Edward Alsworth Ross
December 12, 1866 – July 22, 1951
“There may come a time in the career of every sociologist when it is his solemn duty to raise hell.” –Edward Alsworth Ross
Edward Ross was born in Virden, Illinois, where both his parents died when he was quite young. He was raised by several different farm families in Iowa, often working alongside them in their farms. In his autobiography, Ross wrote fondly of these years, declaring that they “left me a famer for life” (1936: 6). Ultimately, however, his life was not that of a farmer; he was a globe-trotting public intellectual who traveled the world and wrote for diverse audiences.
After earning his AB from Coe College in 1886, Ross quickly gravitated toward concrete social issues such as industrialization and its consequences, receiving his PhD in political economy in 1891 from Johns Hopkins University. In 1892 he married Rosamond Simons, the niece of influential sociologist (and first president of the American Sociological Society – now Association) Lester Frank Ward, whom he looked up to as a personal and professional mentor.
As a charismatic teacher and idiosyncratic yet independent thinker, the young Ross appealed to both students and the general public. He began his teaching career at Cornell University and quickly rose through the professional ranks. David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, personally recruited him from Cornell, promising the best treatment and freedom from the cultural conservatism of the East Coast universities. As a reform-minded progressive, Ross openly criticized the ills of contemporary industrial capitalism. His support for the silver standard, sympathies towards socialists, and criticisms of robber-baron capitalists did not sit well with California conservatives.
Eventually, however, it was the issues of race and immigration that got Ross fired. In 1900, he spoke at a forum on the issue of Asian immigration. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, many aging Chinese workers had returned home, and Japanese immigrants had replaced them in farms, factories, mines, and private households. In a public speech, Ross argued that, with their different culture and low standard of living, Japanese immigrants presented a threat to American workers and should be banned from entering the country. However, big capital sided with immigrant workers against labor and reform-oriented intellectuals because immigrants were a cheaper source of labor than native-born workers. Any criticism of immigrants, racial or otherwise, was understood as a thinly veiled challenge to capitalism.
Jane Stanford, the widow of Stanford University founder Leland Stanford, took offense at Ross’s public statements and demanded his resignation from the university. Ross’s case became a national scandal, and a host of Stanford professors resigned in solidarity. Reformers across the country championed Ross—and his nativism—as a bona fide example of free speech. It would take decades for the modern tenure system to emerge, but Ross and the Stanford incident initiated the conversation on the nature of academic freedom. The irony, however, was that the freedom in question was the freedom to argue for the exclusion of Asian immigrants from the United States.
While the incident was a challenging ordeal for Ross and his family, his professional career emerged unscathed. While dealing with the media frenzy, Ross focused on finishing his first major work, Social Control (1901). The book came out soon after his termination and was an instant success. Ross explored the bases of social order as well as change, anticipating the key themes of twentieth-century American sociology. Over the following decades, the book sold 18,000 copies. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. appreciated Ross’s contribution and sent him letters of admiration. In 1906, Ross joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While there, he served as the fifth president of the American Sociological Association for the years 1914 and 1915. His presidential addresses were “Acquisitivei Mimicry” and “The Principle of Anticipation,” respectively. In 1929, Ross founded the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and served as the inaugural chair for the next decade.
Although it is his best-known work, the theoretical substance of Social Control was quickly eclipsed by the contributions of other sociologists, most notably those of the Chicago School. His other works, including Foundations of Sociology (1905), Sin and Society (1907), and Social Psychology (1908), spoke to the educated public and received wide acclaim but did not substantially influence future sociologists. Ross’s legacy is appreciated in some circles today, unfortunately including contemporary white supremacists. In 1900, Ross coined the term “race suicide” and made it an instant sensation among some like-minded intellectuals and politicians. Because of the increasingly competitive and risky social conditions under exploitive industrial capitalism, Ross reasoned, many established, respectable Anglo-Saxon families were choosing to have fewer children than the previous generations, while southern and eastern European immigrant families’ birthrates remained high. Ross went on to warn that this would lead to eventual extinction of the “desirable” race and a takeover of American society and culture by “undesirable” races of immigrants.
Although various groups have obsessed over the implications of demographic transition throughout American and European history—contemporary white supremacists call it “the great replacement”—Ross’s time was perhaps the apex of the idea. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Ross was an unwavering voice for immigration restriction, although he rapidly lost interest in the topic after the national quota laws were passed in the early 1920s. Later in his life, he emphasized that his opposition to immigration had been motivated not by race but by economic reasoning from the perspective of American workers.
Late in his career, Ross traveled to China and Latin America and wrote a series of popular books combining travelogue with sociological analysis. Though these essays do contain a strong dose of orientalism, exoticism, and ethnocentrism, Ross ultimately delivered a balanced, reasonable account by highlighting the potential of any country or people, with time and effort, to achieve what Americans had achieved. He was, however, less generous on his understanding of domestic minorities, most notably Japanese immigrants. Throughout the 1940s, he used his national reputation to support the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) defense of those labelled as communists. Nevertheless, in 1943, when the ACLU sided with the interned Japanese Americans, Ross wrote that this was the only issue on which he could not agree with ACLU.
Overall, Ross was a transitional figure. He came of age in an agricultural society but became a sociologist in a rapidly evolving industrial society. In fact, Ross navigated his professional career through an era of change as he transitioned from a young, maverick professor to an institution-builder, to a globe-trotting public intellectual. Throughout these transformations, he held onto his convictions, most notably on reform and freedom of speech, as well as his racialized perspective on the world. Although his theories were quickly forgotten, his life trajectory provides a useful template for understanding American sociology in the early twentieth century and beyond. Ross died on July 22,1951 at the age of 85.
Biography by Sunmin Kim, Dartmouth College
Selected Works by Edward A. Ross
1901. Social Control. London: The Macmillan Company.
1905. Foundations of Sociology. London: The Macmillan Company.
1907. Sin and Society: An Analysis of Latter-Day Iniquity. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Co.
1936. Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography. New York: Appleton-Century Co.
Works About Edward A. Ross
Hertzler, J. O. 1951. “Edward Alsworth Ross: Sociological Pioneer and Interpreter” American Sociological Review 16(5): 597-598.
Hill, Michael R. 2000. “Ross, Edward Alsworth.” American National Biography Online. Retrieved March 14, 2003 (http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-00522.html).
McMahon, Sean. 1999. Social Control and Public Intellect: The Legacy of Edward A. Ross. London: Taylor and Francis.
Weinberg, Julius. 1972. Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism. State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Obituary
Written by John L. Gillin, published in the American Journal of Sociology, 1951.
On July 22 Professor Ross passed away in his home in Madison, Wisconsin, at the age of eighty-four years, seven months, and ten days. A large assembly of his friends was present at his funeral in the First Baptist Church. He is survived by three sons by his first wife, who died in 1931, by nine grand- children and one great-grandchild, and by his second wife, Helen Forbes Ross. He was buried by the side of his first wife in beautiful Forest Hills Cemetery in Madison. Thus one more of the men who helped to make the University of Wisconsin well known passed from the scene.
In an article published fourteen years ago I described some of Professor Ross’s most striking characteristics as I had learned to know him at that time-his wholehearted devotion to the development of sociology and his almost evangelical zeal in spreading abroad its principles; his cordial and generous attitude toward his colleagues; his refusal to take offense from his critics; his intellectual and moral courage in teaching and proclaiming what he believed to be the truth and defending the right of those who held opposing views to do the same; his self- confidence and his happy family relation- ships in spite of his busy professional life.’
Since Ross wrote his Seventy Years of It in I936, he has published one new book, New- Age Sociology (1940), and a revision of his Principles of Sociology (1938). In 1948 he published Capsules of Social Wisdom. He was still working on an expanded edition of the latter up to almost the end. With the title of the latter he was never satisfied moreover, he did not consider this work primarily sociological. Several articles also have come from his pen during this period.
During his lifetime he published a total of twenty-eight books and about two hundred articles. These were written during the years he was carrying a regular teaching load with large classes, lecturing widely over the country, and traveling over the world observing life among different peoples, the results of which came out as articles in journals and in such books as The Changing Chinese, South of Panama, etc. When one remembers that every word was written in longhand, and not once but often many times, in order to produce that easy style and happy phrasing for which he was famous, one can easily picture the long hours he must have spent in producing this large literary output. Yet, in spite of his struggle to clarify his ideas and to perfect his style, Ross was interested primarily in understanding society and making that understanding clear to others; in short, in seeing that sociology developed and received recognition. In the Preface to his New-Age Sociology this is well brought out. He wrote: “In case sociology goes on surmounting crest after crest, this system of mine, outcome of endless toil, will by the close of our century look so pitiful that, were I alive then, I might be tempted to make a bonfire of all my sociological works! Gesture of chagrin? Not at all. Early obsolescence of my lifework would cheer me if it were to be the outcome of sociology’s advance in scientific recognition and popular acceptance.” That this was no idle pretense is shown by the enthusiasm he has manifested for the recent emphasis on research by some of the younger sociologists and for theoretical developments beyond the limits of his presentation. He did not consider his a closed system of sociology. Even increasing age did not cause him to close the windows of his mind to the fresh breezes blowing from the later ripening fields of scholarship. Even his New-Age Sociology shows developments be- yond his Principles of Sociology.
Moreover, Ross with increasing age did not sour on his fellow-men, nor did he lose his optimism as to the future of the human race. He never shared the sentiment attributed to Carlyle that the English people consist of thirty million souls, mostly fools, or that said to be held by Mark Twain, “the G d human race.” He exemplified that by what he wrote in his Capsules of Social Wisdom: “The wise is never above learning from the moves of his opponent.” Or: “Whenever a body of knowledge ripens into a science, bright youths master it, thereby overtaking their elders.” His pessimism shows in the Capsules in Topics XXXIII, “Newspapers”; XXXIV, “Radio”; XXV, “Deceitful Propaganda”; and XXXVI, “Business.” But that cloud of pessimism has a silver lining: “So long as Popular Education, Free Press, and ‘Government by the People’ are realities, fear not loss of our liberties!” While to the last he held to his belief that the big businessmen were trying to control the economic, political, and social life of the country, to the end he held that enough people in the United States believed in the importance of our constitutional civil liberties to prevent the accomplishment of the schemes of big business. He never lost hope that the working people and the farmers will hold them in check.
Professor Ross was one of the American pioneer sociologists. Ward had written his Dynamic Sociology in 1883. Sumner was teaching a course in social science in 1885, but it was not until 1892 that Columbia announced a single course in sociology, and only in 1893 did the University of Chicago with its opening organize a department of sociology. Ross began to teach sociology in 1891, but in 1894 he definitely began seriously to think about the systematization of one field of sociology developed first in articles and then in his first book Social Control, and then in his Foundations of Sociology. Social processes became the foundations of his system. After that he was wholly committed to his career.
Professor Ross’s interest in the new discipline, the system he developed, even his espousal of free silver and his antipathy to big business, can be understood by consideration of his background as described in his Seventy Years of It, chapters iii-vi. He was a son of the Middle West. Also his diary shows that even during his period of study in Germany he reacted against German philosophy and classical economics. But it was only after he returned to the United States that he became acquainted with the writings of Lester F. Ward. They pointed out a path through the wilderness. But the rural society of Iowa in which he grew up had left an indelible mark upon his system of values.
There are some things in his system of sociology, which, as he anticipated, are bound to be rejected by future sociologists, but there is much which will be found woven into the warp and woof of the texture of sociology. Moreover, his moral courage, his intellectual honesty, his inspiring personality, and his generous nature light the path of all future scholars and throw a brilliant luster upon the statement of the Regents of the University of Wisconsin, a statement of policy cast in enduring bronze on the tablet affixed to the front of Bascom Hall: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continued and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
Gillin, John. 1951. “Edward Alsworth Ross, 1866-1951”. The American Journal of Sociology. 57(3):281-282.
