The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

By Anthem Press

The collection attempts to come to term with Robert Park’s legacy. As will become evident, the focus is largely though not entirely on the work rather than the man. Mary Jo Deegan makes use of aspects of Park’s biography to illustrate what she sees as his disavowal of developing sociology as a moral science in the interest of objectivity. The article by Martin Bulmer addresses how Park came to understand what it meant to “do sociology” and Raymond Lee sees Park’s inquisitiveness as the guiding thread linking his journalism and sociology. Lee contends that in terms of sociological research, inquisitiveness was channeled by a theoretical orientation that was open to mixed methods research.

Lonnie Athens and Donald Reitzes address theoretical concerns, particularly as they pertain to Park’s place in relation to the pragmatist tradition, the work of George Herbert Mead and the emergence of symbolic interactionism. Athens offers a systematic comparison of Mead and Park on social action, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of both positions. Reitzes contends that Park’s contribution to social psychology has heretofore been underappreciated, and sets out to rectify that relative neglect. Peter Kivisto, Chad Alan Goldberg and Vince Marotta address aspects of Park’s contribution to race and ethnic relations, reflecting the centrality of this theme to his body of work taken as a whole. Kivisto explores Park’s understanding of assimilation, which has come to be known as the “canonical theory of assimilation.” Goldberg’s chapter engages in a parallel undertaking by exploring Park’s concept of the marginal man and the subsequent career of this concept. Marotta begins by noting that Park’s links to journalism and his focus on empirical investigation led many subsequent commentators to overlook the theoretical sophistication of his work. In his contribution, Marotta compares Park to contemporary critical race theorists. Coline Ruwet analyzes the shifts in his thinking about the city over the course of a quarter century. Specifically, she identifies three stages in the evolution of Park’s thinking. Anthony Blasi rounds out the collection, addressing a topic usually not associated with Park: religion.

Taken as a whole, it will be evident that these articles embrace no singular response to Park, but rather a broad range of responses, generally appreciative but also critical. The goal of this book is not to make a case for or against Park, but rather to encourage readers to consider the virtue of rethinking—and rereading—this major figure in American sociology. If one is left with a sense that we actually still do not know enough about Park the person and Park the sociologist, but that getting to know him on both fronts is important, then this companion will have served its purpose. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783086566

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The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA; Australian Catholic University, Australia; and University of Potsdam, Germany

Forthcoming titles

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion

to Robert Park

Edited by Peter Kivisto

Anthem Press

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CONTENTS

Chronology

Contributors

Index

Introduction

THE LEGACY OF ROBERT EZRA PARK

Peter Kivisto

Edward Shils was uniquely positioned to assess the importance of Robert Ezra Park during the maturation period of American sociology insofar as he was both a student of Park and, less than two decades later, a collaborator with Talcott Parsons in producing Toward a General Theory of Action (1951). Thus, he had an insider’s familiarity with both the Chicago school of sociology in its heyday and with Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations during the era that it achieved hegemonic status in American sociology. His decision to enroll as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago was predicated on what he had come to know about Park’s writings, though he had never taken a sociology course before arriving at the Midway. And, as it turned out, he managed to take only one course from Park, it being the last course he would ever teach at Chicago before retiring (Shils 1991: 121).

During the 1990s, Shils would write not one, but two appreciative remembrances of Park. Summing up his understanding of Park’s significance in the latter of these two works, he wrote, I would insist that he was one of the great sociologists who, like Weber and Durkheim and Tönnies, still has an important place among those great sociologists of the past. With Durkheim, Park was the only sociologist who understood something about the nature of collective self-consciousness (Shils 1996: 104).

In making these comparisons, Shils reminds us that Park was a contemporary of these scholars. Indeed, Park and Weber were born in the same year, 1864, the youngest of this group (Simmel, who Shils curiously does not mention, was born in 1858, the same year as Durkheim). This is worth observing because in some way Park seems to be closer to the present than his European counterparts. In part this can be explained by the fact that Durkheim, Simmel and Weber were all dead by 1920 and Tönnies was an emeritus professor by 1921, increasingly located on the margins of German university life as a consequence of his anti-fascist views. Meanwhile, Park lived until 1944, nearly to the end of World War II.

But I think there is another reason as well. If we treat the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Eric Hobsbawm suggested we ought to, we see the former as a long century (1789 to 1914 – extending from the French Revolution to the beginning of World War I) and the latter as a short one (from 1914 to 1991 – from World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union). From this perspective, Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies and Weber were to large extent nineteenth-century intellectuals, having produced most (though not all) of their major works before 1914. In contrast, Park’s sociological career began with his move to Chicago from Tuskegee in 1913 and thus coincided with the very beginning of the short twentieth century. His major sociological works did not begin to appear until two articles were published in 1913, and thus the body of sociological work for which he is known is very much located in the short twentieth century (which is not true of his journalistic writings, including his muckraking articles on the atrocities committed by the colonial functionaries of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo, or of his ghost writing for Booker T. Washington).

Who Was Robert E. Park?

Born on February 14, 1864, in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, near the end of the American Civil War, Park spent his formative years in Red Wing, Minnesota. He recounted to his biographer and former assistant, Winifred Raushenbush (1979: 6), an encounter with Jesse James when he was about 12 years old, when he provided the bandit with directions to the local blacksmith’s shop. Park left Minnesota to pursue his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he took courses from the philosopher John Dewey. After graduation, he worked as a journalist for a number of metropolitan newspapers in Chicago, Denver, Detroit and Minneapolis. During this time, he married Clara Cahill and in 1897 entered Harvard, continuing his studies in philosophy with William James, George Santayana and Josiah Royce.

Park’s first encounter with sociology occurred in 1899 at the University of Berlin when he attended Georg Simmel’s lectures. These lectures would comprise the sum total of Park’s formal instruction in sociology. Simmel’s influence was profound. Park came to share his conviction that modernity would express itself most tangibly in the city. Apropos of this, Park (1950: 167) once contended that the world could be divided between two classes: those who reached the city and those who have not yet arrived. Park’s sociology of modernity would focus on the extraordinarily heterogeneous subgroups of urban dwellers. What set Park apart from his mentor was his keen interest in the racial and ethnic groups that were migrating to cities. This was a reflection of his American roots because the significance of these differences was far more pronounced in American cities than in those in Simmel’s Germany.

Before embarking on developing his own sociological enterprise, however, Park made another extended departure from academe. After returning from Europe to Harvard, he completed his dissertation, which was translated seven decades later from German to English as The Crowd and the Public (1972). With a freshly minted PhD in hand, one might have expected Park to seek academic employment. Instead, he returned to his former profession as a journalist, this time as a freelance writer concerned with social reform. He became involved in the activities of the Congo Reform Association, an organization committed to educating the public about the cruel colonialist exploitation of the inhabitants of the Congo by Belgium, then under the leadership of King Leopold. Park served as secretary of the organization and penned a series of muckraking journalistic exposés with provocative titles, such as Blood-Money of the Congo and The Terrible Story of the Congo (see Lyman 1992 for a republication of these and related works, along with an in-depth analysis of them).

Through his involvement in the association, Park met Booker T. Washington, who invited Park to work for him as a press agent at Tuskegee Institute. Washington had first sought to hire W. E. B. Du Bois, but he rejected the offer. Park, on the other hand, accepted and thus began a seven-year stint in the Deep South, where he functioned as a public relations officer and ghost writer for Washington. The two traveled to Europe to scope out what would become a collaborative book, The Man Farthest Down (1913; see Sica’s (2012a: 411) reflections on this forgotten study). During Park’s extended period at Tuskegee, the white northerner would learn much about the racial conditions of the American South and about a rural-based African American culture. In his own mind, his immersion in the world of black southerners was such that, as he wrote in a statement prepared for Luther Bernard in the 1920s, I became, for all intents and purposes, for the time, a Negro myself (Baker 1973: 258). Near the end of his life, in a dictated autobiographical note, Park reflected that he had probably learned more about human nature and society, in the South under Booker Washington, than I had learned elsewhere in all my previous studies (Park 1950: vii).

Because of the growing tensions between Washington and Du Bois during these years, Park did not get to know the latter personally. Nonetheless, Park agreed with Du Bois about the importance of developing a leadership cadre for the black community, what Du Bois referred to as the talented tenth. Beyond this specific topic, references to Du Bois’s work in Park’s writings were always positive; St. Clair Drake (1983: 86) writes that Park expressed admiration for Du Bois in his private notes, and in fact in comparing Washington and Du Bois, he resisted praising one above the other (Drake 1983: 85). Beyond this appreciative response to Du Bois’s work, one could argue that there were parallels in Park’s and Du Bois’s writings that have not yet been fully explored.

Park’s academic career began only after this extended apprenticeship. At age 49, he was hired by W. I. Thomas, then head of the sociology department at the University of Chicago. The two had met at a conference held at Tuskegee, and it was obvious thereafter that they viewed each other as kindred spirits. In particular, they shared a commitment to empirical investigation and to what today would be called grounded theory. Paul Baker (1973: 244) observes that both men came to sociology with little or no interest in many of the intellectual issues prevalent in the sociological thought of their time or the heated debates which engaged early figures such as Sumner, Ward, Giddings, and Small. Rather, Baker (1973: 244) quite correctly notes, the two developed a keen sense for the ordinary affairs of people. Thomas’s forced departure from the university a few years later due to his arrest on a morals charge (charges subsequently dropped) paved the way for Park to be elevated to the chair’s position. As an indication of the close connection between Thomas and Park, in the wake of his firing the latter collaborated with Oberlin College’s Herbert A. Miller to publish in 1921 Old World Traits Transplanted which, Stow Persons (1987: 45–46) writes, was in fact the work of Thomas, but whose authorship was suppressed as a consequence of the scandal.

Park found an important ally in Ernest W. Burgess, who had obtained his PhD at the University of Chicago and, after one-year appointments at Toledo, Kansas and Ohio State, returned to Chicago, where he was to spend the rest of his academic career. Burgess had warm relations with Jane Addams and her associates at Hull House, though he and Park shared a conviction that for sociology to progress, it needed to separate itself to large extent from reform activities. The 1921 publication of their co-authored textbook, Introduction to the Science of Sociology – which became known as the Green Bible – served to codify their particular perspective on the emerging discipline. They identified various substantive concerns that they deemed central to sociology and articulated their commitment to empirical inquiry and to linking research to theory. In terms of theory, Park and Burgess were simultaneously influenced by human ecology and by a perspective that was concerned with meaningful social action as defined by the actors themselves. Alan Sica (2012b: 557) accurately summarized this book’s impact, writing that it singlehandedly shaped the Chicago tradition at its best in a way that no other textbook or sourcebook has since influenced any other major sociology department.

Park, who had become without question the central figure in the department, urged students to see Chicago as a laboratory. He tended to draw parallels between the sociologist and the journalist, seeing the former committed to studying the Big News. Rolf Linder (2006) has suggested that, rather than the reporter, Park’s model for the sociologist was actually the newspaper city-editor, whose goal was to find the proper balance between involvement and detachment. Operating from this perspective, the hallmark of Chicago school sociology was its devotion to ethnographic research, which entailed detailed and rich descriptions of discrete slices of social life, paying careful attention to the spatial dynamics framing social relations. Thus, a partial list of research by Chicago school graduates who came under Park’s influence either directly or after his departure from the department includes accounts of hoboes, gangs, jackrollers (i.e., muggers), race relations in small towns, the juxtaposition in Chicago of the gold coast and the slum, Chicago’s Jewish ghetto, the taxi dance hall (often a front for prostitution), the real estate industry in Chicago, the public school and the medical profession.

This image of the Chicago school as devoted singularly to qualitative research methods is well-established today, as a perusal of much subsequent sociological commentary makes abundantly clear. Such a view has percolated beyond disciplinary confines, as was on display in journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s New York Times Magazine article, The Changeling (2016), a sympathetic feature story on Alice Goffman in the wake of the controversy surrounding her ethnography of a group of young black men in Philadelphia constantly on the run from the law (Goffman 2015). Lewis-Kraus writes, People in Goffman’s camp trace their work to Robert E. Park and the so-called First Chicago School, which set itself to the project of understanding the new vigor and clash of the American city, then driven by the dynamism of industrialization and immigration. While this is not incorrect, it should not lead to the conclusion that the Chicago school was totally opposed to other methodologies. Park and his colleagues did not eschew quantitative sociology and in particular saw value in the social survey. In short, they were more open to other methods than what Lee Harvey (1987) describes as one of the persistent myths surrounding Chicago sociology would have it (see also Abbott 1999: 14).

Park was keenly interested in the impact of modern mobilities. A globalizing capitalism brought together, via mass migration, a wide array of racial and ethnic groups. Most ended up in burgeoning industrial cities. Though he saw this in global and civilizational terms, he was particularly concerned with delineating the processes of immigrant adjustment in the metropole (Kivisto 2004, 1993; Lyman 1992: 41–135; Vidich and Lyman 1985: 195–208). Moreover, he contended that the migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North paralleled the migrations of those crossing international borders – a view visually reinforced by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series paintings produced in 1940 and 1941. It was Park’s conviction that these two migrations could be understood in fundamentally the same way. In both cases, an essentially peasant folk from premodern, preindustrial communities was entering, and forced to adapt to, a modern, urban, industrial milieu. At the same time, he was also acutely aware of the fact that race – as a social construct and not as biological reality – played a profound role in perpetuating group differences and in putting a brake on assimilation.

Like political progressives of the era, he understood that in making the transition from their old parochial world to the new cosmopolitan one, immigrants frequently experienced painful dislocations that contributed to both psychological and social problems, such as mental illness, suicide and criminal activity. Resembling in some ways Simmel’s characterization of the stranger, Park saw the immigrant as a marginal man (a concept that, though not named as such, Persons [1987" 46] contends had its origins in Thomas’s work). Writing at a time when anti-immigration sentiment was at a peak, Park was a sympathetic defender of immigrants, opposing calls for the rapid Americanization of newcomers. Like progressives such as Jane Addams, Park urged tolerance and acceptance as an antidote to ethnocentrism.

Thus, in key respects, Park’s thought resembled that of Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, both advocates of cultural pluralism. The cultural pluralists sought to preserve distinctive ethnic and racial groups; Kallen went so far as to suggest that democracy required such diversity. Bourne saw a special vibrancy in immigrant culture that he hoped would revitalize what he perceived to be a rather static and unimaginative national culture. Park considered himself a hard-boiled realist, and he probably thought that Kallen and Bourne were in some ways hopeless romantics. Like this duo, Park appreciated cultural diversity and was an opponent of Anglo conformity. Unlike these two intellectuals, however, Park largely confined himself in his published works to depicting current realities and short-term future trends that could reasonably be predicted from those realities, sticking to is rather than ought.

At the interpersonal level, Park understood what race differences could mean for intergroup relations. In an insightful essay titled Behind Our Masks (1950), he explored the implications of race relations in situations in which people are compelled to wear their race like a mask. The essay is in part indebted to his former teacher, Simmel, especially his essay The Aesthetic Significance of the Face (Simmel 1959: 276–81), and in part to Harlem Renaissance poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s (1974) poem, We Wear the Mask. Park contended that in societies in which racial differences are considered especially significant, people wear their race like a mask. As a result, people from other races see the person merely as an essentially interchangeable representative of the race. Thus, racial masks prevent people from being seen as individuals. Park concluded by suggesting that in such societies, race relations will be characterized by considerable tension and conflict.

Park was not so pessimistic, however, as to conclude that race was an intractable social problem. He saw in the crucible of modern life, the city – with its social differentiation, mobility, and fragmentary characteristics – new kinds of social relations emerging that had the potential of rendering race a less salient force in social life. Likewise, advances in mass communication were seen as having the potential to reduce levels of group isolation and encourage greater tolerance and mutual respect. Thus, like Simmel, Park’s understanding of modern culture does not contain an unbridled optimism. Rather, its tempered endorsement of modernity was the result of his awareness of the paradoxical character of the age.

Park retired from the University of Chicago in 1933 and took up residence in Nashville, teaching part-time at Fisk University until his death on February 7, 1944. His former student, Charles Sturgeon Johnson, was a member of the sociology department at the time. Johnson is remembered for his work on the Illinois Commission on Race Relations report on the causes of the 1919 race riot in Chicago. After completing his PhD at Chicago, Johnson moved to New York City to work for the National Urban League and as an advocate for the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. He returned to academe at the historically black institution and became its first black president in 1946, two years after Park’s death. The building that houses the Sociology Department at Fisk is named after Johnson and Park.

Park succeeded in training a generation of sociologists, many of whom would in turn become major forces in the discipline, including Herbert Blumer, the founding figure of the theoretical perspective known as symbolic interactionism, Everett C. Hughes, E. Franklin Frazier (the first black president of the American Sociological Society) and Louis Wirth. These former students in turn trained yet another generation of graduate students.

How Has Park Been Remembered?

How was Park received within the discipline during his lifetime, and how has he been received subsequently? In raising these questions, one raises another question that from our retrospective position calls for making sense of what it means to talk about a Chicago school and, if it can be said to exist, what has it wrought (Faris, 1967; Matthews 1977; Persons 1987). The idea of a distinctive school – though distinctive in precisely what ways is not always clear – has been part of the historiography of American sociology since at least the works of figures such as Floyd House (1936), Luther and Jessie Bernard (1943) and Howard Odum (1951). Indeed, subsequent commentaries have speculated about whether one can talk about generational succession and about whether as a consequence we ought to talk about two or more Chicago schools (Smith 1988: 3–4; Fine 1995). Putting such work into perspective, Andrew Abbott (1999: 1), reflecting on the centenary of a sociology department at Chicago, contends that the Chicago school … was not a thing, a fixed arrangement of social relationships or intellectual ideas that obtained at a given time. It was rather a tradition of such relationships and ideas combined with a conception of how that tradition should be reproduced over time. Park, was, obviously, an important part of that tradition, and has generally been depicted as such.

However, writing from the perspective of the twenty-first century, over seven decades after Park’s death, one might continue to ponder how he is remembered today, or even how he was remembered much earlier. Sociology is not alone in forgetting its predecessors, the pathfinders from a bygone time, and it is not surprising that one response to Park has been to simply ignore him. Like so many others, one can ask, as Chad Alan Goldberg does herein, Who now reads Robert Park? The Structure of Social Action (1949 [1937]), the tome that launched Talcott Parsons’s career and set off the Who now reads […]? question in the discipline, makes no reference to Park, who was very much alive when the book appeared. For Parsons, the intellectual traditions that resonated with his intellectual trajectory were to be found on the other side of the Atlantic. One can peruse the rest of Parsons’s books and discover that there is no evidence that he acquired subsequent interest in Park. In A Short Account of My Intellectual Development, he mentioned that his Harvard colleague, the biochemist L. J. Henderson had great respect for Park’s work, and for Park, whom he knew as a fellow student at Strasbourg (Parsons 1959: 7). But Parsons says nothing that would suggest that he came to hold Park in similar regard.

Parsons lived to see his own work, not ignored, but attacked relentlessly during what Stephen Turner (2014: 44) calls the crisis of the 1970s. Only later would sociological pundits direct the "Who now reads […]? question squarely at Parsons. But what about the critics of Parsons who saw him as representative of the sociological mainstream? Did they seek to rehabilitate Park? The answer is, no. Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) was perhaps the most influential of these broadsides against the discipline. It is very much a presentist argument. As Abbott (1999: 11) observes, Gouldner’s sights were set on Parsonian structural-functionalism, and one might add that his subsequent efforts to embrace a critical Marxism signaled a rethinking of his own Marxist biography in one of the leftist alcoves in the cafeteria at City College rather than an effort to explore more broadly into American sociology’s pre-Parsonian past (Kivisto 2011: 79).

But forgetting has not been the only response. Over a period of decades one can find biting criticisms of Park. I will point to three such efforts that span a four-decade period. The first appeared at a moment of Marxist ascendancy in American sociology: Herman and Julia Schwendinger’s The Sociologists of the Chair (1974), which claimed to employ a historical materialist mode of analysis. They contended that capitalism’s ideological underpinnings had shifted over time from what they call classical to laissez-faire, and then in the latter part of the nineteenth century – concurrent with the rise of sociology as an academic discipline – to corporate capitalism. Sociology is portrayed as a tool of corporate capitalism in a writing style characterized by its flatness and one-dimensionality. The early proponents of American sociology are uniformly accused of being technocrats and exponents of imperialism, as well as being sexists to a man, and racists. Park is characterized as a technocratic urban ethnographer with a belief in natural law theory (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974: 290).

Whereas the Schwendingers engaged in a broadside directed at American sociology writ large, the next two books focus on the Chicago school. The first, by Mary Jo Deegan (see her contribution herein), examines the relationship between Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School (1988). In her estimation, the earliest figures at Chicago, under the leadership of Albion Small, developed a symbiotic relationship with Jane Addams and her associates at Hull House and likewise shared a common vision about sociological research and its role in informing social reform. The book’s aim is to lay claim to Jane Addams as a founding figure in American sociology, which Deegan asserts has not been heretofore appreciated because of the efforts of Park and his colleagues to erase from memory the contributions of Addams, Small and their respective collaborators. Deegan’s description of Park is unflattering: he is gruff, egotistical, and motivated by a virulent ideology against social reform (Deegan 1988: 22–23). The textbook he coauthored with Burgess is depicted as laying the foundation of patriarchal sociology (Deegan 1988: 216). The goal of Deegan’s book, thus, is to rehabilitate Addams’s reputation, seeking, as Stephen Turner (2014: 4) puts it, the canonization of Jane Addams […] as a lost foremother of sociology. To do so, Deegan finds it necessary to undertake a thoroughgoing repudiation of the legacy of Park and his associates.

Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied (2015) has a similar objective, only in this case replacing Addams with W. E. B. Du Bois as the legitimate originator of an American sociology characterized by a coherent theoretical orientation and original methodological approach. However, all of this would be ignored by Park and his Chicago colleagues. Park is portrayed in starkly negative terms: not only did he remain locked into biological notions of the racial inferiority of blacks, but in fact harbored proslavery sentiments (Morris 2015: 127). Morris’s book argues that Park advanced Booker T. Washington’s desire to marginalize Du Bois, with whom relations had soured, and this meant ignoring his scholarship, in effect erasing his major contributions to the nascent discipline. As Morris (2015: 141) describes it, Park and the Chicago school locked Du Bois out of the intellectual fraternity of sociology by systematically ignoring his scholarship. This is a curious claim given that a few pages earlier in the text Morris (2015: 137–38) points out that Park cited The Souls of Black Folk in several publications and assigned it in a class he taught at Chicago. Moreover, Park cited other works as well, including The Philadelphia Negro. Despite this and similar evidence, Morris contends that Du Bois had an impact on sociology that largely went unrecognized, appropriated but unappreciated.

In both Deegan’s and Morris’s accounts Park is not the central figure, but rather the anti-hero responsible for preventing their respective heroes from attaining their rightful places in the sociological pantheon. A counter-narrative might contend that over time neither Addams nor Du Bois came to view the sociological vocation as their proper calling, if it ever really had been. In an age when sociology was becoming professionalized in the academy, and disciplinary boundaries were taking hold, their roles as public intellectuals and social reformers placed them on far larger stages where such boundaries could be impediments to their much more consequential public roles. Put another way, as Kwame Anthony Appiah (2014: 163) has done regarding Du Bois, but might be extended to Addams, what one saw was a move from sociology to soteriology.

A third type of response – which is most typical – is to offer critical but largely favorable accounts of Park’s work. A substantial body of scholarly attention devoted to Park and the Chicago school appeared over a two-decade period beginning around the mid-1970s, though, as Abbott (1999: 10) has noted, the stage was set by 1960s works of Robert E. L. Faris and James Carey, both holding doctorates from Chicago and thus writing with an insider’s perspective. Two books published in the late 1970s have since become invaluable sources for scholars who followed: historian Fred Matthews’s Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (1977), and reporter and former assistant to Park, Winifred Raushenbush’s Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist (1979). Raushenbush, the daughter of the Social Gospel minister Walter Raushenbush and mother of the philosopher Richard Rorty, served as Park’s assistant during his project on race relations on the Pacific coast (Gross 2008: 63–83). Encouraging Raushenbush over many years to complete the book, Everett Hughes wrote a foreword that summarizes well what the book is and is not: This book is the story of Park’s enterprises, that is to say, his research projects. This book makes no claims for Park’s theories. It tells ‘how he did it’ (Hughes 1979: viii).

In contrast, Matthews presents a careful, critical, yet sympathetic intellectual history of Park, his scholarship and his role in making the Chicago school what it would become during its moment of hegemony. Matthews’s judiciousness can be seen, for example, in his analysis of Park’s characterizations of racial temperaments, which he observes was a view shared by many early-twentieth-century thinkers, including W. E. B. Du Bois (Matthews 1977: 172). Summing up his overall assessment of Park, Matthews (1979: 192) writes, While much of Park’s significance lies in his advocacy of value neutrality in the pursuit of truth, in a broader sense the purpose of sociology was deeply moral: knowledge was not only enriching but integrative.

Like Matthews, numerous other studies sought to locate Park’s work in terms of a larger project under way at Chicago, dating either from the founding of the sociology department under Albion Small or in some cases beginning with a presumed shift in focus under the leadership of Thomas, Park, or both men. Thus, Martin Bulmer’s (1984) institutional focus traces out the emergence of a research tradition, aided by the ability to obtain significant levels of external funding. Stow Persons (1987) makes a case for the development of a distinctive but changing approach to ethnic studies that originated with Thomas, was further elaborated by Park and was taken up and reshaped in various ways by others, his account ending with an analysis of the work of E. Franklin Frazier. Dennis Smith (1988) offers a counter-narrative to the Schwendingers, arguing that rather than being tools of capitalism, the members of the Chicago school collectively, but in distinctive individual ways, offered a liberal critique of capitalism. Paul Rock (1979) argues that the most important impact of the Chicago school to the discipline in general was due to the fact that it laid the groundwork for symbolic interactionism. In this regard, Park’s contribution was to bring Simmel’s work into fruitful interaction with American pragmatism (see Abbott 1999: 12).

Park’s