A Half-Century Perspective on APSA Annual Meetings

I attended my first American Political Science Association meeting in 1949. It was an exciting experience for me as a first-year graduate student. I already venerated several established scholars in the profession. Herman Finer and Carl Friedrich were the towering figures on my intellectual landscape in comparative politics, my major field. In American politics, in which I was a teaching assistant, Edward S. Corwin and Carl B. Swisher were giants. And here they were, conspicuous in the halls of the hotel, standing for hours, as I recall, each in his own place, talking with groups of awe-struck students. The greats of the profession were suddenly real people rather than simply names on books. The APSA membership included a significant cadre of political leaders, public figures, and well-known journalists. I was astonished to see Senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas, Congressman Jacob Javits, Ralph Bunche, who had just served as acting UN Mediator on Palestine, and Max Lerner, a noted editorial writer and political theorist.