When Robert E. Park Was (Re) Writing "The City": Biography, the Social Survey, and the Science of Sociology*
Pierre Lannoy
Sociological production is a situated and embodied activity carried out by individuals inserted in actual social relations. Considering that this feature has an influence upon the content of scholarly litetature and that it can be revealed in the scientific text itself, I propound a new interpretation of the writing process of Robert E. Park's "The City," the famous paper he published initially in 1915. Customarily depicted as a manifesto for an autonomous urban sociology I argue on the contrary that its general economy has to be linked to Park's biographical background. When he affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, Park was brought to teach a course on the social survey. "The City" was to be the academic expression of his point of view on the topic. Park's biographical encounters with some active promoters of the social survey approach are evidenced and their influence on his 1915 essay is carefully analyzed, showing notably that curious intellectual omissions in "The City" can be traced back to these previous encounters. Park's latter texts, and the 1925 revised version of "The City" in particular, are shown to provide the interwar sociologists with a peculiar narrarive about the history of sociology: Park's predecessors are deliberately confined in a pre-scientific stage of the discipline and Park's original essay is presented as a seminal research program destined to be later fulfilled by the newly established urban sociologists.
Introduction
The article that Robert E. Park published in the March 1915 issue of The American Journal of Sociology (hereafter referred to as AJS) under the title "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment" is usually presented as the founding text of urban sociology in general and of the famous Chicago School in particular (Shils, 1948; Hatt and Reiss, 1951; Sennett, 1969; Remy, 1989; Flanagan, 1999; Savage et al., 2003). If there is a constant theme in the many studies which have been produced since the 1970s on work associated with the Chicago sociological tradition, it is the idea that this first article of Park's on the city must be read as the exposition of a research program of which the work carried out latterly at Chicago is only in reality the culmination. It was without doubt Everett Hughes who stated this for the first time in his introduction to the posthumous publication of Park's collected papers:
Pierre Lannoy is Charge de Recherche by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium). Address: Unite d'Anthropologie et de Sociologie, Universite catholique de Louvain, Place Montesquieu 1/1, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). E-mail: lannoy@anso.ucl.ac.be.
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About the time he came to the University of Chicago, Park wrote and published a long article entitled, 'The City: Some Suggestions for the Study of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.' The proposals in it became the research program of Park himself, of his students, and of many colleagues in other fields as well as in sociology; a program realized in part in The Hobo, The Gold Coast and the Slum, The Ghetto, The Gang and other studies of city types and city areas. The suggestions have not been exhausted in some thirty-five years of active work by an ever-increasing army of students of cities and city life (Hughes, 1952: 5-6).
The following essay aims to show that contrary to generally accepted belief the author's original intention in writing "The City" was not so much to present a program of research on the city as to make a radical critique of the social survey movement, one of the dominant sociological practices of the time.1 The notion that Park wanted to distance himself from this current sociological stream has already been commented on by authors such as Matthews (1977), Bulmer (1984), Converse (1987), Lai (1990), Breslau (1990), Gaziano (1996), and more recently Chapoulie (2001), who have all demonstrated the ambiguous nature of the relations between Park and this movement. However, even though the evidence for this ambiguity comes from Park's later texts (those published after the First World War, particularly those dating from 1925 onwards, when Park's reputation and academic authority had become well-established), no one has posed the question of whether this attitude had any influence on the writing of his earlier work in general and on "The City" in particular. In order to answer this question I suggest breaking with the idea of Park as a leading figure in his field (Hughes, 1969; Coser, 1971) and admitting the fact that in 1914-1915 he was effectively only a marginal figure in American sociology. Only then will it become possible to understand the original background to the production of "The City." Such an understanding has been lost because "The City" has been overwhelmingly interpreted according to the context of the dominating interwar Chicago sociology. In other words the Park's text has been read according to what it engendered, i.e. "The Chicago School of Urban Sociology" considered as a landmark in the history of American sociology. Such a penetrating study as Gaziano's (1996) focuses on the changes Park brought to the revised version of "The City" but is silent on the writing of the 1915 version itself. What I will do here on the contrary is to read "The City" with the aim of identifying the influences and the motives that shaped its original writing—the main reason being the absence of such a study and absolutely not the will to debunk Park's work.
Such a reading postulates that sociological writing may reveal at the same time both the general social context in which it is produced and the particular social and biographical trajectory of an author (Laslett, 1991). Any learned production takes both a social as well as an intellectual stance. That is to say, it possesses both a cognitive and a practical dimension precisely because it positions its author in a bundle of concrete social relations with other producers of knowledge (Breslau, 1990). One may then consider a publication as the material inscription of this position taking and discern in it the cartography of these relations as the author himself maps them. In this perspective, the writing process is teleological as far as it is oriented towards "significant others"—competitors, colleagues, editors, friends, and readers, some being explicitly acknowledged and others being intentionally omitted.
Applied to Park's text on the city, this approach leads me to propound the following interpretation: I consider it as the expression of its author's position on the question of the social survey much more than on the city as sociological object. In taking up his new responsibilities in Chicago, Park was in effect brought in to give a course on the social survey and "The City" was to be the academic expression of it. But Park's social and biographical trajectory was to lead him to produce a text that was out of phase with other productions of the same nature published on the same question at that time. It is this trajectory that makes
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sense of the overall construction of the original version of "The City" much more than what will follow later on and will become known as the Chicago School of urban sociology. What is peculiar with Park's text is that each version of it was shaped according to different "significant others." The 1915 version is self-positioning because it is structured by Park's drive to veil the work of a definite group of social scientists. The 1925 version is conquering because it is directed at giving "cognitive authority" to a collective research program recently grasped under the label of "human ecology" (Gaziano, 1996).
The text that here follows lays out the stages which allow me to support this interpretation.2 First I will detail the biographical and institutional circumstances in which Park produced his article on the city—or more precisely on the investigation of the urban milieu, the property of the social surveyors. Next I will examine Parks biographical and social encounters with these social scientists and I will discuss some evidences showing that some of them were in fact his direct competitors on the occupational market. In the following section I will detail the treatment Park accords in "The City" to the objects and actors of the social survey movement at the cognitive level, one might say. Finally, I will display the amendments Park made to the second version of his own text. These will testify to the differences between the circumstances surrounding the initial conception of "The City" and those related to its re-publication in modified form a decade later.3
The Circumstances of a Production
In order to understand the background to the writing of "The City," it is worth looking at the point in his career at which Park had arrived as well as at the obligations and institutional responsibilities under which he was placed. All these elements had a major impact on the genesis of his 1915 article.
A Stage in the Life of Robert E. Park
When "The City" first appeated in March 1915, Park had just celebrated his fifty-first birthday (he was born on 14 February 1864). He had just completed his first year at the University of Chicago, where he occupied the post of professorial lecturer in the Department of Sociology. In the course of the year 1912, he had left his previous employment as amanuensis, counselor, and press agent for the black American leader Booker T. Washington. In this role, which he had occupied since 1905, he divided his time between the Normal and Industrial Institute founded by Washington at Tuskegee, Alabama, and his home 1200 miles away in Wollaston, a section of Quincy in the Boston suburb, where his wife and four children lived. Park would spend the winter in the south in Tuskegee and the summer in the northeast in Wollaston or in his second home further west on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was at Tuskegee in April 1912, at an international conference on the condition of black people, that Park first met William I. Thomas, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Their mutual intellectual attraction led them to engage in an intense correspondence that culminated in an invitation from Thomas to Park to join him at the university. Park's appointment at the university took some time to come through but he had already given Washington notice of his intention to leave his employment, ostensibly for family reasons. In the meantime, Park was invited to speak at a conference on the occasion of the September 1913 Meeting of the American Sociological Society. He would eventually publish his contribution in the March 1914 issue of the AJS under the title "Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups, with Particular Reference to the Negro," exactly one year before "The City."
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This was Park's first and only publication of academic status prior to the publication of "The City"—with the exception of his thesis published in German in 1904 and translated only in 1972. Until this point his publications had been restricted to articles (and to books whose authorship were attributed to Washington) written in journalistic style, many of which were couched in the muckraking tone in fashion at the time,4 but with a minimal amount of conceptual content. At least since his return from Germany his writings tended to focus on the status of black people in America and elsewhere and particularly on their relations with the rural environment. In none of these texts did Park interest himself in the urban phenomenon nor did he mention the influence of the city on the subjects he treated.5 In fact, his experience of metropolitan life dated back to the years he spent as a journalist and lasted until his return from Germany where he worked on his thesis between 1899 and 1903.6 Is it therefore possible to see the ten years that Park spent in the rural South working for Washington as a brief episode in Park's life to the point that the writing of "The City" can be understood as a direct translation of his earlier journalistic experience into sociological language? This is the narrative developed by Park himself (Baker, 1973: 254) and subsequently upheld by the historians of sociology.7 Lindner (1996) in particular devotes a full book to the development of the thesis arguing that the urban sociology of Park is the product of his journalist's habitus. But this interpretation fails to answer two fundamental questions. The first question is: why did Park publish a text on the city in 1915 when he had never dealt with this subject previously? The second question concerns the identification of the influences that impacted the conception and the writing of this paper.
A Paper on the City to Treat of the Social Survey
While Park was noticed by Thomas because of the originality of his analysis of the question of race, he faced new challenges as a result of his recruitment to the University of Chicago particularly with respect to his teaching responsibilities. In addition to the course entitled "The Negro in America" which he taught from 1914, Park was to teach three further courses in 1915: "Crowd and the Public," "The Newspaper," and "The Survey." It is true that most of these topics corresponded to his main interests: the racial question in the United States, to which he had already dedicated ten years of his life; the question of collective behavior and the distinction between the mob and the public, which had been the subject of the thesis he defended at the University of Heidelberg in 1903; and the analysis of the press, of which he had inside knowledge through his work as a journalist for many years prior to his stay in Germany (Lai, 1990: 22—23). On the other hand the theory and practice of social survey would have been very much less familiar to him. In fact, as I will detail in the following section, it would seem that not only had Park never undertaken a social survey, in the proper sense of the term, but also that he was at that time unacquainted with the prime movers in what then amounted to a veritable social movement. It remains true nonetheless that he was brought to teach a course on the social survey and that he felt the need to provide it with structure and background—which he accomplished by writing "The City." This interpretation, which has never been previously developed to my knowledge, is based on three points of fact.
The first point relates to the courses that Park was to teach at Chicago. If it is not possible to see "The City" as a course designed to teach urban sociology, this is not only because the discipline as such did not exist at the time but also because Park never taught any course about the sociology of the city. Harvey (1987) supplies the list of courses taught in the sociology department of Chicago University during the period that Park was professor there (see Table 1). Scott Bedford clearly monopolized the teaching of urban sociology until 1925,
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TABLE 1
Courses on the City and Courses Taught by Park Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1914-1933
Courses on the City and Lecturer Courses Taught by Park
Modern Cities	-Bedford, 1914-1925	The Negro in America	-1914-1933
	-not taught 1926-1939	Crowd and Public	-1915-1933
Urban Communities	-not taught 1914-1917	The Newspaper	-1915-1933
Municipal Sociology	-not taught 1918	The (Social) Survey	-1915-1933
	-Bedford 1919-1923		-not taught 1921-1933
Urban Sociology	-Bedford 1924-1925	Field Studies	-1917-1919, 1925-1931
	-not taught 1926-1928	Research in Social	-1917-1928
		Psychology	
Growth and the City	-Burgess 1926-1932	Race and Nationalities	-1919-1930
Local Community	-Burgess 1925-1936	Social Forces	-1920-1932
Studies			
		Teaching Sociology in	-1921-1933
		Colleges	
		Study of Society	-1923
		Human Ecology	-1925-1933
			-(McKenzie 1929)
		Human Migrations	-1926-1933
		Modern German	-1926
		Sociology	
the year in which he left the University.8 Following this date, it was Burgess and not Park who took over the teaching of urban sociology. Park could not therefore have used "The City" as material to support a course on the sociology of the city because he was never brought to teach this material. If the idea that his paper served nevertheless as an "extension of his teaching activities" (Chapoulie, 2001: 97) has to be followed through, the only logical interpretation is to link it to Park's course on the social survey. A second argument which supports this interpretation comes from testimony supplied by Park's students. Helen McGill Hughes (1980: 73) reports that "In The Survey, he (Park) organized his theories of urban behavior; it soon was renamed The City." Even if there is nothing to show that the new name ever became official, this memory—the only one to express it in these terms, to my knowledge—clearly shows that Park had linked the two issues in his mind. The third point on which our interpretation rests concerns the form itself of the text of "The City." This comprises paragraphs in which theoretical issues alternate with lists of questions which could be posed within the framework proposed by the author. This leads one to think that Park used these as typical questions for his own "investigation of the life of the city." Within this framework, the very presence of this questioning smacks less of the construction and elaboration of a research program than of the obligation to supply the components of a survey project (Park would have called it an "investigation") which could serve as a model for his students or readers. Lai (1990: 23) remarks: "Taken together, the topics that Park posed as being suitable for an investigation of the city constituted an outline for a comprehensive community study. On the other hand, any single topic could be used as the basis for a case-study of a specialized area of social life." In other words, any student interested in
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carrying out social research (in the sense in which it was understood at the time) could find a guide in Park's text, even if he had completely redefined the meaning and the impact of such a "study." In effect the structure of Park's paper clearly aims to introduce field research into the exercise; but Park's model here is clearly not the conventional survey questionnaire (as exemplified for example in Taylor, 1919: 73) but instead the kind of questionnaire used by W.I. Thomas in these years.9
All these points of fact support the argument that Park in "The City" was indeed dealing with the question of the social survey and the links that he felt should exist between this technique and sociology. As I shall show, Park was a stranger and largely hostile to the mainstream of social surveyors. This outsider status placed him in a paradoxical position when, newly arrived in Chicago, he found himself in charge of a course which was supposed to introduce students to the aims and techniques of those from whom he had gradually distanced himself during the period between his return from Germany in 1903 and his move to Chicago in 1914.10
Park and the Social Surveyors: Biographical Encounters
If we wish properly to understand the textual structure of "The City," we must take note of some of the milestones in the professional life of Robert Park which would serve to influence his conception of the social investigation of the urban environment. As already mentioned, he entered the academic world at an advanced age and his true recognition by the sociological community dates only from 1921, following the appearance of the magisterial Introduction to the Science of Sociology written in collaboration with Ernest Burgess. Prior to this, Park had often had to compete for employment with established social scientists. I will here present the available evidence of these biographical encounters and propound an interpretation of their consequences for Park's writing of "The City." More precisely I will argue that the occupational competition in which Park was unwillingly engaged engendered a distance between him and the social survey movement's epistemological stance—an ambivalence that would have a lasting effect on his conception of the nature and method of sociology (Bramson, 1961; Watts, 1983).
As a man of his time, Park's background gave him ready access to the world of reformers and social scientists whose preferred tool was the survey of urban communities. Having worked as a journalist in the principal American cities during the 1890s, Park had shared the reformist zeal of the muckraking press. As he himself said later, "I became a reformer." (Baker, 1973: 254). In pursuit of this new direction, he undertook a thesis at Harvard on the subject of the public as a social entity. Doing this, he was sharing with many of his contemporaries the belief that social change can be brought about by educating public opinion and by the dissemination of good quality information (Levine, 1995: 267; Mattson, 1998). But he was disappointed in his expectations of his thesis and of academic life.11 He then became active in the Congo Reform Association whose American branch he founded in 1904. This was a typically reformist organization whose aim was to denounce and to change the situation in the Congo, then the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. Here as well he was disappointed, having been naive enough to misunderstand the hidden motivations of the Baptist missionaries working in this cause (Hughes, 1969: 164; Lyman, 1992: 72). As a result of this episode he acquired a profound aversion for those to whom he referred as "do-gooders," donators, social workers, and other right-thinking reformers. The experience served to set off a series of events which would definitively fix Park's opposition to overtly reformist sociologists.
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The first of this series of events concerned Park's engagement as chief ghostwriter and white adviser of Booker T. Washington (Harlan, 1983: 290). This position had originally been offered to William E.B, Du Bois (1868—1963), then a professor of social sciences at the University of Atlanta. Before becoming one of the iconic figures of the Civil Rights movement, Du Bois taught sociology and developed a framework for a wide-ranging program of social study focusing mainly on the city.12 In common with many of his contemporaries he considered sociology's soul as being at once scientific and social, scholarly and humanistic. If he declined the post that Washington offered him in 1903, it was not only because of his differences of opinion with the "Wizard ofTuskegee" but also because the position would have brought him very little additional prestige (St. Clair, 1983: 84; Lindner, 1996: 45). Park, however, lacking self-confidence, accepted Washington's offer and suppressed his claim to authorship for eight years in spite of a prolific output.
The start of Park's career atTuskegee might have been marked by these setbacks, but he also experienced other major dissatisfactions in the course of it. During this period, Park conducted journalistic but passionate explorations of the poorer populations of the southern states and of Europe. Nevertheless he failed to carry out any survey in the strict sense of the term, that is to say investigation with scientific aims and outputs. The opportunity to do so presented itself in 1912, however, when Park was identified as the best qualified person to conduct a survey about the condition of schools for blacks in the United States—a donation by the white millionaire Anson Phelps Stokes to Washington's Institute would cover the costs. In spite of Washington's total support for Park, the white sociologist Thomas Jesse Jones, who was trained by Giddings at New York's Columbia University and who resided for a time in the New York University Settlement House,13 was appointed to manage this survey (Harlan, 1983: 201; Watkins, 2001: 98-117; Yellin, 2002: 331). This decision left Park full of bitterness and fed his skepticism about the scientific content of any social survey. As yet another personal setback in his involvement as a reformer, it spurred him on to accept the offer made by Thomas. The link between the two events is clearly made in the following letter that Park wrote to Washington on 3 December 1912:
I have just had a letter from Mr. Stokes which I enclose. It seems to me that now that the investigation is assured we should proceed to take the next step. The next step seems to me to be the endowment of the research work at Tuskegee. I was impressed, in talking with Mr. Stokes, with the fact that the reason I did not get the job, or was not going to get it, was because I did not seem to reptesent science. Perhaps also, there was a distrust of the ability of any one connected with a Negro school to do scientific work. This suggests the advisability of my making some connection with Chicago University. Mr. Thomas has proposed it. Then, when I wanted to do sociological work from Tuskegee, I would have a title and the backing of the University (Harlan and Smock, 1982: 83).
The competition from New York might have proved fatal to his ambitions to become a surveyor,14 but Park's move to Chicago, even though better starred, was marked by circumstances which could have worked against him and which certainly confronted him with a number of challenges. Chicago was at the time as important as New York or Boston as one of the centers of production of urban social surveys (Bulmer et al., 1991: 296). It was the birthplace of the prolific feminist tradition of social survey exemplified by Jane Addams (1860-1935). The work of the female residents of Addams's Chicago Hull House consisted mainly of surveying the city, that is to say gathering information about the conditions of life of the inhabitants of the metropolis, especially its poorest populations, immigrants, and colored people.15 Out of this collective enterprise came in 1895 the celebrated Hull House
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Maps and Papers (a two-volume work describing in minute detail the social conditions prevailing in Chicago's poorest districts) as well as, in similar vein, an impressive series of articles in the AJS. Ten of these articles on "Chicago Housing Conditions" appeared between September 1910 and November 1915, all written by women attached to the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy,16 an independent school for training social workers that became a department of the University of Chicago in 1920, with Edith Abbott as its first chair (Muncy, 1991: 66-79). Park who had not lived in Chicago since 1898 had no links with either Hull House or the Chicago School, unlike the other members of the department that he had just joined. His colleagues Small, Henderson, Zeublin, Vincent, and even Thomas had all developed intellectual or professional links with Addams and her co-workers and recognized to a greater or lesser degree the contribution of their work to the study of sociology (Diner, 1980: 56; Deegan, 2000: 164). For Park, however, Addams was not only outside his social network, which was explained by his recent arrival in Chicago, but also was a competitor in the academic job market. In fact, in 1913, some time before Park was offered his post in the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, Jane Addams had turned down a similar post offered to her by Albion Small. The then chair of the Department of Sociology was seeking a replacement for Vincent who was then mostly engaged in social action (Deegan, 2000: 81). It would appear that the two posts were mutually exclusive. On the one hand, in a letter addressed to Addams, Small presents himself as obliged to choose between "a man who would develop his work along the lines of social psychology" (this being the wish of Thomas who supported Park's application) and a person who would "shift our emphasis more in the line of social service." The latter was Small's own preference and he saw Addams as the ideal candidate (Diner, 1997: 40). On the other hand, Small's inability to offer Park a job as quickly as Thomas would have liked (Raushenbush, 1979: 75-76) leads one to suspect that Small was still waiting for a response from Addams (which never came). In the end, Park was employed not as a professor but as a professorial lecturer (a lower position), whereas Addams, a major figure in the contemporary social and sociological landscape next to a relative unknown like Park,17 had been offered a (part-time) full professorship. Addams as one of the pioneers of the approach in the United States would have been the best-qualified person to teach this course on the social survey.181 am driven to think that Park would have felt constrained to justify his appointment over that of Addams by showing the originality of his viewpoint on a topic on which he was not an expert, unlike Hull House's mistress. My interpretation is upheld retrospectively by the fact that Park would not cite Addams's work until 1921 (when she was no longer shadowing his position) and that he would announce explicitly to his students his distaste for the work of the female researchers of Hull House.19
The elements assembled so far allow us to understand the motives which led Park to produce a text that is at once so close to and yet so different from that which was current at the time. Upon his arrival in Chicago he found himself confronted with the dilemma of dealing with a heated debate with protagonists who were not only unknown to him but who were simultaneously his competitors in the market for knowledge. However, the experience built up during his previous career allowed him to respond to this challenge in his own way. From his position on the fringes of the academic establishment, Park could enjoy a margin for maneuver that owed much to his intellectual and social independence from the figures currently dominating the social survey movement. He was able, up to a point, to follow his own research inclinations and to offer an external viewpoint on the established urban research practices of his time.
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Intellectual Omissions
Even though he was able to express his distaste for the world of do-gooders and reformers to his students, Park could not do so in his written work. He was constrained to express himself within the format of academic writing. He would give intellectual expression to this distaste by the use of different strategies for dealing with the subject of the social survey, all of which were designed to distance himself from it. When considering "The City" as a text dealing, admittedly in its own way, with the subject of the social survey, it can be read in a new way which reveals Park's views on the subject and hence sheds light on the general social theory that he was busy developing at this time. The impact that Park's outsider status and animosity towards the social survey establishment may have had on the development of his thought are highlighted if his article is compared with other contemporary texts written on the same subject. Such comparison shows up two traits that characterize Park's text. First it omits to comment on current urban research works. Second it shows that Park relied largely on subjects that he had completely mastered at that time, namely collective behavior and race relations.
Selective Vocabulary and Biased References
Starting at the most practical level of analysis of academic writing, that is to say the choice of vocabulary and references to other works, I will identify the first shift that Park makes. In the thirty-six pages of his article he uses the word "survey" just once and then deictically to refer to certain social research projects which followed the principles of "social advertising" (Park, 1915a: 605). At no other time does he use this term. Park prefers to use the term "investigation" (which in addition to its use in the title of the article, occurs ten times) or "study" (which appears thirteen times). This is not the result of a random choice of vocabulary. It arises out of a practical strategy designed to distance the author both intellectually and socially from an academic framework functioning according to certain precise rules. It constitutes a first response to the dilemma with which Park was confronted. By contrast, in a text published a year later by Burgess (1916), at a time when he was not yet attached to the University of Chicago and which also relates to the sociological study of urban communities, the word "survey" is used not just in the title but on total seventy times in the text, on average eight times per page.
Park's denial of the social survey is displayed not just in the vocabulary but also in the use of academic syntax and particularly in the sources cited. Unlike Burgess, Park is very parsimonious in his references to current social research projects and their authors. From the way that they are cited, and particularly from their absence, we can see the radical difference that characterizes Park relative to other observers of urban life. He passes over not just the work of those who were his erstwhile competitors (DuBois, Jones, or even Addams and her colleagues) but also that of other social scientists whose work he would certainly have known of at the time of writing "The City." As I shall show further he will commit the same omissions about some prominent urban reformers. I argue that these intellectual omissions can be related to Park's conception of social survey versus sociological investigation, the genesis of which I have previously depicted.20
The most obvious case is that of George E. Haynes (1880-1960), the first black American to earn the title of Doctor (in Economics) from Columbia University and the first professor of sociology at Fisk University where he had obtained his B.A. in 1903. Haynes published The Negro at Work in New York City in 1912, a work which would today be
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described as urban sociology (Bracey et aL, 1971: 4). Park could not be ignorant of Haynes's work not only because it followed the same theme as his own, but also because Haynes had published an article on the "Conditions among Negroes in the Cities" in the same issue of the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science in which an article by Park on the standard of living of this same population had appeared. In his paper, Haynes (1913b) draws attention to the spontaneous process of spatial aggregation, segregation, and ghettoization among populations of different ethnic origins as well as the residential succession of urban populations according to their social mobility. These themes would become central to Park and his colleagues some years later21 (Persons, 1987). Nevertheless Haynes was never to be cited by Park and his name does not appear within the impressive bibliography collected by Louis Wirth in 1925 in The City.22
Haynes, moreover, was one of the co-founders of the National Urban League, an association for the defense and advancement of the urban Black population, which was in some ways the rival in terms of its philosophy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded by Du Bois in 1910. Now Park had attended the founding meeting of the League in 1911 and had been the first president of its Chicago branch from 1916 to 1918 (Raushenbush, 1979: 73; Strickland, 2001: 27). Both men were also invited to join the board of editors of the newly founded Journal of Negro History but neither of them was present at the first 1915 meeting of the board—which in fact never operated as a staff (Savage, 1935: 380). As a result of these facts the idea that Park did not know Haynes or his work at the time that he was writing "The City" holds very little credibility. If he does not cite Haynes, it is not because his views on urban phenomena differed from his own as the extracts already quoted demonstrate. It is rather to the status accorded to sociological research that we should look in order to explain Park's silence.23 For Haynes, sociological research is justified above all by reason of its social utility, that is to say its ability to serve as a basis for intervention and sociopolitical reform. One of the principal aims of the National Urban League, of which Haynes was the most ardent supporter, was the training of social workers capable of contributing by the use of their skills (including competence in social survey) to the improvement of the living conditions of the urban black population. In this, Haynes was the black incarnation of the general philosophy of the largely white social survey movement and shared with it a belief in its axioms and its methods (Weiss, 1974). Because he had been trained in social science not only by Devine at Columbia but also by Addams and Breckinridge at Chicago, the women of Hull House and of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy were among the most ardent supporters of the National League and of its Chicago branch. Now the distinctive feature of Park's presidency of the latter organization was his advocacy of the importance of research, which to him meant something quite other than social survey on its own.24 Hence he took the initiative in developing the research resources of this organization, notably by establishing an office for investigation and recording data, and in acquiring funding to pay for a researcher (Strickland, 2001: 42). This post was filled by Charles Johnson, a student of Park's from the University of Chicago, whose research aims were fundamentally different from those of Haynes or the women social scientists (Bracey et al., 1971: 7). We see here in action Park's wish to redefine the status of sociological research with the attendant implication, from an intellectual as well as a social point of view, that those who had signed up to the "role" of social surveyor should be kept at arm's length (Strickland, 2001: 42)—even if Park shared their ideals, especially those of black social scientists.
The only social surveys that he cites explicitly in "The City" are those of Paul Kellogg on Pittsburgh (published between 1910 and 1914 and without a doubt the best-known of the
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period and also the largest social survey ever) and those conducted by the Russell Sage Foundation which had set up a Survey Department in 1912 (Carpenter, 1934: 163; Bulmer, 1984: 66). Park describes them as a "superior form of journalism" whose objective is to produce "radical reforms." In other words, these surveys are interesting less for their content or conclusions than for their existence as examples of social advertising, a movement which aims to change society by the appropriate mobilization of public opinion25: "As a source of social control public opinion becomes important in societies founded on secondary relationships of which great cities are a type." (Park, 1915a: 605). We can better understand the distance that separates Park from the common conception of the role and status of the survey in the community prevalent at the time if we again compare Park's style with the manner in which Burgess expresses himself in his 1916 article on the social survey.26 This text, written while he was still at the University of Ohio, reflects Burgess's peculiar trajectory in comparison with Park's, especially when we think of the common destiny that would be shared by the two men. Burgess (1916: 492) begins his article with the following sentence: "The social survey of a community is the scientific study of its conditions and needs for the purpose of presenting a constructive program for social advance." We can find here all the ingredients that constituted "urban" sociology at the time: the use of science to promote social action. In so doing, Burgess places himself squarely within his period and also makes reference to a large number of urban surveys carried out before him: those of Booth on London, Rowntree on poverty, Addams on Chicago, even Kellogg's famous Pittsburgh survey. After that he mentions his own experiences in Kansas and Ohio and renders homage to his mentor at the time, Frank Blackmar. For Burgess the mention of these studies testifies to his identification with a certain network of sociologists. In contrast Park did not make references to such works because he was finding it both unnecessary and meaningless either to find or to demonstrate such an affiliation in the context of his career so far.
Apart from this unique reference to well-known prior surveys, two other citations made in "The City" are worthy of notice because they could lead one to think that Park was not so far from the social survey movement as I have argued up to this point. The first is the mention made of East London, a work published in 1901 by the British writer Walter Besant. Given that the first university settlement in history, Toynbee Hall, was founded in this part of London in 1884 and that Besant was a supporter of the endeavor (Carson, 1990: 1), one could see in this reference an indication of Park's willingness to show his knowledge of and gratitude toward the origins of this social movement. But there is nothing of the sort. Not only does Park make no reference to the London settlement in the extracts that he quotes from this book, but his interest in this part of London originates in a visit he made to London in 1910 not to visit this institution and to learn about it as had many Americans who visited it at the time (Carson, 1990: 1), but to act as companion and guide to Booker T. Washington in his observations of the underprivileged populations of Europe. In the third chapter of The Man Farthest Down, the book that they wrote together to describe their voyage, the authors describe East End in a fashion that is very similar in tone and detail to that followed by Besant.27 Park was in charge not only of preparing Washington's itinerary but also of gathering as much documentation as possible on the populations that they visited (Washington, 1912: 17; Harlan, 1983: 291). It was probably then that he first encountered Besant s book,28 which he used later as a source of observations to illustrate his theory of the process of urban segregation in "The City." The use of this citation therefore does not seem to reflect any ideological or epistemological debt towards the London social scientists.
Similarly with the reference that Park makes (1915a: 580) to a conference paper presented by one of the most prominent leaders of the settlement movement, Robert A. Woods.29
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Woods was like Jane Addams one of the pioneers of the settlement movement in the United States. He had also visited Toynbee Hall but with the aim of importing the model across the Atlantic, which he did by founding the South End Settlement in Boston. He was also the first to describe settlements as laboratories of social science (Carson, 1990). So, if my interpretation followed so far is right, how can I explain that Park quoted Woods? Now Park had a particular link to Woods: the two men had each spoken at the eighth annual congress of the American Sociological Society held in Minneapolis in September 1913. On this occasion Woods spoke about the role of "the neighborhood in social reconstruction" and Park presented his ideas on the subject of "racial assimilation in secondary groups." Both texts were subsequently published in the March 1914 issue of the AJS. As a consequence Park might have cited Woods because the latter was the first representative of the social survey movement whom he met within an academic arena. Moreover Woods showed himself to be critical towards the naivety of reformers—a opinion that Park appreciated.30 It is also possible that Wood's work and output were already well known to Park as a result of his time in Boston, the city where he had lived prior to moving to Chicago. Since his return from Germany in 1903, Park had lived in Wollaston, a suburb to the south of Boston, from which he traveled to Harvard when he was employed there as an instructor (in 1903 and 1904) and where he subsequently spent his summers (following his employment by Washington at Tuskegee). It is very unlikely that in the ten years that he spent in Boston, with a wife who was not only an artist but also philosophically inclined towards socialism and involved in the struggle for women's rights, Park had never come across the work of Woods who shared in many respects a similar background to that of his wife.31 Moreover Park obtained in 1905-1906 a South End House Fellowship from Harvard for John Daniels to study the black population of Boston (Daniels was a "white Bookerite" and a newspaperman as Park was and succeeded Park as secretary of the Congo Reform Association). This connection eventually led to the publication in 1914 of Daniels's In Freedom Birthplace (Chapoulie, 2001: 72). Daniels opens his preface by acknowledging his gratitude to Woods and Park respectively.32 The fact remains that the only representative of "applied sociology" that Park mentions in "The City" lived in Boston and not in Chicago (a city of which Park had had no intimate knowledge since his stay there between 1897 and 189833) and that this reference appears to be largely biographically driven—as was Park's omission of Haynes.
A New Epistemology for Sociological Research
The second intellectual displacement operating within "The City" is situated at the epis-temological level. Park (1915a: 604) insists on the necessity of studying the social material produced by the investigation in a "disinterested" manner. He delivers this instruction explicitly at the end of the paragraph that he devotes to local politics, where he deals with the phenomenon of the urban "bosses" and the "machines" that they had set up in all the big American cities. Now social reformers were combating this political machinery, notably by the uses of social surveys aimed at depicting the truly conditions of life in the neighborhoods. Park clearly enjoins his readers not to adopt the attitude of this latter group because he finds that it harms the quality of a true scientific investigation. This appeal to axiological neutrality is not completely new at the time at which Park published his paper. Some of his academic colleagues had already underlined the importance of a coldly dispassionate approach to the "hottest" social problems of the moment. But for these others such an attitude would allow a better cure to be found for these problems more than it would enhance theoretical understanding.34 For himself, Park employs a conceptual leap which is rooted in
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the debates of his own time but which surpasses them. In fact, that which reformers in general and social scientists in particular hailed as a new idea was the fact that "social problems" depended less on the moral responsibility of individuals considered as people than on structural factors such as the living environment, the political setup, the division of labor and so on, all of these dimensions being what could be subsumed under the general term "environment." This idea led them to move the debate away from its moral tone towards a more systematic reading of social phenomena. They held that the improvement of infrastructures (public amenities, town planning, etc.) and of structures (political, economic, administrative, etc.) would raise the morality of individuals and of society in general. Having subscribed to this vision of things, Park rather than opposing or favoring either of these extreme positions puts forward the notion that they are inseparable and mutually influential. In order to express this duality he proposes for the first time the paired concepts: "physical structure" and "moral order," "moral organization" and "physical organization." The idea of this distinction as well as of the interrelationship of the concepts was first expressed in the work of a celebrated intellectual of the reform movement of the time, Frederic C. Howe, who was for many years involved in local politics in Cleveland (Lubove, 1977; Mattson, 1998: 32-41). Howe had published a book in 1905 also entitled The City in which he proposed this distinction. He would present it again in an article that appeared in the AJS in 1912, devoted to the "socializing" (i.e. moralizing) effects of the "physical basis of the city." Park would borrow from Howe (but without citing him) not just the title of his book but also the title of his article ("the city plan" appears within the title of the first paragraph of Park's "The City"). Many of the themes that he tackles in this section can be compared to the writings of Howe, especially those relating to the importance of urban infrastructure, unregulated town-planning, or the people's vote. But Park demonstrates originality relative to Howe and his contemporaries in stripping definitively the qualifier "moral" of its ethical connotations. Howe made the first move away from a merely ethical look at urban phenomena. For him individual and collective morality is shaped by economic conditions or more precisely by the ways economy is organized:
We have generally assumed that the city problem was a personal one; that it was a problem of men, of charters, of political machinery. We have approached the city as a personal, ethical, political question. . . . The city problem is primarily an economic not a personal problem. . . . The basis of the city, like the basis of all life, is physical (Howe, 1912: 590).
Park made a move further: relying on Sumner's notion of institution, he considered that the physical organization and the moral organization of the city are not subordinated orders but are interacting orders:
Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to be, mere artifact. . . . The fact is, however, that the city is rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit it. The consequence is that the city possesses a moral as well as a physical organization, and these two mutually interact in characteristic ways to moid and modify one another. (Park, 1915a: 578).
The notion of "moral order" permits for him the description of an order of reality which is just as objective or "natural" as the physical elements of a city—thereby avoiding esthetic or moral evaluation of processes yet described in a very similar fashion.35 In Park's words the adjective "moral" designates not "the good and evil in human nature" (Park, 1915a: 612) but refers instead to anything touching on folkways (Park refers here to Sumner but will later adopt the notion of culture), "customs," "traditions," or even "passions," "tastes," or
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"interests" linking individuals in given social groups. Park consequently makes a double epistemological shift. First he calls upon the axiological neutrality of the sociologist; second he uses the notion of "morality" in a descriptive rather than in a normative sense. In so doing he was distancing himself from the social scientists who continued to work within the realm of social ethics. Social customs were to be considered as "materials" for research and not as "problems" which had been dealt with according to ethical criteria.
A Renewed Ontology of Social Reality
Park's idea was to have a more general impact, implicitly redefining the ontology of social phenomena. According to him, the objects of study of the "committed" or "applied" sociologists had no value in themselves. The ideal investigation does not aim to produce knowledge which permits future action. The aim of social science is to describe "human behavior" in an objective manner. As a result the phenomena investigated by "social pathologists" (as Mills would latter say) should be seen only as a route into the fundamental and general reality of "human nature." In the paragraph on the unity of the neighborhood, Park says that "the social settlements . . . have developed certain methods and a technique for stimulating and controlling local communities," making a clear but implicit reference to existing social surveys. He goes on to elaborate: "We should study, in connection with the investigation of these agencies, these methods and this technique, since it is just the method by which objects are practically controlled that reveals their essential nature, that is to say, their predictable character." (Park, 1915a: 581). A little further, still on the subject of tools developed by social workers, he adds that these "should be studied, in short, not merely for their own sake but for what they can reveal to us of human behavior and human nature generally" (Park, 1915a: 582). Park is therefore suggesting a change of focus in the observation of urban phenomena. Rather than seeing them as societal "problems" that should be dealt with by social science, the sociologist should consider them to be expressions of a fundamental reality. This reality is that of human nature and its collective dimension of which the nomologic essence should be sought. This is the meaning that he also ascribes to the idea of the city as laboratory, an idea that was developed and maintained by the social survey movement but whose significance is transformed by Park. If Robert Woods had since 1893 referred to this type of establishment as "social science laboratories," it was because they permitted access to "a microcosm of all social problems" (Woods, 1923: 43). The expression was taken up by academic sociologists and proved attractive to a student clientele eager to be involved in social intervention (Kurtz, 1984: 60; Leclerc, 1979: 68). Park (1915a: 612) for his part substitutes for this idea "the view that would make of the city a laboratory or a clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied." One does not have to study the city in order to change it (the goal of all "research" at the time) nor even to study the city for its own sake (Park does not yet seek to lay the foundations of a sociological sub-discipline, as he was later do with his colleagues Burgess and Wirth) but to take advantage of the city as a place for the expression, the embodiment and the ideal observation-point of social and fundamental human realities.36 The laboratory is the reduction of the social world and of human nature, brought within reach, and placed under a magnifying glass, in an environment which is ideal for observation. But the recourse to the idea of a laboratory cannot be understood solely in reference to the general context of this idea at the time. It could be explained also and perhaps primarily with reference to the situation in which Park found himself and which led him to deal with a social movement whose aims he did not share.37 Faced with such a dilemma, Park goes on to
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use the idea while radically changing its significance just as he did with the notion of moral order.
"The City" as an Exposition of a General Theory of Contemporary Society
This ontological ordering of sociological objects corresponds to a theoretical interpretation through which the practice of the social survey becomes itself the subject of research. According to Park, it is not enough to think of social problems as the critical expression of social reality. It is also necessary to admit that the phenomenon of the social survey is itself an expression and incarnation of the constituent elements of contemporary society. For Park, the writing of "The City" would be an opportunity to define, to present, and to illustrate his general theory of the distinctiveness of modern society. According to him modern society is characterized by the weakening of primary social bonds in favor of the ordering of relationships by conformity and by public opinion. In his own words it means that society is now structured around secondary groups, individualized behavior, and social and geographical mobility. From this point of view the reformer and the boss represent two different types of political actors of which one operates on secondary relations and the other on primary relations. Their opposition is no longer a conflict between good and evil, virtue and vice, but between two different orders of the construction of social relations. In Park's view their coexistence represents in reality a historical stage in the replacement of one by the other. The innovative character generally attributed to Park's text should not however blind us to the fact that it recapitulates to a large extent the interpretations that Park had already developed on the subject of phenomena other than the city. With the exception of the first paragraph ("the city plan and local organization") where Park deals with the questions preoccupying social workers and surveyors and which constitutes the sole implicit or explicit reference to their work, most of the rest of the text is devoted to phenomena which had previously attracted his scholarly interest. The crowd, public opinion, collective action, the press, the stock exchange, have already been treated in Park's Masse und Publikum and his hypothesis on the "secondarization" of social relations had been presented a year earlier in his text on racial assimilation.38 The novelty represented by "The City" relative to Park's earlier writings is to present the city as the preferred locus for the manifestation of these phenomena, a perspective that he had never previously mentioned in his written work. Nevertheless, even though the originality of the interpretation is undeniable, his return in such an obvious and faithful manner to his prior theoretical framework testifies to two things: first, the distance that separated Park from the socio-academic paradigm of the social survey; second, the relatively improvised or immature character of his theoretical conception of the urban phenomenon. Apart from the absence of references to work already published on this question (a fact which gives weight to the idea that "The City" is more of an attack on the social survey than on the question of the city itself),39 it must be noted that the definition of the city as an institution presented at the beginning of the article was to disappear completely in the 1925 revision. It was to be replaced by a characterization couched in environmental terms. In other words, at the time that he was writing "The City" in 1914 Park did not have a theory of the city but only a theory of contemporary society. Having been assigned to teach a course on the social survey, Park took this opportunity to apply to urban reality the explanatory paradigm of contemporary society that he was currently building. In so doing he was simultaneously fulfilling the demands (but certainly not the expectations) of the academic institution to which he belonged henceforth. Moreover it can be stated that from the time of his conference paper of 1913 on assimilation to the appearance
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of the Introduction to the Science of Sociology in 1921, Park was driven by the need to create a general theoretical framework that could cover both collective behavior and contemporary society. The writing of "The City" forms part of this intellectual quest and cannot be completely understood outside this context. To put it another way, "The City" stands in the same relation to the Parkian theory of contemporary society that the Principles of Human Behavior, which also appeared in 1915, does to his general theory of collective action. Further, if the analytical framework that Park puts forward in "The City" had already been used a year earlier in "Racial Assimilation," that which he presents in the Principles is taken almost word for word from his thesis of 1903. The 1921 Introduction integrates these two preoccupations in a magisterial presentation whose general structure Park was never to modify or discard (Bramson, 1961: 60).40 But this theory, whose impact would be undeniable, transposed to the conceptual level the social and axiological distance that separated Park from the social scientists of the time.
Narrative Provisions: The Revised City
In describing this distance in "The City" Park was defining his own conception of sociology and of sociological research more than he was seeking, at least inl915,tosetupanew specialist discipline. At the paradigmatic level, as detailed in the previous section, his article suggests an innovative stance for the investigation of'human behavior' by allying the viewpoint of the speculative sociologists of the previous generation (whose thinking centered on the "natural" ground rules of the social order) and the empirical orientation of the new intra—and extra-academic generation of "applied sociologists."41 From a social point of view this innovation was shown in the distance taken either by criticism or by silence from the work of a certain community of social scientists who furthermore maintained close professional and institutional links among themselves.42 But all of them, particularly Addams and Du Bois (now the subjects of renewed interest), were nevertheless excluded almost entirely from the memory of academic sociology despite their undeniable contributions to its development (Deegan, 2003). Their destiny is not unconnected with Park's "ambivalent encounters" with them43 and with the enterprise that Park and his younger colleagues developed after the First World War.
The Circumstances of a Revision
The circumstances underlying the revision and above all the reception of the second edition of "The City" were in effect radically different to those underlying its initial genesis. The United States emerged victorious from the conflict of 1914—1918 and became the world's greatest power. The 1920s were a period of great economic prosperity, a prosperity which transformed the material and cultural aspects of daily life and led to a considerable increase in both resources for and users of the university system (Bramson, 1961: 86). It was also a decade marked by the professionalization and specialization of expertise regarding the urban landscape as well as in technical and social subjects (Lubove, 1965; Muncy, 1991; Lannoy, 2003). The reform movement, which Park characterized in 1915 as a "popular indoor sport," lost its coherence under the pressure of these various developments (e.g. Jane Addams lost her public reputation because of her pacifism during the First World War) while urban research was monopolized by university academics (Lasker, 1922; Young, 1942; Bulmer et al. 1991; Piatt, 1996).
At the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago the death in 1915 of Charles
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Henderson, undoubtedly the most active teacher in terms of social research, led to the engagement of Burgess who began a chance but long-term collaboration with Park.44 For Park the immediate post-war period was marked by the enforced departure of Thomas in 1918. This unfortunate event was undoubtedly if involuntarily to profit Park who became in a way the new intellectual leader of sociology at Chicago. The Introduction to the Science of Sociology which he published in 1921 sold enormously well while the report he prepared on the Chicago racist riots of 1919 was particularly noted. But his article on the city passed unnoticed in the period immediately after its publication. The first author to refer to it in the AJS was McKenzie in his series of articles on the study of an area of Columbus, Ohio, the first of which appeared in 1921. Park himself cited his own text at several points in the Introduction. Of course his students must have read "The City." However, after 1921 these no longer had the opportunity to take a course on the social survey (Park had decided to give up this responsibility) but instead were able to follow an introduction to "field studies," whose philosophy was explicitly different from that of the social survey (Palmer, 1926; Converse, 1987: 37). From the 1920s onward several theses relating to the city of Chicago were undertaken under Park's supervision. He came to be greatly esteemed by the students, notably on account of his creation in 1920 of the Society for Social Research where students and teachers from Chicago could exchange ideas about work in progress (Kurtz, 1982).
But it was under the influence of the political scientist Charles Merriam, a man particularly well situated in Chicago's social circles, that the Local Community Research Committee was founded in 1923. From its foundation until the Second World War this independent and interdisciplinary research institute was particularly well financed by private foundations, principally the Laura Spelman Rockfeller Memorial, named after the wife of the founder of the University of Chicago (Bulmer, 1980; Matthews, 1977). It was in 1923, too, that Park acquired the title of professor and also launched a collection at the university press {The University of Chicago Sociological Series) in which would be published the urban monographs that were to establish the reputation of the Chicago School (Leavy, 1996). It was in this context that the sociologists were to prepare a collective work outlining their approaches to urban research.45 This work appeared in 1925 under the title The City, the title of Park's 1915 article (but also, as we have seen, of Howe's work). In the same year Park was named president of the American Sociological Society and proposed "The City" as the theme of the annual meeting (Park, 1925a) whose proceedings were to be published by Burgess under the title of The Urban Community. These two works testify to the changes that had taken place since 1915 in the academic field and reflect the position Park was henceforth to occupy in it.
Providing a "Natural History" of Urban Sociology
As the introductory chapter of The City we find Park's article of the same name that had appeared ten years earlier, but now in a modified form. The author's revisions consist of two main points. First, he cuts his definition of the city as institution, thus eliminating the reference to Sumner, and proposes a theoretical framework articulated around the notions of culture and ecology, so giving conceptual support to his early (but not original, as we have seen) distinction between the "moral organization" and the "physical organization" of the city. Henceforth, Park was to draw on Spengler and Boas to introduce the idea of culture, which takes its meaning in opposition to what is defined as "natural," principally urban spaces.46 It is this "point of view" developed "recently" under the name of "ecology," writes Park (1925b: 1), that allows one to describe the forces which define the natural order
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of the city. Park here takes up once again the approach suggested for the first time a year earlier by McKenzie in an article in the AJS (and which constitutes the third chapter of The City). This recourse to an ecological vocabulary was to allow the description of a new paradigm (Alihan, 1964; Gaziano, 1996) as well as the identification of a "Chicago School."47
The second modification Park made to his text is less of a conceptual than a rhetorical nature. Park is going to introduce the idea that his text should be read as a research program. He ends his entirely new introduction with this sentence: "The observations which follow are intended to define a point of view and to indicate a program for the study of urban life: its physical organization, its occupations, and its culture" (Park, 1925b: 3). In the same way he adds a new passage at the end of its second paragraph in which he writes: "The city, and in particular the great city, in which more than elsewhere human relations are likely to be impersonal and rational, defined in terms of interest and in terms of cash, is in a very real sense a laboratory for the investigation of collective behavior. . . . The questions which follow will perhaps suggest lines of investigation that could be followed profitably by students of urban life" (Park, 1925b: 22). In making these clarifications Park proposes a new reading of his own text. Having become both researcher and director of research esteemed by his peers and surrounded by industrious and devoted collaborators and students (Bedford left the University in 1925 and Park became the leader of the investigating enterprise of the Chicago urban life, with some younger colleagues like Burgess, Wirth, Palmer, and their students), he was in a position to present a text which can and must henceforth appear as a research program, but which was not so in the beginning. The other important rhetorical change is the use of the adjective "urban." In addition to its appearance in the title (where the expression "urban environment" is substituted for that of "city environment") Park uses it systematically in all the new passages introduced to the text. This he writes "urban" as many times in his 1925 introduction (three pages) as he does in the whole of his text of 1915. As Lindner (1996: 50) has remarked, this lexical change testifies to the desire of urban sociologists to define the sociological specificity of their object in relation to what is defined as rural, and in doing so to compete with rural sociology, a specialization broadly established and institutionalized at that time, as opposed to urban sociology.48 Still the fact remains that these different investments (institutional, conceptual, rhetorical) secured Park and his researchers a strong hold on the "laboratory" that Chicago had already been for quite some time. They also placed them in the leading position in the field of urban analysis, relegating non-university researchers to the rank of pre-scientific precursors, applied sociologists, or amateur observers.
Park was to be not only a central actor in this "natural history" of sociological research, and more precisely of urban sociology. He was also to be its first narrator. In the Introduction we can already see the idea according to which social surveys constitute, in the same way as muckraking journalism, an historic stage in the development of social science of which sociology is the final stage:
Social interest in the city was first stimulated by the polemics against the political and social disorders of urban life. There were those who would destroy the city in order to remedy its evils and restore the simple life of the country. Sociology sought a surer basis for the solution of the problems from a study of the facts of city life. Statistics of population by governmental departments provide figures upon conditions and tendencies. Community surveys have translated into understandable form a mass of information about the formal aspects of city life. Naturally enough, sympathetic and arresting pictures of city life have come from residents of settlements as in Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House, Robert Woods's The City Wilderness, Lillian Wald's The House on Henry Street zná Mrs. Simkhovitch's The City Worker's World (Park and Burgess, 1924: 331).
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If these studies supply only "arresting pictures" it is because their authors do not go beyond common-sense thinking, says Park a little further on. In the chapter devoted to social forces, we read :
The idea of forces behind the manifestations of physical nature and of society is a notion which arises naturally out of the experience of the ordinary man. Historians, social reformers, and students of community life have used the term in the language of common sense to describe factors in social situations which they recognized but did not attempt to describe or define. . . . Sociologists have carried the analysis a step further (Park and Burgess, 1924: 435-437).
Park presents the same idea in an article aimed at social workers published in 1924 in the journal of Applied Sociology:
If social service is to expand its activities to meet all these needs [i.e. the fundamental demands of human nature] we shall require a very different sort of community study than we have had in the past. But these new forms of social study are making their appearance. If I speak of studies made in Chicago it is because I happen to know them best. Studies of the sort I have in mind are Nels Anderson's study of "Hobohemia," as he called it. . . . Another social study which falls in this same category is the Negro in Chicago (Park, 1924: 267).
But it is in his 1929 article "The City as Social Laboratory" that Park gives the most complete and explicit version of his story of the development of urban research. In it he describes 'the first local studies' as having a 'practical rather than theoretical character' (Park, 1929:5). He includes among these Addams's Hull House Maps and Papers, Woods's The City Wilderness, the works of Booth and of Rowntree, the Pittsburgh Survey as well as the series of articles that appeared between 1910 and 1915 in the AJS under the direction of Breckinridge and Abbott.49 Having emphasized the contributions of these studies in terms of the quantity of material gathered, Park (1929: 8) nevertheless points out that "they do not yield generalizations of wide or general validity." And he makes it clear in the next paragraph, in which the present situation of urban research is described, that this comparative and generalizing concern "has been the central theme of a series of special studies of the Chicago Urban Community, some of which have already been published, others of which are still in progress" (Park, 1929: 9). It is the concern, we will have understood, of all the research carried out under his direction and which will constitute the "contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology" (Short, 1971).
In adding these modifications to his 1915 text as in publishing this account of the development of urban research, Park was to write a chapter in the history of sociology, deliberately supplying to future generations of sociologists a program of investigation and explicitly offering to his contemporaries as to historians of the discipline a teleological representation of its genesis (Levine, 1995: 18). Without doubt no other natural history has been as socially constructed as this one.
Conclusion
Sociological production, like any other social activity, is a located activity, embodied in and carried out by individuals situated in actual social relations. Such a feature can be detected in the scholarly writing itself—this was the heuristic starting point of my essay. This point of view has led me to find in the article Robert Park wrote on the city in 1915 an intellectual concern which is not the one generally identified today. Rather than finding in it the presentation of a research program which the author in some sense had foreseen I have
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depicted it as an answer to a contradictory order that only the biographical trajectory and social position of the author can allow us to grasp fully. Arriving in Chicago with second-level professional status and brought to teach a technique he had never practiced in the recognized forms of the time, Park fulfilled his tasks with all the freedom granted him precisely by his status as an outsider. But if while writing "The City" Park took up his stance (and his distance) in relation to the question of the social survey (which constituted at that time the focal point of a social movement and a leading current in sociology) he did so not just for intellectual reasons. In fact Park's text can be viewed as the written record of his biographical and social trajectory in the academic form of the sociological writing of the time. In other words there is a dynamic homology between the interpretative position Park maintained and the position he occupied in the field of intellectual production. This means that the interpretations he proposes and the way in which he formulates them can be linked to the objective relations he maintained with other producers and bodies of knowledge, and notably the promoters of the social survey (Breslau, 1990). Park was not at all close to this milieu because of his long stay in Tuskegee with Booker T Washington and despite the intellectual and social affinity he had for it a decade earlier. In this perspective the writing of "The City" was not so much an opportunity for him to propound a theory of urban phenomena as a chance to express his views on the way sociology ought to be done. His text reveals the selective process by which he omitted or veiled some central figures of the urban research of the time. As for the second version of the "The City," it provides readers with a renewed representation of research on the city as much as it testifies to the trajectory of its author and to the changes in his status in the field of knowledge producers. Enjoying a substantially different status to that of 1915 and the intellectual, academic, material, and cultural context having substantially changed since the end of the First World War, Park in 1925 found himself at the center of a collective and effective research enterprise of which he was the motive force as much as the beneficiary.
But all this does not mean that sociological writing is purely circumstantial and can be reduced to the context of its production. The very forms in which sociological writing is obliged to express itself in order to be recognized as such (and which vary both in time and in space) opens up the possibility of a disconnection of both words and meanings along with this initial context. In Park's case the disconnection of "The City" from its original context allowed subsequent generations of sociologists to forget the circumstances of its genesis and to read it as the work of an accomplished sociologist—a "Master of Sociological Thought"—with no other motivations than theoretical ones. I have tried to show the narrowness of such a conception by arguing that circumstances play a far from negligible role in the process of intellectual innovation. Among these the personal relations that a writer maintains with his contemporaries are of crucial importance because they can lead to intellectual omissions (or acknowledgements) otherwise unintelligible. In the case of "The City" the only feature shared in common by the authors Park omitted to mention, while being nevertheless aware of their work, is their conception of the sociological task. In other words Park's prime motive at this time was academic politics. From his arrival at Chicago Park was to become an effective reformer—the reformer of sociology's reformist inclinations. Through the interplay between historical circumstances and purposive actions he established himself as an authoritative innovator in the redefined field of sociology. Identifying such actual influences and motives, which supposes meticulous work from the point of view of both the history of ideas and social historiography, allows a sort of comprehensive sociology of sociological production and innovation which shows it as a life form subject to the same constraints and forces as any other human enterprise.
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Notes
* The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on the first draft of this paper, Lawrence T. Nichols for his kindly editorial guidance, and Jacques Marquet and Felice Dassetto for their material support.
1. For views contemporary with Park's on the role of the social survey and its links with the science of sociology, see Riley (1911), Burgess (1916), or Taylor (1919, 1920). For general historical accounts of the social survey movement, see Carpenter (1934), Gordon (1973), Converse (1987), Bulmer et al. (1991), or Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (2002).
2. Here I will pay special attention to Park's intellectual omissions in "The City" considering omitted authors or works as "negative" influences that affected Park's writing—in the photographic sense of the term. But Park was also influenced by "positive" models. Many more studies have been devoted to this aspect. But some further details are also to be given about Park's "positive" influences—notably about W.I. Thomas's influence. In this respect the present paper must be considered as complementary to my other paper on "The City" (Lannoy and Ruwet, 2004).
3. The AJS was a bimonthly journal and authors were asked to furnish their manuscript three months before publication at least (Abbott, 1999: 93). "The City" having been published in the March 1915 issue, Park must have written it before November 1914. The revised version was published in December 1925. It is generally acknowledged that both versions are effectively equivalent. Yet in the preface to the work of 1925, in which Park published "The City" for the second time, he makes it clear that this is a modified version of the text that had been published earlier. But Hughes, in his edition of Park's works, was the first to betray this assertion. He prints the 1925 version claiming that it was published in March 1916 (sic) in the AJS then republished in The City, without noting that the two versions are different. The new edition of The City prepared by Janowitz in 1967 in his collection The Heritage of Sociology does not contain the original preface but rather a new introduction by the editor ignoring this point of detail. Lindner (1996: 50) lists authors guilty of the same imprecision. The 1915 version of "The City" has never been reprinted.
4. Harlan and Smock (1979: 203) have provided definitive evidences of Park's ghostwriting work for Washington. The main articles written by Park between 1900 and 1913 can be found in Lyman (1992).
5. Even in his thesis there is no reference to the city, whether as concept, milieu, or context of the forms of social action which the thesis seeks to define from a sociological point of view. The only exception is the work he prepared with Washington, The Man Farthest Down, where the authors give an account of their visit to various European cities (Washington, 1912). We will return to this later.
6. After gaining his B.A. at the University of Michigan in 1887 Park worked as a journalist in Minneapolis (1887-1890), Detroit (1891), Denver (1891-1892), New York (1892-1893), once again in Detroit (1894-1896), and Chicago (1897-1898). In 1898 he returned to Boston where he took up his philosophy studies at Harvard. From 1899 to 1903 he studied for a thesis in philosophy, following his director of studies, Wilhelm Windelband, from Berlin to Heidelberg via Strasbourg. Back in the United States, he was to work for two years as an instructor at Harvard, becoming secretary of the Congo Reform Association in Boston before working full-time with Booker T. Washington from 1905.
7- The explicative pattern usually given refers to Park's curiosity towards urban phenomena as having been stimulated by his newspaperman experiences: " [Park] plunged into academic life with the same unquenchable curiosity he had manifested in each of his earlier occupations. He made himself familiar with the city of Chicago, walking its streets, stopping to look at whatever interested him, speaking to whomever he pleased. He was once more a reporter, but this time he had no deadlines, and he did not have to confine himself to "digging-out" facts. He could exercise his freedom of imagination." (Shils, 1991: 126). I argue that "The City" is as much the product of his animosity towards some previously encountered students of urban life as it was of his curiosity towards urban phenomena.
8. Bedford was a Fellow in the department of sociology from 1905 to 1907, assistant professor from 1910 to 1915, then associate professor until 1925 (Harvey, 1987). He was also associate editor of the AJS from 1914 to 1925. The history of sociology has not remembered his name and, to my knowledge, he was the author of only one work, entitled Readings in Urban Sociology, published in 1927. For the circumstances of his departure form the University, see the comments in Chapoulie (2001: 124).
9. Thomas (1912) also provided a list of questions relating to each topic of his paper. For a full account of the similarities between "The City" and Thomas's previous works, see Lannoy and Ruwet (2004). Park was not to use this form of writing again, except in an article of 1923 in which he attempts to answer the question: "What is a Survey of Race Relations?" (Park, 1923). Note the formal closeness of the questions in the titles: the announcement of the subject is followed by "suggestions for ..."
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10. There is no evidence that the social survey course had ever been taught before Park's arrival at Chicago. Could this mean that Park chose to teach a course on the survey? As I shall show, there was at that time an explicit demand to develop what Park will later call "field studies"—a demand conjointly nurtured by "reform minded" sociologists (like Henderson or Vincent) and by "ethnographically inclined" sociologists (like Thomas). As a consequence to teach a course on the survey was for Park a way to fulfill simultaneously the institutional expectations of his new Department and his need to define his own vision of the sociological research task—precisely as distinct from reform purposes (Converse, 1987: 37).
11. It is for this reason that he declined Albion Small's offer in 1904 to join the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. For details on this event and his feelings at this time, see Raushenbush (1979:41).
12. See the surveys published under Du Bois's direction by the University Press of Atlanta between 1896 and 1906 (Du Bois, 1968). Carried out by his students, with very limited means, these surveys constituted the first attempts at an extensive sociological examination of the urban Black community. Du Bois, also the author of The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first study of the American urban community (Vidich and Lyman, 1985:127; Ross, 1991: 439), and of The Black North (1901), was the American founder of a reading of urban segregation in terms both economic (according to social class) and ethnic. According to Du Bois the black population suffered from the combination of these two factors. Park was to substitute for this vision his own ecological conception of the social mosaic, founded at one and the same time on physical factors and on elective factors linked to individual types (or functional roles).
13. Jones, author of a thesis published in 1904 as The Sociology of a New York City Block, was a member of the Columbia F.H.G. Club, a group of Giddings's students in which the Kellogg brothers, authors of the famous Pittsburgh Survey and founders of the review The Survey also took part. As Odum (1951: 15) makes clear, "The Kelloggs and Jones were 'promising sociologists'" at that time, in contrast with Park. On the connections between Jones, Giddings, the Stokes family and Washington, see Watkins (2001).
14. Park (1918b) was quick to take his revenge in his highly critical commentary on the work that resulted from Jones's survey, which he characterized as voluminous but lacking any interpretative framework.
15. Social settlements were neighborhood institutions whose aim was to develop on the local level new forms of solidarity and social action (adult education, co-operative businesses and banks, cultural centers, libraries, recreational facilities, etc.) for deprived sectors of the population. Social surveys of these sectors had the aim of determining their needs (Kellogg, 1934; Carson, 1990).
16. The team of women researchers was under the direction of Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, two Hull House residents and close collaborators of Addams who both taught at the department of sociology at the University of Chicago, where they had each obtained a Ph.D. (Ross, 1991: 227). The team consisted of Milton Hunt (1910), Alzada Comstock (1912), Grace Peloubet Norton (1913), Helen Wilson and Eugenice Smith (1914), Elizabeth Hughes (1914), and Natalie Walker (1915). Abbott and Breckinridge wrote four articles in the series (1910, 1911a, 1911b, 1911c). For a general view on the contributions of women sociologists, including those here cited, see Grant, Stalp, and Ward (2002).
17. Park was perfectly well aware of his marginal status: "I did not land in Chicago in the regular way, but as a professorial lecturer. A professorial lecturer was supposed to have special knowledge. I had some special knowledge of the Negro, and I had written a thesis on collective psychology" (Baker, 1973: 259-260). He was therefore not recognized as having any special expertise in either social survey or in urban sociology.
18. The description Small gave to Addams of the teaching she would have to carry out if she accepted a post in the department of sociology makes it clear that it was to involve training students to carry out field studies (Diner, 1997: 40; Deegan, 2000: 81).
19. Park's frequently quoted declaration says: "The greatest damage done to the city of Chicago was not the product of corrupt politicians or criminals but of women reformers." (Raushenbush, 1979: 97). See also Deegan's arguments on rhe distance between Park and Addams (2000: 158—159).
20. I do not intend to state that Park like any author of every period of time had limited knowledge of the work of others^—which is common sense. I will treat the only authors about whom there is a 'reasonable assumption' of having been voluntarily omitted in Park's text. This assumption relies on the fact that intellectual or institutional proximity between Park and these others at this time can be established.
21. Haynes (1913b: 59) writes: "Migration to the city is being followed by segregation into districts and neighborhoods within the city"; and further on: "as Negroes develop in intelligence, in their standard of living and economic power, they desire better houses, better public facilities and other conveniences not usually obtainable in the sections allowed to their less fortunate Black brothers. To obtain these advantages they seek other neighborhoods, just as the European immigrants who are crowded into segregated sections of our cities seek better surroundings when they are economically able to secure them" (Ibid.: 60). Park, for his part, makes the following comments in "The City": "The influences of local distribu-
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tion of the population participate with the influences of class and race in the evolution of the social organization. Every great city has its racial colonies" (Park, 1915a: 582); but goes on: "What we want to know of these neighborhoods, racial communities, and segregated city areas, existing within or on the outer edge of great cities, is what we want to know of all other social groups. What are the elements of which they are composed? To what extent are they the product of a selective process? How do people get in and out of the group thus formed? What are the relative permanence and stability of their populations?" (Ibid.: 583). As we can see, Park formulates in general terms ("every great city," "all other social groups," etc.) the questions that Haynes, for his part, had asked himself regarding the urban Black population. Haynes did not neglect, however, to make it clear that Blacks were subject to the same processes as other "immigrant" populations (notably European immigrants) and even the "population in general": "The causes that have operated to draw the Negro to urban centers have been those fundamental economic, social, and individual causes which have affected the general population." (Haynes, 1913b: 58).
22. Moreover, Haynes was not to be cited in other (white) works of general and urban sociology of the time (Hayes, 1915; Park and Burgess, 1921; Burgess, 1926; Anderson and Lindeman, 1928; Anderson, 1929; Young, 1942).
23. It could be argued that Park perhaps did not cite Haynes' work because he did not find it directly relevant. But what I am trying to show is precisely the fact that any work's relevance is socially constructed. By the very nature of the writing economy any author is confronted with the dilemma of citing or not citing others' works. In Haynes's case Park's omission cannot be attributed to ignorance; but could it be attributed to racist motives? To some contemporary observers "Park entertained racist or quasi-racist beliefs, as well as sexists beliefs . . . because he believed in racial temperaments." (Watts, 1983: 285). But to others Park "was entirely free from prejudice about race and color" and his "sympathies were inexhaustible and they went out in full measure to Negroes, and to everyone for that matter" (Shils, 1991: 125). The argument seems thus to be indecisive.
24. Park was to write later on the subject of surveys regarding the racial question: "In the most limited sense of the word, i should say that a survey is never research. It is exploration; it seeks to define problems rather than to test hypotheses" (Park, 1926: 415).
25. Around 1917, in his course on "The Social Survey," Park also explained that the social survey was the product of the merging of two broad social movements, i.e. "the welfare and the efficiency movements" (Taylor, 1919: 6), reiterating his conception of the social survey as an object rather than a technique of sociological investigation.
26. Having received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1913, Burgess moved first to the University of Kansas, and two years later, to the University of Ohio. In the autumn of 1916 he was appointed to an assistant professorship in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago (partly as a replacement for Henderson, a specialist in the study of social services, who had died in 1915) where he would meet Park for rhe first time. During the three years he spent away from Chicago, Burgess did "urban sociology" in the sense that it was understood at the time: he carried out several community surveys, including one of the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and conducted survey programs in Belleville, Topeka, and Columbus (Bogue, 1974: xiv).
27. See principally the remarks of Besant (cited by Park, 1915a: 583, 595) and of Washington on the nature of businesses and clients, as well as on local churches (Washington, 1912: 38-46).
28. In one of his biographical works, Park notes: "I went ahead and spent a couple of weeks exploring East London, getting acquainted with a part of London I thought Dr. Washington would most like to see" (Baker, 1973:258).
29. Park refers to the Papers and Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society of 1913, but this text was also published in the March 1914 issue of the A/S (Woods, 1914), that is, in the issue in which Park's article "Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups" appeared. The passages cited by Park can be found on pages 580 and 581 of this second edition.
30. The fact that they had a conversation on this matter is established by this letter of Park to Washington in which he reports that "this prominent Bostonian had announced at the meeting that the age of pragmatism had finally dawned, and sentimental reform was dead." (Marshall, 1994: 247)- For another expression of this criticism of reformism as the fruit of sentimentality rather than reason, and one which emphasizes the presumed central role of women in this work, see the text that appeared a year later in the A/S (Todd, 1916).
31. For a study of the links between Clara Cahill Park and the Bostonian social work and settlement milieus, seeTraverso (2003).
32. Daniels thanks Woods "for constant guidance in connection with the making of the present study" and about Park he writes: "The plan of casting the account mainly in the historical and the descriptive, rather
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than the argumentative, mould, to the extent which has been done, was suggested by Dr. Robert E. Park, now of the sociological department of Chicago University." (1968: v). Daniels was also to have written a chapter of The Zone of Emergence, a collective manuscript under Woods' direction which was achieved in 1913 but was never published. In this Woods developed a vision of the city growth peculiarly similar to Park's. It is thus possible that Park read the manuscript or discussed it with Woods or Daniels about 1913 just before writing "The City." This connection remains to be fully established by archival evidence.
33. Diner (1980) supplies the most in-depth study of the links which united the people and institutions at the heart of the reformers' "community" in Chicago. In the period preceding the First World War Park is entirely absent.
34. This attitude, clearly expressed by Burgess (1916), does not call for a break with the practice of the survey but asks instead that it should be carried out "scientifically," and calls for university sociologists to take this task in hand.
35- Considering the city plan, Howe and Park propound dissimilar interpretations of the same phenomenon. Howe (1912: 591) writes: "The American city is inconvenient, dirty, lacking in charm and beauty because the individual land owner has been permitted to plan it, to build, to do as he willed with his land. There has been no community control, no sense of the public as opposed to private rights. Our cities have been planned by a hundred different land owners, each desirous of securing the quickest possible speculative returns from the sale of his property." Park (1915a: 579) writes in contrast: "Under our system of individual ownership, for instance, it is not possible to determine in advance the extent of concentration of population in any given area. The city cannot fix land values, and we leave to private enterprise, for the most part, the task of determining the city's limits and the location of its residential and industrial districts. Personal tastes and convenience, vocational and economic interests, infallibly tend to segregate and thus to classify the populations of great cities. In this way the city acquires an organization which is neither designed nor controlled." See Quandt (1970) for an extensive comparison of both authors' writings.
36. In that same year, 1915, Park published a work entitled The Principles of Human Behavior (Park, 1915b).
37. From this perspective, our interpretation seems more convincing rhan Lindners. He proposes the idea that Park withdrew his conception of the city as laboratory because he shared the stereotypical view of the muckrakers for whom the city was a college, a place of apprenticeship and training (Lindner, 1996: 40-41). The muckrakers, however, never used the notion of the "laboratory," which implies a place not so much of personal development as of observation of collective phenomena. Furthermore, Lindner makes no reference either to the writings of the social surveyors (such as Woods, whom Park explicitly cites) or to the definition of the city suggested by the prospectuses of the large urban universities, which use the notion of the laboratory and against which Park was to take up his position.
38. Park claims to take the distinction between primary and secondary groups from Cooley. However, while Cooley used the notion of "primary relations" for the first time in his 1909 work Social Organization, he never used the adjective "secondary" to designate non-primary relations. He was to speak of "nucleated groups" in his 1918 book Social Process (Hinkle, 1980: 161). Could it have been Park who introduced the idea for the first time?
39. This absence is all the more astonishing given that Park (1918a: 543) did not fail during the period to criticize certain works for the "serious omission that almost no reference is made to the contributions of earlier writers to the same theme."
40. It is interesting moreover to note that the Introduction contains almost the whole text of the Principles. Of Park's 46 handwritten pages contained in the latter (in its final section the work also includes long extracts from the works of other authors) only fourteen are not reproduced in the Introduction. Park also includes two passages from his thesis. The Introduction also includes four extracts from "The City" of which only one is referenced under the entry "city" in the index. This demonstrates the overwhelmingly theoretical interest Park saw in his own text.
41. A double intellectual inscription which is concretely marked by the references Park makes on the one hand to Sumner (the first citation in the text) and on the other hand to Thomas (notably, note 2, p. 596).
42. Addams and Du Bois were close friends and jointly founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Addams testifies to their closeness in her memoirs (Deegan, 2000: 13). On his arrival at the University of Chicago, Haynes established relations not only with Devine, professor of social economy at Columbia, but also with Addams and Breckinridge who joined him in the foundation of the National and of the Chicago Urban League. As for Woods and Addams, both quickly came to be considered as leaders in the field of "social technology" and as such they frequently rubbed shoulders on committees and in the journalism devoted to social questions. Woods thus contributed with Addams, among others, to a work entitled Philanthropy and Social Progress (1893). In the work he published with
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A,J, Kennedy in 1911, Handbook of Settlements, Woods outlines the work of Addams and the organization of Hull House (Kurtz, 1984: 262). More generally about all these connections see Deegan (2000) or Lengermann et al (2002).
43. Levine (1985) presents one of Park's ambivalent theoretical encounters. But in order to understand the genesis of Park's urban and general sociology I argue that one has to consider his personal encounters too.
44. In taking up his new responsibilities at Chicago, Burgess first made contact with Scott Bedford with the aim of getting Bedford's advice on teaching. Bedford was then an associate professor (a rank more elevated than Park held at the time) specializing in urban problems and responsible for an introduction to sociology course. He refused all help and collaboration. Burgess then turned to Patk whom he did not know. From their intellectual association came in 1921 the famous Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Raushenbush, 1979: 81).
45. The City has three main contributors: Park (author of six chapters), Burgess (author of two chapters) and McKenzie (one chapter), Wirth limiting himself to presenting an impressive bibliography. The three maintained close intellectual as well as social relations. McKenzie followed Park's first courses at Chicago before becoming from 1915 a colleague of Burgess at the University of Ohio. Burgess was to join Park a year later. McKenzie completed his thesis under Park's supervision (it was submitted in 1921) and met him again in Seattle in 1924 during his study of the Pacific coast where they jointly pursued their interest in human ecology (Raushenbush, 1979: 159). McKenzie would later be invited to give a course in this subject at Chicago.
46. The notions of "culture" and "natural space" are completely absent from the 1915 text. Park there used on one occasion the expression "city area," which is also found in the 1925 version (Park, 1915a: 583; 1925b: 11).
47. The first author to use the expression was not Luther L. Bernard in 1930 (Bulmer, 1984: 229) but Jessie Bernard in 1929. She presents the characteristic of the "so-called 'Chicago school' of sociology" as being the intensive use of the "local survey method." This was ironic for Park who strongly wished to distance himself from social survey and for whom no paternity is recognized, Thomas and Henderson being cited as the initiators (Bernard, 1929: 25—26).
48. In his preface to The Urban Community, Burgess offers an analysis of the reasons why, according to him, rural sociology gained recognition a decade before urban sociology, which henceforth was to be the focus of all interest (Burgess, 1926: vii). The first textbooks of urban sociology also appeared in the second half of the 1920s (Bedford, 1927; Anderson and Lindeman, 1928; see also Odum, 1951: 305 for an illuminating list).
49. The list is almost identical to the one already supplied by Burgess in 1916 but from a very different perspective, as we have seen. Burgess, however, was to return to Park's account and to explicitly uncover it in his introduction to the collective work The Urban Community (Burgess, 1926: viii). Anderson (1929), a student of Park, would do the same some years later.
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