(Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge indebtedness to A ...)
Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge indebtedness to A nn Rosenzweig and Ursula de Antonio for help in reading and digesting materials for this book, and to Stephen Brigham and George Kaplan for certain materials that they supplied. My colleagues at Columbia University have offered criticisms and suggestions, and the staff of the Columbia University Library has been extremely helpful. Donald S. Howard, Russell H. Kurtz, and Sigrid C. Holt, of the Russell Sage Foundation, have also given assistance. Morris Zelditch, Director of War Services, Family Welfare Association of A merica, and Donald A mbler, of The Dryden Press, have kindly read the manuscript and have contributed certain excellent suggestions. Stanley Burnshaw, of The Dryden Press, has given help which amounted literally to collaboration. I wish to extend my thanks to all these, and to the authors and publishers who have permitted quotation of copyrighted materials. The illustration of the soldier on the jacket is used by permission of the United States Advertising Corporation, of Chicago. I must, of course, assume the full responsibility for any errors in this book, as well as for the opinions expressed therein.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.
Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the aged text. Read books online for free at www.forgottenbooks.org
Willard Walter Waller was an American sociologist.
Background
Willard Walter Waller was born in Murphysboro, Ill. , the older of the two surviving sons of Elbert and Margaret Dora (Clendenin) Waller. His mother was the daughter of a physician of Scots ancestry; orphaned at an early age, she had been reared by an aunt as a Catholic. His father, the son of a prosperous pioneer farmer of the Baptist faith, was a schoolteacher who farmed in the summers; upon losing his farm to creditors, he became a full-time school superintendent in successive small Illinois towns. A reform-minded moralist, he combined intellectual pursuits with a faculty for alienating people which cost him friends and jobs, thus bringing him into unending conflict with his conventional wife, who decried his failures and ridiculed his high-mindedness. Their son was later to look back on this quarrelsome, insecure life as providing significant insights into family sociology.
Education
After completing high school at Albion, Ill. , in 1915, young Waller entered McKendree College at Lebanon, Ill. Two years later he transferred to the University of Illinois, where he studied sociology under Edward C. Hayes. A tour of duty in the navy in 1918 delayed his graduation by one semester. He received the B. A. in 1920. He obtained his MA from the University of Chicago in 1925.
Career
Following a short stint as a reporter on the Evansville (Ind. ) Courier, he took a job near Chicago, Ill. , at the Morgan Park Military Academy, where for the next six years he taught Latin and French. Having separated from his wife, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both instructor and graduate student. A roommate acquainted Waller with psychoanalytic techniques, which he later used in giving lay therapy and in analyzing case studies. Though formerly a Methodist, he now became antireligious, cultivated a cynical manner, and prided himself on the tough-minded iconoclasm which was to become the hallmark of his sociological investigations. He received the Ph. D. in 1929 with a study of divorce, The Old Love and the New (1930), in which he analyzed the process by which married people become alienated from each other and provided original insights into the nature of marital dissolution and readjustment. It became a pattern for Waller, whose first marriage had ended in divorce, to rework his personal experience into his scholarly writing. In the fall of 1929 Waller went to the University of Nebraska as an assistant professor of sociology. He quickly established himself as a popular teacher. Students responded enthusiastically to his unorthodox views, and he, in turn, took on the role of lay therapist and mentor. He fostered an unblinking social realism in his students, had them provide personal life histories and diaries as research data, and even urged them to write candid introspective studies of their own families. Parents and fellow instructors complained about Waller's procedures, and when a university official discovered in February 1931 that his unmarried and pregnant daughter had been confidentially counseled by Waller, the young professor was immediately dismissed. Paid the balance of his salary, Waller moved to Chicago, where he completed his second book, The Sociology of Teaching (1932). This study depicted the school in terms of symbolic social interaction, where a nexus of small group relationships involved continual bargaining and conflict over the distribution of power within a precarious social order verging on collapse. To maintain the authority structure, he pointed out, thus required immense energy and constant attention. Waller next (May 1931) joined the faculty of Pennsylvania State College (later University) as associate professor of sociology; he was promoted to professor in 1933. Here he continued to unmask the realities that he felt lay behind polite social fictions and sacrosanct institutions. He published two important studies in the American Sociological Review, "Social Problems and the Mores" (December 1936) and "The Rating and Dating Complex" (October 1937). In the first he contended that social problems are actually perpetuated by so-called respectable social institutions. In the second he analyzed student dating patterns and ratings of self and others, material which appeared also in his textbook, The Family (1938), which drew on his parents' marriage for illustration. This study of middle-class families as closed units of interacting personalities emphasized the conflicts and tensions that so frequently underlie the seeming stability of domestic life. In contrast to the bland, even squeamish, textbooks that preceded his, Waller's book used acerb epigrams, pointed literary allusions, and paradoxes to puncture the static, abstract, and idealized conception of the family. Written in a graceful style, it caught on outside academic circles, and Waller was soon giving advice to troubled married couples. In 1937 he accepted the chairmanship of the sociology department at Wayne University in Detroit, but then negotiated his release to take an associate professorship at Barnard College, Columbia University. He utilized his location in New York City to broaden his activities. Partly because he was never promoted and partly because of his desire to implement constructively his iconoclastic views, he turned to publishing ventures, popular articles, and radio speeches on social policy, and his scholarly output declined sharply. The outbreak of war found him an isolationist, but he eventually accepted American participation in the conflict. Concerned about the long-term effects of the organization of American society into a war-making machine, he wrote The Veteran Comes Back (1944), a plea for a humane, planned demobilization of returning veterans. The average American, once made a soldier, he argued, would be so converted to military values that he would be unfitted for civilian life and in his confusion might turn to insurrection. The book was oversimplified, repetitious, unsophisticated, and nonsociological, but it sold well. Rejected for military service on physical grounds, Waller threw himself into touring the country to publicize the need for government programs to ease the adjustment of veterans. He died of a heart attack in the subway station near Columbia a few days before his forty-sixth birthday. His body was cremated.
Achievements
Despite his early death, Waller made significant contributions to the social psychology of marriage and the family. He correctly foresaw that there was no necessary conflict between the "artistic" method he espoused and the quantitative, and his skilled use of the case study and of disciplined introspection added to the understanding of social interaction.
On January 3, 1922, he married Thelma A. Jones of Evansville. On August 13, 1929, he married Josephine Wilkins of Philadelphia; their children were Peter, Bruce, and Suzanne.
