Background

Edward Alsworth Ross was born in Virden, Ill. His father, William Carpenter Ross, was a farmer who spent a lifetime searching for the main chance that never materialized. His mother, Rachel Ellsworth (Ross changed the spelling of the family name), had taught school in Marion, Iowa, in the 1840's and 1850's. She was a member of the pious and learned Dodd clan that provided religious and academic leadership for the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had established a bastion of Calvinism in and around Washington County in southwest Pennsylvania in the early nineteenth century. Ross's formative years were peripatetic and traumatic, punctuated by a series of moves--from Virden, Ill. , to Davenport, Cedar Rapids, and Marion, Iowa--and climaxed by the death of both his parents before he reached his thirteenth birthday.

Education

Determined to make a name for himself, he enrolled in the preparatory division of Coe College in Cedar Rapids, shortly after his fifteenth birthday. He received the B. A. from Coe in June 1886. In September 1888 he left the United States for doctoral study in Germany. He changed his mind but enjoyed a Wanderjahr abroad, and then returned to enroll in the doctoral program in political economy at Johns Hopkins University. Ross completed the requirements for the Ph. D. in less than two years; his dissertation was on sinking funds, a subject to which he never returned.

Career

In the fall of 1891, Ross took an instructorship at Indiana University; after a year there and one at Cornell University, he accepted a full professorship at Stanford University. While at Stanford, from 1893 to 1900, Ross laid the basic foundations for his subsequent career by shifting the focus of his scholarship from economics to sociology.

Ross's advocacy of railroad regulation, tax reform, the free and unlimited coinage of silver, and immigration restriction offended Jane Lathrop Stanford, the widow of the university's founder and its sole source of financial support. A national furor, resolved largely in Ross's favor, followed his announcement in November 1900 that at Mrs. Stanford's behest he had been dismissed from his tenured post at the university. In February 1901 Ross accepted a professorship at the University of Nebraska, and five years later he moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he remained until his retirement in 1937. He died in Madison.

The decades in Nebraska and Wisconsin were professionally productive and personally satisfying for Ross. Students and colleagues alike were charmed by Ross's quick wit and natural ebullience, and awed by his physical and academic prowess and by his singular literary gifts. Except for David Riesman and C. Wright Mills, who were popular after World War II, Ross had no peer among American sociologists as a popularizer of sociological materials and ideas.

From the publication of his progressive tract Sin and Society in 1907 until his retirement, Ross published a book every year or two and received more lecture offers than he could possibly accept. The intellectual and reformist sources of the progressive sociology fashioned by Ross included the writings of Henry George, Edward Bellamy and other meliorists of the Gilded Age, his work in the "historical school" of political economy under Richard T. Ely at Hopkins, and the close intellectual and personal relationship that developed between Ross and his uncle by marriage, Lester Frank Ward, the nation's most erudite exponent of a reform-minded interpretation of social evolutionary thought and the first president of the American Sociological Society. Ely, Ward, and Ross shared a distaste for the laissez-faire politics, classical economics, and "survival of the fit" sociology advanced by Herbert Spencer and his American counterpart, William Graham Sumner; in contrast, they stressed the malleability of human nature and the social order, the need to ameliorate the glaring inequities in American life, and the positive role the state could play in carrying out their agenda of social and economic reforms. As Ross put it, the Darwinism of the Spencer-Sumner school seemed "to link up the repulsive dog-eat-dog practices with that 'struggle for existence' which evoked the higher forms of life. "

Ross fought the conservatives in and out of the university on two levels: as one of the principal architects of the sociology of progressivism and as an active publicist in the cause of progressive reform. Three volumes, all published early in his career, contain the essence of Ross's sociology of progressivism: Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (1901), Ross's most creative contribution to sociological thought; The Foundations of Sociology (1905), a collection of monographs on sociological theory and methodology; and Social Psychology (1908), the first American textbook in that field. Foundations contained a rigorous attack on the sociological notions of Herbert Spencer; in these essays Ross demonstrated the need to reject the bio-organic and mechanistic analogies of his conservative predecessors and urged sociologists to convert the discipline into a purely social and sociopsychological science--one that would focus on the social processes that stimulate change rather than the social institutions that tend to restrain it. By defining the processes in purely social, pluralistic, and nondeterministic terms, Ross enabled the sociologists of his generation to understand American society better and the progressives to reform it.

Equally significant for the early development of sociology in the United States were Ross's two books on what he termed "social ascendency"--the informal restraints that society employs to discipline the individual (Social Psychology) and the formal ones (Social Control) to accomplish similar ends. The volumes share a commitment to the "collective behavior" school of social behaviorism, following and developing the sociological tradition of Gabriel de Tarde and Emile Durkheim rather than the "interactionist" school headed by George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley. They also are concerned with the broad institutional arrangements of society rather than the small, face-to-face relationships that became the focus of the "interactionist" school in later decades.

Social Control, Ross's magnum opus, remains an important document in American social and intellectual thought. Like Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) and Sumner's Folkways (1907), it represents a scholarly effort to discover the sources of social stability as the American nation moved from community to society, from the personal relationships and agrarian economy of cross-roads America of the nineteenth century to the impersonality of mass society as fashioned by a twentieth-century, industrial-urban order. Like others of his generation, Ross wanted to retain the individualism of the nineteenth century as well as its social and cultural ethos. Although Social Control reflects a nostalgia for the individualistic social order of the nineteenth century, its strength lies in the program of progressive reforms offered by Ross in an effort to preserve it. The adoption of social controls as Ross defined them--the practice of the social gospel and sociological jurisprudence, and the enlightened molding of public opinion--would enable Americans to enjoy both the individualism of the past and benefits of the corporate society they were creating for the future.

In 1914 and in 1915, Ross served as president of the American Sociological Society; his subsequent activities and writings in the field were more professional than creative. His activities included building a competent department of sociology at Wisconsin; publishing a widely used text, The Principles of Sociology (1920, revised in 1930; third edition 1938); serving as editor of the Century Social Science series; and giving lectures throughout the country on sociology--popularizing the subject for laymen and attracting students to his scholarly and melioristic outlook. Ross was also a spokesman for social reform at home and a commentator on social developments abroad. In the former role he consistently stood in the camp of those who would make a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth and ameliorate its social ills. His reform rhetoric contained a strong animus against the business community, a sense of compassion for the workingman and farmer, and a liberal program for socioeconomic reform. Ross never questioned the fundamental assumptions of the nation's capitalistic system; like other Populists, progressives, and New Dealers he would reform the system in order to save it.

Until the 1930's Ross's agenda of reform included a minor but persistent nativistic strain. Assuming the ethnic superiority of Anglo-Saxons, for many decades he was active in the various immigration-restriction movements against Orientals and the "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Ross's nativism also included a demand for the prohibition of alcohol, a racist interpretation of eugenics for the American people at home, and deeply pessimistic statistical studies concerning population trends abroad. These views, along with his belief in the congenital inferiority of blacks, grew out of his commitment to the doctrine of the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race; nativism, like social reform, was a means of preserving the values and way of life he had inherited. From 1911, when Ross published The Changing Chinese (based upon his trip to that country), until the 1930's, he periodically offered his readers a sociological travelogue of his journeys to foreign countries.

As a sociologist Ross focused on the social structure, the institutions, and the trends within these countries; as a reformer he identified with their aggrieved and downtrodden elements, and offered progressive solutions to their problems. The highlight of Ross's career as a roving sociologist came in 1917, when he went to Russia to report on the revolution there. In a number of magazine articles, in a report to President Woodrow Wilson, and in three books that followed (Russia in Upheaval, 1918; The Russian Bolshevik Revolution, 1921; and The Russian Soviet Republic, 1923), he presented the Bolshevik Revolution in a favorable light. Although Ross continued to defend the Soviet "experiment" throughout the 1920's and 1930's, he made it quite clear that he did not advocate a similar revolution for the American nation.

Achievements

• Ross was the founder of American sociology and one of the first sociologists to pursue a comprehensive sociological theory. He attracted attention in the United States and in Europe as a singularly gifted social scientist, and achieved prominence on the West Coast as an articulate spokesman for populist-progressive reform. His best-known work was "Social Control" (1901). Another widely read book was Social Psychology (1908), one of the first American works written specifically on that discipline. Ross was a staunch advocate of academic freedom; he also spoke out, often and loudly, particularly in the 1930's, on behalf of freedom of the press and the civil liberties of the individual. These pronouncements, together with the other facets of his career--his sociology of progressivism, his advocacy of a host of liberal reforms at home, and his role as a defender of social change abroad--provide evidence of a unity in Ross's life and thought. Given his academic and ideological purpose--the creation of a social science and a climate of opinion that could improve the quality of life for the multitude--Ross had few peers, and no superior, in his profession.

Works

More photos

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  • Edward Alsworth Ross & The Sociology Of Progressivism

    (For four decades--from 1900 to 1940--American sociology h...)

  • Russia in Upheaval

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order

    ( Social Control falls within social psychology, which is...)

  • Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book (Classic Reprint)

    (In spite of infinite pains and thirteen years of experien...)

  • Changing America: Studies in Contemporary Society

    ( About the Book Sociology is a social science that studi...)

  • Social Control and Public Intellect: The Legacy of Edward A. Ross

    ( As the last presumptive founder of American sociology,...)

  • The Art of Life Series. Latter Day Sinners and Saints

    ( About the Book Biographical books, or bios, are detaile...)

  • The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

    (This is a history that looks at immigration trends and pa...)

  • The Old World in the New

    (The Old World in the New By Edward Alsworth Ross)

  • Sin and Society: An Analysis of Latter-Day Iniquity (1907)

    (Originally published in 1907. This volume from the Cornel...)

Connections

Ross married Rosamund Simons, an art student, on June 16, 1892. They had three sons. His wife died in 1931, and in 1940 he married Helen Forbes.

Father:

William Carpenter Ross

Farmer

Mother:

Rachel Ellsworth

Spouse:

Rosamund Simons

Spouse:

Helen Forbes