F. (Francis) Stuart Chapin
February 3, 1888 — July 7, 1974
Sociologist, university administrator, and academic entrepreneur, F. Stuart Chapin played a key role in creation of a quantitative, statistical sociology in the United States in the years between World War I and World War II (1920-40). Moving from an early interest in social evolutionism to statistics , he devised “living room scales” to measure social class by items in the home; undertook studies of civic participation as a key to social adjustment; and proposed methods for the comparative study of social situations using experiment and control groups. A theorist as well as quantifier, he proposed a cyclical view of social change, and anticipated later work on latent and manifest functions and on bureaucratic personality. Chapin also helped professionalize American sociology, being a prime mover in the creation of the Social Science Research Council and an active participant in the American Sociological Society (later Association).
F. Stuart Chapin served as the 25th President of the American Sociological Society (later renamed Association). His Presidential Address “Social Theory and Social Action” was delivered on December 30, 1935 at the organization’s annual meeting in New York City.
Obituary
Written by Don Martindale, published in Footnotes, October 1974.
F. Stuart Chapin was born in Brooklyn on February 3, 1888 to a family of attorneys, clergymen and businessmen; he died in Asheville, North Carolina on July 7, 1974. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Chapin was steeped in the household’s puritan ethos, tempered by a love of nature, which he shared with his father, and a love of poetry and painting, which he shared with his mother. He was educated in his grandfather’s academy, the Chapin Collegiate School, the Rochester, New York high schools and the University of Rochester, where he enrolled in a pre-engineering program. Upon receipt of a scholarship, Chapin transferred to Columbia, where he earned a BS in science {1909) and continued on to earn the MA (1910) and PhD (1911) in sociology. He brought to his studies and to ‘his later professional life the ethos of a highly developed Protestant work ethic, placing them in service of secular education, professionalism and research science. The results were a remarkably productive career.
As teacher and lecturer: Chapin taught mathematics part time in the New York City schools to help finance his undergraduate education at Columbia (1910); he taught economics at Wellesley College (1910-1911) to finance his graduate education; he accepted an instructorship in sociology at Smith College in 1912 and rapidly rose to full professor by 1922; he was professor of sociology at Minnesota from 1922 to 1953; along the way he accepted numerous summer appointments at various colleges and universities; in retirement he gave a series of lectures on the scientific method at Cologne, Geneva and Utrech and the R.I.A.S. lectures at the University of the Air (Berlin) of The Voice of America in 1957.
As editor: Chapin opened a long and varied editorial career as editor-in-chief of The Campus at the University of Rochester in 1908; he became contributing editor to Sociology and Social Research (1923-1961); as editor of Harper’s Social Science Series he developed one of the world’s most distinguished social science series; he was pioneer editor-in-chief of the Social Science Abstracts (1928-1932) until its initial career was interrupted by the great depression; he was advisory editor of the American Journal of Sociology (1934-1954); he served as co-editor of the American Sociological Review (1944-1946).
As professional: Throughout his life Chapin worked to strengthen professional sociology in America and the world. He served as member of the Executive Committee of the American Sociological Society (1915-1920); he was a member of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies (1919-1920); he was a member of the board of the nascent Social Science Research Council (1923-1928); he was President of the American Sociological Society (1935), President of the Sociological Research Association (1936) and Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1942); he was consultant to UNESCO (1951), President of Consumer Behavior Incorporated (1952) chairman of the Seminar on Experimental Method at the World Congress of Sociology (1961) and consultant on Housing and Mental Health for the World Health Organization (1961).
As public servant: From time to time Chapin undertook public service activities of one sort or other. He was secretary, later chairman, of the Hampshire County (Mass.) Chapter of the American Red Cross (1917-1921); he was chairman of the Twin City Chapter of the American Association of Social Workers (1932); he served as consultant to- Community Research Associations of New York (1954-1964); he was appointed to the governor’s Commission on Higher Education in North Carolina (1962).
As administrator: Chapin became director of the newly founded Smith School of Social Work in 1918, serving until 1922; he served as Director of the Minnesota School of Social Work from 1922-1949; he was chairman of the Minnesota Department of Sociology from 1922 to 1951.
As author: Chapin wrote ten books and one hundred seventy articles.
But the statistics on a man, however formidable, give no very exact indication of the quality of his mind and character. When as assistant professor at Minnesota, shortly after Chapin had hired me, I was asked by the graduate students who were close to my own age at the time, what I thought of him I summed up my first impressions that “he was moved by a powerful drive toward order and rationality that was manifest in a formality in his personal relations and the demand for empirical, particularly statistical, evidence in his scientific concerns.” “That sounds right,” the graduate students told me insouciantly, “when Chapin goes to bed at night he files himself under ‘C’.” Chapin was not attractive to the type of student who seeks charismatic leadership from his teachers. In fact, when the waves churned by the charisma of others broke over the department and receded, Chapin was always still there, solid, immutable, rock-like. But it had not always been so.
Chapin’s formative years (1900 – 1912) coincided with a turning point in American life and thought. At the turn of the century the frontier had closed while it simultaneously became evident that the centralizing force of American capitalism had shattered the old domestic economy, shifting the tides of life from the small town to the city. It was the time of the muckrakers and of a great surge of American liberalism as intellectuals in a variety of disciplines reviewed the documents and experiences of the founding fathers and laid down the positions which were to dominate so much of 20th Century American thought: the new history, sociological jurisprudence; instrumentalism; pragmatism and critical realism. At Columbia Chapin studied with two social scientists who were deeply immersed in the new intellectual ferment: Franklin Giddings in Sociology and Franz Boas in Anthropology. From Boas’ seminars Chapin took over the drive for empirical, particularly statistical, evidence; from Giddings he took over that form of elementaristic social theory which Giddings at one point described as Pluralistic Behaviorism.
Chapin’s early writings were imaginative and global in scope. From the beginning he undertook to develop and bring into synthesis the various aspects of the Pluralistic Behavioral point of view. To 1920 his writings were dominated by the notions of progress and biological evolution. In the 1920s he addressed himself to problems in the theory of change and proposed to take over the culture lag theory of change resetting the concept of the linear development of material culture in a framework of the cyclical change of nonmaterial culture. Also in the 1920s Chapin showed increasing concern with the synthesis of methods and the development of scaling procedures for social measurement. In the 1930s he turned attention to the place of the theory of institutions and the possibilities giving it more adequate empirical grounding; in the 1940s and 1950s he undertook to give decisive integration of procedures for the conduct of experimental research under field conditions. In the course of these labors Chapin quietly introduced ideas (such as the conflict in institutions between professional and organizational role requirements and the contrast between latent and manifest functions) which were to elicit major interest by later scholars.
Comparable to the increasing demand for rigorous proof which characterizes Chapin’s writing and research, was an increasing inclination toward formality in his personal relations. From his original relaxed informality and permissiveness (reported by all persons who remembered him from the 1920s), Chapin increasingly moved toward a ceremoniously formal style of administrative control which many persons viewed as “cold,” “unfeeling” and even “tyrannical.” In his long years as an administrator Chapin had come to look with increasing skepticism both on the endless adolescent bickering that tends to characterize academic types and charisma which tends to wipe away all common sense limitations on experience. Empiricism of scientific method, thus, and formalism of administrative procedure moved to the forefront of these respective spheres of Chapin’s behavior. Both were instruments of rational control.
These traits permitted Chapin to turn out, during his tenure at Minnesota, a remarkable number of outstanding scholars including: George A. Lundberg, Carle Zimmerman, Robert Murchie, Conrad Taeuber, Irene Barnes Taeuber, Charles A. Anderson, T. Lynn Smith, Paul Landis, Raymond Sletto, William Sewell, Louis Guttman, Theodore Caplow, Llewellyn Gross, Arthur Johnson and David Moberg. Under Chapin’s guidance the Minnesota Department of Sociology was rated by a variety of scholarly evaluations as 4th-never less than 5th-in the United States.
However these traits-the drive toward empiricism of method and formalism of personal relations-were also correlated with an increasing sense of isolation and alienation. The abandonment of the adventurous speculation of his younger days for the controlled experimental study and the avoidance of the hurly burly of interpersonal relations for ceremonious formality, left him, to some degree, unfulfilled, isolated and misunderstood. He turned with new intensity to poetry and painting. He was an avid reader of detective stories. He went fishing almost as a religious ritual. He brought his drive toward empiricism and formalism to his hobbies. He indexed and cross referenced every detective story he ever read. In his tackle box he carried a battered set of statistical tables and when he caught a bass at one of his favorite spots he carefully set down the lure, time of day, temperature, barometric pressure and phase of the moon. He wet his hand and removed the hook gently to do minimum damage to the fish. He held it a moment spellbound by its jewel-like beauty before slipping it into the water to dart away.
Chapin’s achievements have now been entered into the statistical tables and, indeed, few men have done so much to transform our discipline into a science and a profession. But perhaps for a brief moment fate held him in its hand to gaze one last time upon his qualities-the drive toward rationality in an irrational world, the integrity, the naive delight in the beauty of wild things, the loneliness and reaching out across the unbridgeable barriers of empiricism and formality-before unhooking him gently from the snares of the world to slip away into the unfathomed depths.
