Howard Paul Becker
December 9, 1899 – June 8, 1960
Howard Paul Becker was born December 9, 1899 in New York City, the son of John Paul Becker and Letitia Dickson. For several years while Becker’s father traveled for work, he and his mother lived in Ontario, Canada. Later he and his mother joined his father in Nevada for a few years; after a few years there, the family moved to Indiana where Becker and his father both worked for the Dort Motor Company.
Due to family circumstances and the many moves the family made, Becker was not able to complete his high school education. Despite the lack of formal high school training, he nonetheless demonstrated strong aptitude and was able, at age 23, to enter Northwestern University based on his performance on a special entrance examination. In 1925, he earned his A.B. degree from Northwestern, followed the next year by an M.A., also from Northwestern.
Becker spent some time traveling through Europe during his time at Northwestern and in the year after securing his M.A. In 1927, he entered the University of Chicago Department of Sociology Ph.D. program where he worked under the guidance of Robert Park.
In 1960, Howard Becker served as the 50th President of the American Sociological Association. Unfortunately, Becker died of a stroke on June 8, 1960 in Madison, Wisconsin, before the end of his term as President. His Presidential address, which had been prepared ahead of time, was read by his son, Christopher Bennett Becker, at the ASA Annual Meeting in August, 1960. The address, entitled “Normative Reactions to Normlessness”, was published in December 1960 issue of American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 25 No 6, Dec 1960, pages 803-810).
Becker’s professional papers are housed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Upon his death in 1960, obituaries were published in American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 25, No 5, Oct 1960, pages 743-744) as well as the American Journal of Sociology (AJS Vol 66, No 3, Nov 1960, pages 289-290).
Obituary
Written by Hans H. Gerth, published in the American Sociological Review in 1960, 25(5), 743-744.
Howard Becker, President of our Association, died prematurely and unexpectedly of cerebral thrombosis on June 8. He was born December 9, 1899, in New York City, left school at the age of 14, and worked as a laborer in the West. He became an industrial engineer for the Dort Motor Company and the International Harvester Company. The equipment of his basement workshop and his craftsmanship at hobbies bespeak of skills acquired early in life.
In 1922 he turned to academic pursuits, entering Northwestern University after a special examination. In 1925 he was awarded the A.B., the following year, the M.A. During the summer of 1923 he visited Germany as a member of a student mission. An unpublished and engaging diary bespeaks of the sensitivity and astuteness of the “innocent abroad” in a defeated country, ridden by inflation, insurrections, Ruhr occupation, and the rest. Howard Becker observed the fumbling endeavors of wild-eyed student and youth groups groping toward the democratic way of life. In 1926 he returned to Germany where he studied at Cologne under Leopold von Wiese, Paul Honigsheim, and Max Scheler. With von Wiese’s research team, he learned to know a Hunsriick village, which struck him on the eve of the Nazi landslide and the big depression as a “Sargasso Iceberg.” Upon his return to this country he continued his studies at the University of Chicago, receiving the Ph.D. in 1930, with a thesis on ancient Athens and Sparta. Postdoctoral study led him to Greece and Sicily, France and Belgium, Germany and England. The legacy of ancient Greece became a lifelong intellectual commitment for him.
Howard Becker began his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1928, and went to Smith College as an Associate Professor in 1931. In 1937, upon the retirement of E. A. Ross, he was called to Wisconsin as Professor, where for almost a quarter of a century he lent distinction to the Department of Sociology. In 1934-1935 he served as a Lecturer at Harvard University; during summers he taught at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and the Universities of Marburg and Cologne, Germany; and in 1951 he was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Birmingham. He was an eminent teacher and speaker before large classes, small seminars, radio and television audiences, and civic groups, both here and abroad.
For several years Professor Becker served as book review editor of the American Sociological Review, as editor in sociology for Henry Holt, and as Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Wisconsin. Chief of Higher Education of the American Military Government in Hesse in 1947-1948, he declined a similar post for the entire American zone in Germany because he preferred to resume his work as scholar and teacher at Wisconsin. During World War II, he was the efficient organizer of 25 Wisconsin faculty members of diverse departments teaching ASTP courses to future occupation personnel. He then joined the O.S.S.; among the “cloak and dagger boys” he managed a secret broadcasting station engaged in “Operation Capricorn” in 1945. This unit was credited with outmaneuvering the Nazi Elite Guard, so that Munich was conquered without being turned into rubble.
In 1945, Professor Becker interviewed Marianne Weber, the widow of Max Weber: her account appears in Lebenserinnerungen (Bremen, 1948, pp. 483 ff.); Professor Becker’s own report is to be found in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (July 1951, pp. 401-405). This incident is an illustration of Becker’s concern with the “humanistic coefficient” and his dedication to the kind of field work that was so brilliantly developed by the “Chicago School” during the 1920s. In the same vein, while in Hesse, he began his intensive study of two nearby villages of peasants, another “Sargasso Iceberg.” Frances Bennett Becker, his wife and frequent collaborator since 1927, assisted him in his field work among old- world peasants in invaluable ways. This concern with “simple folk,” folklore, the proverbial wisdom of olden days, with folk dances and music, was one of the aspects of Howard Becker’s many-faceted and receptive mind. But this concern expressed nothing “romantic,” irrational, or “conservative.” His book, German Youth: Bond or Free (1946) makes this obvious: Scottish Highlanders and Lowlanders and Scots in the Hebrides were to him at least as interesting as traditionalistic pockets of German rural society.
This panoramic concern with “folk” of all sorts and conditions was paralleled by an equally wide preoccupation with “man’s ideas about life with his fellows,” to use the subtitle of the monumental work Social Thought from Lore to Science (1938, 1952). This work was co-authored by Harry Elmer Barnes; Emile Benoit-Smullyan and others assisted. Its dedication “to all men and women of good will the round world over” on the eve of the last war bespeaks of Howard Becker’s humanistic convictions. Lest he be misunderstood as a sentimentalist, we should recall that in a paper on “Vitalizing Sociological Theory” (American Sociological Review, August 1954, p. 379) he chose for his “watchword”: “. . . he that is not against us is for us.”
In May 1959, as President-elect of the American Sociological Association, Professor Becker attended the meetings of the German Sociological Society and heard Leopold von Wiese’s address in honor of Georg Simmel. Becker’s first major publication had been an augmented and adapted transposition of von Wiese’s Systematic Sociology (1932). The stronger the impact of the temporal nature of the human condition between the Great Depression and the height of victory and its aftermath, the more Becker became intrigued by the historicity of man and his works, and by the tensions between supra-historically conceived “forms” and historically experienced “content.” He devoted an increasing part of his prolific writings to the problem of typology and its constructs, the problems of prediction, and the logically possible and the empirically probable. He subtilized the overarching polarities of “sacred” and “secular” societies by numerous subtypes and processes in either direction-in Through Values to Social Interpretation and its revised edition as Soziologie als Wissenschaft vom sozialen Handeln (Wurzburg, 1959) and other works.
Professor Becker’s last years as President- elect and President of the Association kept him extremely busy; yet he was extraordinarily productive to the very end. He lectured at numerous American universities, read several papers at German and Austrian universities, gave an address at the 50th meeting of the German Sociological Society and spoke on American sociology at Oxford University. He attended the Fourth World Congress of Sociology at Stresa, supervised M.A. and Ph.D. theses, served on a number of committees, and published or sent to press an impressive list of writings, including his annual essay on “Sociology” for the 1959 Britannica Book of the Year. In his essays and books in theory, sociology of knowledge, the family, youth, and religion Howard Becker made an important contribution to sociology and sociologists here and abroad. He was a force.
