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2. Sol Tax and the Value of Anthropology
- University of Nebraska Press
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2. Sol Tax and the Value of Anthropology The question that Ed Davenport posed to Sol Tax when they met in the summer of 1948 was one that Tax had begun asking himself even before he became an anthropologist. Tax’s personal struggle over whether to “work out some sort of a plan to fix things up, instead of just studying people,” coincided with efforts in anthropology and throughout the social sciences to understand what, if anything, professionals in those disciplines had to offer a world suffering first from economic collapse and then from global war. For Tax, the search for the proper balance between scholarship and activism began in his early years and took place over decades in which the Great Depression and World War II left their marks on anthropology. Tax the Young Idealist The son of Russian immigrant Jews, Sol Tax was born in Chicago in 1907 and grew up in Milwaukee. Like many foreign-born residents of early twentieth-century Milwaukee, Tax’s parents were Socialists, and he grew up with their populist views on the threat of powerful capitalist interests to common people, as well as amidst the Socialist views of the broader Milwaukee community. Socialism in Milwaukee had been growing since 1898 when Eugene V. Debs came to the city to make his first political speech for the Socialist Party immediately after the party’s formation in Chicago. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Milwaukee Socialists elected aldermen, representatives to the Wisconsin Legislature, the first Socialist mayor of a major American city (Emil Seidel), county supervisors, judges, and a member of the U.S. House. While Socialism peaked nationally sol tax and the value of anthropology 65 in 1912 when Debs captured nearly one million votes for the presidency , Milwaukee remained a stronghold of Socialism through Tax’s formative years. As late as 1960, the city still had a Socialist mayor.1 The Socialists espoused faith in the “Cooperative Commonwealth and the Brotherhood of Man.” They foresaw a better world, without capitalism, in which the benefits of “the blessings of our modern inventions” would accrue “to the people collectively” and not to big interests. The Wisconsin Social Democratic Party platforms urged hastening the arrival of that world by nationalizing “the coal trust, the meat trust, the oil trust, the sugar trust, the farming machinery trust, and others of the same kind,” as well as by achieving national ownership of utilities, railroads, and steamship lines. Growing up around such rhetoric, Tax came to believe that “the task of a good person was to improve the lot of humanity. My emotions were quickly aroused by thoughts of social injustice, violence, war.” Although Tax later described himself as “idealistic and socially minded” as a youth, he retained some capitalistic spirit. He admitted that he did not mind making money because his family needed it. “But whatever else I did had some social quality,” he later wrote.2 Tax’s early money-making ventures started when he began peddling newspapers at age twelve, and it did indeed lead to social action . The Milwaukee school board had organized an association to protect newsboys from newspaper publisher exploitation called the “Newsboys’ Republic,” which required newsboys to have permits to sell papers. Tax demonstrated his interest in community organization by leading the effort by newsboys to take over operation of the Republic themselves. He later became chief justice of the group’s Supreme Court and the editor of its magazine, the beginning of a long association with publishing. It is no wonder that, years later, Tax recalled that even before he had entered high school, he knew “that my function in the world is to improve the world.”3 Tax began college at the University of Chicago in 1926, but financial problems forced him to leave after his first semester and transfer to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He withdrew from college again, in the spring of 1927, because of poor grades, which [54.157.61.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:05 GMT) 66 sol tax and the value of anthropology he blamed on having spent too much time on Hillel Foundation activities . Political activities also occupied much of his time. In 1927 Tax protested the imprisonment of the author of a poem entitled “America,” which had been published in the New York Daily Worker. David Gordon had been put in jail for writing, “America is a land of Censored opportunity. Lick spit; eat dirt...