Howard W. Odum

Howard W. Odum

May 24, 1884 – November 8, 1954

Howard W. Odum served as President of the American Sociological Society in 1930. His Presidential Address, “Folk and Regional Conflict as a Field of Sociological Study,” was delivered at the organization’s annual meeting in Cleveland, Ohio in December 1930.

Upon his death, Howard Odum’s papers were donated to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for preservation. A detailed finding aid of the Odum papers is available online. The UNC Archives provides the following biographical summary of Dr. Odum’s life and work:

Howard Washington Odum was born May 24, 1884, on a small farm near Bethlehem, Georgia, the son of William Pleasants and Mary Ann Odum. In 1900, Odum began his studies at Emory College, and graduated four years later. Odum then moved to Mississippi, where he taught school and attended the University of Mississippi at Oxford. He also earned a master’s degree in the classics at Mississippi.

After Odum received a Ph.D. degree in psychology from Clark University, he entered Columbia University. Under the direction of Franklin Henry Giddings, Odum completed the requirements for his second doctoral degree, this one in sociology. In 1910, his dissertation, “Social and Mental Traits of the Negro,” was published in part by Columbia. Odum then worked at the Philadelphia Bureau of Municipal Research as a research expert, and later as a professor at the University of Georgia. He returned to Emory in 1919 as the dean of liberal arts.

In 1920, Odum arrived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to direct the School of Public Welfare and Department of Sociology. A few years after his arrival, Odum established the Institute for Research in Social Science, and founded the journal, Social Forces. While at the University of North Carolina, he began to demonstrate the variety of talents and great energy that his peers found remarkable. Odum toiled constantly to improve race relations, the quality of education, and living conditions in the South.

During the 1920s and through the Great Depression, Odum authored three novels, served as Assistant Director of Research for President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, and chaired the North Carolina Emergency Relief Administration. In addition, Odum was president of the American Sociological Society, chief of the Social Science Division of A Century of Progress at the Chicago World’s Fair, and head of the North Carolina Commission for Interracial Cooperation.

In 1944, Odum was one of the five founding members of the Southern Regional Council. He also became president of the North Carolina Jersey Cattlemen’s Association during World War II. Along with Odum’s skill as organizer and social reformer, he was a prolific writer. From 1909 until his death in 1954, he wrote more than twenty books and 200 articles reflecting his concern for race relations, education, the social sciences, and regionalism.

Odum received at least three honorary degrees; the College of the Ozarks, Harvard University, and his alma mater in Georgia bestowed honors on him. He also received the O. Max Gardner Award from the University of North Carolina.

In 1909, Odum met Anna Louise Kranz. They were married the following year and had three children: Mary Frances, Howard Thomas, and Eugene Pleasants. Odum died 8 November 1954, shortly after his retirement.

Upon his death in 1954, an obituary was published in the American Sociological Review (see ASR 20:237). An extensive article on Dr. Odum’s life and work was published in Social Forces (33:203-217).

Obituary 

Written by William Ogburn, published in the American Sociological Review, 20:237
The sociological career of Howard W. Odum came to an end with his death the 12th of November, 1954, after an illness incapacitating him for only two months. In June he had officially retired from teaching at 70 years of age, after nearly half a century of university teaching. He had just received a three-year Guggenheim grant to continue studies of regional character and folk culture in the South. At the time of his death he had completed one half of the Mid-Century South, and his volume on the American Negro was well on the way. He was working on two other projects, Technicways of Modern Man and Ecology and Regionalism.

As a sociologist he was dedicated to the development of sociology by scientific methods; his books were generally loaded with facts either quantitative or verbally descriptive. He was appreciative of theory and conducted yearly a seminar in general sociology. In his scientific work he was careful in trying not to put in writing biased opinions, well-illustrated in his exceptional (in this regard) book on American Sociology. At the same time there was a poetic urge in him and he had a sensitive feeling for literature, as shown by his trilogy, Rainbow Round My Shoulder, Wings on my Feet, and Cold Blue Moon. His varied personality is further shown by a life-long drive to improve social conditions. He was one of the few able to be both scientific and busy in social action.

His success in social action is recognized, after his death, in an editorial in the Washington Post, which begins with these sentences: “Howard W. Odum was the Eli Whitney of the Modern South. He inspired a revolution. Certainly there was no one-unless it was Franklin Roosevelt-whose influence was greater than Odum’s on the development of the region below the Potomac.” The intensity of his motivation suggests that of a social worker or an internationalist. He was the founder, president or administrative officer in about a dozen national, regional or state commissions or councils dealing with interracial cooperation, relief, public welfare, civil works, planning and regional pro­grams.

His influence through his writings was great. His books listed in Who’s Who number twenty-two and he wrote about 200 articles. This prodigious productivity was foreshadowed by his acquisition of two Ph.D. degrees in 1909 and 1910; but it hardly predicted his success as a breeder of bulls, of possible symbolic value, though, to him. The American Jersey Cattle Club gave him their Master Breeders Award in 1948. The feed bill for his Jerseys alone was greater than his salary.

Of his contributions to sociology, the most well-known are his researches in regionalism, of which Southern Regions had a particularly wide influence, and his studies in folk sociology, begun early, where he kept close to the objective and did not try to impress others with the value-systems of small communities. Uncompleted were his researches on “technicways” of modern industrialism.

The Department of Sociology which he founded in 1920 at the University of North Carolina became quickly distinguished. There he emphasized community research, race relations, statistics, regionalism, population, rural studies, and adult education. He added to his staff rather ingeniously by the use of parts of some 650,000 dollars he is said to have raised, later to be carried permanently by regular university funds. Shortly after coming to North Carolina he created and was director of the School of Public Welfare, and of the Institute for Research in Social Science. During his directorship of the latter, the Institute published 87 books and 322 articles. Such accomplishment aided his fund raising. He delivered. About the same time he started the Journal of Social Forces, of which he was for a time the editor. Busy years these! The Depart­ment of City and Regional Planning at the Uni­versity, formed in 1946, resulted from his efforts.

Of connections with scientific organizations, Odum was assistant director of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (which he took first steps in initiating) , president of the American Sociological Society, chief of the Social Science Division of the Century of Progress Exposition, and president of the Southern Regional Council. 

Among his honors, prominent were the Bernays Award in Race Relations and the Gardner Award for contributions to human welfare.

It is interesting to inquire what were the char­acteristics and habits that were responsible for these many achievements. Often he worked at all hours of the night, slept little and irregularly. For a time at the University he had three offices with the writing of a book or a research project in progress in each. Notable among his personal traits were boldness, initiative, leadership, kindness and loyalty. The power he possessed was built upon cooperation and in no sense Machiavellian; and in the attain­ment of his naturally strong ambition, he never “used” friends nor trampled upon the equities of others.