Advocacy and Objectivity

A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905

Mary Furner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351533737
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This award-winning book of the Frederick Jackson Turner Studies describes the early development of social science professions in the United States. Furner traces the academic process in economics, sociology, and political science. She devotes considerable attention to economics in the 1880s, when first-generation professionals wrestled with the enormously difficult social questions associated with industrialization. Controversies among economists reflected an endemic tension in social science between the necessity of being recognized as objective scientists and an intense desire to advocate reforms.

Molded by internal conflicts and external pressures, social science gradually changed. In the 1890s economics was defined more narrowly around market concerns. Both reformers and students of social dynamics gravitated to the emerging discipline of sociology, while political science professionalized around the important new field of public administration. This division of social science into specialized disciplines was especially significant as progressivism opened paths to power and influence for social science experts.

Professionalization profoundly altered the role and contribution of social scientists in American life. Since the late nineteenth century, professionals have exerted increasing control over complex economic and social processes, often performing services that they themselves have helped to make essential. Furner here seeks to discover how emerging groups of American social scientists envisioned their role what rights and responsibilities they claimed how they hoped to perform a vital social function as they fulfilled their own ambitions, and what restraints they recognized.

1

Reform versus Knowledge

From 1865 to 1885, a single, comprehensive organization represented the diverse interests of American social scientists. Though academic specialists of a later time have described the American Social Science Association as little more than a coalition of reformers, contemporaries looked to the ASSA as a major source for guidance in adjusting to modern industrial society.¹ Many of the most distinguished figures in literary, academic, social, industrial, political, and professional circles joined the ASSA. As this diverse group of inquirers searched for ways to solve social problems, they also moved gradually toward a clearer conception of the social scientist’s role in society.

Unlike the university professors who would eventually dominate the academic social sciences, early ASSA members were united by no common pattern of training, guided in their efforts by no full-formed code of ethics, inspired by no traditionally recognized social mission. Even as they cooperated in reform ventures, groups with varied interests and diverse perceptions of themselves as social scientists competed for control of the association. By the mid-1880s several professionalizing impulses had developed in the ASSA. But for the timely competition of university-based social scientists, these impulses might have led social science professionalization in some very different directions. Thus the ASSA, important enough for its own achievements, also provides a useful basis of comparison for the study of professionalization within the academic social science disciplines.

The amateur social scientists in the ASSA approached professionalization in an unorthodox manner. Their history demonstrates the difficulty of using conventional models to understand the academic professions and their antecedents. According to traditional canons, a profession invariably begins as an occupation and moves along a continuum toward professional status as its members, acting more or less in unison, begin to perform a vital social function, develop a body of knowledge to guide practice, create a code of ethics to govern their conduct as professionals, and win formal recognition from society for their authority in the field. The limitations of that model for analyzing the ASSA are obvious. ASSA members followed dozens of different occupations and traditional professions.² A shared interest in alarming social conditions drew people together from different walks of life, but their mutual concern did not define one common mission for the social scientist. Depending on their backgrounds and interests, these early social scientists saw different missions. Because there was no clearly defined body of knowledge that could explain the origin of social welfare needs and no recognized body of specialists or set of procedures for coping with dramatically increased dependency, the ASSA provided a laboratory for theoretical and practical experimentation. Progress toward professionalization in the ASSA never followed a straight line. It began bravely, faltered, shifted direction, surged forward, branched, and finally faltered again as different kinds of leaders and different philosophies held sway.

Though ASSA activity reached in many directions, two definite impulses were always present: the urge to reform and the quest for knowledge. At the beginning reform was the dominant theme. Many members worked as volunteers in humanitarian societies or as officials in government bureaus that dealt with the needy. The avalanche of information which their efforts generated sensitized ASSA leaders to the need in industrial society for standardized, scientific procedures to use in gathering and evaluating social data. Until American political realities thwarted such dreams, there was momentum in the ASSA toward a professional civil service which would operate at the policy level, especially in social service agencies that extended the assistance of government to the people.

Gradually, however, progressive members realized that effective, broad-gauged social criticism required both a systematic program of organized research and the appearance of objectivity. As their desire to understand society transcended their devotion to special issues, some ASSA leaders dedicated themselves primarily to rational scientific values. They wanted to know how society worked and to communicate their knowledge directly to the people, leaving the direct implementation of reform to others. Some ASSA leaders believed in disseminating knowledge through the popular media and the common schools. Others, recognizing a need for more specialized knowledge and authoritative status, tried to build a base for their version of the social science movement in higher education. Finally, in an attempt to clarify their image and fulfill what they had come to perceive as their professional mission, a group of these pre-professional, preacademic, still so-called amateur social scientists attempted to establish a general social science curriculum in the colleges and universities. But the professionalization of academic social science, with its more specialized disciplines and research ethos, was too far advanced for effective competition.

The development of theoretical social science could hardly have been foreseen at mid-century. Unlike the Utopian social theorists of the 1840s and the 1850s, the founders of the American Social Science Association were practical, even conventional Americans who confronted a host of unfamiliar welfare problems in mid-century New England. Faced with a rising tide of Irish immigration, Massachusetts established in 1851 a Board of Alien Commissioners whose members found themselves dealing with the problems of illness, indigence, poverty, and crime. Rural migration to growing cities and wartime population mobility strained private welfare resources even further. In 1862 Samuel Gridley Howe proposed the creation of a Board of State Charities to coordinate the efforts of separate relief agencies. Howe wanted to replace hit-and-miss philanthropy with a rational approach to welfare, which would begin by collecting information on the size and nature of the problem. When Howe’s union of relief agencies attracted the attention of philanthropists and reformers, it grew into a grander organization with a loftier purpose. Members of the Boston Social Science Association, a new society modeled on the British National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, suggested that the Massachusetts Board of State Charities provided the ideal basis for a national social science movement in America. In 1865 the American Social Science Association was established.³

The ASSA attracted people who sensed a new dimension in the human problems created by industrial society. As they saw fresh evidence of individual need and helplessness, they defined social science existentially. “Our attention has lately been called,” an ASSA circular read, “to the importance of some organization in the United States, both local and national, whose object shall be the discussion of those questions relating to the Sanitary Conditions of the People, the Relief, Employment, and Education of the Poor, the Prevention of Crime, the Amelioration of the Insane, and those numerous matters of statistical and philanthropist interest which are included under the general head of ‘Social Science.’” So little seemed to be known. Frank B. Sanborn, one of the founders, later recalled that it was “the scarcity of material for the investigation of social questions which suggested the importance of bringing together in this way the persons interested in the development of civilization here, and in setting forth its results, and its unresolved problems, for the information and guidance of each other.” Not knowing quite how to proceed, welfare workers hoped by comparing data from various situations to develop a better understanding of the problems they and their clients faced.⁴

Gradually, as they worked together to rationalize welfare procedures, ASSA members began to think more consciously of themselves as social scientists. Some may have hoped to dignify otherwise irksome duties by adding the aura of science to their charity work, but they also turned to science for a model to use in organizing the chaotic mass of data that overwhelmed them when they pooled their records. When a group of untrained investigators vowed “to gather all information within reach” and to “diffuse this information through and beyond our country,” they faced problems far more perplexing than the perennial financial worries of charity organizations. None of them had formal training in social science (for none existed in America), but educated men and women of the mid-nineteenth century had common access to a Baconian model for scientific analysis. It was only natural that they turned first to the Baconian tradition for guidance.⁵

To some extent the Baconian model determined not only what the amateurs did but how they envisioned their role in society. As it had been popularized over time, the Baconian method demanded three simple steps in problem solving: the collection, classification, and interpretation of facts. To mid-nineteenth-century Americans, the existence of absolute truth was an undiminished reality. Though advanced thinkers were beginning to describe natural processes through theories of evolutionary change, most people clung simultaneously to the more conventional model of a universe governed by immutable laws. As surely as iron laws held planets rigidly on course, ASSA members reasoned, there were equally binding principles to guide human conduct.⁶

There was no contradiction between a Baconian approach and humanitarian intentions. As George Daniels has explained, “Bacon had said that knowledge was power, and he hoped to use science to elevate the condition of man beyond his wildest dreams and give him a control which he had never known before. This was one Baconian idea that was adhered to rigorously by all scientists . . . ; the dominant theme was still that science was the great hope for mankind, and that any progress that was made would be by virtue of the revolution begun by Lord Bacon.”⁷ The philanthropists, bureaucrats, reformers, and educators who joined the ASSA hoped to make a social revolution by developing a social science.

The simplicity of Baconian procedure made it convenient for amateurs. Baconian method required no consciously articulated theory of causation, no theoretical questions to guide research, not even a hypothesis. ASSA members were accustomed to dealing with results, not causes. But suddenly old formulas that ascribed poverty and crime to individual wickedness seemed useless. Americans were no longer even remotely homogeneous in national origins, social class, intellectual heritage, values, customs, or aspirations. Huge cities, great factories, and strange unassimilated populations compounded the problems of poverty and dependence. Some general response was obviously needed. At first ASSA members hoped to find the new causes of social problems by looking hard at the combined results. Like earlier Baconians, many of them believed that science was “the knowledge of many methodically arranged so as to become attainable by one.” So simple a faith waned quickly among evolutionary theorists. Yet even very talented amateurs clung to the fiction that piling up enough data would lead to the discovery of self-evident truths. Those truths in turn would show how men should live.⁸

Because facts were the key to discovery in a Baconian system, amateur social scientists were intensely preoccupied with machinery for handling data. The structure of the ASSA illustrates their passion for classification. They divided their concerns among four departments—Education, Public Health, Social Economy, and Jurisprudence—and made a graphic list of the evils each department should study:

1. Under the Department of Education will come everything relating to the interests of Public Schools, Universities, and Colleges; to Reformatory, Adult, and Evening Schools; to Instruction in the useful Arts; to Systems of Apprenticeship, to Lyceums, Pulpits, and the formation of Societies for the purpose of Public Instruction. In this department will be debated also all questions relating to Classical, Linguistic, and Scientific Studies, in their proportion to what is called an English Education; and the bearing of National and Patriotic Memorials upon Popular culture.

2. Under the Department relating to Public Health, a very large proportion of the popular interest will naturally be fixed. All Sanitary and Hygienic matters will come before it; and what the Sanitary Commission has learned in the last four years will be made available, through its action, to the people at large. The subject of Epidemics, of the origin and spread of Cholera, Yellow Fever, and Eruptive Diseases, will be legitimately discussed here. It will consider all questions of Increase of Population, Vaccination, Ventilation of Public and Private Buildings, Drainage, Houses for the Poor, the Management of Cemeteries, Public Baths, Parks, and Public Gardens, Places of Recreation, the Management of Hospitals and Insane Asylums, the Adulteration of Food and Drugs, all questions relating to the Duration of Human Life, Sanitary Regulations of the Army and Navy, and all Matters of popular interest connected with medical science. We shall look to our ablest physicians and surgeons for contributions to this department.

3. Under the head of Social Economy, we shall consider Pauperism, actual rather than legal, and the relation and the responsibilities of the gifted and educated classes toward the weak, the witless and the ignorant. We shall endeavor to make useful inquiries into the causes of Human Failure, and the Duties devolving upon Human Success. We shall consider the hours of Labor, the relation of Employers and Employed; the Employment of Women by itself considered; the relation of Idleness to Female Crime, Prostitution and Intemperance; Workhouses, Public Libraries and Museums, Savings Banks and Dispensaries. Here, too, will be discussed National Debt; the subjects of Tariff and Taxation; the Habits of Trade; the quality of our Manufactures; the Control of Markets; the Monopolies in the Sale of Food, or the Production of articles of common use; the Value of gold; and all questions connected with the Currency.

4. In the Department of Jurisprudence we aim to consider, first, the absolute science of Right; and second, the Amendment of laws. This department should be the final resort of the other three; for when the laws of Education, of Public Health, and Social Economy, are fully ascertained, the law of the land should recognize and define them all. Under this head shall be considered all questions of the justice, the expediency, and the results of existing statutes, including their bearing on Suffrage, Property, Privilege, Debt, Crime, and Pauperism. Here, then, will come up the vexed questions of Prison Discipline and Capital Punishment.⁹

Bleak as the catalog of human weaknesses was, the optimistic charter members of the ASSA hoped to discover the scientific principles that could eliminate such evils and then change the civil laws accordingly.¹⁰

Experience was as important as scientific theory in shaping the amateur ethos. For many amateur social scientists, social responsibility was a habit reinforced by family tradition and New England ethical teaching. The sentiments of people attracted to the movement ranged from hard-core Yankee abolitionism to a milder evangelical reformism. Samuel Gridley Howe had been a frequenter of revolutions. As a young man he joined the Greek rebellion against Turkish rule. In both France and Poland he supported the 1830 risings against autocratic regimes. He was the editor of the antislavery Commonwealth, a supporter of John Brown, and a surgeon on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson joined the ASSA; Henry Villard, the association’s first secretary, was Garrison’s son-in-law. General John Eaton led a Negro regiment—as did Higginson—and then served in the Freedmen’s Bureau. Edward Atkinson helped freed Negroes to become Sea Island cotton producers. Charles F...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title PAge
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Reform versus Knowledge
• 2 Scientists of Wealth & Welfare
• 3 Battle of the Schools
• 4 Patterns of Professionalism
• 5 Compromise
• 6 Compliance
• 7 From Advocacy to Acceptability
• 8 The Perils of Radicalism
• 9 Permissible Dissent
• 10 Collective Security
• 11 Patterns of Authority
• 12 Specialization
• 13 Resolution
• Bibliography
• Index