Charles Abram Ellwood
January 20, 1873 – September 25, 1946
Charles Ellwood was born in a small but prosperous upstate New York farming community called Black Lake. Inspired by reading American economist Richard T. Ely, he took a state scholarship to Cornell University to pursue the new PhB degree, an alternative to the classically oriented degree of his day. He became active in social reform and advocated for an ethically oriented sociology in his senior thesis. He then went to the University of Chicago, where he was a star PhD student of Albion Small, John Dewey, and the young Georg Herbert Mead. He also studied in Germany with Georg Simmel and others. His dissertation was published in the American Journal of Sociology, where he laid out the essentials of the interactionist approach to social life he followed and developed over his long career. He rejected metaphysical and collective mind conceptions of “society” in favor of an account of mutual psychological relations as the core of social life.
Although there were few teaching positions in sociology, Ellwood secured an appointment at the University of Nebraska, allowing him to lecture while requiring him to run the local Charity Organization Society (COS) and raise his own salary. In 1900, Ellwood was appointed to a professorship at the University of Missouri, where he continued his COS work, a common expectation for sociologists at the time. This professorship in sociology was publicized internationally. It is noteworthy that there would not be one in Germany for another twenty years. He built the sociology major at Missouri and his criticisms of the welfare system made him a public figure in the state. He began to produce books, including a social problems text that replaced the then-standard American Charities with an explicitly sociological approach that emphasized the interrelatedness of social problems (1910). This book went through many editions and name changes, including a vastly expanded version rejecting monocausal explanations (such as Marxist economic determinism). His work established social problems as a defined field within sociology. In a 1925 survey, Missouri was ranked in the top five sociology departments in the United States. By the end of his career, Ellwood was said to have sold a million books. His last major work (Ellwood 1938), a history of social thought, was a book club selection that went through eight editions.
Ellwood’s time at Missouri was not free of controversy. For his staunch Darwinism, he was called “the monkey man.” The town (Columbia) experienced a lynching in 1925, which Ellwood publicly denounced, earning local enmity. He was already well known in Europe through translations, and in 1928 he took a sabbatical to travel there. After he returned to the U.S., he became an early and vocal critic of Mussolini and fascism. In 1929, his department was enmeshed in a “scandal” over an innocuous “sex questionnaire” distributed in a family sociology class. Although the controversy involved him only indirectly, it cost a famous psychologist, Max Meyer, his position, and damaged the university for many years. In 1930, Ellwood accepted an offer to start a department of sociology at Duke University. The offer came largely because of his widely read religious writings offering a pacifistic alternative to the views of Reinhold Niebuhr and enhancing Duke’s aspirations to provide Christian education.
Ellwood became president of the American Sociological Society in 1924 and gave a presidential address on intolerance. As a member of the generation between the founders and the rising “scientifically” oriented sociologists, he became the first serious critic of the new scientism, defending qualitative understanding and outlining the earliest critiques of what became conventional sociological methodology, as presented in Methods of Sociology: A Critical Study (1933). He also become a convert to the importance of culture and defended an evolutionary view of culture, in conflict with the emerging ahistorical functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski. He did not benefit from the infusion of Rockefeller money supporting quantification in sociology in the 1920s. Rather, he became an outsider and critic within American sociology, but was nevertheless an internationally respected figure.
Ellwood developed an interactionist perspective oriented to the psychological side of culture, rejecting a collective conception of culture in favor of a psychological one rooted in the life process and focused on transmission and evolutionary change:
…we find in human groups…a continuity maintained by passing on from generation to generation—mental patterns that is, knowledge, ideas, standards, and values—largely by means of language. These mental patterns have gradually accumulated and developed from primitive times to the present. They are a set of inner mental habits acquired in ever increasing complexity by each succeeding generation. (Ellwood 1925:462).
These views were reflected in different ways in the thoughts of two of his Missouri students who later received degrees at Chicago and also became presidents of ASA, Herbert Blumer (1956) and Luther L. Bernard (1932), and in the practice of ASA President Carl C. Taylor (1946) whose 1918 PhD was from Missouri.
Ellwood was an internationalist, but his efforts at bringing sociologists together internationally in a cooperative and open way were stymied by Chicago sociologists and the Durkheimians. In the mid-1930s, he was president of the International Institute of Sociology, at a time of crisis for European sociology as the continent changed politically with the rise of various forms of fascism. He worked with Secretary Guillaume Duprat to block a fascist takeover of the organization by Mussolini’s follower, Corrado Gini. The war was a great disappointment to Ellwood, who ended his career with a bitter “Valedictory” (1944) lamenting the loss in sociology of the scientific reformist vision of Lester Ward, the domination of the university by the natural sciences, militarism, and scientistic sociology. He supported women, from his time at Cornell, where he organized a lecture series on “The Family” that included feminist Annis Eastman. Later he became mentor to his undergraduate student Irene Tauber, who kept in touch with him the rest of his life. He died in Durham, North Carolina, September 25, 1946.
Selected Works by Charles A. Ellwood
1910. Sociology and Modern Social Problems. New York: American Book Company. http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/6568
1925. The Psychology of Human Society; an Introduction to Sociological Theory. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
1933. Methods in Sociology: A Critical Study. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1938. A History of Social Philosophy. New York: Prentice Hall, Inc.
1945. “Valedictory.” Social Science 20(1):5
Works about Charles A. Ellwood
Bannister, Robert C. 1991. Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
LoConto, David 2006. “The Influence of Charles A. Ellwood on Herbert Blumer and Symbolic Interactionism.” Journal of Classical Sociology 6(1):75-99
LoConto, David 2011. “Charles A. Ellwood and the End of Sociology.” The American Sociologist 42(1):112-128
Turner, Stephen. 2007. A Life in the First Half-Century of Sociology: Charles Ellwood and the Division of Sociology.” Pp. 115-154 in Sociology in America: The American Sociological Association’s Centennial History, edited by Craig Calhoun. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Turner, Stephen. 2010. “Ellwood’s Europe.” Pp. 163-176 in Transatlantic Voyages and Sociology: The Migration and Development of Ideas, edited by Cherry Shrecker. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Obituary
Written by Edgar Thompson, published in the American Sociological Review, 1946. 11(6): 753-754.
Charles Abram Ellwood, former president of the American Sociological Society and a pioneer in American sociology, died at his home in Durham, North Carolina, September 25, 1946, a little more than a year after the death of his wife, Ida B. Ellwood. He leaves one son, Walter B. Ellwood of New York City, and two grandchildren.
Dr. Ellwood was born January 20, 1873 on a farm in northern New York near Ogdenburg. During his undergraduate years at Cornell he came under the influence of Professor Edward A. Ross who took a personal interest in him and persuaded him to follow a career in sociology rather than in law. At Cornell Dr. Ellwood also was influenced by Professor Walter Willcox but reacted against Willcox’s insistence upon the statistical method in the social sciences. He wrote his bachelor’s thesis under Professor J. W. Jenks on the subject, “The Social Sciences as a Basis for a Science of Ethics,” a subject which continued to be his main interest for the rest of his life.
Dr. Ellwood entered upon graduate study at the University of Chicago in 1896. At Chicago he was influenced by the work he had with Professors Small, Henderson, Vincent, Thomas Mead and especially John Dewey. Graduate work at Chicago was interrupted by a year of study in German universities where he met and studied under such men as Schmoller, Simmel, and Paulsen. Unlike most other American sociologists who studied in Germany, Ellwood reacted against Simmel’s formal sociology although “some of his ideas,” he said, “I found very stimulating.” In Paulsen, however, Ellwood found a teacher very sympathetic to the idea that ethics should seek its basis in the social sciences. Returning to the University of Chicago Ellwood completed his work for Ph.D. degree in 1899. His thesis, “Some Prolegomena to Social Psychology,” was published in the American Journal of Sociology.
Dr. Ellwood began his teaching career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Nebraska while serving as secretary of a charity organization in Lincoln. In 1900 he moved to the University of Missouri where he organized a department of sociology stressing sociology in its social psychological aspects. Ellwood regarded his work in social psychology, or “psychological sociology,” as he preferred to call it, as a continuation of the viewpoint of Dewey. In 1904 he served as chairman of the Section on Social Psychology of the Congress of Arts and Science held in connection with the World’s Fair at St. Louis. From this time on he was increasingly influenced by Cooley.
The year 1914-15 was spent in England in association with Marett at Oxford and Hob- house at the University of London. Marett greatly strengthened Dr. Ellwood’s growing interest in anthropology and ethnology and Hob- house reinforced his faith in the social sciences as a foundation for the rational good. These influences upon Ellwood’s thinking, coupled with the first World War then raging in Europe, led him to take a strongly pacifist position with reference to international problems, a position which he continued to hold throughout the recent war.
At the invitation of President Few, Dr. Ellwood came to Duke University in 1930. He retired as chairman of the Department of Sociology at Duke in 1944.
During a long career of fifty years as sociologist and educator Professor Ellwood held many honors and published many notable books. He served many years as national president of Pi Gamma Mu, a social science fraternity which he helped organize. He was president of the American Sociological Society in 1924; president of the International Congress of Sociology at Brussels in 1935; president of the International Institute of Sociology the year 1935-36. His Sociology and Modern Social Problems, first published in 1910, was widely used as a text in high schools and colleges and contributed greatly to the popularization of sociology in the United States. Other works include: Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects (19I2), The Social Problem (1915), Introduction to Social Psychology (1917), The Reconstruction of Religion (1922), Christianity and the Social Sciences (1923), Psychology of Human Society (1925), Cultural Evolution (1925), Man’s Social Destiny in the Light of Science (1929), Methods in Sociology (1933), A History of Social Philosophy (1938), and The World’s Need of Christ (1940). In addition, Dr. Ellwood contributed numerous articles to the various sociological journals in this country as well as abroad.
Dr. Ellwood’s fundamental interest in good citizenship led him to prefer teaching to re- search. He crusaded mightily for his ideal of world citizenship and he conceived of sociology as worth little if it were not directly instrumental to that end. He had very little patience with those who would make sociology a natural science.
