NOTES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LINGUISTIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA 1924 TO 1950 MARTIN JOOS for JENNIE MAE JOOS FORE\\ORO It is important for the reader of this document to know how it came to be written and what function it is intended to serve. In the early 1970s, when the Executive Committee and the Committee on Pub1ications of the linguistic Society of America v.ere planning for the observance of its Golden Anniversary, they decided to sponsor the preparation of a history of the Society's first fifty years, to be published as part of the celebration. The task was entrusted to the three living Secretaries, J M. Cowan{who had served from 1940 to 1950), Archibald A. Hill {1951-1969), and Thomas A. Sebeok {1970-1973). Each was asked to survey the period of his tenure; in addition, Cowan,who had learned the craft of the office from the Society's first Secretary, Roland G. Kent {deceased 1952),was to cover Kent's period of service. At the time, CO'flal'\was just embarking on a new career. He therefore asked his close friend Martin Joos to take on his share of the task, and to that end gave Joos all his files. Joos then did the bulk of the research and writing, but the~ conferred repeatedly, Cowansupplying information to which Joos v.t>uldnot otherwise have had access. Joos and HiU completed their assignments in time for the planned publication, but Sebeok, burdened with other responsibilities, was unable to do so. Since the Society did not wish to bring out an incomplete history, the project was suspended. Joos continued to r~rk his segment of the report up to the time of his death on 6 May 1978, making refinements and producing an Index. The latter, as Joos left it, covered also Hill's part of the report, which he had been attempting to dovetail with his own.The form reproduced herewith is the ribbon copy of Joos's last version, except only that, upon HiU's request, the dovetailing has been eliminated and references in the Index to material from Hill's pen have been deleted. This document is nof a history of the Linguistic Society of America and should not be read as one. It is a set of notes and observations on the early career of the Society, made from Martin Joos's always very special and sometimes highly personal stance. Several informed readers of the unpublished document have spotted what they consider to be serious factual errors. But this is not a history; it is only source-materials for one. As the historiographer and historian R. G. Collin~od tells us, when ~ find an assertion in such material the proper question is not "Is it true?" but rather ''What does it mean? Why was it said?" Taken that way, Joos's treatment sheds interesting light both on the early Linguistic Society and on himself; and both the Society and the man deserve to have that light in the record for posterity. Ithaca NY J M. Cowan August 1986 C. F. Hockett Preface Accounting for the Linguistic Society of America, nearing half a century of life as a group-entity still functioning upon the same basic principles, was the charge accepted early in 1973 by two narrators, Archibald A. Hill and Martin Joos, who both sign this Preface. We write from our separate points of view, but start from the same premises, a pair of premises: that our Society began, and continues, as an autonomous entity and at the same time as a self-sustaining group of per­ sons. Here we must speak from the point of view of the Society in pointing out that our publications or other costly undertakings have always been at the risk of the Society's own funds; and we have functioned from the start under one Con­ stitution whose wordings guarantee that we do all such things at our own risk. These points merit explicit statement here, particularly because the contrary is true of the other noteworthy scholarly associations and of their journals every­ where. Some of them were created by publishers, some by governments, some by clusters of persons who associated themselves with pre-existent publishers, or by publishers who assembled the requisite group of scholars, and so on through a myriad variations. Language, the quarterly journal of our Society, is published ru; the Waverley Press as it has been from the 1925 beginning, but~ the Society. - Our three successive Editors, George Melville Bolling first, Bernard Bloch then for the central quarter-century, and finally William Bright, are thus central to this History. The Constitution adopted on 28th December 1924, stable in this regard through all the years that we narrate, established a Publications Committee and assumed each of its members would naturally be a competent Editor, so that there could hardly be any serious problem in making up quarterly issues: it foresaw having a distinct, presumably new, responsible Editor for each publishing year, namely the senior member (or some otherwise automatically identifiable person) within that Committee, the Editor for one year only rarely and exceptionally continuing for a second year but hardly for a third or later year in succession. And yet the 1924 Constitution prescribed the electing, after formal nomination by a Nominating Committee whose membership could not include any officer or member of the Executive Committee, of the next year's Editor during the year-end Annual Meet­ ing scheduled between Christmas and New Year's Day. Details of just how that recognizably Athenian plan collapsed are not known to us-not one word of print or writing bas turned up during diligent search-but the oral tradition is compelling. Learning in the 192.5 Annual Meeting that Bolling had the first 192.6 issue in press already and was editing the next one, nobody was will­ ing to accept nomination to be Editor as if competing with George Melville Bolling. That made the Editor the first of our so-called 'continuing officers' re-elected year by year without competition. The other was Roland Grubb Kent, the Secretary and Treasurer, whose functions constitutionally included the duty and authority of Comptroller, although that word was nowhere printed; the incumbent was to make sure that nothing printed could be issued in the name of the Linguistic Society of America unless there was money to pay for it; in other words it was his function to keep the Society out of debt, for the Founders knew, from experience beginning in the 19th century, precisely how earlier scholarly societies had been wrecked on those rocks. Now although no Article of the Constitution has ever employed the term 'continuing officer' or any synonym, that term or a synonym was spoken in conclaves from around 192.8 and onward, so that it eventually became Unwritten Law and continued in force, all the more firm for remaining unwritten, throughout the years which we undertake to cover with this History, namely through 1968. Editor and Secretary-Treasurer are, then, the two key persons upon whom the Society's scholarly health and economic survival depend; neither can reasonably be called 'more important' than the other; each is indispensable, and that's all. Luckily, the Society has never been forced to replace them both within the same -1- year. Each Editor's years in office will appear in the Table of Contents next below and will serve as a natural time-scale; likewise, each Secretary-Treasurer's for parallel reasons. Presidents and Vice-Presidents, however, have (through 19681] held quite another sort of relation to the course of events; details will emerge in suitable context man for man for the first two decades. No LSA President has so far died in office, and that fact is so curious as to be nothing short of astonishing. It is noteworthy especially because custom has provided us with Presidents of !ar greater age than is likely to be the rule henceforth; and secondarily it has meant that the duty of substituting for the President in periods of his absence was at first the only stable duty of a Vice-President, so that he was typically a younger man. Motives for selecting the first three dozen nominees to the Presidency are so transparent that we are disconcerted at finding nothing in print or w~iting on that; the actual sequence of incumbencies, however, is compelling. Each Signer of the Call-see the reprinted Call on page Z.44-was to be made President in turn, in any sequence that seemed natural at the moment; and the eldest of them was Hermann Collitz, 192.5 President, and so on. Equivalently, the President was to be a senior scholar that was being honored while he was alive to enjoy it. Distinguished work by certain Presidents-wise guidance, and decisions given force by the respect due to a white-haired scholar-were welcome sequels, while the ineffectiveness that could be an unwelcome sequel had usually been foreseen in contrary cases and was an only temporary inconvenience: no permanent harm could develop in a twelve­ month, during which continuity was safeguarded by a Secretary's watchful eye. For 1946, E[mma] Adelaide Hahn was chosen President during the 1945 Summer Meeting (during the first 'atom bomb' period) amid total uncertainty as to whether the ban on travel to national conventions would prevent the normal Annual Meeting vote (which it did!) and moreover a fresh memory of the Louise Pound drop-out determined the result: of course she must be made President, and high time, too.