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If you’re feeling ambivalent about celebrating this Fourth of July, you’re in good company. As Abraham Maslow’s biographer, I’ve found no evidence that he specifically noted our nation’s birthday. However, his famous colleague and friend, anthropologist Margaret Mead, did so on the momentous bicentennial in 1976. Like Maslow, Mead became a celebrity intellectual with a warm, genial persona; she emphasized social science as a path to creating a better world for people everywhere.
When 27-year-old Maslow returned to his hometown, New York City, in 1935 after gaining his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, he was immensely excited. Though prizing his training in experimental psychology, he had found it intellectually narrow. Many of his midwestern professors had been parochial—sometimes even xenophobic—in disparaging his interest in European thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Gestalt psychologists. Now, Maslow was free to pursue his own interests unfettered by academic demands.
“(It) was like coming out of the dark into the light. It was like a farm boy coming to Athens. Many of the great European and American originators were available, even to a young student, and I have many of them to thank for their kindness and patience. No young man has ever been so fortunate in his teachers and friends as I,” Maslow reminisced decades later.
During Maslow’s absence, New York City had become more than ever a center of intellectual discourse. After Hitler gained power in 1933, a steady migration of scholars, including leading social scientists and psychoanalysts, took place. By mid-1935, a lively community of foreign-born social thinkers had transplanted itself. It was an historically unprecedented situation, and Maslow knew it. Almost immediately upon settling in, he zealously sought out many of these figures. Some were world-famous, like Adler. Others, like psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, were still obscure.
But public notability was unimportant to young Maslow. He had an intuitive, almost uncanny, brilliant sense in choosing teachers and mentors during this period. Between 1935 and 1940, he came to know and study with Adler, Fromm, and Karen Horney in psychoanalysis, and Kurt Goldstein, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka in Gestalt psychology. “I think it’s fair to say that I have had the best teachers, both formal and informal, of any person who ever lived, “Maslow recalled, “just because of the historical accident of being in New York City when the very cream of European intellect was migrating away from Hitler.”
Not all of Maslow’s mentors in New York City were refugees. Among the most important were the anthropologists Ruth Benedict at Columbia University and her former doctoral student Margaret Mead, already a media star 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 acumen immediately, and by the time the latter book was published, they were already collaborating on psychology research. In an unpublished letter to Benedict in 1940, Maslow effusively described Mead as “one of the smartest people on the planet,” though whether he knew at the time that they had been lovers is unclear.
In the coming years, Maslow would explicitly base his seminal theory of self-actualization on his mentors Benedict and Wertheimer, and retain a collegial friendship with Margaret Mead. Through her nearly 45-year tenure as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, she became a celebrity intellectual, opining in popular media on such topics as romantic love, sex, marriage, child-rearing, family life, and women’s rights.
In America’s bicentennial year of 1976, Mead, in her mid-70s, remained an adored and prolific writer-speaker. For example, in March of that year, she received a standing ovation for lecturing at Louisiana State University on “the generation gap” and its stresses for both young and older adults. The following month, in a paper presented for the East-West Communication Institute in Honolulu, Mead presciently observed, “If we want to think about the whole planet, we are going to have to think about which things have to be planetary and which things ought to be left to very small units (of people).” And specifically for America’s 200th birthday in July, Mead maintained a cautiously optimistic stance on our country’s humanitarian possibilities after it had emerged from the Vietnam War.
Mead felt that Maslow had over-idealized their mutual mentor, Ruth Benedict, but shared his boundless enthusiasm for the benefits of social science knowledge and for America’s and humanity’s unrealized potentials. On this Independence Day, such optimism seems a valuable beacon to guide us.
