Social Control and Public Intellect

The Legacy of Edward A.Ross

Sean McMahon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351289580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As the last presumptive founder of American sociology, Edward Alsworth Ross (1866û1951) was the first to secure its place in public discourse. Originally an economist who strongly criticized monopolies, Ross sought answers to the larger social issues of his day. His theory of social control helped to unify sociology into an independent discipline and elevate social research into an academic necessity. He implored sociologists to explain those social forces that unified people into sustainable groups. This first full analysis of Ross's intellectual legacy uses new sources to explore more broadly the scope of his influence.Throughout his career, Ross remained a controversial figure. Strong critiques of monopolies and immigration led to his dismissal from Stanford in 1900 in a landmark academic freedom case. Never satisfied with qualitative research, Ross traveled the world in search of social changes which he reported back to the American public. A 1910 trip to China yielded profound conclusions on the American economy and on the status of women. As one of the first observers of revolutionary Russia, Ross emerged at once critical of socialism and confident in the American system. Moreover, his articles reached a wide audience to demonstrate the usefulness and scope of American sociology. As Ross gained public favor, however, his academic reputation waned. By the 1920s he was left in the wake of quantitative scholarship. His concept of social control continued to engage academic theorists while new applications emerged in industrial management. After his death, scholars have debated new meanings of social control even as the disciplines of history and sociology have fragmented.In offering this examination of Ross's thought, McMahon draws on new primary materials, including interviews, to recreate the controversies that surrounded his career. The depths of his pursuits have never been so fully explored, and this new look at Ross places him among the giants of American intellectual life. Social Control and Public Intellect will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and American studies specialists.

1

Early Life and Economic Advocacy, 1866–1900

“My high-tension intellectual life,” wrote Edward Alsworth Ross early in his autobiography, “has been actuated by the passion to know.”¹ He directed this passion both outward, to contemporary American society, and inward toward a knowledge of self. Early in his life, Ross soundly rejected the dogma of his youth for a pursuit of academic knowledge. If as an expert he could create an efficient social system, he could augment political and economic progress. Above all, he required knowledge. “Give me true,” he wrote in his diary at age seventeen, “and I will solve the problem of life.”²

The problem which Ross studied for much of his career was the force or forces which coalesced diverse peoples under common ideals. What unified different people into a “nation”? Born the year after the end of the American Civil War, Ross grew up during a time of social reforms. The mid-nineteenth century marked the end of individual-scale reforms and the beginning of a nationwide attempt to reshape society as a whole. Ross's writings from his 1891 dissertation to two final economic monographs in 1896 show a transition from state socialism to a vision of social cohesion, which he later called social control. His contradictions paced the institutionalization of American reform during an era of expanding academic and political actions.

In the first phase of his life Ross formulated a personal philosophy which combined objectivity and pragmatism. During his formative years he further identified himself as a positivist in his search for the causes of social phemonena. Finally, in contrast to a staid Victorian upbringing, he demonstrated some of the broad characteristics of a modernist. The concept of social control bound his own unique construction of society into a theory which provided immediate structure to inchoate strands of American thought.

Born 12 December 1866 to a Scottish farm family near Virden, Illinois, Ross lost his mother in 1874 and his father eighteen months later. Before he was ten, the orphan recalled, he had “lived with three farm families, one of them of no blood kin to me, but always I was well treated.” Finally, in autumn 1876 John Beach, a local justice of the peace, and his wife took young Edward into their home near the Iowa town of Marion. The Beaches provided a loving yet strict Presbyterian environment. “That was my upbringing,” he later recalled, “We Presbyterians are reserved, stiff, undemonstrative.”³ Ross's introspective personality and desire for knowledge soon emerged in a powerful intellect: “Out of these early trials came my horror of the subjective and delusional, my passion to see and to present things as they actually are.”⁴

An orphan at an early age, and possessed of a gifted intellect, Ross strongly resisted the Protestant, Republican ties of his youth. His biographer admitted that Ross had “no adherence” to Protestant “rites or theology.”⁵ Instead, Ross embraced science in graduate school and ultimately rejected religion. Yet he continued to value love and moral behavior as significant social agents. Ross's identity closely combined with a sense of objectivity. He internalized a wide variety of influences but fiercely resisted labels. So, for example, he did not formally worship as a Protestant yet he espoused many basic religious beliefs.

Another aspect of his early life which Ross proudly retained was an affiliation with farmers. “I have been more concerned with the lot of our farmers than with that of any other class,” he wrote. Although those such as the educated, affluent Beaches were a minority in rural Iowa, Ross consistently identified himself as a “farmer” or worker. He possessed an empathy with farmers that was tempered by restraint. “It was a good thing for me that, during my more sensitive years, I was a member of an element that was looked down on; it saved me for life from the vice of snob bery. I have never cared to look down on any one.”⁶ Again his sense of objectivity allowed him to at once identify with, yet distance himself from, a formalized social group.

The broadening of Ross's horizons began with education. He enrolled at Iowa's Coe College, near Cedar Rapids, in January 1882, and he pursued courses in the liberal arts. Although he spent his summers at home, he feared that the rural Iowa environment would suffocate his intellectual curiosity. On 26 June 1883 he wrote in his diary, “Since I have been on the farm any stock of ideas and fund of knowledge seems to have fled away…. I firmly believe that a rural atmosphere will not support a mental ardor.” Summers on the farm meant days of sad isolation, which Ross poignantly described in his diary. “24 July [1883]. Miserable weather. Not despondent or discouraged but hopelessly disgusted…. I have been feeling lonely lately as I have not heard from or beheld any of my friends. The world is dull.”⁷ He remained proud of his background but always believed that with his education he had risen above the drudgeries of farm life. He simultaneously identified with farmers and placed himself well above them. Ross would maintain a similar attitude toward farmers’ causes as an economist.

Ross found great satisfaction in his studies. The eager student studied many subjects at Coe with equal vigor. Before he applied his knowledge he simply enjoyed reading and studying, “not because knowledge is power, but because knowledge is thrilling!” Ross excelled in all of his classes and completed his degree in just over four years. He appreciated his solid education at Coe College, despite its “tight little intellectual world…bounded by Presbyterianism, Republicanism, protectionism, and capitalism.”⁸ Such a restrictive environment challenged him to break through the formalistic confines of his upbringing.

Ross decided to attend graduate school but postponed his plans to accept a teaching position. For two years he taught at nearby Fort Dodge, a two-year Presbyterian college, where his astonishing curriculum included literature, logic, biology, geology, law, and German. The stern teacher tolerated no disruptions within his classroom as he took full advantage of his large physical stature. “In establishing my moral ascendancy my six feet five inches and my 185 pounds may have helped.”⁹ His classroom presence combined with a love of knowledge to develop a passion for teaching which would last for over fifty years. “But still,” he confessed, “restlessness grew upon me. I must have broader opportunities.”¹⁰ Ross constantly sought loftier educational goals, so he decided to attend graduate school at the most prestigious place in the world at that time.

Ross travelled to Germany for his postgraduate work along with thousands of other nineteenth-century American scholars.¹¹ From the summer of 1888 until the fall of 1890 Ross enjoyed “a colossal intellectual spree.” He went with no specific career plans and simply absorbed knowledge. Ross studied comparative literature, languages, and philosophy even as he mastered his ninth language. His first trip away from home to a foreign land severely tested his own beliefs and self-confidence. Having learned at an early age to survive by his own mind, however, Ross emerged with an enhanced value system and hopes for a practical future.

From late 1888 into 1889, his first winter in Berlin, Ross grew lonely, depressed, and discouraged by his studies. His readings in philosophy had revealed the abusurdities of life so that he constantly questioned himself and the world around him. Ross's diary entries reveal pessimism and a pervading sense of gloom. Abstract subjects, particularly philosophy, seeded doubts about the existence of reality and the purpose of life. He refused to languish in philosophical dilemmas, however, and he remained practical about life and his own personal limitations. On 20 December 1888 he wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that, since we must live more or less in illusion, the better way is to plunge headlong into the illusion and get from it what we can. The cold heights of philosophy are beautiful and sublime, but they are not for men but for the gods.”¹² In the first step toward the creation of a pragmatic world view, Ross resolved to use his mind to seek out knowledge. He accepted the world and its absurdities, plus his own limitations, and simply sought intellectual experience.

Ross found strength in his own resolve during his eighteen months in Berlin. “The natural buoyancy of a healthy mind soon asserted itself,” and he survived by developing his own values. Ross “renounced pessimism not for being false, but for being unendurable.” That winter he affirmed the importance of love, which he found more important and more comforting than religion. He called love “the prime and absolute psychical necessity. Man cannot live upon bread alone, but he can live on bread and love.” Religion, he concluded, was “not a primary need, for it is but a special application of the love principle…. As a substitute for the religion of Christ we must take the love of humanity or, better, the love of human beings.”¹³

In Berlin that winter Ross overcame his intellectual isolation, which dated back to his days on the farm, in anticipation of a life in the modern world. Ross called his diary entry of 26 January 1889 a “Golden Moment.” He had studied alone all day and emerged to a cold, rainy Berlin. As he walked through the city its sights and sounds excited him:”When I reached Freidrich Strasse the long lines of brilliant electric light globes, the rows of brilliant shop windows, the omnibuses, the carriages, the streams of pedestrians, all these made me exult. ‘Hurrah!’ I cried silently to myself. ‘This is what you are preparing for. You will yet be one of similar streams of humanity in the cities of the Great Republic. You shall be in the tide. Work and wait and watch.’”¹⁴

Ross's awareness of light and motion around him demonstrated a broader change. As he emerged from confusion into a life of the mind he developed a philosophy consistent with American modernism. Many common traits of modernists existed across the arts to the social sciences during the late nineteenth century. What united painters, writers, and social scientists was a quest for usable truths. American modernists lived in an unstable universe in which values and morals were highly volatile. Neither Ross's family, nor the religious conservatism of Iowa, provided stability to his life. In graduate school, as Ross pursued truth, the world seemed even more in flux. However, he accepted these realities and strove to know all he could about the world around him. Finally, the experiences of life rewarded the modernist with the most profound knowledge of the world.

A model of early American modernism was William James, whose writings demonstrated a belief in an open, uncertain universe with no established truths. To understand his world, James sought raw experience and formulated his own truths in a community of inquiry.¹⁵ Similarly, Ross continued to gather knowledge on his own in Berlin. Later he would apply his intellect within communal intellectual pursuits of American academic life.

Ross's readings of abstract philosophy had thoroughly discouraged him from finding definite answers. The underlying cause of life, he believed, lay in the events or “facts” of life itself. In his Berlin diary he revealed that “I am a positivist for I resolve causality into the regular succession of antecedents and consequence, and ignore all attempts to ascertain the essence, cause, reason or ground of being of things.” Nothing in the world, he believed, caused or depended on another thing. “Everything is in itself ground and justification for being.”

He connected the common pursuit of knowledge, of both the humanities and the sciences, while in Germany. Events and organisms developed in regular intervals, and it was the task of modern scientists to study all natural phenomena in a disinterested manner. “The unity that science has discovered in the natural world,” he believed, was the basis for all truth. He grew less interested in literature and philosophy and set as his personal task “the determination of the regular time and space order of groups of similar phenomena” in pursuit of “the only philosophy that is not doomed to disappoint.”¹⁶ Finally, the rigorous attitude of German scholars greatly impressed him. The orphan who eschewed subjectivity grew into a student who looked at the world in an unbiased scientific manner. In Germany he learned by example a definition of “that majestic phrase, ‘scientific objectivity,’ and unceasingly I carry on its spirit.”¹⁷

Ross believed in the efficacy of accumulating facts even if they did not immediately reveal an inherent logical structure. Western society, as he would shortly describe, was mired in cynicism and subjectivity. He initially sought truth in an abstract artistic field but his exposure to German objectivity converted him to the study of society through scientific means. Human institutions had beginnings and ends, causes and effects, to which he applied his self-avowed positivism. Ross's stay in Berlin solidified a strong personal philosophy with which he could return to America and apply through an appropriate vocation.

On 6 January 1889, near the end of his stay in Berlin, Ross first expressed a desire to escape the passive world of a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Early Life and Economic Advocacy, 1866–1900
• 2. “A Great Social Secret”: Social Control, 1895–1905
• 3. An American Sociological Canon, 1900–1915
• 4. Progressivism and National Efficiency, 1905–1920
• 5. Selectionism: A Sociology of Race and Gender, 1900–1920
• 6. Efficiency and the Dilemma of Public Intellect
• 7. The Organon of Social Control
• Appendix: A Selective Bibliography of Edward Alsworth Ross
• Bibliography
• Index