"What Are We Doing?"

Since the first World War, determined efforts have been made by several U. S. universities--notably Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota, Stanford --to put social investigation on a scientific basis. In 1929 the University of Chicago dedicated a new building, financed mainly by the Rockefeller Foundation and designed to house Chicago's Division of Social Sciences. Last week social scientists from all over the U. S. assembled there to celebrate its tenth anniversary and take stock of their work. They did not pile up detailed reports of social research. They discussed techniques, viewpoints, "frames of reference," spheres of influence. They seemed to be asking themselves, "What are we?" and "What are we doing?"

Social scientists have a story about the social scientist who measured the intelligence of convicts in prison. He found it just as high as the intelligence of the civil population, delivered a popular lecture on his finding. A woman in the audience got up and asked him what intelligence was. "Madam," said the scientist loftily, "intelligence is that which these measurements measure."

The question has often been raised whether the social sciences are sciences at all. Certainly they occupy a place on the fringe of the physical and biological sciences, from which they must draw much of their nourishment. "Sociology," a term coined about a century ago by the French Philosopher Auguste Comte, has been described as "the science of leftovers"--that is, a science which picks up crumbs spilled from the groaning table of the other social sciences.* But it has also been suggested that sociology be enthroned as the basic social science--a sort of central switchboard which would coordinate the others. Today sociologists are concerned with such things as family relations, social organizations, city life, crime. If cultural anthropology has concerned itself largely with the quaint customs of primitive tribes, sociology has concerned itself largely with the quaint customs of civilization.

Speakers read formal papers in the mornings, in the afternoons the scientists gathered at "round tables" for informal discussion. Some of these sessions grew so heated that they finished in the hall outside the conference room. From the sidelines University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins rather tartly reminded the delegates that in 1929 the world had a much greater sense of social well-being than it has today. Henry Bruere, onetime U. of C. social worker, now president of Manhattan's big Bowery Savings, pointed out that the first time social scientists really got their teeth into national affairs was under the New Deal--an experiment not everywhere regarded as an entire success.

Trends. Almost everyone thinks he knows what a trend is, but to a sociologist a trend is a numerical series showing change in a more or less constant direction. The University of Chicago's tall, affable William Fielding Ogburn has made a special study of trends. He once headed a detachment of the National Resources Committee which, on the basis of trend analysis, listed 13 technologies due for a booming industrial future (TIME, July 26, 1937). Such predictions are made possible by extending (or, in sociological jargon, "extrapolating") into the future the trend line as charted up to the present. Last week Dr. Ogburn observed that trend analysis had enabled U. of C. investigators to estimate the probability of parole violations, of happy or unhappy marriages. Such predictions do not take account of individual exceptions, but--like the death rate statistics of insurance actuaries, who are also social scientists-- hold good for large numbers of subjects.

The Big City. Almost since the year of the university's founding (1857) University of Chicago social scientists have watched Chicago grow from a Midwestern town to a sprawling metropolis. They have studied numerous facets of the city --real estate, money markets, stock trading, light & power, men's clothing, furniture, bakeries, pottery, industrial location, voting habits, youth delinquency, Negro families, etc. Perhaps Chicago has not yet profited much from this scrutiny, but it may do so eventually,* and so may many another city.

Dr. Robert Redfield, dean of U. of C.'s Division of Social Sciences, is a cultural anthropologist who had the pleasure of discovering, in 1937, a town in Guatemala whose inhabitants had never heard of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Wallis Warfield Windsor, the Dionne Quintuplets. Last week Dr. Redfield declared that the big city pattern, to be thoroughly understood, should be studied in the light of its opposite pole--the primitive tribe--and of intermediate societies such as peasants. Peasants may seem to be primitive in their simple, stable way of life but they have definite urban connections if they can read, vote, go to school, use machines and send their produce to markets.

Small, round-faced Dr. Louis Wirth, University of Chicago sociologist, declared that urbanism--the big city problem--enters into almost every major problem of modern society. "Our cultures are still many, but our civilization is one. The city is the symbol of that civilization. We will either master this ominously complicated entity or perish under it."

*The social sciences are sociology, economics and political science; part of psychology (attitudes, traits, abilities, collective behavior) and cultural (as distinguished from physical) anthropology. They overflow the bounds of science into law, history, education, linguistics. *Writing on the racetrack information racket last week, Scripps-Howard Columnist Westbrook Pegler observed: "Chicago has been so rotten for years that the town may seem to be abandoned and utterly without any will to turn square, but, for the first time in the modern history of the city, there are some stirrings of conscience and civic decency. . . ."

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