Born and raised in New Orleans, LA, I have also lived for a year or more in Levittown, NJ; Houston, TX; College Station, TX; Anchorage, AK; Fairbanks, AK; London, England; Anderson, SC; Newport News, VA; and now Gainesville, FL, plus I spent about two years traveling around the world. But I have never considered any of these places to be a “community” because, to me, community was a special, idealized place. Indeed I have spent a good part of my life looking for that community but have yet to find it. Like many members of my baby‑boom generation, I grew up in the suburbs, a sterile, homogenous environment which did not remind me of my idealized community at all. My community was a small rural town or village where everyone knew each other and helped each other out but yet where individualism was respected; where no one dominated anyone else; where racism, hatred, hypocrisy, cruelty, jealousy, dissent, and competition did not exist; where people could be what they wanted to be.
From my earliest memories, I have been aware that I see the world simultaneously through two sets of lenses: one set idealistic and optimistic and the other set realistic and pessimistic. Perhaps this might be called schizophrenia in some people, but to me this condition has always been quite natural and has never caused any problems that I know of. I think sometimes that this double vision is a natural condition that most people either just are not aware of or just never talk about.
However, this “double vision” has often given me strange, seemingly contradictory, images and attitudes. It has made me more an observer of society than a direct participant. As a child I constantly watched what people said and did. And I saw many things I hated. Always idealistic, I held my society up to impossibly high standards that it could never even come close to meeting. I became convinced my ideal society was a deserted island. And yet I was a very happy child. I loved life, loved the excitement of seeing what the next day would bring, had plenty of friends, liked school, loved baseball, etc.
My suburban life did not come very close to meeting my ideal of community. The parents hardly knew their neighbors; there was no mutual cooperation; everybody was trying to keep up with the Joneses; peer pressure among parents and kids to conform to certain middle‑class standards was intense; racism was rampant. And yet I caught glimpses of my “community”, times when a real camaraderie existed between me and my friends‑‑on a camping trip or in a game of cops‑and‑robbers or baseball. Such memories would linger in my memory for a long time and strengthen my ideals.
But such times were few and far between and rarely repeated and, as I went through the heavy peer pressure of my teen years, I turned more and more inward and found solace when I discovered the word “misanthrope.” When I went off to college to get a degree in Chemical Engineering, I determined that after working for a few years I would move off to the wilds of Alaska where I could survive in peace. But after graduating in 1977 and beginning work in a refinery down in Houston I began to doubt whether survival would be enough for me. I started reading about communes and alternative lifestyles. After three years I finally moved up to Alaska and almost immediately realized that I was not that interested in fishing or building a log cabin. When I was finally free to be alone, I discovered loneliness. I discovered I was much more interested in people and trying to understand how an alternative society might be realistically structured.
In some literature I discovered a commune in India called Auroville which seemed to meet most of the criteria of my ideal community. It was international, recognized by the United Nations and India, non‑denominational without charismatic or religious leaders, and open to all who wanted to make the world a better, more peaceful place. After working in Alaska for two years, I went to Auroville and stayed there three months watching and learning. Unfortunately I realized that the Aurovillians had as many if not more problems than any people I had known and were as far away from my ideal of community as any place I had lived. People divided up into little cliques along national lines and tried to manipulate each other through intimidation and lack of cooperation. Backstabbing was as vicious as in any corporation I had worked for. The only reason the community held together was a common “religious” faith in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher whose ideas had been the original inspiration for the commune, even though each clique interpreted those teachings quite differently. I believe I came of age when I realized that no place could live up to my ideal of community, that people could never live up to my very unrealistic expectations.
Returning to the United States, I then slowly began my search to find my niche in a society where neither my deserted island nor idealized community was a real alternative. (At the same time I abandoned my impossible ideal of romantic love and found a nice girl who complemented many of my weaknesses, such as excessive idealism, and who is now my wife and the mother of our two‑year‑old son.) After trying teaching high school, growing strawberries, genealogy, and extensive travelling, I finally decided to go back to school and become a professional historian. What kind of history I wanted to do I had no idea beyond a vague notion of contributing my own interpretation of American history. However soon upon entering graduate school at William and Mary I discovered the “new social history,” a movement in the discipline which was attempting to discover the history of the common man using computers and statistical methods to retrieve “quantitative” data buried in the masses of public and private documents. With my interest in genealogy and engineering background in computers and mathematics, I was naturally attracted to this “new” history. With this better idea of what I wanted to do, I eventually decided to pursue my Ph.D. at the Unviersity of Florida where I was offered a Presidential Fellowship and where I could work with Darrett Rutman, whose work I admired.
Ironically Rutman is highly respected within the historical discipline as a community historian but, as I told him flat out before coming down, I had no interest in doing a community study. I simply found the approach too confining for the type of questions I wanted to answer. I thought of the history of the early United States as a “wave” of westward migration and I was much more interested in watching the process from on top of the wave than watching the inundation from below. Previous community studies could calculate only persistance rates without knowing anything about where the people were coming from or going to. And community studies seemed defenseless against charges of non‑representativeness. I also continued to equate “community” with a failed ideal that no longer interested me.
However, gradually Rutman has made me realize the importance of understanding community not as a failed ideal but as the reality of a localized network of social relations which provides a central key to the human existence. My disenchantment with the ideal actually became an asset that allowed me to see beyond sentimental notions of community which continue to dominate the historical literature. Many American community historians, reacting against a modern world driven by the reckless pursuit of self‑interest, are trapped in the search for an alternative pre‑capitalist “Golden Age” of community. Not only does my experience (albeit presentist and subject to change if contrary evidence appears) make me doubt that such a “Golden Age” ever existed but, more importantly, I believe that such a myth, even if discovered to be real at some place and time, can not help a society so far removed from such an ideal. At any rate I intuitively feel that the cause does not justify the effort and my time will be much better employed examining the reality of “community” in any place and time.
Rutman also convinced me that I could incorporate a narrow community study within a broader temporal and spatial framework to avoid many of the problems I had with community studies such as non‑representativeness. Indeed my professional interests will undoubtedly always tend to look toward the “bigger picture” because I believe my talents lie in analyzing the greater connections between places, people, and communities that few historians attempt to pursue. But the community study does give me a more solid base from which to work, greater access to the lives of historical people through locally-oriented sources, a link to other community studies, and greater insight into the context in which individuals and households make decisions. Yet the broader framework will place the community firmly within a network of other communities and a greater economic, demographic, and sociocultural environment.
Presently I am still working out my “community” framework, scouring a wide variety of social science literature for insights. My flawed ideal of community still remains buried in my brain, but now I am tackling the more relevant reality of community which I firmly believe will make a greater contribution to society than my previous utopian musings. Thus, my search for community played a central role in my coming of age both as a person and budding professional historian. Although I have yet to turn this incipient framework back onto the suburban communities in which I was raised, I have no doubt that such an effort would be viable and would help create a more accurate understanding of both myself and our modern world. But for the moment, I prefer to stick to a more “exotic” past world from which the present world evolved, at least until I get tenure.