Abstract
This is an article about the history of US sociology with systematic intent. It goes back to World War II to recover a wartime narrative context through which sociologists formulated a ‘trauma’ to the discipline and ‘blamed’ qualitative and values-oriented research for damaging the scientific status of sociology. This narrative documents a discussion of the changes that sociologists said needed to be made in sociology as a science to repair its status and reputation. While debates among sociologists about theory and method had always been contentious, the wartime narrative insisted for the first time that sociology be immediately unified around quantitative approaches. The narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science that developed during the war not only undermined the efforts of social interactionists to theorize social action and social justice, but also derailed Parsons’ pre-war effort to bridge differences. The moral coding that is the legacy of the narrative stigmatized important approaches to sociology, leading to a ‘crisis’ in the 1960s that still haunts the discipline. Disciplinary history has overlooked the wartime narrative with the result that the role played by World War II in effecting this crisis has gone unrecognized.
Keywords
Qualitative methods, including studies of social and symbolic interaction, pragmatism, cultural studies and ethnography, all well respected before World War II, had been stigmatized as subjective and unscientific by the end of the war and have remained so. This article argues that a narrative that developed among sociologists, as a way of making sense of scientific work during WWII, changed how they talked about being scientific. This wartime narrative formulated a ‘trauma’ to the science (Alexander, 2012). 1 Using terms like ‘unity/traitor’ and ‘worthy/trivial’, to position ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sociology – victim and perpetrator – against one another, the narrative blamed qualitative and ‘values’ research (addressed to issues of justice and inequality) for damaging the scientific standing of sociology. The result, it said, was an ineffective discipline unable either to support peace or prevent war. The proposed solution was a ‘unity’ of ‘big’, ‘worthy’, ‘verifiable’, quantitative ‘science’, and the elimination of ‘trivial’, ‘subjective’, qualitative ‘traitors’. What had been a scientific debate about theory and method, before the war, became a reformulation of moral categories; of what science should and shouldn’t be, in the context of WWII. As with other cultural narratives, the categories it created, which reorganized sociology as a science, became routinized and taken-for-granted, allowing them to outlive their narrative context. The resulting imbalance in the scientific respect accorded quantitative vs qualitative methods has impoverished research in the decades since, leading to high levels of reification, positivism, indeterminacy, and a diminished relevance of social theory to research.
Disciplinary history has largely overlooked the wartime period, taking the moral valuations of the wartime narrative for granted, and treating the transition to quantitative methods as a gradual and inevitable scientific advance that was reinforced by a turn against value-oriented research in the anti-communist post-war period. The longstanding debate over methods in the pre-war period is cited as evidence that the transition was long, slow and scientific (Turner, 2005); and Hinkle’s (1994: 46) assertion that ‘with almost no modifications’ the pre-war development of a quantified positivist approach to science was ‘transmitted to the post World War Two period to become the orthodox, foundational, epistemological-methodological stance of American sociology’ is representative. Those who have examined the wartime period (e.g. Abbott and Sparrow, 2005) conclude that the war did little more than speed up changes already underway.
There are at least two problems with this assessment: Qualitative methods were still well respected and a balance of methods was being maintained before 1940; and, while the New Deal had increased demand for statistical research after 1935, and Ogburn, Lazersfeld, Stouffer and others found their skill as statisticians in increasing demand (Ryan, 2013: 23), they could not agree on a single approach before 1940. Throughout the 1930s, two approaches to quantitative scientific sociology did battle: one led by Ogburn, the other by Bernard (Bannister, 1987: 7). It was during the war that the balance suddenly shifted: the question is why and how.
This article turns for an explanation to the wartime narrative about qualitative and quantitative methods – about being scientific – generated by sociologists from 1940 to 1947. It is part of a larger project of reconstructing the intellectual context in which Garfinkel and Goffman began their graduate work in the 1940s. 2 What later looked like rebellion against an established disciplinary preference for quantitative sociology began in the 1940s as a fight to preserve and protect a viable and eclectic discipline from a self-destructive reformulation during the war.
The war had initiated a crisis of meaning. In the words of Robert Park (1943: 165), ‘In the course of an incredibly brief space things that were once familiar have begun to look strange and eventualities that seemed remote are now visibly close at hand.’ That ‘strangeness’ called out for reconceptualization. Sociologists did a lot of talking to each other about how to meet the challenges of the war as scientists. Most stopped doing ‘business as usual’, and many turned to professional war work. Their elected representatives talked about what they should do in new terms. Their professional associations, committees, and meetings were reorganized around the war effort. What they were saying in that moment comprises an essential narrative context for understanding what happened to sociology during the war, and how qualitative sociologists trying to defend a more eclectic and balanced sociology could have been cast as traitors – a label that stuck. In Alexander’s (2012) terms, the narrative formulated the war as a traumatic event and scientific sociology as the victim of qualitative ‘charlatans and soothsayers’ (Lundberg, 1944: 5).
Shared narrative is a powerful framing device for sense-making. Experience interviewing French villagers in 1944 about the Nazi Occupation convinced Jerome Bruner that in times of extreme stress, like war, shared narrative can support alternate ‘realities’ (Bruner, 1990). For the villagers he interviewed, it had enabled a normalization of their ‘collaboration’ with the Nazis (inspiring Bruner’s narrative psychology). In the context of immigration in modern societies, narratives can quickly recode identity in religious and racial terms (Somers, 1994; Eder and Spohn, 2005). In the context of gender and transgender identity, narrative recoding can shift category boundaries (Garfinkel, 1967; Schilt and Joynt, 2018). While narrative can be all-consuming in the moment, however, awareness can fade quickly; leaving intact the oppositional moral values it imparts to categories of people, things, or activities, and thus perpetuating conflict.
Sociology had never been unified. Qualitative sociology had for decades resisted the arguments of quantitative methodologists that statistics was valid science without either theory, or qualitative research. But, good science was generated by that debate. Robert Park (1925: 1), for instance, the preeminent Chicago School sociologist, argued that ‘position’ was a social phenomenon that could be counted, but only after its social characteristics were established. Also at Chicago, Ogburn countered that statistics was valid science on its own, while Stouffer and Blumer, two more Chicago colleagues, debated the relative scientific merits of ethnographic documents and attitude surveys.
Authoritative treatments of the Chicago School say it declined before the war (Bulmer, 1984: 205; Bannister, 1987), but that seems to mean the department was no longer exclusively focused on qualitative methods. Given that Park had used the occasion of his own presidential address to the ASA in 1925 to argue for a blend of qualitative and quantitative approaches; that the department was at the center of debate on these issues; and, that under Park’s direction the department had hired and trained quantitative sociologists (beginning with Ogburn in 1929), it is hard to see how their presence could signal decline. The founding of the American Sociological Review (ASR) in 1935 is also cited (Matthews, 1977: 182) as evidence of decline, as Chicago had previously controlled the primary sociology journal, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS). But founding the ASR could equally signify an increased importance of sociology as a discipline.
In 1940, the department at Chicago could boast some of the most influential qualitative sociologists in the country (including Everett Hughes, Edwin Sutherland, Herbert Blumer and William L. Warner). They could also boast two of the most influential quantitative sociologists, Ogburn and Stouffer. In 1942, eleven current and former members of the department (including Blumer, Burgess, Ogburn, Park, Stouffer, Sutherland, and Wirth) collaborated on a book about WWII, edited by Ogburn (1943). Before and during the war, Chicago was maintaining a balance between warring methods camps, albeit an uneasy one in which qualitative sociology would do the exploratory research that determined what could be counted.
The biggest challenge to the Chicago School was likely theoretical, not methodological. 3 Before the war, Talcott Parsons (1938) had intervened in the debate over methods, arguing that even the balance of methods achieved by Chicago was fundamentally misconstrued. According to Parsons, the division into qualitative and quantitative methods was itself a false distinction: the artifact of an inherent individualism in US social theory. Overcoming the artificial division between methods, he argued, required modernizing theory. By contrast with Park, Parsons urged the adoption of a ‘younger’ European theoretical tradition that would combine Durkheim’s (1984 [1893]) social fact approach and Weber’s (1905) verstehen method with the best of American social thought. Qualitative and quantitative approaches would be integrated.
Parsons agreed with Ogburn that social theory had become irrelevant to research (Parsons, 1938). But he attributed this to shortcomings in theory, not method. Statistics cannot do without theory, he pointed out, because counting requires sorting by category. Without theory, categories are based on unexamined assumptions, thereby embedding ethnocentricism and subjectivity. Park’s proposal was for a marriage between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Parsons proposed a modernized social theory that resolved the methods dichotomy. Statisticians objected to both. The discussion of these issues changed during the war.
Luckily, evidence of the wartime narrative as it developed among sociologists year-by-year was recorded for posterity in the annual addresses of the eight presidents of the American Sociological Association (ASA) 4 from 1940–47. These talks both reflect a broader discussion and formulate its shifting moral categories in authoritative terms. They refer to what ‘people’ are saying, to what ‘committees’ are focusing on, to letters that ‘flow freely’ from the membership; and describe how the ASA was reorganizing to meet the challenges of war.
The wartime narrative, as it emerged over the course of the eight wartime addresses, embroidered on a more general narrative framing of ‘sociology in a time of war’ that was animating discussion among their peers; transforming it into an agenda actively pursued by the ASA that shifted the terms in which sociology was discussed as a science. Each ASA president would have been at the center of these reorganization efforts for several years. The talks as a set constitute one of the few public records of the development of this wartime narrative.
The first two talks set the agenda; MacIver in 1940 insisting that sociologists narrow their focus to topics that make a difference in a time of war; and Queen, in 1941, urging a focus only on the best, most sophisticated scientific methods. Overall, the wartime narrative declared an urgent need to emphasize quantitative methods; set aside all but ‘serious’ and ‘big’ topics; and, immediately secure scientific ‘unity’. Dissenters were, in the terms of the narrative, ‘traitors’. During the war, lack of agreement – which had always characterized sociology – was suddenly formulated as a big problem. Given that there were still serious disagreements about the proposed changes, however, the insistence on immediate unity led to even more disagreement.
If things had worked out differently, the diversity of pre-war sociology could have become a strength in a well-integrated modernized sociology. The Chicago School, Pragmatism, and Durkheim’s social fact lineage, could be making essential contributions to sociological theory and research. Instead, during the war, sociologists turned with active hostility against their own cultural, social interactionist and social fact foundations. Parsons’ attempt was overwhelmed and qualitative sociologists found themselves stigmatized. While Parsons didn’t get it entirely right, his move to reintroduce Durkheim and Weber in the 1930s, and his 1949 proposal to treat culture as an independent level of social action, evident in patterns of action, were pivotal moves at a pivotal time. The legacy of the failure to integrate methods and modernize sociology is a fragmented discipline that is heavily quantitative, in which theory has become largely irrelevant, qualitative issues trivialized, and qualitative sociologists are treated as outcasts, rebels and traitors.
The narrative reframing of sociology during WWII distinguishes the period from anything before or since. The turn away from qualitative studies of interaction, culture and social facts took place quickly and was emotional rather than scientific, driven by what Howard Odum (1943) described as ‘wartime frenzy’. The damaged scientific potential of the discipline was cast as the ‘victim’ of qualitative and values approaches. The much-heralded sociological ‘crisis’ of the late 1960s, when Gouldner (1970) and others challenged the state of the discipline, was set in motion by the narrative that overtook sociology during the war; its demands for unity and standardized methods, and the narrative ‘code’ trivializing qualitative methods that it embedded.
It is also important to note that, while this is, on the surface, a North American narrative, it had worldwide implications, because WWII put an end to most academic sociology outside the US. Many of the scholars from other countries who did continue doing academic work during the war did that work in the US. These scholars experienced the wartime narrative and took it back home with them after the war, spreading the problems it generated. 5
The wartime narrative
The kinds of data researchers have typically relied on to assess the effects of WWII (e.g. research projects and reports, department composition, professional positions, publications, dissertation topics, course offerings, etc.), take time to come into being and change slowly. As such, they do not bear witness to how everyone is immediately caught up in the war effort and talking about how best to meet its challenges. Those who have considered narrative data with regard to WWII, like Ryan (2013), in his monumental study of Stouffer’s war research, and Platt (1996) in her history of research methods, have used those materials to shed light on which research was done and how research practices and groups developed. They have not taken a narrative approach, or addressed the general narrative about sociology as a science that developed during the war. The relationship between narrative and social action has been overlooked in this regard.
In announcing ‘Narrative’s Moment’ in 1993, David Maines pointed out that three recent addresses by presidents of the largest US regional sociology associations (in 1988, 1989 and 1990) had emphasized the importance of narrative. Maines (1993: 17) took this as an indication that it might finally be possible for sociology to correct an old mistake wherein, he said: ‘In its urgency to establish itself as a science, sociology missed the opportunity to nurture its narrative character.’ On this view, narrative is a resource for constructing social relations that, at the same time, reveals the categories and essential details of that construction.
Many different narrative approaches have developed (e.g., Somers, 1994, and Eder and Spohn, 2005, on identity as narrative construction, and Alexander’s cultural sociology). According to Somers (1994: 606): It is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities…it matters not whether we are social scientists or subjects of historical research, but that all of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making.
WWII led to immediate changes in the American workforce and family, and to corresponding changes in the symbolic and moral categories of social life: The moral valuations of gender and race identities shifted and that shift was recorded in narrative. The war also led to improvements in industrial production (Steinmetz, 2005) that changed the quality of both daily life and science. These changes generated well-known narrative and media treatments.
Sweeping changes confronted sociologists as well. Much of the research across disciplines was war-related (Fisher, 1993: 187–96). Sociologists participated in discussion groups on technology and society (e.g. the famous Macy group), and many received war-related funding. We should expect that the sociological narrative also changed and the science with it.
Each year, since 1906, the president of ASA has given an address to the membership at the annual meeting. 7 As these talks were intended to be given before an audience of peers, the wartime addresses record how the eight wartime presidents talked about the war and elaborated and reflected a narrative about how and why their science needed to change. Their words reference discussions sociologists were having among themselves. They refer to competing views of how sociology as a science should meet the challenges of war. They refer to changes made in the ASA, and other organizations, in response. They reference a general concern that the scientific status of sociology had been damaged, and a fear that when funds were handed round, sociology would lose out, because it lacked respect as a science. They blame qualitative and values research for this lack of respect, and assert that the standardization of theory and method to support generalization and prediction is a necessary remedy. Questions were raised about the patriotism and scientific legitimacy of any who did not support this narrowing agenda.
During the war the longstanding tolerance for scientific debate came to an abrupt end. Abandoning pre-war efforts to coordinate a division of labor between qualitative and quantitative researchers, as statistics became more sophisticated and important, the wartime narrative sought to eliminate conflict by insisting on scientific unity. The narrative broke with the past in emphasizing the scientific superiority of quantitative methods, calling social facts metaphysical nonsense, and casting qualitative sociologists as traitors. The narrative changed the terms of the longstanding debate over theory and method, diminishing the scientific worth accorded to social facts, symbols, social interaction, narrative and qualitative methods generally.
The eight addresses exhibit and formalize these changes in the way sociology was talked about during the war. Trying urgently to repair the damage they said had been done to sociology, and make it relevant to the war effort, they announced that only some types of sociology would count as science, pronouncing quantitative and standardized methods as superior, and reorganizing the ASA among the new priorities. Because their demands were made in public talks, 8 and published in the ASR, 9 they were widely available. 10
What sets the approach to science in these talks apart from anything before or since is that some ways of doing science were forbidden. The narrative favored forcing a resolution of scientific differences by insisting on a single unified way of doing sociology. The emotional tone accords with other ‘trauma’ narratives (Alexander, 2012). Some said the fate of the world hung in the balance, depending on whether sociologists heeded their pleas for immediate change. Others insisted science should come before action, while still calling for immediate change. Still others alluded to defectors (like rural sociologists) as traitors and proclaimed that threats to the unity of the main group (e.g., from symbolic interaction and social problems) would not be tolerated. 11 They were not arguing a case, but rather, using the voice of authority to insist on compliance, altering the moral balance between methods at a critical point, and, by insisting on the superiority of statistical and positivist approaches, diminishing the science.
In their determination to achieve immediate scientific unity and deliver answers only to ‘big’ questions of war and peace, wartime sociologists also assumed there was agreement on core concepts such as individual and group characteristics, and processes of social interaction, which still remain much debated. They treated essential questions as ‘minutiae’: too small to waste time on. In defiance of the narrative, many qualitative sociologists would focus on those forbidden cooperative building blocks – the DNA of social life – throughout their careers.
While the narrative itself has become so taken-for-granted, it is overlooked, the language it used to stigmatize the methods and theories it judged inferior and the topics it forbade live on in the sociological lexicon as a kind of ‘code’ used to exclude and diminish qualitative sociology. The wartime narrative fostered a rhetoric of unity and dissent – of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ sociology – that diminished the science and that still haunts sociology to this day. This unexamined narrative explains why contemporary sociology, and the quantitative methods that dominate it, so often look more like economics, or psychology; It explains why social theory is neglected and misrepresented in individualistic and naturalistic terms; Finally, it explains how prominent social interactionists like Garfinkel and Goffman, who worked alongside disciplinary leaders like Parsons, Hughes, and Odum during the war, to create an adequate basis for studying social interaction, and to preserve sociology from the regressive changes proposed by the wartime narrative, could later be treated as outsiders, even traitors. It’s all about the war.
‘Skies filled with death’
MacIver and Queen between them threw down the gauntlet: what they called the ‘present crisis’ required immediate changes; primary among them standardization of methods and topics and securing disciplinary unity. Their challenge was taken up in the addresses that followed, framing the conversation about sociology as science for eight years. Although the first three addresses (1940–1942) focused on the war itself, while the next four (1943–1946), took up the challenge of planning for peace, the narrative of trauma and scientific change was consistent. Wirth occupied a pivotal position in 1947: he was the last to focus on the ‘present crisis’, in his case, the ‘bomb’.
Even Taylor (1946), also Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, in his presidential talk in 1946, who challenged the narrative saying his government department needed qualitative fieldworkers with a ‘commonsense’ knowledge of social practices, nevertheless focused on the present crisis and argued that sociology had been damaged (Taylor, 1947). But, in Taylor’s version, it was the focus on statistics that had damaged sociology. 12 By the time Franklin Frazier spoke in 1948, the war had ceased to animate discussion. As Parsons noted in his own presidential talk in 1949, the only time the addresses had focused on the present, or insisted on immediate scientific changes, was 1940–1947.
Speaking on December 27, 1940, as bombs dropped on Europe, Robert MacIver opened his presidential talk with an emotional plea to sociologists to reconsider their scientific commitments, give up insignificant research and petty disputes, and rise to new heights to meet the challenges of war. ‘When a storm shakes the house,’ MacIver said: [W]e grow concerned for the foundations. When a crisis challenges our routines, we are forced to think back to the values on which they rest…Our scholarship, our learning, our research, how do they look against the background of a time when small and great states crumble, when across the seas the skies are filled with death…? (1941: 1)
The narrative that developed over the next eight years specified not only topics worthy of study, but methods that should be standardized. MacIver (1941: 4) had warned that the social ‘images’ that motivate social action, were being used against America by the enemy. He asked how sociologists could be satisfied with business as usual at such a time, and urged an immediate focus on social images. Six of the next seven presidents followed MacIver in urging their fellow sociologists to narrow their topical focus to issues relevant to the war. But, starting with Queen in 1941, they also began insisting on the need to standardize methods based on demographics, attitude studies, and polls: statistical methods which they said were best suited to deliver the scientific facts needed to improve the reputation of sociology. They emphasized the need to standardize core findings, to trade-mark a sociologist, and render values scientifically. In all, seven of the eight presidents would insist on quantitative, generalizable and what they called ‘verifiable’ methods, dismissing qualitative, exploratory and interactional approaches.
The changes that the narrative insisted were necessary to improve the science, restore its reputation, and make it relevant to the war effort, moved in the opposite direction from the rapprochement attempted before the war, narrowing the focus of the discipline, re-consecrating its grounding in naturalist individualism, and, in the process, reifying methodological differences.
‘Jews, charlatans, and soothsayers’
Whereas MacIver had insisted on narrowing topical focus, it was Queen who initiated the focus on standardizing methods in a quantitative direction. Speaking on December 28, 1941, three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Queen opened his presidential address, ‘Can Sociologists Face Reality?’ by reminding the membership that sociology had failed to deal effectively with World War I. Like many, he blamed World War II on this failure and expressed concern that sociology had been so badly damaged by trivial, qualitative and unstandardized research in the interim that the mistake would be repeated. Whereas MacIver (1941: 8) asserted that sociologists were ready for the challenges of wartime research, having at their ‘disposal the whole kit-bag of science’, only needing to narrow their focus, Queen insisted the science needed to be improved before it could produce results that would be taken seriously in the ‘real’ world: It had certainly not yet earned the respect needed to make an impact on government decisions.
Queen’s insistence on standardizing methods in a quantitative direction was taken up by those who followed (except Taylor). ‘The continued growth of our science,’ he said, ‘demands the development and standardization of new tools of research’ (Queen, 1942: 7). This idea that standardization and quantification would improve the scientific status and reputation of sociology, and thus its ability to influence government, became a central theme of the narrative. But the question remained, what exactly did it mean? Queen (1942: 7) specifically singled out the ‘three-fold testing methods used by Angell’, the ‘sociometric scales developed by Chapin’, and ‘reliable methods of prediction’ as methods that would make sociology more scientific.
As for theory, Queen (1942) laid out a vision of a science that works ‘inductively toward generalizations about the processes of interaction’ (related to civil liberties) with the idea that these would provide a reliable basis for prediction. However, the prominent position that Queen gave to ‘induction’, ‘generalization’ and ‘prediction’ effectively excluded studies of actual social interaction, while fostering the claim that interaction was being explained. Many disagreed.
Dwight Sanderson, who was scheduled to give his presidential address ‘Sociology, a Means to Democracy’ at the cancelled December 1942 meeting (his talk was published in February 1943), continued the trend, insisting that standardization of core concepts was necessary (1943: 7). Like Queen and MacIver, his presidential address was emotional, formulating both the importance of sociology in a time of war and its shortcomings: ‘[T]hese days of world tragedy,’ he said, are ‘no time for sociologists to sit in their ivory towers’ (1943: 8). Following Comte, he proposed that: ‘As in any other science there must first be a workable agreement as to the elements involved in the phenomena with which we deal…’ (1943: 7). To establish such an agreement, he summarized what he considered to be the core sociological findings on the social self, status, social heritage, cultural lag, and social order (1943: 2). Like other wartime presidents who believed that science requires the ‘definition of concepts’, he hoped that defining core concepts would establish consensus and promote scientific rigor. But his definitions excluded much that others considered important. It is illustrative of the overall problem with these attempts at imposing standards, that the various definitions of the ‘same’ social phenomenon in these addresses were not the same.
In expressing hope the next year that an intelligent approach to peacemaking might prevent a third world war, Lundberg (1944: 1) was still formulating the trauma: ‘We may now soon return to where we left off twenty-five years ago,’ he said, ‘except that the problems then facing us have been immensely aggravated.’ In common with many, Lundberg blamed the failure of peace after World War I on bad sociology. The success of the next peace effort, he declared, would depend on what sociologists did next (1944: 1). The job facing sociology, as he saw it, was nothing less than starting from scratch to build a new discipline on the model of demography (1944: 10). Only this, he argued, would earn them the respect needed to make a difference.
While Lundberg insisted that conditions for peace required that sociologists be heard, he also insisted that before they could contribute effectively: ‘the social sciences must have advanced to a point where they could reliably specify the requirements of an enduring peace’ (1944: 1). Taking the position that George Homans would later popularize, Lundberg argued that by modern scientific criteria, no classical sociological theories even counted as theories because they did not consist of deductive propositions. Thus, while ‘sociological subject matter’ was the only possible salvation of humanity, in his view, the discipline that could deal scientifically with this subject matter did not yet exist. In its place were, he said, a collection of ‘Jews’, ‘charlatans’ and ‘soothsayers’ chasing a metaphysical conception of science focused on values, ‘divided by God into two categories’, that he several times called ‘magic’ (Lundberg, 1944).
Lundberg insisted that in addition to rejecting social facts and values-oriented research, ‘upgrading’ the science required standardizing methods and government certification of who is a sociologist. The task he put first was: ‘how to trade-mark a true social scientist so a public official can identify him…’ (1944: 2). Lundberg would draw new boundaries around who was in and who was out and give the authority to ‘certify’ in group status to the state (1944: 5–6).
‘Values are natural phenomena…and should be measured by Polling'
With the 1944 meetings cancelled, Rupert Vance’s presidential address, ‘Toward Social Dynamics’, was published in April 1945. Vance disagreed with Lundberg on the relevance of values. But rather than defending qualitative and theoretical approaches to values, Vance proposed standardizing scientific/mathematical measures for values. Even in economics, he argued, which is based on statistical and completely ‘secular’ analysis, the need to accommodate dynamics (‘economic cycles’) requires values to be considered. Building on a naturalistic tradition in economics, he laid out a relationship between ‘statics’ (equilibrium states) and ‘dynamics’ (change). Both, he argued, are value-oriented processes, and ‘values’ and ideas like ‘justice’ are integral to them. Furthermore, Vance (1945) maintained, agitation for rights and improved conditions by minorities (criticized by Lundberg) is an important source of the new values that produce dynamic change. Read in sequence as a response to Lundberg, Vance can be seen defending minorities and values research to some extent. However, Vance would standardize and mathematize values.
The 1945 meetings were postponed and when Kimball Young gave his address, ‘Society and the State: Some Neglected Areas of Research and Theory’, on March 1, 1946, he referred to a veritable ‘cult’ of ‘planning’ emerging as a topic of discussion at the end of the war. Young asked what the relationship between state and society should be when the government let go the reins of power and economic control acquired during the war. The fear of total government control echoed in his talk faded with time. But, at that moment, Young, who had completed two tours of duty with what he called ‘that great example of state socialism – the Army’, returned to sociology, like many others, ‘more convinced than ever’ that the relationship between society and the state should be the focus of research (1946: 137).
Young described a clash of opinions among sociologists over the role of the state. Some, he said, argued that the state should make the important decisions. But Lundberg’s proposal to invest scientific authority in the state was contentious: The insistence by scientists from every discipline that they remain in charge of decisions about their sciences had been an obstacle to setting up the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the same period. Many worried that state control would erode scientific freedom. For Young, who took a consensus position, ‘mass society’ (the new location of consensus) made society vulnerable to state manipulation.
As the preferred method of research, Young singled out polling and methods of sampling; tying polling as a method to democracy as a form of government (1946: 144). In his view, ‘the spread of such a method [polling] of tapping public sentiment and opinion over the world is itself a measure of the presence or absence of representative democracy’ (1946: 144). While admitting that totalitarian governments and the Army had used polls for planning purposes during the war, he nevertheless maintained that it is characteristic of democracy that these ‘are published without let or hindrance’ and consequently ‘there is little danger of abuse from the use of such devices’.
Like the other wartime presidents, Young advocated a narrow focus: on planning and state/society conflict, insisting that ‘polling’ and ‘sampling’ were the scientific methods most consistent with democracy. Also like the others, he did not report on research about planning or even how to do better polling or sampling. Rather he named topics that he insisted sociologists should study at a time when talk of ‘planning’ was in the air and state/society relations were a pressing concern. He articulated a shift in scientific categories: They should collect data through polls. It was another blueprint for immediate scientific change in a narrow quantitative direction.
‘How to trade-mark a true social scientist’
Before the war, Parsons had blamed the division into qualitative and quantitative methods on an inherent individualism and naturalism in American social theory. The influence of Comte and the emphasis on consensus in early American sociology were particularly problematic in this regard. Parsons wanted to solve the problem by introducing Durkheim and Weber and focusing more on the collective character of social meaning and social things. The emphasis on unity/consensus in science had been a particular point of difference between Durkheim (1984 [1893]: 294–8) and Comte. Science, Durkheim argued, is based on constitutive practices that must be free to ‘run ahead of’ belief. Pragmatism made a similar point. But the wartime narrative followed Comte in treating science as a kind of religion requiring consensus, and dissent as a threat to the war effort, a kind of heresy. Sanderson even called sociology the religion of democracy.
Furthermore, while MacIver took a qualitative perspective toward social ‘images’, even as he tried to constrain the topics sociologists would work on, he was alone in this. Lundberg (1944: 8) would ridicule social facts and symbols as the result of mystical thinking involving ‘the notion that social phenomena were divided by God into two categories, those that can be quantified and those that cannot’. Only with the disappearance of such ideas, he said, had ‘a vigorous experimental movement’ involving statistics and generalization begun to develop (1944: 8). While his rhetoric was offensive, and Vance would insist values could be rendered scientifically/mathematically, the stripped-down sociological narrative that came to dominate, which referred to modern society as a ‘mass’, and focused on relations between the individual and the ‘mass’ (or ‘state’) through statistical measures of individual indicators, is consistent with Lundberg.
The language of unity running through the addresses is abstract, more suited to drawing ideological boundaries than promoting science. The problem for the developing wartime narrative became territorial: in the manner of a classic Durkheimian sacred/profane distinction, determining who is in and who is out, or as Lundberg put it in his talk in 1943: ‘how to trade-mark a true social scientist’ in an attempt to secure government recognition of the legitimacy of a single standardized version of sociology (1944: 2). Hope was expressed that a more scientific sociology could control its boundaries and ‘certify’ its members: a move aimed at restoring the damage to, and the reputation of sociology, in a bid to secure more influence and government funding.
‘When the world is on fire’
There was a lot of talk among sociologists in general about sociology during the war: about what they should do and how their science should address the war effort. The wartime addresses document this general discussion in a number of ways. They refer to what people in society are saying, to what their fellow sociologists are talking about, to what the government and other sciences are doing, and to prior addresses. They document changes made by sociologists in their formal organizations and standards as a science: In addition to citing meetings, committees, and sessions of the ASA, they reference the efforts of the Social Science Research Council. 13
MacIver painted a picture of what was going on both in society and among sociologists: Of the urgency people felt when their ‘routines’ were disrupted. Queen compared the crisis to what happened during World War I, reporting that little had been done in 1915, and urging his fellow sociologists to ‘face reality’ and do better this time. He described debate over needed changes, and the many committees, discussions, and letters, taking place already in the first year.
MacIver had moved quickly to organize committees of the ASA in December 1940, so that during that year, and at the subsequent 1941 meetings, all sociologists involved in presenting and organizing were focused on the war. As Queen described, the reorganization: ‘for 1941, the general sessions have obviously been planned with the international emergency in mind’ (1942: 3). Subsequent presidents followed his lead such that the organizational structure of the ASA was reorganized to focus on the war for the duration. Lundberg, Young, and Wirth would reference similar discussions and organizational changes. The US government also reorganized its funding mechanisms during the war, proposing the new NSF, which would involve the ASA, and Parsons as its representative, in lengthy discussions of sociology as a science.
Queen (1942: 5) referred to ‘Discussions at Chicago [during the 1940 meeting] last winter and in the correspondence that has flowed freely ever since’, and to the many sessions, groups, and committees focused on the war. For Queen, talking and being emotional about the war were not enough. He reported that at the 1915 meetings there had been almost a ‘religious fervor’ to discussions of the war. But, he said, in spite of all the talk, there is ‘little evidence that thought was given to what sociologists themselves might do’ (1942: 3). The problem, as Queen tells it, was that, while feelings ran high, attention was only momentary, and nothing was done to change what sociologists did. This time the ASA and its committees were organizing to ensure that the general discussion was translated into real changes in sociology as a science.
There were many opinions about what to do. Queen described opposing viewpoints being widely discussed. Subsequent addresses also reference this general debate, reiterating similar opposing viewpoints, as well as referencing a more general public discussion. Queen notes that: A great diversity of attitudes and opinions has emerged. Some members of our group apparently fear the decline of sociology from the lofty heights of pure science down the slopes of applied science, into the valley of administrative drudgery. Others with fewer illusions about sociology’s present attitude and purity, are fearful lest participation in the controversial issues of the day injure both our capacity and our reputation for important analysis and reporting…(1942: 5)
Two years later, Lundberg complained that because sociology was not recognized as a science, there was a tendency during the war for every lay person to consider themselves a competent sociologist. Consequently, there were many discussions of sociological issues during the war that were dangerously naïve, while sociology itself was ignored. The problem, as many saw it, was that sociology had not drawn its boundaries clearly enough, allowing subjective values research to damage its reputation, preventing sociological findings from being recognized as scientific knowledge. Lundberg (1944: 5) said that ‘If scientists do not take over, charlatans will’, and he insisted steps be taken immediately to establish the scientific status of sociology.
MacIver and Queen both referenced a broader wartime ‘reality’, urging sociologists not to miss the opportunity to do something important during this war. Queen asked: (1942: 2) ‘What kinds of reality do sociologists face especially in times of crisis?’ While MacIver (1941: 1) referred to a general discussion of that ‘reality’ saying, ‘I have heard some scholars say that in these days their work seems insignificant and futile.’ In MacIver’s view (1941: 2) ‘The crisis convicts us of neglected opportunities.’
The narrative they initiated and the collective discussion it referenced continued through 1947. In 1944, Vance was still referring to ‘[a] mass fear of unemployment and mass fear of future wars…’ (1945: 131). The next year, Young talked of a general discussion of public planning: ‘The air is full of many voices today saying “Lo, here,” and “Lo, there” warning the public about contemporary trends in our public life’ (1946: 137). In 1947, Wirth was still talking about wartime conditions and the desire to: ‘Withdraw into…the laboratory when the world is on fire’ (1947: 1). Wirth (1947:11) focused on the bomb, referring to discussions of the influence of mass media on consensus. Unless sociologists solve the problem of securing ‘world consensus’ on the ‘bomb’, Wirth warned (1947:15), there would be no opportunity to work on other questions.
Addressed directly to their peers and reflecting the concerns of the day, as they were being discussed, these talks represent the defining narrative context of the discipline during the war. Narratives frame experience. In the context of World War II, US sociologists formulated a narrative about how their science had been damaged by bad science and lacked scientific respect as a consequence. It is a ‘trauma’ narrative that references broad social trends and discussions, blaming qualitative and ‘values’ research, combined with the failure to clearly define scientific boundaries, for their lack of influence over issues, they argue, that only sociology could deliver answers to. The proposed solution was to immediately eliminate ‘bad’ sociology and redraw scientific boundaries. Like the French villagers Bruner (1990) interviewed in 1944, their world would have been seen through this narrative lens, but only for the duration. After the war, narrative reality would quickly have been reframed, and the wartime narrative receded from view, leaving only the addresses (and their embedded code) as evidence of its fleeting existence.
A ‘dead record’
The narrative that legitimized the coded language that still marginalizes qualitative sociology, interactionism, Pragmatism, cultural studies, and Durkheim’s social fact lineage, has itself faded from view. It is interesting to consider this in the context of the narrative itself. The first wartime president, MacIver (1941: 8), ended his address with the prediction that if sociologists would only put aside their differences and work together on the ‘noble’ projects he outlined, the disputes that plagued the discipline would become ‘the dead records’ of the past, while the noble goals he outlined would be achieved. After eight years of extensive discussion and reorganization, it turned out that MacIver was wrong. The attempt to force unity deepened disputes, and the noble goals he hoped for were not achieved. Instead the wartime narrative itself became a ‘dead record’: forgotten, but living on invisibly in the taken-for-granted conviction that quantitative methods are better science, and in the deep-seated prejudice that qualitative and interactional questions are not ‘big’, ‘noble’, ‘valid’ or ‘scientific’ enough to merit attention.
The wartime presidential addresses allude to bitter conflicts over conceptions of democracy, the state, and civil liberties that sociologists expected after the war. What they seem not to have anticipated is that their own efforts to standardize theory and method in a quantitative direction, and ‘trade-mark’ a scientist, would be contentious – creating new divisions – and leading finally to the sociological crisis that Gouldner would immortalize in 1970. The attempt to force a scientific hegemony worked against both scientific progress and disciplinary unity. The words: ‘I assume we agree’ were often said. But they did not agree. What is most surprising is that not one address even hinted that a forced unity might be unscientific; or that in their attempt to certify ‘a true social scientist’, they could be excluding important scientific approaches.
Essentially, sociologists abandoned their reason for existing during the war. As Homans (1964) would later argue, without some conception of social facts, culture, or symbolic meaning, there is no distinct sociological object: no distinct discipline of sociology; only natural facts and psychological individuals. Following the revelations of Whitehead (1929), Wittgenstein (1953) and mid-century philosophy (Winch, 1958), it is even doubtful if any of those exist, or more accurately, if it is possible to know anything ‘objective’ about them: The very process of communicating about and ‘knowing’ a so-called ‘natural fact’ is to transform it into something social. This epistemological crisis transformed philosophy in the later twentieth century, bringing Pragmatism to the forefront and giving social interaction new life in other disciplines. In this regard, the continued influence of the wartime narrative on sociology is particularly problematic. While other disciplines have been discovering the importance of social facts, social interaction and culture, sociology is still marginalizing its own best innovations.
Reconsidering disciplinary history
Disciplinary history has largely ignored the years from 1940 to 1947, treating differences between pre- and post-war sociology either as the outcome of changes, like the increasing demand for statistics, which began well before the war, or the result of political changes in the post-war period. Treatments of the Chicago School, and the development of scientism tend to end at 1940 (Bulmer, 1984; Bannister, 1987), or begin at 1950. The war is rarely mentioned in terms of its impact on scientific development. There is one little gem of a book written by Chicago School sociologists about World War II (Ogburn, 1943). But, with the exception of remarks by Park on the new importance of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, the book focuses on the impact of the war on society, and not on sociology as a science. Platt (1996) notes that ‘Surprisingly little attention has been given to the detail of what happened – and, until the recent work of Bannister (1987), Hinkle (1994) and S. P. Turner and J. H. Turner (1990), the interwar period has been largely neglected.’ But even these authors focus on the interwar, not the war years, 1940–1947.
The book commissioned by the ASA to commemorate the centennial, Sociology in America: A History (Calhoun, 2005), does devote parts of two chapters to intellectual and social upheaval during World War II itself, and its possible effects on sociology. Abbott and Sparrow undertake the difficult task of documenting broad demographic and intellectual changes during the war, while Steinmetz focuses on the effects of new funding sources and the advances in manufacturing of ‘Fordism’, on changes in the post-war period. Abbott and Sparrow assess war work by sociologists, attempting to gauge the effects the war might have had on the type of work done (i.e., the Army would not be pleased with work that was critical of the Army), and assess changes in the discipline after the war. Both chapters struggle, however, with the difficulty of documenting intellectual changes during the short turbulent wartime period: Abbott and Sparrow (2005: 297) conclude that, while the period is in serious need of more attention, the war seems mainly to have had the effect of ‘hastening developments already underway’.
One barrier to appreciating the dramatic narrative shift that occurred during the war is that the question has been framed in terms of ‘circumstances in which sociologists found themselves’ – a naturalistic approach – rather than beginning with the understanding that those circumstances were shaped by the evolving social narratives and positions of the groups of actors concerned. As a consequence, researchers have not looked for the narrative created by sociologists about their science during the war. This is a huge oversight. Sociologists expended a great deal of effort formulating the urgency of the war; conceptualizing themselves as victims of those who ignored scientific standards; and placing the blame for their perceived lack of respect as a science on qualitative methods and values research. This narrative reframing matters.
Sociology did change during the war. It was not only the narrative that shifted. However, these other changes are also reflected by the narrative. Many sociologists engaged in war research. Others offered their professional skills to the war effort as enlisted soldiers. European scholars who came to the USA during the war energized sociology with new ideas, as Park’s (1943) remarks on Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge attest. The American Jewish Committee funded Horkheimer and Adorno to work on ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ at the Institute for Social Research (Madge, 1962: 377). Dramatic developments in computers and information theory involved sociologists alongside other scientists, engineers, philosophers and economists. Government and private sector funding increased, enabling large (often interdisciplinary) research projects, and rapidly swelling the ranks of sociologists. Without considering the narrative reframing of sociology as science, however, the impact has remained obscure.
Far from continuing to develop along a pre-war path, the wartime narrative reframing of sociology created new conditions for theory and method that were regressive; making sociology less scientific and less creative. To improve their reputation they talked about changing the science. Rather than advocating research that met sociological criteria, six of the eight presidents talked about tailoring research to meet the criteria of other sciences that were more respected and better funded. Their efforts derailed the Chicago School, along with the promising attempt by Parsons (1938) to reframe the pre-war methodological debate theoretically by introducing the social fact and verstehen approaches of Durkheim and Weber: They also negatively impacted the reception of social interaction and social problems research more generally. The war had prompted sociologists to reconceptualize their science. Why had they been unable to stop the war? Why had no one heeded their warnings? The wartime narrative they formulated to explain how their discipline had been damaged, and the social/moral categories created by that narrative, continues to shape sociological debate today in ways that remain tacit and unexamined.
Other disciplines, like economics and cybernetics, have acknowledged that their sciences changed because of the war. Sociology has not yet done so. The omission obscures one of the most important transition points in sociology as a science, creating the false impression that the transition to a more quantitative and standardized sociology was the result of a scientific contest in which qualitative approaches lost out for scientific reasons. This false impression is the theme of much disciplinary history. Textbooks and graduate examinations reproduce it. The contest was not scientific. It was a bid for moral authority.
Although the war is long over, the substance of the wartime narrative, its conception of disciplinary traitors, and the moral authority of statistics, still haunt sociology, perpetuating a lack of respect and open hostility toward social interaction and social theory more broadly, combined with a reverence for naïve forms of positivism, which is incompatible with science. Important innovations by social interactionists are dismissed so summarily that Louis Coser in his 1974 presidential address, could openly refer to ‘sects’ of ‘true believers’ who engage in ‘magic’ (1975: 696–7). The language used by the narrative to dismiss Durkheim’s social fact lineage and qualitative research more generally has become taken-for-granted sociological code.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The research on which this article rests took place over many years, in a number of different places, and while not sponsored by any institution or grant, benefited from conversations and feedback from many scholars and friends. Harold Garfinkel first alerted me to the importance of WWII and how it changed sociology, and it was writing about his early work of the 1940’s that brought me to these Presidential Addresses. A view of the Eiffel Tower from my apartment in Paris in 2010 inspired the first draft. For an appreciation of a narrative approach I am indebted again to Harold, along with Jerome Bruner, Jeffrey Alexander, and David Maines (who was at Wayne State University with me in the 1990’s). Bruner, 95 when we met, was especially generous with his time. Conversations over many years with Albert Ogien, Francesco Callegaro and Bruno Karsenti, in Paris, about the history of social theory, have been invaluable, as have conversations with Giolo Fele in Trento, Martin Zillinger in Cologne, and with Tristan Thielmann and Erhard Schüttpelz in Siegen. I found Gerard Delanty to be an exceptionally reasonable and enlightened editor. Frederic Vandenberghe deserves special thanks for much encouragement in the beautiful city of Rio, and many helpful comments that resulted in a broader vision of the issues. Jason Turowetz has become a trusted reader of this and other papers, and finally Peter Manning, whose shared time in the trenches has become a trusted touchstone.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.