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university made a startling proposal for Greta to come back to America with her and apply to Columbia University in New York. Greta saved up five hundred marks in newly adjusted currency and began to plan her adventure. 6 She was more than ready to leave the university in Berlin, whose rector was so hostile to women students that he refused to shake hands with them.
    Still, it wasn't easy to say good-bye. On the night before her departure, her father sorrowfully asked her where he had gone wrong, raising a daughter who would rather wander the world by herself than settle down to a nice teaching job, a good husband, and some apple-cheeked children.
    Greta was susceptible to such guilt, especially since her father had lost his job in the instrument factory. He now got by with marginal work, commuting twice a day to Berlin to pick up bundles of Catholic newspapers, returning to sell them in Frankfurt.
    The ocean voyage was a novelty, but nothing compared to the sensation of New York. Greta roamed the city with her friend, inhaling the experience, from the streets of Harlem to the glitter of Broadway. New York was compelling, but it was also expensive, and Greta realized that her modest savings would not go far at Columbia. Her friend had just received an assistantship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which was becoming a magnet for progressives, reformers, and freethinkers. It would be easier for Greta to earn money there, too. Greta was dizzied by the precipitous change in plans; as a German she was used to endless layers of bureaucracy. These Americans, she marveled, didn't even require residence permits. She took a deep breath and boarded the train for Madison.
    Wisconsin was a pleasant surprise. In Germany, professors were proud and remote; a mere student didn't dream of a personal conversation unless he had excellent family connections. American academia was more democratic. “In Madison not a week went by without a number of professors coming by and sitting on the carpet in our small dwelling,” Greta wrote. 7 “They nibbled cheap peanuts and drank equally cheap coffee, wanting to hear every possible new detail about post-war developments in Germany.”
    Greta was dazzled by the sheer diversity of the people around her— “Japanese, Chinese, South American; Mormons, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterians,” she noted breathlessly in her memoirs. They were all interesting, and they were all full of questions about Germany. But Greta was disturbed by the white students' reluctance to socialize with her black friends. In Greta's tally of America's virtues and flaws, race relations went down in the debit column.
    Greta's sociological field trips included a visit to a Ford auto plant, where she got to see an assembly line for the first time. She thought the workers looked miserable, driven for hours on end at breakneck speed. She contrasted their situation with the memory of an early morning in the sleeper car on the way to Wisconsin, when the train woke her up with a sudden stop. She stuck her head out of the window just in time to see young Edsel Ford step out to meet his father, Henry, on the platform— “at a small private train station reserved for the Ford family and their guests,” she noted pointedly. Such privilege seemed to mock democratic principles. America, too, she thought, was ripe for reform.
    The University of Wisconsin was full of people who agreed. Greta was pleased to be invited to “The Friday Niters,” a weekly discussion circle hosted by John Commons, a distinguished professor known for his explorations of the relationship between economics and law. Her friends among The Friday Niters included Elizabeth Brandeis, the daughter of the first Jewish justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, who later joined Roosevelt's Brain Trust herself. Greta's roommate, Elsie Gluck, later became a prominent American trade unionist and labor historian.
    There were relatively few German students in America at the