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The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago

The Intellectual Trajectory of W. I. Thomas

The American Sociologist Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper examines the historical sources for W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s celebrated monograph on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. It first characterizes the work itself, a monumental interpretive casebook of largely biographical material about individuals and groups. It then seeks the origins of these qualities, looking first at Thomas’s prior work, then at the personal influence of Florian Znaniecki and Robert Park. Since these sources do not sufficiently account for the unique qualities of the work, we then turn to three other important sources: 1) the casebook tradition in the social reform literature and beyond, 2) the psychiatric concept of the life history, and 3) the literary sources that Thomas had taught in his prior career as an English professor. We close by identifying the autobiographical roots of the work in Thomas’s own life history.

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Notes

  1. For the SSRC reference, see the foreword by E. E. Day in Blumer 1939. Berle and Means’s The Modern Corporation is the other of the six whose reputation has endured.

  2. The best printed sources on Thomas’s life are Faris 1948, Young 1963, Janowitz 1966, Deegan and Burger 1981, Murray 1988, and Haerle 1991. Although the unpublished E. Thomas 1986 is not mainly biographical, it discusses Thomas’s life as well, and its archival coverage is by far the most comprehensive of any source to date. Another useful source is Luther L. Bernard’s draft recollection of Thomas (Original in the Bernard archives at the Pennsylvania State University, copy in the Morris Janowitz Papers at UCSCRC [MJP], Box 80, Folder 5, hereafter referred to as Bernard n.d.). Thomas’s “official” autobiographical document, written at Bernard’s request in 1928 and published in 1973 (Baker 1973), is short, vague, and undoubtedly ironic: the bucolic countryside he describes in his early childhood was in fact recovering from front-line status in the Civil War, the supposedly rustic Thomas in fact learned Latin and Greek early enough to be teaching them at the University of Tennessee at age twenty, and so on. Readers of this piece, desperate for information on Thomas, have taken it largely at face value. But read in the context of Thomas’s subtle readings of other people’s autobiographies, it looks dangerously close to parody. His own opinion of it, given in a letter to Kimball Young 2 years later (UCSCRC Miscellaneous Archives, W. I. Thomas [hereafter MAWIT], WIT to KY 4 May 1930) was contemptuous: “Bernard asked me to do something of this kind.…I did it. I would not do it again. It bored me.”

  3. “Dear Dorothy,” Thomas wrote to his new fiancee in January 1935, “as I said in our conversation, I can’t get much interested in the problem of the precise authorship of the Polish Peasant.” (UCSCRC MAWIT, WIT to DST, Jan 1935). At the end of the letter, he promised her that he would publicly call her the sole author of The Child in America (jointly published 8 years before) if she wanted it.

  4. Anthropologists periodically rediscover Thomas’s role in culture and personality studies. See Murray 1988 and Darnell 1990. As for the “Thomas theorem” as Merton called it, it is also attributed to Dorothy Swaine Thomas (as coauthor of Thomas and Thomas 1928) and to Znaniecki (see E. Thomas 1986:327 citing Howard Becker). The phraseology “real in fact and real in their consequences” occurs already in TPP (I:295). The underlying idea first appears in Thomas in the concept of “definition of the situation,” which dates from Thomas 1917, although one can find hints of it earlier. For a long and self-involved account of the whole “Thomas theorem” affair, see Merton 1995. Thomas’s remark about Old World Traits Transplanted is striking “You know darned well how much I had to do with Old World Traits Transplanted but do you expect me to tell you for publication? The men concerned there were my friends, and acted friendly. I needed the money.” (MAWIT, WIT to Kimball Young, 4 May 1930, denying Young’s request for Thomas’s autobiography in no uncertain terms). “I don’t regard myself as important,” Thomas continued. “I don’t want to be noticed. I don’t care whether a word appears about me in print living or dead.” See also Raushenbush 1979:92.

  5. Thomas was fired by a special Trustees‘ Meeting of 16 April 1918, the decision confirmed by a regular Trustees‘ Meeting of 14 May 1918. (Trustees‘ Minutes, UCSCRC [hereafter TM] 10:424–8; the notification letter was 16 April, J. S. Dickerson to WIT, in UCSCRC Board of Trustees, Secretary, Correspondence, Addenda, Volume S, p. 275.). Thomas’s correspondence with Ethel Sturges Dummer provides the best guide to this episode beyond the sensational newspaper articles. (Nearly all the Thomas-Dummer letters are in a continuous chronological series [which has been filmed], so we have generally omitted folder numbers. The lone exceptions are those letters exchanged exactly at the time of the firing, which are located in the folders on the 1917 Suggestions project [folders 233 and 333].) The Thomas-Dummer correspondence shows that Thomas’s work for the Carnegie Foundation antedated the episode and thus was not cooked up by his friends to give him work, as has been sometimes assumed (WIT to ESD 9 Ap 1918). It also shows that Mrs. Dummer, who would become Thomas’s main funder for the next eight years and who had already known him well since the mid-teens, got over the episode very quickly. She found out about it from her family (she was at the Dummers’ house in Coronado, California at the time; see the exchanges with her husband and her sister Marion Dauchy) but although disappointed and shocked, set it aside in the welter of other important events—the news of the Western front, the birth of her namesake grandchild, and the impending imprisonment of a friend’s son for conscientious objection. (Her sister’s husband remarked “that Thomas was usurping the prerogative of an officer. If an officer had run away with the wife of a professor, that would have been romance. This is a mess” [MFD to ESD 24 April replying to Mrs. Dummer’s long note about her thoughts of the affair, unfortunately lost]). Thomas himself wrote her somewhat sheepishly on 9 May 1918 offering to relinquish all connection and forwarding a copy of his official statement. Her reply of 24 July 1918 conveyed her thoughts (in a separate document, apparently lost) but tactfully forwarded an architectural book concerning places like the City Club where the Dummers and Thomases had met. By Thomas’s August reply, it is clear that they are completely on their pre-incident footing; indeed, Mrs. Dummer would become one of Thomas’s principal interlocutors for the next decade. A somewhat darker view of the matter shows in Mrs. Thomas’s letter to Mrs. Dummer of 13 Nov 1919 referring to her inability to understand the episode (“I long ago stopped trying to understand the other lady and to pierce the mystery of how she came to be”), but says that her husband “has developed a touching dependence on me.” But it is striking that the harsh public condemnation of Thomas is not to be found in the correspondence of the women who knew him best.

  6. Miss Culver gave about $40,000 toward The Polish Peasant project (TM 10:570). This particular figure would seem to be Miss Culver’s own recollection, and there is little reason to doubt her formidable monetary skills. The original arrangement with the Trustees had been for up to $7,000 per year for 5 years (Haerle 1991). Thomas habitually used the figure $50,000, and it has become proverbial in the Thomas literature. The monies beyond the planned $35,000—whatever their amount—were most likely subsidies for publication, as we note below. Miss Culver gave the University well over a million dollars in the 1890s, largely in endowments for biology buildings and research.

  7. The University of Chicago Press files (UCPressP) are in UCSCRC, and contain files on all of Thomas’s Chicago books. The Badger papers (RGBP) are at Harvard’s Houghton Library. They cover only the last few years of the Badger enterprise (late 1920s and early 1930s), but make the vanity basis of Badger’s arrangements with authors very clear. In addition to publishing TPP, Badger continued the publication of Sex and Society and Source Book for Social Origins. Somewhat confusingly, he used the original copyright dates (1907 and 1909 respectively) as if he had held the copyrights at those times, even though he acquired the copyrights only on 20 November 1918 (UCPressP 451:7) and though there is no indication anywhere that Thomas had any direct contact with him before 1918. (Thomas would have known of Badger in 1918 through people like Adolf Meyer, who was on the board of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, a Badger publication.) Although Sex and Society dropped out of sight quickly (after a large initial sale), Badger printed another 1000 copies of the Source Book as late as November 1926. (RGB to MPC 27 Nov 26, RGBP item 378). Badger’s fragmentary invoice records (RGBP item 398) indicate that the book was still selling five to ten copies a month in the early 1930s. In 1927, when Thomas arranged for a new edition of TPP from Knopf, he had apparently forgotten about the transfer of the copyrights of the first two volumes (see D.P. Bean to WIT 3 Nov 27 and related correspondence in UCPressP 451:7).

  8. The Press files on The Polish Peasant contain repeated and elaborate discussions and negotiations about the design, cost, and ultimate disposal of the materials. Thomas sold well: Sex and Society sold 3892 copies in its first 10 years and Source Book 2175 in its first seven (UCPressP 451:5 and 451:6). The TPP files (UCPressP 451:7) indicate that the case-book format was to a certain extent the Press’s idea, as a way of saving money by putting the letters in 10-point. (ACM to NM 4 May 1916) An undated typescript in UCPressP 451:7 between items for 4 May and 28 Nov gives the eight volume plan reported in text. The decision to go to the five volume format was made by mid 1917 and seems to have been largely cost-based, at least on the Press side.

  9. On the eight volume plan, see also WIT to ESD 6 June 1915, ESDP. Neither the amount nor the source of the subsidies to the University of Chicago Press is known. An approach to Miss Culver was proposed by Press Director Laing and Thomas, but vetoed by President Harry Pratt Judson, (GJL to HPJ 28 Nov 16 with penciled reply, UCPressP 451:7). Perhaps Miss Culver was approached by Thomas himself, since the Thomases knew her well enough for Mrs. Thomas to stay with her in Florida on occasion (Helen Culver to Jane Addams 18 Mar 1922, Jane Addams Papers, Series I, Box 9, Swarthmore College Peace Collection). It is also unclear who advanced the money for the Badger volumes, which must have cost $5,000 at least. Thomas’s financial settlement with the University brought him some cash but surely not enough. The obvious candidate is Mrs. Dummer, who had known Thomas since the early teens at least and who bankrolled him through the period 1918–1926. But her papers show no sign of any dealings with Richard Badger. Note that in point of fact, the University of Chicago Press published the first two volumes on a basis only slightly different from Badger’s: Thomas took most of the risks through the subsidies. It should however be noted that these subsidies were not particularly unusual. Many or even most monographs in this period were published at the writer’s expense. For example, at this time all Chicago dissertations were, if not otherwise published, printed in multiple copies at the author’s expense for the library’s use in its exchange relations with other libraries.

  10. Because the Knopf edition is the more widely available one (both in its original printing and in a Dover reprint in 1958), all citations to TPP, unless otherwise noted, are to this, the second edition. The Knopf edition combined the first two volumes of the original edition into Volume I. Knopf Volume II contained the other three volumes of the original, but in the order IV, V, III, that is, with Wladek’s autobiography at the end. Despite its enormous length, the work is extraordinarily compelling when read in its entirety.

  11. It is nonetheless worth recalling that TPP was not particularly unusual in its length. Many contemporary studies were of similar magnitude. The Pittsburgh Survey (1908–1911), with multiple authors, grew to six volumes and 2600 pages. Booth’s Life and Labor of the London Poor had been four volumes. Bronislaw Malinowski wrote three books totaling 2000 pages about his Trobriand Island research, including in Coral Gardens and Their Magic quite as many magic spells as TPP does letters. Malinowski was a great admirer of Thomas. Speaking at the SSRC Hanover Conference in August 1926 he said:

    I certainly would try always to keep as close as possible to W. I. Thomas because I admire his work very much. His work on the Polish peasant—being a Polish peasant myself—I would regard as belonging to social anthropology, and we Poles are savages in many respects, as are all other nations. (SSRC 1926:62)

  12. Thomas’s Chicago PhD was in Folk Psychology (sociology was the second field). On the basis of the transcripts we have seen, it seems to be the only such PhD Chicago ever gave.

  13. Donald Fleming’s (1967) history of the concept of “attitude” sees in Sex and Society Thomas’s first statement of a revolutionary concept of attitudes as uniting cognitive and emotional judgments. But even he notes that these “brilliant but glancing references” (1967:324) are by no means the central material of the book. On Thomas’s development from a biological to a social understanding of sex differences, see also Balfe 1981.

  14. If one looks hard enough, there are of course dozens of minor continuities between the early and late Thomas, if only because Thomas’s mind was itself so capacious and porous. It is this fact that makes E. Thomas’s analysis of Thomas’s thought (E Thomas 1986 C. 2) ultimately unpersuasive. It is also troubling that E. Thomas uses later work of Thomas and Znaniecki to help decide what was going on in TPP, as if intellectual personas were immanently evolving trajectories and hence could be read in either temporal direction. This may have been true of Znaniecki, but hardly of Thomas.

  15. On Thomas’s salary, see TM 6:153, giving his associate professor salary as $3000 as of 1908. Since he was promoted in 1910, his salary was undoubtedly raised slightly. At the same time, however, he ceased his position as Superintendent of Departmental Libraries, which had paid $1000 annually since 1896 (TM 1:410). Haerle’s study, based in part on documents not in public hands, is invaluable reading. It is not clear how Thomas first met Miss Culver. It may have been through Thomas’s biological interests, which were evident in Thomas’s letter to Miss Culver of 16 December 1895 (quoted by Haerle). Thomas’s correspondence with President Harper re Miss Culver in 1895–1896 shows that he already knew her by November 1895 and that he was actively assisting the University in its attempt to annex some of Miss Culver’s millions (University of Chicago President’s Papers UCSCRC [UCPresidP] 64:4.) The connection may also have come through literature, of which Thomas had just been a college professor and in which Miss Culver had a deep interest, as Haerle notes. The two may also have been connected through Hull-House, although Miss Culver tended to limit her involvement in Hull-House to her donation of its premises. The exact amount of Thomas’s “course buyout” is unclear. The Trustees‘ vote of 25 May 1910 approved the 2 quarter proposal, but another of 16 August 1910 speaks of only one. On 23 June 1914 the deal was extended on the grounds that Thomas had had to teach overtime because of departmental need, and negotiation was still continuing in early 1918 (See T. Arnett to Harry Pratt Judson UCPresidP 64:4.) Note that the account of the origins of the work in Bernard n.d. is quite different. Bernard saw Thomas starting the study out of boredom and a desire for a vacation, and seeking his first funds from Mrs. Dummer. Although this last was an obvious mistake, the boredom theory was apposite.

  16. See the general letter (in German) from Thomas to Sehr geehrter Herr, Berlin 1912, in the Samuel N. Harper Papers (SNHP) at UCSCRC, Box 1, folder 16, bylined Amerika Institut, Berlin NW 7.

  17. Serving as the basis for our estimates of Thomas’s travels in these years, these letters are found in the SNHP, Box 1, Folders 15 and 16. Dates are given in text. All letters are from WIT to SNH. On the earlier stay, which may have been as long as 18 months, see WIT to SNH 5 July 1912 and also the letters to Miss Culver mentioned by Haerle 1991:27. Although the letters suggest an April 1913 return by Thomas, he may have been back in Chicago by mid-March, as there is a “report”—possibly verbatim—from him in a G. H. Mead seminar of that time. (See UCSCRC Ellsworth Faris Papers, notebook 1, course 3, “Social Consciousness.”) Thomas’s general methodological strategy of collecting he undoubtedly got from anthropologists. In the period 1907ff. (and possibly before), he was in close contact with George Dorsey and other anthropologists at the Field Museum. The Source Book was dedicated to one of them, William Jones, who was killed by the Ilongot in 1909. See G. A. Dorsey to William Jones, 26 July 1907, UCSCRC Fred Eggan Papers, Box 118, Folder 16.

  18. Only about a third of the documents in the “America” volume are dated. Of those that are dated, the vast majority are dated 1914 or later. As for the Wiszniewski autobiography, internal evidence (TPP II:2220ff) shows that it was completed around March 1915. The autobiography also establishes that advertisements for peasant letters appeared in Dziennik Chicagoski in the fall of 1914 (TPP II:2222). The letter series themselves permit us to date this data more closely. Of the 51 datable letter series in the “primary group” analysis, 31 terminate in 1914, 6 in 1913, 6 in 1912, and 8 earlier. The series in 1914 are clumped, making it seem that ads were probably run in April and July (as well as later in the fall). When exactly Thomas and Znaniecki knew that return to Europe would be impossible is unknown. The Balkans were at war during much of Thomas’s stay July 1912–April 1913 and flared up again in the summer of 1913. However much Thomas—like many others—may have hoped that the July 1914 affair would be another short war, at some point fairly soon thereafter, he must have realized that the work would have to be finished from materials gathered in America. Znaniecki arrived in the United States in September 1914. His (brief) account of the timing of the various research efforts corroborates ours, although he - not surprisingly - thought the focus on Poland to be much more inevitable than it seems to us to have been (Znaniecki 1948). See also E. Thomas 1986:330 ff.

  19. The migration theme did have earlier roots. Thomas had taught a course on migration since 1910. This course had been renamed “The European Peasant” in 1913, indicating that Thomas’s interests were shifting away from migration towards studies of peasantries tout court at the time when the war forced his hand, making migration central. All course information on Thomas derives from the Annual Register of the University of Chicago.

  20. The material on other societies found its way into Old World Traits Transplanted (OWTT). See Znaniecki 1948:766. On the authorship of OWTT, see among published sources Volkart 1951:259 and Raushenbush 1979:92ff., and among manuscript sources WIT to Kimball Young, 4 May 1930, MAWIT, and WIT to ESD 13 Dec 1919, ESDP. Note that the Miller/Park/Thomas team that produced OWTT first emerged at the American Sociological Society meetings in 1913, when Small suggested the addition of Miller’s paper on “national individualism” to Park’s and Thomas’s papers on assimilation. (See Publications of the American Sociological Society, 8:100).

  21. It is striking that Thomas’s first major pronouncement on the Poles—his American Sociological Society paper of December 1913, reprinted in the AJS (Thomas 1914)—is largely an essay on the macrosociology of assimilation. It contains almost no signs of an interest in social psychology. Thomas’s turn towards a social psychological work may, then, have come even later—and more sharply—than we suggest above. Note that Thomas had already met both Znaniecki and Park by this time, as we discuss below.

  22. Znaniecki’s own account of his move to America and his relation to Thomas is in Znaniecki 1948. Evan Thomas’s 1986 dissertation gives a comprehensive discussion of Znaniecki’s sociology and his contribution to TPP. Even he, however, comes to no final judgment on whether Thomas invited Znaniecki or he simply came to America (E. Thomas 1986:618–619) For another analysis, see Orbach 1993. Orbach’s figure (155) of April 1915 for submission of the first two volumes of TPP to the Press is clearly a misprint for April 1916. There is no evidence in the Press folder for the 1915 date.

  23. Znaniecki’s English language work of the time is nearly impenetrable, given the combination of abstract topics, an unfamiliar language, and a philosophy compounded of phenomenology, Hegelian idealism, and an admixture of pragmatism. It is not surprising that when Thomas sent Adolf Meyer a Znaniecki paper to add to the Suggestions volume (Jennings et al. 1917), Meyer read it and reacted with real alarm (AM to WIT 23 Mar 1917 AMP). The heart of Znaniecki’s philosophy was a concept of culture (in the German sense) as a more or less objective realm of becoming that is always tending towards, but never achieving, logic and rationality (Znaniecki 1919:39–50). “Cultural schemes” were the elements of this supra-individual world and had an internal logic that feels to the present-day reader somewhat structuralist. Znaniecki aimed to provide a progressive account of knowledge that would steer between Hegelian immanentism and naturalistic evolutionary arguments (Znaniecki 1919. c. 1). A source on the Thomas/Znaniecki division of labor that E. Thomas happened to miss is Thomas’s letter to Floyd N. House of 8 Jun 36 (in the F. N. House papers, University of Virginia, Box 1). Thomas says:

    I had had a course of Social Attitudes for several years before I met Z [this is not correct unless the course had some other title] and I wrote the attitude portions of the Methodological Note. But Znaniecki had a volume in Polish on values and we together combined the two. However, p. 55 and thereabouts, [a somewhat formalized section on causes and effects] written by Z., is, I think, nonsense, and I would have omitted this and other points in the second printing but for the fact of the cost.

    On Thomas’s general distrust of theorizing as reported by his student Tomatsu Shibutani, see also Murray 1988:399, n. 21. For a slightly different view of the perennial “Thomas versus Znaniecki” issue, see Orbach 1993.

  24. The preamble is, of course, unsigned. But since nearly all the courses listed under Social Psychology were Thomas’s, his authorship is almost certain. As we shall show below, there is good reason to think, however, that Robert Park played at least some role in its composition.

  25. For example, Thomas wrote Ethel Sturges Dummer on 16 October 1925 “I heard yesterday a rumor I was to be called to Columbia, but why should I want to go to jail again?” (WIT to ESD, 16 Oct 1925, ESDP) But he did in fact think about giving some lectures, see WIT to ESD 18 Nov 1925.

  26. Thomas was clearly aware of case-based medical work early on. His early work (1897:45) contains citations to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, one of the most notable casebooks in medical history. It is also worth recalling that William James, one of the clearest intellectual influences on Thomas, had used documents extensively in Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. Our judgment of the quantity and character of early medical casebooks is based on surveys of major catalogues, particularly Worldcat and the online catalogue of the New York Academy of Medicine.

  27. The standard work on the case method is Stevens 1983. On Langdell, see also Schofield 1907.

  28. Like Thomas’s 1912 article on “Race Psychology,” Richmond’s text concludes with a long questionnaire. Richmond thanks law professor John Wigmore (see below) for his advice on concepts of evidence (Richmond 1917:56), a fact that nicely shows the derivation of casebooks from the legal tradition.

  29. Deegan 1988 c. 5 discusses the reform activities of Thomas and his good friend George Herbert Mead at considerable length. It is quite probable that the first contact between Mrs. Dummer and Thomas came through Thomas’s wife’s activities for the JPA, of which Mrs. Dummer was a founder. (Anderson 1988:189, 242.)

  30. One might have expected that TPP would have been strongly influenced by the six volumes of the Pittsburgh survey, the greatest single product of reform social science. But while those volumes have a large amount of individual case-type material scattered in them, particularly in the volumes on work accidents and on wage-earning Pittsburgh, none of them is organized as a casebook per se.

  31. Oddly, given Healy’s immense subsequent reputation, he was not the main choice of the psychiatric establishment, as the consultation letters in ESDP folder 372 show rather clearly. He appears to have gotten the job through the connection between his father, a prominent Chicago physician, and John Wigmore, who was close to the Hull-House group in general and to Julia Lathrop in particular. Our main source on the history of psychiatry in this period is Abbott 1982.

  32. The printed dinner invitation with program is to be found in ESDP 578. Healy, Wigmore, and Thomas spoke on the origins, legal relations, and “social bearing” of the juvenile court respectively. The dinner was 30 January 1917, that is, before Thomas had given the talk included in Jennings et al. 1917. The letters between Healy and Mrs. Dummer make it very clear that the former was very strongly influenced by the thinking of Adolf Meyer prior to about 1913. By the time he had finished The Individual Delinquent, however, he was well on the way to the more or less psychoanalytic position he adopted in Mental Conflicts and Misconduct (1917). For his part, Thomas explicitly recognized the impact of psychiatry on his work. In his “standpoint” for the Americanization studies that led to OWTT, Thomas wrote:

    It is comparatively easy to study formal organization (societies, clubs, churches, etc.) and it is done, but the field of behavior has been relatively neglected by the student of society, and undertaken seriously only by literary men—Zola, Ibsen, Shaw, Meredith, etc.—and the psychiatrists. “Life Histories—Standpoint and Questionnaire” in UCSCRC Robert Park Collection, 17:9

  33. Leighton 1952:xxii. Thomas cannot have been less than sixty when he made the remark about influence, as he didn’t meet Dorothy Swaine Thomas until the mid 1920s. Since Thomas was much involved with psychiatry in the late 1920s (largely through Harry Stack Sullivan, who like himself was a free- floating intellectual in New York at the time, see Perry 1982:c. 29), Meyer may have loomed large in his mind at the time simply through recency. But the judgment is more likely to be a long-term one, as we argue in text. It is interesting to speculate on the other two major influences Thomas had in mind. Mead—from whom Thomas took two courses when the philosopher was a beginning Assistant Professor—is an obvious possibility, as are William James and Robert Park.

  34. We know about this course through having inspected Thomas’s University of Chicago transcript, although Thomas mentions it, as well, in his life history document (Baker 1973:248). On the dinners, see Leighton 1952:xxii. There is evidence for such meetings as early as 1916. Given Mrs. Dummer’s relentless hospitality, they undoubtedly preceded that date as well. Meyer kept up ties at the University, speaking later of his “neighborly contacts” with Dewey, Mead, and Tufts of the University of Chicago (AM III:471–472).

  35. We know that Thomas read Psychological Bulletin, (since he cited a paper from it in 1912 [1912:741]), in which Meyer published five articles and twenty-five book reviews in the period 1905–1912. Meyer’s papers in Psychological Bulletin included his landmark 1908 paper on “reaction-types” in mental illness, in which he speaks of mental events as “attitudes and reactions of the person as a whole” (AM II:601). It should also be recalled that the common language between the two men to some extent arose from their common immersion in the larger stream of pragmatist psychology: both Meyer and Thomas had been strongly influenced by William James.

  36. The best place to follow the creation of this lecture series is through the correspondence in ESDP 333, not in the folders containing Mrs. Dummer’s correspondence with Thomas. We know from the lecture series correspondence that Thomas read and admired Meyer’s paper. There was correspondence between Thomas and Meyer later in the 1920s about various abortive collaborations, and we know that Meyer was privately reading Thomas’s work on Levy-Bruhl in 1923 (AMP XII/1/785) although he had found Thomas’s behavior in 1918 unacceptable (AM to ESD 9 Nov 20 ESDP 669). The absence of Thomas-Meyer correspondence 1894–1916 in Meyer’s files—given Meyer’s compulsiveness—is affirmative evidence that there was no correspondence. We do know that Meyer was occasionally at the University of Chicago: he was staying at the Quadrangle Club in 1916, for example (AM to ESD 14 June 1916 AMP I/991/1a). Meyer’s acquaintance with Mrs. Dummer dates at least from the first beginnings of the Juvenile Court Clinic in 1909, see correspondence in ESDP 372. On the other connections, Thomas obviously knew Watson very well, speaking of him as “an old friend of mine.” (WIT to ESD 7 Feb 17 ESD 333) By contrast, his letters to Meyer are headed with the more formal “My dear Dr. Meyer.”

  37. Thomas was well enough versed in Freud to present a report on the “Freudian Complex” in one of G. H. Mead’s seminars, on 17 March 1913, as we know from the Faris notebook mentioned in note 17 above.

  38. Understandable in Meyer whose first language was German, this usage was Thomas’s most pronounced linguistic idiosyncracy. In Thomas, the word is everywhere, even in titles, e.g., Thomas 1912. In Meyer, see, e.g., AMP X/2/30/p. 1, opening his lectures on psychiatry in 1900 at Clark, and also AMP XI/2/22 p.1 at New York later in the decade. See also the following, in Meyer’s Collected Papers (hereafter AM followed by a volume number [I–IV]), AM II:611 in 1910 and AM III:38 in 1915). This commonality could be explained by Thomas’s sojourns in Germany, but dozens of American scholars spent long periods in Germany without bringing back this particular idiom. Thomas tended to mean two things by “standpoint.” First, he used it to mean “theory,” as in the title “Race Psychology: Standpoint and Questionnaire” (it is striking confirmation of this meaning that he sometimes used “standpoint” without an article, as in Source Book 1909:316: “The first three selections in part II may be accepted as sound standpoint for the interpretation of savage mind and they also contain standpoint for the interpretation of the succeeding parts of the volume”). Second, he used “standpoint” in the modern sense to mean a point of view, as in “from the standpoint of primary group.” Sometimes it is clear from the context that he intends one or the other meaning. At other times, he seems to mean both, as in Source Book (1909:16) where he suggests that “attention” is a standpoint, meaning that thinking about the social process in terms of attention is an interesting (but perhaps arbitrary) way to parse that process.

  39. Meyer first uses the term “disorganization” to refer to mental illness in the New York teaching materials (AMP XI/2/22 p 10). It first appears in print in the title of an article of 1905 (“The Role of Habit Disorganizations in the Essential Deteriorations” (AM II:421) His 1908 Psychological Bulletin piece speaks of “mind as an organized being” (AM II:583). “Disorganization” appears briefly in the Thomas’s Source Book (1909:21 along with “social organization”), but then largely disappears until TPP, in which it is one of the handful of major concepts. A more surprising similarity with Thomas is the use of “individualization,” which for Meyer meant moving from diagnostic types as labels to an understanding of individuals as the product of unique situations and reactions. See, e.g., AM IV:71 1913 as well as Meyer’s paper in the Suggestions lecture series. TPP focuses on a similar individualization generated by the uniqueness of social experience.

  40. “Efficiency” appears in Thomas’s correspondence with Mrs. Dummer as early as 17 November 1916 (ESDP 333). It is prominently featured in Thomas 1917. We know that concepts of efficiency were current at Chicago well before TPP because Divinity School Dean Shailer Mathews - one of Chicago’s most central and visible faculty members - gave in 1911 a lecture on “Scientific Management in the Churches” in which he set forth “The Seven Principles of Efficiency in Church Work (1912:16).

  41. It is possible, given that Thomas’s dissertation relied considerably on medical and occasionally on psychiatric sources, that Meyer may have helped advise it in some capacity. Of the teachers who taught Thomas’s courses, only Meyer, Loeb, and Frederick Starr had the expertise necessary to supervise Thomas’s thesis. Without assuming Meyer’s involvement, it is hard to explain Thomas’s citations to such esoteric medical sources as Virchow’s Archiv and such psychiatric ones as Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (both citations 1897:45). At the same time, Thomas’s role as superintendent of departmental libraries at Chicago gave him wideranging opportunities to see different sources. He held this post from 1895 [W.R. Harper to J. Robertson 24 July 1895 UCSCRC University of Chicago Library Records [UCLR] 2:1] to 1910 [WIT to E. D. Burton 19 Mar 1910 UCLR 3:6), when he resigned, presumably because he was about to go to Europe for several quarters. The post required that he negotiate between the departmental libraries, run largely by their senior faculty, and the smaller “general library.” Thomas’s library position thus meant that he interacted with nearly every senior faculty member at the university. Mead, Loeb, Hektoen, and others might thus also be sources for his connection to psychiatry.

  42. Meyer’s reviews of Kraepelin (in two large review essays of 1904 [AM II:331–385, 386–404]) had clearly moved in this direction, as had his 1903 article on the various diatheses (personalities prone to this or that illness, see AM II: 321–330). Meyer recognized that one reason for Kraepelin’s (in his view) success had been the sheer availability of biographical data:

    The relatively small material of the Heidelberg clinic, and the fact that it is fed by a district which is easily accessible and furnishes extensive records of the patients’ families and relatively uniform conditions of life, render it in most respects ideal for an extensive study of what the patients were, are, and prove to be, in the subsequent years of their lives. AM II:349.

  43. On James’s and Meyer’s roles, see Dain 1980: 71–86. Beers’s book was one of a long line of such books, see Alvarez (1961). But Beers‘ manic organizing dovetailed well with the progressive mind, and the book touched off an organization (The National Committee on Mental Hygiene), a phrase (“mental hygiene”), and a movement that had blanketed American consciousness within 15 years. Sales were solid but not overwhelming in the early years: 4500 copies in the first 6 years (Dain 1980:98). But the book was reissued as recently as 1980.

  44. The mental hygiene movement that Beers launched over the next few years would spread Meyer’s concepts to the general public (in fact, Meyer coined the phrase “mental hygiene” Beers 1908:265). So also did the profession of psychiatry. It is hard to overestimate Meyer’s preeminence in American psychiatry. He left New York in 1911 to design (and after 1913 to head) the new Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, whence he retired thirty years later. Having worked in the three dominant communities of psychiatrists in America (Boston, New York, and Baltimore), Meyer knew every major American psychiatrist and neurologist as well as many of the country’s major psychologists. He trained generation after generation of physicians and specialists. And he wrote some 300 papers, reviews, reports, and occasional pieces, on topics ranging from neuroanatomy to psychiatric nosology to occupational therapy to mental hygiene to medical teaching. Small wonder that one of his most famous students said “The intellectual and spiritual stature of Adolf Meyer was such that none of his students can claim to have understood it all. He has stood out among men in our experience like one of his own Swiss Alps…” Leighton 1952:xiii) Note that Freud did not really become a dominant part of the American psychiatric picture until the 1920s, although leading American psychiatrists had been aware of him since around 1900 and some of the non-psychiatric intellectual elite (social scientists like Thomas, Edward Sapir, and William Ogburn and amateur intellectuals like Mrs. Dummer) had begun reading him in the 1910s. For example, the word “sublimation” is used in its Freudian sense in TPP (II:1868).

  45. Another publicly very successful psychiatric biography in this period was Morton Prince’s celebrated story of Miss Beauchamp, The Dissociation of a Personality (1905), which required a second edition within 3 years. It should be reemphasized that Meyer was quite strongly influenced by the pragmatists himself, having known James, Dewey, Mead, and Tufts as we noted earlier.

  46. The two men were similar in other ways as well. Like Thomas, Meyer was no theorist. Like Thomas, Meyer changed his ideas considerably over his life. And while Thomas did not have Meyer’s teaching record, in later life he was renowned for his charisma. One can even see in Meyer’s never-fully-extirpated mania for gathering facts a scientist’s version of Thomas’s inveterate collecting of documents.

  47. The remark about Thomas as artist is attributed to Park by Ellsworth Faris, in a review of the Volkart-edited collection of Thomas’s writings Social Behavior and Personality (Faris 1951:876). The general affinity between the Chicago School and literature has long been the subject of comment. See Cappetti 1993, Lindner 1993, and Cote 1996. Although the customary connection is with urban realists like Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and James T. Farrell (and with small-town realists like Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis), these are all younger writers. Thomas’s sensibility seems to us much closer to that of his exact age peer Edith Wharton, who—while she wrote mainly about the upper classes—anatomized the location of individuals in social structures exactly as did Thomas. Like Thomas (Baker 1973:247) and so many others of their generation, Wharton found reading Spencer, Westermarck, and evolutionists an eye-opening experience (Wharton 1934:94). Indeed, in The Age of Innocence, Wharton drew systematically on anthropological metaphors.

  48. Thomas’s presence at Oberlin in the springs of 1894 and 1895 was kindly verified for us in faculty meeting minutes by Oberlin Professor Emeritus Robert Longsworth. Thomas’s Oberlin resignation was transmitted by the faculty to the Trustees on 25 February 1895. The mechanics of Thomas’s move to Chicago seem straightforward. Correspondence with the Oberlin treasurer, articles in the Oberlin Review, and a faculty vote of 17 April 1893 all testify that Thomas was the faculty chair of the committee for Oberlin’s quite extensive exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in the summer of 1893. An 1893 letter (20 Nov 1893, WIT to G. W. Shurtleff, OCA RG 7, Office of the Treasurer) shows that once arrived he simply stayed on in Chicago. Thomas’s letter of 20 June 98 to Chicago’s President Harper (UCPresidP 64:4) indicates that Oberlin gave him a two-year leave with pay for the first year, conditional on his returning. That Thomas was in debt to Oberlin for large sums at least until 1907 (the letters in OCA RG 7 make this clear) underscores the conditional nature of this advance. He had to return these funds when he left for the Chicago faculty (definitively in 1895) and since he no doubt did not have the money, the debts must have been converted to notes, on which correspondence shows Thomas paying steady interest until at least 1907. Correspondence with Oberlin President Henry King (WIT to HCK 23 Feb 1907 in OCA RG 2/6, the Correspondence Files of Henry Churchill King) makes it likely that Thomas was able to retire the debts through a raise at Chicago and sales of Sex and Society (which sold well, as noted earlier). Thomas’s “sociology” teaching at Oberlin came under the heading of “Christian sociology.” His address on this subject during the “Institute of Christian Sociology” held in the fall of 1894 (reported in the Oberlin Review 22:9:136, 21 November 1894) is his earliest known statement about sociology. (There is a speculative case that Thomas was influenced by a Swiss–American “sociologist” Albert Chavannes of Knoxville, see Knox 1963.) Given the complexity of Thomas’s arrangements, it is not surprising that there is also some unclarity about Thomas’s exact starting date at Chicago. In TM 1:192 (3 April 1894), the Trustees appointed him to unspecified “service” in addition to his Fellowship as of July 1894. But in the May 1894 announcements (in the Annual Register), which record what had happened in 1893/1894 and announce what was coming in 1894/1895, Thomas is listed only as a Fellow in Sociology. The following year he is listed as Instructor in Ethnic Psychology, and the year after that as Assistant Professor (i.e., for 1896/1897).

  49. This course list, like much other evidence, underscores Thomas’s linguistic power. Later writers (and even he himself on occasion) sometimes considered him an indolent scholar, but it is clear from these lists that Thomas by this time knew French, German, Latin, and Greek fluently (he had taught ancient and modern languages at Tennessee), as well as enough Anglo-Saxon to teach it and enough Italian to read it. He of course learned Polish when the time came (E. Thomas 1986: 335).

  50. The courses listed here are, with some exceptions, from the announcements, which concern planned courses. However, they are equally good indicators of the content of Thomas’s reading and concerns in the early 1890s, whether they were given or merely planned. As we noted earlier (note 48), Thomas probably taught some or all of his Oberlin courses in 1893–1895, despite his apparent move to Chicago.

  51. Not surprisingly, Romola was a touchstone text for the women who began Hull-House, where it was read aloud to Italian peasant immigrants in the opening weeks of the settlement in 1889 (Addams 1961:83). What the contadine can possibly have thought of Eliot’s enormous and slow-paced novel can only be imagined. But to Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr it spoke very directly. We thank Peggy Bevington for pointing out the Romola/Hull-House connection.

  52. The influence was two-way, of course. That the precursors of modern sociology—Comte in particular—influenced George Eliot is well known (see the excellent review by Vogeler 1980). Indeed, Eliot had at one point been desperately in love with Herbert Spencer (on Eliot’s lifelong engagement with Spencerian ideas, see Paxton 1991). Moreover, Eliot had read and reviewed the work of Wilhelm Riehl, one of the most influential of Germany’s midcentury social analysts. See her widely anthologized essay on “The Natural History of German Life,” (Westminster Review July 1856.) Thomas would undoubtedly have considered this essay—among the most important Eliot ever wrote, given its obvious relation to her own “peasant” novel Adam Bede—in the Eliot section of his course on essayists.

  53. Like George Eliot, Browning was something of a secular prophet. Moreover, in Browning’s case the religious themes of many of his poems allowed discussion of “dangerous” topics without leaving the respectable religious fold (See Greer 1952). This was important, for there were religious tests for the Oberlin faculty, as is clear from Thomas’s extraordinary letter of 29 February 1896 to his successor Wilfrid Cressy (OCA RG 21, II Letters, box I). See also Bernard n.d. and Barnard 1969:c.2)

  54. Thomas’s brother Thaddeus was a colleague and friend of the man (C. W. Hodell) who in 1909 published a translation of this “Yellow Book”—Browning’s original source—into English, and it is interesting to speculate whether Thomas might not have met him. (See Knipp and Thomas 1938:92) W. I. Thomas, of course, could have read all of Browning’s sources in their original languages had he wished. It should be noted, however, that the “found documents” story was a common one. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) uses exactly the same story, although in that case—unlike the Browning—the story is a fiction (see the essays collected in Person 2005:291–386). On the complexities of Hawthorne’s narrator, see Leverenz 1983.

  55. Oddly enough, Thomas’s senior colleague and former teacher Albion Small had been experimenting with multiperspectivalism only a few years earlier. In Between Eras from Capitalism to Democracy (1913), Small had created a series of dialogues between a set of only slightly fictitious Chicagoans. (“The sociologist” Randall is transparently Small’s own attempt at self parody, right down to former employment at a university in Maine.) These characters, who include capitalists and their various family members as well as university folk and a variety of radicals (but no working class characters), debate the rights and wrongs of a strike against the Avery Company. The work culminates with a three chapter paean to Small’s brand of genteel communism. Thomas would undoubtedly have known about this book, which Small had published by the Inter-collegiate Press of Kansas City, MO, USA.

  56. It is now clear exactly what Robert Park meant in his often quoted remark that “Thomas’s interest was always, it seems, that of a poet….and of a literary man in the reportorial sense” (In “Notes on the Origins of the Society for Social Research,” reprinted in full in Kurtz 1982; the quote is found on p. 337). It is thus by no means surprising that the outside Press reviewer on TPP (Professor J. H. Tufts) commended the letters for their “purely literary interest, which is very considerable as disclosing human sympathies and behavior in frank, unsophisticated, and unspoiled fashion.” UCPressP 451:7.

  57. The farm census return for 1860 shows a classic freestanding operation. Stock were few (nine horses, three milch cows, four steers, three pigs, 33 sheep), but the farm turned a substantial product: 1500 bushels of corn, 500 bushels of oats, 100 bushels of potatoes, 75 lbs of butter, and $40 of home-made manufacture (1860, Schedule 4, Russell County, p. 13). The huge corn output was mostly for winter feed, not for the market, although the new railroad (1856) was already changing the local economy when the war began. The T. P. Thomas family owned three slaves in 1860, a 35 year-old man, a 26 year-old woman, and an 11 year old girl (1860 Census, Russell County, Schedule 2, p.237). It is not known whether this was a family, nor did any of them remain in the household as hired help in 1870. All census information reported here and below was retrieved by the senior author from microfilms of the manuscript census held at the Center for Research Libraries. On the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, a crucial stake in the Civil War, see Noe 1994. For a chilling picture of life in the Holston and Clinch River country in wartime and the postwar, see Fisher 1997 and Blair 1998.

  58. Information on Thomas’s relatives comes from a variety of sources, and is assembled in Tate (1974). We have consulted many of the primary sources used by Tate and have found his work generally reliable. As for Confederate attitudes, Russell County was one of the more secessionist of the southwestern counties. The Thomases and Prices seem all to have been Confederates, Mrs. Thomas’s elder brother Richard rather vehemently so, as can be seen from his later columns in the Holston Methodist. There is, however, no evidence that W. I. Thomas’s father served in any capacity in the Confederate Army. His brother-in-law’s brief biography of him (Price 1913:295–296) speaks of heart problems, which may have prevented the elder Thomas’s service.

  59. Civil War documents show only one hostile military operation in Elk Garden. Part of George Stoneman’s (Union) Cavalry passed through the town on its way back from ruining the Confederate saltworks at Saltville in December 1864 (See Davis et al. 1891–1895, Plate 118).

  60. In 1870, the Thomas farm reported 56 steers and 25 pigs and was producing more wheat than corn (1870 Census, Schedule 3, Lebanon Township, p. 3). The family now numbered father, mother, five children, one white domestic servant, one black domestic servant, and the latter’s 1-year-old child (1870 Census, schedule 1, Russell County, p. 25).

  61. The elder Thomas’s advice columns are entertaining reading. They make it clear that he read widely in European (including German language) sources as well as in American ones, and that he had a curious, restless intelligence rather like that of his famous son. All the same, the core of the columns was agricultural advice. When Thomas left the paper, the columns ceased. On the history of the paper, see Price 1913:71ff, 90ff.

  62. Price Thomas apparently had some wanderlust himself. His successor as Superintendent of Public Instruction in Tennessee notes rather ruefully in his first annual report (Tennessee, Department of Public Instruction, Report, 1898/9, p. 5) that in his (immediately preceding) 2-year term Price Thomas had neither published a report on Tennessee instruction nor gathered the information for one. Like his brother William, Price Thomas was one of the University of Tennessee faculty ousted in a putsch by incoming President Dabney in 1887. (See Montgomery 1961:32ff.)

  63. The traditional story (Thomas’s own, in Baker 1973:246) is that Thomas’s father made the decision to move in order to get educations for his sons. He was, after all, a highly educated man himself, despite his 17 years as a farmer. But it is also clear from his Holston Methodist columns that he had probably read the doom of Eastern agriculture already and made the move for financial reasons as well. W. I. Thomas would have been too young to know about this side of the decision.

  64. The late Ruth Billingsley, Thomas’s grand-daughter, told the senior author (personal communication) that W. I. and Harriet Park Thomas kept in close touch even after Thomas’s second marriage (7 February 1935), in fact spending substantial time together on Thomas’s travels. Thomas is buried beside his parents and his first wife, in lot 790 of the Old Gray Cemetery in Knoxville, TN, USA (Tate 1974).

  65. The quote is from a 1928 letter from Thomas to Park quoted by Wirth in Blumer 1939:166.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Andrew Hannah, Associate Registrar of the University of Chicago, for graciously allowing us to view the transcripts of early Chicago sociology PhDs. We would also like to thank Roland Baumann and his staff for their cordial welcome and assistance at the Oberlin College Archives. We also thank Andrew Harrison at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution for helping us with the Adolf Meyer papers as well as the staffs of the Schlesinger and Houghton Libraries at Harvard University for their assistance with the Ethel Sturges Dummer and Richard S. Badger papers. We also thank the Rockefeller Archives Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY, USA and chief archivist Thomas Rosenbaum (now retired) for help with Thomas sources in RAC collections. Finally, we thank the staff of the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library’s Special Collections Research Center, and particularly University Archivist Dan Maier, for research assistance covering many years and projects. All archival sources are cited in the form in which they are indexed by their holders, which of course varies from one institution to another. We regret the perhaps overwhelming nature of our primary documentation, but the fact is that most historiography of Thomas is based on legends, secondary sources, or primary sources read out of context. So we have tried to base this analysis entirely on critical readings of primary materials.

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Correspondence to Andrew Abbott.

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All manuscript references in text are given in the format used by the various collections themselves. The format is discussed at first usage. Note also that all references to Adolf Meyer’s works are given to the Collected Papers (Winters 1950–1952), rather than to the original sources, for ease of reference. To save space, standard works (e.g., the novels and other literary works mentioned in “The Literary Framework of the Polish Peasant”) have not been listed here.

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Abbott, A., Egloff, R. The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago. Am Soc 39, 217–258 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-008-9045-y

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