Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,930

This is the grave of Robert Park.

Born in 1864 in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, Park grew up in Red Wing, Minnesota, where the family moved shortly after his birth. I only know that town from Dylan’s “Walls of Red Wing,” though this town is also known in turns out for being Hamlin Garland’s model for “Middle Border” in his work. He actually met Jesse James on the outlaw’s trip north. Park was a bad student and graduated toward the bottom of his small class in 1882. His father did not think of him as college material, so Park went to work on the railroad after leaving home. After a bit of time doing this, Park started saving money for college. Turns out he was perfectly smart, just a lazy student.

Park ended up funding himself to go to the University of Minnesota, continuing to work as a journalist. At this point, his father decided to send him to a good school, not podunk U in Minnesota, so his father sent him to the University of Michigan instead (throwing a bone to Campos here, though if Park had enrolled himself at Ohio State it would be a better joke), where he graduated in 1887. He married the daughter of a wealthy Michigan family while there and hoped to solve problems through being a reporter. This was the muckraking era and Park was a socially conscious man who wanted to use his work to make the world a better place. He worked as a journalist between 1887 and 1898, but over time, became disenchanted with the idea that his journalist work could really solve problems. So he went back to school and got a master’s degree from Harvard and then went on to Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin to study with the pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel. He would stay in Germany until 1904, earning a PhD in sociology from Heidelberg University. He wrote the dissertation in German, but in English, it is titled. “Crowd and Public: A Methodological and Sociological Study.”

Park returned to the U.S. in 1904, taking a job teaching sociology at Harvard, helping to introduce the field to that school and to the nation as a whole. He worked there for two years and then received an unusual offer. Booker T. Washington reached out and asked if he would be interested in teaching his subject at Tuskegee Institute. This is interesting to me because Washington’s entire model was avoiding fancy academic fields and training Black students to be tradesmen and other skilled workers unthreatening to white leaders. But he took the job and in fact the two became fast friends. They traveled around the U.S. and Europe examining poverty and comparing it to what they had seen in Alabama and other parts of the South. The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe, published in 1911, was under Washington’s name, but Park was an equal collaborator on it. In it, they discussed visiting the poorest cities in Europe, as well as Jewish and Roma communities.

Park stayed at Tuskegee until 1914, when he took a job at the University of Chicago. He would stay at Chicago until 1933. He used the city as a giant laboratory for himself and his students. He was interested in race relations, naturally enough for someone who had spent so much time at Tuskegee. Interestingly, his course on race relations in Chicago is considered to be perhaps the first ever college course at a white school that focused specifically on Black Americans. That’s crazy to me, but I suppose it makes sense. What else would there been before 1914? The Chicago sociology department became the most famous in the nation due to its use of the city’s teeming immigrant and Black communities as a giant field school, and there was plenty to say about it too. Park led that push to get students into these communities, though of course he was not the only one there. Working with his colleague Ernest Burgess, Park was central to developing urban sociology as well at Chicago. They cowrote a 1922 book called Introduction to the Science of Sociology that seems broad enough to be a textbook, but really introduced to the field the idea of the city as laboratory.

Park became one of the leaders of the human ecology movement, basically the idea that environment matters in developing human behavior. Some of this was related to environment in terms of the scenario in which one grows up–if one grows up in poverty, said person is more likely to live a life based around certain patterns than if one grows up wealthy. Some of it was also more nature based–thinking of humans as actual biological beings that have characteristics around issues such as competition and connection to the earth that are like other species. This seems obvious enough today of course, but then the idea that humans are not animals and are somehow separated from the Earth or should dominate it is central to religion and far-right ideologies; the entire right-wing freakout that humans are descended from apes depends on that. So it’s not as if everyone is totally convinced about humans as biological species today and even more sure don’t act like it in the era of catastrophic climate change and massive ecological collapse.

Park was of course a man and a scholar of his time, which meant that he had ideas that would be utter anathema for progressive thinking people today. This was the era of broad-based racial stereotyping assumed to be accurate without questioning it in social science, or more accurately social “science.” Racial essentialism was the name of the game. For example, he wrote,

The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intel-lectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East African; nor a pioneer and frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving of life for its sake. His métier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak the lady among the races.

It’s not just that this is complete nonsense, it’s more how does one hold this many stereotypes in their head at any given time. And yet, nearly every social scientist of the age did this kind of thing.

In 1933, Park officially retired from Chicago, but he was not done teaching. He decided to take a position at Fisk University, the Black institution in Nashville, and he would continue teaching there until his death. That was in 1944. He was 79 years old.

Robert Park is buried in Oakland Cemetery, Freeport, Illinois.

Park was president of the American Sociological Association in 1925. If you would like this series to visit other ASA presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Gillin, president in 1926, is in Madison, Wisconsin. William Isaac Thomas, president in 1927, is in Knoxville, Tennessee. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.