Intergenerational solidarity in the creation of science: The Ross-Sorokin correspondence, 1921-1931

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 135-150

  Nichols, Lawrence T ^a  

^a WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 9444288576     PISSN: 00225061     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6696(199604)32:2<135::AID-JHBS2>3.0.CO;2-V     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. See, for example: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (NY: Scribner's, 1930);
2. Bernard Barber, Science and the Social Order (NY: Free Press, 1952);
3. Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science, Norman W. Storer, Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973);
4. Stuart S. Blume, Toward A Political Sociology of Science (NY: Free Press, 1974);
5. Stephen Cole, Making Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
6. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
7. See also Stuart S. Blume, Ed., Perspectives in the Sociology of Science (NY: Wiley, 1977);
8. Richard Whitley, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
9. Although this formulation is most often identified with the functionalist or structural-functional approach, most sociologists would agree - even conflict sociologists, who might see intergenerational solidarity as a barrier to changes they desire.
10. See the following sources: Randall Collins, "The Organizational Politics of the ASA," American Sociologist 21 (Winter 1990), p. 311;
11. Ellen K. Coughlin, "Sociologists Confront Questions About Field's Vitality and Direction," Chronicle of Higher Education (August 12, 1992), pp. A5-A7;
12. Albert E. Gollin, "Whither the Profession of Sociology?" American Sociologist 21 (Winter 1990);
13. Barbara Kantrowitz, "Sociology's Lonely Crowd," Newsweek 119, 5 (February 3, 1992), pp. 55-56.
14. Jonathan H. Turner, "The Disintegration of American Sociology," Sociological Perspectives 32, 4 (1989): 419-433.
15. Dennis Wrong, "The Present Condition of American Sociology, A Review Article," Comparative Studies in Sociology and History (1993): 183-196. The quote appears on pp. 194-195.
16. Irving L. Horowitz, The Decomposition of Sociology (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994). Quote is on p. 6.
17. There are numerous summaries of the careers of both sociologists. For Ross, see especially the following: Joyce O. Hertzler, "Edward Alsworth Ross: Sociological Pioneer and Interpreter," American Sociological Review 16 (1951), pp. 597-610;
18. and Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1972).
19. On Sorokin, see: Don Martindale, Prominent Sociologists Since World War II (Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1975);
20. Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 2nd edition, 1977);
21. Lawrence T. Nichols, "Deviance and Social Science: The Instructive Historical Case of Pitirim Sorokin," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25, 4 (1989), pp. 335-355;
22. and Barry Johnston, Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biography (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1996).
23. See Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism.
24. See Gary Dean Jaworski, "Pitirim A. Sorokin's Sociological Anarchism," History of the Human Sciences, 6, 3 (1993), p. 61-77.
25. Sorokin's account has been repeated in a number of publications: e.g., Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism, p. 229;
26. Martindale Prominent Sociologists Since World War II, p. 113;
27. Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought, pp. 486-487;
28. Lawrence T. Nichols, "Deviance and Social Science: The Instructive Historical Case of Pitirim Sorokin," p. 337.
29. Barry Johnston's, Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biography, pp. 52-58, retains the basic framework of Sorokin's summary, but provides a much fuller and more nuanced description of the transition to America than other sources do.
30. Sorokin, A Long Journey (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1963), pp. 201-202.
31. Archival documents indicate that Sorokin's account also contains minor inaccuracies, mainly concerning the exact order of his lecture tour in spring 1924 and the extent of local opposition to his views. This is understandable, since the autobiography was composed forty years after the events described.
32. Ross did not report his efforts on Sorokin's behalf in his autobiography, Seventy Years of It (NY: Appleton - Century, 1936). Perhaps he thought that his action did not merit special praise. Archival documents also show that Ross was generous toward other displaced Russians, even lending money to help them make a start in the U.S. Such data indicate that caution is called for in assessing Ross's often-alleged nativism and ethnic prejudice. Sorokin later provided similar assistance to sociologist Leopold von Wiese, who was trying to escape form Nazi Germany. Ross also aided von Wiese, by helping to arrange a temporary appointment for him at Wisconsin.
33. Letter from Ross to Samuel N. Harper, 28 April 1917. In the Ross Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. All letters to and from Ross cited in the paper are found in this collection.
34. Sorokin's early sociological works in Russian include substantial books, especially. Crime and Punishment, Service and Reward (1913),
35. and the two-volume System of Sociology (1920). He also wrote numerous articles on such topics as theories of progress, defining the field of sociology, and various aspects of social life among the Komi (Zyrian) people.
36. See Ross, Russia in Upheaval (NY: The Century Company, 1918),
37. and Ross, Seventy Years of It.
38. The name Petrograd was adopted after the 1905 revolution for what had been St. Petersburg, a city built during the reign of Peter the Great (1701-1725) that became known as a center of learning and culture. Recently, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the older name was restored.
39. Kareeff was a professor of history and sociology, Takhtareff a professor of sociology. See Sorokin, A Long Journey, p. 95.
40. Sorokin to Ross, 16 December 1921.
41. Frank W. Taussig to Ross, 12 June 1920, and Hutton Webster to Ross, 25 September 1920. Taussig, Harvard's eminent economist, perhaps felt vindicated, since he had urged his university to make Ross its first full professor of sociology in 1902. See Lawrence T. Nichols, "The Establishment of Sociology at Harvard: A Case of Organizational Ambivalence and Scientific Vulnerability," in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, Clark A. Elliott and Margaret W. Rossiter, Eds. (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1992), pp. 191-222.
42. Paul Wikul to Ross, 17 February 1922.
43. Letter from Sorokin to Ross, 26 July 1922.
44. Letter of Sorokin to Ross, 6 January 1923.
45. Letter of Ross to Sorokin, 4 August 1923.
46. Letter of Albion W. Small to Ross, 14 March 1923. On Sorokin's decades-long conflict with Chicago sociologists, see Lawrence T. Nichols, "Sorokin and American Sociology: The Dynamics of a Moral Career in Science," pp. 45-64 in Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment, Joseph Ford, Michel Richard, and Palmer Talbutt, Eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), especially pp. 63-64.
47. The F. Stuart Chapin papers at the University of Minnesota do not include this correspondence, although there are letters to and from Ross. At Nebraska, Ross carried on a cordial correspondence with J. Hertzler, chair of sociology, for many years. On Ross's career at Nebraska, see Bruce Keith, "The Foundations of an American Discipline: Edward A. Ross" Intellectual Work at the University of Nebraska, 1901-1906," Mid-American Review of Sociology, 13, 2 (Winter 1988), pp. 43-56.
48. Sorokin to Ross, 10 September 1923. Sorokin's younger son, Dr. Sergei Sorokin, in one of many enjoyable conversations over a period of years, said to me: "Father was nothing if not bold."
49. Sorokin, Long Journey, p. 210. On the next page, Sorokin says this of the MacCrackens: "When they learned of my arrival in New York . . . they invited me, in November, 1923, to come to Vassar, rented a room for me in nearby Poughkeepsie, and placed at my disposal the facilities of the college library, lectures, dining room, and most congenial company of both professors and students."
50. Letter of Sorokin to Ross, 10 September 1923.
51. Letter of Sorokin to Ross, 5 November 1923.
52. Ross to Sorokin, 10 November 1923.
53. Ross to R. H. Garner, 4 March 1915.
54. Sorokin mistakenly reverses the order of these lectures in his autobiography. Again, it must be remembered that this was written forty years later, and that Sorokin lectured elsewhere during his first several months in the U.S., including Decatur, Illinois and at Princeton University.
55. Letter of Sorokin to Ross, 25 March 1924.
56. Letter from F. Stuart Chapin to Dean Guy Stanton Ford, 16 September 1924. In the papers of Guy Stanton Ford, Walter Library Archives, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
57. Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Sociology of Revolution (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1925). Letter of Sorokin to Ross, 31 January 1925.
58. Letter of Ross to Sorokin ,12 February 1925. See also the following works by Ross: The Changing Chinese (NY: The Century Company, 1911);
59. Russia in Upheaval; The Russian Bolshevik Revolution (NY: The Century Company, 1921);
60. The Russian Soviet Republic (NY: The Century Company, 1923).
61. The importance of mentoring as a predictor of professional success in contemporary sociology has recently been examined in Bruce Keith and Helen Moore, "Training Sociologists: An Assessment of Professional Socialization and the Emergence of Career Aspirations," Teaching Sociology 23 (July 1995), pp. 199-214.
62. Edward A. Ross, The Roads to Social Peace (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1924).
63. Sorokin to Ross, 17 February 1925.
64. Sorokin to Ross, 31 January 1926.
65. Ross to Sorokin, 18 Febuary 1926.
66. Sorokin to Ross, 20 February 1926.
67. Ross to Sorokin, 16 May 1927.
68. Letter from Ross to Miss Annie Marion MacLean, 13 February 1926. Ross made this point repeatedly to those he was sounding out as potential text writers.
69. Theories is the book that prompted President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard to offer a professorship to Sorokin. It is also the book that drew Robert K. Merton to Harvard as a graduate student.
70. Sorokin to Ross, 5 May 1927. The quote from Theories is on p. 761.
71. During Sorokin's chairmanship of sociology at Harvard (1931-1944), a graduate course on experimental methods was offered. Sorokin also did some experimental work on solidarity and conflict in his later period of research on altruism.
72. Sorokin to Ross, 26 January 1928. In Standing Room Only? (NY: The Century Company, 1927), Ross reexamined the problem of population pressure raised by Thomas Malthus. He advocated "adaptive fertility" and extolled contraception, arguing that the "discovery of means of birth-control may well prove even more momentous in the life of humanity than the discovery of the germ origin of disease" (p. 208). He predicted that, in the near future, "the attainment of absolute and perfectly healthy temporary infertility on the part of women will be as simple as taking a headache tablet" (p. 209).
73. Ross to Sorokin, 17 May 1928.
74. Ross to Sorokin, 11 February 1928. In the same spirit, Ross added that, "I have myself discovered the fallacy in the lower paragraph of p. 124."
75. Ross to Sorokin, 17 October 1929.
76. Sorokin to Ross, 17 October 1929.
77. Coser, for example, says: "Sorokin holds a unique place in the study of social stratification and mobility. We owe to him the creation or definition of many of the terms that have become standard. . . . We also owe him a distinct vision of what the study of social mobility should be mainly concerned with" (Masters, p. 472).
78. On the negative response to Dynamics, see Lawrence T. Nichols, "Deviance and Social Science."
79. Ross to Sorokin, 24 May 1928. Letters that Ross may have written promoting Sorokin at various universities apparently have not survived. I found none in the Ross papers, despite looking at all letters from 1921 through 1931.
80. The fact of Minnesota's low pay scale was documented in the university's newspaper. In "University Likely To Lose Its Ablest Men, Coffman Says," (Minnesota Daily, 11 January 1927, p. 1), president L. D. Coffman is quoted as saying: "We have not yet paid salaries at Minnesota that equal those paid at a number of neighboring institutions. . . . Extra efforts will be required to maintain our standing. . . ." There are also indications that the problem may have been longstanding. On 28 April 1920, for example, Luther L. Bernard wrote Ross about his salary problems, saying: "I receive $2750, which does not finance my family expenditures and leave anything for research, stenographer, etc. In fact I have to do outside work, which ought to go to production, to make ends meet." Thus, Minnesota's pay scale may have been an important factor in its loss of four prominent sociologists: Bernard, Sorokin, Carle Zimmerman and Edwin Sutherland.
81. Letter from Sorokin to Ross, 28 May 1928.
82. Ross to Sorokin, 17 October 1929.
83. Sorokin to Ross, 17 October 1929.
84. Figures from the University of Minnesota show that Sorokin's salary had been comparatively low but had increased significantly by 1929. Sociology's budget for 1925-1926 shows F. Stuart Chapin, full professor and chair, receiving $5500, Associated Professor Manuel Elmer $3300, Assistant Professor Edwin Clarke $3000, and Sorokin $2000. These figures remained the same the following year. In 1927-1928, Chapin again received $5500, Professor Edwin Sutherland $4250, Associate Professor Malcolm Willey $4200, and Sorokin $3200. In 1928-1929, Sorokin received $4500, which was above Sutherland's $4250 and Willey's $4200. Sorokin may have been rankled by the slowness as well as the amounts of these increases. In this context, Harvard's offer of $7000 looked very attractive indeed. See the annual reports of the College of Science, Literature, and the Arts, Walter Library Archives, University of Minnesota.
85. Ross to Sorokin, 21 October 1929.
86. Letter of Albion Small to Ross, 14 March 1923.
87. Ross's earlier autobiography was entitled Forty-Five Years of It. Interestingly, both he and Sorokin published two such works, and thus the comment made by Wilbert Moore about Sorokin, that "no man who writes two autobiographies can be said to be wholly self-effacing," applies to Ross as well. In the same way, Martindale's description of Sorokin as the old warrior retelling stories of legendary battles is also pertinent in Ross's case. See Martindale, Prominent Sociologists Since World War II.
88. Sorokin to Ross, 24 September 1930.
89. Ross to Sorokin, 17 February 1931. Ross maintained ties to Harvard, where his two sons received law degrees, corresponding with Frank Taussig, T. N. Carver and W. Z. Ripley in the department of economics, as well as Roscoe Pound at the law school.
90. Horowitz, in his Decomposition of Sociology, also emphasizes Weber's approach.