One of the rewards of working at South Dakota State University was getting to know Bob Mendelsohn. Bob was our deviance instructor – and it says something about the normalcy of a sociology department when the guy who specializes in deviance has been married to the girl he dated in high school. Bob studied deviance – he didn’t live it.
Jewish, with a special appreciation for Christmas. He explained to me the amount of Christmas songs that were written by Jewish composers – and had a smile as he explained that without Judaism there would be no Christmas. When he retired, he moved from researching social deviance to studying the religion of his youth.
Bob looked at the United States with an appreciation that melded his science and his religion. He would point out how small the American population was at the time of the revolution, and how it produced such outstanding thinkers as Franklin, Washington, Payne, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. That virtually every other revolution merely turned into a change of elites – he emphasized the French Revolution eliminating the sixteenth King Louis in 1793 and Napoleon being declared emperor in 1804. So far as Bob was concerned, only the American revolution succeeded in empowering the people, and despite his science, it always seemed to him that God probably had a hand in selecting the people who wrote and signed the declaration, then fought the revolution and developed a nation.
So, as I look at July Fourth, I think of my old friend, now gone away, and how he blended science, history, and his religion in looking at our nation. Working with Bob gave me more appreciation for the folks who built the foundations of our nation than any civics class.
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