In a recently discovered letter from Arthur Vidich to Professor Fred Strodtbeck written on June 12, 1991, Arthur provides an analysis of the sociology taught at Harvard and its consequences for the careers of a wide range of students who graduated from the Department of Social Relations in the early 1950s. We have provided links to the biographies of the sociologists mentioned in this letter for ease of access to the points Vidich makes. Here are the important excerpts from his letter.
June 12, 1991
Prof. Fred Strodtbeck
Dept. of sociology
University of Chicago
Social Science Building
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Dear Fred:
It seems that your 20 minute assignment to talk about Harvard is taking on larger dimensions -- or, if it hasn't yet, I suggest it should. The period you are concerned with warrants expanded coverage (in the form of an intimate history) because Harvard social relations was then the one place where all the action was. During those same years, the Grand Chicago of the thirties had come apart, Ogburn taking it into a statistical mechanistic direction. At the same time, Berkeley had not yet appeared as a major Center (even though there were some outstanding scholars there). Blumer's departure from Chicago in 1954 and his appointment as Chair at Berkeley was the beginning of Berkeley's moment as the dynamic center of sociology. By that time, social relations had partly spent itself -- or, at least, had lost the elan that had been given it by the post-WWII contingent of veterans who so eagerly imbibed from the cafeteria of learning presented by the social relations staff Parsons had put together.
What is more, the period 1946-7 to 1953-5 was quite distinct from that of the mid and late thirties, immediately preceding the war. Then the stage was shared by Sorokin and Parsons -- Sorokin's mark was still left on the products of that period and Parsons did not have the sway that he succeeded in achieving later. Students during that period (among others, Robert Merton, Robin Williams, Ed Devereaux) were not exposed to the full breadth of Social Relations and it shows in the kind of work they did. Moreover, Parsons had not yet formulated a conception of a social system. Then he was still a student of Schumpeter and writing articles on capitalism while working on the structure of Social Action. (In the same apartment I found out later from him where I later lived as a graduate student -- a singular moment of intimacy in my relations with Talcott.) For Parsons, it was the war, fears of Fascism and fears for the future of the country that drove him to frame a total theory with the United States as the world's exemplar. (S.M. Lipset wrote the book The First New Nation as an ode to Parsons and in an effort to get a job at Harvard.)The social system in all its dimensions is a high-minded liberal image of what a social order should be. When Parsons spoke about racial equality, the family, responsibility and obligations, the power structure (his critique of C. Wright Mills ), the functions of the executive and all the other dimensions of American society he touched upon, he spoke from his soul -- almost as an Emersonian and certainly as a Christian ethicist concerned about the moral order of society. At the time we were at Harvard, this Parsons had not yet become the full-fledged formal social theorist he became later when four-fold tables and the harmonics of the system became almost an end in themselves - more like an ideology.
So from the perspective of your project -- and I hope that is what it is -- the Harvard period when we were there was floating with ideas going in all directions, was full of intellectual confusions and contradictions and attracted to it a remarkable collection or professors, instructors and graduate students over whom Parsons could not hold sway . All of this makes your project harder, but it is also why it makes it important -- because the after effects of people who graduated in those years are still being felt across the country.
Students of our academic generation in that period could and did respond to that environment in different ways:
1) The last of the Sorokin students (Al Pearse - in the California system - Fullerton?) spent a lot of time fighting Parsons, defending Sorokin and being ignored, and, in the case of Al, enjoying it.
2) Students (Bernard Barber) who took Parsons as the gospel -- who thought it was the ultimate truth -- followed him around with notebooks writing down his every word. This category of student probably suffered the most later on because they became attached to that Parsons from whom they learned at the time they studied with him. They then later in their careers replicated that Parsons whom Parsons no longer was -- this was a kind of mummification of ideas that for Parsons were only steps on a path to the discovery of newly emergent problems. Each stage of Parson's intellectual growth continued to exist around the country in the form of epigones who held steadfastly to what they had learned at the time they were exposed -- or we may say, catechized. (Actually, this point can be made into a more general observation about academic culture -- the same can be said for Ogborn's, Lazarfeld's or Merton's students -- i.e. , that it perpetuates a lot of dead ideas. Not much came out of this response.
3 ) Other students had the privilege of picking and choosing whom they wished to work with and which ideas they wished to attach themselves to, and went ahead and did what they wanted to do. Bob Wilson was a poet whose sociology is infused with the poet's attitude. Ralph Patrick (deceased), a Southerner struggled with the problem of race and equality and found no formula for coping with this problem. Kaspar Naegele, a poet in the mode of Simmel, knew what intellectual standards could be and anguished over his own abilities to live up to them while others (including me) thought he had achieved them: whatever caused him to commit suicide no one knows, but I think some part of his act can be attributed to the experience of being a refugee from Fascism and an intellectual at the same time. Kim Romney, a Mormon, was attracted to the architectonics of mathematics and followed Moestelar's statistical God. The Boston Irish Catholic Thomist, Tom O’Dea, was encouraged by Parsons to study the Mormons. That was good advice because it made him a sociologist and allowed him to escape from doctrinaire Catholicism. I remember discussions (deep ones) with him about faith and non-faith we were then taking life awfully seriously and thought we could find answers by studying social relations. His work is well known, original and well respected in and out of Mormon circles. There are others too numerous to mention whom I’m sure you are aware of -- and who went in their different directions reflecting themselves and not the intellectual line of an instructor or professor.
4) Harold Garfinkle whose name you mentioned in your letter is a special case -- if you wish, a type of his own (anyway there is nothing systematic or exhaustive about the typology I’ve developed, ad hoc on these pages.)
Before and while Harold was at Harvard, he became acquainted with and studied with Alfred Schutz at the Graduate Faculty, New School. (Harold and I had offices adjacent to each other and walked home together on many a day for a year to the grad student apartments where we each lived, off Brattle Street - Gibson Apartments.) It was from Schutz that Harold got his phenomenology and the problem that was to pre-occupy him the rest of his life -- his dissertation on the medical student was only the beginning. His problem in the largest sense was and is: under what conditions does a social order break down -- or under what circumstances do social relations become chaotic. Neither Parsons nor Moesteller were happy with that problem, not understanding that it was the negative side of the problem of social order for which for both of them for different reasons was the central issue (for Moesteller the harmonics of a statistical world and for Parsons the orderly performance of role functions). Harold was quite aware that his work was consistent with theirs - all he was doing was testing the outer limits of social order, but doing it in what for Harvard was a quite unconventional way (you should read the Parsons Schutz published correspondence to see how Parsons responded to Schutz - Schutz bothered him) -- Harold was trying to get into the mind, whereas Parsons wanted to manage it.
Later, maybe in 1954 or 1955, Harold spent a year of Harvard trying to integrate his work with systems theory, but nothing seems to have come of it. Nor has Harold ever said much about that. I think Harold knew that what he was doing could be made to fit the larger system as its negative counterpart, but I don’t think Parsons appreciated it. After all, Parsons was able to embrace almost everything else into his system -- the system was like a huge sponge, a niche or slot could be found in it for any new tangent, except Harold's. Explanations for this stand-off can be found, I believe, in deeper questions of religion, but this is not the place to do it, nor do I have the time to do it right, and without the implication of prejudice.
So, as a general proposition, Parson's Harvard of our period, had not yet settled into anything like the academic dogma that it had taken on later on. Students could refract off professors of their choice -- Homans, Bates, Murray, Kluckhohn, Inkeles, Moore, Paul, and even Sorokin who was still there.
Remember how physically scattered the offices of the professors were. Kluckhohn, Inkeles and Moore in the Russian Research Center. Stauffer, Parsons and Homans in Emerson Hall. The psychoanalysts and psychologists in another building. This prosaic physical fact lent a sense of freedom and lightness to academic life – you didn’t have to feel anyone was watching over you.
Put everything I've said together and it adds up to the then singular ambiance in American sociology.
(Note: a section of this letter was removed from this blog site since it dealt with personal matters).
This letter has become a little longer than I thought it would be.
Sincerely,
Arthur Vidich
cc: Bob Wilson
Stan Lyman
