Cities are the engines of innovation in modern society. Although raw materials and innovative ideas may come from the countryside, it is mainly in cities—with their concentration of capital, their intensive industry, and their abundance of talent—that the great transformations of society are wrought.
This is not merely the prejudice of hindsight, from an era in which cities not only dominate the economy but also hold the bulk of the population. As one writer at the turn of the 20th century put it:
The city is the spectroscope of society; it analyses and shifts the population, separating and classifying the diverse elements. The entire progress of civilization is a process of differentiation, and the city is the greatest differentiator. The mediocrity of the country is transformed by the city into the highest talent or the lowest criminal. Genius is often born in the country, but it is brought to light and developed by the city [just as] the boy thief of the village becomes the daring bank robber of the metropolis.1
Even at the time of the country’s birth, when cities claimed a relatively modest hold over the nation’s population and economy, the bitter debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could be seen as a nostalgic vision of a nation of yeoman farmers set against a more forward-looking view of the leading roles that urban capital, labor, and industry would play in the most successful countries of the 19th century. From one vantage point, the Civil War was a conflict over the terrible lengths to which a rural agrarian society must go in order to compete even tolerably well with a modern industrial and, ultimately, urban one. Even then, it is a competition that is not sustainable over the long term.
These generalizations were as true for the intellectual world as they were for industrial. Anyone might have a novel thought anywhere, but it is in the cauldron of the city that new ideas are best supported, challenged, tested, improved, and pitted against competing visions. Cities drive those who might otherwise indulge in comfortable convention to question, doubt, reject, rethink, rework, and start anew.
Psychology was no exception to these dynamics. American psychology was born and grew to maturity in the midst of some of the most troubled times the nation has ever experienced. The country was still absorbing the cataclysmic effects of the Civil War—over 600,000 killed in a country of just over 30 million. Then came the failed attempt at reconciliation between the regions that had been such bitter opponents—the Reconstruction—in which widespread corruption undermined whatever small chance there had been of reintegrating Southerners into the country they had fought so desperately to escape.
How the nearly four million recently freed slaves would be integrated into a free society—what land they would own, what jobs they would hold, what homes they would have, what schools they would attend, what enterprises they would lead, what political power they would attain—were by no means settled questions. Many former slaves remained in the South to farm—the only life most had ever known. Early promises of “40 acres and a mule” were rescinded during Reconstruction, and Black farmers were mostly forced into sharecropping: working land owned by White landholders, retaining only a portion of their harvest (often less than half) to pay off their farming debts and to support their families. It was often a miserable, virtually feudal existence. In search of a better fate, many other freed slaves fled to Northern cities to find a new way of life far from the sites of their old bondage. There they found sprawling, congested cities seemingly full of new opportunities, but also teeming with masses of impoverished immigrants who had arrived before the war, and with whom they now had to compete, sometimes bitterly, for poorly paid, precarious, and sometimes dangerous jobs in manufacturing, construction, transportation, and domestic service. As a result, racial tensions, rather than being resolved by the war, continued to run high, in both North and South.
As if the intense racial conflict that beset America wasn’t enough to contend with, by the mid-1870s the effects of rapid industrialization, which had been accelerated by the war, began to tear even further at the fabric of the nation. Enormous fortunes, never before been seen in the Republic, were accumulated by industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. Governments were uncertain whether they should regulate and restrain such avaricious companies as they increasingly sought total control over their domains and, if so, how they might actually manage to do so. Capital was growing more powerful than even government. Periodic economic “panics” and “crashes” added to the uncertainty, leading large swaths of the population to feel that they had become mere pawns in a game played by tycoons. None of the traditional virtues they had been taught would lead to a good life—honesty, thrift, hard work—seemed now to have much impact on their ultimate fate.
Indeed, the question of the relation between capital and labor was brought to a head in 1877, when the first of what would be several violent railway strikes spread from the east coast to a number of the nation’s cities. The chaos lasted for weeks. Protesters burned company buildings to the ground. Police and private security shot protesters. Strikers retaliated with whatever weapons they had. About a hundred people were killed, hundreds more were wounded, and millions of dollars in property was destroyed. A population that had, just a little over a decade before, lived through a catastrophic Civil War over slavery now began to fear that that a second civil war was at hand, this one over the increasing power of capital and the role of labor in the economy, in government, and in society at large.
It was on this anvil of uncertainty that a few young men began to explore a new “scientific” way of examining human thought, feeling, and conduct at a few of the country’s more progressive colleges. Science itself was a relative newcomer to American higher education. Many schools still disdained it as being intellectually inferior to the classics, philosophy, and denominational theology that dominated most curricula at the time. A speculative form of “psychology” sometimes made an appearance in those lessons—often under the traditional English titles of “mental philosophy” or “mental science”—but the idea of psychology being pursued as an empirical scientific endeavor struck many as misguided, bizarre or plain impossible.2 The mind, it was obvious to most, had a divine origin, not a natural one, and its thoughts were guided, at least ideally, by the eternal principles of logic, not by the kind of natural laws that governed mere matter. Feeling, even more so, lay entirely outside of the brute realm of nature.
Nevertheless, a few schools—Harvard, most notably—began to teach a form of “experimental” psychology that was then being developed in Germany by a few physiologists. The Americans, though, combined this German “physiological psychology” with Charles Darwin’s radical new theory of evolution by natural selection, which had recently come to the US. In addition, a new form of higher education—advanced research-based training for students who had already earned their undergraduate degrees—began to appear not only in some of the older schools, like Harvard, but also in a few entirely new universities. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore was the first of these, soon to be followed by Clark University in Worcester, and a little later, the University of Chicago. Laboratories—the very icon of this “new psychology,” as it was sometimes called—soon began popping up in schools across the country. The names of many of those who founded the early laboratories are familiar to anyone who has looked at American psychology’s history: William James, G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, Joseph Jastrow, Edmund C. Sanford, J. Mark Baldwin, etc.
Strangely, however, this well-known story of the development of the “new psychology” in America has rarely been connected to the context of immense urban upheaval in which it took place. It is as though the intellectual development was sealed off from socioeconomic and political conditions in which it arose. Yet, many of the founders and early builders of American psychology taught at colleges and universities situated in the very cities where the turmoil was most intense: New York, Boston, Baltimore, and especially Chicago. The original reason for this odd state of affairs is simple enough to trace: when psychologists started writing about the history of their field—as with the medical history written in the same era—the primary goal was to celebrate the “heroes” and the intellectual achievements of the (still relatively new) discipline. Edwin Boring’s 1929 classic textbook, A History of Experimental Psychology, was aimed at establishing that scientific psychology was already an academic institution worthy of celebrating in so ostentatious a way.3 For these writers, the biographical and the intellectual took precedence over the socioeconomic and the political. Psychology came into existence through the leadership of a few “great men” (and sometimes the pull of a vague “Frontier” or the push of an even vaguer “Zeitgeist”). It was not seen as importantly connected to the “great events” then unfolding outside the college walls. Indeed, these events were, if anything, a distraction to the “deep thoughts” unfolding within. Psychology was driven forward by the genius of its leaders and by its own inexorable momentum.
Surely, Boring would have said, the destitute immigrants, former slaves, lowly laborers, and their uneducated children had contributed little to this latest achievement of the Western intellectual tradition. Even the industrial titans of the age had contributed only the lucre that was required to build and operate the universities. Grateful as we might be for their generosity, the credit for having actually created the new psychology lay with a different sort of people: the scholars, scientists, and other intellectuals. Other historical accounts of psychology were written at about the same time as Boring’s, each with its own separate intellectual agenda, but the idea that psychology was autonomous—both from other disciplines and from “outside” events—was mostly an unquestioned underlying assumption.4
By the 1970s and 1980s, many writers of the history of psychology had started to become more sophisticated in their historiographic practices. They gradually recognized, as historians of many other domains already had, the impact that “external” events had exerted on the course of psychology’s development, and they increasingly included these insights in their writings. By that time, though, there were decades more of psychological history to study, and the events of the founding decades had been “covered” so thoroughly that most historians moved on to newer and more fertile ground, the better to explore the whole of the discipline’s past and to display their own scholarly originality.
New biographies of American psychology’s “founders” were written with some of the newer historiographic sensibilities in mind—many of William James and John Dewey, of course, along with important new contributions to the understanding of Hall, Cattell, Thorndike, and others. But there were few attempts to re-examine the early decades of American psychology within the urban contexts where it first came into being.
That is the aim of this book: to understand the rapid development of American psychology from academic novelty to popular industry as an effect of the colossal urban upheaval in which it appeared. My original plan was to discover how the psychologies of various major metropolises—New York, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago—had differed from each other in their responses to major events that had occurred in each of those places. What I soon found, however, was that they had all faced essentially the same set of crises: a population explosion caused by massive and continuous immigration, an inability (and sometimes unwillingness) to create and maintain public services that were adequate to serve the needs of the ever-growing, diversifying citizenry. These included, of course, housing, water, policing, transportation, communication, and eventually electrical power. Most difficult and contentious of all, though, was the effort to create a universal education system that would produce the sophisticated kinds of adults who could successfully navigate through and thrive in the increasingly intricate urban environment. And all of this had to be done while nearly every major industry was undergoing the most rapid, most revolutionary technological transformations the world had ever seen. It was, in retrospect, a virtually impossible balancing act and, as we shall see, often enough American cities failed to negotiate it successfully. The results of those failures were often fatal for citizens and for the police, and occasionally even for the politicians who led them.
There were different “flavors” to the ways in which various cities handled this suite of challenges, but the suite itself was more or less common to all. So, the theme of this book, rather than focusing on how psychologists in different cities dealt with their different local problems, became how the challenges posed in nearly every city in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century affected the development of psychology across the country. It is important to note at the outset that not all of the most influential psychologists lived in major cities at the time because not all colleges and universities were located in large urban areas. Columbia, for instance, was in tumult of New York City, and Johns Hopkins was in midst of busy Baltimore. University of Chicago, from its start, had to deal with the trials of being in that ever-fractious metropolis. By contrast, though, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell were more or less removed from the mounting urban anxieties, nestled in towns that had grown up around them. As we shall see, the style of psychology that tended to take root in urban institutions, even when the psychologists themselves refused to reside in the city, often had a somewhat different character than the psychology developed at schools in more pastoral settings. Different factors seem to have been at play. Harvard had, perhaps, the most interesting position of all, being separated from Boston by not much more than the Charles River. Nevertheless, life in cozy, clubby Cambridge always seemed more socially and spiritually removed from the metropolis than it was geographically.
Because of the importance that cities play in my story, I treat them more or less as characters in their own rights, alongside of the human figures. Cities have their own births, their own upbringings, so to speak, and those histories have had an impact on the ways in which they have responded to threats, opportunities, crises, and successes. Their geography has affected their development—ocean harbor, river port, rail hub, etc. They have had long-standing relationships with their neighbors—New York with Boston, Chicago with St. Louis, Baltimore with Washington, DC—which have also played a role in the characters they have developed. In short, they have “personalities” and, if I have written more than the reader expects about the histories of the cities featured in my narrative, I did so in order to reveal more about their personalities and how they interacted with the human characters who lived and worked within them.
In order to introduce the context in which psychology arose, I begin my story long before the discipline itself took root. I start with a sensational case of (apparent) murder that was riling the residents of New York City, where William James was born in 1842. In Chapter 1, I follow the James family and the New York in which they lived until they permanently left the city, in the wake of a huge wave of immigration from Ireland and Germany, when William was 13 years of age.
In Chapter 2, I trace the early life of G. Stanley Hall, beginning with his birth in the farmland of western Massachusetts in 1844. I follow his separate discovery of New York City as a graduate student in the late 1860s, then on into Germany, and finally to his first teaching position in Ohio in the 1870s. Chapter 3 picks up the trail of the James family again, returning to the US from a sojourn in Europe, and settling in Newport, Rhode Island. Teenaged William oscillated between art and science as possible vocations. As the Civil War broke out, William’s father bought him out of the draft, and he enrolled in the science school at Harvard. Dissatisfied, he soon switched to medicine. The family was not spared the horrors of the war though; one of William’s younger brothers was grievously wounded and recuperated over a period of months in the family home. William traveled widely, joining a naturalist expedition to Brazil in 1865, and taking regular jaunts to Europe to discover his “true” vocation. Despite his privileged life, in the late 1860s he fell into a terrible melancholy from which he would not completely recover for several years. The agonizing experience would mark his work in various ways for decades to come.
Chapter 4 focuses on the meeting of James and Hall at Harvard in 1876. There is a sense in which their work and their experiences, together and separate, set the stage for psychology in America. Hall earned a PhD in a kind of physiological-philosophical psychology under James’ nominal supervision but, in reality, they discovered the topic together. It was during this period that the first great railway strike broke out in America, bringing with it mass violence the likes of which had rarely before seen. James and Hall were not directly affected, but all of America was put on notice that things would not continue on in the future as they had in the past. What form they would take exactly was by no means clear, but the social, political, and economic life of the country was undergoing some kind of profound transformation. Hall would leave the country for a time to work in the great physiology laboratories of Germany, and in Wilhelm Wundt’s brand new psychology laboratory in Leipzig.
Chapter 5 sees Hall return home to America to find few academic openings for a person with his unconventional kinds of expertise. Pedagogy, however—a topic he had more or less picked up “on the side” while in Europe—found a ready audience in cities like Boston and Baltimore, which were struggling to create universal public school systems. Hall’s public lectures on what he called “Child Study” turned him into an overnight sensation in educational circles. He was soon offered a professorship at the recently opened Johns Hopkins. It was here he created his first laboratory, and launched the nation’s first experimental psychology journal. Soon he was offered an even more remarkable position, though: the founding presidency of a new university in Worcester, Massachusetts called Clark.
The scene in Chapters 6 and 7 shifts to Chicago, which was then both a very young and an immensely vast city (founded in 1833, the second-largest city in the US by 1890). It was raw and crude but revolutionary in its capacity to overthrow old industrial systems for new ones. It was also ever balanced on the edge of political chaos and mass violence. If the dreaded second civil war was going to come, it would probably start here, and nearly everyone knew it. Another new university, this one created from small portion of the vast fortune of John D. Rockefeller, had opened there in 1892, and its administrators were searching for a philosophy professor. They somewhat reluctantly chose a rather obscure man then at the University of Michigan named John Dewey. With his move to Chicago, Dewey became increasingly captured by the seemingly intractable problems of modern urban life and, rather than defensively burying himself in the academy, he decided to make the entire city his classroom. He taught philosophy to impoverished immigrant laborers at Jane Addams’ famous settlement house. He gradually developed an entirely new approach to schooling, premised on the idea that it is far more important, in the modern world, to help children learn to cooperate with people of different backgrounds and attitudes than it is to teach them ancient Biblical passages and arcane mathematical puzzles.
At the same time, Dewey and his younger colleagues revolutionized important aspects of psychology, arguing that the fundamental idea of the “reflex” is not essentially physiological in nature, as has been assumed since the time of Descartes, but is, instead, a kind of practical fiction. “Stimulus” and “response” are not physical but, rather, “function factors.”5 It does not matter that one has not traced the underlying neurology of a particular response to a given stimulus. What matters is that we understand what roles those terms play in advancing (and constraining) our comprehension of the situation. Some 650 miles to east, at Cornell, psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener objected strenuously: one must understand the fundamental “structures” of psychology—pure sensations, images, and feelings—before one can even begin to understand their functions. To do as Dewey suggested would be like trying to study the physiology of an organism before one knew the basic arrangement of its body parts. Thus opened a major fault line in American psychology—that between the cautious, abstract, immaculate musings of Titchener, sequestered in the relative wilderness of central New York state—and the ready, immediate, practical approach of Dewey, caught in the pressing, menacing metropolis of Chicago.
Chapter 8 returns to New York and Boston in the 1890s. The country was then deep in the throes of a second colossal wave of immigration, this time mostly from eastern and southern Europe—Poles, Russians, Jews, Italians, and Greeks. As before, when the Irish and Germans came in the 1850s, every municipal system was stressed beyond capacity. Moral panic spread as established American communities braced themselves against the influx of often-destitute newcomers. James McKeen Cattell, having earned a doctorate in Leipzig and briefly held a psychology professorship in his native Pennsylvania, arrived to take up a new post at Columbia University. He brought with him a new psychological tool: the “mental test.” He did not recognize it himself, but he was carrying the seeds of a new technology that would ultimately prove invaluable to the public schools systems of America. Although his particular form of the test failed, Cattell became what might be termed the leading “manager” of psychology, and of other sciences as well. He founded, owned, and edited many journals; he served on the executive committees of multiple scientific societies; he created a company to publish books and tests and various other psychological products. Cattell became a kind of scientific entrepreneur, in the original sense; he was a go-between who greased the gears of the great scientific “machine” that was gradually being assembled in America. He became quite wealthy doing it, too.
Meanwhile, back at Harvard, William James published his long-awaited textbook, Principles of Psychology in 1890. Then he gradually rose to become one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He gave many public lectures. His philosophical writings were couched in a style that was accessible, even enjoyable, to a wide array of readers. He wrote on topics that interested many—e.g., religion, spiritualism, humanity’s place in the universe. As academic journals grew in both number and abstruseness, James continued to write for a range of high-brow popular magazines. He recognized, however, that for Harvard to remain a leader in the new psychology, it had to have a top-flight laboratory, and he also saw that he personally had neither the time nor the interest to do it correctly. So he brought in a rising star from Germany to restore Harvard’s prestige in the topic: Hugo Münsterberg. Münsterberg would court controversy nearly everywhere he went, but he would soon become one of the most visible psychologists on the American scene.
Although the “new” psychologists up to this time had been intent on establishing the discipline’s scientific credentials, in ever-pragmatic America, there had always been lurking in the background the sense that psychology had something wider to offer the nation; services that not only schools, but also businesses, industries, governments, courts, hospitals, even the general public might be willing to pay for if only some psychologist could figure out what it was and how to provide it. Accordingly, Chapter 9 describes the early rise of applied psychology: 1) The development of psychotherapy in Boston out of a curious alliance between medical neurologists and church ministers (and, of course, William James); 2) The arrival of psychoanalysis in the US when Hall invited both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to give a series of lectures at his Clark University in Worcester; 3) The development, in Philadelphia, of a new kind of “clinic” specialized in diagnosing and treating the peculiar learning difficulties presented by some students in the burgeoning public school system; 4) The elaboration, by Hall, of a newly recognized stage of human development—“adolescence”—which required special consideration by those who were advancing the new idea of universal public high school in America’s cities; 5) The rise to prominence of a number of female psychological researchers who began to successfully challenge, through scientific research, many of the traditional myths and fabrications that had long been used to justify the subjugation of women; and 6) The effort, especially by Münsterberg, to insert psychological understanding into the process of criminal justice. Finally, Chapter 9 examines William James’ final philosophical explorations, in which he questioned the validity of psychology’s central concept, consciousness, and sought to replace it with a non-dualistic alternative that he called “experience.”
One early reviewer remarked that, beginning in Chapter 9, the book seemed to take on the character of multiple short stories instead of a single coherent narrative. I think that is, in part, because psychology itself split along many different paths at about that time. It was not coherent as a discipline. It developed a kind of “ragged” character as psychologists struck out many different directions, testing the old boundaries, looking for new professional opportunities, seeing what work the still-young discipline could do in the increasingly complex and fractious world around them.
In the final chapter we see psychology, over the first two decades of the 20th century, gradually change from a discipline that had been more or less defined by the individual research projects of professors at their several schools into a more collective, corporate, and national project. A number of individuals—notably Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Walter Dill Scott, Harry Hollingworth, and Walter Binghman—began to market their psychological expertise to business and industry for the purposes of increasing efficiency, improving personnel selection, and enhancing the effectiveness of advertising. Psychological “consulting,” thus, became a new way in which a person could make a living, if one could attract enough paying clients. We also see, here, that the never-ending growth of public education continued to outstrip the resources that cities could devote to it. William Wirt, a disciple of Dewey, developed a system to make the more elaborate equipment and other resources required by modern educational available to more students by rotating them through different specialized spaces over the course of the school day. Wirt’s system—known as the Gary Plan—became a political football in the most massive school system of them all—New York, and the conflict resulted in weeks of rioting that ultimately brought down the city’s mayor.
This was also the era in which Alfred Binet’s intelligence test was brought across the Atlantic by Henry Goddard and used to differentiate among different categories of “feeble-minded” children. Goddard became particularly concerned with those he labeled “morons”—people who appeared “normal” but who were subtly intellectually inferior and, as he and many others feared, might gradually undermine the entire American gene pool unless drastic measures were taken against them. On the other side of the continent, Lewis Terman would revise Binet’s test to better suit the American context, and then begin a decades-long research project on children who were possessed of “gifted” intellectual abilities.
The second decade of the 20th century was also the time in which psychological research with animals gradually gained respectability. As though in answer to James’ doubts about the validity of consciousness, animal researchers developed an approach in which mental states need not be imputed to animals at all, but their behavior could be understood entirely on the basis of the stimuli to which they had been previously exposed and the responses they had made. The program erupted on to the wider psychological scene when John B. Watson dubbed it “behaviorism” and declared it to be the only legitimate form of scientific psychology, whether one was studying “lower” animals or the “highest” animal of all—human beings.
Finally, World War I served to fundamentally change the character of psychology’s disciplinary structure. The transformation began when Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association in 1917, energetically advanced a plan to conduct intelligence tests on every single man recruited into the US Army. Ostensibly, the test would determine which men were fit for service and, if so, what more complex duties they might be suited to. Yerkes brought psychologists into the program from all over the country, making it, in effect, the first truly national research project in American psychology’s history. The resulting collection of data was massive by any measure: more than 1.7 million recruits were tested. Yerkes’ rival at Northwestern, Walter Dill Scott, rejected Yerkes’ exclusive focus on intelligence, though, embarking on a multifaceted testing program of his own in another branch of the army. Although the success of both endeavors was debated within the army itself, they both lent the very idea of psychological testing such widespread visibility and legitimacy that, by the 1920s, psychology was finally being recognized by the general public as a trustworthy source of scientific knowledge and authority.
It was here, in about 1920, in the wake of World War I, that a new era in the history of psychology began to open and, thus, that my account of American psychology’s beginnings comes to an end.