HARRIMAN INSTITUTE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT The Reminiscences of Stephen F. Cohen Columbia Center for Oral History Columbia University 2017 PREFACE The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with name of Stephen F. Cohen conducted by Interviewer Caitlin Bertin-Mahieux on April 5 and 6, 2017. This interview is part of the Harriman Institute Oral History Project. The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose. ATC Session: 1 Interviewee: Stephen F. Cohen Location: New York, NY Interviewer: Caitlin Bertin-Mahieux Date: April 5, 2017 Q: This is Caitlin Bertin-Mahieux. I’m here with Professor Stephen F. [Frand] Cohen. Today is Wednesday, April 5, 2017 and this is for the Harriman Institute Oral History Project. We are recording this interview in New York on the upper west side. Professor Cohen, thank you again for joining us today, for the time. Cohen: I’d say my pleasure, but first of all I’m not sure anyone wants to rummage through the past in these times. It’s hard to think about the past today with all the weight of current events pressing down on us. Q: Which we’ll get to as well, I hope. But let’s start well in the past. Let’s start in the beginning. So you were just showing me some photographs of Kentucky where you grew up. So I know you were born there. Tell me a little bit about your childhood in Kentucky. Cohen: Actually I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. Q: Oh, you were? Cohen: Where my mother was from. My father was a fairly—I wouldn’t say typical—but representative figure of what the Depression did to Jews in the Midwest. My father was a student Cohen - 1 – 2 at University of Wisconsin. His father had come from the Russian empire, fleeing the pogroms in the early nineteenth century. The family settled in Cleveland. My father had no ties to Russia, didn’t speak Russian, though my grandfather, a manual laborer, spoke many languages of that area. The Depression caused my father to leave the University of Wisconsin. To make a living he became a traveling salesman. He worked along the way for the Bendix washing machine company, as I recall. That took him throughout the Midwest. He met my mother in Indianapolis, and I was born. Then a man in Terre Haute, Indiana—later famous for two things. It was the pornography capital where college fraternities, in my day, got their stag films, and Larry [J.] Bird, one of the great NBA [National Basketball Association] basketball players, came from French Lick, a sulphur water resort right outside Terre Haute. That’s why Larry became known as The Hick from French Lick. My father met a man in Terre Haute who told him, “If you go down to Owensboro, Kentucky, I’m opening a store there. I know you want to settle down with your family. If you go there and run it, I’ll give you half ownership in the store.” So when I was about eight months old, my father took us to Kentucky, where I grew up. I lived there until—with one break of two years— I went off to college. And I didn’t go very far. I went across the Ohio River to Indiana University, in Bloomington, which was called my “reach” college. I wasn’t an outstanding academic applicant. I could have gone to the University of Kentucky, but I wanted to do better so I went to Indiana, which turned out to be wonderful for me. Kentucky—which left the Civil War more southern than it entered the Civil War— had been a constant battle scene. The Rebs held the town and the Yankees would come across the river. For Cohen - 1 – 3 a while it would be held by the federal government, and then by the Confederate government. It’s probably worth noting—because this became a factor in my life—that the two presidents of the two governments during our Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were both from Kentucky originally, which kind of tells you something about the tormented history of Kentucky. Like Tennessee, it was thought to have been a border state, but as I said, after the Civil War, Owensboro, Kentucky was very Deep South. I grew up in a one hundred percent Jim Crow state. The segregation, or American apartheid, was absolutely complete. We didn’t go to school with black folks, we didn’t formally socialize with each other. Very few black folks, if any—though my father tried to help one—could get white-collar jobs. They worked in stock rooms and the rest. The [Ku Klux] Klan, though subdued by then, was visible. On the fourth of July they had their float. It was just a fact of life, the Klan. I think the last lynching—I checked this once—the last lynching, at least in that region, where they snatched a poor soul from the prison and lynched him, was just outside Owensboro the year before I was born. So I had a Jim Crow childhood. Looking back, given my later intellectual interests, and to a certain extent my political activities, two personal formative experiences of my life were growing up in the Jim Crow south and beginning to understand how people change their minds, how change comes—which when I became a scholar I called reform and applied it to Soviet Russia to some extent, living off and on in Moscow in the [Leonid Ilyich] Brezhnev era from 1976 to 1982, when the Soviet authorities took away my entrance visa, living partly by fluke, among Soviet dissidents who were grappling in their own way with this problem of resistance and protest and morality and reform and what decent people do and don’t do. In my kind of jumbled autobiographical memory my Soviet experiences were reminiscent of discussions that Cohen - 1 – 4 were held as people became more enlightened and more protest-oriented in the Jim Crow South a decade or two earlier. Otherwise, because when you’re a child, as Corinthians says, you think and act as a child and then, if you’re lucky, later you put away childish things. You’re born into a society and you accept it. Segregation seemed completely normal to me. Though as you get older sometimes you have experiences that unnerve you. Mine involved briefly a young black woman that I took a hankering to and used to walk with her and that created some problems. But for me, because I was a basketball junkie, and I remain one today, I wanted to play basketball with the black kids. And sometimes you could if you went to the shanty town black neighborhoods and played outdoors, but you couldn’t if you were playing organized basketball. Though eventually basketball helped to desegregate the South, certainly Kentucky, because white coaches wanted to win. The result of that was when I finally came to New York in the 1960s I immediately headed two blocks, three blocks from where we sit today to the inner city to the big Frederick Douglass Project, and adjacent courts where outdoor games, pickup games, were always under way. I was a little uneasy when I came here in the ‘60s. Though I had had an easy rapport with black folks in Kentucky, I didn’t know the culture of New York. I’d never been here. But I soon became integrated into the black basketball culture here. For all these years since the late ‘60s I’ve run or helped run or coach summer and year-round tournaments mainly for young kids—it began for young black boys. I mean young, like five to sixteen. I don’t like the older teens because the Cohen - 1 – 5 gangs come and they cause problems. But more and more also for girls, who didn’t have enough of their own events. And so now I’d say what we do there is at least half girls. My own daughter, my second daughter—who was a super basketball player until she blew out her ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] three times— learned the game out there and was on her way to becoming a Division I player before that happened. But I put my son, I put my second daughter, and now I’ve got my grandkid who’s twelve over there. And that’s all the integration I’ve been able to do there. Other whites rarely will play there, though we’ve tried to recruit them. So growing up in Kentucky was— I mean looking back I understand everything, but I wouldn’t have exchanged that childhood. Because when I came north I realized that I’d grown up in a kind of different country. For one thing it alerted me to the importance of the Russian provinces. Moscow is not Russia; New York is not the United States. Also I came with a set of experiences and attitudes that were different from the northeast corridor up here. I think there were others at Harriman. Loren [R.] Graham came out of that Indiana environment. But when I came to New York in the ‘60s—it was then the Russian Institute—it was really very much, so far as I encountered it, kind of a northeastern phenomenon, another world. But Kentucky [pause]—and by the way I still go back occasionally. In Owensboro the economy there got depressed and the town decided to create an Owensboro Hall of Fame.