If you’re feeling ambivalent about celebrating this Fourth of July, you’re in good company. As a biographer of Abraham Maslow, I have found no evidence that he specifically marked our nation’s birthday. However, his famous colleague and friend, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, did just that on the landmark bicentennial in 1976. Like Maslow, Mead became a famous mind of a warm and sincere nature; he emphasized the social sciences as a way to create a better world for people everywhere.
When the 27-year-old Maslow returned to his hometown of New York City in 1935 after receiving his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, he was extremely excited. Although he valued his training in experimental psychology, he found it intellectually narrow. Many of his Midwestern professors were parochial—sometimes even xenophobic—in denigrating his interest in European thinkers like Sigmund. FreudAlfred Adler, and Gestalt psychologists. Now, Maslow was free to pursue his personal interests without the constraints of academic demands.
“(It) was like coming out of the darkness into the light. It was like a farm boy to Athens. Many great European and American founders were accessible, even to a young student, and I thank many of them for their kindness and patience. No young man was as lucky in his teachers and friends as I was,” Maslow recalled decades later.
During Maslow’s absence, New York became more than ever the center of intellectual discourse. After Hitler came to power in 1933, there was a steady exodus of scholars, including leading sociologists and psychoanalysts. By mid-1935, a vibrant community of foreign social thinkers had transplanted itself. This historical situation was unprecedented, and Maslow knew it. Almost immediately after settling in, he diligently searched for many of these numbers. Some were famous in the world, like Adler. Others, like the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, were still more obscure.
But public recognition did not matter to the young Maslow. During this period, he had an instinctive, almost unusual and brilliant sense in the selection of teachers and tutors. Between 1935-1940 he met and studied with Adler, Fromm and Karen Horney. psychoanalysisand Kurt Goldstein, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka in Gestalt psychology. “I think it’s fair to say that I had the best formal and informal teachers of any person,” Maslow recalled, “just because of the historical accident of being in New York when the cream of the European mind moved away from Hitler.”
Not all of Maslow’s mentors in New York were refugees. Among the most important were anthropologists Ruth Benedict at Columbia University and her former doctoral student Margaret Mead, who were already media stars for her books. Coming of age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in three primitive societies (1935). Mead and Maslow seemed to recognize each other’s intelligence immediately, and by the time the latter book was published, they were already collaborating on psychological research. In an unpublished letter to Benedict in 1940, Maslow effectively described Mead as “one of the smartest people on the planet,” although it is unclear whether he knew at the time that they were lovers.
In the years to come, Maslow would clearly base his core theory of self on his mentors Benedict and Wertheimer and maintain a collegiality. friendship with Margaret Mead. Through his nearly 45-year career as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, he became a popular intellectual and appeared in popular media on topics such as romantic lovesex, marriagechild rearing, family life and women’s rights.
In America’s bicentennial year, 1976, Mead, in his mid-70s, remained a beloved and prolific writer. For example, in March of that year, he received a standing ovation for a lecture at Louisiana State University on the “generation gap” and its pressures on both young and old. The following month, in a paper presented to the East-West Communication Institute in Honolulu, Mead carefully noted: “If we want to think about the whole planet, we have to think about what things should be planets and what things should be put into very small units (people).” And especially for America’s 200th birthday in July, Mead took a cautious approach optimistic the position of the humanitarian capabilities of our country after its exit from the Vietnam war.
Mead felt that Maslow had over-idealized their mutual mentor, Ruth Benedict, but shared his undying enthusiasm for the benefits of sociological knowledge and the unrealized potentials of America and humanity. On this Independence Day, such optimism is a valuable beacon to guide us.
