The Ohio State University and Columbus and the foundations of the Linguistic Society of America

We take as our starting point an observation from Leonard Bloomfield’s retrospective on two decades of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA): ‘Only those who, before the year 1925, worked in almost complete isolation can appreciate the change that came about with the existence of the Linguistic society’ (Bloomfield 1946:2). Bloomfield was, of course, in a good position to offer such an assessment, as he was involved in the formulation and circulation of the call for the formation of the society. It was not just Bloomfield, in fact, but a number of scholars at a variety of institutions who were involved, including other scholars at his own, The Ohio State University. We attempt in what follows to give a sense of how that isolation was overcome in the years leading up to the founding of the LSA, with our focus being on contributions made by individuals in Columbus, Ohio and at The Ohio State University (OSU).

Focusing on OSU and thus Columbus is appropriate (though surely one could examine the emergence of the LSA from the perspective of other cities and other institutions, as our discussion below suggests) because two key people in the founding of the LSA—Leonard Bloomfield and George Melville Bolling—hailed from the Columbus area and were affiliated with OSU. Bloomfield was one of the signers of the call for the formation of a linguistic society (cf. Language 1.6–7, 1925),¹ a member of the LSA organizing committee, and the author of ‘Why a linguistic society?’, the first item published in Language. His reply to the titular question is: ‘The immediate answer is simple: of course, we seek the possibility of meeting and knowing each other’ (Bloomfield 1925:1). Bolling also was one of the signers of the call and a member of the organizing committee, as well as the first editor of Language, from 1925–1939.

Moreover, a significant number of other foundation members (FMs) of the LSA were from OSU and therefore from Columbus or its environs. The FMs (listed in Language 1.26–36, 1925) numbered 264 in all and were a demographically diverse group comprising men, women, nonacademics, academics in language departments, academics in nonlanguage departments, and so on.

To give an idea of how OSU’s and Columbus’s FM representation compares with that of other institutions and cities, we present here a breakdown of the FM membership by geography and by institution. On each parameter, OSU, Ohio, and Columbus rank near the top of the membership lists.

The breakdown of FMs by geography is presented in Table 1. We note that while the FMs were diverse from a geographic standpoint, in that thirty-one states (and the District of Columbia) and four countries are represented among the 264 original FMs, Ohio itself was home to sixteen FMs, the third-most, after Pennsylvania (with fifty-five) and New York (with fifty-three).

Table 1.

FMs by state/country.

Moreover, looking at the academic members by affiliation (Table 2), we observe that while the most widely represented academic institution (out of the eighty-three represented in all) is the University of Pennsylvania with twenty-nine members, there were nine FMs who were associated with OSU, ranking it third by number of representatives among the FMs.

Turning now to OSU in particular, the following constitute the Ohio State contingent of FMs, as given in the initial roster:

Claude Anibal (Spanish)	E. F. Hacker (Romance Langs.)
Leonard Bloomfield (German)	Olin H. Moore (Romance Langs.)
George Melville Bolling (Greek)	S. B. Smith (Latin)
Wallace Elden (Latin)	Albert P. Weiss (Psychology)
Erwin A. Esper (Psychology)

In addition, a tenth FM was from Columbus, someone not overtly affiliated with OSU: Miss Ruth M. Keller is listed in the FM roster only with her address: ‘538 S. Champion Av., Columbus, O.’ and was thus possibly a nonacademic.² In Julia Falk’s excellent account of the women FMs (Falk 1994), very little is said about Miss Keller, as indeed, very little information...