A second course Obama took that spring was International Monetary Theory and Policy, taught by Maurice Obstfeld, a young associate professor of economics who had received his Ph.D. at MIT four years earlier. Barack had already taken Intermediate Macroeconomics, and Obstfeld’s class focused on “the evolution of the world monetary system since 1945” and “monetary problems in international trade.” The third upper-level elective he chose was Sociology W3229y, State Socialist Societies, taught by Andrew G. Walder, a brand-new assistant professor in his first year of teaching who had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1981. Walder’s syllabus explained that the course would be “an analysis of state socialism as a system. The primary focus will be on the central features of these societies that distinguish them from others,” i.e., “the core features of state socialism,” and “we will spend most of the term comparing China and the Soviet Union.”
Walder recommended that students purchase seven books from which most of the required reading would be drawn, and recommended half a dozen others. The semester began with “The Origins of Russian and Chinese Communism,” and students read Alex Nove’s Stalinism and After, a survey of Soviet political history that focused on how deadly Soviet rule had proven for the regime’s many victims, including the early Bolsheviks. The second major topic was “The Communist Party as an Organization,” and over several weeks students read Elizabeth Pond’s From the Yaroslavsky Station: Russia Perceived, a journalistic work structured around the author’s rich and lengthy Trans-Siberian Railway journey.
Prior to Walder’s seven-to-ten-page typed, take-home midterm exam, the class covered “The Communist Party as a Status Group” and “Organized Surveillance and Repression.” Students read Hedrick Smith’s well-known The Russians as well as Jonathan Unger’s new Education Under Mao. Fox Butterfield’s China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, Miklos Haraszti’s A Worker in a Workers’ State, and Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge were three other titles on the syllabus. The second half of the semester covered topics such as “Bureaucracy, Office-Holding, and Corruption” as well as “Social Stratification and Inequality.” Everyone read David Lane’s The End of Social Inequality? Class, Status and Power Under State Socialism, which argues that “inequality is a characteristic of state-socialist society as it is of the capitalist.”
The final assigned reading prior to Walder’s ten-to-twelve-page typed, take-home final exam was Milovan Djilas’s 1957 classic The New Class. Smuggled out of Yugoslavia and published in the U.S. while the author languished in a political prison, the book’s publication was “an immediate sensation,” according to the New York Times. Djilas in the late 1940s had served as Yugoslavian ruler Josip Broz Tito’s personal intermediary to Joseph Stalin, but he was expelled from Yugoslavia’s Communist Party after expressing heretical thoughts. His best-selling book gave voice to those insights. Once a Communist Party “has consolidated its power, party membership means that one belongs to a privileged class. And at the core of the party are the all-powerful exploiters and masters.” Experiencing that in Yugoslavia had transformed Djilas into a democratic socialist. “To the extent that one class, party, or leader stifles criticism completely, or holds absolute power, it or he inevitably falls into an unrealistic, egotistical, and pretentious judgment of reality.”
The New Class was a powerful way to end a semester, or indeed to complete one’s undergraduate education. As one student said with some understatement years later, “Walder was anything but a Marxist,” and Walder himself drily observed that what his syllabus presented “was not a flattering portrayal of political and social life in these now-thankfully defunct systems.” Only an extreme control freak would withhold his academic transcripts from public view simply so as to avoid any public discussion of what possible ideological influence either Walder’s impressive reading list or Len Davis’s teaching about the political uses of fiction might have had upon an intellectually hungry twenty-one-year-old mind.35
Several weeks into that spring semester, Obama wrote another lengthy letter to Alex McNear in Eagle Rock. “I run every other day up at the small indoor track” at Columbia, a bit of news that Barack then spun into a lengthy descriptive portrait of the act of running. “After getting clean, I go to the Greek coffee shop … and have the best bran muffin in New York City—dark and fibrous … and coffee and a glass of water. I light a cigarette, make some talk with the Ethiopian cashier with big murky eyes and the sly smile and a small tattoo on her right hand in foreign code.”
Rereading this decades later, McNear wondered whether her letters to Barack “were just as pretentious … equally as convolutedly long and laborious.” Barack wrote, “I enjoyed your letter. I like the way you use words,” and then proceeded to a long disquisition on the concept of resistance against a “bankrupt” and “distorted system…. But people are busy keeping mouths fed and surroundings intact, and it is left to the obsessed ones like us to make the alternatives more tangible … so that resistance and destruction arrive in the form of creation.” He then paused to say “excuse the sermons,” but “I also have thought about us and conclude that I like what we have…. Perhaps what I’ve been after is a correspondence, a union, yes—but never exclusive, cocoon-like, ingrown. Rather something outwards, a point of extension.”
With graduation approaching, he had more mundane issues to discuss. “I’ve been sending out letters to development and social services agencies, as well as a few publications, so I should find out in the next few months what I have to work with next year. Classes are the average fare. A class called Novel and Ideology has an interesting reading list covering several of the things we spoke of” when Barack was in Los Angeles. “Of what I’ve read so far I recommend Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams. A lot of it is simplification, but it generally has a pretty good aim at some Marxist applications of cultural study. Anyway, it might be a good point of departure for further haranguing between us.”
Obama then ends the letter, but the next day he added a long postscript that began by mentioning homeless panhandlers he often saw. “I play with words and work pretty patterns in my head, but the hole is dark and deep below, immeasurably deep. Know that it’s always there, rats nibbling at the foundations, and it can set me to tremble.” Then he thought to respond to something Alex had said about T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land and told her to read Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as well as his Four Quartets. “Remember how I said there’s a certain brand of conservatism I respect more than bourgeois liberalism.” Barack finally concluded by saying, “I can’t mobilize my thoughts right now, so … I leave you to piece together this jumble.”36
The label “jumble” could also apply to an article Barack submitted to Sundial, a weekly Columbia student newsmagazine. Just prior to its publication, he wrote to Phil Boerner in Arkansas and mentioned he had “been sending out some letters of inquiry to some social service organizations and will also be making up a resume (no comment) soon. I’ve also written an article for the Sundial purely for calculated reasons of beefing up the thing. No keeping your hands clean, eh.”
The article, titled “Breaking the War Mentality,” began by asserting that “The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents’ wartime memories, or incorporating into our frameworks of reality as depicted by a Mailer or a Coppola. But the taste of war—the sounds and chill, the dead bodies, are remote and far removed. We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are occurring, but bringing such experiences down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.”
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