Everett Cherrington Hughes
November 30, 1897 – January 1983
Everett C. Hughes was elected by his peers to serve as the 53rd President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination,” was delivered on August 28, 1963 at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. This address was later published in the December 1963 issue of American Sociological Review (ASR Vol. 28 No. 6 pp 879-890).
Obituary
Written by Howard Becker and Barrie Thorne, published in Footnotes, April 1983
Everett C. Hughes died peacefully on January 5, 1983. He will be missed and mourned by his family, friends, colleagues and students, as well as by the wider sociological and intellectual communities to which he contributed so much.
Everett Hughes was born in 1897 in southern Ohio, the son of a liberal Methodist Episcopal minister; he often attributed his sociological awareness to the marginality of his position as a preacher’s child. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University, he went to the University of Chicago to study sociology. Perhaps more than any other of Robert E. Park’s students, he combined Park’s curiosity about the detail of city life with broader theoretical interests, both exemplified in Hughes’ dissertation on the Chicago Real Estate Board.
While in graduate school, he met and married Helen MacGill, a Canadian, and also a student of Park’s. Their collaboration, in joint projects such as Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers (1952) and editing the American Journal of Sociology (1944-61) was lifelong. They have two daughters, Helen Hughes Brock (a classical archaeologist) and Elizabeth Hughes Schneewind (a philosopher).
Everett Hughes joined the faculty of McGill University in Montreal in 1927. He was instrumental in organizing a research program on ethnic relations and industrialization in Canada that had profound influence on the development of Canadian sociology. His book, French Canada in Transition (1943), was a landmark in Canadian studies as well as pioneering in the study of industrial development. He maintained strong ties to both French and English-speaking Canadians.
He returned to the University of Chicago in 1938, where he advanced to Full Professor and was Chair from 1952-56. During World War II, he collaborated with W. Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, William Foote Whyte, Burleigh Gardner and others in the study of race relations in industry, and then conducted a series of studies of the Chicago public schools. His seminar on occupations and professions bred a generation of researchers who gave fresh direction to work in that field as well as helping to shape the newly developing field of medical sociology. He collaborated with Blanche Geer, Anselm Strauss and Howard S. Becker to produce Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (1961), and with Geer and Becker on Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life (1969), both of which helped to popularize the notion of student culture.
In 1961, Everett Hughes moved to Brandeis University where he helped design a graduate training program in field work and taught another generation of researchers. When he retired from Brandeis in 1968, he joined the faculty of Boston College. His retirement from Boston College in 1976 ended over fifty years of teaching. A central figure in what has been called the Chicago School, he was one of the great teachers of sociology. He excited students’ curiosity about social life, and urged them to do field work wherever they were. Through his own example and questioning, he helped them to see with a sociological eye. His paper, “Teaching as Fieldwork”, exemplifies his approach and his willingness to learn from students.
He was elected President of the ASA in 1964, received honorary degrees from Sir George Williams University, Boston College, Michigan State University, Queen’s University, McGill University, and Ohio Wesleyan University, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964. In 1981, he received the ASA Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship. These are only a few of the honors he received.
Everett Hughes was most at home in the essay form and many of his famous papers continue to exert a strong influence on sociologists’ thinking, for example, “Institutional Office and the Person”, “Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status”, “Good People and Dirty Work”, and “Mistakes at Work”. His papers were published in a variety of journals and volumes. He drew them together in an almost complete collection, The Sociological Eye (1971). These papers exhibit his conceptual strength and distinctive style of thought: telling a seemingly small story and then extracting from it a profound sociological point; making irreverent comparisons which brought out some crucial but ordinarily unnoticed feature of social organization; seeing both the timeless Simmelian social forms and what was topically important in an event. He was, to use Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, a fox rather than a hedgehog. His simply-phrased observations—–” A quack is someone more loyal to clients than to colleagues”-made the world look different. His questions went to the heart of things: when one of us approached him after a class and asked, with the naivete of a first year graduate student, what he thought about Theory, he asked brusquely, “Theory of what?” For him, theories existed to explain the world; the world wasn’t there to test our theories.
Hughes was, at least superficially, eclectic with respect to both theory and method, yet in both areas he reflected his sociological descent from Simmel and Park. Above all, he preferred field work-seeing it for yourself-and he liked to say that you could never have too much data but you could easily have too little. The field notes he kept throughout his life-whether of a trip to Japan or to the corner garage to have his car fixed-combined his love of ethnographic detail with his bent for strong and provocative generalization. Although Hughes’ work is classic in several subfields of sociology (e.g., work and occupations, medical sociology, race and ethnicity), he never became a specialist. He believed that your work improved if you could make comparisons across a variety of fields, and he encouraged work across disciplines. If he had specialties, they were the courses he taught: institutions, sociology of work, race and ethnic relations, field work. Yet those who took all his courses soon absorbed the consistent perspective that underlay them. The essence of his sociological message is that every institution is work for someone, that every organization brings together people of different cultures, that what we have to study are the patterns of activity that make society, as he said, a complex of “going concerns”.
His way of seeing was both caring and dispassionate. With a detached and routinizing perspective, he probed the taken for granted, including sacred beliefs. But he was also a deeply moral man. Before Hitler came to power, he saw the dangers of German fascism, and he always opposed nationalism and race discrimination.
Everett Hughes leaves us a method, a style of thought, and an example of a mind fully engaged in the exercise of the sociological imagination.
