George Elliott Howard
October 1, 1849 – June 9, 1928
George Elliott Howard, the seventh president (1917) of the American Sociological Association, was an extraordinary midwestern scholar of resolute principle, interdisciplinary imagination, intellectual rigor, and progressive social values (pacifist, suffragist, prohibitionist) who, as the founder of institutional history, not only encouraged institutional sociology as a disciplinary focus, but who also serves today as an admirable model of administrative rectitude, academic conviviality, fair play, dedicated teaching, and public sociology in the best sense.
Originally from New York, Howard arrived—at age 20—in eastern Nebraska in 1868. A white male from the pioneer-farming class, he attended the Nebraska State Normal School in Peru, Nebraska, graduating in 1870. At the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln, Howard earned an AB in 1876. Later the same year, he enrolled in the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, studying history and Roman law until 1878. Returning to the University of Nebraska, he completed his MA in 1879 and was subsequently appointed professor of history.
Howard’s solid work at Nebraska led to an 1891 call to head the history program as a member of Stanford University’s distinguished “first faculty.” Sadly, however, Howard became embroiled in academic turmoil when David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s president, abruptly fired Edward A. Ross (fifth ASA president) in December 1900. Howard, facing the choice of retracting his principled public condemnation of Ross’s firing or being himself fired, felt forced to resign. This infamous free speech case resulted eventually in the founding of the American Association of University Professors.
After Stanford, Ross was immediately hired by the University of Nebraska, while Howard taught one-year stints at Cornell University and the University of Chicago before being recalled to Nebraska in 1904 to head a one-person Department of Institutional History. In 1906, Howard was invited to formally organize a Department of Sociology and Political Science. He accepted the challenge, a project consuming the remainder of his academic career. Intellectually, 1904–1907 comprised a stellar era at Nebraska. Howard (the founder of institutional history) joined with Edward A. Ross (a founder of social psychology), and Roscoe Pound (founder of American sociological jurisprudence and cofounder of the American school of plant ecology) in campus-wide convocations and in small dining groups that met frequently for lively discussion and camaraderie. As department head at Nebraska, Howard hired women faculty such as sociologist Lucile Eaves, a former Stanford colleague; in 1909, he trained and later hired sociologist Hattie Plum Williams. Upon Howard’s retirement in 1923, Williams—with Howard’s support—became the first woman in the world to receive a regular appointment as chair of a full-fledged coeducational, doctoral-degree-granting department of sociology.
Howard’s undergraduate and graduate teaching was, by all accounts, stimulating and demanding. He required all students to meet the same high standards, regardless of creed, ethnicity, gender, or social class. As preparation for his lectures and seminars, Howard prepared unusually lengthy, bibliographically detailed guides for several courses, including General Sociology (1907), Social Psychology (1910), and The Family and Marriage (1914). –
Howard’s most significant work is his 1904 three-volume A History of Matrimonial Institutions, of which William I. Thomas (seventeenth ASA president) remarked: “This work is veritably a magnum opus. No work of similar scope has heretofore been attempted, and Dr. Howard has carried out his plan with great ability and conscientiousness…. It would be difficult to name a recent work which is of so great interest at once to the historian, to the sociologist, and to the man of law as this one.” It was the only full-length work by an ASA president personally reviewed by Émile Durkheim in L’Année sociologique. Howard was an internationally respected authority on marriage, family, and divorce, and his work remains foundational to the sociology of marriage and the family.
Howard also deserves recognition for his foundational analysis of what has become the sociology of sport. In “The Social Psychology of the Spectator” (1912), Howard, himself once an accomplished campus athlete, asserted that intercollegiate athletics,
As now conducted. . .are a menace to American higher education; and it seems probable that the only efficient remedy is their entire abandonment…Because of their enormous prestige, the saner forms of recreational play are crowded out and the intellectual activities and achievements are overshadowed. The football champion is a hero although sometimes his superior qualities can be appraised only by the pound. The contests become battles between opposing institutions; and in popular sentiment the relative rank of such institutions is gauged by victory or defeat (1912:45).
Now, more than a century later, Howard’s analysis of collegiate sports is ever more relevant.
Howard, as ASA president, organized the 1917 meeting on the topic of “Social Control.” His presidential address was titled “Ideals as a Factor in the Future Control of International Society.” As the United States was in the midst of fighting World War I, no topic was more pressing. Karl Kelsy spoke on “War as a Crisis in Social Control,” Franklin H. Giddings on “Social Control in a Democracy,” and Charles Horton Cooley on “Social Control in International Relations.” Others spoke on social control in child welfare, immigration, labor and wealth. Notably, Howard included women among the program presenters and discussants, including Sophonisba Breckinridge, Lucile Eaves, Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott, and Hattie Plum Williams.
Selected Works by George E. Howard
1904. A History of Matrimonial Institutions: Chiefly in England and the United States with an Introductory Analysis of the Literature and Theories of Primitive Marriage and the Family. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1909. “Is the Freer Granting of Divorce an Evil?” American Journal of Sociology 14 (6): 766-796.
1912. “Social Psychology of the Spectator.” American Journal of Sociology 18 (1): 33-50.
1914. “Changed Ideals and Status of the Family and the Public Activities of Women.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November): 27-37.
1917. “Social Cost of Southern Race Prejudice.” American Journal of Sociology 22 (5): 577-593.
1928/1988. “Sociology in the University of Nebraska, 1898–1927.” Edited by Michael R. Hill. Mid-American Review of Sociology 13 (2): 3-19.
Works about George E. Howard
Durkheim, Émile. 1906/2000. “A French Perspective on George Elliott Howard’s History of Matrimonial Institutions.” Translated by D. Brian Mann. Sociological Origins 2 (2): 81-86.
Hill, Michael R. 2000. “The Intellectual Context of Émile Durkheim’s Review of George Elliott Howard’s American Institutional Perspective on Marriage and Divorce.” Sociological Origins 2 (2): 75-80.
Thomas, William I. 1904. Review of George Elliott Howard’s History of Matrimonial Institutions. American Journal of Sociology 10 (1): 129-31.
Williams, Hattie Plum. 1928-29. “The Social Philosophy of George Elliott Howard.” Sociology and Social Research 13: 229-33.
Obituary
Written by Arthur James Todd, published in the American Journal of Sociology, 1929.
American sociology has been extremely fortunate from the beginning in attracting to its ranks a group of men whose scholarship was first rate and whose integrity of character was beyond cavil. If we of this second generation can hold up our heads with a certain corporate self-respect, and continue to labor with some sense of growth and achievement, it is because those men laid deep and well the foundations upon which we build.
George Elliott Howard was one of those great foundation stones of American social science, of the same large caliber as Sumner, Ward, Patten, and Small. Although he founded no new school, contributed no new system of sociology, did no heavenstorming stunts to gain the ears of men, nevertheless his work was so sound that it lends an unobtrusive dignity to the whole structure of social science, including sociology.
The annals of his life are easily told. They are as simple and modest as he was himself. Born at Saratoga, New York, in 1849, he emigrated with his brothers to Nebraska via the prairie schooner route in 1868; was a member of the first graduating class at the Peru State Normal School; entered the University of Nebraska in 1872, just a year after its opening, worked his way as private secretary to the state superintendent of education, and was graduated in 1876. One of the first fruits of pioneer Western higher education, he continued his pioneering by joining that vanguard of American students at European universities, like Sumner, Ely, Patten, and Small. These young men were not only gaining the larger knowledge which would fit them for university teaching, but were also being touched by the fire of research whose methods and spirit would confer a new status upon the social sciences in America.
Howard’s two years, chiefly in Munich and Paris, gave him a solid grasp on modem languages and profound knowledge, particularly in the fields of history, political science, and Roman law. More valuable than any of these special knowledges was the sense of perspective and a more or less organic concept of social history. I say social history because Howard inherited, through his European exposure, the tradition of institutional history, at that time in its very heyday, as against mere anecdotal chronicles, dynastic or military annals.
On his return to America in 1879 Howard became the first professor of history in the University of Nebraska. It was not long before his teaching gripped the students. And his ideals of research fired them also, with the result that he was early able to plant a notable milepost in the history of American social science through organizing the first graduate seminar in the University of Nebraska. Equally significant was his service in bringing the Nebraska State Historical Society into being. Western universities in the eighties were not notable for their libraries or laboratory equipment for research. Nevertheless Howard transcended the meager facilities which Lincoln offered in those days and succeeded in producing a solid piece of scholarship in the shape of his Introduction to the Local Constitutional History of the United States, published in 1889 by Johns Hopkins University. The proof of its author’s sound work lies in the fact that this book still remains a standard in its field and has not needed re-working.
The publication of this work and his Development of the King’s Peace in 1891 mark the climax of the first period of Howard the scholar and teacher. For in 1891 he was carried off to the Pacific coast by President Jordan as one of the stars in the new Stanford University constellation. There for the next ten years he did notable work, building up a strong history department and emphasizing the elements of methodology ana creative research. Under his leadership students like Hutton Webster, Lucile Eaves, and Susan Kingsbury were propelled along their scholarly careers. And his kindly wisdom and scholar’s ideals reinforced the whole social science group. For his students testify, not only to his learning and to his power of communicating enthusiasm for learning, but also to the inspiration for real social service which he radiated. As Professor Hutton Webster recalls this period, Howard “was always anxious to show how knowledge of the past might be brought to-bear on the problems of the present and even of the future, how it might help us to understand the life of today and fit us for the life of tomorrow.” Howard, apparently, never became a victim of the enervating and paralyzing belief that learning is an end in itself. Oscar Wilde’s doctrine of art for art’s sake was flourishing just at this time. So far as I am aware, Howard did not overtly attack that sterile formula. Nevertheless he never allowed it to fasten itself upon his own thinking, teaching, or research. Perhaps this is one of the chief reasons why, although wearing the official label of historian, he was always essentially the sociologist.
This was a fruitful decade at Stanford. For it not only laid the foundations of a great center of learning, but in a very real sense revivified the University of California and virtually kicked it along its career of marvellous growth during the next twenty-five years. Research facilities grew; graduate students were attracted; publications multiplied; prestige mounted. Every prospect pleased. Suddenly came the explosion, known in academic history as the “Ross Case.” Howard saw the issue as a threat against academic freedom. Nothing else in his whole career reveals so clearly his courage, his sense of social values, his integrity, and his exalted concept of the scholar’s function. For he promptly sacrificed-his academic career, resigned his professorship as a public protest on a matter of principle, and really led what has become known as the first “faculty walk-out” in American history. The American professorate took on a new dignity and a new self-respect as the result of this noble protest. But it was a costly sacrifice. Remember that Howard was over fifty at the time, had struck deep roots in California, enjoyed the confidence of colleagues and students, and from the human standpoint was entitled to look forward to an increasing easement from financial concern. But none of these considerations held him back.
Nor did he apparently indulge in vain regrets, in spite of the fact that he was without a permanent university connection for five years. I recall the efforts of former students and colleagues to create a research center for him and to secure funds to finance it. But the time was not yet ripe for such plans. The age of foundations and national research organizations had not yet opened. Nevertheless with calmness and serenity both Howard and his. Devoted wife lived actively, for the most part in the preparation of his greatest and best-known work, A History of Matrimonial Institutions. Approximately twenty years of his own most intensive research, plus help from graduate students, colleagues, and his wife, a considerable investment of money, and a large special library went into those three packed volumes of somewhat near two thousand pages issued under imprint of the University of Chicago in 1904. This work not only gave Howard personally an international reputation, but served to raise the whole level of American scholarship. Its proof of broad and intensive reading, but without parade, its caution, reserve, and judicious temper, its frankness and candor without truculence, its illuminating perspectives, its essential liberalism, and its focusing of historical experience upon vital present-day problems, all these meant more and mean more now than a mere new high record of scholarly performance-knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Too frequently such a magnum opus becomes a rather stark and futile monument to years of wasted effort, measurable only by cubic content of library space occupied by it. Nearly three decades of academic social scientists, legislators, and private citizens interested in a juster, more rational system of domestic relations are indebted to Howard’s work. The whole family of social sciences was enriched by it. Its practical effects leaped the Atlantic, for he was invited as an expert on the history of domestic relations to testify before a British parliamentary commission.
This high-water mark of Howard’s scholarly production did not by any means end his services to sociology. During the period from 1901 to 1904 he divided his time between writing anti parttime teaching, acting as a professorial lecturer at Cornell and Chicago. In 1904 he returned to his alma mater as professor of institutional history. In 1906 he became head of its newly organized department of political science and sociology. He threw himself into his new work with all the energy of a master-builder. For by this time his center of interest had shifted from history, and even social history, to out-and-out sociology in both its theoretical and practical aspects. Increasing contacts with foreign as well as American sociologists came to him through travel and summer school teaching as well as by his books. His various sociological course syllabi and his private library of over three thousand volumes of history and social science reveal how carefully he cultivated his field. The inevitable result was a stream of students, many of them children of those whom he had stirred back in the eighties.
His last distinctly historical writing on a large scale was the volume on Preliminaries of the American Revolution in A. B. Hart’s series. But he also contributed articles on modem English history and biography to the New International Encyclopedia. His briefer sociological writings include his paper on “Social Control and the Function of the Family” at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science in 1904; articles on marriage and divorce for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Bliss’s Encyclopedia of Social Reform, and the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge; “The Social Psychology of the Spectator,” “The Social Control of Domestic Relations,” “The Social Cost of Southern Race Prejudice,” and “Alcohol and Crime” in the American Journal of Sociology; “Changed Ideals and Status of Family and Public Activities of Women” in the Annals of the American Academy. Certain popular magazines catering to a domestic clientele secured from him concise articles on the problem of divorce. His interest in sociological curriculum building appeared in the article “What Courses in Sociology Should Be Included in College Departments of Household Science?” in the Journal of Home Economics. I am not pretending here to give a complete bibliography of Howard’s writings, but only to illustrate the breadth and genuineness of his sociological interest.
During these years also he found time to take part in the work of the American Sociological Society. It is to the everlasting credit of the Society that we had the wit to do overt honor to this shy, modest, courtly scholar by electing him president in 1917. He was also made an honorary vice-president of the Institut International de Sociologie of Paris. For the last ten years of his active academic life he gave only part time to university teaching, concentrating on his seminar. In 1924 he was retired and gave up all teaching. Impaired eyesight had long hindered his research and finally terminated scholarly output. But he bore this trial cheerfully. Just before Christmas last year I was fortunate enough to be able to make a little pilgrimage to his modest home on the outskirts of Lincoln. Not the slightest hint of handicap or deprivation came from him or his devoted wife. He had done his work and done it well; that was enough. The essential calm and modesty which had marked him even in the stormiest academic days had now become so touched with age that it evoked spontaneous reverence. His friends, ever solicitous about his fragile health, were not surprised at the news of his passing on June 9 in Lincoln after a winter in Florida.
What does Howard stand for to the sociologist? Of his powers in creative research there can be no question; and two generations of students testify to his mastery in the classroom. As one of them
recently wrote me:
Professor Howard’s scholarship commands respect in all centers of learning; but those who knew him in life will remember him chiefly as a great teacher. Thousands of pupils have profited by his earnestness and fine integrity. He never spared himself in efforts to assist and inspire his pupils. When he found someone willing to do genuinely scholarly work, he gave generously, if not extravagantly, of his teaching services.
For example, when I attended Stanford University he conducted a research seminar of which I was the sole member. He happened to have no other pupils at that time of my maturity and scholarship. He gave me a special course on the family, a subject in which be was doing research at the time. We met at intervals for reports and discussions of assigned readings. Other graduate students interested in special research projects have received similar personal supervision.
During my years of association with him as a student and fellow-teacher I found him critical and discriminating but extremely generous in appreciation of all sincere, scholarly work. His women pupils were grateful for the justice and complete lack of sex bias with which they were treated. He was an enthusiastic supporter of all efforts to promote equality between the sexes in opportunities and recognition. His women associates were inspired by his faith in their capacity to do scholarly work, or to assist in dealing with important issues of our social or political life. Men and women who were privileged to catch glimpses of bis vision of a social order permeated with justice, intelligence, and human sympathy will continue in many communities the fine influence of the long life of this great teacher.
But in our days both these qualities of scholarship and teaching ability are, by lip service at least, taken for granted in the academic sociologist. Howard’s abiding contribution therefore was his own life, outlook, and spirit. He achieved in his own experience the unity and solidarity of social science. He was a master of learning, and not its victim. Vast as was his range of reading and his command of historic facts, he could always communicate sound perspective to them; hence one always senses the presence of an orderly mind, and not a mere person with an overwhelming bibliography. In him was no arrogance of superior knowledge, but the humility of the true scholar who aims to share his stores for the world’s betterment. This generosity led him to go out of his way, as Charles Richmond Henderson was wont to do, to encourage younger scholars and to help them on their way. His courage led him to stand up without bombast for principle, as in the Stanford episode, or for truth as against mere tradition in laying bare the ineptitude of the church in domestic relations. He knew how to criticize without dropping into noisy, vulgar controversy. His unfailing dignity and good taste marked the true gentleman. He was a genuine liberal, lent encouragement to social welfare measures, spoke out boldly for the enfranchisement of women, and demonstrated that social theory need not atrophy one’s humanity or sense of concrete social reality. May his integrity, his courage, and his sober good sense continue to invest all our research projects, our teaching, our community work in the name of sociological science.
Todd, Arthur James. 1929. George Elliott Howard, 1849-1928. The American Journal of Sociology. 34(4):693-699
