The Human Drama Behind the Study of
People as Potato Bugs
The Curious Marriage of Robert E. Park and Clara Cahill Park
MARY JO DEEGAN University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
ABSTRACT Robert E. Park played a central part in defining sociology as a natural
science. He imagined sociologists as unbiased and unaffected by the human
behavior they studied. He particularly criticized the work of female sociologists
who applied their sociological knowledge with the help of hundreds of thousands
of clubwomen. He mocked these clubwomen and their ‘do-goodism’. Clara
Cahill Park, his wife, was one of these clubwomen who engaged in all the work he
mocked and she was allied with female sociologists. This resulted in a curious
situation where Park supported his wife and engaged in social reform while
simultaneously he criticized clubwomen and the work of applied sociologists.
KEYWORDS applied sociology, Chicago school of race relations, Chicago school
of sociology, Clara Cahill Park, marriage, Robert E. Park
Robert E. Park played a central part in defining sociology as a natural science. He
imagined sociologists as unbiased and unaffected by the human behavior they
studied: ‘their role was to be “the calm, detached scientist who investigates race
relations with the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist
dissects the potato bug”’1 (Ernest W. Burgess, cited by Matthews, 1977: 116).
This metaphor attacked the earlier intention of many founders of sociology who
envisioned sociology as a moral science. These founders studied society to learn
how to alleviate poverty, create social justice and enhance human freedom
(Becker, 1971; Deegan, 1988; Feagin and Vera, 2001).
Park’s assault on sociology as a moral science included his aversion to what
he called ‘do-goodism’. He particularly criticized the work of female sociologists
who applied their sociological knowledge with the help of hundreds of thousands
of clubwomen. These women changed American society and instituted a plethora
Journal of Classical Sociology
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 6(1): 101–122 DOI: 10.1177/1468795X06061288
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of laws and government programs concerning the rights of workers, immigrants,
the disabled, children and mothers. These sociologists were fundamental to the
creation of the welfare state in the United States (Deegan, 1987, 1991, 1995,
1997; Goodwin, 1997; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998; Skocpol,
1992). An example of Park’s view of the relation between women, politics and
sociology is found in an account recorded by a former student, Theodore K. Noss.
Here Noss notes a particularly extreme exchange between Park and a female
student who engaged in social reform and was apparently a Quaker – as were
many female sociologists: for example, Edith Abbott, Jane Addams, Emily Greene
Balch and Florence Kelley (Deegan, 1987, 1991). After castigating Quakers’ ‘selfrighteous
meddling in the abolition movement’, Park allegedly claimed ‘that the
greatest damage done to the city of Chicago was not the product of corrupt
politicians or criminals but of women reformers’ (Noss, cited by Rauschenbush,
1979: 97).
I always found this statement by Park to be absurd, a serious misperception
of reality and the accomplishments of sociology as an applied science (e.g.
Deegan, 1985). This view is particularly ridiculous for the city of Chicago, where
he was employed – a city world-famous for its venal politicians; the rapacious
gangster Al Capone; and the applied sociologist and Nobel Laureate Jane
Addams. Imagine my recent astonishment when I discovered that his wife, Clara
Cahill Park, was a social reformer. She was not only what Park referred to as a
meddling woman, she was also a national leader in ‘social reconstruction’
(Campbell, 1992; Mead, 1999), a noted author on social problems and a
significant figure in the creation of federal programs to financially support widows
and their children. In this paper I analyze this human drama: a husband who
disapproves of his wife’s lifework and publicly mocks the intent to help people
have better lives, and a wife who eloquently and successfully argues for such
compassion, human skills and social knowledge. This is the ‘human interest story’
(Hughes, 1940) behind the public presentation (Goffman, 1959) of sociology as
a natural science based on the study of human behavior as exemplified in the
analysis of the lowly and mindless potato bug.
In order to keep the performers’ names clear, I refer hereafter to Clara
Cahill Park as ‘C.C. Park’ and to Robert E. Park as ‘R.E. Park’. I begin by
introducing the biography and work of C.C. Park. I then connect her work to the
wider context of women’s work in sociology. Next I present R.E. Park’s thundering
voice raised against sociology as a moral science and the work of social
reformers. R.E. Park’s patriarchal paradox is that he claimed to be less biased than
reformers, while he loved a woman dedicated to social reform and he, too,
engaged in it. Like the actors in most human dramas, R.E. Park and C.C. Park
lived in a world filled with contradictions and ambivalence. I demonstrate here
that, unlike the potato bug, humans behave in ways that call for tools to explain
intellectual and emotional complexity, moral choices and self-reflection (Addams,
1910, 1912; Mead, 1934).
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C.C. Park
C.C. Park was a remarkable, highly educated, public figure as well as a wife and
the mother of four children. This background is typical for a number of
outstanding women married to male faculty at the University of Chicago. These
women and their husbands created a vibrant ‘world’ filled with civic responsibilities,
the creation of knowledge and intimate relationships between families and
friends (Deegan, 1999). R.E. Park was generally outside this world while his wife
was within it (for an exception, see Ames, 1944). Chicago women also established
a ‘female world of love and ritual’ supporting women’s involvement in strong
interpersonal relations between women and the enactment of female values to
change the patriarchal state (Deegan, 1996). C.C. Park was part of this world as
well (e.g. C.C. Park, 1912a, 1912b, 1913a, 1913b).
C.C. Park was also part of a national social movement of middle-class
women who joined together to change the nation state. Their work, called
‘maternalism’ by Theda Skocpol (1992), drew on women’s traditional interests in
marriage, the home and children to demand social changes to support femaleheaded
households and protect children from the abuses of capitalist society.
Joanne Goodwin differentiates this work from that of ‘social justice maternalists’,
who were national figures, intellectuals and activists who successfully argued and
planned for a new welfare state, including innovative legislation and agencies to
support disenfranchised Americans. ‘Social justice maternalists’ were often based
in Chicago and part of the female world of love and ritual. C.C. Park shared their
intellectually powerful arguments.
The Early Biography of C.C. Park
Clara Cahill (referred to hereafter as ‘C.C.’) was born around 1869, the daughter
of Edward Cahill, an eminent attorney and a member of Michigan’s Supreme
Court, and Lucy Crawford Cahill. Her father had established and led a troop of
African American soldiers, the First Michigan Colored Infantry, during the Civil
War, and his commitment to ending slavery provided an active political background
for his daughter (‘Cahill, Edward’, 1943; Nichols, 1923). C.C. studied in
the United States at the Cincinnati Art Academy and the Chicago Art Institute,
and in Europe in Berlin and Strasburg. C.C. became a noted suffrage supporter,
published short stories and articles in the popular press and had a syndicated
newspaper column. She was a Unitarian and supported the Progressive Party
(‘Park, Clara Cahill’, 1914).
The Courtship and Marriage of R.E. Park and C.C. Park
R.E. Park and C.C. met in 1892 while he was a reporter in Detroit, Michigan, and
she was a young artist in Lansing, Michigan. Even at this time, R.E. Park was
deriding women in social reform through his newspaper writing. In a letter to
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C.C. he wrote, ‘I did not dare to tell all that I mean about them’, so both of them
knew he had little respect for women doing this work. The ever-hopeful and
oblivious young girlfriend lent him a book on nihilism, and the couple fell more in
love with each other.
In June 1894 they married. For the first four years R.E. Park was a
reporter first in Detroit and then in Chicago, followed by New York from 1894
until 1898 (Rauschenbush, 1979: 26–7). While he wrote articles, C.C. often
illustrated them with pen and ink sketches (see C.C. Park, 1894a, 1894b; see also
C.C. Park, 1979). In the fall of 1898 R.E. Park went to Harvard University and
began a seven-year odyssey in his higher education. By the fall of 1899 he moved
to Berlin with his wife and their three small children. When C.C. was pregnant
again, her parents traveled to Europe and took the two oldest children with them
back to the United States. In all these accounts there is no information on how
the family obtained their funds, but Rauschenbush (1979: 28) suggests that R.E.
Park’s father helped them.
In 1903 R.E. Park worked as an assistant in philosophy at Harvard
University, a low-paying job for the 39-year-old father of four, and in 1904 he
started to work for the Congo Reform Association, where he wrote impassioned
dispatches about the corruption of King Leopold II of Belgium (see his reprinted
articles in Lyman, 1992). Although the peripatetic Park soon quit this job, he
followed it with more reform work. Between 1905 and 1913 he was the secretary
of Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute. Here Park aided Washington’s
effort to provide economic independence and vocational education for African
Americans in the South. During these years he lived for significant periods of time
in Alabama while his cash-strapped wife and children lived in Massachusetts.
Winifred Rauschenbush, R.E. Park’s longtime, faithful, female assistant
(and ghostwriter of at least one of his books) is the only scholar of his who
seriously considers his relationship to C.C. Park. Rauschenbush (1979: 22–28, im
passim) perceptively notes that the young couple’s courtship seemed ill-fated from
the very start because of their divergent interests. Rauschenbush also quotes from
one of their daughters, Margaret Park Redfield, who mildly noted that even by
1910 – after Park had spent six winters working in Alabama at the Tuskegee
Institute while his family lived in a Boston suburb in Massachusetts –
Clara Park was never wholly reconciled to having her husband away from
home so much. Nevertheless, she managed. The children were getting
older and more helpful. She developed her own interests and as she had an
elderly Irishwoman . . . to help in the kitchen, she was not entirely
housebound.
(Margaret Park Redfield, cited by Rauschenbush, 1979: 58)
R.E. Park explained to his father-in-law in 1910 how the family’s parsimonious
budget was salutary for his wife:
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If we had had five hundred dollars more a year Clara would never have
written the articles she did. She would never have become one of the
distinguished women of America, she would have been less in touch than
she is now with the great mass of mankind who have less than we do, she
would have been less in touch with real life, more disposed to be peevish,
discontented, [and] dissatisfied.
(R.E. Park, cited by Rauschenbush, 1979: 60)
Unsurprisingly, C.C. Park did not view this financial strain as an opportunity
for personal growth, but as an onerous burden for the mother of four who
labored alone to raise her family without enough funds, emotional support or
shared parenting. Her parents and her daughter Margaret Park Redfield attested
to the terrible nervous strain that C.C. experienced as a result of continuously
running out of money to pay the household bills. R.E. Park, according to his
daughter Margaret Park Redfield, ‘admired and encouraged his wife’ (cited by
Rauschenbush, 1979: 61), but the evidence against his support – whether it is
emotional, financial or intellectual – is strong. Thus C.C. wrote to her husband
that ‘I have been imposed on, not intentionally, but carelessly and veritably’ (C.C.
Park, cited by Rauschenbush, 1979: 62). R.E. Park was stingy toward his family
and cavalier, to say the least, toward his responsibilities as a husband and father.
Extensive research on C.C.’s correspondence, newspaper articles and
female network is an important task that is beyond the scope of this paper. I will
note, however, a small correspondence between her and Mary Heaton Vorse, a
popular writer on social problems and women’s issues (see Vorse, 1969 [c.1914],
1942, 1985). It indicates they had a professional and personal relationship. For
example, on 15 October 1907, Vorse thanks C.C. for her support of a story that
Vorse had written. Vorse also mentions that both C.C. and R.E. had suggested
another possible topic, indicating that R.E. was consulted occasionally by the
women.2 Analysis of her other letters and writings would reveal more about C.C.,
her friends, her ideas and her marriage.
In March 1911 R.E. Park inherited money from his father’s estate, which
then allowed the family to live more comfortably (Rauschenbush, 1979: 62).
R.E., nonetheless, kept a tight control over the money. Thus in August 1911 C.C.
was still limited in her budget and wrote him: ‘I do not like to go on living in
debt, in parsimony, and in unceasing care’ (C.C. Park correspondence to R.E.
Park, cited by Rauschenbush, 1979: 62).
In the summer quarter of 1913 R.E. Park moved to Chicago, where he
taught summer school as a lecturer and earned $500.00 a year. He lived alone in
the city until his family slowly joined him and finally was united in 1916. He lived
on the margins of the university until W.I. Thomas, his mentor, was fired abruptly
in the spring of 1918 as a result of an alleged sexual misconduct (Deegan, 1988:
178–86). R.E. Park assumed the coursework of Thomas in 1918 and his career in
sociology dramatically improved from this point onward. During the 1920s and
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until his retirement in 1934, as noted earlier, R.E. Park denigrated the life
interests of his wife in the classroom, where he lectured about the scientific
detachment of sociologists and erased the legacy and views of early applied
sociologists who shared his wife’s perspective. He continued to travel extensively
during his tenure at Chicago and to systematically absent himself from his home
and family (see R.E. Park, 1923, 1944).
C.C. Park and Widows’ Pensions
C.C. Park’s most important community work supported the state establishment
of ‘widows’ pensions’. This interest emerged from her own economic struggles
with her wandering husband (R.E. Park, 1923, 1944) and her sympathy for
mothers whose husbands’ deaths leave their families with insurmountable financial
problems. Although C.C. became the subject of a nationally prominent story
written by Ray Stannard Baker (1913), then a famous journalist, the absence or
status of her husband was never mentioned in that or in any other article on her
(e.g. Hard, 1913). Baker’s praiseworthy biography on her lifework was published
in the popular American Magazine in their section on ‘Interesting People’, a
column that resembles today’s People magazine. Baker recounts an article C.C.
wrote to help raise funds for a new home for a recently bereaved family who faced
separation because of their lack of money. Her article, called ‘Wanted – Rooseveltian
Landlords!’, called on the readers’ loyalty to President Theodore Roosevelt
and his support for public housing. After Roosevelt read this article he was moved
to write to her:
I am so much interested in your article about the widow that I send you
fifty dollars toward the cottage to be built for her. With all good wishes,
Faithfully Yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
(cited in Baker, 1913: 35)
C.C. Park’s national influence was evident by April 1911, when she
presented a paper on ‘The State and the Fatherless Child’ (Baker, 1913: 35). Here
she argued that the state should help widows keep their families together and out
of state care. In 1911–12 she introduced a bill to establish a commission to study
the needs of widowed mothers with dependent children. She later became a
member and secretary of such a commission that recommended a bill to subsidize
the children of ‘good’ or morally responsible widows until those children reached
legal working age.
C.C. Park began a campaign for this work, including speeches, letters to
editors of newspapers and magazines, and testimony at hearings. She even
personally brought widows to public events to tell their own stories. The law
enacted in Massachusetts set national precedents that were adopted throughout
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most states (Skocpol, 1992). The state of Massachusetts also hired an investigator
in 1912 and 1913 who helped the commission develop new legislation.
In these same years, C.C. Park became involved in a public debate over
widows’ need for state funds that was published in the Survey, the major
publication for applied sociology.
In her first criticism of the conservative, anti-state positions of the social
worker Mary Richmond (e.g. Richmond, 1913), C.C. Park (1912b) called for ‘a
war on poverty’. She ringingly states that ‘[t]his social revolution may be like the
French revolution’, and argues for a public recognition ‘that the fact of bearing
and rearing a child in itself creates a certain, if variable, state of dependence for a
woman’ (1912b: 365), an implicit description of her own reliance on a frequently
absent husband.
In July 1913, Edward T. Devine (1913a, 1913b), an applied sociologist,
strongly attacked widows’ pensions as a form of relief or public charity. He
proposed instead a national system of social insurance to help any American in
financial distress. He specifically rejected a gendered or family-based argument.
C.C. Park responded to his article with a powerful statement based on her
expertise as a mother and as a protector of children. She directed her argument
explicitly against male sociologists like Devine and R.E. Park:
Mothers, in spite of the sociologists, feel themselves, for once, on their
own ground in this matter; and in possession of all their faculties, and will
continue to think that as far as children are concerned, not they, but the
learned doctors, are in the amateur class.
(C.C. Park, 1913c: 669)
She continued in this vein, citing Addams’s book A New Conscience and an
Ancient Evil (1912) as her authority. Moreover, she linked these arguments to
children’s rights for a free, public education. Again, she took on Devine (1913b)
in 1914, and this reply was included in a national reader used by high school
debating teams who argued the two sides of the issue (Bullock, 1915: 137–9).
As Skocpol (1992) persuasively documents, C.C. Park’s maternalist reasoning
to have the state fund widows’ pensions was accepted by the American people
while Devine’s approach to fund any American in financial need was defined as
relief when it was applied to able-bodied men. In 1916 C.C. Park became the first
vice-president of the Massachusetts branch of the Congress of Mothers and
addressed their national convention on ‘The Relation of the States to the
Fatherless Child’.
Although R.E. Park never studied the mothers’ pension movement, the
female sociologist Ada J. Davis (1930) did. She noted that such intervention
created social ideas and legislation,3 and this active human role in social change
contradicted the theories of many male sociologists. Thus Herbert Spencer
thought society follows its own evolutionary, natural process, Charles H. Cooley
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argued that social change occurs only in a slow and tentative manner, and the
Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn stated that changes in technology precede
alterations in ‘adaptive’ or social culture. Of course C.C. Park, Ada Davis and the
women who initiated structural changes are not remembered in sociological
annals today, while Spencer, Cooley and Ogburn are.
C.C. Park, Africans and the ‘Harlem Renaissance’
Despite the wide differences between them, both Parks shared a politicized and
professional interest in the lives of Africans and their descendants in the United
States. As R.E. Park’s only African American masters’ student (Green, 1919), the
late Loraine Richardson Green, told me in three telephone interviews (Deegan
interviews of Green, 8 August 1991; 10 August 1992; 10 October 1992), R.E.
was dedicated to social reform, as was her friend Jane Addams. When I told her
that many of his former students asserted that R.E. Park opposed applied
sociology, she replied that her view was based on experiences with him that
spanned over two decades. To her, he was a committed social reformer on the
topic of African Americans.
C.C. Park shared this devotion and thus she wrote an important letter to
the editor of the Boston Transcript (1904). Here she poignantly appeals to other
American women, especially clubwomen, to reach out to women in Africa who
suffer from desperate poverty and the multitude of abuses created by male soldiers
during war. ‘Men, who are doubtless wiser than we in political matters’, would
know logically that the situation is hopeless. But women continue to hope for
better conditions and help each other despite the odds against them. C.C. Park
read the work of Mary H. Kingsley, an anthropologist/sociologist whose work
was reviewed in ´Emile Durkheim’s journal L’Ann´ee Sociologique (Anon., 1898–9;
Kingsley, 1897; Mauss, 1897), and notes that African women have enormous
influence in many societies, particularly as mothers. Women who are prisoners of
war, however, are physically and sexually abused. C.C. Park calls for American
women to build bridges to African women and to fight for African nationalism.
These positions are completely compatible with those of many early female
sociologists, but they are not ideas that R.E. Park developed or defended.
The Parks also shared an interest in the National Urban League and its
house organ, Opportunity. Charles S. Johnson, who was mentored by R.E. Park
at the University of Chicago (see Johnson, 1944), established editorial policies at
Opportunity that influenced one of the most important literary movements in
African American history, the ‘Harlem renaissance’. This cultural movement
emerged from the artwork, fiction, non-fiction and music surrounding a group of
artists associated with New York’s Harlem district during the mid-1920s to the
mid-1930s (Bontemps, 1972). It is likely that the friendship between R.E. Park
and Johnson led to the publication of two Opportunity covers in January and
March 1929 that reproduced C.C. Park’s paintings of women of color (see also
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C.C. Park, 1928). This is one of the few examples of a shared interest between the
couple; another example is found in C.C. Park’s writing for the American Journal
of Sociology.
C.C. Park, Feminism and the American Journal of
Sociology
Although C.C. Park was not an acknowledged sociologist in the world in which
her husband moved, she published a book review in the American Journal of
Sociology, the preeminent journal sponsored by the Department of Sociology at
the University of Chicago. She reviewed the posthumous autobiography, The
Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), by the feminist sociologist (C.C. Park,
1936; see also Deegan, 1997). C.C. Park found this an excellent memorial to
Gilman, the first sociologist to extensively study the connection between women’s
oppression and their limited access to the marketplace (see Gilman, 1966
[c.1898]). This problem of economic dependence was one that C.C. Park
intimately understood. Like Gilman, she thought this battle was won by 1935,
although both women have been shown to be too optimistic about the changed
economic status of women.
Both C.C. Park and Gilman were part of a wide network of women
dedicated to the study and improvement of society between 1890 and 1920. This
is the network that R.E. Park criticized.
Men’s and Women’s Work in Sociology,
1892–1920
Two central sociological institutions flourished in Chicago between 1892 and
1920: Hull-House, the famous social settlement founded and led by Jane Addams
and the center of applied sociology; and the Department of Sociology at the
University of Chicago, the world-wide academic leader of the discipline and men’s
work in it. These two institutions were gendered, with women gravitating to the
social settlement and men gravitating to the academy. This division corresponded
to the popular Doctrine of the Separate Spheres (Deegan, 1988: 198–9). In
sociology, this meant that white men’s work was more abstract, rational, formal
and academic (Deegan, 1978, 1981, 1988) while women’s work was more
applied, more passionate, more centered on values of the home and the roles of
women, children and the family. Because women were assumed to have more
emotional and cultural sensitivity than men, the women were deemed ideal
professionals to improve society and make it more humane.
The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres also affected women in the community
who wanted to have greater public participation, often using the knowledge
gained by applied sociologists (e.g. Rynbrandt, 1999). Middle-class, married
women, in particular, were expected to labor outside the home in unpaid,
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volunteer work. This structure for women’s work corresponded to ‘clubwomen’s
work’ or ‘civic housekeeping’, as Addams (1907) called it. This public work
became the foundation for the maternal welfare state in the United States
(Goodwin, 1997; Skocpol, 1992; Siegfried, 1998).
Because of the discipline’s initial openness to women and the belief in a
special ‘sphere’ for women’s work in sociology, women flocked to the academy for
training between 1892 and 1920. During this ‘golden era of women in sociology’
(Deegan, 1991, 1996, 1997), a fruitful, applied sociology emerged with a
sophisticated theory of society: feminist pragmatism. This American theory unites
liberal values and belief in a rational public with a cooperative, nurturing and
liberating model of the self, the other and the community. Feminist pragmatism
emphasizes education and democracy as significant mechanisms to organize and
improve society (see Campbell, 1992; Deegan, 1988, 1991, 1995, 1996, 2002;
Siegfried, 1998). It emerged in Chicago, where sociologists observed rapid
urbanization, immigration, industrialization, migration and social change that
took place before their eyes. The Great Migration of African Americans from the
South to the North after World War I was part of this massive movement of
people in search of more freedom and prosperity.4
The University of Chicago towered over the intellectual and professional
landscape of sociology from 1892, when the department was founded, until 1934,
when R.E. Park retired (Faris, 1967; Fine, 1995). It reputedly trained over half of
all sociologists in the world by 1930. This large group of scholars fundamentally
shaped the discipline through its faculty and their doctorally trained students who
produced thousands of books and articles (Kurtz, 1984).
The names of R.E. Park and his colleague Ernest W. Burgess became
synonymous with Chicago sociology after 1920. They are the perceived leaders of
a powerful school that signaled the beginning of ‘modern’ sociology.5 This ‘new’
approach was notable in one respect: it loudly and defiantly separated itself from
social reform and women’s work in the profession. Identifying themselves as
‘urban ecologists’, R.E. Park and Burgess (1921) saw society as socially created
and maintained through conflict similar to that found in the natural world of plants
and animals. They viewed the city as both a human product and a territorial
settlement. They studied populations such as immigrants, minorities and juveniles
which their earlier colleagues had studied, too, but R.E. Park and Burgess’s efforts
to link sociological knowledge with application were truncated, at least in theory.
Because R.E. Park and Burgess were intrinsically social reformers, they
wanted to engage in social reform while asserting that their work was ‘unbiased’.
As a result, they derogated their predecessors’ work while initiating a new form of
‘social policy’ studies that were more politically conservative and acceptable to
businessmen and administrators in the academy. This approach was much less
powerful and effective in improving the everyday life of all citizens. The men
gained more academic respectability but lost vitality and political effectiveness. In
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many ways, C.C. Park and her female allies in sociology fundamentally changed
the American state and politics while R.E. Park and his male colleagues did not.
For R.E. Park, Addams was a public person who was personally admirable
but not a professional colleague and equal (Deegan, 1988: 158–9). The role of
social amelioration in sociology, then, became a pivotal concept in understanding
the work of Addams and other female sociologists in relation to the Chicago
School of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to R.E. Park, C.C. Park viewed
Addams and other women who applied sociology as mentors and role models.
Thus C.C. Park wrote:
If we could have always with us the great people of the earth, like Miss
Addams, Miss [Julia] Lathrop, [Juvenile Court] Judge [Julian] Mack, and
others, there would be no such proverbs [accepting poverty as normal] as
those the poor now murmur among themselves.
(1913c: 669)
R.E. Park and his colleagues ushered in the age that I call elsewhere the ‘dark era
of patriarchal ascendancy’ (Deegan, 1991), in which the study of women was
eclipsed. The critique of sexist ideas and practices in this school (summarized in
Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley, 1998) has resulted in little internal analysis
or reflexive critique. Some scholars curiously vehemently deny that this pattern
ever existed. They stress that Park was a natural, unbiased scientist (e.g. Bulmer,
1984; Lindner, 1996; Lyman, 1992). The complex story of R.E. Park and his
marriage to a significant female social reformer is a private drama behind the
public presentation of sociology as apolitical, objective, rational and as unaffected
by human behavior as a potato bug is.
R.E. Park and His Public Antipathy to
‘Do-Goodism’
As noted earlier, R.E. Park mocked clubwomen as early as the 1890s, two decades
before he became a sociologist (Matthews, 1977; Rauschenbush, 1979). During
this period he was not defending the discipline’s scientific integrity but merely
expressing his patriarchal opinion as a journalist. He carried this bias into the
profession of sociology, where he had the institutional power to claim that his
position was objective and unbiased.
R.E. Park assiduously labored to appear to be an opponent of applied
sociology, and a few more quotations illustrate this stance. For example, a
frequently repeated anecdote of his effort to separate sociology from ameliorating
social problems is the following exchange: ‘His answer to a student’s question,
[“]What did he do for people?[”] was a gruff “Not a damn thing!”’ (Everett C.
Hughes, cited by Matthews, 1977: 116). Similarly, Martin Bulmer also perpetuates
R.E. Park’s self-portrait of being distinct from earlier, applied Chicago
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sociologists when he claims that ‘[w]hereas [Charles R.] Henderson and [Charles]
Zueblin were reform-oriented, Robert Park was not’ (Bulmer, 1984: 39). This
uncritical acceptance of an image without substance is echoed in the writings of
Rolf Lindner (1996), Edward Shils (1991), Everett C. Hughes (1964) and Lee
Harvey (1987).
R.E. Park repeated these views in his writings, too. Thus in 1924 he
scathingly dismissed all social investigations done by applied sociologists – whom
he subsumed under the category of ‘social workers’ – when he wrote: ‘Generally
speaking, we have had nothing that could be called social research, bearing on the
tasks of social workers. The most important contributions of [the] sciences to
social research and social work have come from medicine and particularly from
psychiatry’ (1924c: 263). With these and similar statements on the work of his
early sociological colleagues – whether they were white male academicians,
political activists, white women and/or people of color – he swept away the
decades of work done by applied sociologists and their allies in the community
(Deegan, 1988, 1996; Rynbrandt, 1999; Skocpol, 1992).
All this established evidence of his extreme opposition to ‘women’s work’
in sociology is analyzed rarely. In fact, several scholars even object to criticism of
his patriarchal impact on the development of the discipline (see Lindner, 1996:
53, fn. 224; Lyman, 1992: 143, fn. 73; Ross, 1991: 227, fn. 19). Given his
intense public opposition to these women, this is an important omission. But this
failure to analyze the gendered basis of sociological history and practices becomes
more serious when it is coupled with the fact that when Park opposed the
application of sociological knowledge and singled out clubwomen who engaged
in it, he was expressing a complex, personal problem. He was attacking the life
work, commitments and contributions of his talented and remarkable wife.
R.E. Park was a generally obscure figure until after 1920, when he was 56
years old. His wife, however, received great public acclaim as a clubwoman, a
syndicated columnist and a leader in mother’s pensions. She achieved this
eminence, moreover, without his personal presence or adequate finances. R.E.
Park’s private trouble as a problematic husband and father married to a successful
wife and mother became a public issue in sociology (Mills, 1959). He institutionalized
his patriarchal conflicts exhibited in his marriage into a definition of
sociology as a discipline. As Anthony Blasi noted: ‘Robert Park was the most
influential American sociologist from the 1920s into the 1940s’ (2002: 1), and
this authority included the power to publicly legitimate his patriarchal behavior
and values.
The failure of scholars to seriously examine R.E. Park’s relationship to the
community-based and powerful work of his wife is so buried in the annals of the
discipline that when the sociologist Theda Skocpol (1992) focused on C.C. Park’s
eminent role in creating the maternal welfare state, she did not recognize her as
the wife of R.E. Park. Skocpol notes C.C. Park’s significance by citing one of her
speeches (1992: 313) and two more writings (see 1992: 427, 454). She even
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reproduces a picture of C.C. Park (Skocpol, 1992: 440) that accompanied an
article written by the popular journalist William Hard6 (1913a, 1913b), who
praised C.C. Park as a national leader who protected motherless children.
R.E. Park frequently expressed his opposition to social reform in sociology
as a disinterested scientist who has no more investment in the issue than the
zoologist has in the potato bug. This statement has been accepted as a true,
basically uncomplicated, disinterested position by many of his students and
scholars who document his life’s work (e.g. Bulmer, 1984; Lindner, 1996;
Lyman, 1992; Rauschenbush, 1979). His opposite, equivocal attitudes toward
sociological practice are not as well recorded, particularly by sociologists who
never met him (see Deegan, 1988, for an exception to this statement).
R.E. Park’s Dedication to Social Reform: Or How
Human Actions Differ from Potato Bugs
R.E. Park was deeply attracted to applied sociology if he engaged it, but not when
it was conducted by women. His stance can be characterized as one where he
publicly wrote and taught a position amounting to ‘do as I say but not as I do’.
This vacillation had a profound and deleterious public effect on the discipline of
sociology. In particular, R.E. Park did not adopt collegial roles toward great
female sociologists associated with Hull-House, notably Edith Abbott, Jane
Addams, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelley (Deegan,
1988, 1994, 2002).
Everett C. Hughes correctly interpreted R.E. Park’s commitment to social
reform as integral to Park’s entire system of thought and action. At Park’s funeral,
Hughes opened his eulogy with these words: ‘Robert Park was a reformer. All his
life he was deeply moved to improve this world’ (1944: 7). Again, years later,
Hughes noted the key role of social reform in Park’s life:
It is in a sense, the dialectic of his own life; reform and action as against
detached observation; writing the news of the unique event as against the
discovery of the eternal theme and process of history; sympathy for the
individual man as against concern for the human race.
(1950: xiii)
Carrying out this theme of reform’s significance to him, R.E. Park reflected in an
autobiographical note ‘that with more accurate and adequate reporting of currents
the historical process would be appreciably stepped up, and progress would
go forward steadily, without the interruption and disorder of depression or
violence, and at a rapid pace’ (1944: 11). Such views strongly contradict many of
those cited earlier.
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Park felt that his sociological work began when he was a reporter. Such an
interpretation reveals the kind of complexity of his relationship to ‘reform’ and
‘science’. When he worked as a journalist, both as an undergraduate and for 10
years after that, from 1887 to 1897, he sought to reform the newspaper into
something ‘more accurate’ and ‘in the precise and universal language of science’
(R.E. Park, 1944: 11). He became dissatisfied with newspaper work, however, and
returned to the scholarly life. Shortly after returning to college, he again tired of
that routine and longed for more ‘action’. When he was subsequently invited to
become the secretary of the Congo Reform Association (italics added), he
accepted. Later, he wrote:
There were at the time reports of great scandals in the Congo, and the
secretary of the Baptist Foreign Missions, Dr. Barbour, wanted someone
to help advertise the atrocities in order to prepare for some sort of political
action which would insure reform. I was not, at that time, strong for
missions, but I undertook the job. Eventually, however, I became
interested.
(R.E. Park, 1944: 12)
R.E. Park continued this reform work through numerous publications in applied
sociology after he joined the sociology faculty at the University of Chicago.7 Some
of these writings include addresses to the conference of social workers (R.E. Park,
1918a, 1918b, 1920, 1921), an article for the socialist journal The World
Tomorrow (R.E. Park, 1923), a presentation to the political activists who promoted
the establishment of parks and public recreation (R.E. Park, 1924a), and
five articles for the Journal of Applied Sociology (R.E. Park, 1924b, 1924c, 1924d,
1924e, 1926b). In 1926 (1926a, 1926c) he even edited a special issue of the
Survey. He not only wrote professionally on applied sociology, it was a major focus
within his corpus.8
R.E. Park was also President of the National Community Center Association
from 1922 to 1924, a group dedicated to increasing democratic involvement
in urban life (Rauschenbush, 1979: 46). In addition he cofounded Park
House in 1924, a type of intellectual center for working-class people that was
clearly built on the social settlement model that was the center for early female
applied sociologists. Rauschenbush noted: ‘His interest in the youth center
mystified some of his friends. Had he, who detested do-goodism, himself become
a do-gooder? They were also baffled by his attitude toward the religious tone of
the enterprise’ (1979: 47). As a board member, ‘Park spent a good deal of time
there; it had for him the attraction that “doing good” was combined with, or
possibly masked by, an intellectual rationale and the opportunity to meet interesting
people of a mildly bohemian character’ (Rauschenbush 1979, 48). Park
House, however, never assumed an important role in the city, and it was ignored
by the University of Chicago community.
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The main attraction of the center seems to have been the opportunity to
make friendships; the most successful activity was folk dancing, which
seems to have served the same function as a T[herapy] group in lowering
the inhibitions and defenses of middle-class males.
(Rauschenbush, 1979: 47)
Finally, after Park retired from the University of Chicago, he joined the
faculty of the predominatly African American insitution Fisk University on an
intermittent basis, from 1936 to 1944. Still committed to studying and improving
the lives of African Americans, he did not identify his interests as ‘applied
sociology.’
R.E. Park’s life and sociology were shaped by his concerns with social
amelioration, while he claimed to despise such work. Contradicting himself at
each step, he wanted people to be more fair and democratic, while he wanted to
disassociate himself from activities demanding such changes. Egocentric, brusque,
cantankerous and charismatic, R.E. Park profoundly embodied the conflicts of the
new sociology. He legitimized a conservative political role for sociologists and left
a legacy legitimating the maintenance of the status quo while mildly condemning
it. C.C. Park, in contrast, was a major and successful figure in a powerful
movement to bring the state into the process of protecting women and children.
Instead of bemoaning her husband’s parsimony and long absences, she turned her
experiential knowledge into help for other women who experienced even greater
deprivations than her own.
Conclusion
R.E. Park legitimated men’s abstract and depoliticized academic work in sociology
by promoting the natural sciences as an ideal model for the discipline. Simultaneously,
he openly displayed his hostility toward ‘women’s work’ in the profession
and/or in women’s clubwork. He profoundly embodied the public changes in
sociology in his private marriage to the erudite and feisty C.C. Park. She, in stark
contrast, defended ‘women’s work’ in the profession and in the community and
helped create the American maternal welfare state.
In this essay, I have analyzed R.E. Park’s effect on women’s work in
sociology, emphasizing his patriarchal, formal opposition to the impressive life’s
work of his spouse. As a wife whose husband left her for many months at a time
between 1905 and 1913 while he worked at a low salary for Booker T.
Washington in Alabama, C.C. Park turned to writing to earn sufficient money to
maintain her home and children in Massachusetts. Through this work she
articulated her sympathy with widowed mothers who could not receive financial
help from their deceased spouses. She understood this poverty since her husband
chose to provide his family with an inadequate income for their social status. She
also understood the loneliness of the widow since her husband was frequently
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physically absent – albeit voluntarily – from his wife, children and home. C.C.
Park supported the feminist pragmatism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the
female sociologists at Hull-House, especially that of Jane Addams. Her husband, in
contrast, did not praise feminists, clubwomen or female sociologists. His opinions
were central in redefining the profession and its position on applied work.
C.C. Park and R.E. Park remained married during an era when divorce
was condemned. Perhaps they would have stayed together even if divorce were
more acceptable in that era: love, marriage, parenthood and shared experiences
generate complicated emotions and bonds. At times, their lives and interests
overlapped, particularly in their support of social justice for African Americans. By
and large, however, R.E. Park’s public, frontstage animosity towards the work of
clubwomen was an insulting response to the powerful political work in which his
wife was a leader.
We need more research to explore the intersection of the Parks’ private
drama and the discipline’s public presentation of the natural sciences as an ideal
model to study human behavior. Only then can we begin to understand why
applied sociology, early women’s work in the profession and a powerful public
presence in American public policy began to weaken after 1920. Only then can we
interpret and evaluate the cost to the profession and to society of training and
rewarding sociologists who look at human beings in the same way that zoologists
look at potato bugs.
Notes
My thanks to Michael R. Hill and Anthony J. Blasi who critiqued earlier drafts of this paper.
1. Park did not use the formal, scientific name for the potato bug. The nickname refers to two types
of beetle, either Doryphora decemlineata or Lema trilineata (Oxford Universal Dictionary, 1933:
1555). Park knew his audience was unfamiliar with the natural sciences, and he would get a
better response with a popular, and not a scientific, term.
2. Four letters sent by Vorse to C.C. Park are found in the Robert E. Park papers, addendum, box 1,
file 2, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago, Regenstein Library.
3. Such a planned program of action based on sociological knowledge is called ‘participatory action
research’ by Feagin and Vera (2001).
4. Elsewhere (Deegan, 2002) I document how R.E. Park’s familiarity with the black experience was
supportive, as well as problematic, for applied sociologists in this setting.
5. I do not share this interpretation and see great continuity between R.E. Park’s colleagues prior to
1920 and post-1920, with the exception that the first cohort of sociologists were less paradoxical
and ambivalent in their sociological practices (see Deegan, 1988, 2001).
6. Hard resided at the University of Chicago Social Settlement for a period and helped popularize the
work of female sociologists from Chicago. For a discussion of the importance of this settlement in
the work of G.H. Mead, see Deegan (1999).
7. R.E. Park wrote dozens of book reviews of book in applied sociology over the course of his career.
I include only one sample here.
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8. R.E. Park even claimed to be first author of an applied sociology book, Old Worlds Transplanted,
when W.I. Thomas was the primary author. This book was funded by a commission promoting
applied sociology through the Americanization of immigrants. R.E. Park opportunistically appropriated
the first authorship of the book after Thomas was fired from the University of Chicago.
See [Thomas, W.I.], Robert E. Park (listed erroneously as first author) and Herbert A. Miller (1921)
and my discussion in Deegan (1988, p. 184; 1994, 2002).
Archive
Robert E. Park papers, the Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein
Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Telephone Interviews
Green, Loraine Richardson and Mary Jo Deegan, 8 August 1990; 10 August
1992; 10 October 1992.
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of Chicago Press.
Skocpol, Theda (1992) Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press.
[Thomas, W.I.], Robert E. Park (listed erroneously as first author) and Herbert A.
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Vorse, Mary Heaton (1942) Time and the Town. New York: Dial Press.
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Mary Jo Deegan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of over
150 articles and the author or editor of 19 books, including Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago
School, 1892–1918 (Transaction, 1988), The American Ritual Tapestry (Greenwood, 1998) and Race,
Hull-House, and the University of Chicago (Greenwood, 2002). She co-edited and introduced Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s With Her in Ourland (Greenwood, 1997), The Dress of Women (Greenwood, 2001)
and Social Ethics (Greenwood, 2004), and edited and introduced Fannie Barrier Williams’ The New
Woman of Color (Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), George Herbert Mead’s Play, School, and
Society (Peter Lang, 1999) and Essays in Social Psychology (Transaction, 2001), and Jane Addams, Emily
Greene Balch and Alice Hamilton’s Women at the Hague (Humanity Books, 2003).
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE 68588-0324, USA. [email:
mdeegan2@unl.edu]
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