Sociology, To 1970

SOCIOLOGY, TO 1970. As a formal discipline, sociology originated during the 1890s in two places: France and the US Midwest. Still reeling from the violent suppression of workers’ attempt to achieve self-determination in the Paris Commune of 1870-1871, France was divided anew by the clash between militant liberalism and antisemitic conservatism, a clash highlighted by the so-called Dreyfus Affair. The US Midwest, meanwhile, was undergoing the traumatic experience of lightning-quick urbanization and industrialization, with many accompanying social ills. Sociologists in newly founded university and college departments, almost entirely in the Midwest, grouped these ills under the general rubric of “social disorganization.” They studied the problems intently, with a constructive, reforming, Progressive Era spirit. Like the muckraking writers of the day, most prominently Upton Sinclair and his novel, The Jungle 1906), they sought to beam light into the darkest corners of society, in sympathy with workers, women, immigrants, and the dispossessed.

Radical strains run through the history of sociology in the United States, perhaps most notably in the contributions made by Black sociologists to understanding and resisting racial inequities. Self-identified radicals fared prominently in the profession, particularly during the watershed years between 1920 and 1950 and again in the later 1960s when class inequality featured prominently in their studies. During the latter era especially, radical sociologists who rode the crest of a wave of upheaval, including African Americans, women, and students among them, forced a confrontation between the profession’s founding commitment to social reconstruction and its late-blooming attraction to social engineering and grant-seeking.

In its late nineteenth-century origins, sociology evolved from religion and philosophy, emerging as a new way to reconcile industrial capitalism with the ideal morality of the American creed. At its best, sociology appealed to socialists and feminists because it promised, without myth-making, to use the tools of science to expose the evils of monopoly, to map urban life, gauge inequality, and chronicle injustice. It promised to use new methods like social surveys and community studies to build bridges to ordinary people, with the aim of sharing a utopian vision of rational reconstruction.

Nowhere was the gap between oppressive reality and the ideal of democracy more glaring than in the disenfranchisement of African Americans under a system of Jim Crow segregation and in the second-class citizenship of women who had been denied the vote. That disenfranchisement had served the ends of industrialists, who wanted workers who would accept second-class wages, or worse. More often than not, despite their reforming zeal, mainstream sociologists tended to paper over the connection between capitalism and the deep fissures in race, class, and gender relations that scarred daily life. Radical sociologists tried to tear that veil, pressing opposing interpretations in response to the anti-Black riots of 1919, the anti-immigrant nativism of the 1920s, the labor struggles of the 1930s, and more. They exposed the fissures in Black and immigrant communities created by the after-effects of mass migration and racial segregation.

During the 1919 Red Scare, a Russian sociology student was arrested at a communist cell meeting in Chicago. Explaining his presence to a deportation judge, the young Louis Wirth answered: “Fieldwork, your honor.” Wirth was typical of the immigrants, veterans, small Midwestern and sharecropper youth who flocked to sociology from “elsewhere.” Unlike French and German sociologists, dyed-in-the-wool mandarins, the earliest US sociologists, at the universities in Lawrence, Kansas, and Chicago, were anchored in the realities they studied. Sociology at the University of Chicago, which retained its prominence, was founded in response to radical demands by the organizers of Hull House, including Jane Addams, Mary E. Richmond and Edith Abbott. The aim, as department chair Albion Small explained, was to shift the emphasis in university training from “ameliorating to preventing” social problems. One of Small’s successors, Robert Park, came to sociology from a career as a critical journalist who had exposed King Leopold of Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo in the pages of Everybody’s Magazine. Park had worked under Booker T. Washington as “Secretary for African Affairs.”

Influenced by Park, Wirth, W. I. Thomas, and the anthropologist Robert Redfield, a cohort of Chicago sociologists and African American sociologists in particular produced an ethnographic record of African American, immigrant and working-class life that was unmatched for its richness of detail, conceptual nuance, and evocative imagery of courage amidst squalor. For such early sociologists, urban ethnography created a road map of the democratic vista. In retrospect, Chicago sociology may seem naïve. Whole chapters appear without a statistic, a footnote or a reference to a hyphenated theory. But what this sociology lacked in pedantry, it more than made up in human interest and in graphic detail about realities that are so commonplace they are invisible in plain sight. Best known are the urban and ethnic studies by Thomas and Znaniecki (The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 1919); Anderson (The Hobo, 1923); Wirth (The Ghetto, 1928); Thrasher (The Gang, 1927); Withers and Zorba (The Gold Coast and the Slum, 1929); Cressey (The Taxi Dance Hall Girl, 1933); and Sutherland (The Professional Thief, 1937). A radical scholar who pursued similar work but with a focus on “the leisure class,” business, and elite education was the unclassifiable Thorstein Veblen. Several of the great community studies conducted by non-Chicago sociologists e.g., Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937) by Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd and the “Yankee City” studies by W. Lloyd Warner’s team in the 1930s, were among the few sociological studies to take class seriously.

At the 1968 convention of the American Sociological Association, Martin Nicolaus indicted “Fat Cat Sociology” for “keeping its palms up” for money from corporations and foundations while spying on the poor (“eyes down”). This criticism, directed at the use of data for surveillance or rationing, dramatized the vast departure of successful academics in the Cold War era from the work of reformers like Wirth, Adams and Park in Chicago. That older work, like the ethnography being conducted at the time by the anthropologist Franz Boas and Zora Neal Hurston in Harlem, had been designed to give sentient reality to people at the margin of polite society. Nowhere was this ambition more apparent than when it came to the cadre of Black sociologists associated with Chicago sociology.

Robert Park introduced the study of “race relations” into American sociology in the wake of the “race riot” in Chicago in 1919, and his ideas about racial justice evolved in his work with his four best known students: Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox and St. Clair Drake.
Johnson, the Virginia-born son of a Baptist preacher and a teacher, worked with Park to prepare a report on the riots after serving in World War I. His fieldwork was the basis for Park’s report and his own book, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922). Rather than echoing the exculpatory claim that labor radicals and outside agitators had sparked the riots, Johnson stressed the clash of cultures occasioned by migration, housing segregation, press racism, and vast racial inequities in education, employment, and health. Briefly active on the Left after leaving Chicago, Johnson served as president of Fisk University, the very first African American university president and an outspoken opponent of W. E. B. Du Bois.

Frazier, already a radical when Park invited him to Chicago, had been fired by Morehouse University in Atlanta after a white mob, infuriated on hearing that he had published his controversial essay “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” stormed his house. His Chicago studies included The Negro Family in the United States (1932-1935), which stressed the obstacles to assimilation posed by the distinctive social organization of African American family life, anchored, as it was, in the role of Black women. His later, scathing critique of the subservience of The Black Bourgeoisie (1955) was also squarely within the Chicago tradition.

Cox happened to be less well known at the time. perhaps because of his Marxist politics. He had emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago in 1919 and completed his PhD with Park in 1938. His major work, Caste, Class and Race (1948), comprehensively critiques the application of the Indian category of “caste” to the experience of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation in the United States. Cox argued that racism arose within capitalism and cannot be understood apart from the drive to exploit people of color. Remarkably, though Cox engaged at length with the well-known work of Robert Park, W. Lloyd Warner and Gunnar Myrdal, his book was not reviewed in a single professional journal. His later major works, The Foundations of Capitalism (1959), Capitalism and American Leadership (1962), and Capitalism as a System (1964), anticipated a trend in neo-Marxist sociology called world systems theory that arose in the 1970s and won wide influence, due especially to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein.

St. Clair Drake was an urban sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism focused on the racial tensions of the mid-twentieth century. Born in Virginia in 1911, he received his PhD at Chicago in anthropology and subsequently had a long career as a leader in African American studies, first at Roosevelt University in Chicago, then at Stanford and elsewhere. His defining contribution to radical sociology is Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). Co-authored with the African American sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis captures the multifaceted experience of the northern ghetto at the height of segregation. It is the most important community study to come out of the Chicago School and ranks alongside the Lynds’ Middletown. Utilizing mountains of interview and empirical data compiled by field workers under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration alongside exemplary participant observation, Drake and Cayton offer a singular, unflinching portrait of the myriad ways in which the Southside Chicago community struggled to cope with devastating impact of the Great Depression.

Another masterpiece of the period, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935), paralleled and influenced the work of the Chicago scholars. Offering a sweeping scholarly and polemical re-reading of US history based on meticulous scrutiny of news reports, tax and voting records, Black Reconstruction went beyond Du Bois’s great early works (The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk) to show the centrality of slavery and its sequelae, after the defeat of Reconstruction, to US and world capitalism. Du Bois also showed the leading role played by ex-slaves during Reconstruction and the insidious role of racism in dividing white from black workers, a division that enabled industrialists and plantation oligarchs to disenfranchise African Americans anew in the Jim Crow decades. In contrast to the conventional Marxism of the day, Du Bois showed, as E. P. Thompson would for the working class in England three decades later, that Black radical consciousness was forged in the Reconstruction era, not as a simple reflection of conditions of production but through self-activity born from cultural traditions drawn from resistance to slavery and from the ex-slaves’ African as well as American heritage.

Other major works by Chicago graduates that deepened insight into the racial divide included two studies in Mississippi, John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937) and Alison Davis et al., Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste (1941). Davis, who was among the few African American scholars to win an academic appointment, was influenced, like Dollard, by Warner’s approach to the intersection of class and class, which he used to interpret the aggravating effects of Jim Crow on African American workers and their families.

Robert Lynd posed a defining question in a famous 1939 book: Knowledge for What? During the sharpening labor struggles of the 1930s, many social scientists took sides. Some chose class struggle, in varying forms, while others opted for technocratic planning. That division deepened in the postwar years, when a rush to conformity was met by a critique of conformity, springing up in multiple disciplines. But the dominant tendency was professionalization, not criticism. That professionalization had long been accompanied by pressure to marginalize radicalism. As early as 1936, Jerome Davis, was fired from Yale for his pro-Communist stance, despite his standing as a president of the American Federation of Teachers and the Eastern Sociological Society. Many scholars, including Robert Merton, who early in his career wrote for the Marxist journal Science & Society, ultimately embraced the language, at least, of value-neutral professionalism.

Others, like Talcott Parsons, long the grey eminence of postwar American sociology, became forcefully anti-Communist during the Cold War and McCarthy years. How close that came to the center of the sociological world is shown by the fact that, in the early 1950s, Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd were hounded for their progressivism and falsely accused of Communist Party membership. After the local American Legion demanded Helen Lynd’s dismissal from Sarah Lawrence College, she was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Left–wing sociologists who refused to sign loyalty oaths found themselves ousted in Washington, Ohio State, Florida and throughout California. Admitted and suspected former Communists were also driven from positions at Harvard, Yale, Florida, Rutgers, CCNY, Hunter, Berkeley and Ohio State.

The McCarthyite assault on academic freedom, with its chilling effects on social science, is well documented in The Academic Mind (1958) by Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens. But radicalism was kept alive in enclaves of European refugee intellectuals and young dissenters at small and mostly New England colleges like Brandeis, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan and Smith. At one point or another in the 1960s, for example, the Brandeis faculty included Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Philip Rieff, Herbert Marcuse, and the sociologists C. Wright Mills and Maurice Stein. Few of these intellectuals were formally active on the political left, but they explored contemporary social currents with a unique admixture of Marx, Weber, Freud and others to argue that the “mass culture” of the American super-power had become a material force in its own right.

Many theoretically minded sociologists drew inspiration from the similarly heady brew of theories concocted by scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, where “critical theory” was born. Exiled from Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School scholars were given a new academic home at Columbia University, under the sponsorship of Robert Lynd. Frankfurt refugees in the United States included Erich Fromm, who became an influential Socialist Party member, Leo Lowenthal, who later taught sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. The Institute’s focus on psychocultural barriers to democracy, combined with skepticism toward the power of “instrumental reason” to unsettle conformism, set the pace for a Cold War-era critique not optimistic but firmly anti-fascist.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment (1947), Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) and Otto Kirchheimer’s Political Justice (1961) all point to the convergence of US and Soviet systems of domination, a viewpoint that ran contrary to both mainstream liberalism and orthodox communism. Frankfurt methods paralleled the work of the Chicago School and the Lynds, as shown in Fromm’s 1929-1932 study of The Working Class in Weimar Germany (ultimately published in 1984) with co-authors including the sociologist Hilde Weiss, and The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which Adorno co-authored with the Austrian psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik and the American social psychologists R. Nevitt Sanford and Daniel Levinson.

The Authoritarian Personality was quickly recognized as a milestone in psychology in the examination of the origins of prejudice and bigotry. Few sociologists besides Paul Lazarsfeld and David Riesman, both influenced by the Frankfurt School, pursued its implications. That changed dramatically in the 1960s when Marcuse and other Frankfurt scholars became central figures in New Left debates about repression, anti-authoritarianism, and radical refusals of oppression.

The outstanding radical influence on 1960s sociology is C. Wright Mills. Nothing better illustrates the low standing of radical thought in sociology in that decade than the discrepancy between Mills’s marginality in the profession, when he was barred from teaching graduate students at Columbia, and his later public popularity. Even his most academic study, White Collar (1951) had gone through sixteen printings by 1965. Mills, by no means a Marxist, had an eye for detail, rage at injustice, including distrust of Parsonian Grand Theory and support for radicals at home and abroad. In short, he stood squarely in a line running through Veblen, Park, Cayton-Drake and Du Bois. Mills’s polemical efforts such as Listen Yankee (1960) and The Causes of World War III (1958) became best sellers, utterly disdained by mainstream sociology.

The Power Elite (1956) successfully stirred discussion among social scientists, generating a variety of academic and popular rejoinders. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) and Packard’s The Pyramid Climbers (1962) and a small stream of influential sequels by power-structure researchers followed. Sociologist G. William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America? (1967) and The Higher Circles (1970), supplied the best-known scholarly version of the thesis. The art of documenting and exposing the business-friendly networks of power in many institutions, including higher education and professional associations, became a major focus of the newborn Marxist section of the American Sociological Association and sister organizations like the Union for Radical Political Economists (URPE), itself publisher of a widely read journal. Sociology students also became politically active in the New Left. Todd Gitlin, Richard Flacks, and Robert Ross helped organize Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Black graduate students organized a “Caucus of Black Sociologists” within the ASA in 1968. Demands for “Black Studies” programs in hundreds of campuses revived interest in the work of Frazier, Du Bois and Cox. By the late 1960s, sociologists active in the civil rights and anti-war movements became visible among those who organized and participated in campus “teach-ins.” Many sociologists participated actively in grassroots community organizing as well.

Within the profession, signs emerged in the later stages of the long 1960s that critical and left perspectives had become part of the wider discourse. The Insurgent Sociologist, growing out of the call for a "Sociology Liberation Movement" at the 1969 ASA meeting, proved itself an overtly radical journal which, five decades later, continues to thrive under the name Critical Sociology. Other journals, though formally outside the sociology profession, sprang up at the same time, often with highly sociological content, perhaps most notably, Telos. In 1975, Alfred McClung Lee, who twenty-four years earlier had with Elizabeth Briant Lee organized the Society for the Study of Social Problems, himself became ASA president. A shift in the climate of opinion was underway.

Ladner, Joyce, ed. The Death of White Sociology. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.

Oppenheimer, Martin, Rhonda F. Levine, and Martin J. Murray, eds. Radical Sociologists and the Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Schwendinger, Herman, and Julia R. Schwendinger. The Sociologists of the Chair. New York: Basic Books, 1974.