Sociological Forun~ Vol. 5, No. 3, 1990
Unfeeling Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of Sociology B a r b a r a Laslett a
The theoretical concern of this paper is with the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to the social construction of scientific knowledge. I examine this question through biographical research into the life and work of William Fielding Ogburn (1886-1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology. Ogburn believed that emotion was inimical to science and that statistics could help control what he considered to be its distorting effects. My analysis suggests that there was a personal component, reflecting Ogburn's search for masculinity, to the development of his ideas about how scientific sociology should be defined and practiced. I also suggest that Ogburn's ideas were favorably received by his' mostly male audience because they spoke to broad cultural and historical currents. My analysis" shows the need for a view of scientific knowledge that takes into account the effects of gender relations and emotion on intellectual activity. KEY WORDS: gender;, emotion; scientific knowledge; William Fielding Ogbum.
INTRODUCTION Recent scholarship on the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to intellectual work (Keller, 1985; Harding and O'Barr, 1987; Schiebinger, 1989) has brought feminist perspectives to bear on the sociology of scientific knowledge. An examination of the life and work of William Fielding Ogburn (1886-1959), an American sociologist particularly prominent in the second quarter of this century and an avid advocate of objectivist, quantitative sociology, suggests several ways in which tNs relationship can be observed. First, 1Department of Sociology, 909 Social Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455. 413 0884-8971/90/0900-0413506.00/0© 1990PlenumPublishingCorporation
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emotional responses to problematic situations in family relations and personal life, particularly those associated with gender identity, can help explain why some scientific issues become intellectually interesting. Second, the emotional meaning of certain ideas and intellectual innovations heightens the energy to advocate them. And finally, emotional salience also helps explain audience responses to them. I will argue that changes in the social organization of gender-in the meanings and demands of masculinity in the late 19th and early 20th centuryaccount in part for the changing intellectual styles and commitments between the first and second generation of American sociologists. These changes help explain not only why William Fielding Ogbum was attracted to and advocated increasing scientisrn in sociology but also why his "solution" -- consciously distancing himself from feelings-spoke with equal intensity to innovators of sociological thought and their (mostly male) audiences. I take it as given that scientific knowledge is not an unmediated reflection of the natural world but a construction that can be understood sociologically. The literature that shares this assumption is extensive (Collins, 1983; KnorrCetina and Mulkay, 1983; also Gieryn, 1982), and includes philosophical and methodological debates as well as empirical studies. But in their examinations of laboratories, scientific discourse, and scientists' actions, these researchers systematically ignore the role of personal life, gender relations, and emotions (for a ctear exception, see Traweek, 1988). There is, it would appear, an attempt to avoid "earlier, unduly individualistic, habits of thought" (Barnes, 1983:20). Emotion has entered into sociological discussions of knowledge and science in one way, however. Emotion, or rather its absence, has been linked to scientific practice as a form of "boundary work" by which scientists try to distinguish what they do from other intellectual or technical activities. Gieryn (1983) argues that scientists characterize their work as nonemotional to differentiate science from nonscience as they compete with others for social respect and resources (see also Gieryn et al., 1985). The charge of emotionalism is also used by scientists to undermine scientific claims that differ from their own (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984). A negative association between science and emotion is part of the rhetoric of science. Recent developments in the sociology of science provide an oppo~unity to reconsider the relationship between science and emotion. Of particular relevance is the line of thought that considers ideas as resources linked to interests (Barnes and MacKenzie, 1979; Gieryn, 1982; Woolgar, 1981). MacKenzie, for instance, in his analysis of the development of statistical theory in late 19th- and early 20th-cenmry Britain argues (1978, 1981) that the controversy between Pearson and Yule over their divergent approaches to measures of statistical association reflected a commitment on Pearson's part to a research program in eugenics, which his statistical procedures facilitated, and the absence
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of such a commitment on the part of Yule. Furthermore, he argues, eugenics embodied "the social interests of a specific sector of British society, and not those of other sectors. Thus different social interests can be seen as entering indirectly, through the 'mediation' of eugenics, into the development of statistical theory in Britain" (1978:71). But "interests" has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it refers to something thought to be of benefit, as "in my interest." Social interests have this character. On the other hand, the term also implies something that is intellectually engaging, something "interesting." The question can then be raised, What makes a particular line of inquiry interesting? My argument is that interests, in this sense, embody emotion as well as cognition, and that it is often its emotional meaning that makes one subject rather than another intellectually engaging. Emotion is important to the sociological study of scientific knowledge in other ways as well. If, as Hochschild (1983:219) suggests, emotion reflects a learning relationship between the feeling subject and the environment, then emotion can serve as a source of insight and creativity in intellectual work. But intellectual work entails more than the production of knowledge; it also involves intellectual advocacy. New knowledge and new theories inevitably challenge older ones and are not accepted without contest. To understand how new ideas are accepted and institutionalized, it is necessary to ask how and why individuals come to advocate them, and why some intellectual advocacy succeeds while others fail. Here too emotion plays a part. It is not the case that all people with the same social and cognitive interests necessarily become advocates of those interests. Ernest Burgess, for instance, a significant figure in the history of American sociology whose career overlapped that of Ogburn (they both retired from the University of Chicago in 1951), used quantitative methods in his research (see Bulmer, 1984: 154-162) but did not become a professional advocate of their use, as Ogbum did. Ideas cannot be explained in positional terms alone. Nor can advocacy. Something else is required to understand why some individuals become intellectual advocates and others do not. As well as serving as one route to new ideas, emotional salience may well provide the energy to engage in the intellectual and institutional contests through which new ideas become accepted. The irony of efforts to exclude emotion from the analysis of scientific practice is that the commitment to that exclusion has to be explained. There are, of course, many theories of emotion (for an overview, see Hochschild, 1983), and I do not intend to distinguish between them in this analysis. I do assume, however, that achieving gender identity-- masculinity and femininity--is a basic developmental task confronted by all people, although how these identities are defined and the conditions under which they are achieved vary socially and historically. I also assume that gender identity is an
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emotionally charged status and that when learning what it means to be masculine or feminine is uncertain or achieving gender identity is difficult, then the emotional salience of gender will increase. In the following pages, I will look at the way Ogbum's life events, and his response to them, entered into his search for and his advocacy of objectivity in the social sciences. I will also suggest ways in which his own task of achieving gender identity helps explain the development and decline of statistics as one of his cognitive interests. And I will suggest that the historical and cultural conditions that were part of Ogburn's life history help explain both his action and the appreciative response of the audiences to which he spoke. An analysis of this dynamic relationship between personal life and ideas can, I believe, substantially enhance our understanding of the development of sociological knowledge in 20th-century America (cf. Bannister, 1987).
BIOGRAPHY IN SOCIOLOGY Biographical research is particularly well suited to exploring issues such as these. It is not common in sociology, however; the problem of generalizing from a single life history is seen as a major limitation. But biography should properly, I suggest, be viewed as a case study. As such, it is no different in its logical properties from the study of a single country, community, or time period. Furthermore, biography can make a considerable contribution to the question of how personal life is related to the construction of scientific knowledge. It provides access to the more private dimensions of an individual's life story, those less available to other research strategies. The kinds of data on which biographies, particularly of scientists, writers, and intellectuals are often based--correspondence, diaries, and, depending on the historical period involved, interviews, in addition to formally published materials-make it possible to address the subjective meaning of life events. (See Appendix A for a description of the sources used in this research.) Involving both individual and societal dynamics, biography is an especially appropriate form of research in the history and sociology of knowledge. Because biography can present a detailed and contextualized account of actions and reactions as well as of events, ideas, and social structures, it can demonstrate relatiorL~hips between individual, institutional, and intellectual dimensions in the construction of cognitive interests and intellectual advocacy. This is not to say that biographical research is methodologically unproblematic. It is difficult to reconstruct what events are personally significant since doing so involves interpretations of what is eventful to another person. This is the case even when, as for Ogbum, private papers have been well preserved and catalogued, and it is possible to supplement them with interviews.
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In addition, interpretations of events are filtered through multiple lenses. First and foremost, in this instance, there is Ogburn's own. Most of the records with which I have reconstructed his personal life were written late in his life. His youth and young adulthood can be observed only through his (and his wife's) adult perceptions, through lenses shaped by later life events (cf. Erikson, 1987). This circumstance raises numerous questions. For instance, would Ogbum have emphasized his mother's influence on his intellectual interests, as we shall see he does, if those interests had not been a significant part of his life story? Further, the reason for telling a life story--as, here, to understand the history of "unfeeling knowledge" in American sociology-affects how the story is told and thus serves as another interpretive lens. Constructing Ogbum's biography for this purpose turns early events into explanations, giving them causal meaning. And finally, there are the ways in which the present day context has shaped my sociological interpretations. Would I see gender relations as so important in a pre-feminist world? Or a pre-Freudian one? Whether these methodological problems are unique to the sociological uses of biography, or whether they, or problems similar to them, impinge on all research is too large a question to discuss here. It is important, however, to keep these issues in mind, both when using a biographical research design and when considering conclusions drawn from one.
W I L L I A M FIELDING OGBURN: THE SOCIOLOGIST When William Fielding Ogbum retired from the University of Chicago in 1951, 7~rne magazine referred to him as "the top social statistician in the U.S." A brief account of Ogbum's career provides a basis for understanding 77toe's decision to include him among the six retiring professors they featured in their June 25th article on education. With the exception of 1918-1919, Ogbum's entire professional life was spent as a teacher and researcher. His major academic appointments were at Reed College (1912-1917), Columbia University (1919-1927) and the University of Chicago (1927-1951). His writings cover an unusually wide range of sociological topics, from grand theories of social change to more focused examinations of the cost of living, politics, inventions, population, urbanization, and the family. In addition, Ogbum was a major advocate and exemplar of the use of quantitative methods in the social sciences. Over the course of his career, he continually articulated the belief that sociology had to become more scientific, by which he meant more empirical and more quantitative. His reputation as a social statistician, on which T/me focused in 1951, reflected his success in practicing what he preached.
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Although he was situated at universities for most of his career, Ogbum was also active outside them. During 1918-1919, he worked in Washington, DC, as examiner and head of the Cost-of-Living Department of the War Labor Board, and then briefly at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He was president of both the American Sociological Society (1929) and the American Statistical Association (1931); he edited the journal of the latter organization between 1920 and 1926. He was vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932 and Chairman of the Social Science Research Council in 1937-1939. Ogbum was also active in psychoanalytic circles; he was a member of the original Board of Trustees of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago, founded by Franz Alexander in 1932, and was president of that board from 1942 to 1947. In his work for the federal government, Ogbum was, among other things, research director of the President"s Commission on Social Trends, established by Herbert Hoover in 1929, and director of a study on technological trends and national policy during the New Deal. He was involved in the work of the Science Committee of the National Resources Committee between 1935 and 1943, and the work of the Census Advisory Committee from the late 1920s through the 1940s. Ogburn was a major commentator on the sociological implications of aviation and the atomic bomb, mad was an advocate, before the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization in 1945, for the inclusion of the social sciences in plans to establish the National Science Foundation. AS a historical figure, then, William Fielding Ogburn was prominent from the interwar years onward in the development of sociology as an academic discipline and in the creation of the role of social science consultant to the federal government. In his scholarly work, he addressed major sociological questions of the day and attempted, particularly at the University of Chicago, then the largest producer of sociology Ph.D.s, to shape the way graduate students were trained and departmental appointments were made. In his professional work, within government and outside of it, he was an advocate of empirical research and active in establishing institutions that fostered it. This advocacy reflected a particular theory of society, a particular theory of knowledge, and a particular theory about the relationship between the two.
The Historical Context
William Fielding Ogbum was part of the second generation of American social scientists, a generation that began to dominate and define American social science early in the 20th century. While the preceding intellectual generation had appreciated and articulated the value of science for sociological analysis in general and for the treatment of social problems ~annister, 1987; Fumer,
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1975; Haskell, 1977), it was in this second period that new methodological tools for assessing the scientific validity of knowledge about society became available and central to discussions of it As Ross (1979:128) puts it, Around 1912 . . . a distinctly new voice appeared in the social science literature, and it swelled to a powerful chorus after World War I. Social scientists began to call for a more objective version of empirical and social intervention. The new program was more quantitative and behavioristic and urged that social science eschew ethical judgements altogether in favor of more explicit methodology and objective examination of facts.
Two institutional developments were crucial in this change: the expansion of government activities and the establishment of the modern American university. During World War I, the expansion of government activities was associated with the growth of a bureaucratic infrastructure (Cuff, 1973) and with efforts to use knowledge to plan and control social life. Aside from the war, however, there was, in general, an increase in government's involvement in welfare activities, if more on the state than the national level (Ogbum, 1915). The emphasis on social planning within government expanded further during the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations (see, among others, Amenta and Skocpol, 1988; Auerbach, 1965; Clawson, 1981; Karl, 1969, 1983; Metcalf, 1975). In addition, by the time Ogburn became active as a professional sociologist (he received his Ph.D. in 1912, the same year in which Ross locates "a distinctly new voice"), sociology had been recognized as an academic discipline. While the original institutional struggle to establish the new researchoriented universities was, to some extent, over (Vesey, 1965), the question of what constituted the proper goals of social science, how sociological practice should be defined, was still in flux (Bulmer and Bulmer, 1981; Bulmer, 1982). Would the social sciences continue to be concerned with social philosophy and civic action, or would they develop in a more limited empirical direction?
Ogburn's Theory of Knowledge In Ogbum's view, the social sciences needed to be radically differentiated from social philosophy, on the one hand, and social action, on the other. Even though his theory of social change called for social planning, he continually reiterated the view that a scientific sociology should be concerned only with the search for new knowledge. Even though he was a participant in public life during the Wilson, Hoover, and Roosevelt administrations, he felt that the pressure on the social sciences for action was an obstacle to their becoming more scientific (Ogbum, 1930@ Ogbum did not view the task of making sociology more scientific as simple, straightforward, or without costs, but as with social change itself, he thought it was an inevitable part of social evolution (compare Ogburn, 1930b, with Sorokin, 1933, and Ogbum, 1933).
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In all of his various capacities-as teacher, scholar, researcher, and consultant--Ogbum articulated beliefs about the proper role of the social sciences in modern society. His general theoretical orientation, first presented in his book Social Change (1922a), emphasized the importance of material factors, technology in particular, in social change. Ogburn believed that change was inevitable and depended largely on "past developments and accumulations" (1922a:342). But there was a "lag" between the growth of mechanical inventions and the adjustment of societies to them because the two developed at different rates. Social inventions were therefore necessary to accelerate the adaptations that would reduce such "lags." And the social sciences had a crucial role to play in this respect Although initially taking the position that social scientists could usefully and should properly be directly engaged in social action (by which he appears to have meant action-oriented research), Ogburn came increasingly to believe that the contribution of the social sciences would come from their capacity to produce exact knowledge about social life. Thus, although he was a firm believer in social planning, Ogburn did not believe that social scientists as scientists should serve as planners. They should measure social trends, not try to shape them. For Ogburn, sociology as a science should be concerned only with the discovery of new knowledge, generating empirical facts that were reliable, precise, and enduring. His favorite question--how do you know it?-could, he believed, be satisfactorily answered through recourse to objective, empirical knowledge. Issues of interpretation, mediation, and social construction that concern contemporary philosophers and sociologists of science do not seem to have troubled him. For Ogburn the major struggle was to move sociology away from social philosophy and in a more empirical direction. What did trouble him were what he saw as the psychological barriers to obtaining exact scientific knowledge. Throughout his career, Ogbum was concerned about the impact of emotion on science. As a young man, he read widely in psychoanalytic theory and by 1915 was lecturing to students on Freud (It IL Ogburn, 1955:29). He described the theory of the unconscious as one of the major intellectual achievements of the 20th century. "A great many of our desires," he wrote, "are unconscious. They function in such a manner that we are unconscious of their real nature" (1919:293). These psychological dynamics posed particular problems for the scientific sociologist, the advocate of objectivism. How could the often unconscious, potentially distorting effects of emotion be countered? Emotion coupled with ignorance led to prejudice, in Ogburn's view (1922b). But alleviating ignorance was not a simple matter, since emotion selected some factors for attention while it blinded us to others. For Ogburn, emotion was an enemy of science. Statistics, however, offered a solution because of the attention given to selection and representativeness (1934a; see also
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1932 and 1934c), and because techniques such as partial correlation were "the same in essence as the laboratory expe~ment" (1955) and could, therefore, control the distorting effects of emotion. While a strong advocate of statistics in sociological research, Ogbum was not unmindful of their limitations. In particular, he believed that statistics were primarily useful for verification, not discovery, for testing hypotheses, not generating them (1934b). Discovery required enthusiasm, along with certain other conditions. "Enthusiastic dedication is good for research," he wrote, "when there are adequate tools and data, but without such good checking devices the product is likely to be propaganda" (1955:14). Scientific knowledge, Ogbum argued, had to be differentiated from other types of knowledge. Scholarship, wisdom, understanding, social philosophy, social theory-all reflected emotion. They were all too often manifestations of wishful thinking; they were based all too often on fantasy, not on empirical reality, not on reliable facts. They were not science. (See also Ogbum, 1954.) Ogbum believed that for sociology to become more scientific, attention to ideas without rigorous attention to empirical evidence, what he called "intellectualism," had to be abandoned (1930a). "The disciplining of the mental processes," he said, "is too strict in scientific work to permit intellectualism to flourish. . . . Intellectual processes--as contrasted with scientific thought--are combined usually with feelings. . . . But in the scientific work of proof, of establishing real enduring knowledge, thinking must be free from the bias of emotion" (1930b:302). Thus, it was "necessary to crush out emotion and to discipline the mind so strongly that the fanciful pleasures of intellectuality will have to be eschewed in the verification process" (1930b:306). Ogburn was, then, a major advocate of the development of a sociology that was distinct from philosophy, theory, politics, and art. But he had not always held opinions such as these. His commitments were shaped and reshaped by the changing circumstances of his life. He constructed their meanings in response to his personal situation, and to the historical events and structures of his time.
W I L L I A M FIELDING OGBURN: THE PUBLIC MAN At a banquet given in honor of his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1951, Ogbum provided a rare public account of some of the personal themes of his professional life. He said, When I registered as a student in the graduate school at Columbia University, my ambition was to do my bit toward making the world with which I came in contact a better place in which to live, by being a sort of social worker in larger areas of general community and political endeavor. But at Columbia Graduate School I discovered science,
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which I did not know before. . . . My old master, Franklin t-L Giddings, led me to understand what science is. (Ogburn, 1951:1) Nevertheless, in his first five years o f college teaching, at R e e d College in Portland, Oregon, Ogburn was active, in both his classroom and his offcampus activities, o n behalf o f various social reform issues. H e helped found the Oregon Civic League, worked with the unemployed, g a v e lectures to the Industrial Workers o f the World, and visited lumber camps to make surveys o f living conditions. O g b u r n c a m e to i n t e r p r e t t h e s e e x p e r i e n c e s t h r o u g h t h e l e n s o f psychoanalytic theory, as a "rationalization" of his hope for greater social equality. He said, in his retirement address, socialism in which I was much interested on the Pacific Coast, though pmlx~rtingto be a basic solution [of social problems], was itself a rationalization of a great hope to raise the standard of living by a redistribution of wealth and to shift power from the wealthier to the underprivileged. Karl Marx, like Francis Galton and Woodrow Wilson, left us mostly dreams. . . . So I became much impressed with the phenomenon of the day dream, of the danger which existed for scientific error when the data were inadequate in the power of fant a s y . . . . Psychoanalysis told me much about bias. (1951:4). Similarly, he believed that the desires of both capital and labor distorted their observations. "The trade unionist says there are 10,000 on strike; the e m p l o y e r says there are 400" (1922:66). H e also b e c a m e concemext about the impact of teaching and activism on his career. H e felt that his "standards of scientific research were suffering because of the emotion generated in social action" (1951:3). A n d in a letter to Dorothy Johansen, the Reed College historian, in 1959, he wrote, "I had very little time for research or for keeping up with the scientific literature in my field . . . . I d i d n ' t like the fear that I might get pocketed at Reed and receive no calls from other colleges or universities." Furthermore, he had changed his m i n d about how to m a k e the world a better place. "Invention was the basic solution.., not merely mechanical invention, but social invention as welt" (1951:5). So by the time he joined the faculty o f Columbia University in 1919, he had "resolved to give up social action and dedicate myself to science . . . . M y p r o b l e m as I saw it at C o l u m b i a was to i n d o c t r i n a t e only scientific method . . . . My social action I confined largely to organizational w o r k in the advancement of science in the social discipline" (1951:5). A s a young man, O g b u m ' s commitment to statistics was intense. Thinking b a c k on his earlier life after his retirement, he wrote, Then, I think the nearest to an academic ambition I ever had was to be a social statistician, which is the most exact of the scientific activities of a scientist in the social field. The feeling of devotion and loyalty was very strong. . . . My worship of statistics had a somewhat religious nature. If I wanted to worship, to be loyal, to be devoted, then statistics was the ar~swerfor me, my God. (Ogburn, 1952: June 14).
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But Ogbum also believed in governmental planning and in the need for social inventions. This led him to work as a consultant, particularly in the 1930s, and these activities in turn shaped his cognitive interests. Thus, while devoted to statistics, Ogburn nevertheless chose not to pursue and employ developments in them. There was too much else to do, too many other intellectual interests that commanded his attention, too many trips back and forth to Washington. But despite his belief that "if Government sponsors research in natural science, it ought also to support the study of the social changes and social problems which the natural science researches create" (Library of Congress, 1969:111), Ogbum also believed that solutions would not be found through the involvement of social scientists in politics, but rather through their separation from it. For without such separation, social science would be distorted by the emotions aroused in social action. But how could emotion be controlled? How could the various forms of knowledge--science, scholarship, wisdom, philosophy, understanding--be kept apart? At the organizational level, he believed that institutional differentiation was the answer; he outlined his ideas on this in his presidential address to the American Sociological Society (1930b). But what about at the individual level? How could scholars who were teachers, consultants, advisors, as well as scientists control their emotions? Ogbum had an answer." in many trip to Washington, around the White House, the Department of the Interior, or the Department of Commerce, I never considered my advice was scientific. Though I made use of what scientific knowledge I tx~ss~sed, I could see that science was not the same as wisdom, nor as understanding. . . . There was still a problem for me personally. . . . I [did not] want to have the "integrated mind," where science and intellect are mixed together like scrambledeggs. The key to the solution I worked out for myself.... I turned with admiration to the schizophrene! (1951:6-7) Schizophrenia was, for Ogburn, a strategy, not an illness, and made it possible for him to act under conditions that he considered antagonistic to each other. How and why did Ogbum develop his ideas about differentiation in pursuit of a scientific sociology, and in particular, his views about emotion and objectivity? Why did he define the problem of bias as a problem of emotion? Ogbum himself provided an answer: "My father, planter and merchant, died in 1890 when I was four. Then began my long struggle to resist a dear mother's beautiful but excessive love. To the successful outcome, I attribute my strong devotion to objective reality, [and] an antipathy to the distorting influence of emotion" (Ogbum, no date). To understand the development of Ogbum's view that to be scientific sociology had to be differentiated from both emotion and social action, requires attention to personal as well as professional elements in his life history. The story of the public man is not sufficient. It is in the domain of personal life,
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I believe, that an explanation can be found not only for why Ogburn held the views that he did, but why he held them so strongly.
WILLIAM FIELDING OGBURN: THE PERSONAL DIMENSION
William Fielding Ogbum was bom in Butler, Georgia, on June 29, 1886, the second son of Charlton Greenwood Ogbum and Irene Florence Wynne. (This account is adapted from tL IL Ogburn, 1955 and 1958.) His older brother, Charlton Jr., had been born four years earlier. At the time of William's birth, his mother was 46 and his father 56. William's father was a planter's sorL In 1860, after managing his father's plantation for ten years, he had become a merchant in nearby Butler. During his 30-year stay there, he became a wellestablished businessman and landowner and a leading member of the community. In 1862, Chaflton Greenwood Ogburn married Irene Wynne, a devoutly religious young woman from an affluent plantation family. Irene had never been concerned with practical matters in her father's household, and she continued in a similar fashion in her husband's. Chaflton assumed responsibility for household management, and servants did the work. Having built a fortune, Charlton Ogburn sold his store in Butler in 1882, the year of his son Chaflton's birth; four years later, "Willie" was born. Charlton St. died in 1890 at the age of 60 of typhoid fever. With his death, his family's fortunes were severely undermined. It took 14 years to settle the estate, and Irene Ogburn never received whatever fortune Chaflton had accumulated. Early in her widowhood, when Charlton Jr. and William were still young, Irene and her children lived with extended kin, but she found the status discrepancies too distressing. She eventually moved to Gainesvilte, Georgia, lived with another widow, and took in boarders while her sons got after-school jobs when they could. Irene's health had not been good even before her husband's death, the births of two children relatively late in life having taken their toll, and it deteriorated still further afterward. Accustomed as she had been to luxury and comfort, she found the struggle particularly painful. For her sons, this was also a difficult time. They "learned that their mother was an invalid and must be given special care. They felt keenly the responsibility that had fallen on them. They were never again carefree boys but rather they increasingly labored to protect their mother" (tL tL Ogbum, 1958:133). At the age of 16, William, following his brother Charlton, entered Mercer University, a Baptist college in Macon, Georgia. It was there that Ogbum was introduced to intellectual life; he had many discussions with his friends about
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art and religion. Prior to that, "he had been so deluged with religion he did not know it could be 'objectively' discussed" (tL IL Ogburn, 1958:141). Ogbum's first job after graduating from Mercer in 1905 at the age of 18 was as a teacher at the Morton School for Boys in Savannah, Georgia. By that time, his brother Chaflton had completed law school and entered a firm in Savannah. Irene joined her sons there, and the family lived together. The cultural atmosphere of Savannah exposed Ogbum to wider social and cultural currents. He went to concerts, visited art galleries, went on walking trips along the sea, and participated in the active social life of Savannah house parties. Up to this point, Ogburn's life had been spent entirely in the South in close association with kin. Even at college, family connections surrounded him; his college roommate was the son of the family's minister in Gainesville. Ogburn left this environment for the first time in 1906 when, using money saved from his teaching job, he went on a summeflong trip to Europe. He wrote to his brother at the end of his trip about the importance of the experience to him: Chaflton, I have written you these letters telling you of some of the things I have seenbut they have all seemed so cut and dried-just as you might have read out of a guide book. You can't judge.. , what the trip has meant to me. . . . The interesting people I have met, the ideas lhaveformed, the broadening, the seeing of the world and countries and nl'fairs, the moving not in a provincial circle but in the world, the associationwith greatness, the discussion of topics and things of renown and fame- all this and more.. (Letter from William to Chaflton Oghtma, August 12, 1906). Three days later he again wrote to his brother, "My trip abroad has made me realize more what the world is--and that to succeed in Savannah or C r a . - o r the south is different from becoming known in the world . . ." (letter from William to Chaflton Ogburn, August 15, 1906). Before leaving for Europe, Ogburn had accepted a position teaching in Rome, Georgia, where he moved in the fall of 1906. In Rome, he met Rubyn Reynolds, who was to become his wife. Describing her husband-to-be's life in this Southern community in 1906, Mrs. Ogburn later wrote, in her Letters to My Son, Soon nl'ter his arrival in Rome he [Ogbum] m e t . . , the principal of the public schools, who became a close friend. Here was a scholarly man of insight with whom your father could discuss Darwin's theories and Spencer's philosophy with no fear that he might be criticized as being an a t h e i s t . . , he came to know the Methodist minister who also had the scholarly approach. Many evenings, behind closed doors, the three met for discussions o1' science and religion. These three, two teachers and a preacher, were the only persons in Rome in 1906, so far as 1 know, who believed in evolution. (1L R Ogbum, 1955:5-6)
Ogburn's professional ambitions began to crystallize during his time in Rome. In 1908, he became engaged to be married and left the South to begin his graduate studies at Columbia University.
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He had originally planned to study both sociology and social work. His interest in science was sparked in sociology courses he took from Franklin Henry Giddings, a "marvelously persuasive preacher for science," by Ogbum's own account. At this time, Giddings had "created at Columbia an intellectual setting dominated by questions of statistical method, which he reinforced personally by holding a kind of salon called the FHG club" (Tumer, 1986:4). Through discussion, sociability, and more intimate association than was possible in the classroom, Giddings's views about the importance of science and statistics were reinforced in this "salon." For the young Ogbum, these experiences are likely to have aroused particularly strong emotions. As he had been fatherless since a young boy and had lacked the opportunity in his youth to explore autonomy or develop a sense of self differentiated from his family, graduate school was likely to have had a vivid emotional impact on him. It would have provided him with another taste of the freedom to which his European travels had introduced him, a potential avenue out of the South, and the possibility of associating "with greatness" and "becoming known in the world." In addition, being "a Giddings man" resulted in Ogbum's winning a highly competitive graduate fellowship, which made it possible for him to marry Rubyn Reynolds in 1910 (IL IL Ogbum, 1955:14-15). Viewing Ogbum's graduate school experiences in this light calls attention to their personal meaning. For Ogbum, statistics and the empirical approach to social science had to do with more than career. Mastering them made it possible for him to achieve manhood. Given the close and dependent relationship with his mother, the downward social mobility the family had experienced after his father's death, and the absence of a father in his boyhood, the skills that made marriage and a successful career possible for him were likely to be especially charged. Ogburn's graduate school experiences, then, were part of the process by which science and statistics came to have emotional meaning in his life. Success in pursuing the intellectual questions that dominated his graduate school environment satisfied both subjective and objective desires. That combination, I suggest, helps explain his strong commitment to and advocacy of science and statistics throughout his life. Ogbum's first major academic appointment, however, at Reed College in 1912, inhibited his ability to act on this commitment. He was much involved with students and teaching, and was also active in community affairs. But these were not congenial demands, and in 1917 Ogbum accepted an appointment at the University of Washington. The career concerns that he articulated to the Reed College historian in 1959 may provide a partial explanation for the move. In addition, empirical research and statistical work were more emotionally salient to him than social activism. In his experience, they were associated with success, autonomy, and manhood. The insistence at Reed that faculty be in-
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volved in the community (Johansen, no date) was not consistent with the cognitive interests Ogburn had developed in graduate school. Civic activity could not match the dual meaning of those interests--instrumental and emotional. It could not provide the same satisfactions. For these various reasons, then, Ogbum left Portland in 1917. But he was not to remain in Seattle for long. In 1918 he was offered a position on the National War Labor Board in Washington, DC. Ogbum's time in Washington was, in my view, a critical period in his personal and intellectual development. Of particular importance were the congenial conditions of his work: he had all the necessary clerks, stenographers, statisticians and field workers and lots of office space, a great contrast to the scarcity of help during his university days. Because of his plentiful assistance he wrote in the year and a half he was in Washington seventeen articles which were published. These articles brought him recognition which led to his being offered professorships in the East. (1L IL Ogburn, 1955:38)
These congenial working conditions thus contributed significantly to Ogbum's research productivity and professional advancement. Among the offers that resulted was one from Columbia, and as Mrs. Ogbum puts it, "To be called to teach at Columbia where he had done his graduate work only a few years before gave him immense satisfaction--and made him very proud" (1955:39). A further significant experience while in Washington was his psychoanalysis in 1919 (Ogbum, 1951; Huff, circa 1976). Whether he entered analysis to address emotional problems and/or in the hope of relieving stomach ulcers, a condition from which he had suffered since his youth (Reiss, 1982), is unknown. But given his interest in psychoanalytic theory, the experience was likely to have been cognitive as well as therapeutic, perhaps suggesting to him his "schizophrenic" solution to the multiple activities he was to pursue thereafter. Ideas about differentiation and specialization were core notions within social science theories at the time ~annister, 1987). But for Ogburn differentiation served an additional function. It satisfied an emotional need. Creating sharp dichotomies between objective and subjective, between science and emotion, between rationality and feeling appears to be how Ogbum responded to the biographical events of his life history. Thus, in addition to whatever political and professional reasons may account for Ogbum's beliefs about sociology as a science and his advocacy of statistics to control "the distorting effects of e m o t i o n " - o r even his definition of emotion as a "problem"--at least part of the explanation can be found in his personal life, in his childhood experiences, involving the loss of his father and the care of a dependent and sickly mother, in his search for independence, and in the successes his research skills brought him. Scientific sociology, as he practiced it, had made it possible for him to achieve manhood: to marry, to become a respected family man and a highly visible and successful public figure.
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But if Ogbum's interest in statistics was "overdetermined," serving both professional and personal needs, then why did he pursue it less vigorously over time? Is it sufficient to argue, as he did, that he had become just too busy? I think not. I would suggest that one reason Ogbum's interest in statistical (but not empirical) work declined after the mid-1930s was that the emotional needs to which it was a response earlier in his life were now satisfiecL As a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, a widely cited and publicly recognized expert on national affairs, and as a husband and father, he was successful in both personal and professional terms. Statistics no longer served his emotional interests, and his cognitive interest in them accordingly declined.
A LIFE IN CONTEXT: THE SOCIOLOGICAL USES OF BIOGRAPHY
This analysis provides empirical support for the proposition that there is a personal component, to which sociologists of science have been relatively inattentive, to the development of scientific knowledge. William Fielding Ogbum's struggle to control emotion in his personal life, to distance himself from the early relationship with his mother, was a key to his passionate commitment to objectivism in sociology. His cognitive interest in science and staffstics, his ideas about emotion and objectivity, developed in response to problematics in his personal life as well as to intellectual conviction, career contingencies, historical events, and institutional developments. Within the profession of sociology as a whole, Ogburn's ideas were not adopted automatically; they had to be fought for. Ogburn drew the energy to engage in this battle from the emotions generated in his personal search for manhood. But to demonstrate a relationship between Ogbum's personal and cognitive interests does not explain why science and statistics became central to contemporary sociological practice. To explore that issue I must turn to the larger culture and consider how the solutions that served Ogbum's interests also addressed interests of the audiences to which he spoke. Among the major changes in social organization in 19th-century America was an increasingly specialized division of labor by gender. Both within the family and within the society as a whole, women became increasingly responsible for child rearing, while men became increasingly responsible for breadwinning and participated in child rearing less (Brenner and Laslett, 1986; Demos, 1986; Rotunda, 1983). The ever vigilant mother and more absent father resulted in a "growing closeness and emotional power of the mother-son bond" (Rotunda, 1983). This pattern was particularly true of the middle class, and it was from precisely this segment of society (in actuality or aspiration) that the
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professional classes emerged in post-Civil War America. Ogbum's family relationships were not unique; on the contrary, they were paradigmatic. When women are exclusively responsible for child rearing, psychological maturation presents sons with particular developmental tasks. Chodorow (1978) suggests that under these conditions males are likely to define what is masculine in terms of what is not feminine. The increasingly sentimental and pious character of 19th-century American culture was associated with definitions of womanhood and with women's activities (Blair, 1980; Bloch, 1978; Douglas, 1977; Laslett and Brenner, 1989; Welter, 1978). Manhood, in contrast, was defined by aggressivity, rationality, passion, and sexuality. Yet by the end of the century, masculine success was for more and more men achieved not through physical labor behind a plow but through mental labor behind a desk. Under these conditions, the development of "unfeeling knowledge" can be seen as a construction by men of a cultural domain in opposition to the "feminized" culture of the 19th century. Constructing scientific practice in terms of hard fact and cool rationality can be seen, then, as a response to changing occupational opportunities and gender relations. Science so defined simultaneously offered a cultural space to which men could aspire without threat to their masculinity and provided a gatekeeping mechanism that limited women's entry. A scientific culture that emphasized "unfeeling knowledge" was less likely to attract or welcome women participants (see evidence in Cott, 1987; Deegan, 1978; Morantz-Sanchez, 1985). In both academic social science (Rosenberg, 1982) and medicine (Morantz-Sanchez, 1985), fears of feminization were associated with the demand for more stringent scientific practices. The developmental tasks that Ogbum confronted were not unique. Neither were his solutions. Rather they exemplify the intersection of class and gender relations that grew out of 19th-century changes in the organization of production and social reproduction (Laslett and Brenner, 1989). If analysis of the controversy between Yule and Pearson demonstrates how class relations structured the development of statistical theory in 19th-century Britain, analysis of Ogburn's biography makes us aware of how gender relations shaped sociological practice in 20th-century America. There is a cultural force to practices and beliefs such as those Ogburn espoused when they become embodied in professional institutions. They create a structure of rewards and opportunities and a set of standards that define what is and is not acceptable scholarship and appropriate professional behavior. The kinds of persons attracted to sociology are affected by them, as, in turn, are the kinds of sociological knowledge constructed. The c o n t e n t of what we know about the social world reflects these beliefs and successful advocacy on their behalf. It is in understanding how individual action both shapes and is shaped by social, historical, and cultural forces that the sociology of science can benefit from the feminist focus on gender relations and personal life.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota. Thanks are also given to the Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia University for a year in residence during which I began to formulate the ideas presented here. Many people have helped me to figure out what I was trying to say in this paper. I would like to acknowledge, particularly, the support and critical readings of Johanna Brenner and members of the Program in History and Society at the University of Minnesota. I would also like to thank Rachel Davis, Sociological Forum's free lance copyeditor, for her intelligent and sensitive editing.
APPENDIX A
Archival materials for this study are drawn from the major collection of Ogburn papers in Special Collections at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Materials were also obtained from the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Archive of Contemporary History, University of Wyoming; the Reed College and Bamard College archives; the Documents and Columbiana collections at Columbia University; and the library of Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Additional documents were made available by Fielding Ogburn, to whom I am grateful for sharing with me recollections about his father and unpublished materials, including his mother's Letters to My Son and copies of Ogbum's 1906 letters from Europe; I was especially glad to have the undated Ogbum typescript to which I refer in the paper. Interviews were conducted with numerous of Ogbum's colleagues and students, as well. I would also like to thank Toby Huff, who analyzed the development of Ogbum's ideas about social change (Huff, 1971), for sharing with me primary source materials collected in the course of his own research, Otis Dudley Duncan for passing on to me his personal collection of Ogburn materials (see also Duncan, 1964) and Mirra Komarovsky, whose collection of Ogburn reprints was kindly given to me by Bernard Barber. My thanks, also, to Dorothy Johansen, historian of Reed College, for making available to me materials relevant to Ogbum's years there. Given my thesis about the impact of biography on ideas, a brief account of my relationship with William Fielding Ogbum and how I came to choose him as a subject of study is in order. Although I never met him, I was socialized into the discipline of sociology at the University of Chicago, where Ogbum spent many years of his career and left his imprint on the faculty and graduate program. Beyond that, my thesis supervisor, the late Robert W. Hodge, was
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trained by one of Ogbum's most prominent and faithful students, Otis Dudley Duncan. Hodge was, therefore, an Ogburn "grandchild" and I was a "greatgrandchild"; the language of kinship was actually used to describe relations between us. It is therefore perhaps not too surprising that, when I began to question the positivist tenets with which I had been raised, Ogbum should come to mind as one of the founding fathers of scientism in American sociology.
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