James Quayle Dealey
August 13, 1861 – January 22, 1937
James Dealey was born in Manchester, England, the son of George and Mary Ann Nellins Dealey. When Dealey was nine, he moved with his parents along with four brothers and four sisters to Galveston, Texas. At seventeen, Dealey joined two older brothers working at the Galveston Weekly News where he performed a variety of tasks, ranging from mail clerk to bookkeeper, and where he developed a lifelong interest in journalism. In his early twenties, Dealey enrolled in college preparatory classes at Cook Academy in Montour Falls, New York. Subsequently, he entered Brown University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in languages in 1890. The same year, Dealey married Clara Learned, with whom he had four children, two girls and two boys.
After graduating from Brown, Dealey returned to Texas where he taught languages and history for one year at a small teacher-training college in Denton (now the University of North Texas). Dealey then taught Latin for the Vermont Academy in Saxtons River for two years, after which he returned to Brown where he earned a master’s degree in Greek and German and also earned a faculty appointment to teach Latin. Although at that time Brown offered no formal program of study in sociology, Dealey continued his education by pursuing the social and political sciences. He earned the PhD from Brown in 1895 and was subsequently appointed as assistant professor of political science. Through his study at Brown and his own prodigious reading, Dealey became an admirer of Lester Frank Ward, regarded by many as the “father” of American Sociology, and later collaborated with him on A Text-Book of Sociology (1905). In 1906, Dealey was responsible for bringing Ward to Brown, where, after years in government service, he spent his last years as professor of sociology and where in 1910 Dealey was appointed chair of the Department of Social and Political Sciences.
Dealey was elected the tenth president of the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association) in 1920. His presidential address of the same year, “Eudemics: The Science of National or General Welfare” shows Ward’s influence, emphasizing that order should accompany progress, as well as Dealey’s own interdisciplinary and international thinking. The term eudemics was central to his address. He later credited Brown University librarian, H. L. Koopman, for introducing him to the term as did Lester Ward when he used it in a speech in 1913.
Dealey assumed the ASA presidency during the period of recovery or “readjustment” following World War I and at the onset of women’s suffrage. It was also a time when controversy swirled around the topic of eugenics. Debate centered on the issue of genetic selection to improve or select a master race, fed no doubt by the large numbers of immigrants entering the US from southern and eastern Europe during the late 1800s and early 1900s. No small number of academics, politicians, as well as ordinary citizens perceived these arrivals as a threat to the Nordic racial stock seen as representing the “true” and superior Americans. While expressing some concern about the impact of overpopulation on quality of life, Dealey dismissed the idea of racial superiority with the assertion that “what seems like racial superiority…must be mainly due to the advantages of a favorable environment.” Passing over the public debate about eugenics, Dealey instead turned attention to the welfare of the general public by calling for the scientific study of the welfare of nations—eudemics. He went on to specify that this general welfare should include scientific study preceding action in advance of a desired goal or recommendations for the creation of a fairer and more just society. His speech made several references to changes and adjustments made necessary by the fact that the US was still recovering from the war. The speech also reflected Dealey’s awareness of the power of the press observing that in the US, more than in any other country, the press has a “potent” and “general influence in the accomplishment of changes in public opinion.” Finally, Dealey the sociologist and Dealey the journalist united to advocate for a responsible press that “should be kept in close touch with the best social teachings of the time so as to free itself from the present system of furnishing standardized news, guaranteed not to shock the susceptibilities of the most orthodox conservative.”
Dealey himself had opportunity to realize this kind of press when he retired from Brown in 1928 and returned to Texas where his brother managed the family-owned Dallas Morning News of which Dealey became managing editor. It was at his desk at the News, while in conference with his brother, that Dealey died of a heart attack on January 23, 1937. Interestingly, as other newspapers have gone out of business, consolidated, or gone online, the Morning News is still printed daily and is still family owned and operated by now a fourth generation of Dealeys.
While in no way diminishing his contributions to sociology, Dealey’s training was in classical languages, history, and the social sciences, rather than in sociology as we know it today. Consistent with eudemics, his work was ecumenical and demonstrated a concern with the general welfare of people and of society. His publications were about equally split between sociology and political science. He held offices in both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. He was among the first sociologist to venture into specialized subareas of sociology by writing an early text on the family. He was not the first sociologist, nor would he be the last, to have some experience as a journalist. He valued facts and he valued the power of the press as constitutionally protected. Upon his death, a colleague paid him the high honor of saying, “From beginning to end his career is a history of one who never retreated from his sense of principle.”
Biography by Joyce E. Williams, Texas Woman’s University
Selected Works by James Q. Dealey
1905. A Text-Book of Sociology (with Lester Frank Ward) New York: MacMillan.
1909. Sociology: Its Simpler Teachings and Applications. New York: Silver, Burdett and Co.
1912. The Family in its Sociological Aspects. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
1920. “Eudemics: The Science of National or General Welfare” (EUDEMICS, THE SCIENCE OF NATIONAL OR (asanet.org).
1921. Sociology: Its Development and Applications. New York: D. Appleton
Works about James Q. Dealey
Gard, Wayne. 1994. “Dealey, James Quayle (1861-1937).” Handbook of Texas. Texas State Historical Association. TSHA | Dealey, James Quayle (tshaonline.org)
Mitchell, Martha. 1993. “James Q. Dealey.” Encyclopedia Brunoniana. Brown University
Encyclopedia Brunoniana | Dealey, James Q. (brown.edu)
Phelps, Harold A. 1937. “Obituary: James Quayle Dealey.” American Sociological Review 2(3):406-408.
Wikipedia Reader. “James Q. Dealey.” The Reader View of Wikipedia. James Q. Dealey wiki | TheReaderWiki
Obituary
Written by Harold A. Phelps, published in the American Sociological Review, 1937. 2(3):406-408.
James Quayle Dealey will always be remembered among the representatives of the sociological movement in America through his association with Lester F. Ward. In one sense he discovered Ward and made possible his retirement to the campus and classroom during the last seven years of his life. This intellectual association continued after Ward’s death and furnishes one of the distinctive marks of Dealey’s sociological companionships.
Professor Dealey was born in England and believed that his most evident personal characteristics were rooted in his English-Irish ancestry. His early education was received in the secondary schools of Liverpool and to this experience he credited his habits of mental discipline, mathematical organization and high regard for correct grammar in both written and spoken English.
To his naturally modest and deferential nature he added both the English tradition for good manners and the softening influence of our own Southern culture. In his youth he came to America and lived to young manhood in the South. Here he held one of his first academic positions and to the South he later returned for his crowning years of public social service as an interpreter of social and political thought in that section.
Unassuming in all his ways, Professor Dealey possessed a breadth of scholarship in the Classics, in Modern Languages, History, Government and Sociology that made him easily at home in the seemingly complicated world of conflicting ideas. Fortified by years of foreign study, diversified linguistic abilities and extensive travel he embraced within his personal experience a knowledge of many of the culture groups of our modern world.
Professor Dealey was among the first half dozen of the pioneering teachers in sociology. He entered this field, after spending a few years of his teaching life in the classics, when sociology had little or no literature or academic status. Moreover, at the time when sociology meant practically any theory of reform or utopian project that its advocates cared to make it, Professor Dealey brought to sociology a broad background of humanistic curiosity and a shrewd temper for concrete realities. Both his teaching and his sociological philosophy were distinguished by these characteristics.
To his many students Professor Dealey will be more than the man who was chairman of a department or who taught government as well as sociology. He will also be more than the author of eleven books and monographs. And he will never be judged simply as a disciple of Ward. In addition, students will recall his breadth of scholarship, his creative imagination, his interest in new ideas, his devotion to the objectives of sociology as an experimental and research discipline, and above all else his moral courage. None could be exposed to his teaching without absorbing these qualities or without the awareness of what a genuine and vigorous personality can be.
In his classroom this universality of outlook was always apparent. He stressed Ward’s system in order to introduce the novice to a synthetic point of view. He advocated systematic study so that each student would absorb some of the “spirit behind the vast movements of history.” He was constantly pointing out “fields for investigation,” and warning against the too ready acceptance of generalizations. To him sociology was the “inductive study of human relations.” He was profoundly interested in Utopias because of their potential contributions to the problems of a real world. Although he gave attention to the “material bases of society” and to “natural history,” he was equally concerned with ethical principles, social reform, and the limitations of sociology. Consequently, from his perspective “sociology is true to itself only in so far as it is human”; “the nature of society furnishes criteria for social judgments”; “when science attacks an ethical problem, it becomes a sociological problem.”
In public life Professor Dealey’s interests were equally catholic. With this aspect of his career in mind, Professor E. A. Ross has stated: “Dr. Dealey was a doughty and tenacious forefront fighter in our long struggle to win recognition of sociology. He always took advanced ground and held it.” Moreover, he held this position not only as sociologist but as educational administrator and editor. In each role sociology was in his judgment a necessary and unescapable guide to public policy in governmental or social affairs.
The tribute of his former associates on the faculty of Brown University contains the following paragraph: “His whole life was characterized by unusual vigor of mind and body. He was never content with the easy way, with a narrow mastery of subject matter or with the acceptance of the existing order as the best attainable in this imperfect world. His whole life as teacher and scholar was one continuous striving, with vigor and persistence, in search of a better way of social life and to bring about the practical application of the social ideals which he came to hold. At times perhaps he became intolerant of opposition, particularly if he felt that it was actuated by smug ignorance or selfish motives, and yet he realised full well that ‘progress-goes on halting feet and with leaden step.’ He had great faith in democracy, in the power of education to free and vitalize the latent energies and capacities of the people, and in the possibility through constant experimentation and political pioneering to improve social conditions so as to make life for the average man ‘a happier, broader and more generous existence than that endured by his fathers.’ ”
To limit an appraisal of Dr. Dealey’s position among the leaders of American sociology to specific contributions would be unfair and misleading. In final summary of his work as sociologist, educator, and editor, what he did is far less important than what he was. The heritage to the sociological movement for which he will be remembered is one of moral courage and character. From beginning to end his career is a history of one who never retreated from his sense of principle.
