Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS283 victim of greed and outright dishonesty as the three directors used the bank shamelessly to promote the ill-fated financial ventures of themselves and their friends. Initially protected by the appearance of supervision by an honorific board of distinguished Americans, the Crash of 1873 exposed the bank's hopelessly over-extended status. When the great black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass assumed the presidency in 1874, he first vacillated, then recommended the closing of the bank's doors and the orderly liquidation of its assets. Ultimately the bank's depositors would receive 68 per cent of their savings, but only after nearly a decade of delay. Osthaus successfully leads the reader through the complex history of the bank's political and financial history. One wishes for a more sensitive evocation of the interrelationship between the often competing American pieties of thrift and conservativism and the conflicting values of speculation and risk-taking. And he sometimes pushes his observations beyond the evidence he has been able to gather. Nevertheless, we now know far more about the reasons for the Freedman's Bank's successes, and ultimately its failure. For that we can be grateful. Dan T. Carter Emory University Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905. By Mary O. Furner. (Lexington : University of Kentucky Press, 1975. Pp. xv, .357. $17.50.) The history of scholarship has barely begun to be studied, and Mary Furner's Frederick Jackson Turner Award-winning dissertation is one of the most welcome beginnings. Largely the story of the professionalization of the discipline of economics, with some discussion of sociology and political science, Advocacy and Objectivity investigates the biographies of leading scholars to try to determine how and why the change occurred in the social sciences from a quest for reform of society to a desire for value-free science. The issue of academic freedom is the window through which Fumer looks at the changing role of the new social scientists at the turn of the century. What she sees in the reactions of scholars to the academic freedom cases is an internal self-governance which constrained the more controversial ethical dimension reminiscent of amateur scholarship, and emphasized safer empirical studies which tacitly accepted the overall social and economic order. Furner documents a process among students of society in which ideological conflicts among interested amateurs after the Civil War are followed by ideological conflicts among early professional scholars during the 1880's, after which there is a continuing increase in 284CIVIL WAR HISTORY the equation of professional scholarly respectability and lack of public controversy. Thus Richard Ely's motivation to become a professional economist is originally Christian and reformist, and he is supported in early ideological battles by amateur reformers. During the 1880's at Johns Hopkins Ely becomes increasingly anachronistic to professionals for his moral uplift and Chatauqua summer sessions, and plans are laid to oust him from his Secretaryship of the American Economics Association, which he helped found only a few years earlier. In the 1890's at the University of Wisconsin Ely is attacked by trustees and conservative business interests for his radicalism, and he successfully retains his position by denying his radicalism. No off-campus professional defense in the name of academic freedom is made on Ely's behalf. Ely himself thenceforth shifts his research interests to less controversial areas for the remainder of his career. In this fashion the intellectually and politically narrowing professionalization process works with the consent of the governed. The shrinking intellectual and political ambition of the American academic in the last century, paradoxically coupled as it has been with the rise of the research university, constitutes an important theme in modern intellectual history. Not only political reform but even a general education curriculum has become a casualty of academic professionalization in the twentieth century. It is unclear whether the contemporary social sciences can recapture the sense of centrality expressed by the amateurs a century ago. The opportunity may be more promising for the social sciences than it has been for some time, at least relative to other areas of knowledge . The contraction of higher education has made manifest the shrinking intellectual...