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2. Stouffer in the Interwar Years
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Chapter 2 Stouffer in the Interwar Years One shies at fate, historical contingency, and the clichés attendant with wisdom acquired after the fact. Stouffer, however, was a man almost perfectly, serendipitously prepared to head the Research Branch and to be the lead author of The American Soldier. After completing his bachelor’s degree in Latin at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1921, Stouffer took an MA in English at Harvard, then returned to his hometown of Sac City, Iowa, in 1923 to take over the editorship of his ailing father’s newspaper, the Sac City Sun. The Lives of Harvard Scholars reports that while Stouffer was pursuing journalism, the prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross (1866–1951) visited Sac City and encouraged, either directly or indirectly, Stouffer to pursue a career in sociology. Actually, according to social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew, a colleague of Stouffer, the meeting between Ross and Stouffer occurred in the Wisconsin lake country while both were vacationing there. Stouffer read Ross’s social psychology text on the spot, talked it over with Ross, and decided to become a sociologist.1 Stouffer sold the Sac City Sun in 1926 and headed for the University of Chicago , closing the deal only three days before the fall term began. “Here we are, two blocks from the University,” he wrote to his brother Tom, “in a cozy little apartment which we are renting from the University. . . . We are quite a distance from the machine gun belt, and our only experience with Chicago outdoor sport 18 Stouffer in the Interwar Years thus far is to have our baby carriage stolen.” Despite the distractions of a city like Chicago, Stouffer was committed to his studies. “I don’t know how long we’ll be here and I don’t care much; I’m going to keep on studying and sinking foundation piers until I am satisfied that the superstructure won’t cave in a few years from now,” he told his brother.2 During Stouffer’s graduate student days, Chicago was, indeed, the home of Al Capone, and Stouffer would doubtless have read of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1929) and other gang activities. (He may have even reported on some, as he worked long hours at the Chicago Tribune to help finance his education—further influencing his clear writing style.) But Chicago was also, and had been for some time, the home of sociology in the United States. In his essay “American Sociology before World War II,” sociologist Don Martindale refers to “the virtual knowledge explosion that occurred in the Chicago School” in the 1920s and 1930s.3 Although the intellectual trajectory of Stouffer’s life peaks only at his death at sixty in 1960, the chronological arc peaks in 1930, at the end of his graduate studies in Chicago. In addition to the influence of E. A. Ross, Stouffer remembered that he was motivated to go to Chicago by his “first hand experience in human nature” gained while running the Sac City Sun. “I got to know everybody and all their troubles,” he said, “The main thing, it seemed to me, is that people were tossing a lot of bunk around and it seemed a good idea to try to pin some of these things down.”4 The question was how to do that, and his professors at the University of Chicago had the answers: survey research and statistics. Louis Leon Thurstone (1877–1955), William Fielding Ogburn (1886–1959), and Ellsworth Faris (1874–1953) exerted the most influence on Stouffer at Chicago . Best known for his development of factor analysis, Thurstone was interested in measurement, particularly in the education and psychology fields— what has come to be known as psychometrics. In January 1928, he published “Attitudes Can Be Measured” in the American Journal of Sociology, which Stouffer referenced on the first page of his doctoral dissertation. Thurstone consistently defined his terms, he differentiated carefully between attitude and opinion, and he confined himself to a “linear continuum.” He sounded every bit the scientist, and his essay is as far away from intuition masquerading as knowledge as one can get.5 Ogburn arrived at the University of Chicago in the same academic year as Stouffer (1926–1927). Ogburn also served as president of the American Sociological Society in 1929, and titled his presidential address, “The Folkways of Scientific Sociology,” wherein he spoke of a “differentiating process . . . of methods” as the [3.15.219.217] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00...