The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago the Intellectual Trajectory of W

Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 DOI 10.1007/s12108-008-9045-y The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago The Intellectual Trajectory of W. I. Thomas Andrew Abbott & Rainer Egloff Published online: 26 June 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract This paper examines the historical sources for W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s celebrated monograph on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.It first characterizes the work itself, a monumental interpretive casebook of largely biographical material about individuals and groups. It then seeks the origins of these qualities, looking first at Thomas’s prior work, then at the personal influence of Florian Znaniecki and Robert Park. Since these sources do not sufficiently account for the unique qualities of the work, we then turn to three other important sources: 1) the casebook tradition in the social reform literature and beyond, 2) the psychiatric concept of the life history, and 3) the literary sources that Thomas had taught in his prior career as an English professor. We close by identifying the autobiographical roots of the work in Thomas’s own life history. Keywords Chicago School . Life History. Casebook . Literature . Psychiatry . Personality . Social Change . W. I. Thomas . Adolf Meyer Long retrospect tells us that Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was the defining work of early American sociology. Its theories of social organization and social personality sustained the Chicago School in the 1920s. Its massive documentation set new standards in methodology. Its focus on immigration All manuscript references in text are given in the format used by the various collections themselves. The format is discussed at first usage. Note also that all references to Adolf Meyer’s works are given to the Collected Papers (Winters 1950–1952), rather than to the original sources, for ease of reference. To save space, standard works (e.g., the novels and other literary works mentioned in “The Literary Framework of the Polish Peasant”) have not been listed here. A. Abbott (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Egloff Collegium Helveticum, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] 218 Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 captured a central feature of contemporary society. Indeed, The Polish Peasant was one of the six works chosen—on the basis of wide consultation—by a Social Science Research Council panel of the mid 1930s seeking the most important social science works published after World War One.1 Yet viewed in prospect, The Polish Peasant seems harder to understand. Thomas’s prior work did not concern immigrants. It did not use personal documents. It did not focus on social personality. Quite the contrary, after a biological phase in the mid 1890s, Thomas spent his first dozen years on the Chicago faculty (1895–1907) researching and teaching the comparative ethnology of non-industrial societies. Although he always retained his concern with psychology broadly understood, his substantive focus was on social customs and practices, and his theory of society was the loosely-theorized institutionalism characteristic of American anthropology before Boas. Not only are there no obvious precedents in the work of Thomas, there are few if any in social science more generally. To be sure, one can find surface resemblances here and there. But partial precursors do not account for the work as a whole. The origins of The Polish Peasant remain an enduring puzzle: where exactly did this magisterial work come from? In this paper, we sketch an answer to that question. We begin with an analysis of the formal structure, substantive interests, and methodological approach of the work itself. We then turn to what seem the probable sources for those qualities. As we shall show, a number of Thomas’s past and present selves came together into a final product that, although flawed in many ways, was nonetheless a comprehensive and in its own way cohesive work. The task is not easy. Sources on Thomas are few and scattered. His spectacular departure from Chicago in April 1918 made him a somewhat mythical figure to generations of sociologists: a famous colleague without an academic position, a path-breaking scholar who was a bon-vivant, a collector of data who left no papers, a restless intellectual who played golf daily. As a result, much of what is “known” about Thomas is in fact legend.2 1 For the SSRC reference, see the foreword by E. E. Day in Blumer 1939. Berle and Means’s The Modern Corporation is the other of the six whose reputation has endured. 2 The best printed sources on Thomas’s life are Faris 1948, Young 1963, Janowitz 1966, Deegan and Burger 1981, Murray 1988, and Haerle 1991. Although the unpublished E. Thomas 1986 is not mainly biographical, it discusses Thomas’s life as well, and its archival coverage is by far the most comprehensive of any source to date. Another useful source is Luther L. Bernard’s draft recollection of Thomas (Original in the Bernard archives at the Pennsylvania State University, copy in the Morris Janowitz Papers at UCSCRC [MJP], Box 80, Folder 5, hereafter referred to as Bernard n.d.). Thomas’s “official” autobiographical document, written at Bernard’s request in 1928 and published in 1973 (Baker 1973), is short, vague, and undoubtedly ironic: the bucolic countryside he describes in his early childhood was in fact recovering from front-line status in the Civil War, the supposedly rustic Thomas in fact learned Latin and Greek early enough to be teaching them at the University of Tennessee at age twenty, and so on. Readers of this piece, desperate for information on Thomas, have taken it largely at face value. But read in the context of Thomas’s subtle readings of other people’s autobiographies, it looks dangerously close to parody. His own opinion of it, given in a letter to Kimball Young 2 years later (UCSCRC Miscellaneous Archives, W. I. Thomas [hereafter MAWIT], WIT to KY 4 May 1930) was contemptuous: “Bernard asked me to do something of this kind.…I did it. I would not do it again. It bored me.” Am Soc (2008) 39:217–258 219 This legendary quality is complicated by a number of personal idiosyncracies of Thomas as a thinker. Most important, Thomas never cared much about the ownership of ideas, in particular about their attribution to him. Although this disattention to ownership shows most clearly in his many collaborations, both published and abortive, it is evident in many other ways. He was clearly embarrassed by the longstanding debate over who really wrote which parts of The Polish Peasant.3 He made no public outcry about the false attribution of Old World Traits Transplanted to Robert Park and Herbert Miller. He offered to give the half-done Unadjusted Girl research to Miriam Van Waters with no strings attached (WIT to ESD 17 Feb 1921, Ethel Sturges Dummer papers (ESDP)). It is characteristic of Thomas that his famous apophthegm “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” is of contested attribution (Thomas and Thomas 1928:572) and that his only major institutional contribution to American social science—the foundation of the “culture and personality” school through his work for the Social Science Research Council in the late 1920s and early 1930s—is almost completely forgotten.4 The Van Waters affair underscores another of W. I. Thomas’s qualities—his vagabondism. The reason he gave to Ethel Sturges Dummer—his personal “funding agency”—for offering to send Van Waters all his Unadjusted Girl research materials was that he was becoming so interested in psychoanalysis that he wanted to write a book about it. Indeed, Thomas changed intellectual points of view steadily over his lifetime (see Murray 1988 for an elegant quantitative analysis), much as he changed disciplines (from classics/philology to English literature to folk psychology to sociology) and residences (from Elk Garden, Virginia, to Morristown, Tennessee, to Knoxville to Berlin to Göttingen to Oberlin to Chicago to New York to Berkeley, with several lengthy European tours [1896, 1910–1911, 1912–1913] thrown in). Finally, Thomas was never a systematic theoretician, aiming to build a stable, enduring scheme. Indeed, we shall make a strong case in this paper that Thomas never lost the profoundly interpretive frame of mind that came from his years as an English professor. He used concepts eclectically and often contradictorily to evolve a 3 “Dear Dorothy,” Thomas wrote to his new fiancee in January 1935, “as I said in our conversation, I can’t get much interested in the problem of the precise authorship of the Polish Peasant.” (UCSCRC MAWIT, WIT to DST, Jan 1935). At the end of the letter, he promised her that he would publicly call her the sole author of The Child in America (jointly published 8 years before) if she wanted it. 4 Anthropologists periodically rediscover Thomas’s role in culture and personality studies. See Murray 1988 and Darnell 1990. As for the “Thomas theorem” as Merton called it, it is also attributed to Dorothy Swaine Thomas (as coauthor of Thomas and Thomas 1928) and to Znaniecki (see E. Thomas 1986:327 citing Howard Becker). The phraseology “real in fact and real in their consequences” occurs already in TPP (I:295). The underlying idea first appears in Thomas in the concept of “definition of the situation,” which dates from Thomas 1917, although one can find hints of it earlier. For a long and self-involved account of the whole “Thomas theorem” affair, see Merton 1995. Thomas’s remark about Old World Traits Transplanted is striking “You know darned well how much I had to do with Old World Traits Transplanted but do you expect me to tell you for publication? The men concerned there were my friends, and acted friendly.

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