Showing papers in "American Journal of Sociology in 1916"

The Organization of Will

Abstract: The combining of the efforts of a number of persons for the accomplishment of a particular purpose results in the organization of effort.' Such an organization may receive its direction either from the will of an individual or from the will of a group. The process by which a group will is arrived at may be termed the organization of will. In the organization of effort, he movement is from the one toward the many, i.e., from the controlling purpose to the coordinated efforts of the various persons who contribute to its accomplishment. In the organization of will, the movement is from the many toward the one, i.e., from the wills of individual members to the single purpose which comes to direct and unify the activities of the group. Organizations may be represented graphically by the cone, the base of the cone representing the individuals organized, the apex their unifying purpose. The organizing of will may be thought of as a movement from base toward apex; the organizing of effort as a movement from apex toward base. These two types of organization may exist separately or combined. In an army, a railroad, a government department, and a x See paper on this topic in the July number of this Journal.

Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States (1865-1915)

Abstract: This paper will plot some of the principal points of departure from which to map the main movement of sociological thinking in the United States during the period indicated in the title. It will incidentally write into the sketch certain details of a semiautobiographical character. It will serve, further, as an introduction to a subsequent paper to be entitled \"The Sociological Categories,\" and in connection with the latter paper it will attempt to throw light upon open problems of methodology in the entire field of social science. Referring to the second of these items, no excuses will be offered for rather liberal transgression fthe conventionalities ofimpersonal writing. The years which I have spent in studying the social scientists of the last four centuries have lodged in my mind one indelible impression, viz., that nearly every one of these writers might have done more for the instruction of subsequent generations if each had left on record certain testimony from his personal knowledge, which he probably regarded as trifling and which his contemporaries would probably have pronounced impertinent, than

The Social Survey a Field for Constructive Service by Departments of Sociology

Abstract: 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. The following paper is written for those interested in the development of practical sociology in this country. Its purpose is twofold. It seeks to call attention to the possibilities within the social survey for service by departments of sociology. It attempts in addition to outline a general plan of organization by which the sociologist may best co-operate with the community. The type of relationship described below will be largely based on the experience in social surveys of the department of sociology in the University of Kansas under the leadership of Professor F. W. Blackmar. To the sociologist here is little novel in the method of the social survey. Perhaps the absence of novelty has prevented an adequate realization of its importance. Indeed a case might well be made for the statement hat the social survey was an invention of the sociologist. In every department of sociology in the country beginners in the science have been initiated into this method of community study. The success of the device was immediate and patent. The first-hand study of local conditions vitalized the work of the classroom. Students were convinced that social as well as natural phenomena were susceptible of scientific study. Affective reactions to \"conditions as they are\" crystallized in the social attitude which Patten terms \"the emotional opposition to removable evils.\" As an instrument of social measurement the social survey in the hands of the sociologist was until recently confined by the limita-

Relations Between the Living and the Dead

Abstract: In this paper I propose to treat the subject-the relations between the living and the dead-not in its application to early or primitive society in general, but in reference to a single pagan tribe of the northern Philippines. In his excellent volume, Fonctions mentales dans les socighgs inftrieures,' Levy-Bruhl has treated this subject at length and has outlined a scheme, or a series of stages, through which he believes the less civilized races consider their dead and living to pass. I wish to apply this scheme to the Tinguian people of Northern Luzon, but first shall briefly review Levy-Bruhl's attitude which leads him to adopt his method of treatment. He holds that human mentality, in the main, is a social or collective product and that \"the collective representation fprimitive men differs fundamentally from our ideas or concepts, nor are they their equivalents.\" Civilized man acts in accordance with the precepts of logic, while the mind of primitive man is molded in accordance with the law of participation which, he asserts, is relatively indifferent to the law of contradiction. Such a mentality Levy-Bruhl labels \"prelogical.\" To a man in this stage of society there is only a weak line of demarkation between the living and the dead. He lives with his dead, feeds and converses with the departed, and finds no contradiction in the fact that the deceased still participates, in a way, in the society of the living. For this mentality, death consists in participation or non-participation; that is, a dead person passes through a series of stages in which he participates more or less in life or death. In choosing examples for the elaboration of this argument, Levy-Bruhl has considered only races of the type least

The Legal Status of Negro-White Amalgamation in the United States

Abstract: The fourth annual report of the \"National Association for the Advancement of Colored People\" calls attention to the fact that that Association in I9I3 defeated in several state legislatures proposed statute laws prohibiting negro-white intermarriages. A survey of the existing legal status of such marriages in the United States may be interesting at this time. The constitutions of six of the American states prohibit negrowhite intermarriages. Twenty-eight of the states have statute laws forbidding the intermarriage of negro and white persons. Twenty of the states have no such laws; in ten of those latter states bills aimed at the prevention of negro-white intermarriages were introduced and defeated in I9I3. The state constitutions and statute laws against intermarriage are, so far as their wording is concerned, far from agreement as to what a so-called \"negro\" is. Differences in the stringency of conditions following enforcement of these legal enactments therefore result. Those specifically most stringent make intermarriage illegal between white persons and others having any percentage of negro blood.

The Social Elements of the Indian Problem

Abstract: The problem of wlhat to do with the native American Indians has been the cause of much effort and discussion for three centuries The white race in its endeavor to take possession of the continent has experimented with three great plans of dealing with the aborigines and none of them has so far entirely succeeded In the beginning there was an endeavor to occupy the land forcibly and by various means to exterminate its barbaric owners These things could not be at once successfully done With the establishment of the United States as a government another plan came into vogue The idea of extermination persisted for a long time, to be sure, but there was enough sentiment to bring about a new coursethat of segregation The Indian up to i850, let us say, refused to be exterminated, and his fight for life and territory has no parallel in history Segregation, however, did more to exterminate the Indian than did bullets Rigorously guarded reservations became a place of debasement The "noble red men" could not exist upon them As wards, ruled over, guarded, fed, clothed, thought for, and done for, they lost much of their ancient spirit With the Dawes act of I887 another experiment was launched Its purpose was absorption The Indian under certain restrictions was to be made a citizen But how could men who believed themselves robbed and without a court of justice, who were confused, blind, and broken in spirit, become citizens? What could citizenship mean to them ? What manner of man is the reservation Indian today? One needs only to look to see that there has been a calamity But who is responsible? one may ask Every man who by neglect and indifference has permitted the soul of a race of men to sink beneath the evils of civilization into misery,

Youthful Offenders: A Comparative Study of Two Groups, Each of 1,000 Young Recidivists

Abstract: The after-careers ofyoung offenders of our first series, studied some years ago, show very clearly the immense importance of studying the causation of delinquency at the only time when it really can satisfactorily be studied, namely, during the years when delinquency begins. All of our experience goes to show that the many writers who insist that practically all criminal careers begin during youth are entirely correct. Not only is the high point for crime, according to ages, well within the later years of adolescence, but very many delinquents begin their careers even younger. That thorough case studies can only be made during these earlier years is amply witnessed to by many facts we have observed. Later, the individual has broken away from his family, has frequently taken on a new attitude which makes the ascertainment of fundamentals difficult, is more likely to have drifted from his home town, perhaps shows deterioration from dissipation that is altogether hard to distinguish from innate mental defect. Besides this, the many interesting and more subtle psychological considerations concerning the earliest growth of criminalism steadily become more difficult to discern. Treatment of delinquent endencies, to say nothing of prophylaxis, rapidly becomes more difficult with the increment of years; while etiology and diagnosis may not be fairly developed without a wide range of facts. There should be every rational demand for this more thorough study, both as a large social issue and because, if anything is going

Sentimentality and Social Reform

Abstract: The tragedies of leadership in social reform result in the main from failure to work out a practicable basis of partnership between ideas and sentiments. Men recognize theoretically that ideas always appear swaddled in feelings. But many of us go about the day's business apparently on the assumption that ideas are as clear-cut and unemotional as hammers or rifles. Hence our projects fail to capture men's hearts and imaginations. We have to recognize that after all reason in men is only the very tip of their iceberg of mental life. We live by our sentiments, even by our illusions. They furnish the real motive power which makes things go. They are at the bottom of our choices. And while educated choices are the prerequisite to any sort of social change worthy the name of progress, the process of education must include some canalizing of the sentiments. The reformer who does not include this in his program of good works is foredoomed to failure. But it is notorious that in many of our fellow-citizens both sentiment and reason have been short-circuited into bathos and sentimentality. And the words "social reformer" have become almost an epithet of derision, because some would-be leaders with insufficient sand and iron in their systems have capitalized this tendency toward sickly softness, and, as a result, have scored personal successes with indecent haste, have scratched paths which could not be followed and which must be resurveyed and laid out at great cost and inconvenience. I asked a friend recently about the speech of a housing reformer she had been urged to hear. "It was too sticky-mouthed," was the curt comment. But it is that very stickiness and sweety-sweetness, or the "tear in the voice,"

Factors Which Have to Do with the Decline of the Country Church

Abstract: The influence of the country church in the five sections of the United States included in this study is most restricted where church management is most efficient and educational advancement is greatest; but in all these sections the better-educated classes, the men active in public affairs and engaged in organized social activity of any sort, are generally active in the church. The principal losses are among those whose educational equipment is limited and whose social instincts are poorly developed. The chief cause of the decline of the church's influence is to be found in the breaking down of the old appeal to the fears of men, based on the commonly accepted belief in a future hell and in the church as dispenser of a magical means of salvation, and in the failure of the new appeal to compel the attention and to command the allegiance of men whose viewpoint is essentially individualistic. This, in brief, is the theme of this paper. The investigations upon which these conclusions are based have been made by the writer, during the last five years, in Missouri, in Tennessee, in Kansas, in New York, and in Maine. Part of the time he was working as field investigator for the Department of Church and Country Life of the Presbyterian Church, and part of the time he was working independently. The method used was a combination of that of the general social survey worked out by Dr. Warren H. Wilson with an intensive study much like the "Gill Method," though worked out independently, in the summer of i9ii, before the appearance of Gill and Pinchot's Country Church. As in the Gill method, church attendance was made the chief measure of interest in the church, and the data on church attendance, as well as on school training, financial standing, social activities, and other pertinent questions,

The House-Court Problem

Abstract: A phase of the housing problem in the United States that is almost as old as the nation, but that has not heretofore been discussed, as far as the writer is aware, is that known as the house-court problem. A study of the house-court is of social value for at least two reasons. First, the house-court has given rise on a large scale to as unsanitary and anti-social living conditions, according to Jacob Riis, as have existed anywhere in the United States, not even excepting the New York tenements. Secondly, the housecourt offers for the industrial classes, under given conditions, a type of housing which is of superior character for actual living purposes and for homes. The writer has made an analysis of the facts concerning I,202 house-courts in which over I6,ooo men, women, and children live in Los Angeles. The main facts were secured by the municipal housing inspectors. Other sources are special studies made of particular house-courts. Before the results of this study are given, it may be well to define the house-court and to explain briefly the nature of the leading types.

Culture and Environment

Abstract: The dependence of culture on physical environment is a timehonored problem. The degree and nature of their interrelations have been variously estimated by different writers and continue to occupy the minds of ethnologists, historians, and sociologists. Following the lead of Buckle, historians have often attempted to interpret culture in terms of its physical environment,2 and a similar tendency is noticeable among ethnologists, particularly since the time of Ratzel. A gifted modern writer on geography, Miss Ellen Churchill Semple, building on the foundations laid by Buckle and Ratzel, has constructed an elaborate and apparently selfsustaining system of historical and cultural interpretations based on environmental influences. Attempts to express national and racial traits in terms of physical environment continue to impress our minds and carry conviction. I propose in the following pages to discuss the general relations of culture and environment in the hope of clarifying some of the theoretical issues involved. Before proceeding with our argument attention must be drawn to the types of causal interpretations applicable in historical problems. On the one hand, we may be interested in following up all the antecedents of a given event or cultural phenomenon. Strictly speaking, there is no limit to such an inquiry; what we obtain is, to speak with Spencer, a regressive multiplication of causes. On the other hand, we may be interested in studying the direct causes of a phenomenon, disregarding their antecedents, and thus secure an insight into the character of those factors that appear as causes of cultural changes. Thus the environmentalist will often agree with the anti-environmentalist that certain changes in a culture

Objectivism in Sociology

Abstract: In common with all other scientific workers ociologists have always aimed at \"objectivity \"-that is, such a description of processes investigated that the description can be verified by any scientific nvestigator whatsoever. They have always recognized the necessity of eliminating their subjectivity-their personal equation-in order to get an \"impersonal,\" and so \"objective,\" view of the social reality. This \"impersonal\" view has, indeed, alone made science possible, and until recently has been considered the adequate and secure foundation of scientific method in all fields. But now a new school of \"objectivists\" in psychology and sociology has arisen which claims that the old standards of objectivity are not adequate to produce \"objective\" science in these fields. The adherents of this school assert that a fact for scientific purposes is not \"anything in experience,\" but \"something that can be observed,\" a happening in the external world, which can and should be described without reference to individual psychic processes. These are the external behaviorists in psychology, and those sociologists who would describe everything in the social life in terms of habit (\"folkway\" or \"custom\") and environment.

Implications of a Standard of Living

Abstract: Since anthropological and ethnological works trace the development of man in his early mastery over the materials and forces of nature, attention here need simply be directed to the sociological significance of such development. In these days in place of a continuous struggle for mere subsistence, we desire abundant food of good quality, and many comforts and luxuries besides. We desire leisure for mental, moral, and aesthetic enjoyment, and prefer to spend as little economic energy as need be in order to attain these things. In other words, we demand a relatively greater return for a smaller economic effort. This becomes increasingly possible as we discover how to utilize what nature so generously supplies to us: as we learn to use more effectively, wood, stone, and metal, and to increase our store of these through the preservation and enlargement of our forests, the manufacture of artificial stone, by the making of steel, the extraction of aluminum from clay, or nitrogen from the air. As also we pass beyond the sail and the water mill to the enormous energies stored in stream and electricity, we reach a condition when Malthusianism becomes old-fashioned. For through these achievements food supplies are multiplied enormously, and the energy needed to attain them passes as a burden from human muscle to nature itself. The brain of man invents and guides the machine, and natural power does the rest. The man behind the machine symbolizes a great factor in dynamic civilization, as well as the man behind the gun. The real hopefulness of the situation at present is, that as long as the intellect of man can continue to make improvements in machinery, and utilize more efficiently natural resources, mankind will become more and more free from the fear of starvation; the standards of life will rise; slavery, serfdom, and unskilled labor will disappear, and with shorter hours of labor, which will involve intelligence rather than muscle, even the working classes will have leisure to devote themselves to cultural attainment, as is not possible under a system involving strenuous toiland unremitting poverty.

Durable Monogamous Wedlock

Abstract: A pessimistic view of monogamous wedlock is now current, and it receives confirmation from what appears to be an obvious interpretation of pertinent facts. It is true that the divorce rate in this country is presumably very nearly, if not quite, the highest shown by any people. It is also true that the average number of persons per family has been steadily declining decade by decade during the last fifty years, even though exceptionally large families have been added to the population in recent years through the fecundity of the foreign-born women. This large number of divorces and the rapid increase in the divorce rate, together with the noteworthy tendency in the native element in the population to commit "race suicide," seem, obviously enough, to warrant not a little misgiving as to the durability and permanence of monogamous wedlock. But do these facts, and others of a similar nature that are now available, tell the whole story? It may be that we shall find on examination that it is a case of erroneous inferences drawn from detailed facts seen out of perspective. It may be that we are concentrating our attention upon symptoms and overlooking the seat of the difficulty. Perhaps our interest in individuals and their tribulations blinds us to great social and industrial changes now in progress of which these individuals are unwilling and, for the most part, unwitting victims. Surely it is a time when, if ever, serious consideration should be given to the history of human marriage and to the factors which determine the nature of the family as a social institution. It is our purpose in the first section of this article to examine the general assumption, inherent in all of the pessimistic interpretations, that the permanence of monogamy rests upon the perpetuation of a particular type of home and of family life; and in the second

Rating the Nations: A Study in the Statistics of Opinion

Abstract: In these troublous times, when apostles of Kultur assail disciples of Liberte, and hordes of Muzhiks slaughter swarms of Bauern, a neutral often wonders what is the relative worth of these men. Americans especially are interested in the character of the immigrants who flood into the melting-pot of our national life. How can we tell which will make the most desirable citizens? How shall we rate the nations? Of course there are comparative statistics of foreign countries and the figures of our own immigration, census, and police authorities, showing the proportion of illiteracy, naturalization, and crime assigned to each national group. These data are of greatest significance. But there are also important personal qualities, such as sympathy and adaptability, which are difficult to determine statistically. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the typical Celt surpasses the average Anglo-Saxon in certain traits. We might arrange representatives of different nations in order according to their relative excellence or deficiency in a given quality, just as we rate orators without any fixed scale of measurement.' If we could be sure that our exemplars were fair samples of their people and that no personal bias influenced the estimates, we might even assign them numerical values and standardize them as inspectors grade produce. One way to avoid the danger of restricted or biased selection is to consider the arrangement of samples offered by many observers and to offset their aberrancies by striking an average. Obviously the resultant rating is no better than the mean judgment of these observers. But if we should select the most expert students to

Psychic Causes of Rural Migration

Abstract: In modern civilization the increasing attractiveness of the city is one of the apparent social facts.' Social psychology may reasonably be expected to throw light upon the causes of this movement of population from rural to urban conditions of life. Striking illustrations of individual preference for city life, even in opposition to t.he person's economic interests, suggest that this problem of social behavior so characteristic of our time contains important mental factors. Since sensations give the mind its raw material,2 the mind may be said to crave stimulation. "In the most general way of viewing the matter, beings that seem to us to possess minds show in their physical life what we may call a great and discriminating sensitiveness to what goes on at any present time in their environment."3 This interest of the mind in the receiving of stimulation for its own activity is an essential element in any social problem. The individual reacts socially "with a great and discriminating sensitiveness " to his environment, just as he reacts physically to his stimuli to conserve pleasure and avoid pain. The fundamental sources of stimuli are, of course, common to all forms of social grouping, but one difference between rural and 'urban life expresses itself in the greater difficulty of obtaining under usual conditions certain definite stimulations from the environment. This fact is assumed both by those who hold the popular belief that most great men are country-born and by those who accept the thesis of Ward that "fecundity in eminent persons seems then to be intimately connected with cities."4 The city may be called an

Public Range Lands--A New Policy Needed

Abstract: The United States owns more than four hundred million acres of public land, exclusive of the land in Alaska and other outlying possessions, and by virtue of this ownership the nation is one of the world's greatest landlords. Nearly three-fifths of the land in the whole Intermountain Region is still in public ownership. These public lands constitute an area about four-fifths as large as that part of the United States which lies east of the Mississippi River. Some of this land possesses valuable forest and mineral resources. A limited amount will be made available for farming through the development of irrigation enterprises and dry-farming methods, but the greater part of this vast area is more valuable for grazing than for cultivation or other purposes. While these grazing lands have small value per acre, the vastness of their extent gives them sufficient importance to make their management one of the vital economic and social problems of the Intermountain West. Up to the present time the national government has been remiss in relation to its duties as a landlord. The fundamental idea of nineteenth-century national policy in relation to the public lands was that they should be disposed of to private holders as rapidly as required by the growing population, and in such a way as to contribute to the general welfare and particularly to economic and political stability. The more important features of this policy were designed to give men of little wealth an opportunity to own their own homes and farms. Some of the land was sold at a very low price, but much more was given away to homesteaders and in encouragement of education and transportation. In nearly all cases the land laws contained provisions favoring the landless man and the actual settler. The aim was to give the worker a sufficient amount of land to enable him to apply his own labor effectively and to maintain his family according to

The Mind of the Citizen. III

Abstract: Evidently the most outstanding consideration with reference to incomes is that of their relation to the general welfare; and a social control is implied by the fact that incomes are rewards which society fixes or tolerates. Society is a party to every contract from which profits accrue. Should it be found that the interests of society are not suitably recognized in prevailing relations between services and rewards, the need of regulation would hardly be denied. It may be objected that society does not fix compensations. In the case of the postal clerk or the governor of a state or the nurse in a city hospital, society, acting through the appropriate civil authorities, does actually set salaries; but what of the farmer's, the manufacturer's, or the physician's income? Are not these functionaries, though of society, yet apart from it for all purposes of profit and accumulation? These men go about their private affairs, making such profits as they may. Quite true; and under normal conditions society could perhaps do no better than to leave them alone, when compensations thus gained concur with what society for its own interests might specifically decree. But nevertheless income-takers are in and of society; there is no Crusoe's island of individualism. Even in the case of the farmer, the government aids in the production of corn and wheat, which the farmer delivers at the railroad station in all the pride of ownership. In manifold ways society assists in the preparation of utilities for the market, and, in affording a market, supplies the factor without which all values would vanish. Income to private citizens is therefore hardly distinguishable, logically, from incomes paid public officials for avowed public service. There is a question as to whether the welfare of society is promoted by compensations made upon current terms. Are there

The Puritan and His Indian Ward

Abstract: The relations between the Puritans and the Indians constitute an important phase of early American society. Conquest of the barbarians was part of the taming of the wilderness, with the added variable of a human element, the influence of the Indian upon the Puritan being second only to that of the Puritan upon the Indian. Each introduced many arts, both of war and of peace, into the fashioning of New England civilization. But since ultimate survival constituted the Puritan as final legatee, the Indians' contributions to the Puritans, however minor, have survived, while the Puritans' contributions to the Indians, however great, have perished. Eence Indian influence upon the Puritan deserves more attention. The material lessons of the Indian concerned both war and peace. In war, he was the adept, initiating an untutored novice into the wiles of the wilderness. Though an obstacle in the conquerors' path, the Indians afforded them zest and stimulus, toughening, if shaking, the nerves of rugged adventurers. Pioneer warfare proved the nursery of heroes, and confirmed the sense of early New England that its mission was to conquer and to tame-fit preface to the page of empire. More concrete were the lessons of peace. In agriculture, trade, medicine and surgery, law, music and the arts, humor and imagination, the Indian made a contribution, slight but not despicable. In his spiritual reaction, also, upon New England philosophy, religion, and missionary fervor, the Indian was a notable factor. The memory of the Indian, therefore, justifies a glance at his gifts to a greater than himself, first in the material realm, and, second, in the spiritual.

Exemptions as a Principle of Social Justice

Abstract: It is practical to look for principles and programs of social justice among the policies that are already established in the law and institutions of the land. The law is influenced by an individualistic conception of equality. Nevertheless the common-sense of men causes the social limitations of individual liberty to be expressed in the law. Among these well-settled remedial or limiting principles the present and potential uses of the idea of exemptions may be examined. If there is found general agreement that a small security of comfort may be guaranteed against the want that naturally results from rapidly working competition, or from centralization of property in the hands of a creditor class, it might be concluded that the quiet extension or equalizing of the terms of these exemptions is a desirable direction for social legislation. The present idea of mn inimum incomes in industry has a somewhat more narrow but well-established forerunner in the principle of protection or favor to minimum properties. Socially it is desirable that protected incomes should be saved as protected properties are. These social protections of property against individual actions were incorporated into the law during the period when the theory, or perhaps better, the instinct, of individualism was most unrestrained. In the present period of co-operative organization, these protective laws may serve in some degree to maintain the equilibrium between the propertyless and the overpropertied classes. Perhaps ultimately the idea of securing a minimum might be given even more radical force. These exemptions or protections of individual properties are of two general kinds. The first is the exemption of fixed minimum holdings of property from taxation. The same favor to the poorer