At the outset, William R. Harper defined the University of Chicago as an institution committed to rigorous standards of research, yet open to the broadest engagement with American society. "Democracy," he wrote, "has scarcely begun to understand itself. It is in the university that the best opportunity is afforded to investigate the movements of the past and to present the facts and principles involved before the public. It is the university that, as the center of thought, is to maintain for democracy the unity so essential for its success."
The important position of the social sciences in this program emerged early in Harper's recruitment of faculty. Albion Small, the president of Colby College, was persuaded to come to Chicago and head an academic department of sociology. Like others Harper recruited, Small seized the opportunity to devote himself to research in his chosen field. "I must put the bulk of my time in on my special work, and in the supervision of courses in...Sociology," he wrote. "Our Chicago scheme is the first on this continent to provide for Social Science a chance to be fundamental and comprehensive."
As epitomized by Small, the first generation of social scientists at Chicago saw research as a tool for the promotion of reform. An ordained Baptist minister, Small favored secular scholarship over the pulpit. Nonetheless, like Biblical scholar Harper, he shared liberal Protestant expectations that scientific research into the problems of society would lay the path to a more equitable American democracy. In the first issue of the American Journal of Sociology, which he founded, Small wrote, "I would have American scholars, especially in the social sciences, declare their independence of do-nothing traditions. I would have them repeal the law of custom which bars marriage of thought with action." Sharing the pages of the Journal in the early years were other reformers with strong religious backgrounds, including Jane Addams of Hull House, whose father was a Congregationalist minister, and Charles R. Henderson and Shailer Mathews, both clergymen and professors in the University's Divinity School.
For more secular scholars such as sociologists Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Chicago was a ideal subject for systematic research that displayed nearly every human condition compressed into a single, crowded urban mass. In their classic book The City (1925), Park and Burgess argued that city life offered all of human society simultaneously, something that scholars investigating isolated tribes in remote locations could never encounter. "The same patient methods of observation which anthropologists like Boas and Lowies have expended in the study of the life and manners of the North American Indian," wrote Burgess, "might be more fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and general conceptions of life in Little Italy on the lower North Side of Chicago..."
Drawing on their studies of social conditions in Chicago, Park and Burgess developed generalized theories of urban ecology which explored how cities became divided into separate zones by class and function. They believed that cities had a natural history which if examined and analyzed could explain urban cultural patterns. Under the guidance of Park and Burgess, a whole generation of young sociologists explored Chicago to locate problems and populations that could provide data on which to base explanatory models.
The studies produced by these investigators relied on personal contacts between researchers and their subjects. Sociology students were trained to find individuals who typified a particular social problem, a juvenile delinquent or dance hall girl or someone else on the margins of conventional society, and observe and interview them at length. The best of the field research generated by this method was that which captured most fully the life and character of the subjects. In his preface to Clifford Shaw's The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story (1930), Burgess described the ideal "life-history documents" as microscopes through which to view "the interplay of mental processes and social relationships." Burgess praised Shaw's study, which followed a single delinquent boy for six years, as a "perfect" example of this type of scientific research.
Another student of Burgess, Nels Anderson, had lived and traveled with hobos before coming to the University to study sociology. As a researcher, Anderson moved into the Madison-Halsted area known as Hobohemia and began interviewing homeless men for their life histories. Afterward, their reminiscences were supplemented with the written records of city welfare agencies so that his subjects' accounts were both verified and enlarged. Anderson's interviews, some running as long as 150 pages, were incorporated into his monograph, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (1923).
The intensely personal accounts of individuals collected by the University's sociologists revealed the city of Chicago as a burgeoning metropolis colored by endless hard-luck stories and disturbing verities. The literature of Chicago sociology as it accumulated during the 1920s and 1930s pulsed with vivid tales of drifters, gamblers and hoodlums, domestic strife, sexual vice, the dangers of industrial occupations, the tensions of assimilation, and the powerful undercurrents of group and class.
Ethnic diversity has always been a important element of Chicago's character. Before the Civil War, German, Scandanavian, and Irish immigrants had clustered in separate neighborhoods of the city. In the later nineteenth century, Italians, Poles, Chinese, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and peoples of other nationalities arrived in Chicago by the thousands and established distinct communities. By the turn of the century and in the years thereafter, a great internal migration brought African-Americans from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and other southern states to the South Side and West Side of the city.
The first Chicago sociologist to examine one of these ethnic communities in detail was W. I. Thomas, who began graduate work at the University in 1892 and completed his PhD under Albion Small in 1896. With funds provided by Helen Culver, an important benefactor of the University and of Hull House, Thomas spent ten years researching Polish society and Polish immigration to America. The results of his study, written in collaboration with Florian Znaniecki, were published in five volumes as The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20). Thomas was particularly concerned with the difficulties of assimilation, describing how the rapid cultural changes encountered in Chicago weakened Polish group cohesion and created an individualism that strained marriages, spurred teenagers to leave home, and led to violence.
The decisive impact of Thomas and Znaniecki's study was due less to the actual data presented than the choice of subject and methodology. Although both Thomas and Znaniecki left the Unversity while the publication of The Polish Peasant was still underway, their work set in motion Chicago's strong tradition of ethnic studies. For the Chicago sociologists, the ideal terrain of social analysis lay at points of stress. In showing how individuals or groups deviated from or accommodated to the mainstream, these social scientists hoped to provide data for reforms that would make possible a more complete assimilation of ethnic groups.
Under the guidance of Park and Burgess, an unprecedentedly wide range of race and ethnic studies was produced. Of the fifty-one sociology dissertations written at the University between 1919 and 1930, twenty-five related to race and ethnicity, far more than those of any other topic.
Park had accumulated extensive experience of his own in the field. Prior to his appointment to the University faculty, he had served as secretary to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute and developed a deep interest in race relations and the culture of African-Americans. In his view, sociology could help accelerate black assimilation into American society.
Park, a former journalist, had also written a book about Chicago's foreign language press. At a time when many Americans regarded the prevalence of immigrant newspapers as a threat, Park interpreted them as a means of further assimilation into the broader society. Later work turned Park again to issues of race relations, which he felt some sociologists were not yet approaching objectively. One of the first sociologists to send students to investigate Chicago neighborhoods troubled by racial conflict, Park viewed racism as an inevitable cycle in human relations, but he believed it would be overcome gradually as society evolved.
Louis Wirth, a student of Park and Burgess, maintained that fundamental research concerning the effects of discrimination and ethnic conflicts could help develop social policy for housing, urban planning, and race relations. In The Ghetto (1928), Wirth examined the consequences of centuries of discrimination on Jewish community life, ranging from Renaissance Italy to Chicago's Maxwell Street. The Ghetto served as a model for the University's researchers in ethnicity, many of whom later studied under Wirth when he joined the University's faculty.
While most of the studies of race relations were conducted by the whites who made up the bulk of the Sociology Department, Park, Burgess, and Wirth also attracted a highly capable group of African-American scholars, many of whom were to have distinguished careers in the social sciences. Among them were Charles S. Johnson, America's first professionally trained black sociologist, who later served as president of Fisk University. Another, E. Franklin Frazier, examined the combined issues of family and race in his 1932 study, The Negro Family in Chicago. Frazier subsequently taught at Howard University and was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1948.
As an academic committed to social action, Louis Wirth became involved in numerous groups, committees, and associations concerned with the effects of racial prejudice on community life. He was a founder and president of the Chicago-based American Council on Race Relations, which sponsored research into problems of fair employment, education, housing, and integration. In 1947, with funds from the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, Wirth also established the Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations at the University of Chicago. Led by Wirth, demographer Philip Hauser, and anthropologist Sol Tax, the Committee played a key role in addressing the social and political factors underlying racial discrimination in the city of Chicago.
Faculty research on urban problems was spurred in 1923 with a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial for the creation of the Local Community Research Committee. The Committee, later renamed the Social Science Research Committee and strengthened by additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, was an important source of funding for numerous Chicago-based studies by University sociologists, historians, and political scientists.
The range of this work was apparent in the volume edited by T. V. Smith and Leonard D. White, Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research (1929). In its first six years, the Committee had supported investigations of municipal employment in Chicago, patterns of city development, delinquency and crime, rooming houses, the suburban community, the response of churches to racial issues, the Chicago building trades, parks and recreation, and numerous other subjects bearing on the city. University faculty and graduate students working on Committee-funded Chicago research included Park, Burgess, Abbott, Breckinridge, Charles Merriam, Paul Cressey, Norman Hayner, Walter Reckless, and many others.
Among those supported by the Committee was political scientist Harold Gosnell, who fixed his attention on the critical issue of voting behavior. His first study, Non-Voting: Causes and Methods of Control (1924), written with Charles Merriam, ultilized statistical sampling techniques to examine the drop in voter participation in the 1923 Chicago mayoralty election. Following up with a series of monographs, including The Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (1935) and Machine Politics: Chicago Model (1937), Gosnell applied the latest social survey methodologies to an exploration of the city's legendary political topography.
The Committee also funded the research of Bessie Louise Pierce, who was brought to Chicago in 1929 as an associate professor of history and head of the History of Chicago Project. Originally conceived as a centennial history of the city, the Project was recast by Pierce as a comprehensive survey of all relevant historical records for a definitive history of Chicago from 1673 to 1915. The Field Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, Chicago Historical Society, and Schermerhorn Charitable Trust provided additional support for the Project. Working with student assistants, Pierce directed research that produced a compilation of travel accounts, As Others See Chicago (1933), and three volumes of A History of Chicago (1937-1957) describing the city's growth through the conclusion of the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Although the final volume of Pierce's study remained unfinished at her death in 1974, the History of Chicago Project marked an important advance in the development of modern urban history.
As work on the History proceeded, Pierce also helped direct the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, a project organized in 1936 by the WPA. Under the sponsorship of the Chicago Public Library, the Press Survey located and translated thousands of articles from scores of newspapers published in Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods. More than twenty language communities were represented, from Lithuanian, Slovene, and Filipino to Chinese, Albanian, German, Greek, and Ukranian. The Press Survey provided important information on the acculturation of recent immigrants and their efforts to assimilate with other groups and American society at large.
Urban geography, demography, and planning are fields in which University researchers have encountered the broadest array of urban issues. Here, as with the more tightly focused studies of the Chicago sociologists, the city was both a convenient setting for research and the embodiment of the tensions and dynamics of the modern metropolis.
One of the earliest University faculty members to become involved in these issues was geographer J. Paul Goode, who served as an "expert investigator" for the Chicago Harbor Commission in 1908-09. Goode visited port facilities in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and a number of European cities and defined the economic benefits of substantial harbor development in Chicago.
In Goode's deterministic view, Chicago was "A City of Destiny," its population, industry, and wealth a consequence of its physical location at the center of a vast tributary area rich in resources. Speaking before the Geographic Society of Chicago in 1923, Goode predicted that if "industrial and commercial development continue to go along present lines, this great urban vortex . . . may well look forward to a population of twelve to fifteen million, before the present century is ended. And there is no discoverable reason why commercial supremacy should ever depart from us."
While not sharing Goode's boosterish enthusiasm, other University scholars joined in the effort to understand Chicago's growth and chart its diverse population. In 1938, the Social Science Research Committee, the National Youth Administration, the Federal Writers' Project, and other sources funded a systematic Chicago survey, the Local Community Fact Book (1938). Edited by Louis Wirth and his assistant Margaret Furez, the Fact Book divided the city into seventy-five distinct communities and developed statistical profiles of each derived from the latest Chicago census data. The information on housing population proved so useful to Chicago public agencies and community organizations that a new Local Community Fact Book was published in 1949 and with each decennial census thereafter.
Further development of demographic knowledge of the city was made possible by the work of sociologist Philip Hauser, who studied with Park, Burgess, and their colleague William F. Ogburn, a specialist in statistical methods, before moving through a series of federal census positions and joining the University faculty in 1947. With Evelyn Kitagawa, Hauser edited the 1950 census edition of the Local Community Fact Book (1953) and produced studies of statistical standards, population growth, and government policy. A believer in the application of scholarly research to social problems, Hauser was also involved in the Chicago Community Inventory, the Population Research and Training Center, and the Advisory Panel on Integration in the Chicago Public Schools.
Urban geographer Harold Mayer, another academic in public affairs, joined the Chicago Land Use Survey as a graduate student in geography in 1939. Working under Homer Hoyt, Mayer helped produce a systematic compilation of data and maps identifying land usage throughout the city as well as other studies for the Chicago Plan Commission including The Calumet Industrial Area: A Preface to a Comprehensive Development Plan (1942). Mayer succeeded Hoyt as director of research for the Commission from 1948 to 1950, and as a member of the University faculty was later appointed to the Chicago Regional Port District Board. At the request of Mayor Richard J. Daley, he also prepared a comprehensive report on The Port of Chicago and the St. Lawrence Seaway (1957). In contrast to his predecessor Goode, Mayer argued that Chicago was "A City of Decisions," faced with critical choices as it confronted the problems of urban expansion, deterioration of neighborhoods, and the need for integrated transportation systems. "[T]he destiny of a city is not predetermined," Mayer told the Geographic Society in 1955. "Nature offers opportunities. Man decides when and how to utilize them."
Recognizing the need to coordinate graduate training and the research of faculty such as Hauser and Mayer, the University in 1963 formed the Center for Urban Studies. Supported with federal and foundation grants, the Center examined individual and family life, the governmental and political process, and the role of the city in economic and cultural change. Urban affairs have also figured in the work of the Committee on Public Policy Studies and in the programs of its successor, the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, established in 1990.
In 1894, the University's Christian Union established the University of Chicago Settlement in the congested immigrant neighborhood southwest of the Chicago stockyards known as the Back of the Yards or Packingtown. Like Hull House, Chicago Commons, and other settlement houses in the city, the University Settlement sought to promote child and adult education, improve working conditions, and help immigrants assimilate effectively into American life. The University offered extension courses and public lectures at Chicago settlement houses, and faculty members such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead became involved in the conception and direction of settlement programs.
The University of Chicago Settlement League was formed in 1895 as a social and philanthropic organization of University women interested in supporting the work of the University of Chicago Settlement. Led initially by women such as Mrs. William R. Harper, Mrs. Charles Zueblin, and Mrs. Harry P. Judson, the Settlement League was open to female members of the University faculty, wives of faculty members, students, alumnae, and non-University women committed to the settlement cause. The League staged fundraising events in support of clubs, classes, and improved facilities at the Settlement and programs to promote acculturation of neighborhood residents. League members also worked as volunteers at the Settlement, supported legislation for compulsory school attendance and other reforms, and backed efforts by Mary McDowell, the Settlement's head resident, to clean up garbage dumps and build public bathhouses and playgrounds in the Back-of-the-Yards.
The University Settlement never had a formal affiliation with the University, and Mary McDowell fought successfully to maintain its independence. Through the work of the Settlement League and contacts made by student social workers and faculty, however, the Settlement offered members of the early University community what was perhaps their closest contact with poor and working-class Chicagoans. From its initial quarters in a walk-up apartment, the Settlement grew to occupy a substantial complex of buildings on Gross (later McDowell) Avenue, complete with a school and gymnasium. In 1923, League member Shirley Farr helped expand the Settlement's program by providing funds for the creation of a permanent summer camp near Chesterton, Indiana.
By the 1950s, the League, renamed the University of Chicago Service League, was dividing its resouces between the Settlement and a series of new programs in the University's own community, including support for more than seventy organized youth groups through the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club. The Settlement was enentually merged with the Chicago Commons Association and its buildings demolished, but the League continued to maintain an interest in the old stockyards neighborhood through the Association's South Side Services Area and the annual summer camp, now known as Camp Brueckner-Farr.
Although he was firmly committed to the virtues of academic research, William R. Harper understood at the founding of the University that scholars could become narrowly preoccupied with their own work and isolated from social realities. Endorsing the creation of the University of Chicago Settlement, he pointed out that the Settlement was "not a missionary effort but a necessity to counteract the selfishness of the intellectual life of the University." Support for the social and philanthropic activities of the Settlement League and the Service League represented part of the effort to right the balance.
The training of social workers in Chicago began in 1894, when Graham Taylor, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, sponsored a series of lectures at Chicago Commons, the settlement house he had founded. In 1903, Taylor and William R. Harper collaborated in establishing a social work curriculum in the University's Extension Division, but the institutional ties were frail and dissolved quickly after Harper's death in 1906.
Taylor immediately reconstituted his courses under the auspices of the Chicago Commons and in 1908, with the aid of a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, founded the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, the nation's first full-time school of social work. Julia Lathrop, a Hull House resident, was recruited to direct training in social survey work, and Sophonisba Breckinridge, a political economist in the University's Department of Household Administration, was brought in as her assistant. Breckinridge was the first woman to complete a PhD in political science at the University and the first woman to receive a degree from its Law School. Soon thereafter, Edith Abbott, a Wellesley faculty member who held a University of Chicago doctorate in political economy, joined the staff of the Chicago School.
Although the Chicago School was successful in attracting students, Breckinridge grew frustrated with a curriculum that was limited to vocational training and sources of funding that were increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of the profession. Encouraged by Julius Rosenwald, a trustee of the Chicago School and a trustee and generous supporter of the University, Breckinridge in 1920 negotiated the basis for a merger of Taylor's school with the University. With Taylor's reluctant endorsement, the training curriculum re-emerged under University auspices as the School of Social Service Administration (SSA), a graduate program providing education in social service techniques but emphasizing professional studies and a theoretical approach to social issues.
With Edith Abbott as dean, SSA strengthened existing ties within the Chicago social services community and developed new links. Attracted by the School's location and scholarship programs, between a fourth and a third of SSA's student body was drawn from the city of Chicago. Abbott promoted Chicago settings for field research and worked closely with agencies such as United Charities of Chicago in securing placement for graduating students. New specializations such as medical and psychiatric social work were the basis for programs and placements at the University of Chicago hospitals, Cook County Hospital, Children's Memorial Hospital, and other local medical institutions.
Abbott's integration of the SSA curriculum with the social needs of the Chicago community was maintained by her successors following her retirement in 1942. Fieldwork, theses, and monographs by SSA students and faculty continued to emphasize the importance of Chicago as a setting for social analysis and reform. In 1969, following a feasibility study of the need for a clinical field facility and supported by funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, SSA established the Woodlawn Social Services Center. Providing employment services, vocational rehabilitation, youth programs, and early childhood development counseling, the Woodlawn Center marked an effective interaction of academic studies with government policy and the life of a Chicago neighborhood.
In an effort to link the University more closely with the city, and as an expression of his desire for the coordinating all levels of American education, William R. Harper in 1896 agreed to serve on the Chicago Board of Education. While on the Board, he headed the Educational Commission which conducted a year-long study into ways to remove the governance of the Chicago public schools from the realm of political patronage. The Commission issued its report in 1898, but its recommendations were blocked by political interests in City Hall. The report was finally approved by the city government in 1917 after several years of school reform under Superintendent Ella Flagg Young, who had studied and taught at the University.
For much of this period, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools served as an important counterpoint to the educational practices prevailing in the public schools. Though linked most notably with the reputation of John Dewey, the Laboratory Schools were in fact the union of several elementary and secondary educational institutions incorporated within the University at the turn of the century.
In 1896, a University Elementary School was established by Dewey to serve as a workshop for classroom observation and the testing of educational method; known as the Dewey School or the Laboratory School, it soon attracted national attention and supported Dewey's growing reputation among progressive educators. Five years later, William R. Harper negotiated the acquisition and consolidation of three independent Chicago institutions. Two local secondary schools, the Chicago Manual Training School and the South Side Academy, were merged to form the University High School. The Chicago Institute, a private teachers' college founded by Anita McCormick Blaine in 1899, was incorporated as the College of Education. The Institute's elementary school was amalgamated with the University Elementary School and the University Kindergarten.
This massive reorganization gave the University a complete educational system extending from kindergarten to the graduate level which was to have an important influence on the development of education both within the city and nationally. It was not without its casualties, however. Colonel Francis W. Parker, the highly respected educational reformer who was head of the Chicago Institute, died a year after the consolidation. Dewey, whose plans for the School of Education could not be reconciled with Harper's, resigned in 1904 and left for Columbia University. Under Charles H. Judd and William S. Gray, the School of Education shifted its emphasis to fields such as educational psychology and testing, but it continued to influence educators at the elementary, secondary, and college levels.
Many of the Laboratory Schools' central educational tenets were promoted in the Chicago public school system by Ella Flagg Young, one of Dewey's most gifted students. Young came to the University in 1899 at the age of fifty-four with a substantial record of administrative and teaching experience. Within a year she had completed her PhD in education and joined the University faculty, where she developed sixteen new courses, edited a journal for teachers, and administered the Dewey School. After leaving the University in the wake of Dewey's departure, Young went on to become principal of the Chicago Normal School and from 1909 to 1915 the superintendent of the Chicago public schools, the first women to head a major school system in the United States.
As superintendent, Young initiated a variety of reforms based on her work with Dewey. Among them were the first programs in vocational training and the reorganization of the mathematics and English curricula to replace rote memorization with exercises more directly tied to everyday experience. She also instituted in practice Dewey's theory of democratic education. In a radical departure for an administrator of her time, she encouraged teachers to help shape curricula and operate schools, as was the pattern at the Laboratory Schools. Teacher councils established at Young's direction eventually grew into the Chicago Teachers' Federation. Many of the recent reform efforts in the Chicago public school system, including the establishment of local school councils, mirror Young's commitment to progressive educational ideals.
THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY:
A Centennial View of the University of Chicago