Sally Falk Moore interviewed by Kalman Applbaum 24th August 2008

0:09:07 Born New York City to Jewish parents; father a surgeon and mother an artist, though she never sold anything; brother two years younger; as children taken care of by various nannies; first experience of multi-culturalism as the first was Swiss, the second German, and so on; we slept in a room with the nanny so a very intimate relationship; my mother spent an hour with me every evening before my father returned; I did not eat my meals with them until I was thirteen; my mother was a second or third generation American; father's family had come from Hungary and moved into the slums of New York where they had a dry goods store; he was a prodigy who got himself to Columbia Medical School; he was so young when he graduated at twenty in 1910 that he lied about his age so he could be licensed; he became a very distinguished surgeon and teacher; his father had died on the trip to America and my grandmother married again; she had two sons by her first husband, two more with the second; there was always some tension between them; she had come to the states with my father when he was two years old, but left his older brother behind with her parents; the resentment over that never died; his brother was brought over when about ten; he became a prosperous lawyer in New York; this grandmother and her Hungarian husband lived in a little house in Rockaway that my father had bought for them; they had an orderly little garden which my grandfather cultivated in European style with apples, flowers, vegetables in raised beds; he was quite a character with a Hindenburg moustache. We had a game in which I sat in his lap and tried to pull his moustache and he would bite my finger if I were not fast enough to escape; he went to Synagogue every morning, taking a swift drink beforehand to keep warm; my grandmother took care of the household and cooked enormous heavy meals which I loved; we were taken out to their house in Rockaway by the governess; during the period I remember it was a German governess who would take us; we would go on the Long Island railroad; we only ever went for the day and they never came to our house; their English was creative though they were fluent in Hungarian and German; my mother's parents lived on Park Avenue and were a contrasting case; my mother’s father was a paediatrician; he was a typical exemplar of Russian dress and behaviour; he spoke Russian, German and French; I knew him when he was very old; his principal hobby was to roam second-hand books stores which were then on 59th Street; I liked him a lot but never knew what to talk to him about; his wife was awful; she had been a school teacher and at the slightest provocation would recite the names of the capitals of all the states of the United States

9:07:13 My parents sent me to a wonderful progressive school called the Lincoln School, an experimental school that the Rockefellers had set up for their sons; it was supposed to epitomize the philosophy of John Dewey; it was the experience of my life; all my teaching, contacts with students and contacts with universities have always been to try to replicate this school; they didn't consider children to be too young to talk about anything; in addition to normal things like math which we had to learn, we taught about the city around us and the poverty such as the shacks in Central Park; there was a great deal of learning by doing; remember in fourth grade we had a long study of Egypt, building pyramids out of clay and making paper from papyrus; we read Plato and all sorts of other utopian works and were then asked to write about our ideas about a Utopia; we wrestled with things like government and democracy at an early age; the school used the well connected parents of the students to capture people to come and speak to us; Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer came, and so did Franz Boas; Boas was there not to talk to us but to measure us as we were all the children of immigrants and he was interested in the way the children of immigrants grew compared with their parents; we felt that because of the school we were in touch with the world and that our parents lived in a very restricted social circle; because I spoke French, which I had learnt from my German governess, I advanced rapidly through school; at some point because of high school credits the school  said that I was ready to go to college; I was fifteen; I applied to Vassar and Barnard; I got in to both, but my parents wanted me to go to Barnard, which I did; I lived at home and commuted; I majored in English literature because I thought I would become a writer; I hated Barnard; I had also thought I would do a pre-med course to become a doctor, but an acquaintance with a smelly dogfish discouraged me; also pre-med courses were crowded and purely lectures and memorization; my father did not want me to become a doctor as he thought it not a profession for women; the literature course was also trying with lots of memorization from Shakespeare's sonnets to everything else; the nadir was a history course in which the teacher did not lecture but read from a textbook that she had not written; Barnard had a policy that if you were often absent from class you failed the course despite doing well in exams; it seemed to me that the whole thing was hypocritical since the point of school was to learn the material, not to sit in class; so I became the head of the student curriculum committee and started a movement to change the curriculum; I made enough trouble so that Dean Gildersleeve called me in and said I should stop my activity; by that time I had had a couple of public meetings and had also recruited some faculty members; I was successful in this very small political move; I thought they should have some education about sex (they only taught about what they called “hygiene” meaning good diet, good posture) and much more about what was going on in the world; not much came of my curricular efforts; toward the end of my senior year I saw that the employment for an English literature major would be at best be to become a typist at Time Magazine, or some such, in the hope that somebody would notice you; I had ambitions to write fiction; I realized that it was a much better idea to go to law school than to go into the job market as just a college graduate, and that I could perhaps also realize some of my political ambitions by going to law school.

20:13:03 At the end of three years at college I started in law school; I was eighteen; it was at the beginning of the War, men were being drafted and the school had shrunk; there were very few women and not many men; outside we could hear recruits marching; that was a strange time; when you were called upon to present a case in class the professor went through the list calling everybody 'Mr'; there would always be general laughter when a woman stood up; there were some professors who made fun of women, one in particular, Julius Goebel, had “ladies days” and other torments for the women in the class; there has recently been a survey of women who were at Columbia at that time, many of whom said it was a demeaning experience; it was true of some professors, but not all; the mode was as in many law schools today, you presented a case and then you were asked questions; it was adversarial; one professor was very rude to me and I decided to go and see him; to my surprise, he was very genial, and although his attack on me had been vicious (“you are an example of the reason I opposed the admission of women to the law school”) there was nothing personal about it; although shaky at the start, by the time I reached my last year I has some dazzling grades and was recognized to be one of the bright people; I became research assistant to Jerome Michael, a criminologist; I also had the experience of having worked with Karl Llewellyn who was interested in anthropology and also wrote poetry, which most law professors did not do; I liked him very much for his understandings of law; he explained to us that litigation at the appellate level always presumed more than one interpretation of the law; he was a contracts persons and said you could only understand the legal implications of a contract if you understood the circumstances under which it was written; he was overwhelmingly interested in social context; in the meantime I had got married at eighteen, to a lawyer who was then in the army, so I saw him only when I travelled to the localities where he was stationed; this broke up my legal studies but it had its interesting side; for a time he was stationed in Richmond, Virginia, and became aide de camp of a general; I came to realize that generals were just people; (this general had been a silk stocking manufacturer in civilian life) he decided that, as a law student, I should visit bereaved families and tell them what their financial rights were; I was very scared and found it uncomfortable, but I had to do it; it was surprising to me that I didn't meet any people who were crying but instead were very much interested in their entitlements, and wanted to know how they could get hold of money

28:10:08 After law school I started job hunting; I had chicken pox during that time, which was embarrassing; my parents were in the background saying that I should work for a Jewish firm; in all these firms they asked if I was married and how soon was I going to have children; they were interested to see if they were going to get their money's worth out of me; the job I got was through Karl Llewellyn who had put in a good word for me at the firm Spence, Hotchkiss, Parker and Duryea in Wall Street; they had just made a woman a junior partner; her name was Soia Mentschikoff, and she eventually became Karl Llewellyn’s wife; both of them left Columbia and went to teach at Chicago Law School, and later, as a widow, Soia became the Dean of Miami Law School; her prominence was very encouraging; there was one other young woman at the law firm in an apprentice position like mine (we were called “associates”); what interested and excited me at the law firm was the standard of their product; we had to produce briefs for the partners, and the standards of performance were very high; we were given every support with secretaries etc.; the plan of the firm was to rotate each new young lawyer around from one partner to another through a year and then attach them to one department; there were various kinds of law, in business, banking, or other things; it was still during the war and from the upper floor of our office we could see the ships with soldiers coming back; this was a very different experience from college and one had to learn the culture of the office; it always went beyond the five day week and one was working all the time; everything was urgent or an emergency; what I realized very soon was the way one became a partner was to bring in clients; I couldn't imagine crashing the social circles that produced the clients that this firm had; I was only twenty-one and didn't know those kinds of people, so I felt that I had no future there in terms of high ambition; in the short term, in some ways the work was very dull; I assiduously read the opinions as they came down from the courts because you had to be ahead of the game; a lot of clients came in with the kinds of questions I couldn't possibly answer, like should they float more stock or not, business advice, and I realized that one would have to know something about the business world to be able to do that; I did not feel I was a success even though I was very much a pet in this law firm and did well; in the spring at the end of my first year, Telford Taylor who had just been made the head of the Nuremberg Trials, the successor to Jackson, came to New York to recruit lawyers because the War had ended and his staff lawyers, who were military men, were leaving him; he would never have heard of me except that I had two sponsors for the bar, one a senior partner in the law firm, Kenneth Spence, and the other Max Lowenthal who was a lawyer who was very active in Washington; Max had had a strange career as in his mid-thirties he felt he had made enough money and wanted to become a lobbyist for his political views; he had worked for the ILG and he knew Taylor and suggested me to him

37:04:07 I went to Washington to meet Taylor and his colleagues; they were going to try major figures of the German Government after the first trial was over; we were clearly going to be given a list of the defendants and it was a question of making the cases against them; I was interviewed by a number of people in Washington; I went to the Pentagon, which I think had just opened at that time; they decided to hire me; my husband later got a job to work on the same project; I got leave of absence from my firm; there was always a feeling of unease in the firm about a young female lawyer; I remember one of my first cases; Soia was away and I was temporarily given her desk and her clients; I was told she was going to represent the owner of a factory who had hired underage kids; he was going to appear before a labour board and I had to represent him as she was busy elsewhere; he was in his fifties and when we got to the labour board the mediator asked which one of us was the lawyer; when he found out I was the lawyer, he laughed; I made my case anyway and it all turned out all right; my parents did not want me to go to Nuremberg for many reasons; one was that a doctor had found spots in my lungs that suggested I had TB, but I suspect they did not want me to go into a dangerous situation; I was not going to give up so I went for another opinion where the doctor said that it was not serious, and I was able to convince my parents; I knew some German but didn't speak well, but there were translators; I had also had a vision that I would be able to sort out which Germans were more and which less culpable, I wanted the Americans to make the best case they could; Taylor asked what case I wanted to work on and I asked to work on that of the industrialists because I believed that they had the option of helping or not helping the regime; other people did not have those choices; Farben and Krupp were the ones I wanted to work on; he agreed that I start with IG Farben, the chemical company that made the extermination gas, that also employed slave labour; early on I went to the Farben headquarters with three or four German speakers as assistants to help me go through their files; that was a very instructive but distressing experience; to begin with I didn't know how to drive and I had to go to the motor pool each day to get a car and driver; what I found was that there were tremendous warehouses full of documents; there were floors with shelves full of manila folders; I asked to meet the person who was in charge of the building; it was a German who had been in charge of Farben’s documents before the War; these materials had come out of a salt mine where they had been hidden during the War for fear of damage; I assumed he would know where everything was but he denied knowing anything; he said they were just randomly shelved and I felt sure that was not the case; I felt sure there was a lot of documentation of the slave labour and the maintenance of it; they must have ordered people and food and equipment; I talked to my assistants and all they could find was a telegram sent to Hitler congratulating him on his birthday and things like that; I had not expected that these files would be in the charge of a German, or a Farben man, but in the charge of an American; there was an American Major who did have formal control and I went to see him to complain; he criticized the Nuremberg trials for persecuting Germans who were doing nothing wrong, and suggested that a bunch of Jews were doing this; he said he would give me no support whatsoever in my complaints about the archivist nor would he help me get the kind of documents that I needed; ( there was no point in time where my being a Jew was relevant); there were materials in the main office, some of which I packed together into a brief, but they were not nearly as useful as other materials would have been if I had been able to get hold of them; I finally met a young chemist who was also interested in the Farben documents; but he was interested in their chemical formulae as he wanted to take them for the American Government; I asked him if he would be of any help; absolutely not as he had one objective himself and he was not going  to help the Nuremberg people; it was clear to me that certain of these military  people were anti the Nuremberg trials; they had to give permission for us to look at things ourselves, but they were  not about to offer any assistance; I had another unpleasant experience when I got back to Nuremberg and was asked to evaluate the translators and people I had taken with me; there was one who had done no work and I gave her a poor rating; what I didn't realize was that in a small organization like this everything is public; she found out immediately and told Taylor that I had demanded a limousine and chauffeur, and that I didn't do any work; fortunately my contacts with Taylor were such that he didn't believe her; I realized then that I had to watch my step all the time

51:40:24 The legal problem we had was to connect particular people with the crimes of which they were accused; what was not difficult was to connect the firms that they worked for or the Government; you knew who set up the camps or the gas, but you could not connect the individuals in the firms or in the Government with this operation; I suggested that what we should do was to get hold of these peoples' secretaries as they would know what we needed to know; I was told that we couldn't exploit these little people as it was immoral; I found this attitude very strange; they wanted to prosecute cleanly without any embarrassments; I was too young and unimportant to be able to get anywhere; I stayed six months; I didn't live with my husband there as our divorce was in process, and I had to leave to get a divorce; I left at Christmas, and then Taylor asked me to come and work for the Nuremberg trial staff in Washington, but I said no; I did not go back to the law firm either; I had my eye on the UN because I wanted to go into the international world where I saw there was clearly an opportunity for a young person so I told my friend Max Lowenthal that I wanted a UN job; I also went to my old professors at Columbia Law School; Max said he had a good friend in the State Department who would be able to help but was in a little trouble at the time; this friend was Alger Hiss; the job at the UN never materialized because Alger Hiss's troubles with Nixon got worse and worse during that year; so while I was studying for my anthropology exams I was realizing that I was not going to be able to do this; I had gone into the PhD programme in preparation; I had told the Department that what I was interested in what was known in the social sciences about who had responsibility for what a group, tribe or nation did, and how was that explained - how was responsibility allocated and who had ideas about this; of course, anthropology is a complete blank on this subject, but it was even true of political science; the latter was studying the relationship between government, administration and population; sociology was about the family, but not about these political issues; what seemed to me to be possible was that maybe I would be able to work my way through the anthropology stuff and come up with some political material in the end; the faculty people at Columbia were very welcoming

57:34:13 At that time Alfred Kroeber was at Columbia and the linguist, Joseph Greenberg, Charles Wagley, Julian Steward, all notables; I took the measure of each of these people and I studied with them; I knew that I was not going to look at my subject for the first year as they had no way to adjust their requirements and I had to go through their usual paces; I thought that at the end of that year I would go to the UN; at that point, not going to the UN, I looked at other job possibilities and it seemed to me sensible to continue with anthropology; I continued to be interested in my original idea but ended up writing a dissertation on the Inca; by then I had linked up with my second husband, Cresap Moore; he did not want me to go and do fieldwork as he was not prepared to sit around waiting for me to come back; I decided I had to do a library dissertation; I was going to compare the Inca and the Aztecs and try and sort out the political systems the two empires had, how their tax system worked and how they managed their armies and labour etc.; so it had to do with the same kinds of issues that I was involved in at Nuremberg but in a documentary and rather ancient setting; the book I wrote was called 'Power and Property in Inca Peru. I had to give up the Aztec, Mexican comparison. It was too large a project to do both

1:01:08:18 It took me a long time to finally do the dissertation and there were some years between leaving school and doing it; in the meantime Cresap moved from one job to another in history; he did not have his PhD either, and there was nowhere for me to work in the universities where he went; they had nepotism rules and they couldn't hire the wife of someone who was already in the faculty; what I did was write and my dissertation won a publication prize at that time but could not get a university job; we were at a couple of small universities but there were no professional openings for me; I worked alone and had no contact with anybody; I had two children.  I didn't go to meetings because I had to look after the kids, but I wrote in the evenings and a number of my first articles were produced that way; they were published in 'American Anthropologist'; my first publication was a history of the Department at Columbia because Kroeber had been asked to do that as he was the first PhD in anthropology in the United States and the first to be taught by Boas; he said he didn't want to be bothered but he would give me his notes and would I write it; my second publication was the Inca book; after that I wrote some stuff about kinship terminology because I observed that in Crow-Omaha terminology the women did not use the same terms as the men and it was not a mirror image, and that all the literature was about the men's terminology; it was published but did not attract much attention; then in 1963-4 I wrote another one which was related to a psychoanalytic interest; one of the puzzles about many of these tribal peoples is that they have an origin myth in which there is a first family; the big question is who do the children of the first family marry, and does this conform to their kinship system; what I did was tabulate statistically from many different peoples some of the surrounding myths; then came my first professional break which came from Laura Nader; she held a conference on law and anthropology sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and held at Burg Wartenstein, the castle they had bought for such conferences but have no longer; it was so cold in winter that it could only be used in summer; I wrote a couple of papers; again my rebellious self manifested itself; I was trying to make the point that the rules of kinship and descent which are frequently taken literally by anthropologists are very often bargained over and used symbolically or even undone by the very people who declare these as their rules; at the Wenner-Gren meeting there were all these older and better established anthropologists who seemed to take the categories literally; however, my paper went well and after that I was launched because then I knew all the people who were in law and anthropology, especially the English people; Schapera was there and Gluckman, Nader who had organised it, Bohannan, everybody who had a name in anthropology and law was there; my first academic job was in California after Cresap had got a job at UCLA, so I was simply following him up to that point because there was no possibility of employment; the conference in Austria was set up in a strange way; as most of the delegates were men the woman who ran it wanted them to be happy, so she supplied the equivalent of Geishas, young Austrian girls in costume, to sit at our tables at dinner; of course, they knew nothing about anthropology, so there was this strange element; Gluckman was interested in my work but I don't know whether it was so at that time; my own materials were very seldom cited; it had been a very odd and invisible career - distinguished and invisible; then the 'Biannual Review of Anthropology' asked me to do the first review of legal anthropology which came out in 1969