Hubert Morse Blalock, Jr.
August 23, 1926 – February 8, 1991
Hubert (Tad) Blalock served as the 70th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “Measurement and Conceptualization Problems: The Major Obstacle to Integrating Theory and Research,” was delivered at the Association’s 1979 Annual Meeting in Boston,and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR December 1979, Vol 44 No 6, pp 881-894).
Obituary
Written by Gerhard Lenski and Hubert Costner, originally published in Footnotes, April 1991.
With great sadness we report the death on February 8 of Tad Blalock following an extended illness. As many will have learned already, Tad had been hospitalized since last Thanksgiving, but happily he lived long enough to learn of the Lazarsfeld Award, the announcement of which is on the front page of this issue of Footnotes.
The Lazarsfeld Award was only the latest in a long series of richly deserved honors. Tad won the Samuel Stouffer Award in 1973, became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association the following year, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1976, and President of the American Sociological Association in 1978-1979. These honors came in recognition of an extraordinarily productive and influential career that included the authorship of eleven books, the co-authorship of two others, the editorship or co-editorship of seven more, and approximately75 papers in a variety of scholarly journals.
Although it is a temptation to let the Lazarsfeld Award citation speak for the scholarly side of Tad’s life, that would be a mistake since the Lazarsfeld Award (coming as it does from the Methodology Section of ASA) recognizes only his contributions to methodology and Tad was much more than a methodologist. He was also a theorist with longstanding interest and important contributions m the fields of race relations and stratification. In addition, he served the scholarly community locally, nationally, and internationally in a variety of administrative capacities, including not only the presidency of ASA and membership on its Council, but membership on the Council of the American Statistical Association, and chairmanship of the Faculty Senate at the University of Washington. Finally (though Tad would not have put it last (in his list of priorities), ”He exemplified superbly the informed, conscientious, patient, and inspiring teacher we all aspire to be,” as the Lazarsfeld citation reminds us. If anyone ever gave the lie to the claim that good teaching and good research are incompatible, that person was Tad Blalock.
Younger members of ASA probably have difficu1ty appreciating the magnitude of Tad’s impact on our discipline. Prior to the publication of the first edition of Social Statistics in 1960, quantitative methods seldom extended beyond the use of percentage tables and chi square tests of significance. As the first “user friendly” text on statistics for sociologists, Social Statistics opened up a whole new realm of possibilities and it also sensitized many to the importance of the assumptions that underlie various statistical procedures.
But this was only the beginning. The next year, Tad published Causal Inferences in Non-Experimental Research with its challenging and persuasive argument for the use of formal models. This was a major contribution to the methodology of theory construction, though many theorists in our discipline still prefer the ambiguities that verbal formulations allow. In 1969, Tad carried his campaign a step further with the publication of Theory Construction: From Verbal to Mathematical Formulations. If some day, someone does a content analysis of our major journals they will almost certainly find some interesting lagged correlations between the publication of these volumes and the adoption of the more rigorous modes of theorizing and data analysis that Tad was advocating. More than that, they will find that the early use of these more rigorous procedures was linked to frequent citations of Tad’s publications.
It would be grossly unfair, however, if we were to leave the impression that Tad Blalock was merely a talented scholar who made a difference in the way sociology is done. He was also an extraordinarily warm, engaging, and complex human being whose contributions extended far beyond the books he wrote and the students he taught. His interest in race relations, for example, led him to write the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina a detailed proposal on how the University should and could provide greater opportunities for Black students, faculty, and nonprofessional staff. In North Carolina, he volunteered his services as a skilled witness, providing evidence that the racial composition for jury panels in a number of eastern counties could not have arisen by chance evidence that played a major role in a court decision that led to fundamental changes in the manner of jury selection. In Washington, he chaired the University Human Rights Commission and served as a member of the faculty support network for minority graduate students in all fields studying on Danforth-Compton Fellowships. And at both North Carolina and Washington, he spearheaded efforts to recruit Black faculty and graduate students in sociology.
Looking back on his life as a whole, one cannot help but be impressed with its essential unity. In trying to define the core element of it all, it is hard to avoid the somewhat trite expression that he cared and cared deeply about people and about justice and integrity in personal relations. Tad was a fascinating combination of liberal and conservative (though he might deny the latter allegation). The liberal side is well known to all who knew him and was a reflection both of his concern for people and for social justice. The less obvious conservative side of his personality found expression primarily in his personal relations with others Ann, the children, friends, students, colleagues and was a reflection of his concern for people and for integrity in interpersonal relations . In many ways, he was an exemplar of all the old-fashioned virtues that conservatives praise but do not always practice. And, unlike some liberals, his concern and compassion for people extended to people in the flesh, those with whom he came in contact; he was not one who merely cared for people in the abstract.
Tad was a fun-loving person with a great zest for life. He loved jazz, for example, and rarely missed a meeting of the Southern Sociological Association when it met in New Orleans. He loved camping, the out-of doors, especially mountains-both in Switzerland and the Pacific Northwest. He loved active sports, but had little interest in spectator sports. In tennis and in pingpong he was highly competitive and took full advantage of the special opportunities his southpaw smashes afforded. His compassion for others never quite extended to the playing field.
Although Tad was uncompromising in his hostility toward any expression of racial prejudice, he had certain prejudices and biases of his own. He had an intense dislike of pomposity and was unwilling to pretend he did not. Related to that, and perhaps as an expression of his preference for informality, he had a virulent dislike of neckties (though he was tolerant of the use of them by others). Looking back, it is hard to remember a single occasion on which he wore one.
Most of all, however, we remember Tad as a person with great inner strength. Much of this came from the remarkably warm and close relationship he and Ann, or ” Annie” as he often called her, maintained over many years and the continuing and invaluable support and encouragement she provided. They fell in love at an American Friends Service Committee Work Camp in the inner city of Boston prior to Graduate School-and never fell out.
Ann provided him not only with the kind of emotional support that we all need, but she was also a partner sharing in his intellectual and political life and activities, including collaboration in the writing and editing of a number of books and articles.
The final days and weeks of his life tell much about that man. While in the hospital, under heavy sedation and hooked up to intravenous feeding equipment, he spent his time with his family and in reading and correcting proofs on a new book soon to be published. He also watched developments in the Middle East with intense interest, and in the last several days of his life began work on a paper on the Gulf Crisis, drawing out the relationship of developments there to principles he had discussed in his recent volume, Power and Conflict. In short, to the very end Tad was looking ahead and looking for ways in which he could apply things that he had learned to the betterment of the human condition.
His death leaves a void that will be hard to fill, and not merely for those of us who were privileged to be his friends.
Contributions in Tad Blalock’s honor may be sent to the Hubert M. Blalock Minority Graduate Assistance Fund, c/o Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
