A Biographical Sketch

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The personal history of Alfred de Grazia conveyed him as participant and close observer among varied and significant scenarios of the passing generation. He was born on December 29, 1919 and raised on the Near North Side of Chicago during the "Roaring Twenties." All four of his grandparents were born in Italy, of Sicilian origin. Named for his father, a musician and band conductor, he studied at Franklin Grammar School, and at Walker and Lake View High Schools. At fifteen he entered the University of Chicago, studied there from 1935 to 1940, and 1947 (A.B., Ph.D. 1948),and at Columbia University's Law School in 1940-1.

At college, he was enveloped by the controversies over the"Chicago Plan" curriculum, by philosophical debates between pragmatism and thomism, between the sciences and the humanities; it was the great age of the University, also the period of the Great Depression around the world. Teachers of the highest standing raged over what ideas and books were to be foisted upon their students, who were caught up, enthusiastically so, in the continual imbroglio. His book, The Student, gives a first-hand account of the University of Chicago in the hey-day of Robert Maynard Hutchins.

He was economically self-sufficient at sixteen, earning his educational expenses and livelihood at a variety of jobs. He played solo trumpet and was Manager of the University Band. He worked as well with the Orchestra. He starred on the University championship water polo team, which won national honors. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa honorary scholastic society. In 1938 and 1939 his jazz combo played during the summer aboard British and Dutch Atlantic Ocean steamships.

In World War II he served in the ranks from Private to Captain, in artillery, intelligence, and psychological warfare, and was decorated several times during the six campaigns in which he participated, venturing from North Africa to Germany. He worked with a small group of men who were innovating tactics and techniques of war-front and occupation propaganda; he was involved in fateful decisions regarding the Abbey of Monte Cassino, in the liberation of Rome and its new government, in the introduction of Italian troops into the Allied line, in the development of the First French Army, in the liberation of Southern France and Alsace, and in the conquest and control of Germany.

At war's end he commanded psychological operations of the American Seventh Army in Southern Germany. He had previously served in the British Eighth and American Fifth Armies. He recounts these war years inThe Taste of War.

After the war, he did a brief stint in publishing,and finished his work for the doctorate, which later under the title ofPublic and Republic: A History of American Ideas of Representation was one of the few books in political science to be selected for the initial White House Library collection.a graduate of the "Chicago School" of Political Science,he pioneered, following Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell and H.F. Gosnell,the Political Behavior movement that ultimately captured political science,providing to it especially a general theory of representation and apportionment,and redefining the scope of political science with the founding and editing, for ten years,of the American Behavioral Scientist,a journal which, when acquired by Sage Publications,became the centerpiece for the largest setoff social sciences journal publications in the world.

The Universal Reference System,the first computerized social science bibliographic service was his invention, and he designed other systems for use in welfare tracking and inventorying governmental functions. He supplied much of the theory for the Federalism Task Force of the Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Federal Government in 1947-48.He helped in salient stages of their careers candidates of the Independent Voters of Illinois,the repeatedly press-voted Best U.S. Senator, Paul Douglas,the candidates of the Democratic Clubs and Senator Alan Cranston of California, Robert E. Merriam of Illinois, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and others. Some of his students became leaders later on ranging from a Mayor of San Francisco to a Connecticut Congressman and Rhode Island Governor, from a foreign minister of Algeria to a famous Indian environmentalist.

He taught for the first time at the University of Chicago, briefly, at the age of twenty, a graduate course in comparative political parties and elections;

he spent the latter part of his teaching career (1959-1977)at New York University as Professor of Social Theory. In between he taught at Minnesota, Brown, and Stanford Universities, and lectured at various other schools in America and abroad, including Gothenburg, Istanbul and Lethbridge.(In one year, 1951-2, he held appointment to the faculties of three universities, Brown, Harvard and Columbia.)

His usual courses were entitled Social Invention, Political Behavior and Leadership, Methodology, Psychological Factors in International Politics,and Propaganda, Communications, and Public Opinion.

He helped conceive reorganization plans at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (with Frank Keppel)and Stanford University (in connection with a Ford Foundation program).He directed a Center for Applied Social Research at New York University in 1959-61.He designed a fully innovative college and led an experiment in higher education1970 -1972 at Valais, Switzerland, called the University of the New World. Its several radical innovations included personal-study plans and evaluations for every student, rule by an assembly chosen by lot from the school community, and the "Studio" as a continuous all-levels club-like substitute for conventional departments. To found it, he formed a team composed almost entirely of students, teachers, and adventurers from different places, notably Kevan Cleary, Richard Kramer, Peter Tobia, Philip and Elizabeth Jacob, Robert Cheasty, St. Clair Drake and Elizabeth Johns. Also involved was Nina Mavridis, who later became his second wife and, after divorce, set up a foundation on Naxos and moved with her husband, Peter Bockelmann, a prominent musicologist, to Berlin. The Swiss experiment ended in failure, for total lack of funding and from an internecine struggle for survival among the leaders; in retrospect, nevertheless, through the minds of its hundreds of participants, it appeared to have been a short-lived success, a benchmark of life.

Alfred de Grazia's books, beginning withPublic and Republic (on political representation)
in 1950, are to be found in most substantial libraries. His total published production runs to some two-score volumes. At first he wrote largely in political theory and method. Several major earlier works in the field areElements of Political Science (1952),The Western Public (1954),The American Way of Government (1957),Science and Values in Administration (1961),Political Behavior and Organization, 2 vol. (1962), Apportionment and Representative Government (1963),and Republic in Crisis: Congress Against the Executive Force (1965).Besides, he editedGrass Roots Private Welfare (1958), and wrote American Welfare (1960, co-authored by Ted Gurr ).

As indicated earlier, he undertook responsible roles in Chicago, New York, and California local politics and in national politics, in the Republican, Democratic and Independent movements. He directed a group of experts in a sweeping study of the functions and reform of the United States Congress, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute. Some of the many proposals of the report, entitled Congress: First Branch of Government (1966-7),ultimately achieved adoption. He supplied much salient doctrine to the "New Conservatism"before the term was used and abused,including voluntary welfare theory, anti-bureaucratic systems designs, and the strengthening of the independence and competence of the legislative branch of government. Much of this work was done with the aid of the William Volker Fund, the American Enterprise Institute, the Relm and Earhart Foundations, and New York University.

He then moved toward a more radical merger of right and left ideas, especially represented in the book called Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World? (1968 ff.)There followed Politics for Better or Worse (1973),Eight Bads, Eight Goods: The American Contradictions(1975),and Art and Culture: 1001 Questions on Policy(1979, prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts). He prepared and advanced proposals for new cities and a plan for the rational transition of a traditional rural area of the island of Naxos, Greece, into urbanism and tourism (which failed).He built a house there in 1968and has continued developmental work ever since.

He was an advisor with various national foundations, government agencies, and corporations, and was a senior consultant to the State Department, acting once as a delegate to the UNESCO General Conference, and organized and investigated psychological operations for the Defense Department in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. His reports on psychological operations, now largely declassified, include an early technical manual of the American Fifth Army published in the field (Cassino, 1944),Target Analysis and Media in Propaganda to Audiences Abroad (1952),Elites Analysis (1955), and Psychological Operations in Vietnam (1968).

Beginning in the 1960's his interests turned increasingly toward the problems of neo-catastrophism, following the publication of a widely praised but controversial book upon scientific censorship,The Velikovsky Affair: Scientism against Science.He termed the re-conceived field "quantavolution." Putting class-work aside, from 1977 onward he devoted full time to research and writing, culminating in the publication by 1985of ten volumes of the Quantavolution Series; they deal with subjects as diverse as the Odyssey of Homer(The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars)and the history of the Solar System seen as a binary electro-magnetic transaction(Solaria Binaria).Two volumes deal with the evolution of mankind(Homo Schizo I)and human nature today(Homo Schizo II.);in these he proposes a short-time instinct delay theoryof humanization, and cultural hologenesis. Also in this series are The Lately Tortured Earth,which is a proposed revision of the conventional earth sciences;God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exoduswhich interprets the Exodus in the light of modern science and psychiatry;The Divine Succession, which offers a new theology and new considerations on the existence of gods; The Burning of Troy, a collection of special studies and memoranda and Chaos and Creation,which presents the general theory of Quantavolution.

He came to call the new field "quantavolution,"to denote the theory of sudden, leaping,large-scale changes as the major factor in natural history,evolution, and human development. His Quantavolution Theory is the most general expressionof the movement away from newtonism, darwinism and lyallism in physics,biology and geology,and includes a thoroughly integrated electromagnetic short-time history of the solar system as a binary system;
other novel elements of the Q theory affect drasticallythe issues surrounding the development of human nature,biological evolution, geomorphology, and theology.Thus, his "Homo Schizo" theory has a hologenetic physical-cultural quantavolution from hominid to homo sapiens, bought on by sharp environmental crisis, as with a marked electro-magnetic atmospheric shift, bringing on a micro-delay in instinctual response, hence, multiple personality, hence fear of self and drive for self-control.

His Solaria Binaria Theory originates the solar system from a nova of the Sun and a stretched,lessening electric arc to a binary,now practically disappeared,around which the planets evolved.His theory of Lunagenesis derives the Moon from the Earthin recent times in response to a passing binary fragment("Uranus Minor"), and explains continental drifting,not by tectonic plate theory, but as a raftingof the remaining Pangea toward the great vacated basin,along the fracture lines of the globe occasioned at the moment of passage.He essayed a new theory of mythology and linguistics as well,and offered two novel proofs for the existence of gods.

All the while he worked in these areas,he continued to afford time and energyto his proposed movement for world government,begun in 1969 with the book, Kalos,What is to be done with our World?and pursued as a guiding theme of the Swiss college.He published Kalotics I and Kalotics IIcontaining manifestoes and extensions of the theory of world government.A number of his former students,

Dr. Stephanie Neuman, Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Dr. Nina Mavridis,and Dr. Ibne Hassan, to name four,were for a time actively engaged.In 1985 he set up a World Headquarters for the Kalos movement at Bombay, with Arun Gandhi, Rashmi Mayur, and others, which collapsed upon his departure. Too, his present wife and novelist, Anne-Marie Hueber de Grazia(inter alia, Pigeon d'argile, Sur ce promontoire, Les dents de scie, Amazon's Choice) has worked in the movement. In his study of the Bhopal poison chemical, Union Carbide disaster, A Cloud over Bhopal (1985), which she helped prepare,he urged that multi-national corporations be brought into a world order of responsibility.

The full story of his experiences in the Quantavolution Movement is related in his book, The Cosmic Heretics,which became the first of several planned autobiographical volumesto appear in print.Published in early 1992 were the first three volumes,those dealing with the child(The Babe: Child of Boom and Bust in Old Chicago, Umbilicus Mundi)education: (The Student: At Chicago in Hutchins' Hey-day)and soldiering in World War II: (The Taste of War). To follow are volumes on philosophy, academia and politics,on the Swiss university experiment,on the island and culture of Naxos, and on the family.A first volume of his poetry was published in 1967 as Passage of the Year and the second in 1997, Twentieth Century Fire Sale. In manuscript for some years and now publishedon the web are two novels, Blackout and Ron's Norm.Seventeen plays of recent years are appearing on the web and as a book in English and Italian translation (2004). A theatrical troupe, the Bergamaskers, was organized to perform them. A personal account of a Swiss espionage caseinvolving an acquaintance, Chris Marx, which also forms partof the autobiographical series, is titled The Fall of Spydom; it was written at his home in the Vaucluse, France, during the period 1988-9, and was published in 1992.

His web site, www.grazian-archive.com, welcoming over a million visits per year is working toward containing the full body of his works. Numerous De Grazia's have been extensively involved in American intellectual circles and public affairs. Two of his brothers are professors of law and philosophy, and authors of important works(Sebastian was awarded in 1990 the Pulitzer Prize in History for Machiavelli in Hell).Edward was a founding member of the faculty of the Benjamin Cardozo Law School and has written extensively on freedom of the press. A third brother, Victor, a political campaign manager and onetime Deputy to the Governor of the State of Illinois, heads a consulting firm that specializes in the jury process.

Alfred and his first wife, Jill Oppenheim, had seven children. (Their correspondence of a million words during World War II may be the world's largest of this genre, and in 1999 became available on cd-rom.)Two of his daughters are professors, Catherine in archaeology(a director of the American School of Classical Studies)and Victoria in social history(Columbia University; author ofHow Fascism Ruled Women and editor of A Dictionary of Fascism);a third, Jessica, first assistant and chief of administration of the office of the District Attorney of Manhattan, now a consultant on security matters for international concerns, has written on the the international drug traffic and efforts to combat it. His sons are craftsmen and musicians, working in Seattle. His wife, Anne-Marie, besides her own writing, collaborates with him on several projects. Numerous other relatives by lineage and marriage are also professors and writers, constituting in all one of the largest literary family in America.

In sum, he is author of 4500+ published pages on numerous aspects of American government and history(published by Alfred A. Knopf, John Wiley, Scott Foresman, Doubleday, Sidgwick and Taylor, American Enterprise Institute, Metron Publications,et al),3000+ pages on general political theory and world affairs, many pieces appearing in his role as founder and editor ofThe American Behavioral Scientist for a decade,3000+ pages on quantavolution and ancient catastrophes,1500+ pages of autobiography,2 volumes of poetry,

1 volume of theatrical plays, 2 novels and several thousand pages being prepared for publication on cd-rom.

Despite this intellectual dedication, his varied experiences and activities brought many friends and acquaintances. Among the friends would be named his parents(lest they be forgotten as friends),his wives, the brothers and their wives(particularly Anna Maria D'Annunzio de Grazia, Miriam Carlson de Grazia, and Lucia Heffelfinger de Grazia),and some of their children, and thereafter, in no special order, Bill Steinbrecher, Bob Merriam, Hank Danenberg, Tom Crowell, Livio Stecchini, Dick Cornuelle, Stephanie Neuman, Savvas Camvissis, Martin Herz, Bill Colman, Paul H. Douglas, Hans Wallenberg, Harold Lasswell, Bill Evers, Carl Stover, Norm Pearson, Bob King, Allen Greenman, Elberton Smith, Johnny Anspacher, J.F.Brown, Gert Roesler, Ken Olson,Mike Nalbandian, Jay Gordon Hall, George de Huszar, Paul Oppenheim, Ann Whittington Oppenheim, Earl S. Johnson, Donald Sproat, Derwin Elliott, Joe Farina, Howard Blencoe, Clara Zeutschel, Eugene Vanderpool, Simone Thomas, Ian Greenlees, Suzanne Farkas, Ian Robertson, Mike Fraser, Marge Goldman, Tom Frelinghuysen, Rosalyn Frelinghuysen, Susan Weyerheuser, Livio Stecchini, Stephanie Neuman, Christine Cahill, Ken Templeton, Kevan Cleary, Laura Bergquist, Donna Wilensky, Dick Kramer, Mike Fraser, Jean-Yves Biegbeder, Earl Milton,F.W. Meyer-Rudolphi, Chris Meyer-Rudolphi, Bill Mullen, George English, Emilio Spedicato, Itheil de Sola Pool, and many others whom one would wish to include and will be in the final directory. J’en passe et des meilleurs.’ It would be of little use to label them, except impermissibly to distinguish the famed from the obscure; moreover, each person would constitute matter for a poetic and sociological volume.

Actually affection and friendship varied with duration and intensity, in a kind of scatter-diagram. A rough calculation over the years would accord him about four thousand acquaintances, and a rather larger number of "nodding acquaintances."Of these 1500 or so would have been his students; he would have had about 250 close friends, five in grammar school, eight in high school, twenty-five in college and university, thirty at war, fifteen in politics, fifteen in business, ten in neighborhoods, twenty as colleagues, eleven in immediate family members (except children and wives),and the rest variously occupied and purely social. Intellectual and social activity often contended with public functions, jobs, and political agitation during his lifetime.

Alfred and Ami de Grazia sold their house in Princeton, New Jersey, and gave up a part-time residence in Angouleme, France in order to move in 2002 to Bergamo, maintaining at the same time the old Naxos home. Just as he had discontinued, or failed at some projects, in the past, he invented, but then quit developing, a computerized, on-line disk and print-bind plus electronic book publication system for small presses.

He stepped up his writing and editing of plays. He wrote and published in CD-rom (1999) Reconstructing American History from 1400-2000A.D. Soon afterwards, the total unexpurgated World War II correspondence with his wife Jill, Home Front and War Front, appeared in CD-rom, as one of the largest and reputedly best of the genre of personal war letters. He headed in 2003-4 two research projects on the coincidence of natural disasters and legends in ancient times, and promoted quantavolution teaching and archiving at a temporary Center for Studies in Quantavolution that he was allowed at the University of Bergamo in Italy. He kept up the preparation of a special encyclopedia of quantavolution and natural catastrophe, and began writing a memoir to update developments affecting the sciences of quantavolution between 1980 and 2004.

He continued writing and circulating proposals for world union, and agitating against the rogue state tactics of the Israel and USA governments. In 2002 all of his writings, old and new, on World Governance, were published on CD-rom. It included the Constitution for a Federated Israel-Palestine, which he wrote as a utopian antidote to the absolute pessimism and evasion everywhere prevailing in regard to the region.

Updated to 10 February 2004