Thomas was born in Russell County, Virginia, in 1863. He was the third of six sons and fourth of seven children of Sarah (Price) Thomas and Thaddeus Peter Thomas, a farmer and Methodist preacher. The mother came of Virginia stock that has been traced back to the eighteenth century. The father was descended from a German immigrant who settled in Lancaster County, Pa. , in 1749. Typical of early American sociologists, William I. Thomas came from a rural Protestant background, but little is known of his early life beyond these simple facts.
Education
Seeking better schools for the children, the Thomases moved first to Morristown, Tenn. , and then in 1874 to Knoxville, where in 1880 William entered the University of Tennessee. There he majored in literature and the classics. As an undergraduate he not only excelled scholastically but was also a "big man on campus. " He won highest honors in oratory, became president of the Literary Society, and was captain of the university officer-training unit. After graduation, he continued his studies at Tennessee in English literature and modern languages and was awarded the first doctorate that the university granted in 1886.
Career
After his study he shifted to teaching natural history and Greek as adjunct professor. Typical of university professors of the period, he took the required year abroad in Germany in 1888-1889 at Göttingen and Berlin. There he was exposed to the German folk psychology of Moritz Lazarus and Hermann Steinhal and to ethnology, and as a result, his interests began to be redirected.
When he returned to the United States, he accepted a professorship in English at Oberlin College and held this post until 1895. Although established as a professor in a traditional subject at one of the outstanding undergraduate colleges in the country, he took steps to retrain himself. During the academic year 1893-1894, while on leave from Oberlin, he worked at the University of Chicago as one of the first graduate students in the newly established department of sociology. His studies were directed by Albion W. Small and Charles Henderson. In the summer of 1894 he taught sociology at the University of Chicago; during the following year, after having completed his doctorate, he became an assistant professor.
Until 1918 he remained at Chicago, devoting himself to research for his central work on the Polish community. In 1900, he was promoted to associate professor and in 1910 to professor. From 1908 to 1919 Thomas had charge of the Helen Culver Fund for Race Psychology, which enabled him to travel extensively in Europe and collect much of the material on which The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (5 vols. , 1918 - 1919) was based. While at Chicago, Thomas expressed a deep concern with social policy, another of the central themes of the "Chicago school. " He became a strong advocate of woman's rights.
Thomas' connection with the University of Chicago ended abruptly in 1918 when an extramarital affair became the focus of intense publicity. Arrested for violating the Mann Act, he was dismissed from his post despite the intervention of Albion Small. He never again held a regular university post.
He moved to New York City and spent the next year (1918 - 1919) working on the Americanization studies sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation in New York. He collaborated with Robert E. Park on the manuscript of Old World Traits Transplanted (1921), but the corporation chose not to acknowledge his authorship, on the grounds that the scandal attached to Thomas' name would harm the corporation. After the Americanization study he was supported from 1920 to 1923 by research funds provided by Mrs. W. F. Dummer of Chicago, a wealthy woman interested in sociological inquiry and social welfare problems. He spent the rest of his professional life engaged primarily in research projects, with occasional visiting university appointments.
He lectured at the New School for Social Research from 1923 to 1928. For the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial he prepared a study, The Child in America (1928), with Dorothy Swaine. From 1930 to 1936 he traveled regularly to Sweden and worked closely with the Social Science Institute of the University of Stockholm. He served on the Social Science Research Council in 1932-1933. His last academic appointment was as lecturer in sociology at Harvard University (1936 - 1937). His last book, Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, was published in 1937.
The final phase of his career was spent in semiretirement and independent research, first in New Haven until 1939 and then in Berkeley, Calif. , where he died at the age of eighty-four of arteriosclerosis.
Achievements
Thomas was one of the pioneer American sociologists who in the first quarter of the twentieth century converted sociology from a philosophical and speculative subject into a systematic research discipline.
Quotations:
"It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct – if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. "
"If a person perceives a situation as real, it is real in its consequences. "
Connections
He married Harriet Park on June 6, 1888. His marriage to Harriet Park was terminated by divorce in 1934 and on February 7, 1935, he married Dorothy Swaine, who had been associated with his research work for a number of years.
