Remembering Rose

In September 1945 Rose Coser and I were new graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Columbia. She was from the beginning a vivid and forceful presence who used to sit in the front of Robert K. Merton’s classes and ask probing questions in her soft but firm German-accented voice. Though still in her twenties, she was a few years older than most of us and inevitably assumed something of a leadership role. Professor Robert S. Lynd encouraged some of us to organize a Socialist Club—this was a time of great political hope with the war having just ended. Rose and I and several others drew up a statement of principles, including the assertion that we were “opposed to all forms of totalitarianism.” This sounds inn...