An Interview with Morris L. Cohen*
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LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 104:1 [2012-15] Reflections: An Interview with Morris L. Cohen* In December 2007, Bonnie Collier, then the Associate Librarian of Administration at Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library, interviewed Morris Cohen as part of a series of interviews with Yale Law School faculty called “Reflections.” This is an edited version of that interview. ¶1 Bonnie Collier: We’ve agreed to begin with a biographical conversation for the first part of the interview and then move on to an informal conversation. ¶2 Morris Cohen: Well, I guess if I’m beginning with my pre-Yale life, I will begin in Brooklyn, where I grew up. Brooklyn is, for most of its citizens, part of their very being. It’s at the center of their being. It’s a devotion that you never lose. Brooklyn was, at once, at least in the 1930s when I grew up there, cosmopolitan in its interests, certainly in its education. And while cosmopolitan, it was also provin- cial. That is, we were the center of the universe. Going across the bridge to Manhattan was like going to a foreign country. So it was a funny combination of things. ¶3 I can recall my main interest as a kid was sports. Participatory sports, although I wasn’t a very good athlete. I liked to participate in almost all the sports that were part of our seasonal cycle: stickball, street hockey, stoopball, and in sum- mer camp, which was another center of my world, I played all the traditional sports. ¶4 And spectator sports. Although living within a short walk of Ebbets Field, which was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I was a New York Giants fan. That was difficult at times. We would go to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers, and I would stand up in the wrong half of the seventh inning as the visiting team fan. ¶5 That came about in a strange way. My brother and I had polio in the big epidemic in 1932. To help us recuperate, during the winter they sent us down to Florida, and we lived in a boarding house across the street from the New York Giants training camp. Every morning we would go across the street and collect autographs. And that’s how, at age five, I became a New York Giants fan. ¶6 My other interests were books and reading. I loved my books. I read through all the boys’ series: Bomba the Jungle Boy, Baseball Joe Around the World, Tom Swift. And who were the brothers who were detectives? There was a male counter- part to Nancy Drew. ¶7 Bonnie Collier: The Hardy Boys? ¶8 Morris Cohen: The Hardy Boys. Thank you very much. We were also very big movie fans. I remember one Saturday afternoon going with my brother and my aunt at three o’clock to a triple feature: Greta Garbo in Camille; a film about the * © Yale Law School, 2012. A videorecording of this interview is available on the Yale Law Library’s web site. Morris Cohen Reflections Interview, LiLLiaN goLdmaN Law LibrarY (Dec. 7, 2007), http://library.law.yale.edu/videos/news/morris-cohen-reflections-interview. 149 150 LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 104:1 [2012-15] building of a tunnel underneath the Atlantic with huge doors to prevent fire from going to the wrong side of the tunnel—and of course, the villain gets caught in the doors when they close; and the third was something like the Ritz Brothers—one of those comic groups. I think that was the triple feature. Well, we went at three o’clock, and we didn’t get home till eight o’clock. My parents were frantic. But that was movies then—there were double features and triple features in those days. ¶9 Occasionally we would go to the theater. The WPA, a New Deal agency, put on public theater. The first show I went to, I remember, was The Emperor Had No Clothes, and there were clowns who came down the aisles before the play began, throwing big puffy woolen balls. They threw one toward me, and I caught it and threw it back. That was my first introduction to theater. ¶10 And we also had school and summer camps. I remember all the names and personalities of my teachers through the eight grades of P.S. 161, which counted among its distinguished alumni Norman Mailer. ¶11 Bonnie Collier: He was older than you. ¶12 Morris Cohen: Yes—maybe four years older. He was in my brother’s class, and my brother was four years older than me. ¶13 When I graduated P.S. 161, I went to Boys’ High School—a nondistricted public high school in Brooklyn that was academically very high. It taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I think at that time it was the only public high school that did that. I didn’t take Hebrew, because I went to Hebrew school after school. I didn’t take Greek, but I did take Latin, and that was a very formative experience. ¶14 The Latin group was separate from the others. We had Saturnalia parties with ice cream brought in by our Latin teacher, who was a man from Jamaica. A very stern disciplinarian, but a very good teacher. We each had Latin names, and when I wrote on the blackboard, I’d write “Haec scribit Mauritius Cohen”—this is written by Morris Cohen. ¶15 In sports, I was not good enough to make teams. But I was the manager of the soccer team. I had tried out for the soccer team, but I didn’t make it because there was an unfortunate accident: I didn’t wear my glasses when I played, and the captain of the team was somehow pushed onto the ground, and I kicked at the ball but I kicked the captain of the team by mistake. So they made me manager. ¶16 I was also manager of the track team. And the track team had a number of African American members who were big jazz fans. They sort of adopted me as their mascot and took me to these small nightclubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan, where we would hear Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins and other stars of the New York scene. They also smoked a very strange, sweet cigarette which they wouldn’t let me smoke. And it wasn’t until years later that I realized what it was. My parents would have been pleased that they didn’t let me smoke it. ¶17 From Boys’ High School I went to the University of Chicago. I had intended to go to Harvard where my brother had gone, but I flunked the German college entrance board. My second choice was the University of Chicago, which was fortu- nate because I think I was much happier at Chicago than I would have been at Harvard. Chicago was in the last years of the Robert Maynard Hutchins period, the great educational reformer. He was not a legal reformer, but he was the Dean of the Yale Law School. ¶18 Bonnie Collier: Right. At age twenty-six or something. Vol. 104:1 [2012-15] REFLECTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH MORRIS L. COHEN 151 ¶19 Morris Cohen: And then he became president of Chicago I think at age thirty. It was a very exciting time. Chicago, like Brooklyn, was very ethnocentric, or egocentric, or whatever. We thought we were the center of the intellectual universe. I was involved in a lot of undergraduate activity—intramural football again, strangely . my dire attempts at participation. I had a New York jazz program on the student radio station—Radio Midway. It was in the pre-high-tech days. Wires ran from radiator to radiator in dormitories and that’s the way Radio Midway was transmitted. I had a friend who had a New Orleans Dixieland jazz program, and we would verbally attack each other’s music. ¶20 I was also heavily involved in left-wing politics. I was president of American Youth for Democracy (AYD), which was a front organization on the left. It was the time that the left was trying to maintain close relations with the Soviet Union. ¶21 Bonnie Collier: What year was this? ¶22 Morris Cohen: As the Cold War was sort of beginning to freeze up. I was in Chicago from 1945 to 1948, right after World War II. Relations with the Soviet Union were beginning to cool, and the left focused on trying to maintain the World War II alliance. But then the Soviets took over in Poland, they took over in Czechoslovakia, and the fall of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet regime cooled my interest in the left. I disengaged from AYD, and pursued more academic interests. ¶23 I majored in anthropology. I was an authority, a minor undergraduate authority, on the Chukchi reindeer herders of northeastern Siberia, and I wrote an honors thesis on them for graduation. Then I used the Chukchi for term papers even in law school. I was still writing about Chukchi social control at Columbia Law School. It wasn’t until perhaps sixty years later that I ran into the Chukchi again when we would visit my granddaughter in Alaska. People from Anchorage and other parts of Alaska were beginning to go over to Siberia and bring back postcards, photographs of the Chukchi. So I would buy picture postcards with the Chukchi reindeer herders. That sort of bridged the sixty years between college and grown-up life. ¶24 After graduating from the University of Chicago, I didn’t know what to do.