Cravens HistorySocialSciences 1985

History of the Social Sciences
Author(s): Hamilton Cravens

Source: Osiris , 1985, Vol. 1, Historical Writing on American Science (1985), pp. 183-207
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science
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History of the Social Sciences
By Hamilton Cravens*
A FORCEFUL ANSWER to the question why anyone should be i

1A1. in the history of the social sciences in America was provided three de-
cades ago. In his classic The Organization Man (1956), William H. Whyte, Jr.,
instructed an entire generation in the realities of organizational life in America.
Whyte insisted that the organization employed the ideas and techniques of the
social sciences to resolve tensions between the group and the individual. With
equal measures of paternalism and insidiousness, the organization established
its hegemony in society and culture. The organization and its social ethic were
everywhere: in grade schools and colleges, neighborhoods and suburbs, houses
of worship and places of recreation, factories and offices, mass culture and pop-
ular government, even in the private worlds of family relations and personal
friendships. Whyte argued that the organizational ideal demanded the individ-
ual's conformity with and acquiescence to the larger group or collective. The
organizational ethos branded individualism as subversive. The organization
throttled individuality. The individual had no meaningful existence outside the
organization or the group. Thus Whyte attributed much of the responsibility for
this crisis of American culture and society, not simply to the organization, but
to its appropriation of social science thinking for its own purposes.'
Whatever the merits of the particulars of Whyte's indictment, his general
thesis provides a useful and exciting point of departure for historical inquiry.
The social sciences have played an enormous role in science, society, and cul-
ture for much of American history. The social sciences have been concerned
with people, not things. They have been concerned with us, our society,
economy, polity, and culture. Ultimately they have been invented and formu-
lated as responses to the most profound questions of the relations among human
beings, above all of the implications of group identity for individuals in the na-
tional population. This does not mean that the social sciences have not been
sciences, disciplines, and professions. It does, however, signify that much more
has been involved. As useful as a traditional disciplinary focus is, scholars
should be prepared to use broader perspectives as well.
In the last quarter century the history of the social sciences has slowly become
a recognized field for historians of science and American historians. Within the
field there are several journals, a newsletter, and a scholarly organization. In-
creasingly contributions to the history of various disciplines have appeared with
the full apparatus of professional historical scholarship. Today it is not un-
common for historians to write about eugenics, sociobiology, mental testing, and
the so-called helping and manipulative professions, for example, topics that bid
* Program in History of Technology and Science, Department of History, Iowa State University,
Ames, Iowa 50011.
I William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).
OSIRIS, 2nd series, 1985, 1: 183-207 183

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184 HAMILTON CRAVENS
fair to transcend disciplinary lines of the past. Historians of the social sciences
have also won considerable recognition from such groups as the Organization
of American Historians, which has conferred prizes to several for their books.
The field has even attracted attention beyond academe, as, for example, when
last fall The New Yorker serialized Daniel J. Kevles's new book on eugenics.2
Scholars interested in phenomena related to the social sciences have helped
legitimate and broaden the field. The distinguished pioneer of American intel-
lectual history, Merle Curti, has recently published a major overview of Amer-
ican ideas of human nature. Such prominent historians of medicine and public
health as John C. Burnham and Charles E. Rosenberg have worked on problems
involving the social sciences, medicine, and public health. Much of the recent
literature on the social sciences has been addressed to the difficult, not to say
slippery, problem of professionalism. Historians Roy Lubove and Samuel P.
Hays have provided thoughtful discussions of professionalism as involving much
more than the establishment of disciplines and professions or the deliberations
of a community of expert inquirers. Stimulated in different ways by Bernard
Bailyn and Lawrence A. Cremin, some historians of education are asking hard
questions about the roles of the social sciences in a new social and cultural
history of education very different from the old "foundations of education" tra-
dition. In modern times much history of the social sciences has been intertwined
with that of higher education. The pioneering work of Merle Curti and Vernon
Carstensen on the University of Wisconsin has been followed up by Bruce Kuk-
lick and others for the liberal arts and professional school universities. When
scholars turn to the land-grant and technical institutions and build on Earle D.
Ross's classic, this will further enhance the field.3
2 The Organization of American Historians bestowed the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize on Ed-
ward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of
Value (Lexington: Univ. Kentucky Press, 1973), and Mary 0. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity:
A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science 1865-1905 (Lexington: Univ. Ken-
tucky Press, 1975); and the Merle Curti Prize on Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres:
Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982). The Journal of the
History of the Behavioral Sciences began publishing in 1965, the Journal of the History of Sociology
and Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, in 1978; the
History of Anthropology Newsletter in 1971. Cheiron, the International Society of the History of
Behavioral and Social Sciences, has held annual meetings since 1969; it has a multidisciplinary and
international membership of 360, about one fourth professional historians. See also Daniel J. Kevles,
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985),
serialized as "Annals of Eugenics" in The New Yorker, 1984, 60(34):51-115; (35):52-125; (36):91-
151; (37):51-117.
3 Merle Curti, Human Nature in American Thought: A History (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press,
1980). On medicine, public health, and social science, see esp. John C. Burnham, "Psychiatry, Psy-
chology and the Progressive Movement," American Quarterly, 1960, 12:457-465; Burnham, Psy-
choanalysis and American Medicine, 1894-1918: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Psychological Is-
sues, Vol. 5, No. 4, monograph 20) (New York: International Universities Press, 1967); and Charles
E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Law and Psychiatry in the Gilded Age (Chicago:
Univ. Chicago Press, 1968); see also Barbara G. Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing
Views in Massachusetts, 1842-1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972). On profes-
sionalism, see Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career
1880-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the
Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1959). On American public education, see Bernard Bailyn, Education in the
Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1960); and Lawrence A.
Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New
York: Knopf, 1961). On higher education see Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen, The University
of Wisconsin: A History, 1848-1925, 2 vols. (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1949); Laurence A.

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HISTORY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 185
The field presents challenging possibilities for American historians and his-
torians of science. American historians attracted to the "organizational syn-
thesis," for example, can find rich fare indeed in the history of the social sci-
ences. Those interested in modern social thought and the development of public
and social policy will find ample new opportunities. Nor does this exhaust the
list of potential topics for American historians. The social sciences are no less
fascinating for historians of science. The social sciences have interacted with
the traditional physical and social sciences, as, for instance, in the complex re-
lations between biological and social science since Darwin. For social and cul-
tural historians of science and technology, not to mention those interested in
science, technology, and social studies, the social sciences offer much. In cer-
tain respects the social sciences present us with a different range of conceptual
issues than other sciences. Arguably the term social science is a misnomer. The
social sciences could be rechristened the social technologies. Most have had a
heavily applied orientation. For the most part they have been invented and de-
veloped in response to social and public policy concerns.4
As a field the history of the social sciences appears undeveloped. There is no
paucity of books. Social scientists have been writing the history of their disci-
plines since the 1920s. Much of this practitioner genre is useful: it can provide
information and perspectives difficult to find elsewhere. Furthermore, much re-
cent practitioner literature easily meets the professional historian's standards of
research and interpretation. But the available information is skewed in certain
ways. The overwhelming majority of contributions have been written from
within the framework of traditional disciplinary history. Works on anthropology,
psychology, and sociology so dominate the field that it is difficult to find work
on such staple social sciences as economics, geography, and political science,
not to mention such lesser-known applied social sciences as home economics,
urban planning, industrial engineering, agricultural economics, child develop-
ment, industrial engineering, rural sociology, public administration, or agricul-
tural engineering. Undoubtedly a broad definition of what disciplines have been
among the social sciences would be useful. Even more helpful would be many
more works than currently exist that transcend disciplinary boundaries and focus
on larger problems in science, society, and culture. In a word, the field has not
gelled intellectually. There is no framework, descriptive or interpretive. It is no
Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1965); Bruce
Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1977); Winton U. Solberg, The University of Illinois, 1867-1894: An Intellectual
and Cultural History (Urbana: Univ. Illinois Press, 1968); Earle D. Ross, A History of the Iowa
State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1942). On science
and technology in the land-grant college setting, see Alan I Marcus and Erik Lokensgard, "Greater
Than the Sum of Its Parts: Chemical Engineering, Agricultural Wastes, and the Transformation of
Iowa State College, 1920-1940," Annals of Iowa, forthcoming.
4 On the "organizational synthesis" see Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism 1885-
1914 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1957); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1967); and Louis P. Galambos, "The Emerging Organizational Synthesis
in Modern American History," Business History Review, 1970, 44:279-290. On discussions of the
interaction between the social sciences and social thought, see Stow Persons, American Minds: A
History of Ideas, rev. ed. (1958; Huntington, N.Y.: Krieger, 1975); on the biological and social
sciences, see, e.g., Cynthia Eagle Russett, The Concept of Equilibrium in American Social Thought
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966); and Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: American
Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900-1941 (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania
Press, 1978).

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simple task to supply authoritative answers to many routine questions of fact.

The construction of broader generalizations is accordingly more difficult.
A critical overview of the field can best be realized if it is understood that the
issues of disciplinary history, important as they are, are secondary to larger
areas of inquiry, such as the invention and use of knowledge in society and
culture and the constituencies and merchandisers of such knowledge. Appar-
ently the social sciences have been important because they have been concerned
with the most profound questions of social taxonomy and public policy. As such
general conceptions have changed over time, so have the social sciences and
the history of the various social science "disciplines."
"DEMOCRATIC" SOCIAL SCIENCE
The social sciences first took shape in America in the late 1830s and early 1840s.
They emerged as a new and distinctive way of perceiving and defining the nature
and arrangement of groups in the social order, and of proscribing the implica-
tions of group identity for the individual. As American society and culture un-
derwent a "democratic" transformation for white, middle-class, Protestant males
of British ancestry, questions of what democracy meant and how far it extended
came to the fore. This transformation of social thought meant recognition of the
group in the American social order; prior social thought had focused on the
individual as a member of civilization who was free to pursue commerce and
enterprise.S Many scholars have noted this dramatic shift in American social
attitudes, whether indicated in ideas or in actions, from the "individualism" and
"egalitarianism" of the Revolutionary era to the hard-bitten group consciousness
of the mid-nineteenth century. As many scholars have argued, the mid-century
group consciousness assumed that differences in color of skin, religious faith,
and gender-differences often signified by physical or biological characteristics
and manifested in different behavioral patterns-had enormous consequences for
the social order and, therefore, for public and social policy. Abolitionism offers
a good example of this change in attitude. Until the 1830s, those abolitionists
in the organized movement believed in colonization. They considered all blacks,
free or slave, as Africans and, therefore, incapable of ever fitting into the civ-
ilized society that was America. On the other hand, the new abolitionists of the
1830s, whether we refer to the Garrisonians or their competitors in the move-
ment, defined slaves as members of a group, blacks, that constituted a natural
part of the American social order and whose enslavement was both a moral
blight upon the republic's fair reputation and an affront to Christianity. The col-
onizationists' conception of blacks, free or slave, as alien Africans soon dissi-
pated. By the early 1840s slaves were widely perceived as a group in society
that constituted a social problem, just as free blacks in the North found that
they had become redefined by the white majority as a troublesome group-with
the enactment of many so-called Jim Crow laws in the 1830s and later.6
I A perceptive account of this transformation of social thought is Alan I Marcus, "In Sickness
and In Health: The Marriage of the Municipal Corporation to the Public Interest and the Problem
of Public Health, 1820-1870: The Case of Cincinnati," (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Cincinnati, 1979).
6 See, e.g., Phillip J. Staudenhaus, The African Colonization Movement, 1815-1861 (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1961); Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1970); and Leon W. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States,

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According to the new social thought, group identity had certain implications.
Individuals could rise to the full potential of the group to which they belonged.
Whether they could transcend their group identity was problematic. Perhaps
white male immigrants or non-Protestants could. Certainly, however, woman
operated in a different sphere from man. An Uncle Tom might be a Christ-like
figure, but he was nevertheless black. As Charles Rosenberg and George W.
Stocking, Jr., have noted, the new group consciousness of this period was op-
timistic about the possibilities of individual improvement, but to a point. If the
individual exerted himself or herself so much that the physical constitution of
organs were altered, there was a corresponding change in behavior reflecting
mental and moral causation. Presumably such changes would be beneficial for
the individual, although there was advice aplenty about the permanent conse-
quences of "drink storms" and the "solitary vice." Many Americans arrived at
conclusions about individual development and self-improvement that closely re-
sembled certain aspects of ideas popularized by Lamarck.i The medium of mo-
rality and culture was, then, biological structure, including the brain as an organ.
In a self-proclaimed fluid, democratic, and free society, nineteenth-century
Americans, as Neil Harris has reminded us from a somewhat different perspec-
tive, were fascinated by the facts, routine and bizarre, of biological structure,
and their importance for moral behavior.8
By any reasonable yardstick, phrenology was a mid-century social science. In
one incarnation or another, phrenology lasted in Europe for the better part of
a century. It had both great vogue and fascinating affiliations. Phrenologists
helped disseminate the idea that the brain was the organ of the mind, one of the
nineteenth century's great discoveries and one that has become a part of modern
natural and social science.9 Phrenology came into its own in America only after
the late 1830s, but by mid century it was a roaring business, at least for the
Fowler brothers, who did so much to merchandise it. As John D. Davies argued
thirty years ago, the doctrines of Franz Gall and G. Spurzheim underwent con-
siderable transformation in America. If phrenology did not have the widespread
impact that Davies and a more recent historian, Madeline B. Stern, have im-
plied, nevertheless Americans considered it a "social science" devoted to social
and individual amelioration. The Fowler brothers and other phrenologists in-
sisted that environmentally induced adaptations in the brain would change
1789-1860 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1961). On parallel shifts in majority attitudes towards
Indians, immigrants, and women, see Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the
American Indian From Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978); Ray Allen Billington,
The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Mac-
millan, 1938); and Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution
to the Present (New'York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980).
7 Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought," Perspectiv
in American History, 1974, 8:189-235, rpt. in Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science
and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 25-53; George W.
Stocking, Jr., "Lamarckianism in American Social Science: 1890-1915," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 1962, 23:239-256, rpt. with some changes in Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays
in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 234-269.
8 Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). See also Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg and Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views
of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of American History, 1973,
60:332-356.
9 See Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1950), pp. 50-60.

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behavior-Lamarckism, as it were, for the bumps on the head. Phrenology

was thus both a method of social analysis based on the anatomy of the brain-
one postulating, increasingly, different types of brains for the different groups
in society-and a way of reforming the circumstances of the human race.10
Phrenology belongs to a group of mid-century "sciences" and "crusades."
Some have been studied, like diet reform, others are largely forgotten or ignored
by historians, including mesmerism, animal magnetism, and hydropathy (nor can
it be said, for that matter, that we have enough studies of phrenology or even
of dietary reform). But just because some phenomena in a past age seem, from
a present perspective, not to have led to developments in our own time is no
reason to slight them. Many of these movements attracted many followers who
thought their doctrines eminently "scientific." Here seems an excellent oppor-
tunity for examining the problems of "professional" and "popular" science in
new ways.11
Another mid-century social science was scientific polygenism, a body of doc-
trines that shared many assumptions with phrenology. Both stressed the im-
portance of biological factors, or the organic and physical basis of mind and
culture. Both arose in the later 1830s as fully articulated movements, as re-
sponses to the new perception that society was constituted of biologically de-
fined groups. Both assumed Lamarckian formulae. Thanks to William Stanton's
work, the existence of American polygenism is widely recognized in the liter-
ature. Known then on both sides of the Atlantic as the "American School,"
American polygenists were led by Samuel G. Morton, a Philadelphia physician
and anatomist, whose Crania Americana (1839) launched the school. Their fun-
damental argument was that the various races of man had been created sepa-
rately. The evidence they used focused on measurements of skulls and, hence,
of brains, reminiscent certainly of phrenology. Stanton has insisted that the
American school's members, save for the notoriously proslavery Southern
doctor Josiah C. Nott, took the positions they did for "scientific" rather than
"social" reasons. Yet that is a more difficult distinction to make than might first
appear, especially for so complex and emotive an issue as race. There is con-
siderable evidence that "social" beliefs in racial inferiority and "scientific" be-
liefs in polygenism were more commonly correlated. Louis Agassiz, who joined
the group, was repelled by blacks, for example. If Stanton can argue that poly-
genism was unattractive to proslavery Southerners because it contradicted the
Book of Genesis, that contradiction did not prevent Nott and others from ped-
dling polygenism in the South as an intellectual prop for slavery.12
10 See John D. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science: A Nineteenth-Century American Crusade
(1955,; 2nd ed., Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1971); and Madeline B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The
Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: Univ. Oklahoma Press, 1971).
"I Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (New York: Harper
Row, 1976); Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 1980); and James Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: A History of American Health Re-
formers, 1830-1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982). Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's
Ferment: Phases of American Social History From the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil
War (New York: Harper & Row, 1944; Torchbook ed., 1962), mentions some of these movements
in passing.
12 William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Towards Race in America 1815-
1859 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1960); see also Frank Spencer, "Samuel G. Morton's Doctoral
Thesis on Bodily Pain: The Probable Source of Morton's Polygenism," Transactions and Studies of
the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Philadelphia, 1983, Series 5, 5(4):321-338; and, on
Agassiz, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 42-50.

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Moreover, modern scholarship has shown that racism was hardly unique to
the South, as Stanton seemed to assume. The vast majority of American whites
then and later firmly believed in the hierarchy of races, whether they invoked
the authority of science or not. Scientific polygenism as support for the pro-
slavery argument was in that sense superfluous and presumably used only by
those who found the idioms of science congenial. Works by two distinguished
historians have shown that a large body of popular racial doctrines, some in-
spired by contemporary science, some not, emerged after the mid 1830s. In The
Black Image in the White Mind, George M. Fredrickson has cogently shown
that a large number of popularizers besides Nott widely disseminated the Amer-
ican school's arguments on race. He has also demonstrated assumptions in poly-
genism that paralleled ideas of black inferiority in popular literature and in
such political doctrines as Free Soil. More recently, Reginald Horsman has
studied the role of popular and scientific racism in the development of American
expansionism from the Revolution to the Civil War. Based on meticulous re-
search and precise analysis, his discussions of the American school, of "Anglo-
Saxonism," of racial attitudes as disseminated from scientists to the public, and
of the mechanisms of popularization are particularly illuminating. Fredrickson
and Horsman provide satisfying examples of how the history of science can be
integrated with that of the larger culture and society. Fredrickson's work un-
dermines the notion that the "science" of polygenism was somehow isolated
from society and culture. Both authors have also shown how polygenism was
related to other popular movements. Horsman directly links polygenists and
phrenologists. If most polygenists were not avowed phrenologists, many of
them, including Morton, were interested in phrenology as a science. And many
phrenologists, including the Fowler brothers, believed in polygenism. Polygenist
doctrines may have been more widely accepted, especially among mid-century
doctors and anatomists, than has been thought. Morton's work may simply have
been the most noted of a larger genre of thought that was generated by medical
"scientists," especially if they were not "regular" doctors.'3
Yet another "discipline" that requires more investigation is anthropology, if
anthropology indeed was distinct from polygenism. For this period, a disci-
plinary orientation to historical conceptualization may obscure more than it il-
luminates. Thus it is unclear whether we can speak of a discipline of anthro-
pology in the mid-nineteenth century.' Individuals did address problems that
might be defined as anthropological, but this often meant they worked alone,
despite the widespread currency of such dogmas as polygenism.14 Consider the
13 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American
Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); and Reginald Horsman, Race
and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1981). Of many fine books on white attitudes towards blacks, see, e.g., Winthrop D.
Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: Univ.
North Carolina Press, 1968); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation
to Ghetto (New York: Hill & Wang, 1966; rev. ed., 1976); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to
Freedom (1947; 5th ed., New York: Knopf, 1980); and Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of
an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1963).
14 Thus John C. Greene, in American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State Univ.
Press, 1984), pp. 320-408, has shown there were individuals working on problems that we might
retrospectively label physical anthropology, archaeology, and comparative linguistics well before the
1820s. What is unclear is whether this led to the crystallization of a community of investigators who
invented research traditions.

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example of Lewis Henry Morgan. We know little of Morgan, save that his work
was apparently ignored in his own day but has been influential in modem times.
George W. Stocking, Jr., insists that Morgan's schemes of mental evolution had
a profound impact upon John Wesley Powell and his colleagues at the Bureau
of American Ethnology. Two distinguished anthropologists have seen Morgan's
contributions to the science of anthropology differently. The British social an-
thropologist Meyer Fortes has argued that Morgan had a protean, if delayed,
influence on British social anthropology. Morgan's greatest scientific discovery,
Fortes insisted, was that the custom of designating relatives has scientific sig-
nificance. When W. H. Rivers "discovered" Morgan's work around 1900, this
enabled him and his colleagues to develop British structural or synchronic an-
thropology, which was quite different from the cultural or diachronic anthro-
pology that Franz Boas established in early twentieth-century America. But
Marvin Harris has claimed that Morgan's importance was in underlining the
techno-economic environment as the proper subject matter for the science of
anthropology, a position that Harris himself has elaborated.15 What was the im-
portance of individuals such as Morgan, or Henry Schoolcraft, for that matter,
and other "anthropologists" in nineteenth-century America? Did they form or
create a science? Obviously more work can be done in this area.
A final example of a mid-century social science was the so-called moral treat-
ment used on the insane. Moral treatment had certain affinities with phrenology
and polygenism. Advocates of moral treatment assumed that mental disease re-
sulted directly from physical causes, from the disease and distortion of organs,
especially the brain. Ultimately the larger causes were mental and moral, within
the individual. Champions of moral treatment believed, as a later generation did
not, that bad habits or diseased structures could be modified and even cured if
the individual exerted himself or herself sufficiently. A systematic program could
be effective therapy. Moral treatment thus had important intellectual affinities
with Lamarckian ideas.
In contrast to phrenology and polygenism, the history of the mental hospital
and of moral treatment has become a topic of considerable controversy in recent
years. Unfortunately, more heat than light has been generated. The central issue
is whether those in charge of the asylum had good intentions or not. Perhaps
the most able interpretation by a modern mental health professional is that of
Albert Deutsch, who chronicled the history of American mental hospitals as the
victory of enlightened values over the callous, unscientific opinions of the past.
Deutsch viewed the mid-nineteenth century asylum as a vast improvement over
the past, yet characterized that institution and the therapy of moral treatment
as too flawed to survive in the increasingly scientific world that came into ex-
istence in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Concepts of In-
sanity in the United States, 1789-1865 (1964), the historian Norman Dain por-
trayed the development of what he dubbed psychiatric thought in America. In
his account, a new conception of mental illness arose in the mid 1830s. The
15 The standard study is Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chica
Chicago Press, 1960); see also Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (cit. n. 7), pp. 116-117; Meyer
Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (Chicago: Aldine, 1969);
Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1969), esp. pp. 180-188; and Harris, Cultural Materialism: The
Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York: Random House, 1979).

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mentally ill were no longer individuals; they belonged to a group-the insane.

The therapy of moral treatment included somatic analysis, on the assumption,
not far removed from the doctrines of phrenology or polygenism, that "insanity
was a physical disorder of the brain that manifested itself in psychological symp-
toms." Furthermore, moral therapy was designed explicitly to help the patient
overcome his or her disease by well-defined and regimented physical activity
that would in time lead to release (if not cure). Dain's account was in many
respects eminently useful, well researched, judicious in its interpretations, and
certainly open in pointing to the failures and lapses of the mental hospitals, not
simply in the occasionally brutal treatment of any inmates, but also in the sys-
tematic discrimination against the poor, nonwhites, and immigrants. And Dain
recognized that the origins of moral treatment lay in the larger culture as well
as in "science.'"16
More recently social critics have attacked the nineteenth-century asylum,
standing Deutsch' s enlightened-practitioner interpretation on its head. They see
the asylum as an agent of oppression and social control of the deviant, invented
by the capitalistic class in its drive for hegemony and dominance. From this
point of view, moral therapy receives short shrift as a mere rationalization or
sham. It is easy to oversimplify the critics' positions. Genuine qualitative dif-
ferences exist among them in the sophistication and tightness of their arguments.
They are more easily classified by their abhorrence of the asylum than by any-
thing else. Science, medicine, practitioners, helping institutions, and the like are
viewed as the problem, not the solution. More crudely, the system is bad; in-
eluctable social forces produce bad people in positions of authority. Much of the
criticism of the nineteenth-century asylum stems from presentist social policy
commitments and values.'7
In the 1970s, historians David J. Rothman and Gerald N. Grob debated this
issue from within the framework of the new social history. Rothman saw the
asylum as a harsh, repressive instrument of social control invented by those in
power, who were frightened by the rapid social changes of Jacksonian society,
particularly immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. Grob agreed that
the asylum had to cope with those same social problems, which, in the end,
distorted and engulfed the asylum. In some sense both Rothman and Grob de-
fined history as a morality play. Rothman's practitioners wore the blackest of
hats; Grob's dramatis personae had, if not white hats, then certainly ones no
darker than medium gray. In most respects Grob had the better of the argument.
Rothman interpreted the therapy of moral treatment as harsh, rigid discipline.
The fact that in the state asylums this therapy eventually deteriorated into un-
conscionable and tragic treatment for many inmates, especially the less fortunate
16 Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937; 2nd e
1949); and Norman Dain, Concepts of Insanity in the United States, 1789-1865 (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1964), quoting p. 84. See also Dain, Disordered Minds: The First Century
of Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1766-1866 (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Wil-
liamsburg Foundation, distributed by Univ. Virginia Press, 1971), which substantiates the general
point of the shift from the individual to the group in social thought and action and the particular
notions of that world view in terms of the implications of group identity for the individual.
17 Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum
Keeping, 1840-1883 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 1-18, ably summarizes the con-
troversy and provides citations to other discussions; see also Lawrence J. Friedman, "The Demise
of the Asylum," Reviews in American History, 1984, 12:241-247.

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and minorities, does not support Rothman's Manichean derivation of the mo-
tives of individuals. Grob's research has been more intensive, precise, and wide-
ranging and his analyses more judicious. Moreover, he has not argued with the
past, and he has portrayed individuals as honorably motivated. His criticisms
of the social control argument have been cogent. Yet it may be wondered how
important individual motives are in a historical interpretation that assumes in-
eluctable social forces.18
In A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-
Keeping, 1840-1883, Nancy Tomes has viewed the past on its own terms and
made a superb contribution to our understanding of the private asylum, its re-
lations with its clients and patients, the implementation of moral treatment, the
structural problems and dilemmas of the asylum as institution, treatment of in-
mates, the profession of practitioners, and the circumstances that led to the de-
terioration of the asylum. Tomes's richly researched, perceptively argued, and
judiciously constructed interpretation is far too complex to summarize here. For
present purposes, she has discussed and analyzed the therapy, the asylum's reg-
imen, the relations between administrator, doctor, patient, and patient's family,
and related matters in an eminently comprehensible manner. She has moved
beyond the ideological horizons of the controversy and has made the past come
alive as the past. Unlike some social historians active today, she is sensitive to
the nuances of ideas.19
Between the 1830s and the 1870s a new style of social thought took shape in
American culture and society. It emphasized two levels of description and anal-
ysis that were related to the group and the individual. One stressed the taxo-
nomic hierarchy of superior and inferior groups in the national population. The
other underlined the implications of group identity for the individual. To what
extent Lamarckian formulae were widespread is difficult to say. But evidently
a common way of looking at issues of group and individual worth appeared in
several different "social sciences." Clearly those social sciences had useful ap-
plications and therapies, and important implications for public and social policy,
insofar as many Americans of that era were concerned.
18 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Gera
Grob, The State and the Mentally Ill: A History of the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusett
1830-1920 (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1966); Grob, Mental Institutions in America:
Social Policy to 1875 (New York: Free Press, 1973); and Grob, Edward Jarvis and the Medical World
of Nineteenth-Century America (Knoxville: Univ. Tennessee Press, 1978). Also of interest is Grob's
devastating response to Rothman, "Rediscovering Asylums: The Unhistorical History of the Mental
Hospital," Hastings Center Report, 1977, 7(4):38-41. A critical review of Rothman is Jacques Quen,
The Journal of Psychiatry and Law, 1974, 2(1):105-122. A more concrete and subtle version of the
social-control thesis is Richard Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870-1930
(Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1978); Fox has studied the process of commitment,
using statistical analysis of court records, and concluded that commitment occurred to rid society
of persons of deviant ideas and behavior.
19 Tomes, A Generous Confidence, passim. Tomes's real contribution has been to find a satisfy
ingly interdisciplinary way of writing social history of medicine and science. On mental asylums in
Britain, see Rosen, Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness (New
York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 247-330; William Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of
Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London/Boston: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); and Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of
Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979). See also Michel Fou-
cault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).

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THE PROFESSIONAL IDEA
Most scholars would agree that the social sciences underwent a major transfor-
mation in the five decades following Appomattox. They became national profes-
sions. In this period all manner of national professional, trade, advocacy, and
social policy institutions were founded or recreated. Growing numbers of Amer-
icans believed that local institutions and perspectives could no longer solve their
problems, and that national agendas, analyses, and remedies were necessary. In
the nineteenth century's closing decades, America suddenly seemed no longer
local.
These changes affected the social sciences no less than other aspects of Amer-
ican civilization. The social sciences developed the full apparatus of the national
professional subculture, not always smoothly to be sure. Usually it was the rap-
idly changing system of higher education that gave the new professionals their
base of operations. Other institutional loci of the social scientists included gov-
ernmental agencies, business enterprise, charitable organizations, and the new
foundations. Professional and learned societies, heretofore national in name at
most, now began to function as national organizations. The new professionals
founded or reestablished journals, newsletters, and programs of selection and
training to serve these larger national goals.20
The professionals developed much more than a code of manners or implied
programs of social mobility, as Burton Bledstein seems to imply. They sought
to achieve power and status in a national arena by claiming license to or, if
possible, a monopoly over a defined body of knowledge.21 First they created
their profession, its institutions and intellectual horizons. Then they invented
specialized disciplines of knowledge. From the large store of old facts in Europe
and America they plucked those most congenial and comprehensible, as if to
reaffirm the importance of tradition. They also invented or discovered new facts,
to emphasize that knowledge was progressive. Implied in the new notion of a
specialized discipline was the assumption that it was independent of and no less
scientific than any others.
The social science professionals developed specific positions on the taxonomy
of society, and of groups and individuals that seemed rigorous and scientific,
20 On this shift see, for the social science professions, Lubove, The Professional Altruist, and
Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (both cit. n. 3); for the general trend, see Wiebe,
The Search for Order (cit. n. 4); and John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1968). See also Hamilton Cravens, "American Science Comes of Age: An
Institutional Perspective, 1850-1930," American Studies, 1976, 17:49-70; Alan I Marcus, "Profes-
sional Revolution and Reform in the Progressive Era: Cincinnati Physicians and the City Elections
of 1897 and 1900," Journal of Urban History, 1979, 5:183-207; Marcus, "Disease Prevention in
America: From a Local to a National Outlook, 1880-1910," Bulletin of the History of Medicine,
1979, 53:184-203; and Martin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massa-
chusetts, 1870-1915 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).
21 See Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Develop-
ment of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976); for the professions as a fitting
marketplace model, see Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis
(Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1977), a work superior to many other sociological treatments,
even that of Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1971). On the place of research, see Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochem-
istry: The Making of a Biological Discipline (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); and Ronald
C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Grasslands School of Ecology, 1895-1955
(Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1981).

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but which in fact borrowed much from public and social policy discussion in
society and culture. Questions arose of the segregation of "superior" from "in-
ferior" groups in the national population, as with the backlash against the "new"
immigrants, the reassertion of the separate spheres of male and female activity,
and with the drawing of the color line. The increasing emphasis on race, na-
tionality, religion, and gender meant an intensification of the notion that groups
differed in moral and social value. There was a new emphasis, not simply on
biology as a key to culture, but upon pessimistic and deterministic formulations
of that bromide. Several historians have argued that in this era doctrines of bi-
ological determinism became widely accepted and expressed in social thought
and action.22 The hierarchy of superior and inferior groups in the national pop-
ulation took on determinist implications for immigrants as well as nonwhites.
Group identity foretold an individual's fate, and individual self-improvement
now appeared virtually impossible. Models of biological and social inheritance
invoked Lamarckian idioms, depicting the individual as a member of a group or
type with predetermined and shared group characteristics. What seemed some-
what fluid in an earlier age seemed so no longer.
For some historians of the social sciences the most important shift in this
period was that from social science to social sciences. Thomas L. Haskell has
argued that the gradual disintegration of the American Social Science Associa-
tion between 1865 and 1909 represented a change in the locus of social authority
from the older genteel elites, who believed in a unified science of society, to the
new academic professionals, chiefly academic historians, economists, and so-
ciologists, who insisted that their disciplines had proved the general premise that
society is interdependent. In an interdependent society, Haskell argues, only the
professional social scientists possessed sufficient expertise to interpret and ex-
plain to laity how and why the various parts of society were interdependent and
constituted a whole. While Haskell discusses the ASSA's breakup, Mary Furner
takes up its consequences. She discussed the development of social-science
professionalism largely by examining the tensions generated among the new ac-
ademics (chiefly economists) over "advocacy" and "objectivity" as they appro-
priated social science from those who had dominated the ASSA. By tracing a
series of academic freedom cases, Furner showed how a conservative reaction
against "liberal" economists imposed professional discipline upon the new social
science professoriate. Ideological extremes were abandoned. Centrist politics
and "objective" social science became the new professional credo.23
Haskell and Furner have provided valuable accounts of the shift from the
social science movement to the new academic disciplines and professions. More
work could be done. Haskell's discovery of the pervasiveness of the notion of
the interdependence of the elements of society is helpful. The idea of interde-
pendence, however, was not a generalized abstraction that never changed. Con-
ceptions of the interdependence of the elements, or groups, of society, of the
22 Persons, American Minds (cit. n. 4), pp. 237-365; Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (cit.
n. 7), pp. 42-68, 110-132, 234-269; and Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American
Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 25-53.
23 Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Sci-
ence Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: Univ. Illinois Press,
1977); Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity (cit. n. 2). On the gentry, see, e.g., Stow Persons, The
Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973).

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relationships between the parts and the whole, have permeated the social sci-
ences since their inception. Furner's portrait of social scientists donning the
cloak of professionalism to practice in society's marketplace as best they could
seems more satisfying than Haskell's notion of a community of inquirers. And,
according to Furner, some rambunctious or woolly-headed economists appar-
ently required external threats and internal sanctions to be professionally dis-
ciplined. Yet instances of dissent, let alone rebellion, were relatively rare in
comparison with the great number who accepted and acquiesced. For most
professionals, no threats of dismissal or isolation were necessary; working
within the system was precisely what the new professionalism was about. A
comparison of the fate of the ASSA with the American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science and the engineering societies, moreover, suggests a gen-
eral trend towards a conception of specialization in one discipline with the
professionals in each redefined as members of a national profession.
As Dorothy Ross has suggested, the new professionals were not obscurantists
peddling arcane knowledge. They appealed to those popular bromides, scientism
and progress, to legitimate their status in society from the relatively safe havens
of academe. With the possible exception of the economists, the social scientists
had relatively little subject matter of their own to offer. Here we need to know
far more about why research became so important to the new professionals, and
what that research meant to those who ran colleges and universities, and to its
other consumers.24
Of all the new or reinvented social sciences of this period, American anthro-
pology had the smallest potential for merchandizing its wares to external con-
stituencies.25 The issues anthropologists dealt with, such as race, biological and
social heredity, and anthropometry, were important to many Americans. And
their views on these matters were firmly established, as Franz Boas was to dis-
cover repeatedly in his career. In the late nineteenth century, anthropology's
institutional base was in museums and in the federal government, including the
Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of American Ethnology, under the lead-
ership of John Wesley Powell and W. J. McGee. In his superlative portrait of
anthropology at the Smithsonian, Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr., has shown that its
practitioners found anthropology far closer in meaning and purpose to natural
history and the wondrous regularities of nature than to a social science. Nor
was the government anthropologists' notion of "professionalism" the same as
that of the academic social scientists. As Hinsley and George W. Stocking, Jr.,
have ably shown, it was a commitment to the study of nature and man's place
in it, more akin to the localized and general scientific professionalism of an ear-
lier age than to the cosmopolitan or national programs of the new academic
specialists.26
24 See Dorothy Ross, "The Development of the Social Sciences," The Organization of Knowled
in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 107-138; Ross, "American Social Science and the Idea of Progress," in The
Authority of Experts, ed. Thomas L. Haskell (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984); and Ross,
"Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America," American Historical Review, 1984,
89:909-928; see also Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution (cit. n. 4), Chs. 1 and 2.
25 Anthropology had more potential in other cultures; see, e.g., Henrika Kuklick, "The Sins of
the Fathers: British Anthropology and African Colonial Administration," Research in Sociology of
Knowledge, Sciences, and Art, 1978, 1:93-119.
26 Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Dev

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Yet late nineteenth-century anthropology had a social message, one drawn

from contemporary Lamarckian formulations of evolutionism, as Hinsley,
Stocking, and John S. Haller, Jr., have argued. Indeed, as previously noted, the
Lamarckian principles of biology and social heredity had hardened considerably
since mid century. The evolutionary anthropologists invented schemes of evo-
lutionary racial "progress" in which some groups-most, in fact-could never
reach the pinnacle of civilization of the white race. Through his investigation,
which included the views of doctors and anatomists as well as anthropologists,
Haller especially has expanded our notions of the history of racial anthro-
pology.27 Curiously for a set of doctrines so in tune with popular attitudes on
racial superiority, evolutionary anthropology had few institutional centers and
fewer constituencies and patrons.
Franz Boas and his allies led the movement to reorient American anthro-
pology towards the graduate university and cultural anthropology. In time they
reinvented anthropology's institutions as part of a national academic profession,
but not without bitter controversy. Recently Joan Mark has criticized Boas. In-
sisting that there was a science and profession of American anthropology long
before Boas executed his campaign to change power relations in discipline and
profession, Mark considers Boas a self-regarding, ungracious spoiler contemp-
tuous of his American colleagues. Boas was prickly and difficult. As Columbia
University president Nicholas Murray Butler ruefully discovered, Boas could be
downright uppity. Yet the structuring of a professional revolution is an imper-
sonal process that does not depend on a single individual. Anthropology did not
become fully professionalized until the later 1920s, and Mark is on firm ground
when she insists that nineteenth-century anthropology needs more examination
on its own terms. Much work is needed on its intellectual history. We need not
embrace Marvin Harris's positivistic interpretations of Boasian anthropology,
for example, to agree that much has not been explored.28 Why, for example,
did Boas and his followers ignore British social anthropology and physical an-
thropology? What contributions did they make to the science of anthropology?
What role did they play in scientific discussions of race? What did culture and
cultural relativism mean at various times? Why did recognition and legitimacy
only come to the Boasians after the mid 1920s?29
If American anthropology had relatively few external constituencies, this
cannot be said of psychology. As several scholars have shown, the American
proto-psychologists rapidly cast off their heritage of philosophy and German
psychology and invented a new mental science appropriate for those questions
of group and individual worth that mattered to American culture and not inci-
dentally to American constituencies. Unlike anthropology's social message, psy-
ment of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,

1981); Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (cit. n. 7); Stocking, ed., The Shaping of American
Anthropology, 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader (New York: Basic, 1974).
27 John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts From Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-
1900 (Urbana: Univ. Illinois Press, 1971).
28 Joan Mark, Four Anthropologists: An American Science in its Early Years (New York: Sci
History, 1980); and Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theor
Culture (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1969), Chs. 9-13.
29 On these issues, esp. anthropology's late professionalization, see, e.g., Stocking, Race, Culture
and Evolution, pp. 270-305; and Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution (cit. n. 4), pp. 89-120, 180-
190.

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chology's was powerful in society and culture. Within the academy psycholo-
gists benefited from mushrooming enrollments in the 1890s and after, attributable
to some extent to the expansion of programs for public school teachers. But the
real point, as John C. Burnham and others have insisted, was that psychologists'
evolving concern to develop a psychology of capacity and a psychology of con-
duct had enormous appeal.30 Moreover, the new professionals declared, they
could accomplish one of professionalism's main purposes-standardization-
by creating standards and yardsticks of mind and emotion. This was indeed a
powerful message. As Dorothy Ross points out in her fine analysis of one of
psychology's founders, G. Stanley Hall, if Hall was a man with serious problems
as a scientist, professional, publicist, and administrator, he nevertheless
spawned an entire movement of professional and popular child study- almost
in spite of himself. The man mattered less than the message or even the medium
in which it was cast. And, as Michael M. Sokal has demonstrated in his studies
of another of psychology's founders, James McKeen Cattell, the message was
the thing. Cattell was a difficult character, a curmudgeon early in life. He had
a genius for creating enemies and for isolating himself from mainstream opinion
in the scientific community; even his famous research program on individual
mental differences, launched in the 1890s, soon fell apart. Yet as Hall stood for
the notions that mind has evolved and the child is the father to the man, Cattell
asserted that the scientific measurement of individual and group mental differ-
ences was just around the corner.31
Soon psychologists turned to mental measurement in droves. Some, such as
Edward L. Thorndike, did so from within the academy and influenced several
generations of psychologists and educators, not to mention those thousands who
took the examinations of intellect he and others devised. The real breakthrough
in mental testing, however, came when Henry H. Goddard and Lewis M.
Terman published their "Americanized" versions of Binet's mental scales, which
they redefined as tests of innate intelligence, which was not at all what Binet
had assumed or intended.32 Mental testing was a social technology if there ever
30 Burnham, "Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Progressive Movement" (cit. n. 5); and Cravens,
The Triumph of Evolution, pp. 56-86.
31 Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
1972); Michael M. Sokal, ed., An Education in Psychology: James McKeen Cattell's Journal and
Letters from Germany and England, 1880-1888 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981); Sokal, "Grad-
uate Study with Wundt: Two Eyewitness Accounts," in Wundt Studies: A Centennial Collection,
ed. Wolfgang G. Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney (Toronto: Hogrefe, 1980), pp. 210-255; Sokal,
"James McKeen Cattell and the Failure of Anthropometric Testing, 1890-1901," in The Problematic
Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G.
Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), pp. 322-345; Sokal, "The Origins of the Psychological Corpora-
tion," J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 1981, 17:54-67; Sokal, "James McKeen Cattell and American Psychology
in the 1920s," in Explorations in the History of Psychology, ed. Josef Brozek (Lewisburg, Pa.:
Bucknell Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 273-323; and Sokal, "Science and James McKeen Cattell, 1894 to
1945," Science, 1980, 209:43-52.
32 Geraldine Joncich, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward Lee Thorndike (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1968); Theta H. Wolfe, Alfred Binet (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
1973); and see Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (cit. n. 11), pp. 146-233, for a good discussion of
how scientific, in retrospect, the early American uses of Binet were (this is a polemical rather than
a historical discussion). See also, e.g., L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1979), a judicious critique of mental testing, and Leon J. Kamin, The Science and
Politics of the I.Q. (Potomac, Md.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1974), which led to the exposure
of Burt's serious methodological problems. The emergence of the "new" hereditarian mental testing
came with Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" Har-
vard Educational Review, 1969, 33:1-123. See also Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution, pp. 78-86.

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was one. The question of whether mental testing was a tool of the corporate
state, as some have charged, may not have been satisfactorily resolved, but
clearly testing became a method by which psychologists identified and served
client populations and patrons alike.33
Nor were the most prestigious institutions immune from the seductive appeals
of applied psychology. As Matthew Hale, Jr., notes, the German-born and
trained psychologist Hugo Munsterberg spent much of his time at Harvard ad-
vocating and encouraging mental measurement and all manner of other psycho-
technics to his students and, indeed, to anyone who would listen. These appli-
cations included the law, industry, and the clinic. Munsterberg believed that
social function was directly related to biological and mental structure. Psychol-
ogists even participated in the widespread public discussions of the meaning of
work in the industrial age, of whether the routine of factory and office had made
the work ethic passe.34 Psychotechnics, of course, received much support from
the behaviorist movement of the 1910s. In a very real sense, behaviorism pro-
vided a scientific rationale and legitimacy for applied psychology, for it stressed
the measurement, prediction, and control of human behavior. As John M.
O'Donnell has argued, perhaps behaviorism owed less to its famous high priest,
John B. Watson, than it did to the work of the many obscure clinical and applied
psychologists who labored in private and public agencies to solve immediate
problems. It may well have been Watson's function to provide a voice from
within the academic establishment for that larger community.35
In the 1910s and 1920s, psychologists offered their services to government,
private industry, the mass media, commerce and advertising, and other insti-
tutions. As Loren Baritz's classic study of the uses of social science in industry
suggests, much remains to be explored. The roles and influences of psycholo-
gists in these areas have barely been sketched. And while we may know some-
thing about the interest of the more prestigious institutions and research groups
in applying psychology, we know almost nothing about the "lesser" academic
institutions, such as the state universities of the Midwest, not to mention child-
saving institutions, social welfare charities, and a host of other institutions that
increasingly employed psychologists and other professionals after 1910.36 The
most famous example of applied psychology of the era, of course, was the pro-
gram of mental measurement of Army recruits during World War I. The results
33 Joel H. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon, 1972); and
Spring, "Psychologists and the War: The Meaning of Intelligence in the Alpha and Beta Tests,"
History of Education Quarterly, 1972, 12:3-14.
34 Matthew Hale, Jr., Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Mfinsterberg and the Origins o
Applied Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1980); and James B. Gilbert, Work Without
Salvation: America's Intellectuals and Industrial Alienation, 1880-1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1977).
35 John M. O'Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870-1920 (New York:
New York University Press, forthcoming); and David Cohen, J. B. Watson: The Founder of Be-
haviorism: A Biography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) (not the definitive biography of
its subject, to say the least).
36 On psychology in industry, see Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of
Social Science in American Industry (1960; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974); see also Donald
S. Napoli, Architects of Adjustment: The History of the Psychological Profession in the United
States (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1981). Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (cit.
n. 3), a stunning achievement, and Daniel J. Bjork, The Compromised Scientist: William James in
the Development of American Psychology (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), a book with
far narrower concerns, focus on famous people at prestigious institutions.

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of the Army tests "proved," to the testers' satisfaction, the superiority of some
"races" over others and helped sanction the cause of immigration restriction.
The Army program was a spectacular example of social technics and planning.
Psychology also seemed to have a powerful message to laypeople. As Dominick
Cavallo has argued in his interesting study of the urban recreation and play-
ground movement, the new psychology seemed to the movement's organizers
and leaders a social technology that had the potential to train city children to
be good "team players," by which they meant training them to adapt to society's
rules.37 Yet a review of the corpus of secondary work on American psychology
shows how much remains to be investigated. Psychology was indeed a hot item
in culture and society, far beyond the ivory towers and silos of academe. It is
worth exploring more fully.
American sociologists discovered that when they tried to create their disci-
pline there were already messages aplenty about sociology in culture and so-
ciety. From the academics' point of view, furthermore, these messages were, if
not wrong, certainly not theirs, which was the main point. The academics even
had to retrieve the word sociology from the various popular groups interested
in society and "sociology" and make it theirs. Many historians and sociologists
have dated the origins of American sociology to Lester Frank Ward and his
ponderous writings. This seems highly doubtful. John C. Burnham pointed out
that the academics had little use for Ward, and I have suggested that there was
little relationship intellectually or professionally between Ward and early twen-
tieth-century American sociologists.38 Academic sociologists' most serious com-
petitors in the early twentieth century were the so-called "practical" sociolo-
gists, that is, those interested in social work, charities, corrections, and child
welfare. As economists withdrew from teaching "social problems" courses in
the 1890s, and as social workers became professionalized in the 1910s, this left
the academics in charge of sociology, although it was hardly clear what so-
ciology was. Certainly there was no shared sense of sociology as a research
enterprise before the 1920s, and inventing a consensus on what constituted the
discipline seemed impossible.39
37 Daniel J. Kevles, "Testing the Army's Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World
War I," J. Amer. Hist., 1968, 55:565-581; and Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized
Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia, Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1981). Still the
fullest account of the Army tests remains Robert M. Yerkes, ed., Psychological Examining in the
United States Army (Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 15) (Washington, D.C.: Na-
tional Academy of Sciences, 1921). See also Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution, pp. 224-265, for
a discussion of the mental testing controversy.
38 John C. Burnham, Lester Frank Ward in American Thought (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs
Press, 1956); and Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution, pp. 136-137; those putting Ward at the origins
of American sociology include Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of
American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 204-
210; Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., An Introduction to the History of Sociology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 1948), pp. 173-190; and Clifford H. Scott, Lester Frank Ward (Boston: Twayne, 1976).
39 Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution, pp. 121-153. For useful practitioner histories of sociology
as discipline and profession see, e.g., Roscoe C. and Gisela J. Hinkle, The Development of Modern
Sociology (New York: Random House, 1954); Anthony Oberschall, ed., The Establishment of Em-
pirical Sociology: Studies in Continuity, Discontinuity, and Institutionalization (New York: Harper
& Row, 1972); Luther Lee Bernard, "The Teaching of Sociology in the United States," American
Journal of Sociology, 1909, 15:164-213; and Robert E. L. Faris, Chicago Sociology, 1920-1932 (San
Francisco, Calif.: Chandler, 1967). For valuable raw data on departments of sociology, see "History
of Sociology Departments," Box 4, files 1-8, Luther Lee Bernard Papers, University Archives,
Pennsylvania State University.

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For the most part, the literature on American sociology focuses on individual
sociologists and their ideas. Rarely does one find accounts that attempt to depict
the discipline and profession as a whole, let alone its roles and interrelations in
culture and society. Some accounts represent a New Left consciousness, as-
suming that there is a truly positivistic science of society that "would have"
confirmed the true insights of left ideology about society. Others are more con-
cerned with issues within the discipline itself, such as building or correcting
contemporary theories by examination of older ones.40 The prevailing view
among historians is that the pioneer sociologists were reformers in academic
guise who made reform central to their theories of society. Certainly these pi-
oneer sociologists wanted sociology to be socially useful. But the tension be-
tween "reform" and "professionalism" is more apparent than real. Sociologists
often found themselves in circumstances defined by the academy and academic
professionalism. For example, in his lively, well-researched biography of Ed-
ward A. Ross, Julius Weinberg demonstrates how easily the irrepressible Ross
handled the supposed tension between professionalism and reform. Ross was
essentially an academic entrepreneur who used academic and professional in-
stitutions and customs to win fame and fortune. For Ross both "reform" and
"professionalism" were means to a career.41
There have been several studies of the intellectual history of sociology as well.
Roscoe C. Hinkle has offered an intensive, almost baroque, taxonomy of the
specific disciplinary ideas of those he considers the founders of academic so-
ciology. But its utility is limited by his narrow angle of vision. Only sociological
ideas matter. Ellsworth R. Fuhrman has traced the development of a tradition
of sociology of knowledge among pioneer academic sociologists, arguing that
most accepted a "social-technological" mode of interpretation, that is, they be-
lieved that man had emotive, irrational impulses that society had to control.
Thus they defined the rather sharp limits of individuality within the context of
group identity. William Fine corroborates the importance of group identity from
a slightly different perspective in discussing the impact and later transformation
of evolutionary models in early sociological thought.42
The Chicago School has also received some attention. Fred H. Matthews, in
his biography of Robert E. Park, discusses Park's ideas from within the disci-
pline of sociology. He traces Park's ideas to Georg Simmel and William I.
Thomas. Much of Matthews's discussion is concerned with Park's shift from
"philosophical" to "sociological" levels of argumentation and discourse. J.
David Lewis and Richard L. Smith have combined the history of philosophy
with the cliometrics of knowledge to find the "roots" of the sociological theory
of symbolic interactionism, which Herbert Blumer and other Chicago sociolo-
gists eventually elaborated into a major theory of the discipline. In a series of
40 An example of the former is Herman and Julie R. Schwendinger, The Sociologists of the Chair:
A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology, 1883-1922 (New York:
Basic Books, 1974); an excellent example of the latter is Robert Bierstedt, American Sociologica
Theory: A Critical History (New York: Academic Press, 1981).
41 Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison: State
Historical Society of Wisconsin Press, 1972).
42 Roscoe C. Hinkle, Founding Theory of American Sociology, 1881-1915 (Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1980); Ellsworth R. Fuhrman, The Sociology of Knowledge in America, 1883-1915
(Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1980); and William Fine, Progressive Evolution and Amer-
ican Sociology, 1890-1920 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1979).

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sometimes negative conclusions, they insist that, contrary to professional folk-

lore, George Herbert Mead had very little to do with the development or an-
tecedents of symbolic interactionism. In his study of Albion W. Small, Vernon
K. Dibble suggests that Small's thought, balanced as it was between a desire
for a science of society and for social reform, could not be adapted to the new
notions of social science and public policy that swept through culture, society,
and the social sciences in the 1920s and beyond. Yet it remains difficult to find
the intellectual cohesion within the Chicago School that several of these studies
seem to assume.43 The writing of the history of American sociology is not yet
complete. More broadly gauged studies that go beyond single individuals and
"disciplinary ideas" are welcome.
The controversy over mental illness and institutions continues in this period.
In Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive
America, David J. Rothman has returned to the fray to find more black hats.
Focusing on the "progressive" ministrations to the problems of crime, delin-
quency, and mental illness, Rothman, still a proponent of history as the result
of ineluctable social forces, nevertheless is preoccupied with the motives of in-
dividuals, not with the impersonal structures and processes, the social forces of
the social order-thus the "conscience" and "convenience" of the title. Con-
venience, of course, won out. This is not perhaps a helpful insight for someone
as interested in "correcting" contemporary social policy and changing "the
system" as Rothman is; are social problems the result of "bad" individuals? And
his analyses of therapy, rationale, professional ideology, and related phenomena
appear both presentist and difficult to corroborate. Thus individuals were not
thought of by therapists apart from the group to which they "belonged"; "feeble-
minded" and "psychopathic" delinquents, for example, were regarded and
treated as very different kettles of fish before the 1920s. Gerald N. Grob's
Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 reiterates many of the themes
of his earlier work, but, if anything, is an even more impressive piece of careful
research, thoughtful interpretation and analysis, and balanced judgment. His
findings about the fate of the mentally ill are hardly reassuring. In this work
Grob pays far more attention to ideas, therapeutic and others as well, than be-
fore. His is not an argument with the past, but an understanding of it. Another
contribution of note is Norman Dain's recent biography of that most famous
mental patient of the early twentieth century, Clifford Beers. Dain provided a
judicious, well-researched account of Beers's life and of the mental hygiene
movement in which he played so important a role. In her evolving work on the
child guidance movement, an offshoot of mental hygiene, Margo Horn has
studied a large number of cases in the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic be-
tween the world wars and drastically qualified the argument of some social
critics and historians that such institutions and their staffs sought to "invade"
and "manipulate" the family.44
43 Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School
(Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1978); J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith, American
Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 1980); and Vernon K. Dibble, The Legacy of Albion Small (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 1975). Faris, Chicago Sociology, 1920-1932, has much valuable information on the depart-
ment as an institution. Winifred Rausenbush, Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist (Durham,
N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1979) is an account by a former associate.
I David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progres-

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As historians venture further into the history of mental illness and hygiene,
they will find useful a number of studies of psychiatry as discipline, therapy,
and profession from the 1870s to the 1920s and beyond. Of particular note are
the contributions of John C. Burnham, Nathan Hale, Jr., and Charles Rosen-
berg, which provide a solid basis for further work on the relations between
professionals and the larger society and culture. In his synoptic account of
American ideas on human nature, Merle Curti has provided a thorough assess-
ment of psychoanalytic ideas in America. Also useful are several other more
specialized studies of mental health and certain practitioners of psychiatry.45
Between the 1870s and the 1920s the social sciences became professions and
disciplines. The democratic dogma of an earlier age was considerably revised.
Professional social science projected its hierarchical and deterministic assump-
tions into the creation of a science of society. Historians working on the history
of the social sciences in this period have yet, as a rule, to transcend the bound-
aries of disciplinary history and to place the social disciplines and professions
in a broader context. At the same time, much work needs to be done on the
disciplines and professions themselves.
THE AGE OF PLURALISM
Most historians would agree that after the 1910s, trends of cultural pluralism
and cultural relativism swept through American society and culture. Certainly
within the context of evolutionary theory itself, the emphasis shifted from the
argument that nature "caused" culture to the notion that culture and nature were
interrelated and inseparable and that, moreover, evolutionary progress was the
result of the interaction of many different kinds of factors. If by cultural rela-
tivism one means a belief in the equipotentiality of all groups, with a presumed
tolerance for all with regard to social policy, cultural relativism was probably a
minority view. Power relations within the larger society and culture did not
change substantially with regard to matters of race, religion, national origin, or
gender. Cultural pluralism meant a redefinition of power relationships and a new
way of describing the relations between the "majority" and the "minorities" in
which one conceded complex interrelations and multiple factors. In this new
conception of society and culture, each group contributed to the larger national
sive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Gerald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society
1875-1940 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983); Norman Dain, Clifford Beers: Advocate for the
Insane (Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 1980); and Margo Horn, "The Moral Message of Child
Guidance, 1925-1945," Journal of Social History, Fall 1984, 18:25-36.
45 See Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau (cit. n. 3); Burnham, Psychoanalysis and
American Medicine (cit. n. 3); Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of
Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); Curti,
Human Nature in American Thought (cit. n. 3), esp. pp. 186-416; and John C. Burnham, Jelliffe:
American Psychoanalyst and Physician, and His Correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C. G.
Jung, ed. William McGuire (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1983). On late nineteenth-century psy-
chiatry see Barbara Sicherman, "The Paradox of Prudence: Mental Health in the Gilded Age," J.
Amer. Hist., 1976, 62:890-912; Sicherman, "The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neu-
rasthenia," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1977, 32:33-54; Sicherman, The
Quest for Mental Health in America, 1880-1917 (New York: Arno, 1980); Arthur H. Chapman,
Harry Stack Sullivan: His Life and Work (New York: Putnam, 1976); Helen Swick Perry, Psychi-
atrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982);
and Walter Bromberg, Psychiatry Between the Wars, 1918-1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1982).

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welfare or, more precisely, played its assigned role, on the job, in the kitchen,
or at the back of the bus.
Henry D. Shapiro has provided penetrating discussions of the meaning of cul-
tural pluralism as applied to the problems of region and place. In Appalachia
On Our Mind he examines changing conceptions of Appalachia in American
thought between the 1870s and the 1920s. He argues that the early twentieth-
century reconceptualization of Appalachia as not "other" to American normality
but as instead a distinct but interrelated region provides us with a realistic, if
not cheering, understanding of what regionalism and, therefore, pluralism sig-
nified. In other words, different was different, not necessarily equal in value or
worth. More recently, Shapiro has offered a searching analysis of the role of
place in the identification and explanation of groups in society. He points out
that although post-1920 social science theory may have abandoned naturalistic
racism, in its stead arose a new model. Place now became the key to under-
standing groups. While this might have been expressed partly in terms of cul-
ture, in effect each place had its own culture, whether referred to as a "region,"
a "community," a "ghetto," a "suburb," or the like.46
The new sense of interrelatedness of things and the plurality of social reality
influenced the social sciences. In the modified doctrine of professionalism, it was
appropriate to recognize the valid claims of other professionals in that larger
search for the ultimate truths of human existence and behavior. Most social
scientists won their various institutional and disciplinary battles. They eagerly
established diplomatic relations, if not precisely a foreign policy, with their
public constituencies, but, even more importantly, with the new foundations.
The new foundations made possible interdisciplinary, cooperative social science.
In some instances they mandated it.
An excellent example of the age's penchant for interdisciplinary cooperation
was the new discipline of child development. Known before the 1920s as "child
welfare," in the 1920s the new science and profession of child development was
invented by philanthropic intervention. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Me-
morial, created in 1918, had a vague mandate to assist women and children. The
appointment of a young economist and gadfly of left politics, Lawrence K.
Frank, to oversee the Memorial's interests in women and children led after 1925
to multimillion-dollar investments in several child research institutions, the most
notable of which was the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (founded in
1917). All sciences of the child, ranging from anthropometry to early childhood
education, found a place in the new discipline and profession. Child develop-
mentalists embraced the fundamental assumption of natural and social science
of that age, that biology and culture were interrelated and must be taken into
account in the explanation of child nature and behavior. Some historical work
done by practitioners is useful; thus Robert R. Sears's overview discusses ideas
and professional history accurately and perceptively. This is a rich field. The
developmentalists have launched an archival preservation program for histo-
rians.47
46 Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in t
American Consciousness (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1978); and Shapiro, "The Place
of Culture and the Problem of Identity," in Appalachia and America: Autonomy and Regional De-
pendence, ed. Allen Batteau (Lexington: Univ. Kentucky Press, 1983), pp. 111-141.
47 See. e.g., Robert R. Sears, Your Ancients Revisited: A History of Child Development (Ch

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There are other discussions of the new view of culture and nature in this
period. As Edward A. Purcell, Jr., has perceptively argued, a major substantive
issue from the earlier era that still needed resolution was the meaning and utility
of scientific naturalism, or, put another way, the meaning of group identity for
the individual. Purcell discusses developments in philosophy, jurisprudence, and
social science in the several decades following 1910. In the 1920s social scientists
and lawyers invented a new science of society. Without perhaps realizing it, they
helped undermine such traditional supports of "democratic theory" as the es-
sential rationality of man and the existence of established law. Caught in the
1930s between their commitments to scientific naturalism and democratic theory,
they created a new corpus of democratic thought. This new body of thought
ultimately equated American democracy with the status quo. As I have noted
elsewhere, a concrete manifestation of this discussion was the controversy
within the natural and social sciences over the role of heredity and environment
in the making of human intelligence, conduct, and morals. The controversy led
to the theory of the interrelatedness of nature and culture and to the kind of
model-building that Shapiro and Purcell have noted in slightly different contexts.
For the professionals involved, the controversy's resolution had the happy result
of recognizing the different but legitimate academic and professional turfs of the
various claimants in the controversy. And the controversy itself signified the
shift from the age of hierarchy to that of pluralism.48
Further signs of the new age can be seen in the new "regionalist" geography,
based to a large extent at the University of Chicago. This field raises all sorts
of fascinating questions, such as its relation with anthropology, sociology, and
economics. Physical anthropology finally was revived, slowly, in the 1930s and
1940s. The appointment of E. A. Hooten at Harvard was important, for this
allowed the creation of a school of physical anthropology. If Hooten himself
wanted to hear nothing of culture, in time the discipline he recreated recognized
a multiplicity of factors. And, notwithstanding the flawed historical account
Derek Freeman has written of Margaret Mead-really an account of the Boasian
anthropologists-Boasian cultural anthropology (and anthropologists) always as-
sumed the interrelatedness of culture and nature. Yet these matters deserve
more intensive study.49
Univ. Chicago Press, 1975); Milton J. E. Senn, Insights on the Child Development Movement in
the United States (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 161,
Vol. 40, Nos. 3-4) (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1975); Steven Schlossman, "Philanthropy and
the Gospel of Child Development," History of Education Quarterly, 1981, 21:275-299; Elizabeth M.
R. Lomax, Science and Patterns of Child Care (San Francisco: Freeman, 1978); Hamilton Cravens,
"Child-Saving in the Age of Professionalism, 1915-1930," in History of Childhood in America, ed.
Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985); and Cravens, "The Wan-
dering I.Q.: Mental Testing and American Culture," Human Development, forthcoming. See also
Henry L. Minton, "The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station and the 1940 Debate on Intelligence:
Carrying on the Legacy of a Concerned Mother," J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 1984, 20:160-176. For a
guide to the papers of many key individuals and institutions in child development, see Committee
on Preservation of Historical Source Materials, Society for Research in Child Development, "His-
tory of Child Development: Primary Source Materials: First Compilation of Abstracts," Child De-
velopment Abstracts and Bibliography, 1984, 58:123-141; for Milton J. E. Senn's oral history in-
terviews with professionals in this field, see Michael M. Sokal and Patrice A. Rafail, comps., A
Guide to Manuscripts Collections in the History of Psychology and Related Areas (Millwood, N.Y.:
Kraus, 1982), pp. 177-180.
48 Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory (cit. n. 2); and Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution.
49 See, e.g., Robert E. Dickinson, Regional Concept: The Anglo-American Leaders (London: Rout-

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There is much evidence, furthermore, that social scientists fit within the con-
structs of the age, or, at least, that individuals could not easily modify them.
Much has been said about how the brilliant refugees from Hitlerite barbarism in
the 1930s "upgraded" American science, social science, and the arts. If by this
is meant that a goodly proportion continued to do work of high quality in
America as in Europe, or that many were able to sustain themselves here, this
is probably valid. And in some fields (e.g., atomic physics) the European mi-
gration may have been instrumental in furthering knowledge of the subject.
Within the social sciences, however, most likely the refugees adapted to the
American idiom, as the brilliant topological and child psychologist, Kurt Lewin
did successively at Cornell, Iowa, and MIT, or they remained exciting and per-
haps slightly exotic presences, as did Franz Neumann or Kurt Koffka, whose
work was absorbed and diffused after their deaths. Indeed, this can be said even
of Lewin.50
Of all of the social technologies of the early twentieth century, perhaps eu-
genics had the most determined advocates. From the excellent work of Mark
H. Haller and Kenneth Ludmerer, we know that the old-time eugenics move-
ment declined in the 1920s and that a new eugenics movement arose that took
culture and nature seriously. Thanks to Daniel J. Kevles's intensively detailed
book on eugenics, we now can see how the issues of culture and nature were
carried on in discussions of human heredity to the present day.51
It was in the 1920s and 1930s that social scientists came to sit among the
powerful, most often as advisers to policymakers. As Barry Karl and Stephen
J. Diner have pointed out, social scientists saw in advising the leaders a new
kind of professionalism more useful for the profession and for public policy than
populistic appeals to voters.52 And what were the relationships between power
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Brian W. Blouet, ed., The Origins of Academic Geography in the United
States (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1981); Frank Spencer, ed., A History of American Physical An-
thropology, 1930-1980 (New York: Academic Press, 1982), which contains many informative pa-
pers, with huge bibliographies on the history of the field and "progress" in its various specialties in
the period 1930-1980; Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of
an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983); and Cravens, The
Triumph of Evolution, pp. 157-190. Freeman's anthropological assertions have been seriously chal-
lenged, as well as his depiction of Mead.
50 Much of the literature on the migration of the European intellectuals assumes one of two po-
sitions, both ill suited to investigation by historical methods: either that American culture was "ma-
tured" by the migration, or that the refugees "succeeded." Among the more useful discussions of
the problem are Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration From Europe,
1930-1941 (Univ. Chicago Press, 1968; 2nd ed., 1971); Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds.,
The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1969); H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1975); Michael M. Sokal, "The Gestalt Psychologists in Behaviorist
America," American Historical Review, 1984, 89:1240-1263; and Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M.
Borden, eds., The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation in the United States, 1930-
1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983).
51 Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, 1870-1930 (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963; paper ed., 1984); Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and
American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972); Kevles,
In the Name of Eugenics (cit. n. 2); and Garland E. Allen, "The Misuse of Biological Hierarchies:
The American Eugenics Movement, 1900-1940," History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 1984,
5:105-128.
52 Among the most helpful accounts of social scientists as advisers to policymakers are Richard
S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (1966; Ames: Iowa State
Univ. Press, 1982); Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust (New York: Columbia

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Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) in

about 1936, a refugee social
psychologist who adapted to
the American idiom.
Courtesy of the University
of Iowa Archives.
and pluralism? Several commentators have insisted that by and large American
social science has not been able to understand the nonwhite, and in particular
the black, experience in America. Certainly this would be an interesting question
to explore for those interested in power relations in science, as would the ca-
reers and contributions of nonwhite social scientists.53 In a related vein, Ros-
alind Rosenberg has broken new ground in the history of social science by fo-
cusing on both female scholars and the 'roots" of a feminist intellectual tradition
in social science. She portrays the difficulties that a series of talented and de-
termined women faced in attempting to develop a body of feminist, or at least
woman-oriented, social scientific investigations and theories. Margaret Rossi-
Univ. Press, 1977); Barry D. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963); Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1974); and Stephen J. Diner, A City and Its Universities: Public
Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1980).
53 See, e.g., Eleanor Engram, Science, Myth, Reality: The Black Family in One Half Century of
Research (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982); Robert V. Guthrie, Even the Rat was White (New
York: Harper & Row, 1976); Dale R. Vlasek, 'E. Franklin Frazier and the Problem of Assimilation-
in Ideas in America's Cultures: From Republic to Mass Society, ed. Hamilton Cravens (Ames: Iowa
State Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 141-155; and Stanford M. Lyman, The Black American in Sociological
Thought: New Perspectives on Black America (New York: Putnam, 1972), pp. 171-183 et passim.

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ter's work on women scientists suggests a revealing picture of partly opened

doors slammed shut; the creation of a tradition, or even a network in the mas-
culine world of science, was an extraordinarily difficult task. A recent biography
of Ruth Benedict demonstrates how hard it was for a woman scientist to develop
the kinds of professional networks that male scientists take for granted and that
mean so much for the elaboration of ideas and careers. Perhaps the choices for
women in social science were encapsulated in the contrasting careers of Ruth
Benedict, who remained quite private, and Margaret Mead, who rapidly became
one of the world's best-known anthropologists.54
Historians interested in the social sciences have ample opportunities for fur-
ther work in the period since the 1920s. Vast areas remain untouched, including
physical anthropology, home economics, urban planning, economics, geography,
child development, and the various agricultural social sciences. Nor do we pos-
sess sufficient information for an elementary chronicle of anthropology, psy-
chology, and sociology. Plenty of opportunity exists for work on a single
discipline, several disciplines, and broader studies. A final point remains spec-
ulative, that is, whether the history of the social sciences has been continuous
since the 1920s. There is evidence on both sides of the question. One argument
would emphasize developments within the disciplines, whereas the opposing
view would focus on changes in culture and society.55
CONCLUSION
The history of the social sciences has now begun to take shape as a field of
scholarly investigation. The secondary literature is vast; nevertheless, in many
instances the available information is sparse. Source materials now exist in plen-
titude, and the hope is that in time more materials will be preserved. All manner
of work can and should be done, including biographies, histories of societies,
institutions, particular theories and methods, research projects, studies of "pop-
ular" and "professional" understandings of social science, and the interrelation-
ships between social science and public policy. Nor does this exhaust the list
of possibilities. Perhaps the most important recommendation is that the field be
defined as broadly as possible. The social sciences, or social technologies, em-
brace much of the human experience in modern times.
54 Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (cit. n. 2); Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in
America: Strategies and Struggles to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982); Judith
Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1983);
Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984); and Mary Catherine
Bateson, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (New York:
William Morrow, 1984). The last two works portray Mead less as a thinker than as a promoter and
public representative of anthropology. Other work on Mead's life includes Margaret Mead, Black-
berry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: William Morrow, 1972); "In Memoriam: Margaret Mead
(1901-1978)," American Anthropologist, 1980, 82:261-373; Edward Rice, Margaret Mead: A Portrait
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979); and Robert Cassidy, Margaret Mead: A Voice for the Century
(New York: Universe, 1982).
55 See Peter Clecak, America's Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60's and
70's (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983) which argues that the 1960s and 1970s were, in a cultural
and social sense, quite similar, and united by a sense of individualism, not a larger whole.

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History of the Social Sciences

Author(s): Hamilton Cravens

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/301732

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A FORCEFUL ANSWER to the question why anyone should be i

OSIRIS, 2nd series, 1985, 1: 183-207 183

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simple task to supply authoritative answers to many routine questions of fact.

"DEMOCRATIC" SOCIAL SCIENCE

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behavior-Lamarckism, as it were, for the bumps on the head. Phrenology

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mentally ill were no longer individuals; they belonged to a group-the insane.

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THE PROFESSIONAL IDEA

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Yet late nineteenth-century anthropology had a social message, one drawn

ment of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,

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sometimes negative conclusions, they insist that, contrary to professional folk-

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THE AGE OF PLURALISM

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Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) in

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ter's work on women scientists suggests a revealing picture of partly opened

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