Background

Robert Ezra Park was born on February 14, 1864 in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, United States. His mother, Theodosia Warner, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Hiram Asa Park, was a soldier in the Union Army. Soon after the Civil War the family moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where Park grew up.

Education

When Park graduated from high school in 1882, his father decided that Robert was "not the studious type" and that no further education was necessary. Robert ran away from home, worked on a railroad gang during the summer, earned $50, and enrolled at the University of Minnesota as a freshman in engineering. Although he had problems studying he passed his freshman courses, and his father relented and offered to finance further studies. Robert entered the University of Michigan, abandoned his interest in engineering, and majored in philosophy. He took philosophy courses with John Dewey, of whom Park said that studying with him was "an adventure that was taking us beyond the limits of safe and certified knowledge into the realm of the problematical and unknown." Park graduated in 1887 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Robert E. Park spent 11 years learning the reporter's craft and in the process developed an interest in sociological subjects, based on observations of urban life. He decided to return to university life because he was interested in communication and collective behavior and wanted to know what the universities had to say about it. He received a Master's degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1899 and moved his family to Berlin. He enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University (nowadays the Humboldt University of Berlin), where he expanded his interests in the newspaper to the broader concerns of human social life, particularly in its unplanned aspects, such as crowds and public gatherings, crazes and mobs. At the university he was exposed to the writing and lectures of the sociologist Georg Simmel; indeed, the course that he took from Simmel was the only course in sociology that Park ever had in his entire life. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1903, having written a thesis titled "Crowds and Publics: A Methodological and Sociological Investigation".

Career

From 1887 until 1898 Park was a reporter on daily newspapers in Minneapolis, Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago. In those days newspapers could not draw upon syndicated material to balance the volume of Sunday advertising, and reporters were expected to supply columns of human interest and local color. Park was therefore constantly on the prowl for news and feature stories, and throughout his life the city remained for him a laboratory for discovering human nature.

Park returned to Harvard in 1903 and spent a year as an assistant in philosophy while he completed his thesis. In 1904 he became secretary of the Congo Reform Association, a group organized in England and dedicated to publicizing atrocities perpetrated against Blacks in what was then the Congo Free State. The organization hoped to bring pressure for reform on King Leopold II of Belgium, who was solely responsible for the administration of the area. He wrote a series of articles for the muckraking periodical Everybody's Magazine, which generated considerable public outcry leading eventually, in 1908, to the formal annexation of the Congo by Belgium and the substitution of parliamentary control for the personal rule. With this, the Congo Reform Association ceased to function. In 1905, while working with the association, Park felt himself to be "sick and tired of the academic world" and "wanted to get back into the world of men." Introduced to the noted African American teacher and reformer Booker T. Washington, Park was invited to become a publicist for Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Sensing that this might be an opportunity both to help the cause of African Americans and to learn about them and about the South, and in the process "get back into the world, " Park accepted the offer. Together they toured Europe in 1910, comparing and contrasting the plight of Southern African Americans and European laborers and peasants. In that year, too, he helped organize the National Urban League. Park served Washington as a confidant, as well as serving as director of public relations of the institute. He assisted Washington in preparation of the latter's The Man Farthest Down (1912) and appears as one of its authors. In 1912 Park organized an International Conference on the Negro at Tuskegee.

As the conference opened, Park had decided to leave Tuskegee in order to spend more time with his family. Attending the conference was the sociologist W. I. Thomas who, after a lengthy correspondence, invited Park to join him on the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, then one of a few departments of sociology in the United States. Park came to Chicago in 1913 and remained there until 1936, well past his formal retirement in 1933.

Robert served as president of the American Sociological Society (now known as the American Sociological Association) in 1925. He also was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii from 1931 to 1933; traveled extensively in China, India, South Africa, the Pacific, and Brazil; and in 1936 joined the faculty of Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and taught intermittently as a visiting professor.

Achievements

• Robert E. Park is noted for his work on ethnic minority groups, particularly African Americans, and on human ecology, a term he is credited with coining. One of the leading figures in what came to be known as the "Chicago school" of sociology, he initiated a great deal of fieldwork in Chicago that explored race relations, migration, ethnic relations, social movements, and social disorganization.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The City

    (First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text ...)

    1925
  • The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe 1912
  • Introduction to the Science of Sociology 1921
  • The Immigrant Press and Its Control 1922
  • On Social Control and Collective Behavior 1967
  • Old World Traits Transplanted 1921

Views

In Park's view, society is best seen as the interactions of individuals controlled by traditions and norms. Park was keenly interested in social psychology, and his favorite topics were collective behavior, news, race relations, cities, and human ecology. Park defined sociology as "the science of collective behavior," which suggests the need for analysis of social structures with the study of more fluid social processes.

These processes are divided into four major categories: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Park held that "competition is the elementary universal and fundamental form of social interaction." It is as universal and continuous in human society as it is in nature, and it assigns persons their position in the division of labor. Conflict is intermittent and personal. Competition determines the position of the individual in the community; conflict fixes his place in society. Accommodation is a cessation of conflict that is fragile and easily upset. Assimilation "is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and, by sharing their experiences and history, are incorporated with them in a common culture." Then when assimilation is achieved it does not mean that individual differences are eliminated or that competition and conflict end, but that there is enough unity of experience so that a "community of purpose and action can emerge". Social distance refers to "the degree of intimacy that prevails between groups and individuals. The degree of intimacy measures the influence which each has over the other." The greater the social distance between individuals and groups, the less they influence each other.

Park described sociology as the "abstract science of human nature and experience" that included the "applied science" of his four social process to analyze "those modifications in human beings that are due to the human environment."

Park's sociology "always focused analytical attention on those processes or situations which foster the emergence of novel forms that upset or render obsolete previous adjustments and accommodations".

Although Park has sometimes been accused of making racist remarks, his interest in the problem of race relations stems from a desire for a deeper understanding of the human situation. In a letter to Horace R. Cayton, another Chicago school sociologist, Park elaborated on his work with Negroes, demonstrating his broader analytical views of the problems involved.

Park stimulated his students to learn from their own experiences and observations.

Membership

• president

  American Sociological Association , United States

  1925

Connections

In 1894 Robert E. Park married Clara Cahill. The couple had four children - Edward, Theodosia, Margaret and Robert.

Father:

Hiram Asa Park

(March 28, 1838 - March 21, 1911)

Mother:

Theodosia Warner

(February 8, 1841 - December 2, 1884)

Spouse:

Clara Cahill

(died 1952)

Son:

Edward Cahill Park

Son:

Robert Hiram Park

Daughter:

Theodosia Warner Park

Daughter:

Margaret Lucy (Park) Redfield

colleague:

Ernest W. Burgess

(May 16, 1886 - December 27, 1966)

Ernest Watson Burgess was a Canadian-American urban sociologist. He served as the 24th President of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

References

• Quest for American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School A book by Fred H. Matthews.
  1977
• Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist A book by Winifred Raushenbush.
  1979
• The Romance of Culture in an Urban Civilisation: Robert E. Park on Race and Ethnic Relations in Cities In this book, originally published in 1990, the author presents a general, critical overview of Robert E. Park and the Chicago school of American sociology. Lal concentrates on the contribution that Park and those working within the Chicago school tradition have made to the area of urban race and ethnicity, and suggests how the current thinking among sociologists, anthropologists, social historians, and social geographers might usefully be amalgamated with the ongoing tradition originating with Park at Chicago.
  1990
• The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School In this original and convincing study, Rolf Lindner argues that the method of urban research constituting the core of the famous Chicago School of sociology is ultimately indebted to the tradition of urban reportage. However, the argument goes beyond a reconstruction of the relationship between journalism and sociology. Professor Lindner shows how the figure of the city reporter at the turn of the century represents a new way of looking at life, and reflects a transformation in American culture, from rejecting variety to embracing it.
  1996