American Sociology

From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal

S. Turner

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137377166
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137377173
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

American Sociology has changed radically since 1945. This volume traces these changes to the present, with special emphasis on the feminization of sociology and the decline of the science ideal as well as the challenges sociology faces in the new environment for universities.

1

Pre-Academic Reformism and the Conflict between Advocacy and Objectivity until 1920

Abstract: American sociology emerged out of a large universe of non-academic reform organizations, primarily in connection with measures to reduce ‘dependency’, but including a vast array of ‘progressive’ causes. These organizations and the movements they represented made knowledge claims and presented themselves as experts, but were oriented to public education, standards, and regulation. Early attempts to use universities as advocates of reform produced hostile responses; skepticism about the possibility of mixing advocacy with scholarly objectivity persisted. Academics themselves attempted to distinguish themselves from reformers, and to claim rights as ‘professionals’. An attempt to create a reform ‘school’ in New York did, however, have impact, but at the same time showed that this model could not be applied within universities.

Keywords: American Social Science Association; Bemis affair; Chautauqua; Christian sociology; Columbia sociology; Progressive Party; Rand School of Social Science; Women’s Christian Temperance Union

Turner, Stephen. American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137377173.

In the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social reform was the subject of a vast array of organizations, a major concern of churches, and beginning to become the beneficiary of philanthropy. There was an active settlement house movement, and cities had Charity Organization Societies which supplied relief and social work services for the poor, collected information about them, and had a working theory of sorts about the causes of ‘dependency’. Associations dedicated to various reform causes, such as housing, juvenile courts, household management, and so forth, existed, and typically had ‘educational’ activities. Governments, especially state governments, were beginning to actively intervene in matters of labor relations, land use, and other ‘social’ topics, and these interventions involved both research and expertise. The research done by state bureaus of labor statistics and eventually by the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics was especially influential: these agencies were designed to serve as objective referees on factual issues in the often violent struggle between labor and capital.

Although there is a superficial similarity between the reform organizations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and present-day social movement organizations, there were important differences, and it is necessary to understand these organizations, and reformism generally, on their own terms. An example will help. Among the most powerful reform organizations was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which today bills itself as ‘the oldest continuing non-sectarian woman’s organization in the world’ (Early History, n.d.). Founded 1 November 1874, it grew out of the ‘Woman’s Crusade’ of the winter of 1873–74. The members of local chapters protested at saloons and demanded that the sale of alcohol be stopped. In a short time, they had succeeded in making many cities ‘dry’. Like other later reform organizations, they did not limit themselves to a single issue. Indeed, the organization embraced virtually the whole reform agenda, and especially issues relating to women. It supported

protection of women and children at home and work; women’s right to vote; shelters for abused women and children; the eight-hour work day; equal pay for equal work; the founding of kindergartens; assisted in the founding of the Parent Teacher Association; supported federal aid for education; advocated for stiffer penalties for sexual crimes against girls and women and for uniform marriage and divorce laws; dress reform; travelers’ aid; prison reform and police matrons; women police officers; homes and education for wayward girls; promotion of nutrition and the pure food and drug act; legal aid; labor’s right to organize; and promoted passive demonstrations and world peace. (Women’s Christian Temperance Union Early History, n.d.)

The organization ‘opposed and worked against’ drug trafficking, the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, White slavery, child labor, and army brothels (Women’s Christian Temperance Union Early History, n.d.).

The list of other reformist concerns was even longer. A short list of the key causes might also include the Single Tax and other tax reform movements, movements for ‘municipal socialism’ or the public ownership of utilities and transport, health and sanitation movements, cooperativism (including the three pillars of cooperative production, cooperative distribution, and cooperative credit), housing, playgrounds, ‘comfort stations’, municipal reform, and the central item on the reform agenda, the eight-hour day. Much of the work of these organizations was ‘educational’, including medical advice and household economics, and the ‘educational’ element implied expertise. They developed a refined version of public education, the assembling of facts, exhibitions, and propaganda. A summer camp meeting of Methodists designed to train Sunday School teachers in Chautauqua, New York, evolved into a mass system of public edification, complete with a circuit of temporary tent arenas and permanent ‘daughter’ institutions. It featured reformers such as Maud Ballington Booth, a proponent of prison reform and parole who would bring her audiences to tears with her accounts of prison life. For the early reformers the enormous success of abolitionism was never far from their minds: their attitude was that if the abolition of slavery could be brought about by these methods of education, organization, and acts of activist protest, other evils could be abolished as well. The women among the early reformers honed their organizational skills during the Civil War, when they engaged in such causes as supplying the Red Cross with bandages, and were among the gray eminences advising the newly created Russell Sage Foundation decades later.

The academic side of reformism was never more than a tiny fraction of this vast array of activities, causes, and organizations. But reformers began to stake a claim to a role in the universities in the 1880s, and, characteristically, created a new organization, the American Social Science Association (ASSA). Dorothy Ross (1976) describes the organization as follows: ‘The ASSA divided its work into four departments: education, public health, social economy, and jurisprudence, a division that reflected both the definition of the older professions of education, medicine, and law and the lack of definition in the “social” category’. But ‘both reformers and a newer generation of academic social scientists temporarily joined its ranks in the 1870s and 1880s’ (p. 110). The ASSA became the ‘Mother of Associations’, rather than a viable associational model in its own right, because, as Ross goes on to point out, ‘[a]s each group of social investigators defined its problems and its methods more clearly ... they seceded from the Association’ (p. 110).

This phrasing points to the process of institutional, organizational, and role differentiation that led, early on, to the founding of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885 with its subgroup of Christian Sociology and, much later, in 1905, to the creation of the American Sociological Society. It was a history marked by conflict, succession, and the repeated invention of new organizational and disciplinary forms. One of the main reasons for conflict was the problem of separating science or objective analysis from reform advocacy: line-drawing, exclusion, the creation of statistical agencies, and the separation of roles were the solutions, though each solution was tenuous and problematic, and there was never a true division of labor. Professors were reform advocates, governmental agency heads had agendas, and reformers had theoretical opinions, collected data, and claimed expertise, and there was a fluid line between positions: one could go from agency head or charity executive to professor, as Amos Warner did by becoming chairman of the Economics Association after getting a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and then heading and reforming the Baltimore Charity Organization Society (COS), or move in the reverse, and this fluidity continued until the 1920s and in diminished form ever since.

Why did these organizations differentiate? The constraints of leading a reform organization and the constraints of academic life were very different, but the agendas of each overlapped, however briefly, in a way that was decisive for, and allowed the institutionalization of, academic sociology. Public universities were controlled by boards, usually of leading citizens; private universities by boards dominated by donors. Neither group was likely to be sympathetic to radical reform, especially economic reform. But the relation with wealthy donors cut both ways: Seth Low, both board member and reformer, was able to overcome the resistance of the Columbia University board to establishing sociology by way of a major donation – the great library on the Columbia quadrangle. Sociology was established in public universities largely because of the pressure of prominent reform oriented citizens. This created a very specific dynamic. Sociologists knew exactly who their supporters were, and tried to satisfy them and to bond with the agencies of reform and charity, which provided employment for their students. At the same time they needed to avoid clashes with the interests of board members and donors.

Daniel Coit Gilman, the president of Johns Hopkins, was initially interested in providing a home for the ASSA. Negotiations faltered and ultimately failed. Gilman stated the issues succinctly:

In respect to the connection of the Association with this or any other University, – I think it would be well to consider the two-fold obligations – investigation & agitation. A University should promote study, research, the accumulation of experience, the publication of results. Such work should be steady, quiet, prolonged, attracting but little, passing attention. The Association should endeavor to act upon the public, by meetings, addresses, newspaper-reports, & other modes of awakening attention to possible and necessary reforms. I doubt whether it would be wise to merge the functions of the Association, so far as agitation is concerned, in the University: but it does seem to me that any university, & this of Baltimore in particular should encourage heartily and in many ways scientific studies of social questions. (Daniel Coit Gilman to Franklin B. Sanborn, Baltimore, 24 October 1878; quoted in Haskell, 1977, p. 154; emphasis in the original)

Yet Johns Hopkins was very far from being hostile to reformism. Its first major venture into the social sciences was to produce a multi-volume study of cooperativism: one of the major causes in reformism (Adams, 1888). And Gilman was also a leader in developing, in the 1880s, cooperative relations with the Charity Organization Society and in advocating the inclusion of ‘scientific charity’ at the university. He personally lectured undergraduates on the subject, helped to start a library on it, and involved students and faculty with the COS, making the Baltimore COS a national model and leader in its relation to university scholars (Crouse et al., n.d.).

The struggle to find the right formula for relating reformism to the university played out differently in different places. At Wisconsin, the reformist President John Bascom was a Christian Socialist, a promoter of ‘women’s rights, including suffrage’; shared the ideals of the prohibition movement and its allied attitude to state intervention, which was that ‘if the individual did not have the strength to refrain from the evils of alcohol, the state had a responsibility to intervene’; considered alcohol to be among the main causes of working class poverty; but also was a strong supporter of unions and of ‘the permanent duty of the state to perpetually reestablish the conditions of favorable production’ by which he meant ‘parity between purchasers and sellers’ (Henderson, 1993, p. 322). But Bascom ran into opposition from members of the board or regents who regarded him as a crank and meddler, and from the beer drinking Germans of the state. He was forced out in 1887 – but not before hiring the similarly minded Richard T. Ely, whose rocky career focused many of the issues over the relation of academic social science to reform and advocacy.

Bascom’s firing was a bad omen for the idea of a reform oriented university. But issues with Ely gave a specific shape to the problem, and to the solution. Ely, the founding figure of the American Economic Association, was the embodiment of the idea of a reformer professor. He wrote for the public, taught at a Methodist Chautauqua Summer School, published in the popular education series that went with the Chautauqua lectures, and attempted to make reform ideas part of professional economics. He was the intellectual leader of the group of ‘Christian Sociologists’, which included Albion Small. He believed in the idea of pursuing reform by persuading the public. But everything went wrong: despite their personal affection for him, and their personal debts to him, his peers in economics ousted him from his leadership role in the AEA, took control of the publication committee, and rejected his popularizations as bad economics. One of the critics and successors in control of the publications committee was the future sociologist Franklin Giddings. Eventually Ely was subject to a ‘trial’ at the University of Wisconsin in 1894 for his public promotion of socialist views. Although he was defended by the economics community, he was chastened, and it was evident that this model of ‘reform professor’ was not viable. When E. A. Ross, appointed as an economist, was fired at Stanford in 1892, he proclaimed, ‘I am going to continue working in pure sociology and shall refuse to be drawn into any practical work or discussion of burning issues’, and added that ‘Macmillans will publish my work on Social Control this spring and I have in contemplation two or three other books on sociology. I am going to fight it out on strictly scientific lines; since I am in no wise a “reformer”’ (quoted by Furner, 1975, p. 243). The Stanford firing of Ross led to the first closing of a sociology program and the devastation of the history and economics program, and the resignation of other prominent faculty members (p. 242). These situations were costly for universities, and professors were in a position to resist if they stuck together, which they learned to do. But they could not do so as reformers. They needed the support of other academics.

The nature of the constraints is important for understanding the prospects and character of present sociology, because they have changed. The Bemis affair at the University of Chicago is an exemplary case of the constraints of the 1890s. It has come down to us as a milestone in the struggle for standards of academic freedom. Edward Bemis was fired by President William R. Harper for his outspoken public discussion of the corruption of railroads and legislatures during the Pullman strike. As the university’s own historian of the episode explains: ‘Subsequent scholarship on the Bemis case has been generally hostile to Harper, himself a product of social Christianity, adjudging his motives and actions as at best confused and as at worst duplicitous’ (Boyer, 2002, p. 15). Bemis’s speech brought out enemies. Harper felt constrained by the railroad interests and the dependence of the university on business interests. Albion Small faced a less abstract, practical problem: placing his Ph.D.s in academic positions. After the Bemis affair he was forced, in his letters of recommendation, to reassure the small college presidents to whom he was promoting appointments in sociology that the candidates he was recommending were not radicals who would embarrass them. Universities and colleges, in short, were restricted in ways that reformers were not; consequently the role of academics in reform could not be the role that the reformers who had called for the establishment of sociology departments had expected. These considerations, more than any other, produced pressure to define ‘professional’ standards and to draw a protective border around professional speech.

Safety was to be found in identifying as a professional, but this also meant submitting to professional standards. But what the standards were was the subject of ongoing struggle. Within economics the discussion was intense. Arthur Twining Hadley, the president of Yale, provided one model for the proper stance of the economist:

[A] dispassionate and critical attitude ... as a man who stands above the clouds of prejudice and therefore sees farther than those about him; that it is his mission to be the representative and champion of the permanent interests of the whole community, in face of the conflicting claims of representatives of temporary or partial ones. (Quoted in Coats, 1993, p. 371)

This produced a passionate reply from John R. Commons:

We would be on safer grounds if, when our conclusions lead us to champion the cause of a class ... we should come out squarely and admit that this is so, not because the class interest is foremost in our minds, but because the class is the temporary means of bringing about the permanent interest of the whole. (p. 372)

What is shared by both is the idea of social science as instrumental for bringing about positive change. Where they differ is in the means.

The parallel discussion in sociology reflected similar issues and had the same players: Small, Ross, Sumner, and others. But there was a special issue for sociology produced by the term ‘Christian Sociology’, which meant, in its normal uses, Christian socialism. The sticking point in the discussion of Christian sociology was the term ‘science’: if sociology was to be a ‘science’, it could not at the same time be based on theology. The term ‘Christian sociology’ and the debate over it crystallized a conflict that had only been latent in the conception of ‘social science’ in the ASSA. John Recchiuti (2007) summarizes the issues in this way:

In 1892, a chair of ‘Christian Sociology’ was established at the Chicago Theological Seminary and filled by Graham Taylor, a minister famous for his ‘socioreligious’ survey of conditions among the poor in Hartford, Connecticut. Taylor called upon ‘social science’ to become, ‘the science of Christian society. Its field is the world, including all classes and conditions of men from all nationalities. Its work is to investigate the conditions of social and personal life, discover the causes of suffering and the sources of inharmonious relations’. In Taylor’s view the answer was ‘sociology with God left in it’. (p. 26)

The journal Biblioteca Sacra opened a discussion of this and collected a variety of comments. Many were in agreement. But others demurred.

Jeremiah W. Jenks, then professor of political economy and politics at Cornell, had misgivings: ‘I believe Sociology to be a science dealing with definite facts and principles. I fear that the use of the expression, “Christian Sociology”, may mislead many people regarding the nature of the science and will thus do harm, while I see no good that can come from its use. The expression “Christian Biology” would, in my judgement, be as fit for current use as is “Christian Sociology”’. (pp. 26–27)

If sociology was understood as the scientific application of Christian morality, it meant that the ethical content of sociology came from theological sources, not science. Scientific charity meant something, namely, the systematic allocation of charitable funds following some sort of rational principle based on data. This was one way of thinking about ‘definite facts’. But if sociology was merely scientific charity, it was not much of a science, and not enough to warrant this label. But science was a protective term as well. It insulated its users from political pressure. The problem was ‘which notion of science?’.

There was a great deal of groping around in the face of this problem in the first decade of the twentieth century. Albion Small was never terribly explicit about his vision of sociological knowledge, but his preferences were clear. He was an admirer of the German tradition of Cameralism, the historical school of economics and its ‘Sociologists of the Chair’, and liked the idea of sociology as a comprehensive or synthetic discipline. His major work of this era was an intellectual history of Cameralism, which appealed as a body of knowledge that enabled state administration on a ‘scientific’ basis, meaning rooted in facts about the places being administered and some general knowledge of social conditions. This was very much part of the interventionist tradition we encountered in Bascom, and in Ely, who was a mentor of Small’s. But shaping this tradition, together with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Pre-Academic Reformism and the Conflict between Advocacy and Objectivity until 1920
• 2  The Revolution of the 1920s and the Interwar Years
• 3  The Postwar Boom
• 4  The Crisis of the 1970s and Its Long-Term Consequences
• 5  The Near-Death Experience and Its Consequences
• 6  Feminization, the New University Environment, and the Quest for a Sociology for People
• 7  The Elite and Its Power
• 8  Activism, Professionalism, or Condominium?
• References
• Index