancer research

on dogs. And lo and behold, eventually they took him in the med school. He

became president of his class. And he graduated and he went back to Duke for

his residency. And then he ended up at a university up in Utah, where he

followed this mentor from medical school. He was a physician there for years.

(laughs)

So the three of us went to Europe, traveled around, and had a

Volkswagen. But at a certain point, that was wearying. The three of us were

staying in these cheap, twenty-five cent student hostels. So my buddy and I split

off and Calvin went to Zurich. He was going to see Jung, and get a chance to

meet with Jung. He said, “You got any questions for Jung?” Which I’ll come to.

But in any case, my buddy Jim and I were staying in Copenhagen. We’re

in a youth hostel. It’s a buck a day instead of twenty-five cents. And we’re
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 87

playing volleyball. And I meet this California woman, a young woman who was

going to San Jose State at the time. And we got along. She said, “Hey, you’re

hogging the ball.” She was just feisty enough. So then the four of us—she had a

girlfriend with her, and the four of us traveled for a while. We hit it off. We

wrote back and forth. And then the next summer I came out to California on the

bus from Ohio.

Rabkin: Was this your first trip to California?

Domhoff: Yeah, on a bus. All the way across the country, two or three or four

days. It was something. I can’t remember much of it. Just little pieces of it. I don’t

know when I slept, or where I slept, or anything. Then I got to Napa, California,

and stayed there a while and then proposed. Later that summer we got married.

So, of course, that was obviously a life-changing kind of event, too.

But we came back to Miami for my last year. That was my dissertation

year. We got there and we had to find a place to stay. We were looking at this

one place. And this old couple, we kind of talked. They said, “How would you

like to manage this place?” My wife was very charming, outgoing, extroverted.

And they thought, obviously, that she was going to do most of it. I was going to,

supposedly, study. So we get this free rent.

Calvin Hall had spent a year in Nijmegen teaching in the Netherlands,

and then he was in Zurich just hanging out with these Jungians. And he came

back, I guess it was, then. We had this big apartment building. We had this

perfect apartment: the third floor, perfect sun. And so he moved in there. So

we’re all buddies. He’s hanging out in our apartment.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 88

Rabkin: Had he, by the way, taken your questions for Jung to his meeting?

Domhoff: I’d asked Jung, if aggression was so important, how come the Swiss

hadn’t been in any wars for so long? Something like this. And Calvin wrote me a

long letter about it, which I still have, about his visit with Jung. Because he

wanted to get it on paper. And he told me about it, too. Jung became very

animated. He said, “Not aggressive?” He said, “Geez, they hate you from canton

to canton, from district to district; everybody’s armed to the teeth. You got to be

in the militia. Oh my God.” He said all of this in psychodynamic terms,

“sublimated aggression in Switzerland. We’re poised at the borders. We’ve got

all these Italian, French, German kinds of conflicts. Switzerland basically is a

perfect example of how aggressive human beings are.” But Hall really liked Jung,

and had this good kind of visit with him.

But back to Miami. We weren’t there very long. And my wife got

pregnant. And then another thing happened, and that was I was going do this

study of dreams in a psych lab. EEG’s were so rare that they said, “You can’t get

the EEG for six or eight months.” So wow, this is really heavy. What am I going

to do?

Moving to California

Through a very small group of sleep and dream researchers that had just

started to meet, Calvin had a connection to a guy in San Francisco named Joe

Kamiya, who was also very important in my life. Joe was at Langley Porter

Clinic, and he was doing sleep and dream research. He was mostly a dream

researcher. It turned out he was getting into meditation. So he said, I could come
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 89

to his lab. And, of course, I was getting money from Miami. So we packed up our

gear and drove off. We stopped in Ohio. And my wife’s more and more

pregnant, of course. (laughs) And we arrived in the Bay Area and rented an

apartment in Berkeley, not far from her grandparents, who lived up the hill in

Berkeley, that she really liked and was close to. And, of course, not far from

Napa, where she was from.

I’d drive across the bridge to Langley Porter. But it was pretty clear that

this lab was in transition, and he was really more interested in meditation. So I

thought, “Oh boy.” And so we talk and I realize that he has all of these dreams

that he collected when he was at the University of Chicago, where he had

actually collected dreams from people at home and in the lab. So he just said,

“Would you like to do your work on comparing home and lab dreams?” as we

called them.

Now, the thing is, he and others didn’t really know what to do with them.

They were going to use these scales that were very vague. But I was a content

analyst. I could then look for aggression, sexuality, bizarreness, whatever. So I

wrote back to my committee with bated breath, and I said, “Look, here’s what

I’ve got a really great chance to do. And I can do it faster and better.” It was

actually a very important issue at the time to us: Are the dreams that are

collected at home everyday, or that people remember—is that in any way a

representative sample of our dream life? Because in a way, we were expecting

during REM sleep to wake people up and my God, catch them in on these huge,

Freudian, repressed dreams, and archetypal Jungian dreams. I could exaggerate,

but the point is you expected to see really juicy dreams, so to speak, because they
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 90

wouldn’t have had time to forget or to repress them. Repression was still a very

big concept.

So, are we going to delve into this whole, big new world? People really

hadn’t collected very many dreams at that point. This is the spring of ’62. And

only at the University of Chicago and at two or three other labs were they

actually collecting dreams. And they hadn’t done anything much with them yet

because they were just in the process of publishing. There were some people at

Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn who were also collecting dreams. Calvin

and I had visited them when we went up for a little dream conference in New

York, just before my wife and I left for Ohio and California. So we’d seen these

couple of labs. We’d seen two labs, and then I saw Kamiya’s.

But I then did this content analysis of these dreams. So I’m working in his

lab. It’s like March, April, May, whatever. But pressure is growing in two ways,

because we’re about to have our first child. And she was born on June 3rd, 1962.

And my money was going to run out. I needed a job. Her grandfather said,

“Why don’t you sign up at the placement center at Cal, and see what happens.“

So I go over there. And there’s these lists of jobs at all these state colleges, job

after job in psychology. Totally different from later. As I say, I feel almost guilty,

and then sad for people [now].

California State University, Los Angeles, and Dissertation Research

So they were listed: you know, Fresno, a lot of places I didn’t want to be. I

knew enough, by then, about California. There was one at Sacramento State, and

maybe in one of the other Northern [California] schools. But the interesting there

is my wife didn’t want to be that close to Napa, shall we say. So we ended up at

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 91

Cal State LA. They wanted me. It was a good enough job. So now I’m going to

have a job where my salary maybe starts September 1st or something. The school

year probably started in mid-September, something like that.

Rabkin: Is this a tenure track job?

Domhoff: Yeah, an assistant professor job. There were only about four or five

available at the time. They’d hired a lot of new people. At that point, every year

they were hiring thousands of new professors around the country. All of this

coming off of the baby boom near the end of the war. I was just enough ahead of

that. I was born in the year in which the least Americans were born—in 1936—in

the twentieth century, I think it was. It was just amazing. I think it was a function

of the Depression. So I had, in a ways, the least competition. Plus, it was a racist,

sexist world. So it was a smaller pool of white males competing. Today you’re

competing with—you’ve got men and women; you’ve got people of all races and

ethnicities. And there’s not the discrimination that had existed. We know there

was discrimination against Catholics. There were quotas on Jews to go to some

colleges, to get tenure at schools. Stuff I didn’t know at the time. There hadn’t

been anybody Jewish, I don’t think, that had gotten tenure at Yale until the

fifties—things like that, which I partly learned from [UCSC Professor of

literature] Harry Berger when he came here and I came here in ’65. But all of that

I was pretty naïve on.

Rabkin: Had you finished your dissertation at this point?

Domhoff: No. That’s the point—the point is pressure was really mounting. I was

working night and day. And I can get into that kind of focus: night and day,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 92

night and day, I’m working on that dissertation, doing these quantifications,

doing the stats, typing it up. And then Judy’s mother and Judy—that’s my wife

at the time—they’re typing copies and checking it. And the baby’s born. So all

summer I’m working on that dissertation.

I send it off to them, and then they say, “Okay, come down and defend it.”

It was somewhere around early September, late August. So I flew to Miami, and

on the way back, stopped in St. Louis to go to the American Psychological

Association meetings for the first time, which were interesting. And then I flew

to California. I forget the details of when we went down and got a place to stay

in LA. We started in an apartment in Arcadia. And then we moved to Temple

City, to a nice house. Basically we got this apartment in Arcadia—or I probably

got it. Then Judy came down, because with a baby you’re not always tripping

around in airplanes and so on. And we were literally no sooner settled in

Arcadia than school started.

And I had a letter from Miami saying, “He’s completed his PhD.” Because

that made a little difference in my salary. Not like thousands of dollars, but it

probably made a difference of maybe a thousand or two. I don’t know. Also at

that school everybody was “Mr.” and “Dr.” And during my visit there in spring,

“Mr. Domhoff,” and then “Dr. So-and-so” and this and this. I thought, Oh, I

want to be done. I want to be done. I want to be ‘Dr.’ and ‘professor, like

everyone else.’

I had tremendous motivators. I had a child I felt very responsible towards.

My father was a very responsible breadwinner, non-drinker, organized, hard

worker. All of that I definitely picked up somewhere along the line. So that, plus

I wanted to be done and start and do it right and so on. Now, my degree
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 93

officially says—I don’t know, January of ’63 or so. But I have this letter, and I felt

like I finished in ’62. I had just turned twenty-six. I had done it in four years.

Now that was more standard in those days. Things changed shortly after that.

People would take a year off and there were all the tensions over the draft and

the war and everything else. Now people take longer times. I think partly they

take a longer time because there are less jobs. There’s one old study that said,

“Hey, if the job market’s tight, people finish faster.” I certainly saw that in terms

of, they not only hired me, with the promise of the PhD, at Cal State LA, but we

hired here at Santa Cruz plenty of people that had just started their dissertation. I

mean, people were very much needed.

Rabkin: So if the job market’s good, people finish fast.

Domhoff: They hustle through, although it turned out for a lot of them to be a

mistake to come here without their dissertation done, because then they didn’t

finish or took forever. It was really hard. I think it’s role theory: once you’re in

that role of professor—and of course you’ve got all that work to do, and day-to-

day obligations—it’s really hard to go back into the mindset where, “I’ve really

got to please these three people on the committee.”

My three years at Cal State LA were, in many ways, very incredible, in

terms of faculty and colleagues I met, in terms of teaching, and also in terms of

family life. We had another child, another daughter, July 11th, 1963. So they were

only thirteen months apart. And on June 11th, 1965, our third child and first son

was born. Then three days later, when my wife got out of the hospital, she took

the airplane to San Francisco with the baby and with our second born. And I

started out from LA with my mother and our oldest daughter, who was really
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 94

annoyed that she was not with her mother. At one point, she turned to my

mother and said, “I don’t like you very much, Grandma.” [laughter] She had to

ride up to San Francisco, up to Napa, with us.

So it’s a jam-packed, dynamite three years. The teaching load was four

courses, I think it was. Not five—four a semester.

Rabkin: Four a semester?

Domhoff: Four a semester. I would teach two introductory psych’s, and then a

section of Personality [Psychology] and a section of Child [Psychology]. And then

the next semester I might teach two Personalities, an Intro and a Social. So for

three years I taught social psych, personality psych, child psych, and

introductory psych. The introductory courses would have maybe a hundred, two

hundred. The others would have forty or fifty usually. There weren’t any really

small classes. They were all big lecture classes. I was obviously into it. And this is

when you really learn the stuff.

It reminds me of a small anecdote—but it’s the kind of thing that’s so

freeing. While I was at Kent State with one of the experimentalists I admired, I

said to him, “I’m so discouraged. I know I’m doing well and I get good grades in

the classes.” But I said, “God, I don’t remember this stuff.” He said, “That’s okay.

You won’t remember it until you’ve taught it two or three times.”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: That turned out to be true. It was just fantastic. So I was teaching a lot,

and learning a lot through the teaching.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 95

I also want to say that I was doing a lot of research at that time. I don’t

know how it all happened, because I was also a very active father. But while I

was at Cal State LA, Calvin and I finished up and published—one of them maybe

came out in ’62—these three content analysis papers where we looked at

thousands and thousands of dreams collected outside the lab setting, usually a

classroom. I hadn’t done that much, but he was very kind to make them “Hall

and Domhoff.” He knew how to help his students. I’ve always tried to do that

too.

We had a paper on gender difference in dreams, that concerned the fact

that if you count all the characters who are named by gender—“the guy,” “my

father,” “my mother,” “that woman”—you find that for women, half of the

characters in their dreams are men and half are women. But for men it’s two-

thirds other men, a sixty-seven:thirty-three split. Now, there’re individual

differences on that. But in all of our samples we usually find the same result,

including cross-culturally. We call it a “ubiquitous” sex difference in dreams.

Meaning—and Calvin was so pleased with the word—occurring everywhere.

But it didn’t say universal. But oh, did we get ragged for that. They’d find one

society that didn’t fit. We’d say, “We also found a society that didn’t fit. It’s in

the paper.”

We did one paper on aggression and hostility in dreams to show how

high it is. And it only gradually drops off, if at all, when people get older. By

then, he had a huge collection of dreams. And we did one on friendliness in

dreams. And there’s a lot less compared to hostility and aggression. But we

talked about it. So it was taxonomy stuff. But it was kind of gearing up for the
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 96

laboratory dream reports that were being collected—and we knew more would

be forthcoming.

Then I wrote three little short papers from my dissertation: comparing

home and lab dreams in one; comparing dreams throughout the night from

different REM periods in the other; and then one just looking at laboratory

elements in dreams. At the time we noticed there were a fair number of dreams

in which participants would be dreaming about the lab setting. And so, we were

worried that this was influencing and suppressing. Today we’d say, because of

other research, we’d say, “Hey, you dreamed about your concerns.”

One of these dreams is hilarious. A guy had a dream that Joe Kamiya and

his co-workers were testing the electricity on the machine—the EEG, it’s called,

the electroencephalogram. Anyway, the current started flowing the other way

and he, “Ahh! I’m being electrocuted!” (laughs) This is in his dream. And Joe had

another guy that had a dream in which the experimenter came in the room and

said, or talked to him in the intercom, and said, “Were you dreaming?” And he

reported, “No,” in this dream. “No, I wasn’t.” “You’re lying! The machine says

you’re dreaming.” (laughter) So people had, it turns out, their concerns are right

there in the lab.

So I published those things. And I published my master’s thesis and I

called it “A Paper and Pencil Study of Fromm’s Character Orientations” in The

Journal of Humanistic Psychology. I was also doing work on left and right—I’ve

always been fascinated, as I said, with the difference between leftists and

rightists. And, of course, the election of ’64 was seen as a big one, a big

watershed and so on: Johnson versus Goldwater. I had a buddy from University

of Pennsylvania or Penn State, that came to Cal State LA the same year I did, a
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 97

wonderful guy. He knew more about personality than I did. So we gave lots of

different tests plus a left-right test that I’d gotten hold of that was more general

such as, “Are numbers discovered, or are they invented?” Well, if you think they

were discovered, you’re more likely to be a rightist. If you think they are

invented—see, for the leftists, they come from humans. For rightists, things are

from out there and external, and on high, and God, or they’re built into the

universe. And one question is, “Are human things basically good or are they

basically bad?” That really predicted how participants were going to answer

about a lot of other things. And it really did correlate, we found, with political

orientation—very well. We studied the students in the liberal Democrat group,

the ultraconservative Republican group, the young communists, and students in

two psychology classes.

I never published it until much later because we both left Cal State LA; we

went to other places. We had these basic stats. And they were good enough. One

other colleague wanted to help us with the stats, another new guy at Cal State

LA, but he never did the work. So finally, we just said, “Hey, to heck with it.”

But I kept the stuff.

I also was working on psychoanalytic tests they used at that time. And I

wrote several essays on psychoanalysis that I then played with for a long time,

and then published in the late sixties, that were then useful, it turns out—it was

kind of inadvertent—for my tenure here [at UC Santa Cruz]. One of them was

called, “But Why Did They Sit on the King’s Right in the First Place?” It was a

study of the symbolism of left and right. It partly used some research I’d also

done at Cal State LA that was really wonderful, where I gave a test called the

semantic differential. And all that means is you put a picture or a word or
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 98

anything at the top of the page, and then you have people rate them fast/slow,

up/down, good/bad, curved/straight, male/female, wet/dry and so on. And it

turns out there’re three basic dimensions. One is evaluative: you like it or you

don’t like it. The other is a speed dimension: is it fast or slow. And then there’s a

strong/weak kind of dimension that parcels out of all this. I was able to show the

left was down and curved and female and dangerous and so on, and the right

was good and straight and true and so on.

So I had that for kids, from about the first or second grade on through

high school. My wife’s mother was an administrator in a school system of Napa.

It was a fascinating two days. My research assistant and I, as we moved from

first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, to high school, it was like one of

these unfolding flowers in Disney movie, to watch these kids change. So that was

a good study. And I built it into my “Why Do They Sit on the Right in the First

Place?” Because all over the world, the left is bad and down and curved and

dangerous, and the right is good and straight and true. Then I gave an analysis of

that in terms of this and that and the other thing, that maybe I’ll get to.

So it was great in all those ways: research and teaching. I shared an office

with a political scientist who was also brand new to the campus—he was about

ten years older—who was a great mentor to me. Helped get me to thinking about

power. And the next year we had a third officemate. He was even older than my

other officemate. He was an anthropologist who had been an expert in horse

riding and all kinds of stuff. He was also great. So it was wonderful to be in this

interdisciplinary place. And in fact the psychology chair said, “Well, we share

offices here. You can share an office with a physiological psychologist, or you can

share an office with a political scientist.” I said, symbolic of me, and a turning
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 99

point, “I’ll take the political scientist.” Physiology was far removed from my

interests, but politics are closer to personality. And, of course, I’d done all this

left-right kind of stuff anyhow.

The Beginnings of Research in Sociology

But at Cal State LA I also became more involved in an interest in politics,

and in research in what eventually lead me into sociology. It really starts with the

fact I was sort of—as my then-wife used to call me, “Kind of raunchy rebel. A

little bit scruffy and a little bit oppositional.” She herself was fairly apolitical, and

very extroverted and nice. But her family was fascinating, in terms of the varied

politics. She was certainly very liberal, but the point is she wasn’t out there

banging on gongs and stuff, at the time. Her mother was a socialist, basically,

and her aunt was a communist, and had been in the Communist Party, I learned,

and was a famous painter in the Bay Area, named Emmy Lou Packard. She

definitely had a communist orientation. My wife’s grandparents—the grandpa

was a social democrat, a pretty strong New Dealer. He’d had some second-level

positions that were quite significant in the New Deal. He’d gone to Puerto Rico

to be the right-hand man to the commissioner of Puerto Rico—who was a very

liberal guy named Rexford Tugwell, who’d been big in the New Deal. So they

were certainly very active politically. And then the grandma, she was the most

“conservative” of them. She was in the Americans for Democratic Action. She

was an ADA liberal with these two radical daughters. And then my wife’s

stepfather, he was definitely a leftist and read Marxist magazines. I don’t know,

he’d probably been in some sort of leftist group, but I don’t know what one. So

I’m hearing all this. It’s around me. I certainly like it all right, but I’m not going
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 100

to do anything about it. But I think through her grandfather I read C. Wright

Mills and The Power Elite.

I naturally gravitated to the underdogs and the troublemakers. So when I

arrived at Cal State LA, a few faculty had just decided to start a union, including

my officemate, the political scientist. They said, “We’re going to get twenty-five,

thirty people to sign. Then we can have a chapter. But we don’t want you or any

other assistant professors that are just starting out to sign. We don’t want to

jeopardize your careers or anything like that.” The point is, that’s going to be the

laugh on me, although it didn’t jeopardize my career.

Pretty soon they came back and they said, “We weren’t able get twenty-

five signatures.” This is on a campus, of course, with hundreds and hundreds

and hundreds of professors. “Maybe we could get you and some others to sign

anyhow.” So I sign. And I’m now in this union. So we have a meeting. And as

often happens, they say, “How about you be secretary?” Because that involves

you going to the newspaper and all. So I become the secretary of the union. And

it’s not like this existential decision, or that I think it’s some big deal, or anything

like that. But I’d be quoted in the student paper, “The union da-da-da—”

I obtained my FBI file in the late seventies through a lawyer friend who

was visiting on our campus, a wonderful guy who’d been a lawyer for all these

different leftist groups. He was teaching with us. He’s now a professor at

Temple. A wonderful, wonderful, great law professor, and writer. And he said,

“I’ve got to get your FBI file.” I said, “I don’t have an FBI file. What are you

talking about?” He said, “Oh, I know they’ll have one on you. I know they’ll

have one on you.” I said, “Believe me, I’ve never done enough.” And so he

badgered me, and he said, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it.” So he did it.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 101

So I get this file. And to cut that story short, because it never had an

impact on my life, obviously, there are all the clippings from my union days.

Any time I was quoted in the student paper it was in a file that the FBI got, but it

also involved that I had spoken at a free speech movement talk at Cal State LA.

Some students spotted me and they said, “Come on. You got to speak at the free

speech movement thing.” Whatever it was, ’63, ’64. And I’m speaking on the

campus. A couple of my friends that were there, colleagues—and I guess one of

the students—they got nervous. They thought, “This guy’s taking notes.” And

they decide this guy was a police guy, or a spy of some kind. Apparently they

were a little agitated afterwards. I was only remembering this again just the other

day. I remember thinking back then, Man, informants are not here. It’s too trivial.

I didn’t think it was any kind of a big deal at all. But it turned out my colleagues

were right.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: And the only other things I want to mention about my FBI file. First,

every time I’d give a speech the FBI would send their guys and they’d look at me

again. And they sent the file from LA to Santa Cruz, or to San Francisco. There

was one in the nation’s capital. But they’d all have slightly different stuff in them.

The second thing about my FBI file I want to mention here, that was so

interesting to me intellectually when I got the file, was that in 1970 I was really

involved on the campus in the rallies in the attempts to deal with the Cambodian

incursion, as it was called. Nixon bombed in Laos, I guess it was. But in any case,

students really were up in arms again, after a lot of die-down of the antiwar

movements on campus. And my office became one place where the students—
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 102

one of my research assistants volunteered to deal with the phones, to deal with

messages from all over the place. We were coordinating all of these things,

mostly to do with teas that were being held, meetings with people in town,

where two or three students would go and explain to the town people why they

were against the war and so on. And my wife was very much coordinating this

with all of her many friends and contacts, too.

And then over in Stevenson [College at UCSC], Bill Friedland’s3 office was

the main place. They were the more leftist office. That’s where Mike Rotkin4 and

[Nick] Rabkin and some others were operating out of. They would meet in the

Stevenson College Library and decide what they were going to do. They decided

they were going to block Highway One at one point. And they did get out there.

They blocked it at River Street. You know, that big intersection. I think they

lasted maybe one round or two rounds, I forget. But they got eased off the street,

as these trucks inched forward.

I thought it was not very smart. These people weren’t the cause of the war.

They were truck drivers who were trying to make a living, people who were

trying to feed their kids. You know, everyday life, which a student doesn’t have

a conception of. But I was a guy with, at that point, four kids. We’d had another

child born in September of 1968. So you know, you’ve got to get these kids to

various places. There’re schools; there’s food. You’ve got to have formulas,

3
See the oral history Bill Friedland, Interviewed by Sarah Rabkin, Edited by Irene Reti and Sarah
Rabkin, Community Studies and Research for Change: An Oral History with William Friedland
(Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2013). Available at http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-
hist/friedland.
4
See the oral history with Mike Rotkin, Mike Rotkin and the Rise and Fall of Community Studies at
UCSC, 1969-2010 (Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2013). Available at
http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/rotkin
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 103

diapers, whatever. So everyday life, they were blocking that. But we were doing

something very different.

But one of the things was, one of the faculty—I think it maybe was a guy

named Ben Clark who was in Russian lit—he said we’ve got to give our draft

cards in solidarity to this group that’s coordinating all of this at Princeton, where

we turned in our draft cards to show solidarity. Well, you had to have your draft

card on you at that time. If you didn’t, you were subject to fine or jail or

whatever. They certainly could arrest you. So I said, “Okay, man, I’ll give you

this, but”—I was partly joking, but I said, “But this is going straight to the FBI,

you know.” Because by then I had read all the stuff on all the spying and had just

written a chapter for a book of mine called The Higher Circles. I had a chapter on

all of the behind-the-scenes stuff that had been uncovered in the sixties and had

put it in a more power-elite context.

“Oh, no,” he said, “Bill, that won’t happen.” But when I got my FBI file,

there it was. Within thirty days, the FBI had written a letter to the attorney

general saying, “We have reason to believe that Domhoff doesn’t have his draft

card on him.” And then there was this photocopy of my draft card. (laughs) So

they did have an in. They did have the Princeton radicals wired and it was going

straight to the FBI. They did have a list. They did have files; it’s come out later,

they did have lists of people that were considered dangerous. I don’t know

whether I made that list or not.

But I sure didn’t feel dangerous. I never did anything that was unusual.

Mike Rotkin’s blocking draft boards; I’m at home changing diapers. It’s just I

wasn’t that active. I think it was just a place where I was in my life. Who knows
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 104

what I would have done if I was a single guy five years younger? I have no idea

what I would have done. But I did give speeches at various places.

The Genesis of Who Rules America?

Well, I want to say that in the summer of ’63 or ’64, we took our family to

Ohio to be closer to my parents, to have them experience our kids for the

summer. I taught at Western Reserve University. I was teaching psych. There

was a nice chair there that liked my work and was willing to have me. I was in

the library, and I was looking at books. And I ran into a book on the upper class,

by a sociologist. Then I realized, wow, that would let me try out some of these

ideas that Mills and these Marxists are talking about. I could really use these

social clubs and prep schools and resorts and all. I could use those as what we

called social indicators, and I could do empirical research on whether they run

big companies. So I began to think that way. How many of these people that

Mills and the Marxists are talking about are part of this upper class, which you

know is rich people; which you know is cohesive; which you know fits

definitions of social class that I’d taught about in social psych, and that I read on.

I’d had a couple of sociology courses at Duke.

So at any rate, that year when I came back to Cal State LA, I said to the

students, “Okay, you’re all saying you want relevant research. So how about we

turn this social psych class into a project. I want to do a project in which

everybody will take a different area of the society: foundations, corporations,

university trustees. We’re going to look at them. And you are going to study

them.”
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 105

These students that did this research are all named in Who Rules America? I

compiled all their work. Essentially it was a research class. I was curious to see—

and wow, it was more than I expected in terms of how cohesive it was. I was

fascinated. There was an in-group telephone book at the time, an upper-class

telephone book called The Social Register. I had copies of The Social Register. I

think I found them in various libraries. One of them was called The Social Register

Locator, and it had all the names from A to Z in all the twelve cities. That became

my indicator of upper-class standing. And away I went.

Coming to the University of California, Santa Cruz

We arrived in Santa Cruz in the summer of ’65. I think we first went to

Napa. Somewhere along the line I’d found a house. I forget whether my wife was

in Napa or LA. But she couldn’t come up there, financially, and lots of kids—she

was very pregnant with our third child, at the time. So at any rate, I found a

house, a big sprawling house on Alta Vista [Drive, in Santa Cruz]. ‘Sprawling’ in

the sense that the family that owned it was fortunately big on children, and

they’d added on two bedrooms and a playroom and a bath in the back. Just a

very modest-looking house, but five bedrooms, two baths, and a playroom.

When we arrived there, there was enough room so that I could have a

study. The kids were in the back rooms and Judy and I had a bedroom. And then

there was my study. So I sat down and I wrote Who Rules America? that summer.

It was called: Is the American Upper Class, the Governing Class? I talked about it all

the time. It must have driven my colleagues nuts. I made many mimeographed

copies of it.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 106

And a sociologist who was on the campus—he was not part of Cowell, but

he was part of the original contingent, as I think it was often said—he was going

to be the provost and was the provost, then, of Stevenson—a guy named Charles

Page. He had been a big-deal sociologist. He read it for me, and we sat down for

lunch. And we had a nice chat. He had a very low-key style, maybe because he

was older. But he said, “You got to rewrite it.” He said, “It’s too journalistic.”

Which would be totally true, right, with my background. (laughs) So he didn’t

think it was ready to go. So the next summer I wrote that book again. We can

pick up there the next time.

But I want to say how I came to have a job here. First of all, as great as LA

was for us in terms of family and my research and teaching and exciting and all

that, it was LA. It was smoggy as all get-out. And I was learning this pecking

order. My colleagues were obsessed with UCLA: “What’s UCLA doing?” I’d

never heard of UCLA. But it was clear that we were such second-class citizens.

They were so oppressed by that. It finally can get to you. They were comparing

the teaching loads. I can’t remember the detail.

And my wife certainly wanted to, if she could, be closer to her family in

Northern California. We had all these kids and it’s an onerous ride up there, and

then for them to come down. Freeways weren’t quite as good and all that.

So we agreed that we were going to go on the job market and then also, if

we don’t make it, then maybe we’d even consider moving outside the state. In

other words, get to a better school. And she seemed to be willing to entertain it.

Fortunately, it never came to whether she really meant it or not, because I lucked

out.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 107

Three [UC] campuses opened, as you know, in the fall of ’65: San Diego,

Irvine and Santa Cruz. Calvin Hall alerted me—this is how these networks

work[ed]. I saw him at a meeting. And he said, “Hey, they’re hiring at Santa

Cruz. Write to Bert Kaplan, he’s a friend of mine. Get in touch with him.” I really

lucked into that job. I didn’t know at the time that Calvin had done things for

Bert, like give him dreams for a project [he] was working on to collect all kinds of

primary records.

I met Bert Kaplan in the airport at LA. He was on his way back to Rice

University in Houston, where he taught at the time. He had a big book under his

arm. He’s an awkward kind of guy to talk to. He said to me, “What kind of

psychologist are you?” I said, “I’m a people psychologist.” And he said, “As

opposed to persons?” Because he was a phenomenologist, it turned out. I didn’t

know what the hell he was talking about, and I was so flustered. I said, “No, no,

no,” I said, “as opposed to animals. I study all about humans, not rats and cats

and pigeons.”

He said that was satisfactory to him. And then he mentioned Hegel and

had I read—it was Phenomenology—he had [Hegel’s] The Phenomenology [of Spirit]

under his arm. Had I read this? And “No, no, I sure haven’t.” So I think, this is

not going well at all. But the thing was, what I realize now is—my assumption is

that they hired me because they wanted “atypical people,” in a word. And

because he was a phenomenologist, and had really even given up on the

personality, let alone behaviorism, the fact that I studied dreams, the fact that I

studied power, and the fact that I was Calvin Hall’s student was probably

enough. And then I guess he figured I was outgoing enough. And, of course, I

had three years experience. I had taught a hell of lot of courses. I could teach
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 108

introductory, child, personality, and social for him and then he could teach

whatever he wanted. And then a guy named Bhuwan Joshi, a Nepalese guy who

had to leave Nepal because he’d been involved in revolutionary stuff and the

king would get him—he had gone to Berkeley. He was the experimental stats

guy. So that was the three of us.

Well, I didn’t hear anything more. And then I think Page Smith must have

gotten in touch with me. He was the provost [of Cowell College]. And I went up

there to be interviewed by Page and to meet people. And I was sitting there. I’m

thinking I’m being interviewed. I’m still nervous as all get out—not sure I have

this job nailed down, that’s for sure. But I see on the blackboard he’s got all these

names. And it says, “Psychology: Joshi, Kaplan, Domhoff.” I went, “Huh. Jesus,

maybe I’m really close here.”

Page and I, of course, hit if off really well. And he also was really out for

people that weren’t mainstream. I’m sure that he liked the fact that I studied

dreams and power. It turns out he’s really from a first family in Virginia. He’s a

very upper-class guy. Fits the definition of the word “insouciant” like nothing

you’ve ever seen. He was just unflappable, and far more radical on campus

things than any of his faculty, by far. He once said to me a wonderful thing—he

was a great mentor to me—he said, “They’re all radical about the chamber of

commerce and what’s going on elsewhere, but they’re very conventional about

the university.” I wasn’t so sure I totally agreed with that, but boy, I watched it

unfold. He was totally right.

Rabkin: Who was he referring to? The faculty?

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 109

Domhoff: Yeah. Totally conventional. The legislature was making noises about,

“We got to up teaching loads.” It’s a perennial thing: teaching loads always

going down, but they’re always wanting to up the teaching requirements. I’ve

seen that for fifty years. But in any case, Page said, “This is a wonderful

opportunity. Because what we just have to do is redefine a course.” And he said,

“I think sometimes you’ll teach eight, and sometimes you’ll teach two. It

depends. Some courses might only meet once a month. Some of them might meet

once every two months, and be spread over a year.”

That drove many faculty wild. I can remember my colleague—at that

point my chair was a guy named David Marlowe, who in many ways was very

straight, mainstream, upwardly mobile, totally into social psych. He was from

Brooklyn or New York, and he’d gone to Brooklyn College, and then Ohio State

for a PhD. But he had taught at both Harvard for five years and Berkeley for

several years. And now he’s coming to our place. He was not polished. And he

was very blunt, and all business, but very human and very decent. He related to

you as a person. Marlowe was cynical, but he looked out for us. But he was really

annoyed by Page Smith and all the kinds of things he said. He was the epitome

of that kind of mainstream faculty. He didn’t want to radicalize the place. But he

did like the idea of Santa Cruz. He taught art for fun. Within a few years he was

teaching as much in art history as he was teaching in psychology, and certainly

far more interested in the arts.

Rabkin: So Bill, you were hired into the board of study in psychology?

Domhoff: Oh yeah. Nothing to do with sociology.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 110

Well, I know we’re going to wrap up here, so let me just say that—I also

later put it together that one of the reasons they also hired me, I’m pretty sure—

because I learned this from Bhuwan Joshi, the guy from Berkeley—that Dean

McHenry was checking informally with Brewster Smith about psychology and

psychologists to hire. Brewster had a big national, international image. He’d

taught at Berkeley and Chicago and everywhere else. He’d been part of big-deal

things at Harvard in the forties, big-deal professors and so on. So he was really

one of the most connected guys in psychology. But it turns out that Brewster had

been a student once of Calvin Hall’s. Calvin had taught in Oregon for a year or

so. Brewster was the straightest-looking guy in the world. He had a butch

haircut. Turns out he was a leftist. He later confessed he was communist for a

short time in college. I do mean, ‘confessed’—he put it in journal articles he

wrote toward the end of his life. He wrote about testimony before the House

[Committee] on Un-American Activities. So Brewster, I’d look at him and I’d

think, “He’s being awfully friendly, but he’s a pretty straight guy.” But he had a

lot more sympathy for young leftists like me than I realized. He was a very

young guy at the time. So between Calvin and Bert and Brewster, that’s how I

got my job.

I arrived here, then, as I’ve said, on that July 1st, in that context of having

Bert and Page as my supporters, and this very new faculty that I had not met.

Most of them weren’t around yet, or we weren’t doing things. So I did spend that

summer, then, writing Who Rules America? and had that first draft.

And I’ll pick up [next time] and say more about what happens at Santa

Cruz.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 111

Rabkin: This is Sarah Rabkin. It’s April 17th, 2013, and I am in my kitchen again

with Bill Domhoff for our third interview. So Bill, we were going to pick up from

last time and talk some more about UC Santa Cruz.

Domhoff: Right And before I say anything more about Who Rules America? and

how it was reacted to and my subsequent research and writing, and my attempts

at activism and supporting social change, what I want to do today is talk about

my involvement in the campus, in the colleges, in the senate, and then as acting

dean in 1993-1994. And maybe in some other ways, too. But those were the

primary activities that I had. I think I can give some insight on the saga of the

colleges, from someone who was sort of a semi-outsider but tried to help. I can

talk a little about the failures of the administration, from my perspective.

Where I think it might be useful is, on the one hand, telling it like I think it

was, it might be a little more unvarnished than some other accounts. It might

have some ‘tell some tales out school’ kind of thing.

And the other thing—there’s a certain ridiculousness to it, or hilarity.

Some of it’s kind of fun and funny. So I think it can be useful to somebody who

wants to know, “the truth” about Santa Cruz, but also somebody that might

want to write something about the frolic, the fun side, or looking at it with a

sardonic eye, or whatever it may be. (laughs)

So to get into that, of course arriving here to this campus, brand new,

being in UC, being in a place that had virtually no buildings. Six hundred very

fine students that were really selected—had selected themselves for liberal arts

and adventure. It was tremendously exciting. It was all new. You could do
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 112

anything you wanted. Just say, “Well, it’s part of the Santa Cruz experiment. We

got to try it. And we’re trying everything.”

So that was the spirit that really, especially, Page Smith conveyed. But

really Dean McHenry was up for that. He was just a little bit stiffer. And at that

time, when we arrived, we only had this Cook House at the base of the campus

that we used, where we had some meetings. We had the Field House, which also

served as a dining hall. And then a lot of trailers out in that field where the

students lived. And we had what’s now Hahn Services, which was the library.

And then you could walk up the hill to the one building we had, which was

called Nat Sci I. I think it became Thimann Lecture Hall [later]. And maybe we

had the Thimann Labs the first year. Maybe they were the second—the big

lecture hall. So it was really very small. We didn’t have the Cowell College

buildings. It was only the second year that we had the Cowell and the Stevenson

buildings.

I was into it. I was supportive of all the things that the innovators wanted

to do. In the back of my mind was that, of course that I would last here, or stay

here, or get tenure. This was the perfect spot for me, as I said last time, because of

the location. It was close enough to the relatives on my wife’s side. It was all

idyllic. No freeways. I picked a house five minutes from the campus, so that my

life as a commuter—which had been true in a lot of cities, in Cleveland, where I’d

lived, and certainly in LA—was over. It was, in that sense, very idyllic and fun.

And the Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote stories about the different faculty and their

families, and the campus and the town was greeting us, and so on. All of that

was in the background.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 113

I want to say that, even though I had three years of experience, I arrived

here as an assistant professor, step one, which was the lowest classification. That

was because there was a restraint of trade agreement that was very formal at that

time between the state colleges and the universities. It turned out that the head of

this campus had to ask the head of Cal State LA if I could leave—could they, in

effect, raid me?

Now, a few of us did get out of the state college system at that time,

maybe in the next year or two. Some people I knew. I’d see on their vitae they’d

been from a state college. But it’s an example of what I mean by the academic

caste system, because the state college system is entirely different. It’s

definitely—you’re not allowed to say it, but it’s the second-class citizen of the

state. They teach more. They can’t have grad programs. If they want PhD

programs in certain things, they have to do it in conjunction with the University

[of California], or have the permission of the UC system, or have a program in

conjunction with the nearest UC campus. So definitely it was a kind of a pecking

order. It was better for a professor to be in the UC system.

I don’t remember much about our early meetings. I was not a heavy

contributor. There were people that were senior, obviously. There were people

that had been here, been planning about this for a year or so. As an assistant

professor, step one, I was just along for the ride. It was all very fun for me.

I recall—and we’ll weave this a little bit through the story—at the early

meetings one of the people who was very charming and seemed like he would be

great fun, a man named Jasper Rose, who was a British guy who had been

brought here, I think, from maybe even Rice University. He was very British, and

he was an artist, and fit the image of what they were looking for—to be Oxford
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 114

and Cambridge. Being from Oxford or Cambridge gave a real edge to anybody

that had gone there from the USA, or was British and would come here, because

they wanted to imbue UCSC with that kind of spirit. This Jasper Rose guy was

impressive at first. But he really was an impossible person. And it was not very

long before he would cause all kinds of troubles in all kinds of ways. We made

him a provost at one point. I was actually on the committee when that transition

was made. And I’ll never forget saying, “Well, he’ll either go crazy or drive us

crazy. Either one or the other,” I should say, “Within a year or two.” And, of

course, he did and he got in a huff about everything. I think he soon resigned on

some question of what, in his mind, was principle. So I started to learn about that

kind of person, and dealing with them, and just realizing it was hopeless, and

learn to keep my distance.

And one of my first memories of this kind of thing that was typical of

what happened in all this, when Page Smith5 proposed that we abolish grades—

which was one of the real major innovations and tensions and excitement. Well,

certainly it was nothing that was a problem for me. I liked it just fine. Indeed, I

thought it worked great. Because it took all this grade-grubbing out, and “I

should have gotten a B plus, not a B,” or, “The B plus should have been an A

minus.” It changed the atmosphere and student-faculty relations, the fact that we

were going to write these evaluations.

Well, there were people that had genuine concerns, like for pre-med

students. They said, “There ought to be this opportunity to take a grade in some

cases,” and so on and so forth. So there were compromises that were made, so

5
See Page Smith: Founding Cowell College and UCSC, 1964-1973 (Regional History Project, UCSC,
1996). Available at http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/smith
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 115

that there were some exceptions where there could be grades. I think it was

mostly around pre-med, although I’m not sure. But the important point of the

story is when we came down to a vote—there were thirty, thirty-five, forty of us,

I would guess at that time—there was a man who absolutely opposed it because

he was absolutely for grades. He was one of these people who thought this

would be the end of Western civilization and standards and so on. He was a

biologist, and probably a pretty rigid guy, at least on those kinds of things.

Within a year he was gone.

But the other person that voted against it was from the other extreme, and

it was Jasper Rose. He voted against it, “On principle, dear boy,” because there

were some grades being given and this would undermine the whole system.

And, you know, pretty quickly you see both these guys are impossible and

they’re wrong and they’re fanatics and so on.

[But not all the faculty that said they were big supporters of narrative

evaluations turned out to be willing to write them in a timely fashion:] students

would come and say, “I haven’t gotten an evaluation for three or four of my

courses. A couple of them I need because I’m going to apply to grad school in

this or that.” We were advisors to the students at that time. I was an advisor to

twenty, thirty students. I don’t know what it was. But I would see them once a

month, or when they needed to see me. And they were from a variety of

disciplines, although usually in the social sciences. And so you’d know what was

going on in the campus, [that some faculty were not writing evaluations].

Professors [who said they were for evaluations] didn’t want to do them. And

then they’d act dumb and wouldn’t learn the rules.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 116

It was really very useful to have some sense of the students by being an

advisor. You’d also really have a sense of the faculty. So I don’t remember much

more about those particular early meetings, except that I was always with them,

in terms of all of the innovations.

Reflections on the College Core Courses

They handed me a huge stack of books. It was two feet high at least,

maybe three feet high. These were the books that were going to be used in the

[Cowell] core course over the course of the year. And we all were expected to

participate in this core course. Well, that was a shocker to me. I probably hadn’t

read most of those books ever. They were the great books of the Western world.

And the others I didn’t remember much about. So this was going to be an

enormous amount of time, in order to be involved in this course. I thought, oh

my goodness, this is trouble. What am I going to do? This is bad news. I really

didn’t want to do it.

And then, for me, a lucky thing happened. And that is because of the

openness of the campus, some of the students said, “Why isn’t there an

introductory psych course?” And since there were only three of us [teaching

psychology], a couple of them came to me and said, “We want to be taught some

psych.” And I said, “Well, you find the twenty, thirty people that want to take it,

and you go tell the provost. And then I’ll teach it.” Which, of course, I’d rather

teach, and which would get me out of this [core] course. And so, sure enough,

these students campaigned a little bit for such a course. Page Smith came to me

and said, “Well, we’ve got to have an intro to psych course. We’ll get somebody

else [to teach the core course], no problem.”

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 117

So that’s what happened. Various things would pull people out of this

course, usually to their great joy. And they were replaced, then, with grad

students, with secretaries on the campus that knew their stuff, Page Smith’s

assistant: all those people became involved in the core courses.

And my experience would be—and I think I had evidence for this, looking

at numbers within five, ten years—and that is, within a year or two or three,

most of these core courses were not staffed by the faculty at all, which had been

the original idea, that the faculty would be working closely with these lower-

division students on big ideas and a variety of books and liberal arts generally.

We would be undergraduate, lower-division, liberal arts kind of teachers. In fact,

the numbers of non-faculty in core courses were over 85 to 90 percent, I’m sure,

within a very few years. And the only people that remained in the course were

really those that were in the humanities, where a lot of these basic books were

centered. They were historical. They were classics and so on. Or if their core

course was more about social sciences, or maybe some of the sciences, then some

of the scientists would stay with it.

But this leads me into, then, wanting to say why these college courses

failed. It’s something that I think I can speak of because of how I personally was

so overjoyed to get out of the course, and can then generalize from that. But also

because I sat through a lot of meetings where these guys fought and fought and

fought in Cowell College about this core course, which, of course, didn’t involve

me, thankfully. I thought— (relieved sigh)

Rabkin: (laughs)
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 118

Domhoff: I didn’t have to do it. So there were a couple of things that made it

absolutely so these courses had to fail structurally. One was that the faculty, of

course, was not trained for, or wanted to do, these kinds of courses. Everybody

was more like me. They’d been out in the field in anthropology. They’d done this

sociology dissertation. They were doing psych studies. They were doing natural

science studies. Whatever it may be, they weren’t trained for it. And they weren’t

going to be rewarded for anything but their expertise in their discipline. We were

going to be judged for tenure by our colleagues in our discipline, although the

college would have a say-so. But they’d also have an outside review committee,

because we didn’t have enough senior psychologists on the campus for review

committees. So the ad hoc review committee, as it’s called, was going be made

up of people from other UC campuses. We were going to be judged by UC

standards, which Dean McHenry made clear. But they were also going to put us

to work on a course that wasn’t going to really count towards that except, “Oh,

you’re a fine teacher.”

Now, in fact, there were some faculty that probably did get tenure because

they contributed to what was called institution-building. By being drawn into it,

it pulled them off their track. Some of these people were, I would comment,

brand-new, fresh out of grad school. Some of them hadn’t finished their

dissertation. In a way, they didn’t have a prayer. Because once you get drawn

into the life of being a faculty member—you’re interacting with students, you

love the role, you have to do the role, whichever it is—or both—it’s hard to then

go home and suddenly work on your dissertation and get your mindset back that

you’re going to get ready for this: you’ve got to please these three people on your

committee. That’s your mindset even though they’re probably just saying, “Do
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 119

anything and I’ll give you your degree. Get out of here.” But that’s not how they

saw it.

There were people that didn’t finish. In a couple of places there people I

knew that for five, six years, they were going to both kick them out of grad

school and kick them out of here. Their friends helped them; helped them by

taking their course, by doing the bibliography, by pulling them through.

Now, there’s another aspect to that, and that is that most of these courses

were developed by a senior faculty member who brought them here. In the case

of Cowell College, we had a wonderful guy named Bill Hitchcock who was a

historian from UCLA. He hadn’t been a big publisher. But he taught this world

history kind of course, which Page Smith loved, and brought him here. And it

was a great course. He was a great instructor. He did know enough, certainly, to

teach any college-level student, if not grad students, about Nietzsche or Freud or

Marx or whatever. He had it down pat.

The faculty were originally eager to be part of the course but they wanted

to have more say-so in the action. And, of course, the course was already formed.

Basically, they were being asked to be TAs to Hitchcock. That’s what created a lot

of their tensions. So these big wheels did fight. And at a certain point, all of a

sudden Hitchcock got quieter and quieter, and then he negotiated himself a

withdrawal to Crown. One day he was gone. I had an office kitty corner to him,

got along with him well. Liked him. We certainly had no clash. I wasn’t in the

course. And he knew I didn’t know anything about history and was doing psych.

So I had a sense of him, and liked him and admired him. But after he left and

went to Crown and did their core course—they essentially thought, wow, this
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 120

would be great—he was even distant from me. So it created those kinds of

enormous tensions among these faculty members.

College Courses

Now, colleges also failed for another kind of a reason, and that is we were

asked to teach specific courses for the colleges. And so, say I’d give a course on

dreams, or a course on the upper class. Maybe there were only three or four or

five students in the college that wanted to take it. But by the second year, there

were people in Stevenson that wanted to take it, or the third year from Crown. So

pretty quickly, college courses were essentially specialty courses that would be

focused on some interesting topic. But students from all over the campus wanted

to take them. So in what way were they college courses? The college would offer

this course, but it wasn’t knitting together the college. It wasn’t leading to a

conversation among the students in the college. It was just like a course on any

other big campus: a really interesting course to a number of students. So the

colleges didn’t work at the student level, and they didn’t work at the faculty

level. So in that sense, the colleges had to become something else. And I’m going

to tell you about my quixotic attempts to help on those things from a distance.

But before I say that, I want to say that these college courses were a

personal godsend. And more generally I want to say—because I want to make

these critical remarks about the colleges and the senate and this and that—but all

of them were just great for me, because there was just enough distance that they

gave me an opening, because the campus was so fresh and new that I could do

whatever I wanted to try.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 121

And here I go back to a fact I want to stress, that I meant to say just a

second ago, and that was, I was an assistant professor, step one. But I had three

years of teaching at a university. I’d taught a lot of courses. I had my courses

down pat. And, of course, I had taught for year before that in grad school. And I

had this manuscript for Who Rules America? and I had several publications. So I

landed with both feet running, in effect, even though I was the most junior. And

I liked that, because it gave me more time to get tenure if I needed it. Now, in the

end I didn’t. I asked to be put up for tenure during, I guess, my fourth year here,

which was then seven years an assistant professor. But I had enough published,

and it was easy and it flew through.

But more specifically then, as to why the college system was a godsend for

me. It allowed me really to make a transition. It was the opening for a transition

to sociology. Because I could teach a course on power, on the upper class. And at

one point Page Smith, who as I already said was from the upper class, did

history of some of this—and had written a wonderful book called Daughters of the

Promised Land about the tensions between the fathers and daughters from these

high levels of society, a wonderful book, and so psychological on some levels,

but so historical on class. These upper-class men would have these daughters

they were proud of and they wanted them to be independent like other

Americans and go to college and all. So the daughters would take them at their

word—and I’m making up the examples in a way—but they’d write home, “Oh

father, I’ve found out I believe in free love.” Or, “I believe in contraception.” Or,

“I think I’m going to be a physician.” And then their father would say, “Hey, you

can’t do that!” Their letters would be full of all this tension. And they’re battling.

But Page looked at their upbringing, and they’re encouraged to be independent.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 122

And, of course, when you encourage independence you get it, and then you

don’t like seeing it.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: So he and I taught a course together. It was a great, wonderful

experience for me. But basically then, with the strategic withdrawal from the core

course, and with the fact that we owed the college two courses, I was all set. I

think our teaching load was five. It later went down to four. I think we taught

three for the board and two for the college. But however it was, it gave me

openings and it was fun to do.

Culture Break

But I did do a couple of things for the campus and the college. One of

them was kind of fun and noteworthy and gives you a sense of the campus. Page

Smith had decided that during the slog of a quarter—it was the first year—he

thought we should have a Culture Break. We would take a space of two or three

days right in the middle of the quarter and do whatever. It was kind of thematic.

But it was just stop and enjoy the arts or whatever.

Well, this drove half the faculty just right out of their minds. The more

scientific and organized their course, of course, the more it was upsetting to

them. And so I thought, well—this is the story of my life on this campus. I think I

can do something that Page Smith and his buddies will like, but the other people

will find really acceptable. Because it was will have a very substantive aspect. So

I proposed that I do a Culture Break for the spring that I called the Fantasy

Festival. Now, of course we know I was in dreams, so it would fit. At first I think
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 123

they were a little wary, and especially maybe Jasper—this uncultured soul (me)

interloping on this.

But I put together a plan, and they went for it. It was a great event,

(laughs) to put it modestly, but it was other people who made it great. I got a

folklorist from Berkeley named Alan Dundes, who was a Freudian folklorist. He

came down and he gave a talk on elephant jokes. He had us in stitches. Every

time you’d just about recovered, he’d tell you an elephant joke. But then he’d slip

in this Freudian explanation—in terms of the elephant’s trunk, they’re phallic

symbols or this and that. So in a way that was almost—from the point of view of

most the people there, it was a spoof of Freud. Except he was serious. And he

was, as I say, a wonderful, wonderful person. They made him president of the

American Folklore Association, even though he was a Freudian. And few other

of the folklorists believed Freud. But they thought Dundes was wonderful.

I had experts on drugs, other experts on fantasy. Oh, I think I had a dream

research guy from Stanford come over. And we had films, Bergman films. The

students got into picking them. It was just generally really—it really went well.

But that didn’t really convert the antis to a regular Cultural Break. And I don’t

know how long that lasted. But it didn’t, I don’t think, last long, and didn’t

spread to the other colleges.

A UCSC Baseball Team

The other thing I did in those early years during the second year, 1966-1967—a

few of the students wanted to have a baseball team. They went to McHenry—

because it was, again, such a small place. They could say, “We want a baseball

team. Why can’t we have that?” We had little sports clubs for other sports. So
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 124

McHenry said, “Go see Bill.” I thought, “Well, yeah—” One of reasons that I

think he was willing to hire me was, he thought, “Well, he must be sort of

normal. He played baseball in college. And he’s an athlete and so on.” So I said,

“Okay, okay, I’ll coach this team.” And I don’t want to spend much time on it—

just to say it was hilarious.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: Because we were horrible. Most of these people had not played any

high school baseball. But I got to know some students that were wonderful. And

I told them, I said, “I’m not even going to talk about it until you show me a

catcher. Because otherwise your team looks foolish. Anyway, they bring a guy.

And the guy shows up in his Santa Cruz High letterman jacket. He’s a fairly

small guy. Just the nicest guy in the whole world. He had caught for Santa Cruz

High. I talked to him about it. I knew who the coach was at Santa Cruz High.

And he was one hell of a great catcher. He was just polished and calm, and he

kept that team calm. And then from there it was all characters who had never

played much, except for one or two pitchers.

And we played high schools. We played Soquel High a couple, three

times. Maybe one other. We never got close to beating them. Cabrillo agreed to

play a game with us. The other coach and I decided we’d quit after maybe two

innings, maybe three, because somebody on our team might get hurt. And they

were ahead ten to nothing. They hit the ball so hard that I think they might have

hit the ball back through the box and killed one of our pitchers. (laughter) We

played one fairly decent game against one other community college. But we lost.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 125

But in any case, the point is we did do that. We had no infield to practice

on. We had to practice down at Harvey West [Park], and maybe one high school

let us practice. I forget. But anyway, we’d stand out there on the greens by the

East Field House and try to play baseball with no baseball diamond and no

backstop. So it was all ridiculous on that score. It rained most of the spring. And

we didn’t do it again. I could have continued, but I’d have to ask for a baseball

field. And it was antiwar times and there was tension, tensions with the

chancellor. So it was just one of those things that went by the by.

More on the UCSC College System

Now, I want to continue with colleges by saying that I didn’t do much that

I can remember of any significance within Cowell College after that. In the mid-

seventies I was kind of transferred—but was glad to go over—to College Eight,

where the sociologists were kind of agglomerating, and going to get together to

have a grad program. And that will relate to when I talk about my work. By then

I pretty much transitioned into sociology in terms of my own research, so I was

glad to move over to College Eight with these sociologists and maybe a few

political scientists. But I didn’t do much in that college.

I was only there three or four years, and then there was a reorganization

that was more general on the campus to bring the disciplines into somewhat

more coherence, supposedly. And I took Stevenson College. I had a choice

between Stevenson and Merrill, because that’s where the sociologists were going

to be located. Stevenson not only had some sociologists, but it also was going to

have the social psychologists, to whom I was more connected historically, and in

terms of my training. And they were good folks. So were the people that were
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 126

going to be in Stevenson from sociology. And as of my one political science

buddies said at the time—it was a wonderful phrase—he said, “Stevenson’s the

best piece of real estate on the campus.” I think that was true in terms of A,

parking; but B, the wonderful plaza, the way the buildings are located. There’s a

great lecture hall there that I used for years, Stevenson 150. You could walk right

down the hill to the playing fields. There was just no better spot. And they had a

good coffee shop and so on. So I went to Stevenson. My choice to avoid Merrill

was no choice, because that was where all of the more difficult to deal with social

scientists were located. I didn’t want to be with them. I knew that by then,

because I had partly transitioned into sociology before the big reorganization of

the faculty occurred.

So I was in Stevenson. That’s the point of the story. And I was also grad

director in sociology at the time. And when I wasn’t grad director in sociology, I

was the person that headed the committee on admissions and money. And I

understood that the program was chaotic, and I wasn’t really teaching in it. And

I didn’t have much belief in it or interest in it. And furthermore, it was all

Marxism. The students they brought in were not interested in doing humble

empirical research of the kind that I did. So I did my service for sociology by

being in this position that could give out money, could bring in students. And

that was a service I could do.

But part of that was I quickly saw how I could maybe help the colleges

and help grad programs, too. And what I did was I went to the provost, a person

who I obviously knew at that time, and I said, “Look, I’ll make you a deal. I will

put a TA slot into your core course, if in turn you will hire one of our grad

students into that slot and also one of our grad students into one of your slots.”
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 127

Because by then, of course, nobody was really teaching in the core course, as I’ve

already said.

So it was a plus-plus situation. The college got a couple or three of my TA

slots, but I got placements for maybe four or five of our students. And that went

on for several years. It was really a boon for those students, because now they

were teaching a section; they were kind of a little more than just a TA. And

furthermore, it gave them experience that they could use, in saying they taught

in a liberal arts program. I know that it helped one of my own grad students get

a job at University of San Francisco, where he’s now the right-hand person to the

woman who runs University of San Francisco. Which is kind of ironic because

he’s from Wales and not Catholic, and the right-hand person is a woman at this

University of San Francisco. But they definitely partly hired him because he had

this wide range of Stevenson College teaching, as well as being a very fine

sociologist.

But I did something else: I also joined the core course. I think it was partly

penance for having ditched out on Cowell. I wanted to do my time. I also

probably needed it as a fifth course. It was also an interesting and easy—I don’t

want to ever pretend otherwise—gig in a way, because you’re running a section.

You’re mostly having these students react to these books and you’re reading

their essays. It was satisfying to try to help them with their writing and so on.

And it put me kind of in touch with first-year students, which I hadn’t been

teaching that much of in the previous, probably five, six, or so years.

So I taught in the course, and I was the spring quarter of the course. It was

a three-quarter course. And it was probably the only three-quarter core course

left on the campus at the time. I think Cowell was down to two quarters. I’m not
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 128

sure. And it was more social science-oriented in the spring. It would be Marx and

Freud and Nietzsche, which I was more attuned to, and could relate to and learn

from.

So I taught in this particular course, and I gave the Freud lecture. I want to

say that teaching the course confirmed all my worst suspicions. It was basically,

according to my lights and seeing it—and also according to the student

evaluations—it was a terrible, terrible course, deadly— We bring these students

here, they’re going to have this great liberal arts experience.

To my knowledge, most of these courses were pretty, pretty bad, with a

couple of exceptions, such as Merrill, where John Isbister worked heroically to

try to make the colleges work. And I mention that because he will weave into my

story later today, in my quixotic quests on the colleges. Some of the lectures—

we’d have these guest lectures for each one, that didn’t always connect. One guy

started his lecture on Nietzsche—and he was a faculty member here—and he

started out, he’d just say, “Well, Nietzsche was this young, brilliant guy, and he

died crazy.” You know, basically that was the start of the lecture. Great, well

how are these students ever going to take Nietzsche seriously? He doesn’t talk

about the fact he probably got syphilis and general paresis that blossomed into

psychosis later on, that those were the most likely symptoms, that his brilliant

ideas and scintillating writings had come much earlier. And some of the guest

lecturers they had dragooned into doing it, and some of them were not very

good.

So it was just generally bad news. And I know this not only from talking

to students, but also from the evaluation forms—on one side they evaluated the

course. On the other side they evaluated their section and their section leader. So
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 129

I could just read through my own evaluations, but I read through others. They’d

say, “The course is terrible; my section leader was great. He was wonderful. He

helped me.” So I’d get very positive evaluations, which still mattered, I think.

But at the same time, of course, it was terrible. I knew it and I saw it firsthand. So

in that sense, again, you see this as such a failed experience.

Now, there were a couple of other faculty that came into the course with

the reorganization. And with a couple of new hires we had two or three other

faculty that were working in the core course. But we weren’t allowed to shape it.

We had some ideas: “Okay, here we could do this.” And one new person who

was a person of color, a diversity person, she had some ideas of what they could

do. “Oh, no, no, no.” But finally she got one book into the curriculum.

But the argument the old-guard would make was, “Look, we want this

continuity with the past.” It was “sacred past” kind of stuff. And they even said,

can you imagine? “Well, when the Stevenson alumni gather, they can all talk

about their Plato and Aristotle and all the rest of the gang that they’ve all studied

together in the core course.” Which struck me as kind of ludicrous and

ridiculous. It was like being stuck in the past. There was a way in which all those

core courses were stuck in the past, especially from a social science mentality,

because they’re teaching these people these great books. It can verge on holy

writ. And either the books or the instructors were not always very interesting;

they didn’t quite engage the students. So it’s been really hard to make those core

courses work—at least when I was around.

Now I understand there’re still core courses, at least in some colleges. I

was recently invited to speak in one in Cowell. And it was interesting, because

the people were in charge of it, I think, were instructors, and maybe only had
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 130

that as their job. They really tried to make it so it related to the students and I

think they succeeded. We were talking, in this case, about inequality, but relating

it to some early texts, and texts in ethics and so on, that they had read. And then

they have this sociologist, me, come in and talk about the wealth and income

distribution and power and so on. But you really have to work at it to make the

core course successful. And it was an upper day for me, incidentally, because

there were 350, 400 students out there in that big Classroom Unit I. It had been a

long time since I’d done that. So I was up for it. And when I saw how big it

was— It was just a rip-snorting good time, and good questions. And I really

came at them. But unless the course is done that way, by people who are really

specializing in it—which relates back to this Hitchcock guy—then they don’t

work.

Incidentally, with Hitchcock there’s another thing to say. And that is—

that shows you the contradiction between teaching and the personal

advancement of faculty members. It’s my understanding that he came here as an

associate professor of history. Given his age, that was a surprise, because he was

probably in his forties, at least. And he hadn’t published much. Then he got here

and he’s doing this fantastic job. When they asked students ten years later,

“What do you remember most?” “Oh, Hitchcock and his course.” I mean, he was

just by far and away the most notable thing in this one Cowell retrospective

survey. And yet they had to fight to get him to full professor. Because they said,

“Oh, what’s he published?” So they created these contradictions.

So I want to say, too, in relation to my idea of putting sociology students

into the grad course, which was useful for them and useful to the college, I tried

to spread that to other colleges. There was one person who was working partly
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 131

in administration at the time that kind of liked it. He said, “Yeah, that makes

sense. That could work.” But I tried to spread it. But I’m not sure that any other

discipline ever figured out how to take advantage of that, if they do have core

courses. I say that with laughter at myself, but also [in] frustration of trying to do

any innovation on an allegedly innovative campus that would involve any

changes in the sacred disciplines, or in any way bridging this college-board—

now department—gap were always futile. Because these people really were, in

that sense, very traditional, just like I said my wonderful mentor Page Smith

said: they’re very conventional when it comes to their own business.

Other Early UCSC Activities

Well, most of my involvement, then, was actually outside the colleges,

aside from what I have mentioned. I was on the usual senate kind of committees,

in a minor way. I served on the Committee on Research. It was wonderful fun,

because we were evaluating proposals and giving out money. It was very

positive. I’m sure I was on the Admissions Committee one year. But I really

didn’t do much in the senate until a little later. And I’m going to come to that.

But first I wanted to say that I did help out a couple times with the whole

issue of sports and intramurals on campus, the Office of Physical Education,

Recreation—OPERS, I guess it’s now called. And it was Ron Ruby in physics,

and I that were asked by the chancellor in the first year or the second year to

write some rules, some guidelines about athletics on the campus. And this

involved beyond intramural. How are we going to do that? I haven’t found these

rules, what we wrote up. And I can’t remember most of them. But I know that

the substance of them was to carry out McHenry’s wishes for the campus—
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 132

which were ones I heartily agreed with—not to have it become overwhelmed by

big-time sports. And, in particular, it was written in such a way that it was

basically impossible to have a football team. Because I certainly knew from my

experience at Duke, which didn’t ever rub any skin off my back, but I could sure

see how it dominated the campus, the fanaticism. And, of course, it’s only gotten

worse and uglier since. The athletic department dominates. The coach makes

more than the president, both of whom make way too much money. There’s all

kinds of garbage that goes on to get the athletes through. “They should be paid,”

and so on.

What’s Different About UC Santa Cruz

And I want to say what’s different about Santa Cruz to this day. I think

there are two things that survived that make a tremendous difference in

shielding us from the usual pressures. One is the lack of big-time sports: that

we’re Division Three in most things and we do not have a football team. There’re

a couple other teams. Lots of teams we don’t have, I’m sure. The basketball team

is a minor kind of story.

The other important thing was we didn’t have fraternities and sororities,

or not many. And we wouldn’t have had any, except that Rich Randolph and

others that were anthropologists said, “You know, you grow these colleges

beyond six hundred people, you’re going to get divisions, alienation. It seems

like what is natural is in that five to six hundred range.” So they blew these

colleges way bigger anyhow, and then, of course, they’re not quite the same. And

maybe there’s more tendency to join these fraternities and sororities.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 133

But incidentally, let me say, the way that sororities and fraternities first

came was—it was coterminous with the fact I think it was particularly black

students who wanted to be able to have their fraternity or sorority. And in the

attempt to increase diversity on the campus, the administration was not going to

get in an argument over frats and sororities. It was through that kind of door that

these other frats and sororities came in.

But basically, it’s a no sports and no fraternity-dominant culture that

makes a difference on the campus. In my own case, I had lived on a sports/frat

campus at Duke. At the time it seemed fine to me. I was in a fraternity in college.

It made all the difference in the world. You weren’t a GDI: a goddamn

independent. You weren’t in the dorm with the independents. You were with, in

some way, your own kind—the comfort level. Fraternities and sports, of course,

were big time at Duke University. So I had certainly seen that side, but I was also

ready to entertain something that went the opposite direction. And those two

innovations at UCSC did survive. Looking back, I prefer them to what I saw at

Duke.

The Banana Slug Mascot

The other way I helped with OPERS was that in the late seventies, the

early eighties, for a year or two—and it was when [Chancellor Robert]

Sinsheimer6 had just come here—I was on the OPERS advisory committee. We

were an advisory committee to the chancellor, but I don’t think we ever met with

6
See Randall Jarrell, Interviewer and Editor, Robert Sinsheimer: Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, 1977-
1987 (Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 1996). http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-
hist/sinsheimer
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 134

him. I cannot remember who the other people were. I doubt if we did much. But

I was involved, had a bird’s-eye view on the banana slug story.

It’s a hilarious story. And it’s also a story about administrators and the

lack of democracy, when you say you do have it. For some reason, Sinsheimer

got it in his head—I don’t know from where—maybe because he wanted to see

us have a little more organized sports, still at Division Three level, that we

needed a mascot name. Now, the students had informally often called their

teams whatever they wanted. And usually they’d use “banana slug,” as far as I

can remember. But in any case, he put out a statement to all the colleges saying,

“What should be the name of the team?”

So he got back unanimous, or at least nearly unanimous, advice to name

the teams The Banana Slugs. But he didn’t like that. He thought that that was

kind of demeaning to sports, and made our teams look laughable. And he took

what was either a distant second choice, or what people had maybe suggested to

him, given where we’re located, and he wanted to name us the sea lions. And he

so did. And therein started his trouble. He’d asked for student opinion; they’d

given this strong opinion that reflected the campus mentality; and he’d ignored

it, and he’d made them the sea lions. And he’s got himself a fight.

So I write him—and I think maybe somebody else approved it—but I

write him a very carefully worded message that was partly a fib on my part.

Because I said, “Well, I can certainly see why you think the banana slug might be

not such a good idea.” And that, in my mind, was a fib. But I was cajoling him.

And I said, “On the other hand, if you name [the team] The Sea Lions, this could

be a long conflict.”
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 135

He had no sense of the student involvement in the campus and their

willingness to rise up, so to speak. There was still that whole mentality here from

the sixties and early seventies. We had a very liberal contingent of students still

on the campus. We were still predominantly liberal and radical students at that

time, we know from freshman surveys, especially compared to any other

campus, indeed, compared to any other campus in the country. I know those

numbers from co-authoring a book on Santa Cruz that we’ll come to later. So I

gave him this advice, on which I never heard back, and which he didn’t follow. I

said, “Why don’t you just decide that you’re going to leave things the way they

are? Every team can name themselves what they want to, because that’s the

Santa Cruz way.” I don’t even know whether he received it, read it, but of course

he named them The Sea Lions. And it was hilarious: from that point forward, the

name Sea Lions never appeared in anything written by any student. There were

the sea slugs, the banana lions; there was sea kelp; there were the sea cucumbers.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: On and on and on with the mockery. And the whole fight—then a

wonderful student did a logo of “No grades, please,” with Plato on it. And I

think he had little glasses on the banana slug. He was holding Plato, this student

banana slug. And it was wonderful. It reflected the campus. Students loved it.

Sold them like crazy.

Rabkin: Do you remember the name of the student who did that logo?
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 136

Domhoff: No. He was, what was called a Berkeley redirect. He came here with

the promise he could go to Berkeley after two years. But he liked it so much that

he stayed. He was very political. He worked in the legislature for years.

Rabkin: Marc something?7

Domhoff: Not Marc, I don’t think. If you said it, it might ring a bell. But it’ll

come back, or I’ll have it in my files. He was a wonderful guy. I got to know him

well. He had tremendous political savvy on stuff on this campus. He did a lot of

other very astute things. He was truly always the left wing of the possible in his

actions. He was very low key. He was not a charismatic, push-around kind of

guy. I always liked him enormously and respected his judgment. I think I

learned a lot from him.

At any case, the chancellor stood his ground. One of his statements was,

“Well look, the basketball team would be embarrassed by this. I’m not going to

embarrass them. They’re NCAA Division III.” And then they said, “Oh, we love

it.” So he now was kind of trapped. And he capitulated. The irony is, the

students, oh, they loved him for it. “Oh, he’s so great. He’s such a good guy.”

And then Sports Illustrated picked the banana slug as the mascot of the

year, the most interesting mascot. It appeared in the newspapers, and, of course,

got us publicity. And they interviewed [Sinsheimer] and so on. So, after resisting,

he ended up a hero. Indeed, stories soon developed that he had resisted because

he wanted to really build the whole thing up; in other words, a dumb,

7
The banana slug mascot designs were a co-creation of two Cowell College alum, Marc Ratner
and Peter Blackshaw. See http://www.slugweb.com/history.html
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 137

conspiratorial kind of analysis was made of what had happened, when it was

much more mundane.

[Sinsheimer] is a nice guy, well-meaning guy. At least one of his children

had come here. They brought him in to have a science chancellor, and [there

were] just a lot of things he was not very hip to, and [he] certainly didn’t have a

good feel of the campus at first.

Chairing the Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP)

Well, in the early eighties I was asked to serve on CAP. The Committee on

Committees of the senate asked me to serve on CAP. And that’s the kind of thing

I liked to do. I really liked it when my peers wanted me to do something. I never

liked running for office. I never wanted to be an administrator. I didn’t like those

kinds of situations. I had been chair of sociology for just one year in 1977-1978. I

didn’t like it at all. The kinds of things you deal with are the following: within a

week I’m chair, and in comes this faculty member. And he’s complaining that

one of the new senior guys we brought in turns out to have two offices and he

thinks that’s wrong. So this is the kind of niggling thing you’re dealing with.

Conversely, there was going to be a lot of tension in sociology that year

over hiring someone. Not a particular person, but in what area? Would we hire

somebody more in social psych and face-to-face stuff, or would we continue to

build our strength in what’s called macrosociology, which were political

sociologists, political economists, people that looked at the world in general—

who tended to be white males.

In any case, rather than get in a meeting to discuss this—I had learned

something about power, and they all trusted me, because I had feet in all
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 138

camps—I said, “I would like each of you to write me what your thoughts are,

and that will give me a sense of how to proceed.” And everyone on both sides

wrote that they thought we should hire a micro person, a face-to-face; we needed

a social psychologist of this or that kind.

But one person wrote and said, “We need to hire another political

economist. And he should be so-and-so. He’s a genius. He’s the best. I’ve never

had a person make more astute comments on my own manuscripts.” I think I

talked to him about it. I said, “Most people feel the other way.” I was hoping

he’d go in the meeting and just acquiesce and believe me. And so I said, “I’m

happy to say we’re in more agreement than you may have thought: virtually all

of you think we should be hiring in social psychology.” So he proceeded to make

his pitch for this particular guy. Dealing with that, and having to either mollify

him or somehow cast him aside because he caused endless trouble—he was

endless grief for me. It spoiled my day and my night and my writing and

everything else—and my mood.

So at the end of the year I quit as chair. I wrote a one-page resignation, in

which I said, “I’d like to step down. I’m temperamentally unsuited for this

position.” After I sent it, I had a copy, and I showed it to Carter Wilson, who was

my counterpart, the chair in community studies. He said, “Bill, it’s a great

resignation letter, except you spelled ‘temperamentally’ wrong.”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: Which is one of those words that you learn in high school that you

have to put an ‘A’ in. And I was pretty annoyed with myself that I spelled

‘temperamentally’ wrong in my resignation letter. It still rankles me.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 139

So I say that because I just didn’t like those kinds of positions. And in that

sense, I didn’t quite like being dean when I was dean, but I’ll come to that [later]

today.

In any case, I was asked to join CAP, and I felt honored. When my peers pick

me, that’s what I like. If I’m leader of the baseball team because they say, “Hey,

you should be our leader,” then that was great. And here, on this, it was great as

well.

It went well for me on CAP and for others. The second year they made

me chair. And I was chair the third year. Then they said, “Would you stay a

fourth year?” So I was three years chair of CAP. You usually serve three, and I

served four. And again, I felt very honored that I could do this for the campus,

and felt good about it because there had been a lot of tensions in the previous

CAP over some decisions over rules, over breaking of rules, making mistakes

like putting out a second ad hoc committee, as it’s called.

And so then I became the chair. And in that context, I read all the old cases

that were mistakes, or where there were tensions, and where there were rules

broken. And I really learned my job.

Rabkin: Can you explain what you meant about the second ad hoc committee?

Domhoff: Yeah, okay. The way a personnel process works is simply this: a board

of studies is going to put somebody up for a raise or tenure, or a movement to

associate or full professor. And they have to put together a file. It consists of the

person’s CV and their writings. And also, it includes letters from experts in the

candidate’s field that have been solicited by the board. Partly, the board picks
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 140

people it thinks make sense, and partly it picks people from lists suggested by

the candidate.

The board then makes its recommendation, which goes to the dean. The

dean then adds his or her recommendation. It comes to the Committee on

Academic Personnel: CAP. We take a look at the file, and we strike what’s called

an ad hoc committee. We say, “Okay, for this case we’re going to use so-and-so

from the person’s discipline, and so-and-so from the nearby discipline. And

we’re going to try to get somebody from Berkeley that’s an expert on that, or

UCLA that’s an expert on that.” Today, they no longer use these outsiders, but

then we were still using them, although we were in transition out of that. So you

put together a three-person ad hoc committee, which then looks at this whole

file, which means the board and dean’s letters, and the outside letters. And it

makes a recommendation to CAP as well. Then CAP has all that information

before it, as well as all the teaching evaluations, and then makes a decision on

what it’s going to do.

There had been a case or two where the CAP was unsure after it received

its ad hoc report, and it decided it wasn’t maybe as strong an ad hoc as they

wanted. Because you can look at the people and say, “Oh, these are people that

would never make a tough decision in the world.” So they put out another ad

hoc. That turned out to be illegal and got them in real trouble, in lawsuits, and so

on.

So, clearly you put out the strongest ad hoc you can put out, in terms of

what you know about the individuals. And you know your colleagues by then.

CAP consisted, at the time, of two from science, two from social science, two

from the arts, I think it was. Maybe we had six people. In any case, you know
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 141

enough about the people and who’s fair, who’s not fair, who’s wishy-washy. You

know that kind of stuff.

And by ‘unfair,’ there are people on the campus that are so ideological for

their theory—that doesn’t just mean political—or else they don’t like to be in

conflict. There are other people that say—one person on the CAP when I was on

there that wasn’t from the sciences, I’ll put it that way—he would always

complain, “What do they make more money? These economists, they’re paying

them more money. Why, we only make X. They’re making a lot more.” And I’d

say to him, “X? Our job is to assess the quality of this file, and to recommend

what position—should they be professor, step one, or professor, step two? That’s

all that’s our job. It’s not our job to make suggestions about salaries. They’re

partly determined by the outside world: namely, economists, and a lot of

scientists can leave and go into industry, or work for a corporation, or whatever.

It’s a separate issue.” I even explained it to him in terms of Weber, with class—

you know, economics is one thing. Status”— I was simplifying a little, “is

another.” And we were really making status decisions: “What do they deserve in

terms of the faculty ranking?” Not what they’re worth money-wise. So you have

all these kinds of different people, and you know these things about them.

So at any rate, I made sure that there would be no tensions, no mistakes,

no lawsuits. And that was my prideful thing to say—although I’ll say some

unprideful things in a minute—of the fact that we didn’t have any of those kinds

of things happen to us. If I had the slightest doubt when I read a file, I went to

the head of Privilege and Tenure, which is the committee that’s sort of the court

of justice for faculty, their place of resort. I’d say, “I have the following general

situation, what do I need to do—“ And they’d say, “You’ve got to go get better
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 142

letters.” Or, “You’ve got to go tell that board to do X.” Or, “That kind of a letter

will never make it. That will be contested by the faculty member, for sure.” We’d

then send the file back to the board. So I was on the ball on that. And I took it

dead serious.

But it was a great job, because people aren’t calling you and lobbying you

and hassling you. Most people respected the roles. And the amazing thing for me

was one of the few people to not respect the role was somebody I knew in a

discipline I’d been in. And he had the nerve to call me and lobby me. There were

these kinds of people on the campus. And it’s distasteful.

So we had a really successful time as CAP those four years. A good crew.

And they’d ask me at the end of the year, “How’d it go?” I’d say, “Pretty good.

But you know, so-and-so can be awfully discipline-centered.” Or “So-and-so is

not always up to date, and most of us don’t think he’s read the files.” So I was

able to reshape the committee a couple times. A new person came on at the end

of my first year as chair, then another new person at the end of my second year.

They weren’t awful, because things went super well. But by the last year we had

a great committee.

Rabkin: So would the Committee on Committees make a new set of selections

each year for the CAP?

Domhoff: Yeah, you could change the committee around, and add new people

and so on. So yeah, there were changes. Just a couple—but just enough. Now,

Sinsheimer was chancellor. I’ve already told you my dealings with him on the

banana slug from a distance. He was just as opaque when it came to personnel

matters. And lo and behold, he came to us once and he wanted to talk about a
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 143

file. And he said, “Would it be possible to have another ad hoc committee?”

Well, that was precisely what had got him in trouble before. And here it’s maybe

two years later, and he’s saying, “Maybe we could have another ad hoc

committee.” So we’re all kind of looking at each other in disbelief. I say

something very politic to him about it. Somehow we just finessed it, and didn’t,

of course, do it—and wouldn’t have done it. But I wasn’t about to say, “Hey,

what are you talking about?” Didn’t do it that way at all.

Because with each case, we had to send a letter to the academic vice

chancellor and the chancellor for their final decision. Then the administration

sends a letter to the candidate telling him or her the decision, and why. But the

academic vice chancellor was not satisfied with some of the letters the chancellor

sent out, so he in effect asked CAP to write the letter as if it were go to go the

candidate, and he was going to try to convince the chancellor to use our version

of the letter. I don’t know if the chancellor ever went for it or not, but from then

on I drafted the letters in a somewhat different way.

Now, turning back to the relationship between CAP and the

administration more generally, most of the time they’re routinely going to do

what we suggest. But on tenure decisions, or more conflicted decisions, if there’s

division—half the board says this, half the board says that, the dean’s not sure,

the ad hoc committee says, “Yes,”—CAP’s a little divided—it’s their decision,

because there’s division. If it’s unanimity up and down the ladder when it gets to

them, it’s very unlikely they’re going to mess with it. So in that sense, faculty do

control personnel decisions, or did when I was on the faculty.

And I can tell you had I had this friend—who never hassled me—but he

was a tough-talking radical. He just said, “Yeah, yeah, you guys—you’re just
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 144

toadies to the administration.” I said, “Look buddy, “ I said, “We run that

committee. Do you hear me? And they mostly follow our decisions if we do a

good job and it’s not a divided committee.” “Yeah, sure, you’ve sold out,” and

stuff. Years later he was on CAP. I saw him one day. I happened to be up in

Berkeley and he’d go to Berkeley often—he said, “Hey Domhoff—hey, you were

right. We really have an impact.” And we did have an impact.

We did it really right, and I was really pleased. But, in retrospect, even

though we did right, we made an enormous number of mistakes in terms of the

quality of the faculty. Just going from a file isn’t enough. You can’t tell from

letters what’s going on. And in that sense you understand about why there was

an old boy—what’s now an old boy/old girl network, hopefully—because we

had some people, I’m sure, dumped on us from big-deal schools, where in effect,

they could say, “We’ve got to get rid of this person.” Or they would think, “Oh,

they got a PhD but they’re not good enough for the big leagues. Santa Cruz is

about right for them.” Because they’d get here, you’d meet them, or you’d

interact with them, or you’d read their file two years after they got here, and it’s

just like night and day. The file has no connection to them.

Rabkin: Could I ask you a question about the process, Bill?

Domhoff: Yeah.

Rabkin: I’m curious to what extent, if any, students’ teaching evaluations played

into the analysis of the faculty members’ tenure?

Domhoff: It certainly played into it at that time. If a person did poorly in

teaching it was definitely noted. We had one particular situation where pretty
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 145

noted people in one of the larger science departments, as they’d call them today,

were put up for accelerations by their board, where they’d get an extra jump.

They would go from step one to step three, or they’d make extra money. They

were all big publishers. But their teaching evaluations were extraordinarily bad.

We were really incensed, as a committee, at how cavalier they were, and

how bad it was. We wrote a letter saying, “We don’t think they should get this

advance. And they should be told about their teaching.” Well, the then-executive

vice chancellor [and I]—we took a little walk in the woods. We were walking

along these paths, and he said, “We could lose these guys. And the board will go

crazy. It’s going to be tense. And these guys’ll be mad,” and so on. And I said,

“Look, we’re really not prepared—” So he wanted to cut a deal. I then said,

“Okay, I’ll take that back to CAP and we’ll see.” He wanted to give them just this

half a step acceleration, and I could write a paragraph or two with considerable

chastisement about their teaching and its shortcoming. So we did that.

In other cases, the candidates had great teaching records and they weren’t

publishing. So we moved them forward a step. Now, the way the system works

is it’s got a lot of jumps. Back then at least, when you reach step five of full

professor you’re reviewed as if it’s going up for another professor level. And at

that level, you’re not going to make it with just good teaching. And that is

definitely—if you look at a bar diagram, there will be all these people at step five,

and then a huge drop off in the number of people at step six, seven, eight.

There’s then another—yet another—evaluation that’s major, with outside

letters and full review, if you’re going to be made what was then called ‘above

scale,’ which is now called ‘distinguished professor.’ For that, you have to have

people of their stature on the committee, supposedly. So we’d be looking around

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 146

for the world’s greatest astronomer, or chemist, or political scientist, or whatever

it may be, to put on that particular committee. When I was dean—when you

know what rank everybody has and we had a hundred and twenty-some faculty,

and I think there were three or four who were above scale. So it wasn’t many.

And we didn’t have that many above step six.

So it’s a system that I came to understand as having the same qualities as

the private economy and market in terms of you really have to be, “productive.”

They’re not moving people automatically along. And because they define

themselves as a research university, at a certain point, teaching won’t carry you

any further.

Now, here I can say that I also tried to make innovations while I was the

CAP chair. And I later tried it again as dean. But in any case, one of my

innovations was to say, look, if we have somebody that’s already an associate

professor but hasn’t been moved an inch because they’ve published zero, or we

have a full professor that’s a step one or a step two, and nobody has moved him,

that person could come into their chair and say, “You know, I’m not doing much

research these days and I realize it. And I’d like to teach an extra course.”

Because we needed courses, supposedly. “I’d like to teach an extra course. And I

recognize,” and the rules would say, “I have to be evaluated as really doing

well.” So the idea would be, then you’d teach an extra course each year for two

years, in the case of an associate, three years in the case of a full. The point is that

if you had good teaching evaluations you’d get a raise. And so it would reward

good teaching, get us more courses, and for this person certainly move them

along for retirement.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 147

Well, that was evaluated then by the next CAP on campus. They didn’t

like it. They said this was lowering the standards.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: And these were people I knew. Some of them I’d been on the

committee with. And they wouldn’t do it. I thought I might be able to convince

them because I had published a lot, and because I had been a rigorous CAP chair.

I had also tried to put forth a plan to get more courses, that if a person came in

and volunteered to teach an extra course—say we need an extra section of

American Sociology Today, or something. The dean would automatically put five

thousand dollars in their research fund. And it wouldn’t be salary, but it could

then maybe make them productive. And one guy actually said to me—because

they did do it for a couple years in one discipline. And he came up to me and he

said, “Bill, you’ve revived my career.” Because he could teach these courses. But

he needed a helper. And he was in a discipline where you weren’t going to get

grants. And anyhow, by that time he wasn’t publishing so he was in a

downward spiral on research. So I had plans that would help these people: either

get them back researching, or get them a raise. They could do both. They could

say, “I’ll teach an extra one for advancement. I’ll teach an extra one for five grand

for research money.” I could not convince the faculty to take this on. Once again,

this very conventional kind of thinking.

Rabkin: Were there precedents for either of these innovations on other

campuses?
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 148

Domhoff: Not that I knew of. Julia Armstrong8 once said to me—I was once

lamenting how all these ideas would be shot down. And she said, “Bill, what’s

great is you keep throwing them up there. Some of them are going to get through

some time.” It was the perfectly imagery. You send up flyers, and there’s eight

million conservatives sitting there shooting them down. “No, we can’t do it

because of this! No, we can’t do it because of that! It’s never been done before!”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: You know, which was opposite of my mentality that, from my point of

view, every organization I’ve been involved in is run chaotically. It’s got all these

mistakes. There’re so many things you could do differently, and better. But they

never are willing to try. I’m going to give more examples of this. It’s hilarious to

me.

And yet, I want to say at the same, while I know the campus was run

chaotically—and especially I saw that the year I was dean—but courses were

taught, students were in them. Students learned a lot. While the faculty is

yammering among itself, these students are going to individual classes with

individuals who are, say, wonderful in their classroom but jerks outside it. And

students are learning a great deal. Especially our early students—I knew a lot of

them—they became professors; they were big-deal lawyers; they innovated

nonprofits and they were great. We had all that good stuff going on while we are

being hidebound, and wasting our time arguing with each other.

8
See the oral history with Julia Armstrong-Zwart conducted by the Regional History Project,
forthcoming 2014.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 149

Chair of the Statewide Committee on Preparatory Education

Well, due to my service on CAP, John Isbister, who was on the Committee

on Committees a year or so after I was on CAP—maybe right after—asked me to

serve as chair of the Statewide Committee on Preparatory Education, which

looks at what’s called Subject A and remedial math. And there was real trouble

at the time, which didn’t involve Santa Cruz. Basically a few hardliners—and a

couple of them were math guys—wanted to make it so you had to take remedial

courses off campus. It was a waste of our elite, wonderful university’s time to be

teaching remedial writing, or to be teaching remedial math.

And, of course, this would mean that these students would have to go to

the nearby junior college. It was a really awful and a totally bad idea for anyone,

but especially for trying to diversify the campuses, labeling some students as

second-class citizens. It was, to me, pluperfect stupid. We didn’t have any

problem, because we’d built Subject A into the core courses.9 So we were neutral.

So I was willing to try that committee job and help the overall UC system. And

one of the ways I did that was to do nothing. I mean, I wouldn’t let them in a

room together. And once again, I talked to them individually, wrote with them,

and saw what I could do.

Now, it was clear the math guys, the hardliners, were going to have to

yield, because Berkeley was adamant. Berkeley Subject A had a long tradition.

They were very prideful of their teaching there. They had a lot of people

involved in teaching remedial writing. And the English department saw that as

9
For more detail on this battle over Subject A and remedial courses and a history of the UCSC
Writing Program see Sarah Rabkin, Interviewer and Editor, Teaching Writing in the Company of
Friends: An Oral History with Carol Freeman (Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2013)
http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/freeman
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 150

really important. They weren’t going to give. Their guy on the committee was

Fred Crews. He was a staunch stalwart. He’s the one I remember. The others

were the same way. I’d look at them, and say, that’s a real professor. He or she

fits the platonic ideal. The way they dressed, their whole style was totally elite

professor.

Well, it took a couple, three years, but they compromised. I learned a lot

about bilingual, about second languages. I learned that if you arrive here at

twelve, you’re not going to have an accent in English, but if you arrive at sixteen

you will, depending on your original language. And once again, I had an

innovation. And they wouldn’t do it. It was the simplest thing in the world. At

Duke University they had a basic English I. But if you had done really well you

skipped right out of it and you were in the next English. I’d had that experience.

I’d had really good high school training, as I’ve already said. And so I said,

“Look, there’s a very simple solution to this.” I said, “All these students are

capable. But some are more trained than others. We should have a basic English I

that everybody is required to take unless you pass out of it and then you have

the honor of being in English II. Same difference.” They couldn’t see it. It would

bring us more course money. It would do this and that. I scouted it out with

various people. And they said, “Yeah, yeah.”

Now, I forget who—for some reason various people didn’t like it,

including, I think, Berkeley. I could be being unfair to them here. But I think the

Berkeley faculty figured, “Well, then we don’t have the Subject A writing

instructor.” In other words, they weren’t prepared to make all these people real

professors like they were. I’m not sure about that. Anyway, the point is, it was a

solution that would have satisfied everybody, and most of all taken the stigma
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 151

off of that course. So I guess the basic thing—this is also about me—in an

innovative environment, I could see new stuff we could do. And I was either

totally bananas, or these people were hidebound.

Chairing the Academic Senate

Well, a year or so passed after that was over, and they asked to me to be

senate chair. Once again, I was very honored, because it was my peers. They had

asked me a year or so before, and I had said, “No, I have to finish this particular

book.” I had finished it, and it was a very successful book for me, which came

out in 1990. My first full-length book on power—it was totally new—in some

years, because I had written a dream book and revised my Who Rules America? as

my only books in the 1980s. I’d written articles in between, but here was a book,

and it was a lot of essays, and it was hard-hitting, and it had new stuff as well as

answering all my critics. So it was a very gratifying book, and it was done. And

this time when they asked to me to be senate chair I said, “Okay.”

The reason they asked me was that I had, once again, not been in any

arguments with anybody or had any disagreements with the chancellor, who

was a man named Robert Stevens.10 He was up for evaluation, and he was not

well liked on the campus. And certainly not by the people who had always

attacked authority figures, who had a history of it by then—I knew it well. And

then I thought, if they’re in on it, they’re mongooses, as far as they’re going to kill

that authority figure, which they had done to others. He was in a fix. He didn’t

fit. He was a British guy that didn’t know the system. Furthermore, he’d been the

president of a small college, Haverford. So that’s quite a difference from UC.

10
See Randall Jarrell, Interviewer and Editor, Robert Stevens, UCSC Chancellorship, 1987-1991
(Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 1999) http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/stevens
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 152

And he didn’t understand that when some biologist in blue jeans and no tie

walked into his office and said, “We ought to do X and Y,” that he was talking to

one of the most productive biologists in the country. He had no sense of what his

faculty was really like.

But I was, as I say, at a distance from all this. So they wanted somebody

neutral to be chair while he was going to be evaluated, and “It’s going to be

tough.” The joy was he resigned. I didn’t have to do it. It was as simple as pie.

And they brought in this wonderful guy that I’ll talk about, Karl Pister11, as the

chancellor. I was able to work closely with him and give him a sense of the

campus, which wasn’t hard because he had worked his way through the senate

in Berkeley; he had been chair of the statewide academic senate. He was from an

engineering school. I later learned that [he was] a German Catholic by tradition

and upbringing. He was still maybe a practitioner, but certainly it was part of

him. I’d learned later from him, too, that he was raised in a rural area. He had

picked apples in the Depression. He had a lot of heart in him, and a lot of

judgment, although I’ll come to where I think his judgment failed, in just a few

minutes.

But in any case, he really made a difference on the campus. Pretty quickly

people were coming to me, like Isbister, saying, “Bill, is he really good?” I’d say,

“Yeah, he’s great.” Well, pretty soon you’d say, “Yeah, I think—yeah, John, I

think you’re right. If the faculty would want him to stay another year or two, I

certainly think that’s my judgment, too.” So we asked for him as our chancellor,

11
See Randall Jarrell, Interviewer and Editor, Karl Pister, UCSC Chancellorship, 1991-1996
(Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2000). http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/pister
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 153

and he stayed on, although I do think he probably stayed on a year or so too

long. And that’s being pretty frank.

But in any case, during my term as senate chair I tried to do a number of

things, most of which didn’t work. But particularly, I went back to this college

stuff. I saw some ways that we might be able to do things for the colleges. By

then, I had some ideas from watching and so on. And furthermore, I had a

couple of great allies that were heads of committees. Carolyn Martin-Shaw as

she’s now known, and Carol Freeman, at the least. And there were a couple of

others that were pretty helpful, among others—Kathy Foley, who became the

provost of Porter College. She also seemed to be somebody I could work with.

She was a little wary of me, because I wasn’t a college type. But she was

supportive There were a number of others.

So I put out a committee to do some rethinking on the college. And they

met with colleges. They met with students and so on. I think it was more

general—just mostly college, but maybe it could be more general. One of the

things we were looking at was having these two or three-unit courses. Now, at

that point the campus said a course is a course is a course and they’re all worth

five units, which had driven the scientists wild from a very early time. And a lot

of the college courses looked to people like goofus courses that shouldn’t be

getting five units credit, when physics is only five units for more work. We

actually had the support of the people in the arts because of labs, and their art

studios and all, and then, some of the scientists because they wanted to have

labs.

One of the innovations we made—it was not an innovation for elsewhere,

but a big deal for here—was to say we could have these courses of varying unit
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 154

size, two and three units, which could open things up for some unusual courses

in the colleges. That was our point. For example, we could bring in guests to

teach. Maybe some famous expert on something, or a person who had been a

political person, could come teach a course for four weeks and you get two units

credit. Once again, that Page Smith kind of flexibility.

Rabkin: What had the scientists been doing previously when they had courses

with laboratories attached?

Domhoff: I don’t remember. But they were kind of trapped with five units. If

somebody really wants to study the campus, then [they should] look at oral

histories by some of the scientists and see their perspective. I have a friend in

physics, George Gaspari, that would know all of that, because he was here from

’67, a really good guy, kept neutral in a lot of things, but also was a dean at key

points. So he knew all of these issues, and he remembers lots of events really

well. So if I wanted to understand the science division, I’d go to George Gaspari,

because, frankly, he’s a fair and balanced guy, and doesn’t have axes to grind.

So I don’t know the answer to that question in particular. But the change

got us out of the straitjacket. We had another couple of things that we put

forward that I can’t quite remember. But one of the things the committee

recommended, which I knew was wrong—and I didn’t have the guts to say it—

they said, “We should require all faculty to teach one of these two or three-unit

courses every three years.” I thought, oh, this is nothing but trouble. This is

going to drive, especially the scientists wild, but everybody wild. But I did not

have the nerve to say no to that committee after all the work they’d done.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 155

I think that’s why I’m not a good administrator, and wouldn’t like it. But

it’s also an insight into the kind of things that go into being any kind of a boss or

leader. You have to make these kinds of decisions that will make you not liked,

and will make, maybe, enemies forever out of people. I didn’t like that. I wanted

to be one of the gang, and I was not prepared to do that kind of thing. In this

case, it was a fatal mistake on my part. And it was a misjudgment by the

committee, in the sense that they didn’t have a scientist or two on there, or if they

did, it wasn’t somebody that would represent what most of these scientists

would say.

So we had a big meeting and it passed the senate, but with a lot of tension.

And sure enough a couple of these people, the scientists, would say, “This has to

go to mail ballot [spelling out ‘mail’]?” (laughs) Mail ballot—which still meant

mostly M-A-L-E ballot. But the point is, we just barely won that vote, like 52 to 53

percent voted yes for that requirement on themselves. But this was something

that people resisted. It didn’t happen. The change got us a lot of PR off the

campus. It was very uncomfortable for me. It made me look like I was selling out

the faculty, or that we were groveling for PR. But lots of people didn’t do it, and

it just fell by the wayside. I don’t think it ever happened. It couldn’t be enforced.

But once I decided I wanted to back the committee, I was out there

working to pass the mail ballot. I was out there campaigning. So I was invited to

the chemistry department and I talked about the whole thing to them. And one

of the people that was really good for the campus, and a really good guy and had

been there for a long time, he said, “Bill, I just want to know one thing?” “What’s

that?” He hadn’t said a word. He’s a quiet guy. He says, “Is this good for the

campus?” And I said, “I really think it is. I think it can help us in a lot of ways.”
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 156

Because we were still hurting on various things. We weren’t automatically

attracting enough students. All kinds of ways in which it could make sense. But I

knew that the faculty was not prepared to do that. And I had wanted, of course,

this to be the kind of course that you volunteered to teach and you receive

money for your research. I had put that out there. The committee toughened it

up. And in a way, for the scientists then, it felt like, “You’re sticking it to us

because you think we have lighter teaching loads. Which we do, but you’re

sticking it to us.” So that tension between divisions then comes into the picture. I

wanted to use carrots. But the whole outcome was my mistake by not being a

persuasive enough leader with the committee or the general faculty.

We were also involved that year in all the tensions over how the campus

should grow. Pister made a brilliant decision to bring a guy he knew from

Berkeley, who was an architect prof, to develop a design for the campus. The guy

walked around and he talked to everybody. And I don’t know whether if it was

within a year or the second year, he had made a huge presentation. We had a

huge meeting.

I said to one of my assistants, “I want this taped. I want this taped for

posterity. I want it on video, because I want students to be able to see it. I want

new faculty to be able to see it. I want this on record.” He had these magnificent

designs which are now the art village over there. But other things—he essentially

had a thing about fill-in the campus and preserve trees and open space as much

as possible. God almighty, I’ve never seen such a love fest. I mean, people were

thrilled. Everybody’s patting each other on the back. Everybody’s friends. The

students are happy.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 157

They didn’t make the tape. And again, I should have said, “Has that tape

been made? You have the tape ready?” You have to do that kind of thing to be

sure. Maybe I didn’t have it on paper. Maybe I didn’t tell them. You know, it’s all

that vague stuff. But I remember just a sense of huge disappointment, and a

feeling of stupidity, and why am I not better at this? Because that tape might

have been useful later, or for historians.

I’ll tell you one story that I got in trouble with. Things were going really

well. And it was Black History Month. It was February. It was my second year as

senate chair, and things were moving well: Pister, the campus plan, everything.

Didn’t have much business at point. I decided that to honor Black History Month

that I’d have the African Gospel Chorus open up the senate meeting. I checked

with people. I checked with Julia Armstrong. The choir said they’d be glad to

appear. They were behind the curtain on the stage. I told them, “Just a couple

songs, don’t overdo it. And kind of play it low-key. Don’t use the most religious

songs you’ve got,” or something vague like that.

So I say to the faculty that was assembled, “We are having a very good year. We

have to celebrate this year.” That was the signal when the curtains opened. And

there, in these gorgeous, gorgeous gospel robes is the African Gospel Chorus.

And they start in. And they sing two, and then they sing three, and maybe four.

And it’s just a whole lot of Jesus. I’m in trouble. (laughs) Never thought it

through. Violating church and state! One guy that was really strong on that, he

said to me, “Bill, you violated church and state.” One of the biggest civil

libertarians on the campus, he wrote me a scathing letter. Others said, “It was

insensitivity to Jews.” So I was really—I was, of course, totally taken aback.

Totally apologetic.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 158

At the reception afterwards I went up to one faculty member, who was

one of the most impossible people on the campus, and he was totally impossible

for a senate chair. And he’s one of these people that’s always bringing up the

rules, and he just can’t get along with authority. And he’s a Jewish guy besides.

So I walked up to him and I said, “So, I guess I’m probably in trouble with you

too, over violation of separation of church and state.” And he said, “No Bill, as I

was listening to it, I decided it was just music.” He didn’t hassle me. I thought,

“All right, he can see the greater whole. He’s a better guy than I thought!” But

other people—they wrote me letters. And it was chastening. Once again, I didn’t

think it through. And I could see why administrators are so cautious, when you

are in trouble for things like that.

I want to close on the senate by saying that Pister was a really good guy.

He was really good. But like everybody else, he’s an example of what happens

when you’re powerful. Power distorts, and you think you have higher purposes.

And he did two things that should have involved the senate, and he did not. One

of them was that he decided to put together a position that would allow a person

to administer both the colleges and be the head of admissions. Well, admissions

is really a staff thing; the colleges are an academic thing. No academic wants to

head admissions. And colleges are not going to want to be headed by some staff

person that hasn’t been a professor, that doesn’t have a PhD and so on. So he

didn’t tell us about that. And I was at a general administration meeting. He had

started a meeting forum that was not much because mostly he would talk to all

those assembled—administration, heads of staff committees, the senate chair,

and maybe a few others I’ve forgotten. It was maybe, in concept, a good idea, but
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 159

dumb, because he had all his administrators there and the staff committees and

the senate chair and a couple other things.

So he announces this new position he had created, and I almost faint dead

away. I said, “How was this developed?” or something like that. I tried to act

dumb, but I think he could tell I was surprised by it. Then I said, “Well, do you

have somebody in mind or anything?” He said, “No, Bill. Are you applying?”

Which was really, I thought, nasty. And I didn’t like it at all.

So I thought, “What is going on here?” So I started to snoop around a little

bit. Then I talked to some of my friends “of color,” as you’d say, or the diverse

faculty, including a black guy that was important in EOP. And he said, “That’s

his Chicano position.” Two or three Chicano administrators had left for higher

things, or to go elsewhere for other reasons, and there were a lot of criticisms

coming at the administration from the Latino faculty, and maybe some student

groups. And they really had a position. The administration seemed to think this

would be a position they could put a person of color in. They advertised it, and it

failed. Nobody on campus would take that position. And they advertised

statewide, and they couldn’t find anybody. So it disappeared. But he did that,

and it was kind of upsetting to me because the administration is supposed to

confer with the senate on such changes. It has the ultimate decision-making

power on such issues, but it is supposed to confer with the Committee on

Planning and Budget, of which I was an ex-officio member.

He also did a thing where he made—I think he did this while I was senate

chair—but over the summer he made the academic vice chancellor into the

executive vice chancellor—he made that person, in effect, the head of the

campus. It used to be that various vice chancellors (for business, academics, and
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 160

this and that) were kind of a collectivity under the chancellor. Well, the

chancellor’s position was becoming more of an outside thing, and a money-

raising thing, and a symbolic thing. Maybe that was happening systemwide. But

he did that without asking us. So he bypassed the senate twice when I was chair

of the senate. So that was really disappointing. Yet he had great judgment. He

was a calming influence and so on in doing that job.

Taking VERIP

Well, after I was the senate chair, I had a one-quarter sabbatical. I

probably put it up against the summer, so I had a summer and fall. I wrote. And

I was working. I did the first draft of a book on dreams. Then I came back, and I

think we were on four-course load by that time, and I think I then just had to

teach one in each quarter for the next two quarters. But I knew that this was

going to be something the next year, when I had to come back to four courses.

Through the senate chairship, the statewide thing, and through the senate, I’d

been teaching two less courses most of the time, and one less, maybe while I was

statewide chair. You got two courses off for being senate chair, and two courses

off for being CAP chair. That was a fair deal. A lot of times it’s not a fair deal, in

terms of you’re doing these administrative or committee duties and it’s really

eating into your time. This was fair. It was fair. I could still do my own work. I

didn’t feel I was drowning in anything.

But then I faced the fact that next year I was going to teach four courses—

and I didn’t really have four. I probably had three. But I also said to myself,

you’ll never get this book done. If you get pulled back in any more service, if this

and that— I was tired. I was fifty-seven. I’d been teaching since I was twenty-
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 161

three, and full time since I was twenty-six. And I had a lot of data backed up in

two different fields.

So I was not looking forward to teaching. And all of a sudden they said

there might be a third, a very early retirement incentive program, called VERIP.

It was designed that basically if you had as much service as I did and you were

fifty-seven or older, you were really crazy not to take it. You were given seven

years to play with. You could put three of them towards your age, which made

me sixty, which was the maximum percentage. That would leave me four to add

to my service, which would take me from twenty-nine to thirty-three. And the

truth of the matter is, when you looked at the table, I was going to receive 83

percent of my regular salary, and I was going to be allowed to teach two courses

a year for six years. I thought, this is too good to be true. It won’t happen. And it

almost didn’t happen because the chancellor of Berkeley said, “If you do that,

you’re going to wipe out a lot of my faculty, and I will quit.”

Right down to the final minutes it looked like it wouldn’t happen. In fact, I

had kind of given up, and I was kind of in despair. And I thought, it won’t

happen because they’re not going to cross Berkeley. They won’t cross Berkeley.”

I knew who was numero uno. I’d been on too many committees statewide to think

otherwise. And as CAP chair I went every month to a meeting of statewide CAP

to discuss policy issues. And when I was senate chair, every month I went to a

meeting—statewide senate chairs meeting with the big boss, the president, and a

couple of others. So I was in these fairly small groups, which were either at

UCLA or Berkeley. I understood the system by that point. So I thought they’d

never go against Berkeley. But the way they solved it was genius. For eight of the

campuses the original rules pertained; for Berkeley, not. For Berkeley you had to
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 162

be, to really be tempted, you had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine. So I knew the

minute that they said that, and I looked at that chart and confirmed that I was

going to receive this high percentage of my salary—I made my decision in a

nanosecond.

I often say it’s the second greatest thing that ever happened to me in my

career. The first greatest, truly, for my career—aside from the previous luck of

going to Miami where I was free to do what I wanted—was coming to Santa

Cruz. In terms of resources it was phenomenal, and I will talk about that next

time. But then becoming a VERIP at fifty-seven—I turned fifty-eight later in that

summer—but to become VERIP at that point, and with all the research I wanted

to do, and I could teach two courses and I’d do it in the spring, it was total

liberation. I used to think, it’s like I received a two-quarter fellowship from some

big deal foundation, which, of course, I was never going to get in a whole million

years, with what I taught and with what I researched—which wasn’t exactly

what they like. (laughs) So it was the greatest thing that could have happened to

me. And I’ll talk some about that next time with my research.

Dean of Social Sciences

But the point is, no sooner had I made that decision—although it was not

official, but it was certainly in my mind, and I told people—than the executive

vice chancellor wrote to me, he said, “Look, I’d like to have lunch. I’ve got

something I want to talk to you about.”

I knew that it had do with one of a couple things, and one would be likely

to be the dean thing, because our dean, Gene Garcia, had been taken into the

Clinton government as an assistant secretary of education for bilingual. It was a

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 163

great opportunity for Gene. He’d been a very fine dean. I felt sure he was going

to be a vice chancellor somewhere, someday. He was clearly oriented to being

that, a very articulate guy, studying the right things and so on. I figured he’d

never be back. And he wasn’t.

There was some other thing I thought he might be going to ask me to do,

but I forgot it by now. In any case, we had lunch at O’mei. And he said, “Well, I

suppose you know why we’re having lunch.” I said, “Well, it’s one of these two

things.” And he said, “Well, it’s the dean thing.” I said, “I just want you to know

I’m taking that VERIP before you say anything else.” He said, “That’s okay. I just

need you for one year.” So he started to talk. He said, “I’m asking you because I

met with the chairs of social science, and you’re their number one choice.” So

that did it for me again, right there.

[Executive Vice Chancellor Michael] Tanner and I didn’t have a bad

relationship, but it was tense. And I did not like him, and I do not respect him.

But I decided I was going to do it, for the reasons that this would be a great way

to close. I wouldn’t have the struggle of teaching. It’s reactive. I’ll see what

they’re doing. It will be interesting. My friend, Dave Kliger12, who had been on

CAP with me, and who had been preceding senate chair, was the acting dean in

sciences. That will make it fun. There were a couple other things like that. I

would get more money, which was minor to me. I didn’t realize that it was a

significant [amount], maybe ten, fifteen grand or something.

So I decided, well, it’s well worth it. But I will teach my dreams course,

because I have it on the schedule for fall. And you know, you can do both. The

12
See Irene Reti, Interviewer and Editor, Campus Provost/Executive Vice Chancellor David Kliger,
(Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2011) http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/ucsc/campus-
provostexecutive-vice-chancellor-david-kliger
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 164

joke there is that within two meetings of my dreams course and the schedule I

had as a dean, I said, “I can’t do this.” Fortunately, a former student of mine,

Veronica Tonay, was around the campus. She, I think, had just finished or was

just about to finish her PhD at Berkeley. She had TA’d for me and worked for me

as a research assistant in the past. So I said, “Veronica, would you take over this

course?” And she did. Because the dean job was taxing, and wall-to-wall, and

intense.

To start with Tanner, though, Tanner came to this campus in Cowell,

where I was, three or four years after we started. He was a very young guy. I

didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t know at that time he had taught at a

black college in the South, for which I give him a lot of credit. But he was an

uptight guy. What you have to understand about the campus in the early days is

that very few people wanted to take administrative positions. So he was always

the acting dean of this or that. He had served on the senate Committee on

Educational Policy. I didn’t see it at the time, but he really was headed towards

administration.

What I mean, incidentally, when I say ‘acting deans’—there were a lot of

them. A lot of people were asked to be deans that didn’t want to be—and

certainly including me. I mean, that job can be a career killer as far as research.

And people say, well, that meant you’d given up, or you were out for money or

something. I know that when I was on CAP it was shocking the things CAP

would say about the people that were chairs or deans. And you’d say, “He’s

making enough money as dean.” We didn’t give raises if they hadn’t published.

In the case of one board chair, who was a wonderful guy and in a wonderful,

cohesive discipline, they wrote a letter saying, “He teaches our biggest courses.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 165

He’s a great chair. He makes us as a group more productive.” And it was so

interesting, because they were in the sciences, actually. They weren’t sociologists,

but they were talking like sociologists about how things work. And he was a

very important guy to that department. And that CAP voted five to one against

me on giving him a raise, for which I was forever ashamed, because I was chair

and knew him, and he deserved it. But that’s how administrators were treated on

the campus. That’s why you have to pay them—in a way, why they pay them a

fortune, although it’s too big a fortune. It’s a thankless task. But Tanner liked it.

Anyway, we got Tanner. I don’t think [he was] making very good

judgments—and all totally aimed towards the sciences. So that’s who I’m going

to work for. But I got along with him all right. He was willing to ask me, and for

the reasons I said, I said, “Yeah, I’ll take that job.”

So I take the job, and my secretary comes in and says to me, “It’s the Santa

Cruz Sentinel on the phone. They want to know if they can have permission to

mention your age.” I said, “Well, sure.” What they didn’t ask for—apparently

they had the right, and it was public, all salaries at the UC, as we know now, are

public—they didn’t ask about my salary. So it appears in the Sentinel that I am

fifty-seven, and I’m going to make 109,000 dollars a year. I was going to make

over a hundred grand, which was a big deal in those days.

But, in fact, I was at that point an above-scale professor. And that meant

that they were putting the dean’s stipend on top of that high salary based on

publication. That was a shock to a lot of people in town. It might have been a

shock to a few people on campus, but they knew I’d published a lot. It was

hilarious, because they would say, “Bill, you make 109,000 dollars?” People I’d
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 166

known, faculty wives would say, “109,000?” It was a little embarrassing to be

outed on my salary. I didn’t mind being outed on my age.

I’m going to say three or four things about being the dean that I think are

revealing about the campus.

Rabkin: We have about ten minutes.

Domhoff: Okay. First of all, I spent the whole time fighting for dollars. It turns

out that Kliger was totally narrow-minded towards just wanting more money for

the sciences, which, of course, Tanner wanted too. And their bias—they had a

formula that proved that they were under-rewarded and teaching too much.

Their formula was based on going to other campuses and finding what biologists

and chemists taught, compared to social scientists and humanists and the money

they received. I said, “That’s not right. This is all about power, because at

Berkeley the sciences were long-time big bosses. Here we all started equal, and

it’s not right.” And then Kliger would say, “Yeah, you know where you’re

getting the overhead money for Subject A? You’re getting it from our grants.” So

they just kept lording it over us with this phony formula for lightening their

teaching load, increasing ours, and taking our money. I had to do a big study in

which I did a lot of research and wrote a great report. But also Carl Walsh and

Dan Friedman in economics did a much better statistical analysis that really

helped. And we held them off on that for the time being. I did not want to be

remembered by my social sciences colleagues as the dean that let Tanner and

Kliger destroy the social sciences. That became my whole mission as dean.

What I learned is there is no cooperation, no coordination. And yet, as I

said earlier, classes would meet, students would learn. Meanwhile, it was me
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 167

and the humanities dean, a hothead named Gary Lease, versus the arts dean,

who sided with Kliger, because the arts and sciences have some things in

common. They both need labs or studios, and mostly small classes, at least back

then. And furthermore, the science guys would say, “It’s good to listen to opera

and look at beautiful paintings after you do your hard day in the lab.” So they

really felt a closeness, the arts and the sciences. And that, essentially, was the

alliance. And so that was a particularly big kind of mess for me because the

humanities dean was a difficult person and an impossible ally.

The second thing I did was try to help the division. I could see how the

division could do better, and how we could balance things, but also fight the

sciences better. I put forth a big proposal and I gave it to the chairs. I said, “Work

through this and see what you can use and not use of this. But it will make us

stronger. We’ve got to be stronger, gang, because these scientists are really after

your money.”

They met. They didn’t do a single thing of it, because power’s really

rooted in the tenured professor and then in the board and then up. They didn’t

care much about the division. They cared about their boards. And from the point

of view of one board, my first proposal’s no good for this reason; from the point

of view of the second board, my second proposal’s no good for another reason.

One of my proposals was, “We’ve got to have it so we have our faculty here in

the fall.” But that’s when everybody takes sabbaticals, because you put it against

summer. It’s the longest sabbatical you can have in terms of calendar months. So

we’re hiring temporaries in the fall. So they didn’t do a single bit of it. But I made

them cohesive. (laughs) So it was hilarious.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 168

Third, I tried to help the colleges. I immediately saw, deans have all these

resources, so put the colleges under the divisions. Write it in the job description

of the dean that these colleges will have this, that, and the other thing. And the

executive vice chancellor can then decide whether the dean receives a raise or

keeps the job based in part on how well he or she does with the colleges. That’s

part of their job. You want to make the colleges work. And I wrote a big

background paper. I put in there about all the past suggestions about small

courses, and about how to reward extra teaching with research funds, and to

give people extra raises for teaching extra and so on. I thought I had it perfect.

And I went to Pister and Tanner and they were just scared to death to touch the

colleges. But they would do it if I could convince others. They weren’t certainly

going to be out front, and I understood that.

So I sent this package of papers to the provosts. And I figured there were a

lot of them that would trust me because I’d worked with them. Carol Freeman

was now provost, I think, at Cowell. Carolyn Martin-Shaw was a provost. Kathy

Foley was a provost. And Isbister liked it. Isbister had been my buddy. He was a

sensible, great guy. Isbister had worked hard in the college to make it work. He

was a pragmatist. He was willing to cut a deal and compromise, and he could see

after all this effort he’d made, this was a possibility that could work in the face of

the fact that the colleges were going downhill.

Rabkin: And was he Merrill provost at the time?

Domhoff: I think he was still Merrill provost at the time. So at least those four or

five were supportive and I forgot who the others were. A couple of others were

kind of in between. But two I remember well—and they were ones that really
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 169

forcefully opposed it—one was Carlos Noreña, from Stevenson. He’d been a

Jesuit priest, and he was a philosopher. Beloved of students and that kind of

thing, but you couldn’t change anything at Stevenson. And you certainly

couldn’t change this. He really worked to undermine me in a lot of different

ways. The other person who opposed it was a colleague in the social sciences

division who was serving as a provost, who was not a fan of the colleges. And he

was doing everything he could to protect the boards and divisions. Carlos

Noreña used to call him the anti-provost. But those two voted together against

the plan. So the two extremes, once again, stuck together against change. And

Kathy Foley was wary. So the opposition had at least those three, and nothing

happened.

A fourth thing I did that was interesting and fun but went nowhere: one

of the first people who came to see me was Rita Walker, who’s the sexual

harassment officer. She said, “You going to have to work with these cases.” I’m

sitting there. My eyes are getting bigger. “And you’ve got this guy—if he even

blows his nose he’s off this campus. This is about the fifth time he’s been in

trouble. And then, you see, there’s this person and that person.” They’ve got this

list of people and we generally have a bad record in sexual harassment in the

division.

So once again, I want to do something about it. So I go to meet with all the

boards. I was going to meet with them anyhow, but I brought Rita with me. And

I say, “And now I want you to hear about sexual harassment.” And one guy told

me later, he said, “Bill, I felt like I was on the deck of a ship and there were

machine gun bullets going over my head, and if I lifted my head I’d be dead.”

Because she fired it out there.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 170

So I took Rita to each of these boards and basically said, “I’m behind this.”

And I also said, “I want you to know something that Gene Garcia told me.” I

said, “Gene Garcia told me when he was dean that he spent more time on sexual

harassment cases than anything else and it just ate his time up.” And I said, “I

don’t want to spend my time that way.” I was looking right at various male

colleagues, and I said, “I don’t want to spend my time that way.” I now knew

who the harassers were and they knew that I knew.

So that created an atmosphere. But secondly, I drafted a letter, because the

most frequent harassers are often grad students and visitors, because it’s a fine

line as to whether they are faculty. And so I worked with Julia Armstrong and I

drafted a letter in which I essentially put all the negative consequences of a

sexual harassment charge, like, “You’ll have to pay your costs if you go to court.

The university doesn’t pay.” There are a number of things that are hair-raising

scary. I said, “I want this letter in their packet.” So she said, “Oh, I’ll have to

check.” And she was good, but they have to check. So finally they decided, “You

can put it in the packet if it just says that they sign at the bottom, ‘I have read this

letter.’” That was all I could do was—

Rabkin: They’re not confessing to anything.

Domhoff: No, they don’t have to say, “I agree I won’t do—“ But it said, “I have

read this letter.” So basically you read down this letter, and your eyes would get

bigger, and your hair would stand on end. It was very flat in tone, but the stuff

that could happen to you if you sexually harass was really heavy. So everybody

that signed up for our division to teach part-time, whether a grad student or
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 171

whatever, had to read and sign that letter. What happened then was we didn’t

have a single sexual harassment case that year.

Rabkin: How interesting.

Domhoff: And so I thought, “Well, they’ll spread it [across campus].” I asked

Julia Armstrong a year or so later. She said, “No, they got rid of it.”

Rabkin: What?

Domhoff: They got rid of our plan to end sexual harassment on this campus.

They never did it again.

Rabkin: Social sciences never did it again?

Domhoff: No. Nor did Tanner use this model for these other divisions.

Rabkin: Do you know why?

Domhoff: Because they don’t want to get into that hassle and detail. The dean

has to go around and say, “I’m not going to permit any sexual harassment,” and

bring Rita.

I did do my plan about extra classes. I announced that anybody who

taught an extra course would immediately have five thousand dollars in their

research account. So I got some extra courses. And in one case, it saved the day

because I had an experimental psychologist who fell ill. She could not teach her

course. It was fall. And the chair came to me and said that “X can’t teach the

course, but Mary Sue Weldon will teach it for the 5K.” I said, “Tell her it’s a

deal.” And she immediately had a research assistant. It’s the most sane thing in
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 172

the world. If I’m a dream researcher, I could teach that dreams class off the top of

my head, and meanwhile, while I’m teaching that class there’s a person doing

coding. It’s a twofer. The administration could never get that through their

heads. They, of course, dropped that as well.

I took the time to have lunch with the staff, but also with the media staff,

and all the board staff. I had this real cohesive kind of thing going. I know I

could’ve done it a few more years. I wouldn’t have kamikazed at it the way I

had, because I’d charged at all these people— But I didn’t want to do it.

When they failed to get a dean—because they had failed—I told Tanner, I

said, “Michael, I’m just want to tell you—I’m sorry it’s failed, but I want you to

know I am not going to do it anymore.” Didn’t even wait for him to ask me. I just

told him, “I won’t do it.” And then when I went to the board at the final meeting,

I said, “Look, I tried to give it my best. And we haven’t always agreed.”

Although we’d agreed on everything except this big report, and a couple of them

hadn’t done quite what I thought was right on hiring. I gave econ an extra

position with the hope that I could get an affirmative action hire out of them. But

I really didn’t. They screwed me in various ways. But in any case, I said, “As you

know, the search failed. But there’s going to be a new dean, because I've told

Tanner I'm not prepared to work for him." Which I had told him. So I left with

some pride.

My assistant was a guy named Bob Jorgensen, who had also been in the

humanities division. He was second in command. I’d known Bob. And I liked

him. And he was one of the reasons I took the job: oh, it would be fun to work

with Bob. He was once going to try to run for city council on the progressive

kind of side, but a lot of the progressives didn’t trust him. He was a very
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 173

straight-looking guy and so on. Although I liked him, and figured he’d support

my efforts, he was trying to undercut the union, and I told him to stop that. Also,

he was under higher orders to reduce the staff. So he’d cut these positions out,

and then I’d hire them back as temporaries. The board secretary in psych came in

and said, “We got three positions cut. We can’t possibly function.” Then I’d

rehire them in a temporary kind of fashion.

The one good thing he did do was that he put together—he had this idea

to save a couple [of jobs], to put a couple of guys that he was going to fire on

temporary [hire] to do oral histories of the people that took VERIP. I really

encourage the oral history program to obtain copies of these videotaped

interviews that cover what fourteen pioneering faculty have to say about the

early years. There were sixteen of us, I think it was, that it made sense to take

VERIP. And fourteen of us took it. For the other two, it turned out not to make

sense because of their tremendous commitment to teaching. One of them taught

into his eighties. He hadn’t researched in a long time, and he loved teaching, so

didn’t make sense for him to retire early. And one other pioneer colleague taught

until he was seventy.

Oh, the other thing that happened while I was acting dean that I want to

say and kind of brag about, is that I worked very closely with Julianne Burton-

Carvajal in Latin American literature. We were really close. I really liked her. She

was running Latin American/Latino studies at the time: LALS, but from the

humanities divisions, even though this program was in social sciences. We were

scheming on how to make this legitimate. I spent a lot of time with Julianne

Burton-Carvajal! It was a great, fun working relationship. She was so great. She

never got as much credit as she deserved from the campus. But in any case, we
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 174

did a lot of scheming. And I was able to help. And she said, “What about—we

want it to be LALS. And should we wait?” No—I said no. And she was a leftist:

“We want ideological hegemony on this,” I said to Julianne, “We’ll only talk of

LALS. We speak of it everywhere.” And then she did a little poster display about

it—it was right square where you entered the library, in the old library. It was

right square there, so that when you walk into all these meetings—because the

meetings were often on the third floor of the library in those days. Every time the

vice chancellor walked by he was seeing this display about LALS.

She had to write and rewrite the proposal to suit senate committees and

the administration and statewide committees and I would help her—but I

cleared the way in all kinds of ways and just spoke of it highly. And they had

people in it that were lecturers that were really carrying it. This was one reason it

was so wrong that Bob Jorgensen was undercutting the union.

So there’s a lot of hatchet people running around the campus as staff

people, I fear. They do the bidding, though, of who their bosses are, [such as] the

deans. They took the campus from being egalitarian to being more and more

non-egalitarian. All of their budget cuts they could, they took out of the staff.

They downsized the staff and then overworked them. They held their salaries.

They paid these high administrators even more to make tougher decisions. And

of course, if you’re making ninety grand and the staff’s making forty grand, you

feel this distance from them and pretty soon you do become this cutter and

hammer and hatchet man.

Okay, you’ve got to go. I’m going to talk a little next time at the start—I

want to talk about the Committee on Emeriti Relations.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 175

Rabkin: This is Sarah Rabkin. It is Monday the 29th of April, 2013, and Bill

Domhoff and I are here for our fourth interview. So Bill, why don’t we start?

Domhoff: Okay. I was talking last time about administration and my

involvement with the campus. So, when I retired in July of ’94, I really never

looked back. It was just the greatest thing. I was able to get into writing—and I

had done two books that I’ll talk about, by 1996. I was able to go back and forth

between dreams and power. I thought maybe people would be asking me to do

stuff. I was a little nervous. But they respected the role of retirement. So I felt part

of things, but I didn’t feel any obligation. So it’s almost like, well, you’re there

but you’re invisible. It was wonderful. I could spend more time on my teaching

when I did teach. So we can talk more about that when I talk about my research

in general on the campus.

Committee on Emeriti Relations

But first, I want to say I did do two more things that I was asked to do by

the senate as service. It felt good, and they both epitomized for me what happens

when you get involved with administration. One was in the late 1990s; one was

somewhere around 2009, 2010. And they both involved that I was asked to be

chair of the Committee on Emeriti Relations. And that was fun. I would see what

things were about. We did surveys. We helped individuals. We adjudicated. We

gave advice. It was all very nice, except for two things. And they both showed

what happens, too, I think, with administrators.

The first time I was chair of the Committee on Emeriti Relations I was able

to liberate the title ‘research professor.’ When the VERIP offer was made in 1993,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 176

the central administration—Office of the President—made clear that there was

this title of ‘research professor.’ It could be used as the campuses wanted to use

it. I always thought it should be given freely. It was an honorific. It could help

people in their research. But [administrators here] said, “Oh no, we must use it as

an incentive to get more money for the campus.” So you had to be applying for a

grant or have a grant. And there was nothing you can do about that. And, of

course, what they did was drive the title into the ground. When I checked in the

late nineties, maybe one person had it, or two.

So what I did was talk to a few retired colleagues and ask if they were still

interested in the title. And I drafted some guidelines. They were more loose, but

they were guidelines. And they’d say, “Well, you’ve published something;

you’ve gone to a meeting and given a paper. You’re working with grad

students.” I said, “Give the title to anyone who does one of these four things.” I

went to CAP and I explained to the chair, and they said, “Yeah, we’ll get in on

this.” Then I was able to take a plan to the deans and have it approved so people

could just turn in their little vitae and go through this process. Ah, but they’d

only let them have two years at a time. So they still remained their uptight selves,

instead of letting people feel good about themselves, letting them use this to go

to conferences. Because emeritus does mean you’re done, you’re on the scrap

heap. Research professor means you’re still out there. And it’s used in a great

many campuses.

Rabkin: People wanted to limit it to two years—

Domhoff: Well, they still probably do. But I then told people, when I’d go to give

advisories to these potential emeriti meetings, and I’d say, “Look, just use the
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 177

title. Nobody’s going to hassle you.” And I explained what I just explained now,

of why we had to go through this rigmarole. But we shouldn’t. Whether people

then reapplied, I don’t know. I know there’s one person that doesn’t, and that’s

me. I call myself a research professor and if they don’t like it they can go jump in

the lake.

The second time that I was chair of the Committee on Emeriti Relations I

think it was mostly just routine, helping people. I was officially chair through the

summer. And in June I had a meeting with Ronnie Gruhn13, who was going to

replace me. I talked about what we’d done and gave her some files. I think I had

my senate administrative assistant with me, so it was all smooth. And a week

later we receive word that OPERS is suddenly going to charge us half price, 130

bucks, for the right to go in the Wellness Center and use the pool. That was a

shock because we had been promised that this would always be free. For us, it

was a breach of faith. It was a very symbolic kind of issue, and there was a lot of

fear that the next step, if they did this, was to take our A sticker—which by then,

for parking, was nine hundred dollars a year.

So what happened was that a new young guy that didn’t know any

better—a good guy—in OPERS was told by the administration, “You got to raise

money. Find a way to bring in more money.” And so he thought, “Well, I’ll

charge these retired people.” Which includes staff, and it was a bigger percentage

of their retirements usually, if they were going to buy one of these for a 130

bucks. There were a lot more of them, and a lot more of them used it.

13
See Irene Reti, Interviewer and Editor, Professor Isebill “Ronnie” V. Gruhn: Recollections of UCSC,
1969-2013 (Regional History Project, UCSC Library, 2013). http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-
hist/gruhn
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 178

So we thought about it. Ronnie and I checked with people and said, “No,

this is wrong. We’ve got to fight this.” So we wrote to people. I wrote long

letters. We got all the documents. And we found a letter from 1989 that

somebody had in their files in which the head of OPERS had said, “Note that I

hereby say that from now on all retired professors and staff will have free use of

OPERS.” It was certainly among the temptations to convince us to retire in 1994.

It was one of the perks, along with an A sticker. Suddenly they’re reneging. It

just doesn’t feel right to us. It made us feel unwanted. It’s symbolically stupid on

their part. So we tried to talk to Kliger about it, who was then the executive vice

chancellor. He would not even see us.

But we did see [Chancellor George] Blumenthal, and he had done a little

research on it. He suspended the order to make us immediately pay, and he was

going to investigate it throughout that year. We met with him personally. It was

Ronnie Gruhn, it was me, and it was Lee Duffus, a guy who had been in the early

administration, working with students. A wonderful guy. He’d left the campus

for a while, he and his wife, to run a bookstore, and had come back. He was the

head of the Silver Slugs, which was the retired staff group. Great people,

wonderful fun. I went to one of their meetings to give a talk on my coauthored

book The Leftmost City and it was just a great time.

So the three of us saw Blumenthal. We explained to him what was a stake.

We thought it was symbolically wrong. There wasn’t going to be much money

involved. And we told him we feared they were after the A sticker, to which he

said, “Oh no, no, no.”

At any rate, at the end of the year, in June, when everybody’s gone, he

then decided that we would pay. So he made a breach of faith, in my view. I had
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 179

told him, I said, “I could never give this campus any money if you did that kind

of thing.” And I never will, symbolically, because of this. I think it’s an example

of how a good person, when they take on that kind of role, does these totally out-

of-tune things. I think he feels badly about it. He should change his mind and it

would make him more beloved, like what happened to Sinsheimer with the

banana slug. Instead he has us to lunch once a year. All emeriti are invited. I’ve

gone to those luncheons.

But, in any case, it was a small kind of thing. A lot of people then didn’t

use the fitness center and the wellness center and so on anymore. And, in fact,

we now have access, if we’re in Health Net, to free use of 24-Hour Fitness, and

maybe one or two other [health clubs], as part of keeping the elderly healthy. I

suspect some other health plans have that too. But those were two post-

retirement things where I said, “Oh boy, how can they do this?” It was so not

sensible by either Tanner, on the research professor title, or by Blumenthal

reneging on our free OPERS passes.

The Trajectory of Domhoff’s Research

I now want to turn from my work on the campus to my own research

work from 1965 on. It was mostly about power, some about dreams. And I want

to explain what I did between ’65 and ’80, and then go back and talk a little about

the political things I was involved in, and how I was drawn into politics and to

writing about how to change the United States, based on my power research,

which had zero impact, but at times looked like it was going to mean something.

Well, my dream research was essentially done by 1965, even if I published

a little bit of it later in the sixties. I also had been working on three essays in
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 180

applied psychoanalysis, the first on the origin of the ruling classes. The second

compared Norman O. Brown’s view of Martin Luther with that of a more ego-

Freudian named Erik Erikson, who was a very famous guy, was called “Two

Luthers: The Orthodox and the Heretical in Psychoanalytic Thinking.” Then I

wrote a big paper on the left and the right. They all appeared in the late sixties,

but I had, in fact, been on working on them for some time.

More on Calvin Hall

Although most of my research was on power by 1965, I did keep up with

dreams. And I did come back to dreams later. How was that possible? The

answer was real simple. It was because my mentor and friend and co-author,

Calvin Hall, retired here in the spring of 1966. His research grant to study

dreams in a sleep lab was completed. Miami’s not that intellectual of a place. He

had gone to UC Berkeley, loved the West Coast. He loved the ocean. He decided

he was going to come out this way. And he visited with people in Santa Barbara,

talked to an old friend there. But he knew Bert Kaplan here. He was a friend of

mine. He liked my wife. He liked to have little kids around. But he was older by

then. And so there were my kids here. And there were a couple other people.

So he decided to retire here, which was a bonanza for this young campus.

He arrived in the spring of 1966, and because he was here a person at Brandeis

interested in dreams came out and spent a year, a man named Richard Jones.

Calvin also knew a young sleep researcher, who was one of the leading people, a

man named Ralph Berger, a British guy. And Calvin mentioned Berger to

Kenneth Thimann for his science college. And, of course, Thimann liked that,

because Ralph was a graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh, and he was a great
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 181

researcher, and did both sleep and dreams, and later focused exclusively on

sleep, and did some important work. He was really the first person to put forth

an energy conservation theory of sleep, which was then revived later, and may

win the day, based on new data.

So because Calvin was here we could visit. I could keep up on what was

going on. We did one or two little projects over the years. Most of all, though, in

the sixties I taught a dream seminar, I think, through Cowell. I did at least twice.

And I’d say at certain point, “Calvin Hall is going to join us.”

Now, he was a very, in a way, shy guy. And by that time he didn’t want to

teach much. But he would come to the class and sit in, and pretty soon he’s

involved, and he’s answering questions, and he’s working with lots of the

students, which was just his kind of style—not to get out there and lecture and

be organized and mix it up with students. He just wasn’t that kind of a person.

He continued with his research and I would read his manuscripts. He

wrote a book with one of our students; it was on the dreams of Franz Kafka,

called Dreams, Life and Literature. That was about 1970. And then he wrote a book

that was interesting, the dreams of a child molester. He wrote it with a

psychologist who had worked with this child molester in prison, and the guy

had written down dreams. So Calvin studied them. And then he wrote a book in

1972 called The Individual and His Dreams, which was a popular book. I begged

him not say ‘his.’ By that time I knew better. But he was old-fashioned.

I had read and critiqued these manuscripts, was involved with them. And

he dedicated this 1972 book to me. It says, “To Bill Domhoff, fellow

psychopomp.” We had joked we were psychopompologists because we knew

from Greek myth that psychopompologists were the people that carried people
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 182

to the underworld. And that was our goal, was to carry people to the

underworld of the unconscious.

Calvin was very supportive of my work on sociology and power. To my

shock, at that point I learned that his first vote in 1932 was for Norman Thomas

for president, the Socialist Party man on the ticket. He was pretty much a pacifist.

He’d been a part of Soviet-American friendship committees that later got him

hauled before the House [Committee] on Un-American Activities, or at least he

had to answer questions to them when they came to Cleveland, Ohio, where he

was. He was never a communist, but a dedicated, principled kind of leftist. He

was also very involved in the 1948 Progressive Party campaign, and it’s told

about in a book called Gideon’s Army, by a journalism professor at Northwestern

named Curtis MacDougall. It’s a three-volume work, very detailed. And I

learned all that about Calvin only later. So that’s why he was sympathetic. I

didn’t know some of those things that I just said in the seventies. So Ralph and

his family, me and my family, Dick Jones—Calvin, he’d have us to a birthday

dinner. We’d talk. And so it gave me this parallel life about dreams.

Now, I said that I came here with the first draft of Who Rules America? I

said that earlier. And then, I wrote the next draft the summer of ’66, and it was

published in ’67. But the key to my research here was that basically I was getting

free volunteer student help, courtesy of money from the U.S. federal

government. It was partly War on Poverty, but they had other programs, I think.

And then from Academic Senate research grants.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 183

Student Researchers

Of course we were small, and I was actively researching, and maybe not

everybody was. So I had money. I had student helpers. And I’ll never forget, the

first one walked in and she said, “Would you need any research?” I said, “Well

yeah, but what’s the deal?” She said, “Well I have all this money because I’m low

income, and so I just have to find a job that’s meaningful.” I soon learned the

guidelines were it had to be a sensible job students would learn from, which was

incredible. That was soon abandoned. The campus needed money, and so pretty

soon you’re working on the loading dock, or passing out books at the library, or

doing some more everyday task.

Rabkin: Was this the work-study program?

Domhoff: Maybe partly it was work-study.

Rabkin: It was something else?

Domhoff: But really, it was federal government money at first. Maybe there was

state money. I didn’t know. I just know it was manna from heaven. Some great

students chose to work for me. I put the first person to work—the person I

mentioned that walked in my office was Sonne Lemke, a wonderful woman, who

went on to get a PhD in development psychology at Berkeley. Great, great

student—focused. I put her to work. We did research on the left and the right.

She read all these autobiographies and biographies of leftists and rightists for

me. And we developed profiles of what their families were like and so on.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 184

She then went to work for me on essays for my next book, my 1970 book,

which was called The Higher Circles. And when she was working for me on that

book, I had maybe five, six other people working for me on subsequent books.

On into the early eighties, I always had a student or two or three working for me.

They’re all mentioned in the preface to these books. They were all, as I say,

wonderful people. UCSC attracted very high-quality students and the openness

of that time was pretty amazing.

Who Rules America and The Higher Circles

Well, my interest in the power structure stuff was really boosted by a

huge, unexpected response—a popular, friendly, supportive response—to Who

Rules America? in 1967. It was really beyond my wildest hopes or dreams. It was

reviewed pretty early in the New York Review, which was still fairly new, by a

man named Robert Heilbroner, a famous economist of the day. Wrote a very

well-known book The Worldly Philosophers, but had written other things as well—

he was between Marxism and mainstream or whatever. He was good. And in

that review he also reviewed a book called The American Power Structure by a

pluralist sociologist named Arnold Rose. He gave people the idea to use my book

and The American Power Structure in tandem in courses, which I know because

students all over the country would write me—not by the hundreds, but maybe

dozens, over the space of several years, and say, “I have this assignment to

compare your books and I wanted to ask you this question about yours. What do

you think of that?” and so on. Which, incidentally, led me to write an essay on

his book in great detail that was part of my next book that I’ll talk about briefly,

called The Higher Circles.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 185

When Who Rules came out, a number of people raised questions about it,

although it had received very friendly reviews, certainly from anybody left of

center, but from some others as well. It certainly drew attention. We had a

political scientist on this campus who was a moderate Republican. I suspect he’s

a Democrat in his older age. He left eventually. His name was Karl Lamb. And

Karl said, “Well, to really convince me you’d have to show me how the

Democrats fit in. You’d have to show me how the Social Security Act fits in, and

especially the National Labor Relations Act.”

And that started me thinking, well, I’m going to research those and find

out. So I put these star research assistants to work on some of those kinds of

things. Then I did write about the Social Security Act and the National Labor

Relations Act in long essays in The Higher Circles. I also want to say I had some

things wrong, but particularly on the National Labor Relations Act. I didn’t

know it at the time, but it became a lifelong quest to understand those two acts,

and to find archives about them. I’m going to explain that in a minute.

But I did—I finally found brand-new, original material on these two acts

and wrote about them in a coauthored book in 2011 on class and power in the

New Deal. And I wrote essays on them in between. But getting those right

became real important to me because they were the ones that seemed not to fit.

But more generally, I realized that I could answer most of the kind of questions

that critics raised. And so that pulled me more and more into this power

research, and pushed dreams aside. So there were kind of two things that were

going on there.

In 1967, I was invited by a friend, by a new friend—to go to the socialist

scholar’s conference in New York. This new intellectual friend was named Jim
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 186

O’Connor, James O’Connor. He was at San Jose State. He was an economist. I

forget how he knew of my book, maybe because I had made mimeographs

before it was published. And he thought my work was just really useful as a

prelude, from his point of view, to introducing students to Marxism. I was—not

now, never was a Marxist, but I certainly thought there could be a left that would

be more ecumenical. It would certainly include us all coming to a new theory.

O’Connor was very symbolic and symptomatic in that, and he did end up a

colleague here. I had an office next to him for a number of years. But I’m going to

explain that it was acolytes of his, grad students in other campuses who were

part of his study group, who really externalized me, in a way stigmatized me.

So it was kind of ironic that Jim was the one that took me to this

conference. I met a number of people there that became really good friends. One

was named Jim Weinstein, James Weinstein. He wrote The Corporate Ideal in the

Liberal State, The Decline of Socialism in America, and other books. He became a

lifelong friend. He was ten years older, kind of a mentor. Why a mentor? Because

Jim had been a communist. He was from—I learned later—a quite well-to-do

family, millionaires, but at Cornell he had become a communist and was in the

Communist Party in the forties and into the middle-fifties, when he gave up on it

and just said, “This is going nowhere.” So he wasn’t an anti-communist; he was

an ex-communist—but friends with all these communists. We got along really

well, so he explained to me the difference between a Trotskyist and this and that.

We would be in a meeting and a guy would say two words, and Jim would say,

“That’s a Trotskyist.” And somebody else would say something and he’d say,

“That’s a Social Democrat.”

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 187

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: It was just fascinating. He had another friend, a really easygoing guy I

met there, named David Eakins. He was on a similar path: he had been a

communist, and then he gave up on it. Both he and Weinstein had returned to

graduate school, Weinstein at Columbia in history and Eakins at Wisconsin in

history, where there was a big-deal historian who was leftist but not Marxist,

named William Appleton Williams.

The important point is their historical work on class and power had

tremendous parallels with work I’d been doing on how American foreign policy

is made. And they gave me an opening. From their work, I really saw a way to

explain how policies are made—which I hadn’t talked about hardly at all in Who

Rules America? It was based on social backgrounds of people, network

connections. But now I could really show how policy was made.

So I thought, boy, this is great stuff. My books were doing well and I had

all these students working for me. I had these new friends. I should add that it

was hilarious because there were lots of people of different political persuasions

left of center who would invite me to talk. So I’d talk to the communists, or I’d

talk to the Trotskyists. And I’d learn—just about Who Rules America? which was,

basically I came to understand, something they all could agree on. It was a basic

premise for all of them. And then they would hate each other and fight about

everything else.

And in that context, one of the things that happened by 1970 was that

O’Connor was in disagreement with Jim Weinstein. They were arguing over

some particular article, and Weinstein, with some reluctance, had published an
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 188

article in their journal called Socialist Revolution—a critique by O’Connor that had

to do with American corporations somehow.

But at any rate, they get into these fights. And I learned that this is the

perennial; this is the norm, these constant divisions, splits. And so, when people

would ask me, “What are you,” or “What are you joining?” I said, “I’m not

joining anything until I understand why there’s constant arguments and

divisions and fights.” Which of course it never ended, so I never had to join

anything. But it did make me wary.

So at any rate, as I said, I wrote on the National Labor Relations Act and

the Social Security Act in The Higher Circles. I had other new original research in

there on social cohesion, social indicators. And I wrote a long article called “Dan

Smoot, Phyllis Schlafly, Reverend McBirnie, and Me.” These were three extreme

right-wing conspiratorial thinkers, the latter of whom, McBirnie, for his 125th

book, he’d written this little pamphlet called Who Rules America?—maybe he

called it Who Really Rules America. But it was clearly inspired by my title, but

never, of course, mentioned my book. And people would ask me, “How do you

differ from these conspiratorialists?” Phyllis Schlafly had had a book on

conspiracy.

I wrote a chapter showing just how wrong they were in terms of saying

“This was all secret.” It’s all in the New York Times. I tried to explain very

carefully that they really had a psychological theory. We had a sociological

theory. We thought it was more open, that these are not secret organizations.

People are in their proper roles: the capitalists are trying to make money; the

politicians are trying to get elected. The chapter didn’t have any effect, because

then my critics that were pluralists, if they didn’t like it, they’d still just yell
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 189

“Conspiracy!” Which was the equivalent of calling somebody a Red or a

Communist.

But in any case, that book also did very well. And so Who Rules America

and The Higher Circles put me right out there with everybody else. They were

selling a lot, and I knew they got a lot of currency. People would write me about

them.

But at any case the interesting thing about that I’ll come back to slightly, is

that in 1998 a sociologist decided to find out what were the top fifty bestsellers in

sociology between 1950 and 1995. He’d written to publishers and then to authors

of books that he thought were likely to have big sales, and he asked us to send

him our royalty statements. So I’d sent him my royalty statements on all of my

books, and I didn’t know where they would stack up in these whole lists.

But it turns out Who Rules America? was the eleventh bestselling book. So I

was in the top fifty at number eleven, which is interesting to keep in mind when

I’m being thrashed in the 1970s and disappeared in the 1980s, that when the

students of these people saw how much at one time I had been A-Okay, some of

them were a little surprised. To the point that when I spoke at NYU in March

2013, the person who introduced me, who is twenty-five, thirty years younger,

he said, “If I’m not mistaken, Bill had four books in the top fifty in sociology.”

He’s telling this to these grad students. So it gave me some standing, once again.

And The Higher Circles is number thirty-eight on the list. And they were

my two highest. I’ll come to the others later. But the point for now is that by the

1990s, people were shocked to know of the high standing of these books, the

frequent reading they had once received.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 190

Fat Cats and Democrats: The Role of Big Rich in the Party of the Common Man

Well, at that point I’m really riding high, as you might imagine even from

the tone of my voice. But I went to work on a book at that time called Fat Cats and

Democrats, we later named it. Fat Cats and Democrats: The Role of Big Rich in the

Party of the Common Man. I had a contract for it with Prentice Hall, which had

done the Who Rules America? book. And it did come out 1972.

Part of the research was done when I was on a visiting year at Santa

Barbara. I was getting antsy within psychology. We thought it would be good to

at least try down there. I had written some of the people. I’d met them. Two or

three of them became lifelong friends from our visit down there. But during that

time, I was traveling around a lot and doing a lot of exciting interviews—the first

time I’d done interviewing for these kinds of books. I traveled to New York City

and conquered my height phobia momentarily to go up to the eightieth floor to

talk to one of the biggest deals in the investment banking business. I went to San

Francisco. I went to Washington, D.C. I had interviews in L.A.

And then I saw, “Boy, I’m running out of gas and money on this.” So I

telephone-interviewed all over the South. I would spend six, eight hours a day

talking to these people about Democrats, particularly around campaign finance. I

had an enormous amount of data on how they were financed. I knew the history

of the Democratic Party cold at that particular point. And I’d even, to finish it, I

had gotten an advance that essentially was one third of my salary then. I think

my salary was about $21,000. And I got an advance of $7500. And I thought, I

can’t save this. I’ve got to spend it on taking a one-quarter sabbatical.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 191

So I did what I always believed in: I said, “We’ve got to invest in our time

and in our own selves.” And I just took a quarter off and threw my advance into,

in effect, my salary, so we could continue to live—by that time with four

children.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: My daughters were born in ’62 and ’63, my son in ’65, and we had

another son in 1968. So we had four kids in tow down at Santa Barbara. So it was

quite a busy and wild time. We’d rented a house from a chemistry prof. We were

right across from a really nice field near a creek. We’d go out there and run

around, and chase and play sports. It was, in many ways, an idyllic time. I’d ride

a little motor scooter—it was a Honda Ninety—up to the Santa Barbara campus.

A little bit of my ride was illegal on the freeway because it was only a Ninety. I’d

been riding such a contraption since we’d arrived in Santa Cruz, incidentally,

because we couldn’t afford a second car. It was easy to go from where we lived

on Alta Vista on the hill, so I’d just buzz up to campus. And it was so few

students, an easy road, went through one little field that’s now fully developed.

But in any case, it was a very busy time, an exciting time. I still thought I

was on top of the world. But the book was a mistake in how it was written. It

was my fault. I’ve had many regrets over this book, because it was too flippant. I

didn’t use all of my data. I buried it in glibness. I was influenced a little bit by a

guy we’d met named Ferdinand Lundberg, who was a jaunty journalist of the

twenties. And he still enacted that role. He’d written a famous book in the

thirties called America’s Sixty Families. He’d written a couple other books, and in

the sixties made a little bit of comeback. He was kind of a character. He wasn’t an
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 192

academic. He didn’t have degrees, but he wrote a book on ‘the second sex,’ or

something about women that was too Freudian and very sexist, patriarchal. And

it certainly besmirched his reputation. He’d coauthored that book with

somebody else. He was more of a writer than anything else. At any rate, he loved

the alliterative kind of terms and phrases. He made a lot of suggestions. And I

took too many of them. But it was still my fault. I had written it glibly.

Rabkin: Did he have an influence on your choice of title?

Domhoff: No, not at all. That title came from my wife, Fat Cats and Democrats,

because people used the phrase “fat cats” at that time. So that’s where the title

popped up.

But I talked of the limousine liberals and was flippant about the liberals—

although I was right that they were marginal. I talked about the Southern

albatross; I talked about the Southern rich and their importance in the party. I

wrongly said that they would never leave the party, based on my interviews,

because they liked feeding at the trough of all the federal subsidies. Which it

turned out they could do while voting Republican at the national level, and

didn’t leave the party until decades later.

Worst of all, I had an opening chapter called ‘Jews and Cowboys.’ I had

done some research showing, first of all, very few of the corporate leaders were

giving to campaigns at that time. I was trying to understand the pattern. It would

tend to be the Jews on these corporate boards that gave to the Democrats—which

then, is no surprise if you look wider than just economic. But at any case, they

did a lot of business through Wall Street guys with other outsiders, Texans,

which I called cowboys.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 193

And what I really had discovered was, a generalization that I’ve always

used since, the Republicans and their predecessors were the party of the

established, of the proper, the Federalists, high-minded, the WASPs, the high

religion, proper bankers and so on. Everybody else who is a Democrat, from the

day the party was started in the 1790s, has been marginal in some way. And that

included the rich Southerners: Jefferson and all the presidents that were slave

owners. They were slave owners in a land of free labor. They were agrarians in

an industrializing society. I came to realize that they were marginal. That was the

big thing. The party is made up of marginal people to this day; people who are in

some way mistreated or excluded, or made to feel second class—they are the

people that remain Democrats.

And it was Catholics at that time, still, too. But they’re now okay, because

they’re lumped in as ‘Christians,’ and so lots of them—and especially the rich

ones—leave the party. But the Jews have never left the party. And I think I

understand that in terms of antisemitism, the history of antisemitism—in the

seventies I’d learned more about these social clubs—they still included Jews at

that time period. Many of them still do.

And in work I’m going tell about that I’ve done with somebody else

where he did the interviews, we learned just how annoying this was to wealthy

Jews, and how they were mistreated in prep schools and so on. But in any case, it

was a mistake to talk about Jews and cowboys and to write glibly about these

touchy kinds of topics. I had a sense this could happen.

I’d had a number of friends read it who were Jewish, who were

sociologists, and particularly at Santa Barbara, two or three people, including the

very militant wife of one of my sociology colleagues. My colleague was Richard

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 194

Flacks, Dick Flacks, who had a lot of training similar to mine. I feel very close to

him and his wife, Mickey. They both grew up as red diaper babies, and I learned

a tremendous amount about leftism and Communism and so on from them.

They were founders of the New Left. He helped write the Port Huron Statement,

period. He was really a right-hand man to [Tom] Hayden. But in any case, they

read my manuscript. They said, “No problem, no problem.” And Murray

Baumgarten on our campus read it, and “Oh, Bill,” he said, “My grandfather

would only want to ask one question,” he said, “He’d want to know, is this good

for the Jews?” But he said, “I think it’s fine. I think this day and age,” and so on.

But I had one friend, Maurice Zeitlin, a sociologist now at UCLA. He said,

“Bill, I don’t like it. I don’t like that way of talking.” It surprised me, because he

was a real heavy Marxist. But in a way he was quasi-Zionist, and he actually

spent a year in Israel with his kids. He said to me, “This antisemitism is so

deeply ingrained, damn right I’m taking these kids to Israel. They have to know

what they may face. They have to be ready, just in case.” So he said, “You’re

making a mistake.”

Well, he was only one voice, but I sure learned you listen to that voice.

Because I was criticized. I was even—in some reviews it was hinted that I was an

antisemite, about this particular book.

I’ll come back to some of that, because it did create an interest in

constantly understanding divisions in the power structure, and certainly alerted

me further to the importance of religion in people’s identity. I’d understood that

as a psychologist. As I say, I was never a Marxist, so I never put everything on

class or economics. But it was certainly a very useful, experiential kind of

learning. I was later able to put these main insights into a chapter in a 1990 book
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 195

about out-groups and marginality in the Democrats. I understood that the

Democratic Party North and South was really a spending alliance, because the

Republicans didn’t like to spend money. And the urban Democrats liked to

spend on their city projects, and the Southern Democrats liked their agricultural

subsidies.

But anyway, that book was a failure, and took me aback. And they didn’t

put it in paperback, even.

The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study of Ruling Class Cohesiveness

My next book was on social cohesion. It was called The Bohemian Grove and

Other Retreats: A Study of Ruling Class Cohesiveness. It was a book that was meant

to answer pluralist critics that said, “Oh, you just have a list of names of people.

You don’t even know if they know each other,” and so on. I knew from social

psych literature that there was a lot of evidence that when you bring people

together face-to-face and if they share common values and it’s a relaxed setting

and so on, they develop social cohesion. The claim by pluralists was, before you

could talk about a dominant class, you had to show that they had common

interests, and that they hung together. Critics wanted proof of what was called

cohesion, social cohesiveness. So I developed a mantra that cohesion makes

possible consensus, that when people have social cohesion they listen to each

other more. And there was experimental social psych literature on that, and I did

use it in the book.

The book began while I was interviewing in San Francisco for my Fat Cats

book. I was waiting to talk to this guy who was a bit of a maverick. I noticed he

had these membership lists for the Bohemian Club and the Pacific Union Club in
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 196

the room where I was waiting. So I asked the secretary, “Do you think he might

be able give me copies, or loan me a copy?” She said, “He might, he might.” At

any rate, he was glad to talk to me. He was really a proselytizer for employee-

owned businesses. He was a character. He was marginal intellectually, but

respectable by his day job, and you know, obviously worked and made some

money and so on, because he was in the elite social clubs. So we had a great chat.

He knew something about some of my earlier work. And so we had a real good

chat about the Democrats. And I asked him if I could have copies of these club

lists. He said, “Sure, great.”

Well, the reason that was so important was that then I had a solid basis. I

could trace these names into corporations, other clubs, schools, and so on. Huge

social background analysis. It was a great starting point. So I decided, this is the

organization I want to focus on to demonstrate social cohesion. I had been

looking for a way to do this kind of study—the right prep school, the right club,

whatever. I’d heard a little bit about the Bohemian Club.

I knew, ironically, a tiny bit more about it because [Chancellor] Dean

McHenry was a member. He was so thrilled with that. I think he was so pleased

with himself to be a member. I was once at a dinner he had for the ambassador to

New Zealand. He would often invite a different mix of faculty to dinners. So I

was there, but so was the social psychologist, Dane Archer, on the campus, who

had studied for a year in New Zealand. And so he fit. Dane and I were buddies.

But at any rate, McHenry turned somehow to the subject of the Bohemian Grove

and its retreat. We didn’t know anything about it. So he had to explain. And you

could just see it puff him up with pride. And then he said, “When we’re there,”

he said, “We dress just like students when we’re up there.”

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 197

So I’d had a little inkling of it. I’d read of it briefly. But I went into

historical archives, found lots of stuff. And I did interviews and I had a couple of

informants, in effect, through friends of friends. I was in the clubhouse at two or

three different times. I was even in the Bohemian Grove, before the July

encampment, for the Saturday Picnic in June, which was also known as the June

Picnic, or known as Ladies’ Day, because you could bring your wife or friend or

daughters and we could all walk around the Bohemian Grove.

Rabkin: Was it normally a male enclave?

Domhoff: It’s all male-only. And tremendous tensions about that in the 1970s. I

even ended up testifying in Sacramento—I had forgotten about that—against

their tax deduction because it excluded women. They fought it unbelievably.

They refused to let women in that club. They said, “It would ruin everything on

our encampments. We couldn’t go around naked.” One of the things they often

talked about is they’d just stop and urinate anywhere, like on the redwoods and

so on. And they’d drink a lot when they were up there.

So the fight over inclusion then narrowed to employees. They didn’t want

to hire any women downtown or in the grove. But the last I knew the way it

worked—and probably since the eighties—there’s a center circle in the grove

where they have the mess hall, basically all the cooking and that kind of stuff.

They bus women into that circle. And they have a badge that sort of tells your

zone or what areas you can enter and not enter. So women can’t go outside their

center zone. The guys that work there are making sandwiches or delivering stuff

and so on. They’ve got a different badge, of course. They can move out further

from the inner circle, into other zones. But the women are isolated. And I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 198

actually, through a friend, learned something of that because a woman he knew

who was at Cornell’s hotel management school—this was in the nineties—I think

she did an internship there as part of her hotel experience.

I knew of a comparable group from my stay in Santa Barbara. It was

called the Rancheros Visitadores: the RVs. And this was a spin-off, in effect, of

the Bohemian Club, where a guy in the 1920s or 1930s, who had been at the

Bohemian Grove encampment, he said, “We need one of these in Santa Barbara.”

He was a rich guy. He set up a party week in which they would ride horses back

into the Santa Ynez Mountains. They would hang out for a week, and they’ve got

their little chuck wagons with them. They were really far more coarse even than

the Bohemians in their whole way of doing things, because they were playing at

being cowboys, so they were raunchy, and more dirty pictures, and more silly

stuff. If you messed around, they put you in the wagon that’s got these bars, and

you had to ride in this like you were in prison for a while.

So that project had a lot of rich data in it from interviews, and from the

historical archives. And at a certain point in my research, a member of the club

who was an official got in touch with me. They were willing to talk to me

because they were afraid I would distort some things. By then, they knew I was

determined I was going to do the book. Here, the interesting thing I might say,

intellectually, is they wanted to reassure me that they were just about to have a

black member. And I said, “I don’t think you have any Jewish members.” The

point is that wasn’t the issue at that time. The issue was a black member. “Oh no,

we now have a couple, three Jewish members.” But they were very recent as

well.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 199

He also was very afraid that I would overemphasize what was legendary

as the club stereotype—and mostly wrong—that there was an enormous amount

of prostitution, both inside the grove and outside in Monte Rio. Which I had

learned from a reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat was wrong. They had

studied it. The sheriffs had studied it and so on. There was a small amount, but it

was trivial. These are older guys, and they’re not up there for that and so on.

And when you go to the bars where the pick-up things are, which I did, you

can’t tell a Bohemian from a schmohemian when you go in there.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: A guy walks up to this obvious woman, but who is the guy? There’re

a lot of resorts up there, and a lot of guys up there playing golf that aren’t

Bohemians. So all the while the Bohemian official wants me to tone it down

about prostitution, which by then I wasn’t even going to hardly mention. He’d

totally talked about how much they drank, the millions of gallons of this and that

they brought in. So his presentation of self was totally revealing: oblivious on

Jews, oblivious on an enormous amount of drinking. As a presentation of self, it

was pretty shocking. But he was worried that I might emphasize that they had

no black members and that some of them visited prostitutes. Of course, no

prostitutes came in the Grove—something I’ll come to in a minute.

The last chapter of the book was a gigantic network analysis, very

quantitative, of twenty-five or so policy groups and clubs, and all their

interconnections. Because the book was built like, “Okay, I’ll draw them into it

through all these fantastic ceremonies and the silly stuff they do,” and then in the

last chapter I became more analytical and I was saying, “Okay, and here is what
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 200

this relates to: social cohesion creates policy cohesion. They’re all in these big

policy groups: the Business Council, the Committee for Economic Development.

And they’re all big corporate leaders.

Then I had an appendix of heavies, we called it. People like that were

known as ‘heavies’ in those days. So I had a big appendix of heavies that showed

which of five to eight groups they were a part of. So it was a fairly big book

because of that appendix, but it was fairly short without the appendix of heavies.

And it particularly got criticized for allegedly padding this hardcover book—and

particularly by one pluralist that annoyed the devil out of me. So I took the

appendix out for the paperback, which I now regret. Because people would have

had a lot of fun playing with it.

Well, the book got some play. It got reviewed in The New York Review—

actually [it was] the third time I’d been reviewed in The New York Review, because

none other than Gore Vidal had reviewed my Fat Cats and Democrats book in The

New York Review. And at that point I thought, “Wow, this’ll take this book

sailing.” But it still didn’t go anywhere. This time I was reviewed by a

curmudgeon of a political scientist, a contrarian named Andrew Hacker, who’d

been a thorn in my side in many ways. He made a sport of it, “Oh, they’re just

out there drinking and what’s the big deal?” and so on.

And he named four or five random members. He said, “That’s silly: Edgar

Burgen, the ventriloquist.” And he named a few others. So when I wrote an

answer to him, I had restudied all four or five of the names he casually

mentioned. I put my researchers to work, which, of course in those days, was in

magazines and business books. You had to go to the library and look in different

books. It wasn’t googling anybody, that’s for sure. It was very time-consuming. I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 201

showed, in fact, that all those Hacker mentioned were interconnected in

numerous ways, and that they were also all in the Century Club, and that Edgar

Bergen was friends with four or five major businessmen and had certainly made

some dough and invested. And a couple of these guys sat on boards together. So

he was a wise guy, this Hacker guy, that never did any research, just kibitzed

and chirped. He didn’t hurt the book at that particular time.

Basically, the interesting thing was that the pluralists piped down talking

about consensus. Now they said, “Oh, well, this is a conspiratorial book. I mean,

he’s trying to say their plans are hatched in the Bohemian Grove.” Which, of

course, they’re too drunk, and I had said so in the book. But it was also seen as

irrelevant. And that will come up when I talk about my relation to the Marxists

in the seventies. So in that sense—while, people tell me, “I loved it. I love the

opening part about the ceremony they have where they burn the body of Dull

Cares.” So it’s symbolic: let’s get rid of our concerns and be free. And so they

burn the body of a man named Dull Care.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: So people liked it. They used it. But it didn’t have the impact I had

hoped. It didn’t have that many sales, which I use an indicator of how really

successful a book is—not for the money, but for, is anybody reading it?

And it had an aftermath which was kind of shocking. The book came out

in ’74, but by ’77, ’78, some leftists started the Bohemian Grove Action Network.

They’re hassling the members coming in the gates, and they’re saying they’re

plotting about putting in nuclear plants: “PG&E will have nuclear.” So they

completely distort the book. I went up to one of their gatherings. They had a
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 202

woman there who said she’s a former prostitute. She had done prostitution

inside the Bohemian Grove, she claimed, and she knew they were plotting and

planning because she was right there in bed with them while they were plotting

and planning. And it was a just horrifying experience for me, to see what the

activists were doing and how wrong it was. You want to say, “No, no. That’s not

it.”

Rabkin: Were they using your book as the basis for those accusations?

Domhoff: Yeah, they used it as bait and a draw. And before I knew how horrible

they were, I’d gone up and I was one of the speakers with this prostitute and

some others. But wow—and a couple of them are the nicest people in the world.

But it was upsetting.

But even more upsetting is—and you can go onto YouTube and all and

see this—a really crazy rightist, a conspiratorialist to the utmost, a Texan named

Alex Jones. He says that these people are practicing child sacrifice up there in this

cremation of care ceremony, and that there’s rampant homosexuality, and the

people who run our country are all secret gays, and so on and so forth. They

don’t reference my book as much anymore. They’ve got their own insane

literature. But nonetheless, I really was the person that called that much attention

to the Bohemian Grove.

And it’s just a shocking commentary on something people told me. Calvin

Hall had said, “Look, Bill, books have a life of their own. You cannot control

that.” I think he even said, “They’re like anyone’s children. They can’t control

them. What happens to a book—who knows?” And that’s what happened.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 203

I want to say, though, that the Bohemian Grove still goes on. It hasn’t

changed a bit. And I now write about it in several paragraphs, as a section in

each edition of Who Rules America? to talk about it in terms of social cohesion. I

also, in effect, updated the book and put it on the web. I have a web site called

WhoRulesAmerica.net. And people now can go on that web site, and they can

read the background on why I did it. They can read the main parts of it. And all

the various photographs and slides I’d collected I put up there, so people can see

what really goes on, and what it looks like and so on. So that was a big deal

project, but boy, did that have some ending.

A Study of New Haven

Now, right about this time in the early 1970s, my life took a different

intellectual direction, just out of another happenstance. Often I’m looking for

opportunities, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. So there’s a certain

way in which this research is opportunistic, in a different way than if you had a

lab—you know, you’re going to march, march, march, march. But here, I’ve got

to take my openings when I get them.

There was a guy on our campus who was on the staff in the social sciences

that I knew, a nice guy named Bill Robinson. I think he was some sort of social

scientist in his training. And he said, “Bill, do you know Floyd Hunter?” I said,

“No, I don’t.” Well, Floyd Hunter was a very famous power structure researcher

of the fifties who’d written a book called Community Power, in 1953. It was really

about Atlanta, and it had caused a hullaballoo because he said only a few people

run Atlanta. It had led to political scientists fulminating against it, but also to a

famous political scientist writing a book about New Haven, a book called Who
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 204

Governs? in which Robert Dahl said—the author, a Yale political scientist—

basically said New Haven is a little America; it’s a little example of how America

works, that you get a sense of America from studying New Haven. He had

written that in the early sixties. He had won prizes. It’s one of the most cited and

famous books. And it was interesting, because he was a theorist before and after,

and this was the only really systematic, empirical thing he ever did. It was with

helpers. He had a grad student who was in the mayor’s office, and he had

another guy doing the literature and so on.

I met Floyd Hunter and I really liked him. He was a good old boy from

Kentucky. He was now retired, but he had a nice style. As I talked to him, I

thought, “This guy really knows his stuff.” Now, I had not been that interested in

local power, but I had read with care a book he’d written called Top Leadership,

USA in the late fifties, where basically by travelling back and forth around the

country on his own money, he had interviewed a lot of the powerful people of

that day. And he listed out their names and also the ones he’d learned about in

his interviews. His lists overlapped tremendously with our network analyses

based on archives. And I had said so in Who Rules America?

So I got to know Floyd, and it turns out he was partially embarked on a

study in which he was going to compare Dahl’s New Haven with Atlanta. He

was going to update them both. I thought, what a great idea. That would be so

perfect. He told me he’d talked to some wheels in New Haven and had this a

little bit of a start and all. I was really excited and I was hoping he was going to

do it. But he was out of gas, and he wasn’t going to do it. He said, “I’ve really

decided I’m not going to do that. I’ll be lucky if I finish my updated Atlanta.”
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 205

Which did take him then another seven, eight years. And it didn’t have any

impact. It had some good stuff in it.

But at any rate, it got me thinking about, “Yes, I’ve got to study New

Haven.” I got into a study of New Haven, primarily inspired by Floyd. I started

to look at archives. I did interviews. I went back there. I’d call friends and say, “I

want to talk at Trinity,” or whatever college was nearby. And I’d earn money to

fly back there. Nobody was going to finance me, foundations, whatever, to do

this kind of research. Yeah, I still received grants from the Academic Senate. I

was never hassled on the campus or anything. But I’d have to hustle money to go

to New Haven. Then I would go through these files. And I did telephone

interviews like crazy with people. Some face-to-face, too, but telephone

interviews from California.

But I also had a chance then to meet and talk with Dahl. He was really

nice to me. He was a friendly, outgoing guy. And he said, “You’re welcome to

use all my files.” And he kind of gestured over to a wall, and there sitting in the

open are all of his interviews and so on. He said, “You’re free to look through

them and use them in whenever way you want.” I thought, “What a guy.” What

he had told me when I interviewed him, he said, “I was a socialist in college in

the thirties. I always thought that at various times America would continue to

lurch leftward.” I think the civil rights movement had rekindled this interest. He

had also become involved in a movement that was trying to convince General

Motors to do something decent, maybe it was around integration, but I forget.

And he really was annoyed by General Motors and how it treated people. By

then he was pretty much of a critic of these big companies. He was still a
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 206

pluralist, but he’d actually improved his theory, and the other pluralists did not

follow.

But at any rate, he let me look at these files and these interviews. I looked

at them and I about jumped out of my skin because a lot of them, I thought, said

something very different than what he thought. So I’m starting to take notes, and

I said, “I can’t take notes. This’ll take forever.” So I photocopied a tremendous

amount because he said I could use them, right? So I photocopied a tremendous

amount of that important material, so that I could integrate it and so I would

have photocopy evidence, not just notes, if anyone doubted me. And I then did a

very careful network analysis once again of all of the directors of big companies

in that city. I obtained the membership lists of social clubs. I essentially replicated

but expanded his particular study. I was basically able to show that he had a lot

of things wrong.

Rabkin: Hmm.

Domhoff: I won’t go into any detail. But he really didn’t do a good job at all.

And he really had taken the Democratic Party perspective, and the interviews he

trusted the most were from these Democrats—and certainly he was a liberal

guy—and also he relied on an employee of Yale, an alumnus that worked for the

mayor, and whose father-in-law was a dean on the Yale campus. And this right-

hand man to the mayor also had gone to Yale and loved Yale. He later became a

very big deal in urban renewal all over the country, including running things in

New York. His name was Edward Logue. I spoke with him, and he was very

candid, outgoing and helpful.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 207

So I had this book and it came out in ’78. It caused a little bit of a stir.

People were shocked by it, upset by it, pleased by it. There was a big panel on it

at one of the sociology meetings.

Rabkin: What were you saying that contradicted Dahl’s interpretations of his

research?

Domhoff: Well, I don’t want to try to go into the detail on it, because one of the

things we’d talked about [before the oral history] was that I should just

characterize sort of the background of these books—because people could read

them. I will say it’s also now all up on the web. I’ll come to that.

But in any case, the point is that there were two or three key questions:

Why did urban renewal suddenly take off in 1953 or ’54 in New Haven, which

was precisely when Mayor Lee, the famous Democratic mayor, was elected. And

why did they receive so much money from Washington? There were a couple of

other questions. And he gave them all the same kind of answer, which was,

“Mayor Lee and all these political activists, they were able to really work with

the bureaucracy in Washington and win all this money.”

But the answers were different to each question. In fact, what happened

was that local real estate elites—we call them growth coalitions—had been able

to block what little money there was for urban renewal between the passage of

the Housing Act in 1949 and ’52. Because they didn’t want housing. They wanted

to tear everything down and rebuild their downtowns.

What happened that was crucial was that Eisenhower won the presidency

and Republicans took over Congress in early 1953 for the first time since 1930.

And they immediately changed the urban renewal law so you could build more
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 208

downtown buildings, not housing. The city’s one-third could be partly accounted

for if Yale builds a building and so on. So they jimmied it to favor big real estate

interests. And that’s why it really took off at that particular time.

But also, Dahl missed the fact that they couldn’t move on urban renewal

because there were a lot of challenges to it by smaller landowners, and by right-

wing ideologues about private property. So there had to be some key decisions

by state courts, and I recall in Connecticut it’s called the Supreme Court of Errors

or something like that. Until that Supreme Court ruled that urban renewal was

okay, New Haven couldn’t move.

As far as why they received so much money, it was all Yale. Dahl said

Yale was not important. Yale was tremendously important. As he said, most

professors don’t pay any attention. Well, of course they don’t. They don’t pay

attention here. But the top administrators sure did. And the trustees sure did.

And the head, one of the key trustees, was none other than George W. Bush’s

grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was a very big Wall Street financier who lived in

Connecticut. He was a senator from Connecticut, as well as being a Yale trustee. I

find out in the archives that they’re calling him every minute for help. So are

they big geniuses sitting in New Haven? Or is their success because they got on

the phone and said, “Hey, Prescott, they’re not moving very fast at the Housing

and Home Finance Agency, HHFA.” So Logue would call Bush and then things

moved faster.

But the interesting thing then another researcher found—this is where

archives are so important—later a political scientist found that basically every

proposal that was put forward by a city between ’54 and ’55, while the

Republicans are in charge was eventually approved—and they wanted to pump

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 209

up the economy at that point, besides. The New Haven people weren’t geniuses.

They just sent the application in first and then pressured. Every one of them was

approved for everyone. [hits table] So this blows Dahl’s claims out of the water.

It’s really risky to do the kind of study he did without a lot of documents. Such a

study has to be historical.

So I really showed that. The book did pretty well its first few years. It sold

three or four thousand copies a year. My Prentice Hall publisher had said, “Bill,

we won’t publish it because it won’t sell big. Because there’s not enough courses

on community power.” Now, they happened to be dead right.

But I then found another publisher, and found for him a paperback

publisher. We did sell up to three thousand, four thousand a year for three or

four years. But it fell back. That book was buried. You will see thousands of

references still to Who Governs? But they never mention that it was questioned by

me, although a few people believe that I’m right. So I thought, wow, that’s

amazing denial.

But it was also really a sign of the times. Things were heading back to

normalcy, and the kind of stuff that I did was going to disappear. I’m going to

come to that just a minute.

Who Rules America Now?

But the fun thing about the New Haven book, just like I’ll explain with the

National Labor Relations Act: I stayed with it. I went back to New Haven in the

late seventies, and I did more research, and saw more documents and did this

and that. I can’t remember the details. And then I put a better version—shorter,

obviously, but better version of my account of New Haven into my 1983 book
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 210

called Who Rules America Now? Prentice Hall said, “Bill, you’ve got to update this

book” and so on. And so at this time I had a really long chapter on urban power

structures, thanks to Floyd. And I’d learned a tremendous amount more about

the topic. I hadn’t really cared about urban power with Who Rules America?, I

should say. And I said, “Yeah, at the local level I think Dahl’s probably right. But

Hunter’s probably right for Atlanta. Cities are different.”

But by 1983, I had a powerful chapter that also linked to a new theory that

a friend of mine (Harvey Molotch in sociology at UC Santa Barbara) had

developed, that I had finally assimilated. It’s very simple, and I love it. And that

is, local politics are strictly about land values. That’s all that the real estate people

care about, is that it’s always a good time to buy; it’s always a good time to build.

And they’ve conned a million, billion people. It’s a mentality. So even the littlest

real estate salesperson in this town is part of this growth coalition, always trying

to pump up these land values. That’s the way they make money—not by selling

gadgets and other products, but by intensifying the use of their land, whether it’s

building prostitution houses in Las Vegas, or a better roller coaster in Santa Cruz,

or making Santa Barbara a great tourist attraction, or building high rises in New

York. They’re all about making land valuable.

And their main opponents are neighborhoods, because growth coalitions

always want to put a bigger road in your neighborhood; they want to put a high

rise in your neighborhood; they want to do something. Or they want to roust you

out of your neighborhood, if you’re black and close to the inner city, which has

caused most of the problems in the city. Push them out because we want the land

for a stadium, which will then make our other land more valuable.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 211

So I now had this great theory, thanks to this friend—it’s incidentally a

theory that beautifully contradicts Marxists. I’ll come back to that when I talk

about the study of Santa Cruz.

So I put that in my ’83 book, and I still kept researching on New Haven.

When I retired, I went back to New Haven again because more archives were

open, and I saw more material from the trustees, and also from the former

mayor, who would not let me see his papers while he was alive because he was

so upset about the book. Now I see all of his papers. I see all of Logue’s papers.

So I had a lot of new stuff, some of which I haven’t fully used. But the point is

that there’s now a new version of the New Haven book in more detail on my

web site at WhoRulesAmerica.net, with these great pictures that I’m going to

explain about and (inaudible) from a great research assistant that I have to tell

about. So I now have enormous closure on New Haven and that 1978 book.

The Powers That Be

All along I’d been working on a new book that would talk about just

exactly how—what are the details of the process that these elite rich people, these

big corporate people—use to relate to government. And in 1979 I wrote a book

called The Powers That Be. I told about four key processes. One of them was very

common: lobbying, interest groups. But the other one is more genteel. It’s these

policy groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. Experts and corporate guys

sit around and discuss, and the corporate guys learn from that. And then they go

be the head of the state department. I showed just how policies are made. I

showed how that particular same set of organizations is tied to a whole set of

public relations organizations, which I call the opinion-influencing network. I’ve

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 212

studied it more since. Basically they outsource all the PR material to advertising

agencies. PR people give corporate money to the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, help

the local newspaper. And then I also wrote about the role of campaign finance

again in the rise of big politicians. So the book exactly explains how corporate

domination occurs. I’ve used that model ever since and constantly updated and

improved it.

That book was very successful. It too climbed into the top fifty, so in that

sense I later learned that I was back in the game in 1979. It was number forty-six

on the top-50 list. Who Rules America Now? now ended up forty-two. So I had

books at eleven, thirty-eight, forty-two and forty-six. Which, as I say, came as a

total shock in the nineties. People hadn’t realized—I’m repeating—that those

books had been that successful. I was the only person with four books on the list.

Another guy had four, but two of them were coauthored. So I was right up there,

and that helped me in the late nineties and 2000s, as a retired guy, to have the

little connection I could still maintain with the new generations of sociologists.

Now, I also want to say that that book contained not a harsh critique, but a

gentle critique of the Marxists, who had by then become my critics, which I’m

going to explain just a little bit later. On this work I had a great research assistant

I want to mention, Hal Salzman, an undergraduate. He later earned his PhD at

Brandeis in sociology, and is now a professor at Rutgers. He was into computers,

and God love him, he was trying to bring me up to speed on the new computer

developments. I’d remember and I’d try, and then I’d forget if I wasn’t doing it.

But we did a couple of papers together that then were assimilated into various

books later. They were very original kind of network research papers that really

refuted the kinds of claims that pluralists have made.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 213

A Broader Political Context

I want to stop at that point, as far as my research, for a reason that you’ll

see, of my becoming very marginal. And I want to explain about politics, both in

the real world and in the academic world, that were going on while all of this

was going on. So at one level, you see I was doing well, and these books were

well-received. Then I kind of screwed up on the Bohemian Grove and the Fat Cats

books. But the New Haven book was well received and The Powers That Be book

was well received. Lots of sociologists, lots of students were still interested. My

classes were still pretty large. But there was something else that was going on,

that related to politics.

So let me begin by saying that while all this was going on from the sixties

on I was trying to be an unpaid consultant, as I called myself, to political

activists. I was curious. I would like to be able to see a change. I admit to being

an egalitarian, but I tried to be very careful to keep that separate from my

findings and my research, and I think the evidence that I succeeded is how upset

many leftists got with what I wrote about various kinds of things. For example, I

said, “Look, newspapers, the media: they aren’t that important.” They hated that

conclusion. But I’m going to give other examples here as well.

Now, I already said that my red file, my FBI file, had begun with being in

the union. And I had given a speech to the Free Speech Movement down at Cal

State LA. But on the campus I was not much of a strong activist when there were

antiwar things. We once kind of semi-blocked a campus drive. We’d march

around. We’d let cars through. We had a big, long car back-up. We’d hand them

papers. It was students and faculty. I think that might have triggered them to
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 214

move my FBI file from LA to Santa Cruz, because as I say, I now know

retrospectively that they reinvestigated me in Santa Cruz in the middle sixties.

But what happened that really got me involved in a fairly minor celebrity

kind of way, but with no impact, was that in 1967 SDS [Students for a Democratic

Society] nationwide called for an international student strike day. There was a

little bit of SDS on the campus. I didn’t really know much about it at the time.

They asked me to speak. I spoke in the quarry. And I called my speech “How to

Commit Revolution in Corporate America.” Which you can tell already [with]

that kind of title, it had a little bit of—it had the flavor, still, of the positive

aspects of the New Left.

And the interesting background to that was, as it was coming up towards

the time of this strike and my talk and all—maybe it was publicized on

campus—the chancellor sent out a notice to all of us, kind of a flyer, that pointed

out that you’re not allowed to strike if you’re a faculty member at Santa Cruz, or

at a UC. You’d be fired. You can be fired for striking. This was just general

information. It didn’t say anything related to this teach-in kind of event and the

student strike. I figured, and others figured it was definitely aimed at

intimidating us over this event.

So I was really annoyed. I called the Regents’ office. I said, “I want to talk

to one of your lawyers.” I finally get one on the phone. And I said, “Look, I want

to send you up this piece of paper that McHenry put out saying you’re fired if

you’re involved in the strike. I’ve been asked to speak to the national student

strike day. Can I be fired for this?” He said, “Oh, I’ll get back to you.” So he gets

back to me. He said, “No, you cannot be fired for speaking at an event.”
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 215

Now, I didn’t have a class that day. So it wasn’t like I was cancelling a

class, or anything like that. So I began my speech by saying, “I appear before you

here today by the courtesy of the Regents of the University of California.”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: “I have been told by these men, good and true, that I will not be fired

for participating in the strike. And I want you to know that I am just an unpaid

consultant. And it’s perfectly legitimate for any professor to consult. We have a

lot of examples of that. Most of them are paid. Most of them consult for

corporations. I’m consulting for you, and I’m unpaid. But I do expect this to be

on my vitae and to count towards my tenure.”

That’s how I started. And I went on then to say you’ve got to develop

visions that I called ‘blueprints for a post-corporate America.’ It needs to be a

mixed system. Sure, you’d have to socialize some big companies, but you’ve got

have a market. We need to have a better analysis. We’ve got to know there’s

divisions among the elites.” But I also then said, “And you need a new third

party,” which was standard leftist rhetoric. I knew it historically. Yet again—and

I hadn’t yet done the research for Fat Cats at this point—so yet again, a new third

party.

So then I said phrases like, “You need your own Lenin, not theirs; you

need your own Castro, not theirs.” And I called for strategic nonviolence. “You

must continue strategic nonviolence. You’ve got to keep doing it—” I even used

this trivial phrase, “—but with a smile on your face.” I really liked that part of

the New Left. I thought they could reach people. I said, “You have to do that.”

This was in a context that was starting to turn sour. Many of the SDS members
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 216

were heading towards violence, as part of the antiwar efforts. And it was right

within a year or so that it all broke the other direction and it became a disaster.

I remember my students would tell me what they had seen and heard in

Berkeley, and I used to say to people, “The New Left will be dead within a year.”

I knew that. Nixon’s victory was really the killer. But the real killer, of course,

was in the summer of ’69, right as our first class graduates, three or four of our

leftists, one of them who was a research assistant of mine who went on to get a

Harvard law degree and become a great tenant lawyer—they marched off to go

to this SDS meeting, and came back in total despair because they had split in four

different ways. There was one article that described it “More Mao than Thou.”

Who was the most Maoist, the real Maoists? It was a disaster.

So I was speaking against all that, in a nice way. That’s why I say I’ve had

zero impact, because things didn’t go that way. But I gave the talk. Palo Alto

SDS, somebody over there wanted me to give this talk. And one of the people

that heard it turned out a well-to-do guy that had been in the Communist Party

and made some money with a little invention. He asked me, “Do you have a

copy of the text?” By then I think I had a copy of the text, so I said, “Sure. You

can print it and give it to anybody.” But he didn’t give it to anybody. He wrote

on the bottom, he wrote, “Send 25 cents to Domhoff at Cowell College and he’ll

send you a copy.” Now he gave away a lot of them, and then he sent the rest to

me, a huge stack. And I thought, oh, my. What am I going do?

So pretty soon, you know, two, three a day, I’m receiving letters with a

quarter in them. So I’m sending them a speech and taping the quarter on it, and

sending it back, and then franking it out from the university as intellectual

material. So that was a little flurry.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 217

I didn’t get thousands, but I certainly got hundreds of these kinds of

letters over the next year or two. It came into the hands of an editor at Ballantine

Books, and he said, “I want you to write a book. I’ll give you an advance. I want

you to write a book with this title and your topic and expand it out.” By that

point I got cold feet. I said, “I don’t know enough to do this. I can’t do it.” I was

particularly, by that point, nervous about the third party stuff, because the ’68

election had happened and no blacks had voted for Peace and Freedom.

Although Stan Stevens in the library had signed me up for—the first time I was

ever registered to vote was that year. I’d never voted, I know that, which

shocked one of my more staid political scientist friends that I wasn’t voting in the

local elections. But I’d never voted. At any rate—

Rabkin: Why was that?

Domhoff: I just—I don’t know for sure. I think I just didn’t bother, just didn’t

have time, didn’t care. Was more distant from it. Remember, I was a dream

researcher; I was a father. I was all this and that. I was preparing lectures. You

know, I’d read the newspaper and have the usual, “Oh no!” That kind of outrage

and shock.

But I wasn’t prepared to do it. I knew I had to understand better on

political parties. Particularly a couple of political scientist friends from my Cal

State days had warned me. They said, “Be careful.” One was a really good friend,

he said, “Yeah, you ought to read this and that.”

So I got into it, and that was part of my reading, of course, for

understanding the Democratic Party and why there were no third parties. I came

to understand that it really was the electoral rules, the way our system works
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 218

with single member districts. That is, you’re elected from a house district or from

a state. Or you’re elected, I realized, from one big district called the United

States, and it’s winner-take-all. It’s plurality. You don’t have a runoff to win a

majority. So a vote for a third party on the left is really a vote for the right-

winger, and vice versa. And that’s what shrinks the parties down to two.

So I added that as an addendum to my “How to Commit Revolution”

thing. I put it on there, so any copies I sent out after that, probably in ’69, had

that addendum that we had to be Democrats. And I started then working on why

leftists, why socialists should be Democrats.

Well, that also then contributed to my problems, because not only were

Marxists starting to think that—I’m doing this superficial stuff on like the

Bohemian Grove, but they really hated this idea of being part of the Democratic

Party. I’d go around and give talks, and they were super-revealing in the

feedback and what they’d say. They’d say, “How can we be Democrats? They’re

so impure. They’re corrupt. They’re full of these rotten machine, Democrats,

these horrible Southerners. They’re racist. We don’t want to be in the same

party.” It’s like they have cooties.

And I’d say, “Well look, there’s this rules thing; there’s these electoral

rules that shape. It’s the structure of the system,” you could say. They couldn’t

understand that. And that was especially interesting and infuriating to me,

because my critics were all what were called structural Marxists. There was a

structure to the economic system that made it inevitable that capitalists would

come to agree, but they didn’t even have to tell that government what to do,

because the government would see what’s necessary to keep this system going.

And the politicians have to keep it going or we won’t be reelected. So the

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 219

structure of the system was governing everything. But it was the structure of the

economic system, according to them.

So I’d say, “Doesn’t the political system have a structure?” And it came to

be quite frustrating, and I really felt amazed. It’s an example of what I mean,

where I think I stuck to data, and rules, and history, and rules of evidence—

because I could see that the political scientists were right about that, and that

history certainly bore them out. And cross-cultural research on electoral systems

shows it.

So Marxists are on my case. About 1973, ’74, I came to know a slightly

younger guy named Derek Shearer, who was very liberal, a recent graduate of

Yale, originally was going to go into foreign affairs. Turns out—I didn’t know it

at the time—he was a friend of Clinton’s and lots of other people. His father had

been the head of Parade magazine. But he was more of an upper-middle class

person. But in any case, he was somebody that knew everybody and had a good

sense of what would work for the left and sell. And he asked me to write an

article for Ramparts, which I called “Blueprints for a Post-Corporate America.” It

appeared in ’73 or ’74, and had a little bit of play. And it got me into being more

involved in trying the strategy. I thought, “We have to try it.”

Shortly after that I received a call from Tom Hayden. He says, “I’m going

to try your plan.” Now, he was really already decided before he read my article.

He was already a Democrat, and he was going to make a run at senate for the

United States in California, running against a sitting senator and friend of

Kennedy’s named John Tunney. So we were going into these Democratic

primaries, which is what I had said: “Look, if you’re going to be serious and kick

ass, you have to challenge these Democrats in their primaries. You’ll get to see
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 220

how many people support you. You’ll put your ideas out there. If we lose—

which we probably will—we’re going to support the Democrat no matter what.”

So he went for that. But as I say, he was going to do it anyhow.

I wrote a pamphlet for their campaign. I did a couple of other little things,

went down to a few meetings. But it was too disappointing, because it was

totally top down: Tom [Hayden] and Jane [Fonda] ran it, Jane’s money and Tom.

And they had this big meeting and all these campaign volunteers made

criticisms of the person that was running the campaign, a guy who was a friend

of the Haydens. And they said, “You just don’t understand electoral politics.” He

had been an activist. He was a gutsy activist. He has written a book on himself.

His name was Bill Zimmerman. He wrote a book called Troublemaker in 2012 or

2013. He’s a fine guy. And he was a sleep and dream researcher, and a PhD from

the University of Chicago, when he quit and became an activist. And he became

a big-time person in running ballot initiatives for liberals and leftists in

California.

But Zimmerman was running the campaign before he had any electoral

experience, and they all said, “You don’t understand electoral politics. You have

to do this and that. And you have to quit or listen better.” And they told Tom

and Jane, “You have to get rid of this guy, it won’t work.” Tom and Jane didn’t

do anything, so the campaign really had no impact. Plus, Tom and Bill were

suspicious of the ‘electoral types.’

The volunteers Tom and Bill didn’t trust were good people that had been

liberal Democrats and wanted more, and they were willing to help a leftist like

Hayden. I would say, “Well, they couldn’t be all bad. They’re willing to help the

most dangerous radical in America. What the hell do you want for nothing from
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 221

them? Do they have to strip themselves down and confess the errors of the

past?” Well, I withdrew some from the campaign. Not in any formal way, but I

was wary of it.

But nonetheless Hayden won 37 percent of the vote against a sitting

senator in the Democratic primary. That made my theory look pretty darn good.

It looked like we were maybe going somewhere. The leftist journal I mentioned

earlier, Socialist Revolution, which had been started by my buddy Jimmy

Weinstein, although he had by then moved on to Chicago to start a newspaper

called In These Times. But some of his sidekicks were still there at Socialist

Revolution and others, people I knew. One of them asked me to write an article

about my general view on electoral politics. So I wrote an article called “Why

Socialists Should Be Democrats: A Tactic for the Class Struggle in Corporate

America.” And that subtitle was based on a similar title from a paper Marx

himself wrote for some conference for the social dems in the early 1880s, I think it

was. So I’d used his phrase. (laughs) I was trying to tug on all of the strings with

that title and article. And I wrote it kind of kickass. And my buddy Flacks, who

was in the campaign and had helped write a great document called “Let’s Make

the Future Ours,” he then wrote an article just strictly on the Hayden campaign

for the same issue of Socialist Revolution. They appeared and had little or no

impact.

But the interesting thing was there was enormous tension within the

Socialist Revolution collective over publishing my article. Many of them did not

want to and there was a real split, it turned out. They finally agreed they would

do it, but there would be an answer by a guy named David Plotke, who at the
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 222

time I don’t think had any advanced degrees. But he was the managing editor of

the magazine, and was reading a wide range of stuff.

Plotke went on to get a PhD in political science. He probably teaches at the

New School. He’s written a couple of books that I think are really lame on the

Democrats. He’s a loyal liberal Democrat, and he holds to some—to me—pretty

dumb theories. But in any case, Plotke wrote this answer—he was in his full

leftist garb at that time. It was longer than my article. So if my article was, say,

eleven pages, his answer was twelve. But I had the opportunity to answer it, and

I just teased him all over the place. I’d say, “This is not Sweden,” or “This is not

‘X.’” Or, “I said: weariness grows.” A year or two afterwards, I saw him and he

said, “Bill, I think you had the better of that argument.”

But anyway, he was on his way to other things, and ironically, in a way, to

my right, both theoretically and politically. Which is the story of a number of the

young Marxists of the 1970s.

Rabkin: The people who were criticizing your work, nominally, from the left.

Domhoff: Yeah, from, “my left,” both theoretically and politically—they end up

far to the right. Some of them I have contempt for. They became pluralists. But

they didn’t explain why they were out there throwing darts from the left, and

what was wrong with that, and how they had intellectually changed; what had

brought them to their different view. One of the few rancors I have left is

towards those kinds of people, because I think that they have no intellectual

integrity.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 223

The 1980s

Well, at that point—I was riding high. I had done that article for the

Socialist Revolution. I think the next issue became Socialist Review. I forget whether

it was in Socialist Revolution or Socialist Review, but they had clearly—the times

were changing, and they were seeing that their third parties and their NAM and

all this hadn’t worked.

Rabkin: NAM, New American Movement?

Domhoff: The New American Movement.

At any rate, I went around and I went to see various activists, and I said,

“Look, we have run in 1980 in the presidential primaries. That’s the next step,

whether with one or several candidates. We need to put out there what we truly

believe.” By then we had a view we called economic democracy. I was no longer

really a socialist. “And we’ve got to put our new platform out there, whether we

use one or several candidates.”

So I went to [Ron] Dellums. First, I see Dellums. He’s sitting there with his

big Afro. And he’s a member of DSA: Democratic Socialists of America. And I

tell him my thing. And I remember him pointing at his head. He said, “I know, I

have that in the back of my mind. I have to think about it.” I said, “Look, you’d

be perfect. You just do it in some states. We’re going to win a big vote. We’re

going to win all the leftist vote; we’re going to get the black vote.” And he

wouldn’t do it. But the irony, of course, is—and I had no connection to this and

was not an influence in any way—Jesse Jackson did what I had hoped for. I’m

not implying anything, but of course when Jesse Jackson did it in ’84 and ’88 it
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 224

was more than just the liberal vote. He attracted every leftist in the world. Every

Maoist was working for him. Every leftist grouping, it seemed.

Then I had a chance to talk to Michael Harrington, who was a big deal of

the left at the time, an Irish–American Catholic who had become a socialist, a

fairly rare species. He still drinks at his Irish bar and all that. And he’d been close

to Norman Thomas. He’d been around since the late fifties and he was still

vigorous. He had written a book on the hidden poverty in America in the early

sixties. He was a well-visible figure, and I wanted to talk to him.

I went up to Berkeley and he was giving a talk, totally dumb talk. I was

standing there with my black buddy Hardy Frye, a sociologist. And Harrington

is talking about the working class, and “Unions, we’ve got to be with unions.”

And Hardy turned to me, he said, “Is that the same unions that have been

kicking our ass? Are those the guys that excluded us?” So Harrington is talking

on and on like there’s no racism, no sexism, no nothing-ism. But I said, “I want to

have a chance to talk him.” And they said, “Could you give him a ride to Palo

Alto?” I said, “Can I give him a ride to Palo Alto?” (laughs) Of course, a perfect

opportunity.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: So I gave him a ride. He knew who I was. We talked. And I had his ear

for an hour. I’m talking at him with all this stuff. He said, “Well, we’ll have to see

what the unions are going to do.” And I said, “Yeah, look, we need the unions

for big change. But they’re not going to start it. They’re cautious, they’re

cautious.” “Well, we have to see what Teddy Kennedy’s going to do.” I wanted

to say, “That philanderer? Chappaquiddick?” I didn’t say those things. I said,

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 225

“Look, if a Kennedy comes in, we’ll get out. We won’t do it. But for now it looks

to me like it’s going to be only Carter, and we’ve got to challenge him. It’s just us

and him—David and Goliath.” [makes waffling sound]

So, of course, Harrington just kite-tailed Kennedy, and that was what was

so wrong with his kind of approach. Then Hayden later sort of did what I had

hoped for, going around doing an exploratory tour. People said he was a stalking

horse for Jerry Brown. And, of course, none of these leftists did enter the

Democratic primaries.

But the other thing that happened in 1980 that really finished me was that

Barry Commoner, a biologist-environmentalist, started a third party called the

Citizen’s Party. So they blew away then, basically, everything that I’d been

working on in the seventies. And Jim O’Connor, who I thought I had convinced,

he became the chair of the local committee on the Citizen’s Party. That, to me,

symbolized what a lot of people did. And Zimmerman, who had worked for

Hayden, he later told me—and I hadn’t even paid attention—he was the

campaign manager for Barry Commoner. “Oh, it was good fun and all,” as he

told me when he happened to be in Santa Cruz.

So I said, “That’s it for me.” I was not really then involved at all in much

politics after that. I was just so sickened by what I saw as the pluperfect stupidity

of the late seventies and early eighties. I thought these people were hopeless.

I do want to finish up on just saying my politics thing. So I didn’t do

anything really at the national level for the next twenty years. But the Nader

Green Party campaign really disturbed me.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 226

Ralph Nader and the Green Party

Rabkin: Hmm.

Domhoff: It really made me upset and angry, given all the experience, all I’d

written, all that had been said, all the failures—and I tried to write about that and

speak about that. I did write an article. The Nation finally wrote back to me and

blew it off, but it was months later. It was a casual postcard. So they didn’t

publish my article. I couldn’t ever forgive the haughty editor for that.

I later went on, then—and also, there had been an ad in The Nation for all

the supporters of Nader. It had Chomsky and Fran[ces Fox] Piven, the big-deal

political scientist, and others. I read that list and I just kept getting madder and

madder. It said “The rest of the names available on request.” I had known that

the leftist that was putting this together was a total third partyist named Jesse

Lemisch, a historian who was an early New Leftist, and always seemed to be in

an argument with somebody else on the left. He and I always got along, but he

really despises my views on the Dem Party.

But he sent me this list, and I see this whole list. And I say, “In my mind,

here is a list of idiots that don’t respect the social science.” I even wrote a letter to

Chomsky. We had at some earlier occasion exchanged letters, due to a mutual

friend. I said, “I don’t understand it. You don’t take the social sciences seriously.

You’re all talk about structure, but you don’t take the political structure

seriously.” He said, “Well”—and he wrote back a conciliatory letter which said,

“Look, that might be true. I haven’t really studied it that much. I’ve been mostly

trying to just keep activism alive and so on.”

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 227

So I really decided they were what my father would have called

thickheads and ideologues. Then I really lost all political respect for just all of

those people.

Changing the Powers That Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win

I did then write a book. In 2003, I wrote a book called Changing the Powers

That Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win, which was 105 pages. Just loved it.

Every day, it just flowed out of me. It was just amazing how it flowed out and

flowed out, each step. I ended with, “Let make the future yours.” And I had a

chapter on that: “You’re not this, you’re not that; but you are this, and you’ve got

to confront that.” I restated the argument for nonviolence and improved the

argument for equality through the market system, based on some fine work by

one of Dahl’s best buddies, Charles Lindblom, that had changed his views, and

written a really fine book on the market system and how we could use it to

change things. And there were various other chapters that really went into detail.

I explained the third party issue even better, I think. It’s a quick little 105 pages.

The mock on me is that it only sold about 990 copies, I think. No one bothered to

read it, let alone critique it.

It’s now in bits and pieces on the web. And I have a paper up there I’m

really proud of—it’s called “The What-If Campaign of Ralph Nader.” It’s this

daydream in which Nader declares that he’s running against Gore and he goes

around and draws big crowds—because, you know, he had ten thousand people

actually come out to hear him in Portland as a Green. So I used other actual

numbers, and then I said, “He won 25 percent of the Democratic Party vote in the

California Democratic primary and they have to let him speak at the national
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 228

convention.” And he says, “Well, I wish Gore had a better platform but I endorse

him and we’re going to work for him.” And, of course, they have to appoint all

these Nader people, as Carter had done. So I put that fantasy on the web. That’s

the one The Nation wouldn’t publish. So that, once again, really scalded me at the

national level, alienated me further from all leftists and their politics.

Santa Cruz Harbor Commission

But I want to say something briefly about the local level. I was a local

activist in some ways. (laughs) When we moved to King Street in 1971, ’72, the

traffic seemed a little heavy, what with our little kids. So we started the King

Street Residential Association. My wife and I went up and down the street, got a

lot of people involved. And we were going to try to have traffic barriers and

what was later Berkeley kind of traffic controls. I had read about neighborhood

traffic alternatives. So we had this group. It didn’t work out because people from

other neighborhoods were nervous, and so the city council, which was very

mainstream anyhow, wouldn’t move on it.

And I was always then very close—but not working very hard or doing

much—to the activists that then gradually tried to take over the city. I was a

small-time advisor to the campaign of Bert Muhly when he won in ’73, and knew

the others, and had really supported Sally Di Girolamo.

The insurgents—this was before the progressives took over in 1981—had

three members on the city council. One of them came to me and said, “We want

you to be on the Harbor Commission.” I said, “No, I don’t want to be on any

commission.” They said, “We want you to be on the Harbor Commission. We

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 229

want you to fight those yachtsmen.” I’d say, “I can’t even swim. I don’t like

boats. I’m not interested in being on a boat.”

But they guilt-tripped me and I went on the Harbor Commission. My goal

was to deliver amenities for non-boaters. We were going to put walkways in. The

harbor leaders were going to try to raise the price on people who were just

putting their boat in the water for a day, and I made them do a cost-benefit

analysis, and they had to back down from that. It was just such classic gouging of

the ordinary person for the rich person. The harbor needed more money. They’re

not going to hike the docking fees, the guys who got a slip, who are wealthier

people. They may charge these folks who are going to push their boat in the

water for the day.

So I did those various little things. And I stayed on it for a couple of years.

It was hilarious because the anecdote just so epitomizes politics. One of the

people on the commission—because, obviously, of the five of us, I’m far out. But

one of them is this liberal democrat named Norm Lezin, who ran Saltz Tannery.

And he was a really good guy. He was certainly for what I was talking about, I

could tell, and I knew him just well enough. We really got along well, and I

really like him.

But there’s a third guy that’s a sort of moderate Republican. Hard-nosed,

made his millions. He later gave us Simpkins Pool, the pool out there in Capitola.

So he was a potential third vote because he was smooth and educated like Norm.

And then there were these two pluperfect jerks, one a fisherman still with a little

German accent, I think it was. He was a right-winger. And the other one was a

real fancy real estate guy. He was just a reactionary. He wasn’t a rabid kind of a

right [winger].
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 230

So anyway, when I voted, I often went along with the consensus, being

helpful, friendly, because I’m looking for those two other votes, which we

eventually did win. But at any rate, the people that appointed me were annoyed.

Particularly Carole DePalma was annoyed as hell, because I was not fighting

them. I was assigned to fight them. I said, “Well, I thought I was assigned to

deliver these pathways and all this other stuff.”

But I was like a looking like a sellout to them. And it was kind of

interesting, in terms of when you are on the inside and trying to look for a way to

actually accomplish something, you’re at least going to have to be nice and smile,

and not vote against accepting the budget and a few routine things like that, and

not be a total jerk and thorn in their side. Which made me have an empathy for

[Mike] Rotkin, what he suffered, because he eventually got himself into that role,

although it was certainly nothing that he ever contemplated.

So at any rate, I did that for two years. And we were going nowhere. In

fact, we’d lost an election. It was going to go backwards. I resigned. I’d had

enough of it anyhow. It was not that big a deal. But I was very supportive of

course, but from a distance, of the progressives and of Gary Patton.

The Politics of UCSC’s Growth

But then about ’85, ’86 I became involved again, and got myself in more

trouble. Because the campus was going to grow. And by then we—meaning

people like me—were in charge of this campus. Not me, but particularly my

buddy John Isbister had a fair amount of say, and others. And there were some

sensible things that could be done. We had to grow. The state was going to jam it

on us anyhow. You have to be for the students of California. You can’t become
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 231

totally elitist. I remember my buddy Tom Pettigrew, a social psychologist and an

anti-racist. He was mad as hell at these anti-growthers for the campus, because if

we don’t have more spaces we’re certainly not going to achieve more affirmative

action. When times are tough who gets screwed? It’s the lower-income people

and people of color. And we understood that.

So I started a town-gown forum, where I met with Lezin, and then he

brought a guy from town and I brought a guy from the campus. And we were up

to twenty-some people meeting, and we found we had a lot of agreements. I

wrote an article in The Sentinel talking about some of these things, and campus

growth, and how it could be done if we put a lot of housing on the campus,

which, of course, got me in trouble with the progressives.

But I also want to mention a pair of articles that I wrote that I was really

pleased with that simply analyzed the city in the middle-eighties. They talked in

terms of our growth coalition theory and how the growth coalition had been

defeated in this town, time and again. Particularly at Lighthouse Field, but lots of

other things. I said the thing that was sad was that this former pasture, this

former farmed land called Lighthouse Field, remains a patch of weeds, when it

was bought by the people in California for a considerable sum of money—it was

seven and a half million. Today that would be twenty million. And the

neighborhoods wouldn’t let the state put a tennis court on it. They wouldn’t let

them put a softball field on it.

I wrote, “This is the dead end danger of neighborhood politics.” Because

neighborhood politics can sometimes be progressive when they’re fighting real

estate expansion. But they also can be anti-black. They can have antisemitic

covenants in their deeds from the homeowner’s association. They won’t let
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 232

anything change and so on. In this case, blocking anything on Lighthouse Field

was really the narrowness of neighborhood politics, which can range from right

to left.

So basically I said that the state did not buy this land for neighborhoods,,

and we did not advertise that we were going to make it into essentially a buffer

zone for those neighborhoods. This was supposedly going to be a field for all

California, part of a park. It’s still a weed patch. You know, you can’t get very far

into those weeds. You get scratched and so on. (laughs) That didn’t win me any

friends, needless to say. But that’s how I saw it, theoretically.

I then wrote a piece in the newspaper too about the kind of trade-off—I

might have already said this—relating to UCSC: “We’ll grow, but we’ll grow on

campus.” And this really annoyed Gary Patton. They wanted to deny us every

kind of water and timber permit. So even when we started to build housing, we

needed a timber permit. And Peter Scott in physics, and Gary Patton—they were

all fighting our timber permit even though we had kind of cut this deal. I was

really annoyed with them, and I thought this was really crazy.

And Fred Keeley, he looked like he was going to go along with them. He

had come up to talk at Stevenson College, and boy, did Tom Pettigrew and some

others tell him what they thought. Tom can really get heated. He understood,

yeah, I think there’s ways that progressives can sometimes get a little narrow.

And we have to grow this university, not for the sake of the downtown, but for

the sake of students. So I did become involved in that for a time.

But I never did then anything after the 1980s. So I was at a distance. But I

wanted to mention that past political involvement and political watching and the

attempt to shape both national and local politics in these kinds of directions that I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 233

thought might gain us some hearing with the great mass in the center. I would

say that some of it was a lot of fun, some it was very frustrating. Later on I’d say,

“Don Quixote rides again” whenever I’d go to meet people on these things.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: I didn’t call it just quixotic. I thought, “Boy, there’s Don Quixote on his

horse.” I’ve always loved that book and the imagery of it. So I did feel a lot like

Don Quixote. My political views totally lost, I believe.

Looking Back

Rabkin: Would you do anything differently, looking back on this, if you had to

start over again?

Domhoff: I don’t know. I always find it hard to talk about that kind of thing

because it’s so hypothetical.

Rabkin: Yes.

Domhoff: And it can be so-serving, and I might feel totally different two years

from now in terms of how events might unfold. At one point I thought that,

yeah, I would answer that kind of question by saying, “I wish I had confronted

my Marxists critics earlier. I wish I had really been highly critical of them.” But

when I step back from that I’d say, “Yeah, and then I’ve just added another

splinter to a hopelessly splintered thing.”

Rabkin: Mm-hmm.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 234

Domhoff: So then I took the perspective that—what follows could kind of even

be a cop-out—I actually said this in places, but it’s time to take the idea more

seriously again, and that is, “Maybe there is nothing we could do that would

work. There is nothing we could do that would work.”

Our assumption was, in effect, “If we get it right, we will succeed.” And

for me, I think that meant reaching the Middle Americans, as Nixon called them.

For other leftists I’m going to talk about now, I think finding the right way

involved getting a theory right, developing the grand theory just right. Should

we be Maoist? Should we follow André Gorz? (He had a theory that was part of

the inspiration for NAM.)

I didn’t think in terms of theory as far as social change. I was much more

pragmatic and empirical. And I respected the social science literature that finds

that everyday people have their own opinions, that race and religion are really

independent variables, and the structure of the government matters. So I wasn’t

talking at the high level of theorists, which I had once admired, and still do when

theory is really done well. But I think left theorists really screwed things up and

they’ve never gotten anything right. And so let’s assume we can’t quite do grand

theory that well and quit kidding ourselves. But that’s where all the fame and

glory is, and that’s what most academics and theorists would like to be. After all,

most of us would like to be Einstein or Darwin or someone like that in our

insights. So we’re reaching for those high levels.

So I don’t know what I would’ve done differently. I just can’t imagine a

scenario that would’ve taken us another direction. We don’t know how to talk to

rightists to make them less defensive. I think there’s evidence that they really

dislike violence and disrespect for flags and so on. Which was why, of course,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 235

then, the Seattle thing, the Battle for Seattle [WTO protests] group went all

wrong, because they really did slip into violence, and let anarchists rule them

from their extremes, and win control of the movement’s direction.

But I don’t even know whether that would have been enough, because

when I read the history of the sixties now, for recent research I just finished, the

white working class, lots of parts of it, resisted any integration in the North, from

day one in the early sixties. And even in the liberal UAW, by the middle sixties

and ’66, they were saying, “This civil rights movement has gone far enough.”

And I think they were voting race in the ’68 election. At the time I thought, well,

they’re voting also antiwar and stuff.

But they disliked two things: they didn’t want any integration. And the

second thing was they disliked the war. They were against the war, but they

were more against the antiwar movement in its violent aspect. But they weren’t

going to distinguish between the violent ones and the scruffy-haired nonviolent

ones. So I think, in that sense, the die was cast by racism.

But our whole style—we were atheists, we were drug-takers—this comes

up against the rigidity of the whole rightist mentality. That kind of thing takes

rightists further to the right. I mean, these people were patriarchal. So they were

really upset by the women’s movement. There was even resistance from liberals,

from campus male professors. So if they’re resisting you, can image what a more

authoritarian person, a more rightist personality—they’re just frightened by all

those things. It stirs up, I think, a lot of emotions for them, a lot of things they

don’t want to think about or rethink.

There’re obviously exceptions. But the point is, that enough people from

Middle America that had voted Democratic from the New Deal onward were
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 236

willing to stay with the Democrats on bread and butter issues. But once their

unions were strong—and they thought their unions would last forever, they

didn’t feel as tied to the Democrats. They were making good money. They were

sending their kids to college—then these other factors that play into our complex

decision-making, I think, started to be big deals. Race trumped class.

Rabkin: Hmm.

Domhoff: Patriarchy mattered too. Middle-American white males weren’t going

to let women have any blue collar jobs that were any good. Homosexuality

freaked out another 1 percent or 2 percent. In 1964 60 percent of whites voted for

the Democrat. In 1968 only about 40 percent did.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: The rest voted either for George Wallace and his racist party, or for

Nixon. And the Democrats never fully got them back. Occasionally liberals

would win because of a Watergate. Or Carter runs and he’s a born-again

Christian from the South, and so he wins the Southern states. Clinton does the

good old boy thing and puts Gore on the ticket, so they’re able to win Tennessee

and Arkansas, and maybe one other Southern state, which is just enough, given

that by then all the Northern states are more liberal.

But I look at those election successes for the Democrats and they look a lot

like rearguard actions or temporary blurps, as we move in this rightist direction,

as the white majority solidifies as “We are the white people.” Now, even though

many of these people then talk about poor white trash and trailer trash, which is

a pejorative class putdown that shows that these whites have a lot of class
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 237

arrogance going along with, “We are all white people.” Yeah, but except for the

trailer trash, right?

So the Democrats and liberals and leftists got defeated in that kind of way.

So what could we done differently, would have been impossible to do

differently, because what the moderates and the older people would say was,

“Just go a little slower, you black people. Just take it more gradually, you young

women.” Well, lots of luck—I mean, people have been taking it gradually for a

long time. “You are a woman and you’re twenty and want to go to grad school

or want to go to Yale. How the hell, what do you want them to wait for, their

granddaughters? What’s that do for their lives?” So people live their lives and

they see what’s going on and they’re part of it, and they see an injustice. And

they’re not going to compromise and trim on that. So it becomes really difficult

to develop a sustained social movement.

A New Generation of Sociologists

I want to go back, though, to talking about my research and intellectual

life. By the early seventies, gradually what happened was that the ecumenicalism

of the sixties—and including in the academy began to decline. And part of the

ecumenicalism of the academy I now, in retrospect, think might have been

because Marxists had been under such attack in the fifties. You know, in the Red

Scare and McCarthy and all that kind of stuff. So they were more conciliatory

and so on.

But a new generation was coming along, and they were symbolized by

famous sociologists, particularly Fred Block, and Erik Wright, and Theda

Skocpol, and others. They’re all now very big deals. They’re in their sixties.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 238

They’ve been presidents of associations. They’ve done a range of things like that.

But for them, the kind of thing I did, and that power structure research did, and

that C. Wright Mills did—was not enough. It was not theoretical enough. It was

not rich enough. It was not theorized enough, as they would say, to give us a

theory that would lead to a revolution. Because that was their goal, like Marx’s.

They were academics, but they were revolutionaries in their minds, and wanted

to create this revolution in some kind of a way.

And so they began to put down the kind of work I do. They wanted to put

me and others in theoretical boxes. They’d say, “Oh, you’re Marxist,” or “you’re

quasi-Marxist,” or “You’re left Weberian,” or “You’re Millsean.” That’s what

most people said: “Oh, he’s a Millsean. He carries on the spirit of Mills” or some

such. I call them pigeon-holers. Everybody’s got to fit in the slot, or even they get

anxious. Talk about right-wingers getting anxious—Christ, if sociologists don’t

have a category for somebody, they get traumatized.

I could see this coming on. You could see it in the arguments among old

friends that led to rival camps. For a while, I remained cordial with all of them. I

was at a distance. I wasn’t in their collectives. I could always beg off on a true

thing: “Hey I’m going home to be with my kids.” I had other things to do than

fight with them, and listen to their arguments.

So, in any case, it gradually developed, various kinds of people wrote

things that I could tell were nipping at my heels, and saying negative things.

They’d say things like I was spreading pessimism by saying there was a

dominant ruling class, or I hadn’t talked enough about the working class. I even

wrote an article in ’72 for our insurgent journal, which was called The Insurgent

Sociologist. It was called ‘Some Friendly Answers to Radical Critics.’ And I knew
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 239

it from gossip, not in print. I answered all of their kinds of criticism. I said,

“Look, the larger context for me involves a whole set of”—and I named names

of—they were partly Marxists and partly not Marxists, but they were all these

various kinds of leftist theorists.

But in 1975, there was an article that appeared that really symbolized the

start of the split. It was on Neo-Marxist theories of the state, and it appeared in

this very respected Marxist journal, Monthly Review. It was written by David

Gold, an economist that disappeared, and Clarence Lo, who was a sociologist

who later said, “I back off from that article,” and wrote in a footnote and

apologized to me and we got along. We’re great friends. And a very rigid guy, in

my view, named Erik Wright, was the third author. He was the big deal of the

three, the leader.

So it was Gold, Lo, Wright, and they wrote this article in which there were

three kinds of Marxists, basically. One was me. So first of all, they call me a

Marxist. But it’s an ‘instrumental’ Marxism. It rests, they say, on something of a

rather crude level of tracing out individual patterns, and has no sense of an

overall structure and picture to it, and so on. It has its uses, but it’s clearly the

lower part of the thesis-antithesis-higher synthesis, which is what they’re really

doing. So then they name all the structural Marxists of Germany, and Poulantzas

is a theorist in France. And then there’s this higher synthesis, the way I put it—

this is not how they put it—which is them; which is Jim O’Connor, and Erik

Wright, and their articles and so on.

So now I was known as an instrumental Marxist. I was mad. I wrote

saying, “I am not an instrumentalist.” I wrote a long answer for their journal

called Kapstate, with a ‘K.’ I mean, this is the kind of dumb, alienating things—
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 240

they call themselves Kapitalist State, with a ‘K,’ so clearly that’s not American,

right, and they’re drawing from these German theorists, which are okay, but it’s

just dumb politically as well as highfalutin’ bullshit.

So I wrote this critique that said, “This is not true,” and “that’s not true,

and furthermore there’s this. And on this we need more research.” And they

made me trim it down, which really made me more angry. They received enough

space for them to jabber on forever. But they made me trim it back.

But then in 1980, Theda Skocpol, who I’ve mentioned before, became a

very prominent figure. She wrote an article on her views on the Neo-Marxist

theories of the state. She had developed her new theory, which she called state

autonomy theory, that none of us had given proper respect for the potential

autonomy of the state, and the state’s more powerful—even America—than we

had thought. She was at Harvard. She’d been working with Daniel Bell and other

fairly mainstream people. But she was beloved in the early seventies by leftists. I

remember Wally Goldfrank, of our campus, in sociology said, “We got to go up

and hear her. She’s really good.”

We went up and saw her, heard her. I met her. She asked me what I was

doing. I said I was working on this article on blueprints for Ramparts, “Blueprints

for a post-Corporate America.” And she said, “Oh, I’d love to see it.” I either

gave her a copy or sent her a copy. I guess I gave her a copy, because I think the

postcard, which I still have, that I got a few weeks later said, “I read your piece

on a plane. It’s just delightful. It’s the best thing I’ve seen for a sensible political

change in America.”

I never saw her again until ’79. We were on a panel together. It was an

alternative panel put on by the Democratic Socialists of America in the context of

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 241

the ASA [American Sociological Association]. She was just a little standoffish. It

didn’t feel quite right. I’m talking about power, and she’s talking about how

she’s going to devote a good part of the next ten years to working for socialism in

America. And I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s crazy. You know, I’ve certainly been

there, done that, and if you could learn from our experience you wouldn’t be

doing that.”

But in any case, it turned out she was giving a paper at that meeting

which was her big critique—very similar to the 1975 Gold, Lo, Wright thing. It

critiqued various views by Marxists and then presented her non-Marxist view.

So once again I appear as the simple-minded Marxist. So I write to her and ask

for her copy, because had seen the paper listed on the program after the meetings

were over. And she sends it. I wrote her a long letter. I say, “Theda, I don’t say

that. I didn’t say that. I’ve also pointed out that I had said I made mistakes on

that National Labor Relations Act. You can find that correction in this and that.”

So she made little tiny changes, “Where Bill has convinced me that he’s changed

his mind” or whatever ‘on this and that,’ but it doesn’t change my basic

argument.” She basically trashed me, and then trashed Poulantzas and then Fred

Block, and then Erik Wright.

These two people—Wright and Shocpol—symbolize how I was defined as

a simpleminded Marxist. So they’ve got me in this box. And things are changing

anyhow, for another kind of reason, and that is—movements were going away.

All the people in social movements were back to their routines. It was just in a

heck of a mess for liberals and leftists. It was the malaise of the Carter years—

even though the economy was growing and more people were employed. And

so lots of people are falling away from taking any interest in what we were
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 242

doing. There are no new people joining us as researchers or as movement people.

It’s the remnants, and we’re becoming smaller.

And the other thing that was happening was, I think, it was so contentious

among these various Marxists, and me fighting them, that who would want to

join that as a young person? You’d say, “Jesus, I don’t want to get in that

mishmash.” Plus—young black people were interested in studying about blacks

when they came to college; and the same way for Hispanics, and the same for

women. So there’s a rise in feminist studies, in ethnic studies, in racial studies.

Which were then derided by some big-time leftist theorists as “identity politics.”

Well, what the hell? Class is an identity. So they’re putting them down as

identity politics, and said they had abandoned class politics. Which implies, of

course, that gender relations are not a structure, and the racial structure is not a

structure.

So they’re talking in this dumb way about these new people, all of whom I

personally get along with well. I was okay with them, partly because I had

studied dreams. [Nancy] Chodorow would always stand up for me, and a few

other people like that. And when there would be these macro battles, like in

sociology, because I’d been in social psychology, the micro people thought I was

okay—and especially because I knew social psychology and I hung out with

social psychologists. I was in Stevenson College at the time, as I’ve said, and

there are Elliot Aronson and Pettigrew and others. So I’m keeping up with this

stuff a little bit. And my friend Dane Archer. So I had a foot in both worlds, not

just through friends or something, but intellectually I was interested, and had a

background in all of these kinds of things.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 243

But, in fact, in many ways, the Marxists, Skocpol and the new identity

interests, they finished me off. I became persona non grata. And Mills was

completely disappeared, which is what is so fascinating to me intellectually.

Theda Skocpol is really a Millsean. She has statements in her articles and books

that could have been written by Mills. But she never cites his book called The

Power Elite. I’m not saying she plagiarized or whatever, but at some point she

must have read The Power Elite. But it’s never cited. Oh, and these articles on

Neo-Marxism in the Monthly Review—no Mills. Not a bit.

So the person that had been the young intellectuals of the sixties, for

ecumenicalism and for social change, because he was the best—he did an

amazing amount of stuff I had never known about until at least the last few

years. He was going all over the world trying to say, “Take the new openings—

we don’t know what it’s going to be like ten years from now. Let’s not be old

futilitarians. Let’s be a New Left.” He was begging guys that later became big-

deal Marxists, like Perry Anderson in England, to, “No, stay with this.” And they

of course went Marxist, just in the way that Erik Wright and Fred Block did—

and Block turns out to be a wonderful guy, incidentally, and he was one of the

first to defect and say so.

He wrote a book in which he said, “I’m now a post-Marxist.” And he

said—he even wrote, and I’ve quoted him in my 1990 book, where said, “It

looked too pedestrian to us, too American.” He said it. He was willing to kind of

admit what he thought was going on that led them to be such put-downers of us.

The other thing I think was going on that I didn’t understand at the time,

you always feel you’re younger; you’re a part of things. So I thought I was one of

the gang. But from their point of view, “He’s a big deal professor. He is a tenured
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 244

professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He’s written three or—“ by

that point I had four books out there. So maybe in their minds I was part of the

establishment. I was probably a full professor—although I was not made a full

professor until ’75 or ’76.

Incidentally, I was held up a year on full professor. McHenry didn’t like

the Bohemian Grove book. Being a Bohemian, I should say as a footnote, he

didn’t like it. And there were delays, then, in getting my case together. So at a

certain point the social science dean, who was Brewster Smith, who was the guy I

told you about who turned out to have been a communist in the thirties, very

awkward, but very nice guy—the guy who was sort of in the background of my

hiring I didn’t know about, he had to call me to tell me there’d be a delay. And

he was very circumspect and shy and quiet. But anyway, he said to me, “I think

Dean found that book a little beyond the pale.” (laughter) So I was delayed.

Rabkin: But these guys thought you were a big-deal professor and part of the

university power elite.

Domhoff: Yeah, probably. I didn’t see myself that way. I thought that I was part

of the New Left. I’m a socialist, and a radical, and older social scientists saw me

as an outsider. I’m sure we all have these multiple perceptions and visions and

so on. So they really began to isolate me and not cite me and so on. My classes

got smaller, but that was not because of them. That was because the eighties

were very different.

And these Marxists and Skocpolites were, if I may say, for the record—

and I’ve said it in publications, too—their theories were totally destroyed by the

Reagan Administration. Their theories were blown right out of the water. None
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 245

of what Reagan did was supposed to happen. The crises of the seventies were

supposed to be solved by the state. There was going to be state capitalism. And

here comes Reagan, and he’s ripping through the state. And Fran Piven—she

and [Richard] Cloward had written a book called The New Class War, which is a

great analysis of why the capitalists were trying to cut various kinds of social

programs.

But then they end the book on moral uplift. I mean, it read like Marx in

1848. There’s a new moral economy. The people will rise up. There is now a solid

coalition of the elderly and the workers and the poor and the people of color.

And there’s going to be this fight-back. And so in ’82 or ’83, I wrote a review of

that book in Social Policy in which I said, “I don’t think this is right at all,” in

pretty strong terms.

The other thing I was called was a “corporate liberal.” My friend

Weinstein had made the fatal mistake of saying that these moderate capitalists

were corporate liberals. Mills already had called them sophisticated

conservatives—and that’s all they were. But they were willing to accept the

legitimacy of democracy and the state. But they were certainly going to try to

jimmy it in every way they can. I never liked the term “corporate liberal.” I never

used it. But they lumped me as a corporate liberal, just like I was supposedly a

Marxist. So Piven and Cloward used that phrase “corporate liberal” without any

names in The New Class War book that came out about ’80 or ’81. And I said,

“Hey, you’ve got this all wrong.”

Rabkin: Can you explain—I’m sorry—briefly again what they meant by

corporate liberal?
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 246

Domhoff: Yeah. The corporate liberals were a set of capitalists who accepted as a

given that a liberal state has some role for regulation. Elections are legitimate.

They weren’t fascists, you could say. In other words, the ultra-conservatives, left

to themselves, they’ll suspend law and order. They will put people in jail. We

just saw an example of this in 2013 that will be not current when people read

this, but there’s a man right now in the U.S. Senate from South Carolina. His

name is Lindsey Graham. In the face of the horrible bombing at the Boston

Marathon, he wants to try one of the perpetrators as an enemy combatant

because he was an immigrant and had been influenced by radical Muslim ideas.

This is fascism. This is nuttiness. He was not part of any group. So Lindsey

Graham, who’s always saying these kinds of things, he and several of those like

him, they’re more like fascists than corporate liberals. And this is not what the

corporate liberals believe.

Anyhow, current events aside, what Weinstein and some other left

historians found was that in the face of real serious labor unrest and disruption

and violence in the early 1900s, a set of capitalists sat down and said, “Let’s talk

to these workers. Let’s try to work this out.” And they discussed in their

organization, called the National Civic Federation, which others, besides power

structure researchers like me, have written a lot about—and they talked about

kinds of regulations, social welfare programs. They even talked in a very general

way about labor agreements, which came to be known as collective bargaining.

Now they were only tentative on collective bargaining, and they really only

wanted to let that be possible for other skilled workers.

But the point is that their immediate answer was not to raise a private

army or to call in the U.S. Army, which had been the response of most capitalists
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 247

throughout the nineteenth century. So these were now big corporations. They

wanted to last a long time, not just the lifetime of the entrepreneur. They wanted

to sell overseas. They wanted things to be more regularized and they were

willing to work through a democratic state. That’s who corporate liberals

basically were.

Rabkin: I see.

Domhoff: What I intellectually found out when I studied them in a 2013 book on

the 1930s through 1984 is that they were always willing to accept Social Security.

That’s no threat to them. It’s no threat to their power. They always disliked

intensely the National Labor Relations Act. They have fought it. They still fight

it. They’ve got the percentage of unionized private workers down to 6, 7 percent

and they’re still fighting. They will never stop. On this issue there is nothing

moderate about them. So corporate moderates (sophisticated conservatives) are

not moderate on everything. I certainly knew that by the late seventies, wrote it

in the eighties in articles, which then became a book in the nineties, where I’m

going to soon come to. And I’ve shown this even more convincingly since then, I

think.

At any rate, in the eighties I tried to write these various articles that fought

back. I wrote one that had the subtitle, “An Empirical Attack on a Theoretical

Fantasy.” In that paper, I used the Employment Act of 1946 to show it doesn’t fit

the Marxist or state autonomy view at all. Workers and liberals almost passed a

law in 1946 that would have allowed the state to invest in private companies in

situations like America was in from 2008 to 2013; namely, when there’s under-

consumption. When there’s not enough spending, the government could spend,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 248

instead of doing the right-wing kind of stuff Congress is now doing. So I wrote a

lot of articles like that.

The Mystique of Dreams

But I also had my first return to dreams as a book author that I want to

mention. It was a book that pleased me greatly. Calvin Hall was still alive. And I

was teaching my dreams course by the early eighties. And the students would

ask me, “Well, what about these people who control their dreams?” They were

called the Senoi. It was called Senoi dream theory. So I thought, “Ah, I’ve got to

update my lectures.” So I went over to the library and there still was—I think we

had a computer at the time, and I put in “Senoi,” or “Senoi dream theory,” and

up comes a book about nonviolent people. And the Senoi are nonviolent people.

So I read the book, and I see nothing about dreams. So I write the author and say,

“Hey, when you studied these people did you study anything about their

dreams?” And he sent me back this paper of his. Very tortured language. He’s

very cautious about it.

So basically, all the Senoi dream theory talk is fantasy. It was made up by

a guy that was not an anthropologist at the time. The story is that in the

highlands of Malaysia are this healthy and happy people that are so healthy and

so happy because in the morning they wake up and gather in a circle and they

tell each other their dreams. One person might say, “I was chased last night by a

lion.” The group says, “Next time you turn around and confront him. Say, ‘Don’t

do that, lion.’ Or else they say, ‘Jump up in a tree in your dream.’” It’s this sort of

social reinforcement kind of theory that’s behind it, if you got theoretical. But

supposedly, for this reason they have wonderful dreams. They’re very positive.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 249

And this had been picked up in the New Age stuff of the sixties, and

furthermore, now we’re going to have better sex dreams, great sex dreams. We

are married but we can have sex with other people we like in our dreams. So a

few New Agers had their little Senoi dream groups.

So I got into studying it. I started to see it was all hokey. I interviewed

anthropologists. Once again, I’m on the road. I go to Chico State and meet this

anthropologist. Then I find out that the perpetrator of this, who was just a goofy

romantic, a fallen Mormon, had a brother who was still alive in Boulder. I was on

the next airplane. He was a wonderful guy. He was an ACLU liberal helping the

Indians to hold onto to their religion, including their right to smoke peyote or

whatever. And he told me all about his brother as this big bullshitter and

storyteller, but a wonderful guy, and a liberal. And he gave me his brother’s

unpublished autobiography and other writings.

So I wrote a book called The Mystique of Dreams. It was really a sociological

study of an idea. It was about, how did this myth of the Senoi arise and spread? I

showed this mythmaker had written an article on it ’52, but no one noticed. But

in the mid-sixties, a dream researcher I knew, who was also a parapsychologist

and taught at Davis, named Charles Tart, he found that article and he took it

down to Esalen. He took it to Esalen, and they soon had these Senoi dream

groups, allegedly. They didn’t work. But then an Esalen enthusiast wrote about

Senoi dream theory in an article in Look Magazine. Then Charlie Tart put the

article from ’52 in a book called Altered States of Consciousness. And right there I

knew how that ideology was created and spread.

Rabkin: Interesting.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 250

Domhoff: And so I write a book, and explained what the Senoi are really like.

They’re really a conquered minority. They were chased into the highlands about

seven, eight hundred years by the people who are now Malays. They were very

attractive small people, so if Malaysians could capture them, they’d either

enslave them or make them concubines. So these people are very wary. And

they’re more like when you’re a black in the South in the past, “Oh yeah,

everything’s fine”—and they stay away from dangerous people. Their lives were

the opposite of what the mythmaker said.

Well, you can imagine that it was fun. Calvin and I had a ball working on

it, because he’d read it, he’d laugh. We met with an anthropologist based in

Singapore who was an expert on the Senoi, when he happened to be in

California. We found the mythmaker’s dissertation. He wrote a dissertation at

the London School of Economics, even though he hadn’t done any real research

on the Senoi. He didn’t know the language or anything. It was a totally

ridiculous story.

But boy, did that make some of the dream researchers annoyed. They

didn’t want their myth destroyed. Now, finally, twenty-five years later, they

don’t speak of this theory anymore. They found a replacement in lucid

dreaming. But in any case, it made me read the literature on controlling dreams,

which you can’t do, and shaping dreams and so on. It was a gentle debunking,

though. But nonetheless, they were annoyed with me. But it was a UC Press book

that did all right. And I had a lot of fun doing it. It was a good time out.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 251

“My Rehabilitation”

But then, in the late eighties, it was all about power for me again. And I

was ready to fight back against my critics. I had adopted a new theory. A British

sociologist, Michael Mann, who teaches at UCLA, developed a theory that

involves not just the economy, but, in fact, the religious system, the political

system, and the military, which is often separate from government. It’s these four

organizational systems that are the base of power structures everywhere. They

interact in complex and changing ways. He stresses that government is basically

about regulating interaction in any given territory or geographical area. But it’s

too much to try to spell out his theory here.

Anyhow, as I read his historical work it brought home that what makes

America distinctive is that we don’t have a feudal past. We don’t have one big

church like a big Catholic Church. Our churches are fragmented into separate

systems, and there’s a bug in some of them that makes them fragment even more

all the time. The U.S. military was always small, whereas it had to be big in

European countries, or France wouldn’t be France, that is, it would be wiped out

by rival states. So it was sort of an arms race from 1500 on in Europe.

But in America there wasn’t a big military. Everybody had to have a gun

to fight Indians and to keep their eye on slaves. So the military, the political, and

the religious networks have never been important in the United States. In that

sense, it’s a pure capitalist country. So it’s very atypical, if you look at its power

structure, compared to France or any of these other countries. They have

different power structures. And some power structures are run by religious

people, like Iran, or they’re militarily dominated power structures. And there’re
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 252

some places where the state is extremely powerful. But the United States is not

one of them.

But now I was really armed, because I had his theory. I now knew more

history. And I went after my critics hammer and tong in a set of essays, including

my new research on unions, on Social Security, but a lot of other things that I

won’t go into. But that book (The Power Elite and the State, 1990) had an impact.

One of my critics of that day—but a very gentle critic—was a sociologist

named Jill Quadagno. She was more historically oriented. She was studying

gerontology originally. She’s a major expert about aging and social welfare. The

point is, she had enough distance from the others that she wasn’t an ideologue.

And her views and mine are now very similar. She marched away from

whatever Marxism she had. She later became president of the American

Sociological Association.

But anyway, she wrote a review for Contemporary Sociology: it was called

‘Who Rules Sociology?’ In which she said, “You know, I think he’s got some

points to make.” So it kind of started what I would call my rehabilitation. And

there was a panel on this book at the American Sociological Association

meetings. A lot of people attended. A lot of reconciliation with a lot of people. By

then the Marxists were looking for, as one friend of mine put it: “By this point,”

she said, “I’m glad to be friends with anybody that uses the word ‘class’.”

Because class and the Marxists had disappeared from the sociological agenda.

Rabkin: Wow.

Domhoff: But the new dominant thing was Skocpol and her historical

institutionalists, the word she changed to when “state autonomy” became so

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 253

patently wrong for the USA in the 1980s. And they certainly have always kept

me at distance and don’t read my work. And there’s now a third generation of

her students out there that all consider me not very good, not very smart, and so

on.

So that seemed like closure to me, with that 1990 book. And I turned to

working on a book on dreams, that I published in 1996. It was a book that I had

to finish up after I took retirement. But what I want to say at this point is that

even though I thought I had closure on the power stuff, and now I wanted to do

this dream book, then this opportunity to retire came up, the VERIP of which I

spoke earlier.

I thought, wow, there is more I want to do on that. There’re archives I

want to look at. There’s stuff, more, I can do. And so that’s why that retirement

was so incredibly lucky for me, because now I could really do both. My kids

were grown. They were in their twenties. By then, I’m living as a single person in

my own condo near the campus. I certainly would see my kids, go swimming, go

to events and all. But now I’m totally aimed at—and I was too old for sports,

which I had played all through into the, even a little bit in the early nineties

when I was a senate chair. We had a softball team for faculty and staff in

psychology. So sports were over. Kids were grown. And I didn’t have the

obligations. So I was able to do both dreams and power, when I was now free of

campus obligations. So from here on, I’ll weave a little bit back and forth on

dreams and power, because that’s what I did. I’d study a little bit of one; a little

bit of the other.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 254

Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach

So the first thing I did when I retired was to go back to this manuscript on

dreams that I had been working on in 1992. This book is called Finding Meaning

in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach, with Plenum, a science publisher, which

really helped it. It’s dedicated to Calvin Hall. He was, by then, deceased some

years. But he had given me all his files, and he’d written a lot of papers that he’d

left unpublished. And there was a way in which, some of them I know he was

leaving for me. Or at least I felt that, because he had great hopes for me. There

had been a lot of people that had supported me or believed in me, but never

anybody as strong as Calvin. So he had decided that I probably, potentially really

could do something good, unlike what these Marxists thought. So he’d say, “I’d

written this,” and “I’ve got this for you,” and “I want to show you this new

thing. So he’d analyze the new set of dreams and so on.

So what I did, which was a labor of thanks and love and gratitude, I put

all that together, plus all the other literature I hadn’t been looking at, together in

this book Finding Meaning in Dreams. And it’s all the studies of dreams that build

on his system of content analysis, using these categories for characters: social

interactions, objects, settings, emotions, and so on. It’s a very detailed and

sophisticated kind of system.

And as I began doing the book, I was stunned when I went to the

literature. We just then had the capability of going back in the Psych Abstracts,

because of some technological breakthroughs. The Psych Abstracts were now

online. It was clunky compared to now, but boy, it was incredible. I’d go there [to

the library] Friday nights even in the early nineties, just sit there and go back
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 255

through these articles and print some of them out, and go over to the printer,

grab them. And it would be me and three or four other people that were like

that, just catching up and doing backlog stuff. So there had been studies in India,

Japan, and many other countries using our system.

So I wrote this book in which I drew together all this literature. So there’s

a cross-cultural chapter; there’s an age chapter; there’s a consistency over time

chapter, which is all these studies Calvin had done. And there was a chapter [of]

case studies, blind analysis, where we have the dreams from somebody, we do

the content analysis, we make inferences, and then we ask them questions. And

they give us answers.

So I brought all of that stuff together of his, published and unpublished.

Sometimes he’d published little bits of it. And I put the full thing out there. And

as I say, I wanted to make him coauthor, but several people said, “It wouldn’t be

right. It’s not right.” One guy, a famous dream researcher, he said, “My wife and

I kind of role-played that. We don’t think you should do that,” he wrote to me.

Rabkin: Because it was posthumous?

Domhoff: Well, yeah. Because he hadn’t said it. He hadn’t authorized it. I knew

it felt a little funny to me. So I dedicated the book to him and said, “And on

whose ideas and writings this book is based.” And then I had the preface that

said, in effect, “Although I’ve written it, he’s really the coauthor, except in

name.”

It was really a successful book. Our normative findings for college men

and women in the fifties had been replicated by two or three people by then,

including somebody I think I mentioned earlier, Veronica Tonay. When she went
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 256

to Berkeley, they forced her to update, they didn’t trust our norms, in effect.

Because you know how things change. Well, she did the study; she obtained

enough dreams from women, and the norms totally replicated. She was the first

woman who had collected dreams and quantified them herself, and then had

these similar results. It may look like nothing today, but that was a significant

event, and it made some of the women who were critical of us say, “Well, I guess

women are allowed to quantify too.” Because math was a male thing for some

certain kinds of feminists, at least ones within dream research. So Veronica really

was a huge help with that. A fine study—would that she had done more. But in

any case, then, the book was very successful and legitimating.

So I did this book called Finding Meaning in Dreams. But I also had been,

at the same time—because I had all this time now, I had gone to various archives

that I had always wanted to look at on Social Security, and had found new stuff.

And I’d had other essays I’d written that were critiques of these historical

institutionalists, as they now called themselves. I remember I used the word

“state autonomy theory.” Well, it didn’t fit very well for the United States, and

Skocpol had kind of admitted that in 1992, in a terrible book that got five prizes

called Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, which I reviewed at great length. I knew the

Progressive era and I just knew it was terrible. She’s talking about these

wonderful women as if they’re floated in from Mars. They’re well educated.

They’re all upper-class women, and all the issues they won on were issues that

their male counterparts didn’t care about. They don’t care if there’s mother’s

pensions, or this or that for kids, and so on. But when women tried to help with

minimum wages, no— So when you look at what happened and didn’t happen

in the Progressive era, it’s straight class.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 257

State Autonomy or Class Dominance?

But at any rate, I then wrote a book, again of essays, called State Autonomy

or Class Dominance?, which was in a way a follow-up to the 1990 book, in which I

wrote essays on a variety of topics, including the military, opposing state

autonomy theorists. One of them wanted to say, “Oh, the military is practically

autonomous in America.” Which I had studied from the day of reading Mills,

because Mills had semi-claimed that they really had some independence. And it

didn’t fit any historical literature, and nothing since.

I reread that literature and did some more original research and went back

over Mills’ writings. So it was a set of essays on a variety of topics that was

meant as an all-out attack on the historical institutionalists, including—I

lengthened and upgraded my critique of Skocpol on Protecting Soldiers and

Mothers, and I thought just really did her book in.

But it was another time by then, another place in a lot of ways. I was dead,

as far as the mainstream and the historical institutionalists were concerned. It

didn’t receive many reviews. One historical institutionalist reviewed it and said,

“Well, it’s got some interesting things in it, if he wasn’t so angry.” (laughs) As

though I had been out attacking them all the time.

This was a second or third generation Skocpolite that wrote that review.

Interestingly, I came to know her a little bit ten years later, and she’s doing stuff

relating to social welfare. She’s using the University of Chicago’s archives. Much

of the Social Service infrastructure was financed by the Rockefellers. I had given

a talk about my work on the New Deal, where she was present, at the

Midwestern Sociological Meeting. She was on the panel, and she really listened. I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 258

think she got what I was saying, that I was not a Marxist and I had new data. So

when I saw her a year or so ago, I said, “What’re you up to?” And she’s writing a

book. She says, “I’m coming to sound a little more like you,” she said.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: But at that time, I was still pretty much too far out there for the new

generations. It was too directed at them. And my friend Dick Flacks at Santa

Barbara, he said, “Bill, Theda Skocpol will love this book because it’s all about

her, even though you’re criticizing her. But,” he said, “I don’t know anybody else

that’s going to read it.” Which was a wonderful way to put it.

Two Key Colleagues

As I talk about the rest of my research career, I want to talk, interject

things about two colleagues that made everything possible for me, from the

nineties on. One is a social psychologist named Richard Zweigenhaft, known as

Richie, and a good friend of mine since the early seventies. And the other is my

research assistant on dreams, who I first had in a class in ’92, or spring of ’93,

probably, and had had an independent study with him in ’93 or ’94. Then he

graduated and I retired. He’s been my research assistant ever since, both on

dreams and on power stuff. And once again, I invested in myself and my

rehabilitation, because I hire Adam with whatever royalties I receive from books,

plus some of my pension. I just invested again in my own research, because I

knew nobody, again, would ever finance me. Dreams were too peripheral, and

the power stuff was too controversial. And even though I would just blow it off,
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 259

by then mainstream sociology was amazingly without interest in power. Power

is now really studied better in political science. It’s just a stunning turn of events.

Richie Zweigenhaft was a guy a met when I came back from Santa

Barbara. He was a grad student here. And one of our mutual friends said,

“You’re going to like Richie.” We just plain got along well. Our styles are the

same. He’s a little more conciliatory, as he says. I’m a little more combative. But

we knew each other playing basketball together on the faculty-grad student team

and the softball team. And we both knew stuff about social psychology.

We wrote four books together, and worked on a couple of later editions of

those books. That’s a lot of work. And we’ve stayed friends ever since. I think it’s

important to say he was never my student. I think that mattered. And he

certainly has a leftist sort of orientation, but he totally avoids all the theories and

the controversies and politics. He’s a nonviolent activist, at times, in Greensboro.

But he wanted to be at a small liberal arts school. He’d gone to Wesleyan

as an undergrad. Then he went to a big-time social psych program at Columbia.

All the big deals of then and later times were there. And he wasn’t sure he

wanted to do that, and he took a leave and went to teach at a community college

for a couple of years. Then he decided he wanted to do something different, and

he came to Santa Cruz. Our guys were thrilled to have him. He was really good,

and he did some fine research in social psychology. He could have gone to a

wide variety of universities, but he knew he wanted to teach at a small liberal

arts place. And he chose—a place that wanted him was Guilford College, a

Quaker school in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Here I want to interject, too, that I was so close to him that I got a him a

gig—a Nader group had asked me, would I join the Nader’s Raiders one
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 260

summer, like ’72 or so. I couldn’t do that—family. But Richie went and he had a

great time. And he met a woman from what turns out to be a suburb near where

he grew up in Washington, and they just hit it off perfectly. It was still horrors

for their families, especially hers; he was going to bring her out there and they

were going to live in sin together. Which they did in Santa Cruz. But she became

my research assistant on the Bohemian Grove book. She’s really a very artistic

person. She drew the maps for it and drew an owl. The owl is their totem animal.

Jews in the Protestant Establishment

So I was very close to both of them. And off they went to Greensboro.

He’s just going to teach, but he becomes interested in the question of, “How is it

going to be for a Jewish guy here in Greensboro?” So he writes me, “I’m going to

do this research.” So he does a study of Jews in Greensboro. And it’s very

interesting. It’s not a very antisemitic town at all, but in a lot of ways the town

was started by Jews. The person that started Cone Mill was there. German Jews.

More Jews had come there. So it had integrated its clubs and so on.

But right next store—it’s twenty-five miles away—is Winston-Salem. They

share an airport, Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Winston-Salem was a tobacco

town, a total antisemitic town. So then he writes an article as he finds that out.

He studies lists, does interviews. And he writes a paper called “Two Towns in

North Carolina,” one totally antisemitic and one not, as far as integration, and

even attitudes and people—he did the survey—but in terms of how people

talked about Jews. So he’s scoping out what it’s going to be like to be a Jewish

guy in the South.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 261

But he’s also—clearly he’s a guy that likes to be out in the field and

talking, not doing social psych experiments, although he’s done some of those.

But even there one of things he’s studied was handwriting. The higher status you

feel, the bigger deal you feel, the bigger you will write. And he’s shown that in a

number of ways.

But in any case, then he decided he’s going to do something on the South

more generally. He asked me for more help. So he did a paper on the South.

Well, at that point—and it’s all fun for me, because I’m learning this stuff. It fits

with the troubles I had gotten in over Fat Cats and Democrats. And at that point he

says, “Hey, you got to join me. We’ve got to do a book on Jews in America and

the establishment.”

And we wrote a book. It was named Jews in the Protestant Establishment. It

came out in 1982. And it symbolized our working relationship, because he went

out and interviewed. (laughs) Just incredible interviews. He’s such an engaging,

relaxed, nonjudgmental kind of guy. They’re telling him these stories about their

prep school life and antisemitism. Very polished and smooth, but they really

become hot under the collar, as I said before, when they begin to speak of how

they’ve been treated at prep school, and in clubs, and so on. And we do clever

little studies like, we take Who’s Who—and we know which of these Jewish guys

sit on a lot of mainstream corporate boards and which don’t.

And basically, we developed a scale, a Jewishness identification scale, out

of Who’s Who. Where it asks for “religion,” do you put “Jewish,” or not? If it says

“list clubs,” do you list B’nai B’rith? Do you list the American Jewish Committee

and so on? Lots of them don’t. The more corporate boards they are on, the less

Jewish groups they mention. So their presentation of self is less and less Jewish.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 262

And finally, it comes to the point where they would just mention they were a

trustee of Brandeis or Yeshiva University. They only put in their elite stuff. So we

show how class really came to trump, in a lot of ways, Jewishness—but not

totally.

However, a lot of the German Jews did become Episcopalians, and [join

the secular] [New York Society for] Ethical Culture, and all this kind of stuff.

Some of their grandchildren go back to Judaism and some of them stay

Episcopalian. It’s kind of fun. But some of them being interviewed were Eastern

European Jews, and they were far more into Israel. And one question he asked;

he’d ask people, he’d say, “Have you ever been to Israel? And one guy said,

“Twenty-three times.” Other guy said, “Just got back last week.”

But the German Jewish guys hadn’t been there except one guy said, “Well,

sorta.” He said, “I was at a layover at the Tel Aviv Airport on the way to

somewhere.” This was a Pritzker, in the family in Chicago that’s really super

rich. Penny Pritzker might become secretary of commerce some day.14 She was a

main fundraiser for Obama in ’08. So Richie had interviewed one of her uncles.

And actually, the uncle had named out all the kids that might come up in the

business, and didn’t mention Penny. So we write about that later: of all the

people Jay Pritzker mentioned as potentially running the business, he didn’t

mention Penny. But Penny—he didn’t see it coming on either, but she’s in college

and she’s at an elite school. And pretty soon she’s a runner. And pretty soon she

says, “I think I’ll go into business.” So she’s running the show. She’s the hammer

of her generation.

14
She did so in 2013—Bill Domhoff.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 263

Rabkin: Did he not name her because she was the girl?

Domhoff: Yeah, she’s ‘just a girl.’ He didn’t think she was going to become the

deal.

Blacks in the White Establishment?: A Study of Race and Class in America

So then I said, “Richie, we’ve got to do a book on this program.” It was a

program that started in the sixties called ABC: A Better Chance. It was liberal

rich guys and headmasters that wanted to bring blacks in that had potential.

Bring them in seventh, eighth, ninth grade into prep school. Finance them totally.

They’ve now graduated about 12,000 people. Richie—he’s doing other things,

and he’s teaching mostly. He’s got a heavy teaching load, all with ten or twelve

students in the class. He loves it. He’s got a life with his wife and millions of

friends and so on. So finally he says, “Hey, I think I’d like to do that book.” That

book’s called Blacks in the White Establishment? And once again, he did all the

interviews. My role was more writing and theorizing and saying, “Hey, we could

that. We could do this. Why don’t we do that?” It’s the perfect kind of role, while

I could do all this other stuff. He liked that, and I liked that. We had fun doing it

together. We write compatibly and so on.

So he went out and interviewed all these black people from, oh, I guess

they were from ages thirty to fifty, that had been in this program in the sixties.

And we put a theory on it about the difference between immigrants and

subjugated minorities, that I really like, still like, but people hate. Black people

especially hate it because it says—see, if you’ve been conquered, in some way

subdued, like Native Americans or people who have been enslaved, people have
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 264

taken over your country—conquered minorities are totally different than

immigrant minorities. Immigrant minorities come with their culture, their

language as protection, and hope. And they can always go back. That’s not the

situation of conquered minorities.

So to talk about black people or Native Americans in the same breath with

any immigrant, white or brown or whatever is just wrong, wrong, wrong—

including black immigrants, who have a different attitude and sometimes keep

their accent to avoid the tremendous unfair, unjust stigmatization, and

stereotyping that goes on for African Americans to this day. Even a guy like

Obama, he’s got a Kenyan father. He’s biracial. He went to prep school, due to

his grandparents, and he’s a Harvard law graduate. Two-thirds of the black

students at Harvard are [from] biracial or immigrant families. So it tells you

something about the power of this stigma. But that theory made people nervous.

Another place where I get in trouble as not quite politically correct.

It’s a wonderful book, tells wonderful stories about these people. They

liked their prep school. College was pretty good too. But they say, now boy, out

there in that business world, yeah, now there’s racism. So we’re pretty sure that

we had pretty good data. We looked for failures. There was one guy that was a

real strong failure. We found him. But he wasn’t a failure on his terms. He was

now head chauffeur of a company. He lived in this black neighborhood, and he’d

helped organize it to resist the developers in Richmond, Virginia. Lots of people

loved the book. A black guy said, “You wrote Blacks in the White Establishment?”

He was manning a table at the soc meeting. I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “I want

to shake your hand.“ (laughs)

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 265

But what we’d basically shown, our point was, it just said this stuff about

“It takes generations to make a classy person” is wrong. You take a teenager at

twelve or thirteen and isolate him or her into one of these total institutions called

a prep school, boarding school, for three, four years, and you’ve got one smooth,

cultured person.

Incidentally, one of the graduates, the most famous graduate, the most

visible graduate, is currently the governor of Massachusetts. He left slum

tenements, in Chicago, to go to prep school near Boston. Became a corporate

lawyer, was in Clinton’s administration, became a corporate director, worked for

Coca-Cola, went back to Massachusetts. And he’s the governor. We put that

information into a second edition in 2003. Richie did more interviews for the

update. We received more cooperation. We had better lists. It was a great book.

(laughs) It’s called Blacks in the White Elite the second time around.

Diversity in the Power Elite

So in the mid-nineties then, just as I am in this retirement stuff—Richie

knows I’m vulnerable to attack for temptation—he said, “We have to write a

book updating Mills’ Power Elite.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “We’re

going to look at every position that Mills said made a person part of the power

elite.“ So the first book was his idea, the second was, “my idea.” The third book

was totally his idea, and he says, “Hey, we’re going update it. We’re going to

look at every person that’s a general and admiral, in the cabinet, or is a director.

We’re going to study them all, and we’re going to find all the women and people

of color. We’re even going to look for gays. And so we wrote this book called

Diversity in the Power Elite. It came out in 1998. And it was well liked.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 266

Then we updated it in 2006 and made it even better. I talked him into a

subtitle that he thought about—and he finally decided it was okay. It says,

Diversity in the Power Elite: How it Happened, Why It Matters. It’s one we could

stand on with total closure. We show how women came up through the ranks,

how people of color came up through the ranks. We draw mostly on literature,

but he did do some key kinds of interviews for that book as well.

The New CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American

Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies

Then he talked me into—really against my will, about 2009 he said,

“We’ve got to write a book on the all nonwhite males, anybody who’s not a

white male who’s become a CEO.” Because before we’d only written about

directors. And it’s easy to make somebody a director: they’re maybe a token,

they’re one of twenty. People on the board—they don’t always have money.

They’re not sitting there representing a bank or their billion-dollar fortune. But

now there’re also people who are CEOs. He said, “We’ve got to study them.” So

he talked me into it.

I always say, “Okay, I’ll work along, and then if I deserve to be an author

then I’ll be. Or maybe we’ll make it ‘Zweigenhaft, Zweigenhaft, and Domhoff.’ I

don’t deserve full credit.” But finally I did enough, and we did just a great book

on these new CEOs: on women, Asian Americans, Latino, and African American

CEOs. And it led to us being invited for two years to the meetings of a group

called HACR, Hispanic Association for Corporate Responsibility. The established

Latino executives come there. We gave a talk to the young executives about what

they’re going to face and showed them the statistics, and they asked questions. It
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 267

was a very gratifying experience to be able to do that, to have the book feed back

into these things.

So here we are: we wrote Jews in the Protestant Establishment, and then two

versions of Blacks in the White Elite, and two versions of Diversity in the Power

Elite, and now The New CEOs. So we’ve written four books together. The process

was incredibly fun—but we also learned so much, because we’re passing

literature back and forth. He’s reading stuff I’ve never read. I’ll read it. I’ll read

about the stuff in the draft of the manuscript that I’m the coauthor of. I learn new

things. So I’ve learned a lot about diversity. At the elite level we know more

about diversity—and he does even more. I can brag because he did the work. I’m

comfortable bragging when other people are involved. We’ve just learned a lot

about how it works and what the pitfalls are, and why diversity could well turn

backwards to the past.

There was just in article in The New York Times in April of 2013 in which a

big-deal woman that had been on Wall Street had lost her job in the crunch of the

recession, partly because, she said, “We sold these people these various securities

in good faith, but they’ve lost a lot of money. We ought to share the loss.”

(laughs) The macho white guys didn’t think much of that—she was a white

woman. Anyway, she was pushed out. There’s been a little decline of women on

Wall Street.

I think she had it right: she said in times of stress people want even more

people like them around. Even white rich men will exclude rich white women
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 268

when there’s stress. So it could go backwards. So we keep an eye on that, and we

write about it.15

dreamresearch.net

I want to speak now, jumping back to dreams, I want to speak of Adam

Schneider. Adam was the student that I had in the dreams class in ’92 or ’93. He’s

sitting in the first row, and the first day, after the first day—we’re just giving the

overview—he hangs around a little bit after class to let me know he’s very

skeptical about Freudians. You know, “I’m a little bit edgy.” And I said, “Hey,

we’ve got something for everybody.” And we do. I said, “We’ve got quantitative.

We’ve got this and that.”

Anyway, he sits there and he’s a great student. But he also turns out to be

totally fantastic with a computer and had been using computers since the sixth or

seventh grade. He also is a brilliant person. I saw his GRE, so I know. In fact, he

got 800 on two parts, and I asked, “What did you get on the other one.” And he

said, “I got 790.” I turned to him—and this is my relationship with him—and I

used a curse word in front of him, and I said, “Adam, how do you screw up like

that on that reading exam!” He got a little flustered.

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: Because he’s a shy, introverted, good guy. But at any rate—for the

class, he put our findings and our system on spreadsheets. He created a little

15
Domhoff added the following footnote during the editing process in early 2014: “And since the
interview, Richie and Bill have documented an increase in traditional white males as CEOs for
the 2014 paperback edition of The New CEOs.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 269

graph. I said, “Holy cow.” So he did more, and then I hired him. And he’s been

my research assistant ever since.

And because of him, I have a web site called dreamresearch.net that has

all our findings, all our articles, examples, everything you need to do a study

anywhere in the world. And I feel satisfaction about that, that somebody in the

poorest country in the world has access then to the best quantitative tools. He

created a program to do the summations of all the coding. You still have to code

by hand, that is, say, “Oh, that’s a one MFA,” which means ‘your father.’ One

MFA—‘One’ is just ‘one person’; ‘M’ for ‘male’; ‘F’ for ‘father’; A ‘adult.’ So you

have to enter all those codings, but then the machine spits out a beautiful kind of

graph and shows you statistical significance level and effects sizes and all these

fancy things that are important, that I won’t try to get into here. So Adam did all

that.

dreambank.net

And then he developed a resource for the world for the future that I’m really

gratified by and pleased by and proud of. He developed dreambank.net. What

we have up there is 25,000 dreams. They are dream reports, we call them, more

technically. Dreams reported from labs, from long dream diaries, dreams

collected in high schools with our method, dreams collected in classrooms and

colleges, where we ask people, “Just write down your most recent dreams, with

repeated stress on recent.” We ask the professor for twenty minutes, the

instructor or teacher, twenty minutes, have people write down their most recent

dream they can recall. Most recent—we prime for that by saying, “What was the

date it happened? What was the hour?” And then if they say, “Oh, it was a year
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 270

ago,” we tend not to use those. They ignore the instructions and say, “This is

most incredible dream I have remembered since I was age six.” We toss that out.

If you collect the most recent dreams from 125 people, you have a representative

sample of the dream life of that group, period, end question. We’ve done enough

studies of that to be fairly confident.

So we have a lot of different sources of dream reports. We have 19,000 in

English and 6,000 in German. The ones in German come, on the one hand, from a

dream researcher in Switzerland, who collected dreams as part of a longitudinal

study from the same boys and girls, age nine to fifteen, in the lab and at home.

And a German man, who moved to Switzerland, published a book in which he

had a CD with several thousand of his dreams, and we put those up there. So we

have blind people, different age groups, everything.

And then, Adam developed an incredible search program, far better than

anybody else, because he used a simple language that they didn’t think to use.

He didn’t assume what the answer should be. He said he started with the

assumption, “people know better what they want to ask than I do. And they may

have questions we don’t have.” So you can put in the word “house,” and if

you’ve marked all 19,000 dreams in English, up will come every dream with

“house.” It will tell you what percentage that is of each of the series. You can also

go on there and put in, say a lot of emotion terms for one particular dream series.

And you could say, “We want to see the consistency of these emotion terms per

50 dreams, or 100 dreams, or 500 dreams.” In a nanosecond, it spits it out.

So we update that. People give us new dreams. It constantly improves. It

becomes a resource. It’s been used in some really significant papers by

mainstream psychologists that are the equivalent, for psychology, of E=mc2

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 271

squared. A mathematical psychologist has shown that the social networks in

dreams are very similar to social networks in waking life—this is a professor at

Purdue. And a few other things like that that have been done that are really,

really great.

Adam and I have coauthored four papers. He’s more than a research

assistant, which is why I call him a colleague. He chose never to go to grad

school. He earns his living as a graphic designer. He’s made some great web

sites, including some that track your hiking trails. And a company pays to put

ads on his site. He’s no millionaire, but he lives well, partly from his web site,

and partly from his working for me and for a few others. He’s a very

independent, focused free spirit, a very unique individual.

So we have those two great web sites—and I continue to do research,

thanks to him, and to have books with full graphs and tables that make me look

so quantitative. I know the concepts. I don’t want to ‘down home’ it too much. I

know them. But he’s the one that does the technology.

More on Who Rules America?

I also convinced Adam, at some point in the early 2000s, to make a web

site about Who Rules America? In 1998, after I was retired, an editor just over the

hill in a little company called Mayfield Publishing said, “I’ve talked to people,

and you ought to update the Who Rules America? I didn’t really want to do it, but

friends said, “You ought to at least listen.”

So she came over the hill and we had lunch. And we talked about it. She’d

give me maybe a thousand or two to have a helper. So in 1998 I wrote what I

then called the third edition of Who Rules America? It was longer than the two
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 272

previous ones, and it was more detailed. It really should have been out there as a

new update—we were aiming for classrooms, but we were above classrooms. We

were in upper-division level. It had a lot of great stuff in it that I now draw on, as

I do more recent editions.

About 2002 she said, “Hey, it’s time to update.” So I was working on an

update. Then she wanted me to go even faster, because their company was about

to be bought by McGraw-Hill. So she wanted it done before McGraw-Hill took it

over. Now I’m a captive of this gigantic gulf and devour company called

McGraw-Hill, that has no sensitivity to research. They’re just—it’s just

indescribable. The people are nice. It would hurt their feelings, but the truth is

that they are just paper pushers and putting something out that, for all I know,

they haven’t even read. They’re out to make money. They want just these big

textbooks. I’m hoping someday they’ll finally let go of Who Rules America?,

although I’ll be too old to do anything with it by then. They have it way

overpriced, so we argue. I want it to be widely read. They want the highest

possible profit margins.

But I’ve written updates for them. They essentially had the 2002 one, and

then there’s one in 2006 and 2010. And there’s one that just came out in 2013 with

a 2014 copyright, and a new subtitle, The Triumph of the Corporate Rich. That

means that Who Rules America? might be in print for fifty consecutive years, and

that’s very gratifying for me at this stage of my life.

But where this links to Adam is—and I am really talking about Adam, but

might as well have worked that in—is that I asked Adam to do a web site for me

on Who Rules America? By then, he was even better at making web sites. People

look at it and they say, “Wow, I can’t believe it.” It’s so good in so many ways.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 273

Very sophisticated. It’s not a popular web site because it’s academic. It’s full of

academic papers that I rewrote and updated, like on the Bohemian Grove, like on

New Haven. He puts up great graphics, finds old pictures on the web that are

free. So the documents are beautifully illustrated, at least in my opinion. Other

people say so too. And I took my Changing the Powers That Be book and I updated

the various chapters and put them up there as separate papers on separate

issues. I put a couple of other people’s papers up there.

I put some stuff Richie did up there. Because he did some interesting stuff,

where he spoke to a prep school about elites that became involved in social

change. And there are some elites that do that. Once again, it reminds me of how

the Marxists talk about the working class, and the working class is going to

conquer, and everybody has to pretend they’re from the working class. And then

I slowly find out that many of the Marxists I knew were from well-to-do

backgrounds. But I don’t think that’s wrong. It’s about values. If you want to

change the power structure, it’s because your values say you’d rather have more

equality. It’s not about “God said,” or, “It’s more efficient,” or any of that kind of

stuff said by religionists or some economists.

There are people who are upset by inequality, even if they’re wealthy.

And it’s sometimes from the trauma of seeing poverty, or they’ve been treated

unfairly because of their skin color, or their religion, or they’re sensitive souls.

There’s liberals who we just can’t understand in terms of their backgrounds.

One of the people I interviewed for my Fat Cats book was a liberal guy

that was from an old line, Southern cotton plantation family. Informants told me

to get in touch with him. He had helped the Mississippi Freedom Democrats in

the late sixties and so on. He became more and more pro civil rights and more
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 274

liberal. After that book came out, he wrote me and said, “I saw your book. I’m

now an Episcopalian minister, or priest, in New York. I went to divinity school

and became a priest.” And as you know, Episcopalians have become more and

more liberal, at least a lot of them.

Anyhow, going back to the Who Rules web site, I’d take stuff out of the

book and put it on the web site, if it was too detailed. So I decided to do that with

wealth and income, tell them more about wealth and income. So I wrote this

document. It was called “Wealth, Income and Power.” It tries to explain how

wealth and income are different. I want to use tables. And this next is classic for

how Adam and I interact. He adds pie charts to complement the tables. And I

said, “Adam, what are you putting those pie charts up there for?” He said, “Well,

people can understand them and see them together.” And I said, “Well, I want to

have tables.” He said, “Tables are right under. You didn’t look far enough.” Oh!

So I looked and saw there were my tables.

In effect, his pie charts created a web site bestseller, so to speak. But it’s all

Adam, the way he’s formatted it and so on. And pretty soon, all of sudden

people are writing me, “Can we reprint your pie charts? Can we link to your

site?” And so if you google “wealth and income,” certainly we’ll come up

number one. Put “wealth and power,” we come up number one. For “income,”

or “wealth” alone maybe we’re in the top five or ten. So suddenly we have this

amazing document that receives eight, ten, twelve times more hits than any other

document up there. And in terms of reading and staying with the site, it’s the

only one most people read. In other words, they land on it because of some link,

or because they put in “wealth” and they land on it. They don’t really read

another thing. They just go to that document. (laughs)

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 275

So he just showed me, for spring of 2013 for a couple of months, he

showed me some of the figures. He tracks all that kind of stuff. He’s really

organized and statistically minded and quantitative, as well having a beautiful,

artistic sense on a computer. There were 25,000, 30,000 hits for the wealth

document, and there were 4000 for what’s sort of a synopsis of the Who Rules. Six

times as much, and they don’t linger long when they go to a document such as

the synopsis of Who Rules.

We have other great documents up there, though. We have the whole

history of American labor. Social Security is a long document, and there are

topics up there I only touch on briefly in the Who Rules book; it would have

become too long. As far as the instructors and McGraw-Hill were concerned,

some topics are too historical. Everything has to be about right now for these

textbooks and these young people. But I said, “Okay, there must be some of them

that want to read more.”

So in the book there’s these links. It says, “For more on this, see www.—“

And there’s ten of those now. They can go there and see about the Bohemian

Grove, or New Haven, or Santa Cruz, or the history of labor, or the history of

Social Security. So I feel like I’m out there educating. It may be grandiose, but the

whole world that can read English can read about—the book tries to get it right

about what the United States looked like.

Adam is constantly updating, constantly doing that kind of thing on both

the dreams and power web sites. So thanks to him, I’ve done a lot of empirical

dream research on and off through the first decade of the 21st century. Some of

that will eventually come together in a book that I’m going to start on very soon,

where we have these amazing dream series, like from a fifteen-year old. She’s
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 276

now in her twenties, but she had written down one hundred or more dreams

when she was in her mid-teens. We’re going to do a great study of that.

The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and

Content Analysis

I want to emphasize how much various people have made all this stuff

possible for me. With Adam helping me in the late nineties and early 2000s, I

gradually accumulated a dream team, I called them. My best student from one

year wanted to come work for me, a woman named Sarah Dunn. Then I talked a

woman who was working in a restaurant, who had been a great student in my

class into joining us. I said, “Hey, do you want to work for me too?” And she

came back to campus. And she and Sarah were great. This was Melissa Bowen.

And then Heidi Block, who was the year younger than them, she joined us. And

then a Dutch guy came to be a visitor for year. One male named Ryan Harvey

worked for me a little bit. And we did this book called The Scientific Study of

Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content Analysis. And the

American Psychological Association Press published it. And it’s really, really,

really rigorous. I dedicated that book to “the greatest dream team of them all,”

and named all of those six people.

Then I turned back to power again in the late 2000s. I went again to the

archives. Actually, I had gone to the archives in the early 2000s too, and now it

was time to go write all this up. And the interesting thing is that I found original

sources, absolutely original sources, by doggedly keeping after things.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 277

Rabkin: This is Sarah Rabkin. I’m with Bill Domhoff for our fifth and final

interview. It is May 13th, 2013. And we are in Soquel, California.

Domhoff: Well, I was talking about The Scientific Study of Dreams, and following

the publication of that book and the creation of our web sites that I had

mentioned, I started to do research and work on a variety of documents. I’ve put

them on the web site. I also updated the Who Rules America every four years.

Then I wrote lots of little papers on dreams. And that was sort of getting me

ready for a final push.

Around 2007, 2008, I was ready to go. I had about three projects I really

wanted to finish, and write another Who Rules. So that was a full agenda, then,

for those years.

So I was really ready, basically, for a full focus on power after doing a lot

of research on dreams. I had collected a lot of interview material and archival

findings that—this is in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. But I was also not

completely satisfied with some of the archival findings for one of the projects. I

did some more research, and around 2010, 2011, I struck it rich in the University

of Chicago archives on one of these projects. So that carried me forward, too. But

I’ll get to that.

The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz

So the new power surge began with a book that I wanted my former grad

student, Richard Gendron, to write, which we ended up calling The Leftmost City.

And the story of the way that book came about was that, yeah, I’d always

followed Santa Cruz politics since the seventies, and based on the theories that I
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 278

had come to like in urban sociology, I realized, increasingly, it was unique as a

case study. But I wasn’t ever really going to do anything much about it. I’d

written an article or two about it in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, in fact.

But it was Rich’s great idea for a dissertation that triggered the project.

After the [Loma Prieta] earthquake happened in 1989, he came to me and he said,

“How about I do my dissertation on the aftermath of this earthquake, in terms of

the power structure?” Because we know, from various studies, that accidents and

scandals really catch the power structure without being able to dress itself up

and have PR and all. So it kind of exposes everything.

Here was an incredible accident and a situation in which, on the one hand,

progressives controlled the government, the machinery of government, and there

were a set of landowners that controlled the land on which rebuilding would

take place. So they were going to have to work together if anything was going to

happen. And if they were going to have a power struggle, it would be a matter of

who outweighed whom. So it was a perfect situation, given that most places, if

there was an earthquake or anything like that, the same people that owned the

land would be in charge of the city and they’d do what they wanted. But here,

they couldn’t do what they wanted.

So Rich went out and observed. He interviewed. Just did a lot of

background work. And then he set out to write in 1993, ’94. But he and his family

had to move back to Massachusetts, which was where they were from, because

his wife, who was also a grad student here—and a friend of mine that I’ll get to—

she got a great job at Holy Cross. She had finished up in social psych, and their

plan had been, as a reentry couple with a child, she would start first and then he

would follow along, in terms of their staggering their academic work. So they
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 279

were both scheduled to finish about the same time, but not quite. And as I say, I

did know his wife well. She had been my TA. We had co-taught a course called

Gender and Power. And she used to joke that she was going to go in the first day

and say, “I’m gender and he’s power.”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: And her name was Gendron, although her maiden name was [Ruth]

Thibodeau and that’s the name she’s published under. She’s really a supremely

fine social psychologist, as Rich is a really great sociologist.

So at any rate, he finally finished his dissertation about 1998. I kept after

him to turn it into a book, but he, by then, was teaching at a small school,

Assumption College in Worchester, Mass. So he was very, very busy with child-

rearing duties and other duties, including teaching.

But finally in 2006, he wrote this really fine paper for a good journal called

City and Community. They liked it so much that they asked for commentary on it

by various people, including me. So that gave me a new basis from which to

hassle him to write this book. He was reluctant in various ways. Then he asked

me to join him. I think he did later say it was because of his wife, Ruth. Rich and

I got along. We were good buddies. So she said, “Yeah, write it with Bill; write it

with Bill.” So I became the second author, which—we always liked to joke I’m

the junior author on this project.

We just had an incredible time doing it together. I went out and

interviewed a few more people. I went to see people from the seventies. I can’t

tell you what a great trip it was down memory lane, getting back in touch with

various people. So, in that sense, it was very gratifying. It was also very
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 280

humbling, because we learned so much that I didn’t know anything about, even

though I’d lived through these events. You don’t know what you’re living

through. I mean, all this stuff’s going on; you’re too busy to notice it. In a word,

you’re living your life.

It put me in touch with people like Stan Stevens, who knew everything

about the nineteenth century [in Santa Cruz]. And it turned out the whole history

of Santa Cruz was perfect, from our theoretical framework, because the basis for

attracting people here was, first of all, industry. But the redwoods declined, so

they had to bring in other things. And finally, they switched fully to tourism.

So we framed this book—it’s a very academic book, I want to stress—and

we framed it in terms of a critique of rival theories. And we were able to show, I

think, to my great satisfaction, that the two dominant theories—one based on

market theory and one based on Marxist theory—just don’t capture a place like

Santa Cruz, as they don’t most cities. But here it was really glaring.

We got wonderful, wonderful reviews from the academic world. Couldn’t

have been better. Never did better in my life as far as reviews. We received a

very friendly reception in Santa Cruz. As a way of saying thank you to people

we created a web site, a web document on Who Rules America? It has pictures. It

has links to local sites. You can download a whole dissertation by Mike Rotkin.

Various other things.

Rabkin: This is Who Rules America? Or Leftmost City?

Domhoff: Yeah. This is The Leftmost City, but it’s on the whorulesamerica.net

web site.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 281

Rabkin: I see, I see.

Domhoff: The particular document is called ‘The Leftmost City,’ just like the

book is called. It was a way of saying thank you to everybody, to all those that

had helped us. And it’s out there. As I said, it gets a limited kind of attention. But

it was still a very gratifying project to do—and just a lot of fun.

Current Research

So then I turned right away to my final go at the Social Security Act and

the National Labor Relations Act. And also, I had some new material on the

Agricultural Adjustment Act. Which were the three biggies of the New Deal. As I

said earlier, they had turned into a lifelong quest. I said, when I was talking

about the late sixties, 1970s, I didn’t know at the time it would be this lifelong

quest. But here’s the evidence: it’s 2010 and here I am, deciding finally I can focus

and write this material. I truly had new stuff that I was proud of. It was the

equivalent of going out in the jungle and finding some new creature or some

new fauna.

So I was really into it. I had gone to this Schenectady museum, which is

mostly just a bunch of old lights and trinkets and technical stuff, but in their

basement they had letters back and forth between three of the most powerful

heads of companies in the New Deal. So that gave me new information. I also

had the private newsletters of a key consulting firm at the time, which was

actually financed out of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s pocket. Nobody really had

known enough about that organization. And now I was able to show how they

were really deeply involved in creating the Social Security Act. So I had a week-
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 282

by-week account of what was going on, on both the Social Security Act and the

National Labor Relations Act.

I had smoking guns. And I was pleased. I could do okay on the case

history, but I was struggling. By then, I knew from working with my buddy

Richie, and from working with my former student and friend Rich Gendron, that

I could work well with other people. And I needed help. I needed more theory. I

needed more history.

I turned to one of my other former sociology grad students, Michael

Webber, Mike Webber, who by then was a very good friend. He came to our

campus as a grad student from Wales with an MA in history, and a total love of

American history. Even though he’s a sociologist, he knows all about the

Southern United States, and much, much about U.S. history, especially the

thirties. His dissertation had turned into a fine book called New Deal Fat Cats,

which was about campaign finance in ‘36. He did it systematically, methodically,

empirically, testing various claims by various hotshot theorists that just weren’t

right at all about who was really financing the New Deal.

The only businesspeople that supported Democrats were Southerners,

whatever industry they were in, or people of ethnicity who were excluded by the

WASPs. That was who supported the Democratic Party, end story. It had nothing

to do with their allegedly being in high finance, or being proto-Keynesians that

could see that they needed consumer demand. Which he destroyed as a fantasy

by pointing out, by showing, that all the people in retail that were Republican

WASPs, they didn’t give any money to Roosevelt. It just happened there were

more ethnic people able to get their hand into the merchandising field. And so

they were supporting Democrats for the same reasons they’d always supported
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 283

Democrats: because of this exclusionary WASP power structure, and the heavily,

brutally antisemitic Republican Party at the time.

So once again, here I’m working with a good friend, a former student, and

we complemented each other totally on our strengths. We ended up with this

really, really fine book that Stanford University Press was glad to publish. We

had not only a lay-down hand on these three key acts—the Agricultural

Adjustment Act, Social Security Act, and the National Labor Relations Act—but

we also were able then to really go after what other people had claimed about the

New Deal. And the particularly bad, egregious fantasies were the Marxists’ in

terms of why they think this happened, how they happened. They had no clue.

And we then take the key New Deal acts and we point that out.

Certainly, the other theorists had their weaknesses. None of them had

ever been to any archives. Everybody was arguing strictly from what historians

had written. Historians had written fine stuff, but it was focused on politics; it

was focused on the president; it was focused on the maneuvering in the

Congress. And they would start particularly with, “The president’s program was

sent to Congress. Here’s how it was developed by the president.”

But all those who proposed the key policies, we showed, came from the

corporate network. They were all financed by a handful of big foundations,

tightly controlled by big business people. And we were then able, I think, to be

very successful and do something that was genuinely new. It’s just gotten a few

reviews so far, and I think they’ve been friendly.

But I think the lack of excitement over the book reflects the fact that the

old fights are over as far as the sociologists are concerned. They’re not going to

revisit these issues. Future sociologists that look at the literature might decide
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 284

we’re right. And the other thing is that historians usually don’t read sociologists.

Sociologists rely enormously on historians, but historians feel that—probably

rightly—most of us can’t do archival research. But this was like shooting fish in a

barrel. And I did probe around enough to find enough archives that they hadn’t

found, that they may take a look.

So at that point I was ready for my big finale: a study of the United States

from the late thirties, early forties through the eighties, in a very focused kind of

way. I studied it through the eyes of a set of people I call moderate conservatives

or corporate moderates. They had formed an organization in 1942, after thinking

about it for a couple years, called The Committee for Economic Development. It’s

an organization in which experts and businesspeople get together to discuss

what makes sense for any given issue. In other words, it’s policy-oriented. It was

serious. And they would write their statements and publish them, not only with

their names on it, but also any disagreements. So if Joe X disagreed with one part

of the statement, he could have a footnote saying so. And if other people agreed

with what Joe X said, they could say, “His comment is joined by persons A, B,

and C.” So you can see the cliques of dissent. You can see what they argue about.

It’s really open.

Furthermore, the organization was pretty open, and they allowed me to

see their archives from the sixties and seventies, where I was really focused. And

several of their employees—by then retired, when I started this project, late

eighties, early nineties—were willing to talk to me quite candidly. And their

archives—people from the eighties and nineties didn’t know that, but the

archives were full of smoking guns about the sixties and the seventies. They

didn’t know. And furthermore, these people don’t care. Business leaders don’t
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 285

care what you write about the eighties or nineties. That’s history. They’re moving

forward, and they’re plowing forward, and they win. A book on a shelf is just an

academic book in a university. It’s not, in their eyes, any kind of a threat.

So I have this really good stuff, but on the key times in the seventies I

didn’t have perfect stuff. And then finally, poking around, I found what I

needed. I struck gold in a University of Chicago archive. Because there was one

person, one key guy in the organization, that had kept good files. And that’s the

point of this kind of research: not everybody keeps files. Not everybody gives

them to universities. Not everybody keeps every piece of paper.

The great thing about this man’s files was that the letters to him, and his

letters to others were all there, and also copies of letters he wasn’t directly

involved in. In other words, he was copied on a lot of stuff because he was the

chair of their Research and Policy Committee at the key moment. So that gave me

further confirmation [for] something that I had in writing that fit with what I had

learned in interviews. Because I had interviewed a fair number of these guys—

about half a dozen to a dozen. I forget exactly what it is.

But, for instance, I had arranged to give a talk or two at Vanderbilt in

order to fly down there to interview a particular guy who turned out to be not

that much help—but just enough. And I had had the chance to interview the

most liberal guy in the organization in 1995, who I also interviewed in the 1960s

about his support of the Democrats. So I had his information.

And then I interviewed another guy that I really wanted to see. He was

coming out to Palo Alto. I said, “Why did so-and-so become the chair of such-

and-such a committee?” And he just said to me, he said, “Well, many people

were starting to feel that the chair was too liberal.” Just that kind of thing, fit in
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 286

with the documents, is really telling that there was a battle going on within this

organization.

So basically then I could piece my interviews together with these archival

things, and I had myself a really good case once again. It was the kind of thing I

like to do, which is original research, whether it’s interviews, or observations, or

in my old age here, archives. Which, it really turns out to be fun. So the point of

the story would be that nothing was going to stop me now, and I was rolling

along.

And then lo and behold, something stopped me. Because I was still

looking at the psychology journals, and there was all this new work going on in

what they called imaging. It’s brain imaging stuff with a couple of different

methods. And what these people were finding was that there was a particular

network in the brain that becomes very active when our mind is just wandering,

when we’re not doing a task of monitoring incoming stimuli, or if we’re not

thinking through some serious analytical problem, we’re just, “resting,” we fall

into what’s called the default mode. And there’s a network for that, and it’s

called the Default Mode Network. And studies had just been done showing that

indeed people do mind wander and they do daydream when the brain’s in that

state. Better studies have been done that really match it up and clinched the case.

But what I knew that they didn’t know was that this was also the REM

sleep network. This is the area that reactivates during REM. And so they had

really hit on the neural networks for dreams that I had written about, first in 2000

in a paper and then in my Scientific Study of Dreams book. I knew it was just a

matter of time until somebody figured that out, because there’s other dream
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 287

researchers out there. And in the process of reading about daydreaming they

would have bumped into dreaming.

So I just plain dropped everything, boom. Just let it sit there, and I began

to really read and write on this issue, talked to people, wrote a draft, sent it to

four or five of the default mode network researchers. And one or two of them

gave me responses and said I was on the right track and gave me some advice

and feedback and help. So that paper was then published in late 2011 in a journal

called Consciousness and Cognition, which is a pretty decent journal, as those

things go for a dream researcher.

Since then, there have been a couple different studies that have supported

my claims. One of them was reported at the dream meetings a year ago in the

summer. And it was reported in the context—I had just given a talk on this very

thing I’m saying, that the default network is the basis for dreaming, just like it’s

the basis for dream-reading. Just slightly different—it’s a subsystem. Some things

are a little still inactive, obviously. But the point is, it’s a huge overlap. And so

somebody in the audience—which I couldn’t hear personally with my bad

hearing—what she said was, it turned out, that she had really done work that

had replicated these claims.

So to my research assistant, who was giving half of our talk—I said,

“Okay, what’d she say?” And he turned to me. He had a smile on his face. He

said, “She said she’s just replicated your work.” He was smiling, so I thought,

“He’s probably kidding me.” So I said, “She said she replicated it?” He said,

“Yeah.” And everybody’s hearing this dialogue. I looked out there and I said,

“Well, where are you doing your research? What country?” And she was a little
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 288

taken aback, a very stern, serious—classical prototypical Frenchwoman

researcher. So she says, “France.” And I said, “Viva la France!”

Rabkin: (laughs)

Domhoff: I was so excited and she was so flustered.

And then more recently, four Canadians have done a study where they’ve

matched, compared what’s called a meta-analysis. You take all the results of

various studies to find the degree of overlap of their neural network findings.

This paper shows also that the default network is the same as the REM network.

And they were working along on this paper. At a certain point they wrote me. I

didn’t know about it. They said, “Hey, would you join us? We need somebody

that can tie this literature together.” So lo and behold, I’m now a coauthor on a

paper that has all this fancy stuff in it that appeared in 2013 in a journal on

frontiers of neurology, or frontiers of neuroimaging, or something like that.

So it was really a very gratifying thing to be able to be one of the first to

say, “Look, that’s where it is.” I think it’s going to work. I think it’s really going

to—it’s going to hold up, and it’s going to be useful.

Rabkin: Are there some interesting implications of this discovery that those two

networks are the same?

Domhoff: Yeah, I think there are. It puts daydreaming on a continuum. It really

suggests that there’re just the slightest changes that probably happen that—just

like falling in the rabbit hole, literally all of a sudden there’s a quick switch.

Something else drops out—you know, ‘something else’ being basically some area

that’s got to do with vigilance and self-control. Where am I? I’m right here. I’m in
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 289

this kitchen. And then if I nod off, all of a sudden I’m running down the street

and I see a couple of friends. And then you say, “Bill, Bill, you’re drifting.” And

I’ll go, “Oh yeah.’” But I’ve had this little scenario. I think it happens that quick.

And I believe that, because we know that’s true also in falling asleep. We know

it’s true in the morning, when you drift in and out of sleep, that you’re in those

light stages. You can very quickly be back in a dream.

And furthermore, there was work done that I knew that they didn’t know

about from the mid-seventies. A friend of mine had done this research where

he’d taken people into the sleep lab during the day, hooked them up just like

they were going to go to bed. Had all the leads on, all the electrodes pasted on.

And they were awake. He knew that, because he had the EEG on. And then he

would periodically say, “Hey, what’s going through your mind?” And he even

used the phrase ‘mind-wandering.’

And he had found that 15 percent, 20 percent of these probes during an

hour where you’re allowed to be by yourself, but awake, and just let your mind

drift, were dreamlike. And then he did two repeat studies with similar results. So

neuroimaging researchers didn’t know about that. And I had put that in my 2011

article.

So it shows that this overlap is greater than we thought. And that means

we really can then study this default mode network, and just see, in terms of a

kind of subtraction thing now, what’s not there during dreaming? I think the best

time to study that would be late in the early morning. You’ve awakened. You’ve

gone back to bed. Now we put you in the MRI and you drift off. And then we see

what’s there and what’s not there. And we say, “Hey, what was going on?” “Oh,

well, I was just having a great dream. It was so vivid.” Okay. Then we’d look at
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 290

the pictures in terms of what was there; what was missing; what was not active

that was active just five minutes before or two minutes before?

The other way it has an implication is we’ve never been able to figure out

whether dreams have any adaptive function. So now the question, the way I’d

phrase it, is: To the degree that the default network has an adaptive function—

that is, that mind-wandering is maybe useful for new connections and

creativity—to that degree, do dreams also have a function that is sort of residual?

That dreaming is a continuation in a different form of the fact that mind-

wandering is adaptive.

Now, it’s still very controversial whether mind-wandering is adaptive.

Studies are just starting on that. And some researchers point out that mind-

wandering leads to all sorts of accidents. You miss things. You get lost. On the

other hand, mind-wandering sometimes leads to new connections: “Oh, right

here! Of course, I should mix that with that,” or “Yeah, Joe’s the guy to do that

project.” So mind-wandering—and this is what it’ll come down [to]—do the

plusses outweigh the minuses? It might be that mind-wandering does have some

adaptive functions for us in terms of creativity. But that network is also there, at

least to some extent, in other primates. So it’ll be a whole long process of sorting

it out. But it gives a whole new purchase on the question of adaptation, whether

dreams were in any way selected for.

I think there’s at least a fair chance that the default mode network was

selected for—in terms of why you’re not online all the time, so to speak—why

you’re not cogitating or taking in sensory information and making sense of it. On

the one hand, you’re analyzing incoming stuff and then you’re cogitating stuff.

Maybe when you’re not doing either of those, it’s not just a matter of resting.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 291

Maybe it’s the fact that a particular network comes to the fore, is an indication of

some usefulness. And that was new to me, and interesting. Because, without

going through all the arguments, it’s just not there as far as any good evidence

for any other claims about the adaptive value of dreams. Other claims are not

supported by research. And research that was just done on REM sleep—all of

that stuff that was done in the lab—just doesn’t fit in any of those past theories.

So anyway, it was fun. And it’s something I’m going to obviously go back

to pretty quick somewhere in the next few months.

But anyway, after I finished that paper, I very quickly went back to my

project on the Committee for Economic Development, and I did finish my book

called The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great

Depression to the Great Recession, in which I show, to my surprise—when I started

out I didn’t think this—that actually from the time the Republicans won back a

lot of seats in Congress in ’38, particularly in the House, which led to a

conservative coalition in Congress, liberals and labor have not won a single

important legislative victory. Not a single one.

I was stunned by that. When you look at the Employment Act of ’46, the

Housing Act of ’49, so on. Medicare was certainly a victory for the liberal-labor

alliance. It’s an important exception. But it was jimmied in such fierce ways that

labor was immediately distraught. They knew it would be inflationary. They

knew it would lead to these huge private hospitals. And so, even that was turned

to the advantage of the conservatives. And all along the way, every battle over

labor legislation was lost. And the corporations basically destroyed the unions,

which made it possible to do everything else they’ve done. Because the

Democrats don’t have a base from which to fight back.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 292

The civil rights movement was not an achievement of the liberal-labor

alliance; it was the achievement of African Americans with the help of a few

whites, most of whom defined themselves as leftist, and most of whom were told

to “Go slow, and don’t do that,” by liberals and by labor. Parts of labor viciously

opposed the civil rights movement, particularly those in the building trades,

those in the AFL: skilled tradesmen, white Protestants, who always had a strong

tendency to vote Republican, just started voting Republican even more.

And that’s what really then destroyed the liberal labor alliance, which was

an irony— The liberal-labor alliance was built on a bargain. The Southerners and

the Northern liberal-labor alliance could get along by excluding blacks. Both

agreed, in effect, to exclude blacks, overtly so in the South. But in the North,

there was no great rush to register blacks as voters, because if they were to

become a majority in a city, as they did, the whites knew that they would be

replaced in the government, in Congress, by blacks—and as mayor and so on.

Some white Democrats really were fighting it. Still, ultimately they lost out. But it

distorted everything.

And enough whites went to vote for Republicans to change things. So LBJ

won 60 percent of the vote in 1964. And [Hubert] Humphrey won just a little

more than 40 percent in 1968. And Clinton, he won with like 42 percent of the

total vote. So when you look at it, white people have, they’ve basically declined

in their Democratic voting. One-third of them, roughly, have deserted the

Democratic Party, and have, with a few exceptions ever since, such as when a

born-again Christian from Georgia runs, and they think he’s okay, he’s a good

old boy. Although he would not agree to give a tax deduction to these

segregation academies in the South where they wanted an exemption on

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 293

religious grounds for the new segregationist academies of the 1970s. And that

and other factors—and all the Southern states except Georgia turned against him

in 1980, when he lost. So it was quite a switch by those states between ’76 and

’80.

So I’ve written about that. I’ve shown how that happened. It was totally

contrary to the new mainstream wisdom that the corporations were tired of

being pushed around, like the superman on the beach and people keep kicking

sand on him, and finally he gets up and beats them up. “Finally,” these other

stories say, “the corporations decided to get organized and fight back.”

Well, in fact they had been organized the whole time. They had some

small differences within their general shared class perspective. One group of

conservatives was much more conservative. There were ultra conservatives and

moderate conservatives. They disagreed over Social Security; over how to deal

with insurgencies from civil rights—a few other things like that.

And basically what the ultra conservatives always wanted to do is what

they’re doing now: they want to blame always the poor people. They want to

roust them out. They want to incarcerate more, which of course they’ve done in

enormous numbers with people of color since the 1980s. It’s a very different kind

of strategy. One is much more open, and moderate, and assimilatory, and allows

some social benefits.

But where they totally agree is, there will not be any power rivals. And so

they therefore work together to undercut unions. They also work together to

only make it possible to control inflation through high interest rates. Whereas

there’s other ways to control inflation, including with government guidelines.

But that would give too much power to government.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 294

So my book shows this in detail on how these corporate moderates

gradually said, “Hey, we’ve seen enough. We don’t want to go any further. It’s

the early seventies. Blacks are not rioting anymore. The Vietnam antiwar

movement is over. The feminists are going to school. The environmentalists—

we’re working with them. We can work with them, because it’s not the end of

world, this environment stuff. A few environmental issues might be a real hassle,

but most of them are really easily accommodated by the system.”

So my book tells that story. And it has a final chapter called ‘The Road to

the Great Recession,’ telling how, once moderate conservatives had become

hard-liners—still not quite the same as the ultra conservatives, but pretty hard

liners on more things—once that happened, all this deregulation started to

happen. Once deregulation started to happen, then of course all of the old 1920s

scams in the stock market and other financial misdealings came back. It’s almost

like rerun city. So I discuss the efforts towards deregulation.

In this particular book, there’s no criticism of any other theories as big

theories. It never even mentions Marxists. It doesn’t mention the other rival

school of thought by name. It does have a particular set of people it critiques, but

it’s over their information. Their account is descriptively wrong on when various

things happened, and on the importance of a group called the Business

Roundtable, which everybody “Oohs” and “Aahs” about.

The Business Roundtable began as an attempt to deal with organized

labor. That was their issue. But the people I’m critiquing think that Business

Roundtable arose because these corporate moderates were upset by regulation

by environmentalists. And again, they have not read the primary sources.
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 295

So it definitely still remains a critical kind of a book, in the sense of saying,

“Here’re some people that are wrong.” I call them ‘wistful romantics,’ and

sometimes ‘wishful revisionists.’ Because they want to have the—essentially—

glory days, the glory days of when the liberals ruled. Looking back and going

through the files, it didn’t look that way. Certainly I believed that in the sixties,

when there’s all the excitement of antiwar, and new environmentalists, and

feminists rising. And, of course, the civil rights movement is the engine to all

that. So you think, Wow, things are changing. LBJ won. The right has been

scattered, supposedly.

But from the time Nixon came into office, it went the other way. Even

though—see, what all the revisionists say is, “Well, Nixon still spent a lot of

money.” Yeah, but it was all on middle-class programs that went into the South

and conservative states. And they really improved Social Security, but they

wanted to hold onto the elderly vote. And Social Security is no threat to their

power. So until 1980 they had remained pretty strong for improving Social

Security, and supported the indexing of it, which is one of the greatest things in

the world for the elderly population of America, even though most of them are

not still nearly as well off as ultraconservatives claim. So ultraconservatives are

now trying to undercut the indexing by cooking up new ways to adjust for

inflation, which, of course, will benefit them.

Now, I was going to take a break after I finished that book, because I

finished it in the summer of 2012, in the middle of July. And I was going to take a

little break, and then I was going to start in on a revision of Who Rules America?

that would come out in 2013. And in the past revisions I’d had to give it to them

by the middle of January. So on their new schedule, these new people—because

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 296

now it’s just horrible, it’s just a corporate assembly line. They wanted it, “Oh, we

thought were going to get parts of it in the summer. We want some of it by

November,” and so on. Deadlines I finally met. But working with McGraw-Hill a

horrible experience. So I said, “Look, this book is not like I finished the chapter

on how the eye works, and then I can put it aside and go on. This book’s a whole.

I move stuff back and forth.”

But I went back to work hammer and tong, and I had the benefit of a new

database—a database with all the names of people, and corporations,

foundations, think tanks, discussion groups, networks, and how they were

connected. So I had all their names and their organizations. And I was able to

then have a much better network of the power structure than we’d ever had

before, thanks to a sociologist I had gotten to know at the University of North

Dakota named Clifford Staples. So Cliff became my running buddy on this one.

He had some great new findings, which he and I then presented at the sociology

meetings. I also put a document on the whorules.net web site with his findings in

it.

It’s kind of interesting because Cliff has just turned sixty and he was

doing all this work. But he’s decided, “No, I don’t want to do it anymore.” He’s

back to reading general theory. But he had sort of this late, great, last hooray and

hurrah, where he assembled this incredible database that I had my own research

assistants streamline, take out any little bugs in it, names that don’t quite match,

first names that are off, or misspellings. He got all of it, and created a database he

gave to other people to do all of these fancy kinds of studies. So I was able to

make the Who Rules America? genuinely different on that score and several others
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 297

that I won’t go into, so that it was sort of a major, major revision—the most major

revision from when I’d first written the third edition in 1998.

So it ended up, once again, this very gratifying feeling of closure. And in

the face of the way things have gone I gave it a new subtitle, which was fun. It’s

called The Triumph of the Corporate Rich. I tried it out on all my various friends.

The ones that want to keep hope alive and not spread despair to the masses and

this kind of talk—you know, that more leftist uplift talk—they said, “Oh, don’t

do that. It’s too despairing.” And the others said, “It’s good. Got to tell it like it is.

If this is the thesis, that’s what it should be. People should know that these

people have triumphed. Let’s quit kidding ourselves.” It was interesting on the

feedback. But the people that I trusted the most and thought about it in terms of

the impact of the book favored the new subtitle. I went with The Triumph of the

Corporate Rich. It may raise some hackles, but maybe that’s good for keeping the

book in the mix and in the discussion.

So as I’m doing this oral history, I have these two books that are about to

come out. Who Rules America is due May 24th, 2013. And The Myth of Liberal

Ascendancy has an official publication date of July 1st, 2013. So I’ve got them both

out there. I feel this enormous sense of closure. I know I’m going to leave this

power research behind. I’m not going to do any new power research, I don’t

think ever, but certainly not for several years. You just don’t know, when you’re

older, when you’re going to lose interest, or shut down, or not be able to do it. So

at best I’ll do reactive essays and reviews on power or, maybe rewrite a few

things I’d like most to be remembered for, write that into something.

But I’m also at the point where I have all of these new data on dreams.

There are case studies I did and didn’t publish on purpose. And also research
G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 298

that was done for me by research assistants over the past ten years, where I’ve

had different research assistants that know how to use our coding system, how

to quantify dreams reports.

So I have all of these little things sitting there, waiting for me. And I’m

going to work on them for a book that will be called The Neurocognitive Theory of

Dreams. With this one, though, I feel no pressure. If I finish it, fine. If not, fine.

It’ll be bits and pieces. But it’ll encompass my last ten years of research since The

Scientific Study of Dreams, which had a great run and was mostly methodological.

So that work on dreams, plus occasionally teaching for psych and sociology, is

where I stand at this particular point.

And so for me, it’s a perfect time to have done this oral history, because

I’ve had this enormous sense of closure, this enormous sense of satisfaction about

some of the things I’ve been able to find in new archives, or with this statement

about the default network being also the neural network for dreams. It has a

feeling of—yeah, I can leave this. It’s taken a lot of pressure off my mind, because

I don’t know whether it comes out of my training or just my general past, or

what the university inculcates in you, but it was literally like a sin to leave data

unpublished. That was especially so for the sociological material. With the dream

data, I have it in different places. It’s in little papers. And they’re on my web site.

A couple of them aren’t that big a deal. So if I don’t write the Neurocognitive

Theory of Dreams, that’s okay. Because it’s done, and the basic points are out

there. My books have had their chance. And I’ve had my say. Now we’ll see

what effect it might have.

So that’s my story, as of May 13th, 2013. (laughs)

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 299

Rabkin: Thank you so much, Bill.

G. William Domhoff: The Adventures and Regrets of a Professor of Dreams and Power 300

About the Interviewer

Sarah Rabkin taught in UC Santa Cruz writing program and environmental studies department

for over twenty-five years. She holds a BA in biology from Harvard University and a graduate

certificate in Science Communication from UCSC. Her book of essays, What I Learned at Bug Camp,

was published in 2011.