Coming To America
The Marienthal study attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, leading to a two-year traveling fellowship to the United States. From 1933-1935, Lazarsfeld worked with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and toured the United States, making contacts and visiting the few universities that had programs related to empirical social science research. It was during this time that Lazarsfeld met Luther Fry at the University of Rochester (which resulted in the inspiration for the research done in Personal Influence, written some twenty years later) and Robert S. Lynd, who had written the Middletown study. Lynd would come to play a central role in helping Lazarsfeld emigrate to the United States, and would recommend him for the directorships of the Newark Center and the Princeton Office of Radio Research. Lazarsfeld contacted the Psychological Corporation, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing the techniques of applied psychology to business, and proposed a number of projects that were rejected as not having enough commercial value or being too involved. He also helped John Jenkins, an applied psychologist at Cornell University, translate an introduction to statistics Lazarsfeld had written for his students in Vienna (Say It With Figures). Finally, he pursued research into the ideas presented in the widely-read "The Art of Asking Why" (1935), which explained Lazarsfeld's concept of "reason analysis."
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Famous quotes related to coming to america:
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)