Carl Cleveland Taylor
December 16, 1884 – February 10, 1975
Carl Cleveland Taylor was born December 16, 1884 in Harlan, Iowa, the son of Luntellas S. Taylor and Mary Ellen Mershon. The Taylors were farmers, which likely played a role in their son’s professional focus on agricultural and rural issues.
In 1933, Taylor joined the Roosevelt Administration where he worked with the Subsistence Homesteads Program, the Farm Security Administration, and the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. Sociologist T. Lynn Smith later wrote that Taylor “brought the use of sociology in formulating government policy, planning, and programs to a new level through the division’s research and service in areas such as rural community, farm population, farm labor, rural levels and standards of living, and the rural disadvantaged.”
Taylor wrote one of the first textbooks on rural sociology (Rural Sociology, published in 1926) and was a major figure in the study of rural life in the United States. Later in life he visited Argentina and India to study rural life in those countries as well.
Taylor served at the 36th President of the American Sociological Society (name later changed to Association). His Presidential Address, “Sociology and Common Sense,” was delivered at the organization’s annual meeting in Chicago in December 1946.
Upon his death in 1975, an obituary was published in the August 1975 issue of Footnotes. Carl C. Taylor’s professional papers are housed in the Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; a finding aid for this collection is available at http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM03230.html The Taylor Collection includes the following brief biographical sketch of Carl C. Taylor:
Carl Cleveland Taylor was born in Iowa on December 16, 1884. He taught college-level economics and sociology and in 1933 was appointed sociologist with the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the United States Department of the Interior. He was regional director with the Land Policy Section of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 1934-1935. Later he was chief of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, United States Department of Agriculture. He spent a year of research in rural sociology in Argentina with the State Department, 1942-1943. He was a member of the American Country Life Association, the American Sociological Society, and the Rural Sociology Society. He was a joint author on many surveys, and wrote The Social Survey – Its History and Method, 1919; Economics and Social Conditions of North Carolina Farmers, 1923; Rural Sociology, 1926; Human Relations, 1927; The People of the Drought States (with Conrad Taeuber); and Disadvantaged Classes in American Agriculture (with Helen Wheeler and E.L. Kirkpatrick).
Obituary:
Written by T. Lynn Smith, published in Footnotes, August 1975
Carl Cleveland Taylor, former president of the American Sociological Association (1946) and of the Rural Sociological Society (1939), died on February 10, 1975, in Arlington, Virginia. His death came only a few months after he had passed his ninetieth birthday, and after a lengthy period of incapacitation. With his going the field of sociology lost one of the last survivors of the small group of distinguished men and women who transformed it from a small, upstart pretender in the realm of academic affairs and governmental service (and with no standing at all in industrial matters) into a scientific discipline of considerable importance. In its theoretical aspects and the applied features as well, our branch of knowledge owes much to his perceptive mind, his determination, his dedication to the profession, and his ability in administrative affairs. Most of all he was a friend, a true friend, on whom hundreds of younger sociologists could count.
Carl Taylor was born in Harlan, Shelby County, Iowa on December 16, 1884, and graduated from nearby Drake University in 1911. A few years later, 1914, he received an MA degree from the University of Texas, and in 1918 the PhD in sociology from the University of Missouri. He taught at the University of Texas, the University of Missouri (1916-1920), and North Carolina State University (1920-1923). From 1923 to 1931 he was dean of the graduate school at the latter; and for the years 1931-33 he was engaged in research and writing in North Carolina. Early in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt he began his work with the Federal government, which terminated only with his retirement in 1953. At first he was special assistant to the director of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads in the Department of Interior (1933-34), then regional director of the Land Policy Section of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (1934-35); and assistant administrator of the Resettlement Administration (1935-37). While serving in the latter capacity he also became Head of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he was a tower of strength in sociological matters within governmental circles for eighteen years. In 1942 and 1943, while on leave from his position in Washington, he spent 13 months in Argentina doing the research that led to the publication of his classic Rural Life in Argentina (Louisiana State University Press, 1948). Following his retirement from governmental service he engaged widely in advisory and other kinds of professional work, including a period (1953-54) as community development advisor with the International Cooperation Administration, consultant in rural development with the United Nations, and extensive periods of consultation work with the Ford Foundation in India.
The literature in the field of sociology has been greatly enriched by the titles of which he is the author. When, following the Report of the Roosevelt (Theodore) Commission on Country Life, the “Survey Movement” was in its heyday, the publication of his The Social Survey, Its History and Methods (1919), added both substance and system in a very important methodological development. Shortly after during his early years at North Carolina State University, in collaboration with Carle G. Zimmerman, a graduate student who had accompanied him in the transfer from Missouri, he published the classical study entitled Rural Organization: A Study of Primary Groups in Wake County, N.C. (1922). In 1926 his Rural Sociology, one of the first textbooks in that field, appeared, and in 1933 a revised edition of it came out.
During his years in Washington, Taylor published alone or in cooperation with others dozens of important research reports, and two books that long will be read by all those seeking to know the fundamentals of life and labor in the rural districts, also came out of this period of his work. The first of these is Rural Life in Argentina, mentioned above, and the second, in collaboration with several of his closest associates in the division he headed, is entitled Rural Life in the United States (1949). Before he retired from government service Taylor also had completed his lifelong study of The Farmers’ Movement, 1920-1920 (1953). And his work in India eventually led to the publication, with a number of co-authors, of lndia’s Roots of Democracy (1965).
All of us who were privileged to have Carl C. Taylor as a friend and associate will ever remember him as a stimulating companion, versatile scholar, able speaker, and in short one everyone enjoyed “being around ‘ I shall always remember the four days we spent together at the little town of Uruguayana, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where we met in August 1942 to discuss the studies we were doing in Argentina and Brazil, respectively. It would be difficult to find a more fitting expression of the tribute we all would like to pay Carl Cleveland Taylor, however, than the poem another noted sociologist, long friend and associate, Lowry Nelson, has composed. Nelson has given permission for its use here.
In Memorium
Carl Cleveland Taylor
1884-1975
The land grew him-Iowa land.
Remembering it fondly,
He often spoke of it to friends.
He knew it well:
It’s winters white and bleak;
The cold, the pale sun;
Fury of it’s sometime storms,
The chores of care and feeding.
Then it’s greening springtime;
The plowing, planting, sowing;
The seedlings’ upward thrust;
The hatching and the birthing.
He knew the summer’s growing;
The corn, the grain responding
To the long sun and humid air.
It’s autumn reaping and moving.
Gathering the crops mature
The bounty of the year;
Labor of human hand
Uniting with the land.
The farm had its seasons;
So the man:
The green youth, big with dreams,
Sought college, higher learning:
New knowledge was wind in sails;
It bore him far afield,
To horizons dimly seen.
He would learn more about those
Who also knew the land as he knew it
He also had his years of growing,
Maturing, ripening;
Laboring in his new-found field,
Seeing the fruitage
From furrows early plowed.
Then the warmth of success,
Dreams and promises fulfilled;
Harvest of labor of the years.
A season of leisure,
Comfort of retirement.
Then his tragic winter;
The paling sun, the mental dark;
The flickering flame, then night.
Farm boy; man of knowledge;
Mentor of the folk.
Speak tenderly Muse,
For the beloved dead.
