Franklin Henry Giddings
March 23, 1855 — June 11, 1931
“Sociology enables us to attempt a rational and constructive criticism of our social values, and to combine them in a realizable social ideal.” –F.H. Giddings
Franklin Giddings was born in Sherman, Connecticut, the child of a minister who died while Giddings was a student at Union College, forcing him to drop out for economic reasons. After leaving college, Giddings worked as a journalist and also served in many capacities in associations for economics in the early years of social science publications. During the 1880’s Giddings was actively engaged with issues of inequality, inflation, and wages. He worked with John Bates Clark and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, which, along with other state bureaus and eventually a federal bureau, did numerous studies of social and economic topics using a variety of methods, but largely produced statistical surveys.
Cooperativism and profit sharing were regarded at the time as the best hope for solving the “labor question.” Cooperation as a solution to group conflict and understanding the conditions for cooperation and the forms of cooperation preoccupied Giddings throughout his long career. Giddings conducted a participant-observation study of fishing cooperatives, published under the name of Carroll Wright, the first US Commissioner of Labor. He soon learned that workers preferred either to be employed or to be an employer and wrote a theoretical economic explanation of this. He rose to importance in the fledgling American Economic Association but turned to sociology after getting an academic appointment succeeding Woodrow Wilson in political science at Bryn Mawr in 1893 and then being appointed in social science at Columbia University in 1896.
At Columbia, Giddings encountered a developed statistics program focused on tabular presentations and official statistics, methods being supplanted by the correlational analysis of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth and Karl Pearson. Giddings embraced the new statistics and added to it the idea of measuring social concepts by providing quantitative definitions of such terms as inequality and the distribution of wealth. He also advanced the idea of testing quantitative hypotheses rather than interpreting tables (1901). Giddings had earlier developed an index of inflation and subsequently extended his measurement thinking to social concepts generally. The combination of measurement and correlation was a revolutionary change in methodology that radically distinguished his program for quantitative sociology from the social statisticians who preceded him. He also embraced the philosophy of science of Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson, adding his own views on causality. These became the template for the thinking of a generation of Columbia graduates.
Giddings was particularly concerned with the relation of population homogeneity and heterogeneity to progress. His pioneering use of statistical hypothesis testing and the measurement of these variables confirmed his idea that progress was limited by too much and too little heterogeneity, that “a large social life is possible where there is a great deal of like-mindedness but if people are too much alike there will never be progress in a community” (1932: 33). The highest form of progress was the kind of “deliberative like-mindedness that transforms the political ideas of sympathetic and dogmatic like-mindedness into highly complex Social Values” (1901: 159). But he recognized that forms other than “government by discussion,” such as political machines and dictatorship, served similar purposes in the condition of more extreme population heterogeneity.
Giddings regarded racial and cultural differences as the product of environment, and he held that “all the races of the world have enough brain power to develop high civilization if they were in favorable circumstances and under the proper stimulation” (1932: 87). He embraced both difference and immigration and resisted homogeneity: “I hope that it will never happen that all the cultural wealth that our foreign-born populations have brought to the United States will be lost and merged in what is called current culture. God forbid” (1932: 343). His first presidential address to the American Sociological Society (now Association) in 1910 was concerned with the quality of civilization and global inequality.
Giddings was a polymath, writing poetry, on political topics, and on the history of civilization; writing a newspaper column; holding elective office on a school board; and also performing the usually expected services of sociologists in support of settlements and the Charity Organization Society. His most famous public exchange was in the 1890s with William Graham Sumner over the American empire that emerged after the Spanish-American War, which Sumner thought would be inimical to democracy. Giddings defended the idea that empire could be made benign and beneficial for the development of the colonized; he later argued for it as a step toward world government. Giddings became involved in the American entry into World War I in support of President Woodrow Wilson, who had adopted a vision of international cooperation and organization. His support of the war earned him the enmity of Columbia colleagues when Columbia was in turmoil over the dismissal of James McKeen Cattell over his opposition to the war.
Giddings’s sociological ideas involved carefully developed distinctions between concepts of association. This scheme paralleled, but largely preceded, similar conceptual systems by Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies but reflected and included his earlier interest in forms of cooperation, “consciousness of kind,” and what Giddings called concerted volition. The distinctions he made reappear in recent thinking in the form of other concepts such as collective will formation, deliberative democracy, and concepts of identity. He was concerned, as others were, with what today might be called inclusion, which was then called socialization (1897).
Giddings is often dismissed for failing to perform empirical research himself, though he did some and also had some projects that were not carried out due to external circumstances. But he instilled a devotion to statistical sociology, and provided a research template for doing it, in his students, including American Sociological Society presidents William F. Ogburn, F. Stuart Chapin, and Howard Odum. His students produced a vast array of empirical studies, especially of communities, using multiple methods, and the introduction of multivariate correlation and complex partialling schemes for the purposes of casual inference. He also supervised many dissertations on European sociologists, and was supportive of women, including anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and Virginia Gildersleeve, the longtime dean of Barnard College. He died in Scarsdale, New York, on June 11, 1931.
Biography by Stephen Turner, University of South Florida
Selected Works by Franklin H. Giddings
1896. The Principles of Sociology. New York/London: The Macmillan Company.
1897. The Theory of Socialization: A Syllabus of Sociological Principles. (1897) New York/London: The Macmillan Company.
1900. Democracy and Empire. With Studies of their Psychological, Economic, and Moral Foundations. New York/London: The Macmillan Company.
1901. Inductive Sociology: A Syllabus of Methods, Analyses and Classifications, and Provisionally Formulated Laws. New York/London: The Macmillan Company.
1932. Civilization and Society: An Account of the Development and Behavior of Human Society, ed. Howard W. Odum. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Works about Franklin H. Giddings
Chriss, James. 2006. “Giddings and the Social Mind.” Journal of Classical Sociology 6(1): 123–144
Gillin, John L.1927. Giddings. Pp. 191-230 in American Masters of Social Science: An Approach to the Study of the Social Sciences through a Neglected Field of Biography. edited by Howard Odum. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Northcott, Clarence H. 1948. The Sociological Theories of Franklin Henry Giddings. Pp. 744-65 in An Introduction to the History of Sociology, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Odum, Howard. 1951. American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States to 1950. London: Longman, Green and Co.
Turner, Stephen. 1991. The World of the Academic Quantifiers: The Columbia University Family and Its Connections. Pp. 269-90 in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective: 1880-1940, edited by Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Obituary
Published in the American Journal of Sociology, 1931
The death of Franklin Henry Giddings occurred at his home in Scarsdale, New York, on Thursday, June 11, 1931.
Professor Giddings was the third president of the American Sociological Society, serving for the two years 1910-12.
Professor Giddings was born in Sherman, Connecticut, March 23, 1855. He was a graduate of Union College in 1877, receiving his Master’s degree in 1899 and an honorary Ph.D. degree in 1897, from the same institution. In 1929 he received an LL.D. degree from Columbia University.
His early career, from 1877 to 1883, was devoted to journalism. From 1888 to 1894 he was professor at Bryn Mawr College, and from 1891 to the time of his death served on the faculty of Columbia University, first as lecturer in sociology, later as professor of sociology, and then as professor of sociology and history of civilization. At the time of his retirement he was made professor emeritus in residence, a new academic title, with an increase instead of a de- crease in his salary.
He was a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, serving as vice-president and as editor of the Annals 1890-94. From 1891 to 1893 he was editor of the publications of the American Economics Association, and from 1896 to 1897 the vice- president of this organization. In 1913 he was president of the Institut International de Sociologie. He was also a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a trustee of Union College, and a member of the Board of Education of New York City from 1915 to 1917.
The American Journal of Sociology. 37(2):273.